Nathan Leopold and the Fight Over Compulsion
Adapted and expanded from Nothing But the Night: Leopold & Loeb and the Truth Behind the Murder That Shocked 1920s America by Greg King and Penny Wilson
Thirty-two years after Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb kidnapped and murdered Bobby Franks, a book was published that returned the case to the public’s attention. Meyer Levin had been born into a Jewish Chicago family in 1905, and as a budding reporter he had briefly covered the case for the Chicago Daily News but he left for Europe before the trial; his traveling partner was a fellow University of Chicago student named Will Geer, who later gained fame as an actor, best known for his role as the grandfather in the television series The Waltons.1
In 1954, after stints at the Chicago Daily News and Esquire Magazine and several books on Judaism, Levin decided to write a novel about the Leopold and Loeb case. Loeb had been murdered by a fellow inmate in 1936, but Leopold was still alive, continuing to serve his sentence in the Illinois State Penitentiary. Over the last few years, and in an effort to burnish his image and win parole, Leopold had regularly granted interviews to members of the press on the promise that their coverage would be favorable to his case. He was also seeking a coauthor to assist him with his own memoirs. Levin thus had no difficulty in arranging a face-to-face meeting with Leopold to discuss these projects.2
Levin explained that he had “no desire for any sensational retelling of the story but was interested in the psychological approach. With him alone there rested an opportunity to probe this area…. Here was a case where he could volunteer his inner knowledge to humanity…. He alone could provide a body of material that would enlarge our understanding of human behavior. That was where my interest lay. If he would collaborate on such a book, I would drop my novel and concentrate all I had to offer as a writer in his project.”3
But Leopold proved evasive. “What possible good,” he later mused, “would come from raking up once more – and sensationalizing – the sordid details of a tragedy a generation old? What good, that is, for anyone but Mr. Levin?”4 He was interested enough, though, to launch into a discussion of what financial benefits he could expect to receive. What was the likelihood the rights to the book could be sold to Hollywood? How much would he receive from such a deal? What about syndication rights? Levin realized that Leopold would not discuss the crime, his motivations, or his relationship with Loeb in any detail – even the kidnapping and the murder were to be considered off-limits. Hearing this, Levin gave up and left, determined to pursue his own project.5
Shortly after this meeting, Levin sold the proposal for his novel, to be called Compulsion and Free Will, to publisher McGraw-Hill.6 On learning of this, Leopold – through his legal team – threatened McGraw-Hill with a libel lawsuit and they backed out of the deal. Levin quickly sold the book to Simon & Schuster.7
Under the title Compulsion, Levin's novel was finally published in October 1956. Compulsion was an early “non-fiction novel,” a genre best exploited by Truman Capote a few years later with In Cold Blood. In his foreword, Levin was careful to point this out: “I follow known events. Some scenes are, however, total interpolations, and some of my personages have no correspondence to persons in the case in question. This will be recognized as the method of the historical novel. I suppose Compulsion may be called a contemporary historical novel or a documentary novel, as distinct from a roman à clef. Though the action is taken from reality, it must be recognized that thoughts and emotions described in the characters come from within the author, as he imagines them to belong to the personages in the case he has chosen.”8
Levin used a fictional character, former reporter Sid Silver (a stand-in for himself) to narrate much of the tale. The book is divided into two parts. The first half focuses on the murder and examines the relationship between the two killers. Artie Strauss was a fictionalized depiction of Richard, while Judd Steiner stood in for Nathan. Both are wealthy students, enamored of Nietzsche and convinced of their own intellectual superiority. The details are straightforward: the kidnapping plot, the young victim Paulie Kessler being struck over the head with a chisel, and his body being disposed of in a rural culvert. As in real life, a pair of glasses and the family chauffeur plays a pivotal role in the police investigation, leading the two killers to confess. The second half of the book concentrates on the trial, and the psychiatric defense worked up by their lawyer Jonathan Wilk (standing in for Clarence Darrow) in an attempt to spare their lives. Large sections of the actual trial transcript and arguments are reproduced to lend a touch of authenticity.
