Walking on the ceiling with suction cups on your shoes is the circus specialty of Peerless Pauline, the upside-down woman (Eve Arden) in At the Circus. Their other specialty is to hide the $10,000 that a gang of crooks stole from the circus owner. Groucho arrives under the name J. Cheever Loophole, “the legal eagle,” to collect the money. A striking example of a “legal eagle” appears in a review of an American piece of music called Wildflower in the Sydney [New South Wales] Morning Herald (December 1, 1924): The term “legal eagle” also appears in the November 1, 1946 issue of Princeton Alumni Weekly, while “legal eagle” appears twice in the same general period – February 14, 1947 issue and May 16, 1947 issue. As for the “legal eagle”, Australians show no sign that they have adopted it as an alternative to “legal eagle” or as a separate term. In the United States, the “legal beagle” is showing signs that it took hold around 1946, suggesting that it may have turned out to be a pleasant variant of “legal eagle” after the term became firmly established in American slang. The use of the term in advertisements for Perry Mason`s detective novels may have helped him become more popular. Further research shows that Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the lyrics for Wildflower, which opened in New York City on February 7, 1923; the name “legal eagle” appears in some productions such as “Gaston Larotta” instead of “Gaston La Roche”. The corresponding text is found in the “finale of the first act” of the musical: BIANCA AND ALBERTO: He will hunt them like a beagle. The above examples suggest that “legal eagle” was ubiquitous in American slang at a time (1944) when “legal beagle” was just coming out of the door – at least as a popular term. But “legal eagle” and “legal beagle” appear at least in some versions of the lyrics of Wildflower, a musical that enjoyed considerable success in the United States and abroad after its debut in 1923.
In Wildflower, the character of Gaston La Roche (or Larotta) presents himself as both a brilliant lawyer (a “legal eagle”) and an intelligent detective (a “legal beagle”). Since that episode [featuring a doctor pointing out numerous flaws in descriptions of Queen`s medical practice in a detective novel], Dannay and Lee have gotten into the habit of checking medical details with their GP before publication. They also hire a lawyer to clarify them in legal matters; At one point, his legal eagle struggled non-stop for two days and nights to get out of a problem with a complicated will. Tom Leidy has been appointed attorney for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in Reading, Pennsylvania, where he is an attorney; Dwight Parsons, Legal Eagle of Akron, Ohio, attended the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. Lighter isn`t suggesting that the legal beagle was born in response to the legal eagle as an even more joking term, but I think it probably was. Harold Wentworth & Stuart Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, first edition (1960), attributes slightly different meanings to the two terms: in the 1920s, the character Gaston La Roche (or Larotta) became known as “the legal eagle” in the musical Wildflower and also as “a legal beagle” in a phrase of lyrics – albeit in a musical piece in which his legal wisdom fails. In 1939, Groucho Marx`s petty lawyer, J. Cheever Loophole, may have helped revive the “legal eagle” of American slang in At the Circus.
And in the 1940s, Earle Stanley Gardner`s mysterious lawyer, Perry Mason, seems to have been associated, at least temporarily, with the term “legal beagle.” It`s not clear if these three famous fictional Legal Eagles/Beagles are responsible for the emergence and popularization of “Legal Eagle” and “Legal Beagle” in American slang, but I think all three may have played an important role. I did a number of searches for “legal beagle” and could not find a correspondence older than the half-absurd one quoted in the question posted by “Imptorials” in the Implement & Tractor Trade Journal (December 24, 1921): However, Google Books returns several matches older than the second Wiktionary correspondence, which dates back to 1947. The oldest of these games is that of Wildflower, which has already been mentioned, although there are some doubts as to whether the lyrics containing “legal beagle” were included in the original version of the musical. The earliest correspondence I found for “legal beagle” comes from an unidentified article in Publication of the American Dialect Society (1944) commenting on the sentence [combined excerpts]: This glare on Wall Street probably comes from a large brass plaque with the engraving E. Newton Cutler, assistant vice president of the National City Bank, and around the corner the law firm Davis, Polk, Wardwell, Sunderland & Kiendl (advt.) is now challenging all other firms to match their representation of four `37 people, namely Charlie Pierce, Lang Van Norden, your secretary and, as of July 1, none other than the famous legal beagle Jack Irwin. The term “Legal Eagle” also appeared in the December 2, 1940 and May 20, 1941 issues of Princeton Alumni Weekly. A bookstore ad in Michigan Raw Review (1941) [combined excerpts] offers this temptation: Oh, I doubt it`s that complicated, but, as you suggest, just a pretty obvious juxtaposition of rhyming words. I think the term is used more good-natured than hostile. It is certainly not a phrase you would use to express your fear in the presence of a jurisprudential genius, but a lawyer called a “legal beagle” would not be offended either. (By the way, “legal-eagle” is by far the less used of the two.) These first two allusions to Perry Mason as a “legal beagle” seem to be a game with his amazing ability to uncover the truth in a mysterious entangled ability that makes him appear partly as a lawyer and partly as a bloodhound. But why “legal beagle” instead of “legal bloodhound”? Aside from the appeal of rhyme, I think the writer was probably influenced by the existence of the “legal eagle,” which has been increasingly used as an American slang term since the late 1930s.
A legal eagle who turned to comedy to find her wings, Faiza Saleem was a nonconformist from the start. The “corpse” quickly jumps to his feet – with a big smile on his face! It`s Perry Mason – and the tireless “legal beagle” has just solved one of the strangest cases of his career. A case based on the strange hint of a wax candle so important that it sends a man and almost the BAD MAN murder on the electric chair! BIANCA AND ALBERTO: [sung] We`d better trust the legal eagle.