Maxwell Bodenheim once ranked as a poet with Ezra Pound and Edgar Lee Masters. Born in Hattiesburg, Miss., in 1892, Bodenheim drifted to Chicago in 1913.There he met Ben Hecht, then living the reporter’s life later distilled into the play “The Front Page.” Hecht, who published the cantankerous Chicago Literary Times, hired Bodenheim as an assistant. In 1915, Bodenheim arrived in Greenwich Village as the CLT’s eastern correspondent. There he began what historian Jeff Kisseloff called “equally long trails of empty bottles and broken hearts.”

By the 1920s, fashionable magazines were publishing Bodenhim’s verse. Burton Rascoe, the New York Herald-Tribune’s literary editor, compared him to Rimbaud. Printing his controversial novels, such as “Georgia May,” “Replenishing Jessica,” and “Naked on Roller Skates,” was practically like printing money. In 1926, Bodenheim was prosecuted by John Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who had suppressed “Ulysses” in 1920. Sumner claimed “Replenishing Jessica,” whose heroine found “the simple feat of keeping her legs crossed…a structural impossibility,” was obscene. The litigation, though unsuccessful, made the novel a best-seller.

Like most insatiable skirt chasers, Bodenheim blamed women for his misconduct. He claimed: “A young woman, who embraces a man while he is being assailed by primitive drum beats and bacchanalian horn tootings, may pretend she is interested only in the technique of dancing. I wonder if the same young woman, naked in bed with a man, would insist that she is only testing out the mattress.”

In 1928, Bodenheim’s womanizing became a scandal during what historian Allen Churchill called “60 days of flaming notoriety.” A dalliance with Gladys Loeb, a Bronx 18-year-old, ended in early summer. Loeb turned on the gas. The police broke down the door in time to safe her life. She told reporters the poet had driven her to suicide.

Then 22-year-old Westsider Virginia Drew wrote a fan letter to Bodenheim. The two met at a hotel on West 45th Street. Building staff recalled Drew going up at 8 p.m. and not coming down until 3 a.m. Bodenheim insisted that he had spent the seven hours dissuading her from suicide and then walked her to the subway. But she never went home. When Bodenheim learned that Drew’s father and brother had asked for him at the hotel, he skipped town. Four days later, Drew’s body was found near the East River. This made the front-page headlines at the New York Times: BODENHEIM VANISHES AS GIRL TAKES LIFE. The poet, who had stayed in Provincetown, Mass., returned by train. Fearing police might await him at Grand Central, he disembarked at 125th Street. He went straight to the Rose Ballroom on 126th Street and picked up a girl, only to be recognized and arrested. When the medical examiner determined Drew was a suicide, Bodenheim was released.

Aimee Cortez, an exhibitionist who loved proclaiming she had New York’s most beautiful body and disrobing to prove it, left the gas on after her fling with Bodenheim. Less lucky than Loeb, Cortez died clutching Bodenheim’s picture. Teenager Dorothy Dear had also become involved with Bodenheim. She died instantly when her subway train smashed into the walls at Times Square on August 24. Rescuers found Bodenheim’s love letters in her purse.

The press coverage made Bodenheim infamous. Perhaps it was the apogee of his career.

Bodenheim’s drinking became uncontrollable during the early 1930s. Friends stopped inviting him to parties after he began loading their liquor bottles into burlap sacks. He turned on nearly everyone who had ever done him a kindness. He ended his friendship with the influential Rascoe when, after learning the poet had not eaten for several days, the newspaperman gave him $2 for lunch. To Bodenheim, the editor’s failure to drop everything, take him to lunch, and pick up the tab was a grievous insult. Thereafter, he denounced Rascoe in such terms as: “…a literary prostitute [who, like] all the others in this gilded bordello of publishing parasites…kowtowed to nincompoops and well-known mediocrities.”

By 1935, Bodenheim was reduced to writing for the Federal Writers Project’s guidebooks New York Panorama and New York City Guide. With the project’s end in 1943, the “cadaverous, unwashed” Bodenheim became a homeless lush, scribbling doggerel on scraps of paper to sell for drinks.

His last affair began one rainy night in Washington Square when Bodenheim met Ruth Fagin. She later explained, “He had an umbrella, and I did not.” They married, occasionally sleeping in rented rooms or flophouses, more often in subways or doorways or on park benches.

In late 1953, they met Harold Weinberg, a dishwasher with a history of mental illness. On the bitterly cold night of February 6, 1954, the Bodenheims went to Weinberg’s room on lower Third Avenue, just above the Bowery. When Weinberg began making love to Ruth, Bodenheim objected. Weinberg shot him twice in the chest.