The Girls of Murder City (42 page)

With Maurine’s profile higher in the winter and spring of 1927 than many Broadway leading ladies, newspaper editors weren’t the only ones seeking out her services. Every theater producer in New York wanted her on his next project.

The first assignment Maurine accepted was an adaptation of Samuel Hopkins Adams’s novel
Revelry,
a fictional look at corruption in the Harding administration. Maurine diligently set to work, but with a busy schedule that included celebrity journalism and occasionally appearing as an extra in
Chicago,
her new star status quickly began to weigh on her. Reconnecting with the judgmental George Pierce Baker, who thought she had overcommitted herself, didn’t help her anxiety. “Feel depressed,” she wrote to Alexander Woollcott in longhand. “Just returned from Yale—first attendance since . . .
it
happened. Dear Teacher thinks I’m close by the precipice of utter ruin and that
Revelry
will push me completely over.”

Baker, it turned out, wasn’t far wrong. Thanks to
Chicago,
Maurine suddenly had become the go-to writer for hard-hitting, wisecracking satire that tested the bounds of legal decency. She’d barely gotten started on
Revelry,
a project certain to provoke outrage in some circles, when she accepted another hot-button assignment—adapting Herbert Asbury’s scandalous
American Mercury
magazine article “Hatrack,” the story of a “rebuffed churchgoer and sought-after prostitute” in the small Missouri town where Asbury grew up. “Our town harlot in Farmington,” wrote Asbury, “was a scrawny creature called variously Fanny Fewclothes and Hatrack, but usually the latter in deference to her figure.” During the workweek, Fanny was a “competent drudge” on the domestic staff of one of the town’s proudest families, but on Sundays she unself-consciously sold her body, taking her clients to lie down on the cool slabs in the town’s Masonic and Catholic cemeteries. Upon publication in the
American Mercury,
the piece was deemed indecent and barred from being sent through the U.S. mail.

These were two assignments, like the Snyder-Gray trial, for which Maurine was constitutionally unsuited.
Chicago
was all flash and bang, and its subject matter—sensation journalism and celebrity-lust—was ideal for such eyes-wide-open comic treatment. “Any play which can batter away with unrelenting ridicule for three whole acts—and without a single sop to the sentimentalists—deserves a bonus of unabashed hurrahs,”
Vanity Fair
wrote of
Chicago.
That it did, but
Chicago
was also sui generis. A recently deceased president and a sad small-town prostitute did not so easily lend themselves to Maurine’s broad-stroke, incriminatory humor. Adaptations are always tricky, and for these in particular, Maurine needed a rapier, not the cannon that was her comic weapon of choice.

Revelry,
her much-anticipated follow-up to
Chicago,
in fact proved fated for disaster before it even reached New York. In Philadelphia, the play was withdrawn shortly after it opened in September when a judge denounced it as “false, base and indecent, and slanderous of the dead.” In dealing with a fictional version of the late president, Maurine had been asked to walk a fine line in writing the adaptation, and she had failed. The company that owned the Philadelphia playhouse in which the play was booked announced, “While the play had been rendered unobjectionable in other respects by the censors, the Stanley company considered the theme so essentially unpatriotic that any further revision would be useless.”

That was not the official death of the production, but it might as well have been. When the New York critics got a look at it, the play hung in a dispiriting critical purgatory, garnering neither applause nor outright attack. “The play that Miss Watkins fashioned is, if somewhat disappointing, not worthless,” wrote Edmund Wilson in the
New Republic.
“Its tone carries a certain sarcastic gravity; Miss Watkins has restrained, in the case of these national themes, her gay brutality, and has enjoyed herself less with naughty exposures.” George Jean Nathan, in the
American Mercury,
added that “there is so much profanity and cussing that along toward ten o’clock one begins to suspect the author of concealing her inability to key up dramatic intensity in loud invocations of the Saviour and allusions to kennel genealogy.” The play closed after only a month on Broadway.

With
Revelry
’s embarrassing reception, Maurine began to realize that Baker had been right: She had overextended herself and, perhaps as a result, not given her best to any of her projects. Just days after the
Revelry
brouhaha in Philadelphia, she wrote to Woollcott, then drama critic at the
New York World:
“Does your department pay damages to guileless souls who believe every word written therein? Basely deceived by a statement that out of five plays bought only one is ever produced, I went around this summer busily and merrily signing contracts for old plays, dramatizations, adaptations, or what have you. Came the fall and dawn; and managers’ intentions, if not honorable, proved serious, with the result that I am even more busily if less merrily trying to buy out of various transgressions.” She added that she had learned a hard lesson: “Don’t sell a play till it’s written.”

Two days before Christmas, 1927, the movie version of
Chicago
opened. Maurine now learned another lesson, if she didn’t already know it: New York and Chicago truly weren’t like the rest of the country. America’s middlebrow critics—and the broad public they served outside the urban culture centers—feared the kind of cynical, in-your-face social commentary she served up in her play. Nelson B. Bell, a
Washington Post
film critic, even argued that
Chicago
benefited from being watered down by Hollywood. “Maurine Watkins certainly can harbor no feelings of resentment over the manner in which the producers of films have treated her melodramatic travesty, ‘Chicago,’ in translating it from the articulate stage to silent drama,” he wrote. The chief change that made the film adaptation palatable to Bell was a reimagining of Roxie Hart’s husband. In the movie version, Amos Hart has a backbone, and when he realizes Roxie’s immoral nature, he “casts her firmly and not gently out of his life.” Bell called this a “wholly commendable act” and, not realizing the whole thing was supposed to be funny, added that it “gives the drama an excuse for being.”

