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Excesses
Richard Hack’s biography of J. Edgar
Hoover titled Puppetmaster
presents memorable images of the life of one of the strangest public
characters in American history. One early image: Hoover handing out
mimeographed business cards in high school. An early work image: the
conscious decision to arrive early and leave late every day, and working
every Saturday, all to be noticed by superiors. An image of home life: the
tacky girly pinups in his home rec room. Readers looking for scandals
revealed, and expecting to find sex stories will come away disappointed. The
scandals exposed have everything to do with money and power. Hoover never took a
vacation: all his resort trips were working events: and the hotels and
restaurants usually comped him. Image counted for so much for this 19th
century man: he lived in fear that his FBI and himself would ever be exposed
for any weaknesses.
Here’s
an excerpt from the beginning of
Chapter 13, “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” pp. 357-365:
When J. Edgar Hoover first
met Dorothy Lamour in 1935, she was not yet known as the sultry actress who exchanged
wisecracks with the likes of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby on the road to
somewhere or other. She had not yet become famous for her long brown hair and
wide-set eyes, or for wearing her trademark sarong that showed off a body
thin and fit with a delicate femininity. Truth be told, she had just turned
20, and, as such, had yet to develop much in the way of style or poise. But
to J. Edgar Hoover, she was wonderful.
Walking
into the Stork Club on the arm of singer-bandleader Rudy Vallée, Lamour
pretended not to notice as the movie stars and famous writers in the room
stole glances in her direction, their whispers buzzing like swarming
mosquitoes. She wore a pale blue satin gown that draped across her hips,
catching the lights from the ceiling and bathing her in a glow of mystery.
Her mother was there that night as well, but no one noticed Carmen Louise
Lambour.* This was to be her daughter’s night.
Lamour had arrived the previous week
from Chicago,
where she had worked as a singer with the Herbie Kaye Band, then a sensation
on WGN radio, broadcasting from the ballroom of the Blackhawk Hotel. It was
Vallée who had convinced Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsley to give Lamour
an audition, and pay her $125 a week for her considerable talent. Though just
one of many attractive singers who seemed to propagate themselves in nightclubs
along the Great White Way
and various side streets, Lamour had an innocence that captivated Hoover.
“I brought her up to Walter Winchell’s
table and introduced her before the show,” Vallée recalled in 1980. “The
place was full of famous people. But Dottie made a particular fuss over J.
Edgar Hoover. He stood up like a gentleman and shook her hand, and said he
hoped she would join the table after the show. I don’t think Winchell was too
excited about it, but I know Hoover
was.”
For the next several months, Hoover romanced the young singer with weekend dinners at
the Stork Club, nervously chattering away about crime statistics and
shootings of “Pretty Boy” Floyd and John Dillinger, and inviting her to Washington for a tour
of the Bureau’s forensic labs. If it wasn’t exactly romantic, it was at least
sincere, for the singer, who never got to know her real father, saw in Hoover a successful,
driven, and respectful substitute.
On weekdays, with Hoover back in
Washington, Lam-our was wooed by Vallée, then the reigning king of crooners
with a radio show on NBC and a popular New York nightclub, Villa Vallée, on
Fiftieth Street. Special agents from the Bureau’s New
York office, dispatched to watch Lamour, discovered the
relationship and, on Hoover’s
instructions, interfered with the budding romance. “Phone messages would
mysteriously disappear, taxis would drop her off at the wrong restaurant, and
her mother, Carmen, was everywhere we went,” Vallée said. “Mr. Hoover saw to
it.”
It was to be bandleader Herbie Kaye who
eventually captured the singer’s heart, however. “When Herbie came into town
to do some special industrial engagements at the New York Hotel, he called me
right away,” Lamour later wrote. “I knew how I felt about him, but it
came as a total surprise when he said he loved me and wanted to marry me.” The pair eloped to Waukegan, Illinois,
on May 10, 1935, though pledged to keep their wedding a secret to boost their
growing careers. They had not counted on J. Edgar Hoover, of course, or the Chicago office of the
FBI, which alerted columnist Ed Sullivan, who broke the news of the nuptials
on May 15.
Privately, Hoover was devastated by the loss of
Lam-our to another man. Publicly, he moved directly into the arms of Ginger
Rogers’s mother, Lela, who had been patiently waiting to reacquaint herself
with the well-known, respected bachelor. It was convenient to be seen with
Lela, and Hoover admitted he enjoyed the
spotlight that followed the pair for the next four years on Manhattan’s tuxedoed nightclub circuit.
