Eliot Ness (26 page)

This was a new development. No newspaper had seriously criticized the safety director since his first weeks on the job. He’d always held the moral high ground, and he’d always appeared to be on top of the situation,
whatever it was. But now, with the torso murders, he was flailing, desperate. The newspapers had finally noticed. They mused in print over whether he had too much power. Eliot remained immensely popular in Cleveland, but his cloak of invincibility was suddenly gone.

The bad press made Eliot even more determined to show results in the torso case.
On Monday, August 22, Eliot teamed police officers with fire wardens—a clever way around the need for search warrants. For the next five days the teams went door to door in a ten-square-mile area around Kingsbury Run. They were officially looking for fire-code violations, and there were plenty of them. They poked through dilapidated buildings where they frequently found up to a dozen people living in one room. They searched basements where frayed wiring hung from the ceiling like tinsel. But they issued few citations, for they actually were looking for a killing room—the murderer’s “death laboratory.” Eliot was sure it existed. But even though officers and fire wardens pawed through hundreds of homes, they didn’t find anything of the sort.

The fevered activity wasn’t for nothing, though.
With the Kingsbury Run shantytowns destroyed and the door-to-door searches getting started, Dr. Francis Sweeney showed up in Sandusky, where he committed himself to the veterans’ hospital. Eliot couldn’t boast of an arrest, but he had managed to remove from the streets the man he believed responsible for the gruesome murders.

Of course, Sweeney still could sign himself out of the facility whenever he wanted to.

Full of Love

E
liot loved to fall in love, and Evaline was easy for fall for. He had no idea what he was getting himself into.

The woman he had met on a train nearly two years before was flirtatious and sexy and smart, with a wit as dry as Death Valley. She was unlike any woman Eliot had ever known. What he didn’t know was that it was all an act. Evaline’s confidence—her belief in herself and in the power of romance and possibility—depended on willpower. And it couldn’t be maintained. She was a talented artist. She painted and sketched, made her own clothes and furniture and tapestries, but this overflow of creativity was her way of fighting off ghosts.
A low-boil dissatisfaction roiled constantly inside her, though she refused to acknowledge it, even with intimates.
She struggled to keep her composure—that was something she admired about Eliot, his composure, calling him “the most controlled man I ever met.” The pressure she put on herself to live up to Eliot’s example would become intense—unbearable. “She was an extraordinarily beautiful and talented woman, but she had demons,” said Steve Resnick, her step-grandson. “God knows what they were. It wouldn’t surprise me if she was abused as a child.” Ann Durell saw the same darkness in her. “Oh, what was it about Eve?” she mused, calling Evaline by her nickname. “She was very elegant, very aware, but it was hard being around her. She was not a relaxed person.”

***

Her first few months in Cleveland offered few opportunities for relaxation.

“
Cleveland wasn’t New York but my life was exciting, busy, and full of love,” Evaline would write of her introduction to Ohio’s biggest city. It was all because of Eliot. He was her dashing “fair-haired boy.” She thrilled at the late-night calls that sent him charging out the door, at the newspaper stories describing his latest attacks on corruption, at the interruptions at restaurants from people who just wanted to shake his hand. She would even attend an extortion trial to see him in action. She sat in the front row wearing an exotic turban, intent on being noticed. She listened carefully to the
testimony of mobsters and “stool pigeons,” now and again sneaking a look at Eliot and smiling. She was in love, but more than that, Eliot made her proud. She’d never really been proud of anyone before—certainly not of herself—and she enjoyed the novelty of it.

During his brief singlehood, Eliot had grown accustomed to closing up his office at eight or nine (instead of the usual eleven or twelve) and heading over to one of downtown Cleveland’s grand hotels, where he’d drink and dance and schmooze, sometimes until it was time to go back to work in the morning. It turned out that this work-hard-and-play-harder lifestyle suited Eliot far more than the dull-boy routine he’d stuck with for so long. Drinking loosened him up, pulled him out his shell. It liberated him. “
Eliot was a gay, convivial soul who liked nothing better than to sit around till all hours, drinking with friends, or dancing,” recalled Phillip Porter. “It seemed to unwind him to visit night clubs and hotel dance spots. He was not a heavy drinker, but he could keep at it for long periods without giving any appearance of being swacked.”

Edna had wanted only to stay at home with her husband in the evening, to have him all to herself for a few hours a day. Not Evaline. Eliot had found someone who enjoyed the nightlife as much as he did. “
That may have been the best part of his life,” Evaline said years later. “He loved it.” They’d go to the Vogue Room at the Hollenden Hotel or the Bronze Room at the Hotel Cleveland. They became regulars at the Statler’s Terrace Room.
When the Terrace Room’s bandleader, Manny Landers, saw them come through the doors, he’d stop the band midsong and launch into “I Live the Life I Love,” the couple’s favorite. Inevitably,
Eliot would run into men on his hit list: the Statler was still the Mob’s hotel of choice. This wasn’t nearly as awkward as one might expect. Eliot and Evaline, and whoever else they had brought along, would settle in at the bar, and the pimps and enforcers and numbers-racket monkeys would all shift to the other side.
Now and again, one of the tough boys would make a crack about Eliot or the police or the latest “trumped up” charges, and Eliot would look up and laugh along with them and offer a rejoinder. They’d parry back and forth, the women watching with bemused expressions, until one of the parties moved to a table in the main room. It might have seemed all too congenial to an outsider, but it was a vast improvement from just a couple of years before, when cops and mobsters spent night after night huddled together in back-room booths at the club.

