In this episode, I let Jake Ehrlich do a lot of the talking, because frankly, no one skewered San Francisco’s hypocrisy quite like he did. Dolly wasn’t just fighting a criminal charge—she was being fed to the wolves in a city that had tolerated, taxed, and quietly protected vice for decades. Suddenly, after one raid involving a handful of well-connected teenage boys, everyone found religion.
What fascinates me most here is Dolly’s code. She could have blown the lid off police graft. She could have named names. Instead, she chose silence—and then she chose to disappear. Whether you see that as loyalty, pride, or strategy, it says everything about how the underworld operated. And in the middle of it all? A mother terrified that her child might see her face in the papers.
TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the Frisco: the Secret History Podcast. I’m your host, Knox Bronson. I have a wonderful episode for you today Part Three of the Dolly Fine story, one of Frisco’s last great madams.
In Part One, I traced Dolly’s rise from her teenage underworld beginnings as a lookout and gang moll to running San Francisco’s most profitable brothel and her later clashes with reformers and the Atherton investigation, whose resulting report rocked the city to its core. While it didn’t mention Dolly by name, she had been summoned against her will to testify before the Grand Jury and it was clear that she was their sights.
She kept operating as if nothing had happened, but fortune took a devastating turn. A society matron overheard her 16-year old son telling a friend over the phone that he was going with the gang to Sally Stanford’s house after the school prom the next Saturday night. Mother called the police.
The police staked out Sally’s bordello at the appointed hour. The boys arrived, rang the bell. Sally took one look at the eight pimple-faced lotharios, laughed, and sent them on their way. The determined crew huddled momentarily and, not to be dissuaded from the prize they sought, made their way over to Dolly’s place on Bush Street.
There, the maid let the tuxedo’ed boys in and took them to a parlor to wait until some of the girls were free. It was a busy Saturday night, primetime, after all.
It was then that the police raided the building and arrested Dolly, the maid, and four of the girls. The boys were sent home to their parents. The other customers were allowed to put on their pants and return home to their wives.
Now, the DA and some, but not all, cops were ecstatic. They had Dolly cold.
The case of Dolly Fine-alias Dorothy Harding, Helen West, Joyce Wilson, Dorothy Fine, Dorothy Hardy, Julia Woods, Julia Black, and Julia White, but already best-known as The Lady in Red-was brought before the grand jury, which quickly returned an indictment against her for eight counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, very serious charges indeed.
The boys testified before the closed session, each admitting to having visited the place before. It would not surprise me to hear that the DA had coached them to say this. I do not believe Dolly would have knowingly entertained minors. If convicted on all counts, Dolly faced severe penalties.
In Part Two, I discussed the fallout from the Atherton Report and San Francisco’s long-tolerated system of vice and graft. After the sensational raid on Dolly’s place, public outrage ignited an all-out war between reformers, police, and the underworld. Dolly, the Lady in Red vanished, launching a nationwide manhunt that made front page news from coast to coast.
In San Francisco, every day, newspapers featured new outrages, banner headlines, demands for a crackdowns, policemen and politicians trying to cover their asses while hoping to keep the juice flowing on the down-low.
I’m going to let Jake tell it. Since he was there and knew Dolly well, he told it best in his book, “A Life in My Hands:”
[typewriter]
If the din of journalistic recrimination reached to the high heavens after the raid, it must have become audible even in outer space five days later when Dolly disappeared from public view. Due in Judge Theresa Meikle’s court on the misdemeanor charge of being a “keeper,” my client became newspaperdom’s best publicized absentee since Judge Crater, particularly as she had just been indicted eight times (one for each of the “youngsters”) for violation of Section 702 of the Welfare and Institutions Code, which makes it a felony “to permit or encourage a juvenile to enter a brothel.”
[end typewriter]
Judge Joseph Crater was a New York State Supreme Court Justice who mysteriously vanished shortly after the state began an investigation into corruption in New York City, never to be seen again. His case became one of the most famous unsolved mysteries in American history, hence Jake’s reference.
Jake went on:
[typewriter]
In extremis, Dolly might have been sentenced to a cumulative term of 16 years, with fines totaling $40,000. In the present mood of the witch burners, such an insensate stroke of revenge-or something numerically close to it-was by no means an impossibility.
