This experience gave her the material for her most famous piece of work, the stage play Chicago (1926), which was eventually adapted into the 1975 Broadway musical of the same name, which was then made into a film in 2002 that won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Her family moved to Crawfordsville, Indiana and at age 11 she received local notice for putting on a play she wrote, "Hearts of Gold", which made $45 for charity.
[2] However, her plans changed after she applied for and was accepted into English Professor George Pierce Baker's playwriting workshop at Harvard University.
[1] For the Tribune, where Watkins worked for eight months, she covered the murders and the subsequent trials of Belva Gaertner, a twice-divorced cabaret singer, and Beulah Sheriff Annan.
[1] Watkins also briefly reported on the noted Leopold and Loeb kidnapping and murder case, whose sensational qualities quickly overshadowed the coverage of the Belva Gaertner verdict.
The play ran for a respectable 172 performances, then toured for two years (with a then-unknown Clark Gable appearing as Amos Hart in a Los Angeles production ).
A silent film version in 1927 was produced and supervised by Cecil B. DeMille and starred former Mack Sennett "bathing beauty" Phyllis Haver as Roxie Hart.
Following her death from lung cancer in 1969, C. R. Leonard, a trust officer at the Florida National Bank in Jacksonville, handled Watkins' estate and negotiated sale of rights to her play.
He later stated that at the time a major heir from the playwright's family informed him that Maurine believed that her newspaper articles had "gained sympathy" for Beulah Annan and that "over the years [she] became disturbed that she had assisted in getting an acquittal for a murderer.
"[5] After the much delayed sale of these rights, Fosse was able to move ahead with development of Chicago: A Musical Vaudeville with a score by John Kander and Fred Ebb.