G-Man, page 23
Purvis compensated for his lack of vigor, another supervisor observed, with inflated self-regard. “In my opinion, this agent has one major fault, the existence of which he is aware, and which he is striving to correct. It is, that he is possessed of great confidence in himself.” His trajectory at the Bureau seemed designed to slow him down. In contrast to the rocketing careers of favorites like Tolson and Clegg, Purvis lagged in the lower ranks for his first few years. Throughout that period, he knew Hoover mostly as other agents did: as an inspiring but mercurial, punitive, and highly disciplined boss. Their main form of communication was the Bureau memo, in which Hoover reminded Purvis “to take immediate steps to see that my orders . . . are carried out at once” and came down hard if and when he failed to do so.[10]
Like most savvy agents, Purvis knew how to soothe Hoover in such circumstances. “I am not unmindful of my responsibility in connection with matters of this nature,” he wrote in April 1929, apologizing for submitting a late expense voucher. “I assure you that every effort will be put forth to see that no derelictions of this nature occur in the future.” It also appears to be Purvis, not Hoover, who made the first move to introduce a more intimate note into their relationship. In late 1929, he asked to consult with Hoover “about matters of a personal nature.” Hoover responded positively, inviting Purvis for a one-on-one meeting in Washington. Precisely what they discussed during that meeting remains unclear, but Purvis returned to his field office pleased and relieved. In early January 1930, he sent Hoover a decorous but enthusiastic letter of thanks for listening to his travails.[11]
His Bureau career soon began to take off. Not long after his conference with Hoover, he received a small but significant raise, followed by a transfer to the Cincinnati office. After that, the largesse came regularly, including several more raises and a rare week of vacation in October. Finally, in November, he received yet another raise and a major promotion to special agent in charge at Cincinnati. The posting made him, at the age of twenty-seven, the youngest man ever known to have led a Bureau field office. It also launched a far more intimate, if never entirely transparent, phase of his relationship with Hoover.[12]
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The change appears to have started in February 1931, when Hoover arrived in Cincinnati to deliver a speech before the local Lawyers Club. Despite the importance Hoover attached to proper facilities, the Cincinnati field office was just one big room, with twelve identical wooden desks for the agents and a handful more for the stenographers and accountants. Hoover did not conduct a full inspection. Instead, he delivered his speech, praising the GW professors who taught him about the law and boasting about his early triumph over Emma Goldman. Other than that, he spent his time talking with Purvis about relations with the area’s U.S. attorney, who was under investigation. The conversation apparently veered into more private terrain as well, perhaps a rehashing of the “personal” matters that Purvis had introduced the previous year.[13]
When he returned to Washington, Hoover adopted a tone rarely seen in his official correspondence with other agents. In his initial letter, he sent instructions to avoid involvement in the local scandal, but then he sought an update on Purvis’s romantic life. “I am still holding my breath waiting your announcement of embarkation upon the matrimonial sea,” Hoover wrote. “If I hold it much longer I am going to die from exhaustion so please relieve the strain and let me know what you are planning to do, are doing or have done about this all momentous problem.”[14]
Nothing in the letter explicitly indicates anything other than fraternity-style teasing, one Kappa Alpha ribbing another. And yet the urgent, even gushing tone—“I am going to die from exhaustion”—suggests something more personal. Hoover’s expressions give the correspondence an almost juvenile aspect, as if he were inquiring about the status of his schoolboy crush. Purvis played along. He quickly wrote back to assure Hoover, “I have not done anything about it and right now I am not doing anything. It has been postponed indefinitely, and may yet receive the pocket veto.” He addressed the letter to “Mr. Hoover” (Hoover had written to “Melvin”), an indication that Bureau hierarchy held sway even as the two men began making plans to see each other outside of official auspices.[15]
