For Evaline, returning “home” was the worst part of Eliot’s work. Wartime mobilization had obliterated almost every niggling vestige of the Great Depression; by the second year of the war the federal budget on its own exceeded the nation’s total gross national product from just a decade before. Lingering high unemployment disappeared completely across the country. But the capital city boomed like nowhere else. The population of the metropolitan area had doubled since 1930 and continued to rise fast. And all the newcomers seemed to be women—eager single women, married women whose husbands were in Europe or the Pacific, and even teenage girls looking for adventure. Washington had become a modern-day Amazon nation. Women drove cabs, operated jackhammers, put out fires, asked “Which floor?” when you stepped into an elevator. Lured by splashy employment ads that ran in all the glossy national magazines, the women arrived day after day, heading directly from Union Station to a massive intake department that, working with very nongovernmental efficiency, parceled them out to federal agencies as quickly as the newcomers proved they could type.
The growth was so explosive and continuous that the women found there was no place for them to live. The city issued more than fifteen hundred building permits each month, and yet it seemed to barely put a dent in the housing shortage. Women would arrive on trains in the morning, and by the afternoon they’d be working at a government agency they hadn’t known existed before they walked in the door. That night they’d sleep on the couch in the office’s lobby. When they finally got a day off to look for a room, they had no way to get around. The city had spread outward so rapidly that you couldn’t possibly walk from place to place. And stepping onto a bus was like falling into a black hole. Rush hour didn’t exist; traffic was paralyzed almost around the clock.
This was the chaos to which Eliot and Evaline returned time and again. Coming out of the train station, they would store their luggage in a locker, and then Eliot would head to his office while Evaline began searching for a room. The government had forced the city’s hotels to restrict bookings—after three consecutive nights, you were out on the street—to help ease the jam-up. But a room seeker had no way to know which hotels would have availability on a given day or how many people were seeking to claim the available spots. Evaline usually ended up sitting on park benches for hours, grinding her teeth as she waited for a room to open up. She hated the waiting, hated the uncertainty of it. It made her even angrier when she learned that many well-to-do “dollar-a-year” men working in the federal bureaucracy stayed on in suites for months at a time by slipping the room clerk a little something extra every week, or, better yet, by having a congressman friend call the hotel’s manager. Eliot wasn’t willing to do either, not even for Christmas week. Frustration would build up until Evaline could barely stand to be in her own skin. “I would have said ‘War is Hell!’ if General Sherman hadn’t already said it,” she joked years later about this period, long after the anger—but not the memory of it—had burned off.
Waiting for hotel rooms wasn’t her only source of frustration. She felt “useless.” She had no place to paint, no commercial assignments to work on, nothing to do but play secretary for Eliot on his trips to military bases. The war effort, visible everywhere around her, made her feel guilty and selfish. Women rushed past her on the street every day, on their way to important jobs. Every woman in the capital seemed to be in uniform. It was a sign of the new feminism. “The uniform,” wrote Vogue, “stands for our spine of purpose . . . it is time to stop all the useless little gestures, to stop being the Little Woman and be women.” That sounded good to Evaline. The outbreak of war gave focus and meaning to her interminable, opaque longing to belong. She finally decided to join the American Women’s Voluntary Services, which was on its way to becoming the largest wartime women’s service organization in the country. One of the reasons for its success: volunteers had eight attractive uniforms to choose from. The AWVS girl was immediately identifiable, a wartime trendsetter. Evaline cut her hair short and classically, “up off the neck,” as directed, and got to work. “I paid for a snappy navy-blue uniform with brass buttons and a hat to match,” she remembered. “I volunteered our car and gas rations and drove admirals, generals and lesser brass here and there, waited for them, and drove them back again.”
Eliot was supportive—at first. He liked that his wife had become involved in the war effort—he thought it only right—but he also knew that all was not well in their marriage. When he realized she was spending her evenings escorting self-important officers to cocktail parties and that she wouldn’t be going with him on trips anymore, he told her to quit. Evaline did not like being told what to do, but she also couldn’t have been surprised by the demand. No doubt she flirted with her admirals and generals and lesser brass. She couldn’t help herself. Her sex appeal was important to her; it always would be. She insisted to Eliot that she usually waited out in the car during the soirees, but that could have given him only more reason to worry. His wife was unhappy and lonely, and with the lodging shortage in DC, the automobile had become the favored trysting spot not just for teenagers but for everyone. He put his foot down. She would have to find another way to occupy herself.
“Go to art school,” he told her, a knee-jerk response. “If Renoir could paint through two wars, you are allowed to paint through one.”*
“Some comparison—Renoir and me . . . me and Renoir,” Evaline thought. But she did it. She had recently stumbled upon the Corcoran School of Art “tucked between the exhibition rooms” of the Corcoran Gallery. It was a small operation, with just five artists on the faculty, nothing at all like her ambitious, wide-ranging alma mater, the Art Institute of Chicago. And that was just fine with her. It seemed like a comfortable little school, almost like it needed her. In October 1943, she put down $35 to enroll in unlimited “Day Life” classes and another $2 for locker number 256 to store her equipment. Just like that, she was a student again.
