Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,61

“I told them that ordinarily I would charge $100 a day but that I would take their case and when I got through they could pay me what they liked, or nothing at all. I got them a raise of $8 million and $3 million in back pay and I sent them a bill for $10,000 … I would have sent a corporation a bill for $50,000 for the same work.”

Harrison won a fourth term. The Democrats kept control of City Hall. The results were tight enough that Darrow’s decisions not to run and to endorse the mayor almost certainly made the difference. But Darrow’s radical friends felt betrayed, and the episode stoked his reputation for guile and trickery.18

Chapter 7

RUBY, ED, AND CITIZEN HEARST

Ruby and me, we both love Darrow.

In July 1903, Darrow married Ruby Hamerstrom. For years he had vowed that no new wife would claim his freedom, and so his friends were stunned by the news. A private ceremony was performed by Judge Edward Dunne, attended only by Ruby’s brother Fred and Darrow’s law partner and roommate, Francis Wilson, who had been charged with quietly securing the marriage license, slipping through the doors of the bureau just before they shut for the day. There were champagne toasts and then Darrow and Ruby, evading the press, took a train to Montreal, where they boarded the steamship Bavarian for Europe. Darrow spent much of the voyage seasick in his berth, as Ruby read to him from a history of France. She had dreams of a six-month, or longer, trip around the world. But Darrow’s investments were faring poorly, and they returned to Chicago in mid-October.

Ruby was “incurably in love,” she confessed. “He seemed to be all sorts and all ages, from the boy that he never outgrew to the old man that he never became.” And he was smitten. She was not a striking beauty, but pretty and fashionable. She qualified as a new woman but not so militant and, once married, content to be, as she described herself, “the weed in the knot of the tail of The Kite.” She wrote for the women’s sections, not the front page, and of trends and fashions, not politics or crime. “You can’t really expect good Irish wit from a Swede … that wears French heels, I s’pose,” she told Darrow’s sister Jennie.1

Yet Ruby had wit enough to land him. “He said … that I was the only girl he ever liked that much who didn’t take the courting out of his hands,” she said proudly. In Darrow’s divorce, he had to “relinquish his every last dollar’s worth of property for his release,” Ruby noted, but she promised she would never ask for alimony.

At eighteen, Ruby had rebelled against the dour strictures of her Lutheran home, where she had been expected to help her mother raise her six siblings. She fled from Galesburg to Chicago and the life of a newspaperwoman. Ruby had not finished high school but got work as a bookkeeper, looked for freelance assignments, and discovered a demand for stories about the doings of middle-class women—their clubs and trips and causes. She and Darrow had decided to marry in 1902, and she hoped to buy a nice house, with elm trees and a lawn.

“Just a word tonight, instead of a Christmas present, to tell you that I think you are the dearest, sweetest girl on earth,” Darrow wrote her on Christmas Eve. “I love you with my whole heart and want you all to myself and I hope that this is the last Christmas so long as I live that I can not have you as I want you—all for my own.”

“Goodnight dearest sweetheart,” he signed the note. “Remember that you are always loved by your crazy old Clarence Darrow.”

Ruby was not ruled by social conventions. She accepted Darrow’s Negro friends. She liked to have a drink or two at parties or a restaurant. As women gave up their corseted, floor-sweeping gowns for more liberating fashions, Ruby was an early enthusiast. And she had a modern view of marriage. “My informant … told me that in addition to Darrow being a Socialist, both he and his wife are free lovers,” wrote a Pinkerton detective, spying on the couple. “The wife made the statement this evening that a man had a right to desert his wife and family if he felt like it.” As long as no rival made a serious claim on Ruby’s place in Darrow’s life (“You’ve got