Reynolds v. Reynolds

In what last week promised to become the most involved inheritance litigation of 1933, the principal adult personages were:

Zachary Smith Reynolds, fourth child of the late Richard Joshua Reynolds, founder of a tobacco company at Winston-Salem, N. C. Two years after his birth in 1911, his father's tobacco company gave birth to the first package of Camels. While Zachary Smith Reynolds was growing up, a weak-chinned, moody child at his family's elaborate 600-acre country seat, "Reynolda," the U. S. entered the War. Out of the War came mass-smoking of cigarets, with Camels a U. S. favorite. In 1918, the year "R. J." died, Reynolds were producing more than 20,000,000,000. This accounted for the trust fund of $60,000,000 for the four Reynolds children.

In 1929, when he was barely 18, Smith Reynolds married Anne Cannon, daughter of a Concord, N. C. textile tycoon. In August 1930, they had a daughter. A year later young Smith Reynolds, who had studied aviation instead of going to college, flew his wife to Reno for her divorce.

Anne got a settlement from Smith Reynolds of $500,000 for herself and the same amount for little Anne. On the same day, Smith Reynolds took out a license for his second marriage--to Elsbeth ("Libby") Holman. A week later they were secretly married in Monroe, Mich. Immediately afterward, Smith Reynolds set off to fly around the world in his own plane. When he got back, in May 1932, he and Libby Holman Reynolds announced their marriage in Manhattan. On July 6, at "Reynolda," Smith Reynolds and his wife gave a party, during which Smith Reynolds was found in an upstairs sleeping porch shot to death by person or persons unknown.

Anne Cannon Reynolds Smith came from a family which, in the industrial feudalism of the new South, occupied at Kannapolis, N. C. a position analogous to that of the Reynolds family at Winston-Salem. The Cannon textile mills were founded by James Cannon who started out as a clerk in a Concord, N. C. general store just after the Civil War. Old James Cannon had five sons, four of them given to jollity and excesses, one given to sober industry. He willed his textile mills to his sober youngest son. Charles A. Cannon proved the wisdom of this move by running them so ably that in 1918 the U. S. soldiers who were smoking Camel cigarets were drying themselves with Cannon towels embroidered with such fiery legends as "To Hell with the Kaiser" and "In God We Trust." By 1930, Charles A. Cannon had introduced the vogue for colored towels; the Cannon mills made 65% of the towels in the U. S. It might therefore have seemed that a wedding between Anne Cannon, daughter of the oldest of old James Cannon's lively sons, and young Zachary Smith Reynolds, would be an ideal alliance, satisfying the prudence and propriety of smokestack royalty as gracefully as it embellished the legend of Southern romance. Such was not the case. The wedding of Anne Cannon and Smith Reynolds was celebrated at midnight in York, S. C. There were no witnesses except the bride's father and a policeman.

After her separation from Smith Reynolds, Anne Cannon Reynolds went home to Concord, where she was involved in further publicity over the death of a local bank-cashier who fell off a balcony during a drinking party. Mrs. Reynolds had been the last person to see him alive. Last spring she married a Charlotte realtor named Brandon Smith.

Libby Holman Reynolds came to Manhattan in 1924, the talented, pretty and vivacious daughter of an able Cincinnati lawyer whose professional abilities she was presently both to tax and to advertise. She rapidly acquired fame and a fortune estimated at $150,000 by singing "torch songs." After the death of Smith Reynolds, Libby Holman Reynolds and Albert ("Ab") Walker, Reynolds' friend and secretary, were indicted for murder; it was established that Libby Holman Reynolds was pregnant. Last November the State of North Carolina lacked evidence to prosecute its case against Mrs. Reynolds and Ab Walker. Libby Holman Reynolds went to Philadelphia to have her baby.

Far more important than the adult personages in the case of Reynolds v. Reynolds by last week were two diminutive protagonists neither of whom was yet able to make much sense either about the Reynolds' estate or any other matter.

One was small Anne Cannon Reynolds II, two-year-old daughter of Smith Reynolds' first wife. In a deserted house near Atlanta last week, police used a special electric trap to catch an ex-convict and parachute jumper named Odell Boyles who had been threatening to kidnap small Anne Reynolds II so persistently that she had had a police guard for the last three months. The Brandon Smiths had kept the house lit up, lights burning on the grounds of their estate night after night for three months to foil marauders.

The other was picayune Zachary Smith Reynolds Jr. (not yet officially christened). On the same day that little Anne's would-be kidnapper was arrested, Zachary Smith Reynolds Jr., 3 1/2 lb., was born at the Pennsylvania Hospital. He was promptly dumped into an incubator to remain for some three months.

With the appearance of picayune Zachary Smith Reynolds Jr. there arose immediately the question of who was to inherit the estate--now grown to $20,000,000--of Zachary Smith Reynolds. Before his second marriage he had made a will in New York bequeathing it to his brother and two sisters. The will omitted mention of Libby Holman and her son. It provided $50,000 each for Anne Cannon Reynolds and Anne Cannon Reynolds II.

In Wilmington last week, Lawyer Alfred Holman, father of Libby Holman Reynolds, issued a statement which said: '"Mrs. Reynolds has offered to relinquish her child's right to the inheritance as far as she is legally able and her own share as a widow save a comparatively modest sum in each case . . . hoping the remainder may be devoted to public uses through an endowment established in her late husband's and his father's memory. . . ."

It will be no easy matter for Mrs. Libby Holman Reynolds to relinquish any part of her child's right to the inheritance. Before she can relinquish her own rights, it might well be necessary to determine what her rights are. The statement of Lawyer Holman therefore left the question almost exactly where it had been when Zachary Smith Reynolds Jr. propounded it with his first squawk. A few of the other questions which remained for the courts to settle:

Where did Zachary Smith Reynolds have his legal residence?

Was his will, made in New York, valid? If so, how far would it operate against the claims of his widow and his posthumous son?

Would contests over the inheritance take place in New York, where the will was made, or in North Carolina, where the trust was made?

What rights has the former Mrs. Anne Cannon Reynolds in the estate? Was her waiver of her rights at the time of her divorce legal? Could she waive the rights of her infant daughter?

What would be the effect upon the whole matter in the event of the death of picayune Reynolds, a possibility which his doctors last week found increasingly remote?

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