Purvis’s rejection of marriage (at least for the moment) did not end the conversation about his romantic life. If anything, it piqued Hoover’s interest. On March 16, four days after receiving Purvis’s letter, Hoover responded that he was both “interested and amused” by the sudden change of heart. He sought more detail about Purvis’s reasoning and priorities on the marital front. “I don’t know which saying applies to you in connection with this matter;” he wrote, “that is to say ‘Faint heart never won fair lady’ or ‘Soft in love, soft in head’.” Over the next few weeks, these sayings became the basis for an elaborate but cryptic exchange that danced around questions of marriage, desire, and perhaps even sexual orientation. On March 20, Purvis noted that “those sayings you mentioned recently do not apply to me. There may be a saying, though that does apply.” Hoover, further intrigued, wrote back three days later. “Your Postscript starts me guessing again,” he informed Purvis. “I would like to know what saying you had in mind so I can properly catalogue you.”[16]
How to catalog him, indeed. Their banter is elusive, the precise nature of their mutual interest in such matters obscured beneath layers of propriety and evasive code. Though these early letters still mostly concerned Bureau business, none of them were placed in Purvis’s official Bureau file, an indication that Hoover considered them to be personal correspondence. In one letter, Hoover admitted to Purvis that he had trouble expressing affection: “Usually when I am greatly moved I become tongue-tied and cannot express my sentiments.” But he did just fine in these letters, showing concern and caring if never explicitly addressing what their evolving relationship meant. Ten years Purvis’s senior, Hoover adopted a solicitous, almost fatherly tone, inquiring after the young agent’s health, urging him to get more sleep, even insisting that he take a day or two off. “To be at the office all day and all night is a thing that you cannot stand,” he wrote, contradicting the perception that he wanted every agent working at every moment.[17]
For professionals who claimed to work at all hours, the two men spent a surprising amount of time discussing domestic affairs, from ear infections to the collection of music boxes. Both adored their pets. “I do not know of anything that has given me more pleasure and happiness than my own dog and I know exactly what the puppy will mean to you,” Hoover wrote in 1932, celebrating Purvis’s acquisition of a rambunctious fox terrier. Purvis also shared Hoover’s love of antiques, trading tips about the best stores in cities where the Bureau maintained a significant presence. In June 1931, Hoover sent Purvis the catalog for Mermod & Co., one of his favorite New York shops. Beyond catalogs, they often traded gifts, some mildly illicit in nature. “You have my curiosity aroused as to the package which you have been deliberating sending me,” Hoover wrote to Purvis in September 1932. “I am somewhat concerned as to whether it would be safe for my secretary to open it. You better indicate that when you send it forward.”[18]
It is difficult to say what Purvis thought of this burgeoning intimacy with his boss. At moments, he appears to encourage Hoover, returning wink for wink, joke for joke. At other times, he seems awkward and self-conscious, unsure about the line between professional and personal relations. Nowhere was this more notable than in his back-and-forth with Hoover about how to address his letters. In official mail, there was no question: Hoover was “Mr. Hoover” or “The Director”; Purvis was “Mr. Purvis” or “Sir.” For their private correspondence, read only by the two of them, Hoover found such titles too constraining. In October 1931, he began urging Purvis to make his notes “less formal and stop using ‘MISTER.’ ”[19]
Purvis responded with confusion and nervousness about this shift in protocol. “How am I to address you if I am not to use the ‘MISTER.’?” he wanted to know. He experimented with “Chairman” as a possible substitute. Hoover merely took the title as a chance to push further. “ ‘Chairman’—of what, I don’t know, unless it is the Moral Uplift Squad,” he joked, repeating one of his favorite phrases. Purvis’s “Chairman” reference may have been an inside joke, since he noted that Hoover was truly the “ex-chairman” of the squad, a man hopelessly fallen from grace. The teasing captured something rarely revealed in Hoover’s official correspondence: an admission that his position of rectitude and squeaky-clean public morality was partly a false front.[20]
