By Mel Freilicher
Father Does Know Best: The Lauren Chapin Story by Lauren Chapin with Andrew Collins on Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989
Queen of the Underworld by Sophie Lyons on Combustion Books, 2013, originally published as Why Crime Does Not Pay, by J.S. Ogilvie Publishing Co., 1913
1.
Does. Does Not. Far from simple are the ironies inherent in the titles, as well as, of course, in these stunning, rather sensationalistic (and in Lauren’s case, horrific) first-hand accounts. The real (offstage) father of Lauren Chapin, the youngest daughter, Kathy (“Kitten”) in the ‘50s hit TV series, Father Knows Best, molested her from ages 4 to 10--later too, when he could get his mitts on her. After he left the house, “Uncle Mac,” a married friend of the mother’s, took over dad’s abusive role. Nor does the Father in her title refer to Robert Young, who Lauren never felt close to, though she admired, “almost idolized” him.
Young abandoned the show abruptly at the height of its success, depressed and bored with his Wise Old Dad role. Till then Lauren’s education was at the studio’s irregular, haphazard “school” for child actors (some studios set up tents on their lots). Afterwards, at other schools, she was unable to catch up to her grade, and acquired few marketable skills. “I was a has-been at age 13,” Lauren writes.
Before she reached 22, Lauren was addicted to meth then heroin, had attempted suicide several times (first, at age 10), suffered eight miscarriages, and two doomed marriages. Living on the streets for a while, she became a prostitute, was in and out of jail and rehab, had disastrous relationships with several brutal pimps/addicts. Fortunately for her, Lauren finally found God—that Father. After years of hell, she was able to become a happily married mother of two, and spokesperson, lecturing about child abuse and drug addiction.
Thankfully, for this reader, her rebirth experience is not dwelled on. (Reminding me of Mike Gold’s novel, Jews Without Money, which ends with the protagonist hearing a Communist street orator, marking his conversion to the CP. But the novel almost entirely concerns immigrants’ difficult lives on New York’s lower east side in the 1920s.) Lauren does describe the benefits of AA and NA meetings she attended in prison. Additionally, a Catholic priest, Brother Stanley, was instrumental in Lauren’s sobriety and religious awakening, faithfully befriending her for several years, both in and out of lock up.
Impossible, at least I hope so, to wax ironic about such pain these autobiographies vividly describe--particularly when inflicted by family members. However, it is all too easy, and sometimes counter-productive—i.e. masturbatory—to calculate multiple ironies regarding human nature and the societal dysfunction engendering such calamitous lives.
Sophie Lyons, one of the most famous and successful female thieves and con artists in the Gilded Age, was on the streets of New York as a thief and pickpocket by age 6. Never having gone to school, Sophie only learned to read and write when she was 24. Trained by a criminal stepmother (her unknowing father was in the Union army) mostly to put her hands into men’s and women’s pockets, she also learned how to cut a hole in the bags carried by women, and insert her fingers to remove their valuables.
“Hardly a day would pass when I did not steal a considerable amount of money,” she writes in her memoir, “and on many days I would take home more than a hundred dollars.” Nevertheless, her stepmother or brother would often “catch me up and give me a good many hard knocks for neglecting my duty—and the only duty I knew in those days was to steal, and never stop stealing.” As a youngster, jail was a treat: Sophie was fed well, often given candy, and allowed to play freely.
Sometimes escaping, sometimes jumping bail, the adult Sophie was in and out of a variety of jails. During one stint—her lengthiest stretch was 3-years—her two children were taken away from her: the boy sent to the poorhouse, the little girl to an orphanage. But with much maneuvering and threatening, Sophie managed to get them back: subsequently sending them to expensive boarding schools (which expelled her son when the media heralded Sophie’s exploits).
Once, she and her alcoholic husband, Ned Lyons, “a member of the boldest and busiest group of bank robbers in the world,” were in Sing Sing simultaneously, each serving a 5-year sentence. (Sophie had been sent there 3 times before the age of 20.) After he broke himself out of the prison, Ned managed to spring Sophie, too. Clearly in love with Ned--“in time of trouble, he was a tower of strength”--she also describes him as a “desperate scoundrel…constantly in difficulties.”
