Eliot Ness (30 page)

Falling Star

“With regard to women I never had any information or indication that Ness had an interest in women excepting his own wife.” Some of Ness’s former colleagues would spend years protecting his reputation.

Girls, Girls, Girls

E
valine was miserable. Every morning she woke up with a silent scream in her head—
Let me out of this
—but there was nowhere to go.

She had no home. The boathouse, and Cleveland, had been abandoned after Eliot secured the wartime job. Their furniture sat in storage. They lived out of suitcases in a succession of hotels in Washington, DC. Eliot dived into his work, as always, but the car accident and its fallout still weighed on him like wet winter wool. He worried that the scandal, the shame of it, could resurface at any time and undermine his reputation among the military officers and police chiefs he had to work with every day. “
I don’t think he could stand criticism that well, especially when it came to his job,” Evaline recalled. “That’s why he tried to avoid publicity with the accident. It was just one of those things.”

Just one of those things. That sounded like Eliot talking, not Evaline. She long before had stopped trying to match her husband’s smiling, come-what-may shrugs in the face of adversity, his cool, detached reasonableness.
She needed to scream, to get the blood pulsing through her veins like Niagara Falls. Every month or so she would embrace this need. She cried and broke plates and let herself be swept away by it all. It was
necessary
. By now she recognized that her husband could use a good scream, too. She believed that instead of letting his frustration out, he allowed it to eat him alive. It was his blindness to how trivial the car accident really was that had plopped him down in wartime Washington in a rinky-dink job. Eliot surely would have been in the running for any big-city police-chief position that opened up, but he had rushed to make his part-time VD gig a permanent one, lest he never receive another offer. When the Social Protection job didn’t come to him quite as easily as it probably should have—O. W. Wilson seemed to have been everyone’s first choice for the position—he no doubt saw it as confirmation that his career had gone into the deep freeze. On top of all that, he faced the terror of midlife’s official arrival. He was now forty years old. He had suddenly aged out of his
boy-wonder status, that cherished part of his identity that had set him apart from the crowd for years.

Despite his shaky confidence, Eliot still refused to do anything in his professional life halfway.
He hired Arnold Sagalyn as his information and reports specialist, and together they “designed a systematic, comprehensive program,” Sagalyn wrote, “that made it virtually impossible for a prostitute to meet and pick up a serviceman; and if she did succeed, impossible to find and transport him to a hotel or a motel that would give them a room.” Every serviceman diagnosed with VD had to fill out a form that helped the Social Protection Division track down how and where he had been infected. Eliot strong-armed alcohol distributors into discontinuing deliveries to bars where soldiers had met prostitutes, which led the bars to self-police the local sex trade in their establishments. A cab driver found to cart around “chippies” and their johns faced the forfeiture of his license or the cancellation of his gas-ration card. Sagalyn marveled at how Eliot attacked the military’s venereal-disease problem the same way he had attacked Cleveland’s corruption problem.

As he had done in Cleveland, Eliot created a corps of undercover investigators who would identify the active prostitution operations near Army, Navy and Air Force bases and urban installations, to provide the OSP [Office of Social Protection] with the names of the principals and individual prostitutes involved.

The undercover men would arrive in a town and insinuate themselves into the hotels, bars, and restaurants that served soldiers. They reported their findings directly to Eliot and made special note of whether police or mobsters played a role in the sex industry. The problem was, there were army bases and defense plants all over the country. His handful of new Unknowns couldn’t investigate them all. Eliot had to rely on local sheriff and police departments to carry out his program, which meant he had to convince them of its importance. With his division’s miniscule budget taken up by his investigators, Eliot decided to sell his anti-VD program himself in towns and cities across America. Even if he could have farmed it out to staffers, he really wouldn’t have wanted to.
He was determined that the effort not have “any suggestion of a moral crusade,” and he didn’t want to threaten anyone with invocation of the May Act unless absolutely necessary. He didn’t trust anyone else to make the pitch.

