Eliot Ness (31 page)

Evaline believed she was finally becoming a real and true artist. “It was
here that everything gelled for me,” she said of her work at Corcoran. She spent night after night lost in her painting. It provided a “peace and enjoyment” she hadn’t been able to find through any other activity, not even drinking. At the end of the term, she won the school’s highest award for painting—which came with a $50 prize—in a competition open to students and faculty alike.

Eliot had always encouraged his wife’s artistic ambitions, but he couldn’t take this new Evaline. His wife had changed, suddenly and dramatically. “He said I was no longer the woman he married,” she recalled. Eliot thought she’d become “dull.” For the first time in Evaline’s adult life, that word might actually have applied. Creating art had become her only interest. She had to create, and she did so constantly, in every kind of medium. Her main focus was painting, but she also worked in woodcutting, lithography, etching. She found the physicality involved with woodcutting perfect for taking out her frustrations. She loved the “infinite possibilities for making texture in wood by pounding, gluing, scratching. Nails, screws, paper clips, wire mesh, or anything else which will make a dent are for pounding.”

***

Through Lahey’s guidance Evaline began to focus anew on the human form. She had learned years before at the Art Institute of Chicago that any decent artist could master technique. “It was adding part of yourself to your work that made the difference.” That was where she’d always come up blank. That was what had kept her work no more than adequate, solidly competent but uninspired. Now that elusive inspiration had arrived. She realized she must create for herself, and only for herself, not for anyone else’s approval.

The turning point came in a life-drawing course. On the first day of the spring term, a young woman entered the classroom, carefully disrobed, and stood before the artists. This was nothing unusual. Even some of the school’s students earned cigarette money by posing in the nude for classes. But something about this woman was different. Evaline stared at her dark hair, her heavy breasts, her long legs and big feet. She felt herself blushing. The woman, so comfortable with her body, with her nakedness, fascinated her. No, it was more than that.
Evaline was “extremely attracted to her.”

She tried hard to reproduce the woman on her sketchpad, but it didn’t work. She threw page after page to the floor. Her newfound confidence as an artist couldn’t help her with this assignment; there was no way art could
satisfy the artist. At the end of class one day she approached the model. The woman never ducked into an empty room to change. She brought her clothes in a bag, and as the students filed out, she stood in a corner, adjusting her slip, hiking up her dress. She turned and smiled at Evaline.

“In order to have that beauty I saw in her, I had to have her,” Evaline would tell a friend years later. “So I left Eliot to be with her.”

***

The Allies were slowly making up ground in Europe and the Pacific, but for Eliot, the good news in the papers didn’t penetrate. He had begun to slip into depression again.
A friend from Cleveland, in Washington on business, was shocked at the former safety director’s appearance. The discipline of Eliot’s face—so stark and intense early in his career—had broken down. He looked old and bloated and worn out.

He was hardly alone. Heavy drinking had become epidemic in the District of Columbia. The Allies may have gained some momentum, but it was still a cataclysmic world war, with no end in sight. After the disaster of Prohibition and the economic catastrophe that swallowed the 1930s, you couldn’t help but see a world falling apart forever. Millions of people had been hollowed out by the Depression; many would never emotionally recover from it. The world war, the second in twenty years, would exact an even greater toll. Eliot followed the crowd to the bar every evening to try to forget it all. He began to black out, and wake up at the office the next morning in a rumpled suit.

Careening headlong into middle age, professionally adrift, he needed his wife as never before—but it was too late.
Evaline got up one morning when Eliot was out of town and slipped on trousers and her favorite blouse. She put her champagne bucket and mink coat in their Cadillac, left everything else, and pointed the car north. Her new lover had decided to move to New England, and Evaline decided to follow her. The odd items she chose to take with her suggest she was not acting entirely rationally, but, out on the open road, she felt a weight lift off of her. She didn’t tell Eliot she was leaving. It would be days before he realized she wasn’t coming back.

In October 1945, nearly a year after Evaline had taken her bucket and left, Eliot quietly returned to Cleveland and filed for divorce, citing “gross neglect and extreme cruelty.” The legal proceedings must have mortified him. In court documents, he said he was seeking a divorce because his wife “refused to live with her husband here because she wanted to study art in Maine under the tutelage of a Cleveland artist.”
Worse, he was forced to
testify that he’d been cuckolded, that there was “another person” in Evaline’s life. Eliot left town straight from the courthouse.

