Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (22 page)

Harrison won a fourth term. The Democrats kept control of City Hall. The results were tight enough that Darrow’s decisions not to run and to endorse the mayor almost certainly made the difference. But Darrow’s radical friends felt betrayed, and the episode stoked his reputation for guile and trickery.
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Chapter 7

RUBY, ED, AND CITIZEN HEARST

Ruby and me, we both love Darrow.

I
n July 1903, Darrow married Ruby Hamerstrom. For years he had vowed that no new wife would claim his freedom, and so his friends were stunned by the news. A private ceremony was performed by Judge
Edward Dunne, attended only by Ruby’s brother Fred and Darrow’s law partner and roommate,
Francis Wilson, who had been charged with quietly securing the marriage license, slipping through the doors of the bureau just before they shut for the day. There were champagne toasts and then Darrow and Ruby, evading the press, took a train to Montreal, where they boarded the steamship
Bavarian
for Europe. Darrow spent much of the voyage seasick in his berth, as Ruby read to him from a history of France. She had dreams of a six-month, or longer, trip around the world. But Darrow’s investments were faring poorly, and they returned to Chicago in mid-October.

Ruby was “incurably in love,” she confessed. “He seemed to be all sorts and all ages, from the boy that he never outgrew to the old man that he never became.” And he was smitten. She was not a striking beauty, but pretty and fashionable. She qualified as a new woman but not so militant and, once married, content to be, as she described herself, “the weed in the knot of the tail of The Kite.” She wrote for the women’s sections, not the front page, and of trends and fashions, not politics or crime. “You can’t really expect good Irish wit from a Swede … that wears French heels, I s’pose,” she told Darrow’s sister Jennie.
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Yet Ruby had wit enough to land him. “He said … that I was the only
girl he ever liked that much who didn’t take the courting out of his hands,” she said proudly. In Darrow’s divorce, he had to “relinquish his every last dollar’s worth of property for his release,” Ruby noted, but she promised she would never ask for alimony.

At eighteen, Ruby had rebelled against the dour strictures of her Lutheran home, where she had been expected to help her mother raise her six siblings. She fled from Galesburg to Chicago and the life of a newspaperwoman. Ruby had not finished high school but got work as a bookkeeper, looked for freelance assignments, and discovered a demand for stories about the doings of middle-class women—their clubs and trips and causes. She and Darrow had decided to marry in 1902, and she hoped to buy a nice house, with elm trees and a lawn.

“Just a word tonight, instead of a Christmas present, to tell you that I think you are the dearest, sweetest girl on earth,” Darrow wrote her on Christmas Eve. “I love you with my whole heart and want you all to myself and I hope that this is the last Christmas so long as I live that I can not have you as I want you—all for my own.”

“Goodnight dearest sweetheart,” he signed the note. “Remember that you are always loved by your crazy old Clarence Darrow.”

Ruby was not ruled by social conventions. She accepted Darrow’s Negro friends. She liked to have a drink or two at parties or a restaurant. As women gave up their corseted, floor-sweeping gowns for more liberating fashions, Ruby was an early enthusiast. And she had a modern view of marriage. “My informant … told me that in addition to Darrow being a Socialist, both he and his wife are free lovers,” wrote a Pinkerton detective, spying on the couple. “The wife made the statement this evening that a man had a right to desert his wife and family if he felt like it.” As long as no rival made a serious claim on Ruby’s place in Darrow’s life (“You’ve got the certificate, and no one will ever get that away from you,” he told her), she tolerated his infidelities. But she was conventional enough to fret about social standing, and she could be snobbish and catty; she liked nice things, and prized the wealthy and prominent company he kept.

Darrow’s brothers and sisters, who had maintained a warm relationship with Jessie and Paul, tried to make Ruby feel welcome. They were open-minded; the aged Amirus had taken a far younger second wife as well. But Paul did not warm to Ruby, and she thought he was spoiled and stubborn and manipulative when exploiting his father’s guilt over the
divorce. Paul “appropriated every dollar available that his father permitted him to help himself to,” she griped. Ruby was jealous, as well, of the hooks that Jessie still had in Darrow. She sulked after learning that Jessie left the marriage with real estate and a lovely set of diamonds and told Darrow’s sisters that Jessie’s controlling nature was the cause of the breakup.

Nor did Jessie much like Ruby, whom she instantly identified as a threat to her financial well-being. Darrow was still supporting Jessie with monthly payments, and would until she remarried, late in life. From Europe he wrote to assure her that there was enough money for them all, and that the stipends would continue. “I shall live where I did before or in some cheap house nearby and shall not spend money or be extravagant in any way,” he promised Jessie. “So long as I live you will both come first.” Ruby accepted this, Darrow promised Jessie. It was a dubious claim. The cost of maintaining a wife and an ex-wife is a reason why, though Darrow earned high fees, he was generally on edge about money. He took to speculating in the stock market, and in banks and gold mines and other ventures, but had no gift for it.

