The Girls of Murder City (39 page)

All of Baker’s students were required to read their drafts in class and were subjected to criticism from the room. The students often tried to prove their powers of insight, and impress their professor, by throwing haymakers at each other’s work. But Maurine, reddening in embarrassment, her voice tiny, left everyone gasping in delight and amazement when she read. Her Roxie was the moron triumphant, counting on her fellow morons—on the newspaper staffs, on the jury, everywhere in this twisted new America—to save her. The play was shocking—and it was hilarious. Baker, in particular, was thrilled with the result. He believed Maurine had produced that most rare thing in art: something original. Baker taught classical Greek comedy as the baseline, but he pointed out that “when we have what might be called vernacular comedy as distinguished from classical comedy, when all the conditions of our comedy are freer and more spontaneous than that of the classical comedy, it is absurd that we should apply the definitions and test of Aristotle to our comedy and get any really valuable results.”

Maurine Watkins, he believed, had found a true American style.

Maurine finished the play by the end of the term. Now titled
Chicago,
it didn’t get to be the first production of Yale’s new drama department, as she probably had hoped, but this didn’t mean she was being slighted. Nearly every year, Baker selected a play from the workshop and helped place it with professional producers. For 1926, he chose
Chicago.
Baker introduced Maurine to New York agents, and from there momentum gathered swiftly. Sam H. Harris, George M. Cohan’s former partner, snapped up the play. In October, the
New Yorker
magazine, in a fawning, half-joking “Talk of the Town” item, declared that Harris had accepted Maurine’s play about a “gaudy murder trial,” even though there was a problem with it: the title. “Mr. Harris’ admiration for the play is warm but, after all, he has business interests in Chicago and would like to be able to drop out there from time to time without adding to the familiar depression of such a pilgrimage the disquieting prospect of being obliged to join our feathered friends.” The best solution, the magazine surmised, was a change of title, from
Chicago
back to
The Brave Little Woman.
But Harris’s reception in the Second City clearly didn’t concern the producer as much as the
New Yorker
thought it might. Harris had more than a dozen projects in the works during the summer and fall of 1926, including a Marx Brothers tour of their Broadway hit
The Cocoanuts.
Despite such a full plate, he aggressively moved
Chicago
forward, its new title intact. Early in the fall, George Abbott signed on as director, with a planned New York opening by the end of the year. Rising stage ingenue Francine Larrimore was cast as Roxie.

It was a big leap from Baker’s classroom straight to Broadway, arguably the highest level of commercial theater in the English-speaking world and unquestionably far more prestigious than the movies, which were still silent. But Maurine believed
Chicago
deserved it. She was proud of what she’d written. She had put down on the page, in a great cathartic explosion, all of her frustrations as a police reporter—“the result,” she said, “of watching justice and publicity in their relation to crime.” She knew the play was likely to be controversial. There was nothing uplifting about
Chicago,
though she believed it was deeply moral. “It seems to me that the purpose and treatment of a subject should determine the morality rather than just the choice of your theme,” she later said, in defense of her work.

For his part, Baker worried that Maurine would come under pressure from people who didn’t fully understand what she was trying to accomplish with the play. He warned her to hold tight to her principles as the director worked with his cast to find the right tone and timing for
Chicago,
fearing Abbott or Harris might undercut its purpose to “force as many laughs as possible.” Baker believed Maurine had written more than merely a good comedy. “You wrote something that might have an effect on the conditions you ridicule,” he told his student. “It may well be turned into something which will have no such effect.” Baker’s fears were strong enough that, even after advising her, he couldn’t leave it to Maurine to defend the work’s integrity. Knowing that his reputation depended on his students’ success, he strongly supported the play publicly. “It is a comedy, intensely satirical, treating the sentimentalization of the criminal in this country by the public, newspapers, lawyers, and even courts,” he wrote to the Theatre Guild just before
Chicago
opened. He added: “Whatever happens to the play, I know it was written with honest intent and with the knowledge of facts existing for Chicago, though not perhaps for other cities to the same extent.”

Baker had good reason to be concerned about
Chicago
’s prospects. One prominent playgoer at its pre-Broadway run in New Haven, John Archer of the Yale Divinity School, called
Chicago
“entirely too vile for public performance.” He added: “Why flaunt that sort of life within the realm of drama? Why not leave the lid on the sewer and keep the stench from the nostrils of our Eastern public?”

Though just an unknown former reporter and fledgling playwright, Maurine wasn’t about to let the attack go unchallenged. That was her life up there on stage. “I quite agree with Professor Archer that the situation in the city of Chicago is deplorable,” she responded in the
New Haven Register.
“What surprises me is that he of all people, a divinity professor, should condemn the action of calling attention to evil. Does he suppose the way to combat evil is to ignore it? I wonder whether, in his sermons, Professor Archer pretends that the world is a rose garden, and scrupulously avoids the unpleasant side of things. More than likely he speaks of evil conditions himself.”

