Douglas Perry's Blog, page 2
August 4, 2010
Chicago theater site reviews 'Girls of Murder City'
From Steadstyle Chicago:
We are all familiar by now with Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly, those scintillating sinners who helped put the name "Chicago" on theatrical and movie marquees. Theirs is the tale of murder, greed, corruption, violence, exploitation, adultery and treachery...all those things we hold near and dear to our hearts. And yet how much do we know of the real-life murderesses, beautiful Beulah Annan and stylish Belva Gaertner, whose escapades inspired not only the 1975 Kander and Ebb musical and its 2002 cinematic adaptation, but rocked the Windy City some 90 years back?
"The Girls of Murder City" by Douglas Perry is an illuminating read that is a must for anyone interested in Chicago history, criminal justice and psychology or a juicy murder yarn. It manages to evoke a time and place, as well as a state of mind infinitely more dramatic than anything a playwright could create for the stage. Endlessly fascinating, Perry's remarkably detailed and entertaining book is all the more incredible because it's all true, or at least all the truth that is fit to print.
The book's setting is just as dramatic or more than any of its colorful characters or tawdry events. Chicago in the 1920's was a hotbed of vice and corruption, the perfect symbol of American progress and dreams run amok. Amazing how some things never change! Perry paints a lurid and revealing portrait of Prohibition, with its swinging speakeasies awash in illegal booze, organized crime, political graft...and all that jazz. Chicago's legendary glamorization of the criminal underworld was the ideal stage for women such as Belva Gaertner, Beulah Annan, Kitty Malm, Sabella Nitti and Wanda Stopa, those real life Merry Murderesses.
The titian red-headed Beulah Annan was the prettiest woman ever charged with murder in Chicago. In some ways, she and fellow Cook County jail resident Belva Gaertner were social opposites. Beulah, twice married at the time she shot her married lover Harry Kalstedt in the back, was employed at Tennant's Laundry, the wife of a blue-collar auto mechanic. Belva, once known as the "Queen of Chicago's cabarets," was a wealthy and stylish Hyde Park socialite who felt half dressed without a gaudy ring on each finger. Despite her material comforts, charm and good manners, Belva was a hard drinker and party lover who despised work and grew easily bored with her multi-millionaire husband.
Even in prison, Belva was the life of the party, leading hymns and giving fashion and makeup tips to her fellow inmates. Both women knew how to work the system to get the most out of their fifteen minutes of fame. Men worshipped and lusted for them, and women sympathized with their plight. Most women, that is. A notable exception was an ambitious young reporter named Maurine Watkins, whose cynical, tongue-in-cheek, lacerating prose filled the pages of the Chicago Tribune. The Tribune, one of fifteen newspapers competing for readers and advertisers in the Windy City in the 1920's, was known as "a real hanging paper - out for a conviction". It didn't just report the news, it shaped it. Its unsentimental, hard-edged style of journalism set it apart from the weepy melodrama and sensationalism of its competitors.
Police reporters, Perry notes, were given extraordinary access in those days, walking freely through police stations and jails at all hours, sitting in and participating in police interrogations, and playing cards with prisoners in their cells. The crime beat was a tough and tumble man's game, a far cry from Maurine Watkins' quiet, respectable religious upbringing in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Her drive and deeply rooted ethics allowed her to stand out from the assortment of sob sisters and cut-throat reporters. She would document her experiences covering the Annan and Gaertner murder trials in her highly acclaimed 1926 play "Chicago," which was originally titled "The Brave Little Woman". Ironically, Watkins spent a large part of her life attempting to block her greatest theatrical success from being turned into a musical.
Beulah and Belva had the odds clearly stacked in their favor in spite of some pretty incriminating circumstantial evidence in both cases. Chicago was famous for never convicting women - certainly not beautiful women, whose fates were held safely in the hands of all-male jurors, none of them willing to believe that the fairer sex could be as devious and cold-blooded as their male counterparts. That sense of blind idealism allowed "The Girls of Murder City" to be the media darlings of the day.
