Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (36 page)

Chief
George Shippy claimed Averbuch forced his way into his vestibule and attacked him. But Chicago’s radicals raged at what they suspected was an unjustified shooting of an innocent beggar. Mary joined in the legal strategy meetings, helped arrange for the disinterment and autopsy of Averbuch’s body, and sheltered his sister Olga at the settlement.
¹¹
“Chicago had its spree and its excitement and its hysterics … things quieted down … [and] it was forgotten,” Mary recalled. But the Averbuch incident had been a “blow upon the settlements. They were criticized for harboring young radicals, and particularly anarchists,” she said. “It gave them the name of nurseries of communism.” Concluding that her “usefulness had been impaired,” she left Maxwell Street and the Commons.

Mary knew Darrow by reputation. But though he topped the bill at big public rallies, he was not a daily part of settlement activities, nor did he attend the endless sessions where protests or programs were planned. “He was always called the lone wolf. He never went to those meetings,” she recalled. “He used to go off with a little group of people and read Tolstoy … a group of fellow travelers in the suburbs that has sympathy with the poor people.”

Mary was entering her thirties now, considered herself a modern woman, and agreed with Darrow that enlightened adults should be able to pair up, unfettered by religious and social conventions. She was drawn to him, turned to him for favors, and aided him in his work. When an itinerant gypsy family begged her for money to avoid arrest, Mary asked Darrow for the $10 or $25 they needed. He laughed at the uselessness of jailing gypsies, and reached into his pocket. “He never carried money in a billfold. He always had it rolled in funny little bunches in his pocket,” Mary recalled. “I always asked him if he blew his nose on his money because it always came out like a dirty handkerchief.”
¹²

Mary took dictation, typed his letters, and helped him with clients. They stole away to join Sara on a holiday and visited her in Cleveland, where her liberal beliefs and charity work as the wife of a Baptist minister had brought her to the attention of Progressive mayor
Tom Johnson and his circle. Mary saw Darrow’s flaws. He was “inclined to be stingy” with money—making her take streetcars instead of cabs—and could be sloppy, short-tempered, and crude. But all that paled before his “infinite compassion.” Moreover, he was famous and his life was exciting, and he shared
her militancy for the cause of labor. “I have never known anybody like him,” she recalled. “You couldn’t help but love a person like that.”

Darrow took her to lunch at workingmen’s cafés, and occasionally to dinner, and, ultimately, to bed. He called her Moll or Molly. She called him Darrow. “He had lots of girls,” she recalled. “Women all liked him. And he understood women.” At the same time, he was a married man, wary of scandal and “very cautious.” There was a tension in Darrow’s marriage. He “often used the phrase, ‘women’s biological excuse for existence’ and was contemptuous of childless women,” his friend
Natalie Schretter recalled. “Women who otherwise adored him bristled with distaste when he would make those biting remarks, especially as everyone guessed that the dearest dream of his wife—to have a child—could never be fulfilled.”

Mary had few illusions about their relationship; she was a convenience. On a sweltering day in July 1909, she was overwhelmed with panic when, after fainting on a downtown sidewalk, she realized she had no proof of identity aside from some papers she was carrying for Darrow. She phoned him, but he had left for the day, for home and Ruby. She was alone and hungry and could not even afford to buy a train ticket to Cleveland to see Sara. She wept hysterically at “the sudden and blinding realization that my life meant nothing to anyone.”

Mary resolved to leave. Darrow was gracious, and caring in his way. He gave her money to move to New York, sent her cash to live on, and called on Dreiser and other friends to get her assignments as a magazine writer. She found a flat overlooking the East River and joined the bohemians of Greenwich Village, alive with “atheists, cubists, poets, free-thinkers, free-lovers, women with bobbed hair and intellectuals … philosophers, artists, reporters and musicians,” one writer observed. Here were Goldman and
Ben Reitman, Steffens,
John Reed,
Hutchins Hapgood, Mabel Dodge, and
Max Eastman. Mary and her friends stayed up late, debating momentous issues over cheap red wine or cups of strong coffee in the city’s cafés. She sold three stories for $1,200 and vacationed in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she shared a house with
Gertrude Barnum and met
Eugene O’Neill. In time, she was invited to join the feminist Heterodoxy Club. “This is a precarious living, off the fruits of one’s pen, yet there are always the friends who come to one’s help,” she told Sara. “I know I can always ask Clarence Darrow freely for aid.”

Darrow teased her in his letters (“We will have to stop praising you pretty soon, or you will lose your head, poor little Miss Field”) and said how much he missed her (“Damn if I wouldn’t like to see you, Molly dear”) and visited her in New York when he could. He and a friend picked up Mary and an actress for a weekend of Broadway, dinners, and a picnic in the country where Mary and the men took off their shoes and strolled barefoot through the grass. They listened to Darrow read from Bret Harte’s Western tales, and he stopped her from plucking violets because “It’s a shame to break up their little love affairs.” And “so we left them,” Mary reported to Sara, “aching demurely as violets do.”

Then Darrow returned to Chicago, and once more she felt the pain of “having no one who cares a damn.”

