![\"LostEmAll\"](\"http:\/\/www.bassettbranches.org\/newsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/LostEmAll.jpg\")
<\/a>The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine Section, February 10, 1924\nWife, Job, Home, Son \u2013 Mr. Bassett Lost \u2018Em All
\nReally Tragic Plight of the Young Man
\nWho Is Having to Pay and PAY and PAY Just Because
\na Famous Woman Novelist Found That He Fitted So Very Nicely
\nInto Her Busy Life<\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 In the typical film drama, as every \u201cmovie\u201d goer knows, it is the woman who pays and pays and pays. But in real life this is by no means always the case. Quite frequently it is the man who has to pay most heavily for some crime or some mistake, for some treachery on another\u2019s part or some compromising situation in which circumstances make his innocence look like guilt.<\/p>\n
Take, for example, that thrilling little drama of reality which Nina Wilcox Putnam, the famous author, her former chauffeur and secretary, Ellsworth Bassett, and the latter\u2019s wife, recently have been presenting, to the public\u2019s great amazement.<\/p>\n
The plot of this curious intermingling of comedy and tragedy, on which the curtain rose in the little Connecticut village of Madison, and which later shifted its scene to Canada and Palm Beach and New York, has reached its climax.<\/p>\n
And who is the chief victim? Who of the three actors is the one to suffer most as a result of the denouncement that has come?<\/p>\n
Both Mrs. Putnam and Mrs. Bassett think they have suffered, and must still suffer, more than any woman should have to, but even their most sympathetic friends will hardly maintain that either of them has the heaviest load un happiness and remorse to bear.
\nAs so often happens outside of the \u201cmovies\u201d, Fate has dumped the greatest burden of punishment on the shoulders of a man. It is Ellsworth Bassett, the young and good looking hero, who is having to pay most heavily for the strange tangle in which he and his wife and his former employer became involved.<\/p>\n
And what a staggering price it is that he is being to pay for the guilt or the misunderstanding or whatever it was that caused all this trouble!<\/p>\n
His wife, his home, his job, his son \u2013 Mr. Bassett has lost them all. They have been snatched from him suddenly and completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed them up.<\/p>\n
The rosy future he believed he faced a few weeks ago when he sat beside his pretty and talented employer among the palm trees of Florida has become a drab, dismal thing. With almost movie like swiftness he has been yanked away from the balmy luxuries of a fashionable Southern beach and brought back to the worries of a workaday life in the chilly North.<\/p>\n
No longer has he an expensive car to drive or a famous novelist to introduce him as her business representative and intrust him with the marketing of her writings. Nothing like that now for Ellsworth Bassett. He is hunting a new job, establishing himself in a new home and awaiting with what equanimity he can the outcome of the situation.
\nAs long as he lives Bassett probably never will forget that morning when this disastrous real-life plot began getting under way. He rose from the breakfast table and, taking his overalls down from a hook behind the kitchen door, started rolling them into a neat bundle.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are you going to do, my dear?\u201d his wife asked as she hurried away the breakfast dishes, preparatory to leaving for her day\u2019s work in the village post office.
\n\u201cGoing to paint Nina Wilcox Putnam\u2019s house,\u201d he replied.<\/p>\n
Then he explained how he had met the novelist the day before and she had told him she was looking for somebody to give her house a coat of paint. Having no work of his own on hand, Bassett offered his services and Mrs. Putnam gladly accepted them.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s easy work,\u201d said Bassett to his wife, \u201cand she will pay me well.\u201d<\/p>\n
As he kissed Mrs. Bassett good-bye and started off she seems as well pleased as he over the money his industry was going to bring into the family pocketbook. Neither of them had nay suspicion of the momentous changes this house-painting job was going to bring in their lives.<\/p>\n
Nina Wilcox Putnam has maintained a home in Madison for a number of years, living there between her frequent trips to California, New York, Palm Beach and other places where she goes to gather material for her stories. Her first husband, Robert Faulkner Putnam is dead, and, as the village gossips had long been whispering, she was about to seek a divorce from her second one, Robert J. Sanderson.<\/p>\n
In the course of directing the painting of the house Mrs. Putnam became pretty well acquainted with Ellsworth Bassett. She was favorably impressed, as everybody who meets him is, by his stalwart good looks, his gentlemanly manners and his keen intelligence. She found that he could not only paint a house, but could drive a car and repair one, too, and they talked a good deal of the things that interest motorists.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Putnam was pleasantly surprised to have a young man of such engaging personality wielding a paint brush on her house. As anybody with half an eye could see, he was capable of much better things \u2013 just the type of man to make an ideal chauffeur and business agent and all-round companion and protector for a well-to-do and busy woman who has no husband on the job of looking after her.<\/p>\n
The painting was finished and the paths of Mrs. Putnam and Bassett might never again have crossed if she had not suddenly found it necessary to make an automobile trip to Canada. Since a recent illness her physician had forbidden her to drive a car, and she could think of no one except her versatile house painter of a few days ago whom she cared to take along as chauffeur and companion.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Putnam asked Mrs. Bassett if she could borrow her husband for a little while. Mrs. Bassett gave her consent. Ellsworth himself was of course delighted at the chance of taking this long motor trip at the good wages the novelist offered.<\/p>\n