While the gangsters on the other side of the bar put Eliot in an excellent
mood, they didn’t become part of dinnertime conversation. “
He never really talked much about what he was doing,” Evaline recalled. “We’d go out at night and have a good time, but there would never be any talk about his work.” By this time Evaline had moved into Eliot’s rented place on Lake Avenue in all but name; she maintained her own apartment for propriety’s sake. She also began to take on some freelance illustrating work for Higbee’s department store, thanks to Eliot calling in a favor. Working as an artist during the day, going out every night drinking and dancing, Evaline realized she was actually happy, consistently and truly happy. She wanted this feeling to go on forever—and Eliot promised her it could. In the fall of 1939 the couple sneaked out of town to get married.
They both selected “single” on the marriage certificate, perhaps worried the minister wouldn’t marry them if they admitted to being divorced. Inexplicably, Eliot listed his occupation as “Writer.” (There wasn’t a box provided for the wife to put down an occupation.) It was a quick, makeshift ceremony, presided over by a Methodist minister and witnessed by two men who were strangers to the happy couple. Eliot didn’t mind being married by a clergyman outside his Christian Science faith.
Two weeks later, when word finally trickled out that the safety director had married his young artist girlfriend, the
Plain Dealer
swooned: “The director’s bride is a slender, attractive, friendly person, a smart girl and an unusual one. For example, she was reported as two years older than she is, and she isn’t going to sue. She is 25.” (Actually, the initial report was correct: She was twenty-seven.) The
Press
, for its part, excitedly announced, “Aside from her art work, she is interested in music, the theater and tennis.”

Eliot chose a good time to get hitched again: he was seeing a revival of hero worship in the press after his handling of the United Auto Workers strike that had idled the Fisher Body plant at Coit Road and East 140th Street.
On July 31, the nationwide strike had turned violent in Cleveland when five thousand union men arrived at the entrance to the General Motors factory. Carrying clubs and wearing papier-mâché helmets, they descended on non-striking workers heading into the plant. Horrific screams of pain and fear ripped the morning air; men trying to escape slipped in pools of blood. One replacement worker crawled under a parked sedan. Union men promptly set the car on fire. Eliot, unarmed, waded into the melee with a phalanx of officers. He ordered his men not to unholster their guns. Two Ohio National Guard officers on “observation duty” during the clash singled out Eliot for his leadership in the midst of battle. “Although
members of the Cleveland Safety Department exercised rare qualities of patience and restraint under trying circumstances, when the need arose their prompt militancy and courage left nothing to be desired,” they wrote
in a report to the guard’s adjutant general. Once the battle had been brought under control, Eliot declared an exclusion zone around the plant in all directions, with the exception of a nearby restaurant where the UAW’s local leader had set up his unofficial headquarters. Eliot allowed up to ten union men in the restaurant at a time. That decision, criticized by police commanders in internal memos, would prove effective. Detroit and other cities continued to endure strike violence in the days ahead, but Cleveland stayed quiet. “City Acts to Keep Peace in Strike,” the
Plain Dealer
triumphantly proclaimed across its front page.

This latest wave of press approval did not ease Eliot’s mind about his recent nuptials. Worried that his divorce and quick remarriage reflected poorly on his character, he told people as little as possible about his relationship with Evaline.
Cleveland’s newspapers reported that the Nesses married in Chicago, where the bride, a native Chicagoan, was “a friend of Mr. Ness’ family.” The papers also revealed that the couple had met “several years before” through Eliot’s sisters. What could be more wholesome than that? The problem was, none of it was true. They actually married in Greenup, Kentucky, a town Eliot discovered during his time with the ATU in Cincinnati. (
One Greenup booster boasted that the tiny town on the Ohio border was “known for its beautiful women, fast horses and good whiskey.”) Plus, Evaline was born in Ohio, not Chicago, and she hadn’t yet met Eliot’s family. Evaline recognized what drove her new husband’s small lies. She, too, was often ashamed of her choices, her desires. She feared what people thought of her. She and Eliot were kindred spirits in this way. She stuck to her husband’s talking points. “
I’m lucky in my profession because it’s the kind of work that doesn’t interfere with being a housewife too,” she told the
Plain Dealer
.

Eliot’s social circle found Evaline as charming as the reporters did, but some were wary. “
Evaline may have already been in the picture when Eliot and Edna separated,” one friend suspected. No one had any way of knowing that for sure, but Eliot’s new girl certainly fit the popular conception of a home wrecker. “Edna was an ordinary, simple person,” the friend said. “Evaline was striking in appearance, even dramatic.”

