Part 18

“_The Big Parade_. Long time ago, but I liked it.”

“How about _Gone With the Wind_?”

“I liked that, but I didn’t see much of it. I went with Carole and Clark to the opening here. Raoul Walsh was with us, too. A man who pretended he was Burgess Meredith picked a fight with us. Clark was nervous and didn’t want to sit through the picture, anyway. So we all went into the manager’s office. The manager was off somewhere, and the phone kept ringing. We’d pick it up and say: ‘Sorry, no reservations; all sold out for a year.’ We thought that was funny. Carole was a lot of fun. She liked to have a good time.”

“So did you.”

“It’s taken its toll.”

“Did you ever have any protégés?”

“I kept it all for myself. I couldn’t act.”

“Well, I know you helped Ray Milland, for instance.”

“He played my brother in _Bachelor Father_. The director got impatient with him. It was his first picture and he was nervous. Who isn’t, even on the twenty-fifth picture? So I told him to pretend that the director wasn’t there.”

I asked her about the plush party she gave for Johnnie Ray not long after W.R.’s death, which caught a bit of the glamour of our yesterdays, with six hundred invited and a thousand showing up.

“I was having my hair done when Charlie Morrison brought him in. He didn’t know me at all. He must have been awful young. I never saw so many people I didn’t know--I didn’t know ninety per cent of the guests. We were in a turmoil for weeks. They put gardenias in the bushes and moved all the furniture.”

What was her average day? “I have business things. Then I watch TV and read. I sleep late.”

We talked again about the old days. “Gloria Swanson always liked to play games. So she cooked this one up at San Simeon one night. I played the minister, off in another room. All the men were to pick the girls they wanted to marry, then couple by couple they came into the room where I would perform the ceremony. Then I’d say, ‘All right, seal it with a kiss,’ and when they started to do that, Gloria would pick up a towel that she’d filled with ice and conk the guy on the head.

“Everybody laughed until it was Joe Hergesheimer’s turn. The girl he picked was Aileen Pringle. He was so serious about it and so mad that when Gloria let him have it, he stormed out of the house and said, ‘I’ll write about this. I’m through with Hollywood.’”

Changing the subject: “Why did you keep making pictures if you didn’t like it?”

“Mr. Hearst wanted me to,” she said, “and contracts had something to do with it.”

“Did he have any eccentricities?”

“Yes, he placed his faith in the wrong people.”

Marion put on two more performances during her life. One was for the sole benefit of the Hearsts, when she sat in Joe Kennedy’s box at his son’s 1961 inaugural ball and rode with Joe in the parade, so that Millicent and her sons could see Marion undefeated and unconquerable. But she was a very sick girl and never recovered from that trip.

She’d earned Joe’s hospitality by handing over her house to the Kennedy clan for the Los Angeles convention of the Democrats that nominated John F., while she paid $3500 a month for a rented house in Santa Monica. Joe had extra phones put in her house, installed his own servants, and wouldn’t permit Tom Kensington, who had been with Marion for fifteen years, to remain after he learned Tom was a former FBI man.

She also ousted her sister out of her own house, to make room for the Robert Kennedys, and rented another temporary home for the sister. When Joe heard how sick Marion really was, he sent off three specialists to see her. But Marion paid all the bills.

Earlier, she put on a fine performance, too, to appear on one of my television shows. By this time she was in the middle of her three-year fight with cancer. When word got out that I’d asked her, Kay Gable waxed indignant. “She can’t possibly do it,” said Kay. “She’s not well enough.”

“Why do you think I asked her?” I said. “For one reason only--to lift her morale.”

“But she looks so ill.”

“Take it from me, she’ll look beautiful.”

On the day the show was due to be filmed, I went to Marion’s house wearing the make-up Gene Hibbs had already given me at my home. I brushed aside her compliments: “Wait until you see what he does for you. And George Masters is coming, too, to do your hair.”

She was so weak that her nurse, Mrs. Mauser, had to help her downstairs to the dressing room where the two wizards were waiting to ply their arts. I went off to the bottom of her garden to shoot some scenes there. When I came back, the transformation had been worked. It was as if a magic wand had waved lovingly over her. She looked thirty years younger than when I’d left not more than an hour before.

She literally danced out of that dressing room and hurried upstairs to put on a blue satin gown. Her body was so thin I had to pin the dress in with safety pins all up the back to keep it from falling off. Her arms were as thin as wrists. “You need a mink stole,” I said, “to wear around your shoulders.” When that last touch had been added, she took a long look at herself in a mirror. “You look beautiful,” I said. She nodded agreement, smiling like a girl on her way to her first prom.

I got Charlie Lederer on the telephone. “Come over to Marion’s right away. I want you to see something.”