Reporters rushed to the county clerk’s office when word of the divorce petition reached the city’s newsrooms. Three years after he had left the safety director’s office and Cleveland, Eliot Ness continued to be newsworthy—especially if it involved scandal. The hacks verified that the $11 fee had been paid, but they found no paperwork for the divorce. Eliot still had friends in the county bureaucracy. An almighty roar went up, the outraged cry of a frustrated reportorial herd on deadline. The reporters cornered County Clerk Leonard Fuerst and demanded to know where the petition was. “As far as we’re concerned, it was filed properly and indexed,” he said.

“Where is it, then?” a reporter demanded.

“Isn’t it in the files?” he responded defensively—or evasively. “Nothing is ever hidden from anybody.”

In their next editions, the newspapers tried to raise a stink about the “concealment” of court papers. “
The mystery of Eliot Ness’s missing divorce petition apparently will remain a mystery at Lakeside Avenue Courthouse,” the
Plain Dealer
grumbled. “No official wants to ask questions or hunt for it.”

This left a very public information void. No one had any idea what had gone wrong with the city’s one-time golden couple. Their Cleveland friends had thought they were happy together.
They recalled that Eliot always called Evaline “Doll” and gazed lovingly at her, and that Evaline’s barking laugh resounded with every quip he offered up. She’d sketched sweet domestic portraits of her husband that showed him lounging around their home, attractively lost in thought. Even Sagalyn, witness to the marriage in Washington, believed they had “a good and close relationship.” He thought they were the perfect couple. “It was a mystery to me why they broke up,” he said.

Of course, there had been hints for those paying close attention. Eliot’s friend
Marjorie Mutersbaugh remembered Evaline as “a kind woman, gregarious and fun. She loved Eliot for who he was, but it always seemed more like they were best friends or buddies than husband and wife.”
And then there was the leggy blond woman at Evaline’s side for several months in 1940 and ’41. Evaline introduced the blond as her bodyguard, though she never said why she needed a private protector—especially when Eliot had the whole police department at his command. The woman claimed to be
married—to a dwarf who lived in Florida. No one knew whether she was joking.
One night, Eliot invited “a seven-foot-tall woman” to one of their Monday night parties at the boathouse, a silly (or petulant) jab at his wife’s close companion.

But lesbianism was too far “out there” for it to cross anyone’s mind as a possibility. Homosexuality was a taboo subject. It didn’t exist in polite society. And besides, there was a better explanation for the marriage’s demise. Rumors of Eliot’s womanizing had first come up in Cleveland when he and Edna separated and he began going over to the big hotels after work to drink and dance. Now, even though he’d left public office in the city, the local press felt duty-bound to write about his partying ways. “
His social habits, which included living in a Lakewood boathouse and entertaining in a most sophisticated manner, had tongues wagging most of the time,” wrote the
Plain Dealer
’s Bud Silverman. The
News
reported that he’d had an unusually close relationship with one of his secretaries at city hall.

His friends would defend him against such rumors for years—even long after his death.
In 1973, Neil McGill, at ninety, reacted in outrage to a proposed article about Eliot that claimed “drink and women were his downfall.” In a private letter to
Cleveland Press
editor Thomas L. Boardman, he wrote that he had worked closely with Eliot for years and wished “to assert without equivocation, mental reservation or any doubt in my mind that nothing could be further from the truth.” He added: “I can say from personal knowledge and observation that Eliot Ness was not a heavy drinker or a moderate drinker. The fact is that Ness was a light drinker. With regard to women I never had any information or indication that Ness had an interest in women excepting his own wife. It is unfortunate that so many years after his death anyone would undertake to assassinate the fine character of Eliot Ness even for profit.” More than three decades after that rousing defense, Arnold Sagalyn, at ninety-four, insisted Eliot didn’t have the time—and was too well known—to mess around with women while he was safety director. “
Where could he go with a woman?” he said. “Everyone recognized him. And I always knew where he was.”

That line of reasoning might have held up during Eliot’s tenure in Cleveland, but of course the war years were a different matter. As the Social Protection director he traveled to dozens of cities and towns, usually without Evaline.
He would later boast that he was “attached to the Canadian army in 1944 and visited every province in Canada.” He had the opportunity to stray like he never had before, meeting anxious war brides and bored
waitresses across the land.
His friend Marion Kelly recalled that “Eliot had a tremendous line”—and there had never been a better time for a tremendous line. Illicit romance had suddenly become socially acceptable. People didn’t come right out and say that, but everyone understood. It was the price of winning the war. “
The entire female population was for an odd slip of time effectively single,” pointed out the journalist Betsy Israel. “No one knew if their fiancés, boyfriends, lovers would ever return.”

