screen actor, perhaps, or a debonair sportsman.
Or a playwright, a man’s man who had chopped down trees and fought bulls and ridden tramp steamers and come back worldly wise beyond his years, penning a Pulitzer prize-winning effort about man’s inhumanity to man, and he would be damned if he would allow those Hollywood infidels to destroy his masterpiece. Not him, an American grassroots genius who had earned the right to hobnob with the elite—even to snuggle and, rumor has it, sneak into the stateroom of a certain Isabel Bell after hours, for some high-society intermingling.
Or perhaps he was a suave detective on his way to a distant tropical isle, having been engaged to solve a dastardly crime perpetrated against some lovely innocent white woman by evil dark men.
Of the hooey you’ve just endured, the closest thing to the truth is, believe it or not (to quote an American grassroots genius named Ripley), the last.
The “handsome devil” at the rail with the frail was only me—Nathan Heller, scion of Maxwell Street, on leave from the Chicago Police Department, on the most unusual assignment a member of that city’s pickpocket detail had ever stumbled into. The crisp white jacket—like the steamship ticket that had cost just a little bit less than my yearly salary—had been provided me by an unlikely patron saint who also resided in Chicago.
The shapely Miss Bell I’d managed to pick up on my own devices. She was under no illusions as to my social standing, but seemed to have a certain fascination for my tawdry line of work. And I was, after all, twenty-seven years old and a handsome devil.
So the real lowdown is…Isabel was slumming—and me?
Damned if I wasn’t on my way to paradise.
Several weeks before, an unexpected phone call from an old family friend had taken me away from a job that already had me way the hell off my Chicago beat. In the early stages of the investigation into the kidnapping of the twenty-month-old son of aviator hero Charles Lindbergh, the involvement of Chicago gangsters was strongly suspected; Al Capone, recently incarcerated for income tax evasion, was making suspicious noises about the snatch from his Cook County jail cell.
So for most of March 1932, I acted as liaison between the Chicago PD and the New Jersey State Police (and Colonel Lindbergh himself), working various aspects of the case in New Jersey, New York, and Washington, D.C.
But by early April, my initial involvement in that frustrating episode (about which I have written at length in a previous memoir) had started to wind down. When a phone call to the Lindbergh estate summoned me for luncheon at Sardi’s, a restaurant in the heart of midtown Manhattan’s theatrical district, I was relieved to be taking a break from a frustrating, heartbreaking dead end of a case.
I left my fedora with the redheaded doll at the hat check stand, and was led by a red-jacketed waiter through a high-ceilinged, open-beamed room that was lent a surprising intimacy by its soft lighting, warmly masculine paneling, and walls arrayed with vivid, full-color celebrity caricatures.
Some of the caricatures were alive. Over to one side, George Jessel—in the company of a blonde chorine—was pronouncing a eulogy over the remains of a lamb chop. Walter Winchell was holding court in one of the reddish- orange booths, his mouth machine-gunning remarks to a packed table of rapt listeners, mostly attractive young women. Barbara Stanwyck, her light brown hair boyishly bobbed, delicately pretty yet projecting the same strength in private as on the screen, was in a tete-a-tete over drinks with a balding older gent who was probably an agent or producer or something. Jack Dempsey—didn’t he have his
But the most vivid living caricature in the room came not from Broadway or Hollywood, or the worlds of press or sport, rather from a distant prairie way station called Chicago. His back to the wall, he sat on the inside of a half-circle booth whose white linen tablecloth was set not just for him, but for two expected guests.
Even seated, he was an impressive figure, a big bucket-skulled broad-shouldered train wreck of a man in an unmade bed of a gray suit, his loose excuse of a bow tie dangling like an absurd noose; his hair was gray, too— what there was of it, combed in transparent disguise over his baldpate, a thick forelock straying like a comma down over his right eye, punctuating a craggy, deeply grooved face characterized by razor-keen gray eyes and Apache cheekbones.
Clarence Darrow was buttering a roll. There was nothing methodical about it; strictly slapdash. The seventy- four-year-old household word of an attorney glanced up at me with an impish smile and, though we had not spoken since my father’s funeral over a year ago, said as casually as if I’d seen him this morning, “You’ll forgive my not rising. My legs aren’t what they once were, and I’m preparing this exhibit for my esophagus.”
“If Ruby saw that,” I said, referring to his doting wife and self-proclaimed manager, “she’d object.”
“Overruled,” he smiled, and he chomped down the roll.
The room was a din of clattering china and silverware and raging egos. The perfect place for an intimate conversation.
Sliding in next to him, I nodded toward the place setting opposite me. “We expecting a third?”
Darrow nodded his shaggy head. “Fella named George S. Leisure. Wall Street attorney, Harvard grad. He’s a law partner of Wild Bill Donovan’s.”
“Ah,” I said. “So that’s how you knew where to find me.”
Donovan, a Congressional Medal of Honor-winning war hero, was a pal of Lindbergh’s and had been involved on the fringes of our efforts to locate the stolen child.
“Donovan’s firm was recommended to me,” Darrow said, talking with his mouthful of roll open, “when Dudley Malone had to bow out.”
As slick as Darrow was rumpled, Malone was almost as famous a trial attorney as Clarence himself, and had worked at his side on a number of cases, including the Scopes evolution trial in Tennessee, in which Darrow had made a monkey of William Jennings Bryan, further cementing the national fame he’d gained by defending the teenage “Thrill Killers” Loeb and Leopold back home in Chicago.
“Bow out of what?” I asked.
“Little case I’m considering.”
“Don’t tell me you’re getting back into harness, C.D. Didn’t you retire? Again?”
