Official and Confidential (15 page)

In the thirties Edgar began a long association with the columnist who reigned as the nation's premier purveyor of gossip for thirty years, Walter Winchell. Edgar came to know Winchell, he was to say, ‘as well as any other living person,' and it is the Winchell connection that provides eyewitness corroboration of the affair with Clyde.

Edgar began cultivating the columnist during the gangster wars, when Winchell wrote nice things about him. He assigned Bureau agents to guard him during a visit to Chicago, and entertained him at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. According to Winchell's friend Curly Harris, the columnist and the FBI Director quickly became close. Winchell was one of the few people ever to address Edgar by the first of his Christian names, ‘John.'

For years thereafter, Winchell regaled readers with a diet of trivia about Edgar, along with some genuine newsbreaks. The source, though he always denied it, was Edgar himself. ‘The information would come on plain paper, in plain envelopes, without official identification,' said the columnist's assistant, Herman Klurfeld. ‘He'd hold up a letter and say, “Here it is. Something from John.” Hoover was almost like another press agent submitting material.'

It was through Winchell that Edgar first found his way to New York City's Stork Club, billed as ‘the place to be seen if you wish to feel important.' Between 1934 and 1965
patrons included several Kennedys and Rockefellers, Al Jolson and Joe DiMaggio, Grace Kelly and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and H. L. Mencken.

Winchell was close to the Stork's proprietor, Sherman Billingsley. He regularly held court there and was often joined at Table 50, his place of honor, by Edgar and Clyde. Billingsley, a former bootlegger, saw to it that Edgar's food and drink came free. The Stork was soon boasting a highball called FBI Fizz.

On New Year's Eve 1936, around midnight, freelance photographer Gustave Gale took several pictures of Winchell and his party, all wearing funny hats and festive smiles. One photograph shows Edgar, with Clyde chortling at his side, his hands raised in mock surrender to a comely young woman with a toy gun. The woman, tracked down only recently, was a celebrated fashion model of the day, Luisa Stuart.
¹

That New Year's Eve at the Stork, Stuart and her boyfriend, Winchell's colleague Art Arthur, found themselves seated at Edgar's table for dinner. ‘The world heavyweight champion, Jim Braddock, was there, too,' recalled Stuart, now in her seventies. ‘I remember there were jokes about race, and Hoover didn't want to go on to the Cotton Club because Gene Krupa, the white jazz drummer, played with blacks there.

‘All the same, we did end up going to the Cotton Club, in an FBI limousine. I sat with Art in the backseat. Hoover and Tolson sat opposite us in those two little seats on hinges they have in limousines. And that was when I noticed they were holding hands – all the way to the club, I think. Just sitting there talking and holding hands with each other.

‘Hoover got furious after we did get to the Cotton Club. Because not only were there black and white musicians, there was a black and white couple dancing – a black man with a white woman. And Tolson, who had been getting drunk, said something like, “Well, I'd like to dance with you …” It was an awkward moment.

‘I didn't really understand anything about homosexuality in those days,' said Stuart. ‘I was so young, and those were different times. But I'd never seen two men holding hands. And I remember asking Art about it in the car on the way home that night. And he just said, “Oh, come on.
You
know,” or something like that. And then he told me they were queers or fairies – the sort of terms they used in those days.'

Like other lovers, Edgar and Clyde had their ups and downs. Edgar drove Clyde to the hospital, a month before the episode at the Stork, when he was taken ill with appendicitis. At the office, though, he fussed and fumed at Clyde like a nagging spouse. Why, Edgar asked in one memo, did he have to hold doors open for visitors, while Clyde and others ‘swept through as if members of the British Monarch's Jubilee entourage?'

After the Stork Club episode, Luisa Stuart saw Edgar and Clyde several times at the Sunday brunches Winchell and his wife gave at their Manhattan apartment. ‘One Sunday,' Stuart recalled, ‘Hoover – “Jedgar,” as we called him – showed up without Clyde, and said Clyde was sick. After he left, people said Clyde wasn't really sick. They'd had a big fight. The word was that Hoover had found Clyde in bed with another man.'

