CHAPTER 33
When the war began to wind down, Eliot decided to return to Cleveland. He was starting over and determined to set aside his law-enforcement career and remake himself into a businessman. His wartime work had been low profile but successful. He had closed down more than seven hundred red-light districts and sent hundreds of prostitutes to training camps to learn vocational skills. When he took over the Social Protection Division, prostitutes were responsible for 75 percent of soldiers’ venereal-disease infections. Two years later, that infection rate had dropped to 20 percent, leading the director of Community War Services, Mark A. McCloskey, to tell him: “You had one of wartime’s tough jobs. You have done it well.” But Eliot knew all along it was a wartime job only, not a career. And by this point he wanted to make some real money, build up a nest egg for his old age. So when an opportunity arose at the Diebold Company—he’d been acquainted with the controlling Rex family for years—he jumped at it. He would be chairman of the board of the Canton, Ohio–based safe maker. Never one to do anything halfway, he also picked up a job on the side, becoming vice president of the Middle East Company, a new, small-time import-export business based in Cleveland. He submitted his resignation to McCloskey two months after D-Day.
Eliot’s old crowd in Cleveland wasn’t surprised when he returned to town with an impressive new career in the private sector. Everyone had figured he’d end up in an executive suite sooner or later. They were surprised, however, that he brought with him an impressive new wife. As the newspapers made all too clear, this third marriage for Eliot came soon after his second divorce—very soon. Eliot was granted a divorce from Evaline on November 17, 1945. Two months later, he married Elisabeth Andersen Seaver. Neither Betty nor Eliot ever revealed when exactly their relationship started, but it undoubtedly became serious sometime during the latter stages of the war, when they were both living in Washington. (Betty’s husband, Hugh, had a wartime job in the capital, while she made camouflage at a factory thirty miles away in Baltimore.) The marriage may have surprised their friends but it had been a long time coming. After catching sight of him from her perch above the grounds of the Great Lakes Exposition in 1936, the young sculptor had decided she wanted to meet Cleveland’s dashing safety director, and so a few weeks later she staged an introduction—without their respective spouses in attendance—through New Deal bureaucrat Dan Moore and his artist wife. Eliot turned out to be even more interesting than she expected. She found herself drawn to his “delightful, off-beat sense of humor.” He wasn’t anything like his reputation as an intense, steely-eyed crime-buster. “He laughed easily and a lot,” she recalled of that first meeting. He didn’t talk much about his “old adventures” in Chicago, but when they did come up, Betty said, “his stories were very funny, and usually on himself.” She would admit years later that she fell for him immediately.
By the time they married, nearly a decade later, Eliot wasn’t dashing anymore—age and booze had softened his face into a lumpy pillow—but he was sweet and kind, and that was exactly what she needed. Marjorie Mutersbaugh called them “so congenial.” Years later Betty told her she had never been so happy in her life as when she was married to Eliot.
Hugh and Betty’s divorce became final on January 10, 1946, two weeks before she and Eliot married. Upon returning to Cleveland, however, Betty told friends there had been no romance between her and Eliot until both of their marriages had officially ended. Being seen as a respectable woman meant a lot to her. Betty had left Hugh in August 1943, but she couldn’t bring herself to file for divorce. She feared her parents’ opinion of her. Hugh eventually filed himself, citing abandonment, “gross neglect of duty, and extreme cruelty.” (He filed the petition on November 15, 1945, two days before Eliot and Evaline’s divorce was granted.) There were whispers that Hugh, known for his temper, had banged Betty around some, but they were only rumors. Something someone heard from somebody. Such a harsh charge never could be traced back to Betty. Members of Cleveland’s art and social scene circulated the story because, well, there had to be a reason. People didn’t get divorced simply because they had drifted apart or squabbled a lot.
