by Ed Ifkovic
A Roman orgy of utter sensation.
Not that Aleck, a man who relished the cruel barb or the sentimental hymn to a dead child, agreed with me.
I’d already told myself I’d stay a few days, perhaps listen to the initial testimony of Colonel Lindbergh, hear what Bruno Hauptmann said in his own defense, and then leave, head back into Manhattan. My editors balked at that, to be sure, but I was not going to be a part of such a travesty. Isn’t this trial so divine, my dear? Positively riveting. Divine, yes, divine! Is that a new mink, darling? No—not for me, such twaddle. Guilty or not, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was paraded about like a drugged circus animal, the oily specimen in the jar, this startlingly handsome man in the charcoal-gray double-breasted suit, immaculate, his Windsor tie neatly knotted.
At the livery office attached to the local post office—a closet-sized room where drivers drank coffee, did crossword puzzles, dozed, and spat into spittoons—Aleck signaled to a man sitting just inside the door, who immediately scurried toward him. As with other newspapers and radio stations, the Times had hired drivers and automobiles to shuttle its writers and editors back and forth to the city—and, as well, to assist writers doing local color research in the provinces, perhaps day-trips to nearby Hopewell, where the baby was snatched, to the Next Day Hill mansion in Englewood, where Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s family lived. To anywhere that might yield a gold nugget of throwaway information that would titillate the readership. Long, sleek cars at the ready, with drivers ready to do our bidding.
“Sir.” An old man with sloppy Burnside whiskers and a balding red head nodded at Aleck as he buttoned his coat.
“Ah, Willie,” Aleck acknowledged him. “Ready to wing my chariot northward?”
Willie grimaced, tilted his head to the side. “Don’t know about no chariot, but the time in Manhattan is two hours from now, sure as I’m driving.”
Willie Nolan—“William, my name, but my mother called me Willie”—was one of two full-time drivers provided to us, neither of whom pleased me, although Willie was decidedly more offensive than the other, a slick but taciturn young man named Marcus Wood, largely because Willie was a garrulous, crusty man, hopelessly opinionated and certain his shared ignorance need not be questioned. A tiny, twig-like man, perhaps sixty, maybe older, sun-baked sagging leathery skin despite the deep of winter, Willie looked like someone more at home in faded dungarees, with pitchfork and a sprig of alfalfa lodged between his two front teeth, both of which were sadly buck and cliff-hanger prominent.
Dressed now in an oversized livery uniform, shiny gold buttons against a navy-blue blazer, a look doubtless mandated by whatever firm the Times employed for us, Willie had told us when we first met him that he was a local—“Spent years at a chicken farm a stone’s throw away”—hired for the duration of the trial and happy with the ready salary. “Still a depression on the land, you know.” But he was bothered by the multitude of ungracious visitors who clogged the back roads and spilled out of the rooming houses and spare bedrooms of the townspeople. “Everything in town filled up, five bucks a night to sleep on a pool table.” Then he added, “For me, money for tobacco.” A cloud of smoke from a stub of a Camel lodged in his mouth circled his pale face.
Aleck tucked himself into the backseat of the Buick town car. Willie spread a blanket over Aleck’s lap, an unnecessary act although Aleck’s eyes brightened as though he’d been named prince regent for the Jersey shore.
“I’ll be back later tonight,” he told me as Willie slipped into the driver’s seat. A sickly grin. “Don’t wait up for me.”
“I’m certain the angry crowd with torches will alert me to your return.”
Willie switched on the ignition but glanced back at me, winked. Something I ignored, of course, the foolish old geezer. The other day, rounding us up in Manhattan, he’d informed us that he’d been instructed to keep his mouth shut, not to discuss the upcoming trial, simply to chauffeur us as needed—and immediately he delivered an oration on injustice and American heroism and the fate of an America that allowed such miscreants as Bruno Richard Hauptmann to sneak into our country illegally—and then snatch blond, curly-haired Lindy Jr. from his nighttime cradle. Aleck encouraged him, though I frowned my disapproval—ignored, to be sure. Worse, as we approached Flemington, he sang the radio hit that was popular right after the baby was taken:
Who stole the Lindbergh baby?