The book attempts to explore the peculiar dynamic between the two killers. The admittedly fictional Freudian analysis, offered to explain the crime, may have seemed compelling in 1956 but today seems heavy-handed and unconvincing. Thus, Compulsion and its characters suggest underlying sexual motivations in every act: the chisel was a phallic symbol, the culvert a makeshift womb, and the acid poured over the body Steiner's attempt to erase, by proxy, his own Jewish identity. Only by killing Paulie Kessler, the novel suggests, could Steiner kill “the girl-part of himself” that he so despised.9
The book was an immediate success, selling some 130,000 copies in hardback, with more than a million in paperback.10 But Leopold was angry. He resented the book’s success, and the fact that Levin was gaining financially from his own story. He also didn’t want his crime to be churned up again at a time when he was attempting to win release. To the Chicago Daily Tribune, Leopold complained: “Mr. Levin weaves into his story...a good deal of fictional material, and it is done so well, so cleverly, that it is impossible for the general reader to know where fact stops, and fiction begins.”11
Leopold was cautious: he needed Levin, who had become a high-profile advocate for his release. In May 1957 Levin wrote an article, “Nathan Leopold Should be Freed,” that appeared in Coronet magazine.12 Levin even appeared at Leopold’s 1957 parole hearing to argue for his release. But things changed when 20th Century Fox announced that producer Darryl F. Zanuck had purchased the film rights to Compulsion.13 A panicked Leopold had his attorney Elmer Gertz lodge formal protests, insisting that any production eliminate the book’s “sexual matters that create the impression of homosexuality.”14
The film version of Compulsion was released in April 1959. Actors Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman took the respective roles of Judd Steiner and Artie Strauss, with Orson Welles cast as Clarence Darrow (under the pseudonym of Jonathan Wilk). Martin Milner acted as Levin stand-in reporter Sid Brooks. The New York Times declared the film an “artfully manufactured, tense, forceful and purposeful drama obviously inspired by a purposeless crime that shocked a nation wallowing in prosperity, illicit whiskey, and vague ideas about abnormal psychology…. The film has the rare attribute of gripping one’s attention throughout its dark proceedings.” The main characters, “intellectual giants and emotional pygmies…bask in superior detachment, a superiority based on Nietzschean superman concepts and a shadowy inference of homosexuality.” The film, the review summed up, made “a dark deed into a bright and fascinating picture.”15
By the time of the film’s release, Leopold had won his parole and gone into hiding in Puerto Rico. But his lingering resentment over having lost control of his own narrative coupled with the fact that Levin was profiting handsomely while he was living in obscurity in a jungle convinced Leopold to sue. As his attorney Elmer Gertz later wrote, “Leopold had a right to be his own judge of the propriety, or impropriety, of what was written about his private life.”16
It took some time for Leopold’s legal team to come up with their novel legal argument. In its promotional materials for the film, 20th Century Fox had pointed out that the film had been “suggested” by the Leopold and Loeb case. On this basis, Gertz claimed that the book and film had illegally appropriated Leopold’s name for commercial purposes and thus violated his right to privacy. Unlike a libel case, where Leopold would have to prove that his good name had been damaged – an impossibility given that he was an admitted child murderer – Gertz’s suit argued an entirely different issue: “If we won, Leopold would no longer have to fear the shocking excesses of fiction writers and sensationalists; they could no longer drag up again his long expiated crime whenever they decided they might make money on it or simply get some creative satisfaction from the effort.”17
The legal action was sweeping: Leopold filed a lawsuit against Meyer Levin, his publishers, 20th Century Fox, the film's distributors, and even theaters where it had been shown; in all, the suit named fifty-six defendants for the “appropriation of the name, likeness and personality of Leopold and conversion of same for their profit and gain.”18 The complaint sought $4.3 million: $2.9 million from 20th Century Fox, another $1.4 from various distributors and outlets, and $150,000 from Levin himself.19
Levin was outraged. Leopold, he said, “was most ungrateful in bringing suit against Meyer Levin, who had influenced the “climate of public opinion from direct hostility to understanding and sympathy toward Leopold.”20 Levin bitterly summed up his view of the situation: “Leopold was now a victim, a man who had suffered thirty years of imprisonment as if in a death camp; he was a kind of culture hero – my book had helped to make him so – but also there had been an astute image creation campaign, picturing him as a master of fourteen languages, a savant, and now a hospital volunteer in a remote monastery, a kind of Dr. Schweitzer!” Describing “Leopold's claim of ownership...of the crime itself,” Levin openly questioned “whether his character and his philosophy had changed. The superman philosophy that he had so aggressively spouted after the arrest, the twisted Nietzschean idea of a superior mankind, an elite, unbound by ordinary human laws and moral rules – such a respect for truth – was this not still his concealed but ruling belief? Who but a supermind would be able to manipulate society, even though it took thirty years, in such a way as to get free from a sentence imposed with double locks, so to speak.... Who but a superman would undertake in this way to flout the common ethics of society by attacking the very person who had done so much, as declared by his own attorney, to secure his release? Wasn't he by this action making the very same boast that he and Dickie Loeb had made as a rationale for their murder: We are above the common laws as we are above the common run of mankind? Finally, in his lawsuit Nathan Leopold was daring the highest feat of all – he would at last collect the kidnap-murder ransom, and many times over! It would be handed to him by a court! What a justification for himself, and his dead friend Dickie Loeb! He and Dickie had done the killing, they were the authors of the action, a sort of natural copyright was claimed, all accounts of the crime must pay royalties to them – or at least to Leopold for his half!”21
The suit was first brought in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, but in 1960 it was transferred to federal court. In April 1964, Judge Thomas Kluczynski granted Leopold a summary judgment on the allegation that his likeness had been illegally appropriated, but he declared that the issue of monetary damages would have to be settled in a different hearing.22 Levin and 20th Century Fox appealed but lost.23 With the question of damages still unresolved, the case went before a different judge, who found in favor of the defendants.
