Burning boy, p.55
Burning Boy, page 55
When asked about his opium joint, Crane laughed. “I have an opium lay-out in my room,” he said, “but it is tacked to a plaque hung on the wall.
“I consider it my duty,” he said, “having witnessed an outrage such as Becker’s arrest of this girl, to do my utmost to have him punished. The fact that I was in her company, and had just left what the detective called a resort for thieves, prostitutes, and crooks, does not bear on the matter in the least. I had a perfect right to be there, or any other public resort anywhere else in the city where I choose to go.”
As it happened, he did leave town not long after giving his answers to the Journal reporter, perhaps that same day, perhaps the next, hoping to avoid further interactions with the New York press by traveling to Philadelphia and camping out at Fred Lawrence’s place for a brief, unspecified length of time. During that visit, he sent a telegram to Roosevelt informing him that he fully intended to appear in court, which was confirmed by Roosevelt’s comment to Garland that Crane “insisted on testifying,” but Lawrence, who knew Crane well and had been one of his closest friends for the past five years, was justifiably worried. “If Crane had been wisely counseled,” he wrote, “he would have seen the folly of such an attempt against the system.… He would have realized … that the whole force of the police power would be turned against him. But no, he explained; young Theodore Roosevelt had just been made Police Commissioner of New York, and he would see that he had a square deal.” So the wire was dispatched to Roosevelt from a telegraph office in downtown Philadelphia, and immediately after that, as Lawrence puts it, “Mr. Galahad caught the next train.”
The trial that began on the night of October fifteenth and lasted well into the morning of the sixteenth took place in a special court whose sole purpose was to rule on matters of alleged police misconduct. Clark was the plaintiff in the case, Conway and Becker were the defendants, and Crane’s role was no more than that of a witness who had agreed to testify on the plaintiff’s behalf. Neither Clark nor Crane was on trial, but due to the aggressive, hammer-and-tongs lawyering of Becker’s counsel, Louis D. Grant, and the lax control exercised by the police-commissioner judge, whose name was also Grant—Frederick D., son of the late president and Civil War general—the questions were allowed to stray into territory far outside the purview of the court, and before long the accusers had been turned into the accused. Clark’s charity-sponsored lawyer raised numerous objections to his opponent’s line of inquiry, but in nearly every instance he was overruled by judge Grant, which enabled lawyer Grant to forge on with his attacks against the credibility of the plaintiff and her key witness. In a courtroom jammed with Becker’s fellow cops and commanding officers—man after man in full-dress department blue—the trial unfolded as if it were a lopsided sporting event in which one team owns the ball, the field, and the loyalty of every spectator in the crowd.
Not knowing that the police had raided his apartment while he was out of town—nor that they had been conducting an undercover operation to probe into every hidden corner of his private life—Crane turned up at police headquarters a little in advance of the appointed time of three in the afternoon. The docket was full that day, however, and hours passed before the Conway-Becker case was called before the judge. For the first hour, as the Journal reported, Crane “leaned against a window in the corridor smoking a cigar, apparently oblivious of the scowls of the policemen who were awaiting trial for various offences.… At 4 o’clock Mr. Crane was told that he would probably be called to the stand at 5:30; at 5:30 Clerk Kip thought the case would come up at 7; at 7 o’clock there was a prospect that it might be reached in another hour, and the young novelist who had a dinner engagement at 8 sent a telegram and dined on a ham sandwich and a glass of beer in a Mulberry Street saloon.” The case finally began at nine, but with a horde of witnesses scheduled to testify before him, Crane went on walking up and down the corridor, smoking cigarette after cigarette until 1:55 in the morning as “the women with artificial manners and complexions sneered at him” and “the hack drivers winked at each other and pointed.” As the last of the witnesses, he was barred from entering the courtroom for the first five hours of the trial, and therefore he knew nothing about the nature of the defense lawyer Grant had prepared.*
Conway came first, and the matter was quickly resolved when he and Rosenberg falsely claimed that Clark had been soliciting three men at the time of her arrest. To back their testimony, according to the Journal, “another woman of the streets who had come to headquarters to testify in Dora Clark’s favor, but who had some conversation with officers of the Nineteenth Precinct before the case was called, swore in corroboration of the evidence of Conway and Rosenberg when she was put on the stand.”
