The Girls of Murder City

by Douglas Perry

  Maurine knew, now that the legendary Darrow stood for the defense, that the circus atmosphere would only get worse in the weeks ahead—and she was right. “The case was really ridiculous. . . . Can you imagine it?” she later said. “It was just a grand and gorgeous show. Things being what they are, I don’t see why the state doesn’t charge admission to trials and lighten the taxes.”

  This statement, made in 1927, was bravado, an effort to be amusing and to sell herself to a New York journalist fashioning a feature story about her. By the time of this interview, nearly three years after the trial, the stomach-turning, horrified reaction to the “crime of the century,” if not interest in it, had begun to fade from memory. But as the case was unfolding, when Maurine was looking up close at Leopold’s smirking eyes and Loeb’s friendly grin, she undoubtedly was as shocked as most Americans. Leopold’s cool insistence that the murder was as justifiable as an entomologist killing a beetle, and his scoffing denial of the existence of God, could only have rocked her. Maurine’s hard-boiled reporting style made for addictive reading, and it also made her a rising star at the Tribune, but it was an act. It was a heightened, fantasy version of herself, one that began to break down when faced not with the silly, mindless evil expressed by Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner but with the calculated abominations of soulless young men with first-rate intellects.

  “I was on the case until the trial started and then I had to do movie criticisms,” Maurine recalled in that 1927 interview. “I thrived on murders, but the pictures had given Mae Tinee a nervous breakdown and I had to sub for her. Pinch-hitting was a very tame life after killings. Homicide was such a natural, normal fare out in Chicago.”

  It’s possible Maurine was reassigned to movie criticism against her wishes just as the most sensational crime story in the city’s history picked up momentum, but that seems unlikely. Newspapers were throwing every available reporter onto the story. (Plus, Mae Tinee was a pen name—a play on the word “matinee”—for an array of Tribune film reviewers.) It’s much more likely that Maurine requested reassignment. She had excelled on the police beat, becoming a “name” reporter within weeks of starting at the paper. But it had exacted a toll. Leopold and Loeb, college boys from wealthy, influential families, accomplished students and professed atheists, represented everything that was wrong with the new modern age—everything Maurine’s parents surely had warned her about when she went to the big city. She couldn’t easily make light of such boys. Their murderous act was too horrible, too deliberate and vicious—too powerful.

  By the middle of 1924, after having interviewed some two dozen suspected murderers in less than six months on the job, Maurine Watkins had tired of the police reporter’s life. Just as important, the beat had begun to tire of her. The Bobby Franks story did not lend itself to the cynical, lighthearted, murder-as-entertainment ethos that Maurine had brought to crime reporting. The thrill killing of a teenage boy just went too far. If, as Maurine said, she was conscripted into the movie-reviewing job, this may have been the real reason for it. The tongue-in-cheek writing style that Maurine had perfected—and many other police reporters tried to imitate—was about to become obsolete.

  Early in July, the Tribune announced plans to broadcast the Leopold-Loeb trial on the company’s fledgling radio station, WGN. In the nearly four years since the nation’s first commercial station, in Pittsburgh, had gone on the air, radio’s popularity had soared, and the Tribune Company decided it wanted to dominate the Chicago radio market as it did its newspaper market. It figured broadcasting the trial was a good way to do that. But management was surprised to receive hundreds of letters from Chicagoans asking them not to broadcast the trial, fearful that innocent ears would be subjected to a most horrid reality. The paper’s competitors, worried about the Tribune’s reach through the new medium, stoked the negative response. The American called the Tribune’s broadcast plan “the finest and most powerful appeal ever made in this city to the moron vote.” The Tribune tried to sway public opinion, arguing that the “broadcasting of the trial will be kept clean. Sensation there will be. Sensation is a part of life. It is an inseparable part of a trial for life. But there will be no filth.” The public was not moved by this appeal, though. The trial did not go out over the airwaves. The Tribune quickly tried to regain the high ground on the issue, declaring that the sensational coverage of the story in the city’s papers had “become an abomination.” The rules, quite suddenly, had changed.

