Shownotes: Eve's Tearoom Part 2

Nov 18

Last episode we visited a Greenwich Village tearoom in the mid-1920’s which hung a small sign on its door reading: “men are admitted but not welcome” and relayed the story of the police raid which closed it down. Tonight we follow the two women, lesbian adventurer Eve Adams and policewoman Margaret Leonard, who clashed in Greenwich Village in 1926 to find out what happened to them afterwards. The raid on the tea room ripped one woman from her family, chosen family, and friends. The event put her in prison, sentenced her to debilitating labour, and deported her across the ocean to a country she was unfamiliar with. The other made her career from her actions at the tearoom, launching into a life of daring undercover work.

Eve was not forgotten in Greenwich Village after her deportation. In 1929 Variety gave a tantalising glimpse into the closing of an underground show based on Eve’s Lesbian Love book -- Modernity by the Scientific Players. The Variety article with a tongue-twister of a title -- Queer Show Quits Before Cops Cop It -- is the only source I can find but suggests that a Christopher Street basement theatre was taken over for a run of the show for two weeks before they received a tip off that the police would raid their next performance.

Eve might have been returned to Poland, but she does not seem to have travelled back to her hometown of Mlawa. The early years of Eve’s exile were difficult. In 1929 she relied on her faithful but fickle friend Ben Reitman to raise and send money to her to survive a notoriously harsh winter in Danzig - no small feat in Depression-era America. She weathered the infamous hard winters, inflation, and rabid anti-Semitism of Danzig, finding her feet again after moving to Paris.

Moving to another big city suited Eve and she soon became known in expatriate circles as an expert in avant-garde books. She still lived a precarious life, selling magazines and literature at the outdoor tables of popular Parisian cafes of Montmartre and Monparnasse. She had a reputation as a seller of risque -- even pornographic -- books but the shocking nature of her stock is often overestimated. She first met the American author Henry Miller when she sold him a copy of Fanny Hill which, while first published in 1978, was still banned in the US. Her stock included works by James Joyce and she championed the work of authors she knew personally such as Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, whose controversial Tropic of Cancer (1934) she kept alive by selling the banned book to American tourists seeking bohemian thrills at the Cafe Dome.

While Eve rebuilt her life and literary community in Paris, she still lived on in the memory of New York’s literati. In 1931, 5 years after her arrest, Billy Scully wrote about her tearoom in the Greenwich Village Weekly News, remembering her place as

“one of the most delightful hang-outs the Village ever had” (qtd in Chauncey, Gay New York). Not all papers were as openly sympathetic to Eve. The trashy yet informative tabloid Brevities covered Eve’s deportation from the U.S. with a screaming headline: “Sapphic Sisters Scram!” on its front page. An equally intriguing byline nestled just below:

“Depression Drives Ladies of Lesbos to Normalcy Deserting Boat Boys for Jobs and Feminine Frills.”

The article is written by one Connie Lingle, whom the historian George Chauncey convincingly suggests is really Billy Scully. It can be read as a flattering and affectionate goodbye to Eve from the queer community, or taken at face value as a sensationalist expose of sapphic vice for smug heterosexuals. It starts:

“Depression has hit Lesbos. Along the lyric lanes of this half-light land of sex the lutes of the lesbians are muted in minors. Eve Adams, once the queen of the third sex, has fled to Paris where her “Le Boudoir De l’amour” on Montmartre attracts the supple toungued sirens of the lesbian element.” (Brevities, November 16 1931)

We will never know if Eve’s 1930’s love life was as spectacular as the New York tabloids imagined it was. We do know that she was devoted to one particular partner -- a lesbian singer and artist called Hella who had escaped Nazi Germany and settled in Paris with Eve. Hella was, Eve wrote to Ben, her “most beloved girl” and incidentally “the most marvelous thing to look at”. At this time Eve also legally adopted an ill adult daughter who was 28 years old. Eve would only have been 43 at this time and was, by her own account, completely broke. There is a long history of queer adoption, whether to give a chosen relative or partner financial or medical security, inheritance, or right to remain in the country of their choosing. It is hard to phantom how a precarious Jewish lesbian emigree would have been able to offer any of these things to a woman only 15 years her junior but, for the purposes of our story, it is enough to note that Eve paid whatever security she had access to forward to her adopted daughter.

