E. Virgil Neal: Hypnotist, Fraudster, Tycoon, Part 2

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Crazy v. Wilson. This is part two
of a two parter, and this is an instance where
you really do have to listen to the first part

(00:23):
before you jump into this one, or it's not going
to make any sense, because we are picking up right
in the middle of the fraud case against E. Virgil
Neil's company, Force of Life, for the completely bogused treatments
that it advertised and sent consumers through the mail. We
are also in this episode going to get to the
company that finally shifted Neil into a position as a

(00:46):
head of a pretty respected business in the beauty industry,
although it too had some roots in its old Charlatan
ways in its beginnings. So we left off in part
one as the news was breaking. The investigators on a
joint task force headed up by the Postmaster General had
been digging into Neil's business dealings for about a year

(01:08):
to put together a case against Force of Life, and
that is where we are picking up. So the investigation
into Force of Life quickly revealed that not only Neil
and his immediate associates, but also a number of prominent
men were all part of this company. A lot of
them were high ranking officers at one or more banks.

(01:31):
Others had invested heavily in a company called New York
Food and Chemical Company, which was a wholesaler that Force
of Life purchased medications from. But the biggest scandal was
that the company was tied to General James R. Oburn,
sometimes reported incorrectly as John R. Oburn. James Rowan Oburn

(01:55):
was born in Ireland on September twenty fifth, eighteen thirty nine.
Moved to the US before he turned one to escape
the Great Hunger, and Obern grew up entirely in the US.
He attended Fordham University, was valedictorian of his graduating class,
became a lawyer before enlisting at the start of the
American Civil War. He was part of this thirty seventh

(02:18):
New York Regiment, which was known colloquially as the Irish Rifles.
He was a decorated soldier. He earned a Medal of
Honor after being wounded in battle. He suffered three bullet wounds,
one through the lung. He was discharged and became the
Provost Marshal of Washington, d C. He very famously was

(02:38):
part of the manhunt that ended in John Wilkes Booth
capture after President Abraham Lincoln was shot, and then he
guarded the president's deathbed. He held a number of posts
in Washington, D C. After the Civil War ended, and
eventually moved back to New York City. And this man
frequently referred to as a hero, understandably based on all

(03:01):
that stuff I've just read, apparently ended up tangled with E.
Virgil Neil o'burne was listed as the president of Force
of Life, and The New York Times, like other papers,
followed this entire case closely. By January seventeenth of nineteen
oh six, the paper was reporting that the company's offices

(03:22):
were being dismantled, and according to the Times, quote E.
Virgil Neil, the originator and first president of the Force
of Life Chemical Company, for whom Post Office inspectors armed
with warrants have been searching several days in this city,
Washington and Syracuse, is still at large. Neil is charged
with conspiracy to defraud by use of the United States mails,

(03:45):
jointly with doctor William Wallace Hadley, Chief medical director, Missus
Laura M. Wilson, consulting medical director, and Arthur H. Williams,
Treasurer of the Force of Life concern. These three Force
of Lifers have already been arrested and are now out
on two five hundred dollars bail each. That write up

(04:06):
also noted that O'Byrne had made a statement through his
attorney that he had no part in the company's day
to day management. Another article appearing in an Illinois paper
noted quote General O'Byrne was seen following the arrests, but
his counsel refused to allow him to be interviewed. If
it sounds like a lot had happened in the lead

(04:28):
up to this story breaking publicly, that's because it had.
The investigation, complete with those ongoing back and forth correspondences
between the Force of Life company and federal agents posing
as customers, which we talked about in some detail in
Part one, had been quietly playing out for a full
year before any warrants were issued or arrests were made,

(04:51):
And as the investigation was made public, it was revealed
that the whole thing had been a joint effort after
Roosevelt had gotten the US Post Office in involved. Assistant
US District Attorney Clarence Houghton was also brought on, as
well as two men who served as council for the
New York County Medical Society, Champ S Andrews and john S. Cooper.

