Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [42]
Also on public display was a plaster cast of the dead man’s face, produced at a Chicago embalming college. It became, a New Yorker correspondent noted, ‘a sort of Kaiser’s moustache with the FBI.’ Years later, when a doctor wrote suggesting it was time the Dillinger exhibit was removed, Edgar was furious. The death mask, with just a hint of a smile about the lips, remained on permanent show.
After Dillinger, it seemed at first that Melvin Purvis could do no wrong. Edgar greeted him at Union Station on his triumphal arrival from Chicago, and the headline read: DILLINGER HEROES MEET. ‘He conducted himself,’ Edgar wrote privately to Purvis’ father, ‘with that simple modesty that is so characteristic of his makeup … He has been one of my closest and dearest friends.’
Purvis was in charge, that fall, when an alleged participant in the Kansas City Massacre, Pretty Boy Floyd, was killed in an Ohio cornfield. Edgar and Purvis were again photographed sharing victory together, with Edgar calling Floyd ‘a yellow rat who needed extermination.’ Extermination was what he had received. According to a police officer present at the scene, Purvis ordered another agent to fire into the bandit as he lay wounded on the ground. In a formal complaint, the local police chief said that, instead of going to call an ambulance as requested, Purvis called Edgar to report his latest coup. When he returned, Floyd was dead.
Hardly a week went by without the death or capture of another wanted man. Baby Face Nelson died of his wounds, after killing two agents himself, following a car chase in a Chicago suburb. In Florida, agents killed Kate ‘Ma’ Barker and her son Fred, a key figure in the Hamm kidnapping and other crimes. Singling out the woman in the case again, Edgar called Mrs Barker ‘the she-wolf … the brain of the whole organization.’ In fact, she had been no such thing.
At the height of his season of success, Edgar dumped Melvin Purvis. ‘He was jealous of him,’ Purvis’ secretary, Doris Lockerman, was to say. ‘Unless you continued to please the king, you didn’t continue as a favorite very long … They saw to it that Purvis got no more assignments that put him in the public eye. He found himself spending months interviewing applicants for jobs as agents. Every effort was made to denigrate him, to embarrass him. He was terribly hurt.’
In March 1935 Edgar sent Purvis a curt note that began ‘Dear Sir,’ and asked him to account for a report that he had gotten drunk at a Chicago party. Purvis called it an ‘unmitigated and unadulterated lie.’ Then a newspaper said Purvis had waved a gun about in a Cincinnati store, tried to telephone Edgar, then staggered away. Doris Lockerman recalls no such incidents, and wonders whether the story was planted. ‘Everyone,’ she said, ‘was afraid of Hoover.’
Purvis resigned on July 10, by telegram. The man whom Edgar had called his ‘closest friend’ now became the target of his lasting spite. When studio boss Darryl Zanuck offered Purvis a crime consultancy in Hollywood, Edgar intervened to block it. He spied on Purvis when he was preparing his autobiography. Yet Purvis never betrayed Edgar, never published the private correspondence that would have made the FBI Director the laughing stock of the country. He married, served with distinction as a colonel in World War II, ran a local radio station and worked for various congressional committees.
To mention Purvis’ name to Edgar, according to a veteran official, was ‘like dropping a bomb into Mount Vesuvius.’ His name does not appear at all in The FBI Story, the authorized Bureau history published in 1956. There is no character called Purvis in the Hollywood movie of the same name, produced under Edgar’s control. When Purvis was in line for a Senate job, Edgar ordered officials to disseminate ‘derogatory information’ about him.
In 1952, when Edgar successfully destroyed