The Girls Of Murder City Part 11

Not even Mae West's play was so depraved and cynical as this daring new production. The New York correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, writing on opening night, noted that Chicago arrived from its out-of-town try-out with a reputation "as a shocker unfit for human consumption and all Broadway attempted to get into the Music Box where Sam H. Harris staged it." After seeing it, however, the local critics sought to mitigate any shocks caused to the citizenry. Recognizing an original and ambitious production rather than a moral hazard, they immediately embraced the play, perhaps hoping to preempt the censors.16 "My hat is off to the genius of the young Miss Maurine Watkins, who has contributed to the American theater the most profound and powerful satire it has ever known," wrote novelist and critic Rupert Hughes. "Best of all, [Chicago] is a satire by a woman on the folly of men in their false homage to woman, their silly efforts to protect her while she dupes them." The play was more than a thumping entertainment, he continued. It sought to "put an end to the ghastly business of railroading pretty women safely through murder trials by making fools of the solemn jurymen."

Hughes's review was representative of the norm. In the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson warned off potential moralist outrage, insisting that "Chicago is not a melodrama, as the prologue indicates, but a satirical comedy on the administration of justice through the fetid channels of newspaper publicity-of photographers, 'sob sisters,' feature stunts, standardized prevarication and generalized vulgarity."

Jump-started by the critical reaction, Chicago began to consistently play to packed houses. Maurine Watkins had caught the Zeitgeist, and not just in New York. Plans for a tour were undertaken, first to the t.i.tle city itself and then to Los Angeles. The bloodletting in Chicago, the heart of Prohibition-driven gangsterism, had become a national topic, and thanks to Maurine, making fun of Murder City was now de rigueur. Two months after the play opened, humorist Will Rogers picked up on the subject, joking in a newspaper piece that Detroit's leaders had come to him and complained, "What's the use of having all these robberies and killings [in our city]? No one ever reads about them. Chicago seems to be the only place most people think that can put on a murder." Rogers's answer to Detroit's problem: Go for quality, not quant.i.ty. "It's best not to have a woman do the murdering," he wrote. "A case like that holds for a while, but when it comes to a trial it loses interest, for the people want to see a case where there is some chance of conviction."

With Chicago's unexpected box-office success, Maurine began fielding interview requests. The New York Times, in profiling the new playwright three days after the opening, gave credit to George Pierce Baker and joked that Maurine's final grade under the well-known professor "will be determined by the manner in which the play is produced. And [Baker] has promised that what the Chicago Chamber of Commerce has to say won't count."

The profile praised Maurine's talent and manners, but a more telling pa.s.sage came in the brief description of her journalism career. The paper stated that it was "the experience of reporting the Leopold-Loeb case that supplied her with much of the material for Chicago." A New York World feature on Maurine later in the month also dwelled on Leopold and Loeb, quoting her at length on how she decided what to ask the thrill killers when she had the opportunity and what she thought of the "crime of the century" spectacle.

That Maurine would expound freely on Nathan Leopold and d.i.c.k Loeb is not surprising: It made sense for an unproven playwright writing about the newspaper world to b.u.t.tress her qualifications by highlighting her role in such a famous story. But in both the Times and the World interviews, she failed to mention that her play was actually based on a different trial. In fact, almost none of the numerous feature stories and reviews about Chicago in the New York press mentioned Beulah Annan. By this time, more than two years after the fact, Beulah and her trial had been forgotten outside the Second City. In contrast, articles about the play frequently referenced the infamous Leopold and Loeb.

In keeping the true inspiration for Chicago quiet, Maurine may have been worried that she'd hewed too closely to real events to be worthy of the acclaim she was receiving for writing a brilliantly original play. After all, some snippets of dialogue in Chicago came straight out of William Scott Stewart's and W. W. O'Brien's mouths during Beulah's trial. Key plot points-such as Roxie's pregnancy announcement-were also lifted directly from real events. Some of Maurine's stage directions and scene descriptions were taken nearly word for word from her Tribune articles. The details of Roxie's shooting of her boyfriend tracked exactly with the real thing, including the blaring jazz music on the phonograph and the children playing outside the window. Physical descriptions of Roxie also borrowed from Maurine's Tribune descriptions of Beulah.

Moreover, Beulah wasn't the only real-life murderess to make it onto the stage in Chicago. Belva Gaertner, in the form of the relatively minor character of Velma, was represented down to the smallest details, including Belva's claim to have been so drunk that she didn't remember anything about her boyfriend's murder. Velma is described as being in her "late thirties, with smooth sallowed features, large dreamy eyes, and full lips that have a dipsomaniacal droop." Velma, like Belva, is a wealthy society lady who pays an Italian immigrant prisoner to make her bed every morning. Sabella Nitti, Kitty Malm, and Elizabeth Unkafer also got lifted from the newspaper and dropped down into the play intact.

Maurine even offered herself up, tangentially, as "the woman from the Ledger" who doesn't buy into the sham public persona Roxie puts on for the sob sisters. "I won't see her," Roxie says petulantly, when Billy Flynn tells her the reporter is coming to the jail for an interview. Flynn replies, "You've talked so much, you can't stop now. If you tell enough lies they're bound to forget a few!"

