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The pair became a Washington legend, one heavy with the innuendo that they were homosexual lovers. Robert Ludlum, in his novel The Chancellor Manuscript, was to write what no one dared say straight out in their lifetime. For Ludlum, Clyde’s ‘soft pampered face – struggling for masculinity – had for decades been the flower to the bristled cactus.’

Journalists dropped hints about the couple, though, as early as the thirties. ‘Mr Hoover,’ Collier’s magazine told readers early in the Roosevelt presidency, ‘is short, fat, businesslike, and walks with a mincing step … He dresses fastidiously, with Eleanor blue as the favorite color for the matched shades of tie, handkerchief and socks. A little pompous, he rides in a limousine even if only to a nearby selfservice cafeteria …’

Edgar kept a thick file on the writer of that article, journalist Ray Tucker, and denounced him as a ‘degenerate alcoholic.’ Tucker became convinced that Edgar even placed him under surveillance for a while. ‘Has anyone noted,’ asked another columnist, ‘that the Hoover stride has grown noticeably longer and more vigorous since Tucker charged him with walking with mincing steps?’

Yet another reporter observed that Edgar kept dainty china in his office beside the crime trophies. ‘He is different,’ commented a foreign diplomat, ‘from any police officer I ever knew, in that he uses a distinctive and conspicuous perfume.’ Edgar ordered a senior aide to say ‘very, very diplomatically’ that he never used perfume. In fact, he did.

The hints about Edgar and Clyde persisted. Time ran a piece about Edgar, ‘seldom seen without a male companion, most frequently solemn-faced Clyde Tolson.’ When the two friends sought to hide from the press, as when they stayed at the Muehiebach Hotel in Kansas City, they merely attracted attention to themselves. ‘They were shown,’ the local paper reported, ‘to the Muehlebach’s pride, the penthouse, No. 1125 … When reporters lifted the huge knocker of the door bearing the legend The Penthouse, the door was opened slightly, as in movie mysteries. A man in a café au lait lounging robe appeared. “I’m sorry,” he said, “you cannot see Mr Hoover.”’ The reporter thought Edgar ‘as mysterious as a Garbo smile’ – and noted that Clyde was installed next door.

The message to readers was clear. FBI insiders, most of them not sure what to think, just joked about it. In 1939, when top aide Louis Nichols – like George Ruch before him – named his son J. Edgar, agents joked, ‘If it had been a girl, she’d have been called Clyde.’

In the sixties, agents would chuckle about ‘J. Edna’ and ‘Mother Tolson.’ The writer Truman Capote, himself homosexual, told a magazine editor he knew Edgar and Clyde were, too. He considered writing a magazine piece about them – one that got no further than its title, ‘Johnny and Clyde.’

Scholars have pointed to the many photographs, most of them pictures of Clyde taken by Edgar, that survived from Edgar’s private collection: Clyde asleep, Clyde in a bathrobe, Clyde by the pool. Yet the two friends never openly set up house together. Clyde continued to maintain his own apartment when Edgar bought a home for himself after his mother’s death. At the office, say former colleagues, the two men showed no unusual affection for each other. For the forty-four years they were intimates, the deception must have been a constant strain. But a deception it was.

*

The man who knew them best in the thirties was Guy Hottel, a young executive for AETNA Insurance who shared an apartment with Clyde for years. The three men regularly went fishing, along with Edgar’s publicist Courtney Ryley Cooper. Edgar gave Hottel a job as an agent in 1938, as a favor to help him avert an unwelcome transfer by AETNA, and made him head of the Washington field office after perfunctory training. Later, he acted as best man at Hottel’s wedding.

Hottel remained confidant and constant companion to Edgar and Clyde throughout the ten years that followed. Shortly