The Girls of Murder City (44 page)

After
Revelry,
Maurine Watkins
never had another play produced on Broadway. In the three years after
Chicago
made her name, she saw a handful of her plays announced, and a couple even went into rehearsal, but none opened in the famed theater district. By the end of the 1920s, frustrated with New York, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue a screenwriting career.

In 1936 Maurine cowrote
Libeled Lady,
which starred Spencer Tracy, Jean Harlow, William Powell, and Myrna Loy. The screwball comedy revolves around a newspaper editor who convinces his girl to marry another man as a means of heading off a libel suit. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. In 1981, seeking to revive interest in the movie,
New York Times
film critic Vincent Canby called it “magically funny” and “a comedy to rank alongside such classics as
Twentieth Century, To Be or Not to Be, Pat and Mike
and
The Awful Truth.
”

Canby was right, but
Libeled Lady
proved to be the exception in Maurine’s short movie career. With
Chicago,
it turned out, she had said all she had to say about the American experience. The rest was pleasant busywork: straightforward comedies and melodramas that asked no more from an audience than that they show up. For a decade, she produced professionally crafted but uninspired screenplays for forgettable movies, such as
No Man of Her Own,
starring Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, and the Jimmy Durante vehicle
Strictly Dynamite.
Her last screen credit was for 1940’s
I Love You Again,
which paired her story about a roguish amnesiac and his wife with
Libeled Lady
’s Powell and Loy, this time in a misguided attempt to leech from the movie couple’s burgeoning
Thin Man
popularity.

In 1942, fifteen years after Cecil B. DeMille’s silent-movie version, Twentieth Century-Fox remade
Chicago
as a talking picture. Starring Ginger Rogers,
Roxie Hart
is a consistently entertaining movie, with a first-rate script by Nunnally Johnson and a naturalistic performance by Rogers. But it strayed a long way from the original play Maurine wrote. Most important of the changes: Rogers’s Roxie didn’t commit the crime. The Hays Code, which decreed that “no picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it,” had come into effect, and so criminals could no longer get away with murder on-screen.

It was at about this time that Maurine quit screenwriting and moved to Florida to be near her retired parents. The move was apparently prompted by her father’s poor health. Though she’d had some success publishing short stories in the late twenties, she now effectively stopped writing. She devoted her later years to promoting and funding college scholarships for Greek and Bible studies, and to refusing entreaties to turn
Chicago
into a stage musical. Maurine Watkins died of lung cancer in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1969, at age seventy-three. She never married.

Maurine’s death, of course, was not the end of her story. Her family sold the rights to
Chicago,
and in 1975 a musical adaptation, conceived and directed by groundbreaking choreographer Bob Fosse, reached Broadway. Starring stage legends Gwen Verdon as Roxie and Chita Rivera as Velma, it ran for 936 performances and then went on tour. Twenty years later, the musical returned to the Great White Way, with Fosse’s former lover and protégée Ann Reinking as Roxie. Newly relevant again, thanks to the O. J. Simpson and Amy Fisher trials, it took the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical and went on to become Broadway’s longest-running revival ever. In 2002,
Chicago: The Musical
reached the big screen and won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

In the wake of the musical’s mammoth success, a mystique of sorts swallowed
Chicago
’s creator. Maurine Watkins, fans of the musical learned, fled Hollywood in the 1940s and lived out the rest of her life in obscurity, leaving her apartment only after consulting her horoscope. She repeatedly rejected producers’ offers to buy her play’s rights because she had become a born-again Christian and was horrified that in her youth she had contributed to the acquittals of two murderers and then celebrated them in a wink-and-nod Broadway smash.

This portrait of Maurine comes chiefly from Sheldon Abend, who was president of the American Play Company for more than three decades. Abend, who died in 2003, claimed that Maurine paid the company $500 per year expressly to refuse all offers to revive or adapt
Chicago.
“I believe this gal had a change of heart,” Abend told the
Chicago Tribune
in 1997. “She didn’t want to accept a dime from
Chicago
because she knew she did the wrong thing. She helped acquit a guilty person.” Journalists and theater scholars recycled this view of Maurine for years. University of Delaware professor Thomas H. Pauly, in an introductory essay when
Chicago
was republished in 1997, described her as “an eccentric recluse and born-again Christian” in her later years and stated that she suffered from “a deep-seated guilt that her witty
Chicago Tribune
articles had been responsible for murderesses going free.” Rob Marshall, director of the movie musical, also repeated the guilt-ridden, born-again Christian profile in interviews publicizing the movie’s release.

It was all myth and misunderstanding. Abend, frustrated at being unable to cash in on one of his fallow properties and put off by her social reserve, reached the wrong conclusions about Maurine. She was never a born-again Christian; she was a practicing Christian for her entire life and a broadly curious theological thinker. In a 1959 letter to an administrator at Abilene Christian College, where she provided scholarship funds, she said that she had read religious texts “widely” and “wildly” throughout her life, “from Harnack’s
History of Dogma,
Strong’s
Systematic Theology
, and the Jesuits to Martin Buber’s disciples and the ‘literature’ of the Mormons, etc., etc., etc. . . .”

As for having “helped acquit a guilty person,” Maurine did no such thing, and there’s no evidence to suggest she thought otherwise. Abend may have assumed she’d been a sob sister (it’s unlikely he ever read her
Tribune
articles), but of course she wasn’t. She never sentimentalized the alleged murderesses she covered, as Hearst’s newspapers often did. In her articles for the
Tribune
in the spring and summer of 1924, she did everything she could to see Beulah and Belva convicted, sometimes pushing the bounds of journalistic integrity in an effort to achieve her desired result.

