My father worked in printing, like his father before him and his father before him. Theirs was an old-school “City of the Big Shoulders” family business, begun in 1919 on South Dearborn Street and then relocated to Wacker Drive, where 90 years later I’d find employment around the corner at a Chinese fast-casual restaurant where my T-shirt was emblazoned with the phrase “Hot Asian Buns.” In my great-grandfather’s time, the 1920s and ’30s, the Loop had one of the city’s biggest concentrations of nightclubs and cabarets. (The other hot spots were Towertown, now more or less the Gold Coast, then the city’s demimonde, and Bronzeville on the South Side.) Walking distance from his office was the Moulin Rouge Cafe on Wabash, one of the better dine-and-dance clubs, although a bomb exploded there in 1924. Next door was the Friar’s Inn, a gangster hangout where the New Orleans Rhythm Kings played.
By the time I came to work in the family business, it had moved to the northwest suburbs — not a place a recent college dropout longs to spend her summer, but a job nevertheless. What was it that I did there? Shuffled shipping tubes from one end of a warehouse to another or locked myself inside a vacant room to brood or watch TV. I was rifling through the closets — killing time, I guess — when I found a leather binder, which I opened to reveal a dozen glossy 8-by-10s of a strange and glamorous woman, whose pale and dreamy face had that silent-film-star thing. She gazed moodily past me from a century’s worth of junk. All the photos had been signed, and a few of them were inscribed: “To Ed Jr. With love, Helen.”
In the photo I liked best, the woman stared morosely from long ago with the sort of look you dish out at the bar on certain nights. Floating on the surface of the ink-black background was Helen’s moonbeam face cupped in ghostly little hands, black around the gimlet eyes and on the painted lips. If I squinted, the image took on a Rorschach quality, becoming vaguely anatomical, feminine, frightening. It communicated something I found hard to put into words, some dark inevitability about being a girl. I hung the picture on my wall the same day that I found it.
“Who is she?” I asked my father, who seemed a bit unnerved. “And what are all her pictures doing in the closet?”
“They must have somehow ended up here from my dad’s old office,” he said.
“But who is she? Is she famous?” I asked again.
“A friend of my grandfather’s,” he answered narrowly, “named Helen Morgan.”
Helen Morgan — the type of name you don’t hear much anymore. I typed it into YouTube late that night, and there she was. This time, she smoldered over her shoulder, draped enchantingly in pearls, with the short, tousled haircut of my friends’ moms in the ’90s, rendered fresh and fun by Helen circa 1929. That was the year of the recording of the first song that appeared in my search, with the wonderfully melodramatic title “Why Was I Born?” From my tinny laptop speakers came a high, quivering voice that shocked me insomuch as it reflected — caricatured, even — my own sulky state of mind.
Why do I try to draw you near me?
Why do I cry? You never hear me.
I’m a poor fool, but what can I do?
Why was I born? To love you.
A preteen Helen Morgan was discovered in 1912 singing French Canadian ballads to amuse the workingmen at the Pennsylvania Railroad yard in Danville, Illinois — or perhaps that wasn’t so. Much of her existing biography turns out to be untrue, including a good deal of Gilbert Maxwell’s 1974 book, Helen Morgan: Her Life and Legend. The author places her birth in October 1900 to a single mother in Toronto; upon discovering the news of the pregnancy, the father, a “handsome, swashbuckling” Canadian railroad worker, had lit out for parts unknown. Later she made her debut in a Montreal saloon, draped over the piano in a pose that would become her trademark.
Christopher S. Connelly’s 2024 book, Helen Morgan: The Original Torch Singer and Ziegfeld’s Last Star, corrected the record. In fact, Morgan had been born in August 1902 in Danville to a single mother who, after giving birth alone in her house along the train tracks, returned to work with her newborn in a basket. Morgan’s mother, Lulu Lang, used liquor as a pacifier; her father, Frank Riggin, had denied paternity and sued Lulu for divorce on grounds of drunkenness and adultery. Lulu remarried habitually thereafter, dragging her daughter between eastern Illinois, northwest Indiana, and Chicago’s South Side, either joining or escaping her latest heavy-drinking husband. The stepfather from whom Morgan took her last name was a Chicago railroad switchman who would serve jail time for manslaughter, while beating a couple of other cases for robbing jewelry stores and trains.