(05:13):
As investigators were working on collecting evidence the legal team
was building their case. One of the documents that came
to light in the investigation was a letter written by
doctor Hadley's colleague Laura M. Wilson to E. Virgil Neil.
It hinted that o'burne may have been either suspecting something

(05:33):
was going on at Force of Life or just really
wanted to be on top of the company's business activities,
and that Wilson and Neil were trying to figure out
how to keep some aspects of the business away from
him by preventing the company's secretary from taking down everything
that was said in a meeting. That letter was printed

(05:53):
in part in The New York Times and it read quote,
you do not state why General o'burn wanted you to
take them of the meeting. I do not believe he
realizes fully what you have to do. I hope you
will read my letters to the committee. Miss Nykirk is
trusted with a good many confidential things. It seems to

(06:14):
me she might be safely trusted to do this. Should anything,
if any private nature come up, she could be excused
from the room. And you can take this part of
the report and mail it as a supplementary report. But
if miss Nykirk cannot be trusted to take work of
this kind, it will be necessary to get someone who

(06:36):
can be trusted, because even if you had time, there
are too many things of greater importance that you should do. Yeah, basically,
like just tell the secretary of leaves her room. Sometimes
it's fine. She just won't take that down and he'll
never know. He doesn't need to know. So it does
seem like they were trading on o'burne's good name m

(06:56):
while they knew they were doing really nefarious stuff and
keeping him from knowing about the nefariousness. Yeah. What The
New York Times described as quote reams of lurid Force
of Life pamphlets, circulars, and correspondents had been turned over
or seized as those various members of the Force of
Life staff had been arrested, and it enabled investigators to

(07:19):
piece together the way that the whole operation functioned. Some
of the pills the company provided, and I'm using the
word pills very loosely, as you'll see in a moment,
were touted in this seized material as life rate capsules,
and the literature claimed that they contained radium and suggested
that they could prolong human life to two hundred years.

(07:43):
On the upside, they did not actually contain any radium
at all. They were found to have phosphorus in than
when they were tested. But these were also capsules that
you were not supposed to take orally. It was claimed
that they just gave off emanations of quote wonderful revitalizing
pawer that would cure disease and improve health. Customers were

(08:04):
sent these capsules for free on loan after signing a
pledge that they would return them once their treatment was complete.
Other courses of treatment laid out in correspondence with patient
customers ranged from folk remedies to the reading of poetry.
There was also among the acquired documents a letter from

(08:25):
a person who was very angry that they had not
been paid for the fictional testimonials they had provided force
of life, and it came to light that those many
blood samples that people sent them after they were requested.
Those had been going right in the trash, no one
analyzed them. The only scientific equipment found at the offices

(08:46):
was a single microscope and a handful of test tubes.
Based on what I read, it didn't sound like those
had ever been in use. But all of this theater
was part of luring clients into the idea that they
were working with a benevolent company that truly wanted to
help them, and then once that trust was established with
people who were gullible or desperate, it was really easy

(09:08):
to transition to selling them treatments. E. Virgil Neil was
also running a food manufacturing business at the same time
that Force of Life was operating. This one was called
Neil Biscuit Company, and it manufactured foods that were marketed
as digestion aids. This company didn't ever get rolled into

(09:28):
any of Neil's legal issues, though it did have ties
to the New York Food and Chemical Company, so that
was there the same company that prominent New Yorkers had
invested in as the manufacturer of medications purchased for use
by Force of Life, So these things were kind of connected,
but no legal fallout from that one. No Uh, this

(09:52):
man was so good at shell companies and like obscuring
the truth by having twenty two different legal entities sprouting
off of one another, none of which could be easily traced.
We'll talk more about that, But here's the thing in
all of this. Everyone wanted to hear, of course, from E.
Virgil Neil, but nobody could find him. A thorough search

(10:14):
of the company's Syracuse office, where he was rumored to
be hiding, turned up nothing. The janitor of the building
was questioned, and he told investigators that Neil had last
been there late Saturday afternoon, But that information was a
little problematic because it contradicted a statement that his mother
had made that he had left Syracuse for Manhattan on Friday,