Was it you? Was it you?
After he crossed the ocean wide,
Was that the way to show your pride?
Was it you? Was it you? Was it you?
Then he glanced at us in the rearview mirror. “Sometimes I fall asleep with that melody beating in my head.”
“Touching,” Aleck had commented.
“Perhaps you should see someone,” I’d jibed, and Aleck shot me a look.
So Aleck would be hearing his unending spiel for two hours, I guessed, and I smiled as I headed back to the Union Hotel. Aleck, himself a gossipy chatterbox, lived to break into any conversation and introduce his own topic and then exhaust it. Filling the entire backseat of that expensive car, he would be beet-red and tongue-tied in his efforts to shush the driver who luckily and expertly never took his eyes off the road.
As I turned away, I mumbled to myself, “Let the hanging begin.”
At that moment, strutting past the livery depot, his face tilted into the neck of his assistant, Walter Winchell paused. “What?”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I told him.
Winchell scrunched his eyes in his small bony face. “Be careful what you say, Miss Ferber. Words can boomerang back and hurt you.”
“I know how to use words, Mr. Winchell.”
His face flushed. “As do I.”
“But my words don’t set people on fire.”
He paused for a second, glared at me, and turned away. But he muttered something to his assistant who did look back, eyes hard and cold, and I knew I’d added my name to Winchell’s celebrated blacklist.
Chapter Two
Resting in my small room, jotting notes for a column, I stared out the window into the back parking lot. A grove of skeletal trees, a parking lot, a ramshackle storage hut, and an icy back street of squat dull homes of faded white clapboard and green shutters, a street silent now, not a soul in sight. Late afternoon, restless, purposely avoiding the courthouse where jury selection was going on, I walked downstairs through the lobby, still teeming with people, mostly a band of Hearst reporters all talking over one another.
Hearst supposedly had sent a squadron of over fifty reporters and photographers and telegraphers to cover a trial he planned to feature for months. His bureau chief, Eddie Mahar, was standing next to Damon Runyon, the Hearst factotum jabbing Runyon in the chest. “This Bruno guy looks like the new guy over in Germany, the one they call Der Fürher, that Hitler, both corporals in the war, no?” Runyon, stepping away, snarled, “I think we should keep an open mind.” Mahar scoffed, muttering, “Nazi monster. I got proof this Bruno praised Hitler to his friends.”
Hearst, of course, had already announced in editorials and on front-page spreads that Hauptmann was guilty—everyone knew that. Nevertheless, he had enticed Hauptmann’s wife, Anna, impoverished and homeless and in despair, to let him pay a twenty-five-grand retainer for the defense, hiring Edward Reilly, the bombastic Bull of Brooklyn, who bragged that he had a photograph of Lindbergh on his desk but insisted he have exclusive access to her. I found that tidbit a little disconcerting—guilty, guilty, but let me pay for everything…so long as I have rights to whatever salacious story I can extract from the trial.
Anna, staying in Mrs. Opdike’s rooming house with her little boy, Bubi, was guarded by a slew of female reporters, including a pesky Dorothy Kilgallen, allowing only the New York Journal access to Anna. Kilgallen, twenty-one and dressed like a little girl in a pinafore, had stopped me in the lobby two days ago and gus
hed, “I loved Imitation of Life.” When I told her that Fannie Hurst wrote that potboiler, she blanched and walked away.
I sighed. A long trial, I knew, and deep in my marrow I knew the earth had tilted on its axis. Bruno Hauptmann might well be a horrible murderer, but he needed his day in court. This couldn’t be good.
As I listened to Eddie Mahar and Damon Runyon spat, Walter Winchell, that tiny squirrel of a man, bustled into the lobby, demanding an answer from a housemaid who was trying to avoid him. She looked near tears. Dapper in a three-piece black houndstooth suit, his black-band fedora tipped to the side, he hammered at the young woman about some nonsense.