  That same month, Maurine turned almost exclusively to film criticism and light features. She wrote that Pola Negri had “the spark” of stardom in Lily of the Dust, and she joked that “the weather’s the best part” of The Marriage Cheat, a slow-moving drama set in the tropics. She reported on child star Jackie Coogan’s appearance in Chicago, where the nine-year-old actor got to be mayor of the city for ten minutes. “He looks just like himself!” she quoted an enthusiastic young fan as saying when catching sight of the actor in the flesh.

  Maurine wasn’t the only prominent female police reporter on the sidelines for Chicago’s “crime of the century.” The Evening Post’s city editor did not put Ione Quinby on Leopold-Loeb duty, likely deciding the subject matter was too rough and perverse for a woman. With all of the high-profile murderesses gone from the Cook County Jail, Quinby found herself back on the women’s pages. This did not sit well with the “little bob-haired reporter.” Covering a society yacht party on Lake Michigan one night, she grew so bored that she removed her clothes, climbed up onto the railing, and dived into the water. Guests rushed to the side and watched her kicking for the shore. No one knew how the reporter—sopping wet, all but naked, and possibly drunk—managed to get home once she reached the beach. Years later, when an editor asked if the oft-told story about her stripping and diving off the boat was true, Quinby offered an impish smile. “Oh, yes, I did that,” she said. “The water was very cold.”

  Maurine, for her part, wasn’t nearly so put out. By this point, she was simply marking time until classes began at the newly established Department of Drama at Yale University, where her former teacher, George Pierce Baker, was setting up shop after thirty-six years at Harvard. She’d begun writing her play based on the Beulah Annan case, and Baker had invited her to New Haven to work on it. She now focused on the play, not her day job. Before the end of the year, Maurine would resign from the Tribune and head out of town, first for a stopover in Indiana to see her parents and then on to New York. She had accepted a job as a junior editor at a magazine in the city and planned to take the train to Connecticut for class. Her experiment in Chicago was over. Now the real test—discovering if she’d truly learned anything—would begin.

  19

  Entirely Too Vile

  George Pierce Baker had changed little since Maurine had sat in his Harvard playwriting workshop three years before. With his formal manners, his high-buttoned coats, and an ever-present pince-nez squeezed onto the bridge of his nose, the theatre professor could be a forbidding figure to students. He had a heavy, echoing voice, and he threateningly chopped his arms as he lectured, but he sometimes seemed to favor his female students, “speaking to them half in confidence, half in apology for being so obvious.”

  Baker may have intimidated Maurine back in Cambridge, but now she was more mature and worldly, and it showed in her work. She came to Yale with an ambitious comedy already mapped out, the characters vividly drawn. With his most talented students, Baker believed his chief task was to provide encouragement. “The finer the spirit of the young artist the more unsure and secretly timid he is in trusting his instincts for expression,” he wrote. Baker saw the potential of Maurine’s project right away, and he sought to shore up her confidence to allow her to do her best work. The relationship between teacher and student quickly grew warm at Yale.

  Maurine titled her play, which was set in Chicago, The Brave Little Woman. Its main character was Beulah Annan, renamed Roxie Hart.15 The married Roxie, like Beulah, shoots down her boyfriend when he tr
ies to leave her. When reporters get a look at Roxie’s gorgeous face and figure—and take note of her willingness to do anything to stay in the papers—they make her into a huge celebrity. But Maurine wasn’t simply writing a memoir for the stage. The Brave Little Woman focused on the criminal-justice system, “sensation journalism,” and the stupidity of old-fashioned notions of chivalry in an era of pretty young women wielding guns and sex to get what they wanted. It endeavored to expose the utter corruption of both the legal system and the newspaper industry—how lawyers and reporters were interested not in justice or truth but in making themselves look good. The average American’s desperation for public attention, Maurine believed, only egged on such unscrupulous professionals. “Nobody but a newspaper worker knows to what extent not only indecent but decent people will sometimes go to ‘get publicity,’ ” noted the Chicago Herald and Examiner’s Ashton Stevens.