(10:36):
the day before the janitor claims to have seen him last.
No one seemed to know where he was, but there
were a lot of rumors circulating about it. Various accounts
placed him in hiding right there in Syracuse. Others said
that he was at a sanitarium because he was very
ill and getting treatment, and other accounts, including his mother's,
said that he had left the country entirely coming. We'll

(11:00):
talk about why federal authorities were so eager to pursue
the Force of Life case and how it played out.
But first we will pause for a sponsor break a
lot of the fervor around Force of Life and the

(11:22):
official charges against its officers. That was conspiracy to obtain
money under false pretenses by the use of the United
States mail. Was fueled by the same concerns that led
to the creation of the first consumer protection law in
the United States, the Pure Food and Drug Act of
nineteen oh six. That piece of legislation, which was also

(11:44):
known as the Wily Act after the Chief Chemist at
the US Department of Agriculture, was for its own description,
an Act for preventing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of
adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, rugs, medicines,
and liquors, and for regulation therein and for other purposes.

(12:06):
So this was obviously not an effort that sprung up
out of nowhere. According to the Food and Drug Administration,
almost one hundred pieces of proposed legislation related to food
and drug regulation had been introduced into Congress between eighteen
seventy nine and the passing of the nineteen oh six
law in June that year. This was a time before

(12:27):
drugs had to be approved by the FDA to go
to market, and patent medicines were common, and they were
often very dangerous, like if it was benign, but just
got your money, that was the best possible outcome. A
lot of these had really really scary stuff in them.
Those life ray capsules had been a focus of concern
because of all of this. As this whole cause got underway,

(12:49):
but the case against Force of Life sputtered. Among other things,
one official testified that he had learned that Neil had
been offered consultation from the brother of a Chicago Attorney
General that would ensure Force of Life's literature was written
and edited in a way that they would be able
to avoid mail fraud charges in return for money, of course,

(13:13):
and Neil apparently refused this deal. From there the case
really unraveled, and then it fell apart. The charges were
dismissed on April twenty fourth, nineteen oh four. There's an
alternate version of this story, as told by the American
Medical Association in its nineteen fifteen publication Medical Mail Order Frauds.

(13:35):
That version states that quote when it was found that
an influential New York politician General James R. O'burn was
president of it. The investigation ceased. The newspaper publicity, however,
killed the business, while the stories in the newspapers certainly
didn't help. Neil would later say that the legal costs

(13:56):
of defending the company were what had wiped it out.
Virgil Neil emerged from hiding after the case had ended,
and he did not publicly disclose where he had been.
At the end of April, the Syracuse Post Standard ran
the story Neil returns for business. The article noted quote,
when asked last night as to his plans and in

(14:17):
regards to his whereabouts and doings for the past few months,
he answered absolutely nothing. To say. To every question, he
gave the same reply. This article also commented on the
rumors that Neil had been in a sanitarium for his
ill health, noting quote, Neil does not look as if
he had been ill. Now, obviously you cannot tell by

(14:37):
looking at a person if they are sick. That is
a huge issue in disability rights. But all of the
write ups about Neil during this time noted how very
healthy he looked and acted, pointing out that the rumor
of illness seemed to have simply been a ruse of
some sort to help wiggle out of appearing in court.

(14:58):
He still had the Neil biscuit come and for a
brief period went back to his same old claims about
improving people's health with his products. He set up multiple
other business ventures that operated in similar ways to those
we've already discussed, advertising free services and then offering items
for sale, using the advertorial style of placement in newspapers

(15:22):
that made ads look like articles, and offering up testimonials
that weren't easily traced to actual clients. But these o
their ventures all struggled, and in nineteen oh seven, E
Virgil Neil declared bankruptcy. One aspect of Neil's life that
is very, very fuzzy in all of these years around

