‘Countess’ Jeanne LaMar: The Enigmatic Life and Tragic Death of Boxing’s ‘Mystery Lady’

Written by Christopher Benedict

Sometimes Truth is Stranger Than Fiction

Shortly after Jackson Lake Park Ranger Harry Grace heard gunshots coming from up the mountain road, a distraught young man swinging a suitcase riddled with bullet holes burst through the door of his station house, babbling a breathless, barely coherent story about the gruesome discovery he had just made. Grace directed the frantic stranger toward the Big Pines ranger station, and he was then sent to San Bernardino where the sheriff filed an official report from William Benedict Smith.

A 22-year-old drifter, Smith had been through San Bernardino just three days earlier, looking for work regardless of how temporary. He found it when he was solicited by a woman in her forties who offered him sexual favors and a fistful of dollars as compensation for doing odd jobs around her cabin on an isolated ridge of the San Gabriel mountains. On this, the third day of his short-term employment, Smith was sent out to hunt rabbits for dinner, but stumbled upon a human skeleton instead.

The remains were badly decomposed, a rusty .22-calibre rifle lying beside the splintered skull. Lime powder was sprinkled liberally around the trash pit in which the body was located in an effort to accelerate its degradation. Eerily enough, the nearest access road was known then as Dead Man’s Canyon Road.

William immediately jumped to the conclusion that the woman with whom he had been staying for the last two days was responsible and dashed back to the cabin, shoved his few belongings into his suitcase as fast as he could, and ran for it. She chased after him firing a hunting rifle, quite possibly the very same one she had given him earlier to shoot rabbits, thankfully missing Smith but perforating his valise with birdshot.

Everyone he related his fantastic story to knew exactly who he was talking about. No stranger to law enforcement, or to the locals unfortunate enough to have crossed paths with her, the woman in question was known as ‘The Mystery Lady of Big John Flats.’

She had the reputation of a hard drinker with a hair-trigger temper whose more peculiar behavior involved trolling for young men in the undesirable neighborhoods of the valley below or at the nearby Civilian Conservation Corps and wandering about picking fights with males and females alike in the hope that someone, anyone, would take her up on her belligerent challenges to engage in fisticuffs.

All she had to show for such exasperating antics were getting herself tossed out of a general store and over the railing of a park ranger station. Two recent arrests, one for operating a motor vehicle under the influence, appeared on her record.

It was determined that the body was that of a male in his mid-twenties who had occupied the cabin along with the ‘Mystery Lady’ when she took up quarters there three years before, in 1935, his living space limited to the confines of the cramped attic. She would introduce him as her nephew Gus, although there was widespread speculation as to his real identity. It is believed that he was actually her son, born Gustave Marcel van Herren in 1912, and that she concealed this fact to uphold the illusion of her own youth that she had manufactured and worked diligently to protect.

The tale told to the police by the ‘Mystery Lady’ was that a heartsick Gus had gone missing the year prior following a breakup with his girlfriend and that she had feared all the while that he was suicidal. He had in fact been admitted to the Stockton Hospital for the Insane some time before for this same reason. Despite initial suspicions and gut instincts that told him otherwise, Chief Criminal Deputy William Bright officially documented the cause of death as suicide.

It’s said that one evening she makes a drunken confession to having committed the murder, confirming that it was indeed her son and that she had kept his fingers in a box as a macabre trophy or sick souvenir of some kind. She insists to others, however, that her husband Gerald committed the crime, though she has no spouse to speak of. The subterfuge becomes murkier still when public records are found on file showing that Gustave had purchased two plots of land north of her cabin after his supposed disappearance, contradicting her version of events.

Months later she vanishes herself, abandoning her cabin except for a handful of personal keepsakes left behind which serve as clues into the real-life past of ‘The Mystery Lady of Big John Flats,’ or as she was formerly better known, the European Female Boxing Champion, ‘Countess’ Jeanne LaMar.

