Thoughts about Annie preoccupied Edgar for the rest of his life. He would astonish virtual strangers with guilt-ridden outbursts about not having spent enough time with her when she was alive. He traveled to Florida each Christmas rather than try to celebrate in Washington, where his first forty-two Christmases had been spent with his mother.
Edgar was seen dining out with an older woman within weeks of Annie’s death. His new ‘favorite person,’ as Walter Winchell put it, was Lela Rogers, mother of Ginger and a formidable figure in her own right. She was forty-seven, four years Edgar’s senior, with two marriages behind her. She was tough, as befitted one of the first female recruits to the U.S. Marine Corps, where she had edited Leatherneck, the Corps’ magazine. She was politically of the far Right, and would one day tell a congressional committee that the line ‘Share and share alike – that’s democracy’ in a movie script was dangerous Communist propaganda. She was to be a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.
There were soon rumors that Rogers and Edgar were planning marriage. In New York to promote a play she had written, she received the press standing in front of his silverframed photograph. Edgar had called at 3 A.M. that morning, Rogers let slip, to fill her in on progress in a murder hunt. ‘Are you going to get married, or are you just interested in detective work?’ asked a reporter. ‘That,’ she beamed, ‘is up to him.’ Edgar, for his part, fended off the questions with coy answers.
Rogers showered him with gifts – a monogrammed ring, a gold cigarette box. ‘I think,’ said her friend Anita Colby, ‘that Leli was more interested in Edgar than he was in her.’ Ginger Rogers believed the relationship was a ‘close friendship, not an affair. I do remember this: Mother always said Edgar Hoover was a loner, and lonely.’
Edgar told close friends, though, that the affair was serious. ‘He was really smitten with her,’ recalled Effie Cain, a wealthy Texan who met Edgar in the forties. Edgar said as much to Leo McClairen, the trusted black Agent who chauffeured him in Florida. ‘Mr Hoover told me one time,’ McClairen remembered, ‘he was in love with Ginger Rogers’ mother. He told me she was thinking of getting married to him, but something came up …’
Richard Auerbach, a top Bureau official, was also privy to the relationship. ‘No question,’ he said. ‘It was a courtship. I used to make arrangements for her to meet with him in Florida. They were very careful, and marriage remained a possibility for many years to come. It lasted until 1955, when I brought the news to her one day that the President wanted him back in Washington the next morning. And his lady love said, “This just isn’t going to work. I’m going back to L.A …” She turned around and left the room with tears streaming down her face, and I put her on a flight. I don’t believe he ever saw her again.’
From then on, Edgar kept his distance. ‘Rogers’ letters would come in,’ said Cartha DeLoach, ‘and he’d send them over to me unanswered. I’d have an agent in the Correspondence Section do it, and he’d sign them.’
There were two other women in Edgar’s life in the thirties and early forties. The first was Oscar-winner Frances Marion, screenwriter of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and The Scarlet Letter. She was seven years older than Edgar, a veteran of several marriages. ‘Frances told me Hoover was in hot pursuit,’ her daughter-in-law recalled, ‘but she wouldn’t marry him because of the boys, her sons.’
The third, and perhaps most important, liaison was with the actress Dorothy Lamour – heroine of films like Road to Singapore and Road to Hong Kong with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. She had first met Edgar as early as 1931, when she was a twenty-year-old former beauty queen working as a singer at the Stork Club. They became close, however, only after Lamour’s divorce from her first husband and the death of Edgar’s mother.
In her autobiography, Lamour wrote only that Edgar was ‘a lifelong friend.’ In private, in the seventies, she spoke of deeper feelings. ‘She just started to glow when his name was mentioned,’ said acquaintances of hers in California. ‘But she told us she knew marriage would not have worked. They were both too involved in their careers. They were heartbroken, though. It was a really sad story.’
After 1942, when Lamour married her second husband, businessman Bill Howard, Edgar became a regular visitor at their home. ‘Nobody else was invited,’ said Howard. ‘He so enjoyed privacy where he could relax … He would do the barbecuing and we’d sit in the backyard. I didn’t fool with Edgar. I was afraid of him …’
Lamour and Howard lived for years near Baltimore, a short drive from Washington, and the star was occasionally seen dining with Edgar at Harvey’s. He was sometimes at her side on film sets, or when she gave interviews, and FBI agents smoothed the way when she traveled abroad.
