Other defense attorneys ask you why you did it, or where you were the night you didn’t. Gladys, “The Purple Lady,” asked you for your favourite colour. And then she wore it around her client to put him at ease. If you didn’t have a preference, she usually wore purple.
Thanks to Cy Rice for his fascinating bio.
Gladys Towles Root began practicing law when it was not popular for a lady to grace the courtroom. To say she made a splash is an understatement. Her work began in 1930, and to this day she has won more sex crime cases than any other lawyer in history.
Despite being a trailblazer of the California legal system, her work did not make her popular with the later feminist movement, as her views about rape tended to favour man’s insistent biology. Furthermore, “Only one out of a hundred of these cases is founded on fact,” Gladys stated. “The woman usually gave willing consent, fabricated the story, or encouraged the act.”
That said, her sympathies to sex offenders stemmed from her belief that no one wanted to be a pervert and that the sick needed care and understanding. She also had a much different idea of what constituted ‘perversion’ than most of her colleagues in decades like the ‘30s and ‘40s. (Her career lasted for 52 years, from 19030-1982).
While her work sometimes veered shockingly close to “blaming the victim,” she was adamant that a lawyer do her job to the best of her ability, whether or not each job was pleasant. The right to a fair trial was sacred, and too bad for the prosecution that the best of Gladys’s ability was better than anyone else’s ability. Her shrewd intelligence, showmanship, and deep knowledge of the law won nearly every time.
Sometimes it was quite shocking to watch a woman’s vehement defense of a child molester. Though Ms. Root acknowledged that sex crimes against children were reprehensible, she also expressed that children possessed “an imagination rivaling Alfred Hitchcock’s, and often just as macabre.”
About that unpopular figure, the pedophile, she said, he “can be either married with a family, or single. In a way, he is to be pitied. He has strong guilt feelings and he lives in a private hell with himself. He utters the torments of the damned and carries a heavy burden of shame. Not all molesters are furtive and scheming and feel triumphant when not apprehended by the law. Some have a strong compulsion to be caught…they subconsciously want to pay for their deviate thoughts and actions.”
But Gladys way ahead of her time in her deep conviction that the government had no business in the bedroom of consenting adults. She didn’t believe justice should be wasting people’s time, money and lives for the consenting kinks of married (or even unmarried!) grownups. At a time when every creative act of sensuality was against the law, Gladys urged the law to reconsider its prudishness. She worked in a time when cross-dressing or homosexuality were illegal, and saved many ‘sex offenders’ from a life in prison. She felt strongly that whether we like it or not, prostitution can never be outlawed and that access to abortion is an absolute right. “Prostitution is going to be with us forever and a day,” she said. “The highest officials in the world have tried in vain to eliminate the oldest profession. It couldn’t be done.” As for abortion, “it comes under the heading of progress,” she said. “Many a young woman could be saved whose life may now be ruined by a few minutes of reckless passion.”
Once while defending a man arrested 30 times for the same crime, she turned to the judge and asked, “”Your Honour, can you tell me what’s wrong with a man wearing women’s clothes if he so chooses?” He could not.
Of course, not every deviant she defended was so harmless. She believed in a fair trial for professed rapists and murderers, too, and she often worked pro bono for those who couldn’t afford her services. “I don’t speculate on the guilt of a client,” she says. “When he comes to me he is innocent, and I’ll do my damnedest to see that he walks from the courtroom a free soul and becomes, I hope, a good future citizen.”
Ms. Root herself was herself charged with a few criminal acts throughout her career, including charges of conspiracy, suborning perjury, and obstruction of justice. She was defending a man charged with the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra’s son, and accused of making up a baseless story in order to defend her client. She maintained her innocence and the charges were dropped. Later, there was some tax evasion drama.
Gladys took on as many as 1600 cases a year, often joking that she spent so much time working that, “I’m going to die in the courthouse.” She won the majority of her cases, and for better or for worse, she saved many from the chair, and many whores and homos from prison.
