That was what Maurine had been doing as a reporter in Chicago—combating evil. She wanted people to know that. If she now helped bring about a wider understanding of that evil, even if it had to be turned into rank comedy to do so, that was for the good. The sharp response shut down the minor controversy, but Maurine recognized that more of the same surely waited in the big city. Like Archer in New Haven, theater censors were on the march in New York, for the Jazz Age had belatedly arrived on the city’s stages in 1926, throwing all sorts of licentious shocks at audiences. “Liquor runs deep down the course of this season’s theatre in New York,” wrote Gilbert W. Gabriel in Vanity Fair. “Scarcely a play is staged without the bravado of some one or two scenes of secret and melancholy drinking.” On top of that, thanks to Mae West’s career revival as playwright and performer, there was sex. Manhattan’s district attorney, goaded by the influential New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, empowered a “play jury” to attend plays and vote on their moral stature.
The jury quickly attacked West’s off-Broadway play, SEX, along with two prominent Broadway shows, The Captive and The Virgin Man, for their “tendency to corrupt the morals of youth.” Police raided all three productions on the same night and dragged the casts off to jail. A police sergeant, Patrick Keneally, had been sent out to the plays beforehand to make notes on their transgressions. When SEX went to trial, in February 1927, Keneally focused on West’s “kootchie” dance in the show, testifying in a room full of sucked-in breath that “Miss West moved her navel up and down and from right to left.” The jury convicted West and her producers and sentenced them to ten days in jail, along with a $500 fine each. Both the author and producer of The Virgin Man, about an undergraduate undone by a bevy of “seductresses,” received similar fines and jail sentences.
Into this tense, nervous atmosphere arrived Chicago, which opened at the Music Box Theatre on December 30, 1926. The play had drinking, and it had sex. If you weren’t of a mood to recognize it as satire—and members of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice tended to take all art literally—you saw only the most horrific debauchery: remorseless murderers celebrating their bloody acts and being celebrated for them. At one point in the play, the jailed Roxie, surrounded by male reporters but without the slightest shame, decides to remove her garters so she can auction them off to her fans. “Here, take these, too!” Roxie tells Jake as she “gives herself a reflective wriggle” and then pops the elastic band free.
JAKE [waves them aloft]: Bravo! ‘You’ve read about ’em, boys, here they are: what am I offered for the Famous Turquoise Garter?’ [Breaks off in alarm as she seems bent on further disapparelment.] Stop! This is not strip poker!
ROXIE [straightens with dignity]: I was only rollin’ my stockin’s. [They drop to her ankles and JAKE retreats.]
Not even Mae West’s play was so depraved and cynical as this daring new production. The New York correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, writing on opening night, noted that Chicago arrived from its out-of-town try-out with a reputation “as a shocker unfit for human consumption and all Broadway attempted to get into the Music Box where Sam H. Harris staged it.” After seeing it, however, the local critics sought to mitigate any shocks caused to the citizenry. Recognizing an original and ambitious production rather than a moral hazard, they immediately embraced the play, perhaps hoping to preempt the censors.16 “My hat is off to the genius of the young Miss Maurine Watkins, who has contributed to the American theater the most profound and powerful satire it has ever known,” wrote novelist and critic Rupert Hughes. “Best of all, [Chicago] is a satire by a woman on the folly of men in their false homage to woman, their silly efforts to protect her while she dupes them.” The play was more than a thumping entertainment, he continued. It sought to “put an end to the ghastly business of railroading pretty women safely through murder trials by making fools of the solemn jurymen.”
Hughes’s review was representative of the norm. In the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson warned off potential moralist outrage, insisting that “Chicago is not a melodrama, as the prologue indicates, but a satirical comedy on the administration of justice through the fetid channels of newspaper publicity—of photographers, ‘sob sisters,’ feature stunts, standardized prevarication and generalized vulgarity.”