All of these similarities, now that the play was actually up and running, appear to have made Maurine a bit nervous. The play was advertised as a satire based on broadly identifiable conditions in the country; she wasn't supposed to be retrying an old case on the stage. The furthest she went in acknowledging the extent of her inspiration was to write, in a letter to the editor in the New York World, that she "was portraying conditions as I actually found [them] during my newspaper work. For while the play may sound like burlesque or travesty in New York, it would pa.s.s for realism in its home town." Again, she did not mention Beulah Annan.

Of course, that was Maurine Watkins in sophisticated New York. When Chicago arrived in Chicago in the fall of 1927, after running for 172 performances on Broadway and being sold to Hollywood, there would be no ducking the truth. There was no reason to do so.

20.

The Most Monotonous City on Earth On Sunday morning, October 9, 1927, the Twentieth Century Limited chugged slowly through Gary, Indiana. Heavy clouds pulled the sky down to the rooftops like a cap. The train swung north into Chicago's sprawling industrial suburbs, open fields giving way to "crooked, ill-paved streets lined with bleak houses and thick with the murk of factory vapors." For mile after mile, pa.s.sengers watched one ramshackle structure worse than the last roll past, swimming in crashing waves of bilious smoke. Men and women pressed their noses to the windows. A sheltered, properly raised young woman, a woman like Maurine Watkins had once been, could be forgiven for looking out the window of her compartment and thinking some dreadful natural disaster had occurred. The traveler coming into Chicago for the first time saw a ghastly, dirty farce of a city. It was "the most monotonous city on earth," proclaimed New York businessman Edward Hungerford on his initial trip. "Chicago, with the most wretched approaches on her main lines of travel of any great city of the world."

To Maurine, of course, it looked like home. Once the train settled into LaSalle Street station, she stepped onto a red carpet that had been laid out for the pa.s.sengers and walked through the station. Out at the taxi stand, a driver a.s.sumed control of her baggage and drove her to the Drake Hotel, where she registered and went up to her room. Maurine had looked forward to her return to the city for weeks. Chicago's press agent planned to send newspaper photographers over to the station to meet her, but Maurine didn't want to show up her old colleagues who hadn't left town and become famous. She conveniently forgot to tell the publicity man when she was coming. Just to be safe, she stayed shut up in her room all day, as if she didn't know a soul in the city or where to go.

When Maurine finally stepped from the Drake that evening, small, beautifully dressed, and alone, she climbed into a taxi and directed it to the Harris Theater, where she paid the driver and walked quickly up to the box office. It thrilled her to be going to the theater, her favorite pastime, and especially to be going to this play in particular, her own hit comedy. But she hadn't planned ahead. The best available seat at this late hour, the ticket seller told her, was in the sixteenth row. Maurine smiled and told him that the sixteenth row was perfect; she was "glad it was not in the fifth or sixth row." Mystified by the response-it certainly took all kinds to fill a theater-the man completed the transaction without further comment and gazed over her shoulder to the next patron. Maurine stepped toward the doors, happy to be unrecognized, something that hadn't been possible for Belva Gaertner or W. W. O'Brien when they attended the play two weeks before.

It took all of ten seconds from the opening curtain for Francine Larrimore to have the packed house choking with laughter. Maurine laughed too. Oh, Francie was so wonderful! Maurine could enjoy the beautiful, gangly girl's performance night after night. Watching Larrimore bound about the stage, Maurine was convinced anew that the actress had captured the character perfectly: "a hint of a Raphael angel-with a touch of Medusa." You'd never know she was such a darling girl offstage.

"Why did you kill him?" a copper asked Larrimore.

The actress, an alley cat all of a sudden, screeched: "It's a lie! I didn't! d.a.m.n you, let go!" She chomped down on the policeman's wrist with sharp incisors, and he yelped and flung her off.

"So it was you," said the sergeant, a bit slow on the uptake.

"Yes, it was me! I shot him and I'm d.a.m.ned glad I did! I'd do it again-"

She didn't get to finish her confession-she never did. A reporter cut her off: "Once is enough, dearie!"

The audience erupted at the line, the whole theater reverberating with t.i.ttering echoes, as Francine Larrimore slowly started to fall apart.

"Oh, G.o.d . . . G.o.d . . . Don't let 'em hang me-don't . . . Why, I'd . . . die! "

The elegantly dressed men and women around Maurine crashed into hysterics yet again. They pounded on their armrests, cackled in delight. Maurine was delighted with the line as well. The success of the play gratified her. And yet when the second of the play's three acts closed, she apparently had had enough. She got to her feet and headed for the door. Eddie Kitt, the manager, smiled at her approach, grinning as any man instinctively did at the advance of a pretty young woman. Maurine asked him to escort her backstage. Kitt paused-this was an unusual request in the middle of a play-but then the young lady's smile, the dancing eyes, the loose, pulled-back hair, all clicked together in his brainpan, and he did as he was asked.

When the curtain rose for the third act, Maurine Watkins still was not in her seat-she was walking quietly, purposefully, across the stage, in full view of the audience. She sat next to the actress playing Mary Sunshine, her perfect doll's cheeks bulbous and reflecting light, blue eyes surveying the scene. Mr. Tilden, the stage manager, leaned forward from the wings to see what was happening.

Francine Larrimore glared at Maurine, but it was a look of surprise, momentary surprise. She wasn't really upset.

"What kind of look?" the lawyer asked. "Describe it to the jury."

Larrimore's eyes swung from Maurine to her questioner. "I can't describe it," she said. "But a terrible look-angry-wild-"

"Were you afraid? Did you think he meant to kill you?"

