Louise Fazenda, the zany, pigtailed comedienne of the Mack Sennett
era. Mack enjoyed working late at his studio so he could chase pretty
girls between takes. Louise found the only means of quieting an empty
stomach and finding some fleeting peace was to take a sandwich and hide
it, ready for supper, in the women’s lavatory.
Louise married Hal Wallis in 1927 and began a new career as an angel
of mercy who covered her philanthropies in secrecy. A law student
concluded that he’d have to quit school because his girl-wife was
pregnant; Louise took up all the bills. She would go out to UCLA
Medical Center to feed young children, rock and sing them to sleep.
Not all of her charges recovered; she made a special point of seeking
out the hopeless, terminal cases because her heart was big and strong
enough to pour out its love even when a child was doomed.
And she never lost her sense of fun. There used to be a vacant corner
lot next to her small house. At night she’d wander over the ground
scattering wild-flower seeds, just for the sake of hearing her
neighbors exclaim in wonder that only a blooming miracle could have
produced the flowers that sprang up. It was Louise’s sense of humor,
matched with the need to teach Hal and his friends a lesson, that
brought the stately brothel keeper to the Wallis’ home in the San
Fernando Valley.
Hal was in the habit of asking his men friends and associates around
for Sunday luncheon to sample his wife’s delicious cooking. Most of his
buddies seemed to think this was something too tasty to waste on their
wives, so they brought along their girl friends. Finally, Louise’s
patience ran out. One Sunday, when the usual crowd had gathered for
some home cooking, Louise entered with her own special guest. Almost
all the men knew her instantly; some of their companions needed no
introductions either. Not a single harsh word was spoken between Mr.
and Mrs. Wallis; but from that Sunday on, the husbands started bringing
their wives.
Faced with the certainty of a prison term, the madam asked for Louise’s
help. “I’ve no place to hide my jewels, my car, and my clothes,” she
said, “and they’re all the savings I’ve got left. If the police get
their hands on them, I may never get them back. Is there anything you
can do?”
“Certainly,” Louise said. “There’s a special stall in my garage to
which this is the only key. Drive in there tomorrow, lock the door,
and keep the key until you’re free.” That is why, when search was made
of the lady’s place of business, there were some mighty mystified
investigators around, for they could find nothing. All her valuables
were safe in the Wallises’ garage, and when Hal reads this it will be
news to him.
Crooks as well as shady ladies like to mingle with celebrities. Bugsie
Siegel’s gaudy days and nights as a man-about-Hollywood ended on a
davenport in the house at 810 Linden Drive, Beverly Hills, that his
dear friend, red-haired Virginia Hill, rented at $500 a month. “Death
at the hands of a person or persons unknown,” said the coroner’s jury
after the machine-gun bullet holes in his back had been counted, fired
(while the watchdogs remained peculiarly silent) through a window.
Bugsie loved to socialize. He’d turn up, dressed to the nines, to take
a drink or play poker as the guest of all kinds of people. Every two
weeks he came into Beverly Hills to get his hair cut by his favorite
barber. Marie MacDonald used to dine in his company at Las Vegas.
George Raft appeared as a witness for Bugsie when the mobster went on
trial in Los Angeles. Leo Durocher was one of many who knew Bugsie
well. The day before he was rubbed out he sent a check for $2500 to the
Lou Costello Youth Foundation, a sports center Lou and his partner, Bud
Abbott, built on East Olympic Boulevard. The day after Bugsie departed
this life, the sun-blackened peddlers who sell maps of movie stars’
homes to tourists along Sunset Boulevard latched onto a new sales dodge
with hastily scrawled signs that said: “See Where Bugsie Met His End.”
One old friend of his, Countess Dorothy Taylor di Frasso, was in Europe
when she heard the news. “Bugsie, Bugsie?” she said, and eyebrows could
be heard arching over the telephone. “Why, I don’t know any Bugsie.
Could you mean Mr. Benjamin Siegel?” An amateur gentleman to the final
curtain, he would have appreciated the formality.
“I was very fond of Mr. Siegel,” the countess allowed, “but it is
utterly ridiculous to say I was in love with him.” A man in her life
that she really cottoned to was Gary Cooper. She snaffled him up when
he was worn out from too many pictures and too much Lupe Velez. She
whisked him off aboard a slow boat to a safari in Africa.
She found our town an unplowed pasture for her type of worldliness,
mixing titles with prize fighters and topnotch actors with show girls.
