THE OGDEN STANDARD-EXAMINER

Ogden, Utah, U.S.A.

11 March 1923

(page 38)

No More Trial Marriages For Pretty Artists’ Model.

Never Again Does Charming Mrs. Mazie

Ryerson Want to Repeat Her Dreadful

Experience With the Elderly Millionaire

She Is Now Leaving Forever.

The disillusioned young bride who fled from her millionaire

husband at the end of twenty-nine days of her trial marriage

Mazie Mitchell Ryerson, the “Queen of the Chalet des Arts,” will never, never, NEVER AGAIN make a trial marriage a part of the experiences of her life.

The beautiful artist’s model of eighteen entered into a formal agreement with Albert W. Ryerson, millionaire real estate man, to become his trial wife for thirty days, with the understanding that if the venture was not pleasing during that time she might have a divorce. She stood the ordeal for twenty-nine days.

Then, within site of the finish line of the test, she bundled a few simple things into a bag, turned her back upon a palatial home, shut her eyes to the scintillant dazzle of gems and the jingle of gold and went out into the world—alone. She went to earn her living rather than be the wife of a mature man whose thirty-day period of love testing—or at least twenty-nine of the thirty—unfolded the most remarkable story of occult mysticism and shadowy ideals drawn from a past that antedates even the weird secrets now being shoveled from Egyptian tombs which has ever come to the pages of a court record.

For in the very opening of her test of marriage Mazie the beautiful discovered that for the purposes of household enumeration she was in reality Cleopatra, the siren, who had vamped a Caesar and an Anthony, while Ryerson was the reincarnation of King Solomon, wise in love from the association of a thousand wives and the graceful tutoring of a Queen of Sheba.

But Cleopatra would have none of King Solomon and the reincarnation of the Titian queen of the pyramids is now awaiting the day when, by virtue of living in this country for two years, the courts will entertain her plea for absolute divorce. She sued at the end of the trial test. Since she was a resident of Windsor, Canada, at the time, the Detroit courts—for the scene of this strange, weird tale is set in the city whence comes the flivver—held that she might not sue in Michigan and dismissed her case.

One must start at the very entrance to the mystic world to unravel this yarn. It was born among the Mahatmas of the Indian realm, in the days when the Flood had not come to decorate the pages of sacred history. It was transmitted through Hindu hands to America, and to Ryerson, and with the revelation of its existence there comes the startling denouement—

That throughout America, notably in New York, there are thousands of persons who secretly worship the mysterious love god after the rites and the ideals of a turban-shrouded past.

It shows a little girl, a member of a plain family in Windsor, Canada. Both parents were Puritanically religious. The mother died. The father became engaged again. The family melted before the fire of a new love as snow before the sun and the girl of fifteen started out in the world to make her living.

Thus came Mazie Mitchell the beauteous to the story that is to follow:

It was to the stage that she turned, as a dancer. She pursued the occupation for a time, and then that same agency that told Marguerite in “Faust” the damning truth of her life—the looking glass—pointed the way to a new life. She looked upon herself and found that she had charms and they took her to the studios of Detroit as a model. She posed for commercial pictures, she was the “Queen of the Chalet des Arts,” and her striking face and lithe young form loaned themselves to enhance the sales possibilities of mayhap a corset, a brand of stockings, or yet a face cream.

Mrs. Mazie Ryerson posing before a class of art

students in the Chalet des Arts studio in Detroit.

So the little girl of the simple life flashes on the screen next as the darling of the studios—the undisputed queen of commercial art.

Mrs. Ryerson in another appealing studio pose.

Next, for continuity of camera action, your skilled director would show the picture of a city “home” in a town building. It was the town residence of Ryerson in a building that bears his name.

As one seeks comparative ideas, the thought comes instinctively of the wonderful nest in Madison Square Garden where Standford White, great gifted architect, fitted for himself and friends a bower of aesthetic art. It was in this suite, with its maze of mirrors and its roseate tint of push, that Evelyn Nesbit came first to make her bow in a great drama that was punctuated by the most notable tragedy New York—or the world, for that matter—ever knew.

All of the artistic beauty that wealth and the imagination of a man of undoubted talent might command had been posed, with deft touch and rare skill, in the five rooms that served as a fairy core to the apple of this rough office structure—a grimly dull home of business for its meat—a pleasure dome such as the Khubla Khan might have decreed where Alf, the sacred river ran in the poem of our childhood study hours.

On every side the city of industry erupted, like some volcano, its lava of automobiles, of industrial solids, of smoky, grimy fact. Here was only fancy, fancy set in a picture of dream life, with Oriental splendor and softness shading off into the distance of another world the hardware realities of even the immediate neighbors.

