“I promised Miss Buckingham that the fountain will be open in August,” Ed said. “Imagine what it will be like on a summer’s night with families strolling along the plaza taking in the spectacle.”
“And listening to the music,” Buckingham added.
“Mayor Dever has authorized double shifts for the crews,” Ed said. “Get as much done before the real winter sets in.”
“A good man, your Mayor Dever,” Kate Buckingham said. “I would not have begun this project while William Thompson was mayor. He was dreadful.”
“And yet your people elected Big Bill twice. Gave him not one but two terms,” I said.
Kate Buckingham shrugged. “We were Republicans and while he seemed to be one of us…”
“Rich?” I said
“Please Nora,” Ed said.
Miss Buckingham said, “Let her speak. She has a point. We were fooled. His father, the colonel, was a friend of my parents. And though William was a bit of a harum-scarum growing up…” She paused.
I couldn’t let that pass.
“He was a spoiled brat,” I said. “And a menace. He and his friends would gallop their horses through the city streets…”
“But he was only a boy,” Kate Buckingham said. “Thirteen.”
“Ed and my brother were both working at twelve. Thompson caused real damage. Growing up in Bridgeport I heard stories about how he and his gang would come riding hell for leather over the bridge at Bubbly Creek. They knocked down a little girl called Janie Donohue. When she tried to jump out of their way, they laughed at her, Miss Buckingham. That part was always told—those boys from so-called good families thought she was comical. My grandmother said it reminded her of the landlord’s coach rushing through an Irish village running over children. Remember her saying that, Ed?”
“I do,” Ed said. “But Thompson didn’t have the nerve to run against Dever. He’s finished.”
“I hope so,” I said.
Kate Buckingham couldn’t help but defend the Thompsons. “His family did try. They sent him out to the West to their ranch,” she said.
“And he’s played at being a cowboy ever since,” I said.
Tim McShane had been a pal of the fellow who referred to himself as “Big Bill.” One thing to be given a nickname but to hang one on yourself? Maybe he was afraid he’d be called “Fats” Thompson because he was. Tall too. But still wore boots and a ten-gallon hat to make himself more massive. Tim told me he met him in gambling houses that I now realize were brothels in the Levee, that strip of wickedness on the near South Side where Carl Sandburg had seen the “painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.” Although there were plenty of local city slickers patronizing any number of fancy mansions there too. Thompson was one of them.
When he’d returned to Chicago at age twenty-three, Thompson took over his dead father’s real estate company just as the World’s Fair of 1893 started Chicago booming and the Levee exploded with customers from all over the country, the world, really. Thompson left the running of the company to the woman who had been his father’s assistant. She made him a fortune. Big Bill married her, but according to Tim, never changed his ways. For a laugh, Bathhouse John Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna, the “Lords of the Levee,” who were the aldermen of the First Ward, glommed on this rich amadan and ran him as alderman for the Second Ward. They managed to squeak him through. But once Thompson got on the city council, he was taken over by the slightly more respectable Fred Lundin, who discovered that Big Bill had a natural ability to rant and rave in front of an audience.
“We’re the real Americans,” he’d tell a crowd of white Protestant males and go on about how they had to fend off the scum invading Chicago. He described immigrants using the slurs that we were taught never to say, which delighted his supporters. He was well known in the city, a character no one took too seriously when I left in 1911, so I was shocked when the Chicago Tribune’s Paris edition reported in 1915 that Big Bill Thompson had been elected mayor. Ed must be tearing his hair out, I’d thought. The Paris Tribune called Big Bill “the Clown Prince” and enjoyed making fun of his antics. Not so humorous, though, when Al Capone and a pack of New York gangsters came to town after Prohibition. Big Bill overcame his disdain for “grease balls” and gave the key to the city to the Italian outfit. Levee-style vice flooded all of Chicago with gang violence. The Paris Tribune wrote a big article about how much money Capone contributed to Thompson’s campaign for a second term as mayor, which he won thanks in part to the support of respectable people like Kate Buckingham.
