Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [51]
Rogers showered him with gifts – a monogrammed ring, a gold cigarette box. ‘I think,’ said her friend Anita Colby, ‘that Leli was more interested in Edgar than he was in her.’ Ginger Rogers believed the relationship was a ‘close friendship, not an affair. I do remember this: Mother always said Edgar Hoover was a loner, and lonely.’
Edgar told close friends, though, that the affair was serious. ‘He was really smitten with her,’ recalled Effie Cain, a wealthy Texan who met Edgar in the forties. Edgar said as much to Leo McClairen, the trusted black Agent who chauffeured him in Florida. ‘Mr Hoover told me one time,’ McClairen remembered, ‘he was in love with Ginger Rogers’ mother. He told me she was thinking of getting married to him, but something came up …’
Richard Auerbach, a top Bureau official, was also privy to the relationship. ‘No question,’ he said. ‘It was a courtship. I used to make arrangements for her to meet with him in Florida. They were very careful, and marriage remained a possibility for many years to come. It lasted until 1955, when I brought the news to her one day that the President wanted him back in Washington the next morning. And his lady love said, “This just isn’t going to work. I’m going back to L.A …” She turned around and left the room with tears streaming down her face, and I put her on a flight. I don’t believe he ever saw her again.’
From then on, Edgar kept his distance. ‘Rogers’ letters would come in,’ said Cartha DeLoach, ‘and he’d send them over to me unanswered. I’d have an agent in the Correspondence Section do it, and he’d sign them.’
There were two other women in Edgar’s life in the thirties and early forties. The first was Oscar-winner Frances Marion, screenwriter of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and The Scarlet Letter. She was seven years older than Edgar, a veteran of several marriages. ‘Frances told me Hoover was in hot pursuit,’ her daughter-in-law recalled, ‘but she wouldn’t marry him because of the boys, her sons.’
The third, and perhaps most important, liaison was with the actress Dorothy Lamour – heroine of films like Road to Singapore and Road to Hong Kong with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. She had first met Edgar as early as 1931, when she was a twenty-year-old former beauty queen working as a singer at the Stork Club. They became close, however, only after Lamour’s divorce from her first husband and the death of Edgar’s mother.
In her autobiography, Lamour wrote only that Edgar was ‘a lifelong friend.’ In private, in the seventies, she spoke of deeper feelings. ‘She just started to glow when his name was mentioned,’ said acquaintances of hers in California. ‘But she told us she knew marriage would not have worked. They were both too involved in their careers. They were heartbroken, though. It was a really sad story.’
After 1942, when Lamour married her second husband, businessman Bill Howard, Edgar became a regular visitor at their home. ‘Nobody else was invited,’ said Howard. ‘He so enjoyed privacy where he could relax … He would do the barbecuing and we’d sit in the backyard. I didn’t fool with Edgar. I was afraid of him …’
Lamour and Howard lived for years near Baltimore, a short drive from Washington, and the star was occasionally seen dining with Edgar at Harvey’s. He was sometimes at her side on film sets, or when she gave interviews, and FBI agents smoothed the way when she traveled abroad.
‘When our boys were born,’ said Lamour’s husband, ‘Edgar sent an FBI agent out and had their toe prints put on little gold coins inscribed on the back with his name.’ ‘He wrote a stack of letters to me signed, “Uncle,”’ recalled John, the elder of the Howards’ two sons. ‘My brother used to kid me I was born in an FBI test tube.’
When Lamour needed financing for a play,