Eliot chose a good time to get hitched again: he was seeing a revival of hero worship in the press after his handling of the United Auto Workers strike that had idled the Fisher Body plant at Coit Road and East 140th Street. On July 31, the nationwide strike had turned violent in Cleveland when five thousand union men arrived at the entrance to the General Motors factory. Carrying clubs and wearing papier-mâché helmets, they descended on non-striking workers heading into the plant. Horrific screams of pain and fear ripped the morning air; men trying to escape slipped in pools of blood. One replacement worker crawled under a parked sedan. Union men promptly set the car on fire. Eliot, unarmed, waded into the melee with a phalanx of officers. He ordered his men not to unholster their guns. Two Ohio National Guard officers on “observation duty” during the clash singled out Eliot for his leadership in the midst of battle. “Although members of the Cleveland Safety Department exercised rare qualities of patience and restraint under trying circumstances, when the need arose their prompt militancy and courage left nothing to be desired,” they wrote in a report to the guard’s adjutant general. Once the battle had been brought under control, Eliot declared an exclusion zone around the plant in all directions, with the exception of a nearby restaurant where the UAW’s local leader had set up his unofficial headquarters. Eliot allowed up to ten union men in the restaurant at a time. That decision, criticized by police commanders in internal memos, would prove effective. Detroit and other cities continued to endure strike violence in the days ahead, but Cleveland stayed quiet. “City Acts to Keep Peace in Strike,” the Plain Dealer triumphantly proclaimed across its front page.
This latest wave of press approval did not ease Eliot’s mind about his recent nuptials. Worried that his divorce and quick remarriage reflected poorly on his character, he told people as little as possible about his relationship with Evaline. Cleveland’s newspapers reported that the Nesses married in Chicago, where the bride, a native Chicagoan, was “a friend of Mr. Ness’ family.” The papers also revealed that the couple had met “several years before” through Eliot’s sisters. What could be more wholesome than that? The problem was, none of it was true. They actually married in Greenup, Kentucky, a town Eliot discovered during his time with the ATU in Cincinnati. (One Greenup booster boasted that the tiny town on the Ohio border was “known for its beautiful women, fast horses and good whiskey.”) Plus, Evaline was born in Ohio, not Chicago, and she hadn’t yet met Eliot’s family. Evaline recognized what drove her new husband’s small lies. She, too, was often ashamed of her choices, her desires. She feared what people thought of her. She and Eliot were kindred spirits in this way. She stuck to her husband’s talking points. “I’m lucky in my profession because it’s the kind of work that doesn’t interfere with being a housewife too,” she told the Plain Dealer.
Eliot’s social circle found Evaline as charming as the reporters did, but some were wary. “Evaline may have already been in the picture when Eliot and Edna separated,” one friend suspected. No one had any way of knowing that for sure, but Eliot’s new girl certainly fit the popular conception of a home wrecker. “Edna was an ordinary, simple person,” the friend said. “Evaline was striking in appearance, even dramatic.”
Some observers—and there were a lot of observers of the relationship early on—thought her desperate for attention. One said that “Evaline liked being Eliot’s wife when he was a famous and influential public official. . . . She liked his prominence and power and fame.” This was a common, catty misreading of Evaline at the time. She became outgoing when she drank, and she drank so she could keep it together when she found herself stuck in her husband’s spotlight. Evaline remembered loving the attention at first, “because I felt like a star. But I hated it, too. It meant my having to make speeches to women’s groups, appear before book clubs, hand out medals to Girl Scouts when they had jamborees—all those things that a public figure’s wife is expected to do. I was no good at it.” In fact, her experience as a public man’s wife soon made her gun-shy, tetchy. This would harden into intransigence later in life, even though by then the spotlight had found her for her own accomplishments, not Eliot’s. Ann Durell, who became her editor in the 1950s when Evaline took up writing and illustrating children’s books, recalled that any kind of public appearance was “sheer torture” for her. For years Durell warded off librarians and event bookers, telling them: “She says the only kind of communicating that she can do is through her books!”
