The Real Stories That Inspired 'Chicago' (the Musical & the Film) (#99)

Today I’m going to go into the real life stories behind the musical Chicago, and how it came to be!

Chicago is a 1926 play written by Maurine Dallas Watkins that is best known as the inspiration for the 1975 Broadway musical of the same name. The play, while fiction, is a satire on the concept of the ‘celebrity criminal’ and was based on two unrelated 1924 court cases involving two murderesses, Beulah Annan (the inspiration for Roxie Hart) and Belva Gaertner (the inspiration for Velma) who were both suspected and later acquitted of murder, whom Watkins had covered for the Chicago Tribune as a reporter. Watkins loosely based Roxie Hart, Velma Kelly, Billy Flynn and other characters in the play off the individuals involved in these famed Chicago courtroom proceedings.

Although there is a lot of truth in the story told by the play and musical, not everything completely matches up with the real-life events during the trials. So here is a little insight into the lives of the real-life counterparts of Roxie and Velma:

Beulah Annan was born Beulah May Sheriff in Owensboro, Kentucky, to Mary and John R. Sheriff. While living in Kentucky, she married her first husband but they soon divorced, and Beulah then met car mechanic Albert "Al" Annan (the real life inspiration for Amos Hart in the musical). They went to Chicago together, where they got married on March 29, 1920. In Chicago, Albert found work as a mechanic at a garage and Beulah eventually became a bookkeeper at Tennant's Model Laundry. At the laundry she met Harry Kalstedt (the real life inspiration for Fred Casley) and the two began an affair.

On April 3, 1924, at the age of only 23, in the married couple's bedroom, Annan shot Kalstedt in the back. According to her initial story, they had been drinking wine which Kalstedt had brought over, and got into an argument. There was a gun on the bed and both reached for it, but Beulah got it first and shot Kalstedt while he was putting on his coat and hat. She played a foxtrot record, "Hula Lou", over and over for about four hours as she sat drinking cocktails and watching Kalstedt die. She then called her husband to say that she had killed a man who had "tried to make love" to her.

Annan's story changed over time: first, she confessed to the murder; later, Annan claimed that she shot Kalstedt in self-defense, fearing that she was about to be raped. According to one of her later versions of the story, he told her that he was leaving her, she reacted angrily and then shot him. Prosecutors surmised that Kalstedt threatened to leave Annan and she responded to his threat by shooting him in a jealous rage. Her final story at her trial was that she told Kalstedt that she was pregnant, they struggled, and both of them reached for the gun.

Albert Annan stood by her after her arrest, pulled his money out of the bank to get her the best lawyers and stood by her throughout the trial. The day after the trial ended with her acquittal, on May 25, 1924, Beulah Annan announced, "I have left my husband. He is too slow." In 1926 she claimed that he had deserted her and divorced him.

Annan died of tuberculosis, aged 28, at the Chicago Fresh Air Sanatorium, where she was staying under the name Beulah Stephens, in 1928, four years after her acquittal on charges of murder.

Now Belva’s story in comparison is a far bit more removed from that of Velma Kelly’s than Beulah’s was to Roxie. Belva Gaertner was born Belva Eleanora Boosinger on September 14, 1884, in Litchfield, Illinois to Mary Jane and Charles M. Boosinger. She was a three-time divorced cabaret singer who used the professional name Belle Brown.

On March 11, 1924, Belva Gaertner allegedly shot and killed her lover Walter Law, a married man with one child. Law was found sprawled in the front seat of Gaertner's car with a bottle of gin and a gun lying beside him. Gaertner, found later at her apartment with blood-soaked clothes on the floor, confessed that she was drunk and was driving with Law, but couldn't remember what happened.

Gaertner was arrested for the murder of Law in Chicago on March 12, 1924, and admitted to drinking with Law at various bars and jazz houses, saying she carried a gun for fear of robbers.

One of Law's co-workers testified that Law had confided that Gaertner was a possessive lover who had threatened him with a knife when he tried to leave her, and Law believed she would kill him one day.

Gaertner told Maurine Dallas Watkins: "No woman can love a man enough to kill him. They aren't worth it, because there are always plenty more. Walter was just a kid—29 and I'm 38. Why should I have worried whether he loved me or whether he left me? Gin and guns—either one is bad enough, but together they get you in a dickens of a mess, don't they?"

Gaertner was defended by William Scott Stewart who, along with WW O’Brien, Beulah’s lawyer, were the inspiration for Billy Flynn in the musical. Gaertner's defense was that Law might have killed himself with the gun. She was acquitted in June 1924.

Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner didn’t meet until they both were put on ‘Murderesses Row’ in the Cook County Jail. This was an actual cell block in the women’s section of the jail that housed Chicago’s most notorious killers. Annan and Gaertner were rumoured to have set up their own beauty shop out of their jail cell. At this beauty shop the two would help other murderesses awaiting trial pick out outfits to wear and teach them how to do their hair and make-up for the day of their trials.

Watkins' sensational columns documenting these trials at the Chicago City Courthouse (which still stands at the north-east corner of Clark and Randolph) proved so popular that she decided to write a play based on them (originally titled Brave Little Woman) as a class assignment while attending the Yale Drama School. The show received both popular and critical acclaim and even made it to Broadway in 1926, running for 172 performances.

In the 1960s, Gwen Verdon read the play and asked her husband, Bob Fosse, about the possibility of creating a musical adaptation. Fosse approached playwright Watkins numerous times to buy the rights, but she repeatedly declined. However, upon her death in 1969, her estate sold the rights. The play was transformed into the musical that everyone loves today by the creative team of John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse. Kander, Ebb and Fosse wanted the whole musical to really focus on the show-biz aspect of society. In order to achieve this overall focus, they created the entire score to reflect traditional vaudeville numbers such as in the song “We Both Reached For the Gun”.

This jazz age musical, now known as Chicago, first appeared on Broadway in 1975 and nominated for nearly a dozen Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Direction of a Musical for Bob Fosse, running over two years before closing in 1977. It debuted in the West End in 1979, where it ran for 600 performances.

The current revival, playing now at the Ambassador Theatre, opened in 1996 (and a year later in the West End) and both are still going strong. They havetaken home six Tonys for categories such as Outstanding Revival of a Musical and Outstanding Choreography. The show holds the record for the second longest-running musical revival in Broadway history behind The Phantom of the Opera.

Over the years has starred the likes of Mel B, Christie Brinkley, Ashlee Simpson, Billy Ray Cyrus and Sofia Vergara have starred on Broadway, and in the West End the likes of David Hasselhoff, Tony Hadley, Jerry Springer and Marti Pellow have previously tried their luck as Billy Flynn, and Denise Van Outen, Jill Halfpenny, Jennifer Ellison, Claire Sweeney, Ashlee Simpson, Frances Ruffelle, Michelle Williams and Brooke Shields are just a few of the stars who have played Roxie Hart. Then there is also Ruthie Henshall who most recently played Mama Morton, making her the first actress to have played the three main female parts (she’s also played Roxie and Velma Kelly).

The musical version in turn was adapted as the 2002 film Chicago, starring Renee Zellweger, Richard Gere and Catherine Zeta-Jones; this adaptation won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 75th Academy Awards. And, for the whole reason why I decided to do this episode on this day, was released on 27th December 2002.