Lost in the Stars

"I shall probably live a year or two at most," Poet-Novelist Maxwell Bodenheim once wrote in a letter to a young woman admirer, "and then investigate the twinkling scandals of the sky." The letter was found on the young woman's body in a Times Square subway wreck in 1928, at the height of Bodenheim's literary popularity. This week, 25 years later, Max Bodenheim was off at last to investigate the twinkling scandals.

He died as he had lived--violently, sensationally and in squalor. The operator of a cheap rooming house near the Bowery found Bodenheim, 60, and his third wife, Ruth Fagan, 35, dead in a sleazy furnished room. The poet sprawled on the floor, a paperback copy of Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us propped awkwardly on his chest, covering a .22-cal. bullet hole. On a bed beside him was the barefoot body of his wife, her face cruelly beaten and a deep knife wound in her back. The murderer had locked the door behind him with a padlock. Working on the theory that the murders might have been a crime of passion, police began looking for the ex-convict who had rented the room.

In his heyday, Max Bodenheim was one of the literary lions of the U.S. A native of Mississippi, he came to Chicago as a young man and for a time lit up the literary sky as the editorial partner of Ben Hecht. In the '20s, when he settled down in Greenwich Village, Max hit his bohemian crescendo. A lusty, limpidly handsome man. he attracted women by the scores (at least two of his castoff in amoratas committed suicide). By 1935, though, Bodenheim was no longer in vogue. Sales of his murky verse (Minna and Myself) and erotic novels (Replenishing Jessica) dwindled away, and he sank gradually into the bleary stupor of the alcoholic. He flapped disconsolately around the Village resting up periodically in the Bellevue alcoholic ward, sleeping in gutters, hallways and subways (TIME, Feb. 18, 1952). On a rainswept night three years ago, he met his third wife, a writer of sorts, in the middle of Washington Square. Ruth Fagan had a simple explanation for the meeting: "He had an umbrella and I didn't."

After that, Max and his young wife were seldom apart. Together they roamed the bars and byways of Greenwich Village, cleaning up in public toilets, cadging the price of an occasional drink, meal or free flop from old friends. Despite his stubbled chin and unshorn hair, Max managed to preserve a certain courtly Southern dignity, and when the news of his death got around the Village this week, there was genuine sadness. At the San Remo Cafe, Caricaturist Jake Spencer smashed Bodenheim's personal gin glass and proposed a toast. "Max was a splendid type," he said. "He used to write poetry in a booth here and then try to peddle the verse at the bar for a drink of gin."

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