  This obsession for publicity was something new in society—some pundits believed it to be the scourge of the twentieth century. Maurine recognized that it made the newspapers, just as much as the people they covered, what they were—and she zeroed in on it. “Here you’re gettin’ somethin’ money can’t buy: front-page advertisin’,” a gruff reporter named Jake, recognizing the circulation potential of such a beautiful girl gunner, tells Roxie after her arrest. “Why, a three-line want ad would cost you two eighty-five, and you’ll get line after line, column after column, for nothin’.” Jake continues:

  Who knows you now? Nobody. But this time tomorrow your face will be known from coast to coast. Who cares today whether you live or die? But tomorrow they’ll be crazy to know your breakfast food and how did yuh rest last night. They’ll fight to see you, come by the hundred just for a glimpse of your house—Remember Wanda Stopa? Well, we had twenty thousand at her funeral.

  One of Baker’s lectures about comedy had a particular resonance for Maurine as she worked. The Victorian writer George Meredith wrote that classical comedy “proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dullness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness yet to be found among us. [Comedy] is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher.” Expanding on Meredith’s writing, Baker added farce to the discussion, pointing out that classical comedy “presents us with the imperfections of human nature. Farce entertains us with what is monstrous.” Classical comedy, Baker insisted, made human imperfections funny for “those who can judge.” Farce, on the other hand, was “intended for those who can’t judge.”

  Here was where Maurine made a leap, where she moved beyond her mentor. She chose not to make a distinction. From her experiences as a reporter in Chicago, she’d determined that human imperfections, individual and collective, had become monstrous. Real life had become farce. Her play would not only make no distinction between traditional comedy and farce, it also would make no distinction between comedy and tragedy. They were all one and the same in a superficial modern world of mass communication and overpopulated, spirit-crushing cities, a world that produced anonymous men and women seized by insecurity and a frantic desire for money, status, and attention.

  In jail while awaiting trial, Roxie spends her time pasting news clippings into a scrapbook, happy to be noticed and unconcerned that it’s because she killed a man. When the newspapers begin to show interest in another murderess, she feigns pregnancy to grab back the headlines. Roxie is so beautiful, and so ruthless in promoting herself, that it simply doesn’t matter that she has committed murder. “Oh, I feel so sorry for her when I think of all she must have gone through to be driven to a step like that,” the reporter Mary Sunshine says to Roxie’s lawyer, Billy Flynn. “But she has everyone’s sympathy—that will help her in this awful hour.” The sob sister pulls a handful of telegrams and letters about Roxie out of her bag to show the counselor. “We’re paying ten dollars a day for the best letter, you know, and some of these are just too lovely.”

  All of Baker’s students were required to read their drafts in class and were subjected to criticism from the room. The students often tried to prove their powers of insight, and impress their professor, by throwing haymakers at each other’s work. But Maurine, reddening in embarrassment, her voice tiny, left everyone gasping in delight and amazement when she read. Her Roxie was the moron triumphant, counting on her fellow morons—on the newspaper staffs, on the jury, everywhere in this twisted new America—to save her. The play was shocking—and it was hilarious. Baker, in particular, was thrilled with the result. He believed Maurine had produced that most rare thing in art: something original. Baker taught classical Greek comedy as the baseline, but he pointed out that “when we have what might be called vernacular comedy as distinguished from classical comedy, when all the conditions of our comedy are freer and more spontaneous than that of the classical comedy, it is absurd that we should apply the definitions and test of Aristotle to our comedy and get any really valuable results.”

  Maurine Watkins, he believed, had found a true American style.

