I’ve produced a video documentary based on my biography of Carl Magee. So if you’ve been waiting for the movie, here it is. The video gave me a chance to add an episode to Magee’s life story that I completely missed in writing Citizen Carl: The Editor Who Cracked Teapot Dome, Shot a Judge and Invented the Parking Meter.
After his wife Grace died, Magee dated a woman named Perle Mesta, who became famous in her own right. Mesta was an Oklahoma oil heiress who later earned a reputation for her parties in Washington, D.C., and her fundraising for the Democratic Party. President Harry Truman named her ambassador to Luxembourg. The Broadway musical “Call Me Madam” was based on her life, and a song in the production dubbed her “The Hostess with the Mostes'”.
She and Magee dated for several months, but he broke off the relationship after she refused his proposal of marriage. Mesta described the relationship in her memoir, and it was recounted in a recent biography of her, The Woman Who Knew Everyone: The Power of Perle Mesta, Washington’s Most Famous Hostess by Meryl Gordon,.
I completely missed this information in my research, so Mesta isn’t mentioned in my book at all. My old friend and colleague John Moore, who helped edit Citizen Carl, brought the relationship to my attention when he was reading the new Mesta biography.
It’s an embarrassing oversight. But I’ve tried to amend by including the detail in this new video, which, by the way, is less than a half hour long.
Jack McElroy Books 