The World Sits Up and Wonders

Just as the end of her life was obscured beneath a shroud of mystery, so too did it begin. Establishing a definitive timeline is extremely difficult and distinguishing between fact and fiction all but impossible. Contrary to her claims of her point of origin being Paris, Jeanne Vina LaMar was born in New York to French parents, although exactly when isn’t clear. A 1930 New York census gives her year of birth as 1900, but this hardly corresponds with the fact that her son Gustave was born twelve years later.

At some point in her childhood, Jeanne and her parents relocate to France where she takes up acting, ballet dancing, and singing soprano, becoming quite the cultured, refined young lady. Mostly. It seems the fighting spirit for which she would later become reviled was within Jeanne from an early age.

“When I was 10 years old, I lived in a section of Paris where a number of small boys my own age used to tease the girls,” she recalled. “I beat up a lad of 15 and from that time on I was spared from jeering remarks.” LaMar enrolled in boxing lessons and proceeded to ply her newfound roughhouse trade by taking on all comers in fairground carnival booths where she boasted of knocking out twenty-five women and five men. Besides serving as a nurse with the Red Cross during World War I, it was reported that she boxed exhibitions against Georges Carpentier and Eugene Criqui for the benefit of wounded soldiers.

It was in France where she met her first husband, Paul LaMar, who was a member of the American Expeditionary Forces, and together they moved back to New York after the war. Jeanne frequented the world famous Stillman’s Gym on Eighth Avenue to strengthen her leg muscles for her dance performances and soon began working out a routine whereby she would hit the speed bag in time to a musical rhythm. Gym owner, and legendary boxing trainer Lou Stillman not only tolerated her eccentricities but thoroughly enjoyed them.

In 1920, LaMar competed in a two-round bout against middleweight fighter Jack Stone at Manhattan’s Roseland Ballroom as part of a “girl championship boxing exhibition” for the New York American and Evening Journal Christmas Relief Fund Benefit.

Jeanne traveled often to Chicago where she furthered her boxing education as a pupil of Kid Gleason, but New York was where she aspired to make a name for herself by securing a legitimate fight at Madison Square Garden. In the hopes of accomplishing this, LaMar brazenly approached Jack Dempsey’s handlers, promoter Tex Rickard and manager/matchmaker Leo Flynn.

She would sign a contract with Flynn, becoming the only female in his stable of more than sixty boxers, and pursue a bout with Mae Deveraux. Like LaMar, Deveraux was also a singer and actress whose real name was May O’Hara. Her brother and trainer Eddie also worked with Jack Dempsey, who personally endorsed Mae’s pugilistic skills. LaMar’s fight with Devereaux never materialized, nor did an exhibition between her and Dempsey, who politely declined Jeanne’s challenge.

Instead, she toured theatres and music halls across America, making and accepting challenges of all kinds and supposedly fighting exhibitions against Harry Greb and Charley Phil Rosenberg. Two documented occurrences in Pennsylvania from that time had her knocking down Johnny Watson in the third round of their exhibition in Reading and then traveling to McKeesport where she got the better of Ray McCall, who “took the lacing like a man” and “didn’t have the heart to even muss her nicely penciled eyebrows.”

Jeanne was set to box an exhibition against reigning world lightweight champion Benny Leonard at New York’s Winter Garden Theatre in February 1923. “I’ve always been afraid of this LaMar woman,” Leonard is quoted as saying. “They say she packs a wicked right.” Whether or not this event took place is unclear.

What is known is that in 1923 Jeanne became the first ever woman to obtain a professional boxing license in the United States, issued by the New Jersey State Athletic Commission whereas her efforts in New York the year before proved fruitless. “Someday all the women will be fighters and not be afraid to admit it, and then the world will be much better,” she philosophized. “Boxing develops character and, quickness, and intelligence. It is especially good for a woman because it makes her strong and self-reliant.”