After school, Morgan would hang out at the Arsonia Cafe, a song-and-dance club on Madison where she sang occasionally. In 1919, the same year the 18th Amendment brought Prohibition into being, she began working as a chorus girl at the Marigold Gardens, a lavish North Side beer garden with a nightly cabaret. Morgan made her way through the city’s ritziest nightclubs — the Friar’s Inn, Rainbo Gardens, the Green Mill. These clubs observed the law on paper, but under the table, alcohol flowed while organized crime networks spread across the city.
By the end of the 1920s, Morgan had left Chicago and become a star of stage and screen, famous to a degree that is hard to convey today — a Jazz Age Madonna, maybe. A protégé of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. and Oscar Hammerstein II, she headlined shows on Broadway and toured stages nationwide. She starred in pictures for Paramount and Fox; hosted her own moody radio program, Broadway Melodies, on CBS; and earned the title of Manhattan’s favorite nightclub hostess-chanteuse, whose own trio of speakeasies (first Helen Morgan’s 54th Street Club, then Chez Helen Morgan, then Helen Morgan’s Summer Home) were summarily raided and padlocked by the feds. Morgan learned to combat her stage fright with brandy and Champagne; over time, her trademark draped-over-the-piano pose would help her legs not to give way. She learned, too, how to cultivate an image: To her patrons, she was a fun and bubbly hostess, while onstage, her weepy voice and look of wide-eyed terror made her songs all the more affecting.
As her 30s spiraled on, Helen Morgan’s failing health and sinking reputation battled against her joie de vivre. She continued performing against her doctors’ orders, though she sometimes collapsed onstage.
Some of those melancholy numbers had been written just for Morgan: wistful, aching songs with titles like “What Wouldn’t I Do for That Man” and “Don’t Ever Leave Me” (“Now I am something completed by you / I am no one / Just part of two”). Though the term “torch singer” was not invented specifically for her, she was the archetype, warbling songs about a love that was almost always unrequited. Offstage, she had few female friends, preferring the company of men, while in romance, she fell hardest for the emotionally unavailable. She had been married and divorced twice by the age of 21, both times to men she’d later pretend did not exist, and now she was nearly 30, childless and alone, driving the same car Norma Desmond did in Sunset Boulevard.
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As her 30s spiraled on, Helen Morgan’s failing health and sinking reputation battled against her joie de vivre. She continued performing against her doctors’ orders, though she sometimes collapsed onstage. She’d grown tired of the nightlife, the smoky clubs and sleazy actors, and bought a farm in upstate New York, where she dreamed of retiring to raise chickens and goats. Still, if she stopped working, who would pay for the minks and caviar, much less the hospital bills? So she carried on much the way she always had, while her creeping melancholy deepened into fatalism.
Morgan married two times more: in both cases, in a hurry and to men she barely seemed to know, let alone love. Meanwhile, she drank. By the mid-1930s, she couldn’t travel for work without cases of brandy, and by 1941, she was lying on her deathbed in Chicago’s Henrotin Hospital with cirrhosis of the liver — penniless despite the fact that she’d earned $1 million over the course of her career. It was just the way F. Scott Fitzgerald once said in a notebook entry: “Drunk at 20, wrecked at 30, dead at 40,” though in her case, 39.
“America’s first superstar singer gains fame and fortune but never the prize she desires above all else — the heart of the man she loves — in The Helen Morgan Story.” That was the tagline for a 1957 Warner Bros. film, directed by Michael Curtiz (White Christmas, Casablanca) and starring Ann Blyth in the last role of her career. “The intimate, startling real-life story behind the glitter of the girl they called the Goddess of the Jazz Age,” declared the release poster, though that wasn’t really true. Here, the innocent Midwesterner is caught between two lovers: a racketeer, played by Paul Newman, who hitches his wagon to Helen’s star and a dependable lawyer who loves her but also happens to be married. Both romances prove impossible, which drives Helen to drink, and soon she’s tumbling off stages and reading gloomy poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay in bed:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends —
It gives a lovely light!
The singer tries and fails to pull herself together. But without love, she hits rock bottom, and soon she’s just another derelict stumbling around Skid Row. “Listen! That’s me singing!” she announces to the bar as “Why Was I Born?” crackles on the radio, but the other rummies laugh. “I’m Helen Morgan, I tell you! Helen Morgan, the star!” “Yeah, sure,” says a drunk woman. “And I’m the queen of Romania.”