In a street fight, the notorious burglar, Jimmy Haggerty (who was afterwards killed by “Reddy the Blacksmith” in a saloon fight), managed to bite off “the greater portion of my husband’s ear…a great misfortune to him,” Sophie adds, “as it served as means of identification ever after.” Additionally, during an attempted jewelry store robbery, the police shot Ned, putting one bullet through his body, and embedding another in his neck.
In a number of significant ways, though, crime did pay for Sophie—and paid big. Retiring with a fortune in 1913 when she wrote her memoir at age 50, thanks to careful investment of her loot from swindles, shoplifting, and bank robbery, Sophie’s real estate empire included some 40 houses. Using her wealth to aid many criminals and their families, she offered free rent during times of incarceration.
The reprint’s new Introduction also comments on how notoriety brought an odd utilitarian fame: already intimate with most of the major big-time criminals, Sophie became the country’s first society gossip columnist, for the New York World.
Many fascinating tales here. In a chapter entitled, “Women Criminals of Extraordinary Ability with Whom I Was in Partnership,” Sophie writes about becoming a bank president, on the suggestion of Carrie Morse: exquisitely dressed, coifed, poised, and bejeweled, Carrie “would have passed anywhere without the slightest question for the beautiful and cultured wife of some millionaire.” Establishing sumptuous offices, Carrie started a bank for women only, also offering investment advice. Needless to say, with no capital on hand.
When the bank went bust, Carrie disappeared completely without warning Sophie. Of this first experience with “clever women swindlers,” Sophie writes, “I was surprised to learn, to my sorrow, that the standards of the underworld do not hold good among most women criminals.” She resolved to have nothing further to do with criminals of her own sex, until meeting Helen Gardner: the bogus Lady Temple, impersonating the wealthy widow of a recently deceased, prominent physician. Advertising the sale of his practice, she swindled many doctors.
Sophie was with Gardner when she “leisurely selected a necklace, two rings, and a locket—worth in all more than $5000,” on credit. “’Doubtless you knew my dear husband, the late Sir Edward’—her voice caught as it always did when she spoke his name—‘he had an account here for years.’” The end came with a store manager who knew the real Lady Temple was in Egypt. Helen Gardner also escaped without notifying Sophie. Convicted of thievery in France two or three years later, after prison, Gardner “settled down to an honest career and later became the wife of a prosperous merchant.”
Lauren Chapin’s stories are way less amusing, and way more heartbreaking. Her classic stage mother was a lifelong alcoholic, like her own father, and eventually committed suicide. (Mom had gone to Hollywood High; as the daughter of a schoolteacher, she’d always envied her rich classmates.) Unable, in a desperate attempt at upward mobility, to show her daughter the slightest affection, she kept all the actress’s earnings, leaving Lauren to pilfer spending money from her classmates.
Spoiling her middle son, Billy (who also turned to drugs later on) became the mother’s Enforcer: basically beating up his younger sister on request—or sometimes, just for his own kicks (literally), especially in the lower stomach. Mom’s only concern was for Billy not to strike Lauren anywhere which would show on camera. At one point, when Lauren was in severe pain, her mother accused her of being pregnant. Calling her gay neighbor, Mike, to take her to the hospital, Lauren’s ovaries were the size of ostrich eggs; the swelling probably the cause of the “first of a host of female problems that would haunt me for the next several years.”
For a time, Billy Chapin was also a very successful child actor in the movies, and the sole financial support of the family. (The mother never held a job; once he left, the father was chiefly absent. Teenage Lauren did go to live with him briefly when she couldn’t bear home life—until dad started molesting her again.) But as TV became so predominant, and Billy’s marketability went downhill, his competitive bullying of Lauren rose sky high.
Most notably, in 1955, Billy Chapin played the boy in Night of the Hunter. A stellar movie, unappreciated at its release, greatly lauded later. Billy and his younger sister (and the doll she totes around, stuffed with money their bank-robbing father had given them right before he was carted off by the sheriff) are being persecuted by a serial killer. Psychotic faux minister, Robert Mitchum, dupes their lonely mother, Shelley Winters, into a sexless marriage. Lillian Gish saves the runaway children; a rifle is sometimes involved. Charles Laughton directed (his only time); the wonderful James Agee wrote the screenplay.