It wasn’t just Betty’s respectability that appealed to Eliot. At thirty-nine years old, she was beautiful in the kind of natural, unadulterated way Evaline never could be. She had been a beautiful child, with a perfect round face and large, heartbreaking eyes, and she never grew out of it. Even more remarkable was how little her striking good looks seemed to mean to her. She had a boyish, practical stride, artless compared to Evaline’s, but seductive, too, the willful amateurishness of it. She pulled her hair back into a bun even for formal occasions. Betty, not Evaline, was born to be a model, but doing such a thing never crossed her mind when she was growing up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She fished. She hunted with her daddy. She wore overalls around the house and didn’t mind getting plaster in her hair and clothes when she worked in the high school’s art studio.
This ingrained lack of affect faced a challenge once she moved to the big city to attend the Cleveland School of Art. Her tiny frame and pixie smile caught the Jazz Age zeitgeist, and she soon came across people who nudged—or shoved—her in a new direction. Not long after Betty landed in Cleveland, the city’s foremost art photographer, Clifford Norton, convinced her to pose. The eighteen-year-old immediately became his favorite subject. Teachers and students at the school asked her to pose for them, too, and she always obliged. She had been taught never to be rude.
All of this attention inevitably led to an evolution in her look. She chopped her unruly long hair into a pageboy. She squeezed into form-fitting dresses provided by her photographer patron. Men did double takes in the street. The more ambitious mugs reversed course midstride and chased her down.
That she had transformed herself wouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone who knew her back in South Dakota. She had always loved to create, to make something new and alive out of whatever she had at hand—blank pieces of paper or lumps of clay or herself. Her father, somewhat befuddled by his daughter’s talent, agreed to send his little Betty Lee away to school because he didn’t know what else to do with her. She had too much ambition to marry a farmer and settle down in Sioux Falls. In 1924, he prevailed upon J. A. Derome, an esteemed local clergyman and newspaper editor, to write a letter of recommendation for Betty to the Cleveland School of Art. Derome wrote, “Miss Andersen is peculiarly gifted along the lines of art, especially in sculpture. I have no doubt she has before her a brilliant future as an artist.”
The Reverend Derome’s words would soon appear prophetic. Betty was an excellent student in Cleveland, and she made a splash right out of art school. She won first-place awards time and again at the May Show. Her winning piece for the 1932 show sold for a jaw-dropping $1,500. Later that year, New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company hired her to produce a statuette of its premiere danseuse, Rita De Leporte. Four years later, she landed the sculpture commission for the Great Lakes Exposition. By then she was one half of a celebrated artistic couple, having married Hugh Seaver, a well-known watercolorist. But in the teeth of the Great Depression, success proved difficult to maintain. Despite continued raves for their work, commissions dried up for the Seavers; their paintings and sculptures sold at galleries for less and less—and then not at all. Betty followed her husband to Minneapolis, then to Michigan (where she studied under the great sculptor Carl Milles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art). The wanderlust was for naught: Hugh couldn’t find a secure teaching position anywhere, nor could Betty get her career momentum back. Finally, the couple returned to Cleveland, where their struggles continued. Childless, with their careers floundering, the marriage started to fall apart.
The couple ended up on the city’s relief rolls, until Betty landed a job with the Works Progress Administration’s ceramics project, headed by the artist Edris Eckhardt, with whom she’d once worked at the now-defunct Cowan Pottery. Betty considered herself lucky to be earning $109 a month making art for public schools and government buildings, but the WPA proved to be a contentious place to work. Extreme dysfunction and internecine battles—Eckhardt faced near-constant threats of sit-down strikes from her artists—soured Betty on continuing her career. By the time war broke out and she and Hugh moved to Washington, she wanted nothing more than to be a wife and a mother.
Now, with a new husband and both the Depression and the war in the past, Betty would get her wish. In January 1947, a year after she and Eliot married, the couple adopted a baby boy. They named him Robert. Eliot had wanted to be a father for years, and now finally he felt like he had the time for it. Just days after he and Betty brought Robert home, Eliot received a jolt from his morning paper. His long-ago nemesis, Al Capone, had died of a heart attack at his estate in Florida. The former gangster, released from prison in 1939 and suffering from advanced syphilis, was forty-eight years old.