S
O THE LOVERS
parted—for a time. Mary was more than just one of Darrow’s “girls.” She had come to represent vitality and ardor to an aging, somewhat lost, hero who had just returned from a brush with death. The reminders of his own mortality were insistent. In September 1909, while on a speaking tour in the state of Washington, he was again seriously ill. And in November 1909, his sister Mary passed away. For a year she had lost sleep over a lawsuit she had filed against their late brother Hubert’s business partners; Darrow took over the case, and won the judgment. A few days after her death, he hosted a séance at his apartment, trying to make contact with her spirit. With a group of other radicals, he welcomed and listened to
Swami Abhedananda, an Indian holy man. Darrow began to daydream about founding a “colony” in California, where intellectuals could write and reflect and practice their free love creed.

“He talks at some length to me regarding coming to Southern California to live, in a sort of retirement, and of purchasing a place where he could live and work, surrounded by such congenial friends as he might choose,” said
Henry Coit, a California banker in a letter to a friend. Darrow hoped to build the retreat along the path of a planned streetcar line from Pasadena or in the mission town of San Juan Capistrano, and profit as the value of the real estate grew. “If I had the courage I would move to California,” Darrow wrote his friend, San Francisco editor Fremont Older, “but I still have to earn some money and am a little afraid to make the change.”

Yet middle-aged restlessness could not fully explain his relationship with Mary, which would last the rest of his life. Darrow was a self-confessed failure at the art of writing letters—except when he sat down at his desk after everyone had left the office for the day and opened his heart to her.

“Dear Mary,” he wrote on March 15, 1910, “I miss you all the time. No one else is so bright and clear and sympathetic to say nothing of sweet and dear, and I wonder how you are and what you are doing in the big city. I don’t hear from you—please write.”

He was “tired and hungry and wish you were here to eat and drink with me and talk to me with your low sweet kind sympathetic voice,” Darrow wrote. “I shall send you more money next week.”

So things stood. And then, on the first of October in 1910, a bomb destroyed the
Los Angeles Times
.
¹³

Chapter 11

LOS ANGELES

I dread the fight and am in the dark.

D
avid Douglas and
Charlie Hagerty were tending the huge printing press called the “Old Guard” in the moments after midnight on October 1, 1910. General
Harrison Gray Otis, USA (Ret.), the militant owner of the
Los Angeles Times
, liked to christen his presses and adorn them with martial symbols. Otis was a union hater, and the “Old Guard” had been named to honor the nonunion pressmen who broke a printers’ strike in 1890. It bore the image of a Roman soldier and the
Times
motto,
STAND FAST, STAND FIRM, STAND SURE, STAND TRUE
.
¹

It was a busy night at the
Times
. A new press had been installed, requiring a reconfiguration of the basement pressroom. There was confusion, and the paper missed its early deadlines. At one a.m., there were still more than a hundred employees in the block-long building at the northeast corner of Broadway and First Street. It was a warm night, and the pressroom windows were open. Late-night passersby could look down on the illuminated scene and hear the presses roar.

C. G. Varcoe had been sitting on a windowsill along Broadway watching the printers work as he waited for a streetcar. Then, growing impatient, he strolled down the hill toward Spring Street. He was halfway down the block when he heard a piercing blast. Turning, Varcoe saw “a column of debris and smoke” rising above the
Times
building. It was followed by a second rumble, “and immediately with the second explosion came the column of flame.”

The second detonation had a dull
whump
, like the sound of gas igniting.
But there was no mistaking the initial blast. “The first one had,” Varcoe said, “the distinctive crack of dynamite.”

The explosion, directly above him, threw Douglas to the basement floor. Dazed, he stumbled to his feet. There was a sizzling and a cracking noise, and dust and darkness all around. His corner of the pressroom lay just below “Ink Alley,” a street-level passage that opened on Broadway, where barrels of flammable ink were stored. The blast pulverized concrete, snapped iron beams, and slung the floor of the alley down into the basement. Groping through the oily smoke, Douglas found a stairway and escaped. He never saw Hagerty again.

Harry Chandler’s office adjoined Ink Alley on the ground floor of the
Times
building. He was the assistant publisher of the newspaper, and the son-in-law of its owner. Chandler had just left for home that night when the explosion obliterated the room and tore the head and limbs from the torso of his dutiful stenographer,
J. Wesley Reaves. The next floor up, in the composing room, foreman
Simeon Crabill was delivering corrected proofs to a typesetter when a blast that would “jar you inside” parted the boards and timbers beneath his feet. The floor over the alley, he saw, was gone, replaced by a gaping, volcanic opening with “just one solid sheet of flame, shooting up, shutting out the exit.” Crabill watched as
John Howard, a copy cutter, raised his arms in mute appeal, and was swallowed by the inferno.

Crabill ran north through a hall of linotype machines, each with its own gas burner, used to keep the lead type pliable. Scattered about were cans of gasoline to clean ink from the printing plates, as well as saturated rags and paper. He was enveloped in a panicky group of men who bore him toward the open doors of an elevator; they could not see, in the acrid gloom, that the car itself was stuck far below. Crabill and others tumbled into the black shaft, colliding with the walls and cables, and each other, as they fell to the basement. “I heard them shrieking for help,” Crabill recalled. “It was all dark in there … the darkest night on earth right at that spot.” He came upon a conveyor belt used to carry bundles of newspapers to the street, wormed his way up the chute, and fell through its now-burning opening to the sidewalk. “As I looked back the whole Broadway front was a solid mass of flames,” he said.