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Episode 251: Glenn Stout Brings to Life The Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid: America's First Gangster Couple
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Glenn Stout returns to talk about his thrilling book The Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid: America's First Gangster Couple.
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Transcript
Introduction and Book Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, how's it going CNF-ers? Glad to have the one and only Glenn Stout back to the show to talk about Tiger Girl in The Candy Kid, America's original gangster couple. His true crime, epic from the roaring 20s, a time of deep poverty among towering opulence.
00:00:23
Speaker
so much opulence that should you be on the outside looking in you might choose to make your own luck and grab a piece of the pie for yourself because no Tom or Daisy Buchanan is about to walk through that door and give you a helping hand and if you pulled it off and you look the part and you threw yourself on your own sword for the love of your life then you might just become famous and Richard and Margaret
00:00:53
Speaker
for a brief period of time, for about four or five months, were as famous as any other two people in America at that time. Yeah, this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Let's hit it. So Glenn makes his fifth return to the podcast, I think.
00:01:21
Speaker
I don't have my calculator or whatever it is that you use to count things. It could be number five. It could be six. It's definitely more than four. So that probably puts it at five. I don't know. I didn't do well in
Historical Context and Main Characters
00:01:40
Speaker
math. So Glenn makes his return to the podcast to talk about his hundredth book, Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid.
00:01:46
Speaker
The book takes us to the 1920s, a time when wars were supposed to be a thing of the past, a pandemic wiped across the globe, and veterans coming back from the Great War had little support at home. I'm glad all of those things are a relic of the 20th century. Richard Reese Whittemore and his wife Margaret
00:02:06
Speaker
were working class kids from Baltimore who decided it best to live the life they saw on Instagram, or the equivalent thereof at the time. Richard was in and out of jail, and when he violently broke out of prison, he teamed up with some criminal masterminds to steal valuable jewels.
00:02:25
Speaker
and coordinated attacks in well-tailored suits, mind you, that took all of 20 seconds. Glenn creates these scenes. It's incredible what he was able to create from the material and everything. It's like you're right there, man. They made a lot of money, spent just as much. Richard and Margaret played up their marriage for the press, and what we saw here was a man willing to die for love, and Margaret would be there by his side until the bitter end.
00:02:55
Speaker
Here's some jacket copy, cause it's a bit more eloquent than what I'm saying, right? Set against the backdrop of the excesses of the Roaring Twenties, their story takes us from the jailhouse to the speakeasy, from the cabarets where they celebrated good times, to the gallows where their story finally came to an end, and left Tiger Girl pining for a final kiss. Tiger Girl and the Candy Gate is a tale of rags to riches, tragedy, and infamy.
00:03:23
Speaker
So, I don't know, sounds pretty damn good, right? Stay tuned to the end of the show for my pot and shot and some housekeeping details that you won't want to miss.
Crafting a Realistic Narrative
00:03:35
Speaker
So let's get after it with my good friend Glenn Stout.
00:03:49
Speaker
take us into like how you were able to make it as readable as you as you want. Well you know the challenge I think when you're trying to recreate history is to make the stories seem immediate, seem like they're happening and unfolding right in front of you and that they're doing so in a way that is three-dimensional. That it's not just a brief sketch but that the scene and the action has some depth to it.
00:04:20
Speaker
Um, and the way to do that with a story of this age, and believe me, I worry if you're going to be able to do it with events of today, and I'll talk about that too. But the way to do that with an event that took place, you know, 80, 90, a hundred years ago, uh, in this instance is your only resource material or your main resource material are the newspapers of the time. Now, I was very fortunate in Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid.
00:04:46
Speaker
in that it took place in several urban areas, namely Baltimore, New York, and Buffalo, and that each of these urban areas had multiple daily newspapers. And not just multiple daily newspapers, but multiple daily newspapers that differed in style, that differed in approach. But that also covered things in depth. For example, a
00:05:11
Speaker
What we might look back today is some maybe sort of a run of the mill crime might end up with a story that's eight or 10 inches in the newspaper, which gives a lot of detail. So you might you might use one of those stories, say, for instance, in this book about a jewelry store heist and you might use one story as your main outline that gives the most information. But then you go to the other stories and maybe this other story
00:05:40
Speaker
Instead of just saying they escaped by car says they escaped by Cadillac and they squealed their tires as they left. Another story might have a snippet of dialogue from one of the victims. Another story might be a little more descriptive on one aspect of the robbery than another story is. So what you do is, is you layer those accounts together and you create a
00:06:08
Speaker
fuller portrait, a 3D portrait. I liken it to like a 3D printer. You just keep going around and you add details from one source and details from another source and details from another source. And all of a sudden, instead of just an outline of what took place, you have that three-dimensional picture. And that's how I've learned over the years to build scenes in history. When I first started out doing it, I was doing it mostly with events in sports. I mean,
00:06:36
Speaker
It's really no different describing a jewelry store heist than it is a double play at a critical moment in the World Series of 1918. You're looking at multiple accounts, you're getting every single perspective as possible, and you're knitting those together into a single point of view. And that's what I do throughout this book and throughout a lot of my books that are historical. What I worry today, just before I forget,
00:07:05
Speaker
is that with the paucity of news sources we have today, you're not going to be able to go to six or eight or 10 different accounts of a single event. You might just have one. Now, we have the advantage today. You might have video. You might have some other resources that you wouldn't have had 100 years ago, but you're going to have to build those scenes in a different way because you're not going to have those multiple accounts that appeared in the newspapers. You know, there were six or seven daily newspapers in Buffalo.