I often assigned sections of Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (with Walker Evans’ arresting photographs) in my writing workshops at UCSD: once, this occasioned a poignant scene. A young woman in the class talked about her grandfather having been the proud art director of The Night of the Hunter. They sat together watching the movie on TV. He was blind. But he lovingly described every single scene to her—how it looked, how it was shot, what ambience was evoked.
With co-writer Andrew Collins, Lauren Chapin graphically details the ups, and mainly downs, of her life, and relationships. Some high points of childhood: Learning her lines came easy, and for six years running Lauren won the Mars Gold Star best actress award for young females. Receiving singing lessons, mime lessons “from no less than Marcel Marceau,” and dancing lessons from Marge and Gower Champion, when Eugene B. Rodney, producer of their show, asked Lauren what she wanted for her 12th birthday, she replied, “to meet Elvis Presley.”
On that day, Lauren was escorted by an older companion onto a set on the Paramount lot, empty except for a beautiful birthday cake and numerous party decorations. Elvis walked in through a side door. The three of them spent the next two hours eating cake, singing songs, telling stories about their work lives. Lauren wrote, “I knew that I had never met a more polite, handsome, and unselfish gentleman. He was unspoiled and kind, and he had made this the most wonderful day of my life.”
Lauren loved her agent, Hazel McMillan. And she had a guardian angel of sorts in her oldest brother, Michael, the only sympathetic family member (“always loving, patient, kind, and gentle”). Unfortunately, he was sent off to military school fairly early on, so the mother needn’t be burdened with taking care of him. The adult Michael was instrumental in finally getting Lauren into a successful drug rehab program, while he and his wife took care of her first child. In later years, she also reconnected to a loving figure, her paternal grandmother.
Working as a stewardess for a year, Lauren was still frequently able to get high. En route to sobriety, her most reinforcing time came while living in a kind of half-way house, and working in a Tarzana hospital, where she began to counsel other addicts (until she came down with viral encephalitis).
About the gruesome tales: Living with a partner/pimp, she writes: “I wondered if I was even a human being; I felt more like an animal…For months my existence went like this. I would turn my tricks, give Eddie the money, get fixed, and get beaten.” Incarcerated at Camarillo State Hospital for a 90 day drug rehab program, after a suicide attempt, Lauren succinctly declares: “I had decided that hell must be a place where you want to die but can’t.”
Another agonizing passage:
Using my one phone call, I contacted Mother and she bailed me out. Then running as soon as she turned her back, I escaped into the world of hard-core heroin addicts. If it was a drug and it could be snorted, swallowed, or shot up, I’d use it. I took so much stuff so fast and so often that I lost three months of my life. They were not even a misty memory: they just weren’t there. I have no idea where I stayed, what I did, who I was with, or if I even ate…One day, stoned out of my mind, I was picked up and again thrown in the county jail.
Once, Lauren was in isolation in prison for 62 days. Released, moving in with “one of my old shooting partners,” she proceeded to lock herself in a closet filled with old clothes. “By this time,” she writes, “I had developed into a complete paranoid schizophrenic.” An internal voice kept repeating the Biblical verse, “If thy hand offend thee, Lord, cut it off.” Grotesquely, Lauren tried to do just that with a cleaver. Crying out, “’If it weren’t for this hand, I wouldn’t have done drugs. This hand made me this way.’”
Following a trail of blood, the police found Lauren wandering the streets. Waking several days later in the hospital, her hand was swollen “to at least three times its normal size. It looked like a part from an elephant.” She was told repeatedly how lucky she was to be alive and to not have lost her hand. At the end of five days, she was able to leave the hospital. With nowhere to go, she called her brother Michael who insisted on checking Lauren into a psychiatric ward.
2.
I’m a bit embarrassed about how engrossing I find Lauren’s gruesome tales. At least there’s a happy ending. Of course, the most blatant irony here practically goes without saying: with six hugely popular seasons, starting in l954, and reruns into the early sixties, Father Knows Best provided the chief normative template of what an American family should aspire to. And Lauren Chapin’s life is the exact opposite of the TV image.
