Journalists dropped hints about the couple, though, as early as the thirties. ‘Mr Hoover,’ Collier’s magazine told readers early in the Roosevelt presidency, ‘is short, fat, businesslike, and walks with a mincing step … He dresses fastidiously, with Eleanor blue as the favorite color for the matched shades of tie, handkerchief and socks. A little pompous, he rides in a limousine even if only to a nearby selfservice cafeteria …’
Edgar kept a thick file on the writer of that article, journalist Ray Tucker, and denounced him as a ‘degenerate alcoholic.’ Tucker became convinced that Edgar even placed him under surveillance for a while. ‘Has anyone noted,’ asked another columnist, ‘that the Hoover stride has grown noticeably longer and more vigorous since Tucker charged him with walking with mincing steps?’
Yet another reporter observed that Edgar kept dainty china in his office beside the crime trophies. ‘He is different,’ commented a foreign diplomat, ‘from any police officer I ever knew, in that he uses a distinctive and conspicuous perfume.’ Edgar ordered a senior aide to say ‘very, very diplomatically’ that he never used perfume. In fact, he did.
The hints about Edgar and Clyde persisted. Time ran a piece about Edgar, ‘seldom seen without a male companion, most frequently solemn-faced Clyde Tolson.’ When the two friends sought to hide from the press, as when they stayed at the Muehiebach Hotel in Kansas City, they merely attracted attention to themselves. ‘They were shown,’ the local paper reported, ‘to the Muehlebach’s pride, the penthouse, No. 1125 … When reporters lifted the huge knocker of the door bearing the legend The Penthouse, the door was opened slightly, as in movie mysteries. A man in a café au lait lounging robe appeared. “I’m sorry,” he said, “you cannot see Mr Hoover.”’ The reporter thought Edgar ‘as mysterious as a Garbo smile’ – and noted that Clyde was installed next door.
The message to readers was clear. FBI insiders, most of them not sure what to think, just joked about it. In 1939, when top aide Louis Nichols – like George Ruch before him – named his son J. Edgar, agents joked, ‘If it had been a girl, she’d have been called Clyde.’
In the sixties, agents would chuckle about ‘J. Edna’ and ‘Mother Tolson.’ The writer Truman Capote, himself homosexual, told a magazine editor he knew Edgar and Clyde were, too. He considered writing a magazine piece about them – one that got no further than its title, ‘Johnny and Clyde.’
Scholars have pointed to the many photographs, most of them pictures of Clyde taken by Edgar, that survived from Edgar’s private collection: Clyde asleep, Clyde in a bathrobe, Clyde by the pool. Yet the two friends never openly set up house together. Clyde continued to maintain his own apartment when Edgar bought a home for himself after his mother’s death. At the office, say former colleagues, the two men showed no unusual affection for each other. For the forty-four years they were intimates, the deception must have been a constant strain. But a deception it was.
*
The man who knew them best in the thirties was Guy Hottel, a young executive for AETNA Insurance who shared an apartment with Clyde for years. The three men regularly went fishing, along with Edgar’s publicist Courtney Ryley Cooper. Edgar gave Hottel a job as an agent in 1938, as a favor to help him avert an unwelcome transfer by AETNA, and made him head of the Washington field office after perfunctory training. Later, he acted as best man at Hottel’s wedding.
Hottel remained confidant and constant companion to Edgar and Clyde throughout the ten years that followed. Shortly before his death in 1990, he spoke of going on ‘inspection tours’ with Edgar and Clyde that were no more than glorified junkets. He told of vacations in Florida and California, of hobnobbing with the wealthy – the Firestones of tire fame and senior Ford executives.
‘We did a little gambling, jai alai, horseracing, shuffleboard,’ Hottel recalled. ‘At the Flamingo Hotel, in Miami, they had a court with sides on it, and you could go up there and sunbathe all you wanted in the nude. Hoover liked the sun, but Tolson didn’t like it too much.’ On the record, Hottel limited himself to saying that Edgar and Clyde kept their distance from women. ‘They didn’t date them. They might take them out to dinner, but they didn’t date them – you know …’
Hottel had more to say on the subject in the forties when, as Agent in Charge of the Washington field office, he became a problem drinker. Former police Inspector Joseph Shimon, whose career in law enforcement in Washington spanned three decades, recalls that time.