(15:42):
the scandal is his marriage. His wife, Mollie, we mentioned
briefly in Part One, kind of vanishes from his story.
According to biographer Mary Schaeffer Conroy. She doesn't get mentioned
in the public record again until her death in nineteen
four four, at which point she was living in Arizona

(16:03):
away from E. Virgil Neil. It is unclear if she
left when the Force of Life scandal and the hearing
were playing out, or if the couple had been estranged
in some way before that. There are even rumors and
speculation that he left her for another woman. She was
still listed as married to Neil in her obituary, but

(16:25):
it's unclear if there ever was a divorce, but in
any case, by then Neil had remarried twice. In fact,
there is so much hayes around Evirgil Neil's romantic partners
and marriages that it is almost impossible to put together
a clear picture. This is a problem that stems from
a couple of things. Right There is the fact that

(16:45):
Neil was a very messy man in a lot of ways,
and particularly in his relationships with women. He was involved
allegedly with a lot of women. The other problem is
that official accounts and records listing the women he was
seen with often just call them missus e. Virgil Neil,
rather than specifying their names. So aside from the fact

(17:06):
that people who are married to other people are still
humans with their own names and should be recognized as such,
the historical record, like the practice of calling women missus
their husband's name, makes things like this very very difficult
to figure out. Additionally, he also sometimes traveled with women
from his family, like his mother and his sisters, so

(17:28):
it's unclear if the women that were sometimes with him,
which were sometimes called miss or missus Neil, were actually,
you know, benign relatives or actually paramours. Some versions of
his life list a woman named Emma as his first wife.
There was a woman named Emma with him at one
point on a ship manifest, but it is unclear who

(17:51):
that woman was to him. His first wife's name was Molly.
The nature of his relationships with the other women that
he married also causes some confusion. His second wife, Harriet Metameister,
had been called his wife for quite a while before
they actually got legally married, and she seems to have
been in the picture with perhaps a little bit of

(18:11):
overlap with his first wife, Molly. Harriet and Neil were
consistently together by nineteen oh seven. So there's just so
much confusion to try to untangle here, and we will
get into his third wife later, which has its own
set of rumors. As we mentioned a moment ago, Neil
started up a handful of ventures in the aftermath of

(18:32):
the Force of Life scandal, most of which came and
went at a pretty rapid pace, but one that he
founded in nineteen oh seven after his bankruptcy actually had
some lasting power, and that was tukulan manufacturing company. Like
many of his other businesses at that time, it started

(18:52):
in Syracuse and it would become a very lucrative international brand.
We will talk a lot more about Tuklan after we
hear or from the sponsors that keep the show going.
One thing to note about e. Virgil Neil, and we've

(19:14):
alluded to it already, and it also would be obvious
even if we hadn't, was how adept he had become
at obfuscating the details of any given businesses ownership and
leadership structure. He would register the addresses of businesses, sometimes
at his home address, other times at offices, but rarely
was he listing them where they were actually operating. Similarly,

(19:37):
his executives associated with a business often included people who
were only minimally connected to it, or he would sometimes
list himself as an owner, president, etc. In one filing,
but list someone else on another. In instances where he
was required to list out a group of executives, they
were often mentioned only with a last name, making it

(19:58):
difficult to impossible Will to try to verify or track
those people down. There were almost certainly some fictitious employees
among them. This was all done to create a muddled
paper trail that made things like legal actions and tax
tracking more difficult. And with Tookolan, he also made a
new choice in marketing only to women and often making

(20:22):
his wife Harriet the front and center in the advertising,
which made it less obviously associated with him. Tukulan was
also a different path for Neil because it was a
beauty brand, and it may have existed as a venture
of Harriet's before Neil got involved with it. The name
Tukulan was supposedly coming from Greek, meaning the beautiful, although

(20:46):
this is a whole concept in the ancient Greek world.
It doesn't just mean physical beauty. It's a broader concept
than that. The company's advertising followed the same exact playbook,
bok and sales tactics that he had been using for years,
placing advertorials in newspapers. These would once again include testimonials