As I walked by, he glowered at me. In the dining room, late afternoon, only a few stragglers occupied the tables, hard-bitten reporters jotting into pads. A middle-aged couple, looking like accidental visitors to the hotel, stared vacantly out the front window, neither speaking. A scraggly man in an Associated Press cap was talking to a New York Daily News stringer, lecturing him, it seemed. The young man, belligerently indifferent, kept trying to get away, tapping the pocket watch conspicuously displayed in his right hand.
I selected a small table by the front window and watched as the waitress took her time noticing me. She’d been eavesdropping on the conversation of the two reporters. I ordered a cup of tea with a slice of lemon, as well as a slice of the Hopewell chocolate cream pie—as recommended and highlighted in capital letters on the black chalkboard by the entrance. Other tasteless menu items included lamb chops Jafie—named for Dr. John Condon and the nickname he employed as an intermediary between Lindbergh and the kidnapper. Baked beans Wilentz—the prosecutor. And for dessert, ice cream sundaes called Lindys. Nice touch, I thought—as tasteful as public intoxication. As I spoke to the young woman, she stared over my shoulder, gazing out the window at the street.
I cleared my throat. “Miss,” I began, “could you also…?” I cleared my throat loudly.
She snapped to attention. “Sorry, ma’am.” She spoke in a brittle, crackling voice, vaguely British Cockney. “It’s easy to be distracted.”
She pointed outside where actress Lynn Fontaine was strutting by, dressed in a leopard-skin coat.
“I’m not surprised. Lots of famous people streaming by in this small village, so…”
She interrupted me. “And you’re one of them.” She grinned, showing a missing side tooth at the back of her smile, an omission that gave her a comical vaudevillian grin, not reassuring. “The manager”—she pointed over her shoulder at a dapper young man in a wide-lapelled shiny suit standing against a counter, fingertips idly grazing the cash register—“he’s Horace Tripp and a sweet tyrant of a boss—I mean, he whispered when you walked in that you are Edna Ferber and I said who and he said Show Boat and I said you’re kidding and he said…”
I broke into her babble: “Yes, I’m that Show Boat, poop deck and all.”
That confused her and she glanced back toward the street. “It did ring a bell, you know.” A tickle at the back of her throat.
“That’s comforting, my dear.”
She leaned in, the grin wider now. “Name is Annabel Biggs.”
“A pleasure.”
She perked up. “Is it really? Well, thank you.”
I tapped her wrist. “Dear, it’s just something people say.”
“Oh, I know that. But, you know, being here is like being in the center of the universe.”
“The trial?”
She nodded vigorously. “It’s like…the Old West. Like in a Western. You head here to make your fortune.”
I was confused. “You come here to make a fortune? As a waitress?”
A confidential whisper. “A gold mine, this trial.”
“For you?”
Again the conspiratorial glance out into the street. “Especially for me.” She swirled around, an awkward pirouette.
“And why is that?”
A loud celebratory voice. “The world is my oyster.”
That made no sense to me. “What?” I stared into her eager face. “What?”
Again the loud, insistent voice, though she glanced back at the manager. “Things happening.”
“You have a delightful accent,” I lied.
That gave her pause. “Born in England, as you can tell.” A high cackle, forced. “But I’ve been in Chicago the last few years, this job, that job. Last job at the Palmer House, all lah-di-dah, that place. Grubbing about.” Then her hand shot out to take in the room. “This job. The hotel put out a call for workers and—here I am.”
“You wanted to come here?”
A moment’s hesitation. “Of course. I mean, the Lindbergh kidnapping. I read every word in the papers. Listen to Winchell on the radio. Everybody’s talking about it. The craziest thing in the world, this story.” Another pause as she lowered her voice. “I’m…like part of the story.”
“What does that mean?”
“Let’s just say that I know a thing or two, ma’am.” A silly smile.
A woman, I considered, who wanted to be a part of the story—a gossip, perhaps. Fodder for the letters sent back to England.
“And what is that?”
She paused.
“Things.” Another hearty laugh, but she stopped abruptly.
I probed. “You like being in Flemington? This sensational trial. The Lindbergh baby.”
