1921
In Chicago, Louise Rolfe’s father prospers when advertising becomes increasingly more important in the early 1920s. It is a gigantic new industry as millions of washing machines, vacuum cleaners, radios, automobiles, and movie tickets are sold throughout the decade. Postwar manufacturing and retail are giddy. If there is ever a time to celebrate with alcohol, it is now, which is exactly why most people will continue to do everything they can to break the dry laws.
Louise is only fifteen, but her body is more mature. She is beautiful, constantly noticed by men, and straining at the leash that is rapidly slipping out of her mother’s hands. She loves to be the center of attention, anywhere, any time. She and her best friend Jenetthlyn “Jennett” Fredericks enter Senn High School together, where they immediately became hypersocial, toying with boys and drinking anything they can find that won’t explode. A popular gateway concoction is “syllabub,” a mixture of port wine, milk, and sugar. Louise probably learns quickly to do without the milk and sugar.
Like most other well-to-do girls, they will wind up the Victrola and put on 78 rpm records of the new jazz played by the African American musicians like Joe “King” Oliver, whose exotic Creole Jazz Band plays at the Lincoln Gardens Café on East 31st Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. Louise, Jennett, and many of their more precocious friends are no doubt eager to go there. They deem themselves ready to enjoy the world of the seductive, adult music. They’ve been told about the chicken-wire ceiling festooned with maple leaves and the licorice gin at two dollars a Prohibition pint. But of course, they are too young to get in the door.
Instead, they find their way to the Friar’s Inn at 343 South Wabash Avenue, on the Near North Side. It’s a rundown, sinister-looking dive where the bands play the “slow drag” and the “two-four one-step.” Those who are underage are still banned, but they are allowed to stand outside near the doorway and listen to the wonderful music. They pass slim silver hip flasks among themselves and get “spiflicated” out there on the sidewalk. The visionary young foundlings of the jazz generation congregate here on weekend nights, as if apprenticing themselves to the music. This is as close as they can get for the moment.
The New Orleans Rhythm Kings start playing the Friar’s in December. They are eight white boys who play black jazz, emulating King Oliver. Louise and the other teenagers who love the new music loiter in the Chicago cold until the Friar’s Inn is forced to close their front door to keep the heat inside.
Louise and her friends realize that they can read the African American paper, the Chicago Defender, to find out where the bands are playing. Louise’s main dream is to find older boys who are of age to take her to any of the hot joints. Because she possesses a mature look and attitude, she is frequently able to achieve this. In the winter of 1921, the big news is at the College Inn, where Chicagoans are flocking to hear the Isham Jones Orchestra, with Frank “Tram” Trambauer on the saxophone. Their signature number, “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” is an instant anthem for Louise’s generation, who buy records with African American labels like Okeh, Paramount, Vocation, Black Swan, and Brunswick.
“Race music” is the rage, the cat’s pajamas, especially in Chicago, with its wonderful infusion of transplanted New Orleans musicians who have been slowly migrating to the city by the lake. The older generation doesn’t approve of the kids dancing to such suggestive music. Conservative and fundamental groups all over America are horrified, a reaction that is, of course, the finest kind of publicity. This turns out to be the second time white youngsters will rebel and trump their parents’ racism, a happy tradition that began with the white acceptance of ragtime after the turn of the century.
The old fogies bitterly complain about how harmful the new jazz is to their children, while at the same time they reluctantly foot the bill for the purchase of the records. Since Frank Rolfe has decided to move out of the apartment and divorce Mabel, he certainly makes sure that his daughter has money for the current hits such as the Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues” and the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra’s “Shanghai Shuffle.” When he finds the ever-shrinking time, he dotes on Louise, inviting her to his country club where she learns to play golf and sneak drinks of Prohibition booze, rubbing shoulders with her eager, blossoming generation of rich kids. Frank must think everything she does is cute.
The truth is that at fifteen, Louise is almost as wild as any adult. She already has a plan to be the center of attention in larger arenas, perhaps the theater and silent movies. She has the same “look” as film stars Carol Dempster and Lillian Gish, which further convinces her that she can be an actress or a model. She is dangerously spoiled by her guilty father, quickly becoming a dedicated pleasure seeker and hedonist with appetites beyond her years. But she is special. Not only does she drink any alcohol she can find and experiment with every kind of sex, but a month before her sixteenth birthday, Senn High School student Louise Rolfe kills her first man.