"Oh, yes, sir! I knew if he once reached the gun . . ."

"It was his life then or yours," the man said, his voice rising just enough to make everyone realize he was saying something important now.

"Yes, sir," said Roxie Hart, finally lifting her wavering eyes to meet his. She took a deep breath, her cheeks cherry-red all at once, then: "He was coming right toward me, with that awful look-that wild look . . . and I closed my eyes . . . and . . . shot! "

Maurine loved being a part of the production. She'd been a reliable background player for months on Broadway, putting aside new writing a.s.signments each evening to head over to the theater. She even understudied a couple of the minor roles. She couldn't help but want to be involved in all the fun. She'd had plenty of laughs during the real events on which the play was based, just like some of the other faces in the audience here in Chicago. She hadn't realized how much she missed the city and her former life until the play started. New York was surprisingly tame: Its murder rate was more than 50 percent lower than the Second City's. At one point, Maurine took a trip to supposedly wild Baltimore but found none of that old Chicago feeling, to her disappointment: "Nary a cherub with happy days in her arms or revolver in hand, and I strolled particularly through ladies' retiring quarters," she wrote to her friend Alexander Woollcott, the Broadway drama critic. But now she could have as much of her late police reporter's life as she wanted-at least her fantasy version of it. When she arrived in Chicago, the silent-movie adaptation of her play was shooting across town under the guidance of the legendary Cecil B. DeMille, its producer. It was being made under great secrecy, and everyone was talking about what they didn't know-everyone except Maurine, who never gossiped. Francine Larrimore was committed to the stage show, so the former Mack Sennett bathing beauty Phyllis Haver, best known as the vampire in Emil Jannings's The Way of All Flesh, took the lead for Mr. DeMille. Maurine didn't know what to think about that. The whole endeavor was challenging, turning such a talky play into a silent film. Haver would admit that herself, saying: "It is bad enough to get in tune with any character but when one jumps up and down the octave whamming out this discord and that, the task is nerve wracking."

Having the movie shooting in town was exciting, but the actors and crew mostly kept to themselves during production, and Maurine didn't impose herself on them. The play, on the other hand, was here for everyone, right now. And everyone seemed to love it, especially the critics. "Miss Watkins is uncannily keen, and Chicago is one of the brilliant satirical plays of the times," wrote C. J. Bulliet in the Evening Post. The Tribune said the play "is as rich a reason for laughter as has in many years been proffered to those of us who think we are civilized, educated, adult, responsive, transilient [sic], literate, something more than half-witted, what used to be called 'aware,' and what is now miscalled 'sophisticated.' " Whether or not Maurine needed to fear being found out in New York, Chicagoans felt flattered that real events in their city had made it to the Broadway stage. The American observed that "Good-natured Chicago laughed loudly and gossiped incessantly between the three acts at the clever burlesque on the stage, [at] county and city and bar and newspapers and police-at the hectic jazz times which could make possible an evening of entertainment, with women swearing like troopers, in this 'what price bullets' production."17 Praise for Francine Larrimore, as Roxie, was also unanimous. The Daily News enthused that the actress's performance was "faultless," adding that her "moods and tantrums, her wiles and witchery are superb." The Herald and Examiner insisted that Larrimore was "the solar plexus of this shrill satire. She gives herself to it body, nerve and adenoid. She is comical with a pa.s.sion that sometimes wrings tears-yours as well as her own." When the play opened, Chicago was preparing to host the heavily antic.i.p.ated heavyweight championship rematch between Jack Dempsey and the man who took his t.i.tle the year before, Gene Tunney. The Herald and Examiner 's critic remarked, "Should Dempsey next Thursday night attack Tunney, or Tunney attack Dempsey, as Miss Larrimore tackles Roxie, it will be over in the first act."

Beulah Annan was not available to see Larrimore's knockout interpretation of her, but her lawyer, W. W. O'Brien, and Belva Gaertner showed up for the premiere. "Gee, this play's sure got our number, ain't it," Belva offered with a smile. "Sure, that's me," she added when a Herald and Examiner reporter asked her about the character of Velma. She also said, generously, "Roxie Hart's supposed to be Beulah Annan. She was the most beautiful woman ever accused of murder." O'Brien, recognizing his own words in the script, called Chicago "the finest piece of stage satire ever written by an American."

Maurine's old compatriot, Genevieve Forbes, also took in the show. She was just as fascinated as Maurine with the reimagining of their newspaper lives. The production recalled gayer journalistic times in Chicago, "of those local ladies who tarried on the fourth floor of the building at Dearborn Street and Austin Avenue long enough to get themselves into a play." Like Maurine, she had become nostalgic for the old days. Crime in the city was all gangsters now-bootleggers with tommy guns and cold hearts. They didn't shoot for love, like the women she and Maurine had written about. A few days after Maurine took in the play, Forbes decided to remind any Chicagoan who might have forgotten about the city's murderesses of yore. In the Tribune, she wrote an open letter to theater management requesting "a block of seats, that I may take as my guests the women whom Maurine interviewed that May day now more than two years ago."

