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A Tribune reporter wrote the hit play ‘Chicago’ after covering Cook County murder trials. Decades later, we owe her an obituary.

Maurine Dallas Watkins died on Aug. 10, 1969 — 50 years ago this weekend — in Jacksonville, Fla.

Don’t be surprised if Watkins’ name is unfamiliar. A nine-line death notice in the Florida Times-Union on Aug. 12, 1969, was the only recognition of her passing. Like many newspapers around the country, the Chicago Tribune failed to run her obituary.

In 1926, Watkins wrote the play “Chicago,” which today is a $2 billion entertainment franchise featuring A-list celebrities, a hit, Tony Award-winning Broadway musical and an Oscar-winning movie. It’s likely the most financially successful piece of writing ever produced by a Chicago Tribune reporter in the paper’s more than 170 years of operation.

The content was pulled from the headlines — some of Watkins’ own. She was hired by the Tribune in early 1924 and reported on women inside Cook County Jail who were accused of murder. It was the only professional journalism job in her lifetime and she only held it for eight months.

Watkins used the plot twists of the women’s trials to write a three-act play, “A Brave Little Woman,” the first she would write while attending the new Yale School of Drama in 1926. When it debuted on Broadway later that year it was a play called “Chicago.”

Some years after her death, “Chicago” was adapted by John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse into the stage musical best known today; the show opened on Broadway in 1975 and a 1996 revival is currently the second-longest running show on Broadway. A touring production with Roxie Hart, Billy Flynn and “All That Jazz” was last in Chicago this spring at the Cadillac Palace.

Not many traces of Watkins remain at the newspaper.

Time then, 50 years after her death, for Watkins to have her Tribune obituary.

Several years ago, Chicago Tribune photo editor Marianne Mather found a box of photo negatives made of glass, stored in the Tribune Tower basement. On the outside of the cardboard box was written two words, “Kitty Malm.” Katherine “Kitty Malm” Baluk was one of four women who inspired Watkins to write “Chicago.” Soon, Mather found similar boxes for Beulah Annan, who inspired the character of Roxie Hart; Belva Gaertner, who inspired the character Velma Kelly; and Sabella Nitti, who inspired the character Hunyak.

There was not a box of photos for Watkins. There is only her byline on about 50 stories in the newspaper’s archives.

(A similar effort at the New York Times tells the stories of fascinating people who never received final recognition for their life’s work, often women and people of color, launched in 2018 by editor Amisha Padnani. She confirms the New York Times did not run an obituary for Watkins.)

An only child of a minister and his wife, it’s unclear where and when Watkins was born. Various records indicate she was born on July 27 in Kentucky, but none agree on the year or location. Possibly Louisville or Lexington. Her original birth certificate is missing from Kentucky’s vital statistics files.

The trio moved to Crawfordsville, Ind., 50 miles northwest of Indianapolis, when Watkins was young. There, she flourished as a playwright, first making headlines for her production “Hearts of Gold” at age 11. According to the story, she gave the $45 she made from it “to the heathen.”

While attending Crawfordsville High School, she continued to flourish as a writer and Good Samaritan. She helped found a newspaper, the Billiken, and delivered blankets, gifts and food to needy families as a member of the Sunshine Society.

Maurine graduated in 1914, ranking at the top of her class of 82 students and never scored below 90 percent through her four years there. Her final yearbook portrait was accompanied by a quote from the first act of “Romeo and Juliet,” a lament about Romeo’s unrequited love for the chaste Rosaline: “She’ll not be hit with Cupid’s arrow.”

True to those words, Watkins never married nor had children. Instead, she pursued an advanced education. First at Hamilton College in Kentucky, then Butler University in Indiana, but her ambition was drama school on the East Coast.

She applied three times to Radcliffe College, the women’s liberal arts college in Cambridge, Mass., that shared facilities and courses with the then all-male Harvard University, before finally gaining acceptance in fall 1919. She took English 47, a pioneering class where students not only studied stagecraft but put their skills into practice in an experimental theater under the guidance of Professor George Pierce Baker, who was once called “the greatest living authority on the drama” by the Boston Globe.

It’s unclear why, but Watkins left Radcliffe before earning her master’s degree and returned to her parents’ home in Indiana.

She reemerged in 1923, after taking a job as assistant manager for outdoor advertising for Standard Oil of Indiana. While in Chicago, Watkins was contacted by Leo Ditrichstein, a European playwright-actor whom she contacted several years earlier about partnering to write a play. He was ready to work with her, he said. But their collaboration was short-lived. Ditrichstein soon departed for Italy with his wife.

“After that,” Watkins later recalled in an interview. “I thought I’d turn to newspaper work.”

No one knows how Watkins was hired with no previous professional journalism experience and accounts vary about what she was hired to write about at the Chicago Tribune. She covered crime, courts and funerals, but also health issues, provided style commentary and followed women leading the pacifism movement. She often reported on women inside Cook County Jail. In her final months at the Chicago Tribune, she reviewed movies and a few plays. On Aug. 7, 1924, Watkins’ byline appeared in the Chicago Tribune — twice — for the final time.

After Professor Baker brought his theater program to the new Yale School of Drama, Watkins enrolled in his class in early 1926 and produced what would become “Chicago.” On June 8, 1926, New York City theater owner and producer Sam H. Harris announced he would stage Watkins’s play. It would play at the Music Box Theatre in New York City for 22 weeks before other productions opened in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Detroit and Berlin, Germany.

Watkins would continue to write plays then head to Hollywood to work for a variety of studios, but she would never again replicate the success of “Chicago.” Yet, she was handsomely compensated for that show’s success. She used that and her screenwriting earnings to invest in prime stocks, buy luxury items and travel the world.

Once described as “rather old-fashioned, she does not smoke, nor drink; neither has she bobbed her hair,” Watkins never conformed to society’s standards of what a professional, single woman should look like and be. She set her own.

Everything changed, however, after Watkins’ beloved father, George, died on Feb. 15, 1941. She stopped writing, stopped working and stopped traveling. There’s no record of her whereabouts for almost a decade — until her name appeared in the 1951 city directory for Jacksonville.

Watkins shared an apartment with her mother and would stay in the same building until her death. In 1955, she composed a handwritten will and letter to her mother with specific instructions for distribution of her property among family, a few friends and acquaintances and religious institutions. In all, Watkins’ estate was valued at $2 million (or, about $14 million in today’s dollars). She would live another 15 years in obscurity, but never amended either document.

At the time of Watkins’s death, it had been more than 41 years since “Chicago” was last staged on Broadway and 27 years since the movie “Roxie Hart.” But her famous work didn’t expire with her.

WE COULD WRITE A BOOK

We began researching Maurine Watkins in 2017 after the discovery of that box of negatives, and also looked further into the court cases behind her famous play.

All are captured in “He Had It Coming: Four Murderous Women and the Reporter Who Immortalized Their Stories,” produced by the Chicago Tribune with Agate Publishing, which will be released on Nov. 19, 2019. The book includes recently discovered photos, original newspaper clippings and Watkins’ stories as well as new analysis written by Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips, theater critic Chris Jones and columnists Heidi Stevens and Rick Kogan.

To read more about Watkins, the women she profiled and how “Chicago” came to be, preorder “He Had It Coming” at the Tribune Store.