  Maurine finished the play by the end of the term. Now titled Chicago, it didn’t get to be the first production of Yale’s new drama department, as she probably had hoped, but this didn’t mean she was being slighted. Nearly every year, Baker selected a play from the workshop and helped place it with professional producers. For 1926, he chose Chicago. Baker introduced Maurine to New York agents, and from there momentum gathered swiftly. Sam H. Harris, George M. Cohan’s former partner, snapped up the play. In October, the New Yorker magazine, in a fawning, half-joking “Talk of the Town” item, declared that Harris had accepted Maurine’s play about a “gaudy murder trial,” even though there was a problem with it: the title. “Mr. Harris’ admiration for the play is warm but, after all, he has business interests in Chicago and would like to be able to drop out there from time to time without adding to the familiar depression of such a pilgrimage the disquieting prospect of being obliged to join our feathered friends.” The best solution, the magazine surmised, was a change of title, from Chicago back to The Brave Little Woman. But Harris’s reception in the Second City clearly didn’t concern the producer as much as the New Yorker thought it might. Harris had more than a dozen projects in the works during the summer and fall of 1926, including a Marx Brothers tour of their Broadway hit The Cocoanuts. Despite such a full plate, he aggressively moved Chicago forward, its new title intact. Early in the fall, George Abbott signed on as director, with a planned New York opening by the end of the year. Rising stage ingenue Francine Larrimore was cast as Roxie.

  It was a big leap from Baker’s classroom straight to Broadway, arguably the highest level of commercial theater in the English-speaking world and unquestionably far more prestigious than the movies, which were still silent. But Maurine believed Chicago deserved it. She was proud of what she’d written. She had put down on the page, in a great cathartic explosion, all of her frustrations as a police reporter—“the result,” she said, “of watching justice and publicity in their relation to crime.” She knew the play was likely to be controversial. There was nothing uplifting about Chicago, though she believed it was deeply moral. “It seems to me that the purpose and treatment of a subject should determine the morality rather than just the choice of your theme,” she later said, in defense of her work.

  For his part, Baker worried that Maurine would come under pressure from people who didn’t fully understand what she was trying to accomplish with the play. He warned her to hold tight to her principles as the director worked with his cast to find the right tone and timing for Chicago, fearing Abbott or Harris might undercut its purpose to “force as many laughs as possible.” Baker believed Maurine had written more than merely a good comedy. “You wrote something that might have an effect on the conditions you ridicule,” he told his student. “It may well be turned into something which will have no such effect.” Baker’s fears were strong enough that, even after advising her, he couldn’t leave it to Maurine to defend the work’s integrity. Knowing that his reputation depended on his students’ succ
ess, he strongly supported the play publicly. “It is a comedy, intensely satirical, treating the sentimentalization of the criminal in this country by the public, newspapers, lawyers, and even courts,” he wrote to the Theatre Guild just before Chicago opened. He added: “Whatever happens to the play, I know it was written with honest intent and with the knowledge of facts existing for Chicago, though not perhaps for other cities to the same extent.”

  Baker had good reason to be concerned about Chicago’s prospects. One prominent playgoer at its pre-Broadway run in New Haven, John Archer of the Yale Divinity School, called Chicago “entirely too vile for public performance.” He added: “Why flaunt that sort of life within the realm of drama? Why not leave the lid on the sewer and keep the stench from the nostrils of our Eastern public?”

  Though just an unknown former reporter and fledgling playwright, Maurine wasn’t about to let the attack go unchallenged. That was her life up there on stage. “I quite agree with Professor Archer that the situation in the city of Chicago is deplorable,” she responded in the New Haven Register. “What surprises me is that he of all people, a divinity professor, should condemn the action of calling attention to evil. Does he suppose the way to combat evil is to ignore it? I wonder whether, in his sermons, Professor Archer pretends that the world is a rose garden, and scrupulously avoids the unpleasant side of things. More than likely he speaks of evil conditions himself.”