Yet, his heart remained with Dorothy Lamour, whose star was rising quickly in
Hollywood.
When her marriage disintegrated under the pressures of show business, Hoover was the first to
offer his shoulder in support. However, it took a president and a birthday
party to reunite the unlikely pair.
The fifty-eighth birthday celebration
of President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought both Dorothy Lamour and J. Edgar
Hoover to the White House—she escorted by Tyrone Power, her most recent
co-star, and he with Lela Rogers, who was excited about an anticipated
marriage proposal. Yet neither Power nor the hopeful Rogers
held on to their dates, who were discovered together the next morning in
Lamour’s suite at the Willard
Hotel by Walter
Winchell. While Winchell was blackmailed into secrecy by Hoover,
he revealed the story to film producer Allan Can, who had purchased
Winchell’s Manhattan apartment on Central Park. The romance was later verified by author
Charles Higham in 1971, interviewing the actress for an audio history of her
life. When asked about her sexual relationship with Hoover, she commented simply, “I cannot
deny it.”
As Higham says, “A lady never tells.”
Though Lamour married William Ross Howard
III in 1943, she maintained a close friendship with Hoover for the remainder of her life. The
Bureau’s director visited the Howard home in Beverly
Hills once a year for an extended stay, and a portrait of the
actress remained in Hoover’s
bedroom until the day he died. It was hardly surprising therefore that Hoover turned to Lamour
for support after Tolson suffered two massive and debilitating strokes in the
mid-sixties.
Lamour had long suspected Tolson’s
health was declining, though she was shocked at his appearance when Tolson
joined Hoover
at the debut of the singer’s nightclub act in 1965—so shocked that she
referred him to her own physician for a complete physical. Both Tolson and Hoover dismissed the
associate directors weight loss to overwork. It was a legitimate excuse.
Tolson was working harder than ever, thanks to Hoover’s sale of his 1958 book, Masters
of Deceit, to ABC for $75,000 as the basis for a new television series, The
EB.I.
The Quinn Martin production starred
Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as fictional FBI inspector Lewis Erskine, whose office
was said to be next to the director’s own. To some, it was the ideal telling of the Bureau’s story. To Hoover, it was the ultimate vindication. His
Bureau, his life, was placed on the pedestal of fictional television and
passed off as fact, to the extent that in the initial years of the show,
authentic case file numbers were listed in the opening credits of the
hour-long drama.
Hoover had handpicked Zimbalist for the
actor’s clean-cut, immaculate image, and saw to it that every script, every movement, was approved by someone
within his department—at first Tolson, then DeLoach, who grudgingly assumed
the task. They were, in a very real sense, crafting the Bureau’s image for a
new generation of American consumers, and the audience bought the illusion
wholesale.
Zimbalist as well became convinced of
the FBI’s integrity and strength, based on his initial meeting with Hoover soon after he
was cast. “I don’t recall his ever pausing in his conversation once,”
Zimbalist remembered. “He just talked at breakneck speed on every subject
imaginable and with such a command of thought and language that there wasn’t
room to get in the amenities of conversation. When it was over, I looked at my watch, and I’d been there two hours
and four minutes. He was a great conversationalist, had a great sense of
humor, and wide knowledge of every area of life, and he just chatted most
charmingly and interestingly about every subject— he crossed decades and
continents and everything else.”
The actor was subjected to a full FBI
investigation into his past in Hoover
and Tolson’s attempt to prevent even the slightest hint of scandal from being
injected into the program. Despite their caution, however, both men
approached the series’ debut with apprehension, particularly Hoover, whose voice
opened the premiere episode on Sunday, September 19, 1965. Seated in Hoover’s downstairs
den, surrounded by mementos of a career nearing its end, the director and his
assistant sat transfixed as the show unfolded. The sets, the cast, even the
Ford automobiles used in the production were perfectly polished. Yet into
this wholesomeness of good vs. evil slipped an incipient villain with a
problem: the bad guy was no ordinary crook, no mere bank robber or kidnapper.
To Hoover’s horror, the villain had a fetish—the touch of human hair made him
kill. Hoover
demanded that in the future, the criminal element on the drama would be
“dishonest, rather than psychologically imbalanced.”
The pressure was on Tolson to keep the
program exciting yet pure, dramatic if uncontroversial. It was, of; course,
not his only assignment, and had grown in manhours to encompass a full
quarter of his workweek. Adding to the pressure, Tolson was being pushed by :~ Hoover to protect the Bureau
against an ever-suspicious Senate—particularly
Senator Edward V. Long, who, in 1966, had launched an investigation into the
Bureau’s use of electronic surveillance, including the use of microphone listening
devices installed through black bag jobs.