‘When Hottel went on the drunk,’ said Shimon, ‘he’d go into different bars and start telling stories about the sex parties at Hoover’s house, you know, with the boys. To give you an idea of the influence Hoover had, when Hottel’s wife would call in and say, “He’s on a drunk,” we would get an order over the Teletype to the police department, to cover the bars and pick him up right away and send him over to the FBI. That was to keep him from talking. You know, that’s tremendous power. That happened so many times …’
Edgar did not fire Hottel. Perhaps, after so many years of intimacy, he simply knew too much. ‘He wasn’t fabricating,’ said Shimon. ‘He had attended some of the parties, let’s put it that way. According to him, some of the top boys who were holding the top jobs at the FBI were participating. They were kind of promoted over other people. I guess sometimes, in order to be promoted, you had to be one of the boys …’
A further serious allegation came from Jimmy G. C. Corcoran, who had become Edgar’s trusted associate while working as an FBI Inspector in the twenties.
‘After he left the Bureau,’ said Shimon, ‘Jimmy became very powerful politically. During World War II he was a lobbyist, and he was retained by a business group to get congressional help for them to open up a factory – for a $75,000 fee. That was illegal during the war, and we got a tip-off from the Attorney General’s office that the FBI were going to set Jimmy up when he went to pick up his $75,000 at the Mayflower Hotel.
‘Jimmy was really mad. He went to Harvey’s Restaurant and sent word to Hoover that Jimmy Corcoran wanted him to come out right now or he was going to create a scene.
‘Hoover came out in the end, and said, “What’s the matter, Jimmy?” and Jimmy called him a lot of dirty words and said, “What d’you mean trying to set me up?” Hoover said, “Gee, Jimmy, I didn’t know it was you.” And Jimmy said, “For Chrissake, how many J. G. C. Corcorans do you know?… This is what I get for doing you a favor, you dirty S.O.B …” And the outcome was that Jimmy went and collected his $75,000. And he wasn’t arrested.’
After the incident Corcoran confided to Shimon, and to Washington lobbyist Henry Grunewald, what the ‘favor’ had been. While he was at the Bureau, Corcoran said, Edgar used him to deal with a ‘problem.’ He said Edgar had been arrested in the late twenties in New Orleans, on sex charges involving a young man. Corcoran, who had by then left the FBI and had powerful contacts in Louisiana, said he had intervened to prevent a prosecution.
Corcoran was to die in a mysterious plane crash in 1956 near Spanish Cay, a Caribbean island owned by a close associate of Edgar’s, oil millionaire Clint Murchison. Most of the documents in his FBI file have since been destroyed. While Corcoran’s account may never be proven, it does not stand alone. Joe Pasternak, the veteran film producer remembered for his relaunch of Marlene Dietrich in the late thirties, told of another close call. He knew Edgar, and claimed personal knowledge of a sordid episode that occurred in California. ‘He was a homosexual,’ Pasternak said. ‘Every year he used to come down to the Del Mar racetrack with a different boy. He was caught in a bathroom by a newspaperman. They made sure he didn’t speak … Nobody dared say anything because he was so powerful.’
There are numerous anecdotes about Edgar and Clyde. Joseph Shimon recalled a story told by an astonished cab driver who had picked the couple up at National Airport. ‘He said Hoover was waiting, and rented the cab. It was Tolson who came off the plane. And he said he never saw so much kissing and ass-grabbing in his life. It was the kind of thing that made you feel
the rumors were true.’
Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society, America’s first homosexual rights organization, had homosexual friends who went regularly to Edgar’s summer racing haunt, the Del Mar track in California. ‘In the forties,’ said Hay, ‘people I knew would come back and say, “Guess who was in so-and-so’s box today?” And they’d say, you know, “Hoover and Tolson were there again.” I was gay, the people I was hearing it from were gay and the boxes Hoover and Tolson were in were boxes owned by gay men, in a circle in which they didn’t have people who weren’t gay. They wouldn’t be in that crowd otherwise. They were nodded together as lovers.’