Even a volcano rarely stays red hot very long. My blond friend might be purchasing a cooling-off period rather expensively in terms of her bond forfeiture and other minor penalties, but then again, the price might be worth the advantages gained.
The newspapers continued to shrill the hue and cry. Dolly was reported in Nevada, in Mexico, in Hawaii and even-curiously enough-in Alaska, where she’d been born. The chief of detectives of Chicago got into the act with a really daffy yarn to the effect that she was in his overseasoned and undercivilized bailiwick, being comforted by “known members of gangland.”
Another report had her headed for France with a secret husband and a large-denomination nest egg. Still another one, apparently circulated by a catty nonfriend, related that she was, “in the East, getting a face-lifting and various other plastic surgeries.” Dolly needed plastic surgery like Custer needed another Indian.
Meanwhile, quite certain that I had masterminded the whole disappearing act and was actually having secret daily Parlays with my client, the newspapermen were sticking close to me. My disclaimers met with mockery, but as long as my utterances were enjoying such a bull market with the press I took full advantage of the situation to heap coals of fire upon the heads of the spuriously righteous.
I wanted to know why the chief of police and the district attorney and their own bosses had failed to erupt in sniveling recrimination at hundred-year-old ills until an octette of young delinquents described as “scions of socially prominent families” dipped themselves in the fleshpots. I stated that I could “stand on the front steps of the Hall of Justice with a handful of buckshot and with one throw hit fifty whore-houses”; that one such establishment (the Palm Hotel) was close enough from the office of the chief of police to permit the “inmates” to read his morning mail without binoculars; that there were at least 580 other similar facilities in San Francisco… so why pick on Dolly Fine for special crucifixion? They printed all of it.
[end typewriter]
As to that number of 58O bordellos, remember that the Atherton Report had placed the number of active sporting houses in Frisco to 135. Given the amount of money the Report stated was claimed by the police in graft, $1,200,000 or about $30M today, the 580 count seems more likely. Legendary newspaper columnist Herb Caen arrived in San Francisco in 1938 a fresh-faced sprout from Sacramento. No wonder he coined the affectionate term “the cool grey city of love” for his beloved city.
[typewriter]
I pointed out that Madam Fine hadn’t bear-trapped Bush Street, that it was a mite unlikely that the delicately moraled octette had been in her place because-in the language of the code—they had been “encouraged” to go there. I suggested that it was improbable that they had visited the establishment for the purpose of choral singing or a prebedtime game of musical chairs.
And I pointedly asked the district attorney to provide the press with some facts and figures (especially the figures) on his long and sentimental friendship with Pete McDonough, San Francisco’s grand old man of vice, whose purchased friendship kept more red lights burning in our town than ever twinkled in Chicago, New Orleans or Galveston.
“In a vice raid conducted at the request of mothers who suspected all was not right with their sons,” reported the Chronicle, “police early yesterday struck to protect the morals of boys of high school age.
“They trailed a group of eight boys members of well-known families—to the notorious house of prostitution operated by the equally notorious Dolly Fine-of McDonough tapped wires fame-at 1275 Bush Street. There, while scantily attired men and girls scurried in confusion, the raiders confronted the white-faced youngsters-they ranged in age from 15 to 17-and rounded up and jailed the inmates of the lavishly furnished two-story vice den …”
Dolly, described as a tall blonde woman in a scarlet dress,” claimed she didn’t know they were there.
“My God,” she said. “I don’t know how those boys got in here! I certainly did not admit them!” The boys, trailed from a dance, had been admitted by the Negro maid. When police arrived buzzers rang throughout the house, announcing that a raid was on. The boys were found in a back room; because it was a busy night they had been told to wait.
Dolly was booked as keeper, the maid and four girls as inmates. The boys’ names were kept secret. A sampling of newspaper headlines over the next two days indicated this was not to be an ordinary raid:
S.F. PARENTS DEMAND DECISIVE ACTION
30 RAIDS ON DOLLY’S PLACE IN LAST 3 YEARS/
CLOSING OF VICE DEN PATRONIZED BY BOYS SOUGHT
MOTHERS UNITE TO FIGHT VICE
COURT GIVES WARNING OF HEAVY PENALTIES.
