For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (57 page)

“You are taking an equal share of responsibility?”

“Very definitely….”

“I understand there were articles used in this crime purchased by you and stored in your house?”

“My share was equal,” Nathan replied cautiously. Bookwalter’s manner was skeptical. Was Nathan to be denied parole a second time?
⁶¹

If the board did grant him parole, Bookwalter added, suddenly changing the subject, did Nathan realize that he was to avoid television and radio appearances? Did he understand that he was not to give out statements to the newspapers? Every media outlet in the country would want an interview with him. Already there was a rumor that Ed Murrow, the CBS correspondent, wanted Nathan to appear on his television show
See It Now
. “I don’t want,” Nathan replied hastily, “any part of lecturing, television or radio, or trading on the notoriety. That is the last thing…. All I want, if I am so lucky as to ever see freedom again, is to try to become a humble little person.”
⁶²

On 20 February 1958 the news reached Stateville that the board had agreed to parole Nathan Leopold. Three weeks later, on 13 March, on a clear crisp winter morning, Nathan emerged from the prison to confront an immense scrum of newspaper reporters, television cameramen, and photographers. He had left his prison uniform behind; he now wore an ill-fitting blue suit that seemed slightly too large for his diminutive frame. He blinked nervously at the crowd as the reporters shouted questions at him, and suddenly the mob pressed forward, ready to record his first words back in the free world.
⁶³

“I appeal as solemnly as I know how,” Nathan said in a tremulous voice, speaking into a microphone, “to you and to your editors…to agree that the only piece of news about me is that I have ceased to be news. I beg, I beseech you and your editors and publishers to grant me a gift almost as precious as freedom itself—a gift without which freedom ceases to have much value—the gift of privacy. Give me a chance—a fair chance—to start life anew.”
⁶⁴

It was a futile appeal. The crowd pushed forward again. Elmer Gertz gently pulled Nathan away from the microphone and nudged him in the direction of a waiting limousine, its engine running, the driver ready to make a quick exit. The reporters also, suddenly realizing that Nathan was about to leave, began to scramble, pushing and shoving each other as they ran toward their cars, desperate not to be left behind, desperate not to miss the scoop that each imagined was within his grasp.

Back to Chicago! The caravan of automobiles roared away with Leopold’s car in front. They raced pell-mell along the Chicago road at ninety miles an hour, horns blaring, until they reached Oak Park, west of the city. Ralph Newman, one of Nathan’s closest friends, had offered his home as a temporary refuge. But, already, as Nathan watched from a downstairs window, he could see dozens of reporters running from their cars toward the house as though to set up a siege. At two o’clock that afternoon the police arrived to escort Nathan to Chicago, where he planned to stay at an apartment on Lake Shore Drive with his college friend Abel Brown.
⁶⁵

It had become impossible for Nathan to stay even a few days in Chicago. He had hoped to visit the graves of his parents. But the journalists had discovered his hiding place and were camped outside, waiting for him to leave the apartment building. They obviously had no intention of respecting his plea for privacy. There was no alternative: he would leave Chicago for Puerto Rico as soon as possible. Only when he had left the United States would he find peace. The next day Nathan boarded a plane at O’Hare Airport for New York for a connecting flight to San Juan. Finally he was a free man.
⁶⁶

T
HE TRANQUILLITY OF
C
ASTANER
was a welcome change from the bustle of Chicago. High in the mountains, at an altitude of 4,000 feet, with a temperate climate, and surrounded by banana and coffee plantations, the village was an oasis of quiet. Nathan Leopold spent his days peacefully, working as a medical assistant at the village hospital, enrolling as a graduate student in social work at the University of Puerto Rico, and finding friends among the small community of North Americans on the island.
⁶⁷

It might have been idyllic—except for one nagging irritation. Meyer Levin, a contemporary of Leopold and Loeb at the University of Chicago, had written a novel,
Compulsion
, based on the murder. Levin’s writing style was overwrought, exaggerated, and fanciful, and his description of the character based on Nathan Leopold was far from flattering. Now Nathan learned that Twentieth Century Fox was to make a movie of the novel starring Orson Welles. It was yet one more invasion of his privacy, Nathan decided, and in October 1959 he instructed Elmer Gertz to file suit against Levin and the film production company, Darryl F. Zanuck Productions, for the “appropriation of the name, likeness, and personality of Leopold and conversion of same for their profit and gain.”
⁶⁸