With the depression hitting Paris hard, Eve still struggled to make ends meet and, when Ben coaxed her to write a paid chapter of his novel Sister of the Road based on her experiences in her itinerant years in America she was tempted but reluctant to condense her wandering years into a condensed narrative:

"Why, my dear man, if I wanted to write my experiences of my wanderings and people and adventures, which still continue with every blessed day, it would take me years to write, and I could fill volumes, not chapters."

While Ben’s letters to his publisher suggest that Eve did eventually contribute a chapter to Sister of the Road, it does not survive. Eve’s chapter might have been cut in the publisher’s attempts to sanitize the work (Reis). Considering Eve’s sexual reputation and literary leanings, this is a sad but likely scenario. In the end, Eve’s voice is absent from Ben’s most famous novel which documents the lives of “hobo” women. He did, however, include a character in his Outcast Narratives who sounds familiar:

“Eve was a short, red-headed Jew girl
Born in Russia 25 years ago.
She has a pale, freckled, masculine face
With an ambitious nose and masculine chin.
She got tired of the New York factory life
And decided to tramp around the country.
She travelled around the country in search of types
And had about twenty affairs with ladies
She said, ‘Why do you object -- what harm am I doing?”
(Cresswell, The Tramp in America)

If we don’t have access to Eve’s own words looking back on her own experiences, we do at least have this quick sketch of a woman who is brave and completely unapologetic about her sexual or lifestyle needs and choices. Despite their differences, Eve and Ben corresponded throughout her exile. Her letters became less political and more personal in the 1940’s, with requests for assistance in gaining entry to the US (see Reis 2000). Ben’s earlier unkind assessment of Eve as an old acquaintance who

“writes me pathetic letters begging me to find a way for her to come back” to the US was hopefully updated to reflect the growing urgency of her situation (qutd. in Reis 2000). The final years of Eve’s life were lived under the stress of France’s increasingly hostile policies towards foreigners in general and Jewish people in particular. Eve saw America as her way out, petitioning friends to help her leave Europe and return to the land she grew up in and never chose to leave. With convictions and a deportation hanging over her, Eve’s chances of escaping back to the US were particularly sparse.

In her last years in Paris Eve saw her international group of friends and customers move out of the city as the war drew closer to them. After the declaration of war artists, queers, and radicals dispersed as far as their finances allowed, moving back to their home countries -- if they still existed -- or seeking new home countries. Eve’s options were limited not just by her poverty and her loyalties to her German girlfriend and French daughter but also by the racism of supposedly safe countries which looked on Jewish and Eastern European refugees with hostility. The Nazis occupied Paris in 1940 and promptly targeted places where foreigners and deviants found community like Sylvia Beach’s haven of Modernist thought, Shakespeare & Co. and the stunningly sophisticated and explicitly queer cabaret, Le Monocle. Eve’s Paris started to disintegrate. Anaïs Nin remembers the subdued atmosphere of wartime Paris in her diaries as she packed her bags for New York:

“Paris at night. I stepped out of a cafe, a restaurant, into darkness. I recognized no one. The person I was going to say good-bye to vanished into darkness. What a profound, total isolation. But then, as I lost my intimate contacts, I entered into contact with the world. A world of gentleness was gone. A world of collective suffering was beginning” (Nin 247-248).

Eve and Hella joined the exodus from their capital city, settling together in a small, bright flat in Nice. From the French Riviera, the women were more anonymous though not safe from the persecution of the French Vichy government. The people of Nice and their new neighbours did not accept the new government quietly. I can’t imagine the radical pair missing a protest but even if they did not brave the streets of Nice to protest the Vichy regime they would have been able to see the hundreds of protesters march down the Avenue de la Victoire from their small balcony and to know that they were not alone. While Nazi Germany occupied most of France in 1940, Eve and Hella had an uneasy reprive under the occupation of fascist Italy which did not cooperate with the deportation of Jews from this area. This ended with the Nazi takeover of Nice in September of 1943 when SS and police raids were supported by a network of informers and physiognomists (see Zuccotti 2019). Eve and Hella were taken from their flat and transported to Drancy internment camp outside Paris. Drancy was originally built as a quiet housing complex for a few hundred workers. By the time Eve and Hella were imprisoned there it held tens of thousands of prisoners in terrifying and unsanitary conditions. They stayed there for 10 days.