Police Chief William J. Quinn appeared before Judge Theresa Meikle two days after the raid, asking that abatement proceedings be made against the house. “We have raided the premises at 1275 Bush Street time and time again, ” the chief said.
“We have tried to close the place, but with no success. Since 1930 we have made 30 raiding arrests there.” (Mention was not made that Dolly had been residing there only since 1937 and accounted for only six of these raids. The confusion was understandable, however, as when the Hall of Justice folder on Dolly Fine was examined it was found to be quite empty.)
Chief Quinn said abatement proceedings against all the other houses in the city would follow. “The result,” he declared, “will be a closed town, in so far as this phase of the city’s night life is concerned.”
[end typewriter]
Another fine example of covering one’s butt in the wake of Dolly’s arrest.
The Chronicle led off with the first of the many remarkable newspaper accounts which would soon bare every known detail of Dolly’s past.
[intermezzo]
Under the headline DOLLY’S OWN STORY OF BEING ON THE SPOT, appeared this editor’s note: “The disclosures and statements appearing in this article were made in confidence to The Chronicle by Dolly Fine last Wednesday in a three hour interview with this writer. Her confidence was held inviolate.
Yesterday, however, she became a fugitive from justice. For that reason, The Chronicle believes the confidence has been dissolved and her action entitles the readers of this newspaper to her story.”
Here is the Chronicle story, the one that drove Jake Ehrlich, as protector and defense lawyer for his friend and client in the scarlet dress, crazy, for he had sternly instructed her to keep her lips zipped until he could sort things out.
[typewriter]
In the pre-dawn hours following her indictment by the Grand Jury last Wednesday, Dolly Fine, haggard, fearful and at bay, wrestled with her code to decide which way to go. Four courses were open to her. She enumerated each of them and dwelt at length on their advantages and disadvantages.
“I can commit suicide,” she said. “I can squeal. I can fight the case and plead my innocence before a jury. Or I can run away.”
She was speaking in deadly seriousness. “First of all. I want you to get this straight I have lived most of my life by the code of the underworld.
“Whichever route I take, I’m going to go first class.
“When I tell you I am perfectly capable, under certain circumstances, of killing myself, don’t think I’m being theatrical.
“I know this is a terrible rap. I know Dolly Fine can never operate again in San Francisco. They tell me I may have to go to jail for 16 years. I won’t do that.
“There is nothing more pitiful in life than a prostitute who has risen from the streets, tasted luxuries and liked them, and then finds herself once again in the gutter.
“If I go to jail for a long term, where do I stand? I come out broke. My friends have disappeared. I am a financial, moral and physical ruin.
“No, Dolly Fine will not hold still for that kind of a deal. “
“That brings us to the next step. I can squeal.” She shuddered. “I’m not a rat. I won’t blow the whistle now. Sure, I know a lot about police graft. I could make it tough on a lot of people inside and outside the police department.
“But listen: Dolly Fine is not that kind. I have a code. That code says ‘Keep your mouth shut.’ I have lived by that standard and I can’t find it inside myself to change my stripes now. “
A lot of persons are going to feel mighty relieved to know that Dolly Fine has pinned up her lips. Well, let them rest easy.
“For years I got along in this town. I was doing a swell business, trying to run a decent house. I paid attention to details. I kept my girls healthy. I obeyed the rules.
“If I had been able to get along for another 18 months, until after the World’s Fair, I would have made my fortune and cleared out. “I could have leased the Bush street place and gone traveling, with a couple of hundred dollars a month income from the lease.
“Then last Saturday night the cops came in. My world the world I had lived in-collapsed. I know that raid smashed me into ‘so many pieces I can never put them together again.
“I am being crucified. For what reason I don’t exactly know. But I do know this is no ordinary case. Politics are mixed up in it somewhere. Dolly Fine is the goat.
“They are going to feed Dolly Fine to the wolves. They are going to say ‘Look, we’ve got the goods on her-we’re going to put her away for a long time. She’s a bad woman.’
