Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [45]
Snappily dressed, shifty-eyed Jess Smith was a tall, plump, lazy mama’s boy who always wore a large diamond-and-ruby ring. He took care of Daugherty’s informal business, keeping house and keeping his fingers in all the pies in town, humming his favorite popular song with its catchy chorus:
My sister sells snow [cocaine] to the snow-birds
My father sells bootlegger gin
My grandma does back-street abortions
My God! How the money rolls in!
My brother’s a poor missionary
He saves fallen women from sin
He’ll save you a blonde for five dollars
My God! How the money rolls in!
Smith sold useful introductions to shady businessmen, pardons and paroles for criminals, and impounded booze and licenses to sell liquor from drugstores out of a small greenstone house on K Street. An Ohio lawyer-turned-bootlegger, George Remus, paid Daugherty and Smith $350,000 a year for government licenses to sell medicinal alcohol, making $40 million in three years. When the regime changed he was caught and imprisoned.
Harding’s attitude towards Prohibition was emblematic of his administration’s self-serving hypocrisy and his own eagerness to ignore unpleasant facts if they interfered with his pleasures or peace of mind. “Though President Harding likes to drink as much as I do, he is prepared to stand or fall by the enforcement of Prohibition on the ground that it is the law and must be enforced,” one of his former Cabinet ministers commented in 1923. Alice Roosevelt Longworth said that throughout the twenties, “the Cabinet member who did not take a drink when it was offered to him was an exception.” Although Longworth herself later became what was called a “constitutional dry” (supporting and practicing Prohibition because it was the law), when Prohibition first came into effect she had a home-still from which her butler concocted “a very passable gin from oranges.”
One of Daugherty’s Department of Justice agents, Gaston Means, later claimed that it was in “the little green house in K Street” that, between 1921 and 1923, he had turned over $7 million to Smith from bootleggers. Means had started work at the Justice Department on a weekly salary of $90 but, thanks to Jess Smith, and Means’s own rapid grasp of his job requirements (“I was to do as I was told and ask no questions”), he was soon living in a fully-staffed house with a monthly rental of $1,000 and being driven around Washington in a chauffeured Cadillac. His house contained an arsenal of weapons and had a buried safe in its garden.
Smith held notorious parties where showgirls were shipped in from New York at weekends to dance on the tables. Pornographic films, “featuring a couple of dolls who later put on clothes, changed their names and became famous in Hollywood, were shown nightly,” remembered one journalist acquaintance. One evening things went too far. A “dope fiend” call-girl was either accidentally hit on the temple by someone throwing bottles or had a glass smashed in her throat by another girl, and died. Harding, who was present, was hustled away; when the dead girl’s brother tried to blackmail the President he was hastily put behind bars.
Daugherty and Smith’s H Street house, known as the Love Nest because Harding used it for assignations with his “lullapaloozas,” was owned by Evalyn and Ned McLean. Wealthy, feckless Ned McLean was proprietor of the Washington Post, known during Harding’s administration as the “Court Journal.” He shared Harding’s passions for drinking, gambling and womanizing; his mistress, Rose Davies, was the sister of Marion Davies, W. H. Hearst’s lover. It was McLean, aided by Gaston Means and Jess Smith, who had been entrusted with paying off Harding’s girlfriends in the run-up to the election. McLean even moonlighted as a spy: Daugherty appointed him a Special Agent of the Bureau of Investigation (which a former private eye, William Burns, ran for him as a personal protection racket) with a nominal salary of a dollar a year.
Mrs. McLean was the indulged only daughter of an