Praise for Francine Larrimore, as Roxie, was also unanimous. The Daily News enthused that the actress’s performance was “faultless,” adding that her “moods and tantrums, her wiles and witchery are superb.” The Herald and Examiner insisted that Larrimore was “the solar plexus of this shrill satire. She gives herself to it body, nerve and adenoid. She is comical with a passion that sometimes wrings tears—yours as well as her own.” When the play opened, Chicago was preparing to host the heavily anticipated heavyweight championship rematch between Jack Dempsey and the man who took his title the year before, Gene Tunney. The Herald and Examiner ’s critic remarked, “Should Dempsey next Thursday night attack Tunney, or Tunney attack Dempsey, as Miss Larrimore tackles Roxie, it will be over in the first act.”
Beulah Annan was not available to see Larrimore’s knockout interpretation of her, but her lawyer, W. W. O’Brien, and Belva Gaertner showed up for the premiere. “Gee, this play’s sure got our number, ain’t it,” Belva offered with a smile. “Sure, that’s me,” she added when a Herald and Examiner reporter asked her about the character of Velma. She also said, generously, “Roxie Hart’s supposed to be Beulah Annan. She was the most beautiful woman ever accused of murder.” O’Brien, recognizing his own words in the script, called Chicago “the finest piece of stage satire ever written by an American.”
Maurine’s old compatriot, Genevieve Forbes, also took in the show. She was just as fascinated as Maurine with the reimagining of their newspaper lives. The production recalled gayer journalistic times in Chicago, “of those local ladies who tarried on the fourth floor of the building at Dearborn Street and Austin Avenue long enough to get themselves into a play.” Like Maurine, she had become nostalgic for the old days. Crime in the city was all gangsters now—bootleggers with tommy guns and cold hearts. They didn’t shoot for love, like the women she and Maurine had written about. A few days after Maurine took in the play, Forbes decided to remind any Chicagoan who might have forgotten about the city’s murderesses of yore. In the Tribune, she wrote an open letter to theater management requesting “a block of seats, that I may take as my guests the women whom Maurine interviewed that May day now more than two years ago.”
“Beulah Annan ought to have the aisle-seat,” she continued. “For it was she—too beautiful to work in a laundry, but a sufficiently good shot to get her man with one bullet in the back—who is the Roxie of the piece. . . . Beulah went free: else, there might have been no play.” Forbes knew the real Roxie still had star power. It had been incorrectly “whispered about” (principally by the American) that Beulah would attend the show on opening night, leading theatergoers to scan the crowd at every opportunity. But Forbes hoped she would make an appearance now, seeing as the reporter was issuing a formal invitation.
The next best seat, Forbes insisted, “ought to go to Belva Gaertner, Cook County’s most stylish murderess.” She wrote that Belva, remarried to the millionaire William Gaertner, was strikingly portrayed in Chicago. “One thing, however, is all wrong with her stage descendant. The Velma of the play goes before the jury in a vivid green gown; and everybody knows that Belva’s favorite color was café-au-lait. A trivial point, but irksome, perhaps, to Belva.”
Then there was the character of Moonshine Maggie. She was “a tangent form of Sabella Nitti, the farm-lady who achieved fame as instant as Byron’s when she was heralded as the first woman in the county to receive the death sentence. It was for the murder of her husband. But she tarried in jail long enough to learn the value of a hot bath, a manicure and a smart hair-do. . . . She’d love the theater!”
Last but far from least was the murderess Forbes covered more closely than any other. The character “Go-to-Hell Kitty,” she wrote, “is Kitty Malm, who packed a gat where most girls harbor their love-letters. She’s a life-timer at Joliet; but, if the Harris theater management throws in an extra ticket for a guard, I’ll try to get permission for Kitty to come along.”
The open letter was all in fun, of course, so there was another name that hung over the production that Forbes did not mention: Wanda Stopa. There was simply nothing amusing about her story, even with Francine Larrimore up on stage. And besides, Wanda had even less opportunity to attend the show than Kitty Malm.