Others wouldn't have it quite so lucky, we learn. Where Beulah traded her looks and Belva her class for assured acquittals, neither Kitty Malm (aka "The Tiger Girl") or Sabella Nitti (the first woman ever sentenced to death in Cook County) had the beauty or grace to do likewise. Indeed, we find that cultural prejudices and aesthetic considerations played as big a role in their respective fates as their actual deeds, guilt or innocence. The circus style nature of the media coverage and the trials themselves can all be summed up in the musical "Chicago"'s declaration, "It's all show biz, kid". In fact, times haven't changed that much from Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner up through O.J. Simpson and, yes, former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.
Just as the leading leadies of our story were taking their bows, there would be another starlet waiting in the wings. From the bohemian lawyer turned girl gunner Wanda Stopa, to the notorious thrill seeking "boy killers" Nathan Leopold and Dick Loeb, the pages of Perry's book fairly bristle with colorful and distinctive players. It was typically the love of a man that caused the ladies to pull the trigger. In the case of the wealthy, educated and cheerful intellectuals Leopold and Loeb, the premeditated slaying of 14-year-old Bobby Franks was the result of an "experiment," no different to these calculated monsters than an entomologist killing a beetle.
"It was just a grand and gorgeous show," Maurine Watkins would write. "Things being what they are, I don't see why the state doesn't charge admission to trials and lighten the taxes," she added with her accustomed acerbic wit. How prophetic that this sordid chapter in Chicago history would be remembered exactly as the reporter turned playwright suggested. Murder as a form of entertainment! Now who says you can't get a man with a gun?
"The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago" is a Viking book on sale August 5, 2010, for $25.95.
We are all familiar by now with Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly, those scintillating sinners who helped put the name "Chicago" on theatrical and movie marquees. Theirs is the tale of murder, greed, corruption, violence, exploitation, adultery and treachery...all those things we hold near and dear to our hearts. And yet how much do we know of the real-life murderesses, beautiful Beulah Annan and stylish Belva Gaertner, whose escapades inspired not only the 1975 Kander and Ebb musical and its 2002 cinematic adaptation, but rocked the Windy City some 90 years back?
"The Girls of Murder City" by Douglas Perry is an illuminating read that is a must for anyone interested in Chicago history, criminal justice and psychology or a juicy murder yarn. It manages to evoke a time and place, as well as a state of mind infinitely more dramatic than anything a playwright could create for the stage. Endlessly fascinating, Perry's remarkably detailed and entertaining book is all the more incredible because it's all true, or at least all the truth that is fit to print.
The book's setting is just as dramatic or more than any of its colorful characters or tawdry events. Chicago in the 1920's was a hotbed of vice and corruption, the perfect symbol of American progress and dreams run amok. Amazing how some things never change! Perry paints a lurid and revealing portrait of Prohibition, with its swinging speakeasies awash in illegal booze, organized crime, political graft...and all that jazz. Chicago's legendary glamorization of the criminal underworld was the ideal stage for women such as Belva Gaertner, Beulah Annan, Kitty Malm, Sabella Nitti and Wanda Stopa, those real life Merry Murderesses.
The titian red-headed Beulah Annan was the prettiest woman ever charged with murder in Chicago. In some ways, she and fellow Cook County jail resident Belva Gaertner were social opposites. Beulah, twice married at the time she shot her married lover Harry Kalstedt in the back, was employed at Tennant's Laundry, the wife of a blue-collar auto mechanic. Belva, once known as the "Queen of Chicago's cabarets," was a wealthy and stylish Hyde Park socialite who felt half dressed without a gaudy ring on each finger. Despite her material comforts, charm and good manners, Belva was a hard drinker and party lover who despised work and grew easily bored with her multi-millionaire husband.