Jump-started by the critical reaction, Chicago began to consistently play to packed houses. Maurine Watkins had caught the Zeitgeist, and not just in New York. Plans for a tour were undertaken, first to the title city itself and then to Los Angeles. The bloodletting in Chicago, the heart of Prohibition-driven gangsterism, had become a national topic, and thanks to Maurine, making fun of Murder City was now de rigueur. Two months after the play opened, humorist Will Rogers picked up on the subject, joking in a newspaper piece that Detroit’s leaders had come to him and complained, “What’s the use of having all these robberies and killings [in our city]? No one ever reads about them. Chicago seems to be the only place most people think that can put on a murder.” Rogers’s answer to Detroit’s problem: Go for quality, not quantity. “It’s best not to have a woman do the murdering,” he wrote. “A case like that holds for a while, but when it comes to a trial it loses interest, for the people want to see a case where there is some chance of conviction.”
With Chicago’s unexpected box-office success, Maurine began fielding interview requests. The New York Times, in profiling the new playwright three days after the opening, gave credit to George Pierce Baker and joked that Maurine’s final grade under the well-known professor “will be determined by the manner in which the play is produced. And [Baker] has promised that what the Chicago Chamber of Commerce has to say won’t count.”
The profile praised Maurine’s talent and manners, but a more telling passage came in the brief description of her journalism career. The paper stated that it was “the experience of reporting the Leopold-Loeb case that supplied her with much of the material for Chicago.” A New York World feature on Maurine later in the month also dwelled on Leopold and Loeb, quoting her at length on how she decided what to ask the thrill killers when she had the opportunity and what she thought of the “crime of the century” spectacle.
That Maurine would expound freely on Nathan Leopold and Dick Loeb is not surprising: It made sense for an unproven playwright writing about the newspaper world to buttress her qualifications by highlighting her role in such a famous story. But in both the Times and the World interviews, she failed to mention that her play was actually based on a different trial. In fact, almost none of the numerous feature stories and reviews about Chicago in the New York press mentioned Beulah Annan. By this time, more than two years after the fact, Beulah and her trial had been forgotten outside the Second City. In contrast, articles about the play frequently referenced the infamous Leopold and Loeb.
In keeping the true inspiration for Chicago quiet, Maurine may have been worried that she’d hewed too closely to real events to be worthy of the acclaim she was receiving for writing a brilliantly original play. After all, some snippets of dialogue in Chicago came straight out of William Scott Stewart’s and W. W. O’Brien’s mouths during Beulah’s trial. Key plot points—such as Roxie’s pregnancy announcement—were also lifted directly from real events. Some of Maurine’s stage directions and scene descriptions were taken nearly word for word from her Tribune articles. The details of Roxie’s shooting of her boyfriend tracked exactly with the real thing, including the blaring jazz music on the phonograph and the children playing outside the window. Physical descriptions of Roxie also borrowed from Maurine’s Tribune descriptions of Beulah.
Moreover, Beulah wasn’t the only real-life murderess to make it onto the stage in Chicago. Belva Gaertner, in the form of the relatively minor character of Velma, was represented down to the smallest details, including Belva’s claim to have been so drunk that she didn’t remember anything about her boyfriend’s murder. Velma is described as being in her “late thirties, with smooth sallowed features, large dreamy eyes, and ful
l lips that have a dipsomaniacal droop.” Velma, like Belva, is a wealthy society lady who pays an Italian immigrant prisoner to make her bed every morning. Sabella Nitti, Kitty Malm, and Elizabeth Unkafer also got lifted from the newspaper and dropped down into the play intact.
Maurine even offered herself up, tangentially, as “the woman from the Ledger” who doesn’t buy into the sham public persona Roxie puts on for the sob sisters. “I won’t see her,” Roxie says petulantly, when Billy Flynn tells her the reporter is coming to the jail for an interview. Flynn replies, “You’ve talked so much, you can’t stop now. If you tell enough lies they’re bound to forget a few!”
All of these similarities, now that the play was actually up and running, appear to have made Maurine a bit nervous. The play was advertised as a satire based on broadly identifiable conditions in the country; she wasn’t supposed to be retrying an old case on the stage. The furthest she went in acknowledging the extent of her inspiration was to write, in a letter to the editor in the New York World, that she “was portraying conditions as I actually found [them] during my newspaper work. For while the play may sound like burlesque or travesty in New York, it would pass for realism in its home town.” Again, she did not mention Beulah Annan.