“Well, Dolly Fine may be a sucker to stand for it and not fight back. Maybe she’s a fool to take it without opening. up and letting them have some of their own medicine.
“But that’s not the way I am going. Remember, one. of the few things I have left is my reputation among my own kind of people. Do you think I’d let them down?-that I’d turn the heat on them to get it off myself?
“Sure, the spotlight is playing on Dolly now. I could talk and switch it. I could become forgotten in the screaming and yelling that would follow. I won’t.”
“Isn’t it a fact, Dolly, that you paid for police protection at the rate of $300 a month, and that within the past month, that sum was reduced by $75?” the writer asked.
“I won’t insult your intelligence by saying no, that it isn’t the fact,’ Dolly replied. “Instead, I won’t answer the question.”
“Will you deny that the $75 reduction followed the refusal of a ranking police offer to take any money from you?”
“Please don’t insist – I won’t discuss anything of that nature,” Dolly said. She meant it. To questions concerning the location of a down town cafe reputed to be a payoff center where Dolly carried her funds, her reply was the same.
The writer asked Dolly, in view of her sentiments, what she proposed to do about the indictment.
“I’ll plead not guilty and tell the truth,” she said. “Do you think I’m crazy to have knowingly permitted those boys into my house?
“Remember, when the police came in and took me to the back room where the boys were sitting, my exclamation was ‘My God-how did you get in here!’
“People can say I. let them in for the few paltry dollars involved. But listen-I am a mother. And I have a mother’s instincts to protect -a child.
“I don’t want that kind of money. I don’t need it. Does anyone believe I would jeopardize my whole existence every thing I have built up through the years by inviting kids into my house!
“What happened was this: The boys rang the bell and the Negro maid answered the door. I was inside and could not see who the callers were. “They came into the dim-lit hallway and went to the rear. That was my part of the whole affair.
“Don’t forget, too, that these boys were dressed in Tuxedos, which make most. people look much older than they actually are. “I know this is a rap that probably can’t be beaten. I know that I am probably as good as convicted right now, especially with the way the public feels.
“But I am ready to plead my own case before the jury if this thing turns out that way. I can tell the truth and stand or fall by it.” Dolly Fine’s blue eyes are mirrors. They can turn to steel or swim in tenderness.
At this moment, they reflected her inner struggle self-preservation versus the code of the underworld. “I could run away,” she said, There was a long silence. “No, I don’t see how I could do that either. I can’t go through life a fugitive from justice, hunted from one city to another, haunted by fear of a policeman’s hand on’ my shoulder.
“There’s something else, too, that would make that hard. I have told you I am a mother.
“I can’t become a wanderer and find myself forever barred from seeing. my loved one. Few people know I have a child. I won’t tell you whether that child is a boy or a girl.
“My child lives in a distant town. My child does not know how its mother makes her money. But my child has everything money can buy. “People who say ‘She’s just an old prostitute’ can enjoy their smug view of Dolly Fine. I live my life as my profession dictates, but there are some things Dolly Fine knows about herself that are pretty good for her conscience.”
Dolly Fine relaxed and scanned the past. Hers is the story of a woman who achieved a dubious stature and a strange respectability in San Francisco’s underworld after literally working her way up from the streets.
Prostitution to this woman is a profession not without honor-her actions yesterday confirmed her words.
She got into the profession early. She was 34 years old yesterday. Dolly Fine never went beyond the sixth grade in grammar school. What she learned, she learned the hard way. She knows the answers to things’ that most people never learn anything about.
Money, she said, is not her god. She reputedly has $50,000 cash, owns a $16,000 home at Sharp’s Point, lives in luxury. Early in life, Dolly suffered certain reverses that turned her to prostitution. She found it paid. She was a streetwalker at first. But a streetwalker with brains and common sense. She saved her money because she wanted to rise in her profession.
From streetwalking she entered a house. She made money there and saved that too. Since that first house, there have been many in Dolly’s career. She has a long record of arrests. At each place that Dolly worked, she learned something, saved a little more, one day found herself comparatively wealthy.
Then she went into business for herself. Her place at 1275 Bush street is a four-story apartment building, leased by her and catering almost exclusively to the taxicab which is the most lucrative. trade, which is the most lucrative.
