CHAPTER 30
At 4:45 on an icy March morning in 1942, Eliot and Evaline hurtled down Bulkley Boulevard, heading home after a long night of drinking at the Hotel Hollenden. The couple was laughing, with Evaline telling her husband about how she had “told off” a rude reporter, when the car began to slide. Eliot didn’t realize what was happening at first. He pumped the brake, but it didn’t do any good. The car crossed into the oncoming lane. Eliot shut his eyes against a sudden glare of light.
The impact slammed Evaline against the passenger-side door. Eliot cracked his face against the steering wheel, loosening his front teeth. He then spun into the door, his elbow cracking against the handle. When the car came to a rest, Eliot turned to find his wife slumped down in her seat, unconscious. He frantically shook her until she opened her eyes. She groggily insisted she was all right, that she just had the wind knocked out of her.
Eliot climbed out of the car to check on the other driver. Robert Sims, a twenty-one-year-old machinist at the Addressograph-Multigraph plant, appeared to be OK. His knee hurt, he said, that was all. He’d find out later the kneecap was broken.
Eliot told Sims to stay in the vehicle; he was going to move his own car off the road and then return. He eased the sedan down Bulkley a few hundred feet to an open area. He walked back to the crash site, where he found Sims’s car on the side of the road, empty, the door hanging open. Another car appeared out of the early-morning gloom, inching along. The driver told him that a motorist had taken Sims to the Fairview Park Hospital. Eliot, wiping blood from his mouth, thanked the man and walked back to his auto. Evaline was still groggy—from drink or the accident, or both. She insisted on being taken home, not to the hospital. She then passed out again.
At the boathouse, after putting his wife to bed and cleaning himself up, Eliot called the hospital. A nurse told him Sims couldn’t come to the phone—he was giving an accident report to the police. She handed the phone to Patrolman Joseph Koneval. The officer asked for the caller’s name, but Eliot, not expecting to be talking to a policeman, panicked and refused to give it. Later in the day, Eliot called his traffic commissioner, Martin Blecke, and gave an accident report over the phone.
The official report wouldn’t be filed for more than two days, and when it finally was, it was incomplete. The statements of the drivers—and the name of one of them, Eliot—were missing from the record. The only tip-off that the accident involved an important person was the inclusion of Eliot’s personalized license plate, EN-1. That was all a reporter from the Press needed. He caught up with Blecke and asked about the missing information. “If the report wasn’t filled out correctly, I will call in the patrolman who made it,” Blecke said. He disappeared into his office and closed the door.
The reporter could smell a big story. He kept digging, and the Press soon published a damning little expose on the “Ness Cover-Up.” The story suggested that the accident report got “lost” on Blecke’s desk, perhaps at Eliot’s direction. The traffic commissioner admitted he’d had the report in his office for a day after talking to the director, “but I wasn’t covering anyone then and I am not covering anyone now,” he said. Eliot didn’t do himself any good by keeping his head down and trying to brazen it out. “As for Director Ness’ explanation of the unusual handling of the accident report,” the paper wrote, “Ness said there was ‘no mystery’ about the report because it was ‘always available.’”
Once the Press published its broadside, the story took on an unstoppable momentum. Radio stations and the city’s other papers weighed in with righteous clucking about the behavior of the man who had done more than his share of righteous clucking over the past six years. Sims’s father called reporters, declaring himself “dumbfounded” that on the day of the accident the police couldn’t tell him who the other driver was. “I had to get in touch with the Cleveland Automobile Club to find who it was listed to,” Ralph Sims said. The press’s accusations about a cover up led to conspiracy theories, with some city hall insiders speculating that a very drunk Evaline, not Eliot, was driving the car.
Stung by the press reports and by everyone’s apparent willingness to believe the worst, Eliot agreed to be interviewed by a reporter in his city hall office. He knew he had made a mistake by refusing to tell the officer at the hospital his name—and that his attempt to set things right by calling Blecke had only made the situation worse. As the reporter began the interview, Eliot sat at his desk, fidgeting, his eyes jumping about the room. He sighed, long and deep.
“It was very slippery and the thing just happened like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. “My first thought was for my wife, because I thought she was the most seriously injured. She had had the wind knocked out of her. After she regained consciousness I got out of my car and went over to the other driver and told him who I was.
