Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,223

caught the knack of care-taker and general proxy for many a step and stretch and strain that saves taxing his none-too-fit heart—alas.”

Ruby “watches over Clarence, day and night, like a baby, and Clarence delights in it,” the critic George Nathan wrote. “She answers all his telephone calls, makes or breaks all his appointments, writes and answers three-fourths of his letters, lifts him out of taxicabs (when the occasion demands), tells him when his socks are falling down, pours his and his friends’ drinks for him, answers any possibly embarrassing questions that interviewers may put to him, tells him what he should eat and if it tastes good to him.…

“Without Ruby, he would be completely lost—and he knows it,” Nathan wrote. “She tells him several times a day that he is the greatest and finest and most adorable man she has ever known and that she loves him to death.”

Hoover whipped Smith in the November election, which Darrow blamed, in part, on women voters who had gone against the “wet” candidate. “To any woman he is the best, the most helpful, the most understanding friend. But the collective woman! Here he lets emotion color his views,” said Mary, after listening to one of Darrow’s tirades. “Against the collective woman he rages as he would like to against the little piss ant wife whose pettiness and jealousies have galled him.”

Yet when feminist Margaret Sanger was persecuted for her advocacy of sex education and birth control, Darrow spoke at a rally on her behalf in Boston in 1929. She arrived with a gag around her mouth and Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger read her speech. The next day Darrow was in court, as a witness, speaking in defense of Theodore Dreiser, who had been charged with violating obscenity laws when writing An American Tragedy. The jury found Dreiser guilty.

“The powers of reaction and despotism never sleep,” Darrow told Roger Baldwin. “We have to be very watchful.”14

IN JUNE 1929 the Darrows were off to Europe once again. They went to Paris and to Germany, where Darrow was examined by heart specialists. They took a motor tour of Wales and Scotland and the English countryside. From Montreux, in Switzerland, Darrow wrote his grandchildren in the nonsense style he liked to use.

“Eye have bin thinking how lucky it waz that Eye got U to kum to Chicago so I woodent be so far away from U when U kum. Eye dident think about kumming to Europe but now I am 4 thosand miles aweigh but if U haddent kame to Chicago eye would now bee 5 thousand miles awa and what wood we have dun then. You kan sea yourself.” He signed it “Ur Grand Dad.”

Darrow seemed set in retirement. His investment in the Colorado gas company, with Paul’s sweat equity, left them with small fortunes when they sold the business in 1928. Paul moved back to Chicago. Darrow loaned $8,000 to Mary and Lem (without telling Ruby); helped fund treatments for two friends suffering from cancer; and wrote to the ACLU and the NAACP to announce that he was adding them as beneficiaries in his will. “Do you need any money?” he asked W. C. Curtis, after hearing the news that the zoologist’s son had contracted polio.

Darrow had always liked to speculate—railroads, copper companies, banks, gold mines, and Latin American stocks were among his favorites—even though he often took big losses. “Here is the kind of damn fool I have been,” he had written Paul after a previous catastrophe. He had invested $10,000 on a tip “from a friend of mine who knows,” who “had word direct from Guggenheim who is a relative about the supposed copper merger.” The copper stocks “went up a minute, then went down fast” and Darrow was stuck scurrying for cash to cover margin calls.

“We are not very good speculators, and had better go slow in the stock business,” Darrow told Paul. Now “I am going to quit forever,” he vowed. “I think we both should and this time I will stay sworn off.”

Of course, he did not. But he was wise enough in the bull market of 1929 to see what was going to happen. “Things can’t keep going up forever,” he warned Paul in August. “I don’t like the look of things. All stocks are far too high,” he told his son in September, and “if there are big drops you might get caught very badly.” In early October he wrote Paul again: “Everybody is crazy and most of