The Girls Of Murder City Part 10

Chicagoans across the city would be just as impressed as court spectators when papers started rolling off the presses later in the afternoon. As Belva stood alone before the judge, with the court fans no longer near enough to reach out to her and spoil the frame, news photographers exploded into action. The cameras clicked and flashbulbs popped, momentarily blinding everyone. One of the prosecutors, Samuel Hamilton, took offense at the fawning attention. He requested that the photographers be removed. Judge Lindsay, who'd seen worse when presiding over Beulah's trial, waved him off. "The cameras are not disturbing me nor the defendant nor the men called for jury service as far as I can see," he said. Belva smiled at the judge, and then gave Hamilton a quick, triumphant glare. Forgotten in all the hullabaloo was a small, thin figure in the front row. Mrs. Freda Law, dressed in black, sat alone, grim-faced and staring straight ahead.

"Are you ready?" Lindsay asked each set of lawyers.

Belva joined her attorneys at the defendant's table. Judge Lindsay addressed the potential jurors and then turned to the state. "Proceed," he said.

Hamilton got right to it. He strode up to the nearest juror candidate. "You understand the penalty is death or life imprisonment? Do you think that's too severe?" he demanded. The man paused, and then answered that he understood the penalty for murder. "If this were to be proved a cold-blooded murder, could you inflict the death penalty?" Hamilton asked.

The man swallowed. "I could."

With that answer, Freda Law quivered to life. "Mrs. Law, who up to this time had shown little emotion, leaned forward eagerly," wrote the Post. "Her eyes shone. She trembled slightly."

Hamilton moved down the line, taking turns with the case's lead prosecutor, Harry Pritzker. "Would you be willing to mete out the same punishment to a woman that you would to a man?" they asked each potential juryman.

Faced with this hard-hearted questioning of jurors, and with the comfort most of the men expressed with putting a woman to death, Belva finally showed some anxiety. "She clasped and unclasped the fastener of her fur choker nervously" and stared straight ahead, wrote the Journal. Her lead attorney, Thomas D. Nash, whispered something to her, soothing words.

The lawyer had a knack for calming down clients. For one thing, he looked the part of the quintessential defense attorney. Though just thirty-eight years old, his hair was a forbidding gray, and he had a voice and manner that instinctively provoked confidence. Nash had made a name for himself quickly in Chicago, winning election to the city council in 1911 when he was just twenty-five. In 1920 he was defeated in a run for judge of the munic.i.p.al court, but the setback hardly dented his political influence. He remained the Nineteenth Ward's Democratic committeeman, a powerful position, and turned his attention to his thriving criminal law practice. "The list of Tom Nash's clients reads like a page from the who's who of vicious criminals," his opponent for the county board of review would charge in 1928. "Murderers, gun toters, robbers, gangsters and their political tools are included among the crew which pays retainers to Tom Nash." That was true. Johnny Torrio and Al Capone, among other prominent gangsters, were Nash clients. They came to him because he was good: smart, clever, personable. He could put any man, no matter what charge he faced, at ease.

Nash was just as conscientious about seating a jury as the prosecutors. He took seriously his client's preference for "worldly" jurors-"the kind of men," as Belva put it to reporters, "who realize that after a woman has had as many sweethearts as I have had, she can't love any one enough to shoot him." Because Belva had been so open about her preferences, the jury selection process sparked an unusual public debate in the newspapers. "She's wrong," one policeman told a reporter outside of court. "The kind she should get on a jury is the inexperienced, home man who is used to gentle women. A worldly man knows that the woman who has been on the primrose path is more likely to shoot than any other." But an automobile salesman said he "could certainly give a woman an impartial break on the story Mrs. Gaertner tells." Seconded a hotel clerk: "I believe that to a woman of a rosy past, a man is just a man. What they want is a good time and they don't care who pays for it. She wouldn't shoot for love." A coffee-shop owner, on the other hand, opined that "women who have a succession of sweethearts usually display violent attachment for the man who holds their interest for the moment. That's my observation, and I think Mrs. Gaertner's argument is all wrong."

Captain Patrick Kelliher of the Chicago Police expressed the fears of every prosecutor: "A jury of family men probably would not convict her," he said. "A jury of bachelors would never convict her. The average unmarried man about town has liberal views and is very tolerant of erring women."

That must have sounded good to Nash and his team, but the commonness of the view also guaranteed that they wouldn't be able to finagle a jury solely of single men on the make, as Belva hoped. Pritzker and his seconds, Hamilton and H. M. Sharpe, were able prosecutors. Men who seemed vulnerable to irrelevant explanations for a woman's violent behavior were sent home. The defense, meanwhile, sought to jettison those from the other extreme. One man after another was dismissed after expressing prejudice against any woman who drank liquor or went to clubs. "Would you be prejudiced if it should develop that the lady had been drinking that evening?" Nash asked the jurors, an important question considering Belva's official statement that she was too drunk on the night of the murder to remember what happened.

There also was one more consideration for the attorneys: the so-called beauty-proof jury, like the one that had set free "Beautiful Beulah" Annan.

"Would you let a stylish hat make you find her 'not guilty'?" a.s.sistant State's Attorney Hamilton asked a jury candidate. He asked other potential jurors similar questions about their susceptibility to high fas.h.i.+on and carefully rouged female faces. In the end, everyone the state accepted declared himself suitably armored against such feminine wiles.