‘When our boys were born,’ said Lamour’s husband, ‘Edgar sent an FBI agent out and had their toe prints put on little gold coins inscribed on the back with his name.’ ‘He wrote a stack of letters to me signed, “Uncle,”’ recalled John, the elder of the Howards’ two sons. ‘My brother used to kid me I was born in an FBI test tube.’
When Lamour needed financing for a play, Edgar helped contact an elusive Texas millionaire. ‘Clyde Tolson called the Dallas Agent in Charge,’ recalled Fort Worth FBI Agent Joseph Schott. ‘He got the unlisted phone number, and Lamour contacted the millionaire and got the money. But the play was a turkey, and he got mad and called Hoover and asked how she’d gotten to him in the first place. They ended up blaming the Agent in Charge, and he got transferred …’
After Edgar’s death, during an inquiry into FBI corruption, probers discovered how he spent taxpayers’ money to entertain Lamour. ‘Witnesses told us about the time he had a party for Dorothy Lamour,’ recalled investigator Joseph Griffin. ‘She’d sung all those songs about moons, and Hoover wanted her to have a moon that night. So the FBI Exhibits Section installed an electric globe way up in a tree in his garden, and rigged it up to look like a moon.’
Edgar himself hinted at his feelings about Lamour as late as 1969, during a visit to his home by Arthur and Mara Forbes, managers of the resort he stayed at each summer in California. ‘In his den,’ Mara recalled, ‘her signed pictures were all over the wall. He grinned all over and made no bones about it – it was as if it was the big love of his life, something serious.’
Lamour declined, in her late seventies, to say more about Edgar on the record than she did in her autobiography. The real nature of their relationship was to remain one of the mysteries of Edgar’s life.
Edgar’s sexual torment had effects far beyond his personal life. In his day, as is still often the case today, anything other than evident heterosexuality could destroy a public official. Acutely aware of the danger, Edgar overcompensated. Like several other public figures with a secret homosexual life, Edgar often behaved viciously toward fellow homosexuals. Once, reportedly, this resulted in the destruction of a leading statesman’s career.
In the fall of 1943 Roosevelt announced the resignation of Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles. Welles was forty-seven, a brilliant diplomat and one of Roosevelt’s personal friends. The President said the resignation was because Welles’ wife was sick, but it was really the outcome of a drawn-out homosexual scandal in which Edgar played a key role.
Three years earlier, during a night train journey with fellow cabinet members, Welles had allegedly tried to bribe several black male Pullman staff members to have sex with him in his compartment. A prolonged whispering campaign followed, and, after trying to protect Welles for many months, Roosevelt decided he would have to go.
Edgar’s file on the case suggests he behaved impartially throughout, that he merely looked into the matter at the President’s request, then briefed senior officials – telling them no more than was absolutely necessary. Edgar’s memoranda, however, sometimes hide more than they reveal. In the Welles case, others paint a very different picture.
The unpublished diaries of Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, show Edgar went o
ut of his way to volunteer dirt on Welles – two years before the diplomat resigned and at a time when the President was trying to take the heat out of the scandal. In June 1941, Ickes noted, Edgar said he had ‘absolute proof that Welles is a homosexual … and he did not ask that I hold this information in confidence … To my surprise, I found that Hoover was very talkative.’
Author and former New York Times correspondent Charles Higham stumbled on fresh information about Edgar’s role. A retired FBI official said Edgar connived with one of Welles’ sworn enemies, William Bullitt, to destroy him. The incident on the train, the official claimed, was an FBI setup – some of the Pullman staff who went to Welles’ compartment were paid to do so.
Historian Dr Beatrice Berle, widow of Adolf Berle, then Assistant Secretary of State, and a cousin of Welles’, recently recalled that her husband, too, was sure the scandal was ‘a put-up job.’ Edgar’s malice, reportedly, was sparked by his distrust of Welles’ liberal tendencies – and by gossip that Welles was especially interested in homosexual sex with young blacks.
