A Not-So-Charmed Life

A Not-So-Charmed Life . . . .

       She was the “it” girl of the Edwardian era. Society pages and gossip columns from 1915 to the late 1930s followed her escapades. And her adventures really ought to be a movie – or at least a cautionary tale.
 
       Born in Kansas on June 30, 1893, her real name was Syida Wirt. She was raised in a solid, hard-working ranch family. But chores, cattle, and wide open spaces never quite made it into her blood.
 
       Instead, by 1910 at age seventeen, Sidi (as she later insisted on being called) was attending the University of Kansas, where she fast became (as one wit put it) “the major extracurricular activity of boys from the best fraternities.” She’d been blessed with “sharp blue eyes, [a] trim figure, and taffy-colored hair.” And already she’d learned the value of good packaging; her dresses “were styled at least a year ahead” of Hutchinson, Kansas.
 
       As for her name upgrade, well, ‘Sidi’ sounded more Egyptian; a purported heritage she claimed through a great-grandmother. Meanwhile, and probably not coincidentally, Theda Bara’s starring role in the silent film “Cleopatra” and Howard Carter’s excavations in the Valley of the Kings were making Egyptomania the latest thing.
 
       Sidi quickly became engaged to Hugo Leal, scion of a wealthy Brazilian family, and rumors of an imminent wedding began circulating in Brazil. But Harry C. Williams, a childhood beau from Hutchinson, Kansas and now humble circulation manager for the small town’s newspaper, also was desperate to marry her.
 
       Sidi, it was said, flipped a coin. Williams won the toss. In February, 1911, he picked Sidi up in a borrowed auto on the pretense of taking her shopping. Instead, they motored to the home of a local judge and were hastily “married at the curbing.” Sidi’s mother reportedly “needed a cushioned chair” when the news of their elopement was shared.
 
       But married domesticity, much like ranch work, turned out not to be Sidi’s idea of fun. She took off for the West coast a few months later, determined to become a cabaret singer. Williams sued for divorce in 1913, claiming desertion.
 
       Sidi was, it appears, a talented singer and performer. By 1915 she had danced her way across stages in Portland, California, and New York. Society pages began sharing rumors that she had become engaged to John D. (“Jack”) Spreckels, Jr., heir to a large sugar fortune. The pair had purportedly met when Spreckles spotted Sidi being accosted on the streets of Chicago by a pair of ruffians. Two well-directed punches later, the bad guys had been dispatched and Sidi fainted dead away in Spreckels’ arms. A whirlwind romance followed.

       Inconveniently enough, Jack Spreckels was still married to his first wife at the time they met, though “awaiting his final divorce.” Rather than dispelling the rumors of an engagement, Sidi simply politely hinted he was “not in a position at this time to make a public announcement.”
 
       All the gossip turned out to be accurate. The pair were married on September 5, 1915 – to the chagrin of Spreckels’ prominent family. The pair’s first and only child, Geraldine, entered the world a year later, in October, 1916. (Jack Spreckels already had three other children by his first wife.)
 
       Once again, married life did not live up to Sidi’s expectations. Jack’s financial circumstances, too, were not what she had anticipated. Sidi left him about 1919 and went East, announcing plans of going into “grand opera.” She stopped in Reno that same year under the pseudonym “Mrs. Smith,” just long enough to begin a  divorce from Spreckels.
 
       By June of 1920, with that divorce still not quite finished, Sidi and four-year-old daughter Geraldine were enjoying the sights of London. While there, Sidi picked out a lovely pearl necklace at Tiffany & Co. – a £16,500 purchase, worth roughly $80,000 at the time. An eager sales clerk allowed her to simply sign for it, based on the Spreckels name. Higher-ups soon became “apprehensive,” however, and politely requested that Sidi return the necklace “until she could furnish satisfactory credit references.”
 
       There was just one small problem. The pearl necklace was gone.

