Eliot believed his own official warnings about the risks of promiscuity, but he was hardly a prude. He read the work of the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, coiner of the phrase “sexual revolution,” in an effort to understand the arguments against complete suppression of prostitution. Reich, who studied under Sigmund Freud, believed that eye-popping orgasms were the best path to physical and emotional wellbeing. He also believed prostitution should be legal—indeed, that it should be encouraged, socially legitimized. Healthy, thoughtful sex should take the place of shameful sex or no sex. “Reich shared the moralist’s distaste for the kind of sexuality that flourished in brothels,” wrote the critic and essayist Kenneth Tynan. “He distinguished between primary drives, which were natural and wholly benevolent, and unnatural or secondary drives, which came into being when primary drives were frustrated.” Reich believed that urges like sadism or masochism “were not biologically innate in man, as Freud was tending to believe; instead they were caused by the repression of basic desires that were inherently life-enhancing.”*
For Eliot, as with so many other people, alcohol piqued those inherently life-enhancing desires. And he was drinking more and more during the war years. A snapshot from this period finds Eliot in a dark bar, gazing into the mists, eyelids closing like sodden umbrellas. Leaning toward him but looking warily at the camera is a woman who is not his wife. She sports a smart hat and an authoritative half profile. Her hand is extended on the table, reaching for Eliot’s hand—or maybe she’s reaching for her drink. Eliot would realize that he looked a bit out of it in the photo. He scribbled on it, “The flash light got me!! It was 10:30 a.m. and the first drink—and that’s my story.”
CHAPTER 33
Starting Over
When the war began to wind down, Eliot decided to return to Cleveland. He was starting over and determined to set aside his law-enforcement career and remake himself into a businessman. His wartime work had been low profile but successful. He had closed down more than seven hundred red-light districts and sent hundreds of prostitutes to training camps to learn vocational skills. When he took over the Social Protection Division, prostitutes were responsible for 75 percent of soldiers’ venereal-disease infections. Two years later, that infection rate had dropped to 20 percent, leading the director of Community War Services, Mark A. McCloskey, to tell him: “You had one of wartime’s tough jobs. You have done it well.” But Eliot knew all along it was a wartime job only, not a career. And by this point he wanted to make some real money, build up a nest egg for his old age. So when an opportunity arose at the Diebold Company—he’d been acquainted with the controlling Rex family for years—he jumped at it. He would be chairman of the board of the Canton, Ohio–based safe maker. Never one to do anything halfway, he also picked up a job on the side, becoming vice president of the Middle East Company, a new, small-time import-export business based in Cleveland. He submitted his resignation to McCloskey two months after D-Day.
Eliot’s old crowd in Cleveland wasn’t surprised when he returned to town with an impressive new career in the private sector. Everyone had figured he’d end up in an executive suite sooner or later. They were surprised, however, that he brought with him an impressive new wife. As the newspapers made all too clear, this third marriage for Eliot came soon after his second divorce—very soon. Eliot was granted a divorce from Evaline on November 17, 1945. Two months later, he married Elisabeth Andersen Seaver. Neither Betty nor Eliot ever revealed when exactly their relationship started, but it undoubtedly became serious sometime during the latter stages of the war, when they were both living in Washington. (Betty’s husband, Hugh, had a wartime job in the capital, while she made camouflage at a factory thirty miles away in Baltimore.) The marriage may have surprised their friends but it had been a long time coming. After catching sight of him from her perch above the grounds of the Great Lakes Exposition in 1936, the young sculptor had decided she wanted to meet Cleveland’s dashing safety director, and so a few weeks later she staged an introduction—without their respective spouses in attendance—through New Deal bureaucrat Dan Moore and his artist wife. Eliot turned out to be even more interesting than she expected. She found herself drawn to his “delightful, off-beat sense of humor.” He wasn’t anything like his reputation as an intense, steely-eyed crime-buster. “He laughed easily and a lot,” she recalled of that first meeting. He didn’t talk much about his “old adventures” in Chicago, but when they did come up, Betty said, “his stories were very funny, and usually on himself.” She would admit years later that she fell for him immediately.