They experimented with “Mel” and “Jayee,” one of Hoover’s many nicknames among friends. On occasion, though, Purvis reverted to the slightly more formal “JEH,” which became Hoover’s sometime signature as well. When a newspaper mistakenly referred to Purvis as the Bureau’s director, Hoover briefly took to calling him “director,” noting in jest that the Washington office could use another set of eyes and ears. “On the other hand, I am, as I have said, somewhat concerned because of your well-known proclivities along certain lines,” he added. “I fear that my good reputation as Chairman of the Moral Uplift Squad may become seriously affected by reason of confusing your activities with those of mine, the latter always being above any reproach.” He was referring to Purvis’s reputation as a ladies’ man, but the question of their respective “proclivities” continued to weave through their correspondence.[21]
Of all their shared interests, few received as much attention as the topic of women—specifically, of Purvis’s alleged prowess with and swooning effect upon members of the opposite sex. Hoover spent pages extolling Purvis’s physical beauty and magnetic powers of attraction, as well as his heartlessness toward his legions of female admirers. Much of his writing focused on Purvis’s alleged romances with Helen Gandy and the other Bureau secretaries, though there is no evidence that Purvis actually dated or took much interest in the agency “girls.” When Purvis sent along a photo of himself, Hoover complained that Gandy stopped working and spent the afternoon “floating around in the air,” gushing about “how ‘SWEET’ you look.” A year and a half later, after sending another photo, Purvis learned that “Miss Gandy has been practically useless since its arrival and has now asked for several days’ leave in order to fully recuperate from the debilitating effects of viewing your sheik-like appearance.” On yet another occasion, Purvis received a note over Hoover’s signature praising the mysterious “power” of a recent photograph. In the postscript, Hoover claimed, “The fact Mel is that Miss Gandy actually prepared this letter.”[22]
It is possible that Gandy was romantically interested in Purvis, and that she openly shared this information with her boss. It seems as likely that she served as a stand-in for Hoover’s own difficult-to-express affections. Hoover was not above using his position as Bureau director to promote the alleged romance between Gandy and Purvis, bringing Purvis to Washington for official business but also, as one letter noted, “just to take a look at you.” In the fall of 1932, he went so far as to order Purvis to escort Gandy to the Bureau’s Halloween masquerade ball. For weeks before the ball, both Purvis and Gandy were subject to widespread mockery around the office, with Hoover joking that “Miss Gandy has promised she will wear a cellophane gown.” That prospect, in turn, fueled widespread comment among Bureau executives. Harold Nathan composed a poem on the subject. To Purvis himself, Nathan issued a direct order: “Please don’t apply a match to her cellophane garment.”[23]
For all the joking, Hoover’s heightened attention to Purvis’s private life had the potential to turn serious and even threatening. They were friends and intimates, but Hoover was still the boss, able to exact punishment if things did not go his way. Purvis clearly feared this prospect, responding swiftly at the merest hint of displeasure or misunderstanding. On one occasion, his secretary mistakenly noted on a personnel form that Purvis was now “married” rather than “single.” Hoover’s reply, delivered just days later, demanded to know why Purvis had not notified the Bureau of his sudden change in status. Alarmed, Purvis wrote back to assure Hoover that he had no desire to get married: “In fact, I doubt my ability to even get married.” His secretary, he added, had made the mistake due to a terrible headache.[24]
Hoover, apparently mollified, noted that the confusion had given him “an awful headache” as well, then returned to his standard teasing about Purvis’s sexual escapades. “Everyone seems to pretty well have your number so that there is little use of your trying now to cover up the situation,” he wrote. “My advice to you, however, is that you watch your step and not be guilty of committing bigamy.”[25]
What was Purvis’s “number”? It is possible that Hoover himself never quite knew. Perhaps Purvis felt genuine affection, even desire, for Hoover. Or perhaps he was simply making his best guess about what his boss wanted to hear. Whatever else he may have thought or felt, Purvis had mastered the one skill that assured Bureau success: pleasing J. Edgar Hoover.
