Glenn Stout - Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid: Americas Original Gangster Couple

Copyright 2021 by Glenn Stout

X Minus X from Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearing. Copyright 1940 by Kenneth Fearing. Reprinted by permission of Russell & Volekning as agents for Kenneth Fearing.

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stout, Glenn, 1958 author.

Title: Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid : Americas original gangster couple / Glenn Stout.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020033857 (print) | LCCN 2020033858 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358067771 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358067252 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Whittemore, Richard, 19011926. | Whittemore, Margaret, 19031993. | Criminal couplesUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC HV6785 .S86 2021 (print) | LCC HV6785 (ebook) | DDC 364.15/52092273dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033857

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033858

Cover design by Mark Robinson

Author photograph Saorla Stout

Cover images: Bettman / Getty Images (top)and New York Daily News Archive / Getty Images (bottom)

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To all the reporters, correspondents, columnists, sob sisters, ink-stained wretches, and journalists of the era, the thousands of men and women whose reporting and dedication to the craft contributed not only to this story but to so many others, and to all the many newspapers that supported their work. Their cumulative efforts are the only reason it is possible to begin to know the past and re-create long-forgotten stories of an era that still resonates with readers today.

Even when your friend, the radio, is still; even when her dream, the magazine, is finished; even when his life, the ticker, is silent; even when their destiny, the boulevard, is bare;

And after that paradise, the dancehall, is closed; after that theater, the clinic, is dark,

Still there will be your desire, and hers, and his hopes and theirs,

Your laughter, their laughter,

Your curse and his curse, her reward and their reward, their dismay and his dismay and her dismay and yours

FROM X MINUS X BY KENNETH FEARING

T HE ROBBERS OF THY PEOPLE SHALL EXALT THEMSELVES TO ESTABLISH THE VISION; BUT THEY SHALL FAIL .

D ANIEL 11:14

Each member of the gang had a job. Margaret Whittemore, soon to be known all over America as Tiger Girl, knew exactly what to do. And she played her role to the hilt.

Early on the morning of January 11, 1926, Margaret Whittemore, not quite twenty-two years old, rose just before dawn. Daylight would reveal a sky as dull as a mollusk and gray as concrete on this early winter day, but at this hour, as the sky slowly brightened, the lights of the streets of Manhattan still twinkled outside the window. Most days Margaret and her husband, Richard Whittemore, rarely opened the curtains before noon, if at all. They stayed out late and awoke even later, often stumbling home at four or five or six in the morning, after spending the early morning hours at the Club Chantee, where over the sound of a jazz band Richard laughed and held court long into the night.

But this day was different. In fact, for the last several days they had stayed at home and turned in early to make sure that on this day they would awake clearheaded and alert.

It was a big apartmenttwo bedrooms, two baths, with a nine-foot beamed ceiling, formal dining room, eat-in kitchen, and large entry foyer, one of half a dozen or so apartments on the twelfth floor of Chester Court, a fancy, brand-new fourteen-story building at 201 West Eighty-Ninth Street on Manhattans Upper West Side.

Margaret liked nice places, and so did Richard. Theyd never had much growing up in Baltimore and were making up for it now. There had been nothing wrong with their previous place, a fine town house on West Eightieth Street, but this place was nicer, newer, bigger, and had more room, more class, more everything. Advertised as High Class Apartments for Particular People, Chester Court was a full-service building, with staff available to fulfill every whim. It was almost like a hotel, the housekeeping apartments already partially furnished, with electric refrigerators, stoves, and ranges. Even the closets had their own electric lights. The lobby was appointed in gleaming pink marble trimmed in gold gilt, and a doorman out front held the door for Margaret every time she entered and exited the building. Whenever she needed a taxi, he would stand on the curb, blow a whistle, and wave, then open the door and help her in.

He treated her with respect, and the way the buildings staff spoke to her, saying things like, Yes, Mrs. Vaughn. Of course, Mrs. Vaughn. Right away, Mrs. Vaughn, must have made her feel goodclassy. She was younger than most of the other women in the building, who were wives of serious people, attorneys and architects and stockbrokers, and they jealously might have wondered how someone so young seemed to have so much.

Chances are the apartment was cluttered after a rare stretch of nights in, stacks of magazines spilling over the side tables. Richard favored adventure stories in pulps like Argosy and Dime Detective. Margaret liked the movies and, like other young women at the time, probably favored popular magazines that catered to her generation, glossy titles like Photoplay, Motion Picture Classic, and Vogue and pulps such as Dream World, True Confessions, and Flapper Experiences, all of which presented fantasies now close enough to touch. The ashtrays were full of cigarette buttsRichard was a chain-smokerand a radio sat on the table. Their little dog, a brown and white spitz mix named Bades, a gift from Richard to Margaret, bounced back and forth. The dog was important to her. Shed had one before, a poodle, but after the couple were arrested in Philadelphia, police had taken the dog away. Margarets clothes were still packed and hanging in oversized trunks, as if the Whittemores had either just arrived or were preparing to leave. In fact, their life at Chester Court was the first time, really, the pair had stayed in a place of their own, by themselves, for long enough to live together like a regular couple.

That was what made their little dog so important. When Richard had bought it for her shortly after they moved in, it was a sign that maybe their life on the run was coming to an end, that they could in some way settle down.

Margaret and her husband still kept nearly all their belongings in several wardrobe trunks, clothes as well as jewelry, some cash, and a gun, just in case. Even that was a risk, but it was easier to dump one gun in a hurry than a whole stash. At any moment, the whole gang might have to bolt.

Margaret was a flapper, a modern young woman. Her short blond hair was cut in a smart and daring version of the Eton Crop, a hairstyle enhanced by a finger wave that curled just over the ears, like the models in the magazines, exposing the porcelain skin of her bare neck and leading the eye to the perfect boyish silhouette created by her nearly flat chest and slender figure.

Because it was a cold winter day and she had a job to do, she would have passed over the smart and sexier outfits that she wore at night, dresses made of crepe de Chine or taffeta and trimmed in silk or satin. For daywear, she usually selected something more conservative, like a ready-to-wear ensemble suit, sophisticated but sharp, and a pair of stockings. She didnt wear the cheap rayons that were often so shiny that they had to be dulled with skin powder. She could afford real silk now. Her dress lingered just below the knee.