       Sidi had handed the necklace over to a man named Barrett – a swindler known affectionately by the press as “Diamond Bill” for his history of borrowing (and then pawning) valuable gems. Sidi’s motive in the affair isn’t perfectly clear. Though she claimed Barrett had promised to get the necklace insured for her, Sidi herself was apparently in dire need of cash at the time. So it’s at least possible she and Barrett had acted in concert. Meanwhile, Barrett had disappeared, and the necklace had disappeared with him.
 
       Tiffany & Co. cabled still-husband Jack in America, politely but firmly threatening criminal prosecution against his estranged wife if he didn’t correct matters – a dust-up that naturally hit the news. Sidi anxiously reached out to Jack, too, telegraphing: “Position desperate. Keep silent to mother, and for God’s sake come over to me and Geraldine and help us to obtain redress from thief.”
 
       Jack hightailed it across the ocean to London, managing to satisfy Tiffany with a written agreement that Sidi would make payments, secured by his own personal guarantee. Sidi herself failed to sign.
 
       Jack returned home, writing Sidi in June 1921 about his promising investments in the Kern oil fields, and hoping his financial troubles would “be over soon.” A new piece of property could “make me a rich man,” he said, promising that when his oil fortune came in, “you won’t have to worry either.”
 
       It was not to be. Jack Spreckles died August 8, 1921, after taking a curve too fast between the oil towns of Fellows and Taft. And he’d left his financial affairs in a mess. As the San Francisco Call delicately put it, the sugar heir “had many obligations, and his estate was not as large as first thought.” The San Francisco Examiner was even more blunt. Spreckles, it said, was so deeply in debt that $100,000 was not “a drop in the bucket.” Even his secured creditors were left high and dry.
 
       On top of it all, Jack Spreckles had made two different “last” wills. The first, executed in 1908 while still married to his first wife, left half his estate to Edith Wakefield, whom he had later divorced. The second, a handwritten will scribbled on office stationery, was dated 1915, the year he remarried, and left Sidi one-third of his estate.
 
       Newspapers across the country took great glee in covering in the will dispute between the two Spreckels widows. One article described Sidi arriving in San Francisco from Paris that September to defend her legal rights, clad entirely in black and proclaiming herself “too prostrated by grief” to visit friends. “I am sure my [singing] voice is gone now,” she sighed dramatically. “The shock and the sadness has been too much for me, and I do not feel that I will have any more interest in music.”
 
       Sidi and Jack’s father both sought to be named administrator for his estate. But as the relatively small size of that estate became clear, a practical solution was quickly reached. Sidi took the proceeds of one insurance policy; Edith got the proceeds of another; and Jack’s wealthy father agreed to leave an inheritance for Geraldine in his will, along with his other grandchildren.  
 
       Gossip columnists disappointed by the swift and ultimately amicable resolution of this tasty society feud managed to console themselves by reporting on a separate scandal involving Sidi that same month. The bereaved “Mrs. Spreckels,” it seems, had been called to the hospital to comfort dying actress Virginia Rappe. Exactly how Sidi knew Ms. Rappe isn’t clear, but the actress had been injured (and ultimately expired) after a wild party in a hotel suite. Motion picture star Fatty Arbuckle was indicted for Ms. Rappe’s murder, and Sidi was called to the stand to testify about the victim’s final hours. In addition, as the press breathlessly reported, “a squad of process servers” had been scouring the city in an effort to locate Mrs. Spreckels to serve her with papers from Tiffany & Co. over those $80,000 missing pearls.
 
       Jack’s father was probably eager to get Sidi out of sight for a while. Soon she was living abroad again, “plentifully supplied with funds which came from John D. Spreckels Sr.,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted. One bit of 1922 gossip dished that she had been spotted “capering in Paris with a Japanese admirer.” Another news items shared a rumor that she was engaged to jazz orchestra leader Art Hickman.

