It happened that a lawyer friend, a fellow who liked to collect weapons, including machine guns, was charged by federal authorities with possessing illegal weapons. Percy Foreman was engaged for the defense, and DeGeurin called up the old warrior and volunteered to help. The offer was accepted, and DeGeurin was quickly overwhelmed by the experience. “To be around Percy was incredible,” he would say. “All of our motions were dealing with bedrock constitutional law, the kind of law that has stood for two hundred years. I kept comparing that with what I was supposed to be doing at my law firm, figuring out a workman’s compensation settlement for a Mexican with a bad back.” Walking home from the courthouse one day, Percy Foreman complimented his volunteer associate and remarked, “Would you rather defend insurance companies or people?” Two days later, the most famous lawyer in Texas made DeGeurin a firm offer which he eagerly accepted. Young Turks would have paid Foreman just to hide in the bookcases and hear the old man dictate. At any given moment the Foreman office carried some three hundred active criminal cases.
But though DeGeurin’s trial work was respected by his peers—he had lost only one client to a life sentence—the embrace of public acclaim had not yet enveloped him. He was crown prince to the king of criminal law, and almost no one even knew that the sign on the office door read “Foreman and DeGeurin.” As he strode confidently into Judge Frank Price’s courtroom on the morning of February 17, 1975, he sensed that all this would soon change.
Now it was Lilla’s turn.
Since the hour of her arrest, she had wisely remained silent and at the same time sealed off the entrances to her past. Bob Bennett dispatched investigators to rummage through her history, but the ensuing reports were thin-blooded, as frail as the woman herself. She sat now at the defense table, coughing heavily from a long winter siege of bronchitis, her body so thin and her hair so much grayer than at her last court appearance that the skeptics concluded she had deliberately aged herself in preparation for the trial. Would any jury convict its grandmother, particularly when she had obviously risen from a sickbed to answer the state’s impudent charge? Lilla’s face was set in the cast of a martyr. She seemed one of those anonymous little women with shoulders sagged and rounded, the kind who creeps through life afraid of being heard or noticed, not even spunky enough to tell the greengrocer his tomatoes are rotten. She offered herself as a creature of defeat. She seemed to have accepted her place at the bottom of the heap since the days of childhood, and she had no voice with which to complain. Perhaps the good Lord would note her suffering and make a special place for her.
“How on earth is Bennett going to convince a jury that she’s the Ma Barker of our time?” wondered one of the reporters, having heard the courthouse gossip that Lilla had hijackers and hit men as décor in her living room. The same reporter stopped Lilla on the way to the defense table and inquired, “How do you feel about the trial?” And she shook her head and replied, “No comment. I just want to get it over. I’m innocent.”
Lilla Paulus was on this day, as she had always been, a clever and purposeful woman. She was coming across exactly as she wanted to, and had she so desired, she could have replaced the St. Christopher medal about her neck with a brace of diamonds, or slipped out of the spinsterly beige wool dress into a hand-sewn, skin-tight Western suit of unborn calf and gold fringes that danced in the wind and were as the marks of vibrance around a sun. Her only daughter, a now grown woman from whom Lilla was bitterly estranged, had given Bob Bennett a guarded and reluctant interview. She made him swear he would never reveal the hidden city in which she lived. “I’m afraid of my mother,” the daughter said. “She’s a dangerous woman. And one of the greatest actresses of all time.”
How similar were all their beginnings! The same words that sketched in the early years of John Hill and Bobby Vandiver and Marcia McKittrick and even Bob Bennett could serve for the opening chapter of Lilla Paulus’ life story. She, too, had been born and reared in the same kind of anonymous Texas town where the people worked hard and whose principal purchases in life were a house, a pickup truck, and a tombstone. Lilla was the only child of a devout Methodist couple whose code of living was so restrictive that they forbade their daughter to attend school dances. A pretty youngster with bright blonde hair and a merry attitude, she was constantly threatened with eternal damnation. Years later a classmate would remember that Lilla took a fashion magazine from a drugstore and kept it hidden for months, terrified that her parents would discover the forbidden treasure and inflict terrible punishment, at the same time mesmerized by the beautiful women on the pages. The Depression did not concern these women in marceled hair and clinging satins. They had no worry about hundred-pound sacks of potatoes selling for two bits, or that there was not a spare dime for a hairbrush because the church house needed a new coat of paint and God’s needs were always ahead of man’s. “I’m going to be famous someday,” said the young Lilla to her friend. It was not the idle prattle of a child. It seemed at the time an oath of the soul.
