One Summer: America, 1927 (5 page)

Magazines boomed, too. Advertising revenues leaped 500 percent in the decade, and many publications of lasting importance made their debut:
Reader’s Digest
in 1922,
Time
in 1923, the
American Mercury
and
Smart Set
in 1924,
The New Yorker
in 1925.
Time
was perhaps the most immediately influential. Founded by two former Yale classmates, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, it was very popular but wildly inaccurate. It described Charles Nungesser, for instance, as having “lost an arm, a leg, a chin” during the war, which was not merely incorrect in all particulars but visibly so since Nungesser could be seen every day in newspaper photographs with a full set of limbs and an incontestably bechinned face.
Time
was noted for its repetitious devotion to certain words—
swart, nimble, gimlet-eyed
—and to squashed neologisms like
cinemaddict
and
cinemactress
. It also had a fondness for odd, distorted phrases, so that “in the nick of time” became, without embarrassment, “in time’s nick.” Above all, it had a curious Germanic affection for inverting normal word
order and packing as many nouns, adjectives, and adverbs as possible into a sentence before bringing in a verb—or as Wolcott Gibbs put it in a famous
New Yorker
profile of Luce, “Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind.” Despite their up-to-the-minute swagger, Luce and Hadden were deeply conservative. They would not, for instance, employ women for any job above the level of secretary or office assistant.

Above all, the 1920s was a golden age for newspapers. Newspaper sales in the decade rose by about a fifth, to 36 million copies a day—or 1.4 newspapers for every household. New York City alone had twelve daily papers, and almost all other cities worthy of the name had at least two or three. More than this, in many cities readers could get their news from a new, revolutionary type of publication that completely changed people’s expectations of what daily news should be—the tabloid. Tabloids focused on crime, sports, and celebrity gossip, and in so doing gave all three an importance considerably beyond any they had enjoyed before. A study in 1927 showed that tabloids devoted between a quarter and a third of their space to crime reports, up to ten times more than the serious papers did. It was because of their influence that the quiet but messy murder of a man like Albert Snyder could become national news.

The tabloid, both as a format and as a way of distilling news down to its salacious essence, had been around for a quarter of a century in England, but no one had thought to try it in the United States until two young members of the
Chicago Tribune
publishing family, Robert R. McCormick and his cousin Joseph Patterson, saw London’s
Daily Mirror
while serving in England during World War I and decided to offer something similar at home when peace came. The result was the
Illustrated Daily News
, launched in New York in June 1919, price 2 cents. The concept was not an immediate hit—circulation at one point was just eleven thousand—but gradually the
Daily News
built a devoted following and by the mid-1920s it was far and away the bestselling newspaper in the country, with a circulation of one million, more than double that of the
New York Times
.

Such success inevitably inspired imitators. First came the
New York Daily Mirror
from William Randolph Hearst in June 1924, followed three months later by the wondrously dreadful
Evening Graphic
. The
Graphic
was the creation of an eccentric, bushy-haired businessman named Bernarr Macfadden, who had started life rather more prosaically some fifty years earlier as a Missouri farmboy named Bernard MacFadden. Macfadden, as he now styled himself, was a man of strong and exotic beliefs. He didn’t like doctors, lawyers, or clothing. He was powerfully devoted to bodybuilding, vegetarianism, the rights of commuters to a decent railroad service, and getting naked. He and his wife frequently bemused their neighbors in Englewood, New Jersey—among them Dwight Morrow, a figure of some centrality to this story, as will become apparent—by exercising naked on the lawn. Macfadden’s commitment to healthfulness was so total that when one of his daughters died of a heart condition he remarked: “It’s better she’s gone. She’d only have disgraced me.” Well into his eighties he could be seen walking around Manhattan carrying a forty-pound bag of sand on his back as a way of keeping fit. He lived to be eighty-seven.