"Beulah Annan ought to have the aisle-seat," she continued. "For it was she-too beautiful to work in a laundry, but a sufficiently good shot to get her man with one bullet in the back-who is the Roxie of the piece. . . . Beulah went free: else, there might have been no play." Forbes knew the real Roxie still had star power. It had been incorrectly "whispered about" (princ.i.p.ally by the American) that Beulah would attend the show on opening night, leading theatergoers to scan the crowd at every opportunity. But Forbes hoped she would make an appearance now, seeing as the reporter was issuing a formal invitation.

The next best seat, Forbes insisted, "ought to go to Belva Gaertner, Cook County's most stylish murderess." She wrote that Belva, remarried to the millionaire William Gaertner, was strikingly portrayed in Chicago. "One thing, however, is all wrong with her stage descendant. The Velma of the play goes before the jury in a vivid green gown; and everybody knows that Belva's favorite color was cafe-au-lait. A trivial point, but irksome, perhaps, to Belva."

Then there was the character of Moonshine Maggie. She was "a tangent form of Sabella Nitti, the farm-lady who achieved fame as instant as Byron's when she was heralded as the first woman in the county to receive the death sentence. It was for the murder of her husband. But she tarried in jail long enough to learn the value of a hot bath, a manicure and a smart hair-do. . . . She'd love the theater!"

Last but far from least was the murderess Forbes covered more closely than any other. The character "Go-to-h.e.l.l Kitty," she wrote, "is Kitty Malm, who packed a gat where most girls harbor their love-letters. She's a life-timer at Joliet; but, if the Harris theater management throws in an extra ticket for a guard, I'll try to get permission for Kitty to come along."

The open letter was all in fun, of course, so there was another name that hung over the production that Forbes did not mention: Wanda Stopa. There was simply nothing amusing about her story, even with Francine Larrimore up on stage. And besides, Wanda had even less opportunity to attend the show than Kitty Malm.

Despite the raves Francine Larrimore received as Roxie Hart, Maurine had proved to be the biggest star to come out of the production. Reporters and critics had a difficult time believing she could be the writer of such a hard-edged, hard-hearted satire. (She heightened this sense of implausibility by saying she was twenty-six years old, though she was now thirty.) "She is blonde, comely, chic, and considerably under thirty-a pleasant way to be," the New Yorker declared in October 1926 when announcing the play. After Chicago opened, the magazine weighed in again, noting that the "popular opinion is that she is one of the prettiest unmarried girls who ever wrote a successful Broadway play."

The New Yorker's theater writer was hardly alone in his crush. Everybody loved Maurine Watkins, and it was easy to understand why. That other popular stage auth.o.r.ess of the moment, Mae West, was a threat-her stated goal was proving the equality of the s.e.xes. Not so Chicago's scribe. She had sweet, old-fashioned manners, and her satire showed not how accomplished unfettered women could be, but how wicked. Vanity Fair thrilled to this "seraphic young person from the South," and the New York World marveled at her "distinctly feminine manner." The New York Times's theater correspondent, on meeting Maurine, wrote that she was "more easily suspected as the author of poetry such as that penned by Edna St. Vincent Millay, than of a play like Chicago."

Now that Maurine had achieved celebrity status, it was inevitable that she would be recruited to be a celebrity commentator on the news of the day, the latest trend in the newspaper business. In January 1927, the New York World hired her to liven up the silly and already sensationalized Browning divorce case. Frances Browning was the sixteen-year-old wife of Edward W. Browning, a fifty-two-year-old real-estate millionaire. He called her Peaches. She called him Daddy. Not long after a series of loveydovey public appearances by the newlyweds, Peaches ran out on Daddy and sought a divorce. She insisted that her husband had forced her to walk around their residence naked and that he'd thrown phone books at her and burned her with acid.

The shocking charges notwithstanding, Daddy Browning had little to worry about from the court of public opinion. A swarming crowd gave him an ovation when he arrived at the courthouse in suburban White Plains, where the case was to be decided. Why not? He dressed beautifully, he had exquisite manners, and his name appeared in the New York papers a lot. Just a few years before, that wouldn't have been enough to engender the public's admiration, but this was now the age of moving pictures and public relations. People greeted Browning on the street like a war hero. Besides, his estranged wife didn't meet the public standard.

"She's too fat," a girl outside court announced loudly as Peaches made for a taxi on the case's first day.

"I don't call her pretty," agreed a fellow court-watcher.

"Gold digger," hissed still another spectator.

Witnessing all of this, Maurine saw an excellent opportunity to bring an even higher profile to Chicago, which was still in the first month of its New York run. Her coverage of the divorce would be less about the Brownings than about Maurine herself and her play's themes.

The World had no problem with this angle. An editor's note pointed out that "Miss Watkins," having revealed the real Chicago on the Broadway stage, was now "investigating scientifically the road to fame in our own fair city." As expected, that investigation's results amused the playwright-reporter. "Chicago was never like this," she wrote, leaning hard on her new public persona as a cynical Midwestern wisecracker in the Big Apple. "The Brownings would have been dismissed with a couple of 'moron' headlines; the whole Gold Coast could wash its linen on the Lake Sh.o.r.e without moving journalistically from that cemetery known as the Social Column. In Chicago you must shoot, not sue, your way to glory. Her front pages drip with blood, whereas New York's are smeared with dirt."