Less than 9 months before Drancy was liberated, over 850 Jewish men, women, and children were designated transport 63. Eve and Hella were among them. They sang banned songs as their luggage was cut open and they were forced into cattle cars where they endured a journey lasting three days and three nights. Eve was deported back to Poland for the second time in her life. The extraordinary Eve was not alone when she was murdered at the age of only 52, Hella was with her. 500 people from Drancy were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau on Monday 20th December; the day of their arrival and the day before the 1943 Hanukkah started. As night fell on the day after their murder, prisoners in the Lodz ghetto, where surviving members of Eve and Hella’s families were imprisoned, met to light the first candle of Hanukkah in a secret act of resistance against the Nazis.

And what of the policewoman who had Eve deported for the first time? More has been written about Eve than Margaret, but Margaret is easier to follow through the official records. Paragraphs in George Chauncey’s Gay New York and the tireless research of playwright Barbara Kahn have propelled Eve into queer memory but she is still elusive. Eve’s compelling maverick life has to be pieced together from original letters, in-jokes in left-wing papers, and sensationalist news coverage. Margaret moved, steadily if not effortlessly, through official channels. She lived in Queens in New York for most of her life, first with her parents and later with her husband and child. She might have kicked convention while doing this -- her husband was a few years younger than her and she joined the police force when her son was young -- but she still stayed within the boundaries of official paperwork. She appears in her flat in Queens in the census, works her way through official NYPD channels, and appears in a stream of sympathetic news reports throughout her career. I first started to research her to find out more about what kind of woman would join the police force and actively work against her queer sisters. What I found was that, while I still resented Margaret for her persecution of Eve, she was a pioneer in her own right.

Margaret Keenan was born in 1891, the same year as Eve, and stayed in the Queens district for most of her life. She adopted the name we know her by, Margaret Leonard, after marrying her husband. Robert was three years her junior and a paper plant employee. She gave birth to her son (Robert Jr., a future accountant) when she was 29 and returned to work when he was 4. Margaret’s badge number tells us that she was only the 94th policewoman to join the NYPD. She worked in the Bureau of Police Women before joining Vice. As any signs of sexual or gender deviance were of interest to the Vice Squad, and Eve was a fabulous embodiment of both these goals, she staked out Eve’s place.

Margaret had only been in the NYPD for 6 months when she arrested Eve. It was her first big undercover role, or at least the first to hit the papers. Just after giving evidence against Eve, she was back in the public eye. In July of 1926 she was under cover at the establishment of another female entrepreneur the 300 Club run by the silent film star Tex Guinan. Margaret and other detectives spent several evenings surveilling the club “dressed as flappers seeking a thrill” (Hello, Sucker!).

The star’s glamorous speakeasy, with its dancers, orchestra and high-profile clientele, was a far cry from the poetry readings and small dark spaces of Eve’s tearoom. Margaret’s team raided the 300 Club on the evening of Mayor Walker’s private party when the venue was bedecked in white ribbons and the guests included senators, a captain and a selection of famous golfers. The police seized liquor bottles and arrested two people for suggestive dancing.

Margaret appears in a spontaneous sting in 1927, putting herself between a real estate salesman and women window shoppers who were being harassed by him:

“Policewoman Margaret Leonard, petite pride of the 18th division, saw the pinching sheik doing his stuff in the midst of a group of women out window shopping. Motioning to [her colleagues] to edge in, she wormed her way to the side of the pincher. In a moment she felt her dimpled knee pinched ferociously. Her aids had observed the pinch being made, and they, too, made a pinch” (Daily News, New York, 16 Dec 1927, p2).