To most observers, Leopold’s lawsuit seemed risible. One of the most notorious murderers in American history, the brutal killer of a fourteen-year-old boy, was now complaining that a fictionalized account of the crime was an appropriation of his name! Leopold had filed suit for $1.4 million; if he were to collect in the courts, would he not, in fact, profit from his crime? Meyer Levin, who had publicly supported Leopold’s parole the previous year, was indignant that his generosity had been rewarded with such base ingratitude. “Leopold was now a victim, a man who had suffered thirty years of imprisonment as if in a death camp,” Levin sputtered angrily in an autobiographical account. “He was a kind of culture hero…. There had been an astute image-creation campaign, picturing him as a master of fourteen languages, a savant, and now a hospital volunteer in a remote monastery, a kind of Dr. Schweitzer!…In his lawsuit Nathan Leopold was daring the highest feat of all—he would at last collect the kidnap-murder ransom, and many times over! It would be handed to him by a court! What a justification for himself, and his dead friend Dickie Loeb! He and Dickie had done the killing, they were the authors of the action, a sort of natural copyright was claimed, all accounts of the crime must pay royalties to them—or at least to Leopold for his half!”
⁶⁹

Levin was right to be indignant. The case wound its way endlessly through the courts, eventually reaching the Illinois supreme court in 1970; there, it was finally dismissed. Levin spent tens of thousands of dollars in his defense. In the decade of legal wrangling over the case, no publisher would reissue
Compulsion
after its initial print run for fear of incurring potential damages if the courts did decide in favor of Leopold.
⁷⁰

29.
THE HAPPY COUPLE.
This photograph, taken on 26 June 1964, shows Nathan Leopold and his wife, Trudi Feldman, at a press conference in Chicago. Leopold was in Chicago to attend the World Conference of the Church of the Brethren.

While his lawsuit kept the attorneys busy in Chicago, Nathan continued to live peacefully in Puerto Rico. Not long after his arrival in the island, he had met a fifty-three-year-old woman from Baltimore, Trudi Feldman, the widow of a physician; and in October 1961, after obtaining the permission of his parole board, they exchanged vows at a wedding ceremony in Castaner. They lived comfortably—Nathan had inherited $50,000 on his father’s death in 1929, and it had been accumulating interest throughout his imprisonment. Trudi, for her part, had an independent income as the owner of a flower shop in San Juan.
⁷¹

In 1963 Nathan won his release from parole. Finally he could drink alcohol, drive an automobile, and stay out at night; best of all, he could now travel outside Puerto Rico. Neither Trudi nor Nathan had seen much of the world, and during the 1960s they made up for lost time, traveling throughout Europe, South America, Asia, and the Middle East. Nathan returned to Chicago often, to see old friends, to tour the South Side neighborhood near the university, and to place flowers on the graves of his mother and father and two brothers.
⁷²

It had been so long ago—that summer of 1924, in the stuffy courtroom on the sixth floor of the Cook County Criminal Court—and now he was the sole survivor. William Alanson White had died in 1937, honored as the leader of the American psychiatric profession. Clarence Darrow had died in 1938, exalted as the greatest lawyer of his generation. John Caverly had suffered a fatal stroke while on vacation in Bermuda in 1939. Benjamin Bachrach and his younger brother, Walter, had died within a few months of each other, in December 1950 and March 1951, respectively. Robert Crowe had lived until 1958, spending his final years in a retirement home. Richard Loeb, of course, had expired on the operating table in the Stateville prison.

He had atoned for his crime, Nathan believed. In any case, the murder had passed into legend. It had become a catchphrase—the Leopold and Loeb case—and in the absence of any authoritative account of the murder, newspaper writers had been free to embellish it as they pleased. They recounted the story in detail one more time, on 29 August 1971, when Nathan Leopold died of a heart attack. His body was donated to the University of Puerto Rico for medical research. There was no funeral service.
⁷³

LEOPOLD AND LOEB IN FICTION

In April 1927, F. Scott Fitzgerald sat down with a reporter for the New York
World
over drinks at the Plaza Hotel in New York to reveal that he had been writing a novel based on the Leopold-Loeb case. His new book, Fitzgerald confided, would be darker and more pessimistic than his previous accounts of American youth—it would reflect his conviction that American culture and society were set inexorably on a path to self-immolation and destruction. What episode in the Jazz Age could better express Fitzgerald’s pessimism and despair than the random murder of a fourteen-year-old child by two wealthy hedonistic teenage lovers?
¹

