Helping Hands

It takes a village to write a book like 'Nightmare in the Pacific.'

Take Artie Shaw's 1944 divorce from the former Elizabeth Kern. As a reporter, I long ago learned the value of divorce records. Particularly when the split gets nasty; hoo boy. I recall the prominent farm lobbyist with a toxic sexual history, the jealous California congressman who allegedly locked his wife in the bedroom, the embittered CIA case officer who spilled his secrets at the Fairfax County Courthouse.

So I had some hopes for Artie's divorce file. Candidly, I envisioned Elizabeth having submitted documentation about what he was like before and after his Navy service in the Pacific.

But how to get it? The divorce file, if it existed, would be held at Los Angeles County Superior Court. I live in Arlington, Virginia. The records from 1944 aren't online. That's good, because it means that they can't be found by every web-crawling Tom, Dick and Harry. But, it also presents a conundrum. First, I'd have to determine if the file even exists. If it did, it would probably be held in some archive from which it would have to be pulled. Do I fly to California, search for and request the file, fly back to Virginia, then fly back to California to review the file that might, or might not, be useful?

Instead, I hired a helper.

I looked for freelance genealogical researchers, and found a great one in Diane Hellmer, a licensed private investigator. Diane went to the L.A. courthouse, found the index listing for the Shaw divorce file, requested it from the court archive and returned several weeks later to copy it. It was a smooth, cost-efficient process that made the best use of my time and research budget.

Spoiler alert. The divorce file in Shaw v. Shaw proved to be not quite as juicy as I hoped. Still, it was a turned page that shed a little bit more light both on my subject and on the value of helping hands.