The Girls of Murder City Read online

  This kind of ambition impressed readers—and competitors—but it didn’t faze Hearst. Rather than trying to match the Tribune’s depth, he sought to bring his rival down to his level. The country’s biggest newspaper baron moved into Chicago in 1900 with the launch of the Chicago Evening American. The American, soon to be joined by its sister morning paper, fought to gain the workingman’s pennies with blatant populism and the kind of sensationalist reporting that had worked so well for its owner in New York. Serious journals called the Hearst style “the new black plague” and an “unholy blot on the fourth estate—bawdy, inane and contemptible.” His reporters, the critics said, “mock at privacy and finger in glee all the soiled linen they can discover.” A cartoonist labeled Hearst the Wizard of Ooze.

  Hearst didn’t care. His newspapers served a larger purpose than gaining the favor of the intelligentsia or, for that matter, making money. Twice elected to the House of Representatives from New York, Hearst dreamed of the presidency. A Democrat, he supported the eight-hour day and woman suffrage, and so did his newspapers. His papers also vocally supported him, and he believed he had to have a presence in Chicago to build a serious national political organization. Hearst epitomized the “journalism of action” that seethed in Chicago like nowhere else, New York included. He emphatically was the Wizard of Ooze, but he also crusaded against the powerful and privileged. He dug out government corruption, and when he couldn’t find or invent proof, he screamed about it in editorials.

  When Hearst entered the Chicago market, the Tribune, fearful of yellow journalism’s appeal, fought to keep the new papers off the city’s newsstands, setting off more than a decade of violence that served as hands-on training for many of the thugs who later became beer runners during Prohibition. The hardball tactics in the circulation war reached their apex one day in 1912 when two of Hearst’s men jumped onto a streetcar at Washington and Wells and noticed that not one of the riders was reading a Hearst paper. The bullyboys snapped; they pulled out revolvers and pumped bullets into two men who were reading the Tribune. They then killed the conductor.

  By the 1920s, however, Hearst was in his seventh decade and had mellowed. Having lost bids for both the New York City mayoralty and the New York governorship, he had come to accept that he would never live in the White House. So instead he turned his attention to building an outrageously grand estate in California and pumping up the Hollywood career of his mistress, actress Marion Davies. This meant his newspapers were more important than ever. He needed cash flow—a lot of it. Politics and the boss’s aggrandizement no longer drove the papers’ news judgment. Drama did. Now more than ever, to secure their circulation goals, the two Hearst newspapers in Chicago sought to mold news to their liking, which meant the commonplace blown up bigger and better than in any of their competitors.

  Fortunately for Hearst, he had thought ahead by luring one of the city’s best editors, Walter Howey, from the Tribune shortly after coming into Chicago. Howey’s charge was, “Beat the Trib. That’s your only job. Just beat the Tribune.” The ambitious editor planned on doing exactly that, by whatever means necessary. “Don’t ever fake a story or anything in a story,” Howey told one young reporter, summarizing his journalistic credo. “That is, never let me catch you at it.”

  It was one piece of advice everyone under Howey diligently followed. No one ever got caught at anything, as long as first-rate copy came in. In contrast to the Tribune’s culture, the Hearst papers boasted such notoriously out-of-control reporters that their headquarters at Madison and Market, which the American and the Herald and Examiner shared, was known as the Madhouse on Madison Street, with no hyperbole intended. Editors at the two newspapers worked their reporters fourteen hours a day and told them daily journalism and marriage couldn’t coexist. Their crime reporters practically lived at police stations. They bribed officers to sit in on interrogations, and they sometimes took an active part, yelling at suspects, tricking them, threatening violence. Jailers let them into cells, where for hours they would play cards with accused murderers, jotting down quotes between games and phoning them in to rewrite men. The toilet was right there in the cell, and interviews and card games would continue while one of them sat on the can.

