At another time and under other circumstances, the Henry Field-Nancy Keene Perkins wedding would have been a high point of the international social agenda. The groom was a grandson of Chicago’s late Marshall Field and a nephew of the commander of the British navy. The bride was a Virginia debutante and niece of the legendary Langhorne sisters. Aunt Nancy was the wife of Sir Waldorf Astor and author of the celebrated comment “I married beneath me. All women do.” Aunt Irene was the wife of artist Charles Dana Gibson, who redefined Western beauty and fashion by creating the “Gibson girl” look.
A more fatalistic bride might have abandoned Henry at the altar. Tragedy and scandal seemed to plague the Field family, and her groom would be no exception.
The brothers’ widowed mother, Albertine, abandoned Chicago for Britain, where in 1908 she married Captain Maldwin Drummond, a minor nobleman. Defying her late father-in-law’s will, she took her two sons abroad with her to be educated at Eton. The elder Field had stipulated that his grandsons be educated in the United States for business careers.
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Having braved the German U-boats, Marsh arrived in Chicago herself months later with a baby she claimed was Henry’s son and promptly discovered he was engaged. After some hard bargaining, she signed a financial agreement the morning of Henry’s wedding day. The document remains on file in Chicago’s probate court. Henry agreed to pay her $10,000 a year in monthly installments to support her child born “on or about July 11, 1916.” The annual remittance would increase by $2,500 when little Henry reached age five and again by that amount at age ten, and big Henry would either designate little Henry the beneficiary of a $100,000 insurance policy on the former’s life or set up an irrevocable trust paying the boy a minimum of $20,000 annually for life.
Peggy received a $5,000 signing bonus for accepting three conditions: she would relinquish all future claims against big Henry, never communicate with him again except through his attorney and then only with respect to the terms of their agreement, and “support, maintain and care for and educate her said child with care and diligence.” Despite the implications, nowhere in the agreement did Henry admit to fathering Henry Field Marsh.
About a year later, Peggy Marsh heard a knock at the door of her modest New York apartment. She might have hoped to find a messenger delivering a check from the Fields, for child support had all but ceased with Henry’s death. Instead she greeted a stranger in uniform who introduced himself as Chief Yeoman MacGregor Bond of naval intelligence.
He claimed to have known about Kaiser Wilhelm’s secret weapon, a huge long-range cannon, before it fired its first salvos on Paris. His closest associates were fellow Russian immigrants who squandered much of their questionable income on women and regularly sat in on table-stakes poker games that floated among luxurious suites in Manhattan’s finest hotels.