Fitzgerald never did write his novel, but in 1929, the first fictional account of the murder appeared—not in the United States, but on the London stage. The success of the play
Rope
abruptly lifted its author, Patrick Hamilton, from abject poverty to financial independence. “How can I begin to describe to you the
uncanniness
of my success?” Hamilton wrote to his brother. “For it is not only the money—it is fame…. And all through
Rope
. It is all too funny.” In his play Hamilton moved the action from Chicago to a Mayfair apartment in London. His two killers, Wyndham Brandon and Charles Granillo, collaborate in the murder of a close friend by each pulling on one end of a rope. They then stuff the corpse into a large chest. They invite other acquaintances, including the father of the victim, to a dinner party with the buffet laid out on the top of the chest. One guest, Rupert Cadell, shares the Nietzschean philosophy of the two murderers but, on opening the chest and discovering the corpse, denounces the murder and calls the police. The first stage production of
Rope
was at the Strand Theatre in March 1929. Critics alternately praised and condemned the play for its macabre and violent theme, but it continued to earn Hamilton substantial royalties until his death in 1974.
²

In 1948 Alfred Hitchcock produced the screen adaptation of Hamilton’s play. Hitchcock had conceived of
Rope
as an inexpensive movie—the action occurs in a single room, and there are fewer than a dozen characters—but his decision to film it in a series of long takes cost him more time and money than he had anticipated.
Rope
begins with the murder as a sexual act. The two killers, Brandon Shaw and Philip Morgan, then hide the corpse in a chest and host a dinner party in their New York apartment. Some critics regarded the film as one of Hitchcock’s least successful, overburdened with suggestive theories and clumsily concluded with a monologue by Rupert Cadell (played by James Stewart). Others have praised its complex portrayal of Brandon as both aggressively self-assured and painfully vulnerable; Brandon has an overwhelming lust for power and control and yet is desperately fearful of his own impotence. The film did poorly at the box office. The production company, Warner Bros., belatedly realized that a homosexual relationship framed the murder and its aftermath; the Anti-Defamation League protested against the movie’s depiction of two Jews as homosexual murderers; and the National Review Board decreed that only mature audiences could see the film.
Rope
was a commercial success in New York but flopped everywhere else.
³

In 1953, Nathan Leopold’s initial request for parole reawakened public interest in the murder and ignited a national debate about crime and punishment and the wisdom of releasing prisoners convicted of heinous crimes. The furor over Leopold’s parole application prompted three novelists to write fictional accounts. The playwright James Yaffe set his novel
Nothing but the Night
in New York City. Mary-Carter Roberts, the book editor of the Washington
Evening Star
, intertwined two other stories around her version of the murder in
Little Brother Fate
. Meyer Levin, in
Compulsion
, claimed historical accuracy in his interpretation of the killing. All three novels appeared within a few months of one another.
⁴

Compulsion
is best remembered today not because of its literary merits but because it was adapted as a movie, starring Orson Welles as Clarence Darrow and E. G. Marshall as Robert Crowe. Welles stipulated in his contract that he was to spend just ten days filming his role. Yet he turned in a remarkable performance as the defense attorney. Welles is a charismatic presence throughout the film and his dramatic closing speech is one of the best performances of his career.
⁵

Fictional accounts of the murder continue to appear. The movie
Swoon
, an avant-garde production that depicts the relationship between Leopold and Loeb in explicitly sexual terms, appeared in 1992. Shot in black-and-white,
Swoon
alternates between, on the one hand, precisely realistic scenes that convey a sense of documentary verisimilitude and, on the other, scenes that are bizarrely anachronistic. Another film,
Murder by Numbers
, directed by Barbet Schroeder, appeared in 2002 and takes San Benito, California, as its mise-en-scène. Its resemblance to the actual murder is comparatively slight. Two teenagers, Richard Haywood and Justin Pendleton, plot the perfect crime. Their random murder of a woman is less significant than the developing relationship between the two killers. A second relationship, between a homicide detective and her junior partner in the police department, shadows the first. Both relationships are pathological and assume a degree of control by one person over the other.

The screenwriter John Logan wrote
Never the Sinner
, a play based on the case, after reading
Compulsion
in high school. As an undergraduate at Northwestern, Logan read the courtroom transcripts in the archives at the university and wrote the first version of his play in a drama class.
Never the Sinner
premiered in 1985 in Chicago, and after its production in New York, it won the Outer Critics Circle Award.
⁶

Most improbably, the murder has inspired a musical drama,
Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story
. A production of the York Theatre Company,
Thrill Me
premiered in 2003 at the Fourth Annual Midtown International Theatre Festival in New York City. The composer, Stephen Dolginoff, used Leopold’s 1958 parole hearing to frame the events of 1924 and the pathological relationship between Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.