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.