At one of her parties she hid a recording machine under a sofa in
the hope of picking up some spice from her unsuspecting guests. Jack
Barrymore ruined it. He sat there, unknowing, and delivered a monologue
of tangy reminiscences about every celebrity who entered, including
his delightful hostess. Unaware of all this, the countess grabbed an
opportunity to remove the record and summon her closest pals up to her
bedroom to hear a playback. After it made a few revolutions on the
turntable, she snatched the record off and smashed it on the floor.
Bugsie’s darling, Virginia Hill, who’d given him a gold key to the
house on North Linden Drive, was in Paris when she got word that he had
turned his back to a window for the last time. “It looks so bad to have
a thing like that happen in your house,” she said when she’d dried her
tears.
Some months after this I was dining at a left-bank restaurant in Paris
with Lilly Daché, her husband, and Jean Daspras, a struggling young
French designer who was about to open his own dress salon. After coffee
he took us up to his roof-top garret to show us some of his sketches.
There he told us about an American, a friend of his, who had recently
arrived at the place with a tightly wrapped shoe box.
“Please don’t open this,” said the visitor. “Just hide it somewhere and
forget it.”
Six months later the same American returned for the box, which the
young Frenchman had kept hidden under his bed. As a favor, he was
allowed to take one look inside before the caller departed. It was
filled not with shoes but with jewels--hundreds of thousands of
dollars’ worth belonging, so the American said, to a woman named
Virginia Hill; but who she was, Jean Daspras had no idea.
Bugsie had his finger in a lot of pies. He was trying to corner the
bookmaking business as far east as St. Louis. In Los Angeles, Reno,
and Las Vegas he was cramming his race wire, known delicately as
“Trans-American News Service,” down the throats of bookies. He had his
own bookie joint at Guy McAfee’s Golden Nugget in Las Vegas.
Siegel also had set up a milk route, as he called it, for running
raw opium, which is a popular crop in Mexican fields just south of
the United States, to cookers in Tijuana. There it was prepared for
a further trip across the California border, for distribution and
sale in Los Angeles. Rumors flew around that Luciano was sore at the
competition Bugsie was giving him and had warned him to stay out of
opium smuggling. Forty-eight hours after the gang had lost its boss,
border patrolmen were battling smugglers near Calexico and confiscating
thousands of dollars’ worth of opium destined for Los Angeles.
Bugsie was a big man in Vegas. He was president of Nevada Projects
Corporation which operated the Flamingo, a sprawling, hectic-hued
hotel and gambling joint built spang in the middle of a scrubby desert
at a cost of $5,600,000. He started in as vice president when Billy
Wilkerson was president.
Billy was a dapper operator who used to run two plush Los Angeles
restaurants, the Vendôme and the Trocadero, later the Mocambo and
Ciro’s, then opened a fancy haberdashery and barbershop. When they
failed, he started as publisher and editor of the _Hollywood Reporter_.
His greatest claim to fame is that he discovered Lana Turner sitting on
a drugstore stool, playing hookey from Hollywood High School. He sold
out his interest in the Flamingo to Bugsie and was on vacation in Paris
when the machine gun opened fire outside 810 Linden Drive.
Bugsie had lost a fortune running the Flamingo and was struggling
to save it from foreclosure. One police report had it that he owed
$150,000 to an eastern gangster. The police also had a shrewd idea that
he was behind some mighty big jewel robberies in our town. Earl Warren,
our governor at the time, made the expected statement of the obvious:
“One lone gangster coming to California from another state where he
was a power doesn’t mean much, but when he becomes connected with
narcotics, gambling, bookmaking, and jewel and fur thefts, he becomes a
dangerous article.”
Whoever knocked off Bugsie got away with it; his murder has never been
solved.
One inevitable suspect was questioned but set free. “I don’t think
anybody’s gunning for me,” said slippery Mickey Cohen, who has
more friends among the movie makers than Bugsie ever dreamed of. I
accidentally found myself sitting at the table next to Mickey in the
Mocambo one night. He had a party of ten that night, including Florabel
Muir and her husband, Denny Morrison, plus a guard sitting at each
corner with the usual bulge under his coat that denotes the presence of
concealed artillery.
I called over the captain. “I refuse to sit next to gangsters.”
Florabel turned around. “But they’re _not_ gangsters,” she said.
“They certainly look like gangsters to me,” said I, and was given
another table in double time.