Ryerson was fifty-one, rich and a student. His first wife had obtained a divorce in 1919, charging that he “professed love for so many and sundry women who professed to have the same ideals as himself,” and that he received many notes from “love-sick women who said that his love aroused in them a fiery torrent.”

For further sketching of the Mahatma of this Oriental bower he was the hero of a story in which Mrs. Margaret Hiller of Boston, was alleged to have offered him $100,000 to wed her, only to find that Ryerson had married a Detroit girl of his choice just before the date set for the wedding. A few weeks later the widow married her coachman, took him to Europe, and upon departing this life left him $2,000,000.

Such was the strange mansion in the skies and the master thereof to whom Mazie, the simple girl of the small town, the model of the big one, was introduced to make the telling of this tale.

And it was her father, a fellow lodge member of the rich man, who introduced the daughter to him, made him her guardian and sent her to live in the realm of the transplanted Orient.

Ryerson talked to the girl of occult science, of the mysteries of the East and of psychology. He complimented her beauty and understanding. So was the way paved for her start on the remarkable adventure that ended with a flight in the night.

Just how the trial match got under way is best told by Mazie.

“After I had been living with Ryerson as his daughter for two months,” she said, “he suggested to me that perhaps it would be better if we were married. The notion was repulsive to me.

“ ‘Well, Mazie,’ he said to me, ‘the world would not think it the proper thing for you to be living here with me. It would be better if you were my wife.

“ ‘If you do not believe that you would like to be my wife we can have a thirty-day trial marriage. If at the end of that time you do not like me as a husband you can divorce me and I will not contest it.’ ”

Such was the understanding, as charged by the girl, under which on September 6, 1922, she motored to Mount Clemens with the rich suitor and became his wife through a regular, formal ceremony. It was a cheery night for the wedding party, with dancing, dining, music and song—that is to say, for all of the wedding party excepting the girl. She was silent and unhappy over the prospect.

They motored to his Canadian palace, near Ford City—a home costing more than $100,000 and fitted with everything that luxury might suggest. Let her again take up the narrative—

“I cannot describe the first three days of my married life. It is better to cast a veil over the things he said and did. If there had ever been any love in my heart for my aged husband he would have killed it in the first days of our marriage. I lived through unspeakable tortures of mind and body.

“The third day of our marriage I determined to leave him. Better to beg my bread in the streets than to live another day with him, I made up my mind.

Briefly to resume some of her complaints, she charged that during the honeymoon Ryerson did these things:

Whipped her for refusing to quit reading a letter from a girl friend to talk to him.

Beat her until she ran under the porch to hide.

Appeared to be delighted when she screamed with pain.

Raved, stormed and swore at her.

Opened to her the lore of the Order of the Temple of the Orient.

And in the opening of this last chapter of her complaint comes the most interesting and strange portion of the narrative of this your woman who fled from the arms of her rich husband one day before the expiration of the pact for a trial of affection.

“Soon after we were married,” she says, “strange people began coming to the house. They were a number Hindus—mysterious, dark-skinned men from the Far East. I soon learned to know them by name and found that they were intimate friends of Ryerson.

“They would sit for hours with him, discussing theosophy, religions and philosophy. I did not understand much of what they said. Ryerson told me once that they were instructing him in the old beliefs and rites of the ancients in the strange cults of centuries ago.

“I believe that he wanted to know about them for his Order of the Temple of the Orient—called the ‘O.T.O.’—and sometimes he would discuss the subject with me.

“From what I learned I believe that there are thousands of members of the O.T.O. throughout this country.

“He told me a great many of their beliefs and rituals, but he did not try to initiate me into the order.”

And with the rapid-fire experience of thirty days less one as outlined in this summary, Mazie the model wrapped her shapely lines in simple clothes, took a few bare necessaries and fled. The divorce suit followed.

As for Ryerson, he avers that he has been slandered; that the girl was hypnotized by one of his Hindu employees; that she has attempted to blackmail him; that she was married to one George A. Martin, alias George Foy Gregory, of Pittsburgh, and forgot the formality of divorce before marrying him—an allegation that she denies with vigor.

But the fact remains that the mystic love cult that she reveals does exist and that Ryerson has been charged with being its chief votary, and in the studios of Detroit one hears each day a new chapter of the adventures of Mazie.

She is back at the Chalet des Arts reigning as queen, in her smock gown and her atmosphere of line and form.

“I found happiness again with my friends of the studio,” she says, “and I could never go back to live with Ryerson.”

Richard W. Fatigant, one of the artists, who gave a dinner in honor of her return, added:

“We are always happy when Mazie is around. The atmosphere of the studio changes when she enters the door.”

And as to Ryerson—

Well, when the girl had gone back to the studio the artists found him trekking there also. He was asking for Mazie. He found men and women sketching with charcoal the beautiful lines of the woman who had fled, but the curves of the neck, the torso and the limbs were all from memory, for the model was not there to receive him.