Doug Cartland's Four-Minute Leadership Advisory
Doug Cartland, Inc.03/06/2012

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Snug in the depths of prohibition during 1920s Chicago, a new dynamic emerged in America...

 

People are people. All through history there have been those driven by notoriety. But in the 1920s, the growth of the media stoked the flame to a fever pitch. Moving pictures were rolling, radio was in its infancy and newspaper circulation was higher and more efficient than ever before. Big cities were bustling, populations were growing and some couldn't stand being suffocated by the din. Besides, American capitalism was all about the little man having a chance; notoriety didn't have to be for the upper crust alone anymore.

 

So came the obsession for fame.

 

Nowhere was this experienced more acutely than in the city of Chicago, where a series of murders caught the imagination of most everyone. These murders were different because they were carried out by women. And they were sordid because it was women killing their lovers or husbands. Oh...and one more thing...the women were beautiful.

 

These were the murders that inspired the Broadway musical and the Oscar winning movie, Chicago. The trials became a national sensation, the women became instant celebrities and they bathed in the publicity.

 

Maurine Watkins was a Chicago Tribune reporter who covered the trials and ultimately penned the original Broadway play. In the play, she put these words in the mouth of a reporter as he worships at the feet of accused murderer Roxie Hart on the eve of her arraignment:

 

"Who knows you now? Nobody. But this time tomorrow your face will be known from coast to coast. Who cares today whether you live or die? But tomorrow they'll be crazy to know your breakfast food and how did yuh rest last night. They'll fight to see you, come by the hundreds just for a glimpse of your house. Remember Wanda Stopa? Well we had twenty thousand for her funeral."

 

(Wanda Stopa was a real-life accused murderer in Chicago, and she indeed had twenty-thousand people overrun her funeral.)

 

According to Douglas Perry's book The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust and the Beautiful Killers who Inspired Chicago, the character of Roxie Hart was inspired by 27-year old beauty Beulah Annan, a married woman charged with killing her boyfriend in Chicago in 1924.

 

So let's paint the picture: An unknown kills a man. She's stunningly beautiful, charming and seductive. She winks for the cameras, does her makeup just right, wears clothes that show off her best parts. Her fame skyrockets. The nation falls in love with her. She speaks to every reporter. She poses for every picture. For months she's on everyone's tongues, on top of the world.

 

And the all male jury pronounces her not guilty. And then this...

 

"[Beulah's] popularity with the press," writes Perry, "collapsed almost as soon as she left the Cook County jail..."

 

Whoa now! The trial is over. She takes pictures with the jury that acquitted her. She steps out of the jail a free woman...and they are all gone. No one is interested anymore.

 

She stepped from a party that lasted for almost a year, in which she was the centerist of the center of attention...and with her next step...into a big vast nothingness.

 

Who said fame is fleeting?

 

Stunned, Beulah retreated from a spotlight that was no longer shining. She moved to Indiana and married a 26-year old boxer. Four months later they were divorced. There were reports he beat her. She moved back to Chicago to live in a small apartment with her mother.

 

Beulah was dead three years later, consumed by tuberculosis. "She wasn't very beautiful," Perry quotes a friend of hers who saw her in her final days. "She was thin and faded. All she seemed to care about besides her mother were her canaries and cat."

 

Chicago didn't notice. It was one week later that a short blurb was written in the Tribune about her passing.

 

I'll end my short little note to you this week, my friends, with a quote from Mr. Rogers. Yes...that Mr. Rogers:

 

"All through history the sages have said the same thing," he said. "You don't set out to be famous-you set out to be helpful. If fame comes along with that, then fine."  

I'd love to hear from you. Reply to this email and let me know your thoughts. 

 

Doug

 

Doug Cartland, President
Doug Cartland, Inc.

 

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