“How any church-going citizen could have voted Republican is beyond me,” I said to her. “He’s immoral and stupid and greedy.”
Kate Buckingham held up her hand.
“I agree with everything you’re saying, Miss Kelly. Let me assure you that Thompson will never represent the Republican Party again. And I may even vote for a Democrat.”
Ed and I smiled at her.
“I will have these photos ready in a few days,” I said. “We’re all grateful to you for this fountain, Miss Buckingham. I know it will cost a great deal of money.”
“I have a great deal of money, and I loved my brother, Miss Kelly,” she said.
“A memorial,” I said, “because the dead still are with us.”
And she smiled at me, a real smile. We have more in common than you know, Kate, I thought. I heard those words again. I loved my brother. Does Henrietta love Michael? Never considered that before. I knew she wanted him to support her and her children, but love? Once again I heard Agnella’s voice: “You don’t understand my mother. She’s sick and suffering.” Mmm.
After Kate Buckingham left, Ed said to me, “Remember how the stink of the stockyards held down the air in Bridgeport until we could hardly breathe in the summer? Now relief will be only a bus ride away. Next week Julius Rosenwald is bringing his brother-in-law Max Adler to talk to me. Julius says Max is fascinated with tracking the stars and planets and might be willing to fund a planetarium in Chicago. It would be the first one in the United States.”
“So they’re Julius and Max to you now?”
“They’re nice fellows, Nora,” Ed said.
“Well, be sure to tell them the Irish practiced astronomy thousands of years ago. Before the pyramids were built, the ancient inhabitants of Ireland created passage graves that face east. On the day of the winter solstice, the sun comes through an opening and illuminates the interior of the grave at Newgrange.”
“Oh,” Ed said, but he was rooting around on his desk. He held up a letter.
“This is from John Shedd, the retired president of Marshall Fields. He’s interested in marine life and wants to build the biggest aquarium in North America. This letter is full of compliments for Mayor William Dever. He even said a few nice things about me. Shedd wrote that he had started as a stock clerk, and admired me as another man who began at the bottom. Listen to how he described me,” Ed said. “‘You acquired not only the skills necessary for success but the manners and deportment of a gentleman.’” Ed smiled at me. “See?” he said. “They had written us Irish off as greedy roughnecks, like Hinky Dink and Bathhouse, but now…”
“Margaret dresses up in an ermine coat, and you put on a top hat and tails and go to the opera. Ed, why don’t you tell them that the Irish monks were translating Greek myths when the English were painting themselves blue?”
But Ed wasn’t listening. He rolled up the plans he’d shown Kate Buckingham.
“I want you to photograph every phase of the fountain’s construction.”
“No small plans,” I said.
FEBRUARY 1927
But Chicago winters have a way of disrupting plans, no matter how large, and the construction of the fountain proceeded in stops and starts. It wasn’t until February that the sea horses could be installed in the basin. The crew had gotten used to me showing up at dawn, dressed in the version of Coco Chanel’s trouser suit I’d had Rose copy for me in a nice heavy, worsted wool.<
br />
At first she’d protested, “Oh, Nonie, what will people say?”
“Come on, Rose. You weren’t afraid to try new things when we had our studio at Montgomery Ward. You loved to whip up new designs,” I’d said.
“Nonie, you work for Ed,” John had told me a few weeks before Christmas. “He’s given you a lot of responsibility. If you start running around in pants, it’ll give the opposition another stick to hit Ed with.”
“Rose, we marched for women’s right to vote. Surely I can choose to be warm,” I’d said. “Are you afraid of what Aunt Kate and Aunt Nelly will think?” She and John were living with them now. I’d given in once to Ed’s mother but I wouldn’t again, so I went to her and said, “Aunt Nelly, I need Rose to make me a kind of uniform for work.”
“Fine, dear,” she’d said. “Go ahead.”
“We three have been through too much together,” Rose said. That Christmas she handed me a box with beautiful pants and a jacket, warm and comfortable and perfect for an early morning’s photo assignment.