Mickey, who was finally sentenced to San Quentin for income-tax
evasion, wheedled his way into a friendship with Red Skelton, a
sentimental, unpredictable man whom I admire very much. Red was a soft
touch for Mickey; lent him money; took him into his home, together with
Janet Schneider, a Cohen protégée whom Mickey eventually succeeded in
getting onto a Jerry Lewis television show. He tried to sell Red the
idea that he should play himself in a movie version of his incredible
life story.
Red survived the depression of the thirties as a marathon dancer around
Bayonne, New Jersey. He managed to stay on his feet sixty days at
one time to win enough money to keep body and soul together, though
not very tightly. He worked as a circus clown--his father was one,
too--and he’s never lost that quality in his nature, a sympathy for the
underdog, an ability to picture all human frailties.
Not that he’s slow with a wisecrack when the magic moment comes.
Like the day I went to see him in the hospital soon after the last
inauguration. We talked about how much Frank Sinatra had given of
himself to stage the inauguration party for the President. “What can
Kennedy do to repay Frank, the man who has everything?” I asked.
Red paused to consider that for a moment, then grinned: “He can repeal
the Mann Act.”
Red’s an Abraham Lincoln Republican. In fact, he’s one of our country’s
foremost experts on our greatest president, and he’s got a Lincoln
library that stirs your soul. During a lull in rehearsal at one of his
television shows on which I was appearing, we decided to try to convert
some of his crew to our brand of politics. We both made stump speeches
and got a good round of applause. “I don’t think we changed anybody’s
mind,” I said.
“Maybe not,” he answered, “but we gave ’em something to chew on,
anyway.”
He begged Gene Fowler to cross the Atlantic as his guest when he
opened at the Palladium in the summer of 1951, following Danny Kaye,
who was cutting it up all over London town as a buddy of Princess
Margaret. Gene, an old Hearst reporter and once editor of the New York
_American_, went along, principally to fend off some of the bites of
the sharp-fanged British press. He wrote to me:
Dear Sweetie:
This is the old man’s last long journey anywhere except perhaps
to the cemetery. Every citizen should be compelled by law to
take a trip abroad--all expenses paid--so as to know how to
vote.
Skelton is a big hit at the Palladium notwithstanding all
manner of handicaps. It is a hot June with all kinds of sports
events going, _and_ Danny Kaye failed to introduce him (as is
the hitherto unbroken tradition) on Sir Danny’s last night at
the Palladium. Tell me, honey, is it possible for any man to be
bigger than himself? And is momentary glory too precious to be
shared with a fellow American and a fellow trouper? It is quite
true that we cannot share personal grief, but we can and should
share happiness or success.
Gene
P.S. It is not true that I have been knighted.
When they got back, Red bought Gene a car to say his thanks, but Gene
would have none of it. He clung like a limpet to his ramshackle jalopy,
growling: “I didn’t go to London with you for a present, but because
I’m a friend.”
Gene wasn’t around to help when Red and his wife, Georgia, took their
son, Richard, on his last, long journey to see the world after doctors
at UCLA Medical Center told them the boy was doomed with leukemia. The
British press venomously accused Red of publicity seeking in taking
Richard to see the Pope. The boy read the papers and realized for the
first time that his illness was fatal. Wounded to the heart by the
stories, Red brought his family home to Brentwood, to wait for the
inevitable. Gene was one of the pallbearers at Richard’s funeral.
Mickey Cohen was among those at the ceremony.
I was working in a television studio next to Red’s soon after that day.
In the corridor he said shyly: “Do you suppose you could do something
for me, Hedda?”
“Anything, Red.”
“My wife is mourning, just as I am. I get home tired from working and
burst into tears, and so does she. She says everybody knows how I feel
but nobody thinks of her. Could you write something about her, how
she’s having a bad time, too?”
Four years later Red has been unable to shake off his melancholy. He
sits by the hour in his garden rather than go into the house, which
holds too many memories. Though he’s earned enough to make him a
millionaire, he has gone through so much money--diamonds for Georgia,
gifts to friends--that he has been compelled to sell the $3,500,000 TV
studio he bought in hopes of becoming a big producer like Desi Arnaz.
His health isn’t good, he sleeps poorly. Yet before the cameras or on
a night-club stage, he’ll work hard enough to break his heart--and put
a chip or two in yours.