The Broadway singer Ethel Merman, star of Annie Get Your Gun, met Edgar and Clyde in New York in 1936. They remained in touch for the rest of their lives, and regularly sent affectionate telegrams to her on opening nights. In 1978, when a reporter asked her to comment on Anita Bryant, the antihomosexual campaigner, Merman had an interesting reply. ‘Some of my best friends,’ she said, ‘are homosexual. Everybody knew about J. Edgar Hoover, but he was the best chief the FBI ever had. A lot of people have always been homosexual. To each his own. They don’t bother me.’
In the thirties Edgar began a long association with the columnist who reigned as the nation’s premier purveyor of gossip for thirty years, Walter Winchell. Edgar came to know Winchell, he was to say, ‘as well as any other living person,’ and it is the Winchell connection that provides eyewitness corroboration of the affair with Clyde.
Edgar began cultivating the columnist during the gangster wars, when Winchell wrote nice things about him. He assigned Bureau agents to guard him during a visit to Chicago, and entertained him at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. According to Winchell’s friend Curly Harris, the columnist and the FBI Director quickly became close. Winchell was one of the few people ever to address Edgar by the first of his Christian names, ‘John.’
For years thereafter, Winchell regaled readers with a diet of trivia about Edgar, along with some genuine newsbreaks. The source, though he always denied it, was Edgar himself. ‘The information would come on plain paper, in plain envelopes, without official identification,’ said the columnist’s assistant, Herman Klurfeld. ‘He’d hold up a letter and say, “Here it is. Something from John.” Hoover was almost like another press agent submitting material.’
It was through Winchell that Edgar first found his way to New York City’s Stork Club, billed as ‘the place to be seen if you wish to feel important.’ Between 1934 and 1965 patrons included several Kennedys and Rockefellers, Al Jolson and Joe DiMaggio, Grace Kelly and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and H. L. Mencken.
Winchell was close to the Stork’s proprietor, Sherman Billingsley. He regularly held court there and was often joined at Table 50, his place of honor, by Edgar and Clyde. Billingsley, a former bootlegger, saw to it that Edgar’s food and drink came free. The Stork was soon boasting a highball called FBI Fizz.
On New Year’s Eve 1936, around midnight, freelance photographer Gustave Gale took several pictures of Winchell and his party, all wearing funny hats and festive smiles. One photograph shows Edgar, with Clyde chortling at his side, his hands raised in mock surrender to a comely young woman with a toy gun. The woman, tracked down only recently, was a celebrated fashion model of the day, Luisa Stuart.1
That New Year’s Eve at the Stork, Stuart and her boyfriend, Winchell’s colleague Art Arthur, found themselves seated at Edgar’s table for dinner. ‘The world heavyweight champion, Jim Braddock, was there, too,’ recalled Stuart, now in her seventies. ‘I remember there were jokes about race, and Hoover didn’t want to go on to the Cotton Club because Gene Krupa, the white jazz drummer, played with blacks there.
‘All the same, we did end up going to the Cotton Club, in an FBI limousine. I sat with Art in the backseat. Hoover and Tolson sat opposite us in those two little seats on hinges they have in limousines. And that was when I noticed they were holding hands – all the way to the club, I think. Just sitting there talking and holding hands with each other.
‘Hoover got furious after we did get to the Cotton Club. Because not only were there black and white musicians, there was a black and white couple dancing – a black man with a white woman. And Tolson, who had been getting drunk, said something like, “Well, I’d like to dance with you …” It was an awkward moment.
‘I didn’t really understand anything about homosexuality in those days,’ said Stuart. ‘I was so young, and those were different times. But I’d never seen two men holding hands. And I remember asking Art about it in the car on the way home that night. And he just said, “Oh, come on. You know,” or something like that. And then he told me they were queers or fairies – the sort of terms they used in those days.’
Like other lovers, Edgar and Clyde had their ups and downs. Edgar drove Clyde to the hospital, a month before the episode at the Stork, when he was taken ill with appendicitis. At the office, though, he fussed and fumed at Clyde like a nagging spouse. Why, Edgar asked in one memo, did he have to hold doors open for visitors, while Clyde and others ‘swept through as if members of the British Monarch’s Jubilee entourage?’
After the Stork Club episode, Luisa Stuart saw Edgar and Clyde several times at the Sunday brunches Winchell and his wife gave at their Manhattan apartment. ‘One Sunday,’ Stuart recalled, ‘Hoover – “Jedgar,” as we called him – showed up without Clyde, and said Clyde was sick. After he left, people said Clyde wasn’t really sick. They’d had a big fight. The word was that Hoover had found Clyde in bed with another man.’