Even in prison, Belva was the life of the party, leading hymns and giving fashion and makeup tips to her fellow inmates. Both women knew how to work the system to get the most out of their fifteen minutes of fame. Men worshipped and lusted for them, and women sympathized with their plight. Most women, that is. A notable exception was an ambitious young reporter named Maurine Watkins, whose cynical, tongue-in-cheek, lacerating prose filled the pages of the Chicago Tribune. The Tribune, one of fifteen newspapers competing for readers and advertisers in the Windy City in the 1920's, was known as "a real hanging paper - out for a conviction". It didn't just report the news, it shaped it. Its unsentimental, hard-edged style of journalism set it apart from the weepy melodrama and sensationalism of its competitors.
Police reporters, Perry notes, were given extraordinary access in those days, walking freely through police stations and jails at all hours, sitting in and participating in police interrogations, and playing cards with prisoners in their cells. The crime beat was a tough and tumble man's game, a far cry from Maurine Watkins' quiet, respectable religious upbringing in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Her drive and deeply rooted ethics allowed her to stand out from the assortment of sob sisters and cut-throat reporters. She would document her experiences covering the Annan and Gaertner murder trials in her highly acclaimed 1926 play "Chicago," which was originally titled "The Brave Little Woman". Ironically, Watkins spent a large part of her life attempting to block her greatest theatrical success from being turned into a musical.
Beulah and Belva had the odds clearly stacked in their favor in spite of some pretty incriminating circumstantial evidence in both cases. Chicago was famous for never convicting women - certainly not beautiful women, whose fates were held safely in the hands of all-male jurors, none of them willing to believe that the fairer sex could be as devious and cold-blooded as their male counterparts. That sense of blind idealism allowed "The Girls of Murder City" to be the media darlings of the day.
Others wouldn't have it quite so lucky, we learn. Where Beulah traded her looks and Belva her class for assured acquittals, neither Kitty Malm (aka "The Tiger Girl") or Sabella Nitti (the first woman ever sentenced to death in Cook County) had the beauty or grace to do likewise. Indeed, we find that cultural prejudices and aesthetic considerations played as big a role in their respective fates as their actual deeds, guilt or innocence. The circus style nature of the media coverage and the trials themselves can all be summed up in the musical "Chicago"'s declaration, "It's all show biz, kid". In fact, times haven't changed that much from Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner up through O.J. Simpson and, yes, former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.
Just as the leading leadies of our story were taking their bows, there would be another starlet waiting in the wings. From the bohemian lawyer turned girl gunner Wanda Stopa, to the notorious thrill seeking "boy killers" Nathan Leopold and Dick Loeb, the pages of Perry's book fairly bristle with colorful and distinctive players. It was typically the love of a man that caused the ladies to pull the trigger. In the case of the wealthy, educated and cheerful intellectuals Leopold and Loeb, the premeditated slaying of 14-year-old Bobby Franks was the result of an "experiment," no different to these calculated monsters than an entomologist killing a beetle.
"It was just a grand and gorgeous show," Maurine Watkins would write. "Things being what they are, I don't see why the state doesn't charge admission to trials and lighten the taxes," she added with her accustomed acerbic wit. How prophetic that this sordid chapter in Chicago history would be remembered exactly as the reporter turned playwright suggested. Murder as a form of entertainment! Now who says you can't get a man with a gun?
"The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago" is a Viking book on sale August 5, 2010, for $25.95.
July 30, 2010
My new favorite book critic ...
From Corduroy Books:
Oh good lord is this a fun book. Easy admission at the outset: I could care less about the musical (or movie) Chicago; I’m exceptionally fond of the town, but for reasons that have nothing to do with female murderers of the early 20th century. In fact, I wouldn’t've guessed, at this book’s outset, that it’d draw me in as it did, simply because it didn’t seem or smell like my cup of tea. But then I cracked it. And then, the next night, I was suddenly already thick into the thing. Then, the next few nights, the thing was done.
And what tremendous ease makes falling into this book’s story so freakishly simple and fun and good? Two words: Douglas Perry. Dude’s writing is astonishing, in ways that are actually tricky and hard to parse. Like the best writers, Mr. Perry takes the reader down a narrative path that, once you’ve trod/read it, feels 100% inevitable yet which, had you thought hard about where you’d be headed, you wouldn’t have guessed where you’d end up. In other words — he perfectly balances surprise and expectation. Here’s the truth: Douglas Perry is a master.