“I had told Mr. Sims that we would follow him to the hospital but Mrs. Ness said she was feeling better and would rather go home,” he continued. “After I got home I immediately called the hospital and talked to someone. I didn’t know who he was. The person at the other end of the wire asked who was talking and I said the other party. . . . I wanted to make sure that the injured man was all right, but I didn’t identify myself. I said that I would have my insurance adjusters on the job in the morning. . . . At no time did he say he was a policeman.”
Eliot gazed at the reporter for a long time, trying to gauge his sympathies. “I have never regretted anything more in my life,” he said. “I felt I was discharging my duties to the others involved. Obviously, I was trying to avoid publicity.”
The interview did not shut down the scandal. The battering in the press continued, the accident rehashed time and again in editorials and gossip columns. Newsmen and politicians who had long tired of Eliot’s golden-boy image embraced the vicious stories. It wasn’t until nearly a week later that the official police report reached the newspapers, where it was buried on the back pages. Written by Koneval’s partner, Patrolman James Webster, and submitted before he knew the safety director was involved in the collision, the report declared:
The injured man [Sims] stated that after the collision the other driver stopped and came back to his auto and asked if he were injured, and assisted in every way to get him to the hospital and told him he would be taken care of.
In considering the fact that there was no liquor involved and that the injured man showed no desire to prosecute, and also the time of day and condition of the pavement, I did not think it was necessary to make any further investigation . . .
After a short meeting with Eliot, Mayor Lausche tried to put an end to what the Press was calling “L’Affaire Ness.” “So far as I am concerned, it is a closed matter,” the mayor told reporters. “If there was any delinquency about filing the report, Mr. Ness already has more than paid the penalty. If it were not for the position he occupies, the accident would not have commanded the attention it did and would have called only for a routine investigation.”
Six days later, Eliot attempted to change the subject by announcing an updated plan for improving the fire department. This included replacing a station house, building a maintenance facility, and purchasing two thirty-foot fireboats. It wasn’t enough to turn the tide. Just as newspaper columnists were running out of ways to tweak Eliot over the car accident, news broke of four white teenage schoolgirls having sex with black nightclub entertainers, possibly with money exchanging hands. The newspaper story shocked the city. The scandal worsened when rumors circulated that one of the girls had also had sex with Cleveland police officers. Charges now flew that Eliot hadn’t done anything to clean up prostitution during his long tenure as safety director, leading to a culture of promiscuity in many Cleveland neighborhoods. Prostitution was “just as deep and just as open as it was during the regime of Mayor Harry L. Davis,” said Jane Hunter, a prominent African American activist in the city and founder of the social-service organization the Phillis Wheatley Association.
Mrs. Hunter was trying to keep blame from falling on the black community, but her accusation was true enough. Eliot had targeted brothels controlled by the Mob, but otherwise he’d paid little attention to lifestyle sex crimes such as fornication, sodomy, and bigamy. Eliot agreed with August Vollmer that sexual deviancy was an issue for social workers and doctors, not the police. A student of police history, he believed that a crackdown on vice for its own sake was doomed to fail in a big city and was a good way for a police department to get bogged down. He didn’t want to make the same mistake Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt had made in New York and Police Chief Francis O’Neill had made in Chicago. Both of them had led unsuccessful vice campaigns that had damaged their careers. As a result, Eliot had ended up doing too little—and now it had come back on him. Underage white girls were being corrupted in the city—by Negroes, no less—and the safety director had done nothing about it. A new wave of condemnation washed through the newspapers.
Eliot read every word printed about him. He cut out and saved even the most damning and unfounded accusations. The way coverage of the teen-sex scandal focused on him, rather than on the men actually involved in the aberrant behavior, showed him that he had lost his moral authority in the city. He fell into a depression. As far as he was concerned, this latest brouhaha served as proof that the criticism he’d faced over the car accident had been deserved and probably had been a long time coming. He had always assumed he would suffer cosmic retribution for failing to live up to his own expectations; now it had arrived. He stopped going out to the nightclubs after work. He stopped taking meetings with anyone but his safety department staff. With Evaline working long hours on a Higbee’s campaign every evening, he holed up at the boathouse, drinking alone and listening to recordings of Shakespeare’s tragedies from his extensive record collection. He took long drives, too. He had always liked to drive—his high school yearbook had proclaimed him “an automobilist”—but it wasn’t speed he was after but simply the feeling of motion, the illusion that he was going somewhere. When, after a few weeks, he finally surfaced from his self-imposed social and professional exile, he had made a decision: it was time to leave the best job he’d ever had.