“What is it?” he said instantly, afraid as we all were that her illness was taking a bad turn. I refused to tell him, let him see for himself. At the first sight of Marion with her age and sickness erased, he burst into tears and left the room.

For fear of her stutter and of fatiguing her, we’d arranged to give her only one line to say: “Welcome to my house.” She carried it off on the first take. “Is this all I get to do?” she demanded. “I want more.”

“Don’t be a greedy little girl.” At five o’clock she insisted on going visiting. She went to Pickfair to show Mary how young she looked and then all over town, until it was time for bed. At midnight I received a call from her: “How do I get this stuff off my face?”

When the show was screened, she was a sensation. Thanks to Hibbs and Masters, she enjoyed a last flurry of fame and fun, including her trip to the inauguration, while I went off for a month to Europe. She had two more offers for TV.

When I came home, Marion had been taken into Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. She never came out alive. She was in a coma for five weeks. “I don’t think she’ll recognize you,” Mrs. Mauser said. But I went anyway. I’ll never forget my last picture of her. Weeks of daily cobalt treatments had colored her neck and part of her face a deep purple. It was heartbreaking, yet she was feeling no pain.

On September 23, 1961, the Los Angeles _Examiner_ reported the death of Marion Davies the previous day. “The list of Miss Davies’ close friends,” the obituary said, “was long, impressive and diverse, reflecting her wide range of interests. They included George Bernard Shaw, William Randolph Hearst, Sir Thomas Lipton, Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Bernard M. Baruch.... Miss Davies’ only venture into matrimony lasted until her death. She was married to former Merchant Marine Captain Horace Brown....”

* * * * *

A letter Frances Marion wrote her earlier struck some different notes: “Remember how we laughed even when we were crying?... How we danced the shimmy and the Charleston ... tossed our petticoats over the windmill ... went to the Follies to applaud _A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody_ and cheer the beautiful Miss Davies, who was Miss-Miss-Miss America!

“Then the thirties ... those fabulous excursions to San Simeon ... the long table in the dining room with W.R. shepherding his flock (and not all of us lambs) ... nipping champagne in the little girls’ room ... those overnight picnics ... Miss-Miss-Miss America on a gentle old nag but looking more scared than if a mouse had run up her riding habit ... sleeping under the stars ... W.R. pacing up and down as he waited for his forgotten Seidlitz powders ... the ride back in the morning, the fields dappled with wild flowers ... a lot of us wilder than the flowers but just as pretty ... Bill Haines dressed as though for the North Pole wearing a hood over his head and face, and mittens on his hands ... Errol Flynn smacked in the heart by the limbs of Lili Damita....

“All of this was ours to enjoy and be grateful for the rest of our lives. And none of these memories could have graced our past if it hadn’t been for you and your loving kindness.”

If anybody can sum up a life in nine words, Frances can. Of Marion Davies she says: “She was a butterfly with glue on her wings.”

_Twelve_

The lure of the almighty dollar brings two categories of people to our community--those who work and those who prey. Like Hamlin before the Pied Piper, we are infested with rodents, from bookies to con men, from mobsters to panderers anxious to supply anything a paying customer calls for. Difference between us and Hamlin is that we’ve given up hoping for the Piper.

Extortioners have flocked to our town since the notorious reign of George Browne and Willie Bioff, the union racketeers, who, in the thirties and early forties, didn’t even condescend to visit the studios--top producers had to stop by their hotel room and toss on to the bed wads of greenbacks for “protection.”

Now there are only lean pickings left at most studios, and the leeches cling to individual stars. They sucker them into accepting loans to buy the new house, the new mink, the new car, in return for a permanent slice of income. They let them run up bookmakers’ bills at strangulation rates of interest, collectable every payday. By offering fat fees for night-club performances, they entice them to Las Vegas, the sanctuary for birds of prey, and make sure they get back every cent of salary and more at the gambling tables.

Syndicate men have the run of Hollywood society. I don’t know who charms whom more, the actor or the mobster. I understand that “Lucky” Luciano could charm a bird off a bough. Frank Sinatra, who has a weakness for such fragrant characters as Joe Rocco and Charlie Fascetti, of Chicago fame, is fond of boasting: “If I hadn’t made it in show business, I’d have been a mobster myself.”

## Bookies used to have priority at studio switchboards when they made

their calls to Culver City. Nowadays, Las Vegas soaks up much more floating cash and credit. It’s fashionable in some circles to brag about how much you lost down the drain. Phil Silvers has shed a fortune at the tables. Gordon MacRae has unloaded thousands at one go, so that ever-popular pair of night-club entertainers, Gordon and Sheila MacRae, parents of four fine children, have to smile with every evidence of delight when they find they’ve been booked around the country forty-three weeks out of fifty-two to make ends meet. When Ernie Kovacs departed this vale of tears, he left $600,000 of gambling debts.