As the novelist and her new chauffeur sped up the Connecticut River Valley her first favorable impression of him deepened. By the time they reached the Canadian border she had engaged him to drive her car right along. Before they started back to Madison he had ceased to be a mere chauffeur and had been made her confidential representative \u2013 with full charge of her household affairs and authority to represent her in the sale of her writings.<\/p>\n
The record of what happened after Mrs. Putnam and Bassett arrived back in Madison and broke the news of their new relationship to Mrs. Bassett is badly blurred by the conflicting stories the two heroines tell.<\/p>\n
\u201cNina Wilcox Putnam invited me to her house\u201d \u2013 so Mrs. Bassett had since declared \u2013 \u201cand tried to persuade me to give up my husband so that she could marry him. When I would not du such a thing he went away with her.\u201d<\/p>\n
All this the novelist denies. \u00a0She declares that Mrs. Bassett said she was glad her husband was working for Mrs. Putnam and \u201cgetting good, steady money.\u201d
\nWhatever the truth about Mrs. Bassett\u2019s attitude, Mrs. Putnam and her new personal representative soon started for Florida together, leaving the wife and her little son to look out for themselves.<\/p>\n
For several weeks Mrs. Bassett let nobody know that she felt any dissatisfaction or uneasiness over her husband\u2019s absence under these conditions. But at last the remarks the gossips kept making began to cause her painful heart burnings. Her husband\u2019s letters, enthusiastically describing the great hotels at which he and Mrs. Putnam were living, the plantation where they picked oranges and the delights of the sun-kissed beaches where they strolled, made her only the more unhappy.<\/p>\n
One morning she burst into the newspapers, crying that she was love-robbed wife \u2013 that the charming novelist had taken her husband away form her and probably would never return him.<\/p>\n
When this happened Mrs. Putnam was just starting for New York to see what could be done about her divorce suit, which had been thrown out of a Rhode Island court on the ground that she was not a legal resident of the State.<\/p>\n
On reaching New York and seeing the publicity that was being given Mrs. Bassett\u2019s vociferous charges, she suffered a nervous collapse. Form her sick bed she issued vigorous denials and pitiful please to her \u201cpublic\u201d not to misjudge her. But the wife in Madison only shouted her grievances all the louder.<\/p>\n
A few days later Ellsworth Bassett arrived from Florida, and, with a noble gesture of self-sacrifice that would do credit to any hero of novels or \u201cmovies\u201d, he resigned the job in which he saw such a glittering future. Then he hurried on to Madison to see a reconciliation with the wife who persisted in describing him as \u201conly a clam digger.\u201d
\nBut Bassett might as well have saved the price of his railroad ticket. In Madison he found that the loss of his job was only a small part of the terrible blow that had fallen on him. He was barred from his home. His wife refused to see him. He was not even permitted a sight of his little son.<\/p>\n
At once Bassett, whether guilty of any wrong to his wife or not, became a tremendously pathetic figure \u2013 a man who had lost all the things that are dearest, next to life itself, and who stands no chance of winning any of them back unless one or the other of the two women in the triangle takes pity on his plight.<\/p>\n
The key to his future happiness seems to rest entirely with his wife and his late employers, and whether either of them will see fit to use it is an interesting question.<\/p>\n
Will Mrs. Bassett\u2019s heart eventually lose its bitterness? Will she decide to call the whole thing an unfortunate misunderstanding and take her handsome husband back to her arms?<\/p>\n
If she will not do this, then Bassett\u2019s only hope of escape from the bondage of a man who must pay and pay and pay lies in the hands of Nina Wilcox Putnam. Through her only can he regain the good job he lost, and through her also he might win another wife and home and son to replace those that have been taken from him.<\/p>\n
As millions of readers of Nina Wilcox Putnam\u2019s stories know, she is an expert at contriving \u201chappy endings\u201d for her plots.<\/p>\n
Will she supply one for the tragedy that has overtaken Ellsworth Bassett, as the result of his relations with her, by taking him back into her employ?<\/p>\n
And later on, if Mrs. Bassett divorces her husband, and if Mrs. Putnam herself succeeds in securing a divorce, will the novelist promote her personal representative to a still more personal position in her life?<\/p>\n
Perhaps Mrs. Putnam\u2019s present husband, Robert J. Sanderson, thinks thi exactly what will happen. Quite possibly this is why, as he recently announced, he has instructed his lawyers to see whether the tangled affairs of his wife and her former house painter and chauffeur and the latter\u2019s wife furnish him the grounds for a divorce.<\/p>\n
Unless his wife decides to forgive him or Mrs. Putnam takes pity on her former employee it seems probable he will have to continue paying, perhaps as long as he lives. Of all the heroines of the moves whose predicaments have won the public\u2019s tears, where is there one who has had to shoulder, whether deserved or undeserved, than is being loaded on unfortunate Mr. Bassett?<\/p>\n
Oakland Tribune, Friday, June 21, 1929 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 NEW HAVEN, Conn. \u2013 June 21 \u2013 (AP) \u2013 Judge F. Arthur Ells in superior court took under advisement the plea of Mrs. Gertrude Hall Bassett, of Madison, for divorce from Richard Ellsworth Bassett of Los Angeles, who took a prominent part in the Rhode Island divorce of Nina Wilcox Putnam, authoress.<\/p>\n Mrs. Bassett charges her husband with eloping with Mrs. Muriel Blanchard Nelson, heiress and wife of William A. Nelson, Madison artist. Mrs. Bassett said Mrs. Nelson took Bassett away in her roadster just after the Putnam divorce. Testimony before Judge Ells brought out that Bassett had been the secretary of the woman writer for thirteen months. Mrs. Nelson is to inherit part of the fortune of Major George Blanchard, millionaire Brooklyn, N.Y., hotel owner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Richard Ellsworth Bassett descends from William Bassett of Plymouth as follows: William Bassett and his wife Elizabeth William Bassett (b. 1624) and wife Mary Raynesford William Bassett (b. 1656) and wife Rachel Williston Jonathan Bassett (b. 1683) and wife Mary … Continue reading <\/a> Whitesville New York News<\/p>\n
\nElopement Charged In Suit For Divorce<\/p>\n