This made for an entertaining premise, and allowed Maurine to tout her play to a wide audience, but it obviously wasn't true. New York's papers could bathe happily in blood, and often did. Maurine helped prove this just three months after the Browning pas de deux, when another New York paper, this time the Telegram, hired her for another trial. Ruth Snyder, a onetime stenographer, and her corset-salesman boyfriend, Henry Judd Gray, were charged with murdering Snyder's husband so they could collect on an insurance policy and run off together. Reporters from every newspaper in the tristate area-and many more throughout the country-flooded the courthouse in Long Island City for this latest "crime of the century." Among those who signed up to cover the trial were novelist Fannie Hurst, celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, actress and socialite Peggy Joyce Hopkins, even an ex-wife of Rudolph Valentino. Maurine would share s.p.a.ce in the Telegram with popular philosopher Will Durant.

The Telegram hoped that Maurine's good looks and satiric charms would lure readers to imagine a "palship" with the plucky young playwright-reporter, causing them to pick the Telegram over its many newsstand compet.i.tors. With an alluring inset photograph accompanying each report-Maurine looking gorgeous in a practical, no-frills way, her hair pulled back and her face freshly scrubbed-she was the all-American girl commenting on the all-American sport. There was, however, a problem. Unlike the cases of Belva and Beulah, every aspect of this story was revolting. The nature of the crime-Snyder's husband was viciously garroted, after numerous previous attempts on the man's life-stood athwart all of the defense's efforts to make Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray sympathetic. Time magazine pointed out that the "details, unusually gruesome, included poisoned whiskey, picture wire, binding, gagging, taking turns at skull-smashing with a window-weight, and $104,000 in life insurance."

From the start, Maurine hit the wrong note. "Strike up the band, for the show starts today!" she declared on April 18, under a byline that read "Maurine Watkins, Author of 'Chicago.' " As the trial careened toward a verdict, she mocked the two defendants for blaming their actions on the magnetic influence of the other: Scene reconstructed from Snyder-Gray testimony: "Oh, Mumsie, you're terrible to want to kill your husband! But I'll buy the chloroform for you-and what about a little sash-weight?"

"O Lover Boy, you mustn't come back to kill my husband! But here's the sash-weight, and I'll leave a couple of doors open and you'll find a bottle of whiskey up in Mamma's room."

"Oh Mumsie, I can't do it! Have you got the cotton waste and picture wire?"

O Judd, you really mustn't do it! Have another drink and the revolver's there on the piano."

Maurine undoubtedly recognized that Snyder, with her wax-figure countenance, stout figure, and carefully planned viciousness, was no Beulah Annan. She enjoyed tweaking Snyder, but mostly she gave the trial and its defendants short shrift, focusing instead on what was now her pet theme: the excesses of the ma.s.s media. More than a hundred seats in the courthouse had been "ticketed for the press," she pointed out. And that was just for starters. A "special room" had been given over to stenographers, another for a wire room, and an elevator was reserved for the use of messenger boys, for "what tragedy if the color of Ruth Snyder's hose or Henry Gray's breakfast menu should miss the early edition of the Houston Press or the Rocky Mountain News!" Maurine looked around at her fellow reporters, all doing the same job she was, and acted offended. "For a few days, at least, perhaps for a few weeks, the stenographer who married her boss will get attention such as Queen Marie [of Romania] enjoyed, and the corset salesman of East Orange will take his place with the Prince of Wales."18 In the end, the a.s.signment brought Maurine nothing but a paycheck she no longer needed. The public greedily consumed coverage of the trial but never warmed to the story or its correspondents. Both Snyder and Gray, with a sigh of relief from millions of newspaper readers, were convicted. In January 1928, they were put to death in the electric chair.

With Maurine's profile higher in the winter and spring of 1927 than many Broadway leading ladies, newspaper editors weren't the only ones seeking out her services. Every theater producer in New York wanted her on his next project.

The first a.s.signment Maurine accepted was an adaptation of Samuel Hopkins Adams's novel Revelry, a fictional look at corruption in the Harding administration. Maurine diligently set to work, but with a busy schedule that included celebrity journalism and occasionally appearing as an extra in Chicago, her new star status quickly began to weigh on her. Reconnecting with the judgmental George Pierce Baker, who thought she had overcommitted herself, didn't help her anxiety. "Feel depressed," she wrote to Alexander Woollcott in longhand. "Just returned from Yale-first attendance since . . . it happened. Dear Teacher thinks I'm close by the precipice of utter ruin and that Revelry will push me completely over."

Baker, it turned out, wasn't far wrong. Thanks to Chicago, Maurine suddenly had become the go-to writer for hard-hitting, wisecracking satire that tested the bounds of legal decency. She'd barely gotten started on Revelry, a project certain to provoke outrage in some circles, when she accepted another hot-b.u.t.ton a.s.signment-adapting Herbert Asbury's scandalous American Mercury magazine article "Hatrack," the story of a "rebuffed churchgoer and sought-after prost.i.tute" in the small Missouri town where Asbury grew up. "Our town harlot in Farmington," wrote Asbury, "was a scrawny creature called variously f.a.n.n.y Fewclothes and Hatrack, but usually the latter in deference to her figure." During the workweek, f.a.n.n.y was a "competent drudge" on the domestic staff of one of the town's proudest families, but on Sundays she unself-consciously sold her body, taking her clients to lie down on the cool slabs in the town's Masonic and Catholic cemeteries. Upon publication in the American Mercury, the piece was deemed indecent and barred from being sent through the U.S. mail.

