They Had It Coming

I love the musical Chicago.  It’s a great play, a good CD for the car, and I even enjoyed reading the play, but none of that compares to watching the movie starring Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere.  

Yes, I know the movie is almost twenty years old, but let’s face it—there is kind of a shortage of good movies being released this year.  And since next year’s movies aren’t being filmed right now…  I suppose that we will have to get used to the old movies, and Chicago is as good a place to start as any.

There is one scene that always gets me:  the musical number, the Cell Block Tango, where the prison inmates are all singing “He had it coming!”.  Watch Catherine Zeta-Jones face as she sings it—I have no trouble at all believing that she could kill an unfaithful lover.  If filming Fatal Attraction, didn’t convince Michael Douglas to stay faithful, that number should. It is also worth remembering that the actress filmed all those difficult dance numbers while pregnant, deserving more than the Oscar she earned for her performance.  (And if that doesn’t impress you, she performed one of the dance routines the night of the Oscars, just ten days before the baby was born.)

Watching the movie got me to wondering, is any of it true?  

Maurine Dallas Watkins wrote Chicago in 1926, originally titled as Brave Little Woman, as a homework assignment while attending Yale Drama School.  The first thing every writer learns is to write what you know, and in this case, Watkins had been the beat reporter covering crime for the Chicago Tribune for eight months.  (No: The character Mary Sunshine was not a self-portrait—it was the author’s way of making fun of her female colleagues that Watkins believed were suffering from a near fatal case of bleeding heart because of their seemingly endless stories about young women becoming victims of “hot jazz and cold gin.”)

Watkins modeled the play after two spectacular crimes she had covered for the newspaper.  The first was that of Beulah May Annan.  (Try really hard not to think Roxie Hart as you read the next couple of paragraphs.)  Beulah was born in Kentucky and came to Chicago with her second husband, who worked as a mechanic at a garage.  Beulah worked as a laundress and was soon having an affair with Harry Kalstedt, a bookkeeper at the laundry.

One night, in the bedroom she shared with her husband, she shot and killed Kalstedt.  Exactly what happened depends on which story Watkins told, but the gist of it was there was a gun on the bed and while fearing for her honor and/or her life, they both reached for the gun and she was little quicker.  Since Kalstedt was shot in the back….Well, the police were a little skeptical.

It didn’t help Beulah’s flimsy alibi that, after shooting her lover, she sat down and listened to a foxtrot record, “Hula Lou”, for four hours while drinking cocktails and smoking cigarettes.  Four hours is about the time the coroner estimated that it took for Kalstedt to die while his moans and cries for help were drowned out by the sound of the foxtrot.

Somehow, her husband believed her, paid for an attorney (emptying his bank account) and stood faithfully by when Beulah said at her trial that Kalstedt had tried to kill her after she told him she was pregnant by him, forcing her to defend herself and her unborn child.  The jury believed her, and found her not guilty.  The day after the trial, she announced that she had separated from her husband and was seeking a divorce.  There was no mention of a child’s ever being born.  Beulah died of tuberculosis in 1928.

The other sensational murder story involved Belva Gaertner, an oft-married cabaret singer whom Watkins turned into Velma Kelly.  Belva had already been married once when she met and fell in love with William Gaertner, who she married, divorced, and remarried.  The two were separated when she met Walter Law and—despite Walter’s being married and having a child—they began an affair.  

On March 11, 1924, Belva was arrested after the police found the blood-soaked body of Walter sprawled across the front seat of Belva’s car.  When the police searched her apartment, they found a pile of Belva’s clothes, soaked in blood.  Belva, clearly drunk, said all she could remember was driving—and drinking—with Walter, but had no memory of the rest of the evening.  She admitted to carrying a gun, saying it was necessary to protect herself from robbers.

Watkins interviewed Belva, “No woman can love a man enough to kill him. They aren't worth it, because there are always plenty more. Walter was just a kid—29 and I'm 38. Why should I have worried whether he loved me or whether he left me? Gin and guns—either one is bad enough, but together they get you in a dickens of a mess, don't they?”

At her trial, Belva had the simplest of defenses:  Maybe Law shot himself.  Somehow, the jury believed her and she was acquitted.  

The next year, Belva married William for the third time, but he promptly divorced her, saying she had threatened to kill him.  The next year, she and William remarried and they moved to Europe.  After that, the trail gets a little cold, but the two were still together, presumably celebrating all of their anniversaries, when William died in 1948.  

By the time Belva died in 1965, she had been able to watch two different movies based on Watkin’s play, in 1927 and 1942.  When the play opened in Chicago in 1927, Belva was there on opening night.

In the movie, poor Katalin Helinski, a Hungarian immigrant, is found guilty and hanged.  Actually, the character was based on Sabella Nitti, an Italian immigrant, who was accused of holding down her husband while her boyfriend beat him to death with a sledgehammer.  However, unlike Katalin, Sabella escaped the hangman:  The jury acquitted both Sabella and her boyfriend and they quickly married after the trial.  Later, her new husband vanished under suspicious circumstances.

There is not a real-life counterpart to Roxie’s and Velma’s attorney, Billy Flynn.  In real life, there were two different attorneys, although the same prosecuting attorney tried both cases.  After his second loss, reporters asked him for a comment.  His terse reply was, “Women—just women!”

Oh, yes!  If you are wondering, when Watkins turned in her homework assignment, she received a grade of 98 percent.