Part 19

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_

The magic word now is “television.” It used to be “Hollywood,” and there was no end to the miracles it could work. It transformed plowboys into princes, peasant girls into goddesses. The stars were American royalty and revered as such by their subjects. The magic word would bring whole villages out on the street to watch a star go by. It opened palace doors, stopped trains, brought you the keys of a city or an audience with the Pope.

Hollywood set the social style for thirty years of our history, until TV came along. Clara Bow wore a cupid’s-bow lipstick job; fifty million women copied her. Clark Gable shucked off his undershirt; so did fifty million men. The studios stuck to a simple rule and coined fortunes with it: “Show the stars like kings and queens in a glamorous setting, and the crowds will flock to see them.” Today it’s a calculated risk to put a man on the screen in evening dress in case the popcorn-munching customers decide that he’s a square.

They follow television stars just as they used to emulate the motion-picture variety. My reader mail proves that. “Is Dorothy Provine a natural blonde?” “Whatever happened to Edd Byrnes?” “When did Richard Boone get married?” Ben Casey’s surgical gown turns out to be a Seventh Avenue fashion hit. The children switch from coonskin hats to space helmets to Soupy Sales. Some of the biggest names in our town--Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and all--go on to let Soupy toss a custard pie in their faces. The children love it and the networks want the child audience.

The impact on the audience--and I don’t mean from the custard pies--is astounding to anybody like me who’s been making pictures since World War I. One of the early ones was a thing called _Virtuous Wives_, in which I sank my entire salary of $5000 on my clothes and got $25,000 worth of the loveliest outfits you ever saw from Lady Duff-Gordon, known professionally as Lucile and one of the greatest dressmakers of them all. The biggest impact I made was on a pudgy little fellow who used to lurk around the set.

When the picture was finished, he sidled up to me. I mistook his intentions. “I don’t want to buy any fur coats,” said I.

“You don’t understand,” said he. “My name’s Louis Mayer. I’m the producer and this is my first picture.”

Making a reputation then was slow going. Producers used to say: “Get what’s-her-name who played the rich bitch in _Virtuous Wives_--she might be good for this one.” But when you go on television the impact is felt overnight. The following morning a cab driver won’t let you pay your fare, a workman on a construction job offers you his hard hat.

Outside Saks Fifth Avenue, after an Easter Sunday appearance on “What’s My Line?”, I found myself surrounded by a crowd of autograph hunters so big that a disgruntled policeman threatened to turn me in unless we all went around the corner into a side street. “You’ll have to call the paddy wagon,” I warned him, “and a picture of Hopper behind bars is all I need for my collection.”

For another “What’s My Line?” appearance I had some fun with Dorothy Kilgallen, who likes to queen it on the panel. I knew I’d have to do something exciting to knock her in the eye, so I asked Marion Davies to lend me a diamond necklace. “Which one?” asked Marion. “Or would you like them all?”