One Summer: America, 1927 (6 page)

Gray was convinced that even if he came under suspicion the police would be unable to prove anything because his alibi placed him three hundred miles away in Syracuse. Unfortunately, Gray was remembered by a Long Island taxi driver to whom he had given a 5-cent tip on a $3.50 fare—even in 1920s money a nickel was a paltry show of gratitude—and who was now extremely eager to give evidence against him. Gray was
tracked down to the Hotel Onondaga, where he professed astonishment that the police would suspect him. “Why, I have never even been given a ticket for speeding,” he said, and confidently asserted that he could show that he had been in the hotel all weekend. Unfortunately, not to say amazingly, he had thrown the ticket stub from his train journey in the wastebasket. When a policeman fished it out and confronted him with it, Gray swiftly confessed, too. Upon learning that Ruth was blaming him for everything, he hotly insisted that she was the mastermind and had blackmailed him into cooperating by threatening to expose his faithlessness to his loving wife. It was clear that he and Ruth Snyder were not going to be friends again.

Such was the intensity of interest in the trial that no aspect of the affair, however tangential, was overlooked. Readers learned that the presiding judge, Townsend Scudder, returned home to his Long Island estate each evening to be greeted—and presumably all but overwhelmed—by his 125 pet dogs, which he then personally fed. Someone else noticed, and solemnly reported, that the ages of the jurors exactly added up to five hundred. One of Ruth Snyder’s lawyers, Dana Wallace, merited special attention for being the son of the owner of the
Mary Celeste
, the infamous cargo ship found drifting in the Atlantic in 1872, its crew mysteriously vanished. A journalist named Silas Bent made a careful measurement of column inches and found that the Snyder-Gray affair received more coverage than the sinking of the
Titanic
. Analysis and commentary were provided by a pack of celebrity observers, including the mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, the playwright Ben Hecht, the motion picture director D. W. Griffith, the actress Mae West, and the historian Will Durant, whose
Story of Philosophy
was currently a phenomenal best seller, if not obviously relevant to a criminal trial on Long Island. Also present, somewhat unaccountably, was a magician who went by the single name Thurston. Moral context was added by three leading evangelists: Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, and John Roach Straton. Straton was famous for hating almost everything—“card playing, cocktail drinking, poodle dogs, jazz music, the theater, low-cut
dresses, divorce, novels, stuffy rooms, Clarence Darrow, overeating, the Museum of Natural History, evolution, the Standard Oil influence in the Baptist church, prizefighting, the private lives of actors, nude art, bridge playing, modernism and greyhound racing,” according to one partial contemporary accounting. To this list he was now happy to add Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray; they couldn’t be executed fast enough as far as he was concerned. McPherson, more moderately, offered prayers and the hope that God would teach young men everywhere to think “I want a wife like Mother—not a Red Hot Cutie.”

The critic Edmund Wilson wondered in an essay why it was that something so dull and unimaginative as the Snyder murder excited such earnest attention, without pausing to reflect that the same question could be asked of his essay. To him it was largely another case of “a familiar motif”—a “ruthless ambitious woman who commands the submissive male.” By almost universal consent, Ruth Snyder was held to be the guilty party, Judd Gray the hapless dupe. Gray received so much mail, nearly all of it sympathetic, that it filled two neighboring cells in the Queens County Jailhouse.

The papers strove hard to portray Ruth Snyder as an evil temptress. “Her naturally blonde hair was marcelled to perfection,” wrote one observer tartly, as if that alone confirmed her guilt. The
Mirror
dubbed her “the marble woman without a heart.” Elsewhere she was called “the human serpent,” “the ice woman,” and, in a moment of journalistic hyperventilation, “the Swedish-Norwegian vampire.” Nearly all reports dwelt on Ruth Snyder’s deadly good looks, but this was either delusional or selectively generous. By 1927, Ruth Snyder was thirty-six years old, plump, haggard, and worn. Her complexion was blotchy, her expression an iron scowl. Franker commentators doubted that she had ever been attractive. A reporter for
The New Yorker
suggested: “No one has yet satisfactorily analyzed the interest that attaches to Ruth Snyder.… Her irresistible charm is visible only to Judd Gray.” Gray, with his heavy round glasses, looked improbably wise and professorial, and much older than his thirty-five years. In photographs he wore an expression of perpetual startlement, as if he couldn’t believe where he now found himself.

