Official and Confidential (14 page)

In Clyde's eyes, though, Edgar could do no wrong. ‘This is what the Boss wants,' he would tell senior colleagues supposedly convened to make a decision, and there the debate would end. ‘The Director,' Clyde said to anyone who would listen, ‘is the Man of the Century.'

To many he seemed a pathetic figure, especially as he aged. Washington gossips would note that he walked humbly a pace or two behind Edgar, changing pace in order to stay in step.

Edgar called him ‘Junior' in the early days, later just ‘Clyde.' In public, even in the virtual privacy of the directorial limousine, one chauffeur noted, Clyde called Edgar ‘Mr Hoover.' Former officials, even very senior ones, still cannot bring themselves to say plain ‘Hoover,' two decades after his death. Occasionally, though, Clyde was heard to call the boss something no one else ever called him – ‘Eddie.'

It soon became clear, from their daily rituals, that Edgar and Clyde were more than colleagues. Every day, on the dot of noon, the limousine would bear them to lunch at the Mayflower Hotel. There they would consume hamburgers and vanilla ice cream or, when Edgar was watching his weight, chicken soup and salad. According to the hotel's publicity, Edgar once noticed the FBI's third Most Wanted man sitting two tables away, had him arrested, then resumed eating. Another less kind account said he looked straight through the criminal and failed to recognize him.

Five nights a week, for more than forty years, except for a break when Edgar quarreled with a new owner, the pair would appear at Harvey's Restaurant, then on the 1100 block of Connecticut Avenue.

‘They would come in together and sit up on a little dais,' recalled barman George Dunson, ‘a step up from other people. Mr Tolson would always face the door, and Mr Hoover sat with his back to the wall. Mr Tolson did it so he
could watch who was coming in. If anyone tried to get Mr Hoover, they couldn't come at him from behind.' Once Edgar became really famous, the management put a barrier between him and unwelcome strangers, by blocking the aisle with a trolley.

Under an arrangement negotiated by Clyde, the pair consumed all they could eat – in one of the best restaurants in town – for $2.50 and the price of their drinks. For years, they did not even have to pay that. ‘The check was picked up by Hoover's friend Harry Viner, who ran a big laundry business,' said former Washington police inspector Joe Shimon. ‘His reward was that Hoover made one of his relatives an agent when World War II started. Later, when Harvey's closed down for a while, Hoover sent agents to the restaurant opposite, to try and arrange a special rate. He was a chiseler.'

Edgar liked steak, medium rare, and, more exotically, green-turtle soup. He took part in the restaurant's oystereating competitions, and usually won. At the end of the evening he would leave carrying a bag of ham and turkey, provided by the management, to take home to his dogs.

Once, when Edgar and Clyde arrived late to find their regular table was taken, they made a scene and stormed out. Harvey's owner, Julius Lulley, was often the butt of Edgar's peculiar brand of practical jokes. When Lulley's wife complained that her husband would not give her a new fur coat, Edgar had agents photograph him with another woman, then used the pictures to change his mind.

Edgar, who was so stern with his agents about drink, enjoyed whiskey, and officials in distant field offices had to keep up with his changing taste in brands. Edgar never drank much in front of colleagues, and none of them ever saw him drunk. Away from the office, said Miami restaurateur Jesse Weiss, who met Edgar in the thirties, things were different. The mood at private parties could be ‘real friendly, loose, a lot of guys drinking booze, “Hooray for Hell, who's afraid of fire?” – that kind of thing …'

The waiters at Harvey's also remember heavy drinking. ‘Mr Hoover drank Grand-Dad,' said Pooch Miller, who was maître d' for thirty-six years. ‘I used to give him six miniatures when he arrived, with club sodas to go with them. And after he'd finished drinking we'd bring him his dinner, five days a week.' ‘Today,' said Aaron Shainus, whose father owned Harvey's at one point, ‘Hoover would be considered an alcoholic.'

The pair became a Washington legend, one heavy with the innuendo that they were homosexual lovers. Robert Ludlum, in his novel
The Chancellor Manuscript
, was to write what no one dared say straight out in their lifetime. For Ludlum, Clyde's ‘soft pampered face – struggling for masculinity – had for decades been the flower to the bristled cactus.'

