A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

Ruth was at first described as a “headturner,” “a wowzer,” “a beautiful blonde, five feet seven inches tall” with “China blue eyes crackling sparks.” But almost immediately women loathed her and soon she’d even lost some attractiveness to men, becoming for journalists just “the faithless wife,” “the blonde fiend,” “the Viking vampire,” and “the spider woman,” or, in more highbrow publications, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Mata Hari,” and “the quintessential femme fatale.” She was felt to have an air of “burning ice,” “iron unconcern,” and an arrogance that was masquerading as injured dignity. Damon Runyon, who covered the trial for the William Randolph Hearst paper American, called Ruth “a chilly looking blonde with frosty eyes and one of those marble, you-bet-you-will chins.” One paper even preposterously stated that she was reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, “the philosophers blamed for so many student suicides.”

Even after the damning interview was published, Judd defended Ruth, saying, “She is a pure woman, a perfect woman, and I won’t say anything against her. She is a woman any man would like.” Evidence of that came when Judd’s attorneys found no less than fifteen mooning men, generally policemen or Coney Island “beach sheiks,” who’d been in the gay and gorgeous Tommy’s thrall, if not her arms.

Because most of those paramours were married, they never visited her in jail, and because Lorraine was underage, Ruth celebrated her thirty-second birthday on Sunday, March 27th, with just Josephine and her lawyers. Mrs. Brown had baked a twelve-egg, “heavenly angel food” cake that the jailers had ravaged with a pencil to ensure no tools of escape were concealed inside it. But even the butchery of a dessert delighted Ruth. She beamed and bounced on the jail cot like a child before shutting her eyes to blow out the flames on imaginary candles. Edgar Hazelton smiled and asked what she’d wished for, and Ruth said, “Liberty and justice for all.”

Dana Wallace teetered as he squeezed up a ball of cake and filled his mouth and fell down in a hard-backed jail chair, intoxicated and tired.

Like a good hostess, like Emily Post, Ruth told Hazelton and Josephine, “Oh please, everybody. Eat up. Eat and be merry.”

After coolly wishing May a happy birthday, Josephine felt permitted to scoop up a handful of cake, for there were no forks, then sucked the goo from her fingers. Hazelton slouched against the jail bars with folded arms and an ankle crossed, kindly evaluating his client.

She told him, “Al and I were going to have the grandest birthday party last night. Loads of company. Liquor already bought. Al was selecting his favorite music for the Victrola, but I insisted on some more popu—”

“Mrs. Snyder, please,” Hazelton said. “I’m not the jury.”

She stared at him with concerned innocence and for some reason she recalled heat misting the bathroom mirror as she lifted a tiny Lorraine from the sink, and carrying the towel-swaddled infant, fresh from the bath and fragrant, her small head bobbing against Ruth’s brassiere and then finding a tiny thumb. And Hazelton was looking at her as she told him how she’d linger by Lorraine’s bed and love her child as she slept. Tears rose in Ruth’s eyes in a slow, tidal way, and then her face reefed and she folded over toward her gray-smocked knees and rocked as she cried, “Oh, why isn’t my baby here? Don’t they know how much I need her? Don’t they see what I’ve done for her? She’s my oxygen!”

Mrs. Brown softly patted her daughter’s back in a there-there gesture but contradictory emotions would not let her speak.

Ruth bolted upright on her cot and fiercely shouted at Hazelton, “Cruel and unusual punishment, denying me Lorraine! You tell them! Cruel and unusual! I’m her mother!”

Hazelton tugged up Dana Wallace’s left elbow and Wallace’s head jerked from his doze.

She screamed, “Are you listening to me?”

Hazelton ignored her as he helped Wallace struggle up from his chair. “Well, we’ll be going now. We just wanted to wish you the very best on your birthday.”

“Are you representing Judd Gray?” she demanded.

“Emphatically no.”

“You do as I say then.”

And Hazelton smiled as he repeated, “Emphatically, no.”

She wrote a poem:

Just a thought of cheerful things,

Things I used to know.

Joys that loving—mothering brings,

Watching Lorraine grow.

Years, Oh, ages—long ago

Happiness was mine.

Oh, I loved my family so,

Now all I do is pine.

With Mrs. Isabel Gray, Mrs. Kallenbach, and Jane all hiding out in Norwalk, Connecticut, the newspapers again sought out Judd’s mother, Mrs. Margaret Gray, as the not-Ruth of the day. She was sixty but seemed much older, a frail, white-haired, cultivated, sorrowful woman whose selflessness, loyalty, and piety were treated as an instructive contrast to Mrs. Snyder.

Mrs. Gray invited a freight truck full of reporters out to Judd’s sister’s house in West Orange and gave them coffee and still-warm macaroons from the oven as she talked about how Buddy loved reading as a boy and was an excellent student and athlete who would have gone on to college and medical school were it not for the pneumonia he caught in high school. She petted her white Pomeranian Nicky in her lap as she spoke, also, of the jobs Bud had held, the good deeds he’d done, that “he was not what I would call a drinker.” “Bud’s home life was ideal,” she said. “Isabel and he never quarreled. They had a fifty-fifty arrangement in which they were both equal in their home.”

She was asked if she still loved her son and she said, “The Judd Gray of today is a boy I don’t understand. But one I must help. He must be brought back. I am trying to reach through this strange personality and …” Quavering, her