Evaline probably was an alcoholic before she met Eliot, and the new marriage didn’t help. Their entire lives together revolved around drinking. Years later, she described her relationship with Eliot as “steamy”—but not in the good, sexually charged sense of the word. “She was an interesting, generous, creative person when she was sober,” recalled Marni Greenberg, her step-granddaughter. “And she was very unpleasant and confrontational when she was drunk.”
Eliot, bumping up against the unpleasantness under Evaline’s glossy surface, did his best to make her happy. Because he had his own struggles with black moods, he thought he understood her. Material possessions never meant much to him, but he thought they might keep his wife’s busy brain occupied. He bought her a new car every year. And he moved them into a fortress-like, four-story boathouse in the swank Clifton Park Lagoon, the deepest mooring place on Lake Erie. Since they were right on the water, he also bought her a speedboat, which Evaline cranked up to its 35-mile-per-hour limit whenever she could. In the early years of their marriage, she would often zip over to East Ninth Street in the boat to pick up her husband after work and ferry him home.
Eliot loved that his wife was an artist. He encouraged her to submit her work to galleries and for competitions. He bought her a Mary Cassatt art book for Christmas, inscribing it, “To my wonderful and beautiful wife, the modern Mary Cassatt.” Still, Evaline struggled with her confidence. She feared she had wasted her time at the Art Institute of Chicago, her alma mater, that she should have become a librarian or a teacher—or nothing at all. She had a breakthrough with a painting that was accepted in the May Show, a seminude, unofficial self-portrait called Sunning. (Evaline loved to lie out in the sun wearing as little as possible.) The work, with its long, blackened limbs stretched out across the canvas like a spider on its web, was by turns erotic, dreamy, and disturbing, depending on the viewer’s frame of mind. The Plain Dealer listed Sunning among works in the show “worthy of special notice,” but the painting failed to secure a prize and Evaline’s momentum once again faltered. She had set up her easel in a small, glass-enclosed room in the boathouse that looked out at the lake, but day after day inspiration failed to come. “I floundered, all sense of direction lost,” she wrote. “I despaired of ever becoming an artist.”
A regular diet of drinking and dancing didn’t help her artistic ambitions, but it did push her despair into the background for a while. She flirted brazenly with Eliot’s colleagues, friends, city officials, waiters. At the Vogue Room and the Terrace Room, Evaline would take to the dance floor with anyone who would have her—which was everyone. She danced with a charming looseness, draping herself on her partner’s hips and arms in her own embryonic version of dirty dancing. Eliot didn’t seem to mind. “Eliot was a very social person who enjoyed partying with friends after work and also liked being married,” remembered his aide, Arnold Sagalyn. Meaning, he put up with a lot. Eliot distracted himself from the more difficult aspects of his life with Evaline by redirecting his focus. He became a bit of a mother hen to Sagalyn, for one. Eliot had hired the gangly, moonfaced kid straight out of Oberlin College after Sagalyn had interviewed him for his senior paper, titled “Eliot Ness in Cleveland.” It didn’t matter that this well-brought-up Jewish boy from Springfield, Massachusetts, had no law-enforcement experience. Eliot saw something in him. And sure enough, the intelligent, imaginative Sagalyn proved to be a fast learner and exceptionally hardworking. So now Eliot worried over his unattached protégé, who often worked deep into the nig
ht with him. He began inviting him to parties at the boathouse. “I developed a warm personal relationship with both Eliot and Evaline,” Sagalyn remembered. “I was a steady visitor at their evening gatherings, where I made myself useful making and serving drinks and hors d’oeuvres.” He quickly learned that this entrée to the boss’s personal life came with responsibilities. “Eliot was an extremely newsworthy public figure in Cleveland, and virtually anything he said or did was of interest and written about in the daily papers,” Sagalyn recalled. That meant anyone with a close relationship with him took an oath of sorts. “I never talked about him, or in any other way revealed anything I heard or saw that might adversely affect or embarrass him,” Sagalyn said. “I also made it a policy not to write anything about him or to describe in detail any of my own activities with anyone, including my family and friends.” This could be a trial, because to young Arnold Sagalyn, Mr. and Mrs. Eliot Ness were the most fascinating, most sophisticated couple he had ever known.