***
Going back to school turned out to be exactly what she needed.
“As I climbed the steps to my first class,” Evaline recalled later, “I couldn’t have guessed what lay ahead: that day the walls of Jericho came down . . . the Red Sea parted . . . manna fell from Heaven! All because I met the right teacher at the right time.”
The teacher was Richard Lahey, a romantic, white-haired Irishman who had made the unlikely transition from newspaper cartoonist to respected painter and art instructor. The fifty-year-old Lahey was having a bad war. All of his best students had joined the military, leaving him with dotty old ladies and one untalented hunchback the army wouldn’t take. So he quickly homed in on Evaline. Her work was uncertain, but it also showed great promise—and just enough maturity to make her passion for art useful. He hovered behind her during class, watching her strokes, her decision-making. He kept her after class for one-on-one discussions and pep talks. The attention quickly paid off. “My painting flourished because he urged me to experiment,” she recalled. “With his sensitive perception, he led me to express feelings that I never knew I had.”
Evaline believed she was finally becoming a real and true artist. “It was here that everything gelled for me,” she said of her work at Corcoran. She spent night after night lost in her painting. It provided a “peace and enjoyment” she hadn’t been able to find through any other activity, not even drinking. At the end of the term, she won the school’s highest award for painting—which came with a $50 prize—in a competition open to students and faculty alike.
Eliot had always encouraged his wife’s artistic ambitions, but he couldn’t take this new Evaline. His wife had changed, suddenly and dramatically. “He said I was no longer the woman he married,” she recalled. Eliot thought she’d become “dull.” For the first time in Evaline’s adult life, that word might actually have applied. Creating art had become her only interest. She had to create, and she did so constantly, in every kind of medium. Her main focus was painting, but she also wor
ked in woodcutting, lithography, etching. She found the physicality involved with woodcutting perfect for taking out her frustrations. She loved the “infinite possibilities for making texture in wood by pounding, gluing, scratching. Nails, screws, paper clips, wire mesh, or anything else which will make a dent are for pounding.”
***
Through Lahey’s guidance Evaline began to focus anew on the human form. She had learned years before at the Art Institute of Chicago that any decent artist could master technique. “It was adding part of yourself to your work that made the difference.” That was where she’d always come up blank. That was what had kept her work no more than adequate, solidly competent but uninspired. Now that elusive inspiration had arrived. She realized she must create for herself, and only for herself, not for anyone else’s approval.
The turning point came in a life-drawing course. On the first day of the spring term, a young woman entered the classroom, carefully disrobed, and stood before the artists. This was nothing unusual. Even some of the school’s students earned cigarette money by posing in the nude for classes. But something about this woman was different. Evaline stared at her dark hair, her heavy breasts, her long legs and big feet. She felt herself blushing. The woman, so comfortable with her body, with her nakedness, fascinated her. No, it was more than that. Evaline was “extremely attracted to her.”
She tried hard to reproduce the woman on her sketchpad, but it didn’t work. She threw page after page to the floor. Her newfound confidence as an artist couldn’t help her with this assignment; there was no way art could satisfy the artist. At the end of class one day she approached the model. The woman never ducked into an empty room to change. She brought her clothes in a bag, and as the students filed out, she stood in a corner, adjusting her slip, hiking up her dress. She turned and smiled at Evaline.
“In order to have that beauty I saw in her, I had to have her,” Evaline would tell a friend years later. “So I left Eliot to be with her.”
***
The Allies were slowly making up ground in Europe and the Pacific, but for Eliot, the good news in the papers didn’t penetrate. He had begun to slip into depression again. A friend from Cleveland, in Washington on business, was shocked at the former safety director’s appearance. The discipline of Eliot’s face—so stark and intense early in his career—had broken down. He looked old and bloated and worn out.
He was hardly alone. Heavy drinking had become epidemic in the District of Columbia. The Allies may have gained some momentum, but it was still a cataclysmic world war, with no end in sight. After the disaster of Prohibition and the economic catastrophe that swallowed the 1930s, you couldn’t help but see a world falling apart forever. Millions of people had been hollowed out by the Depression; many would never emotionally recover from it. The world war, the second in twenty years, would exact an even greater toll. Eliot followed the crowd to the bar every evening to try to forget it all. He began to black out, and wake up at the office the next morning in a rumpled suit.
Careening headlong into middle age, professionally adrift, he needed his wife as never before—but it was too late. Evaline got up one morning when Eliot was out of town and slipped on trousers and her favorite blouse. She put her champagne bucket and mink coat in their Cadillac, left everything else, and pointed the car north. Her new lover had decided to move to New England, and Evaline decided to follow her. The odd items she chose to take with her suggest she was not acting entirely rationally, but, out on the open road, she felt a weight lift off of her. She didn’t tell Eliot she was leaving. It would be days before he realized she wasn’t coming back.