00:07:35
Speaker
There were, I don't know, eight or 10 in New York City, particularly if you include Brooklyn. There were, during the time period I was working, there were four in Baltimore. That gives you, particularly during trials, where they're all covering it, you've got 20 sources to pull from. You almost have too much, but maybe one source just has a single telling detail that really brings something to light. It might mention that somebody smirks.
00:08:03
Speaker
Well, all of a sudden, instead of just having somebody sitting static in a chair, you have somebody with exhibiting some personality. You have Richard Whittemore, say, for instance, my protagonist, you know, tapping his feet and smirking, rather than just sitting static while testimony is going on. That's how you build scenes.
00:08:24
Speaker
Yeah and I imagine that these days almost like having the the glut of daily say newspapers back in the day like nowadays I almost feel like people's Twitter threads and Twitter feeds are almost kind of like the multiple sourced ways from different angles if you are to lean on such a
00:08:46
Speaker
on such a thing because you've got reporters on the ground, you know, telling things that as it is in real time. And then if you get a lot of those, you can similarly layer a three day portrait, but it's just like it's just the evolution of where you need to curate the information from. Yeah. If you can tell that those people who are on Twitter are people who are actually there and aren't just aren't just making it up or aping something they got from someplace else and embellishing it a little bit.
00:09:16
Speaker
Um, you know, that's going to be the real challenge. So, uh, um, but you know, Hey, I'm 62 years old, so I won't have to worry about it in 40 years. That'll be somebody else's problem. Right. And so when you're, when you're dealing with those kinds of things and trying to build, build a particular scene or a car chase or a bank heist, and you're getting all this kind of information, how are you going about filing the research so you're able to access it later? I do it in the crudest way possible, quite frankly.
00:09:45
Speaker
I, in this book, for instance, which basically unfolds chronologically, I just ordered my files and I print out those newspaper stories. I don't try to save them and then organize them on my machine. I do it the same way I've been doing it 30 years. I print them out, arrange them chronologically in folders, and I highlight things that I like and I read them over and over and over and over again.
00:10:10
Speaker
so that when I go to write, a lot of it is already in my head, but I can always go back and check and I can see the pull quotes that I really liked or those little factoids I might have circled or I might have highlighted. And I just do it that way. I know there are people that have much more organized methods of doing it. Some of them use different programs, things like that. I don't think one way is better than another way. I'm accustomed to doing it this way.
00:10:39
Speaker
This is the most efficient way for me. If I was to try to do it a different way now, I would spend more time organizing than I would writing. And that would be to the detriment of the project. So, you know, it's one of the things I always tell writers is to find the way that works best for you. And to this point, this way works best for me. So that's the way I do it.
00:11:02
Speaker
Yeah, I just watched a great video. It's a few years old now, but a great video from the great writer, New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright about research and organization. And he frontloads almost most of the work with organizing things on index cards.
00:11:20
Speaker
very analog system, it builds a lot of friction into the process early on, but it makes the writing that much easier. And I think, I'm more in favor of that too, kind of like this analog thing early on, build a lot of repetition and redundancy and friction into the early part of the process. And that way it can really just turn you loose like an unbridled horse when you're ready to write. Yeah, yes and no. I mean, I always find that no matter how much organization I do before I start writing,
00:11:50
Speaker
that I rarely go many sentences before I realize I have to look up something new. All of a sudden, there's an address there, and I'm like, what took place at that address? You can never do all the research before you start writing. That's impossible because you are always going to have questions along the way. And in midstream, you're going to have to go find out the answers to those things. But again, it's whatever works for the individual writer.
00:12:17
Speaker
try to presuppose my system onto somebody else and you know the one thing I can just caution writers is you know if you do find something that works for you don't feel diminished because somebody else does it a different way. You know it's they found their way and as long as the end result is the end result that you want and that readers enjoy and that holds up that's fine you know just use what works
00:12:45
Speaker
And this is the method I started using before there were computers. And I've done a lot of projects. This is essentially my 100th book. And it's foolish for me to kind of try to change that method right now.
00:13:02
Speaker
And I love that 100 books with your name on it in some capacity, writing many of them. What does it mean that you've made it to 100 books, which is just incredible? And the fact that you're largely known as kind of tethered to the sporting world, and this book has
00:13:24
Speaker
It is just a historical, a historical yarn of a particular era that has nothing to do with sports. So what was that like for you to be able to kind of step outside, you know, the the Glenn Staudion purview, if you will? Well, it was it was it was fun to do. It also really wasn't any different from what I've done in a lot of the sports books. It's just, you know, as I said, instead of examining that double play, you're examining a jewel heist. A lot of my sports titles have been historical.