Though he hit hard at businesses that allowed prostitution to thrive, he showed an unusually enlightened attitude toward the professional girls whose livelihood he was determined to stamp out. Sagalyn recalled Eliot being moved almost to tears by research that indicated the average prostitute had been abused by a parent or husband “and was often unable to read or write.” Disturbed by the tendency of local authorities to blame the prostitutes themselves for their community’s vice problem, Eliot pushed beyond the purview of the division’s mission by creating an unofficial network of social workers and health officials. Girls found to be infected were detained and treated, but Eliot didn’t want to incarcerate hundreds of women for the duration of the war. He wanted to give them better options. He hadn’t focused on prostitution when he was safety director in Cleveland, but now he would try to save girls across the country from the sex industry. “
Many of them have come from broken homes, deprived families,” he wrote in a report justifying his efforts. “Often their education has been limited, and they have had no specialized job training. They have simply drifted from one poorly-paid, dead-end job to another, and—lacking both emotional and economic stability—have eventually taken the path of least resistance.” He insisted that “sympathetic, trained case workers should be available in each town or vice district for personal interviewing of women arrested in enforcement of repression.” Whenever possible, he sent prostitutes to Civilian Conservation Corps camps for vocational training.

Evaline sometimes went on the road with Eliot, “living in dreary hotels in towns near army bases where Eliot conferred with the mayors,” she remembered. Eliot, the city boy, found he liked small-town America. He appreciated the easy, natural friendliness of the people, the no-nonsense, let’s-roll-up-our-sleeves attitude to whatever problem they faced. These people weren’t whiners, and they didn’t put on airs. Better still, they liked him back. His reserved, unpretentious amiability allowed him to fit right in. “
Eliot liked that job,” Evaline said. “We’d go to all of those small towns and he’d advise them on how to get rid of their red-light districts. We met a lot of funny people in those towns, believe me.” There can be little doubt about that. Not just anyone went down to the town hall to hear a man from Washington talk about sex diseases. Eliot would give his lecture, show some gross pictures, and then spend hours patiently answering questions from the kooks and the civic-minded alike. The actual useful conversations, with town councilors and the police on how to implement his program, took place before or after the public meetings. After each trip, he and
Evaline would return to DC and try to find a hotel that had a room for them.

For Evaline, returning “home” was the worst part of Eliot’s work. Wartime mobilization had obliterated almost every niggling vestige of the Great Depression; by the second year of the war the federal budget on its own exceeded the nation’s total gross national product from just a decade before. Lingering high unemployment disappeared completely across the country. But the capital city boomed like nowhere else. The population of the metropolitan area had doubled since 1930 and continued to rise fast. And all the newcomers seemed to be women—eager single women, married women whose husbands were in Europe or the Pacific, and even teenage girls looking for adventure.
Washington had become a modern-day Amazon nation. Women drove cabs, operated jackhammers, put out fires, asked “Which floor?” when you stepped into an elevator. Lured by splashy employment ads that ran in all the glossy national magazines, the women arrived day after day, heading directly from Union Station to a massive intake department that, working with very nongovernmental efficiency, parceled them out to federal agencies as quickly as the newcomers proved they could type.

The growth was so explosive and continuous that the women found there was no place for them to live. The city issued more than fifteen hundred building permits each month, and yet it seemed to barely put a dent in the housing shortage. Women would arrive on trains in the morning, and by the afternoon they’d be working at a government agency they hadn’t known existed before they walked in the door. That night they’d sleep on the couch in the office’s lobby. When they finally got a day off to look for a room, they had no way to get around. The city had spread outward so rapidly that you couldn’t possibly walk from place to place. And stepping onto a bus was like falling into a black hole. Rush hour didn’t exist; traffic was paralyzed almost around the clock.

This was the chaos to which Eliot and Evaline returned time and again. Coming out of the train station, they would store their luggage in a locker, and then Eliot would head to his office while Evaline began searching for a room. The government had forced the city’s hotels to restrict bookings—after three consecutive nights, you were out on the street—to help ease the jam-up. But a room seeker had no way to know which hotels would have availability on a given day or how many people were seeking to claim the available spots. Evaline usually ended up sitting on park benches for hours,
grinding her teeth as she waited for a room to open up. She hated the waiting, hated the uncertainty of it. It made her even angrier when she learned that many well-to-do “dollar-a-year” men working in the federal bureaucracy stayed on in suites for months at a time by slipping the room clerk a little something extra every week, or, better yet, by having a congressman friend call the hotel’s manager. Eliot wasn’t willing to do either, not even for Christmas week. Frustration would build up until Evaline could barely stand to be in her own skin. “
I would have said ‘War is Hell!’ if General Sherman hadn’t already said it,” she joked years later about this period, long after the anger—but not the memory of it—had burned off.