      But Sidi’s previous antics were nothing compared to what came next. By July 1923 she had become Princess Suad Chakir, bride of a member of one of the richest Turkish families in Constantinople. Guests at their lavish wedding included Admiral Mark L. Bristol, commander of the American fleet in the Mediterranean, and “other notables of the social elite” from Europe and America.

Prince Suad himself was just 24 when they married; Sidi was 30. They had apparently met the previous year in Paris. The society pages loved it, running glamorous photos of Sidi in her new role as a princess.

Even with all the amenities of this new fairytale life, Sidi somehow managed to make herself the focus of a scandal. In December 1924 she embarked on a moonlight yacht ride with a Turkish captain . . . whose incensed wife was standing on the pier when they returned. Sidi found herself labelled a homewrecker during the pair’s bitter divorce, and countersued the aggrieved wife for libel and assault.

       After seven years of increasingly unhappy marriage to the Turkish prince, Sidi persuaded Suad to return her to America, where in 1929 she obtained another Reno divorce for “failure to provide.” The prince was apparently all too happy to get rid of her. According to one contemporary account, he divorced her “because she did not obey her husband.”
 
       The whole affair only made Sidi even more fascinating to the press. She returned to America with fashionably bobbed hair, smoking thin Turkish cigarettes “ever so gracefully.” Perhaps best of all, Geraldine herself soon became an heiress, inheriting half a million dollars when Jack’s father passed away, with another cool million expected when she turned 25.
 
       December 1927 had also brought Sidi some happy news from the California Supreme Court, which finally ruled against Tiffany & Co. in the long, drawn-out case of the missing pearls — Spreckels’ written agreement to repay the jewelers was unenforceable, the court concluded, since it had been obtained through threats and coercion. As for “Diamond Bill” Barrett, he apparently never did face justice for the necklace’s disappearance, though he did turn up briefly in Los Angeles under a pseudonym, “waving around wads of cash” and got sent to prison in Brazil in 1932 for counterfeiting. (He nevertheless merited an Arlington military burial for his World War I service when he finally died in 1963.)

       Three months after swearing she would never marry again, Sidi tied the knot for a fourth time. Her latest choice was a dashing 27-year-old Army air pilot named Roger Alan Gardner – “Duke,” to his friends. Sidi herself was by now approaching 35.

       Even the military had apparently recognized this marital disaster as it was approaching; fellow officers later said that higher-ups had transferred Gardner from San Francisco to Virginia in a deliberate effort to break up the couple’s burgeoning romance.

       But determined as ever, Sidi followed. She presented the object of her affections with an expensive car. Over the “protests of his family,” the pair were married in 1930.

       Daughter Geraldine, herself a stunning beauty, made a few brief appearances in movies and ads in the 1930s and ’40s, and even signed a contract with Warner Brothers. She reportedly appeared with Bette Davis in the 1937 movie “Jezebel.”

       And for a while, it seems, Sidi and her latest husband were happy, though their quarters in a small military barracks cottage were a far cry from a Turkish palace. By 1946, however, the San Francisco Examiner confirmed that the Gardner surname had been “scratched.”

       Sidi largely disappeared from the society pages and gossip columns thereafter – an odd contrast to her flamboyant youth. One notable exception came in December 1965, when a San Francisco Chronicle columnist reported Sidi’s attendance at the wedding of a great-niece. Headlined Memories of a Lovely Charmer, the piece described Sidi Wirt as a “semi-invalid,” confined to a wheelchair, though “many traces still remain of the blonde beauty and vivaciousness” that had kept her in the news for so many years. She attended the event accompanied by Geraldine and Geraldine’s husband, Andrew Fuller, “whom she had been visiting in New York.”

        The irrepressible Sidi Wirt — aka Williams, Spreckels, Suad, Gardner — passed away in Fort Worth, Texas on June 1, 1970. She was 76 years old. And I think she would love that you’re still reading about her escapades.