00:13:54
Speaker
So I always have to go into the context of the time and the context of the era. I mean, I was, I think I went back and I figured out this is something like my seventh or eighth book that at least part of it has taken place in the 1920s. And then if I include, you know, features that I did, historical features that I did, there's probably five or six more that also took place in the 1920s.
00:14:23
Speaker
So in all of those, I was playing with context to some degree, because you have to bring your readers into a place and into a time. And the 1920s is just really, really rich. I've also always been interested in it. So I felt like I had a leg up for that. It wasn't like I was going to the 1920s blind. I'd done the Gertrude Eterly book, which also takes place in 1926. And Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid, the bulk of the book takes place in 1926. So I knew the era.
00:14:53
Speaker
I knew the time period. And the methodology is just the same. I've always had an interest in history. I've always had some interest in kind of true crime. So it really wasn't a stretch for me to do this book. I didn't feel. I felt it was just, I'm just turning the focus from like a ballpark to a street scene.
1920s Influence on Glenn's Work
00:15:16
Speaker
It wasn't that much different for me at all.
00:15:19
Speaker
Yeah, and I love that. Well, you know what? Laura Hillenbrand, when she was researching Seabiscuit, she stumbled across this man, Louis Zamperini, and lo, that becomes unbroken. And I love that when you were researching and writing A Young Woman in the Sea, it's Tiger Girl and Candy Kid kept kind of cropping up in your periphery as you were doing that book. And this is some 15 years ago, and it sunk its teeth into you.
00:15:45
Speaker
So I love that as you were doing the one book something else was kind of you know pecking and pecking at you and in so well and and and quite frankly You know when I did the when I discovered the Gertrude Eterly story That's when I was researching a book on the New York Yankees during the 1920s and I see headlines about Gertrude Eterly Why don't I know who this woman is? Same thing happened with this as I'm working on the Eterly book and I was probably working on it in 2006
00:16:14
Speaker
uh... icy headlines that say tiger girl in the candy kid and initially i was just intrigued by the names i mean the very evocative who are these people uh... and i poked around a little and there were just a handful of headlines there were hundreds and hundreds and they were on the front page of the new york times forty times in a one-year period and uh... their stories were published nationwide the wire services pick them up so
00:16:43
Speaker
You could read about them in California papers, in Florida papers, everywhere. You know, and the more I found out about them, the more intrigued I was in the way that their story intersected with sort of the story of an entire era, the story of, you know, post or prohibition era 1920s. But not just that it intersected with that, but it also intersected with it from an interesting perspective. And that was from the perspective of two working class kids.
00:17:13
Speaker
They weren't, you know, Jay Gatsby. They were, you know, or Zelda and F. Scott. They were working class kids who desired the lifestyle that they saw in the movies and the lifestyle that F. Scott Fitzgerald later celebrated.
00:17:31
Speaker
That's what they wanted. They wanted the lifestyle. They wanted the celebrity. They wanted the material goods because they were working class kids for whom all of the benefits of the 1920s were not readily accessible unless you reached out and grabbed them. You know, if you didn't have money already, the 1920s were pretty miserable. How could you get money? You could get money through various means, through prohibition, or you could become a criminal.
00:17:59
Speaker
Otherwise, you were probably closed out. Yeah, you're right that it optimism for a post-war future marked by peace and prosperity rapidly became mired in another miasma, a trench of despair and the widening gap between reality and desire. Right. I mean, you know, Richard and Margaret Whittemore, they were coming out of, you know, their generation had experienced a war, World War One, a pandemic, the Spanish flu.
Exploration of Criminal Motivations
00:18:28
Speaker
And then right after that, there was a quite severe, very brief, lasted about two years, but a really severe depression, which made those who came out of the war unable to find work, and particularly in a place like Baltimore that took a huge hit. So you had Margaret Whittemore, who was already confined by the fact that she was a woman, and Richard Whittemore, who was confined by the fact that he was also an ex-con, a petty theft, a petty thief that had done time. So he found it hard to get a job.
00:18:59
Speaker
And at a certain point he just decided, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to get it another way. And, uh, you know, she was his wife and she kind of agreed and, and they just went for it, uh, without regret. Just simply, you know, we want to have this lifestyle that we see other people having that we have no access to. And we're going to find a way to get it. And that's what they did.
00:19:23
Speaker
I love that at the very end of your author's note, at the very end of the book, you italicize a few central questions that really animated your research and your writing, and they are, who were the tiger girl and the candy kid? What did they do and what happened to them? Why were they forgotten? And what does their story tell us today about both their time and ours? And was that kind of your north star throughout the entire process of researching and writing this book?
