The Girls of Murder City (40 page)

The profile praised Maurine’s talent and manners, but a more telling passage came in the brief description of her journalism career. The paper stated that it was “the experience of reporting the Leopold-Loeb case that supplied her with much of the material for
Chicago.
” A
New York World
feature on Maurine later in the month also dwelled on Leopold and Loeb, quoting her at length on how she decided what to ask the thrill killers when she had the opportunity and what she thought of the “crime of the century” spectacle.

That Maurine would expound freely on Nathan Leopold and Dick Loeb is not surprising: It made sense for an unproven playwright writing about the newspaper world to buttress her qualifications by highlighting her role in such a famous story. But in both the
Times
and the
World
interviews, she failed to mention that her play was actually based on a different trial. In fact, almost none of the numerous feature stories and reviews about
Chicago
in the New York press mentioned Beulah Annan. By this time, more than two years after the fact, Beulah and her trial had been forgotten outside the Second City. In contrast, articles about the play frequently referenced the infamous Leopold and Loeb.

In keeping the true inspiration for
Chicago
quiet, Maurine may have been worried that she’d hewed too closely to real events to be worthy of the acclaim she was receiving for writing a brilliantly original play. After all, some snippets of dialogue in
Chicago
came straight out of William Scott Stewart’s and W. W. O’Brien’s mouths during Beulah’s trial. Key plot points—such as Roxie’s pregnancy announcement—were also lifted directly from real events. Some of Maurine’s stage directions and scene descriptions were taken nearly word for word from her
Tribune
articles. The details of Roxie’s shooting of her boyfriend tracked exactly with the real thing, including the blaring jazz music on the phonograph and the children playing outside the window. Physical descriptions of Roxie also borrowed from Maurine’s
Tribune
descriptions of Beulah.

Moreover, Beulah wasn’t the only real-life murderess to make it onto the stage in
Chicago.
Belva Gaertner, in the form of the relatively minor character of Velma, was represented down to the smallest details, including Belva’s claim to have been so drunk that she didn’t remember anything about her boyfriend’s murder. Velma is described as being in her “late thirties, with smooth sallowed features, large dreamy eyes, and full lips that have a dipsomaniacal droop.” Velma, like Belva, is a wealthy society lady who pays an Italian immigrant prisoner to make her bed every morning. Sabella Nitti, Kitty Malm, and Elizabeth Unkafer also got lifted from the newspaper and dropped down into the play intact.

Maurine even offered herself up, tangentially, as “the woman from the
Ledger
” who doesn’t buy into the sham public persona Roxie puts on for the sob sisters. “I won’t see her,” Roxie says petulantly, when Billy Flynn tells her the reporter is coming to the jail for an interview. Flynn replies, “You’ve talked so much, you can’t stop now. If you tell enough lies they’re bound to forget a few!”

All of these similarities, now that the play was actually up and running, appear to have made Maurine a bit nervous. The play was advertised as a satire based on broadly identifiable conditions in the country; she wasn’t supposed to be retrying an old case on the stage. The furthest she went in acknowledging the extent of her inspiration was to write, in a letter to the editor in the
New York World,
that she “was portraying conditions as I actually found [them] during my newspaper work. For while the play may sound like burlesque or travesty in New York, it would pass for realism in its home town.” Again, she did not mention Beulah Annan.

Of course, that was Maurine Watkins in sophisticated New York. When
Chicago
arrived in Chicago in the fall of 1927, after running for 172 performances on Broadway and being sold to Hollywood, there would be no ducking the truth. There was no reason to do so.

20

The Most Monotonous City on Earth

On Sunday morning, October 9, 1927, the Twentieth Century Limited chugged slowly through Gary, Indiana. Heavy clouds pulled the sky down to the rooftops like a cap. The train swung north into Chicago’s sprawling industrial suburbs, open fields giving way to “crooked, ill-paved streets lined with bleak houses and thick with the murk of factory vapors.” For mile after mile, passengers watched one ramshackle structure worse than the last roll past, swimming in crashing waves of bilious smoke. Men and women pressed their noses to the windows. A sheltered, properly raised young woman, a woman like Maurine Watkins had once been, could be forgiven for looking out the window of her compartment and thinking some dreadful natural disaster had occurred. The traveler coming into Chicago for the first time saw a ghastly, dirty farce of a city. It was “the most monotonous city on earth,” proclaimed New York businessman Edward Hungerford on his initial trip. “Chicago, with the most wretched approaches on her main lines of travel of any great city of the world.”

To Maurine, of course, it looked like home. Once the train settled into LaSalle Street station, she stepped onto a red carpet that had been laid out for the passengers and walked through the station. Out at the taxi stand, a driver assumed control of her baggage and drove her to the Drake Hotel, where she registered and went up to her room. Maurine had looked forward to her return to the city for weeks.
Chicago
’s press agent planned to send newspaper photographers over to the station to meet her, but Maurine didn’t want to show up her old colleagues who hadn’t left town and become famous. She conveniently forgot to tell the publicity man when she was coming. Just to be safe, she stayed shut up in her room all day, as if she didn’t know a soul in the city or where to go.

When Maurine finally stepped from the Drake that evening, small, beautifully dressed, and alone, she climbed into a taxi and directed it to the Harris Theater, where she paid the driver and walked quickly up to the box office. It thrilled her to be going to the theater, her favorite pastime, and especially to be going to this play in particular, her own hit comedy. But she hadn’t planned ahead. The best available seat at this late hour, the ticket seller told her, was in the sixteenth row. Maurine smiled and told him that the sixteenth row was perfect; she was “glad it was not in the fifth or sixth row.” Mystified by the response—it certainly took all kinds to fill a theater—the man completed the transaction without further comment and gazed over her shoulder to the next patron. Maurine stepped toward the doors, happy to be unrecognized, something that hadn’t been possible for Belva Gaertner or W. W. O’Brien when they attended the play two weeks before.

