Short story by ‘Chicago’ playwright discovered

NEW YORK – The late Maurine Dallas Watkins is known to millions for her play “Chicago,” the basis for the Bob Fosse musical and the Oscar-winning film. She also wrote screenplays for more than a dozen movies, from the screwball comedy “Libeled Lady” to the prison satire “Up the River,” the feature debut of Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart.

But Watkins, it turns out, also dabbled in fiction.

Watkins’ “Bound,” an obscure, decades-old story of betrayal and violence, appears in the February-May issue of The Strand Magazine, a Birmingham, Mich.-based quarterly that has published long-lost fiction by Mark Twain, Graham Greene and others. The Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli said the story was offered to him by Watkins’ literary estate.

“This certainly doesn’t share much with the stories and screenplays she wrote which were filmed in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s,” Gulli wrote in a recent email. “Many of those were standard dramas and comedies, this is very dark and when reading it you almost feel that she was experimenting and trying to see if this could be expanded to a novel or play.”

Watkins, who died in 1969 at age 73, was a journalist in Chicago in the 1920s and “Chicago” was based on her coverage of a pair of murder trials. The play opened on Broadway in 1926 and was adapted into a silent film. Meanwhile, she continued writing for the stage and screen, including the play “So Help Me God!” that went into production just before the 1929 stock market crash, killing any chances for Broadway. She had success in Hollywood in the 1930s and ’40s, but her career then faded and she was rarely seen in public over the last decade of her life.