One Christmas, Edgar, Clyde and Guy Hottel were staying at Miami’s Gulfstream Hotel. At the height of a tiff with Clyde, Edgar stormed into the bathroom and locked the door. Hottel had to force his way in, grab the Director by the shoulders and shake some sense into him.
The bathroom siege was also apparently triggered by jealousy – though not, on this occasion, over another male. Hottel, who was something of a ladies’ man, had asked Clyde to make up a foursome for the evening with him and two women. Clyde had accepted and Edgar, piqued at the prospect of being left alone, threw a tantrum.
‘One of Guy’s jobs,’ said his brother-in-law Chandler Brossard, ‘was to sort of calm Hoover down. He was an hysteric. And Guy would often have to stay with him half the night to calm him. One of the most powerful men in America would in effect be under house arrest. He and Clyde had to watch Hoover very carefully.’
9
‘But there’s a man in Washington
Whom not many women see,
Who’s as dark and as handsome
As a sheik of Arabie.’
Poem for J. Edgar Hoover, submitted by woman describing herself only as ‘Wisconsin Girl,’ 1940
Edgar had deeply ambivalent feelings about women, but he did not avoid their company. At times, perhaps, he made a point of being seen with women to dispel rumors that he was homosexual. Perhaps, too, Edgar wanted to prove to himself that he could sustain a heterosexual relationship – something he never really achieved. In the end, he was too crippled emotionally to forge a truly fulfilling link with anyone, even Clyde.
When they met, Edgar and Clyde had much in common. As Edgar was devoted to his mother, Annie, so Clyde doted on his mother. As time passed, and their mothers aged, each man gave time and affection not only to his own mother but to his lover’s, too. Clyde even sent Annie Hoover Valentine cards.
As Edgar had been humiliated by a young woman in 1918, so Clyde had been rejected – twice. First there had been his childhood sweetheart, who married another man when Clyde went off to Washington. Then, while he was at law school, a second girlfriend became pregnant by another man and married him. According to a classmate, Raymond Suran, Clyde was devastated. Yet he remained attracted to women, and Edgar found that hard to handle.
Anita Colby, the celebrated thirties model, recalled Clyde having ‘a crush’ on her but never following through. In 1939 he briefly courted Edna Daulyton, a waitress in
a restaurant near the Justice Department. ‘He kind of flirted with me,’ she remembered, ‘and he took me out to dinner. He talked to me a bit about cases. We saw each other maybe half a dozen times, but I was leery of him.
‘One evening when we were having dinner at the Mayflower, Hoover came and joined us. I was shocked. He behaved in such an ugly way to me. He was like a little Napoleon. And there was a closeness between him and Clyde that I didn’t understand – something that didn’t seem quite natural. It was only afterwards I heard the stories.’
Clyde would hold Daulyton’s hand and give her a goodnight kiss on the cheek, but that was all. ‘One night,’ she said, ‘I asked him, “Is there something funny between you and Hoover?” He went very serious and said something like, “What d’you mean? Are you saying I’m some sort of abnormal faggot?” I guess I said, “Well, there’s something between you and that friend of yours …” Hoover joined us again when we went to eat at a place down near the water. And soon after that I stopped seeing Clyde.’
In 1939, when Clyde fell in love with a woman in New York and began talking of marriage, Edgar moved ruthlessly to prevent it. ‘Hoover suggested,’ said Guy Hottel, ‘that I have a little talk with Clyde, tell him to forget it. I did. If Clyde had married, he wouldn’t have been there to have dinner with Hoover every night. Hoover was selfish. He liked the setup the way it was, and he had ways of getting his own way.’
Ironically, at the very time Edgar snuffed out this relationship of Clyde’s, he was starting to see women himself. He began to do so immediately after his mother’s death, following a long battle with cancer, in 1938.
Annie had always been there, holding court when FBI colleagues came visiting, worrying when Edgar took airplane flights. ‘I am proud and happy that you are my son,’ she cabled from her sickbed when the National Institute of Social Scientists honored Edgar for ‘distinguished services to humanity.’ Soon after, with Edgar at her side in the bedroom where she had given birth to him, she died.
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