BEACHCOMBER Daniel Moriarty was sifting through the sands on fashionable Long Beach, L.
I., looking for trinkets abandoned by the beautiful people who had sunned themselves the day before. It was just after dawn on Monday, June 8, 1931. A fog was rolling in, and with the fog came a body. She came in facedown, rocking slowly in the waves, seaweed tangled in her sand-matted hair. She was 25 and beautiful. She wore a fitted black-and-white print dress with nothing underneath. She was badly bruised. Her name was Starr Faithfull. She might have stepped from the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a high-society girl who epitomized the age of jazz and bathtub gin, and the mystery of her final hours, the torrid secrets of her wanton flapper life and the desperate sadness that limned her eyes in every glamorous photograph would rivet the public for months. There would be two explosive diaries detailing sexual adventures dating to her childhood. There would be melodramatic suicide notes, and charges they were forged. There would be broad hints that her death came as no small relief to certain prominent individuals. "I'm not sorry she's dead," said her 19-year-old sister, Tucker. "She's happier. Everybody's happier.
" Nassau County District Attorney Elvin Edwards agreed. "Several people in high places will rest easier with her dead," he said. "I am playing a dangerous game," the drowned woman had written a friend shortly before she disappeared. "There is no telling where I'll land.
" SHE WAS barely on the morgue slab before her shocking double life began to spill out. The rich young beauty was a refined product of the finest finishing schools; she was also an out-of-control drunk, a wild-child party girl who snorted ether, gulped barbiturates and didn't always come home every night to the family apartment at 12 St. Luke's Place in Greenwich Village. She liked to haunt the Cunard docks and crash bon voyage parties aboard outgoing ocean liners. Having sailed Cunard to Europe eight times, she was now, authorities decided, in the habit of trysting with various ships' officers. On May 29, it was established, she had been put off the Franconia, sloshed and crazed and screaming. "Kill me!
" she shrieked as she was wrestled ashore. "Throw me overboard!
" Swiftly there arose reports that on Friday, June 5, the day her family saw her last, she had spirited herself aboard the Mauretania, which had sailed that night for the Bahamas. Her stepfather, industrialist Stanley Faithfull, insisted to police that Starr kept no diary but detectives found one on Tuesday. And on Wednesday they were in Boston, questioning politically powerful Andrew Peters 59-year-old former mayor, ex-congressman, President Woodrow Wilson's assistant secretary of the treasury, the man who had seconded Al Smith's presidential nomination in June 1928. He was an old family friend. His wife was Starr's mother's first cousin. By Friday, Starr's diary what was printable of it was all over the headlines. The 40-page bombshell vividly detailed 14 years of drug-addled sexual adventures with at least 19 men, including London aristocrats, Manhattan playboys and, the papers said, a "man of political importance" who had been her "tutor" and who apparently had paid well for the privilege. In Boston, Peters fumed that he had no knowledge of Starr's demise and warned that he would not see his good name dragged into scandal. But in Nassau County, minutes before Starr's body was to be cremated, Edwards suddenly ordered the proceeding stopped. That night, police found another diary hidden in Starr's room. The next day, authorities said they were now convinced that she had met her end aboard the Mauretania, perhaps 7 miles at sea, and been put over the rail. On Sunday, after reexamining the body, city toxicologist Dr. Alexander Goettler announced that Starr's liver was full of the good-time drug Veronal that she had, in essence, gone asleep into the sea. "Death by drowning," said Edwards, "brought about by someone interested in closing her lips.
" Then he made a large point of blasting Stanley Faithfull and Starr's sister Tucker, who had, it seemed to him, been less than fully forthcoming at every stage of the investigation. There was, he said, more to the story yet untold. A FEW DAYS later, the case took a massive U-turn: Dr. George Jameson Carr, a Cunard ship's surgeon just back from England, produced several letters purportedly mailed to him by Starr in her final hours. "When you receive this letter, I will have committed suicide by drowning," she had written. Starr had fallen for the doctor when he once helped her with a bad onboard hangover. Her affections were not returned. "You don't become romantic about a girl on whom you used a stomach pump the first time you saw her," Carr explained. The letters were patently suicidal. Starr had resolved, she wrote, "to end my worthless, disorderly bore of an existence before I ruin anyone else's life as well. I certainly have made a sordid futureless mess of it all. "I take dope to forget and drink to try and like people, but it is of no use. Everything is an anti-climax to me now. I want oblivion. "If there is an afterlife, it would be a dirty trick. But I'm sure 50 million priests are wrong.
" This appeared to bring some closure to the matter. Stanley Faithfull loudly insisted that the letters were forgeries and got a handwriting expert to declare them such. Police experts disagreed. And the tawdry tale of the beautiful and the damned came quietly to an end. BUT IN late July, Stanley Faithfull went back to the papers, charging "shameful official negligence"; Edwards, he said, was "lying down on the job," intimidated by persons "too big and influential for him to tackle.
" His stepdaughter, he alleged, had been kidnaped and "criminally drowned" by hired assassins. And he produced stunning documents: copies of a $20,000 check from Andrew Peters and a 1927 agreement releasing Peters from liability in the seduction and ruination of Starr Faithfull when she was 11. In Boston, Peters immediately suffered a nervous collapse as the ghosts of his past rose up to forever destroy his career and social standing. In Nassau County, Edwards declared that he firmly believed Starr to have been murdered but that he had no evidence. "Neither Peters nor anybody else is so highly placed that I won't proceed against them," the district attorney sputtered. Now the Daily News opened its own investigation and soon asserted that industrialist Faithfull was nearly broke and that several days before Starr disappeared he had traveled to Boston to seek additional pay-offs from Peters. Enraged, Faithfull sued The News and several other papers for libel. Late in the year, the courts dismissed his claim. About that same time, a final inquest into Starr Faithfull's death was held. It was over in 15 minutes, and it reached no conclusion. "Whatever I decide," said Nassau County Coroner Edward Neu, "it will be only a matter of opinion.
" BIG TOWN BIG TIME A NEW YORK EPIC: 1898-1998 CHAPTER 64
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