Without any immediate financial gain, Leopold decided to appeal to the Illinois State Supreme Court. The verdict only came in 1970, and it completely vindicated Levin and the other defendants while offering a scathing commentary on Leopold:
“We must hold here that the plaintiff did not have a legally protected right of privacy. Considerations which in our judgment require this conclusion include: the liberty of expression constitutionally assured in a matter of public interest, as the one here; the enduring public attention to the plaintiff's crime and prosecution, which remain an American cause célèbre; and the plaintiff's consequent and continuing status as a public figure. It is of importance here, too, that the plaintiff became and remained a public figure because of his criminal conduct in 1924. No right of privacy attached to matters associated with his participation in that completely publicized crime. The circumstances of the crime and the prosecution etched a deep public impression which the passing of time did not extinguish. A strong curiosity and social and news interest in the crime, the prosecution, and Leopold remained. It is of some relevance, too, in this consideration, that the plaintiff himself certainly did not appear to seek retirement from public attention. The publication of the autobiographical story and other writings and his providing interviews unquestionably contributed to the continuing public interest in him and the crime. Having encouraged public attention, he cannot at his whim withdraw the events of his life from public scrutiny…. His participation was a matter of public and, even, of historical record. The core of the novel and film were derived from the notorious crime, a matter of public record and interest, in which the plaintiff had been a central figure and to which he pleaded guilty. That conduct was without benefit of privacy. The plaintiff became and remained a public figure because of his criminal conduct in 1924. No right of privacy attached to matters associated with his participation in that completely publicized crime.”24
This defeat was Leopold’s last brush with infamy. He died a year later, leaving a complicated and murderous legacy that still scars Twentieth Century American history.
Source Notes
1. Higdon, 139.
2. Levin, Obsession, 107.
3. Ibid., 109.
4. Leopold, 368.
5. Levin, Obsession, 109.
6. Ibid., 103.
7. Leopold, 369; Nathan Leopold, letter to William Friedman, December 20, 1956, in the Leopold and Loeb Collection, Northwestern University, Box 35, Folder I; Levin, Obsession, 103, 116-19; Higdon, 314-15.
8. Levin, Compulsion, xiii.
9. Ibid., 447-49.
10. Higdon, 316; Fass, 944.
11. Chicago Daily Tribune, June 2, 1957.
12. Levin, “Leopold Should be Freed,” Coronet, 36-42.
13. Variety, December 5, 1956; Zambrana.
14. Elmer Gertz Papers, July 2, 1957, at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.
15. New York Times, April 2, 1959.
16. Gertz, 169.
17. Ibid., 150, 166.
18. Chicago Daily Tribune, October 3, 1959; New York Times, October 3, 1959; Gertz, 160.
19. New York Times, October 4, 1959; Chicago Tribune, October 3, 1959; Larson, 142.
20. New York Times, October 4, 1959.
21. Levin, Obsession, 225-27.
22. Leopold v. Levin et al, No. 59 C 14087, Circuit Court of Illinois State, April 15, 1964.
23. New York Times, November 14, 1964.
24. Chicago Daily News, May 27, 1970; Leopold v. Levin et al, 45 I11.2d 424, 442, 259 N.E.2d 250, 255 (1970), Supreme Court of Illinois.
Bibliography
Archival Sources
Elmer Gertz Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, DC.
Leopold and Loeb Collection, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.
Books
Gertz, Elmer. A Handful of Clients. Chicago: Follett, 1965.
Higdon, Hal. The Crime of the Century: The Leopold and Loeb Case. New York: Putnam, 1976.
Leopold, Nathan. Life Plus 99 Years. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958.
Levin, Meter. Compulsion. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956.
___ The Obsession. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.
Newspapers and Periodicals
Chicago Daily News
Chicago Daily Tribune
Fass, Paula. “Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture.” In the Journal of American History, Issue 80, No. 3, December 1993.
Larson, Edward J. “Murder Will Out: Rethinking the Right of Publicity Through One Classic Case.” In Rutgers Law Review, Volume 61, No. 1, 1996.
Levin, Meyer. “Leopold Should Be Freed!” In Coronet, Volume 42, No. 1, May 1957.
New York Times
Variety
Other Media
Zambrana, Maria. “The Fictionalization of the Leopold-Loeb Case and the Struggle for Creative Control of the ‘Crime of the Century.’” Master’s Thesis, Northern Michigan University, 2015.
Circuit Cout of Illinois, Leopold v. Levin et al, No. 59 C 14087, April 15, 1964.
Supreme Court of Illinois, Leopold v. Levin et al, 45 I11.2d 424, 442, 259 N.E.2d 250, 255, 1970.