Maurine Watkins, after the disaster of Beulah's trial, found the whole thing a farce. She wrote that many prospective jurors, wanting to be part of the trial at any cost, struggled to come up with what they thought the attorneys wanted to hear, and "the questioning went merrily on to find a hat-proof, s.e.x-proof, and 'damp' jury, who would also accept circ.u.mstantial evidence as conclusive." Though she joked about it in the Tribune, Maurine worried that she'd get another "moron jury" that wasn't capable of doing the right thing. "The essence of Christianity is to think of other people," she later remarked. "That doesn't mean to give an easy break. The juryman with his maudlin sentiment may think he's practicing Christianity when he gives an acquittal and in some instances he may be, but there is just as much Christianity in having your sympathy with the man who was killed and in restraining the individual."

After a full day, most of the jury had been selected, and the trial was scheduled to get under way the next afternoon. Matrons escorted Belva back to the women's section of the jail, with reporters striding along behind them in the hope that the defendant would be in a talkative mood before deadline. They were disappointed. Belva smiled and said she felt fine but had nothing more than that to say.

In the morning, Maurine's report once again made clear her sympathy for the city's prosecutors. "Demure but with an 'Air' at Murder Trial," the subhead teased. The story itself was even more direct. Like Beulah, Belva was trying to fool jurors with womanly razzmatazz.

Cabaret dancer and twice divorcee, Mrs. Gaertner was as demure as any convent girl-yesterday!-with brown eyes dreamily cast downward. Her lips were closed in a not-quite smile, the contour of her cheek was unbroken by lines, and rejuvenating rouge made her well on the dangerous side of 30.

It was another jazzy, satirical performance-and one that hit hard. Maurine described, in stark contrast to Belva's rouged, dangerous appearance, the sad, "sweet-faced" widow in the front row, decked in mourning attire, looking younger still than the aggressively made-up Belva and not at all dangerous. Maurine claimed that, of the two women, Mrs. Law "seemed more concerned."

If Maurine's eviscerating story in the Tribune bothered Belva or her lawyers, they didn't show it when they came into court.14 Belva once again looked fabulous, with a new dress "that clung in soft folds to her body." She smiled dutifully as flashbulbs popped. ("I hear Belva got a lot of compliments on how she looked when she walked into court this morning," one inmate said to Ione Quinby when the reporter came through the jail later in the day.) With court fans once again blocking the aisle and falling over each other, Judge Lindsay kept the entrance theatrics to a minimum this time. He hurried along the questioning of more juror prospects, and the final four jurors were quickly identified and accepted. At two P.M., after a lunch break, Hamilton and Pritzker launched into their opening statement, declaring that they would prove Belva E. Gaertner had fired the bullet that killed Walter Law and had even tried to dispose of the body before deciding the dead man was too heavy to move.

Nash seemed unperturbed by this salvo. He waived an opening statement. He was counting on the fact, Maurine pointed out, that there were no witnesses: "Just a man found dead, slumped over the steering wheel of Mrs. Gaertner's car, a bullet in his head from her pistol left lying on the sedan floor." Maurine added with icy mockery that Belva was expected to testify on her own behalf, and that, with her defense based solely on her lack of memory of the murder, the testimony "will at least be unique."

First, though, the state presented its evidence. Prosecutors brought out a pair of bloodstained silver dance slippers to show the jury. Belva "stared, chin in hand," as a.s.sistant State's Attorney Hamilton insisted that the slippers put her up close with the victim at the time of his death. Taking the stand, Dr. William D. McNally, the coroner's chemist, described how he did his work, gesturing mindlessly with one of Belva's slippers, which he held in his hand while giving testimony. "Now, a small strip of fabric was removed and dissolved in a salt solution," he said. "Then the usual chemical tests were made-placed under a spectroscope, acetic acid, crystals obtained-indicating human blood."

The newspapers latched onto the stylish footwear. "They had been effective with the green velvet gown she had worn that fatal night. They had carried her through that last dance," wrote the Daily News, attempting to mimic the humorous bent in Maurine's stories. Maurine, of course, topped the compet.i.tion, writing that it was Belva's "twinkling feet" in those silver slippers that "had danced her into Overbeck's [sic] heart, when she was Belle Brown, cabaret girl; that had carried her to-and from!-a bridle path romance with Gaertner, wealthy manufacturer; that had stolen her into a 'pals.h.i.+p' with a young married man-and then to a murder trial." For all the florid newspaper prose they inspired, however, the slippers proved only that Belva had been at the crime scene, which the defense already acknowledged.

A more promising witness for the state was the coroner's physician, Joseph Springer, who testified that a gun "must be held within fifteen inches or so to make powder burns."

"From the absence of these, is it your opinion that he did not shoot himself?" Hamilton asked.

Springer nodded. "He did not."

The defense, almost completely mute until now, refused to accept so definitive a statement. Nash's a.s.sociate, Michael Ahern, approached the witness and, saying he would pose as Law, asked Springer to hold the pistol at the correct angle and distance from the victim. Springer agreed, placed Ahern just so, and pulled the trigger. The gun clicked violently, drawing gasps from around the room. But Ahern didn't even flinch.

"There! You see," the lawyer said, twisting his arm to show how he could hold the gun himself where Springer had it. He imitated a man holding a gun to his own head and leaning away in fear, eyes clenched in antic.i.p.ation of impact. "He could have killed himself."

"He could not!" Springer whined as Ahern strutted back to the defense table.

William F. Leathers, headwaiter at the Gingham Inn, was next. Belva had insisted from the beginning that she was too drunk on the night of the murder to remember what happened to Walter Law, and so the state wanted to suggest otherwise. "They ordered three bottles of ginger ale, family-size, eleven-ounce bottles. I waited on them myself," Leathers said. "No, their steps were not unsteady. They seemed perfectly sober when they were dancing." He added: "I wish that I had always remained as sober as they were."