Of course, that was Maurine Watkins in sophisticated New York. When Chicago arrived in Chicago in the fall of 1927, after running for 172 performances on Broadway and being sold to Hollywood, there would be no ducking the truth. There was no reason to do so.
20
The Most Monotonous City on Earth
On Sunday morning, October 9, 1927, the Twentieth Century Limited chugged slowly through Gary, Indiana. Heavy clouds pulled the sky down to the rooftops like a cap. The train swung north into Chicago’s sprawling industrial suburbs, open fields giving way to “crooked, ill-paved streets lined with bleak houses and thick with the murk of factory vapors.” For mile after mile, passengers watched one ramshackle structure worse than the last roll past, swimming in crashing waves of bilious smoke. Men and women pressed their noses to the windows. A sheltered, properly raised young woman, a woman like Maurine Watkins had once been, could be forgiven for looking out the window of her compartment and thinking some dreadful natural disaster had occurred. The traveler coming into Chicago for the first time saw a ghastly, dirty farce of a city. It was “the most monotonous city on earth,” proclaimed New York businessman Edward Hungerford on his initial trip. “Chicago, with the most wretched approaches on her main lines of travel of any great city of the world.”
To Maurine, of course, it looked like home. Once the train settled into LaSalle Street station, she stepped onto a red carpet that had been laid out for the passengers and walked through the station. Out at the taxi stand, a driver assumed control of her baggage and drove her to the Drake Hotel, where she registered and went up to her room. Maurine had looked forward to her return to the city for weeks. Chicago’s press agent planned to send newspaper photographers over to the station to meet her, but Maurine didn’t want to show up her old colleagues who hadn’t left town and become famous. She conveniently forgot to tell the publicity man when she was coming. Just to be safe, she stayed shut up in her room all day, as if she didn’t know a soul in the city or where to go.
When Maurine finally stepped from the Drake that evening, small, beautifully dressed, and alone, she climbed into a taxi and directed it to the Harris Theater, where she paid the driver and walked quickly up to the box office. It thrilled her to be going to the theater, her favorite pastime, and especially to be going to this play in particular, her own hit comedy. But she hadn’t planned ahead. The best available seat at this late hour, the ticket seller told her, was in the sixteenth row. Maurine smiled and told him that the sixteenth row was perfect; she was “glad it was not in the fifth or sixth row.” Mystified by the response—it certainly took all kinds to fill a theater—the man completed the transaction without further comment and gazed over her shoulder to the next patron. Maurine stepped toward the doors, happy to be unrecognized, something that hadn’t been possible for Belva Gaertner or W. W. O’Brien when they attended the play two weeks before.
It took all of ten seconds from the opening curtain for Francine Larrimore to have the packed house choking with laughter. Maurine laughed too. Oh, Francie was so wonderful! Maurine could enjoy the beautiful, gangly girl’s performance night after night. Watching Larrimore bound about the stage, Maurine was convinced anew that the actress had captured the character perfectly: “a hint of a Raphael angel—with a touch of Medusa.” You’d never know she was such a darling girl offstage.
“Why did you kill him?” a copper asked Larrimore.
The actress, an alley cat all of a sudden, screeched: “It’s a lie! I didn’t! Damn you, let go!” She chomped down on the policeman’s wrist with sharp incisors, and he yelped and flung her off.
“So it was you,” said the sergeant, a bit slow on the uptake.
“Yes, it was me! I shot him and I’m damned glad I did! I’d do it again—”
She didn’t get to finish her confession—she never did. A reporter cut her off: “Once is enough, dearie!”
The audience erupted at the line, the whole theater reverberating with tittering echoes, as Francine Larrimore slowly started to fall apart.
“Oh, God . . . God . . . Don’t let ’em hang me—don’t . . . Why, I’d . . . die! ”
The elegantly dressed men and women around Maurine crashed into hysterics yet again. They pounded on their armrests, cackled in delight. Maurine was delighted with the line as well. The success of the play gratified her. And yet when the second of the play’s three acts closed, she apparently had had enough. She got to her feet and headed for the door. Eddie Kitt, the manager, smiled at her approach, grinning as any man instinctively did at the advance of a pretty young woman. Maurine asked him to escort her backstage. Kitt paused—this was an unusual request in the middle of a play—but then the young lady’s smile, the dancing eyes, the loose, pulled-back hair, all clicked together in his brainpan, and he did as he was asked.
