For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (7 page)

The fantasy had an enduring central narrative—a powerful slave serving a grateful king—but varied in its details. In one version, the king had first discovered Nathan as a young boy, beaten and abused by slave drivers; he had rescued the boy from neglect and poverty and had made him a member of the royal household. In time Nathan himself had come to possess slaves, despite his own condition of servitude—he marked his slaves by branding a crown on the inner calf of each slave’s leg.
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The stronger his feelings for Richard Loeb, the more Richard appropriated the role of the king in Nathan’s fantasy. Richard, as the king, might issue any command, for any reason, at any time, and Nathan would have no choice but to obey. But Nathan had reserved for himself the role of a strong, good-looking, powerful slave whose servitude was more apparent than real, dependent on his own acquiescence, and liable to be dissolved at any moment. It was a curiously contradictory fantasy, one that allowed Nathan to be both submissive and dominant; it gave over authority and power to the king while providing Nathan himself with potency and virility.
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Each imagined life—Richard’s ideal of the master criminal and Nathan’s self-portrait as the powerful slave—fulfilled the other. Richard, in his imagination, was capable of committing the most intricate and complex crimes, but he needed an audience to applaud his ingenuity: what better, more appreciative, onlooker could he choose than his subservient companion, Nathan Leopold? And Nathan secured gratification in imagining himself the slave to an appreciative king: could anyone other than Richard Loeb fill such a role?
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B
UT THEIR FRIENDSHIP WOULD
not endure. Richard was restless at the University of Chicago; during his freshman and sophomore years, he had continued to live at home while studying at the university; but now that he was about to become a junior, he was anxious to slip off the family bonds. He had friends at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, about 300 miles east of Chicago; he had visited the Michigan campus for football games, and by comparison the University of Chicago seemed too quiet, too sedate. In 1921 he suddenly announced to his parents that he intended to transfer to Michigan to finish his degree.
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Nathan was devastated—his closest companion, his most intimate friend, was to leave Chicago for Ann Arbor! He would lose Richard—perhaps forever! In his desperation, Nathan announced that he too would transfer to Michigan; and so, in September 1921, both boys prepared for the journey eastward.

Nothing went right for Nathan that fall. He contracted scarlet fever shortly before the start of the semester and arrived on campus only after the beginning of classes. In October his mother, Florence, finally died, succumbing to an illness that had persisted for many years. Nathan had grown close to his mother during his adolescence, and her death was a bitter blow that hardened his cynicism and mistrust; how could there be a God, he reasoned, who would allow the death of such a loving, sweet mother? Nathan remained in Chicago until Yom Kippur so as to attend the memorial service for his mother, and when he returned to the university, he discovered that Richard no longer cared to continue their friendship. On 17 October Richard had passed for pledgeship at Zeta Beta Tau fraternity. Members of the fraternity had cautioned him, however, that he had been seen too frequently in the company of Nathan Leopold, a suspected homosexual. Such an association would surely torpedo his chances of election—better, they advised him, that if he hoped to join Zeta Beta Tau, he should entirely cut Leopold.
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Nothing could have given Nathan more pain that to realize that Richard had abandoned him for new friends at Zeta Beta Tau. Nathan led a solitary existence at Ann Arbor, eating his meals alone or with one or two other Jewish boys, who, like himself, had neither enthusiasm nor aptitude for fraternity life. He spent most of his time immersed in his studies; he earned good grades, but there was now little reason for him to remain at the university and so, in fall 1922, Nathan transferred back to the University of Chicago.
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It was an auspicious move. Nathan’s final year at Chicago was a time of self-realization, when he was able to break free of Richard’s influence. He began to seek out friends and to develop extracurricular interests. Il Circolo Italiano, an undergraduate society devoted to the study of Italian culture, had been established on the campus the previous year; Nathan quickly became one of the group’s most enthusiastic members, serving on committees, speaking in the discussions, and helping to organize joint meetings with the French and Spanish clubs.
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6.
IL CIRCOLO ITALIANO.
Members of Il Circolo Italiano, an undergraduate group at the University of Chicago for the study of Italian culture, pose for their 1923 yearbook photograph. Nathan Leopold, holding his hat, is standing in the front row.