By the time they married, nearly a decade later, Eliot wasn’t dashing anymore—age and booze had softened his face into a lumpy pillow—but he was sweet and kind, and that was exactly what she needed. Marjorie Mutersbaugh called them “so congenial.” Years later Betty told her she had never been so happy in her life as when she was married to Eliot.
Hugh and Betty’s divorce became final on January 10, 1946, two weeks before she and Eliot married. Upon returning to Cleveland, however, Betty told friends there had been no romance between her and Eliot until both of their marriages had officially ended. Being seen as a respectable woman meant a lot to her. Betty had left Hugh in August 1943, but she couldn’t bring herself to file for divorce. She feared her parents’ opinion of her. Hugh eventually filed himself, citing abandonment, “gross neglect of duty, and extreme cruelty.” (He filed the petition on November 15, 1945, two days before Eliot and Evaline’s divorce was granted.) There were whispers that Hugh, known for his temper, had banged Betty around some, but they were only rumors. Something someone heard from somebody. Such a harsh charge never could be traced back to Betty. Members of Cleveland’s art and social scene circulated the story because, well, there had to be a reason. People didn’t get divorced simply because they had drifted apart or squabbled a lot.
It wasn’t just Betty’s respectability that appealed to Eliot. At thirty-nine years old, she was beautiful in the kind of natural, unadulterated way Evaline never could be. She had been a beautiful child, with a perfect round face and large, heartbreaking eyes, and she never grew out of it. Even more remarkable was how little her striking good looks seemed to mean to her. She had a boyish, practical stride, artless compared to Evaline’s, but seductive, too, the willful amateurishness of it. She pulled her hair back into a bun even for formal occasions. Betty, not Evaline, was born to be a model, but doing such a thing never crossed her mind when she was growing up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She fished. She hunted with her daddy. She wore overalls around the house and didn’t mind getting plaster in her hair and clothes when she worked in the high school’s art studio.
This ingrained lack of affect faced a challenge once she moved to the big city to attend the Cleveland School of Art. Her tiny frame and pixie smile caught the Jazz Age zeitgeist, and she soon came across people who nudged—or shoved—her in a new direction. Not long after Betty landed in Cleveland, the city’s foremost art photographer, Clifford Norton, convinced her to pose. The eighteen-year-old immediately became his favorite subject. Teachers and students at the school asked her to pose for them, too, and she always obliged. She had been taught never to be rude.
All of this attention inevitably led to an evolution in her look. She chopped her unruly long hair into a pageboy. She squeezed into form-fitting dresses provided by her photographer patron. Men did double takes in the street. The more ambitious mugs reversed course midstride and chased her down.
That she had transformed herself wouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone who knew her back in South Dakota. She had always loved to create, to make something new and alive out of whatever she had at hand—blank pieces of paper or lumps of clay or herself. Her father, somewhat befuddled by his daughter’s talent, agreed to send his little Betty Lee away to school because he didn’t know what else to do with her. She had too much ambition to marry a farmer and settle down in Sioux Falls. In 1924, he prevailed upon J. A. Derome,
an esteemed local clergyman and newspaper editor, to write a letter of recommendation for Betty to the Cleveland School of Art. Derome wrote, “Miss Andersen is peculiarly gifted along the lines of art, especially in sculpture. I have no doubt she has before her a brilliant future as an artist.”
The Reverend Derome’s words would soon appear prophetic. Betty was an excellent student in Cleveland, and she made a splash right out of art school. She won first-place awards time and again at the May Show. Her winning piece for the 1932 show sold for a jaw-dropping $1,500. Later that year, New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company hired her to produce a statuette of its premiere danseuse, Rita De Leporte. Four years later, she landed the sculpture commission for the Great Lakes Exposition. By then she was one half of a celebrated artistic couple, having married Hugh Seaver, a well-known watercolorist. But in the teeth of the Great Depression, success proved difficult to maintain. Despite continued raves for their work, commissions dried up for the Seavers; their paintings and sculptures sold at galleries for less and less—and then not at all. Betty followed her husband to Minneapolis, then to Michigan (where she studied under the great sculptor Carl Milles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art). The wanderlust was for naught: Hugh couldn’t find a secure teaching position anywhere, nor could Betty get her career momentum back. Finally, the couple returned to Cleveland, where their struggles continued. Childless, with their careers floundering, the marriage started to fall apart.