Despite the raves Francine Larrimore received as Roxie Hart, Maurine had proved to be the biggest star to come out of the production. Reporters and critics had a difficult time believing she could be the writer of such a hard-edged, hard-hearted satire. (She heightened this sense of implausibility by saying she was twenty-six years old, though she was now thirty.) “She is blonde, comely, chic, and considerably under thirty—a pleasant way to be,” the New Yorker declared in October 1926 when announcing the play. After Chicago opened, the magazine weighed in again, noting that the “popular opinion is that she is one of the prettiest unmarried girls who ever wrote a successful Broadway play.”
The New Yorker’s theater writer was hardly alone in his crush. Everybody loved Maurine Watkins, and it was easy to understand why. That other popular stage authoress of the moment, Mae West, was a threat—her stated goal was proving the equality of the sexes. Not so Chicago’s scribe. She had sweet, old-fashioned manners, and her satire showed not how accomplished unfettered women could be, but how wicked. Vanity Fair thrilled to this “seraphic young person from the South,” and the New York World marveled at her “distinctly feminine manner.” The New York Times’s theater correspondent, on meeting Maurine, wrote that she was “more easily suspected as the author of poetry such as that penned by Edna St. Vincent Millay, than of a play like Chicago.”
Now that Maurine had achieved celebrity status, it was inevitable that she would be recruited to be a celebrity commentator on the news of the day, the latest trend in the newspaper business. In January 1927, the New York World hired her to liven up the silly and already sensationalized Browning divorce case. Frances Browning was the sixteen-year-old wife of Edward W. Browning, a fifty-two-year-old real-estate millionaire. He called her Peaches. She called him Daddy. Not long after a series of loveydovey public appearances by the newlyweds, Peaches ran out on Daddy and sought a divorce. She insisted that her husband had forced her to walk around their residence naked and that he’d thrown phone books at her and burned her with acid.
The shocking charges notwithstanding, Daddy Browning had little to worry about from the court of public opinion. A swarming crowd gave him an ovation when he arrived at the courthouse in suburban White Plains, where the case was to be decided. Why not? He dressed beautifully, he had exquisite manners, and his name appeared in the New York papers a lot. Just a few years before, that wouldn’t have been enough to engender the public’s admiration, but this was now the age of moving pictures and public relations. People greeted Browning on the street like a war hero. Besides, his estranged wife didn’t meet the public standard.
“She’s too fat,” a girl outside court announced loudly as Peaches made for a taxi on the case’s first day.
“I don’t call her pretty,” agreed a fellow court-watcher.
“Gold digger,” hissed still another spectator.
Witnessing all of this, Maurine saw an excellent opportunity to bring an even higher profile to Chicago, which was still in the first month of its New York run. Her coverage of the divorce would be less about the Brownings than about Maurine herself and her play’s themes.
The World had no problem with this angle. An editor’s note pointed out that “Miss Watkins,” having revealed the real Chicago on the Broadway stage, was now “investigating scientifically the road to fame in our own fair city.” As expected, that investigation’s results amused the playwright-reporter. “Chicago was never like this,” she wrote, leaning hard on her new public persona as a cynical Midwestern wisecracker in the Big Apple. “The Brownings would have been dismissed with a couple of ‘moron’ headlines; the whole Gold Coast could wash its linen on the Lake Shore without moving journalistically from that cemetery known as the Social Column. In Chicago you m
ust shoot, not sue, your way to glory. Her front pages drip with blood, whereas New York’s are smeared with dirt.”