00:19:52
Speaker
Sure, because at a certain point, they're criminals, right? Why do they matter? There are a lot of criminals, but why do these criminals matter? And I think these criminals mattered because of the intersections they have with their times and with their era. And then also, there is resonance with this time. As I spoke about them coming out of a war and a pandemic and an economic depression,
00:20:20
Speaker
That's not dissimilar to, you know, kids today who are coming out of a time where, you know, we've been at war one way or another for 20 years. We just had a pandemic with a recession on the tail end of it. And yet we're living in a time of incredible bounty where it looks like all things are available to you. And in the 1920s, you know, America was just becoming electrified and there were movies and there was recorded music all of a sudden and there was lights at night and there were cars and there were
00:20:49
Speaker
telephones you could communicate and all of a sudden this brand new world was there that was tantalizingly close you could see it in the movies you could see it on the street but if you didn't have money you couldn't get it and I knew the challenge in this book was to to find reasons for the reader to care about Margaret and Richard Whittemore because you know let's face it they're they're criminals and Richard in particular is pretty unsavory
00:21:16
Speaker
He kills a number of people. He's sort of a sociopath. He really doesn't care about other people very much except for Margaret, his wife. What's really been surprising to me is the people who have read it so far is the degree to which women and particularly younger women really identify with Margaret and kind of root for her because they realize that she has just really no options.
Margaret Whittemore: Public Perception and Influence
00:21:42
Speaker
And they kind of root for her to get out of it. And sort of in her own way, eventually she does. Whereas Richard isn't quite so fortunate.
00:21:54
Speaker
And to your point about how this story can reflect into the current day, there was a moment where you write whatnot, what editorial this of the day failed to understand, essentially understood, was the tenor of the age and the increasingly addictive pull of stardom in ambition, more powerful than wealth or achievement.
00:22:22
Speaker
And it really struck me as how today's obsession with social media and delusional thinking and this drive to be famous above anything else, really. Right. You know, the 1920s was the beginning of the age of celebrity, where you could be famous just for being famous. It's a time period where, you know, people would would sit on a flagpole for a week because I would get their name in the paper or they do pull some other stunt because we get their name in the paper.
00:22:51
Speaker
And you had celebrities for the first time. Babe Ruth was larger than life. Film stars like Rudolph Valentino were larger than life. And people, you know, were drawn to that. And that became a goal, to be famous, not to be a movie star, not to be a baseball player, but to be famous. And Richard and Margaret, for a brief period of time, for about four or five months,
00:23:19
Speaker
were as famous as any other two people in America at that time. You know, it's the same summer that Gertrude Eterly was trying to swim the English Channel. And Richard and Margaret, a hundred times the coverage that Gertrude Eterly did for swimming the English Channel. They were in the papers every day for five or six months. They did reach in some strange sort of perverted way
00:23:43
Speaker
They did reach that stature that they desired. Everybody knew who they were. Wherever they went, even when Richard was under arrest, hundreds of people showed up at the train station just to get a glimpse of him when he went on trial.
00:23:58
Speaker
The courthouses were packed with hundreds and hundreds of people just to get a glimpse of him. Women were smitten with him. Men were smitten with Tiger Girl. They looked at those two as succeeding in some way, in a way that they couldn't. And they didn't blame them so much for their crimes either. This was an era that celebrated lawlessness.
00:24:24
Speaker
You know, prohibition was taking place. Everybody was breaking the law. Even the cops were breaking the law. Everybody knew they were on the take. Everybody knew the politicians were looking the other way. So committing a crime, so what? Everybody's committing a crime. And that's how the bulk of people looked at Richard and Margaret, Tiger Girl and Candy Kid.
00:24:47
Speaker
And yeah, and speaking of crime, too, the Kramer brothers were, to me, they were just so fascinating. And I imagine for you, it must have been a little frustrating. There wasn't more material on them because they just seem like the pulling all these kind of levers, just these kind of these, you know, were they from Poland, if I'm remembering right? Yeah, they were from Polish Russia, the Kramer brothers. They were two brothers.
00:25:15
Speaker
who had become notorious in Europe because they invented the can opener, which was a method of cracking safes using leverage. So you didn't have to use explosives. And they were really successful. They got caught and they were trying to be sent back to Polish Russia from England and they escaped and made their way to the United States where they proceeded to start cracking safes again and they got caught and they got thrown in prison.
00:25:45
Speaker
And that's where they met Richard Whittemore at the Maryland State Penitentiary. And the Kramer brothers knew that when they got out, they couldn't crack safes the way they'd cracked them before the cops would know who they were. But they looked at Richard Whittemore and they decided that if they paired their brains with his brawn and his kind of brazen guile and his penchant for violence, that maybe they could create another really efficient way
00:26:14
Speaker
of getting jewels and gems from people who had them. And that's what they did. The Cramer's used their planning, their brains, and they paired it with Richard Whittemore's brawn and ability to wield a gun and to crack a whip on a gang. And they created a very, very efficient machine to rob jewelers and jewelry stores that over a one-year period.
00:26:41
Speaker
uh... they stole more than one million dollars worth of precious gems that's worth about fifteen million dollars today and all of their uh... all their crimes were had the same earmarks they were done very efficiently they were planned ahead of time even to the point where they already had the fencing of the goods arranged even before they stole them sometimes they knew what they were going to steal the fence knew what they were going to bring in and it was and the jobs went down in
00:27:11
Speaker
often 15 or 20 seconds and they were in, they were out, they were gone, overwhelming force. And then they would just disappear under assumed names and reap the benefits of crime and live like the other half lived. You know, Margaret and Richard lived in one of the most exclusive residential hotels in New York. They went to the best cab arrays.
