The Wrestler

A gaunt, bookish fellow named Alexander Ector Orr Munsell was presented last week with a problem calculated to curl a man's nerve ends up like watch springs: he inherited $650,000 from his mother. Under ordinary circumstances, he might well have kissed his fingers and done a buck & wing. But Alexander Ector Orr Munsell was forced to remember something: 18 years ago, finding himself with a million dollars, he had given it all away, and he had sworn he never wanted anything to do with money again.

The original million, except for a few bucketfuls he had made in Wall Street and in a Baltimore firm which produced color charts, had come from relatives too. (Grandfather Orr was president of the New York Life Insurance Co.) Until he was 37, Alexander did not protest; he had attended Harvard, served in World War I, and entered business--a conformist in a Brooks Brothers suit.

Browder Brigadier. But in 1933, he decided to experience "the reality of being poor." His wife was critical, even though he gave her half the million. She divorced him, saying: "I tried to establish a happy home . . . but he was more interested in helping out the entire human race." Undisturbed, Alexander gave the other half million dollars to strikers, charities and the unemployed; he also had himself examined by psychiatrists to demonstrate that he was not irresponsible.

Then, costumed summer and winter in seersucker suits and tennis shoes, he hustled around looking for some reality. He took up yoga, and did deep-breathing exercises. He went south for a while to accomplish reforms, but gave it up. He returned to New York, lived in a "whitecollar flophouse" on West 54th Street, and said he was going to get a job. If not, would he take money from relatives? "Certainly not," he said. "I'll go on relief."

In a 1943 report to his Harvard classmates, he announced that he had been a Communist for five years, was serving as a "Browder Brigadier" and selling 50 copies of the Daily Worker every week. After that, as the years passed, the world just let him drop out of sight.

Temptation. Last week's announcement about the $650,000 bequest sent newsmen hunting for him again. They found unmistakable evidence that Munsell, now 55, had not become a horny-handed laborer after all. He owned a remodeled Manhattan brownstone house, rented the top two floors, and was ensconced in a lower-floor apartment with a good library and all the comforts of home. Where had he gotten the money? His friends said it had come from his mother and from other relatives. Munsell, they added, had changed his attitude slightly after a few years of poverty. Having become poor, some of them suggested, he now valued a buck and hungered for the inheritance just like any other poor man. Would he accept it?

Alexander Ector Orr Munsell would not say. He stayed inside his house, surveying the outer world cautiously through a peephole in his door and, presumably, wrestling mightily with temptation.

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