The Becker case started at ten. After the two sides presented their competing versions of the facts, an army of Tenderloin characters marched to the stand to support the police version in order to save their skins or their livelihoods or, depending on their line of work, both. One of them, “a legendary prostitute of the nineties,” Big Chicago May, “was famous for her method of biting the stones out of men’s scarf-pins while she amorously pretended to bury her face against their chests.” The article in the Journal on October seventeenth underscored the extent to which those witnesses lied:
All the women with diamonds and all the hackmen were absolutely certain that Dora Clark left the Broadway Garden alone. They positively swore so. One woman, known in the Tenderloin as “Big Chicago May,” went further. She is a huge blonde, whose diamond earrings are as big as hickory nuts. Miss “Big Chicago May” is as familiar on Sixth Avenue and on Twenty-third street after dark as is the Masonic Temple. Calmly she swore that Dora Clark offered her $25 if she would swear falsely against Becker.
“Dora Clark went to other women,” swore Miss “Big Chicago May.” “She said, ‘We must protect ourselves. Becker is persecuting us. We must break him. Then I’m going to Europe.’”
“What’s your occupation?” Mr. Newburger [sic] asked this woman, whose blushes are not visible.
“I’m a typewriter,” she retorted.
“On what machine do you typewrite?”
She did not know.
“Name one typewriting machine.”
She could not.
“Did you earn those diamonds with your wages as a typewriter?”
Lawyer Grant’s interrogation of Clark was relentless. Described in the same Journal article as “good looking” and with “good manners,” she had prepared herself for her appearance in court by putting on a black dress “trimmed with purple velvet” and “a large black hat adorned with black feathers.” Both “veiled and gloved,” she wore no jewelry except for “a diamond star at her throat.” An impressive figure of just twenty-one who seemed to be “above the level of her class,” and yet, to lawyer Grant and the assembled policemen, she was nothing but a shabby, run-of-the-mill Manhattan whore. When Grant asked her where she lived, she refused to divulge the address, telling him that she would be run out of the place if she did, just as she had been run out of all the other places where she had lived since the police began their persecution campaign against her. Grant pressed on, however, and eventually extracted the information from her. Even more damning (and no doubt based on diligent detective work), he bullied her into admitting that she was a “kept woman” and “had received money lately from a wealthy man who lives at the Waldorf” (the World, October 16). Which raises a question: If she was supported by someone with the financial resources to live in the city’s finest hotel, why would she bother to solicit unknown men in the streets of the Tenderloin? Lawyer Grant, of course, failed to ask that question.
When Crane’s turn finally came at two in the morning, he had been waiting outside the courtroom for eleven hours. The instant Neuberger opened the door to announce that they were ready for him, a man who had been watching Crane all through those eleven hours slipped into the courtroom, whispered something into lawyer Grant’s ear, and a moment later Grant jumped up and shouted: “This is an outrage, unjust to all concerned. This witness, Crane, has heard everything that has been said in this room, has been waiting outside within earshot.”
Again, not true, but one more example of Grant’s pugnacious strategy to stay on the attack and do everything in his power to discredit the ones who were about to discredit his client. If nothing else, his outburst should have warned Crane about what he would be up against when he took the stand. The atmosphere was already hostile enough, and in a courtroom packed with “policemen, policemen, policemen” a well as “women with yellow hair and white diamonds” and a contingent of Tenderloin hack drivers (all of them pro-police), it must have been fairly intimidating. On top of that, Crane was exhausted and emotionally spent, so exhausted and so spent that the Journal ’s description of his appearance that night is perhaps the most unflattering portrait of him on record:
a thin, pale, young man, with straight hair plastered down on a curiously shaped head, with a poorly nourished mustache, a large nose, prominent teeth; a young man who does not look brainy, but who has proved he has brains.