00:27:35
Speaker
They spent money like water. Richard had all his suits tailored. Margaret bought the best dresses. They bought cars, paid cash for them, and not just any car, but Cadillacs and Locomobiles and the real luxury automobiles of the day. And they weren't planning for the future. They were just accessing the life that they saw. And they got to know people like Gloria Swanson.
00:28:02
Speaker
and movie stars of the day, politicians of the day, musicians of the day, they were able to infiltrate the height of society.
00:28:13
Speaker
Yeah. They were able to fully live out the, you know, as you're right, the romanticized mythologies of the era and provide an irresistible fantasy, you know, and all of this from someone who more or less kind of, uh, you know, with the swing of a pipe was able to escape from prison and then manifest that fantasy for at least a short period of time. Right. Because, you know, he and the Kramer brothers, they had this plan of what they were going to do when they got out and Richard got out first.
00:28:40
Speaker
on parole and then managed to get himself arrested again and put back in prison before the Cramer's had been paroled. So Richard needed to get out because otherwise he wasn't going to be up for parole for a very, very long time. So he attacked a guard. He was in the prison hospital. He kind of faked an injury so he would get treatment. And they all knew him. He'd been in prison for years and they trusted him. And essentially the guard turned his back
00:29:08
Speaker
Richard brained him with a lead pipe, took his keys, and walked out of prison. Kramer's got out several months later, and then they all hooked up, and they put their big plans in place. But Richard was very cut and dried. He said at the time, or shortly thereafter, that it was either the guard's life or his. And I figure mine is more valuable. Simple as that. And he never came up with any great
00:29:36
Speaker
motivation for what they were doing. Margaret said she got involved because Richard promised her nice things and all these wonderful clothes and she got them. And when they asked Richard why he embarked on this life of crime, he just said, easy money.
00:29:54
Speaker
Like, what are you, stupid? It's easy money. And when they had the money, I mean, they spent it. Richard was, it's documented that he would go to a cabaret and spend two, three, $4,000 in a night, not even think twice about it. And this is in the mid-1920s. That's like going to a nightclub today and spending $100,000.
00:30:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's hard to do a lot of fun, but it's hard to do Yeah, there's that that part where to where he's he's drunk. He wants the wine He's like this isn't why like I give me the best wine you have in New York and this isn't like I have the best wine in my In my hotel room or whatever, you know, he's just flaunting it throwing away. He doesn't even care what happens He's living not even for the next minute. It's the next second right, you know, he's you know, there's there's a
00:30:46
Speaker
A teacher will tell you that young people, the temporal lobe which controls your desires and your needs and your ability to plan, really isn't developed until your mid to late 20s. And if there are two people that exhibit that trait, it's Margaret and Richard Whittemore because they just didn't think ahead at all. That just was not a concern.
00:31:11
Speaker
They thought this could last forever because if you look at it, stealing the amount of money, the amount of gems they stole and the money they took in was more than enough for them to live the rest of their lives very, very comfortably, several times over. And they spent it as fast as it came in. They weren't concerned about tomorrow. It was live for now.
00:31:35
Speaker
Yeah, and then there's the way, especially Margaret was covered in the era, and the way women and young women were covered, it was mainly as avatars of style, if anything. Rarely any depth. There was that sort of misogyny and sexism that went into the reporting of the day.
00:31:56
Speaker
And so maybe you can talk about that and about how, you know, you weren't able to make, you were able to scrape up as much as you could on Margaret, but it was weighed in favor. It was more difficult. Yeah, it was more difficult because given the chauvinism of the age, she just wasn't valued as much by newspaper reporters. So, you know, they didn't give her the amount of coverage really that they gave him. She didn't really give extensive interviews.
00:32:27
Speaker
I mean, profiles weren't done then as they are now, but even those that were done didn't give her a great deal of weight. She's quoted quite extensively. She would go put herself before the press, particularly after her husband had been convicted for murder and was scheduled to be executed, and she was pleading his case in the press.
00:32:50
Speaker
But there was very little focus on her. But I think I was still able to manage to flesh her out and to do that kind of in terms of the era, the context of the era, what women were dealing with, what the flapper lifestyle was about, how women really for the first time there was birth control was available. So they didn't have to get married.
00:33:18
Speaker
Uh, they had the ability to control their own, their own fate, their own future. They could, they could get a job if they wanted to, if they could find one. Um, so, you know, I kind of present Margaret as this, uh, you know, exemplar of a young woman of the 1920s coming, you know, coming from the working class with, with few options and yet looking around and seeing how attractive all those other options that she saw in the movies. And she was a big movie file. She, she watched everything that came out.
00:33:48
Speaker
And, you know, the women they saw in the movies were the women they wanted to be. And so I think that, you know, cumulatively, I think I still end up creating a pretty good portrait of her, even though there's not nearly as much information on her as there was on Richard. But, you know, the two of them reflect the other pretty well also. So you get a lot of her from him.