(21:09):
of people helped buy Tukulan's products, and would offer information
and beauty advice at no charge. In some cases, writeups
would include recipes so people could make the products themselves
at home. However, they always included an ingredient that needed
to be ordered directly from Tukulan. These were touted as

(21:31):
proprietary ingredients, but analysis later showed that they were usually
common things like rosewater that had been kind of doctored
up with other ingredients like colorants and glycerine. If a
customer didn't want to make the concoction herself and risk
making errors with that, she could also just order the

(21:51):
pre made version from Tukulan. One ad that ran in
numerous papers in nineteen oh nine was written according to
a splash she graphic at the top, by the Countess
de Kergemo, not a real person, and it described how
she had been born into nobility but was alas sadly
not beautiful, and how she had sought help from many

(22:13):
beauty experts but they all came up short until she
found Tucalan products including Tukalon complexion powder, krem, Tukalan Tuklan perfume,
Tukalan dentacrem, and Tuklan talcum powder, as well as various
preparations that made use of these and other products. This
very lengthy write up concludes with a note that a

(22:35):
local supplier has plenty of these products in stock to
meet the growing demand, and the consumers should call and
reserve them. The Countess de Kergemo was just one of
a long line of fictitious women cooked up by Neil
to promote Tukalan. The same year those ads were running,
Neil set up a production facility in France. It appeared

(22:57):
the beauty business was going really well, and as France,
and specifically the village of Grass on the Riviera, was
known as the place for quality perfume being made, Neil
got a home there to oversee the factory workings. He
still maintained a home in New York, although e Virgil

(23:17):
Neil continued to run a variety of quick money businesses,
including a corset manufacturing concern that was also under the
Tuklan branding umbrella. It seemed as though as cosmetics business,
and especially the perfume line, was becoming legitimate and somewhat respected.
As it gained reputation, Neil pivoted away from some of

(23:40):
his shadier advertising practices and more toward what you'd expect
from a legitimate perfume and cosmetics brand. He still used testimonials,
but they almost all featured his wife Harriet, and the
practice of giving something away for free and then offering
a tie in for purchase slowly disappeared. He also started

(24:02):
expanding into offices in London as well as France, and
started to more carefully ensure that Tuclan didn't have any
crossover associations with his more dubious business ventures. In some cases,
this meant founding new companies to handle things like patent
medicines so that they could be removed from Toukelan's factories.

(24:23):
As part of this reorg, Tukelon, which had always had
a hyphen after its first syllable so it was too
dash ka n became one non hyphenated word just took
Alan and beauty products were all under that company. Some
of the product line at that point was retired, some
of them were renamed, and eventually makeup products like eyebrow

(24:45):
and lip pencils, rouge face powders, and a skin beautifier
that sounds like a foundation or a concealer were all
added to the line. One aspect of this new setup
that Neil was able to really manipulate was the multi
'sige national identity of the business. In the US, advertisements
to talk about Tukulan's European identity, and then in Europe

(25:09):
he sometimes introduced new products or renamed old products as
being the latest development from America. Also in Europe, he
was able to parlay his relative anonymity into a rewritten
image for himself. He started to tell versions of his
life story and education that weren't entirely accurate or left

(25:31):
out things like his various accusations of fraud. And these
strategies worked really well. Took Alan started bringing in massive
profits and e Virgil Neil became incredibly wealthy. In the process.
He was able to expand sales of the Tooklan product
line into a lot more countries around the world. He
basically had a beauty empire. Yeah, when we say a

(25:55):
lot more countries, I'm not going into all of it
because it gets really big. But like we're talking like
into Russia and the Soviet Union, eventually into Australia, into Asia,
like he was kind of all of the continents but Antarctica.
He was hitting them with product. At that point. In Europe,
all of the scandal of the early nineteen hundreds was

(26:16):
kind of left behind, and Neil, who was now a
rich and respected businessman moved in very heady circles. In
September of nineteen ten, The New York Times reported that
Neil was given an audience with Pope Pius the tenth,
along with the former president of the Force of Life
Company O'Byrne. It read quote James R. O Byrne with

