A Secret Life: The Sex, Lies, and Scandal of President Grover Cleveland's Presidency

Despite his walrus-like appearance, president Grover Cleveland (1837%E2%80%931908) generated enough sexual turmoil to fuel several Victorian melodramas, according to this rollicking biography. Journalist Lachman (The Last Lincolns: The Rise and Fall of a Great American Family) accepts the claim of Maria Halpin, a garment-industry supervisor in whom Cleveland was romantically interested, that, 11 years before his presidency began, Cleveland raped and impregnated her, broke a marriage promise and, in the course of a years-long custody battle, consigned their illegitimate son to an orphanage and had his hired men drag her to an insane asylum. The allegations became the centerpiece of the famously mud-slinging presidential campaign of 1884%E2%80%94Cleveland's Republican opponents chanted ,"Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?"%E2%80%94and afford Lachman a peg for a lively, revealing account of the overwrought sexual politics, cutthroat partisanship, and press frenzies of the Gilded Age. Writing next to nothing about Cleveland's politics and policies, the author focuses instead on his woman issues, including his White House marriage to a decades-younger beauty and, casting about further, Lachman covers even Cleveland's sister's torrid lesbian affair. Lachman's Cleveland is a rather appealing, Falstaffian figure%E2%80%94jolly, beery, gluttonous, and possessed of a stubborn honor that's hard to square with a lapse into villainy. The result is a colorful but shapeless heap of dirty laundry. Photos. (Aug.)