  Boorish behavior may have been tolerated at the other papers, but the Madhouse enthusiastically encouraged it. Hearst’s women police reporters covered only women criminals, and they sat in their own isolated area of the newsroom. This was for their own good, for Howey believed that drinking put men in the best frame of mind to produce superior copy. Everyone drank on the job—the newsroom frequently reeked of vomit. Howey’s most memorable physical characteristic was a glass left eye, which supposedly was necessitated after he drank too much during a breaking story, blacked out at his desk, and impaled the orb on a copy spike. Maybe that useless eye was one of the reasons the papers’ headline type got so big on the front page—often a whopping six inches high. But that was doubtful. The heads also got consistently racy. Howey trained headline writers to boil down a story to a single shocking phrase. If he didn’t find it in the story, the headline writer went to the rewrite man and pressed him: “What do you mean, the man was shot dead in the street? That happens daily. What makes this shooting differ from all others?”

  Howey roamed the newsroom, looking over the shoulders of his rewrite men, constantly reminding them that he didn’t want a rundown of facts—that was the job of the “leg man” who called in the story. The rewrite specialist at a Hearst paper provided the emotional context, the bang that forced a reader at a newsstand to pick out the American or the Herald and Examiner instead of the Tribune, Daily News, Evening Post, or Daily Journal. “Hype this up!” the editor would demand, over and over. “Hype this up!”

  It wasn’t easy for the Tribune to match the sometimes questionable details that poured daily out of the rewrite bank at the Madhouse on Madison. “A newspaper man need have only a spoonful of brains to dip his journal in blood and wave it before a morbid mob,” Robert Lee said defensively, when comparing the Tribune’s “steady hand” to the Hearst papers’ sensation. But Lee was happy to wave blood around too, if only a little more decorously, and on a Tuesday night in the middle of March, a report came in that wouldn’t need to be hyped up to attract the morbid. Maurine Watkins learned that a man had been found shot dead in a car over on Forrestville Avenue. Possible suicide. She set out for the Fiftieth Street police station. It was after one in the morning—more than three hours after deadline for the earliest edition.

  In the station’s booking room, reporters from the various newspapers waited for more information. No one thought the dead man in the car was a suicide. The new widow, Freda Law, came through, stunned and shuffling, a pretty young thing. Not long after, two officers brought in a middle-aged woman from the back room—the woman who’d been with the dead man. She was wide-eyed drunk, scared into some semblance of clarity. Her hair was twisted into origami; her hands trembled. She’d been crying. Maurine, on the job for only a few weeks, already understood what this was all about. A drunken fight that went too far—you got them every night.

  The woman listed in her seat as detectives waited on a cell assignment for her. Maurine hovered, hoping for a chance to get in some questions. There was something about the woman, something that didn’t quite fit with an address on the wrong side of Washington Park and a domestic dispute ending in gunshots. The woman stank, but she was wearing beautiful jewelry—huge hunks of diamonds—and she had a way of holding herself that got your attention. None of the founders of the Anti-Saloon League, which had driven the dry movement for twenty years before it took hold, could have foreseen that someone like this, a woman of means and sophistication, would be a victim of their efforts. That was what Prohibition did—it pulled everyone down into the pit.

  She and Walter were so drunk, they’d gotten giddy, the woman was telling the policemen minding her. She had been worried about their safety, going home so late. It was very dark out, she said. Even drunk, the
woman knew how to tell a story, how to build suspense. She propped her elbows on shaky knees, made eye contact. “On our way to my home we began talking about stick-up men,” she said. “I jokingly remarked, ‘I’ll bet I’m a better shooter than you are.’ Mr. Law said I was mistaken. ‘I’m a wonderful marksman—I never miss,’ he said, laughing out loud and patting me on the shoulder. I suggested, jokingly, that we toss up a coin and that the winner shoot the loser. I said if the winner missed the loser, the latter would get a chance to shoot, and vice versa, until one of us was shot. There were nine bullets in the pistol. And then—oh, I don’t know just what did happen. I was too drunk.”

