In 1975, the musical Chicago debuted on Broadway. It was overshadowed that year by A Chorus Line. In 1996, a revival of Chicago opened. The third time was a charm. It garnered six Tony Awards and it is the longest-running musical revival. The story upon which the musical is based first hit Broadway at the very end of 1926. It was written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, an initiate of the Butler University chapter of Kappa Alpha Theta.
Watkins was born in Kentucky and she graduated from high school in Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1914. She attended Hamilton College in Kentucky and Transylvania University before enrolling at Butler University in Indiana as a senior. She became a member of the Gamma chapter of Kappa Alpha Theta. The November 1918 issue of the organization’s Kappa Alpha Theta reported:
We were all registered but had not attended all of our classes when the first ‘flu’ ban was called, closing the college for all non-military students. Now after four weeks of vacation, revised programs, registration, another ‘flu’ ban, ‘flu’ masks, and peace celebrations, we are hoping to get acquainted with our books before ‘exams’ come. . . . We have had so few fraternity meetings that little has been done, but we can count ourselves most fortunate to introduce the following pledge: Maurine Watkins, a senior who come to us from Transylvania.
Her dramatic abilities must have become evident to the chapter. At a joint chapter and alumnae meeting on February 15, 1919, the freshmen:
gave their stunt for the alumnae. It made us more proud of our To-Be-Thetas than ever. Maurine Watkins, a senior, pledged in September, wrote the stunt, which told of the trials of a love sick young man in selecting a valentine for his lady. The maid in the shop brought out valentines galore. Girls with Kappa, Pi Phi, Tri Delt, Delta Gamma and various other kinds of hearts, but he was hard to please, and it was only when the girl with a Theta heart appeared that he was completely satisfied. There was a great deal of dancing and singing, which, with the artistic costumes of the valentines, made it one of the best stunts ever given by a group of our pledges.
After graduation she headed to Cambridge, Massachusetts where she enrolled in a graduate program at Radcliffe College. She ended up in George Pierce Baker’s playwriting workshop at Harvard University but she returned to Indiana without finishing a degree. She was teaching public speaking in the Shelbyville, Indiana, high school in the fall of 1921, according to the Kappa Alpha Theta. In 1923, she was an assistant manager overseeing Standard Oil of Indiana’s outdoor advertising.
Watkins was hired by the Chicago Tribune in February 1924 to cover crime with a feminine touch. The pay was $50 a week. She worked at the job for less than a year, but her by-line was often on the front page. Two of the cases she covered involved women who were accused of murdering men, Belva Gaertner and Beulah Sheriff Annan.
After she left the Tribune, she headed to New Haven, Connecticut. George Pierce Baker was now at Yale helping to set up the Yale Drama School. She again enrolled in his class and wrote a play thinly fictionalizing the murders upon which she reported. Beulah Annan became “Roxie Hart”and Belva Gaertner became “Velma Kelly.”
The play opened on Broadway on December 30, 1926 and had 172 performances. It toured for two years. A silent version of it was filmed shortly afterwards. In the 1940s, Ginger Rogers starred as Roxie Hart in a film by the same name.
On January 10, 1928, the Kappa Alpha Thetas gave a reception and dinner in Watkin’s honor at the chapter house. Watkins was identified as living in Indianapolis at this point, in a newspaper account of the event, but she soon headed west to work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. She invested wisely and at the end of her life, she was a philanthropist.
For years she turned down offers to buy the rights to Chicago. Bob Fosse was interested in making it a musical, but Watkins would not relent. After her death on August 12, 1964, her estate finally sold the rights. John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote the score. The musical was made into a movie and it won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2002.
Watkins left bequests to several institutions to establish awards focusing on her love of classical studies and creative writing. Students who study Latin and Greek are eligible to compete for Maurine Dallas Watkins Prizes through Eta Sigma Phi, a collegiate honor society. She established the Ernest Woodruff Delcamp Essay Awards at Transylvania University to honor a former chairman of the Department of English. Scholarships were set up for students at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in Greece and the American Academy in Rome, Italy. She also gave donations to the classical studies programs at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. She was also a major donor to the McGarvey Fellowship Program at Abilene Christian University.