LaMar was on a crusade, her mission statement being that she was out to elevate boxing beyond “commercialized brutalism” and “to place women of the world on a level with men by proving her right to be known as the world’s champion lady fighter.”

She was under new management as well, now represented by the team of Joe Woodman and George Lawrence, who promptly signed her to fight a three-round exhibition with gangster turned boxer, Bugs Moran. What ‘Countess’ Jeanne LaMar really craved, though, was the legitimacy of a sanctioned fight. Unable to corner either Kiddy McCue or Princess Henry, LaMar believed she had finally found the highly publicized opportunity she had been seeking in the form of Brooklynite Ida Schnall.

One of the premiere renaissance women of the day, Ida had made headlines for being barred from competing as a swimmer and high diver on the 1912 U.S. Olympic squad due to the Committee’s “preservation of modesty,” starring to great acclaim in Al Jolson’s vaudeville revue The Passing Show of 1912, diving off a 130-foot cliff in the motion picture Undine, winning a New York to Philadelphia bicycle race, being crowned 1915’s “most beautifully formed woman in America,” and pitching for the New York Female Giants, a baseball team she founded and captained.

Schnall called out LaMar to face her in a boxing match and, challenge accepted, their fight was set to take place on May 12, 1923 with the ‘Countess’ going into training at Long Beach on the south shore of Long Island. Ultimately, the New York State Athletic Commission squashed the match by denying the women a permit and venue.

LaMar missed out on what would have been a high profile exhibition opposite the great Pancho Villa in 1925 when the Filipino flyweight champion died unexpectedly at the age of 23 of complications resulting from a routine extraction of an infected tooth. Also disheartening was the fact that a theatre manager in Albany, New York insisted on billing her as an “artist” rather than a boxer and her bouts as “vaudeville exchanges.”

It probably didn’t help her cause any that a three-round exhibition against Young Stribling’s kid brother Herbert ‘Baby’ Stribling was laughed off as a farce when LaMar’s second, a comedian by the name of Michelena, upstaged the competitors by performing lewd antics between rounds and Jeanne threatened to have Stribling arrested for assaulting a woman after he hit her in the nose.

Toward the Mountains of Madness

With her pugilistic exploits dwindling down, despite an unanswered challenge from African American fighters Emma Maitland and Aurelia Wheeldin, and an unsubstantiated report that she had been granted a boxing license in Texas, Jeanne would rely on her other talents to stay in the spotlight by singing in both English and French on stage or on radio programs. She would routinely appear at public events looking to belt any spectator up the challenge of a fight or else belt out a version of the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.”

With the proceeds going to the Vina Science, Health and Art League, of which she was founder and president, LaMar assumed the lead role in a December 1927 Chicago Opera Company production of Carmen, dreaming that one day she would play the part in a feature film.

Less than three weeks later, Jeanne married her business manager, Thomas Failace, and the newlyweds moved to Los Angeles. The couple’s wedded bliss was short-lived. Just fourteen days after exchanging vows, the Hollywood police were summoned to their Whitley Avenue apartment on a domestic disturbance call where the responding officers found husband and wife “engaged in a fistfight.” They went their separate ways not long after.

Popular Los Angeles radio personality and sometimes boxing promoter Bill Sharples tried and failed to get LaMar’s fistic career back on track and, to add insult to injury, Dr. Harry Martin, presiding over the California State Athletic Commission, rejected her application for a license in 1931.

Her only means of grabbing some positive media attention around this time was to weigh in on the debate over the appropriate length of women’s skirts by boldly suggesting pantalettes as an alternative. “It takes a little courage, that’s all,” offered LaMar. “And it’s so much more comfortable and sensible that it’s worth it.”

Badly itching for a fight, LaMar challenged 1932 Olympic track and field gold medalist Ella ‘Babe’ Didrikson, who at the time, was training for a proposed novelty boxing exhibition with Yankees slugger Babe Ruth in a ‘Battle of the Babes.’ Neither fight came to fruition.