She found herself in the vortex of the police graft investigation when tapped telephone wires revealed her as being tipped off on several occasions to pending police raids. Records showed those raids occurred on schedule, in accordance with the tapped conversations. They took Dolly Fine before the Grand Jury-routed her out of her Bush street establishment one night and swept her into the witness chair.
It was a sensation. Dolly was caught entirely unprepared. But she didn’t need an attorney-because Dolly Fine is not the kind that needs an attorney to tell her what to do when she is on the spot.
She simply observed the code of the underworld and sealed her lips. It worked.
Yesterday Dolly Fine had made her choice between suicide, squealing, facing a jury, or becoming a fugitive. Perhaps the factor which decided Dolly to flee in the hours following the interview was this: the fear that her child would discover, through newspaper pictures and stories, that the mother he or she loves is a common prostitute.
“They can’t take my picture if I go to court, can they?” she asked the writer. “I’ll fight them—they can do anything they want to me but take my picture.
“The police haven’t any in their files. The newspapers have never taken a picture that really looks like me. I could not live if my child finds out.”
Dolly was told the police would insist on a rogue’s gallery photo, in view of her indictment. And she already knew the press is tireless.
So today Dolly Fine, woman with a past, is a woman in the past. She went first class.
[end typewriter]
[intermezzo]
There was much more. And during the following weeks each of the city’s four major newspapers would add their exclusives. Dolly was in Chicago, New York, hiding out in her “sex castle” at Sharp Park (a small beach house badly in need of paint).
More headlines:
Vice Queen may spill on police, according to a person close to the madam; Dolly once in love with cop, according to an unidentified prostitute.
The Lady in Red had definitely been traced to Chicago.
The Mexican border patrol was expected to capture her momentarily.
That is, if the Paris police didn’t arrest her first.
Dolly Fine Seen Sipping Around Downtown.
She had been a gangland moll, a dancer, a streetwalker. One of her brothers was a well-known comedian.
When even gossip became sparse, the Examiner produced an interview with several of her girls, who revealed, among other things, that they had Social Security numbers, the missing Dolly and other prominent madams having begun keeping books and making deductions from the earnings of their inmates shortly after Social Security became effective.
They were designated as “chamber maids.”
[intermezzo]
Here’s Jake’s take on the Chronicle’s front page “Dolly’s Own Story of Being On The Spot.
The morning Chronicle came up with a yarn with more meat on its bones. Three days after Dolly withdrew from circulation, the Chronicle revealed that one of its writers had been granted an interview by the Lady in Red on the day before she “fled.” It had been a cozy tête-a-tête permitted with the rather inane understanding (under the circumstance) that nothing that passed between them would be published.
Now, because Dolly had been unsporting enough to fly the coop, the Chronicle no longer felt bound by its representative’s promise to respect such a confidence. It published all, with quotation enclosures, exclamation marks and an occasional asterisk.
“I’ve lived all my life by the code of the underworld,” the Chronicle quoted my client as confiding, and at the moment I happily could have drop-kicked Dolly into orbit. “I have three alternatives. I can squeal. I can run. I can kill myself.
But whichever way I go, I’ll go with class.”
Fine! This little séance had apparently taken place during the grim hours before the Cliff House conference and despite my telephonic admonition to speak not at all to the press.
The rest of it was equally bloodcurdling to the eyes of a defense attorney.
The story might have been remotely acceptable as a fund-raising pitch for a home for fallen women, otherwise it was merely excruciating.
My intake of Scottish therapy—and I’m sure that The Master, being who he was, meant Scottish therapy of the single malt variety—that night was doubled.
[intermezzo]
Dolly would return to San Francisco in eighty-nine days and, with Jake’s guidance, turn herself in to face the music. This was one day shy of the deadline where she would forfeit her one-thousand dollars bail.
Of course, Jake will work his magic in that most Ehrlichian manner, and in so doing hold up a mirror to the hypocrisy of the newly chaste defenders of San Francisco decency and rectitude.
It’s a story you will not want to miss.
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Once again, I’m your host, Knox Bronson.
Thank you for listening. Until next time, please get a little crazy and call it Frisco.