00:34:16
Speaker
And you get a lot of him from her. And that worked out pretty well, I think. Absolutely. And what I loved, too, was when Richard, when he was extradited back to Maryland and he's been convicted, the death penalty, he's going to hang.
00:34:37
Speaker
But he's able to pen like a 15,000 word essay more or less. And I love that. I love what you're able to cite too here, which echoes a lot of what we've spoken about where he writes, I decided that if society was laying like a snake in the grass for me to become careless so it could strike, I would strike at it the only way I knew how. I decided I was not going to be broke any longer.
00:35:01
Speaker
That's right. That's that's exactly it. And, you know, he had this great this the audacity after he he was convicted and he's, you know, waiting in the gallows that, you know, I'm going to sell my story. Who wants to buy it? You know, and he does. He writes this 15000 word biography of himself that's very accurate in many ways, but also very, very self-serving and, you know, does give some insight into him.
00:35:30
Speaker
He doesn't really apologize. He does kind of blame society for, you know, you made me. And he's got a point. You know, he's someone who, you know, was first incarcerated when he was about 10 years old just for playing hooky. And once you get into that juvenile reform system, you might go in for playing hooky, but you're going to stay there because you're probably going to break a rule while you're in there. And then you're going to have to stay there for breaking that rule.
00:35:59
Speaker
Before you get done with your sentence for that rule, you're probably gonna break another rule and you're gonna stay in even longer. And that's what happened to him. So over time, you go in as somebody who just played hooky and you come out as a total juvenile delinquent criminal. You've picked up all the skills you need to operate in the criminal world. And that's what happened to him. And so when he finally reaches adulthood and is finally out free, what else is he gonna do?
00:36:28
Speaker
You know, what they teach him to do when he was in, uh, in reform school, they taught him to be a blacksmith. Well, there weren't jobs for blacksmiths going into the 1920s, you know, automobiles had come in. You didn't need to make horseshoes anymore. Right. So, you know, he looks around and he sees everybody that's, uh, you know, um, getting rich off prohibition in one way or another, either directly or indirectly. And by making the decision to become a criminal.
00:36:57
Speaker
He's deciding that he's going to skim off the top of prohibition, too, because the money in prohibition led to profligate spending. People bought jewelry, they wore jewelry, they showed off their wealth everywhere. And it was extraordinarily easy to skim off the top of that and rob stores, rob people. It was a cash business then, too.
00:37:26
Speaker
The other thing that's interesting back then is it was really difficult to identify criminals. So it was an easy time to be a criminal. There wasn't the FBI or anything like that. And, you know, fingerprints were just coming into use and false IDs were extraordinarily easy to come by. And so it was incredibly easy to be whoever you wanted to be. I mean, at various times, you know, he always used different aliases. The Kramer brothers used a number of aliases.
00:37:55
Speaker
In fact, we're still not sure really if their last name was Kramer or might've been something else. It was, if you did it well and if you were discreet, you could succeed as a thief and a criminal for a long time. And they did.
00:38:11
Speaker
And I love at the end – well, not that I – it made me think of a woman I used to work with. She was an investigative reporter in Louisiana, and she told me that she was covering someone who was on death row, and she insisted on going to the execution because she really wanted to see it. And she told me – she's like,
00:38:33
Speaker
I shouldn't have done it. I went into it very brazenly, thinking it wouldn't shake me. And she went there and witnessed it. I don't know if it was lethal injection or what, but it definitely shook her to the core. And it made me think of when Gene Fowler, the famous columnist of the Daily News, he didn't want to see Whittemore hang, because it was something he didn't want to see. And it was probably one of the smarter things he could have done. And he left it to somebody, basically a stringer.
00:39:03
Speaker
to write the gory scene, but he stepped out of that for a moment and it really made you sit with this idea of capital punishment in that moment. Well, because it's a pretty, you know, as described, hanging is a pretty gruesome way to die. Yeah. And it's a pretty gruesome way to witness someone dying too. And, you know, you did have some journalists, H.L. Menken of the Baltimore Sun, for instance, who kind of relished watching someone hang because he thought
00:39:31
Speaker
Richard Whittemore and his words was a moron and the world was better off without him. But yeah, you had people like Fowler who'd seen an execution before and he's like, I don't need to see this again. So it was a terrible way to go. In part of the research there, I also found out that at one point, simultaneously when they were hanging people, they were also experimenting in some places with a method of execution that was known as the upright jerker.
00:40:01
Speaker
where instead of hanging someone, you would stand with a noose around your neck and they would drop a counterweight and you would be jerked upward from the ground rather than drop down. And they thought it was more scientific and quicker. They learned very, very quickly that it didn't work very well or when it did work, it sometimes pulled the head off the body of the executed person.
00:40:28
Speaker
So the upright jerker was rarely used after a certain point. Hanging was gruesome enough. Yeah, you were able to find a scene like, it was like an amusement park scene outside the penitentiary where one person is even saying, ice cold pop, good to the last drop, like the candy kid himself. Right, right. Well, because, you know, when Richard was arrested at a certain point, he tells the
Richard Whittemore: The Anti-Hero Archetype
00:40:58
Speaker
police that
00:40:58
Speaker
he'll confess all if they'll just let Tiger Girl go. And that was the real moment where they became elevated, where they really became celebrities because all of a sudden they weren't just two crooks, but he was in some sense this gallant figure, you know, falling on his sword for the love of his bride. And she was, you know, the devoted bride who would sticking by her husband through anything.