Becoming gradually more unhinged due to an unfortunate run of personal and professional failures, Jeanne then turned her agitation toward Clara Bow, silent film’s “It Girl,” who had starred in the 1927 boxing-themed romantic comedy Rough House Rosie. To no one’s surprise, Clara had no interest in lacing up the gloves other than on a movie set or for publicity photos.

Dejected and increasingly erratic, in 1935 she picked up and left Los Angeles and, with her son Gustave, made her ill-fated retreat into the seclusion of the San Gabriel Mountains where ‘Countess’ Jeanne Vina LaMar would finish out her life as ‘The Mystery Lady of Big John Flats.’ Even her boxing nickname ‘Countess’ is part of her mysterious lore, up for debate whether it refers to a referee’s count of ten or LaMar’s having supposedly once been married to an Italian nobleman as she liked to claim.

Fittingly, her own death was subject to rumor and innuendo. Some said she was struck down by a reckless taxi driver, others that she met her demise in a seedy San Bernardino hotel. What really happened was far sadder.

Having run through the cash-out from the insurance policy of her first husband Paul, who had allegedly died under questionable circumstances, she turned up in 1940 at the Los Amigos Indigent Home in Norwalk, California. Penniless and friendless, she was comforted in her dying days by Alberta Farnbaugh, the daughter of the original homesteaders of the Big John Flats property where the mysterious ‘Countess’ devolved from a history-making boxer to an agitator and sexual predator to, speculatively anyway, a cold-blooded killer.

Sources:

Joe Blackstock. The Countess Who Lived in the San Gabriel Mountains Was Always Ready for a Fight (Daily Bulletin, May 6, 2019)

Caroline Crawford. Urges American Girls to Learn to Box (Des Moines Register, October 5, 1924)

Bob Dorman. Women Fighters to Better World Says Buff’s Challenger (Berkshire Evening Eagle, June 13, 1922)

Terry Graham. The Countess’ Last Stand (WBAN, July 10, 2007)

Terry Graham/Sarah Jo Rauschi. 1920’s Female Boxer—Jeanne LaMar: Flash From the Past (WBAN, September 26, 2005)

L.A. Jennings. Jeanne LaMarr[sic]: Boxing Champion, Countess, Murderer? (Vice, October 20, 2016)

Adelaide Kerr. Dresses Topic of Hot Debate and Both Long, Shorts Urged (Ogden Standard-Examiner, December 13, 1929)

Lucille E. Morehouse. Woman Pugilist, Singer Dreams of Role in Carmen (Indianapolis Star, November 2, 1929)

Melania Sebastiani. The Last Shot of the Countess (Storie di Sport, 2019)

Malissa Smith. A History of Women’s Boxing (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014)

Mixed Match (Danville Bee, September 25, 1922—accessed through WBAN)

Lady Boxer at the Moose (Monessen Daily Independent, October 19, 1922—accessed through WBAN)

Mixed Match (New Castle News, February 21, 1923—accessed through WBAN)

Challenger (Millville Daily, March 17, 1923)

Frederick News, April 19, 1923

Just What Are These So Called Arts, Anyway? (Fall River Evening Herald, July 18, 1923)

She’s Ready (Fort Myers News-Press, September 6, 1923)

St. Paul Colored Girl Challenges French Battler (St. Paul Echo, January 15, 1927)

Female Ring Star Makes Stop Here (Indianapolis Star, December 5, 1927)

Jeanne LaMar Gets Into Domestic Fight with Husband (Chicago Tribune, January 3, 1928—accessed through WBAN)

LaMar Request Boxing License from California and is Denied (San Antonio Light, April 27, 1931—accessed through WBAN)

Mme Lamarr [sic] Once Boxed Bugs Moran (Boxing Illustrated, August 1974—accessed through WBAN)