American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (27 page)

Sands
was Biograph’s important “literary” production of the season, an adaptation of a Charles Kingsley poem. The role of the girl who breaks with her father over her love for a painter had been coveted by all the company’s actresses.

The director’s announcement left Mary, she freely admitted, “thunderstruck.” As D.W. knew she would be.

Mary fumed. “Only a short while before Miss Marsh had given up a job at the lining counter of Bullock’s Department Store and had come without any previous training in the theater to Biograph.” Even Mary’s mother complained to D.W. about his poor judgment.

Mary, however, was practical as well as ambitious. And she knew precisely how to get back at her nemesis.

At the screening of
Sands,
she was the first to applaud Mae’s performance. But she also shared a “sudden” realization with the director: “If a little girl fresh from the department store could give a performance as good or better than any of us who had spent years mastering our techniques, then pictures were not for me.” She coolly announced that she wanted to return to the theater, “where years of study were a safeguard against the encroachments of amateurs.” Delivering another blow, she haughtily waved about a letter that the playwright William DeMille had written on her behalf to David Belasco, the celebrated man of the theater. “There will never be any real money in these galloping tintypes,” DeMille had pontificated. “And certainly no one can expect them to develop into anything which could, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, be called art.”

D.W. was left reeling. As Mary knew he would be. All his previous uncertainties, all his insecurities about his achievement, rose up. He found himself forced to confront a harsh and self-incriminating memory: If he had succeeded in making a career for himself in the theater, he would never have become involved in the movies.

Yet he remained on the surface a model of calm and politeness. He asked Mary to complete one final film, please, and then she could go to Belasco and Broadway. She graciously agreed.

Once again caught up in his work, in the weeks before the filming of
The New York Hat
D.W.’s doubts gradually receded, and a new understanding took hold. The New York cultural scions would always look down their noses at the moving-picture business. The city belonged to the theater and the Belascos. If he were ever going to make the sort of large, transcendent films that were taking shape in his mind, if he were going to unleash the still-untapped power in his “new force,” he would have to leave New York. His future was in Los Angeles.

THIRTY-FOUR

______________________

D
ARROW’S DESTINATION WAS
the Los Angeles County Jail, a dull gray box of a building next to the Lincoln Heights police station. He sent Ruby on to the Alexandria Hotel, but he hurried to the prison directly from the train station. During the long, introspective trip from Chicago, the challenges he faced had grown larger and his responsibilities more daunting. And as soon as he arrived in Los Angeles, Darrow felt an urgent need to take measure of the two men whose lives, against all odds, he had been hired to save. Darrow needed to be reassured of the necessity of his unwanted and doubtful mission.

His meeting that morning with his clients was brief, and Darrow carefully controlled the agenda. J.J. wore a gray suit for the occasion and struck Darrow as self-assured and full of open charm. His younger brother did not bother to shave and offered only curt, oddly defensive responses to the lawyer’s discursive and chatty questions.

It was Darrow’s practice never to ask if his clients were guilty. Once he had taken a case, the only relevant question was how he would guide the defense. In fact, Darrow brought up nothing substantive at this first meeting, and the McNamaras, for their part, made no attempt either to explain or to dismiss any of the mountain of evidence the prosecution had piled up against them. Nevertheless, Darrow walked out of the prison satisfied. He had shaken hands with the two brothers, touched his flesh to theirs, and looked them straight in the eye. Seated across from them, hearing the sound of their voices, they were no longer the anointed symbols of millions of workers’ hopes and struggles. They were two living, breathing, mortal souls. He knew he could not allow the state of California to take their lives.

But that same afternoon Darrow found he suddenly needed to go to the site of the crime. Perhaps, he would suggest later, he had been testing himself, gauging his own resolve. He stood in Ink Alley at the precise spot where the prosecution charged the bomb had been planted. The site of the
Times
Building was now a vacant lot. He stared into a terrible stillness, and his imagination filled in the empty space. Summoned, the tragic night took shape in his mind, and it was as if he were reliving the memory of a horrible dream. Only he knew it had been all too real. What must it have been like, the inescapable flames, the choking smoke? Abruptly Darrow willed himself to stop. Nothing could bring back the twenty-one dead. And nothing could convince him that any version of justice would be served by adding two more victims to the already sorrowful total.