00:41:26
Speaker
And that movement on his part, that made them anti-heroes for a generation of young flappers and sheiks, that's what men of the time period were called, who didn't look at them with disdain as these terrible criminals, but they looked at them as these heroes. So when he was on his trials, and then even when he was waiting to be executed,
00:41:51
Speaker
You know, hundreds and thousands of people would show up. They weren't celebrating the fact that he was being hung. They wanted to be there. They were supporters. And even after he was killed, his funeral, which was being held at his brother's in-laws' house,
00:42:10
Speaker
There were about several thousand people on the street outside. They weren't just, you know, gawkers looking at the car crash passing by. They were there because they were generally touched by his death. You know, one of the Baltimore papers said no war hero in Baltimore, you know, ever got a better reception than Richard Whittemore did in death. It's kind of extraordinary. It reminded me a little bit of, you know, the executioner's song, Gary Gilmore, who sort of became
00:42:39
Speaker
an anti-hero or cause celeb while he was demanding to be executed. There's a touch of that in Richard Whittemore. People of the time period, particularly young people, they looked at him in a much different way than the older generation did.
00:42:56
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah, I can almost, you know, as we overlay it over various eras, you can almost picture something similar going on like over, you know, Instagram stories or something where it's just like people are plugging into this thing that is just it's tapping into a level of like human fantasy that here is this guy who's sticking it to society, but also sticking his neck out for the woman he loves. And it's just like, what a story. And you want to you just plug in and live through it.
00:43:26
Speaker
Right. I mean, it's a this is a true crime story, but it's also a romance. And, you know, people responded to it at the time as much as as much to the romance and probably even more than anything else. That's what made Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid stand out. That's what made them stand out to me. You know, there's a lot of interesting crimes that take place in the 1920s. And what was interesting about this is
00:43:54
Speaker
It's really one of the first times that you had a couple involved. And what was also interesting to me was to realize that at the time period, you know, there really weren't any gangster films. This was still the silent era. And most films about crime were told from the perspective of the police. But Richard is the quintessential archetypal gangster.
00:44:19
Speaker
And Margaret is the archetypal gun mole. Well, those two archetypes really didn't exist before them. Um, and when the talkies come in and you know, by then the, the, the roaring twenties are over, the stock market has crashed and a new generation of filmmakers and screenwriters come in and they start telling the stories more from the perspective of the criminal rather than the authorities.
00:44:48
Speaker
And lo and behold, what do they seize on? They seize on this gangster type for which Richard Whittemore is, I think, the exemplar and the gun mole. And I think Margaret performs the same function. There's no film really that's specifically about them. But anytime I watch a gangster film from the 1930s, that's about the 1920s, there are echoes of the story.
00:45:17
Speaker
of Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid throughout. And in fact, many of the journalists who covered his trials later left journalism when the talkies came in, went to Hollywood, became screenwriters, became producers, and they wrote what they knew. And what did they know? They knew this compelling character, the gangster, the tough guy with a heart, the gun mole devoted to her man.
00:45:46
Speaker
And we see that repeated over and over and over in movies all the way up to the present day. And I think in some ways, Richard and Margaret Whittemore were the inspiration for those two kinds of characters.
00:46:02
Speaker
Well, it's a great story, Glenn. I had a ton of fun reading it and I commend you for what you were able to pull off with it. So, as always, thanks for the work and thanks for hopping on the show to talk about it. I appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Brendan. It's always fun to talk a little shop and to talk about Tiger Girl and Candy Kid. It was on the story for more than 15 years.
00:46:29
Speaker
I'm very gratified that it's finally coming to light and I hope people enjoy it. I think I created a readable story, something you can kind of get lost in. You can get lost in another time period, you can get lost in another age, you can get lost in another sensibility. So that's what I set out to accomplish.
00:46:56
Speaker
Would you say that this podcast is a roaring podcast?
00:47:01
Speaker
That's kind of a stupid thing to say. Always a good time when Glenn comes by the show to talk shop, to talk writing, to talk about his work. He always seems to have a book coming out every two to three years. It makes me want to step my game up. That's for damn sure. If you like the Bob Bachelors, the Bourbon King, Paul Willets, King Khan, Stephanie Gorton, Citizen Reporter, any of the myriad people who have been on the show and do these re-creative
00:47:31
Speaker
a recreation of a historical narrative non-fiction. Tiger Girl Candy Kid is right up there. It is Major League Sun. I'm gonna beat that Patreon drum to death, especially between now and when issue 2 of the audio magazine goes out because that audio magazine, unlike the very first one on isolation, it's only going out to Patreon members.
00:47:58
Speaker
It isn't just so that I can make a little scratch from the podcast. It's to keep the quality high. Podcast listeners are becoming far more discerning, I believe, and intolerant of bad audio and bad production. But it's also to make the best possible magazine.
