Excerpt from A Gentleman and a Thief by Dean Jobb, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

PROLOGUE
Prince Charming
Long Island and Manhattan • 1924

A man in a tuxedo and winged collar navigated a room filled with black-clad men and elegant women in Parisian gowns, sparkling with jewels. He docked alongside a group of guests who had formed a cordon around a punch bowl. Someone offered him a drink, and as names were exchanged the newcomer identified himself as Gibson. Dr. Gibson. He had thick black hair, blue eyes, and the chiseled good looks of the matinee idols seen—but not yet heard—in the movie houses. Some guests may have done a double take as he passed; he was a dead ringer for the British actor Ronald Colman, who had been catapulted to Hollywood stardom the previous year in The White Sister, starring opposite silent-era legend Lillian Gish.

One of the punch bowl's defenders was short and slim, with sandy hair, and needed no introduction. His boyish face was tilted slightly downward, betraying his shyness, and his puppy-dog eyes had been staring out from the pages of every newspaper in the United States for days. Gibson, who scoured the society pages of New York City's papers as meticulously as a prospector in search of gold or precious jewels, had recognized him from across the room. Edward, the Prince of Wales, was almost a week into a much-ballyhooed American holiday. Eager for a break from his royal duties, the heir to the British throne had headed for "that slender riotous island," as F. Scott Fitzgerald would describe it in his soon-to-be-published novel, The Great Gatsby, "which extends itself due east of New York." Long Island.

The September 1924 royal holiday coincided with a late-summer heat wave. The prince was the guest of honor at dinners, dances, and cocktail parties in the imposing mansions of the island's elite. He went riding and played polo on their manicured grounds. He boarded their yachts to skim the waves of Long Island Sound. He golfed their private courses and plunged into their swimming pools. A fox hunt with a pack of about a hundred hounds was organized, to make him feel at home. "Never before in the history of metropolitan society," claimed a columnist for the New York American, "has any visitor to these shores been so persistently and so extravagantly feted."

Standard Oil executive Harold Irving Pratt and his wife, Harriet, threw a garden party for the prince and two hundred guests at Welwyn, their country estate at Glen Cove, which overlooked the sound and was considered "one of the show places of Long Island." But they were soon upstaged by Clarence H. Mackay, a financier and heir to a mining fortune, who hosted a dinner and dance for the distinguished visitor and almost one thousand worthies at Harbor Hill, a replica French château with six hundred acres of grounds. A platoon of workmen spent days trucking in potted orange trees and installing strands of yellow electric lights, transforming the outdoor dining area into "a fairyland" fit for a prince. "A royal fete for a royal guest," gushed Washington, DC's Evening Star.

Not to be outdone, iron and steel magnate James Abercrombie Burden handed the prince the keys to Woodside, a Georgian mansion near Syosset that could have been transported intact from the English countryside. One New York newspaper gave it a new name: Burden Palace. The prince and his entourage were also free to drive the automobiles Burden kept on-site, a fleet that included five chrome-grilled, bug-eyed Rolls-Royce limousines.

The Cedars, the estate of Oklahoma oilman Joshua S. Cosden and his wife, Nellie, in Sands Point, however, turned out to be the biggest draw for the prince. The mansion, overlooking a wide white-sand beach, was a rambling, colonial-style confection of porches and columned verandas, with two tiers of dormers and eyebrow windows peeking out from its barnlike gambrel roof. Its owners offered the prince something the Burdens, Pratts, and other Long Island hosts could not: familiar faces. His cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife, Lady Edwina, along with his close friend Jean Norton, wife of the future Lord Grantley, were staying at The Cedars.

Excerpted from A Gentleman and a Thief by Dean Jobb. Copyright © 2024 by Dean Jobb. Excerpted by permission of Algonquin Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.