Whenever I write about Leopold and Loeb,” says playwright John Logan,
”I feel their ghosts hovering over me and, oddly enough, a sense of responsibility. I feel compelled to promise not to mess up their story, to tell it honestly and effectively.”
Logan was speaking of Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, the Chicago youths who, in 1924, kidnapped little Bobby Franks, bludgeoned him to death and thus became two of the most notorious figures in the history of crime.
But Logan could well have been delivering his own artistic credo. Of all the young playwrights scribbling away in the off-off-Loop arena, Logan seems to have the most singular mission. He writes about sensational murders, the ones that make tabloid headlines in their time and fascinate criminologists forever afterward.
A lot of docu-dramatists and made-for-television movie scenarists do that. But Logan has a unique ability to climb inside the minds of his killers (or accused killers) and present their motives and feelings, as well as the chronicled facts. In ”Never the Sinner,” which Stormfield Theatre produced in 1985 and which has been optioned for a London production, Logan detailed convincing glimpses of what he imagines the emotional relationship between Leopold and Loeb might have been like. (In fact, there is almost no record of what they said privately to one another.)
In ”Hauptmann,” which recently closed its long run at Stormfield, Logan has Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the man executed for the kidnaping and murder of Charles Lindbergh`s son, tell his own story. In effect, Hauptmann, who Logan considers innocent, puts himself on trial and then demands that the audience exonerate him. The play makes use of recent evidence suppressed at the time of Hauptmann`s conviction; but it also celebrates the killer himself, allowing him to be part victim and part vaudevillian.
In one harrowing segment, he even describes how he would have stolen the child had he been the real kidnaper. That lets Logan have it both ways. However much we become convinced by the facts that Hauptmann the man was innocently executed, we still get a spine-tingling sense of Hauptmann the legend, the ”lone wolf” and grubby-looking ”child killer” of
contemporaneous headlines.
”I don`t think the plays have a message so much as a sense of redemption for the worst as for the best,” Logan says. ” `Never the Sinner` could have been about Charles Manson or Adolf Hitler, and it would have been about the same thing. My point when I wrote the play (and I think playwrights are the last people to ask about their own themes) comes from Terence (the Roman playwright), who once said, `Nothing that is human is alien to me.` ”
Logan also cites poet W.H. Auden: ”We must love one another or die.”
”If `Never the Sinner` argues anything,” Logan continues, ”it is do not judge, do not condemn, realize they are you and you are they.”
Many playwrights need only a writing tool, a blank piece of paper and a functioning imagination; for Logan, whole libraries and thick volumes of what he calls ”formidible black transcripts” aren`t always enough. After he decided to write ”Never the Sinner” as a student at Northwestern University –the Leopold-Loeb case had been an obsession since junior high school, and was the only logical subject, he says, for his first play–he learned of a wealth of material stored in one of the university`s special collections.,
”The library had obtained the material through Elmer Gertz, who served as Leopold`s parole attorney and knew him well in later life,” Logan said.
”I got to know Gertz, and he talked with me about the case and gave me permission to study the materials.”
In the library files, Logan found something like 10 three-inch thick volumes of trial transcripts, one of the few complete transcripts of the famous trial. Logan spent eight months studying the transcripts along with boxes of correspondence between Leopold and family members, Clarence Darrow
(who defended the duo), and Gertz. Significantly, there were no letters to Loeb.
At the Chicago Historical Society, Logan found more private papers, manuscripts for ”Life Plus 99 Years” (Leopold`s sanitized, apologetic biography), Leopold`s personal notes and a large collection of photographs.
But in a sense, because of his early interest in the case, Logan had been researching the play most of his life. For ”Hauptmann,” a kind of follow-up, he turned to the many books on the subject, especially Anthony Scaduto`s
”Scapegoat,” a recent and forceful work arguing Hauptmann`s innocence.
Logan didn`t escape library stacks completely. He works for Northwestern`s law library, which happens to have a complete seven-volume set of Hauptmann`s trial transcriptions. ”But it wasn`t quite the same thing. Leopold and Loeb are part of a lifelong obsession I couldn`t purge until I`d written their play.”
As a writer, he is content to continue his unusual method for a while.
”I`m not the kind of writer who thinks a play can be set in a void,” he says. ”I don`t think in 10 years I`ll still be doing historical plays. But it`s something that intrigues me. Everybody has to start someplace. I`m new at this, and this is the place I`m comfortable starting from.”
Logan, 25, became Chicago`s murder playwright of the `80s largely because of a long interest in this case. An avid reader with interests in history and journalism, Logan, despite his cheery and disarming personality, is a natural for such topics. But he incorporates highly effective, modern theatrical conventions that set his docu-dramas apart. Bits of furniture are the only scenery. Actors play multiple roles, giving the works a sparse, poetic feel, and sometimes roles aren`t even filled. In ”Never the Sinner,” Leopold and Loeb murder an invisible Bobby Franks.
Whatever the mechanics, the results have been riveting. British producer Stephen Graham is now in the process of raising money for a London production of ”Never the Sinner;” ”Hauptmann” may be remounted in a larger theater. Both plays, given their salacious subjects and Logan`s well-researched, intelligent and human treatment, are likely to show up again.
Meanwhile, Logan is busy plotting a black comedy about the murder of a fictional pope, a sort of behind-the-scenes look at the college of cardinals in electoral seclusion, and a study of Roy Cohn and the McCarthy hearings.
”My social life consists of work at the Northwestern University law library, buying typewriter ribbons, going home to write and occasionally going out dancing,” he says.