Though let’s give a bit of credit, too, to the three canny women who pack this story’s soul: Belva Gaertner, Beulah Annan, and Maurine Watkins. The first two were beautiful murdereresses (such, such a great word), the last a rookie newspaper writer with a background one wouldn’t presume automatically made her an ideal choice as a crime reporter, and the three of them, together, intersect to form an interesting prism through which the reader’s bound to flash his or her questions as they come, questions which’ll have to do with the surge of liberalism that allowed women to get away with ankle-bearing skirts and public cigarette smoking and (that awfulest vice) jazz, questions that’ll touch in notions of celebrity and public manipulation, questions that’ll have to do with feminism (big, fascinating, hairy, complex questions on that issue, just fyi).
It’s a stellar, stellar book, and Douglas Perry is a fantastic writer, and, not least, this book is coming soon from Viking, which is part of the Penguin imprint, and today, July 30th, is the 75th anniversary of the press. Not only is Penguin one of the biggest and best forces in publishing, and that it has been for so, so long (check what they’ve published, for a run-down: start with Gravity’s Rainbow if you can’t think of anything else), and that, through their various imprints, they still put out much of the most exciting books around (hey there, Stewart O’Nan, Evan Wright, Joe Flood, Zadie Smith, Kurlansky, Vollmann, etc. etc. etc.), but they’ve also supplied a copy of one of their books for us here at Corduroy to give away. Write if you’d like it (it’s a surprise, what the actual book is, but it’s good+worth it), and, for sure, check out the website dedicated to their anniversary. I know, I know: it’s authors who make the books, and we should all, always, write to our favorite authors and thank them for the good work, but the work places like Penguin (and the rest) puts into books is just as laudable, just as important.
Oh good lord is this a fun book. Easy admission at the outset: I could care less about the musical (or movie) Chicago; I’m exceptionally fond of the town, but for reasons that have nothing to do with female murderers of the early 20th century. In fact, I wouldn’t've guessed, at this book’s outset, that it’d draw me in as it did, simply because it didn’t seem or smell like my cup of tea. But then I cracked it. And then, the next night, I was suddenly already thick into the thing. Then, the next few nights, the thing was done.
And what tremendous ease makes falling into this book’s story so freakishly simple and fun and good? Two words: Douglas Perry. Dude’s writing is astonishing, in ways that are actually tricky and hard to parse. Like the best writers, Mr. Perry takes the reader down a narrative path that, once you’ve trod/read it, feels 100% inevitable yet which, had you thought hard about where you’d be headed, you wouldn’t have guessed where you’d end up. In other words — he perfectly balances surprise and expectation. Here’s the truth: Douglas Perry is a master.
Though let’s give a bit of credit, too, to the three canny women who pack this story’s soul: Belva Gaertner, Beulah Annan, and Maurine Watkins. The first two were beautiful murdereresses (such, such a great word), the last a rookie newspaper writer with a background one wouldn’t presume automatically made her an ideal choice as a crime reporter, and the three of them, together, intersect to form an interesting prism through which the reader’s bound to flash his or her questions as they come, questions which’ll have to do with the surge of liberalism that allowed women to get away with ankle-bearing skirts and public cigarette smoking and (that awfulest vice) jazz, questions that’ll touch in notions of celebrity and public manipulation, questions that’ll have to do with feminism (big, fascinating, hairy, complex questions on that issue, just fyi).
