• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1684 0

in some suitable profession. During World War I, he served as chief petty officer in the navy, stationed out of Newport, Rhode Island, and upon his discharge he lived briefly with his parents before getting hired as a hotel manager in Pawtucket. Within five years he had become manager of Manhattan’s Dorset Hotel, just off Fifth Avenue in midtown. Apparently he embarked on a successful career in hotel management, but—contrary to Malcolm’s later assertions that his patron was a multimillionaire—there is no record indicating that Lennon ever became truly wealthy. Sometime during the 1930s or early 1940s, Lennon had relocated to Boston, where he began to employ male secretaries in his home.

Malcolm’s initial contact with Lennon may have come through classified advertisements placed in New York newspapers. What is certain is that sometime in 1944 Malcolm had begun working for Lennon as a “butler and occasional house worker” at Lennon’s Boston home, on an affluent stretch of Arlington Street overlooking the Public Garden. Soon something deeper than an employer–employee relationship developed. (After Malcolm’s later arrest, in 1946, he would give the police Lennon’s name and address as a previous employer, convinced that Lennon would use his financial resources and other contacts to help him during his time in prison.) The Autobiography describes sexual contacts with Lennon, except that Malcolm falsely attributed them to a character named Rudy:

[Rudy] had a side deal going, a hustle that took me right back to the old steering days in Harlem. Once a week, Rudy went to the home of this old, rich Boston blueblood, pillar-of-society aristocrat. He paid Rudy to undress them both, then pick up the old man like a baby, lay him on his bed, then stand over him and sprinkle him all over with talcum powder. Rudy said the old man would actually reach his climax from that.

Based on circumstantial but strong evidence, Malcolm was probably describing his own homosexual encounters with Paul Lennon. The revelation of his involvement with Lennon produced much speculation about Malcolm’s sexual orientation, but the experience appears to have been limited. There is no evidence from his prison record in Massachusetts or from his personal life after 1952 that he was actively homosexual. More credible, perhaps, is Rodnell Collins’s insight about his uncle: “Malcolm basically lived two lives.” When he was around Ella, “he enthusiastically participated in family picnics and family dinners. . . . He saved some of his money to send to his brothers and sisters in Lansing.” But in his Detroit Red life, he participated in prostitution, marijuana sales, cocaine sessions, numbers running, the occasional robbery, and, apparently, paid homosexual encounters. Keeping the two lives separate from each other was never easy, due to his unstable material circumstances. But Malcolm had the intelligence and ingenuity to mask his most illegal and potentially upsetting activities from his family and friends.

Well-to-do white men were one thing, white women another. During the war, his old paramour Bea Caragulian had married a white man, Mehan Bazarian, but he was serving in the military and was largely away. Malcolm’s sexual relationship with Bea had continued after her marriage, although it eventually grew chaotic and frequently abusive. By early December 1945, he was back in Boston, with no place to go except Ella’s. Once again, his disgusted half sister had no choice but to allow him to stay; after all, blood was blood. Malcolm quickly ran down Shorty Jarvis, who complained to him about his wife and their money problems. Within several days, Malcolm organized a gang, with the intention of robbing homes in Boston’s affluent neighborhoods. His motley crew consisted of another African American, Francis E. “Sonny” Brown; Bea; her younger sister, Joyce Caragulian; a third Armenian woman, Kora Marderosian; and Shorty. Early in the evening of December 14, 1945, Malcolm and Brown robbed a Brookline home, absconding with $2,400 worth of fur coats, silverware, jewelry,