Frederick Carl Frieseke The Garden Parasol painting

Frederick Carl Frieseke The Garden Parasol paintingFrederick Carl Frieseke Lady in a Garden paintingFrederick Carl Frieseke Breakfast in the Garden painting
New York sushi bar, along with a female companion, Mildred Mamoulian, described as an actress, forty years of age. The story was that he had approached numbers of society matrons, "movers and shakers", asking for "very substantial" sums of money which he had claimed to need in order to buy his freedom from a sect of winner, especially as the Devil he offered was so democratically responsive to the dictates of the Almighty Dollar. What Billy offered the West Side matrons in return for their fat cheques was verification: yes, there is a Devil; I've seen him with my own eyes -- Goddevil worshippers. Once a confidence man, always a confidence man: it was what Mimi Mamoulian would no doubt have described as a beautiful sting. Penetrating the heart of American religiosity, pleading to be saved -- "when you sell your soul you can't expect to buy back cheap" -- Billy had banked, the investigators alleged, "six figure sums". The world community of the faithful longed, in the late 1980s, for _direct contact with the supernal_, and Billy, claiming to have raised (and therefore to need rescuing from) infernal fiends, was on to a