As more witnesses took turns on the witness stand-a series of policemen followed Leathers-Maurine homed in on Belva's "virtuous calm" during the testimony. It irritated her. She ratcheted up her attack on the woman who had sat patiently and politely for numerous interviews with the young reporter over the weeks.

Her sultry eyes never lost their dreaminess as policemen described the dead body slumped over the wheel of her Nash sedan-the matted hair around the wound, the blood that dripped in pools-and her revolver and "fifth" of gin lying on the floor. Her sensuous mouth kept its soft curves as they told of finding her in her apartment-4809 Forrestville avenue-with blood on coat, blood on her dress of green velvet and silver cloth, and blood on the silver slippers.

Not all of the observers present saw only steely calm. A reporter from the Atlanta Const.i.tution, sent north specifically for the trial, declared that "Mrs. Gaertner lost her composure and trembled as the prosecution exhibited bloodstained clothing she wore the night Walter Law, an automobile salesman, was shot and killed in her sedan." The Daily News and the Evening Post also noted signs of nervousness in Belva as she listened to testimony.

Maurine refused to attribute such human emotions to the defendant. She worried that she hadn't been hard enough on Beulah Annan, that she'd underestimated her and thus helped free the beautiful killer. She would make sure there was no doubt about Belva Gaertner's guilt. This sense of mission, however, didn't cause her to lose her sense of humor. In fact, it sharpened her wit. She would pepper her trial stories with sly digs at Belva and the jury, at witnesses and lawyers and court fans. Dr. Springer, she wrote, "identified the gin bottle which was found lying on the floor of the car. Belva's jury, selected for their lack of prejudice in favor of the Volstead act, pepped up a bit at sight of this, and Belva herself leaned forward. But it was empty." Maurine laughed openly at the testimony of the Gingham Inn's Bert Brown, who claimed the establishment served "nothing stronger than ginger ale."

According to his statement, the Gingham Inn is matched in dryness only by the Sahara; no liquor is sold there, no liquor is brought there, no liquor is displayed there on table, floor, or under cover.

In describing a policeman's testimony, Maurine even managed a playful swipe at Belva's vaunted clothes sense, skillfully insinuating along the way that the defendant was both a liar and a wh.o.r.e. Belva, she wrote, "couldn't shake her head nor nod approvingly at the testimony, for she doesn't 'remember,' but she could show impatience as the officer floundered in describing her clothes. But-to his relief-they were admitted in evidence; the mashed hat and rumpled coat, the 'one more struggle and I'm free' dress, and the flimsy slippers."

The trial moved swiftly. Straightforward and uneventful, it was given to the jury on Thursday, having lasted less than two days in total. Belva, to the disappointment of the crowded room, did not testify.

As the state completed its closing argument, Maurine saw reasons to be optimistic. Freda Law's brief testimony, during which she identified a bloodied hat as belonging to her late husband, was so pathetic that surely even the hardest juryman's heart broke. Lieutenant Egan, who had interrogated Belva the night of the shooting, testified that she was only "intoxicated enough to be cunning." And there was no cynical, fanciful defense, like the one Stewart and O'Brien had put on for Beulah Annan. In fact, there was essentially no defense at all. Nash and his colleagues "refused to present evidence and waived their closing argument."

These reasons for hope soon suffered, however. Nash, in refusing a closing argument, declared the case purely circ.u.mstantial and asked for a dismissal. Judge Lindsay refused the request but, out of the hearing of the jury, agreed "that there was not sufficient evidence to cause the Supreme Court to uphold a verdict of guilty." Nash had done an excellent job of playing possum, coming alive at opportune moments to punch holes in the state's evidence. Lindsay said that he couldn't "tell the state's attorney what to do. But if the jury should bring in a verdict of guilty, I am confident the Supreme Court would reverse the decision, as the evidence is only circ.u.mstantial; strong enough to rouse suspicion of guilt, but not to convict."

Pritzker and his team ignored the judge's warning. They were willing to take their chances with the higher court. They asked for life imprisonment, not the death penalty. Lindsay gave final instructions to the jury, landing hard on the definition of reasonable doubt. He reminded jurors "not to a.s.sume that, because the defendant might have committed the crime, she necessarily did commit it." As the judge motioned to Belva, a reporter observed, they "turned to stare at the slim, youthfully rounded creature who'd never looked prettier." The defendant offered a small, brave smile as twelve pairs of eyes fell on her. At four P.M., the jurors left the room.

Belva was taken from the courtroom and placed in the adjacent prisoner bull pen, some ten feet from the room where the jurors were beginning their deliberations. Nash expected her wait to be short. Seeing as he had mounted no active defense, a swift decision would be a good sign. He'd simply a.s.serted that the prosecution had no case-no meaningful evidence, no eyewitnesses. If the jury reached the same conclusion, they should do so quickly. There was either evidence or there wasn't.

So when the minutes ticked into hours, Belva's composure began to fray. She paced in the small holding cell, wondering what the jurors could be discussing behind that door. Were some of them "narrow-minded old birds" who'd lied about their opinion of liquor so that they wouldn't be dismissed from the jury? She knew self-righteous fanatics could be convincing when they got going; they could shame anybody. Belva chain-smoked cigarettes and, like Beulah before her, avoided chatting with the matron minding her, hoping to fight off a burgeoning hysteria. Her mind reeled with the possibilities, the rest of her life behind bars rolling out before her.