Lilla had difficulty in even getting out of Madisonville. First she married a local boy, a farmer, and not until she had borne a son did she realize that marriage had done little but move her body from one confinement—her parents’ home—to another. Abandoning the farmer, Lilla appeared promptly on the rodeo circuit, affixing herself to a series of cowboys, traveling with the lean, hard-muscled men and yelling encouragement as they tried to keep seats atop wild horses and Brahman bulls. Once, to make a little money, she even stood as the target for a carnival knife-throwing act. Husband number two was a Dallas man named Reynolds, the kind Jerry Carpenter would recognize as a “character.” He introduced his shapely blonde wife around the night spots of Big D as “my beautiful little farm girl with a face like an angel and a tongue like the devil.” Lilla could shock some of Reynolds’ coterie—the kind with no Social Security cards—by the way she swore. She was saying “mother fucker” in public before most women were attempting “damn” in their closets. The police first became acquainted with Lilla Seay Gibson Reynolds in 1942 when she was arrested in Shreveport for prostitution, using the trick name of Molly Rather. That was the first entry in a file on deposit at the Texas Department of Public Safety which, by 1949, would have nine more arrests on minor offenses—“vagrancy” and “common prostitution” were usually the charges. The file showed that Lilla used several other names, including Lilla Reynolds, Louise Reynolds, and Sandra Harris. Whatever the name, the fingerprints always traced back to the country girl whose parents forbade her to dance. Of these arrests Lilla would later claim that they were illegitimate, nothing but harassment from the law because of her alliance with the police character Reynolds. But they took place in several cities from Port Arthur at the bottom of Texas to Amarillo at the top, and it seemed unlikely that the police of such disparate places would bother to roust a lady so perversely because of her choice of husbands.
There may have been one or two other spouses, Lilla having once told her daughter that she was married five times. But the record shows that Lilla wed under her real name on but three occasions, the last one to a remarkable man named Claude Paulus. It would endure for more than twenty years and give her a measure of respectability. Claude Paulus was a giant, standing six feet four with wide shoulders and thickly muscled forearms from the work of his youth on the farm of German pioneers in a South Central Texas town called Hallettsville. If someone was needed to toss the beer barrels off the truck at the picnic, or bodily transfer a balky yearling calf from one pen to another, they called on Claude. His parents were well fixed, and his grandmother a millionairess from vast property holdings. When Claude finished high school, his family selected his occupation and sent him off to obtain a dental degree. That earned, the father congratulated his powerful son and gave him $3,000 in cash. This would launch his practice in the awakening city of Houston; a new dentist would be needed in the post-World War I boom. Claude drove to Houston in a Model A Ford. Twenty-four hours later he hitched a ride home on a
freight train, his pockets empty. He had been cleaned out—stake and automobile—in a crap game that operated permanently in a downtown Houston hotel room.
Then and there Claude Paulus decided there was more money to be made from shooting dice than filling cavities. He worked around Hallettsville for a few months, assembling a new purse, and returned to Houston as a gambler man. For the rest of his life he was nothing more, but in his way he achieved a modest stature in Houston both as the owner-proprietor of a downtown gambling club and as the city’s society bookie. Claude often told his daughter that there had been too many women in his life—“they pained me and drained me” was his way of putting it—and not until he met and wed Lilla did he close his roving eye. Lilla was clearly any man’s match.