On several documented occasions in the future, Edgar would attempt to smear other public men – including Adlai Stevenson, Martin Luther King, and three aides to President Nixon – as homosexuals. There is no evidence that any of the allegations were true.
The Welles case occurred at a time when rumors of Edgar’s own homosexuality were circulating among high government officials. Secretary Ickes noted it in his diaries, and Attorney General Francis Biddle delighted in making mocking jokes about it. ‘Do you think Hoover is a homosexual?’ he would say in a loud stage whisper as he and Assistant Attorney General James Rowe walked past Edgar’s office. ‘Shh …’ Rowe would respond, cringing with embarrassment. ‘Oh,’ Biddle would say, still talking loudly, ‘I only mean a latent homosexual.’
The whispers spreading about Edgar made him angry and afraid – and he retaliated whenever possible. Agents around the country received standing orders on the subject. ‘We had a communication,’ recalled FBI veteran Joe Wickman, ‘saying he wanted us to deny any of those allegations that might come in, and how. A report had to be made in every case. He wanted to know who said what.’
Ordinary citizens who made passing comments on Edgar’s sexuality found that, if their remarks filtered back to the FBI, agents arrived to conduct solemn interrogations. Reports to Edgar usually assured him the offender had recanted, sometimes apparently in a state of abject fear. ‘Agents were rather vigorous in their treatment of – [name censored in released document],’ one aide noted, ‘much more so than their memorandum would indicate.’
To disassociate himself further from homosexuality, Edgar would make sweeping public statements about his hunt for ‘sex deviates in government service.’ He ordered agents to penetrate homosexual rights groups across the country, collect names of members, record speeches and photograph demonstrations. Such surveillance continued for twenty-three years, long after the FBI had concluded that the activists were in no way ‘subversive.’
Edgar was enraged when the leading group, the Mattachine Society, put him, like other heads of federal agencies, on its mailing list. A few years later, Edgar contrived an assurance to the House Appropriations Committee that ‘no member of the Mattachine Society or anyone who is a sex deviate will ever be appointed to the FBI.’
Both Edgar and Clyde kept up a macho front all their lives. They let it be known that they liked smutty jokes, and would call senior colleagues to offer off-color gags – always about women – for inclusion in speeches. Edgar once gave a transparent ‘striptease’ pen, inscribed to President Truman’s Attorney General, Howard McGrath. One New Year’s Eve, at Gatti’s restaurant in Miami Beach, Clyde was seen presenting the sexagenarian Edgar with his birthday present – a Jayne Mansfield doll.
Edgar railed publicly against pornography, and endlessly demanded stern action against the ‘peddlers of filth,’ those ‘parasites of the most deadly variety.’ As late as 1960, one agent was criticized in front of dozens of colleagues for possessing a copy of Playboy magazine. ‘The Director,’ said Bureau officials, ‘looks upon those who read such magazines as moral degenerates.’
Edgar himself not only enjoyed Playboy but viewed pornographic movies in the Blue Room, a screening facility in Crime Records. A former Agent in Charge, Neil Welch, remembers how a Washington supervisor had to rush a fresh collection of obscene material – seized during Bureau operations – to Edgar’s office. Edgar was furious when agents failed to bring him surveillance pictures that showed black activist Angela Davis having sex with her lover.
Once, said Assistant Director William Sullivan, a senior aide with a passkey indulged the temptation to rummage through Edgar’s desk after hours. He found ‘lurid literature of the most filthy kind … naked women and lurid magazines that dealt with all sorts of abnormal sexual activities.’
Where sexuality is concerned, one must be careful in attaching labels to people. Commenting on Edgar’s behavioral patterns, however, two leading medical specialists reached similar conclusions. Dr John Money, Professor of Medical Psychology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, felt Edgar was of a ‘bisexual, but strongly predominant homosexual, orientation.’
Dr Harold Lief, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and past president of the American Academy of Psychoanalysts, concluded that Edgar was probably ‘a bisexual, with a failed heterosexuality, because of what I see as the sharp division between lust and love in his history.’
