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On April 3, police received a phone call from Beulah
Annan, a young married woman who worked in a laundry.
She said that a man had attempted to rape her and that she
had shot him. Police raced to her apartment, where they
found Harry Kalstedt dead from a gunshot wound. Annan
insisted that she had acted in self-defense, and her husband
supported her story. But police hammered away at the fact
that Kalstedt had worked at the same laundry as Annan, and
that he had been shot in the back. Annan eventually con-
fessed that the two had been having an affair and that, when
he threatened to dump her, she shot him. For two hours, as
he lay dying, she drank cocktails and listened to a recording
of “Hula Lou,” a foxtrot about a Hawaiian girl “with more
sweeties than a dog has fleas.”
Maurine Watkins, a young reporter, covered both stories
for the Chicago Tribune. Murder had long been a staple of
local journalism, but Watkins recognized the extraordinary
appeal of this story: jazz, booze, and two comely “lady mur-
deresses,” as Watkins termed them. While awaiting trial in
prison, the women provided Watkins with delicious quotes.
Gaertner told Watkins that she was innocent. “No
woman can love a man enough to kill him,” she explained.
“There are always plenty more. ” She added, “Gin and guns—
either one is bad enough, but together they get you in a dick-
ens of a mess. ” When the grand jury ruled that she could be
tried for murder, Gaertner was irritated. “That was bum,” she
snapped. She called the jurors “narrow-minded old birds—bet
they never heard a jazz band in their lives. Now, if I’m tried, IC
hicago(2003) is a tale of illicit sex, booze, and “all that jazz.”
The characters played by Renée Zellweger and Catherine
Zeta-Jones aspire to cabaret stardom. Each is married, each is
jilted, and each shoots her wayward lover because “he had it
coming.”The newspapers gleefully promote the stories. From
prison, while awaiting trial for murder, the women compete to
garner the most headlines, courting the fame that will boost
their careers. Richard Gere, who plays their celebrity lawyer,
“razzle dazzles” all Chicago (including the juries) and gets the
women acquitted.Chicagois a musical. It does not claim to be
history. Trial lawyers do not tap dance upon the judge’s bench,
nor do prisoners tango on death row. The movie, however, is
based on a true story; and both the movie and the story illumi-
nate important aspects of the Roaring Twenties.
On March 11, 1924, Walter Law, an automobile salesman,
was found slumped against the steering wheel of a car in
downtown Chicago. He was dead from a gunshot wound to
the head. A pistol and an empty bottle of gin were on the
floor. The car was registered to Belva Gaertner, a twice-
divorced cabaret singer known as Belle Brown. Police hurried
to her rooming house and peppered her with questions.
“We went driving, Mr. Law and I,” she told them. She
explained that they had stopped at the Bingham “café,”
bought a bottle of gin (illegally, since this was during
Prohibition), and drove around town. “I don’t know what hap-
pened next,” she declared. During the interrogation Gaertner
paced nervously, perhaps for good reason: Her clothes were
soaked with blood. The police charged her with murder.
RE-VIEWING THE PAST
Chicago
Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger from the movie Chicago.