When the curtain rose for the third act, Maurine Watkins still was not in her seat—she was walking quietly, purposefully, across the stage, in full view of the audience. She sat next to the actress playing Mary Sunshine, her perfect doll’s cheeks bulbous and reflecting light, blue eyes surveying the scene. Mr. Tilden, the stage manager, leaned forward from the wings to see what was happening.
Francine Larrimore glared at Maurine, but it was a look of surprise, momentary surprise. She wasn’t really upset.
“What kind of look?” the lawyer asked. “Describe it to the jury.”
Larrimore’s eyes swung from Maurine to her questioner. “I can’t describe it,” she said. “But a terrible look—angry—wild—”
“Were you afraid? Did you think he meant to kill you?”
“Oh, yes, sir! I knew if he once reached the gun . . .”
“It was his life then or yours,” the man said, his voice rising just enough to make everyone realize he was saying something important now.
“Yes, sir,” said Roxie Hart, finally lifting her wavering eyes to meet his. She took a deep breath, her cheeks cherry-red all at once, then: “He was coming right toward me, with that awful look—that wild look . . . and I closed my eyes . . . and . . . shot! ”
Maurine loved being a part of the production. She’d been a reliable background player for months on Broadway, putting aside new writing assignments each evening to head over to the theater. She even understudied a couple of the minor roles. She couldn’t help but want to be involved in all the fun. She’d had plenty of laughs during the real events on which the play was based, just like some of the other faces in the audience here in Chicago. She hadn’t realized how much she missed the city and her former life until the play started. New York was surprisingly tame: Its murder rate was more than 50 percent lower than the Second City’s. At one point, Maurine took a trip to supposedly wild Baltimore but found none of that old Chicago feeling,
to her disappointment: “Nary a cherub with happy days in her arms or revolver in hand, and I strolled particularly through ladies’ retiring quarters,” she wrote to her friend Alexander Woollcott, the Broadway drama critic. But now she could have as much of her late police reporter’s life as she wanted—at least her fantasy version of it. When she arrived in Chicago, the silent-movie adaptation of her play was shooting across town under the guidance of the legendary Cecil B. DeMille, its producer. It was being made under great secrecy, and everyone was talking about what they didn’t know—everyone except Maurine, who never gossiped. Francine Larrimore was committed to the stage show, so the former Mack Sennett bathing beauty Phyllis Haver, best known as the vampire in Emil Jannings’s The Way of All Flesh, took the lead for Mr. DeMille. Maurine didn’t know what to think about that. The whole endeavor was challenging, turning such a talky play into a silent film. Haver would admit that herself, saying: “It is bad enough to get in tune with any character but when one jumps up and down the octave whamming out this discord and that, the task is nerve wracking.”
Having the movie shooting in town was exciting, but the actors and crew mostly kept to themselves during production, and Maurine didn’t impose herself on them. The play, on the other hand, was here for everyone, right now. And everyone seemed to love it, especially the critics. “Miss Watkins is uncannily keen, and Chicago is one of the brilliant satirical plays of the times,” wrote C. J. Bulliet in the Evening Post. The Tribune said the play “is as rich a reason for laughter as has in many years been proffered to those of us who think we are civilized, educated, adult, responsive, transilient [sic], literate, something more than half-witted, what used to be called ‘aware,’ and what is now miscalled ‘sophisticated.’ ” Whether or not Maurine needed to fear being found out in New York, Chicagoans felt flattered that real events in their city had made it to the Broadway stage. The American observed that “Good-natured Chicago laughed loudly and gossiped incessantly between the three acts at the clever burlesque on the stage, [at] county and city and bar and newspapers and police—at the hectic jazz times which could make possible an evening of entertainment, with women swearing like troopers, in this ‘what price bullets’ production.”17
The Girls of Murder City Page 27