The couple ended up on the city’s relief rolls, until Betty landed a job with the Works Progress Administration’s ceramics project, headed by the artist Edris Eckhardt, with whom she’d once worked at the now-defunct Cowan Pottery. Betty considered herself lucky to be earning $109 a month making art for public schools and government buildings, but the WPA proved to be a contentious place to work. Extreme dysfunction and internecine battles—Eckhardt faced near-constant threats of sit-down strikes from her artists—soured Betty on continuing her career. By the time war broke out and she and Hugh moved to Washington, she wanted nothing more than to be a wife and a mother.
Now, with a new husband and both the Depression and the war in the past, Betty would get her wish. In January 1947, a year after she and Eliot married, the couple adopted a baby boy. They named him Robert. Eliot had wanted to be a father for years, and now finally he felt like he had the time for it. Just days after he and Betty brought Robert home, Eliot received a jolt from his morning paper. His long-ago nemesis, Al Capone, had died of a heart attack at his estate in Florida. The former gangster, released from prison in 1939 and suffering from advanced syphilis, was forty-eight years old.
CHAPTER 34
Ness Is Necessary
Eliot tried to make the best of a bad situation.
He hired a band to sit in an open car and bang out jaunty tunes as the car rolled slowly down the street. Behind the band came a shiny new automobile with Eliot’s picture stuck on every available surface. A local radio personality, George Kilbride, rode in a truck with a large megaphone strapped to the top. He called himself the “Voice of Tomorrow.” Next came another open car, this one with Eliot and Betty in the backseat.
Tony LaBranche, a former boxer and a longtime handball and tennis buddy of Eliot’s, was the operation’s ringleader. Ten years earlier, a drunk LaBranche had invoked Eliot’s name at a police station to avoid spending the night in jail after a car accident, sparking the first bad press of Eliot’s Cleveland tenure. He now had a way to make up for it. He chose the neighborhood and cleared traffic each time they conducted their small parade. He seeded the route with supporters to assure waving and cheering when Eliot and Betty rolled by. Behind Eliot and Betty’s car came the “beauty squad”—three attractive young women with big smiles and even bigger brassieres, assuring still more waving and cheering.
“This is the Eliot Ness caravan,” the Voice of Tomorrow boomed from the megaphone. “In the car immediately behind the sound truck are Eliot Ness, candidate for mayor of Cleveland, and Mrs. Ness. They are going today to discuss Cleveland problems with Cleveland people.”
The Diebold Company chairman and new father had decided, against all sensible advice, to run for mayor against a popular incumbent. And he was doing it in his own way. The Plain Dealer’s Bud Silverman heralded the miniparades as an idea that had “revolutionized major political campaigning in Cleveland. This is the caravan about which thousands of citizens are talking with such enthusiasm that some professional campaigners here already sense the end of the venerable ward meeting as a forum of candidacy.”
It certainly was something different. Eliot was the featured attraction, of course, but Silverman pointed out that Kilbride almost always stole the show, expertly riffing on the campaign’s themes and the sights and sounds of the neighborhood around him.
Is that group of persons waiting for a streetcar?
“Eliot Ness has a plan for a transportation system that works, not jerks,” comes the voice.
See those children playing tag around their mothers on the crowded sidewalk?
“Cleveland needs playgrounds. For action now, Ness is necessary.”
The caravan halts at an important intersection. The band busts loose again. Out of the cars spill the occupants. The beauty squad, armed with Ness literature and buttons, disappears into the side streets for door-to-door visitations.