Darrow’s efforts did not dispel the tension. After he returned from Europe, Darrow invited Paul to come to Washington to see him argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, but his son rebuffed him, just as he turned down his father’s invitations to spend evenings together or to join him at the law firm. Their relationship, which had improved, took a step backward.

“I have always cared for him more than anything on Earth … I have tried to live an unselfish life … tried to consider others and do all in my power for their happiness,” Darrow wrote Jessie. But his self-pity flared to anger. “Paul is too young to judge me,” he wrote. “And neither to him nor anyone else shall I make any effort to be judged or understood. I shall go on with what is left of my life and try to live it as honestly and courageously as I can and pay no attention to the rewards or punishment which the world always gives without any regard to merit.”

It wasn’t the happiest time. Darrow’s nephew Karl recalled the family’s feverish maneuvering to keep Jessie, Paul, and Ruby from confronting one another at family gatherings. Gradually, Darrow drifted from his brothers and sisters.
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T
HEY HAD PLANNED
to return to the Langdon, but Ruby did not want to start a new life in his old bachelor haunts. “When we came home … I felt I never before had seen a pigpen inhabited by humans. They all in the Langdon had used Darrow’s place for a loafing place, burned all his wood [and] mopped up the ashes with beautiful velvet pillows I’d made and sent him one Christmas,” she told one of his sisters. “The janitor’s wife was supposed to keep the place in order, but whisked in and out very briefly, just enough to collect what was paid her.”

Nor were the girls from the Langdon gracious. “One of our first callers was
Gertrude Barnum, hysterically and shamelessly demanding to know how Darrow had dared to marry after promising her and all the others that he never would, and on several later occasions she came in tantrums and tears to attack us both for having betrayed them all,” Ruby said. It was a rude hello to “the unwelcome stranger-bride,” as she called herself, and she let Darrow know about it. The Darrows moved to a new apartment, on Sheridan Road, “more suitable and roomy and less imbedded in the soot of the West Side,” she recalled.

The intensity of her new life left her breathless. “It was like wonderland,” Ruby said. “I was busy learning how to manage my life, our home, making so many varied new acquaintances … which seemed only part of the great world I now dwelt in.” She worked hard to keep Darrow happy. “He had escaped from a first marriage that had been unbearable,” she explained, “and that made me careful to the greatest degree possible that he should not call me another mistake.”

It is hard to find a friend of Darrow’s who didn’t marvel, not only that he had remarried, but that he married Ruby. The near-universal opinion of Darrow’s pals is that his new wife was his intellectual inferior. They talk of her henpecking, of her “twittering,” and of her insecurity and possessiveness. Ruby “is not a good sharer,” one of her sisters-in-law wrote. She “would like to monopolize Clarence rather entirely.”

As the years passed, Ruby took control of Darrow’s life. She watched his health, served his guests, helped him with correspondence, and selected his clothes. He grew to rely upon her for the dull details of life, and she to exult in self-sacrifice. Darrow was a finicky eater who—except for a brief experiment as a vegetarian—clung to beefsteak and boiled vegetables. And so, even in the restaurants of Paris or New York, “I never
ordered or ate in his presence any dish other than whatever he wished for himself,” she recalled, proud of her self-abnegation.

Darrow had complained that Jessie was a poor hostess for the friends he brought home. Ruby was determined to do better. “We served … after dinner coffee—(in the most lovely tea-sized cups one ever would see!) There were daintily colored and arranged bonbons, fine liqueurs, in most enticing old-world glasses—exquisitely-cut finger bowls on cut glass saucers—either a low barge bowl or low wide bowl full of many-colored fruits, usually decorated with glowing cherries or strawberries dotted in among green geranium leaves here and there,” she wrote. “From our honeymoon trip I had carried back in a large valise the Sheffield steel, ivory-handled knives & forks we bought at the manufacturing-plant, that he had said before we left home he wanted,—and all his favorite white-metal spoons of all sizes and serving-uses, to be polished like silver. In every respect the table was always a part of the success of the meal, as spick and span and artistically arranged as though for—any other king of my universe.”

Still, he loved her. Their physical relationship was warm and satisfying. He would write her amorous notes from the road, and nestle in their big brass bed with her when home, reading aloud as they cuddled. He called her, affectionately, “Rube” or “Ruben.” And she called him “D.” And her loyalty to Darrow, time would show, was unshakable.

“How are you getting along with Ruby?”
Lincoln Steffens asked him.

“Fine,” Darrow replied, “because Ruby and me, we both love Darrow.”
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D
ARROW ALSO ACQUIRED
a new law partner. Altgeld’s death left an empty office at the firm. He tried to lure
Brand Whitlock to Chicago. “I would like you with me if it can be properly arranged,” Darrow wrote Whitlock toward the end of 1902. “We need a good man who can do all kinds of work. I do not know whether you can or not. Literary men … are not generally the ones who can. Still, I think so much of you that I wish you could.”
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