Yesterday, I told the story of the brief and tumultuous marriage of Charles Monson Jr and Sara Cowen. Today, I'm dedicating an entire post to the last ten years of Sara's life.
Sara inherited quite a sum of money. And over the course of the years from 1911-1921, she spent an amazing amount of money on her lavish lifestyle. She was left over $100,000 in trust at the death of her father. Her mother didn't have the best of luck with money and was forced to declare bankruptcy before her death in 1912. Some reports at the time claimed Sara burned through $2.5 million dollars, but I just didn't find any evidence of this kind of money. She also had developed a severe drug problem - opiates, which was then, the drug of choice for the upper class set.
Sara lived the next 10 years in the Hotel de France in New York City, despite the fact she had inherited the family mansion in Baltimore.
The pull of opiates was strong, and though she tried over and over to be free of her addiction, she was never successful and returned to drugs.
She gave one last valiant last try in May of 1921, when Sara decided to take up nursing as a profession. She entered the New York Post Graduate and Medical Hospital, allied with Bellevue hospital, as a student nurse. It was reported she hoped to kill her desire for drugs by throwing herself into the 12-hour shifts required of nursing. In late July 1921, Sara left the Hotel de France and checked in at the Hotel Maryland on W 49th Street in the Tenderloin of Manhattan with a man who was identified as her chaffeur. They registered as Mr & Mrs S. Cowen. Reports say the couple left the hotel shortly after checking in. Sara returned at 5 am Saturday morning, 31 Jul 21. Her companion returned two hours later to find Sara unresponsive on the floor.
A physician, Dr. J T Carriva, who resided in the hotel, entered the room and found Sara dead. He reported that on the table near her, were two glasses containing a brownish fluid and the other a white liqued. A package of white powder was beside the glasses. Dr. Carriva believed these items to be drugs. He phoned the police and her body was sent to the New York City morgue, where it remained, unclaimed until a nephew eventually claimed the body. The cause of death was morphine overdose.
The chaffeur had run out of the hotel after the physician arrived, but did make himself available to the police at a later date. He stated he was married and did not want to get involved in the mess in which he found himself.
"Her death recalled to these friends memories of big dinner and theatre parties she had given at prominent hotels, where lavishness was the watchword. Some of the guests at them remembered that there came a time when her popularity began to wane.
She had lost money, they said, in Wall Street, at the races, and in purchasing drugs to appease a desire which rapidly became a craving. Her once-plentiful money rapidly dwindling, she began to pawn her jewels and costly clothes to pay for drugs..
There are those who say some of her friends were friends in name only, and that they could account for much of Miss Cowen's m oney. The last year and a half of her life was a constant battle to overcome the drug habit - a battle she waged in Brooklyn, where a prominent woman in Brooklyn aided her in her losing fight...
...Miss Cowen, the police believe, is one of many girls of prominent families who have become drug addicts and creatures of the underworld. Their downfall, the police assert, can in nearly every case be traced to the use of narcotics given them be girl friends or by men who were planning to rob them of their money.
At police headquarters, the criminal record of Miss Cowen was found yesterday. Her picture was among thosein Dr. Carleton Simon's Narcotics Division. Miss Cowen had first been arrested on Jan 22, 1918, on the charge of having narcotics in her possession, and was placed on probation. In Jan 1919, she was again arrested and this time was again arrested, and this time sent to Blackwell's Island Asylum (now Roosevelt's Island) to get relief from her addiction. She was released on 9 Nov 1919. --Daily News, New York, New York 02 Aug 1921, Tue, pg 3
Sara had come a long way from her early debutante days when she was crowned, "The Oriole City's most beautiful bud." Her society connections, for the most part, did not attend her funeral. Though a loyal group of friends made up the meager 50 guests at the funeral in Baltimore. She was interred near her mother in Aiken, South Carolina. Sara was 33 at the time of her death.
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