At last, shortly before midnight, the jurors sent word that they had a verdict. It had taken them nearly seven hours to reach a decision-"much longer," noted the Daily News, "than it takes most 'woman-proof ' juries." When guards led Belva back into the courtroom, dark circles slashed under her eyes. She looked shaken, scared. She chanced a look at her sister, Malinda, who stood in the back.

The jury entered a few minutes later, tired and grim. Tension gathered about the defendant's table; Belva, rocking slightly, seemed prepared for the worst. A piece of paper was pa.s.sed to the bailiff, on to the judge, and then back again. The jury foreman now unfolded it as if he had no idea what it said. When he announced the verdict-"Not guilty," in a clear, echoing voice-Belva let out a gasp and clutched at her stomach. She "laughed and cried in one breath" and swung around to see her lawyers' reactions. "I'm so happy," she managed, her voice breaking. She sat, as if exhausted, and then climbed to her feet. "I want to leave this place and get some air." Suddenly overcome by emotion, she hugged a deputy sheriff, surprising the man, who reflexively returned the embrace. She bounded over to the jury. She thanked them, tears in her eyes, reaching out to grasp their hands. As Belva posed for pictures with the jury, Walter Law's widow once again went almost unnoticed. Freda Law cried softly, hugging herself and her sister in the back of the room. When a reporter approached, she lashed out. "There's no justice in Illinois!" she spat. "No justice! Walter paid-why shouldn't she?" She quickly left the courtroom. Harry Pritzker saw Mrs. Law storm out. Defeated, appalled at the verdict, he didn't want to talk to the press. "Women-just women," he said, shaking his head as he gathered his papers and marched from the room.

After the courtroom had emptied, Belva crossed the bridge of sighs to the Cook County Jail, Malinda a step behind her. She packed her "wardrobe" and said good-bye to the inmates. She waved off the reporters who followed her on this final trek to the jail. "I'm going to remarry Mr. Gaertner and forget all this on a second honeymoon to Europe," she said, as she glided out of the building and into the early morning air.

William Gaertner didn't yet know that he was about to marry again. Up past his bedtime, he had gone home before the verdict came in.

Even with the Leopold-Loeb drama gripping the city, Belva Gaertner earned prime placement on the city's front pages on Friday. The Daily Journal trumpeted: "Belva 'Checks Out' of Jail." The Daily News reported stolidly, "Jury Takes Eight Ballots; 'I'm So Happy,' She Declares After Verdict." The Evening Post offered the blandest headline-"Mrs. Gaertner Given Freedom on Murder Charge"-and the blandest report. Ione Quinby, her work consistently overshadowed by Maurine's sharp coverage of the Beulah and Belva trials, had done the unthinkable: She gave over the prized verdict story to a junior colleague.

In the Tribune, unsurprisingly, Maurine did not hide her disgust at seeing a second murderess walk free. For the first time, a sour, humorless note dominated her prose.

Belva Gaertner, another of those women who messed things up by adding a gun to her fondness for gin and men, was acquitted last night at 12:10 o'clock of the murder of Walter Law. "So drunk she didn't remember" whether she shot the man found dead in her sedan at Forrestville avenue and 50th street March 12- But after six and one-half hours and eight ballots the jury said she didn't.

Maurine was angry, just like after Beulah's acquittal. She couldn't believe it had happened again. But she tried not to wallow in her fury. The next day, Sat.u.r.day, June 7, she wrote a follow-up that showed she had managed to take a breath and find her sense of humor again. With Belva's acquittal on Thursday night, and with Leopold and Loeb indicted for murder just a few hours later on Friday, she recognized that the women's quarters of the Cook County Jail would no longer be the focus of the city's attention. An era had pa.s.sed. "Only four women, the fewest in years, are now waiting trial for murder-for they're getting out even faster than they're getting in!" Maurine wrote. "And the two who walked to freedom in the last two weeks, 'pretty' Beulah Annan and 'stylish' Belva Gaertner, robbed the women's quarters of their claims to distinction and plunged murderess' row into oblivion."

Maurine jokingly lamented that the pretty and interesting girl gunners, which the city once supplied in seemingly inexhaustible numbers, were all gone from the jail. Two of the remaining murder suspects were black women, and the other two-Helen Cirese's clients, Sabella Nitti and Lela Foster-were middle-aged and dowdy. Makeup and new clothes surely wouldn't be enough for any of these four to gain acquittal, Maurine wrote, for they "will lack the advice of Belva, known even in some other circles as an expert in dress."

18.

A Grand and Gorgeous Show Five days after Belva walked out of the Cook County Jail for the last time, Maurine returned to Nathan Leopold and d.i.c.k Loeb. The "boy killers" continued to rule every newspaper in the city, and correspondents began to arrive from around the country to report on the case.

Even now, after nearly two weeks in jail, Leopold and Loeb lacked the barest semblance of remorse. These intelligent young men, brought up with every advantage, had done what they'd done purely for the "experience," they said, as a sort of personal scientific experiment. Said Loeb, "I know I should feel sorry I killed that young boy and all that, but I just don't feel it. I didn't have much feeling about this from the first. That's why I could do it. There was nothing inside of me to stop me."

Reading such an admission sickened people across the country, Maurine included. Sent out to cover the boys' arraignment, Maurine attacked from the first sentence. She noted that it was Loeb's nineteenth birthday, but "d.i.c.kie" didn't much interest her. The good-looking boy seemed pathetic, desperate to be liked-the weak half of the malevolent duo. It was the haughty Leopold, with his slicked-back hair, swarthy complexion, and smug, half-lidded gaze, who truly repulsed her.

