Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [48]
There are numerous anecdotes about Edgar and Clyde. Joseph Shimon recalled a story told by an astonished cab driver who had picked the couple up at National Airport. ‘He said Hoover was waiting, and rented the cab. It was Tolson who came off the plane. And he said he never saw so much kissing and ass-grabbing in his life. It was the kind of thing that made you feel the rumors were true.’
Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society, America’s first homosexual rights organization, had homosexual friends who went regularly to Edgar’s summer racing haunt, the Del Mar track in California. ‘In the forties,’ said Hay, ‘people I knew would come back and say, “Guess who was in so-and-so’s box today?” And they’d say, you know, “Hoover and Tolson were there again.” I was gay, the people I was hearing it from were gay and the boxes Hoover and Tolson were in were boxes owned by gay men, in a circle in which they didn’t have people who weren’t gay. They wouldn’t be in that crowd otherwise. They were nodded together as lovers.’
The Broadway singer Ethel Merman, star of Annie Get Your Gun, met Edgar and Clyde in New York in 1936. They remained in touch for the rest of their lives, and regularly sent affectionate telegrams to her on opening nights. In 1978, when a reporter asked her to comment on Anita Bryant, the antihomosexual campaigner, Merman had an interesting reply. ‘Some of my best friends,’ she said, ‘are homosexual. Everybody knew about J. Edgar Hoover, but he was the best chief the FBI ever had. A lot of people have always been homosexual. To each his own. They don’t bother me.’
In the thirties Edgar began a long association with the columnist who reigned as the nation’s premier purveyor of gossip for thirty years, Walter Winchell. Edgar came to know Winchell, he was to say, ‘as well as any other living person,’ and it is the Winchell connection that provides eyewitness corroboration of the affair with Clyde.
Edgar began cultivating the columnist during the gangster wars, when Winchell wrote nice things about him. He assigned Bureau agents to guard him during a visit to Chicago, and entertained him at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. According to Winchell’s friend Curly Harris, the columnist and the FBI Director quickly became close. Winchell was one of the few people ever to address Edgar by the first of his Christian names, ‘John.’
For years thereafter, Winchell regaled readers with a diet of trivia about Edgar, along with some genuine newsbreaks. The source, though he always denied it, was Edgar himself. ‘The information would come on plain paper, in plain envelopes, without official identification,’ said the columnist’s assistant, Herman Klurfeld. ‘He’d hold up a letter and say, “Here it is. Something from John.” Hoover was almost like another press agent submitting material.’
It was through Winchell that Edgar first found his way to New York City’s Stork Club, billed as ‘the place to be seen if you wish to feel important.’ Between 1934 and 1965 patrons included several Kennedys and Rockefellers, Al Jolson and Joe DiMaggio, Grace Kelly and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and H. L. Mencken.
Winchell was close to the Stork’s proprietor, Sherman Billingsley. He regularly held court there and was often joined at Table 50, his place of honor, by Edgar and Clyde. Billingsley, a former bootlegger, saw to it that Edgar’s food and drink came free. The Stork was soon boasting a highball called FBI Fizz.
On New Year’s Eve 1936, around midnight, freelance photographer Gustave Gale took several pictures of Winchell and his party, all wearing funny hats and festive smiles. One photograph shows Edgar, with Clyde chortling at his side, his hands raised in mock surrender to a comely young woman with a toy gun. The woman, tracked down only recently,