Margaret appears in the press again in the spring of 1928, undercover as a distressed pregnant woman to prosecute an abortion clinic. In the autumn she was back in court, and the papers, testifying to the inaccurate forecast offered by a spiritualist in another undercover operation. In 1933 Margaret was one of two policewomen attending Roosevelt’s inauguration, and the following year assisted in the prosecution of an unlicensed salesman performing abortions in New York.

She moved to the narcotics squad in 1935; the first woman to hold a position there. Margaret flourished at the Narcotics Bureau (she was promoted to Third Grade Detective in the 18th division in 1939 and received at least 3 recognitions for her work), though she became a more unobtrusive presence in New York as far as the press was concerned. At least some of her assignments were lengthy undercover operations. In 1942 she was in deep cover in the Lower East Side, renting a flat beside neighbourhood drug dealers to investigate their sources. While many of her cases might have been less sensationalist than her early work in the city clubs, her major cases still hit the papers. 1949 saw her involved in a major drugs bust, seizing bottles of cocaine from a closet worth over 3 million dollars. Later that year, she posed as an addict -- or in some accounts as a chambermaid -- in a heated narcotics sting which saw one of her fellow detectives shot from a speeding sedan. She managed to record the number plate of the car before it disappeared. In 1950 she was the arresting officer in the biggest dope seizure in New York at that time. A year later, along with 5 other woman, Detective Leonard was designated a Second Grade Detective.

It made the papers when Margaret, the first woman on the Narcotics squad, put in her notice. “I’ve got a lot of knitting to catch up with”

she is quoted as explaining to a reporter (21 Jul 1954). She retired on August 16, 1954. Her annual salary was $2907.50. A respectable salary for the time, but far below that of her male counterparts. Her retirement too filled the pages of a slow Sunday with the headline: “Granny Quits the Force; Warred on Dope for 19 yrs.”

The feature on the retired grandmother of three, resplendent with pictures of the former detective in a patterned dress and apron at her stove. “I’ve never had time before to be a full-time housewife. I’m finally catching up with the housework that got ahead of me...”

she said to the Daily News, a paper that dismissed her distinguished career as “29 years as a frustrated housewife” (5 Sep 1954). The prettily reassuring picture of femininity Margaret paints jars slightly with her reason for resigning; she was about to hit the compulsory retirement age of 63.

Whether or not her public commitment to housewifery was deeply felt, it was short-lived. Margaret’s husband died in 1955. A couple of years later, Margaret returned to work. This time she was a consultant on the television series Decoy, the first American crime series to feature a female protagonist. Decoy is a sincere, campy series starring Beverly Garland as a detective who gets into all sorts of titillating scrapes and dons skimpy costumes for her undercover work. Costumes much smaller than those of the burlesque dancers Margaret had arrested for indecency. Margaret is credited as the technical advisor on all 39 episodes. She finally left New York after Decoy ended, retiring to Plymouth Meeting in Pennsylvania where she died in 1975 at the age of 83.

Anecdotes from Margaret’s undercover work often read like the pitch for her own low budget returnable crime drama series. Her career was accomplished, and exciting, and long. The world had changed a lot by the time of her death in 1975, almost 50 years after her arrest of Eve.. Did she read about the Stonewall riots and the first gay pride marches happening only a few streets away from the former location of Eve’s Tearoom? When she heard about Auschwitz, did she think about her role in deporting a Polish-Jewish lesbian and wonder what happened to Eve after their encounter? The questions are similar to those we should ask of law enforcement now. What will happen to those you choose to deport? Whose laws are you enforcing? And how will generations to come view your actions?

Photographs of Eve belong to Eran Zahavy. To find out more about Eve read about Barbara Kahn’s trilogy of plays about Eve and keep an eye out for Jonathan Ned Katz’ upcoming book about Eve’s life. Our thanks to both these researchers for keeping Eve’s memory alive. Queer Ephemera is a storytelling podcast which is based on historical sources but we do not provide a full and accurate account of the subjects we cover. Wherever possible, we will signpost our listeners to the work of historians or original documents.

Shownotes: Eve's Tearoom Part 2

Further Reading

Shownotes: Eve's Tearoom Part 1

Queer Ephemera