‘Lady in Purple’ Took L.A. Legal World by Storm

Before Gloria Allred, before Leslie Abramson, there was Gladys Towles Root.

The flamboyant “Lady in Purple” was a Los Angeles courtroom fixture for more than half a century, during which her formidable tactics earned her notoriety and success as a defense attorney for thousands of clients charged with sex crimes.

Root spent her life prowling the courtrooms, pleading for an assortment that included accused ne’er-do-wells and perverts--partly because in those days they were just about the only clients a woman attorney could get, partly because few other lawyers wanted to defend them.

With her domineering air and her cornucopia of flamboyant chapeaux--many of them purple--Root became a highly decorative legal landmark. She scored a major coup in 1931, when the state Supreme Court reversed part of a 1906 state law barring marriage between certain races.

A Filipino and a white woman who was pregnant with his child begged Root to find a way they could be married. Root found that the law did not include the racial group from which Filipinos are descended. The high court agreed.

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Her first client, Louis Osuna, walked into her office at 7th and Spring streets in 1929, just as her career began. He demanded a quick divorce from his wife for her infidelity. But the next day, he decided the wheels of justice turned too slowly and he shot and killed his wife instead.

Showing the first among what would become her sensational bag of legal tricks, the glamorous 25-year-old woman in a male-dominated world persuaded the jury to convict Osuna of manslaughter, not first-degree murder. That got her career rolling: Osuna introduced other inmates to Root, and for years thereafter, defendants’ familiar phrase was, “Get me Gladys.”

With her style and skill, she defended alleged child molesters, prostitutes, rapists and peeping Toms as a matter of principle. “My mother told me when I was a young girl that I must be broad-minded toward unusual behavior,” she said.

“She told me to think of those people as loose spokes on the wheel of life.” While some clients paid for her services with live poultry, others paid cash--enough for Root to buy a Hancock Park mansion. In 1948, she would be among the residents who refused to sign a petition to stop Nat (King) Cole from buying a house there.

In 1929, she married sheriff’s Deputy Frank Root, with whom she had a son. By 1941, they were divorced, and in 1943, she married Jay C. Geiger. They were devoted to each other, and showed off their legendary wardrobes at resorts and trendy restaurants.

Geiger always had a green parrot named Pablo perched on his mink-covered lapels; at Perino’s one day, Pablo took a bite out of the neck of a judge Root disliked.

Root’s colorful hair--dyed with Easter egg dye and Mercurochrome--matched every outfit she wore, as did her grandiose hats that had the wingspan of a 747. Once, long before attorneys had consultants advising them how to dress, she swished up a narrow courtroom aisle in a skirt with 20 yards of taffeta and 60 yards of ruffled petticoat beneath it. Later a judge ordered her to remove her gigantic hat. But when she complied and he saw her gaudy hair in pincurls, he shouted, “Put it back on!”

Her outfits hid her pregnancy well, and in 1944, she gave birth to a daughter.

With her sharp mind and boundless energy, she plotted unique defenses. One backfired on her. After she persuaded the jury that her client had an irresistible impulse to steal Cadillacs, like an alcoholic craving a drink, he was acquitted.

A few days later, he was back in jail. Root asked why he had stolen another Cadillac--hers. “Compulsion,” he said. “Isn’t that the word you used at my trial?”

While defending a man against rape charges, she marched up to a husky juror and said, “Anytime after this trial is over, if you still believe a man can rape a woman while she’s conscious, you’re at liberty to step into my office and I’ll prove that it can’t be done.” Her client was acquitted.

Root never drank. Instead, she rewarded herself with chocolate after her victories. But one case didn’t merit the candy.

After she helped her client, accused of molesting a 10-year-old girl, walk to and from the witness stand with a white cane denoting blindness, the judge dismissed the case. He said no blind man could possibly have done what the child claimed he did.

As the defendant stood and faced the judge, he said, “Thank you. The moment I came into this courtroom and looked at you, I knew you had an honest face.”

Root, appalled, whispered to her assistant, “I swear, I didn’t know.”

Although sex cases were her bread and butter, it was a kidnaping that made her as well-known as the victim, Frank Sinatra Jr., and got her indicted in 1964.

Federal prosecutors accused her of falsely claiming that the young singer had permitted himself to be kidnaped as a publicity stunt. But after a four-year battle, all charges were dropped.

In 1982, she was still working hard and spectacularly attired--in gold--when she suffered a fatal heart attack in a Pomona courtroom while defending two brothers accused in a sodomy-rape case. She was 77.