G-Man, page 29
Their relationship intensified in 1935, and not just because of Purvis’s fall from grace. In the midst of the G-Man craze, Hoover’s social life took off, and he wanted someone along for the ride. Together, they plunged into a whirl of nightclubs, film premieres, and star-studded parties. In doing so, they subjected themselves to a new level of public scrutiny. For the first time, Hoover’s relationships were out in the open, a matter for the news columns and gossip sheets rather than merely a fact of life at the Bureau. He kept certain aspects of his relationship with Tolson private, hidden from public view. And yet what is most striking about their budding relationship is not its furtive quality but its openness, vitality, and broad social acceptance. Far from hiding their affection, Hoover and Tolson moved freely together during the 1930s. When Edgar received an invitation, so did Clyde.
Some of those outings still centered around Bureau life. Increasingly, though, they began to venture beyond the confines of Washington, building new social circles in New York, Florida, and California. They were seen together at the best nightclubs and Broadway theaters, at the top racetracks and boxing arenas. They were also spotted side by side on more somber occasions, including the funerals of close family members and friends.
Newspapers usually described Tolson in official terms, as Hoover’s “aide” or “right hand man.” Friends and Bureau colleagues stuck with a similar story, insisting for decades that both men were too “masculine” to have been anything other than solid friends, reflecting a standard mid-century view of male homosexuality as something for “sissies” and outliers. There were at least a few friends and acquaintances who saw something else in their relationship, however. “Everybody knew about J. Edgar Hoover . . . ,” Broadway star Ethel Merman recalled decades later. “A lot of people have always been homosexual. To each his own.” The Stork Club, their favorite watering hole, welcomed patrons with “blue noses, white ermines, striped trousers, and checkered lives,” one customer recalled. These were the sorts of terms their sophisticated new friends used to describe, and to accept, unconventional relationships like the one developing between Hoover and Tolson.[5]
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Tolson’s promotion to assistant director in 1930 had placed him on par with the acerbic and entertaining Harold Nathan, but the actual division of responsibility put Tolson much closer to Hoover. Nathan ran the investigative side of things, orchestrating the police-work triumphs that won the Bureau its headlines. Tolson was the institution man—assistant director for personnel and administration—charged with making sure that the machine ran smoothly from his Washington post. Hoover put him in charge of inspections, recruitment, employee activities, and personnel reviews—matters close to Hoover’s heart. He relied on Tolson to be available at all times, a desire that only increased with the crime wave and the FBI’s personnel expansion. While Nathan rushed out to Kansas City after the Union Station shootings, Tolson had managed what needed to be done from Washington, ordering guns for the Midwestern offices and then sitting down to compose letters of condolence to the victims’ families.[6]
Within the Bureau, Tolson became known for his attention to detail, his inexhaustible knowledge of Bureau policy, and above all his loyalty to Hoover. He had a way of maintaining order in the midst of chaos, Hugh Clegg remembered—“just a well-qualified and stabilizing sort of a person.” Tolson showed a talent for guessing Hoover’s preferences and adjusting his own views accordingly. In 1934, charged with investigating allegations that agents had mutinied against Purvis at Little Bohemia, Tolson dismissed the claims as the product of an agent’s “disordered and possibly hysterical state of mind,” a nod to Hoover’s then-fond attitude toward Purvis. When Hoover changed his mind about Purvis a few years later, Tolson followed suit. It was Tolson who alerted Hoover to the rumors that Purvis had gotten drunk and brandished his weapon at the Chicago party.[7]
Some of Tolson’s disdain for Purvis may have stemmed from personal or professional jealousy. But it was also his job to hold the line on agents’ behavior, ensuring that everyone at the Bureau met Hoover’s exacting standards. “I think it is imperative, with the growing size of our Division, that strict discipline be maintained and that the new men particularly realize that we mean business,” Hoover wrote in a memo to Tolson in late 1934. Tolson acted as the internal watchdog, testing and measuring other employees’ honesty and loyalty to Hoover.[8]