This made for an entertaining premise, and allowed Maurine to tout her play to a wide audience, but it obviously wasn’t true. New York’s papers could bathe happily in blood, and often did. Maurine helped prove this just three months after the Browning pas de deux, when another New York paper, this time the Telegram, hired her for another trial. Ruth Snyder, a onetime stenographer, and her corset-salesman boyfriend, Henry Judd Gray, were charged with murdering Snyder’s husband so they could collect on an insurance policy and run off together. Reporters from every newspaper in the tristate area—and many more throughout the country—flooded the courthouse in Long Island City for this latest “crime of the century.” Among those who signed up to cover the trial were novelist Fannie Hurst, celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, actress and socialite Peggy Joyce Hopkins, even an ex-wife of Rudolph Valentino. Maurine would share space in the Telegram with popular philosopher Will Durant.
The Telegram hoped that Maurine’s good looks and satiric charms would lure readers to imagine a “palship” with the plucky young playwright-reporter, causing them to pick the Telegram over its many newsstand competitors. With an alluring inset photograph accompanying each report—Maurine looking gorgeous in a practical, no-frills way, her hair pulled back and her face freshly scrubbed—she was the all-American girl commenting on the all-American sport. There was, however, a problem. Unlike the cases of Belva and Beulah, every aspect of this story was revolting. The nature of the crime—Snyder’s husband was viciously garroted, after numerous previous attempts on the man’s life—stood athwart all of the defense’s efforts to make Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray sympathetic. Time magazine pointed out that the “details, unusually gruesome, included poisoned whiskey, picture wire, binding, gagging, taking turns at skull-smashing with a window-weight, and $104,000 in life insurance.”
From the start, Maurine hit the wrong note. “Strike up the band, for the show starts today!” she declared on April 18, under a byline that read “Maurine Watkins, Author of ‘Chicago.’ ” As the trial careened toward a verdict, she mocked the two defendants for blaming their actions on the magnetic influence of the other:
Scene reconstructed from Snyder-Gray testimony:
“Oh, Mumsie, you’re terrible to want to kill your husband! But I’ll buy the chloroform for you—and what about a little sash-weight?”
“O Lover Boy, you mustn’t come back to kill my husband! But here’s the sash-weight, and I’ll leave a couple of doors open and you’ll find a bottle of whiskey up in Mamma’s room.”
“Oh Mumsie, I can’t do it! Have you got the cotton waste and picture wire?”
O Judd, you really mustn’t do it! Have another drink and the revolver’s there on the piano.”
Maurine undoubtedly recognized that Snyder, with her wax-figure countenance, stout figure, and carefully planned viciousness, was no Beulah Annan. She enjoyed tweaking Snyder, but mostly she gave the trial and its defendants short shrift, focusing instead on what was now her pet theme: the excesses of the mass media. More than a hundred seats in the courthouse had been “ticketed for the press,” she pointed out. And that was just for starters. A “special room” had been given over to stenographers, another for a wire room, and an elevator was reserved for the use of messenger boys, for “what tragedy if the color of Ruth Snyder’s hose or Henry Gray’s breakfast menu should miss the early edition of the Houston Press or the Rocky Mountain News!” Maurine looked around at her fellow reporters, all doing the same job she was, and acted offended. “For a few days, at least, perhaps for a few weeks, the stenographer who married her boss will get attention such as Queen Marie [of Romania] enjoyed, and the corset salesman of East Orange will take his place with the Prince of Wales.”18
In the end, the assignment brought Maurine nothing but a paycheck she no longer needed. The public greedily consumed coverage of the trial but never warmed to the story or its correspondents. Both Snyder and Gray, with a sigh of relief from millions of newspaper readers, were convicted. In January 1928, they were put to death in the electric chair.
With Maurine’s profile higher in the winter and spring of 1927 than many Broadway leading ladies, newspaper editors weren’t the only ones seeking out her services. Every theater producer in New York wanted her on his next project.
The first assignment Maurine accepted was an adaptation of Samuel Hopkins Adams’s novel Revelry, a fictional look at corruption in the Harding administration. Maurine diligently set to work, but with a busy schedule that included celebrity journalism and occasionally appearing as an extra in Chicago, her new star status quickly began to weigh on her. Reconnecting with the judgmental George Pierce Baker, who thought she had overcommitted herself, didn’t help her anxiety. “Feel depressed,” she wrote to Alexander Woollcott in longhand. “Just returned from Yale—first attendance since . . . it happened. Dear Teacher thinks I’m close by the precipice of utter ruin and that Revelry will push me completely over.”