  A group of reporters had gathered around, as if the woman were a scout leader sitting in front of a crackling fire. In the days ahead, the papers would refer to her as the Flip-Coin Murderess. A veteran officer at the station, a Lieutenant Egan, pressed her to continue, to try to remember. “Mr. Law said something about hold-up men . . . said he was afraid of them,” the woman insisted. Her nose, too big for her face in the best of circumstances, had been engorged by drink. It looked like a deformity. Her eyes bulged. “I remember seeing him collapse over the wheel, but I had no idea what was the matter,” she continued. “I looked at Wallie closer and saw blood streaming down his face. I put up my hand to stop the flow, but I couldn’t. ‘Walter, Walter,’ I called. But he did not move or answer me. Then I tried to pull him out of the driver’s seat so I could drive the car home, but I couldn’t budge him; he was so limp. His head fell on my arms and that is how my clothing came to be spattered with blood. I became frightened and ran home.” Tears had started during the story, and they rolled down the woman’s cheeks and hung from her jowls. She sat back. She seemed to cave in on herself in exhaustion, her mottled face sliding into her neck.

  It was quite a performance. Reporters were left wondering what to make of it—and what to make of her, this drunken rich woman who carried a pistol. She was a mess, a grotesquerie, but everyone seemed to recognize there was something special about her, something . . . appealing. Was she a gangster’s mistress? A bit old for that, maybe, but when first brought in she had the same look that all the gangster girls had, the ones who stood around outside the central police station waiting for their men to come out. It was the vacant, bemused look of someone watching a rinky-dink neighborhood parade go by.

  Finally somebody recognized her: She was Belle Gaertner, a popular cabaret dancer before the war. She’d left the stage to marry William Gaertner, one of the country’s leading manufacturers of scientific instruments. There’d been a scandalous divorce—Mrs. Gaertner had been caught committing adultery. That was all before Maurine’s time, but the young reporter liked what she was hearing. She had a big story.

  Maurine had page-one material, there was no doubt about it. But there was a problem. “Girl reporters”—that was what everyone called women hacks—almost never made it to the front page. The biggest, most challenging assignments went to the best reporters, and that meant men. A girl reporter simply couldn’t be counted on—even many women in the newsroom believed that. “On the big story her vision is apt to be [too] close and her factual grasp inadequate,” insisted New York Herald Tribune reporter Ishbel Ross. Editors demanded “complete reliability” on breaking news, Ross noted. “They can’t depend on the variable feminine mechanism.”

  Women on newspaper staffs who wanted to knock down such notions rarely got the opportunity. Despite the dramatic rise in “gun girls” and women bandits in Chicago, some of the city’s newspapers still wouldn’t send girl reporters out on nighttime assignments. “I would rather see my daughter starve than that she should ever have heard or seen what the women on my staff have been compelled to hear and see,” exclaimed one editor. Other outfits—like the Hearst papers—employed only sob sisters, who were allowed out after dark but whose charge was to write heartbreaking stories of personal tragedy, no matter what the circumstances.

  The Tribune, at least, wanted a true “feminine perspective” on women criminals. It sought strong, unsentimental women who could write crime stories “with a high moral tone.” To no one’s surprise, the paper had had limited success so far. One of its first hires was a young woman not long out of the University of Chicago. On her first assignment, Fanny Butcher interviewed a woman whose son had attempted to kill her. The fledgling reporter was so shaken by the events the woman described that she barely made it back to the local room without collapsing. Next, Butcher spent a week in the morals court, watching as men and women were arraigned on prostitution and related charges. She had to listen, she said, “to the intimate details of sexual intercourse, abnormal as well as normal, of amounts paid and demanded as refund by dissatisfied customers, of friskings during lovemaking, and of young girls hounded by procurers. I went home every night and promptly lost whatever dinner I had been able to get down (I weighed ninety-eight pounds when it was over).” Butcher wasn’t able to take it, just as the Tribune’s managing editor, Teddy Beck, had foreseen. He sent her to women’s features to save her from having to write any more “tales of depravity.”