What had Ed said about the fountain—sublime? The very word, I thought, as the rising sun splashed onto the pink marble basin. Still cold on this February morning, but I’d noticed a few crocuses pushing their way up through the strip of grass that edged Michigan Avenue in front of the Art Institute. Here’s a masterpiece no one would have to pay to see or even dress up to brave the Institute’s Protestant-built halls and galleries. Like the crocuses, I thought as I smiled to myself and tipped my camera up to catch that stream of luminescence.
Then I heard someone arguing behind me. I recognized the foreman Chris Garvey’s voice but the other fellow was shouting in French, “Les chevaux marins,” repeated over and over. I turned to see a man holding Chris by the shoulders.
Now Chris was a Bridgeport fellow, a decent guy and fairly open-minded. “She’s from the neighborhood, boys,” he’d said to the crew the first morning, stopping the catcalls I might have expected when I arrived wearing my woolen trouser suit. His grandmother and my mother had been friends and like most of the men from Bridgeport, he had a strong sense of his own dignity. He did not like this Frenchman grabbing him. He’ll sock the guy, I thought. I’d better step in.
“Pardon, monsieur,” I said. And to my surprise the language I’d used in Paris for ten years came creaking out and the fellow understood me.
He explained that he was Marcel Loyau, the sculptor of the chevaux. The sea horses. He was trying to make sure that these “idiots,” a word that unfortunately sounded the same in French as in English, placed them properly.
I saw Chris start to react. “Hey, Chris,” I said, “how about a picture with you and monsieur here? The South Park Commission is putting out a special pamphlet on the construction of the fountain. I’d like to photograph you and the artist.”
“Beauty and the Beast,” Chris said. I forgot that Bridgeport fellows also have a sense of humor.
I translated for Loyau as he and Chris went over the plans, a meeting of the minds, and finally I lined up the whole crew with Loyau in the center. “Not a bad guy, Chris,” I said. He told me he did the monument for the American Cemetery of the Somme.
Chris nodded. “A lot of our crew fought in France.”
By now my French was flowing and I began telling Loyau that I had lived in Paris. He made that noise with his lips that meant “so what?” in French. So I started batting names at him—Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein, Coco Chanel—until Loyau told me that he was having lunch with his patroness, Mademoiselle Buckingham, and gave me the Gallic equivalent of a bum’s rush. Chris Garvey observed the whole exchange.
“He’s an artist, Chris,” I said as we watched Loyau walk toward Michigan Avenue. “And you have to admit that those sea horses are amazing.”
“But why get a Frenchman? Surely there is someone in Chicago who could have made these statues. Big Bill says that Dever and Ed Kelly are letting themselves get bushwhacked by the rich who pretend to be Europeans, as if America isn’t good enough for them.”
“Big Bill Thompson,” I said. “I can’t believe you would listen to that loudmouth. Remember whatever he says, he’s a Republican underneath it all with no use for the working man.”
“I just happened to catch one of his rallies,” Chris said. “He does put on a good show.”
Today was the primary election. Thompson was running for the Republican nomination for mayor. The party had tried to ignore him, so he had staged a debate where two rats in cages stood in for his opponents. Got big coverage in all the newspapers.
I’d asked Ed about Thompson’s chances. “None,” he’d said, “though I wouldn’t mind if he were the nominee. Dever would clean his clock.”
So, I should have been prepared when I went to Ed’s office that afternoon—prints from that morning’s photography session in hand. I had my darkroom in the basement of the South Park Commission offices where I also kept a change in clothes. Ed had asked me not to wear pants in the office.
Pat Nash was on the phone, holding the receiver so Ed could hear what was being said. “The Republicans have nominated Thompson,” Ed said to me.
Pat put down the phone. “Thompson got a better turnout than anyone expected, but that’s among Republicans. The general election will be different. No Democrat or any rational person for that matter will vote for the man,” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “One of the crew this morning was talking about the Thompson rally he went to, sounded like he was getting a kick out of him.”
“One of our fellows?” Ed said. “Working on a job we got him? What’s his name?”