The conflicting pressures of dealing with his sexual confusion in private, while posturing as J. Edgar Hoover, masculine, all-American hero in public, eventually drove Edgar to seek medical help. Probably in late 1946, in the wake of continuing rumors that he was a homosexual, Edgar took his worries to a psychiatrist.
Almost all his adult life, Edgar was a patient of Clark, King and Carter, a diagnostic clinic in Washington that handled many distinguished patients. Dr William Clark, who founded the practice, usually looked after Edgar himself. Soon after the war, however, puzzled by a strange malaise in his patient, he referred Edgar to a colleague who specialized in psychiatry, Dr Marshall de G. Ruffin.
A product of Harvard and Cornell, Dr Ruffin had taught psychology at the School of Aviation Medicine during the war. He would go on to become Mental Health Commissioner for the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, and president of the Washington Psychiatric Society. He accepted Edgar as a patient, says his widow, Monteen, because Dr Clark ‘couldn’t quite understand what was wrong with him … He was suspicious, so he had my husband see him because of his specialty in psychiatry. It was the group opinion – Hoover needed to see a psychiatrist.
‘He was definitely troubled by homosexuality,’ Mrs Ruffin told the author, ‘and my husband’s notes would’ve proved that … I might stir a keg of worms by making that statement, but everybody then understood he was homosexual, not just the doctors.
‘After a series of visits,’ said Mrs Ruffin, ‘my understanding was that Hoover got very paranoid about anyone finding out he was a homosexual, and got scared of the psychiatry angle.’ Edgar ceased seeing the psychiatrist after a while, but reportedly consulted him again as late as 1971, not long before his death.
Dr Ruffin’s case notes on Edgar are not available. He burned them in the fireplace of his home, along with other patient histories, shortly before his own death in 1984. The surviving member of the practice Edgar attended, Dr Hill Carter, refused to discuss Edgar’s sexuality.
By 1946, when he first consulted Dr Ruffin, Edgar’s social life had long since lost the high profile of the thirties. Edgar had taken his private life out of the public eye and virtually underground. William Stutz, then a young trainee at Schaffer’s flower shop in Washington, offered a glimpse of how he went about it.
‘First thing each morning,’ he said, ‘a Lincoln limo would pull up outside. The chauffeur, usually a black man, would come in and pick up a carnation, a special variety called Dubonnet th
at we shipped in by air. Normally he would just carry it out to the limousine and drive away. But one day he gave me the motion to go out to the limo, and the glass was rolled down, and the mature man in the back asked if I had a private telephone line. If I had, he said, he would use it to place some orders. Well, it was Mr Hoover, and my boss had a line assigned to me to take his orders.
‘If that phone rang I dealt with the call. It was usually a man’s voice. Apparently Mr Hoover wore his carnation every morning, but only till twelve o’clock – he complained if it did not stay fresh till noon. More often the call was to make a separate order, a flower for a friend. His favorite was a Cypripedium orchid with green and brownish speckles on the throat, the sort of thing a man could send and still remain macho. It came in a glass vial with a special wrought-iron stand, and it cost him twenty-five dollars a crack.’
Edgar’s florist bill, Stutz recalled, was about $250 a month. ‘I never knew who the flowers were for,’ said Stutz, ‘whether they were favors for someone, I couldn’t tell.’ Sometimes Edgar sent Stutz on mysterious missions. ‘I was handed a key in an envelope, and I had to take the usual orchid and deliver it, and return the key when the limo came the next morning. The word was discretion, you know, “Mum’s the word” without exactly saying so. I was to go to a place, get in, put the orchid somewhere and take off. One time I was given a key to an apartment in the Wardman Park Hotel. It had dramatic decor, white furniture with a contrasting carpet. There was a sealed envelope with the flowers. I didn’t know if it was for a lady or a gentleman. I didn’t ask any questions …’
10
‘The FBI is a really great organization. Under J. Edgar Hoover its list of achievements is most impressive. The rub comes in the never-ending effort to fit the halo. Any angel can tell you this is a damnably hard job.’
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