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What was being negotiated in their correspondence was not just a friendship or even a romance. It was also a power relationship, a question of how far Hoover could push and how far Purvis might push back. Desire and affection, humor and concern—all of these were present and, presumably, genuine. But they were never far removed from the knowledge that Hoover was Purvis’s boss, and that he could enforce his will through Bureau policy. If Hoover had one great personal failing, it was perhaps not his inability to love, but his inability to establish relationships outside of formal and controlling hierarchies.
Hoover’s fondness for Purvis enhanced the young agent’s career. Whether or not it served the Bureau is another question. As they grew closer, Hoover accelerated Purvis’s rise through the ranks, offering extra trips to Washington, holding out plum jobs in return for an affectionate letter, or as a reward for a moment of charm. This was not special treatment, exactly. It was simply how the Bureau worked, with Hoover’s personal and professional interests enmeshed. Along the way, he often ignored the warnings of other Bureau executives, who found Purvis capable but still overconfident and too green for a leadership position.
There is no mistaking the fact that Purvis’s career took off only after he began the more personal phase of his correspondence with Hoover. In the spring of 1931, as they traded jokes about their marital hesitations, “Mr. Hoover” informed “Mr. Purvis” in a formal Bureau notice that he was being transferred to Washington, D.C. Hoover may have been trying to bring Purvis more tightly into his personal orbit. If so, the effort largely failed. Purvis spent the spring and summer of 1931 as head of the Washington field office, but the time did not go well. Accustomed to the more laid-back atmosphere of distant field offices, Purvis paid insufficient attention to storeroom supplies, press etiquette, and other oft-scrutinized Bureau policies.
His track record did not improve after a transfer in August to run the fingerprint division. It was a laughably bad choice, playing to all of Purvis’s weaknesses and none of his strengths. In September, Hoover reprimanded Purvis for smoking cigarettes inside the division building, professing to be “amazed” at the indiscretion. Less than a month later, he transferred Purvis to the Bureau’s most rough-and-tumble field office: Oklahoma City. Hoover often used Oklahoma as a proving ground. “What we usually do is to send a new man to Oklahoma, where things are still in the raw,” he explained in 1926. “If he’s got any yellow about him, it will come out and we get rid of him. But if he’s got the courage and the determination and isn’t afraid to work hard, he won’t have to stay there long.”[26]
Purvis made it through. But he was lonely throughout, writing mournful letters to Hoover describing his isolation and his determination to succeed at Bureau business. The two men did not see each other much during 1932, though Hoover warned, “I may surprise you some of these days and give you a ring at your apartment.” Meanwhile their correspondence continued to deepen, as did Hoover’s faith in his young agent. One sign of this trust was Purvis’s transfer, after only four months, to head the field office in Birmingham, Alabama—relief from his Oklahoma banishment and a post closer to his heart and upbringing. Even more significant was an increase in “special” assignments channeled to Purvis outside of official Bureau procedures. These were personal favors for Hoover, negotiated in private letters rather than in official Bureau memos. By the summer of 1932, even as he rhapsodized about Gandy’s affections and “cellophane gown,” Hoover began to rely on Purvis to carry out a variety of secret tasks. “There is a very confidential matter that I may call you to Washington to take care of for me shortly,” Hoover wrote in July, as Purvis settled in at Birmingham. “There is certain information which I want to either prove or disprove and I believe that you possibly are the only one who could handle it for me if you are willing to do so.”[27]
The letter did not indicate what that “certain information” might be. Purvis, however, was eager to help out. “I sincerely hope that you will let me handle that matter for you because I will be more than glad to do it,” he wrote. It was both the reassurance of a friend and the plea of a supplicant in exile. And it seemed to work. Other Bureau executives continued to question Purvis’s temperament and leadership abilities. “He is a little impatient for things to happen,” Clegg noted in 1932, even as he praised Purvis’s “loyalty.” Hoover, though, had already made up his mind to give Purvis the biggest reward yet. In October 1932, he appointed Purvis special agent in charge at Chicago, one of the Bureau’s largest and most important field offices.[28]
