G-Man, page 35
Just what that agenda might be was a subject of intense speculation. In late March, Hoover and Tolson appeared at the Mayflower for their customary lunch. Rather than heading straight to their table, however, they paused at the elevator bank. When the doors slid open, two women—a petite blonde and a “willowy” brunette—conspicuously sallied forth, joining Hoover and Tolson for a “secluded” luncheon. The sight was extraordinary enough to make headlines in Los Angeles, where the Times published a three-paragraph story recounting the date in detail. “Loungers in the lobby of one of the capital’s swankest hotels rubbed their eyes with amazement the other noon. Washington’s best-known bachelor and most confirmed woman-dodger was lunching with two gorgeous out-of-town damsels.” The reporter noted that the press was watching eagerly to find out what would happen next.[9]
Hoover was cagey when asked directly. In 1939, in a widely syndicated interview with a society reporter, he described his lifelong search for an “old-fashioned girl,” someone whose virtues and modesty would make him a suitable wife. About his dating record he commented only that “the girls men take out to make whoopee with are not the girls they want as the mother of their children,” lamenting that he mostly met the former type in his profession. He claimed to harbor a deep fear of marriage, and of the rejection it might bring. “If I ever marry and the girl fails me, ceases to love me, and our marriage is dissolved,” he explained, “it would ruin me. I couldn’t take it, and I would not be responsible for my actions.” The problem was not that he was uninterested in women, his words implied, but that he cared about them too deeply.
As a practical matter, Hoover made little effort to meet the sort of “old-fashioned girl” he professed to want. Throughout the spring of 1938, as he traveled the country with Tolson, gossip columns began to attach him to various models and actresses—“so-called glamor girls,” in Hoover’s words—from his Stork Club circle. In April, Winchell revealed Hoover’s supposed romance with Lela Rogers, a forty-six-year-old aspiring Broadway writer and producer best known as the stage mother of film star Ginger Rogers. Hoover may have met Lela in 1937, when the FBI investigated a series of threats against Ginger. But only in 1938, after media began to speculate about his bachelor status, did he offer any hint of romantic interest. On paper, she was an excellent choice: more or less the proper age, the proper social status, even the proper political ideology. She was also skilled in public relations, one of the few women trained by the Marines to serve as an ambassador to the public. In mid-June, during a press interview, she mentioned that Hoover had telephoned at three o’clock in the morning. When the reporter asked if they were involved, Rogers played coy, joking that “Congress cut down the bureau’s appropriations” and therefore she would have to wait awhile for her engagement ring. The reporter interpreted her quip to mean that “Ginger Rogers’ Mother May Wed J. Edgar Hoover, G-man Chief.”[10]
By all accounts, this was pure fantasy; no questions had been popped, no rings exchanged. Rogers herself insisted that she had been horribly misunderstood. “Oh. Now I don’t know what to say,” she complained to another reporter. “We’re very good friends, it’s true. But this is a horrible spot to put me in. I wish you’d move me off it.” Hoover took a more equivocal stance. “I don’t think my personal affairs are of interest to the public,” he said. “That’s not saying yes nor no.” It is difficult to imagine that Rogers—a skilled public relations professional, with long-standing ties to both Winchell and Courtney Ryley Cooper—went into the whole episode unsuspecting. Nor does it seem plausible that Hoover would have tolerated an unplanned burst of gossip with such good humor. More likely, they joined forces to create a useful myth.[11]
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Columns expressing doubt about Hoover’s dating record implied that Tolson, too, was a “woman hater” and “woman-dodger” who had deliberately chosen life with his charismatic male boss. Melvin Purvis—still the country’s most famous G-Man, aside from Hoover—provided a convenient point of contrast, as rumors in the spring of 1938 suggested that he planned to marry his childhood sweetheart. Of more immediate consequence for Tolson was the impending marriage of Guy Hottel. Tolson and Hottel had lived together off and on since college, fraternity brothers playing out an extended adolescence. Hottel’s departure left Tolson, like Hoover, more alone than he had been in years, the routine commitments of his life thrown into flux.[12]