(26:37):
mister and Missus E. Virgil Neil of New York came
this week from Monte Carlo to Rome, where an introduction
from Archbishop Ireland obtained for them the honor of private
audience of the Holy Father, to whom they were presented
by Monsignor Hermanos Franerro. The Pope was extremely kind and
had the whole party sit next him at his desk

(26:58):
as the audience took place in the Pontiff's private library.
He gave Missus Neil a photograph of himself with a
long autograph inscription, which he wrote in the visitor's presence.
When they went, he insisted on accompanying them to the
door of the room. What's interesting is that during all
this he did still have a number of shady businesses

(27:19):
and related lawsuits. Back in the United States. During World
War One, Neil and his wife Harriet, were back in
the US on a number of occasions, and during that
time a product of his called nooxaded iron was the
focus of a fresh accusation of fraud. The product was
manufactured by Day Health Laboratories of Detroit, at least on paper.

(27:43):
In reality, it was produced in offices Neil had in
New York. The claim of knoxaded iron was that it
would quote increase vigor, snap and staying power. Adcopy talked
about how it would enrich the blood and bring color
back to the face. Its list of ingredients were quote
organic iron in the form of iron peptonate, nux vomica,

(28:06):
and glycerol phosphate of calcium nux fomica. Sounds very gross,
and there was not much nux vomica in it, just
one five hundredth of a grain in each tablet, But
that was actually strick nine. The biggest issue for critics,
bigger than that, anyway, was that it claimed to be

(28:27):
a wonder drug when its main ingredient, which was iron,
was commonplace and readily available. That wasn't the only problem, though.
One of the drug's medical endorsers, the doctor Howard James,
was convicted for dispensing drugs illegally and admitted that he
had a drug misuse problem of his own. Other doctors

(28:48):
that endorsed nuxated iron had similarly problematic backstories, including faked
work histories and fake credentials. In April of nineteen eighteen,
Neil was arraigned on a fraud charge in New York.
He entered a not guilty plea and was detained with
bail set at five thousand dollars. Neil's behavior in this

(29:10):
case was very different from his previous charges with force
of life. He did not go into hiding. He showed
up for his arraignment with his lawyer, He paid his bail,
and then he sued the New York Tribune for libel
overcalling him a quack and their coverage over it. This
is conjecture on my part, but all of this seems
a little bit as though his took along business was

(29:31):
legitimizing and he wanted this nookxtated iron problem to be
handled swiftly and in a way that cleared his name
as much as possible. He was, at the same time
named in a lawsuit for mail fraud related to another
company he was associated with. The Cartilage company which sold
a harness by mail that it claimed could stretch a

(29:52):
user's vertebrae and increase their height. In these cases, as before,
Neil's lawyer also worked to distance E. Virgil Neil from
the products, claiming that really they were the work of
someone else and thus get him out from under any
responsibility for them. I was not able to find any
sort of clear indicator of how these few cases we've

(30:14):
just been talking about resolved, but Nook stated iron was
sold for years after this, so it seems to have
been resolved in favor of the company in some way.
After World War One, Neil appears to have spent almost
all of his time in Europe, including building a new,
sprawling mansion called Chateau Dazure in a village north of Nice.

(30:37):
This is also a time when his second marriage ended.
That's similarly nebulous the way his first marriage did, although
we do know that he and Harriet legally divorced and
that he almost immediately remarried to a much younger woman
named Renee Baudier. There were rumors that Neil had become

(30:58):
obsessed with Renee after after meeting her when she was
still a teenager, and that she may have lived at
his house as a sort of adopted daughter before his
marriage to Harriet ended. That's one of many things in
these episodes that's not substantiated, and it may have endured
over the years because Renee lied about her own age

(31:19):
to appear younger than she was. We really don't have
any additional solid information about how Neil and his third
wife met and became romantically involved, but they did get
married on July twenty eighth, nineteen twenty four. A few
months later, on October thirteenth, the couple welcomed a baby,
a son that they named after Neil's alter ego from