Maurine had little interest in imparting any actual news with her report; she was out simply to ridicule, to hit the two wealthy criminals where she knew it would hurt them most: their egos. (The approach apparently worked. Even twenty-five years later, Leopold would profess a deep hatred for the Chicago Tribune.) The reporter, taking a shot at Leopold's atheism, snorted that "it was a big day in itself to Mr. Nathan Leopold Jr., that gentleman who first won fame because 'he loved the birdies so.' How it must have delighted his egocentric soul-your pardon, Leopold!-his egocentric mind, to know that the crowd had begun gathering before 7 o'clock that morning. By 9-an hour before the performance-there were S.R.O. signs and the hallway to Judge Caverly's court was jammed with st.u.r.dy determinists who broke down the door for a chance glimpse."

The crowd, in fact, astounded Maurine almost as much as Leopold did. She watched as court fans, even more than had turned out for Beulah and Belva, jockeyed for position in the hallway of the Criminal Courts Building three hours before the arraignment, and then, when the doors opened, rushed for seats as if fleeing a tornado. She scrutinized men and women "packed in separate quarters like a Quaker meeting": "gum-chewing flappers" and "housewives sentimentally inclined" on the right, men "with loud ties and s.h.i.+fting eyes" on the left. Even courthouse professionals, who dealt with degenerates every day, wanted to see these killers: "Lawyers and stenographers from other courts lined the walls and filled the benches. Reporters sat-or stood-on tables and chairs, and cameramen formed an impregnable line back of the 'bench.' " Leopold's father, Nathan Leopold Sr., found himself surrounded by reporters. He had nothing to say to them. "Why come to me?" he croaked, tears in his eyes, still unable to fathom what his son had done and what had happened to his family. "What did I do? Why come to me?"

For weeks Maurine had been tinkering with an idea for a stage play based on the Beulah Annan case. She wanted to create a deeply cynical satire of the celebrity mania that she saw as the dominant feature of twentieth-century urban life. The sight before her only confirmed that she had chosen the right subject. Maurine didn't bother approaching the senior Leopold like the other reporters. By now supremely confident in her satiric style, she remained an observer and posed the whole scene as the equivalent of a play. Labeling Leopold "the Master" and Loeb "his dutiful friend," she wrote, "The judge entered; Superior Court, criminal branch No. 1, was opened. Camera men poised their flashlights. All turned breathless to the door that leads from the 'bridge of sighs.' "

The stage was set. "The Master" entered. Accompanied by his dutiful friend and their two attendants-faithful attendants chained to their wrists by "come-ons."

Still poised and self-possessed. And prison life, where they've done without wine, women and song, has helped them physically. Both were carefully groomed, and d.i.c.k wore a brand new suit for the "party." His brown eyes searched the crowd half fearfully for his brother, Allan, and the weak, sensuous mouth half parted.

But the "hypnotic" eyes of Nathan, with the whites gleaming 'neath the pupil, sought no one. He swept the crowd with a glance; just a mob, important only because they wanted to see him.

The boys' guards-their "faithful attendants"-had to put their shoulders down like halfbacks to ward off the pus.h.i.+ng, grasping spectators. The guards pulled the boys down the aisle to the bench. Judge John R. Caverly glowered down on them. He reminded them that they had been indicted for murder and then asked if they pleaded guilty or not guilty.

"Not guilty, sir," said Leopold, followed by Loeb, straining to match his friend's tone of cool indifference: "Not guilty, sir." ("They never forgot the 'sir,' " Maurine pointed out. "Millionaires are bringing etiquette to our courts!") With the pleading out of the way, State's Attorney Crowe requested a trial date of July 15. The redoubtable Clarence Darrow, however, demurred. "We need time to prepare the case, and time," the defense attorney said, indicating with a flick of his eyes the mob behind him, "for public sentiment to die down." Darrow got a promise of time, and then Leopold and Loeb were led out of the courtroom and back to the jail. "The crowd," wrote Maurine, "filtered out slowly. Satisfied: they had seen the millionaire murder confessors."

Maurine knew, now that the legendary Darrow stood for the defense, that the circus atmosphere would only get worse in the weeks ahead-and she was right. "The case was really ridiculous. . . . Can you imagine it?" she later said. "It was just a grand and gorgeous show. Things being what they are, I don't see why the state doesn't charge admission to trials and lighten the taxes."

This statement, made in 1927, was bravado, an effort to be amusing and to sell herself to a New York journalist fas.h.i.+oning a feature story about her. By the time of this interview, nearly three years after the trial, the stomach-turning, horrified reaction to the "crime of the century," if not interest in it, had begun to fade from memory. But as the case was unfolding, when Maurine was looking up close at Leopold's smirking eyes and Loeb's friendly grin, she undoubtedly was as shocked as most Americans. Leopold's cool insistence that the murder was as justifiable as an entomologist killing a beetle, and his scoffing denial of the existence of G.o.d, could only have rocked her. Maurine's hard-boiled reporting style made for addictive reading, and it also made her a rising star at the Tribune, but it was an act. It was a heightened, fantasy version of herself, one that began to break down when faced not with the silly, mindless evil expressed by Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner but with the calculated abominations of soulless young men with first-rate intellects.

"I was on the case until the trial started and then I had to do movie criticisms," Maurine recalled in that 1927 interview. "I thrived on murders, but the pictures had given Mae Tinee a nervous breakdown and I had to sub for her. Pinch-hitting was a very tame life after killings. Homicide was such a natural, normal fare out in Chicago."

