The Ambivalence Chaser

From the first days of the talking movie, the cry of Hollywood celebrities in distress has been: "Get me Giesler." For whether the charge was rape or murder or merely mental cruelty in a divorce case, Jerry Giesler was the best defense attorney in town. Last week the irreplaceable Giesler died, at 77, leaving behind him a saddened and nervous Hollywood.

His clients ranged from Errol Flynn to Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin to Smoky Bob Mitchum. He was attacked as a publicity hound and had a reputation as a fast man at taking on sensational cases: when the Beverly Hills cops first arrived at the home of Lana Turner after her daughter had stabbed Johnny Stompanato, Giesler opened the door. But underneath all the star-spangled headlines was a quiet, brilliant lawyer, an ambivalence chaser and not an ambulance chaser, who third-guessed his opposition and won his cases less by theatrics than by thorough and meticulous preparation.

Violations & Acquittals. Nonetheless, his legend rests on his occasional histrionic flashes. He broke bones in both hands thumping on the counsel table or the jury-box railing. Once, demonstrating a murder scene, he lay flat on the courtroom floor and continued his oration from that position. When he defended Stripper Lili St. Cyr on an indecent-exposure charge, he concealed his own paunchy frame in the allegedly diaphanous towel that had covered her on the night in question, so convulsing the jury that the case was laughed out of court. In his desk drawer he kept Lili's black lace panties as a trophy of the victory.

His tactic in rape cases was to make the victims seem even more rapacious than the accused. When Alexander Pantages was prosecuted for violating a 17-year-old girl, Giesler first established that the girl was strong and athletic and could probably have pinned the scrawny old theater owner to the floor if she had wished to. She had arrived in court in pigtails and a little girl's dress, so Giesler asked the judge to make her wear the clothes she had worn the day of the "rape." After she showed up in a low-cut crimson gown, Pantages was acquitted.

A bald, unprepossessing man who looked like a half brother to both Adlai Stevenson and Alfred Hitchcock, Giesler delivered his exhortations to juries in a crescendoing whine, sometimes trailing off into the deep purple. He defended Walter Wanger after the jealous producer fired a -38-cal. slug into the groin of a fellow whom he considered too attentive to his wife, Joan Bennett. Giesler decided this was temporary insanity. "For a brief mo ment," he told the jury, "through the violet haze of early evening, Wanger saw things in a bluish flash." The jury some how saw it that way, too, convicting him of a minor charge, and Wanger ended up with a short prison term.

Giesler's client Robert Mitchum, ar rested for smoking marijuana, also went to jail. Although Giesler was fairly sure that Mitchum had been framed, he counseled against a not-guilty plea in order to avoid the added publicity of a drawn-out jury trial. "My handling of the Mitchum and Wanger cases saved the motion-picture industry much grief," Giesler said much later in his as-told-to book with Saturday Evening Post Writer Pete Martin, "but they didn't appreciate it then. They don't appreciate it now. It has always been the industry's weakness that it can only see an inch before its nose."

A Specialty. Son of a bank cashier, Harold Lee Giesler (pronounced Geese-ler) was born in Wilton Junction, Iowa. He was about to go to the University of Michigan when he developed eye trouble and went instead to Los Angeles, where he drove a horse-drawn lumber wagon. Soon he began studying law at U.S.C. and clerking in the office of Earl Rogers, a flamboyant attorney who was a kind of Edwardian Giesler. Rogers nicknamed him Jerry, and the young attorney got some of his first courtroom experience helping Rogers successfully defend Clarence Darrow against a charge of bribing jurors.

On his own, Giesler was soon cutting his eyeteeth in some toweringly strange trials. Murders were a specialty, and in all, Giesler handled more than 70 murder cases over the years. Not one of his clients was executed, not even Bugsy Siegel, the excess-personnel man at Murder, Inc. And when Norman Selby, the fighter known as Kid McCoy, * was charged with the murder of his mistress, Giesler got a verdict of manslaughter even though Selby had earlier insisted to the police that he was guilty. Giesler's explanation of the confession: the Kid was so depressed that he wanted to die.

Divorce & a Horse. Divorce was Giesler's other specialty. Married twice himself (he had two daughters and one son), he helped Barbara Hutton divest herself of Cary Grant, took the side of Lady Sylvia Ashley against Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe against Joe DiMaggio. In his most bizarre case, he defended the life of a horse named Tom Boy whose owner's will had decreed that the stallion should be destroyed to save him from mistreatment; and in perhaps his most celebrated case, he won an acquittal for Charlie Chaplin, charged with a violation of the Mann Act for transporting Starlet Joan Berry to New York. (He did not defend Chaplin when the actor lost the paternity suit that prompted him to leave Hollywood forever.)

Giesler never talked about the fees he charged, but Chaplin reportedly paid him $100,000, Errol Flynn $75,000. He averaged about $150,000 a year--not much for a star whose performance in some of the greatest of Hollywood scenes should have earned him half a dozen Oscars.

* At the time, there were two fighters called McCoy, Selby was a good one, and the other pug, by comparison, was a glass-jawed failure. When fans referred to Selby, they called him "the real McCoy," adding a phrase to the American language.

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