When he returned to the Alex that evening, a reporter was waiting. Otheman Stevens from the
Examiner
asked, “Do you believe the men you will defend are innocent?”

“I always believe in the innocence of the men I defend,” Darrow parried. But he might as well have added that he also tried not to think about their guilt.

Work, Darrow hoped, would steady his seesawing thoughts and refocus his mind. Nearly an entire floor of offices had been rented in the Higgins Building on Second and Main, and Darrow, swift, purposeful, and with a surprising pragmatism, began selecting his defense team. They were an eclectic group, each man chosen with a knowing nod for the unique qualities he’d bring to the fray.

Co-counsel LeCompte Davis carried himself with the gilded bearing of the Kentucky gentleman he had been before tuberculosis had forced him to seek the healing California sun. As an assistant district attorney, Davis had not hesitated to prosecute labor. But he had gone on to earn a reputation as a skilled criminal attorney, and no less valuable given Darrow’s despairing assessment of the case, he was an expert in the complex laws of California. If the facts gave little comfort, then legal nuances, Darrow tried to hope, would come to the rescue of his clients.

Joseph Scott, another co-counsel, was chosen for strategic reasons that trumped any mere legal expertise. A former president of the Los Angeles school board, he had long been a vocal leader of the city’s Irish Catholic community. Put the well-known, ruddy-faced Scott at the defense table, and maybe the jury would think the McNamaras were cut from the same sort of solid, devout Irish stock.

Cyrus McNutt, a former Indiana Supreme Court justice, was selected primarily because he was a legendary champion of labor. The AFL was paying the bills; it didn’t hurt, Darrow knew, to give them a co-counsel with whom they’d feel comfortable.

Still, Darrow knew he wouldn’t be wrangling with just John Fredericks, the relentless L.A. district attorney, and his crew of ambitious assistants. Outside the courtroom he’d have to deal with the sly Burns and the detective’s own legion of diligent operatives. He’d need people who wouldn’t hesitate to trade punches or, even better, strike the first low blow. Two lives hung in the balance; it was a time for bare knuckles, not squeamishness. So Darrow recruited his own squad of practical and stubbornly aggressive tough-guy investigators.

The head of this unruly team was John Harrington, an old friend of Darrow’s. The two men had worked together on several cases in Chicago, and the attorney was convinced he was “the best evidence gatherer I have ever seen.” Harrington had lost his previous job as an investigator for the Chicago Surface Lines because of “insubordination,” but Darrow was not concerned. He was looking for someone who wouldn’t pay too much attention either to rules or to authority.

Bert Franklin, a former head of the L.A. sheriff’s office of criminal investigations, possessed both a veteran cop’s bulldog cunning and an alcoholic’s familiarity with deceit. For someone whose job it was to conduct background checks of potential jurors, these were prized qualities.

Larry Sullivan, however, was the bruiser in the crew, a broad-shouldered giant who could give shivers with just a long, solid look. He had been a famous exhibition fighter, going ninety-nine rounds in one river-barge bout. Now retired from the ring, he still lumbered about as if looking for an excuse to come out swinging. Sullivan came to Darrow with a warning about his “reckless unscrupulousness.” The attorney, though, did not think this caveat was any cause for concern at all.

In addition, Darrow had to find a way to counter the daily thumping that the brothers would undoubtedly get in the press once the trial began. Otis and the other sniping news barons would demand an incriminating tone. Darrow’s only hope, and a small one at that, was to reach out directly to the crowd of reporters who’d be covering the case. Perhaps some level of objectivity was possible in a few of the dispatches. To handle this task—decades later it would be given the lofty title of “media relations”—Darrow settled on an inspired choice, Frank E. Wolfe.

