Editor’s Note: When the nominations for the best adapted screenplay were announced at the Academy Awards ceremony in March, there was one name that, though probably unknown to most listeners, should have been recognized by members of Eta Sigma Phi. The original play on which both the Broadway and Hollywood musicals Chicago were based was written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, for whom Eta Sigma Phi’s translation contests are named. On her death in 1969, Eta Sigma Phi received a bequest of $10,000, which became the seed money of the endowment which supports the summer scholarships, and her name was given to the translation contests. The following reminiscence was written by Kappa Alpha Theta’s fraternity archivist for the Kappa Alpha Theta Magazine and is reprinted here with the permission of Ms. Arnold and the editor of the magazine.

"This one’s got the makin’s: wine, woman, jazz, a lover." — newspaper reporter Jake Callahan in Chicago. Ladies, lovers, liquor — and all that jazz. Not only the intriguing elements of the current movie Chicago, but also the circumstances behind two true-life murders in the Roaring ’20s that launched the writing career of a Theta from Butler University’s Gamma Chapter. 

Chicago, derived from the 1975 Bob Fosse musical, originally was written as a play by Maurine Dallas Watkins — based on her experiences covering the arrests and trials of two women accused of murdering their lovers in 1924. A fresh-faced but savvy reporter at the Chicago Tribune,  

Watkins recognized the headline-making opportunity in the crimes involving Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annan and helped turn them into media sensations. After both were acquitted, Watkins penned Chicago as a satire of crime, celebrity, and the creation of image.  

Born in 1896 in Louisville, Kentucky, Watkins began writing as a young girl — producing plays, founding her high school newspaper, and writing short stories. After graduating from high school in Indiana, she attended Hamilton and she found herself covering Gaertner and Annan. Her witty and wry humor turned the trials — and Watkins’ by-line — into After graduating from high school in Indiana, she attended Hamilton and Transylvania Colleges in Kentucky and Butler College in Indianapolis, Indiana, graduating in 1919. Watkins later pursued graduate work at Radcliffe, studying playwriting under George Pierce Baker, America’s foremost teacher in the field at the time.

Watkins’ journalism career began at the Chicago Tribune in 1924 she found herself covering Gaertner and Annan. Her witty and wry humor turned the trials — and Watkins’ by-line — into front-page news. After the trials, Watkins moved to New York, where she worked as an editor and continued to study playwriting under Baker, then at the newly formed Yale School of Drama. It was in Baker’s classes that she wrote Chicago.

Chicago, with the same tongue-in-cheek humor exhibited in her newspaper columns, vaulted Watkins to national fame when it opened on Broadway on December 30, 1926. The play ran for 172 performances before touring at home   

and abroad. Within a year Chicago was produced as a silent film, supervised by Cecil B. De Mille. It also was the basis for the 1942 film Roxie Hart, starring Ginger Rogers.

Following Chicago’s success, Broadway producers pursued Watkins for new works to mount, but those plans didn’t materialize. Only one other Watkins play opened on Broadway — Revelry (1927), adapted from the S. H. Adams novel about the Teapot Dome scandal. It had a modest run of 48 performances.

Watkins then moved to Hollywood and worked for the major movie studios

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