Growing up (born in 1946, the year after Lauren’s birth), I felt the show was compelling—not credible, but the characters were sympathetic and likeable. Often hard to swallow was Dad’s somewhat homespun wisdom—after all, he and Mother did meet in college, and boy was that a time! The siblings were good-hearted; bickering, making mistakes, and typically, helping one another out of jams.
Naturally, these goyim from (presumably Midwest) GoyimLand seemed to have absolutely no relation to my own New York suburban world, or anything I’d ever seen. The father sold insurance! The teenage son loved to tinker with his old jalopy. At least the kids weren’t “cute,” goofy nerds like Beaver; and mom (Jane Wyatt, pretty, but not bougie) vacuumed with a kerchief around her hair, not pearls around her neck like Donna Reed.
In retrospect, I must have been attracted to the son, Bud: handsome, popular in high school, somewhat hunky, yet shy, especially with girls—sweet, not wholesome or preppy as son, David, on Ozzie and Harriet. Or as cocky as Rick Nelson. Joe and I sometimes watch Father Knows Best reruns late Saturday night on a nostalgia TV network: I was surprised at how tight Bud’s tee shirts were, making him look hot but not like a jock.
Although perfectly capable of playing perky and pertinaciously “cute,” Lauren’s strongest roles seem to be ones where she’s crying, and in the greatest anguish: often in the throes of guilt about something selfish she’s done. In one episode, the family is eager to win a vacation to Hawaii via a family photo contest, and Lauren hides the entries of their competitors: a poorer, benign ethnic family (not black; there appear to be none in Springfield.) Of course, Kitten confesses just in the nick of time. That other family wins, but Dad insists someday he’ll make enough money for their own tropical jaunt.
Recently reading about the show, I discovered brother Bud (Billy Gray) had been busted for pot during one season and spent 45 days in jail which essentially ended his acting career. (From 1970 to 1995, Wikipedia informs us, Billy Gray was a class A motorcycle speedway racer and producer.) I came across a funny anecdote about him showing up to the set quite stoned one day. With no speaking lines, he was only supposed to mow the lawn. Unable to accomplish that task, FATHER severely castigated him, driving Bud from the set!
Lauren and Billy Gray often shared the studio’s “doghouse,” since she kept disappearing—“constantly running away from home.” Glad to read about their offstage “comradeship.” About Billy Gray, Lauren writes, “When we were not shooting, it was different. He was my pal. For both of us, the studio was an escape…a place to walk away from an unhappy home life. We were so relaxed together that we couldn’t help but have fun.”
In the show, they were often at each other’s throats, though if “Kitten” had a serious problem, either Billy or Elinor Donahue (“Princess”), the oldest sibling—mature, popular, excelling in school, and as it turns out actually a young matron, pregnant during shooting—came to her rescue, while parents exchanged all-too-self-satisfied smiles.
Although Lauren’s story is particularly grotesque, obviously many childhood TV stars have suffered over the decades: often typecast in their roles, unable to find work once the series ends. From Lauren’s era, the most infamous suicide was Rusty Hamer, the son in ten seasons of the very successful Danny Thomas Show, who shot himself at age 42. Many others had difficulty adjusting to the world outside show business.
A cursory look at some of those stories revealed Tommy Rettig, the non-eponymous star of Lassie, was convicted of growing marijuana on his farm in 1972; then again at age 35, he was arrested for possession of pot and cocaine—the latter charge being dropped. I came across a charming anecdote about Rettig when he was shooting the movie, River of No Return, with the fabulous duo, Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe, in one of her first films. Actually, the anecdote is more about her--insecure Marilyn spent her down time on the set hanging out with Tommy and avoiding the adults.
3.
Combustion Books’s 2013 reprint of Sophie Lyons’ memoir opens with an announcement of their agenda to bring back out-of-print works, with this their first release. Originally published and distributed by William Randolph Hearst, as Crime Does Not Pay, the editors clarify, “It was the style at the time to release these lurid and truthful descriptions of the joys of the criminal life under titles that denounced the crimes.” Sophie does so faithfully in every chapter, even though, the Intro assures us, crime did pay well for The Queen of the Underworld: born a pauper, Sophie retired with a fortune of half a million dollars and extensive real estate holdings.
