Free American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century by Howard Blum Page A

budge. And IMP also promised to display her name in theaters. D.W.’s own name was not credited; he would not allow one of his players to gain recognition that was denied to him.
    But the roots of the breakup ran deeper. Mary felt her talents and her celebrity were constrained by D.W. At Biograph, he was the star. Now she could become one.
     
    After Mary left, D.W. went around the studio like a man in mourning. He would need to find another ingenue to replace her for the trip to Los Angeles. In the meantime, he would focus on scenarios that featured older, more mature women. But with Mary’s absence, he began to examine the nature of the attentions he had rained on her. His thoughts remained unarticulated, yet they were a torment. They pounded through his consciousness with the force of a compulsion. Mary, the teenager who looked young enough to be his virginal daughter, was the embodiment of deeper desires. D.W. was drawn to attractive young girls. He needed them in his films, and in his life. The prospect of being in California without Mary left him deadened. His only comfort was the hope that someday she would return to his troupe, and to him.

ELEVEN
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    T HAT FALL DARROW’S life, too, had its secrets. Of course, a woman was involved. He had returned to Chicago with a practical vision of his future and quickly set to work. He ignored the many calls that arrived from all over the country begging him to rush to the defense of one after another victimized populist hero. Instead, he stayed close to home, lending his name to a few local causes but devoting most of his time and practice to well-paid tasks for the Chicago Title and Trust Company. At nights, rather than the swirl of earnest political meetings that had been so much a part of his previous life, he returned home to his wife Ruby. He tried to find comfort in her companionship, familiarity, and stability. In Los Angeles Darrow had come close enough to death to resign himself to its ineluctable pull. When to his great astonishment he was granted a reprieve, he vowed to take advantage of this second chance. He would live a more reasonable and settled existence. Only this too, he came to discover, was a sort of death. He realized this when he fell in love.
     
    Mary Field was a woman of immense vitality and she channeled her intensity and passion into the great causes of her times. She had come to Chicago from her native Detroit because she wanted to help integrate the flood of recently arrived immigrants into the American Experience. She found work and a home at the Maxwell Street Settlement and was drawn into the impoverished lives and socialist politics of the city’s Russian-Jewish immigrants. Their oppression, first by the czars and then by the Chicago police, became hers; and as she absorbed their experiences, she was further radicalized.
    She met Darrow in the spring of 1909 at a rally to protest the extradition to Russia of Christian Rudowitz, a czarist dissident. The crowd was large and dangerous; Rudowitz’s deportation, they knew, would ensure his death. When Darrow spoke, his words offered hope and the possibility of a legal solution. The crowd at once grew silent and attentive. Field, too, was swept up in Darrow’s oration. She was certain of the deep well of his commitment. He was the sort of man it would be an honor to love. Emboldened, she introduced herself to the famous attorney after the rally.
    Darrow shook hands with a short, tiny actually, dark-brown-haired thirty-year-old woman. She had a firm handshake and a steady smile. It was a candid greeting, and Darrow understood its implicit invitation. Did he try to resist? Perhaps. But his life had grown tedious. He suffered from a malaise more painful than the sickness that had previously brought him to despair: death without dying. In time, inevitably, Mary became his lover.
     
    He called her Molly, and she called him Darrow. He was more than twenty years her senior,