These were two a.s.signments, like the Snyder-Gray trial, for which Maurine was const.i.tutionally unsuited. Chicago was all flash and bang, and its subject matter-sensation journalism and celebrity-l.u.s.t-was ideal for such eyes-wide-open comic treatment. "Any play which can batter away with unrelenting ridicule for three whole acts-and without a single sop to the sentimentalists-deserves a bonus of unabashed hurrahs," Vanity Fair wrote of Chicago. That it did, but Chicago was also sui generis. A recently deceased president and a sad small-town prost.i.tute did not so easily lend themselves to Maurine's broad-stroke, incriminatory humor. Adaptations are always tricky, and for these in particular, Maurine needed a rapier, not the cannon that was her comic weapon of choice.

Revelry, her much-antic.i.p.ated follow-up to Chicago, in fact proved fated for disaster before it even reached New York. In Philadelphia, the play was withdrawn shortly after it opened in September when a judge denounced it as "false, base and indecent, and slanderous of the dead." In dealing with a fictional version of the late president, Maurine had been asked to walk a fine line in writing the adaptation, and she had failed. The company that owned the Philadelphia playhouse in which the play was booked announced, "While the play had been rendered un.o.bjectionable in other respects by the censors, the Stanley company considered the theme so essentially unpatriotic that any further revision would be useless."

That was not the official death of the production, but it might as well have been. When the New York critics got a look at it, the play hung in a dispiriting critical purgatory, garnering neither applause nor outright attack. "The play that Miss Watkins fashioned is, if somewhat disappointing, not worthless," wrote Edmund Wilson in the New Republic. "Its tone carries a certain sarcastic gravity; Miss Watkins has restrained, in the case of these national themes, her gay brutality, and has enjoyed herself less with naughty exposures." George Jean Nathan, in the American Mercury, added that "there is so much profanity and cussing that along toward ten o'clock one begins to suspect the author of concealing her inability to key up dramatic intensity in loud invocations of the Saviour and allusions to kennel genealogy." The play closed after only a month on Broadway.

With Revelry's embarra.s.sing reception, Maurine began to realize that Baker had been right: She had overextended herself and, perhaps as a result, not given her best to any of her projects. Just days after the Revelry brouhaha in Philadelphia, she wrote to Woollcott, then drama critic at the New York World: "Does your department pay damages to guileless souls who believe every word written therein? Basely deceived by a statement that out of five plays bought only one is ever produced, I went around this summer busily and merrily signing contracts for old plays, dramatizations, adaptations, or what have you. Came the fall and dawn; and managers' intentions, if not honorable, proved serious, with the result that I am even more busily if less merrily trying to buy out of various transgressions." She added that she had learned a hard lesson: "Don't sell a play till it's written."

Two days before Christmas, 1927, the movie version of Chicago opened. Maurine now learned another lesson, if she didn't already know it: New York and Chicago truly weren't like the rest of the country. America's middlebrow critics-and the broad public they served outside the urban culture centers-feared the kind of cynical, in-your-face social commentary she served up in her play. Nelson B. Bell, a Washington Post film critic, even argued that Chicago benefited from being watered down by Hollywood. "Maurine Watkins certainly can harbor no feelings of resentment over the manner in which the producers of films have treated her melodramatic travesty, 'Chicago,' in translating it from the articulate stage to silent drama," he wrote. The chief change that made the film adaptation palatable to Bell was a reimagining of Roxie Hart's husband. In the movie version, Amos Hart has a backbone, and when he realizes Roxie's immoral nature, he "casts her firmly and not gently out of his life." Bell called this a "wholly commendable act" and, not realizing the whole thing was supposed to be funny, added that it "gives the drama an excuse for being."

The movie, produced by Cecil B. DeMille and directed by Frank Urson, opened to a mixed critical reception and good box office sales, but the renewed attention on her work didn't help Maurine's playwriting struggles. Two weeks before the film's release, still reeling from Revelry's failure, she gave up on Herbert Asbury's story. The Chicago Tribune reported that "Miss Maurine Watkins has torn up her notes and memoranda, and has asked that she be let out of the contract to dramatize 'Hatrack.' " Baker wrote to Maurine from Yale, trying to buck her up. He told her it was time to write another original work. "I can understand that you may not have had a wholly happy experience in spite of your success in the theatre world, but you cannot afford not to have something worthy of you on the New York stage within a year. Otherwise, you will have to begin again."

Maurine did have an original play in the works, but it didn't appear to be a top priority. She was just trying to hold on, to survive the scrutiny and expectations. The past year had drained her. She understood publicity and sensation, those conjoined twins of the burgeoning tabloid era. Three years before, she'd expertly whipped them up for Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner. The two alleged murderesses, on trial for their lives, had reveled in the public's attention. But Maurine, with one of the most successful new plays of recent years, could not match their enthusiasm when it was her turn in the spotlight.

The thirty-year-old playwright seemed to understand that the cost of continued success in New York would be high. The country's largest city, like Chicago, roared on at an ever more frenzied pace. No one seemed to have learned anything from the story of Roxie Hart. Mae West was a bigger star than ever now, thanks to her arrest and conviction for s.e.x's "indecency." ("I expect it will be the making of me," she'd said as she was led to jail.) Newspaper readers, and so newspaper editors, wanted more and bigger shocks. The New York Daily News sneaked a camera into Ruth Snyder's execution; the resulting page-one photo of the woman sizzling in the electric chair-with a huge banner headline, "DEAD!"-sold out newspapers in a few hours. Literature followed the crowd: The Snyder story inspired Sophie Treadwell's Machinal on stage and James M. Cain's Double Indemnity in print. The pressure on writers to produce work that was deemed new and tough and exciting could be intense.