It's possible Maurine was rea.s.signed to movie criticism against her wishes just as the most sensational crime story in the city's history picked up momentum, but that seems unlikely. Newspapers were throwing every available reporter onto the story. (Plus, Mae Tinee was a pen name-a play on the word "matinee"-for an array of Tribune film reviewers.) It's much more likely that Maurine requested rea.s.signment. She had excelled on the police beat, becoming a "name" reporter within weeks of starting at the paper. But it had exacted a toll. Leopold and Loeb, college boys from wealthy, influential families, accomplished students and professed atheists, represented everything that was wrong with the new modern age-everything Maurine's parents surely had warned her about when she went to the big city. She couldn't easily make light of such boys. Their murderous act was too horrible, too deliberate and vicious-too powerful.

By the middle of 1924, after having interviewed some two dozen suspected murderers in less than six months on the job, Maurine Watkins had tired of the police reporter's life. Just as important, the beat had begun to tire of her. The Bobby Franks story did not lend itself to the cynical, lighthearted, murder-as-entertainment ethos that Maurine had brought to crime reporting. The thrill killing of a teenage boy just went too far. If, as Maurine said, she was conscripted into the movie-reviewing job, this may have been the real reason for it. The tongue-in-cheek writing style that Maurine had perfected-and many other police reporters tried to imitate-was about to become obsolete.

Early in July, the Tribune announced plans to broadcast the Leopold-Loeb trial on the company's fledgling radio station, WGN. In the nearly four years since the nation's first commercial station, in Pittsburgh, had gone on the air, radio's popularity had soared, and the Tribune Company decided it wanted to dominate the Chicago radio market as it did its newspaper market. It figured broadcasting the trial was a good way to do that. But management was surprised to receive hundreds of letters from Chicagoans asking them not to broadcast the trial, fearful that innocent ears would be subjected to a most horrid reality. The paper's compet.i.tors, worried about the Tribune's reach through the new medium, stoked the negative response. The American called the Tribune's broadcast plan "the finest and most powerful appeal ever made in this city to the moron vote." The Tribune tried to sway public opinion, arguing that the "broadcasting of the trial will be kept clean. Sensation there will be. Sensation is a part of life. It is an inseparable part of a trial for life. But there will be no filth." The public was not moved by this appeal, though. The trial did not go out over the airwaves. The Tribune quickly tried to regain the high ground on the issue, declaring that the sensational coverage of the story in the city's papers had "become an abomination." The rules, quite suddenly, had changed.

That same month, Maurine turned almost exclusively to film criticism and light features. She wrote that Pola Negri had "the spark" of stardom in Lily of the Dust, and she joked that "the weather's the best part" of The Marriage Cheat, a slow-moving drama set in the tropics. She reported on child star Jackie Coogan's appearance in Chicago, where the nine-year-old actor got to be mayor of the city for ten minutes. "He looks just like himself!" she quoted an enthusiastic young fan as saying when catching sight of the actor in the flesh.

Maurine wasn't the only prominent female police reporter on the sidelines for Chicago's "crime of the century." The Evening Post's city editor did not put Ione Quinby on Leopold-Loeb duty, likely deciding the subject matter was too rough and perverse for a woman. With all of the high-profile murderesses gone from the Cook County Jail, Quinby found herself back on the women's pages. This did not sit well with the "little bob-haired reporter." Covering a society yacht party on Lake Michigan one night, she grew so bored that she removed her clothes, climbed up onto the railing, and dived into the water. Guests rushed to the side and watched her kicking for the sh.o.r.e. No one knew how the reporter-sopping wet, all but naked, and possibly drunk-managed to get home once she reached the beach. Years later, when an editor asked if the oft-told story about her stripping and diving off the boat was true, Quinby offered an impish smile. "Oh, yes, I did that," she said. "The water was very cold."

Maurine, for her part, wasn't nearly so put out. By this point, she was simply marking time until cla.s.ses began at the newly established Department of Drama at Yale University, where her former teacher, George Pierce Baker, was setting up shop after thirty-six years at Harvard. She'd begun writing her play based on the Beulah Annan case, and Baker had invited her to New Haven to work on it. She now focused on the play, not her day job. Before the end of the year, Maurine would resign from the Tribune and head out of town, first for a stopover in Indiana to see her parents and then on to New York. She had accepted a job as a junior editor at a magazine in the city and planned to take the train to Connecticut for cla.s.s. Her experiment in Chicago was over. Now the real test-discovering if she'd truly learned anything-would begin.

19.

Entirely Too Vile George Pierce Baker had changed little since Maurine had sat in his Harvard playwriting workshop three years before. With his formal manners, his high-b.u.t.toned coats, and an ever-present pince-nez squeezed onto the bridge of his nose, the theatre professor could be a forbidding figure to students. He had a heavy, echoing voice, and he threateningly chopped his arms as he lectured, but he sometimes seemed to favor his female students, "speaking to them half in confidence, half in apology for being so obvious."

Baker may have intimidated Maurine back in Cambridge, but now she was more mature and worldly, and it showed in her work. She came to Yale with an ambitious comedy already mapped out, the characters vividly drawn. With his most talented students, Baker believed his chief task was to provide encouragement. "The finer the spirit of the young artist the more unsure and secretly timid he is in trusting his instincts for expression," he wrote. Baker saw the potential of Maurine's project right away, and he sought to sh.o.r.e up her confidence to allow her to do her best work. The relations.h.i.+p between teacher and student quickly grew warm at Yale.