Tolson also had his share of family problems. His brother, Hillory, the golden boy of GW, was in the midst of a wrenching divorce. Back in Iowa, Tolson’s father was dying, raising questions about who would now care for his aged mother. Hoover flew out to Iowa for the funeral, posing for family photos with Tolson’s country relatives. A few months later, they brought Tolson’s mother back to New York for a distraction. A photo from the Stork Club shows a tiny Midwestern matron in mourning dress, her half smile, wire-rimmed glasses, and veiled black hat decidedly out of sync with café society glamour. Seated at her right, Hoover glances bemusedly at Tolson, while Tolson stares straight into the camera, grinning and laughing. This was what spouses did: tend to aging parents, attend family funerals, sit by patiently while out-of-town relatives sampled big-city wares.[13]
In that sense, Tolson and Hoover already had the affectionate, supportive marriage they were supposed to want. Still, this was not what the columnists meant when they speculated about the marriage prospects of “handsome Clyde Tolson!” Like Hoover, Tolson responded to the gossip in the logical way: he began to date women. His most serious girlfriend seems to have been a Miami divorcee named Frances Baswell, alleged to be “wedding-bell shopping” with him in early 1939. Though her name came and went quickly, the possibility that Tolson might indeed get married seemed to weigh on Hoover. Decades later, Hottel said that Hoover once begged him to intervene when Tolson seemed too interested in one of his dates. “I didn’t say, ‘Dump her,’ ” Hottel recalled. “I said ‘Forget her.’ ” Hottel claimed that Hoover’s stance was less a matter of romantic jealousy than of wanting things his own way, loath to share Tolson’s time and attention.[14]
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Hoover did initiate one significant change in his relationship with Tolson after Annie’s death: rather than pulling away, he moved closer. In the spring of 1938, Tolson moved to an apartment at the Marlyn complex on Cathedral Avenue, initially with Hottel, but soon on his own. Around the same time, Hoover began preparations to move out of Seward Square for the first time in his life. He no longer fit in along his childhood streets, a national celebrity living well below his means. Always tenuous, the neighborhood’s middle-class identity seemed to be slipping, as the local real estate market succumbed to Depression brutalities and what would soon be known as “white flight.” Hoover wanted a home of his own in a neighborhood better suited to a man of his station. A few months after Annie’s death, he brought in a Bureau photographer to capture his childhood home as it looked during his final months of residence. Then he put the house up for sale, ready to begin a new life across town, closer to Tolson.[15]
Hoover purchased a house at Thirtieth Place, a secluded single-block street in the bucolic Northwest neighborhood of Forest Hills. The builder’s ad emphasized the area’s racial exclusivity: “Safely restricted to assure a permanently desirable environment,” it read, code for the “covenants” that bound white homeowners to sell only to white buyers. In contrast to Seward Square’s close-packed rowhouses, Forest Hills offered yards and trees, its newly constructed homes spaced far apart. Hoover chose a brick house toward the end of the block, priced at twenty-five thousand dollars. From his new home, some seven miles from the seat of government, Hoover could no longer walk to work. But he now lived just three miles from Tolson, an easy drive along Nebraska Avenue through the segregated Northwest.[16]
The house itself had been built for a family “on a generous scale,” with a screened porch looking out onto a walled-in shaded yard. “In planning the lovely garden, special thought was given to creating privacy,” the house ad explained—presumably a major selling point for Hoover. He adopted his mother’s dog, Scottie, suddenly free to roam in the backyard. To keep Scottie company, Hoover acquired a little cairn terrier named G-Boy, one of a succession of cairns that he would dote upon for the rest of his life. Hoover later said that he liked dogs better than people. “They’re great company to me,” he told a reporter. “The less I think of some people, the more I think of my dogs. I can leave in the morning and be in a bad mood, and when I come home at night they’ll jump all over me.” It was in the months after Annie’s death that his dogs began to take on this increased importance—no longer merely pets, but the primary members of his near-suburban family.[17]
