theatre

Award-winning journalist

and author Douglas Perry

A slide talk based on his 2010 book, The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers who Inspired Chicago

The Girls of Murder City is “savvy, flamboyant social history.” ~ Publisher’s Weekly

May 28, 2011
Saturday @ 3:00 p.m.

Free
The event concludes with refreshments and a book signing of The Girls of Murder City organized by Eagle Harbor Book Co.

Sponsors
This event is funded, in part, by Humanities Washington

View/print the POSTER!

Journalist and author Douglas Perry will present a slide talk based on his 2010 book, The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers who Inspired Chicago on May 28 at BPA. The presentation will explore the real-life personalities and social history behind the award-winning musical, CHICAGO, which plays at Bainbridge Performing Arts from May 13 to May 29.

Chicago was first a Broadway play, then a 1927 movie, then a 1975 musical by John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse, and finally, in 2002, an Oscar-winning movie-musical. It all began with Maurine Watkins, a demure young woman from a small Indiana town who, in 1924, managed to talk her way into a job as police reporter at the Chicago Tribune.

The Girls of Murder City is ostensibly about accused murderesses Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, who provided the raw material for the characters Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly, and the reporter who was inspired by them. In actuality, the book captures a glittering moment in 1924 Chicago when six women’s life hung in the balance as they awaited trail in the Cook County Jail, while Chicago newspapers, staffed for the first time with ambitious, modern, female reporters, competed fiercely for stories.

Although the evidence against them was overwhelming, both Annan and Gaertner were acquitted, largely because juries in Chicago at that time were made up only of men who considered pretty women incapable of murder. Watkins learned to be a hardboiled newspaper reporter and then returned to Yale Drama School to write the play that became Chicago.

The May 28 presentation will be a chance to explore not only the history of the musical, but also the social history behind the story. Beulah Annan, for example, took a short-cut out of an extramarital affair: She gunned down her lover—and convinced her husband to pay for her defense. In prison, she joined Murderesses' Row, a veritable chorus line of women accused of knocking off their men for one flimsy reason or another. Their crimes were viewed as symptoms of a troubled era. Prohibition was backfiring spectacularly. Everyone, women included, seemed to be drinking, and everyone, women included, seemed to be packing guns.

Another aspect of the story is the emergence of the celebrity culture (still alive and well today) in those early days of the mass media. Watkins endeavored to expose, in her satirical play, how that culture had corrupted both the newspaper business and the legal system. Finally,The Girls of Murder City provides a fascinating glimpse of the history of journalism as it recreates the newsroom of the day. In Chicago, six papers engaged in vicious competition. At the center of the fray were the headline-grabbing stories that are vividly retold inThe Girls of Murder City.

In addition toThe Girls of Murder City, Doug Perry is the co-author ofThe Sixteenth Minute: Life in the Aftermath of Fame, and an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the New Orleans Times-Picayune,The Oregonian, Details, and many other publications.