BRILLIANT ODDBALL

Colonel Telamon Cuyler - The Most Mysterious Man in Georgia

By: Ken Fortenberry

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Colonel Telamon Cuyler was as comfortable dining with royalty and world leaders as he was weaving colorful tales to visitors as he sipped mint juleps at his remote ancestral plantation near Macon, Georgia.

The Atlanta Constitution once proclaimed Cuyler as “one of the most puzzling and fascinating figures” in modern Georgia history. The Macon Telegraph stated that he was “the most interesting man in Central Georgia” and he was widely recognized as one of the premier authorities of Southern history and the Confederacy.

Married to a millionaire heiress from California, the soft-spoken Cuyler hosted gala dinners at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City and at the fashionable Ritz in Paris and mixed it up in the highest social circles in London, Paris and Rome, and in his native Georgia. He counted everyone from “Uncle Remus” author Joel Chandler Harris and Atlanta newspaper editor Henry W. Grady to U.S. presidents and European royalty among his friends and acquaintances.

He served as a consultant for the filming of “Gone With the Wind” and served was counsel for the governments of Brazil, Chile, Guatemala and Mexico between 1895 and 1905, and was the Paris legal representative for American business tycoon and financier J.P. Morgan. He was a negotiator of the 1905 peace treaty between Russia and Japan that granted independence to Korea and was praised by President Theodore Roosevelt for his efforts.

The public side of the dignified, cigar-smoking, mustachioed millionaire Southern gentleman who dressed in white linen suits also hid a very dark and inexplicable side: While working as a cotton broker in Manhattan, he was jailed as the “brains” of an elaborate metal swindling scheme; he made worldwide headlines when he sued his wealthy mother-in-law for $500,000 claiming she had alienated him from the affections of his wife; and he once jumped from a moving train in North Carolina while reportedly mentally impaired because of business losses.