Eliot believed his own official warnings about the risks of promiscuity, but he was hardly a prude. He read the work of the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, coiner of the phrase “sexual revolution,” in an effort to understand the arguments against complete suppression of prostitution. Reich, who studied under Sigmund Freud, believed that eye-popping orgasms were the best path to physical and emotional wellbeing. He also believed prostitution should be legal—indeed, that it should be encouraged, socially legitimized. Healthy, thoughtful sex should take the place of shameful sex or no sex. “
Reich shared the moralist’s distaste for the kind of sexuality that flourished in brothels,” wrote the critic and essayist Kenneth Tynan. “He distinguished between primary drives, which were natural and wholly benevolent, and unnatural or secondary drives, which came into being when primary drives were frustrated.” Reich believed that urges like sadism or masochism “were not biologically innate in man, as Freud was tending to believe; instead they were caused by the repression of basic desires that were inherently life-enhancing.”
*

For Eliot, as with so many other people, alcohol piqued those inherently life-enhancing desires. And he was drinking more and more during the war years.
A snapshot from this period finds Eliot in a dark bar, gazing into the mists, eyelids closing like sodden umbrellas. Leaning toward him but looking warily at the camera is a woman who is not his wife. She sports a smart hat and an authoritative half profile. Her hand is extended on the table, reaching for Eliot’s hand—or maybe she’s reaching for her drink. Eliot would realize that he looked a bit out of it in the photo. He scribbled on it, “The flash light got me!! It was 10:30 a.m. and the first drink—and that’s my story.”

Starting Over

W
hen the war began to wind down, Eliot decided to return to Cleveland. He was starting over and determined to set aside his law-enforcement career and remake himself into a businessman. His wartime work had been low profile but successful. He had closed down more than seven hundred red-light districts and sent hundreds of prostitutes to training camps to learn vocational skills. When he took over the Social Protection Division, prostitutes were responsible for 75 percent of soldiers’ venereal-disease infections. Two years later, that infection rate had dropped to 20 percent, leading the director of Community War Services, Mark A. McCloskey, to tell him: “You had one of wartime’s tough jobs. You have done it well.” But Eliot knew all along it was a wartime job only, not a career. And by this point he wanted to make some real money, build up a nest egg for his old age. So when an opportunity arose at the Diebold Company—he’d been acquainted with the controlling Rex family for years—he jumped at it. He would be chairman of the board of the Canton, Ohio–based safe maker. Never one to do anything halfway, he also picked up a job on the side, becoming vice president of the Middle East Company, a new, small-time import-export business based in Cleveland. He submitted his resignation to McCloskey two months after D-Day.

Eliot’s old crowd in Cleveland wasn’t surprised when he returned to town with an impressive new career in the private sector. Everyone had figured he’d end up in an executive suite sooner or later. They were surprised, however, that he brought with him an impressive new wife. As the newspapers made all too clear, this third marriage for Eliot came soon after his second divorce—very soon. Eliot was granted a divorce from Evaline on November 17, 1945. Two months later, he married Elisabeth Andersen Seaver. Neither Betty nor Eliot ever revealed when exactly their relationship started, but it undoubtedly became serious sometime during the latter stages of the war, when they were both living in Washington. (Betty’s husband, Hugh, had a wartime job in the capital, while she made camouflage
at a factory thirty miles away in Baltimore.) The marriage may have surprised their friends but it had been a long time coming. After catching sight of him from her perch above the grounds of the Great Lakes Exposition in 1936, the young sculptor had decided she wanted to meet Cleveland’s dashing safety director, and so a few weeks later she staged an introduction—without their respective spouses in attendance—through New Deal bureaucrat Dan Moore and his artist wife. Eliot turned out to be even more interesting than she expected.
She found herself drawn to his “delightful, off-beat sense of humor.” He wasn’t anything like his reputation as an intense, steely-eyed crime-buster. “He laughed easily and a lot,” she recalled of that first meeting. He didn’t talk much about his “old adventures” in Chicago, but when they did come up, Betty said, “his stories were very funny, and usually on himself.” She would admit years later that she fell for him immediately.

By the time they married, nearly a decade later, Eliot wasn’t dashing anymore—age and booze had softened his face into a lumpy pillow—but he was sweet and kind, and that was exactly what she needed.
Marjorie Mutersbaugh called them “so congenial.” Years later Betty told her she had never been so happy in her life as when she was married to Eliot.

Hugh and Betty’s divorce became final on January 10, 1946, two weeks before she and Eliot married. Upon returning to Cleveland, however, Betty told friends there had been no romance between her and Eliot until both of their marriages had officially ended. Being seen as a respectable woman meant a lot to her. Betty had left Hugh in August 1943, but she couldn’t bring herself to file for divorce. She feared her parents’ opinion of her. Hugh eventually filed himself, citing abandonment, “gross neglect of duty, and extreme cruelty.” (He filed the petition on November 15, 1945, two days before Eliot and Evaline’s divorce was granted.) There were whispers that Hugh, known for his temper, had banged Betty around some, but they were only rumors. Something someone heard from somebody. Such a harsh charge never could be traced back to Betty. Members of Cleveland’s art and social scene circulated the story because, well, there had to be a reason. People didn’t get divorced simply because they had drifted apart or squabbled a lot.