  Maurine was certainly aware of the widespread doubts about her gender’s ability to cut it under pressure, but she didn’t have time to worry about perceptions. Knowing that a replate would be necessary for a final street edition, she began to write as soon as she had the bare-bones facts. She was so rushed that she didn’t even get all of those facts right. She called Belva by her popular nickname, her old stage name, and misspelled her first husband’s surname. She called the dead man Robert, instead of Walter. She misnamed the café where Belva and Walter had sat drinking. Nevertheless, she had a feel for the story. She knew it was leading somewhere good. She wrote:

  Mrs. Belle Brown Overbeck Gaertner, a handsome divorcee of numerous experiences with divorce publicity, was arrested at an early hour this morning after the police had found the dead body of Robert Law, an automobile salesman, in her automobile.

  Law had been shot through the head. His body was found slumped down at the steering wheel of Mrs. Gaertner’s Nash sedan, a short distance from the entrance to Mrs. Gaertner’s home, 4809 Forrestville avenue. On the floor of the automobile was found an automatic pistol from which three shots had been fired, and a bottle of gin. . . .

  From the license number of the automobile Mrs. Gaertner’s name and address were found. The police went to her apartment at 4809 Forrestville avenue and found Mrs. Gaertner hysterically pacing the floor. She readily admitted she had been with Law, but steadfastly denied she knew anything of the manner of his death. . . . She finally admitted the gun was hers, saying she always carried it, because of her fear of robbers. When pressed concerning the actual shooting, she answered all queries with:

  “I don’t know, I was drunk.”

  Maurine, probably nervous about how her first big story would be received by the copyreaders, reined in her personality, sticking to the facts at hand. There was nothing special about the finished product, nothing like what the Herald and Examiner would surely come up with, though Maurine did linger on the infidelity that caused Belva’s divorce back in 1920. The story had the feel of being rushed. Considering the late hour when Belva arrived at the police station, it’s possible Maurine called the story in, with a copyboy running to the “morgue,” the paper’s archives, to pull information on Belva’s divorce for her. But the young reporter knew she’d done a competent job. It was a start. The typewritten pages, pounded out by her or a rewrite man, were sent down to the composing room in a basket. The story had been designated for a page-one position in place of another item already on the presses; once the story was ready, the remade pages would be cast, the presses shut down, the new plates inserted and the presses sent flying again, all within minutes. All Maurine could do now was wait. In the composing room, a copyboy took the pages over to the copy cutter’s desk. The cutter sliced the story into sections for the copyreaders and marked each “take” with a number to keep it in order. Everybody worked quickly, and soon
the Linotype operator began to knock away at his keyboard, transferring Maurine’s words into hot type.

  The Tribune was a massive operation, a city institution, and any reporter was just one very small part of it. This fact was represented perfectly by the Linotype, which differentiated not a whit between sports or crime, star columnist or suburban reporter. The machine operator read every word of every story that was dropped onto his holding plate, but he didn’t comprehend any of it—there wasn’t time. He simply shoveled it into the mechanical maw.

  The Linotype, or line-casting, machine was part typewriter, part foundry. The machine had revolutionized newspaper publishing late in the previous century, allowing a small team to swiftly set page after page of metal type, resulting in casts that could be used on multiple presses at the same time. With this innovation, along with the electric-powered rotary press, newspapers suddenly could be far more than a handful of pages each day. They could cover the whole world, with as many pages per edition and copies every day as readers and advertisers made economically feasible. The Tribune’s maximum capacity for a forty-page edition was well over one million copies. Yet there was nothing glamorous about the technological triumph that made this possible. An operator sat before a ninety-character keyboard, the rest of the Linotype machine rearing up before him at close range, making him look like a disobedient child being forced to face the wall. A pot of molten metal was attached to the back of the machine, providing the source material for the lines typed out by the operator. The Linotype was, quite simply, a large, dangerous beast, with various safety mechanisms built in to keep the 550-degree liquid metal from spraying through gaps between the letter molds. As the operator typed, little mechanical arms swung just above eye level, releasing matrices—small pieces of metal—on which letters were stamped and then arranged into completed lines of hot type, spitting them out one by one with a satisfying tick-tick-tick and then distributing the letter molds back to their magazines for the next line. On the fourth floor of the Tribune Plant Building, dozens of these machines stood side-by-side, clicking and humming in unison as deadline approached, the operators one with their Linotypes.