The police departments, often reported to be openly cozy with mobsters, have a long record of blinking at other kinds of lawbreakers, provided a nimble press agent can get on to the case in time. Clark Gable, returning home from a party at Paulette Goddard’s after downing too much of the bubbly, banged up his car in a traffic circle, but it was happily announced that a passing motorist was really to blame.

Eddie Mannix has related how it cost a total of $90,000 to keep the reputation of a celebrated MGM star intact when he was caught in the same desperate situation that sent Big Bill Tilden, the tennis ace, to prison as a homosexual.

Studio cops worked hand in glove with custodians of the law outside the studio gates. Some days the telephones of top public-relations men like Howard Strickling at Metro and Harry Brand at Fox rang like a four-alarm call in the firehouse, as police dutifully reported they had this or that star safely locked up for speeding, drinking, or mixing it up in a public brawl.

There’s something heady about driving in Hollywood that got even Garbo tagged twice for speeding. One of the wildcat drivers was Luise Rainer. She had won her _Great Ziegfeld_ Oscar and was going into _The Good Earth_ as the sensation of the industry. For the picture’s sake, the studio conspired with minions of the law to frame her. She’d be arrested, plead guilty, and the judge, primed in advance, would lift her license until _The Good Earth_ was completed. So ran the plot. But a snag developed after the police trapped her; she clung to her innocence and vowed to fight the case in court. So the ticket had to be quashed, and the suppress agents had to ’fess up to Luise. She refused to speak to them for weeks.

Since we live in an age of corruption, almost like the declining days of ancient Rome, with the “interests” digging in deeper all the time, I ought not have been surprised at a campaign to build another Las Vegas right in the heart of our community. The plan was to incorporate a separate little city made up of the Sunset Strip, with its night clubs like Dino’s and Jerry Lewis’ new place, and stretching from Santa Monica Boulevard up into the hills. Like Beverly Hills, which is a town unto itself and an extremely well-conducted one, this new Sunset City, or whatever it was to be christened, would have written its own rules and controlled its own life.

The idea was perfectly feasible, however unattractive. The area involves a bit of no man’s land, bounded by the city limits of Beverly Hills and Los Angeles, yet attached to neither of them. This is county territory. The promoters’ objective, among other things, was to bring in gambling, making it as legal as Nevada. It was a choice location and could be a perfect haven for mobsters.

Among the unsuspecting citizens of the Strip, petitions were circulated to gather signatures as the first step to take the proposed “city” away from county control. Whether or not he realized the implications, one of the sponsors was Bart Lytton, whose modernistic new savings bank stands on the site of the old Garden of Allah at the hub of the territory. It was he who threw one of the biggest parties in Washington, D.C., on the night of President Kennedy’s inauguration, which drew JFK and other members of the family. Even I received one of the gold-engraved invitations, though I’d never met the host.

Our local _Citizen-News_, which has since changed management, broke the story of what lay behind the apparently innocent moves to make the Strip independent. I got busy in my column and with some letter writing to throw a monkey wrench into the wheels.

I was amazed at the time that my words were allowed to appear, because some exceedingly powerful individuals stood to gain from “Sunset City.” But it worked. Our community had seen too much of Murder, Inc. muscling in, of gangsters receiving the lead-poisoning treatment on the streets. The petitions died from anemia--but I am sure the backers haven’t given up hope or forgiven me.

There was another time when the businessmen of the Strip weren’t so slow to take up arms. In this other affray they succeeded in putting the object of their attention behind bars, but then she was a woman, or even a lady, and a local celebrity. She was a tall, dignified creature with a back straight as a ramrod, who introduced herself to me one day as we sat under neighboring dryers in a beauty parlor. I was happy to make her acquaintance, having heard a great deal about her.

She was a pioneer in her profession by allowing her patrons, including some super-sized stars, to run up bills for their pleasure, whereas cash in advance is, I gather, the almost invariable procedure elsewhere. She accumulated a load of bad bets as a reward for establishing her informal credit plan, though her establishment gained a certain distinction from the array of several Oscars which stood on her mantelpiece, gifts from satisfied customers.

She conceived the ambition of retiring from her former calling and opening an extremely proper and swank restaurant on the Strip. She had the plans drawn up, which envisaged upstairs dining accommodations for private parties, which are not unusual among caterers. She ordered some somber but becoming gowns to wear as hostess. The restaurateurs along the Strip were outraged. They shuddered at the thought that _chez elle_ could well become the most popular, though innocent, port of call for natives and tourists alike. She was denied a liquor license and later arrested.

She had one stanch supporter to turn to--that friend to all womankind, 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.