But in this version of the story, Helen Morgan does not die. Instead, her racketeering lover has a sudden change of heart. He fetches the fallen star from the alcoholic ward at Bellevue and whisks her to a lavish surprise party in her honor. “We are here tonight,” says the MC, “for a gal whose love songs made so many of us forget the bad booze, the bamboozlers, and the tinsel-tarnished years of the Roaring Twenties. It was an era of mistakes — and Helen Morgan made some of the biggest mistakes of them all.” He goes on solemnly while the singer weeps: “But for me, and for all of us who loved the songs she sang, the thunder of the ’20s will rumble down through Broadway history. And somewhere, above it all, will be heard the sad, sweet note of a grand gal on a grand piano.”
I picked up Morgan’s first biography the day I found her photos, but pretty soon the unread book had vanished in the shelves. Years later, something moved me to retrieve it. I’d reached the closing scene, Morgan’s funeral, a star-studded affair in the Chicago suburb of La Grange on October 11, 1941, when a typo near the last page caught my breath.
Everything was done with taste, out there in La Grange, Illinois. Someone (surely the stoic Lulu, aware of what Helen would have wanted) had chosen the pallbearers who would carry her unpretentious casket to the grave in the Holy Sepulcher Cemetery. And someone who must have guessed at the order in which Helen would have liked these pallbearers listed had named them in the Chicago Times as John Willis, her “favorite waiter” at Chicago’s Chez Paris; Ray Jesselson, a “family friend” from New York; Ed Garney, Jr., a friend in the printing business; a gentleman named Don Chase whose wife was a “friend of Miss Morgan’s”; and, last but not least, Jack Irving, secretary to the American Guild of Variety Artists.
It seemed obvious that these pallbearers were more to Morgan than “friends.” What’s more, typo notwithstanding: Ed Garvey, Jr., “a friend in the printing business,” was my grandfather, married happily or otherwise until his early death in 1978 to my frail and doll-like grandmother, who died in my teenage years. On top of that, born as he was in 1915, he would have been 13 years Morgan’s junior. I chalked it up as a mistake: Surely it should have said Sr., not Jr. After all, the entry had also misspelled Sepulchre, Chez Paree, and Don Case.
I wondered how my dad had so quickly recognized Morgan in the photos. “Just a distant memory that my sister had once mentioned,” he said. “It really wasn’t something that either my grandmother or my mother ever wanted to talk about.”
“It could only have been my grandfather who was involved with Helen Morgan,” my father insisted when I called later that day. “My grandfather led a life of — well, he was a party guy. He went out constantly and was never really home to raise a family. My grandmother was on her own. In those days, you could live that life. He had a chauffeur and a boat on Lake Michigan, but he didn’t have any money. He was a devil-may-care guy. My father didn’t roll that way.”
I wondered again how he had so quickly recognized Morgan in the photos. “Just a distant memory that my sister had once mentioned,” he said. “It really wasn’t something that either my grandmother or my mother ever wanted to talk about, because my grandfather was clearly having an affair with her. That kind of stuff you didn’t talk about — and certainly didn’t brag about.”
I went to my aunt — my dad’s sister — who was sure to know the truth. “Have you ever heard of a singer from the 1920s named Helen Morgan?” I texted, sending her Gilbert Maxwell’s account of her pallbearer “friend.”
“That was my dad,” she answered. “He knew her. Also, very weird … he was an undertaker at the time, and he did her funeral.”
She went on: “My dad and grandfather must have met Helen in Chicago in some speakeasy kind of club. My dad and grandfather looked very much alike, and my grandfather would sometimes introduce my dad to people as his younger brother. Good God …”
Exactly which ways both my grandfather and great-grandfather were “involved” with Helen Morgan is not for me to say. What I can say is that her funeral, where over 600 mourning fans, including Chicago’s mayor, bid goodbye to the original torch singer, was arranged by my grandfather — “friend in the printing business” and novice undertaker. (Morgan’s body was his first embalming gig.)
“Sleep for the Singer,” read the headline above a photo of her casket that took up half a page of the New York Journal-American on October 9, 1941. “The entertainment world mourned today the death of another tinsel heroine of the prohibition era, sad-voiced Helen Morgan who rode to fame on a grand piano,” read the article below. “The singer of teary songs died last night in Henrotin Hospital in a room about the size of the cozy little speakeasies where she began the career that brought her international triumphs.”
In the half-page photo, the glowing moon face that had shocked me in my father’s office all those years ago now appeared as a crescent, peeking out in profile from a well-appointed casket. Morgan looked pale and tired and much older than me, though she wasn’t really.
Adapted with permission from Midwestern Death Trip, Meaghan Garvey’s debut memoir, published by Panamerica.