Waiting for hotel rooms wasn’t her only source of frustration. She felt “useless.” She had no place to paint, no commercial assignments to work on, nothing to do but play secretary for Eliot on his trips to military bases. The war effort, visible everywhere around her, made her feel guilty and selfish. Women rushed past her on the street every day, on their way to important jobs. Every woman in the capital seemed to be in uniform. It was a sign of the new feminism. “
The uniform,” wrote
Vogue
, “stands for our spine of purpose . . . it is time to stop all the useless little gestures, to stop being the Little Woman and be women.” That sounded good to Evaline. The outbreak of war gave focus and meaning to her interminable, opaque longing to belong. She finally decided to join the American Women’s Voluntary Services, which was on its way to becoming the largest wartime women’s service organization in the country. One of the reasons for its success: volunteers had eight attractive uniforms to choose from. The AWVS girl was immediately identifiable, a wartime trendsetter. Evaline cut her hair short and classically, “up off the neck,” as directed, and got to work. “I paid for a snappy navy-blue uniform with brass buttons and a hat to match,” she remembered. “I volunteered our car and gas rations and drove admirals, generals and lesser brass here and there, waited for them, and drove them back again.”

Eliot was supportive—at first. He liked that his wife had become involved in the war effort—he thought it only right—but he also knew that all was not well in their marriage. When he realized she was spending her evenings escorting self-important officers to cocktail parties and that she wouldn’t be going with him on trips anymore, he told her to quit. Evaline did not like being told what to do, but she also couldn’t have been surprised by the demand. No doubt she flirted with her admirals and generals and lesser brass.
She couldn’t help herself. Her sex appeal was important to her;
it always would be. She insisted to Eliot that she usually waited out in the car during the soirees, but that could have given him only more reason to worry. His wife was unhappy and lonely, and with the lodging shortage in DC, the automobile had become the favored trysting spot not just for teenagers but for everyone. He put his foot down. She would have to find another way to occupy herself.

“
Go to art school,” he told her, a knee-jerk response. “If Renoir could paint through
two
wars, you are allowed to paint through
one
.”
*

“Some comparison—Renoir and me . . . me and Renoir,” Evaline thought. But she did it. She had recently stumbled upon the Corcoran School of Art “tucked between the exhibition rooms” of the Corcoran Gallery. It was a small operation, with just five artists on the faculty, nothing at all like her ambitious, wide-ranging alma mater, the Art Institute of Chicago. And that was just fine with her. It seemed like a comfortable little school, almost like it needed her. In October 1943, she put down $35 to enroll in unlimited “Day Life” classes and another $2 for locker number 256 to store her equipment. Just like that, she was a student again.

***

Going back to school turned out to be exactly what she needed.

“As I climbed the steps to my first class,” Evaline recalled later, “I couldn’t have guessed what lay ahead: that day the walls of Jericho came down . . . the Red Sea parted . . . manna fell from Heaven! All because I met the right teacher at the right time.”

The teacher was Richard Lahey, a romantic, white-haired Irishman who had made the unlikely transition from newspaper cartoonist to respected painter and art instructor. The fifty-year-old Lahey was having a bad war. All of his best students had joined the military, leaving him with dotty old ladies and one untalented hunchback the army wouldn’t take. So he quickly homed in on Evaline. Her work was uncertain, but it also showed great promise—and just enough maturity to make her passion for art useful. He hovered behind her during class, watching her strokes, her decision-making. He kept her after class for one-on-one discussions and pep talks. The attention quickly paid off. “My painting flourished because he urged me to experiment,” she recalled. “With his sensitive perception, he led me to express feelings that I never knew I had.”