00:48:17
Speaker
a literary magazine that's coming to you twice in 2021, hopefully three to four times thereafter per year. You know, we want to pay writers for their work. Don't want to be just soliciting free things. I want to be able to cut a nice little check that can buy you a nice bottle of wine and a night out on the town when nights out on the town are a thing that will happen if it'll ever happen.
00:48:45
Speaker
You can buy yourself a lot of good masks because maybe that's what's going to be the new luxury. So on top of supporting that, you're helping to pay for hosting and web space and equipment upgrades. These things add up several hundred dollars a year out of pocket. And so to kind of offset some of that, it's nice to
00:49:10
Speaker
nice to put out the pass the pass the tray around but you get some good stuff too you know of course the magazine try to make the a great show here for you transcripts if you want coaching good stuff you know always looking to level you up
00:49:27
Speaker
And right now, these days, I'm actually, even though I'm pretty well versed in how to draw up weightlifting programs and stuff of that nature, I've just been spinning my wheels physically. So I actually ponied up, and I'm working with a trainer online who drew up a program and everything. And it's more of an accountability thing for me. Why do I bring this up?
00:49:53
Speaker
A lot of you writers, you know how to write, you know how to edit, but often it's hard to do your own work and look at your own stuff objectively. And even though it might be a little spendy, it's always good to sometimes work with a coach or an editor to level your game up. If nothing, excuse me, if nothing else, it holds you accountable to your work and yourself and your development as an artist and as a writer.
00:50:21
Speaker
So if you want to work with me, email me, and we'll start a dialogue. If you want a little audition of what it's like, leave a kind review on Apple Podcast, take a screenshot, email that to me, and I will coach up a piece of your work of up to 2,000 words. Words, words, words.
00:50:44
Speaker
back to the Patreon thing a little bit. Given the relative size of the audience, I may have to, I may have hit the full amount of people who would be willing to contribute to the enterprise. Given how many patrons are already committed and they only say like, only typically one to two percent of a show's audience will actually, you know, find enough value to contribute to that. And I think we're at that level.
00:51:13
Speaker
so that means the show's got to grow right and If you can't be a patreon member, then maybe linking up to the show talking it up with your network of a fellow writers fellow CNFers that'll help matters grow the show and then maybe that'll grow the grow the pod of people who want to Contribute, you know Cal Newport talks about not needing social networks to build a platform or brand or sell books or get podcast downloads and
00:51:41
Speaker
And I do believe it, to an extent, because you have to be good enough that people want to talk about what you do. You know, other people can use it. But if you're in the morass and you're making stuff that's good enough that people talk about, let the other people talk about it on social media, hashtag it up, talk about it, have their own groups, share it and say, yes, you got to buy this book or you got to listen to the show.
00:52:10
Speaker
then I don't have to talk about it or tweet about it. The people I make the show for will sound the alarm. To quote Seth Godin, people like us listen to podcasts like this. And if I can't do that, if I fail to do that, then I just have to keep getting better. If you're being largely ignored, then you're not good enough. So I gots to get better. It's the only option. Be better, BO. Be better.
00:52:41
Speaker
My Twitter side is ongoing. I'm under 10,000 tweets en route to erasing my entire Twitter footprint while writing an essay about the pathetic sad attempts at attention and validation and desperation to be seen since 2009 when I first enrolled in the Twitter journey and was hoodwinked into thinking I needed the thing.
00:53:03
Speaker
Sad. Though of the thousand or so tweets I've deleted the past few days, most are just quotes from the podcast and that nobody saw or reacted to. It's depressing. And I look forward to the day when
00:53:19
Speaker
this enterprise of podcast in the newsletter itself is the only way I plug into the world and to serve you, the listener and reader. Speaking of that, head over to brendanamara.com for show notes and to find the monthly newsletter archive and to subscribe to it. I'm also on the right side of the website. I'm starting to break out several of the episodes by sub-genre. So if you're looking for a memoir fix or something, I'll be a chunk of
00:53:49
Speaker
episodes linked up to memoir writers, essay poets, filmmakers, some of the self-improvement type authors that come on the show. So that way you can kind of be like, all right, I know there's one. I don't remember the name. It's hard to search because there's 250 of these things. And then you can just go, boom.
00:54:11
Speaker
There's Nick Flynn. Boom. There's Earl Swift. What's that? Say we're Darby? OK. I feel like having a narrative journalism fix. So there's that. All sorts of goodies.
00:54:26
Speaker
As I pull away from social media, the newsletter is what it's all about. I'm so tired of Twitter and people trying to sound clever, myself included. You know, smart and snarky and ironic. Like, whatever happened just sitting there with your own thoughts and maybe scribbling it in a notebook or something. Now if you have something that you think is funny, you have to tweet it out and get that hit.
00:54:48
Speaker
Or maybe you're a prominent author and you want to bitch about your book tour. If I ever bitch about any of my subsequent book tours, you have my full permission when you see me to kick me in the nuts. I don't need them anyway. Newsletters once a month, no spam, can't beat it. Was this postscript so good you couldn't ignore it? Stay wild, CNFers. Brendan says, see ya!