Journalists dropped hints about the couple, though, as early as the thirties. ‘Mr Hoover,'
Collier
's magazine told readers early in the Roosevelt presidency, ‘is short, fat, businesslike, and walks with a mincing step … He dresses fastidiously, with Eleanor blue as the favorite color for the matched shades of tie, handkerchief and socks. A little pompous, he rides in a limousine even if only to a nearby selfservice cafeteria …'

Edgar kept a thick file on the writer of that article, journalist Ray Tucker, and denounced him as a ‘degenerate alcoholic.' Tucker became convinced that Edgar even placed him under surveillance for a while. ‘Has anyone noted,' asked another columnist, ‘that the Hoover stride has grown noticeably longer and more vigorous since Tucker charged him with walking with mincing steps?'

Yet another reporter observed that Edgar kept dainty china in his office beside the crime trophies. ‘He is different,' commented a foreign diplomat, ‘from any police officer I ever knew, in that he uses a distinctive and conspicuous perfume.' Edgar ordered a senior aide to say ‘very, very diplomatically' that he never used perfume. In fact, he did.

The hints about Edgar and Clyde persisted.
Time
ran a piece about Edgar, ‘seldom seen without a male companion, most frequently solemn-faced Clyde Tolson.' When the two friends sought to hide from the press, as when they stayed at the Muehiebach Hotel in Kansas City, they merely attracted attention to themselves. ‘They were shown,' the local paper reported, ‘to the Muehlebach's pride, the penthouse, No. 1125 … When reporters lifted the huge knocker of the door bearing the legend The Penthouse, the door was opened slightly, as in movie mysteries. A man in a café au lait lounging robe appeared. “I'm sorry,” he said, “you cannot see Mr Hoover.”' The reporter thought Edgar ‘as mysterious as a Garbo smile' – and noted that Clyde was installed next door.

The message to readers was clear. FBI insiders, most of them not sure what to think, just joked about it. In 1939, when top aide Louis Nichols – like George Ruch before him – named his son J. Edgar, agents joked, ‘If it had been a girl, she'd have been called Clyde.'

In the sixties, agents would chuckle about ‘J. Edna' and ‘Mother Tolson.' The writer Truman Capote, himself homosexual, told a magazine editor he knew Edgar and Clyde were, too. He considered writing a magazine piece about them – one that got no further than its title, ‘Johnny and Clyde.'

Scholars have pointed to the many photographs, most of them pictures of Clyde taken by Edgar, that survived from Edgar's private collection: Clyde asleep, Clyde in a bathrobe, Clyde by the pool. Yet the two friends never openly set up house together. Clyde continued to maintain his own apartment when Edgar bought a home for himself after his mother's death. At the office, say former colleagues, the two men showed no unusual affection for each other. For the forty-four years they were intimates, the deception must have been a constant strain. But a deception it was.

*

The man who knew them best in the thirties was Guy Hottel, a young executive for AETNA Insurance who shared an apartment with Clyde for years. The three men regularly went fishing, along with Edgar's publicist Courtney Ryley Cooper. Edgar gave Hottel a job as an agent in 1938, as a favor to help him avert an unwelcome transfer by AETNA, and made him head of the Washington field office after perfunctory training. Later, he acted as best man at Hottel's wedding.

Hottel remained confidant and constant companion to Edgar and Clyde throughout the ten years that followed. Shortly before his death in 1990, he spoke of going on ‘inspection tours' with Edgar and Clyde that were no more than glorified junkets. He told of vacations in Florida and California, of hobnobbing with the wealthy – the Firestones of tire fame and senior Ford executives.

‘We did a little gambling, jai alai, horseracing, shuffleboard,' Hottel recalled. ‘At the Flamingo Hotel, in Miami, they had a court with sides on it, and you could go up there and sunbathe all you wanted in the nude. Hoover liked the sun, but Tolson didn't like it too much.' On the record, Hottel limited himself to saying that Edgar and Clyde kept their distance from women. ‘They didn't date them. They might take them out to dinner, but they didn't date them – you know …'

Hottel had more to say on the subject in the forties when, as Agent in Charge of the Washington field office, he became a problem drinker. Former police Inspector Joseph Shimon, whose career in law enforcement in Washington spanned three decades, recalls that time.