They certainly knew how to have fun. Eliot’s childlike giggle and Evaline’s cannonball guffaw cut through the boathouse every Monday night, when they had a standing party at Clifton Park Lagoon. Evaline wasn’t the only one busting a gut at every one of Eliot’s witticisms. “He was a party man, a party man,” remembered Corinne Lawson, his longtime housekeeper. “And all the women were just crazy about him.”
***
Ultimately, the fun wasn’t enough. Cracks began to appear in the marriage. Evaline may have been impressed by Eliot’s low-key amiability, his desire to always remain in control and reasonable, but it also infuriated her. She needed the dramatic gesture: to be shaken or shouted down or boxed about the ears. That was passion. That was life. And so their marriage heaved and simmered. Sometimes, when Evaline was in one of her black moods, Eliot would simply stay away from her—for days. That was easy enough. He made more time for a personal life now than he had during his marriage to Edna, but he still worked very long hours. And Evaline also worked, churning out advertising drawings for various local stores. She did her best work after dark, which meant Eliot sometimes found himself on his own whether he liked it or not. This was just as well, for Evaline couldn’t manage even the most basic domestic tasks expected of a wife. One night, while trying to prepare dinner for a quiet evening with her husband, she knocked over a pot of boiling water while distracted. She ended up with nasty burns on her feet that required a trip to the doctor and an extended convalescence.
The kitchen accident could be seen as an omen. “Normal life” was simply beyond this unusual couple. Eliot had enjoyed success after success as safety director, and he had an alluring, intelligent wife, but a few close friends began to realize that something was deeply wrong. Eliot no longer fought his fatigue and stress by zoning out at home. He had reached the final, inevitable stage of mental burnout: recklessness. He began to slip away from work for long lunches that sometimes left him late for appointments. Evaline, unable to reach him in the middle of the day, suspected the worst. Years later she would tell a family member that he “screwed everything in a skirt.” His wife’s suspicions led Eliot to try to be more conscious of time. One day he blasted through a red light in his sedan, causing a pedestrian stepping into the street to jump back and scream at him in fury. Eliot pulled to the curb, climbed out of his car, and marched back to the man—perhaps to apologize, perhaps to give him the high hat. Whatever Eliot’s aim, the man attacked him, sending the public safety director crashing to the pavement. This brought a policeman hustling to his aid, but Eliot refused to file a complaint or even give his name. He hurried away.
Even stranger than midday brawling, Eliot began playing unfunny practical jokes. He hired an actor to pretend to be a drug pusher at a restaurant where he was having a working lunch with Governor Martin Davey. He egged the actor on until the “drug pusher” got into a shoving match with a man at the bar, sending the governor fleeing out the back to avoid the press. “Eliot had pulled that stunt on a couple of other people, but doing it to the governor was going a little overboard,” said Dan Moore, the state securities commissioner and Eliot’s friend. Another time, having belatedly learned that Michael Harwood had secretly recorded one of the witnesses in his trial, Eliot bugged the boathouse before a party, carefully hiding microphones in every room. He couldn’t help himself: technology fascinated him, and he probably wanted to know if Harwood’s plan could have worked. “When the party was nearing the end, he told us what he had done, and he began to play back the recording,” recalled Marion Kelly, a journalist and friend. “On it we heard women talking with other women’s husbands. He managed to pick up quite a lot, and even though it stopped short of scandal, it wasn’t a very nice thing to do. People were not amused.”