One Christmas, Edgar, Clyde and Guy Hottel were staying at Miami's Gulfstream Hotel. At the height of a tiff with Clyde, Edgar stormed into the bathroom and locked the door. Hottel had to force his way in, grab the Director by the shoulders and shake some sense into him.

The bathroom siege was also apparently triggered by jealousy – though not, on this occasion, over another male. Hottel, who was something of a ladies' man, had asked Clyde to make up a foursome for the evening with him and two women. Clyde had accepted and Edgar, piqued at the prospect of being left alone, threw a tantrum.

‘One of Guy's jobs,' said his brother-in-law Chandler Brossard, ‘was to sort of calm Hoover down. He was an
hysteric. And Guy would often have to stay with him half the night to calm him. One of the most powerful men in America would in effect be under house arrest. He and Clyde had to watch Hoover very carefully.'

9

‘But there's a man in Washington
Whom not many women see,
Who's as dark and as handsome
As a sheik of Arabie.'

Poem for J. Edgar Hoover, submitted by woman describing herself only as ‘Wisconsin Girl,' 1940

E
dgar had deeply ambivalent feelings about women, but he did not avoid their company. At times, perhaps, he made a point of being seen with women to dispel rumors that he was homosexual. Perhaps, too, Edgar wanted to prove to himself that he could sustain a heterosexual relationship – something he never really achieved. In the end, he was too crippled emotionally to forge a truly fulfilling link with anyone, even Clyde.

When they met, Edgar and Clyde had much in common. As Edgar was devoted to his mother, Annie, so Clyde doted on his mother. As time passed, and their mothers aged, each man gave time and affection not only to his own mother but to his lover's, too. Clyde even sent Annie Hoover Valentine cards.

As Edgar had been humiliated by a young woman in 1918, so Clyde had been rejected – twice. First there had been his childhood sweetheart, who married another man when Clyde went off to Washington. Then, while he was at law school, a second girlfriend became pregnant by another man and married him. According to a classmate, Raymond Suran, Clyde was devastated. Yet he remained attracted to women, and Edgar found that hard to handle.

Anita Colby, the celebrated thirties model, recalled Clyde having ‘a crush' on her but never following through. In 1939 he briefly courted Edna Daulyton, a waitress in a restaurant near the Justice Department. ‘He kind of flirted with me,' she remembered, ‘and he took me out to dinner. He talked to me a bit about cases. We saw each other maybe half a dozen times, but I was leery of him.

‘One evening when we were having dinner at the Mayflower, Hoover came and joined us. I was shocked. He behaved in such an ugly way to me. He was like a little Napoleon. And there was a closeness between him and Clyde that I didn't understand – something that didn't seem quite natural. It was only afterwards I heard the stories.'

Clyde would hold Daulyton's hand and give her a goodnight kiss on the cheek, but that was all. ‘One night,' she said, ‘I asked him, “Is there something funny between you and Hoover?” He went very serious and said something like, “What d'you mean? Are you saying I'm some sort of abnormal faggot?” I guess I said, “Well, there's
something
between you and that friend of yours …” Hoover joined us again when we went to eat at a place down near the water. And soon after that I stopped seeing Clyde.'

In 1939, when Clyde fell in love with a woman in New York and began talking of marriage, Edgar moved ruthlessly to prevent it. ‘Hoover suggested,' said Guy Hottel, ‘that I have a little talk with Clyde, tell him to forget it. I did. If Clyde had married, he wouldn't have been there to have dinner with Hoover every night. Hoover was selfish. He liked the setup the way it was, and he had ways of getting his own way.'

Ironically, at the very time Edgar snuffed out this relationship of Clyde's, he was starting to see women himself. He began to do so immediately after his mother's death, following a long battle with cancer, in 1938.

Annie had always been there, holding court when FBI colleagues came visiting, worrying when Edgar took airplane flights. ‘I am proud and happy that you are my son,' she
cabled from her sickbed when the National Institute of Social Scientists honored Edgar for ‘distinguished services to humanity.' Soon after, with Edgar at her side in the bedroom where she had given birth to him, she died.

Thoughts about Annie preoccupied Edgar for the rest of his life. He would astonish virtual strangers with guilt-ridden outbursts about not having spent enough time with her when she was alive. He traveled to Florida each Christmas rather than try to celebrate in Washington, where his first forty-two Christmases had been spent with his mother.

