"It must be true that whenever a sensational murder is committed there are people who -- though they are, quite properly, of no interest to law enforcers, attorneys, or newspaper reporters -- weep, lie sleepless, and realize at last that their lives have been changed by a crime in which they paid no part. That such a thing has happened again and again is my guess. For certain, I know only what happened in my home when murder rocked New York. I was nine years old."
"The Becker Scandal" was written by VIna Delmar, who was born in 1903 to a theatrical couple in New York City. She left school and went into the theater herself at the age of 15, then married at sixteen, quit acting and began to write. Like a lot of female novelists, she's a "lost" writer. Despite the fact that she wrote a huge number of novels, short stories, and screenplays (including "The Awful Truth", which starred Irene Dunne and Cary Grant) her name seems to mean nothing to anybody anymore. Google her; you'll find that Google is pretty sure you mean "vina del mar", a beach resort in Chile.
Let's rescue her, at least for a minute.
"The Becker Scandal" is based on fact, and centers around a scandalous murder case that was the OJ trial of its time, but has pretty much slipped through the cracks of history since then. It's told through the eyes of a young girl who's nine years old when the murder happens. And "Baby", as she's called, isn't sheltered from the reality of the crime; as she says, she was "born to two people who did not know how a child should be raised." They don't try to shelter their daughter; they think of her as another person in a hard world who has to face reality just like everybody else. So when her Papa, Charlie, learns that his childhood friend Herman Rosenthal -- whom Baby and Charlie visited just the day before -- has been murdered by drive-by shooters in front of the Hotel Metropole, Baby isn't protected from the sight of her father weeping over the news. She also sees her mother's complete lack of sympathy. Honey, Baby's mother, watches Charlie sobbing, and says coldly "I don't cry that much when I lose a baby."
Baby is fascinated by the case. She knew Herman and his wife Lillian; they lived a flamboyant existence in a house with a pink satin bedroom and a casino downstairs. On the day Baby last saw them, there was a policeman in the house, for what reason Baby didn't know. But as she peruses the papers, she learns that Herman had been paying protection money to NY Cop Lt. Becker... head of the Vice Squad. When Becker raided Herman's gambling house anyway, Herman went to the District Attorney. But before he could testify, he was mysteriously gunned down in the street, under the eyes of several cops who just couldn't manage to get the car's license number.
Becker is fingered for the murder anyway, and as the papers start to tell about how he hired wonderfully named hit men Gyp the Blood, Whitey Lewis, Dago Frank and Lefty Louie, life at Baby's house starts to change. Honey, who was in the chorus when she met vaudeville performer Charlie but has pretensions of culture, is horrified at the reminder of Charlie's rough upbringing and tough companions. Charlie admits to having grown up on the streets. As he tells Baby, "clean houses and a mother in a gingham apron baking a chocolate cake were for other people." Honey, who had thought she'd civilized Charlie and saved him from low companions, begins to think she really doesn't know him at all.
When Becker is indicted, and then convicted, of the crime, Honey's life turns upside down. "If policemen hire murderers," she says, "then what can be depended upon? Nothing. Don't you see that... we're lost if nothing is as we believed it was?" And she simply refuses to believe it. Angry at Charlie for what she believes is his cynical outlook on life, she moves her things into the spare bedroom, refuses to go on Charlie's vaudeville tour to Atlantic City, and becomes obsessed with saintly Mrs. Helen Becker's crusade to prove her husband innocent.
Helen Becker, by the way, is just too good to be true. She is a fine wife who also works with "children crippled in mind or body", who I'm willing to bet she whipped into shape and forced to make something of their lives. Seriously, I would not be surprised to find out that one of them turned out to be FDR. Women all over the country weep for her, and send her little home-knitted shawls and booties when it's learned that she's pregnant. She is a media darling and a tireless crusader on behalf of her crooked husband. She brings homemade cookies to his cell every single day. This is while she's working two jobs; she started teaching night school in order to pay for Becker's lawyer. When she is rushed to the hospital, her unborn child in danger, she tells the doctor to save her, not the baby, because "What can a child do to help my husband?" The baby dies, and while the nation weeps, Baby feels that Helen Becker is lying "quietly upon her pillow, wondering who could get her an interview with President-elect Wilson." Helen prowls around tenements in the dead of night looking for unsavory characters who might have knowledge that will prove Becker innocent. When Honey is afraid that "something bad happened to Helen Becker," Charles accurately replies that if it had, there would be no need for an extra edition of the newspaper; "God would simply have announced it from the top of the Flatiron Building." Despite her completely misguided belief in the innocence of her husband, Helen Becker is awesome and there should be a statue of her someplace. If I could sculpt and had any idea what the hell she looked like, I'd make one.
Despite its dark subject matter, the book is also lots of fun. Baby's family is a theatrical one, and each summer they wind up broke as the theaters shut down in hot weather. Baby's used to seeing her parents' possessions go off to the pawnshop every summer and get redeemed every fall, and it doesn't occur to her to wonder why her parents just don't put some money aside to get them through the inevitable slow periods. There's always enough money in the summer for ice cream sodas and trips to the "airdome", an outdoor cinema, so Baby's happy... and her mother can buy everything from dishes to bedroom sets "on time", so their house always looks up-to-date. And there's plenty of detail of period New York, including visits to Charlie's socialist friend Eli in his tenement flat, where Baby learns that she is, apparently, a slave of capitalism... whatever that means.
I wish I could say that the book ends happily, but I can't. Despite the best efforts of the impossibly saintly Helen (about whose later life I would dearly love to know), Lt. Becker is executed for murder on July 30, 1915... and Honey, who had days earlier lost a baby, never recovered from this double blow. The New York Times of September 16, 1916 reports that "
Mrs. Jean G. Hoey, known on the stage as Jeanne Powell, a vaudeville performer and a member of the team of Hoey and Lee, died on Wednesday at her home, 3514 Clarendon Road, Brooklyn."
Intrigued, I hunted further and found this in the NYT of March 9, 1922: "Charles Hoey, vaudeville actor, died yesterday in Bellevue Hospital, having been found unconscious of cerebral hemmorhage in his room at 252 West Thirty-Eighth Street." Vina (born Alvina) would have been 19 at the time, and already married and retired from the stage.
A few years later, Vina had her first big hit: a novel called "Bad Girl", a cautionary tale about premarital sex that was adapted for the screen and was a huge bestseller. I haven't read any of her other books, but "Bad Girl" sounds pretty exciting. We may need to rediscover that one.
Next up: Something a bit less tragic. "Don't Knock the Corners Off", by 15-year-old Caroline Glyn. Caroline is a descendent of almost-forgotten racy writer Elinor Glyn who gave us "The It Girl", the novel whose screen adaptation made Clara Bow a star. Caroline, less racy, gives us eleven-year-old Londoner Antonia Rutherford Bird, a poet and artist who's experiencing public school for the first time, and finding that studying maths really cuts into the time she could be spending up on the roof with her flying horses.