‘When Hottel went on the drunk,' said Shimon, ‘he'd go into different bars and start telling stories about the sex parties at Hoover's house, you know, with the boys. To give you an idea of the influence Hoover had, when Hottel's wife would call in and say, “He's on a drunk,” we would get an order over the Teletype to the police department, to cover the bars and pick him up right away and send him over to the
FBI. That was to keep him from talking. You know, that's tremendous power. That happened so many times …'

Edgar did not fire Hottel. Perhaps, after so many years of intimacy, he simply knew too much. ‘He wasn't fabricating,' said Shimon. ‘He had attended some of the parties, let's put it that way. According to him, some of the top boys who were holding the top jobs at the FBI were participating. They were kind of promoted over other people. I guess sometimes, in order to be promoted, you had to be one of the boys …'

A further serious allegation came from Jimmy G. C. Corcoran, who had become Edgar's trusted associate while working as an FBI Inspector in the twenties.

‘After he left the Bureau,' said Shimon, ‘Jimmy became very powerful politically. During World War II he was a lobbyist, and he was retained by a business group to get congressional help for them to open up a factory – for a $75,000 fee. That was illegal during the war, and we got a tip-off from the Attorney General's office that the FBI were going to set Jimmy up when he went to pick up his $75,000 at the Mayflower Hotel.

‘Jimmy was really mad. He went to Harvey's Restaurant and sent word to Hoover that Jimmy Corcoran wanted him to come out right now or he was going to create a scene.

‘Hoover came out in the end, and said, “What's the matter, Jimmy?” and Jimmy called him a lot of dirty words and said, “What d'you mean trying to set me up?” Hoover said, “Gee, Jimmy, I didn't know it was you.” And Jimmy said, “For Chrissake, how many J. G. C. Corcorans do you know?… This is what I get for doing you a favor, you dirty S.O.B …” And the outcome was that Jimmy went and collected his $75,000. And he wasn't arrested.'

After the incident Corcoran confided to Shimon, and to Washington lobbyist Henry Grunewald, what the ‘favor' had been. While he was at the Bureau, Corcoran said, Edgar used him to deal with a ‘problem.' He said Edgar had been arrested in the late twenties in New Orleans, on sex charges involving
a young man. Corcoran, who had by then left the FBI and had powerful contacts in Louisiana, said he had intervened to prevent a prosecution.

Corcoran was to die in a mysterious plane crash in 1956 near Spanish Cay, a Caribbean island owned by a close associate of Edgar's, oil millionaire Clint Murchison. Most of the documents in his FBI file have since been destroyed. While Corcoran's account may never be proven, it does not stand alone. Joe Pasternak, the veteran film producer remembered for his relaunch of Marlene Dietrich in the late thirties, told of another close call. He knew Edgar, and claimed personal knowledge of a sordid episode that occurred in California. ‘He was a homosexual,' Pasternak said. ‘Every year he used to come down to the Del Mar racetrack with a different boy. He was caught in a bathroom by a newspaperman. They made sure he didn't speak … Nobody dared say anything because he was so powerful.'

There are numerous anecdotes about Edgar and Clyde. Joseph Shimon recalled a story told by an astonished cab driver who had picked the couple up at National Airport. ‘He said Hoover was waiting, and rented the cab. It was Tolson who came off the plane. And he said he never saw so much kissing and ass-grabbing in his life. It was the kind of thing that made you feel the rumors were true.'

Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society, America's first homosexual rights organization, had homosexual friends who went regularly to Edgar's summer racing haunt, the Del Mar track in California. ‘In the forties,' said Hay, ‘people I knew would come back and say, “Guess who was in so-and-so's box today?” And they'd say, you know, “Hoover and Tolson were there again.” I was gay, the people I was hearing it from were gay and the boxes Hoover and Tolson were in were boxes owned by gay men, in a circle in which they didn't have people who weren't gay. They wouldn't be in that crowd otherwise. They were nodded together as lovers.'

The Broadway singer Ethel Merman, star of
Annie Get Your Gun
, met Edgar and Clyde in New York in 1936. They remained in touch for the rest of their lives, and regularly sent affectionate telegrams to her on opening nights. In 1978, when a reporter asked her to comment on Anita Bryant, the antihomosexual campaigner, Merman had an interesting reply. ‘Some of my best friends,' she said, ‘are homosexual. Everybody knew about J. Edgar Hoover, but he was the best chief the FBI ever had. A lot of people have always been homosexual. To each his own. They don't bother me.'