The Girl from Kansas

"My father despised publicity," said Elizabeth Woodward Pratt. "As children, we were never allowed to be photographed." Her father, the late William Woodward, was a topflight U.S. banker, a figure in authentic Manhattan society and, as master of Belair Stud (Gallant Fox, Omaha), one of the most widely respected sportsmen on two continents. Last week the glare of worldwide publicity beat in a way it never had before on the Woodward family. Had the wife of William Woodward Jr. deliberately shot him in that darkened hallway in their Long Island home? Was it an accident? Was there a connection between his death and the gaudy life, so different from his father's, that Bill Woodward and his wife led? The story belonged more to her biography than to the dignified annals of the Woodwards.

The Farmer's Daughter. Ann Woodward was born nearly 40 years ago on a farm four miles west of Pittsburg, Kans. (pop. 20,000) and named Angeline Luceil (later Lucille) Crowell. At some time in her rise to fame and fortune she shucked seven years from her age, along with most other details of her ordinary but respectable past.

When Angeline was three, in 1918, the Crowell farm failed, and the family moved to another farm near Hugoton, Kans.

Four years later that farm failed, too, and the Crowells moved into Pittsburg. There, when Angeline was eight, her mother and father were divorced. Last week father Jesse Crowell, 64, a retired streetcar conductor in Gaylord, Mich., was amazed and "awful sorry" to learn that Ann Woodward was the daughter he had not seen or heard of in 23 years. "I taught her how to sit on a horse, and she later became a good rider," he recalled proudly. "I'm sure that was a great help to her when she began to associate with high society." For years he had been under the impression that his daughter was Actress Eve Arden (Our Miss Brooks).

After her parents' divorce, pretty Angeline and her mother stayed in Pittsburg, where Ethel Crowell (who was also a pretty blonde) taught social science in the high school, and was married and divorced a second time. During the Depression, Mrs. Crowell operated a four-hack taxicab company in Kansas City, and she and her daughter lived in a shabby apartment back of the taxicab office. Angeline was "shy and insecure," according to a cousin, and had one ambition that amounted to an obsession: to go to Hollywood and become a film star.

After graduating from Kansas City's Westport High School in 1932, the girl clerked in the Kansas City Junior League Thrift Shop, later worked as a salesgirl and a model in Harzfeld's specialty shop. In 1938 she changed her name to Ann Eden and went to New York in search of fame. She was a Powers model. ("An all-round, wholesome-looking girl," recalls John Robert Powers. "We don't get calls for them like that any more. Nowadays they want a cadaverous look.")

The Girl in the Copa Line. From modeling, Ann progressed to acting. In 1939, when Bill Woodward was a schoolboy at Groton, she was a showgirl in Noel Coward's girlshow, Set to Music. Later she had some minor success in radio soap operas, e.g., Joyce Jordan, Girl Interne, and in nightclubs.. One night in 1943 Ensign Bill Woodward, just out of Harvard and just sworn in for wartime service with the Navy, spotted a girl wearing a cat costume in the chorus line at the Copacabana. It was Ann, and it was love. After a two-week engagement, they were married in Tacoma, Wash. Bill went to sea duty (later he was one of 272 survivors of 916 aboard the torpedoed carrier Liscome Bay), and Ann moved in with her new in-laws.

The Woodwards were frankly disappointed with their son's wife, but accepted her "with reserve." Under the tutelage of Mrs. William Woodward Sr. (one of the Cryder triplets of New York), at whose balls guests are lighted up the stairway by a row of candelabra-bearing footmen, Ann met the family friends.

The girl from Kansas caught on fast. When Bill Woodward came home from the war, Ann led him rapidly away from the staid social world, in which his family had always moved, into gayer, more publicized spheres of international society. "Bill was brought up differently," says

Mrs. Pratt, his sister. "Ann loved the gay life, the excitement of being always on the go--and she drew Bill into it. He wasn't as enthusiastic about it as she was, but he went along with it." Amid the glamour, the Woodwards' domestic life was anything but serene. As Bill matured, he grew more attractive to women, and Ann, five years older and desperately hiding the fact, began to fade. There were frequent quarrels, embarrassing scenes, separations and reconciliations. Seven years ago the two seriously discussed divorce, but called it off for the sake of their two young sons. Bill was rumored to be enamored of an Italian princess at one time; Ann saw a lot of Aly Khan during one temporary separation in Paris. Each hired private detectives to shadow the other.