As head of the Crime Records Section, he also helped Hoover communicate with the outside world and manage the growing challenge of public relations. As early as 1932, Tolson had taken charge of the circular “Fugitives Wanted by Police,” soon to become the Law Enforcement Bulletin. In 1933, he began serving as point man for Courtney Ryley Cooper and other favored reporters, answering queries when needed and fending off those he deemed unnecessary. Tolson’s duties as the Bureau’s publicity man expanded more swiftly in the months after Ten Thousand Public Enemies and G-Men, as requests poured in from reporters and film directors. In July 1935, he helped to coordinate with Cooper as the FBI made the leap into radio. In a nod to Tolson’s special status, Cooper signed his notes to Hoover with “best regards to you and Clyde.”[9]
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There was another figure whose presence at the Bureau testified to Tolson’s increasing significance in Hoover’s life. Like Tolson himself, this man was a perfect FBI specimen: five feet nine and strikingly handsome, with a well-defined jaw, a broad flat nose, and a muscular build. He also happened to be Tolson’s longtime roommate, the GW alum and Sigma Nu fraternity brother Guy Hottel. Publicly, Hoover described Hottel as a just another Bureau agent, one of hundreds of men in his employ. And yet it is clear that Hottel played a unique role in Hoover and Tolson’s relationship, the one man invited along on vacations and nights out, turning their partnership into three instead of two. He also received special privileges at the Bureau. From the moment Hottel accepted the job in 1934, Hoover bent and even broke the rules for him. Hottel’s sudden arrival at the FBI in 1934 raises provocative questions: Was he there as a favor to Tolson or as a genuinely qualified recruit? What role did he play in mediating the relationship between Hoover and Tolson? And once welcomed into that relationship, what did he see and know?[10]
Hottel had been a star at GW: captain of the football team, inducted into the top honor societies, the most popular man on campus and in Tolson’s fraternity, where he got to know some of the Bureau’s future top men. His only flaw as a recruit was his academic record. As an undergraduate, he ended up on academic probation a whopping three times. Eventually he enrolled in the law school but failed to take a single exam or finish a course. Perhaps for this reason, he initially went into insurance rather than government service.
He remained tied to the Bureau nonetheless, both through his friendship with Tolson and through his broader circle of acquaintances. In 1928, forced to abandon the Sigma Nu house in the wake of graduation, Hottel and Tolson moved into a flat near the fraternity. A few years after that, they relocated to the Westchester Apartments on Cathedral Avenue, where, according to the rental manager, Hottel cultivated “many friends” and ended up “very well-liked by everyone.” Hoover was among those friends, frequently stopping by the apartment with Tolson as part of their weeknight routine. In 1934, when Hottel quit his insurance job rather than accept a transfer to Chicago, Hoover suggested the obvious: “Well, why don’t you come with us?”[11]
There was never much question about whether Hottel’s Bureau application would be approved. Tolson’s brother (now an assistant director of the National Park Service) gave a glowing reference, assuring the interviewing agent that “he has never heard anything derogatory to applicant and has never heard of him ever getting in any trouble whatsoever.” FBI official Stan Tracy testified that Hottel had been a “popular student” at GW, “exceptionally active in athletics” and admired “by both students and professors.” Tolson personally signed off on the application. “Recommend appointment Guy Hottel as Sp Agt Caf 8 for Sept school,” he jotted in a memo, “address Apt 431B Westchester Apts.” At no point did Tolson acknowledge in writing what everyone at the Bureau knew: 431B of the Westchester was his own apartment.[12]
This tendency to overlook the rules for Hottel, to simply pass him along, held for years to come, as he rose to become a top Bureau official as well as a key member of Hoover’s social world. Hoover whisked him through training, then assigned him to the usual run of distant offices. Once in the field, Hottel promptly crashed a Bureau car. While Hoover demanded that he pay for the damage, two months later he gave the agent a raise, based on Tolson’s recommendation. In July 1935, Hottel endured a head injury when another agent ran their car into a telephone pole. The following month, he got a raise of three hundred dollars, personally approved by both Hoover and Tolson. By the end of 1935, Hottel had earned a third raise as well as a transfer back to D.C. Despite his weak record, Hoover decided to place Hottel at the important Washington field office, where he could resume living with Tolson.[13]