Quite why the Snyder murder attracted such a devoted following
wasn’t easy to say then and is impossible to say now. Plenty of other, better murders were available to excite attention that year, even without leaving New York. One was the Gravesend Bay Insurance Murder, as the newspapers dubbed it, in which a man named Benny Goldstein devised a plan to fake his own drowning in Gravesend Bay, Brooklyn, so that his friend Joe Lefkowitz could collect on a $75,000 insurance policy, which they would then split. Lefkowitz, however, made one significant change to the plan: he tossed Goldstein out of a boat in the middle of the bay rather than conveying him to a beach in New Jersey, as agreed. Since Goldstein couldn’t swim his death was pretty well assured, and Lefkowitz collected all the money, though he didn’t have long to enjoy it because he was swiftly caught and convicted.

The Snyder case, in contrast, was clumsy and banal, and didn’t even hold out the promise of exciting courtroom revelations since both of the accused had already fully confessed. Yet it became known, without any sense of hyperbole, as “the crime of the century,” and exerted a most extraordinary influence on popular culture, particularly on Hollywood, Broadway, and the more sensational end of light fiction. The film producer Adolph Zukor brought out a movie called
The Woman Who Needed Killing
(the title was later toned down), and the journalist Sophie Treadwell, who had covered the trial for the
Herald Tribune
, wrote a play called
Machinal
, which enjoyed both critical and commercial success. (The part of Judd Gray in the Treadwell production was played by a promising young actor named Clark Gable.) The novelist James M. Cain was so taken with the case that he used it as the central plot device in
two
books:
The Postman Always Rings Twice
and
Double Indemnity
. Billy Wilder made the latter into the artfully lit 1944 movie of the same name starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. This was the movie that created film noir and so became the template on which a generation of Hollywood melodramas were based. The movie
Double Indemnity
is the Snyder-Gray case but with snappier dialogue and better-looking people.

The murder of poor Albert Snyder had one other unusual feature: the people responsible were caught. That didn’t actually happen much in America in the 1920s. New York recorded 372 murders in 1927; in 115
of those cases no one was arrested. Where arrests were made, the conviction rate was less than 20 percent. Nationally, according to a survey made by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company—and it is notable that the best records were kept by insurers, not police authorities—two-thirds of America’s murders were unsolved in 1927. Some localities couldn’t even achieve that grimly unsatisfactory proportion. Chicago in a typical year experienced between 450 and 500 murders and managed to solve much less than a quarter of them. Altogether, nine-tenths of all serious crime in America went unpunished, according to the survey. Only about one murder in a hundred resulted in an execution. So for Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray to be accused, convicted, and ultimately executed, they had to be truly, outstandingly inept. They were.

Late in the afternoon of May 9, the lawyers concluded their closing arguments in the case and the twelve men of the jury—it was all male because women were not allowed to hear murder cases in New York State in 1927—were sent to deliberate. One hour and forty minutes later the jurors shuffled back in with their verdicts: both defendants were guilty of murder in the first degree. Ruth Snyder wept bitterly in her seat. Judd Gray, face flushed, stared hard at the jury but without animosity. Justice Scudder set sentencing for the following Monday, though that was really just a formality. The penalty for murder in the first degree was death by electrocution.

Coincidentally and conveniently, just as the Snyder-Gray case wound to its inevitable conclusion, an even bigger story began to unfold. Three days after the trial ended and just a short distance away, a silvery plane called the
Spirit of St. Louis
swooped down on Long Island from the west and landed at Curtiss Field, adjacent to Roosevelt Field. From it stepped a grinning young man from Minnesota about whom almost nothing was known.

