A Nut Barely on the Family Tree: “Countess” Ida Marie “von” Claussen (1874-1960)

You are not supposed to diagnose a person’s psychological problems if you have not interviewed them and are not qualified, and I am not a psychologist. However sometimes a relative spawned so much absurd drama throughout their life that you feel confident in saying they had at least one personality disorder. Such is the case with Ida Marie Claussen, whose grandiosity, narcissism, histrionics and impulsivity were often on display in courts and newspapers. Her fifth husband was my second cousin twice removed, Raymond Hammond Maybury (1895-1970).

A picture of Ida from her book Forget It, available at Google Books but not recommended.

Ida Marie Claussen was born 21 Sep 1874 in New York City to successful merchant Adolph Claussen and his wife Jane Cecilia Byrnes. As of the 1880 census, her family lived on Lexington Avenue and employed two cooks and a waitress. Her maternal grandfather Matthew Byrnes was a wealthy New York City contractor who died in 1890, leaving a significant sum to Ida so that she always had a comfortable independent income.

Ida was first married in 1893 at Saratoga, New York to Robert Lyle Rayner, the son of a wealthy Chicago businessman. The wedding took place after a courtship of only a few hours, and the couple’s haste was such that they did not even change clothes, so that the groom recited his vows in a bicycling suit.

From an article in the Albany Argus of 19 Feb 1894, found on the New York State Historic Newspapers website.

Not surprisingly these newlyweds soon ran into trouble. They set up housekeeping in Saratoga Spa on Ida’s income alone, Mr. Rayner’s father having disinherited him, possibly because of this hasty and ill-advised marriage. Though Ida’s income was substantial, the couple lived beyond their means, buying expensive horses and “filling their house with servants” according to the article excerpted above. They stiffed several creditors and were sued for debt in the winter of 1894, though they still gadded about town daily in a fine sleigh.

I assume they divorced before Ida married Maysville, Kentucky-born physician William Francis Honan in 1898 at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Manhattan. They lived together in New York City until January of 1905, when the marriage had broken down due to “radical differences of disposition,” and Ida charged Dr. Honan with non-support.

This charge was dismissed when the court determined that Ida had plenty of money of her own, but the couple soon obtained a divorce in South Dakota. South Dakota had the most lenient divorce laws in the country at this time, so that Sioux Falls had quite a large “divorce colony”, temporary residents who stayed just long enough to meet the residency requirement and end their troubled marriages.

Ida then made a fresh start, emigrating to Germany. While there she supposedly learned that she was descended from German nobility and began to style herself Ida von Claussen. She later also appropriated the title Countess.

In 1907 Ida became obsessed with the goal of being presented to King Oscar II at the Swedish court. She pleaded her case via letter to the wife of the U.S. ambassador to Sweden, saying that “America has worked hard developing me,” as if she were the culmination of some major national project. Her support documents included the surgeon’s bill for her appendectomy and a carte-de-visite from a man she declared to be “the handsomest man in Paris”.

When the ambassador declined to help her, she tried to take her case to President Theodore Roosevelt who refused to see her. Presumably he had more important things to do.

Headline from the Boston Herald of 30 Mar 1907, found on GenealogyBank.

In October 1913 she was arrested in Manhattan for blackmail, having written a long, bizarre letter in which she threatened to shoot the recipient, New York attorney Charles Strauss. She claimed that he had botched her divorce from Dr. Honan, and that this was preventing her from marrying British coal millionaire L. Frederick Davis who, naturally, adored her.

Strauss claimed he had never even been Ida’s lawyer, and this whole incident led to a Manhattan court declaring her to be insane. She was sent to an asylum but was released that winter under the care of two psychiatrists, who declared her sane the following March. She did eventually marry the Englishman, at least very informally and, as usual, briefly.

In 1916 she wed a man using the name Francis Albert Dona, but whose birth surname was actually Donegan. Though she later claimed that her brother coerced her into marrying this man, newspaper accounts of the time seem to indicate she escaped her brother’s custody in order to run away with him. Though Francis did wind up serving in World War I, he filled out his draft registration card giving “Incompetent wife” as a reason that military service would be a hardship.

In 1920 Ida married my relative in Reno, Nevada, though there was much uncertainty as to whether she was actually even single and able to remarry legally. Why did aspiring Hollywood actor Raymond Maybury marry an infamous woman with four failed marriages under her belt, who was 21 years older than he? It is hard to sort out from the newspaper accounts. She claimed he had been stalking her, probably for her money, and that she only married him to get rid of him, which doesn’t make much sense. She tried to get the marriage annulled, but the couple reconciled for a time, supposedly because he promised her $50,000.

By 1930 she boarded at a house in Atlantic City, New Jersey, relocating to Miami, Florida by 1935.

Despite spending so much of her life embroiled in marital and other controversies, Ida found the time to write several books. Not surprisingly, one is a flowery semi-autobiographical piece of fiction entitled Forget It, in which the main character is named Countess Lorraine d’Importance. (The Hotel Lorraine at 545 Fifth Avenue had been one of her maternal grandfather’s properties.) Also predictable is a screed against her enemy, Theodore Roosevelt.

She aimed to solve the wealth gap with a book partially entitled Countess Ida von Claussen and Her Plan to Liberate the White Slave by Co-operative Profits in Capital’s Progress. Somewhat ironically, she also wrote a book on pacifism, When Peace Shall Come.

The “Countess” lived, apparently quietly, in Miami for the last decades of her life. She entered her toy poodle in a dog show in 1937 and was involved in a minor car accident in 1945, but otherwise did not make the papers until she died there 23 Sep 1960, aged 86. A requiem mass was held at Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church.

This post would be far too long if it covered all of Ida’s wild claims, threats, brushes with the law and other antics that made the papers in her first 50 years. I guess we should have compassion for her, since she clearly had serious mental health issues, though her erratic behavior no doubt caused pain, fear, aggravation and embarrassment to many people.