In all fairness, he made a weak showing of himself that night. He handled the questions from Neuberger with “self-control … cold as ice,” repeating the story he had already given numerous times in the past month about the events of the night in question, but when lawyer Grant’s turn came and the grilling began, Crane froze into the defensive posture of a man under assault as he struggled to ward off the blows that kept coming at him. Grant’s objective was to prove that Crane was a liar, but in order to achieve his goal he first had to prove that Crane was a worthless human being, beginning with the accusation that he was an opium smoker and had been under the influence on the night in question (“dopey,” as several earlier witnesses had testified, and therefore unable to remember what had happened), which advanced to the further accusation that he owned and operated an opium den, and then shifted to the accusation (as the World reported in its account of the trial) that he earned his living as a pimp:
Lawyer Grant wanted to know if it was not a fact that Mr. Crane lived by money given to him by women of the Tenderloin.
Mr. Crane denied that such was the case, but said that he made money by writing for newspapers and magazines.
So thick and fast did Lawyer Grant fire the red-hot questions at the witness that he finally put his hands up to his face as if to prevent them from burning into his brain.
Another exchange reported by the Journal shows how Grant’s barrage of random, scattershot questions kept Crane continually off-balance and forced him to refuse to answer many of them.
Mr. Grant questioned this young unmarried man … as to where he lived in New York. The cross-examination proceeded like this:
Mr. Crane (freezingly)—Yes, I lived in a flat house on West Twenty-second Street.
Mr. Grant (sneeringly)—With what woman did you live there?
Mr. Neuberger—As your adviser, Mr. Crane, I tell you not to answer that question. It has absolutely nothing to do with the case in hand here.
Mr. Crane (wearily)—I refuse to answer.
Mr. Grant (triumphantly)—On what ground?
Mr. Crane—Because it would tend to degrade me.
Mr. Grant—Perhaps you think to answer this will tend to disgrace you. With whom did you live at such and such a place?
So it went …
According to the World,
Lawyer Grant then took another tack. He asked the witness whether he knew a woman named Sadie or Amy Huntington. It was presumed that Lawyer Grant had reference to Sadie Traphagen, who was the friend of Annie Goodwin, the cigarette girl, who was a victim of Dr. McConigal. It will be remembered, as the Goodwin case was widely published at the time, that the girl was the victim of malpractice.*
Whether Amy Huntington was really Sadie Traphagen was not developed.
“Did you ever smoke opium with this Sadie or Amy in a house at 121 West Twenty-seventh street?” asked Lawyer Grant.
“I deny that,” said Mr. Crane.
“On the ground it would tend to degrade or incriminate you?”
“Well—yes,” hesitatingly.
The report in the Sun provides some added details: “In the summer he visited a certain house in West Twenty-seventh Street. He refused to say how many times he had visited the house, and also refused to say whether or not he was acquainted with Sadie or Amy Huntington.”
West Twenty-seventh was a street long known for its houses of prostitution and the hookers who lined its sidewalks after dark, but what possible connection could that have to the rest of the case? Although Grant’s question seemed to be just another random assault at the time, it turned out to be a crucial element in his effort to destroy Crane’s credibility, but that would become clear only when a surprise witness was called after Crane had stepped down from the stand. Meanwhile, the beating continued, and whenever Grant wanted to return to the fundamental issue of Crane’s habitual lying, he would trot out the one lie of Crane’s he was aware of, which happened to be the supremely innocent lie he had told Becker on the night in question, pretending to agree with the chorus girl who was about to be arrested that he was her husband. From the Journal, in its concluding remarks about Crane’s testimony:
Mr. Grant turned over and over the fact that Mr. Crane told Becker that one of the women he arrested was his wife.