Hottel later described his treatment as typical Bureau policy. “You got quick promotion in those days.” Others have suggested a more complicated narrative: that Hoover went out of his way for Hottel because Hottel knew his secrets. In later years Hottel allegedly boasted that he had seen Hoover and Tolson involved in “sex parties at Hoover’s house, you know, with the boys”—indeed, that Hoover coerced his Bureau subordinates into attending these gatherings as a rite of passage. Such claims by themselves do not amount to much. The policeman who described Hottel’s confession offered no documentation beyond his own memory, and Hottel allegedly revealed such stories while stupendously drunk. The most that can be said is that the stories fit with Hoover’s pattern of using his status as FBI director to develop intimate relationships with his subordinates. His right to do so was baked into Bureau culture: homosocial intensity, strict hierarchy, the need for employees always to please and placate the boss. At the very least, Hottel’s status as a close friend and social favorite helps to explain his own peculiar FBI record. In 1936 alone, he earned reprimands for offending the Colombian ambassador, playing golf while on call, and failing to restrain drunken companions at the Congressional Country Club. The following year, Hoover appointed him special agent in charge of the Washington field office.[14]
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Hoover had a long practice of hiring men he liked and respected, then developing greater friendship and intimacy through their work together. Beginning in 1935, his job also began to provide him another social outlet. With both Hollywood and Washington backing him as “America’s popular Public Hero No.1,” Hoover suddenly discovered he was the kind of man other people wanted to meet. After four decades of plugging along in Washington, he entered a glittering, cosmopolitan world populated by film stars, socialites, athletes, and wisecracking reporters. And he welcomed the change. Despite his faith in self-discipline and serious-minded work, Hoover finally let loose a little bit in 1935. Tolson (and sometimes Hottel) joined him, in the background but attentively present and ready to support their director.[15]
As The Washington Herald noted, in the wake of the Dillinger case and the G-Men film, everyone who was anyone wanted a chance to peek inside the FBI. “Competing with the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the cherry blossoms is a display with a distinctly modern lure,” the paper wrote. “It presents ‘gats,’ ‘rods,’ bullets, sawed-off shotguns, the gun used by ‘Baby Face’ Nelson when he killed Inspector Cowley, the bullet-proof vest worn by John Dillinger.” If it was convenient, Hoover might occasionally greet public tours. For truly important people, though, he went out of his way. Their tours included visits to his office, where they could peruse the weapons stash and strange trinkets left over from the crime war. They also made their way to the basement shooting range, where special guests were permitted to shoot live ammunition from a tommy gun, then pose for pictures. In the standard photo, visitors faced directly into the camera, the barrels of their guns pointed out.[16]
Hoover joined in countless photos of this sort, whether with the manager of the Detroit Tigers or the editor of The American Magazine. Tolson’s office was responsible for organizing the tours, and Hoover could be vicious when they made a mistake. On one occasion, agents failed to notify him that a baron and baroness would be passing through, yielding a cutting memo from Hoover to Tolson. “I believe it would be entirely possible for Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt to come down, casually join one of the tours, give her name and be shown through, and the Director’s office not even be informed,” Hoover wrote. When Mrs. Roosevelt did show up a few months later, escorting a group of schoolgirls, Tolson made sure that Hoover was her tour guide.[17]
The roster of men and women who traipsed through the FBI in the late 1930s included a who’s who of American celebrity: film stars Jean Harlow and James Cagney, stage duo Victor Moore and Billy Gaxton, bandleader Guy Lombardo and screen legend Walter Pidgeon. Even “America’s little darling,” child actress Shirley Temple, showed up for a series of photos in which she peered into a big black microscope and rode the iron horse in the training gym. Other occasions brought radio stars, Boy Scouts, professional athletes, Shriners, and Jewish boys on educational junkets from the Lower East Side.[18]