In response, Maurine began to retreat into herself, her old shyness rearing up again. Despite being a popular member of a celebrated group of New York artists and journalists-indeed, right now she was the most acclaimed of the bunch-she sometimes couldn't bear to leave her residence. "I am not coming for a drink today-not even for orange pekoe," she wrote in a typical letter to Woollcott. Maurine treasured her friendship with the garrulous critic, but their correspondence was dominated by her apologetic refusals to attend social events, no matter what carrot he dangled before her. "If it's one of those 'yes-or-no-and-stick-by-your-guns' affairs, it must be 'no,' " she wrote in another letter, "for G.o.d alone knows where I'll be next Monday and He won't tell-I've asked Him." She insisted to Woollcott that she was "by nature a recluse."

Maurine now increasingly turned to short story writing, possibly for the greater control it offered, the freedom from the demands of producers looking for the next commercial smash. But her themes and subjects changed little. Her stories frequently involved scheming women on the edge of respectability, women willing to do almost anything to get what they wanted. One, "b.u.t.terfly Goes Home," once again fictionalized Beulah Annan's life, following a beautiful cipher through the press's infatuation-"newspapermen swore to the tawny gold of her hair and the delicate pink of her flesh . . ."-and on to a tragic ending. It seemed important to the former crime reporter to provide the correct conclusion for Beulah. Maurine had gone to Chicago to confront sinfulness, after all. G.o.d created evil so that man-and woman-could create good, and Maurine struggled with the fear that nothing good had come of her time in the city. Despite her public response to Professor Archer, she realized she hadn't gotten closer to G.o.d through her work. Instead she had come to believe that "the feminine temperament can, perhaps, be more primitive than the male," that "the female of the species is really more deadly."

At the end of the 1926-27 stage season, Chicago was chosen as one of the best plays of the year by New York Daily News drama critic Burns Mantle and included in his prestigious theater annual. Most writers would have sought out more work, and more attention, after such an accolade, but Maurine withdrew further into herself. In a letter to Woollcott, she wrote: "Six months from now, if life keeps on happening, my chief worry will be what the angels are wearing this season. (Optimist!)"

Epilogue.

The acquittals of Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner ignited debate over whether it was time for women to serve on juries in Illinois. One headline, published a week after Belva's acquittal, declared: A WOMAN JURY TO TRY WOMEN SLAYERS URGED.

CLAIM NOW THAT PRETTY GIRLS GET FREE, UGLY ONES SENT TO PEN.

Women's groups lobbied for women to be included on juries-Sabella Nitti's lawyer, Helen Cirese, was among the most vocal supporters-but the Illinois legislature could not be convinced. Seven years later, in 1931, Illinois voters pa.s.sed a women jurors law on their own-only to see the state Supreme Court knock it down. Finally, in 1939, fifteen years after Beulah and Belva's murder trials, the legislature pa.s.sed a law allowing women to serve.

There was at least one immediate and unexpected benefit of the new law. In the four months after women began being admitted to Illinois juries in September of 1939, the percentage of men asking to be excused from serving dropped dramatically. "Chicago men have suddenly become delighted to serve as jurors," wrote the Tribune. "And the only reason the jury commissioners and court officials can even suggest is this: The women jurors."

Beulah Annan never made it to Hollywood. Her popularity with the press collapsed almost as soon as she left the Cook County Jail, causing her to retreat from the spotlight. Many reporters had bought into W. W. O'Brien's reimagining of her as a naive innocent, and they didn't appreciate looking like suckers when Beulah walked out on Al right after her acquittal. "It was with a gesture of contempt for his unworldliness that she announced that she was through with him," the Washington Post sneeringly wrote in July 1924. "He is, she observed, too old-fashioned, too conservative, for one so sophisticated, so beautiful as herself."

It didn't help that she never gave birth to the child she had so publicly announced she was carrying while awaiting trial. There's no evidence that she was ever pregnant. In January 1927, six months after her divorce from Al was finalized, Beulah moved to Indiana and married twenty-six-year-old boxer Edward Harlib, reportedly "despite the bitter opposition of Harlib's family." The marriage lasted less than four months. At a divorce hearing, Beulah told of "blackened eyes and broken ribs at the hands of her former pugilist husband," but she didn't claim spousal abuse as the impetus for the court action. It was her discovery that Harlib had never divorced his first wife. Beulah returned to Chicago and took a small apartment with her mother.

Chicago opened in the city that fall, but Beulah didn't attend the play. By then, she found herself bedridden on and off for weeks, her strength sapped. Early the following year, doctors diagnosed tuberculosis, and she entered the Chicago Fresh Air Sanitarium. She registered under the name Dorothy Stephens. By now she was barely recognizable. "She wasn't very beautiful," said a friend. "She was thin and faded. All she seemed to care for besides her mother were her canaries and cats." Just weeks after her arrival at the sanitarium, less than four years after she'd dominated Chicago's front pages, "Beautiful Beulah" Annan died. The press didn't report it until nearly a week later. On March 14, 1928, the Tribune wrote, "Chicago, so long and so vividly aware of her existence, first as the central figure of a lurid murder trial and later in the thinly disguised role of the heroine of the sensational stage and screen success, 'Chicago,' was totally unaware of her pa.s.sing."