Long, a Democrat from Missouri, claimed that federal agents had
embarked on a “nationwide campaign of wiretapping, snooping and harassment
of American citizens.”8 His opinion was based on several hundred reports
of uncovered wiretaps and electronic surveillance, including multiple
installations authorized by the FBI. To Long, America was “a naked society,
where every citizen is a denizen in a goldfish bowl.”9 No one felt
the invasion more than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who remained at the top of
Hoover’s list
of “low-life filth.”
Hoover had found a willing underling in
William Sullivan, whose ascent into the executive ranks in the Seat of
Government was all but assured by his success in invading the sanctity of
the civil rights leader. At least, that is, until Senator Long began to
investigate Sullivan’s late-night break-ins and illegal bugging. At that
point, Hoover
immediately distanced himself from any culpability.
In March 1965, Attorney General Nicholas
Katzenbach had informed Hoover
that authorized wiretaps would be reviewed every six months, and that microphone
surveillance would be subject to the same strict authorization procedures.
For Hoover,
the notice was tantamount to a challenge; the taint of disapproval hanging
in the wind.
The revelation of King’s sexual habits
had failed to impeach the integrity of the civil rights leader. With many
SCLC wiretaps and bugs already in place, and information on King flowing into
Bureau headquarters in sporadic fashion, Hoover needed immediate proof that the Communists
were actively involved in the operation of the SCLC. As usual, Hoover looked to Tolson
to achieve the results. Hoover’s
second-in-command, whose mandate had always been to perform as well as protect,
felt himself faltering, consumed by the very work that was draining him
physically. His was a piquant world where past sins could no longer be
ignored or handled with a wink, yet whose excitement urged him to continue to
play among the political minefields.
For Tolson, it was William Sullivan, not J. Edgar Hoover, who was the source
of most concern. Sullivan, out to trump his predecessors in the Domestic
Intelligence Division, pushed to plant more bugs, further invading the
privacy of King in an effort to locate the single piece of damning evidence
to prove his collusion with the Communist Party.
On January 22, 1966, Tolson received a
memo from Sullivan through “Deke” DeLoach, routinely advising him of the
latest microphone surveillance of the civil rights leader: a bug installed at
the Americana Hotel in New York.
In his enthusiasm for information, Sullivan had failed to secure Hoover’s authorization.
Now, he felt Tolson’s anger. “Remove this surveillance at once,” Tolson
wrote in pencil across the memo. “No one here approved this. I have told
Sullivan again not to institute a mike surveillance without the director’s
approval.’0 Reluctantly, Sullivan obeyed, even as the pressure
within the Bureau mounted. Seven weeks later, Tolson was stricken by a
massive ischemic stroke. Just as with the ministrokes that had preceded it, Tolson became dizzy and
disoriented at work. The most recent stroke had come when he joined Hoover to open the new Bureau office in Jackson, Mississippi,
on July 10, 1964. And as he did with the mini-strokes, Tolson ignored the
warning signs, thinking they would pass. They always passed; yet, not this
time.
Hoover received the news with typical
efficiency, removing Tolson from his office and rushing him to the
hospital—not in an ambulance, but rather his in own limousine. All the
better to minimize confusion—and publicity As always, the FBI had to remain
impenetrable, its leaders impervious to calamity. Yet, as the weeks and
months that followed would show, Hoover
and Tolson were both vulnerable and increasingly pushed to protect a
fast-dissolving illusion.
On the surface, Hoover continued to play hardball politics
and go through the motions of control via intimidation. One casualty was
Attorney General Katzenbach. Determined to openly admit the extent of the
government’s wiretapping and electronic surveillance, Katzenbach fought
against Hoover
and lost. He could not compete with what he labeled “the historical accident
of J. Edgar Hoover.” It was Katzenbach’s naiveté as much as his revelations
about Bureau surveillance that sealed his fate. To think that an attorney
general actually controlled the behavior of the Bureau’s director was serious
folly. Katzenbach’s resignation had nothing to do with justice, and
everything to do with secrets. His replacement, Ramsey Clark, was not about
to make the same mistake.
*
An accidental misspelling
of Lambour to Lamour changed Dorothy’s stage name.
I came away from reading Puppetmaster
with sadness. Hoover
was a haunted man, living in fear of many demons. Hack lays out the events of
Hoover’s life
in ways that conclude that none of the excesses were worth the cost.
Steve Hopkins,
January 25, 2005
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