* * * * *
Mickey Cohen had another friend among the comics in Jerry Lewis, whom
he tried to set up as producer of Red’s movie life story. Jerry was
another who lent Mickey money: $5000 with no security “because he
needed help.” In his Martin and Lewis incarnation, Jerry came from
playing night clubs in Philadelphia, where the majority of clubs are
controlled by Frank Palumbo, no stranger to the racketeers.
When Dean and Jerry first appeared at Slapsie Maxie’s in Hollywood,
every studio in town tried to sign them. It was Hal Wallis who
succeeded. Incidentally, in their days together, Dean and Jerry
had an admirer and occasional companion in the junior senator from
Massachusetts. In show business language, they found John F. Kennedy
was a square John who seldom caught on when they were kidding him.
Jacqueline hadn’t yet come into his life. The girl he was most gone on
was Helen O’Connell, who delivers warm jazz with a genteel air.
Before Dean and Jerry could start work for Hal Wallis in movies, they
had some more night-club dates to fill, including one in Philadelphia.
They were joined in that City of Brotherly Love by the actress wives of
two of our better-known Hollywood personalities, one of them a woman
who had dragged her patient husband to Slapsie Maxie’s night after
night to ogle Dean. If you can prevent catastrophe, you’re bound to
give it a try. So when I found out what was going on in Philadelphia, I
went to see Hal Wallis.
“Unless you nip this in the bud,” I said, “you’re going to start your
first Martin and Lewis picture with a couple of divorces to contend
with.”
Hal was petrified. “What can I do?” he pleaded.
“Stop it before the news gets out.”
He called his partner, Joe Hazen, in for consultation. “How would you
handle the situation?” they both asked.
“Telephone the boys right now. Tell them that unless those women get
out of Philadelphia immediately, you’ll cancel the contract. And tell
them why.”
Hal liked the idea. I sat by his desk while he made the call, and two
foot-loose actresses caught the next available plane from Philadelphia
to New York.
There is a New York night club with a deserved reputation for
high-class entertainment called the Copacabana, formerly conducted by
Jack Entratter, who became the impresario of the Las Vegas Sands, and
Monte Proser, who went on to operate Broadway’s Lanai. For some years
the Copa has enjoyed the services of Jules Podell, who has a gravel
voice and a sharp temper.
Not long after the Martin and Lewis breakup Jerry was visiting New
York to do a television show, while Sinatra was appearing at the Copa,
drawing such crowds that they waited outside in the winter cold for
hours in lines that stretched halfway around the block.
Jerry had played the Copa with Dean some three years earlier and
quarreled briefly with Podell in the course of the engagement. One day
Frank came down with an occupational sore throat, and Jerry agreed to
substitute at the Copa for him, though he had no formal act and hadn’t
played a night-club date alone since his parting from Dean. He appeared
that night ad-libbing like crazy, but that was the last time the Copa
ever saw him.
Jerry had a press agent who knew the Copa and Podell well. In a
previous job, when he’d had his own public-relations business, the
agent represented the place as one of his clients. The agent was in
the bar one night watching Podell, in his overcoat, ushering in the
customers to the restaurant and floor show downstairs. “You’re doing
fantastic business with Sinatra,” the agent said admiringly.
“I need you to tell me?” snapped Podell. “Get the hell out of here.”
The agent snapped right back. The two fell into a shouting match, which
ended with the agent spitting at Podell and walking out the front door,
back to the Hampshire House suite where Jerry was staying. There was
no satisfying Jerry until he’d heard the full account of the set-to.
By now it was after midnight, but Jerry picked up the telephone to get
two vice presidents of MCA out of bed, with a summons to meet him at
ten o’clock the following morning at the Brooklyn studios where he was
rehearsing his television show.
The pair of them showed up on the dot. They knew Jerry had a contract
for a future appearance at the Copa. “I want you,” he ordered, “to
write Mr. Podell a letter saying I will never appear, never set foot
there from now on. You can say I don’t give a damn what pressure they
try to put on me. I told Podell years ago if he ever talked nasty to
any one of my people or laid a hand on one of them, he’d see the last
of me.”
Over the next few days Jerry had some interesting telephone calls from
all kinds of people promising to straighten things out with Podell.
Jerry had a stock answer: “Not if I live to be a thousand will I talk
to Podell. Nobody should look to get lucky with me. I’m not going into
that place--ever.”