Edgar was seen dining out with an older woman within weeks of Annie's death. His new ‘favorite person,' as Walter Winchell put it, was Lela Rogers, mother of Ginger and a formidable figure in her own right. She was forty-seven, four years Edgar's senior, with two marriages behind her. She was tough, as befitted one of the first female recruits to the U.S. Marine Corps, where she had edited
Leatherneck
, the Corps' magazine. She was politically of the far Right, and would one day tell a congressional committee that the line ‘Share and share alike – that's democracy' in a movie script was dangerous Communist propaganda. She was to be a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.

There were soon rumors that Rogers and Edgar were planning marriage. In New York to promote a play she had written, she received the press standing in front of his silverframed photograph. Edgar had called at 3 A.M. that morning, Rogers let slip, to fill her in on progress in a murder hunt. ‘Are you going to get married, or are you just interested in detective work?' asked a reporter. ‘That,' she beamed, ‘is up to him.' Edgar, for his part, fended off the questions with coy answers.

Rogers showered him with gifts – a monogrammed ring, a gold cigarette box. ‘I think,' said her friend Anita Colby, ‘that Leli was more interested in Edgar than he was in her.' Ginger Rogers believed the relationship was a ‘close friendship, not
an affair. I do remember this: Mother always said Edgar Hoover was a loner, and lonely.'

Edgar told close friends, though, that the affair was serious. ‘He was really smitten with her,' recalled Effie Cain, a wealthy Texan who met Edgar in the forties. Edgar said as much to Leo McClairen, the trusted black Agent who chauffeured him in Florida. ‘Mr Hoover told me one time,' McClairen remembered, ‘he was in love with Ginger Rogers' mother. He told me she was thinking of getting married to him, but something came up …'

Richard Auerbach, a top Bureau official, was also privy to the relationship. ‘No question,' he said. ‘It was a courtship. I used to make arrangements for her to meet with him in Florida. They were very careful, and marriage remained a possibility for many years to come. It lasted until 1955, when I brought the news to her one day that the President wanted him back in Washington the next morning. And his lady love said, “This just isn't going to work. I'm going back to L.A …” She turned around and left the room with tears streaming down her face, and I put her on a flight. I don't believe he ever saw her again.'

From then on, Edgar kept his distance. ‘Rogers' letters would come in,' said Cartha DeLoach, ‘and he'd send them over to me unanswered. I'd have an agent in the Correspondence Section do it, and he'd sign them.'

There were two other women in Edgar's life in the thirties and early forties. The first was Oscar-winner Frances Marion, screenwriter of
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
and
The Scarlet Letter
. She was seven years older than Edgar, a veteran of several marriages. ‘Frances told me Hoover was in hot pursuit,' her daughter-in-law recalled, ‘but she wouldn't marry him because of the boys, her sons.'

The third, and perhaps most important, liaison was with the actress Dorothy Lamour – heroine of films like
Road to Singapore
and
Road to Hong Kong
with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. She had first met Edgar as early as 1931, when she
was a twenty-year-old former beauty queen working as a singer at the Stork Club. They became close, however, only after Lamour's divorce from her first husband and the death of Edgar's mother.

In her autobiography, Lamour wrote only that Edgar was ‘a lifelong friend.' In private, in the seventies, she spoke of deeper feelings. ‘She just started to glow when his name was mentioned,' said acquaintances of hers in California. ‘But she told us she knew marriage would not have worked. They were both too involved in their careers. They were heartbroken, though. It was a really sad story.'

After 1942, when Lamour married her second husband, businessman Bill Howard, Edgar became a regular visitor at their home. ‘Nobody else was invited,' said Howard. ‘He so enjoyed privacy where he could relax … He would do the barbecuing and we'd sit in the backyard. I didn't fool with Edgar. I was afraid of him …'

Lamour and Howard lived for years near Baltimore, a short drive from Washington, and the star was occasionally seen dining with Edgar at Harvey's. He was sometimes at her side on film sets, or when she gave interviews, and FBI agents smoothed the way when she traveled abroad.