The campaign’s managers worried about one of the beauty squad members—willowy, brown-eyed Winifred Higgins. The concern was well placed. The thirty-two-year-old Higgins had been Eliot’s secretary at the Social Protection Division, where the two developed a close bond. After the war she divorced her husband and followed Eliot to Cleveland. On business trips, Eliot wrote to “Winnie Darling”—ostensibly the letter would be about his itinerary and hotel arrangements but somehow he would manage to work in praise for his secretary’s smile and “sex appeal.” He often closed out telegrams to her with an emphatic “Love and Kisses.”
Not that he gave anything away in public. Stepping out of the car, he always clasped Betty’s hand. They strolled down the sidewalk alongside LaBranche, who would guide potential voters into their orbit. “Meet the next mayor and his wife,” he’d say, time and again.
These outings offered nothing of substance, which worked out for the best. Eliot was unexpectedly having difficulty with his speeches. He tended to lose his way even with the text right in front of him. He would trail off in the middle of a sentence, distracted by a face in the crowd or a plane flying overhead. Red-faced and watery-eyed, he proved much better at playing the greeter. Campaign polling showed that older women were his best block of voters, and so LaBranche sought out ladies over forty. They always seemed thrilled to shake the former safety director’s hand.
At one caravan event in Ward 12, veteran councilman Herman H. Finkle rode with Eliot and Betty. Stopping at a central intersection, the three climbed out together in front of a small crowd.
“Do you know who that is?” precinct captain Bill Blackman asked a preteen boy standing at the curb.
The boy consulted the campaign literature Blackman had just handed him.
“Sure, that’s Mr. Ness,” he said.
“Kee-rect,” Blackman declared with his best carnival-barker drawl. “And do you know who that is?” he continued, now indicating Finkle, a key Ness supporter.
The boy again perused his handouts. He was flummoxed.
“That,” Blackman happily heaved, “is our distinguished city councilman, the Honorable Herman H. Finkle.”
“’Tis not,” the boy said.
“Why certainly it is.”
The boy, put on the spot, grimaced. “Have him take off his hat,” he said.
Finkle, smiling, did so, displaying his shiny bald dome. The boy again flipped through his campaign literature. Blackman, feeling the happy democratic moment slipping away, pointed to the picture of Finkle.
“Now I know it ain’t Mr. Finkle,” the kid triu
mphantly announced. “Mr. Finkle’s got hair.”
That brought a good laugh, for Finkle had used the same campaign photo for twenty years. With Blackman sending the boy off to hand out the literature, Eliot, Betty, and the councilman, hat firmly back in place, headed down the sidewalk, shaking hands and smiling. Here and there, they’d duck into a store to offer campaign handbills for the front counter and to cluck over the hardworking proprietors, the backbone of America. When they came to a store that sold liquor, Betty, careful of propriety, stayed outside.
***
It didn’t matter that Eliot hadn’t voted in seven years.* It didn’t matter that for most of his adult life he had been registered as an independent voter. He was the Republican Party’s choice for mayor of Cleveland. The same day the newspapers reported his candidacy—“Eliot Ness it is,” The Plain Dealer declared on July 30, 1947—he and Betty had gone down to the board of elections office to register to vote. It would be the first time Betty had ever done so. They listed their residence as Wade Park Manor, a hotel in University Circle. The couple had been renting a house in the nearby town of Bratenahl.
The announcement that Eliot would run for mayor surprised most political observers. The Plain Dealer reported that the “heavy contributors to the Republican party, naturally, are practically delirious with enthusiasm that a person of ability, stature and appeal is about to challenge the formidable incumbent, Thomas A. Burke.” In actuality, the heavy contributors were glad to have any candidate to take on Burke, the former city law director who had succeeded Lausche in 1944. At least six prominent Republicans—including the notoriously corrupt former mayor, Harry L. Davis, and even Eliot’s former assistant, Robert Chamberlin—had turned aside inquiries from a committee tasked with finding a credible candidate. Cleveland, after all, was a Democratic city and Burke a popular Democratic mayor. More than that, the Republican organization in Cleveland had collapsed since Burton’s departure for the U.S. Senate. The state party now focused primarily on the city’s suburbs.
Eliot Ness Page 34