“I’d rather not say,” I said. Both men stared at me for what seemed like a long time.
“Alright, alright,” said Ed. “We can’t pretend that Big Bill’s not entertaining. It’s only six weeks until the election. Somebody’s got to go to one of his rallies and find out what he’s telling people so Dever can expose him.” And they were staring at me.
Which was why two weeks later I headed for the Medinah Temple, my Seneca in my bag. I followed a circus parade made up of Thompson’s supporters—a big crowd of four to five thousand. We were led by a camel with a sign on its back that read “I can go days without a drink, but who wants to be a camel?” Thompson was running on his opposition to Prohibition. The Democrats were against the Volsted Act too. After all, it had failed to reform drinkers and only opened the door for gangsters. But Decent Dever had said as long as Prohibition was the law of the land, he’d enforce it in Chicago which only meant Capone moved his headquarters a few miles outside the city limits to Cicero.
Now we were at the entrance to the Medinah Temple. A barker stood near the main door shouting, “Come in for the best vaudeville show ever seen. Singing. Dancing. Girls.” We filed in very orderly because the ushers who stood at the head of each aisle were gangsters. Capone’s men no question.
Once everyone was in their seats, a boy dressed in rags led a donkey down the middle aisle—a pitiful animal, skinny and mangy. The sign he wore said “Democrats.” Just as the donkey made it to the stage, out from the wings came a black horse with Bill in the saddle. He was dressed in cowboy gear, complete with a ten-gallon hat. He rode straight at the donkey. The poor animal pulled away from the boy and took off. Everybody around me was laughing. Finally, Big Bill dismounted and, still holding the horse’s reins, started bellowing at us.
“Real American men should be able to drink a beer without the police breaking into their homes.” The crowd cheered that.
“Let’s run Dever out of town. Stop all those Micks and Dagos and Bohunks and kikes who support him from feeding at the public trough,” Thompson hollered.
Not as many cheers. I noticed that there weren’t many women. Too sensible, I thought, for this nonsense. So I was impressed when an older lady stood up and called out, “What happened to the thousands of dollars you raised for flood victims? None of them got a cent. You kept the money for yourself.”
“Who do y
ou think you are?” Bill called down to her. “Jane Addams?”
Another roar from the crowd. The woman who worked with immigrants wasn’t popular with this group either. Two ushers came down the aisle. Took the woman by the arms and started walking her toward the exit.
This is a photograph I should get, I thought. Show these goons manhandling her. I took the Seneca out of my large handbag, raised the camera as the woman and two men came toward me. Perfect. I had the frightened woman’s face, the two bruisers in my viewfinder. But just as I was about to press the shutter, somebody pushed me from behind. I went forward into the row ahead of me and was just able to hold on to my camera. “No pictures.” It was the fellow next to me who’d hit me. A perfectly ordinary looking man. “No pictures,” he said again. “Leave Big Bill alone.”
Dear God, what was going on?
* * *
I was not surprised when Big Bill won. A third candidate had run and taken away some of Dever’s votes. Still Thompson carried not only the typically Republican precincts including Bronzeville, the colored neighborhood, but he got a sizable share of usually Democratic wards.
Even my Gold Coast neighbors voted for him. Of course, our poll watchers had looked very much like the ushers at Thompson’s rally. A young dark-haired man who’d been standing in front of our polling place followed me right up to the desk, and looked over my shoulder as I signed the register. “Vote for Thompson, Miss Kelly,” he’d told me. “That’s a nice building you live in.” The election official had said nothing.
A week after Thompson’s inauguration, the mayor came to Ed’s office at the South Park Commission. I was there showing him the shots I’d taken of the fountain. All the sea horses were in place and the jets were being installed.
“You’ll meet the August deadline,” I was saying to Ed as Big Bill came through the door followed by Bessie O’Neill, Ed’s secretary
“Just a minute,” she said. “Mr. Kelly is not expecting you.”
“I don’t care what he is expecting,” Thompson said, and lowered himself into the big leather chair in front of Ed’s desk.
Irish Above All Page 13