Frank Rolfe has left Mabel and now has an apartment at 5925 Magnolia Avenue, where Louise visits him as often as possible. On March 27, 1921, she steals her father’s Cadillac limousine, after which she and Jennett Fredericks pick up two boys, Edward Madigan and Frank Mawicka, who provide a couple of flasks of booze.1 They go joyriding, and on Winthrop Avenue, where Louise removes her eyes from the road to take a swig, she crashes into an automobile driven by a man named Charles Ulberg.
Ulberg’s front-seat passenger is an attorney from north suburban Evanston named Frank A. Lasley; in the backseat is the automobile’s owner, Philo L. Crawford. Louise’s huge limo spins Crawford’s car into the oncoming limousine of Illinois attorney general Edward Brundage, who is traveling south on Winthrop, with his sister and his two children. Brundage’s chauffeur, Harry Moore, and the children are uninjured, but the attorney general and his sister, Margaret Friesinger, are taken unconscious to Chicago Union Hospital, where they both will recover.
Louise and the other three people with her are shaken but able to walk away without medical attention. Ulberg is thrown out of the car, yet he is miraculously unharmed. Crawford and Lasley are pinned in the twisted metal of their Ford, sandwiched between two grand limousines that are at least twice as heavy. Crawford survives, but his unlucky passenger Lasley dies in Lake View Hospital the next day.2
Frank Rolfe puts up the sizable legal fees to get his daughter dismissed from the charge of vehicular manslaughter. It is expensive to get Louise off the hook, for she is obviously guilty. However, because she is underage, mercy is directed her way. Some of this may be due to her performance in court, for she seems to have cunning guile and at least enough theatrical ability to appear appropriately contrite. Her youth tends to be on her side, and no doubt she affects as innocent a physical appearance as she possibly can, including tears at the propitious moments. She already has a natural instinct to attempt to manipulate a courtroom.
For whatever reason, the judges who hear her case apparently feel that it would not serve justice to ruin this teenager’s life as well, hence Louise escapes the nightmare without due punishment. It has to cost Frank Rolfe a small fortune, but it is nothing compared to the cost to Frank A. Lasley, who was never aware of the dangers of being on the road with Louise May Rolfe.
But nobody left alive escapes the wrath of Attorney General Brundage. The rotund, dynamic lawyer and politician is enraged; he and his sister file a civil suit in circuit court on July 14 against Frank and Louise Rolfe as well as the unfortunate Philo Crawford, the owner of the car Louise hit. They ask for fifteen thousand dollars in damages for their injuries.3
Louise sees that her immediate troubles are far from over, yet shockingly the opportunity for some publicity does not escape her. She displays an astonishing narcissism and self-awareness that will continue to define her. She makes certain that a Chicago Tribune reporter is given one of her professionally photographed portraits, which the paper compliantly reproduces for the article announcing Brundage’s lawsuit. In the tiny picture in the paper, another line engraving taken from her corset ad photograph, she is young and fresh, with huge eyes and plaited blonde hair. Her practiced glance is casual, somewhat inviting, and slightly bemused. She seems naked below her neck, the cropped head shot taken from her first advertisement. Her wake of death and destruction notwithstanding, Louise is totally thrilled when the glamour shot ends up on the front page.
In court, justice is served, but it is not perfectly directed. Philo Crawford is judged not liable because his automobile was first hit by Louise. Frank Rolfe, ever his daughter’s pigeon, ends up writing a check for fifteen thousand dollars to the attorney general of Illinois and his sister, a formidable settlement in 1921.
The budding performer Louise skips away. The future moll has one notch on her driver’s license. For most young women, this terrible episode would be life changing, a shocking, wisdom-earning, soul-searching catharsis. It would turn most people around in a hurry.
Louise Rolfe is just getting started.
Vincent and Helen begin their married life in the DeMory home. Helen learns Josephine DeMory’s finest Sicilian cooking tricks, including a gravy-thick sauce that will survive in the family to the present day. With Vincent (his family does not call him Jack) absent many hours at a time as he trains for his next fight, Helen becomes like a DeMory daughter, cooking, helping her mother-in-law, and patiently waiting for her young man to come home each night. She is dutiful, in love, and happy with her new extended family.