Maurine t.i.tled her play, which was set in Chicago, The Brave Little Woman. Its main character was Beulah Annan, renamed Roxie Hart.15 The married Roxie, like Beulah, shoots down her boyfriend when he tries to leave her. When reporters get a look at Roxie's gorgeous face and figure-and take note of her willingness to do anything to stay in the papers-they make her into a huge celebrity. But Maurine wasn't simply writing a memoir for the stage. The Brave Little Woman focused on the criminal-justice system, "sensation journalism," and the stupidity of old-fas.h.i.+oned notions of chivalry in an era of pretty young women wielding guns and s.e.x to get what they wanted. It endeavored to expose the utter corruption of both the legal system and the newspaper industry-how lawyers and reporters were interested not in justice or truth but in making themselves look good. The average American's desperation for public attention, Maurine believed, only egged on such unscrupulous professionals. "n.o.body but a newspaper worker knows to what extent not only indecent but decent people will sometimes go to 'get publicity,' " noted the Chicago Herald and Examiner's Ashton Stevens.

This obsession for publicity was something new in society-some pundits believed it to be the scourge of the twentieth century. Maurine recognized that it made the newspapers, just as much as the people they covered, what they were-and she zeroed in on it. "Here you're gettin' somethin' money can't buy: front-page advertisin'," a gruff reporter named Jake, recognizing the circulation potential of such a beautiful girl gunner, tells Roxie after her arrest. "Why, a three-line want ad would cost you two eighty-five, and you'll get line after line, column after column, for nothin'." Jake continues: Who knows you now? n.o.body. But this time tomorrow your face will be known from coast to coast. Who cares today whether you live or die? But tomorrow they'll be crazy to know your breakfast food and how did yuh rest last night. They'll fight to see you, come by the hundred just for a glimpse of your house-Remember Wanda Stopa? Well, we had twenty thousand at her funeral.

One of Baker's lectures about comedy had a particular resonance for Maurine as she worked. The Victorian writer George Meredith wrote that cla.s.sical comedy "proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dullness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness yet to be found among us. [Comedy] is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher." Expanding on Meredith's writing, Baker added farce to the discussion, pointing out that cla.s.sical comedy "presents us with the imperfections of human nature. Farce entertains us with what is monstrous." Cla.s.sical comedy, Baker insisted, made human imperfections funny for "those who can judge." Farce, on the other hand, was "intended for those who can't judge."

Here was where Maurine made a leap, where she moved beyond her mentor. She chose not to make a distinction. From her experiences as a reporter in Chicago, she'd determined that human imperfections, individual and collective, had become monstrous. Real life had become farce. Her play would not only make no distinction between traditional comedy and farce, it also would make no distinction between comedy and tragedy. They were all one and the same in a superficial modern world of ma.s.s communication and overpopulated, spirit-crus.h.i.+ng cities, a world that produced anonymous men and women seized by insecurity and a frantic desire for money, status, and attention.

In jail while awaiting trial, Roxie spends her time pasting news clippings into a sc.r.a.pbook, happy to be noticed and unconcerned that it's because she killed a man. When the newspapers begin to show interest in another murderess, she feigns pregnancy to grab back the headlines. Roxie is so beautiful, and so ruthless in promoting herself, that it simply doesn't matter that she has committed murder. "Oh, I feel so sorry for her when I think of all she must have gone through to be driven to a step like that," the reporter Mary Suns.h.i.+ne says to Roxie's lawyer, Billy Flynn. "But she has everyone's sympathy-that will help her in this awful hour." The sob sister pulls a handful of telegrams and letters about Roxie out of her bag to show the counselor. "We're paying ten dollars a day for the best letter, you know, and some of these are just too lovely."

All of Baker's students were required to read their drafts in cla.s.s and were subjected to criticism from the room. The students often tried to prove their powers of insight, and impress their professor, by throwing haymakers at each other's work. But Maurine, reddening in embarra.s.sment, her voice tiny, left everyone gasping in delight and amazement when she read. Her Roxie was the moron triumphant, counting on her fellow morons-on the newspaper staffs, on the jury, everywhere in this twisted new America-to save her. The play was shocking-and it was hilarious. Baker, in particular, was thrilled with the result. He believed Maurine had produced that most rare thing in art: something original. Baker taught cla.s.sical Greek comedy as the baseline, but he pointed out that "when we have what might be called vernacular comedy as distinguished from cla.s.sical comedy, when all the conditions of our comedy are freer and more spontaneous than that of the cla.s.sical comedy, it is absurd that we should apply the definitions and test of Aristotle to our comedy and get any really valuable results."

Maurine Watkins, he believed, had found a true American style.

Maurine finished the play by the end of the term. Now t.i.tled Chicago, it didn't get to be the first production of Yale's new drama department, as she probably had hoped, but this didn't mean she was being slighted. Nearly every year, Baker selected a play from the workshop and helped place it with professional producers. For 1926, he chose Chicago. Baker introduced Maurine to New York agents, and from there momentum gathered swiftly. Sam H. Harris, George M. Cohan's former partner, snapped up the play. In October, the New Yorker magazine, in a fawning, half-joking "Talk of the Town" item, declared that Harris had accepted Maurine's play about a "gaudy murder trial," even though there was a problem with it: the t.i.tle. "Mr. Harris' admiration for the play is warm but, after all, he has business interests in Chicago and would like to be able to drop out there from time to time without adding to the familiar depression of such a pilgrimage the disquieting prospect of being obliged to join our feathered friends." The best solution, the magazine surmised, was a change of t.i.tle, from Chicago back to The Brave Little Woman. But Harris's reception in the Second City clearly didn't concern the producer as much as the New Yorker thought it might. Harris had more than a dozen projects in the works during the summer and fall of 1926, including a Marx Brothers tour of their Broadway hit The Cocoanuts. Despite such a full plate, he aggressively moved Chicago forward, its new t.i.tle intact. Early in the fall, George Abbott signed on as director, with a planned New York opening by the end of the year. Rising stage ingenue Francine Larrimore was cast as Roxie.