Baker, it turned out, wasn’t far wrong. Thanks to Chicago, Maurine suddenly had become the go-to writer for hard-hitting, wisecracking satire that tested the bounds of legal decency. She’d barely gotten started on Revelry, a project certain to provoke outrage in some circles, when she accepted another hot-button assignment—adapting Herbert Asbury’s scandalous American Mercury magazine article “Hatrack,” the story of a “rebuffed churchgoer and sought-after prostitute” in the small Missouri town where Asbury grew up. “Our town harlot in Farmington,” wrote Asbury, “was a scrawny creature called variously Fanny Fewclothes and Hatrack, but usually the latter in deference to her figure.” During the workweek, Fanny was a “competent drudge” on the domestic staff of one of the town’s proudest families, but on Sundays she unself-consciously sold her body, taking her clients to lie down on the cool slabs in the town’s Masonic and Catholic cemeteries. Upon publication in the American Mercury, the piece was deemed indecent and barred from being sent through the U.S. mail.
These were two assignments, like the Snyder-Gray trial, for which Maurine was constitutionally unsuited. Chicago was all flash and bang, and its subject matter—sensation journalism and celebrity-lust—was ideal for such eyes-wide-open comic treatment. “Any play which can batter away with unrelenting ridicule for three whole acts—and without a single sop to the sentimentalists—deserves a bonus of unabashed hurrahs,” Vanity Fair wrote of Chicago. That it did, but Chicago was also sui generis. A recently deceased president and a sad small-town prostitute did not so easily lend themselves to Maurine’s broad-stroke, incriminatory humor. Adaptations are always tricky, and for these in particular, Maurine needed a rapier, not the cannon that was her comic weapon of choice.
Revelry, her much-anticipated follow-up to Chicago, in fact proved fated for disaster before it even reached New York. In Philadelphia, the play was withdrawn shortly after it opened in September when a judge denounced it as “false, base and indecent, and slanderous of the dead.” In dealing with a fictional version of the late president, Maurine had been asked to walk a fine line in writing the adaptation, and she had failed. The company that owned the Philadelphia playhouse in which the play was booked announced, “While the play had been rendered unobjectionable in other respects by the censors, the Stanley company considered the theme so essentially unpatriotic that any further revision would be useless.”
That was not the official death of the production, but it might as well have been. When the New York critics got a look at it, the play hung in a dispiriting critical purgatory, garnering neither applause nor outright attack. “The play that Miss Watkins fashioned is, if somewhat disappointing, not worthless,” wrote Edmund Wilson in the New Republic. “Its tone carries a certain sarcastic gravity; Miss Watkins has restrained, in the case of these national themes, her gay brutality, and has enjoyed herself less with naughty exposures.” George Jean Nathan, in the American Mercury, added that “there
is so much profanity and cussing that along toward ten o’clock one begins to suspect the author of concealing her inability to key up dramatic intensity in loud invocations of the Saviour and allusions to kennel genealogy.” The play closed after only a month on Broadway.
With Revelry’s embarrassing reception, Maurine began to realize that Baker had been right: She had overextended herself and, perhaps as a result, not given her best to any of her projects. Just days after the Revelry brouhaha in Philadelphia, she wrote to Woollcott, then drama critic at the New York World: “Does your department pay damages to guileless souls who believe every word written therein? Basely deceived by a statement that out of five plays bought only one is ever produced, I went around this summer busily and merrily signing contracts for old plays, dramatizations, adaptations, or what have you. Came the fall and dawn; and managers’ intentions, if not honorable, proved serious, with the result that I am even more busily if less merrily trying to buy out of various transgressions.” She added that she had learned a hard lesson: “Don’t sell a play till it’s written.”
The Girls of Murder City Page 28