Hoover held on to other sentimental bits of his life with Annie, including a series of framed family portraits. For the first time, however, he was free of his mother’s tastes and restrictions, and able to decorate his own home as he wished. He had always loved to collect antiques and other objets d’art: stone carvings, etched glass, Western statuary. Now he put them out on display, covering nearly every available surface. The house came to contain hundreds of items—vases and ashtrays, silverware and candelabra, landscape paintings and quirky miniatures. The effect was less clutter than curation; each object carried its own story, and visitors were supposed to ask. There was nonetheless something incongruous about Hoover’s form of domesticity: America’s toughest crime fighter surrounded by delicate porcelain and artful trinkets. Many guests were struck by the fussy decor—“like drifting into a Victorian home,” one neighbor commented, still Annie’s domain in spirit if not in fact.[18]
Some of what Hoover displayed would surely not have been tolerated at his mother’s house. In addition to the vases, tchotchkes, and flatware, Hoover decorated his home with an array of nude statuary, mostly of the male variety. In one of its earliest iterations, his living room decor featured a naked boy, sculpted in marble, slumped on an end table. A second male nude, frozen in runner’s form, stood across the room. Built-in shelves presented variations on the godly Greek ideal—Cupid and Hercules, Apollo and Zeus, often naked, rendered in stone or bronze. What could not fit in the living room ended up downstairs in the basement, the most personal of Hoover’s “public” rooms. He chose a western motif: Native American throw rugs on the floor, cowboy hats on the walls, a deer’s head above the fireplace. Certain items fit uneasily with the western theme, however. On the walls he hung autographed pictures of friends and celebrities, along with a gilt-framed photo of a naked woman in profile. Outside in the yard, a life-size statue of a boy stood perched atop a fountain pedestal, clad only in his boots.[19]
What did all this mean to Hoover? He left no written record of his aesthetic choices, and the objects do not speak for themselves. But he did keep a few items in his personal collections that attempted to put words to images, and perhaps they explain some of what he thought and felt. One was a photograph of a bronze sculpture titled Friendship, by the San Francisco artist Haig Patigian: two nude men standing back-to-back, honed from the same metal slab but separated by a rough-hewn head-to-toe barrier. In the sculpture, the men touch longingly but just barely, their fingers brushing together below waist level. During the 1920s, the YMCA had used the Friendship sculpture to teach boys about proper behavior—how to love each other without acting upon “lustful” thoughts. “Let this man burn with a fierce desire toward that man,” the YMCA had instructed, “but let him not evidence that desire except by the actions of his eyes, his hands, and his heart.”
Shot in black-and-white, the photo of the statue in Hoover’s possession came accompanied by a poem titled “A Song of Men.” It told the painful story of “that rare, quiet friendship of men”: “Something strange there. Beautiful, but a little terrible too.” It interpreted the statue as a display of anguish but also of love and solidarity—two men at once “linked” but forever apart. The poem talked of “coming out” from loneliness and despair into “the lust and vigor of manhood.” It told of “everything shared,” but “always something withheld”—“each man coming out and finding the hand of his friend yet never quite coming out.” More than any other memento in Hoover’s home, the poem and photograph seem to offer a meditation on his relationship with Tolson, at once open and secret.[20]
Tolson came often to Thirtieth Place. Photographs show him thoroughly at home there: smoking a cigarette in an Adirondack chair out back, buttoning his suit coat on the half-lit screened porch. There are shots of Hoover alone during these years as well, a suburban breadwinner just returned from work, playing with his dogs in the backyard. Without a family of his own, he relied on a fleet of Black servants to care for the house and gardens, beginning with his housekeeper, Annie Fields, who was responsible for cooking and cleaning. In a neighborhood where only white people owned homes, Fields’s skin color marked her as a servant, able to work in Hoover’s home and maintain her own room there but not to purchase property. She took care of Hoover in ways large and small, a second “Annie” devoting her life to his tastes and needs. She also, by default, tended to Tolson. According to her sister, Fields understood that “there was something between” the two men, but she was discreet and loyal, the qualities Hoover most prized in his employees.[21]
