Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [50]
As Edgar had been humiliated by a young woman in 1918, so Clyde had been rejected – twice. First there had been his childhood sweetheart, who married another man when Clyde went off to Washington. Then, while he was at law school, a second girlfriend became pregnant by another man and married him. According to a classmate, Raymond Suran, Clyde was devastated. Yet he remained attracted to women, and Edgar found that hard to handle.
Anita Colby, the celebrated thirties model, recalled Clyde having ‘a crush’ on her but never following through. In 1939 he briefly courted Edna Daulyton, a waitress in a restaurant near the Justice Department. ‘He kind of flirted with me,’ she remembered, ‘and he took me out to dinner. He talked to me a bit about cases. We saw each other maybe half a dozen times, but I was leery of him.
‘One evening when we were having dinner at the Mayflower, Hoover came and joined us. I was shocked. He behaved in such an ugly way to me. He was like a little Napoleon. And there was a closeness between him and Clyde that I didn’t understand – something that didn’t seem quite natural. It was only afterwards I heard the stories.’
Clyde would hold Daulyton’s hand and give her a goodnight kiss on the cheek, but that was all. ‘One night,’ she said, ‘I asked him, “Is there something funny between you and Hoover?” He went very serious and said something like, “What d’you mean? Are you saying I’m some sort of abnormal faggot?” I guess I said, “Well, there’s something between you and that friend of yours …” Hoover joined us again when we went to eat at a place down near the water. And soon after that I stopped seeing Clyde.’
In 1939, when Clyde fell in love with a woman in New York and began talking of marriage, Edgar moved ruthlessly to prevent it. ‘Hoover suggested,’ said Guy Hottel, ‘that I have a little talk with Clyde, tell him to forget it. I did. If Clyde had married, he wouldn’t have been there to have dinner with Hoover every night. Hoover was selfish. He liked the setup the way it was, and he had ways of getting his own way.’
Ironically, at the very time Edgar snuffed out this relationship of Clyde’s, he was starting to see women himself. He began to do so immediately after his mother’s death, following a long battle with cancer, in 1938.
Annie had always been there, holding court when FBI colleagues came visiting, worrying when Edgar took airplane flights. ‘I am proud and happy that you are my son,’ she cabled from her sickbed when the National Institute of Social Scientists honored Edgar for ‘distinguished services to humanity.’ Soon after, with Edgar at her side in the bedroom where she had given birth to him, she died.
Thoughts about Annie preoccupied Edgar for the rest of his life. He would astonish virtual strangers with guilt-ridden outbursts about not having spent enough time with her when she was alive. He traveled to Florida each Christmas rather than try to celebrate in Washington, where his first forty-two Christmases had been spent with his mother.
Edgar was seen dining out with an older woman within weeks of Annie’s death. His new ‘favorite person,’ as Walter Winchell put it, was Lela Rogers, mother of Ginger and a formidable figure in her own right. She was forty-seven, four years Edgar’s senior, with two marriages behind her. She was tough, as befitted one of the first female recruits to the U.S. Marine Corps, where she had edited Leatherneck, the Corps’ magazine. She was politically of the far Right, and would one day tell a congressional committee that the line ‘Share and share alike – that’s democracy’ in a movie script was dangerous Communist propaganda. She was to be a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.
There were soon rumors that Rogers and Edgar were planning marriage. In New York to promote a play she had written, she received the press standing in front of his silverframed