They met in Dallas when he was well past forty. The six-carat diamond ring that flashed from his finger not unsurprisingly caught the attention of Lilla Reynolds as she sat on a bar stool a few positions down. Lilla deftly worked her way next to the beefy blond fellow and exclaimed over the gem and asked to see it. While she perused its brilliance, Lilla deliberately dropped the ring into an open beer case. It took quite awhile to fish it out, and in those moments the couple became acquainted. Soon thereafter they were wed.
Mr. and Mrs. Claude Paulus bought a two-story home on Sunset Boulevard in Houston, one of the city’s most graceful, and there they and their only child, a girl named Mary Josephine, lived respectable lives which were not exactly what the neighbors came to believe. Outwardly, Claude was in the oil and insurance business, and perhaps he was, to a modest extent. But his principal position was operator of the Redman’s Club in downtown Houston, a pseudo-fraternal organization that provided booze, cards, dice, and a horse-race wire to its brothers. Claude also owned brothels on Galveston’s notorious Post Office Street, which was to the Texas Gulf Coast what Hamburg was to the North Sea. Lilla not only faithfully attended St. John’s Episcopal Church, Houston’s most socially fashionable, she turned her attention now and then to the upkeep of her husband’s “rent property” in Galveston. Once, her daughter Mary Jo told Bob Bennett, Lilla had the imaginative idea of turning one of the brothels into a “House of All Nations.” It was her intent to furnish each room in a spectacular foreign décor and install therein a prostitute of the particular nationality. But the racial color line swept across that notorious district of Galveston, and Lilla abandoned her idea once the neighborhood became black and less popular. Mary Jo carried memories of unusual childhood summers, one in residence at her father’s Galveston brothel. The high point of the season was, she told Bennett, when the ceiling of a bedroom fell in on a customer’s head at the prime moment of his passion.
The social register of Houston contains the names of several women who, if gossip is to be believed, began their careers as prostitutes. They are a widely appreciated source of cocktail party gossip and decorative at charity galas. Lilla Paulus was consumed with the desire to move up accordingly into the best company of Houston. She became practiced at telling acquaintances in the neighborhood and church that her husband was in the “oil and insurance business,” but still the invitations with engraved return addresses never arrived. It angered Lilla that some of the most prominent men in the city were happy to place bets with Claude, but their wives did not return her telephone calls. Thus, like many a parent before her, Lilla used her daughter as a key to the mansions of River Oaks. For a time she was a Brownie leader, and a respected one, beaming with pleasure as the little girls disembarked in front of her home from the chauffeured limousines. And when Mary Jo announced an interest in ponies, Lilla eagerly attended that whim. She well knew that horses could be an entree to social acceptance. Lilla pried thousands of dollars from her husband’s purse to pay for lessons, grooms, and boarding fees at the Alameda Stables, that being a mecca for the “mink and manure” set, and headquarters for Joan Robinson Hill, the epitome of social power in Lilla’s eyes. This girl, Lilla decided, was a model for her daughter, a young woman of beauty and great style, with a doctor husband whose practice would someday be lucrative, and a father who obviously worshiped her. Lilla liked Ash Robinson, finding him to be an old rascal who enjoyed a salty woman (which Lilla could always be if she found a use for it) and a man who even knew and accepted Claude’s occupation. “Nothing wrong with placing a little bet now and then,” winked Ash on occasion. “I even do it myself, but the outgo has always greatly exceeded the income.”
As Joan achieved world success and celebration for her talent on an English saddle, Mary Jo Paulus won championship competitions in the Western class, preferring jeans and cowboy boots to the elegantly tailored riding tuxedo and derby. Unspoken between the two parents, but understood, was the fact that both warmed their bones in the glow cast by their daughters. If not completely content, both had nonetheless accommodated their attitudes toward being pointed out as “Joan’s father” and “Mary Jo’s mother.” Occasionally there were times when Lilla would deliberately draw attention to herself. On one memorable afternoon, at the café near the Alameda Stables, Lilla opened her purse to contribute her share of the tab, and the arrogant butt of a revolver poked into view. Several of the young society women sitting around the table made note, but Lilla made no embarrassed effort to shove it back in place. “She seemed anxious for us to see that she carried a gun,” one of the women would remember years later.