The Undergraduate Classical Club, another literary society, had been a fixture on the Chicago campus for at least a decade but by 1922 there were only twenty-five members, most of them women studying Latin or classical Greek at the university. Despite its small size, the Classical Club was one of the liveliest literary groups at Chicago, sponsoring talks by faculty members in a room lent by the classics department, organizing dinners, and staging a production of
Iphigeneia in Tauris
. It seemed appropriate that Nathan, who could both speak and write Latin and Greek, should join the Classical Club on his return to the university in September 1922. Such literary societies were intellectual oases at a campus where few undergraduates cared a great deal for academic achievement; and Nathan enjoyed the sense of exclusiveness that the fortnightly meetings conferred on the members.
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No other student at the University of Chicago performed so brilliantly in his studies during that academic year as Nathan Leopold. In autumn 1922, he earned an A-minus in Latin, A in classical Greek, A in Romance languages, A-minus in Russian, and A-minus in Sanskrit. The following quarter, in winter 1923, he took four courses for credit—earning an A in philosophy, A-minus in sociology, A in modern Greek, and A in classical Sanskrit—and he audited a reading course on Cervantes’s
Don Quixote of La Mancha
in the Romance languages department. It might have seemed foolhardy to take so many courses—the normal course load at Chicago was three courses each quarter—but Nathan had surpassed all expectations.
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Nathan had distinguished himself as a philologist and linguist, proving worthy of election to Phi Beta Kappa, one of only fifteen students from the university to receive that honor in 1923. But his aptitude for languages was not his only talent. Ornithology was still an avocation for Nathan, something he pursued in his spare time. On weekends, if he had nothing better to do, he would drive to the Forest Preserve, south of Chicago, to the marshland around Wolf Lake, near the Indiana state line, in pursuit of new bird species to add to his collection. Ornithology was a hobby, nothing more, yet so proficient had he become in his studies that during his final year at the University of Chicago, Nathan was able to prepare two scientific papers for publication in
The Auk
, the leading journal for professional ornithologists in the United States.
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During his year at the University of Michigan, Nathan had made field trips to the northern part of the state to observe the Kirtland’s Warbler, a rare, finchlike bird that laid its eggs in ground nests among the jack pines common to northern Michigan. The Kirtland’s Warbler had been seen only infrequently within the United States, and in the 1920s it seemed destined for extinction. Nathan’s account of its nesting habits, which appeared in
The Auk
early in 1924, was a model of detailed observation; and together with an earlier article by Nathan on bird migration and instinct, it earned its author instant recognition among professional ornithologists.
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Nathan had redeemed himself. His stellar academic record during his final year at Chicago, his election to Phi Beta Kappa, and his successful graduation, one year ahead of his class, amounted to a fulfillment of the promise made to his mother, before her death eighteen months earlier, that he would distinguish himself at the university. That spring, shortly before his graduation, Nathan decided on the law as his profession; he planned to enroll at the University of Chicago law school in the fall.

R
ICHARD
L
OEB ALSO GRADUATED
—from the University of Michigan—in 1923. By his own admission he had coasted along, always taking the easy option and doing the minimal amount of work. Yet he had achieved satisfactory grades in his senior year—A in European history, A in American history, B in political economy, B in philosophy, B in zoology—and when he received his degree, still a few weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday, he was the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Michigan.
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7.
NATHAN (BABE) LEOPOLD.
Born 19 November 1904, Leopold attended the Douglas School (1912–1915) and the Harvard School for Boys (1915–1920) before graduating from the University of Chicago in March 1923 at age eighteen.

It was an accomplishment that spoke more for the ambition of his governess, Emily Struthers, than for Richard’s intellectual ability. Richard had never fulfilled the promise with which, four years earlier, Emily had endowed him; and his seeming triumph in graduating at such a young age obscured a darker reality. His university career had been lackluster; he had never joined any of the many student societies or participated in any extracurricular activities. Richard had never tried out for any of the sports teams or volunteered his services for a student publication or joined a debating society or discussion club. He had attended lectures desultorily, preferring to spend his time hanging around the fraternity house on Washtenaw Road, playing cards, reading dime novels, gossiping idly with friends—he seemed, even to his fraternity brothers, to have lost any will to do very much with his life. And Richard had taken to drink; he was so often drunk, even in the early afternoon, that it was sometimes difficult to tell when he was ever sober. There was something childlike in Richard’s mannerisms and behavior: in conversation he could often seem quite normal, even serious, but without any warning, he might suddenly break off a topic and talk in an irritatingly frivolous, infantile manner. Upperclassmen were supposed to set an example for the freshmen and sophomores, but Richard’s eccentricities had become too embarrassing even for his fraternity brothers, and in his senior year the executive committee of the fraternity formally censured him for his drunkenness and suspended his privileges as an upperclassman.
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It was a pitiable conclusion to an inglorious year. He had received his degree but he had neither chosen a career nor made plans for the future. But Richard had always enjoyed studying history—it was the one subject that had caught his interest at Michigan—and so, in September 1923, he returned to the University of Chicago for graduate work, taking a course in American constitutional history during the autumn quarter.

Nathan Leopold was also at Chicago that fall. He also had received his degree earlier that year, and with his customary energy, he was taking four law courses that quarter. Nathan and Richard renewed their acquaintance in September 1923, and very quickly Nathan succumbed, once again, to Richard’s charm. How, indeed, could he have resisted? Richard was too too handsome for Nathan not to fall in love a second time, and Richard was sexually complaisant, willing to indulge Nathan’s desires. To his friends, Richard would boast of his sexual conquests; he claimed to have many girlfriends among the coeds on the Chicago campus but, in truth, sex was only moderately pleasurable. “I could,” he confessed, “get along easily without it. The actual sex act is rather unimportant to me.” His indifference toward sex usually (but not always) translated into acquiescence whenever Nathan importuned him so passionately—why refuse when it mattered so little one way or the other?
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