(31:41):
his hypnotism days. The baby was zen LaMotte Neil. Perhaps
the most intriguing part of Neil's story is how easily
his image was rehabilitated. The many shady dealings of his
life largely seemed to vanish from public memory, even in
the US. In nineteen thirty three, Time magazine ran an

(32:02):
article about him titled Medicine from Sedelia. This rite up
opens with a long description of a luxury car that
the magazine says is valued at fifty two thousand dollars
and how it was seen sitting outside of a hotel,
and then as this article unrolls, it's revealed that the
vehicle belongs to E. Virgil Neil, and its kind of

(32:22):
evidence of his incredible success. This article also makes him
sound downright wholesome, writing quote his rise to wealth began
like that of many another US tycoon, on a farm
sixty four years ago at Siedelia, Missouri. He still talks
with the Midwestern inflection bland, drawling, soothing. This article incidentally,

(32:44):
has been called out for being kind of a fluff
piece and not well researched, but it does go on
to mention many of his more nefarious dealings. But the
summation is kind of like that. Neil was to be
admired for amassing such a huge fortune with the construction
of Chateau Dajuur. A period of truly moving to Europe completely,

(33:07):
including divesting all ties to US production, started for Nil
and for Tuculan. He shuffled the company's primary headquarters around
his existing offices in other countries to minimize the amount
of taxes that were due for import and export. Throughout
the nineteen thirties, both his branch and English branches of
the company grew each developing their own lines of products

(33:30):
to best suit their specific markets. But as World War
Two loomed, living in France and having production facilities in
both France and London created some challenges. Occupation by Italian
and German forces in the two French cities where Neil
was based, Nice and Paris meant that he had to

(33:50):
move production if he wanted to keep the business going.
He had boasted when he visited the US in the
nineteen thirties that he and Benito Mussolini were friends, and
he called Mussolini a great man. But just the same
his factory in Nice was seized by the Italian government
during occupation, so he opened factories in Monte Carlo and Marseille.

(34:12):
Production continued in London and in an already established factory
in Switzerland, enabling Tucolon to survive through the war. At
this point, Tucalon's holdings were so diversified across multiple continents
that the shell game he had played to keep his
financial situation inscrutable to others kind of helped e Virgil
Neil keep everything running. There were also rumors that Neil

(34:36):
and Renee had nefarious dealings during the war that kept
them living very comfortably while other people suffered. The FBI
compiled a file on him on the suspicion that he
had traded with the enemy, in part because Tuclon had
continued its production lines and kept advertising in magazines in

(34:57):
Paris all through the war, even when per was occupied.
He and Renee and their associates had been friendly with
the Germans in France, and that got them labeled as collaborators.
They denied these claims and asserted that anything that had
been deemed suspicious in their activities was simply part of
the larger effort to keep the business running and keep

(35:19):
people employed. Ultimately, all of the evidence against him and
this was circumstantial. Yeah, this is a much bigger story
in and of itself, if you want to kind of
pick part how one person or one company is figuring
out how to get through the war. The biography that

(35:40):
we mentioned by Mary Schaeffer Conroy goes into all of
this in deep detail, mentioning all of the various like
it's a spider web of people they're connected to and
how they are connected to German occupation officers, et cetera.
That biography is called The Cosmetics Bearing. You've never heard
of It's a very long book, but it's full of

(36:00):
a wealth of information. In nineteen forty six, the Neils
went to Geneva and they ended up spending most of
the next several years there. In the early summer of
nineteen forty nine, Evir Jil Neil came down with pneumonia
and he died in Geneva on June thirtieth of nineteen
forty nine. Neil's obituary in his hometown paper, The Sedalia Democrat,

(36:22):
reflects the edit that his life story went through as
he gained commercial success. It jumps right from his early
life to his later business success. Reading quote, mister Neil
was a native Missourian born near Lincoln and attended Central
Business College here, later becoming a member of the faculty.
Leaving Sedalia, he went to New York and successfully conducted