What made Wolfe so effective? What was his great gift? In part, he had earned the respect of his fellow journalists. He had been a reporter and then editor at the Associated Press, but he had made his mark as managing editor of the
Los Angeles Daily Herald:
Wolfe transformed a moribund daily into a influential muckraking journal with a galloping circulation. Then, too, there was his easy conviviality. Wolfe was no backslapper, but people liked him, and he also enjoyed their company. He’d happily sit drinking with his fellow newshounds until the last round was called. But most of all Wolfe was admired for his crusader’s passion. He had quit school at fourteen and found work on flatboats, then the railroad, and later as a telegraph operator. These hard-lived experiences had left him with a deep belief not just in trade unionism but in socialism as the necessary alternative to the injustices of capitalism. He was a true believer, unencumbered by doubts, and even many of those who disagreed with him found themselves respecting the integrity of his commitment.

But the real treasure on Darrow’s team was Job Harriman, the lawyer who had single-handedly been directing the McNamaras’ defense before Darrow arrived in the city. Harriman, nearly fifty, had a presence; he was the sort of rakishly handsome man—arresting blue eyes, a mane of coal-black hair—upon whom all eyes fixed when he strode into a room. He was an affecting orator, good at getting cheers from a crowd, and by all accounts he was a steady and competent lawyer.

But his great, invaluable gift to the defense was his well-known tie to the Socialist Party. In 1900 he had been Eugene Debs’s vice-presidential running mate on the Socialist ticket in the national election. And more important to the fate of the McNamaras, he had for years taken an outspoken—and controversial—public stand in Los Angeles. Labor and socialism, he insisted with conviction, were brothers in a common struggle. “Whenever there is a labor movement in the field,” Harrington had declared, “we should support it.”

THIRTY-FIVE

______________________

I
N 1911 ALL
across the country Socialists were packing meeting halls and winning elections. Voters in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Rhode Island had put Socialists into the state legislatures. Socialist mayors had triumphed in Milwaukee and Schenectady. And now in Los Angeles the Socialist ticket seemed poised for victory, too.

In 1909, when a special election had been held to replace the Democratic mayor who had resigned in disgrace, the Socialists had come tantalizingly close. A progressive “Good Government” coalition—popularly, and a bit derisively, known as the Goo Goos—had nominated George Alexander, a former city supervisor. “Honest Uncle George” campaigned dressed up as Uncle Sam on a moralistic reform platform that promised to rid the freewheeling city of gamblers, prostitutes, and even the bewilderingly popular blind pig races. Fred Wheeler, the Socialist candidate, had been a longtime labor organizer, and most observers did not give him much of a chance. But on election day Wheeler succeeded in getting a large turnout in the previously untapped working-class wards. He lost by only about sixteen hundred votes, a margin that was both unexpectedly narrow and dramatic.

And now two years later in the mayoral election scheduled for the fall of 1911, the Socialists—as well as their anxious opponents—were convinced that their victory would be an inevitability. Shrewdly, the party focused on two issues that it hoped would enlarge its solid worker base to include an increasingly angry and exasperated middle class.

One: Los Angeles was a city teetering. Another disruptive shove, and it could tumble into chaos. The high pitch of conflict between labor and capital, the stream of vituperative strikes, the tense picket lines—on any day an all-out class war could erupt that would have consequences for the entire city. Workers
and
the middle class. Yet, the Socialists were quick to point out, the Alexander administration had deliberately exacerbated these tensions. The Goo Goos had refused to appoint representatives of labor to city policy committees and mayoral posts. And without even a public debate, Mayor Alexander and his city council had approved a heavy-handed anti-picketing ordinance that had been drafted by the Merchants and Manufacturers Association and that had left the jails filled with grumbling workers.

Second: The Owens Valley aqueduct project was a dishonest, avaricious scheme shamelessly endorsed by the Alexander administration. It would make the city’s political elite richer—and middle-class taxes would provide the money to finance the entire enterprise. This multimillion-dollar aqueduct, the Socialists raged in rallies and broadsheets, was not simply corrupt. It was further proof of the deep class struggle in the city. It was another demonstration of the greedy rich covertly conspiring to exploit both the workers and the middle class in order to line their already-bulging pockets.