Lilla Paulus and Ash Robinson shared one further characteristic—an attempt to impose their will on their daughters’ choice of men. Lilla was determined that her daughter would marry a socially acceptable man and often lectured Mary Jo: “Make sure he’s got money—don’t fall in love with a broke.” By the time the girl was sixteen, and a bounteous young woman of tall stature and tumbling roan-colored hair, she and her mother were antagonists. From there they fell into deep and bitter hatred. The final rupture came when Mary Jo grew to love Larry Wood. She was eighteen, he a decade older and already the scarred veteran of four broken marriages. It did not take Lilla very long to discover that Larry Wood talked vaguely of being in “investments” and “business for himself,” but his real source of income was pimping. He was a society pimp, operating on the upper echelon of Houston whoredom. He kept an apartment in the “swinging singles” southwest section of the city, and in it dwelt three or four expensive prostitutes. Wood dispatched them on call.
When all of Lilla’s exhortations against this alliance failed, she took the extraordinary step of taking her daughter to the St. Joseph’s Hospital psychiatric clinic and committing her both for suspected drug use and for erratic behavior. Mary Jo stayed in the clinic under observation for three weeks before she managed to slip out and away and into the arms of Larry Wood. They married at once, and Lilla was devastated. Clearly she had counted on a more promising alliance for her child than a pimp, even though he informed his new mother-in-law that he had reformed, given up the old ways, and was going into “Nigerian oil.” Because of Lilla’s venomous condemnation of the marriage and threats against its existence, the couple left Houston and moved to a secret life in another state.
In his homework for the trial of Lilla Paulus, Bob Bennett managed to track down Mary Jo and interview both her and her husband. The young woman, now twenty-six, was frightened. She was willing, reluctantly, to speak of her mother in confidential conversation, but she refused under any condition to appear at the trial. Until this meeting, Bennett had not realized the strength of the poisoned blood between mother and daughter. If Mary Jo was to be believed, Lilla would stop at nothing in her obsession to destroy the marriage and punish her disobedient daughter.
Mary Jo had grown up knowing that she would someday inherit a substantial fortune from her paternal grandmother. Claude Paulus’ mother left an estate of more than four million dollars, but she specifically excluded Claude in her will, frowning all of her Methodist life at his gambling business. Instead, she left one quarter of her fortune to “any legitimate issue of Claude.” Mary Jo was the only one. But when she applied to the e
state of her grandmother, following Claude’s death, Lilla filed suit to block the claim. In a turbulent and ugly hearing at the small Hallettsville, Texas, courthouse, Lilla took the witness stand and denied that her own daughter was legitimate. She swore that she was already pregnant with Mary Jo before she married Claude Paulus, and therefore the girl had no right to inherit the grandmother’s clean Methodist money. Lilla had no claim whatsoever on the share due Mary Jo, which could have been more than a million dollars. It seemed instead nothing but a perverse denial of her daughter’s inheritance. Lilla’s version was believed; the court held against Mary Jo and dismissed her claim on the estate. “That was her way of getting back at me,” Mary Jo told Bennett. “When I was testifying, I saw her sitting out there patting her handbag, and I knew she had her gun in it. My blood ran cold with every word I spoke.”
Mary Jo’s husband, Larry, told Bennett that during their courtship Lilla had visited his apartment. “She came around one night at 2 A.M. She said she wanted to talk to me about my dating Mary Jo. We sat down on the couch, and she pulled a .32 automatic out of her purse and held it. Well, she didn’t know it, but I had a gun in my bathrobe pocket. We sat there with the drop on one another. She offered me $5,000 not to marry her daughter. She says to me, ‘You’re too old, and besides, I checked you out, and you’ve been working girls.’ Hell, I didn’t deny it. But that kind of stuff shouldn’t have shocked Lilla. I told her, ‘You’re putting a lot of shit on me, and it’s not flushing. Now get the fuck out of my apartment and out of our lives.’”
Blood and Money Page 51