Suffering from an acute sense of insecurity and flickering suspicions, Ann Woodward sometimes created volcanic public scenes with her husband. In El Morocco one night, she scratched Bill Woodward's face until it bled, after he pulled out a handkerchief with a lipstick stain on it. At the Marquis de Cuevas' ball in Biarritz two years ago (TIME. Sept. 14, 1953), Ann, dressed as a red devil, reacted violently when she saw her husband dancing with Carmen Sainte, the beautiful Chilean-born wife of a big French rope-and-hemp man. During the dance, Mme. Sainte wrapped her enormous Spanish shawl around Woodward, and the two rumbaed together underneath. Ann fumed up to them, ripped off the shawl, tore Mme. Sainte's dress, slapped her face, slapped Bill, finally had to be forcibly restrained.

Emotional Dither. In spite of its Frankie-and-Johnnie mood, the marriage persisted. Two years ago Bill Woodward's father died. Bill inherited millions and the thoroughbred, Nashua, which the elder Woodward had intended to race in Britain. Bill decided to keep the colt in the

U.S., and Nashua became the greatest racer since Citation. Up until then, Bill had not cared much for his father's hobby, but he took over gracefully and intelligently the role of a leading turfman. (At the time young Bill was killed, Belair Stud, with $831,025 in purses, was the leading money-winning stable of 1955.) Recently, Woodward and his wife had seemed to their friends and relatives to be much happier together. But they still had a peculiar emotional effect on each other. The week of the killing they got into an emotional dither over evidence that a prowler had broken into their Oyster Bay home. Explained Dr. John Prutting, Ann Woodward's physician:

"Separately, they were able to keep themselves under control. But when they were together they infected one another with the sort of tension each might be feeling at the moment, and built it up tremendously. It was like that with everything, and that obviously was what happened in the case of the prowler. Between them, they built up their fear and determination to catch the prowler into an obsession. When Mrs. Woodward was startled by the noise, grabbing the shotgun and shooting was a conditioned reflex."

After police found Ann Woodward, wearing a transparent blue negligee and a black brassiere and weeping hysterically beside the naked body of her husband, Dr. Prutting packed her off to Manhattan's swank Doctors Hospital.

Speaking for the family, Mrs. Pratt indignantly rejected the theory that the relationship between her brother and his wife was one that was likely to lead to homicide. "In spite of everything, they were in love," she said. "Bill didn't have to live with her, you know. He stayed because he loved her, and liked her. She was fun to be with. And Ann--not only did she love him, it was as Mrs. William Woodward that she was able to live the life she loved."

The Last Dance. A different view, fed by the sensation makers among Bill and Ann Woodward's acquaintances, raised in the press and in millions of conversations the question of possible murder. Long Island police, who also feel the lure of publicity, questioned all of the 58 guests at a party given the night before the killing by Mrs. George F. Baker in honor of the Duchess of Windsor. They did not learn much. Both the Woodwards had seemed overly excited about the prowler. The party had been decorous. Woodward, chemical analysis showed, had no more than two drinks. (Ann rarely took a drink.) He had sat next to Brenda Frazier Kelly and had danced the last dance with Laddie Sanford's wife, Mary Duncan Sanford, both longtime acquaintances. The Duchess of Windsor had congratulated Woodward on Nashua's performance.

The Woodwards left the party about 10'clock, drove home and went to their separate bedrooms. Ann, not a habitual user of sleeping pills, took one that night for cramps. What waked her has not been discovered. Police picked up Paul Wirths, a German refugee; he admitted that it was he who a few nights previously had broken into a cabana and a six-car garage on the Woodward estate and alarmed the family. He said he had not returned on the night of the killing, and he proved it.

Ann Woodward's story was that, hearing a noise, she picked up the loaded shotgun kept in her room because of the prowler and fired both 'barrels across the hallway between her and her husband's bedrooms. One of the charges took Bill Woodward square in the face. The mystery was how a woman supposedly practiced in the use of firearms could unknow ingly shoot her husband at 10 ft. But former hunting companions were not surprised. One said that Ann, who seemed to take joy in hunting, always seemed to be looking one way and shooting another. Russell Havenstrite, a Los Angeles oilman, who, with his wife, had hunted tigers in India with Ann Woodward, said that he had made up his mind that he "wouldn't go into a forest again with her . . . She nearly shot me a couple of times. She's a dangerous person to have a gun in her hands, even when she's only after birds."

Last week goo people crowded into St. James' Episcopal church for Bill Woodward's funeral; thousands more stood outside on Madison Avenue. His widow, still too upset to attend the services, sent a blanket of white chrysanthemums dotted with red carnations, a floral expression of Belair's racing colors--white, red spots, scarlet cap. An inscribed ribbon with this sent through the Woodward connection a slight shudder, quickly repressed by family loyalty. Recalling Ann and Bill's pet names for each other, it read: "From Dunk to Monk."

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