Despite her eyebrow-raising insights into human desire, violence, and her impossible energy, nothing’s as shocking as Gladys Towles Root’s personal style. When asked about what drove her to dress in costumes that not even Cruella or Liz Taylor in her heyday topped, Gladys cavalierly called herself a nutcase and a screwball. This mad hatter wore four-foot hats into court, frequently in purple, her very favourite of favourite colours, lavishly decorated with massive flowers and feathers.
Not only were her outfits skintight so that she could barely wiggle around the courtroom, but they were also vivid rainbows and resplendent with yards of swishing taffetas or trailing skirts. One LA Times reporter described her dress as “a Cinemascope production.” Many of her wardrobe essentials, such as the yard-wide egg-shaped blue hat with a bouquet of poppies, were her own designs.
She also tended to match her hair colour to her dresses. On one occasion, she dyed her hair hot pink, to match two pink lambs on leashes as she walked along the boulevards.
Her jewelry was also larger than life. Rings like golf balls, brooches that rivaled her hats. And all that glitters is indeed gold. Everything was real.
Gladys’s second husband and soul mate Jay Geiger gave both Gladys and Boy George a bit of competition. He liked to dress head to toe in hot pink and satiny fabrics and carry an English walking cane. Once, as a present to Gladys, he fixed angel wings to a live elephant that he brought to her yard as a surprise. Both Root and Geiger adorned themselves with mink trim and matching lilac outfits on occasion. There were rumours about a skunk dressed in a jeweled cape at an evening bash.
Outlandish clothing and pets to match are not Mrs. Root’s only vices. She eschewed alcohol, though occasionally she would sip cocktails or mocktails because they looked fabulous with her vibrant outfits. However, she adored chocolates, and she would indulge in these finest pleasures if, and only if, she won her day’s case.
Her home and office were just as lavishly outrageous as her costumes. Her office, a block from skid row, was gold and purple. At home, she had sequined doorknobs, gold-painted ceilings, and nighties that flowed with twenty yards of chiffon behind her while she lounged by her pool and fed peaches to her peacocks. (Once a parrot accompanied Ms. Root and her husband for dinner, and bit a judge who was dining there at the same time.) Every morning, very early, she lay on her gold chaise while her maid paraded in with costume options for the day.
How she found the hours for these luxuries is one of the many mysteries of Gladys Towles Root, who seemed to have more hours in her day than mere mortals, and significantly more energy with which to fill them.
For on top of her average of 75 or so court appearances monthly (including during her pregnancies), she met with her clients in prisons for consultation or visited them on holidays when they might be lonely, clients as far as 500 miles away. Her compassion for the sick and twisted and lonely and poor was unwavering. Yet she also hobnobbed at various society events with her profession’s glitterati, and spent time with her husbands and children. She seldom slept, but when she did, it was in white satin with taffeta drapes drawn around the bed. The headboard was velvet and the carpet in the boudoir was red.
Her last breath was in a Los Angeles courtroom, just before Christmas, in 1982. She told the judge she needed a moment, as she was having trouble breathing. Then, Gladys Towles Root, decked out head to toe in gold, had a heart attack and died.
She was buried in gold and sequins, and there was an assortment of family, clients, ex-cons and other degenerates, prosecutors, and judges in attendance. Over 4000 came to say goodbye to their “purple lady.”
If you like art, literature, madness and interesting people, you’ll love Lorette C. Luzajic’s books. Her first book is “The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos.” Her second is “Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (Irreverent Ramblings from the End of the World.)” Her poetry and her collected blogs, musings, reviews, memoirs, notes, eulogies, requiems, interviews, profiles and more are both devastating and hilarious romps through one woman’s wild mood swings. Lorette proves that there’s life after death, even for manic-depressives. “Think Courtney Love meets Margaret Atwood,” says Donnarama, Toronto’s premiere performance artist.
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