Washington itself treated Hoover as a hometown hero. In January 1935, GW alumni hosted a luncheon for him and his brother, Dick, now fifty-five and also making news, as an investigator of steamboat accidents. In June, GW presented Hoover with an honorary doctoral degree, eighteen years after he had graduated into the tumult of the Great War. Kappa Alpha put him on the cover of its monthly journal, boasting of his success at developing “a law enforcement unit second to none in the world.” Even the Roosevelt administration paid homage. In the spring of 1935, the government requisitioned two bulletproof Pierce-Arrow limousines capable of reaching 110 miles per hour, polished off with dark blue paint and a chromium finish. One was for Roosevelt, who had survived an assassination attempt in 1933. The other was for Hoover.[19]
The Washington press recognized Hoover’s status as a favored son of the executive branch. “Edgar Hoover and Harry Hopkins Called Chief Personalities of Young New Deal,” one paper noted, pairing Hoover with one of Roosevelt’s closest personal advisers. Now, though, it was not just the reflected glory of the president or attorney general that brought Hoover’s name into the papers. Reporters massaged the available tidbits about his own life: his fondness for antiques, the fact that he lived alone with his “handsome mother,” his preference for “bachelor solitude.” In August, Time even put him on the cover, one of the highest honors the national magazine world could bestow. The article addressed the usual themes of crime detection and federal administration. But it also paid attention to his life outside the office, noting that “he is a bachelor, living with his semi-invalid mother in the pleasant frame house where he was born” and that his “friends . . . are few and include no women.” The article mentioned just three men who seemed personally important to Hoover: his college friend Frank Baughman, his coauthor, Courtney Ryley Cooper, and his “assistant” Clyde Tolson.[20]
Like many other onlookers that year, the Time reporter gained only a dim comprehension of Hoover’s true affections. Though Baughman, Cooper, and Hottel appeared on occasion, smiling and mugging for group photos, it was Tolson who showed up everywhere, sitting with Hoover at the theater, smiling and laughing on the sidelines of baseball games and ringside at fights. When Hoover went back to the Bureau around two o’clock one morning, responding to a false alarm, Tolson came along. When Hoover celebrated his twentieth anniversary at the Justice Department, Tolson posed with him for photos: two men shaking hands in matching white summer suits, surrounded by a sea of flowers. They made little effort to hide from the press, and joked openly about their adventures together. When they got stuck in shallow water on a Potomac fishing expedition, Tolson quipped to a reporter, “I’m not supposed to know how to row. I’m supposed to see that others do it—and I always do my duty.”[21]
One of Tolson’s “duties” was to help Hoover navigate this choppy new world of celebrity, to be at his side when the publicity men, filmmakers, and famous guests came to call. Tolson and Hoover perfected their own pose for the cameras. In a typical shot, Hoover sat at his desk while Tolson stood to his right, peering down at important papers on the blotter. Even in the office, though, they could still have fun. When a Hollywood director showed up to shoot some footage at the Bureau in 1936, Hoover commandeered the equipment and turned the lens on Tolson. A Bureau photographer captured the scene in a still picture: Hoover sitting astride the metal arm of the bulky film camera, controlling the angle and suppressing a grin, while an amused but self-conscious Tolson holds still for his gaze.[22]
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Of all the invitations that came their way in 1935, none was more important than the one from Walter Winchell, the nation’s premier gossip columnist. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants in New York, Winchell had clawed his way from vaudeville to media stardom by cultivating a distinctive “slanguage” that conveyed both a winking insider status and street savvy. By the time he met Hoover in August 1934, Winchell dominated the gossip press, handing out dollops of publicity and notoriety to the nation’s fame seekers through his syndicated column and wildly popular radio show. The truly favored could earn an invitation to join Winchell at his table inside the Stork Club, the most fashionable and sought-after fixture of New York nightlife. Winchell issued this invitation to Hoover in the fall of 1934. Always attuned to social cues and hierarchy, he made sure to extend the welcome for two. “He was also quite impressed with Mr. Tolson,” an FBI memo noted.[23]