Charles Lindbergh was twenty-five years old but looked eighteen. He was six feet two and weighed 128 pounds. He was almost preposterously wholesome. He didn’t smoke or drink—not even coffee or
Coca-Cola—and had never been on a date. He had a curiously stunted sense of humor and loved practical jokes that veered dangerously close to cruelty. Once on a hot day he filled a friend’s water jug with kerosene and mirthfully stood by as the friend took a mighty swig. The friend ended up in the hospital. His principal claim to fame was that he had successfully parachuted out of more crashing planes than anyone else alive, as far as could be told. He had made four emergency parachute jumps—one from just 350 feet—and had crash-landed a fifth plane in a Minnesota bog but clambered out unhurt. He had only just reached the fourth anniversary of his first solo flight. Among the flying community on Long Island his chances of successfully crossing the Atlantic were generally presumed to be about zero.

With Snyder and Gray off the front pages, demand arose now for a new story, and this confident, rather mysterious young midwesterner looked like he could be it. A single question swept through the reporting fraternity: Who
is
this kid?

2

The family name was really Månsson. Charles Lindbergh’s grandfather, a dour Swede with a luxuriant beard and fire-and-brimstone countenance, changed it to Lindbergh when he came to America in 1859 in circumstances that were both abrupt and dubious.

Until shortly before that time, Ola Månsson had been a respectable citizen and, by all appearances, a contentedly married man with a wife and eight children in a village near Ystad on the southernmost, Baltic edge of Sweden. In 1847, at the age of forty, he was elected to the Riksdag, the national parliament, and began to spend a good deal of time in Stockholm, six hundred kilometers to the north. There his life grew uncharacteristically complicated. He took up with a waitress twenty years his junior, and with her produced a child out of wedlock: Charles Lindbergh’s father. At the same time Månsson was implicated in a financial scandal for improperly guaranteeing bank loans to some cronies. It is not clear how serious the charges were; the Lindberghs in America always maintained that they were trumped up by Månsson’s political enemies. What is certain is that in 1859 Ola Månsson left Sweden in a hurry, failed to answer the accusations against him, abandoned his original family, settled in rural Minnesota with his mistress and new child, and changed his name to August Lindbergh—all matters that Charles
Lindbergh overlooked or lightly glossed over in his various autobiographical writings.

The Lindberghs (the name means “linden tree mountain”) settled near Sauk Centre, Minnesota, future hometown of the novelist Sinclair Lewis, but then on the very edge of civilization. It was in Sauk Centre, two years after their arrival, that the elder Lindbergh suffered a famously horrific injury. While working at a sawmill, he slipped and fell against the whirring blade, which tore through his upper body at the shoulder, creating a hole so large that his internal organs were exposed—one witness claimed he could see the poor man’s beating heart—and leaving his arm attached by just a few strands of glistening sinew. The millworkers bound the injuries as best they could and carried Lindbergh home, where he lay in silent agony for three days awaiting the arrival of a doctor from St. Cloud, forty miles away. When the doctor at last reached him, he took off the arm and sewed up the gaping cavity. It was said that Lindbergh made almost no sound. Remarkably, August Lindbergh recovered and lived another thirty years. Stoicism became the Lindbergh family’s most cultivated trait.

Lindbergh’s father, who had arrived in America as a Swedish-speaking toddler named Karl August Månsson, grew up into a strapping but cheerless young man named Charles August Lindbergh. Friends and colleagues called him C.A. As a youth, C.A. became adroit at trapping muskrats, whose pelts furriers made into jackets and stoles that they marketed under the more appealing name of “Hudson seal.” C.A. made enough from the trade to put himself through the University of Michigan law school. Upon qualifying, he opened a law office in Little Falls, Minnesota, married, produced three daughters, and prospered sufficiently to build a large wooden house on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River about a mile and a half outside town. All was eminently well with his life until the spring of 1898, when his wife died suddenly from surgery to remove an abdominal growth.

Three years later, C.A. married again—this time a pretty, rather intense young chemistry teacher from Detroit who had recently taken a position at Little Falls High School. Evangeline Lodge Land was unusually
well educated for a woman, for the time, and for Little Falls. She, too, had graduated from Michigan but was even more academic than her husband and would later do graduate work at Columbia. Beyond physical attraction—they were both extremely good-looking—the new Mr. and Mrs. Lindbergh had little in common. C. A. Lindbergh was handsome but severe and measured; his wife was brittle and demanding. On February 4, 1902, they produced another C. A. Lindbergh—this one named Charles Augustus, with an extra, more classically refined syllable on the second name.