Shameless: Women of the Underworld
Six biographies of women who were part of the 20th century’s gangster underworld.
Bonnie Parker
Without Bonnie Parker, no one would be talking about Clyde Barrow 80 years after his death. Hell, without Bonnie Parker, they would barely have mentioned him when he was alive. He would have been just another petty criminal at a time and place when an honest man was a sucker. But it was his “female companion” who drew the newspapers’ attention, especially after a bloody gun battle in Joplin, Missouri. It wasn’t the 13 dead bodies they left behind that created the legend, but rather a camera with an undeveloped roll of film. On it were a series of photos of the Barrow Gang—men in fedoras posing with machine guns in front of stolen cars. Standard stuff, seen in the movies and magazines, poses familiar even to little boys on the playground.
But the picture that stood out and stood alone was of Bonnie, posing with one foot up on the fender of a V-8 Ford—in a curve-accentuating sweater and showgirl T-strap shoes, sure, but with a pistol gripped in her hand, cigar clutched between her teeth, the sun in her eyes turning her blonde babydoll features into an Edward G. Robinson squint. This was a pose that was not just unladylike, but ballsy at a time when one didn’t even apply that word to men in polite company. Of course, in reality, Bonnie never smoked cigars and seldom fired guns, baat the image of her stuck and sticks to this day.
Kathryn Kelly
Some people are born into a life of crime, others choose a life of crime, and a few fall into a life of crime by circumstance. For Kathryn Kelly, wife of Machine Gun Kelly, it was all three.
She came into the world as Cleo Lera Mae Brooks in Saltillo, Mississippi, in 1904. Some say she was literally born in a brothel, but at the very least, she entered the world in a place that took neither law and order nor morals very seriously. The lawmakers and legislators spent their bribe money at the local saloons and whorehouses and the family boasted its own collection of hustlers, hookers, and hard-timers long before they entangled their bloodline with that of Public Enemy Number One.
Stephanie St. Clair
girl is raised in a loving, prosperous family, but a family cast into poverty and despair by the sudden death of her father. She is sent to a strange land and toils as a servant. But through bravery and wit and luck (albeit not her luck, at least not exactly), she becomes royalty in her new kingdom. She fights many beasts, is imprisoned and released, but eventually triumphs and lives out her days in a palace surrounded by nobility, draped in furs and jewels, beloved by her community for her generosity and courage.
It’s both ironic and appropriate that the life of Stephanie St. Clair, “Harlem’s fearless policy queen” reads like a fairytale. Of course, the strange lands were the Caribbean and Canada and the kingdom was Harlem. The beasts vanquished ranged from Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz to Sgt. John Roberts of the Fourth Precinct and Mayor Jimmy Walker. The palace was the legendary 401 Edgecombe Avenue, her neighbors such pillars of society as Thurgood Marshall and W.E.B. DuBois, and the teller of the tale was Stephanie herself, who never hesitated to erase or embellish when spinning her life story.
Virginia Hill
Virginia was a backwoods waif who became a glamour queen of the gossip columns and the only woman to sit at the table with the Mafia. She moved among the Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles outfits for nearly two decades in a life that was a mix of glittering spotlights and violent backrooms. She transported stolen property, fixed racetrack odds, laundered money, paid bribes, set up drug routes, “worked as a decoy for some of the most sinister punks that ever slinked out of a sewer”—all under the glossy cover of a “Georgia oil heiress” or “Manhattan glamour girl.” The lush figure and lavish lifestyle were just the chassis for an iron will and steel-trap mind. “To make a success of her career, she had to be more than just another set of curves,” wrote columnist Lee Mortimer. “She had to have a good memory, a considerable flair for hole-in-the-corner diplomacy to allay the suspicions of trigger-happy killers, and a dual personality.”
Virginia turned sexual power into just plain power—a tough trick for a woman in any time or milieu, but unheard of in the underworld, a place that made the men’s-club chauvinism of mainstream Eisenhower-era American look like a N.O.W. meeting. Angelo Torriani, a low-level Mafiosi who observed Virginia at the beginning of her career, recalled: “She was more than the sex symbol of gangsterdom. She was the cash-and-carry girl, a mink-clad treasure chest.” And she remained untouchable until the fallout from her 1951 testimony before the Kefauver Committee turned her into the most stylish figure ever to grace a Wanted poster.
Geri Rosenthal
Mario Puzo once wrote about “the most beautiful showgirl in Las Vegas,” explaining that “she was a millionaire living by dipping into her capital. As she got older, the beauty that was her capital diminished.” Geri was wised-up enough to know that once a blonde passes 30, the window for making the last big investment gets narrower and the returns smaller. She looked at what she was holding and what her suitors put on the table and figured Lefty was the best bet. She was not the first or the last woman to be so enchanted by the gilding she forgot she was stepping into a cage.
As for Rosenthal, he saw “Beauty, charm, brains, you name it, she had it. Good sense of humor, well spoken, the Bell of the Ball” [sic]. He always prided himself on his cold-eyed examination of the odds, on never believing in miracles or turnarounds. Yet when it came to his marriage, he ignored the scouting reports, the box scores, the past W-L record. Expecting a wild party girl to turn into Donna Reed was like expecting a junior-high bench player to suddenly outplay Wilt Chamberlain. Mob wives were supposed to be home-loving girl-next-door types who asked no questions, not show-stopping babes with a fondness for stiff drinks and public scenes.
Liz Renay
For virtually every woman who got tangled up with mobsters, it was cataclysmic, something that dominated, even destroyed, her life. But for one lady, made guys were just one category of interesting names in her not-so-little black book, while her ongoing flirtation with the crooked side of the law was just another hairpin turn—albeit the most hazardous one—in her wild ride. Ladies and gentlemen … presenting Miss Liz Renay!
Her life was a Hollywood cliché about a small-town girl who goes to the big city to find fame and fortune. It was also full of tropes: a suspenseful thriller involving the Mafia, a women-in-prison pulp, a name-dropping celebrity tell-all, and the sentimental tale of a mother’s love. On her pink business card, Liz Renay described herself as an “actress, model, artist.” If you asked gangster Mickey Cohen, he’d say she was “real statuesque and has a helluva talent.” If you asked author Lewis Lapham, he’d say she was “a mirage of beautiful air.” If you asked Judge Pierson Hall, he’d say she was “just a prostitute.” If you asked movie director John Waters, he’d say she was “my idea of total glamour.” If you asked newsman John L. Smith, he’d say she was “the original stand-up girl.” And that’s ultimately what she was best known as: a woman who intimately knew some of the most dangerous men in the nation, but who never shared what she knew about them.
Huntington Press
The publishers of Shameless: Women of the Underworld, as well as a number of other books on gambling, organized crime and Las Vegas.