Some observers—and there were a lot of observers of the relationship early on—thought her desperate for attention.
One said that “Evaline liked
being Eliot’s wife when he was a famous and influential public official. . . . She liked his prominence and power and fame.” This was a common, catty misreading of Evaline at the time. She became outgoing when she drank, and she drank so she could keep it together when she found herself stuck in her husband’s spotlight. Evaline remembered loving the attention at first, “because I felt like a star. But I hated it, too. It meant my having to make speeches to women’s groups, appear before book clubs, hand out medals to Girl Scouts when they had jamborees—all those things that a public figure’s wife is expected to do. I was no good at it.” In fact, her experience as a public man’s wife soon made her gun-shy, tetchy. This would harden into intransigence later in life, even though by then the spotlight had found her for her own accomplishments, not Eliot’s.
Ann Durell, who became her editor in the 1950s when Evaline took up writing and illustrating children’s books, recalled that any kind of public appearance was “sheer torture” for her. For years Durell warded off librarians and event bookers, telling them: “She says the only kind of communicating that she can do is through her books!”

Evaline probably was an alcoholic before she met Eliot, and the new marriage didn’t help. Their entire lives together revolved around drinking.
Years later, she described her relationship with Eliot as “steamy”—but not in the good, sexually charged sense of the word. “
She was an interesting, generous, creative person when she was sober,” recalled Marni Greenberg, her step-granddaughter. “And she was very unpleasant and confrontational when she was drunk.”

Eliot, bumping up against the unpleasantness under Evaline’s glossy surface, did his best to make her happy. Because he had his own struggles with black moods, he thought he understood her. Material possessions never meant much to him, but he thought they might keep his wife’s busy brain occupied.
He bought her a new car every year. And he moved them into a fortress-like, four-story boathouse in the swank Clifton Park Lagoon, the deepest mooring place on Lake Erie.
Since they were right on the water, he also bought her a speedboat, which Evaline cranked up to its 35-mile-per-hour limit whenever she could. In the early years of their marriage, she would often zip over to East Ninth Street in the boat to pick up her husband after work and ferry him home.

Eliot loved that his wife was an artist. He encouraged her to submit her work to galleries and for competitions.
He bought her a Mary Cassatt art book for Christmas, inscribing it, “To my wonderful and beautiful wife, the
modern Mary Cassatt.” Still, Evaline struggled with her confidence. She feared she had wasted her time at the Art Institute of Chicago, her alma mater, that she should have become a librarian or a teacher—or nothing at all. She had a breakthrough with a painting that was accepted in the May Show, a seminude, unofficial self-portrait called
Sunning.
(Evaline loved to lie out in the sun wearing as little as possible.) The work, with its long, blackened limbs stretched out across the canvas like a spider on its web, was by turns erotic, dreamy, and disturbing, depending on the viewer’s frame of mind.
The
Plain Dealer
listed
Sunning
among works in the show “worthy of special notice,” but the painting failed to secure a prize and Evaline’s momentum once again faltered. She had set up her easel in a small, glass-enclosed room in the boathouse that looked out at the lake, but day after day inspiration failed to come. “
I floundered, all sense of direction lost,” she wrote. “I despaired of ever becoming an artist.”

A regular diet of drinking and dancing didn’t help her artistic ambitions, but it did push her despair into the background for a while. She flirted brazenly with Eliot’s colleagues, friends, city officials, waiters. At the Vogue Room and the Terrace Room, Evaline would take to the dance floor with anyone who would have her—which was everyone. She danced with a charming looseness, draping herself on her partner’s hips and arms in her own embryonic version of dirty dancing. Eliot didn’t seem to mind. “
Eliot was a very social person who enjoyed partying with friends after work and also liked being married,” remembered his aide, Arnold Sagalyn. Meaning, he put up with a lot. Eliot distracted himself from the more difficult aspects of his life with Evaline by redirecting his focus. He became a bit of a mother hen to Sagalyn, for one. Eliot had hired the gangly, moonfaced kid straight out of Oberlin College after Sagalyn had interviewed him for his senior paper, titled “Eliot Ness in Cleveland.” It didn’t matter that this well-brought-up Jewish boy from Springfield, Massachusetts, had no law-enforcement experience. Eliot saw something in him. And sure enough, the intelligent, imaginative Sagalyn proved to be a fast learner and exceptionally hardworking. So now Eliot worried over his unattached protégé, who often worked deep into the night with him. He began inviting him to parties at the boathouse. “I developed a warm personal relationship with both Eliot and Evaline,” Sagalyn remembered. “I was a steady visitor at their evening gatherings, where I made myself useful making and serving drinks and hors d’oeuvres.” He quickly learned that this entrée to the boss’s personal life came with responsibilities. “Eliot was an extremely
newsworthy public figure in Cleveland, and virtually anything he said or did was of interest and written about in the daily papers,” Sagalyn recalled. That meant anyone with a close relationship with him took an oath of sorts. “I never talked about him, or in any other way revealed anything I heard or saw that might adversely affect or embarrass him,” Sagalyn said. “I also made it a policy not to write anything about him or to describe in detail any of my own activities with anyone, including my family and friends.” This could be a trial, because to young Arnold Sagalyn, Mr. and Mrs. Eliot Ness were the most fascinating, most sophisticated couple he had ever known.