(36:45):
a perfumery business, and from there went to France, where
his business reached an international scope. Goes on to talk
about his beautiful home in France, the last time he
visited Sedalia, and how he worked right up until the
day he died. No mention of any of the legal
tangles that happened in the middle, and some cases alongside

(37:07):
all of that. Yeah, the Took Along company lived on
after its founder, although who exactly owned it at various
points is a little bit hazy. Like many other things
in his life, it was operated by a company that
had been founded in the years prior to Neil's death
to manage the company's international affairs, and although the owners

(37:28):
of that management company are documented, there's been a lot
of speculation that they were managing it after Neil's death
on behalf of a new owner, but we don't know
exactly who that was. Over the course of the twenty
five years following Neil's death, the company changed hands several times,
ultimately becoming part of the larger, privately owned Cooper Cosmetics

(37:50):
in the nineteen seventies. In his will, Neil left two
thirds of his liquid assets to his wife and the
remaining third to his son, Zen. Neil Zen refused his inheritance.
Any money made from sales of assets was to go
into a trust, which was likely used to be used
to manage his debts. Zen went on to work for

(38:12):
Tuklan for a while. He actually became a member of
its board of directors. His wife, Renee, was also involved
in the business for a while, but she was eventually
pushed out. His son, Zen eventually moved to California and
work in retail as a buyer, and he seemed to
largely separate himself from his father's legacy, and Renee died.
I think in nineteen eighty two that is the wildlife

(38:36):
of E. Virgil Neil. Wild is the word I was
thinking of. Also, I just have so many thoughts. I
can't wait for Friday episode. Do you have listener mail? Yes,
I have listener mail. This is from our listener Kimberly,
who writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I had previously written
in about Mammoth Cave Mummy, but just listened to your
behind the scenes on mirror Balls slash disco Balls. The

(38:59):
bathroom you talked about with disco Balls is actually in
a gas station or a chain of gas stations now
in Kentucky called hop shops. The one I heard about
first is in northern Kentucky, which I guess kind of
makes sense based on what I learned about mirror Balls
in your episode. Anyway, I have never seen this bathroom,
as I try to avoid gas station bathrooms at all costs.

(39:20):
But no folks who have stopped there on purpose, just
to push the button and make the disco Ball come out. Listen.
That's the only reason I'd be in there. I kind
of love the idea that it's such a random and
unexpected place that has the disco Ball bathroom rather than
a place where you might expect it anyway. I have
attached a photo of some disco Ball cookies I did
through my cookie business. I often listen to the podcast

(39:41):
as I bake and feel like you all are my
super interesting coworkers that always have fun stories to tell
at the water cooler. I've also included some updated photos
of my kiddies, Calypso the Gray and White Fluff and
Jupiter at the tourny. They both love sleeping on my
daughter's bed during the day, but never together, so it's
a constant fight for territory. They don't seem to care
much for history, but maybe they'll grow into it one day.

(40:02):
Keep up the good word, camp, This is so cool
and I love seeing these disco Ball cookies. And I
had seen a mention of where that where that disco
Ball bathroom was, but then I lost track of it,
So thank you for the reminder or their Kentucky hop shops.
Go see the disco Ball. I kind of want to,
trying to think if I would, my travels would take

(40:23):
me there at any point in the near future. Thank
you for writing us that email, and also listen. We
always want cookie and cat pictures all day, every day.
I can't think of a better thing. If you would
like to write to us, show us whatever cookies you've
been making or where you like to use public bathrooms.
Be a weird email, but who knows. Everybody's got their thing.

(40:43):
You could do that at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
If you would like to look at the show notes
for the episodes, they are all at mistonhistory dot com
connected to the associated episode. If you would like to
subscribe to the show and you haven't gotten around to
that yet, it's so easy. You can do it on
the ie heart radio app or anywhere you listen to
your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is

(41:09):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}E. Virgil Neal: Hypnotist, Fraudster, Tycoon, Part 2