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Chapter 1: His Theater of Shame
- Rutgers University Press
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1 His Theater of Shame And just as a person might pass from anonymity to celebrity without ever understanding why, it is equally common for that person, after preening himself in the warm public glow, to end up not even knowing his own name. —Jose Saramago, All the Names Miss Rae Schade is slender and wears a modest dress. She tilts her head down toward the taller, older man on her right, as if embarrassed. A veil of chiffon gauze hides her eyes. Her body seems to yield to the pressure of watching eyes as she steps from the shadows of the Hall of Justice onto a downtown sidewalk. That taller, older man on her right is her father, Fred. He wears a suit, a wide tie, and a fedora. He, too, averts his eyes as if avoiding the gaze that magnifies a shame made public during a week of police interviews and court hearings. He lets the outer part of his left shoulder touch the inner part of his daughter’s smaller right shoulder. In that exposed moment on March 28, 1929, his closeness suggests protectiveness or a need to hide. The fear he expresses is understandable. His daughter, Rae, has just filed rape charges against her former employer, C. C. Stafford, and set off a media frenzy that will last for months. Los Angeles readers got their first good look at Miss Schade and her father on March 29, when the Los Angeles Times printed the photo it had shot the day before, along with a brief news story.1 Eventually, four local newspapers combined to publish eighty-four news stories (not counting wire stories) that tracked C. C. Stafford’s case, from his arrest to his release from jail. At least fourteen of the stories made the front pages, with the balance appearing inside as local news. In the months preceding the stock market’s infamous Black Tuesday, these stories became a long-running show in a theater of shame, one that featured tales of illicit sex for an 15 16 city of industry audience of thousands of readers. Exposure of these violent intimacies certainly punished C. C.’s family, including his thirteen-year-old son, who was old enough to be embarrassed by the scandal, especially if he chanced to meet Miss Schade in the office of his father’s grain mill. Jim Stafford would always nurse a special hatred for the press—above all, the Times. That newspaper alone published fifty installments of the scandal, a proportion that reflected its power to create an image of him as “the wealthy grain merchant” and then destroy it. Under Harry Chandler’s command, the Times ran the state’s Republican party, selecting its candidates up and down the party roster, from Los Angeles to Sacramento. The paper also marketed Southern California as both a real estate opportunity and a tourist destination, targeting middle-class WASPs who could preserve Los Angeles as a “white spot of America” as well as an anti-union, open-shop city for industrial investors.2 The two-column story that the Times published on March 29 was short on news but long on details and characters that would lure readers to the photograph printed above the story, and to the next suspenseful episode narrated at a high emotional pitch, the signal features of journalistic melodrama. “Her face [was] masked in a white silk scarf,” the lead paragraph began, whetting the reader’s appetite for clues that would reveal the 21-year-old El Monte bookkeeper’s “true” identity. The mystery-woman motif reiterated the theme of the previous day’s Times story, which had mentioned the existence of undisclosed evidence that promised to exonerate C. C. Stafford.3 But the current story’s second paragraph also denied Schade family members their privacy, noting their El Monte address, before returning to the mystery motif. “Her presence in the Hall of Justice with the heavy mask over her face caused a curious throng to follow her from place to place,” presumably into the street, where the “beautiful” young woman cast her spell on onlookers. The article did not identify the people in the “throng.” Doing so might have revealed that it mostly consisted of photographers chasing down this story, thus breaking the illusion of spontaneous civilian curiosity in which the reader could vicariously participate. No matter. The photograph and article, which introduced Miss Schade as if she were a Hollywood starlet on...