Al Annan, alone and saddled with Beulah's legal bills, cut a pathetic figure in the weeks after his wife walked out on him. "I cannot make myself realize that Beulah has given me up," he said. "When we married we took solemn vows that it was for better or for worse, and that it was to exist until death parted us. . . . I shall love Beulah with a love that cannot be destroyed. Beulah is no different than any other woman. She is naturally weak and needs protection. She will come back to me."

Al would be disappointed on that score, but Maurine Watkins, for one, refused to offer any sympathy. She mused publicly that Al's willingness to endure so much abuse from his wife "may mean that men are more faithful than women-or merely that they enjoy more the glamour of heroic martyrdom."

Ten years after Beulah left him, Al, now forty-nine years old, was convicted of manslaughter for beating to death a woman named Otilla Griffin during a drunken argument in the apartment they shared in Chicago. He struck her at about three in the afternoon but didn't call police until three hours later. Al never served any time, however. The judge granted a request for a new trial, and two weeks later the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. William Scott Stewart helped with the defense.

Belva Gaertner remarried William Gaertner in May 1925. This one didn't turn out any better than the previous attempt. After moving into a luxurious new North Side apartment with her husband, she took to getting drunk every night. She also set out on a new round of adulterous affairs. William, now sixty years old, tried to be firm this time, but when he confronted her about her drinking, she flew into a rage and hit him in the head with a mirror.

The breaking point of the marriage came on July 5, 1926, when William returned from work and found a strange man in his bedroom. Belva, upon realizing her husband was home, "shrieked and leaped at him." She screamed that she would kill him, and William took the drunken outburst seriously enough that he retreated to an empty room and locked the door. This cowardice apparently infuriated Belva even more, for her "a.s.sault upon the door was so ferocious that he barricaded himself with chairs and bed." When William finally escaped the apartment, he didn't come back. He filed for divorce later in the month.

In response to her husband's suit, Belva claimed that it was William, not she, who had an "extreme and abnormal s.e.x pa.s.sion," and that her husband's perversion had left her nerves "sorely and permanently impaired." But, as with Beulah, the Fourth Estate could no longer be swayed to her side. She received overwhelming bad press, with one newspaper calling her husband the "most patient soul" since Job. Another paper referred to her as a "cave-girl."

After the divorce, Belva eventually relocated to Southern California to be near her sister. She traveled to New York, Europe, and Cuba for extended vacations but stayed out of the newspapers. She never married again. After years of seeking solace in the arms of others, she may have finally found some contentment on her own. When William Gaertner died in 1948, nearly twenty years before Belva, he left the bulk of his estate to her.

Katherine Malm was a model prisoner at Joliet State Penitentiary. She became proficient in typewriting and shorthand in hopes of a career as a stenographer one day. Known for being cheerful and helpful, she gained trusty status and worked as a clerk in the prison's main office.

During the first year of Kitty's imprisonment, the Chicago Evening Post sent Ione Quinby to the prison every month to check in on her. Quinby often brought Kitty's three-year-old daughter with her. "Each time," the reporter recalled years later, "I would pick up Tootsie, telling her that we were going to see her mother in a hospital. I remember that the first time we drove up in a cab, Tootsie cried, 'What a beautiful hospital!' It was a big, gray-stone, fortress-like place."

Kitty tried to win early release in 1930 and 1931, failing both times. In response, Quinby began to agitate for her parole, saying that Kitty was "no more a murderess than I am." Elsie Walther, a prisoner advocate working for the Church Mission of Christ, became an ardent supporter and secured the backing of Chicago's Episcopal bishop. Even the man who prosecuted Kitty, Harry Pritzker, joined the effort to secure parole for her.

But luck still wasn't with her. On December 19, 1932, the parole board again rejected her application for release. Just days later, she fell ill. What appeared to be a cold or the flu turned out to be pneumonia. Kitty's mother and daughter were hastily summoned to her bedside in Joliet's infirmary. Katherine Walters Baluk (Malm) died on December 27. She was twenty-eight years old.

Otto Malm, like Kitty, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1924. But while Kitty's reputation improved behind bars, Otto's only worsened. In 1931, he was involved in riots at Stateville Penitentiary and declared insane by the state of Illinois. He was given an additional life sentence after killing a convict.

In 1931, Ione Quinby saw her first and only book published, by Covici Friede. Murder for Love, about female murderers, included a chapter on Wanda Stopa, but because of Quinby's belief in Kitty Malm's innocence, not one on Kitty. The following year, the Chicago Evening Post folded, putting Quinby out of work in the midst of the Depression. Also in 1932, she married a fellow journalist, Bruce Griggs, but just thirteen months after the marriage, Griggs died in an automobile accident.

In 1933, the Milwaukee Journal hired Quinby. She soon began an advice column as "Mrs. Griggs" that would make her a statewide celebrity in Wisconsin. In a 1953 profile, Coronet magazine stated that she had "helped countless girls in trouble, and has had many babies named for her out of grat.i.tude." Year after year, Quinby's column remained the paper's most popular. "Whenever we had a tour come through the newsroom, the one person everyone always wanted to see was Ione Quinby Griggs," remembers fellow reporter Jackie Loohauis-Bennett. "They'd stop near her desk and watch her there typing away."