The other essential figure in the life of Thirtieth Place was James Crawford, the chauffeur tasked with shuttling Hoover back and forth between home and office. Unlike Fields, Crawford was a Bureau employee, having worked his way up from warehouse laborer to office messenger before being appointed as Tolson’s chauffeur in 1934 and then, the following year, as Hoover’s personal driver. Before Thirtieth Place, Crawford recalled, Hoover and Tolson went to work in separate cars, coming from opposite directions. After the move, they developed a new routine, with Crawford arriving in the morning to pick up Hoover, then stopping along the way to collect Tolson. Crawford usually dropped them off a bit east of the Justice Department, around the White House. Hoover and Tolson liked to walk the last six or seven blocks together, a transition from one part of their shared life to another.[22]
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Because there was always work to do, some of it as wrenching as the personal events that rocked Hoover and Tolson during these years. In early 1938, Little, Brown publishers released Persons in Hiding, a compendium of crime stories published under Hoover’s byline. The book reflected Hoover’s preoccupation with mothers and children, men and women, social norms and the criminals who violated them. Like Hoover’s speeches, it affirmed what he had been taught in childhood: that the difference between virtue and vice came down to self-control, and that for every young man who succumbed to the temptations of crime and deviance, there was another “who had the ‘will-power to resist.’ ” He dedicated the book to Cooper and Cooper’s wife—and to his Bureau staff and “my Assistant, Clyde A. Tolson,” whose “untiring efforts” made it possible for the book to exist.[23]
Cooper would go on to write one more book with Hoover’s cooperation. Published in 1939, Designs in Scarlet took the reader into the netherworld of prostitutes, pimps, and the outlaw life, a tour rife with both thrills and moralizing. Cooper concluded from his research that “evil” was alive and well in the land, creeping ever closer to the middle-class American home. The following year, perhaps unable to make his peace with what he had seen, he hanged himself in his hotel room, one more loss for Hoover in a season of difficulty.[24]
Hoover’s work, too, took him to dark places in the late 1930s, an unending run of the worst that humanity had to offer. In the winter of 1938, Hoover and Tolson flew out west to lead the search for the body of a seventy-two-year-old Chicago millionaire who had been kidnapped at gunpoint several months earlier. The Bureau tracked the ransom money to a career criminal placing bets at a racetrack in California. Hoover and Tolson accompanied the suspect on the chartered plane from Los Angeles to Minneapolis, then on a rumbling car trip into snowy northern Wisconsin. Over the course of several hours of travel on foot and by sleigh, their manacled prisoner identified the underground dugout where he’d first held his victim and led the search party to a branch-covered pit where he had buried two bodies.[25]
Hoover later expressed pride in this adventure, another installment in his effort to prove that he could, indeed, make arrests. “It was a new experience for us, because we are big town boys,” he said of the trek through the woods, “but we could do it because we keep in excellent physical condition.” He nonetheless admitted to being unsettled by such close contact with human evil, in which the kidnapper apparently let his elderly victim starve for several days before delivering a final, skull-shattering blow. Hoover’s voice “was heavy at times with the anger he felt over the enormity and horror of the double crime,” The Washington Times reported, noting how weary and worn down he seemed after “days of relentless effort.”[26]
Other cases that year brought similar cycles of triumph and despair, with Hoover and Tolson experiencing almost all of it together. In early June, they flew to Miami to oversee the case of little Skeegie Cash, a five-year-old boy abducted from his bedroom in a small Florida town. News photos show them striding along Miami’s commercial boulevards, brows knitted in a near parody of G-Man determination. But they were doing genuinely hard work—conducting “the greatest man hunt ever seen in Florida,” in Hoover’s words. In the final stages, Hoover stayed up for forty-eight hours straight. He went to view the boy’s decomposing body when agents located it just after midnight on June 9, hidden away in a palmetto thicket, still clad in striped pajamas. Hoover announced the terrible discovery at 1:25 a.m., describing the tiny body concealed in “almost impenetrable” underbrush. He then begged forgiveness for ending the press conference. “That will be all tonight,” he declared. “I have been up two nights and am very tired.”[27]
