In only seven months as a courthouse reporter for the Chicago Tribune in 1924, Maurine Dallas Watkins covered the spectacular murder trials of Belva Gaertner and Beulah Sheriff Annan, whose brazen styles and remorseless murders of their lovers made them celebrities during the Jazz Age. From their stories, Watkins fashioned a wild, satirical play she variously called Brave Little Women and Chicago.
The play featured the two murderesses, now known as Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart. It also featured the unapologetically corrupt attorney Billy Flynn, a composite of W.W. O’Brien and William Scott Stewart, the flashy mob-connected Chicago lawyers who represented Gaertner and Annan.
It had a respectable run on Broadway, which inspired Chicago, a 1927 Cecil B. DeMille silent film. Music was added after director Bob Fosse and his wife bought the film rights from the Watkins estate, and a raunchy, vibrant, modern Chicago returned to Broadway.
NOTE: The play also spawned a 1942 movie melodrama, Roxie Hart, starring Ginger Rogers as a woman wrongly accused of murder. Needless to say, it missed the point.