It’s a stellar, stellar book, and Douglas Perry is a fantastic writer, and, not least, this book is coming soon from Viking, which is part of the Penguin imprint, and today, July 30th, is the 75th anniversary of the press. Not only is Penguin one of the biggest and best forces in publishing, and that it has been for so, so long (check what they’ve published, for a run-down: start with Gravity’s Rainbow if you can’t think of anything else), and that, through their various imprints, they still put out much of the most exciting books around (hey there, Stewart O’Nan, Evan Wright, Joe Flood, Zadie Smith, Kurlansky, Vollmann, etc. etc. etc.), but they’ve also supplied a copy of one of their books for us here at Corduroy to give away. Write if you’d like it (it’s a surprise, what the actual book is, but it’s good+worth it), and, for sure, check out the website dedicated to their anniversary. I know, I know: it’s authors who make the books, and we should all, always, write to our favorite authors and thank them for the good work, but the work places like Penguin (and the rest) puts into books is just as laudable, just as important.
July 14, 2010
BookPage reviews 'Girls of Murder City'
BookPage offers up a nice review of The Girls of Murder City in its August edition. Here's an excerpt:
"Douglas Perry’s The Girls of Murder City provides a captivating look at the killer women who dominated headlines in Chicago and across the United States in 1924. More than a dozen women called Murderess’ Row in the Cook County Jail home, but two grabbed most of the attention: Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annan. ... Perry takes a sturdy foundation of murder, sex and Chicago’s scandal-happy newspapers and builds a nonfiction marvel. His bouncy, exuberant prose perfectly complements the theatricality of the proceedings, and he deftly maneuvers away from the main story without ever losing momentum. Perry uncovers illuminating background details on the Chicago newspaper wars and the female inmates who took a backseat to Belva and Beulah, and pushes (reporter Maurine) Watkins back into the spotlight. He captures the pulse of a city that made New York look like a suburban block party. The Girls of Murder City not only illustrates the origins of a new media monster, but reminds us that we’ve never been that innocent."
And here's the link to the whole review: http://www.bookpage.com/books-1001349...
"Douglas Perry’s The Girls of Murder City provides a captivating look at the killer women who dominated headlines in Chicago and across the United States in 1924. More than a dozen women called Murderess’ Row in the Cook County Jail home, but two grabbed most of the attention: Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annan. ... Perry takes a sturdy foundation of murder, sex and Chicago’s scandal-happy newspapers and builds a nonfiction marvel. His bouncy, exuberant prose perfectly complements the theatricality of the proceedings, and he deftly maneuvers away from the main story without ever losing momentum. Perry uncovers illuminating background details on the Chicago newspaper wars and the female inmates who took a backseat to Belva and Beulah, and pushes (reporter Maurine) Watkins back into the spotlight. He captures the pulse of a city that made New York look like a suburban block party. The Girls of Murder City not only illustrates the origins of a new media monster, but reminds us that we’ve never been that innocent."
And here's the link to the whole review: http://www.bookpage.com/books-1001349...
June 25, 2010
Latest review of 'The Girls of Murder City'...
Library Journal has weighed in on my book:
"Jazz Age Chicago was well known as a town where a pretty woman couldn't be convicted. In 1924, prim Maurine Watkins walked away from Radcliffe and into a job as the Chicago Tribune's police reporter just in time to observe the freak run of homicidal wives and girlfriends that made up Chicago's Murderess's Row. Her disgust at a system, in which all-male juries let beautiful women literally get away with murder, caused her to work tirelessly for justice and to write a viciously satirical play, which morphed into the musical, Chicago. VERDICT: The real lives and crimes of these deadly women, as well as the story of Watkins's moral crusade, make for a spellbinding read for history, crime, and theater fans."
Just one more month and the book will be in stores! More reviews
"Jazz Age Chicago was well known as a town where a pretty woman couldn't be convicted. In 1924, prim Maurine Watkins walked away from Radcliffe and into a job as the Chicago Tribune's police reporter just in time to observe the freak run of homicidal wives and girlfriends that made up Chicago's Murderess's Row. Her disgust at a system, in which all-male juries let beautiful women literally get away with murder, caused her to work tirelessly for justice and to write a viciously satirical play, which morphed into the musical, Chicago. VERDICT: The real lives and crimes of these deadly women, as well as the story of Watkins's moral crusade, make for a spellbinding read for history, crime, and theater fans."
Just one more month and the book will be in stores! More reviews