As a businessman, he seems to have dedicated his life to the proposition that where selling to the public is concerned no idea is too stupid. He built three separate fortunes. The first was as the inventor of a cult science he called Physcultopathy, which featured strict adherence to his principles of vegetarianism and strength through bodybuilding, with forays into nakedness for those who dared. The movement produced a chain of successful health farms and related publications. In 1919, as an outgrowth of the latter, Macfadden came up with an even more inspired invention: the confession magazine.
True Story
, the flagship of this side of his operations, soon had monthly sales of 2.2 million. All the stories in
True Story
were candid and juicy, with “a yeasty undercurrent of sexual excitation,” in the words of one satisfied observer. It was Macfadden’s proud boast that not a word in
True Story
was fabricated. This claim caused Macfadden a certain amount of financial discomfort when a piece in 1927 called “The Revealing Kiss,” set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, turned out, by unfortunate chance, to contain the names of eight respectable citizens of that fair city. They sued, and Macfadden was forced to admit that
True Stories
’ stories were not in fact true at all and never had been.

When tabloids became the rage, Macfadden launched the
Evening Graphic
. Its most distinguishing feature was that it had almost no attachment to truth or even, often, a recognizable reality. It conducted imaginary interviews with people it had not met and ran stories by figures who could not possibly have written them. When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, it produced a series of articles by him from beyond the grave. The
Graphic
became famous for a form of illustration of its own invention called the composograph, in which the faces of newsworthy figures were superimposed on the bodies of models who had been posed on sets to create arresting tableaux. The most celebrated of these visual creations came during annulment proceedings, earlier in 1927, between Edward W. “Daddy” Browning and his young and dazzlingly erratic bride, affectionately known to all as Peaches, when the
Graphic
ran a photo showing (without any real attempt at plausibility) Peaches standing naked in the witness box. The
Graphic
sold an extra 250,000 copies that day.
The New Yorker
called the
Graphic
a “grotesque fungus,” but it was a phenomenally successful fungus. By 1927, its circulation was nearing six hundred thousand.

For conventional newspapers, these were serious and worrying numbers. Most responded by becoming conspicuously more like tabloids themselves, in spirit if not presentation. Even the
New York Times
, though still devotedly solemn and gray, found room for plenty of juicy stories throughout the decade and covered them with prose that was often nearly as feverish. So now when a murder like that of Albert Snyder came along, the result across all newspapers was something like a frenzy.

It hardly mattered that the perpetrators were spectacularly inept—so much so that the writer Damon Runyon dubbed it the Dumbbell Murder Case—or that they were not particularly attractive or imaginative. It was enough that the case involved lust, infidelity, a heartless woman, and a sash weight. These were the things that sold newspapers. The Snyder-Gray case received more column inches of coverage than any other crime of the era, and was not exceeded for column inches until the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby in 1935. In terms of its effect on popular culture, even the Lindbergh kidnapping couldn’t touch it.

Trials in 1920s America were often amazingly speedy. Judd Gray and Ruth Snyder were arraigned, indicted by a grand jury, and in the dock barely a month after their arrest. A carnival atmosphere descended on the Queens County Courthouse, a building of classical grandeur in Long Island City. A hundred and thirty newspapers from across the nation and as far afield as Norway sent reporters. Western Union installed the biggest switchboard it had ever built—bigger than any used for a presidential convention or World Series. Outside the courthouse, lunch wagons set up along the curb and souvenir sellers sold stickpins in the shape of sash weights for ten cents each. Throngs of people turned up daily hoping to get seats inside. Those who failed seemed content to stand outside and stare at the building knowing that important matters that they could not see or hear were being decided within. People of wealth and fashion turned up, too, among them the Marquess of Queensberry and the unidentified wife of a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Those fortunate enough to get seats inside were allowed to come forward at the conclusion of proceedings each day and inspect the venerated exhibits in the case—the sash weight, picture wire, and bottle of chloroform that featured in the evil deed. The
News
and
Mirror
ran as many as eight articles a day on the trial. If any especially riveting disclosures emerged during the day—that, for instance, Ruth Snyder on the night of the murder had received Judd Gray in a blood-red kimono—special editions were rushed into print, as if war had been declared. For those too eager or overcome to focus on the words, the
Mirror
provided 160 photographs, diagrams, and other illustrations during the three weeks of the trial, the
Daily News
nearer 200. For a short while, one of Gray’s lawyers was one Edward Reilly, who would later gain notoriety by defending Bruno Richard Hauptmann in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping trial, but Reilly, who was a hopeless drunk, was fired or resigned at an early stage.

