Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,62

the certificate, and no one will ever get that away from you,” he told her), she tolerated his infidelities. But she was conventional enough to fret about social standing, and she could be snobbish and catty; she liked nice things, and prized the wealthy and prominent company he kept.

Darrow’s brothers and sisters, who had maintained a warm relationship with Jessie and Paul, tried to make Ruby feel welcome. They were open-minded; the aged Amirus had taken a far younger second wife as well. But Paul did not warm to Ruby, and she thought he was spoiled and stubborn and manipulative when exploiting his father’s guilt over the divorce. Paul “appropriated every dollar available that his father permitted him to help himself to,” she griped. Ruby was jealous, as well, of the hooks that Jessie still had in Darrow. She sulked after learning that Jessie left the marriage with real estate and a lovely set of diamonds and told Darrow’s sisters that Jessie’s controlling nature was the cause of the breakup.

Nor did Jessie much like Ruby, whom she instantly identified as a threat to her financial well-being. Darrow was still supporting Jessie with monthly payments, and would until she remarried, late in life. From Europe he wrote to assure her that there was enough money for them all, and that the stipends would continue. “I shall live where I did before or in some cheap house nearby and shall not spend money or be extravagant in any way,” he promised Jessie. “So long as I live you will both come first.” Ruby accepted this, Darrow promised Jessie. It was a dubious claim. The cost of maintaining a wife and an ex-wife is a reason why, though Darrow earned high fees, he was generally on edge about money. He took to speculating in the stock market, and in banks and gold mines and other ventures, but had no gift for it.

Darrow’s efforts did not dispel the tension. After he returned from Europe, Darrow invited Paul to come to Washington to see him argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, but his son rebuffed him, just as he turned down his father’s invitations to spend evenings together or to join him at the law firm. Their relationship, which had improved, took a step backward.

“I have always cared for him more than anything on Earth … I have tried to live an unselfish life … tried to consider others and do all in my power for their happiness,” Darrow wrote Jessie. But his self-pity flared to anger. “Paul is too young to judge me,” he wrote. “And neither to him nor anyone else shall I make any effort to be judged or understood. I shall go on with what is left of my life and try to live it as honestly and courageously as I can and pay no attention to the rewards or punishment which the world always gives without any regard to merit.”

It wasn’t the happiest time. Darrow’s nephew Karl recalled the family’s feverish maneuvering to keep Jessie, Paul, and Ruby from confronting one another at family gatherings. Gradually, Darrow drifted from his brothers and sisters.2

THEY HAD PLANNED to return to the Langdon, but Ruby did not want to start a new life in his old bachelor haunts. “When we came home … I felt I never before had seen a pigpen inhabited by humans. They all in the Langdon had used Darrow’s place for a loafing place, burned all his wood [and] mopped up the ashes with beautiful velvet pillows I’d made and sent him one Christmas,” she told one of his sisters. “The janitor’s wife was supposed to keep the place in order, but whisked in and out very briefly, just enough to collect what was paid her.”

Nor were the girls from the Langdon gracious. “One of our first callers was Gertrude Barnum, hysterically and shamelessly demanding to know how Darrow had dared to marry after promising her and all the others that he never would, and on several later occasions she came in tantrums and tears to attack us both for having betrayed them all,” Ruby said. It was a rude hello to “the unwelcome stranger-bride,” as she called herself, and she let Darrow know about it. The Darrows moved to a new apartment, on Sheridan Road, “more suitable and roomy and less imbedded in the soot of the West Side,” she recalled.

The intensity of her new life left her breathless. “It was like wonderland,” Ruby said. “I