645want worldly men, broad-minded men, men who know what
it is to get out a bit. Why, no one like that would convict me!”
Watkins described Gaertner as “stylish” and “classy” but
called Annan the “prettiest woman ever accused of murder in
Chicago”—“young, slender, with bobbed auburn hair; wide
set, appealing blue eyes, upturned nose; translucent skin,
faintly, very faintly, rouged, an ingenuous smile. Refined fea-
tures, intelligent expression—an ‘awfully nice girl.’” This
account appeared on the front page.
During the trial, Annan’s attorney pointed to “this frail
little girl, struggling with a drunken brute.” On May 25, after
deliberating less than two hours, the all-male jury acquitted
her of the crime. (Justice in those days was swift; in Illinois,
too, it was devoid of women, who did not gain the right to
serve on juries until 1939.) Two weeks after Annan’s trial,
Gaertner was also found not guilty.“Another pretty woman
gone free,” muttered the prosecutor. Watkins noted that four
other women remained on death row, but none were as “styl-
ish” or “pretty” as Gaertner and Annan.
Unlike the movie’s “lady murderesses,” Annan and
Gaertner did not team up in a cabaret act. Annan had a ner-
vous breakdown, was institutionalized, and died in 1928. Of
Gaertner’s subsequent life, little is known. Watkins abandoned
journalism and entered Yale drama school. In 1926 she wrote
Chicago, a comedy derived from the Gaertner and Annan trials,
and it ran on Broadway for 172 performances. The next year
Cecil B. De Mille adapted the play as a silent movie. In 1975
director Bob Fosse bought the rights to Chicagoand created
the Broadway musical on which the 2003 movie was based.
The “lady murderesses” became part of the lore of the
Roaring Twenties; the story seemed to confirm the fears of
traditionalists. One minister warned about jazz’s “wriggling
movement and sensuous stimulation” of the body’s “sensory
center.” Short, bobbed, or marcelled hair was similarly worri-
some, because it signified a young woman’s break from con-
vention. Silk stockings, skirts that exposed knees, and straight
dresses that de-emphasized the waist further suggested that
women’s bodies were not meant solely for childbirth. The
movie makes all of these points with suitable salaciousness.
The movie also reiterates widespread concerns about
city life. Several months after the acquittal of Gaertner and
Annan,Literary Digestwarned “country girls” of the moral
dangers of large cities. Such fears echoed the judgments of
sociologists, especially those of “the Chicago school” of urban
sociology, headed by Robert Park of the University of
Chicago. The Chicago sociologists contended that large cities
disrupted traditional bonds of family and community and
fostered crime and deviance. In The Gold Coast and the Slum
(1929), sociologist Harvey Zorbaugh maintained that life in
much of downtown Chicago was “the direct antithesis of all
we are accustomed to think of as normal in society.” Big-city
life was characterized by a “laxity of conventional standards,
and of personal and social disorganization.”
Scholars now recognize that the portrait of urban city life
as propounded by “the Chicago school”—and by movies such
asChicago—was overdrawn. Urbanization did not shatter fam-
ily and ethnic ties. Neighborliness and community persisted
even in blighted tenement districts. Few people cast off social
conventions, much less succumbed to murderous impulses. In
short, Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annan were good copy, and
stories such as theirs helped make that celebrated decade
roar, but most folks painted the town less vividly, if at all.Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, “lady murderesses.”
Questions for Discussion
■Compare the photographs of Beulah Annan and Belva
Gaertner with those of actresses Catherine Zeta-Jones
and Renée Zellweger. What are the similarities and dif-
ferences and what do they suggest about Hollywood’s
rendering of the past?
■Why would Hollywood take pains to depict the visual
aspects of the past accurately?