It took all of ten seconds from the opening curtain for Francine Larrimore to have the packed house choking with laughter. Maurine laughed too. Oh, Francie was so wonderful! Maurine could enjoy the beautiful, gangly girl’s performance night after night. Watching Larrimore bound about the stage, Maurine was convinced anew that the actress had captured the character perfectly: “a hint of a Raphael angel—with a touch of Medusa.” You’d never know she was such a darling girl offstage.

“Why did you kill him?” a copper asked Larrimore.

The actress, an alley cat all of a sudden, screeched: “It’s a lie! I didn’t! Damn you, let go!” She chomped down on the policeman’s wrist with sharp incisors, and he yelped and flung her off.

“So it was you,” said the sergeant, a bit slow on the uptake.

“Yes, it was me! I shot him and I’m damned glad I did! I’d do it again—”

She didn’t get to finish her confession—she never did. A reporter cut her off: “Once is enough, dearie!”

The audience erupted at the line, the whole theater reverberating with tittering echoes, as Francine Larrimore slowly started to fall apart.

“Oh, God . . . God . . . Don’t let ’em hang me—don’t . . . Why, I’d . . .
die!
”

The elegantly dressed men and women around Maurine crashed into hysterics yet again. They pounded on their armrests, cackled in delight. Maurine was delighted with the line as well. The success of the play gratified her. And yet when the second of the play’s three acts closed, she apparently had had enough. She got to her feet and headed for the door. Eddie Kitt, the manager, smiled at her approach, grinning as any man instinctively did at the advance of a pretty young woman. Maurine asked him to escort her backstage. Kitt paused—this was an unusual request in the middle of a play—but then the young lady’s smile, the dancing eyes, the loose, pulled-back hair, all clicked together in his brainpan, and he did as he was asked.

When the curtain rose for the third act, Maurine Watkins still was not in her seat—she was walking quietly, purposefully, across the stage, in full view of the audience. She sat next to the actress playing Mary Sunshine, her perfect doll’s cheeks bulbous and reflecting light, blue eyes surveying the scene. Mr. Tilden, the stage manager, leaned forward from the wings to see what was happening.

Francine Larrimore glared at Maurine, but it was a look of surprise, momentary surprise. She wasn’t really upset.

“What kind of look?” the lawyer asked. “Describe it to the jury.”

Larrimore’s eyes swung from Maurine to her questioner. “I can’t describe it,” she said. “But a terrible look—angry—wild—”

“Were you afraid? Did you think he meant to kill you?”

“Oh, yes, sir! I knew if he once reached the gun . . .”

“It was his life then or yours,” the man said, his voice rising just enough to make everyone realize he was saying something important now.

“Yes, sir,” said Roxie Hart, finally lifting her wavering eyes to meet his. She took a deep breath, her cheeks cherry-red all at once, then: “He was coming right toward me, with that awful look—that wild look . . . and I closed my eyes . . . and . . .
shot!
”

Maurine loved being a part of the production. She’d been a reliable background player for months on Broadway, putting aside new writing assignments each evening to head over to the theater. She even understudied a couple of the minor roles. She couldn’t help but want to be involved in all the fun. She’d had plenty of laughs during the real events on which the play was based, just like some of the other faces in the audience here in Chicago. She hadn’t realized how much she missed the city and her former life until the play started. New York was surprisingly tame: Its murder rate was more than 50 percent lower than the Second City’s. At one point, Maurine took a trip to supposedly wild Baltimore but found none of that old Chicago feeling, to her disappointment: “Nary a cherub with happy days in her arms or revolver in hand, and I strolled particularly through ladies’ retiring quarters,” she wrote to her friend Alexander Woollcott, the Broadway drama critic. But now she could have as much of her late police reporter’s life as she wanted—at least her fantasy version of it. When she arrived in Chicago, the silent-movie adaptation of her play was shooting across town under the guidance of the legendary Cecil B. DeMille, its producer. It was being made under great secrecy, and everyone was talking about what they didn’t know—everyone except Maurine, who never gossiped. Francine Larrimore was committed to the stage show, so the former Mack Sennett bathing beauty Phyllis Haver, best known as the vampire in Emil Jannings’s
The Way of All Flesh,
took the lead for Mr. DeMille. Maurine didn’t know what to think about that. The whole endeavor was challenging, turning such a talky play into a silent film. Haver would admit that herself, saying: “It is bad enough to get in tune with any character but when one jumps up and down the octave whamming out this discord and that, the task is nerve wracking.”

Having the movie shooting in town was exciting, but the actors and crew mostly kept to themselves during production, and Maurine didn’t impose herself on them. The play, on the other hand, was here for everyone, right now. And everyone seemed to love it, especially the critics. “Miss Watkins is uncannily keen, and
Chicago
is one of the brilliant satirical plays of the times,” wrote C. J. Bulliet in the
Evening Post.
The
Tribune
said the play “is as rich a reason for laughter as has in many years been proffered to those of us who think we are civilized, educated, adult, responsive, transilient [
sic
], literate, something more than half-witted, what used to be called ‘aware,’ and what is now miscalled ‘sophisticated.’ ” Whether or not Maurine needed to fear being found out in New York, Chicagoans felt flattered that real events in their city had made it to the Broadway stage. The
American
observed that “Good-natured Chicago laughed loudly and gossiped incessantly between the three acts at the clever burlesque on the stage, [at] county and city and bar and newspapers and police—at the hectic jazz times which could make possible an evening of entertainment, with women swearing like troopers, in this ‘what price bullets’ production.”
¹⁷