That was what Maurine had been doing as a reporter in Chicago—combating evil. She wanted people to know that. If she now helped bring about a wider understanding of that evil, even if it had to be turned into rank comedy to do so, that was for the good. The sharp response shut down the minor controversy, but Maurine recognized that more of the same surely waited in the big city. Like Archer in New Haven, theater censors were on the march in New York, for the Jazz Age had belatedly arrived on the city’s stages in 1926, throwing all sorts of licentious shocks at audiences. “Liquor runs deep down the course of this season’s theatre in New York,” wrote Gilbert W. Gabriel in
Vanity Fair.
“Scarcely a play is staged without the bravado of some one or two scenes of secret and melancholy drinking.” On top of that, thanks to Mae West’s career revival as playwright and performer, there was sex. Manhattan’s district attorney, goaded by the influential New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, empowered a “play jury” to attend plays and vote on their moral stature.

The jury quickly attacked West’s off-Broadway play,
SEX,
along with two prominent Broadway shows,
The Captive
and
The Virgin Man,
for their “tendency to corrupt the morals of youth.” Police raided all three productions on the same night and dragged the casts off to jail. A police sergeant, Patrick Keneally, had been sent out to the plays beforehand to make notes on their transgressions. When
SEX
went to trial, in February 1927, Keneally focused on West’s “kootchie” dance in the show, testifying in a room full of sucked-in breath that “Miss West moved her navel up and down and from right to left.” The jury convicted West and her producers and sentenced them to ten days in jail, along with a $500 fine each. Both the author and producer of
The Virgin Man,
about an undergraduate undone by a bevy of “seductresses,” received similar fines and jail sentences.

Into this tense, nervous atmosphere arrived
Chicago,
which opened at the Music Box Theatre on December 30, 1926. The play had drinking,
and
it had sex. If you weren’t of a mood to recognize it as satire—and members of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice tended to take all art literally—you saw only the most horrific debauchery: remorseless murderers celebrating their bloody acts and being celebrated for them. At one point in the play, the jailed Roxie, surrounded by male reporters but without the slightest shame, decides to remove her garters so she can auction them off to her fans. “Here, take these, too!” Roxie tells Jake as she “gives herself a reflective wriggle” and then pops the elastic band free.

JAKE [
waves them aloft
]: Bravo! ‘You’ve read about ’em, boys, here they are: what am I offered for the Famous Turquoise Garter?’ [
Breaks off in alarm as she seems bent on further disapparelment.
] Stop! This is
not
strip poker!

ROXIE [
straightens with dignity
]: I was only
rollin’
my stockin’s. [
They drop to her ankles and
JAKE
retreats
.]

Not even Mae West’s play was so depraved and cynical as this daring new production. The New York correspondent for the
Chicago Tribune,
writing on opening night, noted that
Chicago
arrived from its out-of-town try-out with a reputation “as a shocker unfit for human consumption and all Broadway attempted to get into the Music Box where Sam H. Harris staged it.” After seeing it, however, the local critics sought to mitigate any shocks caused to the citizenry. Recognizing an original and ambitious production rather than a moral hazard, they immediately embraced the play, perhaps hoping to preempt the censors.
¹⁶
“My hat is off to the genius of the young Miss Maurine Watkins, who has contributed to the American theater the most profound and powerful satire it has ever known,” wrote novelist and critic Rupert Hughes. “Best of all, [
Chicago
] is a satire by a woman on the folly of men in their false homage to woman, their silly efforts to protect her while she dupes them.” The play was more than a thumping entertainment, he continued. It sought to “put an end to the ghastly business of railroading pretty women safely through murder trials by making fools of the solemn jurymen.”

Hughes’s review was representative of the norm. In the
New York Times,
Brooks Atkinson warned off potential moralist outrage, insisting that “
Chicago
is not a melodrama, as the prologue indicates, but a satirical comedy on the administration of justice through the fetid channels of newspaper publicity—of photographers, ‘sob sisters,’ feature stunts, standardized prevarication and generalized vulgarity.”

Jump-started by the critical reaction,
Chicago
began to consistently play to packed houses. Maurine Watkins had caught the Zeitgeist, and not just in New York. Plans for a tour were undertaken, first to the title city itself and then to Los Angeles. The bloodletting in Chicago, the heart of Prohibition-driven gangsterism, had become a national topic, and thanks to Maurine, making fun of Murder City was now de rigueur. Two months after the play opened, humorist Will Rogers picked up on the subject, joking in a newspaper piece that Detroit’s leaders had come to him and complained, “What’s the use of having all these robberies and killings [in our city]? No one ever reads about them. Chicago seems to be the only place most people think that can put on a murder.” Rogers’s answer to Detroit’s problem: Go for quality, not quantity. “It’s best not to have a woman do the murdering,” he wrote. “A case like that holds for a while, but when it comes to a trial it loses interest, for the people want to see a case where there is some chance of conviction.”

With
Chicago
’s unexpected box-office success, Maurine began fielding interview requests. The
New York Times,
in profiling the new playwright three days after the opening, gave credit to George Pierce Baker and joked that Maurine’s final grade under the well-known professor “will be determined by the manner in which the play is produced. And [Baker] has promised that what the Chicago Chamber of Commerce has to say won’t count.”