Sophie’s ersatz morality is particularly comic in the chapter entitled, “How I Escaped from Sing Sing, and Other Daring Escapes from Prison that Profited Us Nothing.” In another section, “Behind the Scenes at a $3,000,000 Burglary—the Robbery of the Manhattan Bank of New York,” for 30 zesty pages, she rhapsodizes about her intimacy with every one of “that remarkable gang of burglars…I knew them, knew their wives, was in partnership with them.” Included are diagrams of the bank vault, and very specific details about the planning and execution of what Sophie proudly calls “the greatest bank robbery in the history of the world.”
I first came across Sophie Lyons’ history in a truly astounding book I was using in research, J. North Conway’s 2014, QUEEN OF THIEVES: The True Story of “Marm” Mandelbaum and Her Gangs of New York. A master fence, Marm was an impoverished German-Jewish immigrant who accumulated more money and power than any woman in the Gilded Age. Intimately connected to Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party’s utterly corrupt machine, Marm invested about $2,500 in tools to carry out the Manhattan Bank robbery. For six years, she ran a school for crime (located quite near a police station). Young boys and girls were taught by professional pickpockets and sneak thieves, with advanced courses in safecracking and burglary.
In a book littered with colorful descriptions of various criminals associated with Marm’s escapades, Conway states Sophie was Marm’s most prominent student. But the protégé’s own memoir downplays that connection (calling Marm a “very wealthy, fat, ugly old woman”). Little about Sophie’s background appears in her own account, but according to Marm’s biographer, young and beautiful Sophie came from an aristocracy of criminals.
Born Sophie Levy in 1848, her father was a notorious burglar, her mother a renowned pickpocket and shoplifter, her grandfather an infamous burglar in England. When waif-like Sophie was 16, both parents were in jail, and Marm took it upon herself to complete Sophie’s education, treating her almost like a daughter.
Once Sophie learned to read and write at age 24, she went on to learn four languages. Hiring tutors to help with art, music, and history, she passed herself off as a cultured lady of exquisite taste and upbringing, assuming the nom de plume of Madame de Varney—until she was caught trying to lift a diamond necklace from a host’s bedroom during a gala party. Before that, engaged in social climbing, she and her husband pulled off a slew of robberies: once managing to steal $500,000 worth of jewelry and cash in one night.
A cursory glance at Wikipedia and other Google entries emphasizes Sophie’s social connections in Europe as instrumental in her becoming a gossip columnist. Even the Vanderbilts, it’s claimed, accepted her as Mary Wilson, daughter of a rich gold prospector. Described as “one of the most sought after criminals in the U.S. and Canada,” Sophie had 6 children and 3 husbands—with differing opinions on some questions of paternity. Apparently trying to shield them from the criminal life, Sophie sent two daughters to school in Germany, and her son, George, to colleges in Canada. Moving to Detroit in 1880 due to its proximity to Canada, Sophie died there in 1924.
Having a sense from my own grandparents’ lives of how hard it was to be a poor immigrant, I personally find Sophie and Marm both quite admirable. Admittedly, their being Jewish is part of it for me, secular though I am. (Marm remained active in the temple when she fled to Canada, ahead of the law.) When first emigrating to the U.S. with an infant daughter who only lived a few years, the Mandelbaums inhabited one room in a tenement with no indoor plumbing, heating or sewage disposal, in the over-crowded pestilent Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) slum.
Health Department records from the period, Conway notes, indicated nearly 75% of children under the age of 2 died each year from rampant strains of tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, chicken pox, poor nutrition, and sanitation. Sixty-five immigrant children died to every 8 non-immigrant children.
Sophie and Marm weren’t murderers, they weren’t dealing drugs. I don’t see their lives making the world a worse place. They were preying on the rich who as a class basically didn’t give a shit about whether they lived or died. Indeed, they triumphed over some of the most lethal obstacles placed in their paths by rapacious capitalism and a complacent and insensate Anglo society.
***
Mel Freilicher retired from some 4 decades of teaching in UCSD's Lit. Dept./ writing program. He was publisher and co-editor of Crawl Out Your Window magazine (1974-89), a journal of the experimental literature and visual arts of the San Diego/Tijuana region. He's been writing for quite some time. He is the author of The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives, Encyclopedia of Rebels, and American Cream, all on San Diego City Works Press.