Each day for three weeks, jurors, reporters, and audience listened in rapt silence as the tragic arc of Albert Snyder’s mortal fall was outlined. The story had begun ten years earlier when Snyder, the lonely, balding art editor of
Motor Boating
magazine, had developed an infatuation with
an office secretary of high spirits and light intellect named Ruth Brown. She was thirteen years his junior and not notably attracted to him, but when, after their third or fourth date, he offered her a gumball-sized engagement ring her modest defenses crumbled. “I just couldn’t give up that ring,” she explained helplessly to a friend.

They were wed four months after they met and moved into his house in Queens Village. Their period of wedded bliss was a short one even by the standards of ill-fated marriages. Albert longed for a life of quiet domesticity. Ruth—who was known to her intimates as Tommy—wanted bright lights and gaiety. Albert infuriated her by refusing to take down photographs of a previous sweetheart. Within two days of marriage she revealed that she didn’t actually like him. And so began ten years of loveless marriage.

Ruth took to going out alone. In 1925, in a café in Manhattan, she met Judd Gray, a traveling salesmen for the Bien Jolie Corset Company, and they began a relationship. Gray made an unlikely villain. He wore owlish spectacles, weighed just 120 pounds, and called Ruth “Mommie.” When not engaged in lustful infidelity, he taught Sunday school and sang in a church choir, raised funds for the Red Cross, and was happily married with a ten-year-old daughter.

Increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage, Ruth tricked her unsuspecting hubby into signing a life insurance policy with a double indemnity clause providing nearly $100,000 in the event that he met a violent end, and she now doggedly dedicated herself to making sure he did. She dosed his evening whiskey with poison and whisked it into his prune whip (a feature of the affair much dwelled on by reporters). When that failed to slow him, she added crushed sleeping pills to the concoction, gave him bichloride of mercury tablets on the pretext that they were a healthful medicine, and even tried gassing him, but the unwitting Albert Snyder proved obstinately indestructible. In desperation, Ruth turned to Judd Gray. Together they devised what they conceived to be the perfect murder. Gray caught a train to Syracuse and checked into the Hotel Onondaga, making sure that plenty of people saw him, before slipping out a back way and returning to the city. While he was away he arranged
for a friend to go to his hotel room, muss the bed, and otherwise make it look as if the room had been occupied. He also left the friend with letters to mail after his departure. His alibi thus securely in place, Gray traveled to Queens Village and presented himself late at night at the Snyder house. Ruth, sitting up in the kitchen in her soon-to-be-famous scarlet kimono, let him in. The plan was for Gray to creep into the marital bedroom and smash in Albert’s skull with a sash weight that Ruth had placed on the dresser for the purpose. Things didn’t work out quite as planned. Gray’s first blow was timidly experimental and served only to wake the intended victim. Confused but considerably enlivened at finding a strange, small man leaning over him and tapping him on the head with a blunt instrument, Snyder cried out in pain and grabbed Gray’s necktie, choking him.

“Mommie, Mommie, for God’s sake help!” Gray croaked.

Ruth Snyder seized the sash weight from her floundering lover and brought it forcefully down on her husband’s cranium, stilling him. She and Gray then stuffed chloroform up Albert Snyder’s nostrils and strangled him with picture wire, which she had also laid in. Then they turned out drawers and cupboards all over the house to make it look as if it had been ransacked. Neither of them appears to have considered that it would be a good idea to make Ruth’s bed look slept in. Gray loosely tied Ruth around the ankles and wrists, and arranged her comfortably on the floor. In what he considered his most cunning touch, he left the Italian newspaper on a table downstairs so that the police would conclude that the intruders were alien subversives, like Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the infamous anarchists then awaiting execution in Massachusetts. When everything was in place, Gray kissed Ruth goodbye, then caught a taxi into the city and a train back to Syracuse.