The movie, produced by Cecil B. DeMille and directed by Frank Urson, opened to a mixed critical reception and good box office sales, but the renewed attention on her work didn’t help Maurine’s playwriting struggles. Two weeks before the film’s release, still reeling from
Revelry
’s failure, she gave up on Herbert Asbury’s story. The
Chicago Tribune
reported that “Miss Maurine Watkins has torn up her notes and memoranda, and has asked that she be let out of the contract to dramatize ‘Hatrack.’ ” Baker wrote to Maurine from Yale, trying to buck her up. He told her it was time to write another original work. “I can understand that you may not have had a wholly happy experience in spite of your success in the theatre world, but you cannot afford not to have something worthy of you on the New York stage within a year. Otherwise, you will have to begin again.”

Maurine did have an original play in the works, but it didn’t appear to be a top priority. She was just trying to hold on, to survive the scrutiny and expectations. The past year had drained her. She understood publicity and sensation, those conjoined twins of the burgeoning tabloid era. Three years before, she’d expertly whipped them up for Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner. The two alleged murderesses, on trial for their lives, had reveled in the public’s attention. But Maurine, with one of the most successful new plays of recent years, could not match their enthusiasm when it was her turn in the spotlight.

The thirty-year-old playwright seemed to understand that the cost of continued success in New York would be high. The country’s largest city, like Chicago, roared on at an ever more frenzied pace. No one seemed to have learned anything from the story of Roxie Hart. Mae West was a bigger star than ever now, thanks to her arrest and conviction for
SEX
’s “indecency.” (“I expect it will be the making of me,” she’d said as she was led to jail.) Newspaper readers, and so newspaper editors, wanted more and bigger shocks. The
New York Daily News
sneaked a camera into Ruth Snyder’s execution; the resulting page-one photo of the woman sizzling in the electric chair—with a huge banner headline, “DEAD!”—sold out newspapers in a few hours. Literature followed the crowd: The Snyder story inspired Sophie Treadwell’s
Machinal
on stage and James M. Cain’s
Double Indemnity
in print. The pressure on writers to produce work that was deemed new and tough and exciting could be intense.

In response, Maurine began to retreat into herself, her old shyness rearing up again. Despite being a popular member of a celebrated group of New York artists and journalists—indeed, right now she was the most acclaimed of the bunch—she sometimes couldn’t bear to leave her residence. “I am not coming for a drink today—not even for orange pekoe,” she wrote in a typical letter to Woollcott. Maurine treasured her friendship with the garrulous critic, but their correspondence was dominated by her apologetic refusals to attend social events, no matter what carrot he dangled before her. “If it’s one of those ‘yes-or-no-and-stick-by-your-guns’ affairs, it must be ‘no,’ ” she wrote in another letter, “for God alone knows where I’ll be next Monday and He won’t tell—I’ve asked Him.” She insisted to Woollcott that she was “by nature a recluse.”

Maurine now increasingly turned to short story writing, possibly for the greater control it offered, the freedom from the demands of producers looking for the next commercial smash. But her themes and subjects changed little. Her stories frequently involved scheming women on the edge of respectability, women willing to do almost anything to get what they wanted. One, “Butterfly Goes Home,” once again fictionalized Beulah Annan’s life, following a beautiful cipher through the press’s infatuation—“newspapermen swore to the tawny gold of her hair and the delicate pink of her flesh . . .”—and on to a tragic ending. It seemed important to the former crime reporter to provide the correct conclusion for Beulah. Maurine had gone to Chicago to confront sinfulness, after all. God created evil so that man—and woman—could create good, and Maurine struggled with the fear that nothing good had come of her time in the city. Despite her public response to Professor Archer, she realized she hadn’t gotten closer to God through her work. Instead she had come to believe that “the feminine temperament can, perhaps, be more primitive than the male,” that “the female of the species is really more deadly.”

At the end of the 1926-27 stage season,
Chicago
was chosen as one of the best plays of the year by
New York Daily News
drama critic Burns Mantle and included in his prestigious theater annual. Most writers would have sought out more work, and more attention, after such an accolade, but Maurine withdrew further into herself. In a letter to Woollcott, she wrote: “Six months from now, if life keeps on happening, my chief worry will be what the angels are wearing this season. (Optimist!)”

Epilogue

The acquittals of Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner ignited debate over whether it was time for women to serve on juries in Illinois. One headline, published a week after Belva’s acquittal, declared:

A WOMAN JURY TO TRY WOMEN SLAYERS URGED

CLAIM NOW THAT PRETTY GIRLS GET FREE, UGLY ONES SENT TO PEN

Women’s groups lobbied for women to be included on juries—Sabella Nitti’s lawyer, Helen Cirese, was among the most vocal supporters—but the Illinois legislature could not be convinced. Seven years later, in 1931, Illinois voters passed a women jurors law on their own—only to see the state Supreme Court knock it down. Finally, in 1939, fifteen years after Beulah and Belva’s murder trials, the legislature passed a law allowing women to serve.