It was a big leap from Baker's cla.s.sroom straight to Broadway, arguably the highest level of commercial theater in the English-speaking world and unquestionably far more prestigious than the movies, which were still silent. But Maurine believed Chicago deserved it. She was proud of what she'd written. She had put down on the page, in a great cathartic explosion, all of her frustrations as a police reporter-"the result," she said, "of watching justice and publicity in their relation to crime." She knew the play was likely to be controversial. There was nothing uplifting about Chicago, though she believed it was deeply moral. "It seems to me that the purpose and treatment of a subject should determine the morality rather than just the choice of your theme," she later said, in defense of her work.

For his part, Baker worried that Maurine would come under pressure from people who didn't fully understand what she was trying to accomplish with the play. He warned her to hold tight to her principles as the director worked with his cast to find the right tone and timing for Chicago, fearing Abbott or Harris might undercut its purpose to "force as many laughs as possible." Baker believed Maurine had written more than merely a good comedy. "You wrote something that might have an effect on the conditions you ridicule," he told his student. "It may well be turned into something which will have no such effect." Baker's fears were strong enough that, even after advising her, he couldn't leave it to Maurine to defend the work's integrity. Knowing that his reputation depended on his students' success, he strongly supported the play publicly. "It is a comedy, intensely satirical, treating the sentimentalization of the criminal in this country by the public, newspapers, lawyers, and even courts," he wrote to the Theatre Guild just before Chicago opened. He added: "Whatever happens to the play, I know it was written with honest intent and with the knowledge of facts existing for Chicago, though not perhaps for other cities to the same extent."

Baker had good reason to be concerned about Chicago's prospects. One prominent playgoer at its pre-Broadway run in New Haven, John Archer of the Yale Divinity School, called Chicago "entirely too vile for public performance." He added: "Why flaunt that sort of life within the realm of drama? Why not leave the lid on the sewer and keep the stench from the nostrils of our Eastern public?"

Though just an unknown former reporter and fledgling playwright, Maurine wasn't about to let the attack go unchallenged. That was her life up there on stage. "I quite agree with Professor Archer that the situation in the city of Chicago is deplorable," she responded in the New Haven Register. "What surprises me is that he of all people, a divinity professor, should condemn the action of calling attention to evil. Does he suppose the way to combat evil is to ignore it? I wonder whether, in his sermons, Professor Archer pretends that the world is a rose garden, and scrupulously avoids the unpleasant side of things. More than likely he speaks of evil conditions himself."

That was what Maurine had been doing as a reporter in Chicago-combating evil. She wanted people to know that. If she now helped bring about a wider understanding of that evil, even if it had to be turned into rank comedy to do so, that was for the good. The sharp response shut down the minor controversy, but Maurine recognized that more of the same surely waited in the big city. Like Archer in New Haven, theater censors were on the march in New York, for the Jazz Age had belatedly arrived on the city's stages in 1926, throwing all sorts of licentious shocks at audiences. "Liquor runs deep down the course of this season's theatre in New York," wrote Gilbert W. Gabriel in Vanity Fair. "Scarcely a play is staged without the bravado of some one or two scenes of secret and melancholy drinking." On top of that, thanks to Mae West's career revival as playwright and performer, there was s.e.x. Manhattan's district attorney, goaded by the influential New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, empowered a "play jury" to attend plays and vote on their moral stature.

The jury quickly attacked West's off-Broadway play, s.e.x, along with two prominent Broadway shows, The Captive and The Virgin Man, for their "tendency to corrupt the morals of youth." Police raided all three productions on the same night and dragged the casts off to jail. A police sergeant, Patrick Keneally, had been sent out to the plays beforehand to make notes on their transgressions. When s.e.x went to trial, in February 1927, Keneally focused on West's "kootchie" dance in the show, testifying in a room full of sucked-in breath that "Miss West moved her navel up and down and from right to left." The jury convicted West and her producers and sentenced them to ten days in jail, along with a $500 fine each. Both the author and producer of The Virgin Man, about an undergraduate undone by a bevy of "seductresses," received similar fines and jail sentences.

Into this tense, nervous atmosphere arrived Chicago, which opened at the Music Box Theatre on December 30, 1926. The play had drinking, and it had s.e.x. If you weren't of a mood to recognize it as satire-and members of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice tended to take all art literally-you saw only the most horrific debauchery: remorseless murderers celebrating their b.l.o.o.d.y acts and being celebrated for them. At one point in the play, the jailed Roxie, surrounded by male reporters but without the slightest shame, decides to remove her garters so she can auction them off to her fans. "Here, take these, too!" Roxie tells Jake as she "gives herself a reflective wriggle" and then pops the elastic band free.

JAKE [waves them aloft]: Bravo! 'You've read about 'em, boys, here they are: what am I offered for the Famous Turquoise Garter?' [Breaks off in alarm as she seems bent on further disapparelment.] Stop! This is not strip poker!

ROXIE [straightens with dignity]: I was only rollin' my stockin's. [They drop to her ankles and JAKE retreats.]