He made that decision stick. One side of Jerry knocks himself out to
have people like him. The other side includes a mind like a steel
trap; when he says no, he means not bloody likely. He won’t run
away from a fight, but he shies away from people who frighten him
intellectually because they’re better educated than he is. He’s the
son of show-business parents who left school in the tenth grade after
swatting a teacher for saying: “All Jews are stupid.”
He makes $3,000,000 a year, and he can’t stand it. Money is something
he disdains. He is probably the one entertainer in our business who has
never struck out in a movie, and he’s been twenty-six times to bat.
Does he have any ideas why? You bet your life he knows exactly:
“I appeal to the kids and ordinary people who spend all their lives
under the thumbs of authority and dignity. And I appeal to children,
who know I get paid for doing what they get slapped for. I flout
dignity and authority, and there’s nobody alive who doesn’t want to do
the same thing.
“No matter how high you go, there’s some schnook up over you. Any
General Motors vice president, for example, thinks he can do a better
job than the guy above him, except he’s down here and his boss is up
there. I’m getting even for every little guy in the world. I’m the kid
who throws snowballs at dignity in a top hat.”
Jerry, who’ll do anything for anybody he likes, once agreed to fill in
for Sammy Davis, Jr., in Las Vegas, because Sammy wanted a few days off
over Christmas in Aurora, Illinois. When I got the tip, I realized the
fat was in the fire. It happened that Kim Novak was also spending the
holidays at her sister’s house in Aurora.
Now Harry Cohn of Columbia, who made Kim everything she is today, had
been getting trouble from her. Her favorite weapon was to date men that
Cohn detested, either for personal reasons or because they clashed
violently with the carefully fostered image of her as a sweet, friendly
girl from Chicago. Sammy was a heavy date. I’m sure he occupied quite
a few pages in the oversized diary which she keeps in code and carries
around with her all the time.
Kim was a girl tied hand and foot by her Columbia contract: “I haven’t
got enough money to invest,” she told me one day. “I’ve been under
contract on a straight salary for six years. When I’m loaned out, I
don’t get anything extra--the salary goes to the studio. On _Man with
a Golden Arm_, I was promised a percentage of the picture, but I guess
they forgot somehow.”
“You never got a bonus?” I asked.
“One time before _Vertigo_ my agents got me a sort of bonus. They got
me a special loan at seven per cent interest for a year so I could buy
my house. But I was on my old salary schedule.”
“Don’t you collect for TV?”
“I can’t do TV.”
The house she bought on Tortuosa Drive in Bel Air cost her $95,000. It
contains an all-blue bedroom, an all-purple study, an all-gray living
room, an all-gray sleeping porch, and a pool where she swims wearing
a straw hat. She gets along without a housekeeper, cooks a big pot
of chile on Sundays, and dips into it for dinner three or four times
a week. “I sometimes get stomach trouble,” she admits, to nobody’s
surprise.
Sammy had been a frequent visitor at her house, but not after he
returned to Las Vegas from Aurora. Harry Cohn, who collapsed with a
fatal heart attack some months later, was not a man who enjoyed being
thwarted. His passion for keeping his fingers on everybody’s business
led him once to install an intercom system at Columbia so that, by
flicking a switch, he could eavesdrop on conversations all over the lot.
The rumor was that it cost him $200,000 to break things up between Kim
and Sammy. Truth is that it cost him no more than a single telephone
call from his office to Las Vegas, where Harry knew one of the mob with
a certain reputation in the business. Cohn was a man you had to stand
in line to dislike. A bitter, final jest about him alleged that two
thousand people attended his funeral, wanting to make sure it was true.
Over the telephone to Vegas, he said to the man on the other end: “You
take care of this for me, will you?”
“Sure,” said the voice on the telephone. “I’ll just say: ‘You’ve only
got one eye; want to try for none?’”
Very soon after that Sammy announced his marriage to Lorena White, a
Negro show girl in Las Vegas. A few more weeks elapsed before Sammy and
Lorena started proceedings for divorce. On November 13, 1960, Sammy
married May Britt, who gave him a daughter the following summer, and
let me tell you they’re very happy, or were when I wrote this.
Two years after the Sammy incident, Kim told me: “I guess I never
really adjusted to being in Hollywood.” She found, she said, that
her telephone hadn’t been ringing for quite a while. “I’m not really
anti-social. It’s just that I prefer smaller parties to big ones,” she
said.
With the help of a house guest, a girl who went to high school with
her, she was fixing up her patio, to make it all turquoise. She was
also building a fallout shelter in her back yard for herself, her
friend, and her dog.
_Thirteen_