It’s possible that, after seeing the liberties taken with
Chicago
on film, Maurine rejected further adaptation offers because she just couldn’t bear to have anyone else tinker with her sole successful play. Such reticence certainly would have made sense, especially after
Roxie Hart
turned Maurine’s main character into a misunderstood innocent. She also may have been concerned that her play simply had become out-of-date. A 1935 stage revival in London received stinging reviews, with one critic declaring that it had “a flat monotony that produces only boredom and disgust.”

That said, Maurine Watkins likely would have approved of the musical adaptation that she had spent more than a decade keeping out of theaters. Bob Fosse had no desire to stage, as he put it himself, “Mary Poppins at lunch in county jail.” Unlike Abend, he understood exactly what Maurine was after with
Chicago,
and, finally able to move forward after her death, he stayed true to her desolate, relentlessly cynical spirit for the piece.

This is perhaps best exemplified at the close of the musical. The newly acquitted Roxie and Velma take to the vaudeville stage together, complete with glittery prop guns, working their notoriety for all it’s worth. They launch into a lilting, self-congratulatory song-and-dance number. “You know, a lot of people have lost faith in America,” Velma tells the audience. “But we are the living examples of what a wonderful country this is.” She and Roxie then stride toward the audience, bathing in the applause of the packed house. “
Thank
you,
thank
you,” they tell their adoring fans, but there’s a hardened gloss to their smiles, a dark glint in their eyes. This is intentional. Fosse told his stars that, though Roxie and Velma are saying “Thank you, thank you” over and over, what they’re thinking as the applause thunders down on them is, “Fuck you, fuck you.”

Acknowledgments

Jim Donovan, my agent, believed in this book—and in me—from the very start. Without him,
The Girls of Murder City
never would have been written.

Alessandra Lusardi, my editor at Viking, expertly guided this book through every stage of its writing, shaping and fixing it as she went. Her contribution is incalculable.

Many others helped me in various ways during the researching and writing of
The Girls of Murder City.
They include Peter Bhatia, Jerry Casey, Joe Darrow, Nick Fox, Susan Gage, Al Girardi, Jeff Guinn, Aaron Lew, Michael Meggison, Marcia Melton, Maureen Ryan, Michael Walden, and Derek Zeller.

Jeanie Child, of the archives staff at the Office of the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, went beyond the call of duty on my behalf. I also received valuable assistance from Alan Gornick of the Western Springs Historical Society, Sarah Hutcheson of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, Mollie Eblen and Barbara Grinnell of Transylvania University, and various staff members at the Harold Washington Library, the Chicago History Museum, the Illinois Supreme Court Archives, and the Illinois State Archives.

I would also like to convey my heartfelt appreciation to Wendy Teresi, Katherine Malm’s great-granddaughter; Wayne Dickson and Ron Dickson, Ione Quinby’s great-nephews; and Helen Del Messier Hachem, Helen Cirese’s niece.

Finally, a special thank-you to my wife, Deborah King, for her keen editorial eye, her patient support, and of course her love.

Notes

To tell the stories of Beulah Annan, Belva Gaertner, Maurine Watkins, and the rest of the women and men in these pages, I have relied on a broad swath of primary and secondary sources. (The books and journals used can be found listed in the bibliography.) I constructed many scenes using a combination of sources. Anything between quotation marks comes verbatim from a court transcript, police file, published article or book, personal letter, interview, or other cited source. Every action and event described in
The Girls of Murder City
is thoroughly grounded in documented facts cited here.

The most significant sources of information for this book are the newspapers of the era. In Chicago in the 1920s, there were six daily newspapers, which competed aggressively with each other. The subjects are quoted frequently from newspaper interviews they gave and court testimony published in newspapers. To be sure, what a subject has to say in a contemporary newspaper story should not always be considered his or her exact words. The grammar was typically cleaned up and the phrasing sometimes “goosed” for dramatic effect by both reporters and rewrite men. That said, the city’s “respectable” papers—the
Tribune,
the
Daily News,
the
Daily Journal,
and the
Evening Post
—took their journalistic ethics seriously. They did not just make stuff up. To buttress accuracy, I leaned heavily on quotes and descriptions of events that appeared in more than one competing newspaper published on the same day. Newspapers were also a valuable source because they frequently published personal letters, diary entries, and various other primary source materials related to suspects and defendants.

While the reporters and rewrite men of the era did tend to overdramatize events compared to today’s journalistic standards, in some ways crime reporting was more accurate in the 1920s. Police reporters were given extraordinary access that is unheard of today. They walked freely through police stations and jails at all hours, sat in on and participated in police interrogations, played cards with prisoners in their cells. They investigated crimes themselves, trying to stay a step ahead of the police, and got so close to the action at crime scenes that they came home with blood on their shoes. They didn’t get information from police spokesmen or press releases; they lived their beat.

In the notes for each chapter, after the first reference to a newspaper or magazine article, subsequent citations of the article omit the headline, except when two or more separate articles from the same issue of the same publication are cited in the chapter.

The following newspapers and library holdings are abbreviated throughout:

CDJ
=
Chicago Daily Journal; CDN
=
Chicago Daily News; CDT
=
Chicago Daily Tribune; CEA
=
Chicago (Evening) American; CEP
=
Chicago Evening Post; CHE
=
Chicago Herald and Examiner; LAT
=
Los Angeles Times; NYT
=
New York Times; NYW
=
New York World.