In October 1945, nearly a year after Evaline had taken her bucket and left, Eliot quietly returned to Cleveland and filed for divorce, citing “gross neglect and extreme cruelty.” The legal proceedings must have mortified him. In court documents, he said he was seeking a divorce because his wife “refused to live with her husband here because she wanted to study art in Maine under the tutelage of a Cleveland artist.” Worse, he was forced to testify that he’d been cuckolded, that there was “another person” in Evaline’s life. Eliot left town straight from the courthouse.
Reporters rushed to the county clerk’s office when word of the divorce petition reached the city’s newsrooms. Three years after he had left the safety director’s office and Cleveland, Eliot Ness continued to be newsworthy—especially if it involved scandal. The hacks verified that the $11 fee had been paid, but they found no paperwork for the divorce. Eliot still had friends in the county bureaucracy. An almighty roar went up, the outraged cry of a frustrated reportorial herd on deadline. The reporters cornered County Clerk Leonard Fuerst and demanded to know where the petition was. “As far as we’re concerned, it was filed properly and indexed,” he said.
“Where is it, then?” a reporter demanded.
“Isn’t it in the files?” he responded defensively—or evasively. “Nothing is ever hidden from anybody.”
In their next editions, the newspapers tried to raise a stink about the “concealment” of court papers. “The mystery of Eliot Ness’s missing divorce petition apparently will remain a mystery at Lakeside Avenue Courthouse,” the Plain Dealer grumbled. “No official wants to ask questions or hunt for it.”
This left a very public information void. No one had any idea what had gone wrong with the city’s one-time golden couple. Their Cleveland friends had thought they were happy together. They recalled that Eliot always called Evaline “Doll” and gazed lovingly at her, and that Evaline’s barking laugh resounded with every quip he offered up. She’d sketched sweet domestic portraits of her husband that showed him lounging around their home, attractively lost in thought. Even Sagalyn, witness to the marriage in Washington, believed they had “a good and close relationship.” He thought they were the perfect couple. “It was a mystery to me why they broke up,” he said.
Of course, there had been hints for those paying close attention. Eliot’s friend Marjorie Mutersbaugh remembered Evaline as “a kind woman, gregarious and fun. She loved Eliot for who he was, but it always seemed more like they were best friends or buddies than husband and wife.” And then there was the leggy blond woman at Evaline’s side for several months in 1940 and ’41. Evaline introduced the blond as her bodyguard, though she never said why she needed a private protector—especially when Eliot had the whole police department at his command. The woman claimed to be married—to a dwarf who lived in Florida. No one knew whether she was joking. One night, Eliot invited “a seven-foot-tall woman” to one of their Monday night parties at the boathouse, a silly (or petulant) jab at his wife’s close companion.
But lesbianism was too far “out there” for it to cross anyone’s mind as a possibility. Homosexuality was a taboo subject. It didn’t exist in polite society. And besides, there was a better explanation for the marriage’s demise. Rumors of Eliot’s womanizing had first come up in Cleveland when he and Edna separated and he began going over to the big hotels after work to drink and dance. Now, even though he’d left public office in the city, the local press felt duty-bound to write about his partying ways. “His social habits, which included living in a Lakewood boathouse and entertaining in a most sophisticated manner, had tongues wagging most of the time,” wrote the Plain Dealer’s Bud Silverman. The News reported that he’d had an unusually close relationship with one of his secretaries at city hall.
His friends would defend him against such rumors for years—even long after his death. In 1973, Neil McGill, at ninety, reacted in outrage to a proposed article about Eliot that claimed “drink and women were his downfall.” In a private letter to Cleveland Press editor Thomas L. Boardman, he wrote that he had worked closely with Eliot for years and wished “to assert without equivocation, mental reservation or any doubt in my mind that nothing could be further from the truth.” He added: “I can say from personal knowledge and observation that Eliot Ness was not a heavy drinker or a moderate drinker. T
he fact is that Ness was a light drinker. With regard to women I never had any information or indication that Ness had an interest in women excepting his own wife. It is unfortunate that so many years after his death anyone would undertake to assassinate the fine character of Eliot Ness even for profit.” More than three decades after that rousing defense, Arnold Sagalyn, at ninety-four, insisted Eliot didn’t have the time—and was too well known—to mess around with women while he was safety director. “Where could he go with a woman?” he said. “Everyone recognized him. And I always knew where he was.”
That line of reasoning might have held up during Eliot’s tenure in Cleveland, but of course the war years were a different matter. As the Social Protection director he traveled to dozens of cities and towns, usually without Evaline. He would later boast that he was “attached to the Canadian army in 1944 and visited every province in Canada.” He had the opportunity to stray like he never had before, meeting anxious war brides and bored waitresses across the land. His friend Marion Kelly recalled that “Eliot had a tremendous line”—and there had never been a better time for a tremendous line. Illicit romance had suddenly become socially acceptable. People didn’t come right out and say that, but everyone understood. It was the price of winning the war. “The entire female population was for an odd slip of time effectively single,” pointed out the journalist Betsy Israel. “No one knew if their fiancés, boyfriends, lovers would ever return.”
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