She drew in her breath, but then her voice trembled. “Things.” The word swallowed. “I know things.” The slapdash grin of someone bubbling over with a secret she dared not reveal.
I was confused. What were we talking about? “Obviously, you follow the case, Annabel Biggs.”
For a second she wore the expression of the town gossip who can’t contain her babble, but immediately regrets it. She pulled back, a little nervous. “This is the thick of things here.”
“But you said…”
“I’ll get you your tea.” She backed away. “And that Hopewell pie.”
She stopped a few feet away from me, stared back as though I’d violated some privacy, the look on her face baffling: a mixture of fear and elation—a child tempted to reveal something that could get her into trouble. But what?
A quirky-looking woman, this Annabel Biggs, tallish, perhaps five-foot ten or so, big-boned, broad shoulders made more dramatic with obvious shoulder pads under her uniform. Bobbed ink-black hair too cheaply dyed and styled in some imitation of a silent film star, a smear of bright red lipstick on a full, fleshy mouth. Her small dart-like eyes set far apart in an expansive face, but eyes that flashed, intense and searching. A woman not beautiful at first glance, I realized, but somehow eye-catching, the pieces coming together so that she drew your stare. You found yourself marveling at her…I guess the word is brio. A life pulse, a charged wire.
Here was a woman who understood her physical failings—her body almost mannish and clumsy, her large hands with bony fingers—a woman whose native and feminine intuition grasped how to translate herself into someone who could haunt you, mesmerize. A young woman who probably intoxicated some men—and repelled others—but knew that some men savored the thrill. Early thirties perhaps, a woman confident, a tad arrogant, and a whole lot sensuous. She moved briskly across the room, disappearing into the kitchen.
Annabel Biggs obviously intrigued me.
As my eyes followed her back into the kitchen, I noticed that the restaurant manager watched her retreating back, a sliver of a smile on his face. He had a droopy-eyed look, as though he’d just awakened from a catnap—his shoulders sloped in the insolent posture of a Parisian gigolo. His lips twitched. A roué, I considered, but a shabby one. I’d seen his ilk in France during the years after the war, and never liked what I saw.
He snapped his fingers and three waiters across the room scurried into the kitchen. He caught me watching him—what was the harsh look on my face?—and rushed to my table
.
“Is everything all right, Miss Ferber?” A bow. “Horace Tripp at your service.”
“Of course.” I stared up into his eager face.
“Is Annabel treating you right?”
I nodded. “A lovely accent, that girl’s. A surprise in this out-of-the-way American town.”
“Cockney, ma’am.”
“I know.”
He looked behind him. “My wife is British as well.”
“Another Cockney lass?”
“Ah, no. London.” He smiled. “Her father was a publican and…” he waved a hand in the air…“without Annabel’s street-monger howl.”
“That’s not very nice.”
He bowed. “A little joke, Miss Ferber. Annabel is aware of my…teasing.”
“I’ll bet.”
Annabel returned with my tea and pie, shyly stepping around Horace Tripp. For a moment she twisted her head, dumbly flirtatious, and color rose in his neck, though a hint of a smile appeared.
“Horace,” she admonished, “didn’t I hear your wife calling you?” These last words came out harshly, clipped, and the redness in his neck worsened.
Two waitresses, stepping from the kitchen with trays of glasses, stopped to watch. Horace waved toward them, then nodded back at me. One woman’s head shifted from Horace to Annabel, though the plump one looked confused. “My wife, Martha.” The tall slender woman with the blond Clara Bow curls glowered. “And Peggy.”
“One happy family.”
He looked to see whether I was serious. But I noticed the woman on the left—the wife, Martha—kept frowning as her gaze moved from her husband to Annabel, who relished the moment. Horace, suddenly flustered, bowed again, and stepped away. But as he scurried by the two women, marching into the kitchen, I found myself watching, not his wife’s shrewish face, but that of the other waitress, Peggy. Raw jealousy there, a mix of anger and resentment. And I understood in some atavistic way that Horace was somehow involved with Peggy, a woman perhaps ten years his senior. That momentary flicker of a glance—it told the story.