“She is not your wife?”
“No.”
“Why did you say she was?”
“Because I know she was guiltless. It was impossible that she solicited, because she was under my protection; because I felt bound to protect her.”
The policemen smiled at each other. The women were puzzled. Being of the Tenderloin, it was utterly impossible for them to understand the motive Mr. Crane expressed. So, having finished the course he laid out for himself, Stephen Crane arose, bowed to Commissioner Grant, turned on his heel and left Headquarters.
It was over—and then it wasn’t over. Judge Grant adjourned the trial, but before anyone could move, Becker’s commanding officer, Captain Chapman, leapt to his feet and asked that one more witness be called to the stand. The judge allowed it, and in walked James O’Conner, the janitor of the building at 121 West Twenty-seventh Street, the same address that lawyer Grant had accused Crane of visiting in order to smoke opium with Sadie or Amy Huntington or Traphagen. According to O’Conner, Crane had lived there with a woman “as man and wife” for six weeks during the summer, whereupon he mentioned the name of the woman, which did not appear in any of the press reports of the trial. Neuberger angrily objected, calling the statement “outrageous” and utterly irrelevant to the case. Judge Grant concurred and excluded it from the record, but the words had been spoken, they had been heard by the press, and because the press had sharp ears and a loud voice, they would soon be heard by everyone in the city.
O’Conner went on to say that some of the women who lived in the house made a practice of luring men into their apartments and then robbing them once they were there. He named a certain Effie Ward as the worst of the offenders, and because Miss Ward happened to be present in the courtroom, the moment the trial ended she joined the dispersing crowd, followed O’Conner out of the building, and “planted her fist in his face with such force as to send him on the run down the steps to the sidewalk.” The Journal report continues:
Before the infuriated woman could reach him again she was pulled to one side by a number of policemen. She was released again, and in an instant she was at a young woman who appeared in behalf of the policeman, tooth and nail. She had grabbed a handful of the young woman’s hair and was twisting it out by the roots when she was again seized and hauled off.
She was taken away by a reporter and disappeared around the corner into Bleecker street.
* * *
It goes without saying that Becker and Conway were found innocent of all charges.
Crane had been ambushed by the combined forces of an indignant police department, a zealous, cunning defense attorney, and the incompetence of a police-commissioner judge who had once been described as a man who liked “nothing so much as to sit and stare into space.” Crane’s double life had been exposed, and no matter how vigorously he was defended in the editorials and articles that were published over the next few days, his name was now forever attached to scandal. The front-page headlines alone would have been enough to make him want to crawl under a rock and hide there until hell froze over or the city went up in flames.
The World, accompanied by a large portrait of the new poster-boy scoundrel:
CRANE HAD
A GAY NIGHT
RACY STORY BROUGHT OUT IN
THE TRIAL OF BECKER
AND CONWAY
A JANITOR CONFESSED THAT THE
NOVELIST LIVED WITH A
TENDERLOIN GIRL
AN OPIUM SMOKING EPISODE
Even the Journal, Crane’s staunchest advocate among the papers that covered the trial, could not resist joining in on the fun:
CRANE RISKED ALL
TO SAVE A WOMAN
HIS BOHEMIAN LIFE IN NEW
YORK LAID BARE FOR THE
SAKE OF DORA CLARK
In the days that followed, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the New York Press, and the Journal itself all rallied to Crane’s defense and excoriated the proceedings as a perversion of justice, correctly insisting that a police court had no legal authority to try citizens and that Crane, “a gallant gentleman,” “a man who had not violated any laws,” had been forced to answer questions that had no bearing on the case against Becker and Conway. The argument was sound, the writing was impassioned and even eloquent, but however consoling those articles might have been to Crane, they made no difference in the end, for the harm had already been done, and it was beyond repair.