It wasn’t just Betty’s respectability that appealed to Eliot. At thirty-nine years old, she was beautiful in the kind of natural, unadulterated way Evaline never could be. She had been a beautiful child, with a perfect round face and large, heartbreaking eyes, and she never grew out of it. Even more
remarkable was how little her striking good looks seemed to mean to her. She had a boyish, practical stride, artless compared to Evaline’s, but seductive, too, the willful amateurishness of it. She pulled her hair back into a bun even for formal occasions. Betty, not Evaline, was born to be a model, but doing such a thing never crossed her mind when she was growing up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She fished. She hunted with her daddy. She wore overalls around the house and didn’t mind getting plaster in her hair and clothes when she worked in the high school’s art studio.

This ingrained lack of affect faced a challenge once she moved to the big city to attend the Cleveland School of Art. Her tiny frame and pixie smile caught the Jazz Age zeitgeist, and she soon came across people who nudged—or shoved—her in a new direction. Not long after Betty landed in Cleveland, the city’s foremost art photographer, Clifford Norton, convinced her to pose. The eighteen-year-old immediately became his favorite subject. Teachers and students at the school asked her to pose for them, too, and she always obliged. She had been taught never to be rude.

All of this attention inevitably led to an evolution in her look. She chopped her unruly long hair into a pageboy. She squeezed into form-fitting dresses provided by her photographer patron. Men did double takes in the street. The more ambitious mugs reversed course midstride and chased her down.

That she had transformed herself wouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone who knew her back in South Dakota. She had always loved to create, to make something new and alive out of whatever she had at hand—blank pieces of paper or lumps of clay or herself. Her father, somewhat befuddled by his daughter’s talent, agreed to send his little Betty Lee away to school because he didn’t know what else to do with her. She had too much ambition to marry a farmer and settle down in Sioux Falls.
In 1924, he prevailed upon J. A. Derome, an esteemed local clergyman and newspaper editor, to write a letter of recommendation for Betty to the Cleveland School of Art. Derome wrote, “Miss Andersen is peculiarly gifted along the lines of art, especially in sculpture. I have no doubt she has before her a brilliant future as an artist.”

The Reverend Derome’s words would soon appear prophetic. Betty was an excellent student in Cleveland, and she made a splash right out of art school. She won first-place awards time and again at the May Show.
Her winning piece for the 1932 show sold for a jaw-dropping $1,500. Later that year, New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company hired her to produce a
statuette of its premiere danseuse, Rita De Leporte. Four years later, she landed the sculpture commission for the Great Lakes Exposition. By then she was one half of a celebrated artistic couple, having married Hugh Seaver, a well-known watercolorist. But in the teeth of the Great Depression, success proved difficult to maintain. Despite continued raves for their work, commissions dried up for the Seavers; their paintings and sculptures sold at galleries for less and less—and then not at all. Betty followed her husband to Minneapolis, then to Michigan (where she studied under the great sculptor Carl Milles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art). The wanderlust was for naught: Hugh couldn’t find a secure teaching position anywhere, nor could Betty get her career momentum back. Finally, the couple returned to Cleveland, where their struggles continued. Childless, with their careers floundering, the marriage started to fall apart.

The couple ended up on the city’s relief rolls, until Betty landed a job with the Works Progress Administration’s ceramics project, headed by the artist Edris Eckhardt, with whom she’d once worked at the now-defunct Cowan Pottery.
Betty considered herself lucky to be earning $109 a month making art for public schools and government buildings, but the WPA proved to be a contentious place to work. Extreme dysfunction and internecine battles—Eckhardt faced near-constant threats of sit-down strikes from her artists—soured Betty on continuing her career. By the time war broke out and she and Hugh moved to Washington, she wanted nothing more than to be a wife and a mother.

Now, with a new husband and both the Depression and the war in the past, Betty would get her wish. In January 1947, a year after she and Eliot married, the couple adopted a baby boy. They named him Robert. Eliot had wanted to be a father for years, and now finally he felt like he had the time for it. Just days after he and Betty brought Robert home, Eliot received a jolt from his morning paper. His long-ago nemesis, Al Capone, had died of a heart attack at his estate in Florida. The former gangster, released from prison in 1939 and suffering from advanced syphilis, was forty-eight years old.