Drink had begun to muddy Eliot’s judgment, but the weird pranks he pulled weren’t enough to keep partiers from putting the Nesses on their invitation lists. Eliot and Evaline’s wit and bonhomie were too good. And there was always the thrill that came with knowing anything might happen. Evaline even led a skinny-dipping expedition in the lake one night after Eliot was called away on business. Just tossed her dress over her head and bounded into the water, leaving all the guests slack-jawed and wondering what to do. (The drunkest ones followed, of course.) The impromptu swim no doubt was a fuck-you to Eliot. He would frequently leave midparty when a call came in—the call was “inevitable,” remembered Viktor Schreckengost, who traveled the same party circuit. That meant if the Nesses were the hosts, Evaline would suddenly find herself running the show on her own. And if they were guests, she would have to bum a ride home from another partygoer. Making it worse, Eliot often took a lucky reveler—anyone who happened to be standing there when Eliot received the call—for the high-speed, siren-screaming ride to the crime scene, an experience the chosen one would relive at parties for weeks to come. Schreckengost went along once. So did another artist, Bill McVey, who had befriended Eliot. And Jo Chamberlin, the brother of Eliot’s assistant. “If something was happening,” remembered Chamberlin, “he’d say, ‘We’d better go take a look,’ and the next thing you know he’d be across town, and whoever happened to be with him went sailing along, too.” Whoever happened to be with him except Evaline, that is. Eliot knew his wife liked excitement as much as anyone, and that she hated to be left out, but he never invited her along for the ride. It was still a man’s world.
CHAPTER 29
Clearing House
Captain Michael Blackwell picked up the scent each day outside Russo’s Drug Store, or Bontempo’s Confectionery, or sometimes Vince Dylinski’s Trocadero Club. These were policy chieftain Frank Hoge’s favorite hangouts.
Hoge and his bodyguard would alight sometime in the afternoon and clamber into one of his big touring sedans. Whether or not he had spotted Blackwell, Hoge acted as if he had a police tail. The sedan frequently and unexpectedly veered across lanes and jerked into turns. It would head west for miles before turning around and crossing the city again. The destination was always the same: the home of Miss Myrtle Taylor, the Hill gang’s bookkeeper. They made sure that staking out Taylor wasn’t easy. She kept moving to new digs.
Hoge, of course, always knew where she was. The car would pull up, the small, slim black woman would duck into the backseat, and the evasive maneuvers would begin again. At a prearranged spot, never the same as the day or the week before, they’d even switch to another car (or maybe not) and the two identical sedans would head in different directions.
If they knew Blackwell was behind them and they couldn’t shake him, they’d drive in circles, maybe pick up some lunch, and then deposit Taylor back at home. If they thought they were in the clear, they’d blast past the city limits to meet up for the “clearing house”—the daily money count—with other members of the gambling racket. The gangsters always counted the “take” together and checked the books together, so everyone could keep an eye on one another.
The meeting always took place in the suburbs. They used
to do it in the city, where the bulk of the business was, but Eliot’s detectives—and especially Captain Blackwell—had made convenience impossible. The “home rule” policy that allowed casinos to thrive in the ’burbs also made it much safer for the stacks of cash the gang’s gambling racket generated throughout the city.
The Mob had to be especially careful these days, ever since Lieutenant Ernest Molnar had been found out. For more than a year, Molnar had been in charge of finding the clearing-house meeting. He never managed to do so, even though he usually knew where it was. Eliot finally figured out what was going on. He had his investigators track Molnar, and they discovered the lieutenant was taking money from the two Angelos and running interference for them. It was a painful revelation for Eliot. Molnar had been his poster boy for the new Cleveland police; Eliot had promoted him and talked him up in the press for years. But nothing surprised the safety director anymore. He knew almost anyone could be corrupted. He called Molnar into his office and confronted him. The always ebullient lieutenant lost his smile. After some hemming and hawing, he admitted it. Eliot made him disgorge every penny that he knew the policeman had taken. Eliot turned over the $770 to Frank Cullitan, but he did not arrest Molnar. Cullitan didn’t think they had the evidence. So like Barney Cloonan when the Prohibition Bureau had discovered his treachery, the lieutenant stayed on the payroll after being found out. He even prospered. Molnar’s perfidy stayed between him, Eliot, the Unknowns, and Cullitan, and so an unsuspecting Chief Matowitz tapped him to head the vice bureau. Blackwell, another Ness protégé and an officer known for his honesty, took over the gambling investigation.
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