Consider this synopsis as presented in words a gangster might employ:
There’s this doll, see. Real young. Her old man’s a big wheel in Hollywood and a real bastard. She’s in love with this younger cat. He’s what you call a tycoon too, like her old man, but square as heaven. That’s why she likes him. The contrast. Anyhow, things get rough. The old bastard puts the squeeze to the square Joe. Gets him by the balls but good.
Well, he may be square, but he knows his way around. When he gets enough of the crap, he has a talk with some of the boys. They “‘do a deal,” as the Limeys say, to knock the old fart off.
Naturally, the good jerk needs an alibi, so they arrange to make the hit while he’s flying east. Back then they didn’t have no jets, see. The trip took like forever. Up and down, up and down, delivering the mail. And you can guess what happens. The good guy gets to thinking. Just like that the rub-out becomes a big moral thing. He decides the game just ain’t worth a killing. So he looks at his watch and figures there’s still time to call it off. Makes up his mind to phone long- distance from the next airport and cancel the contract.
Anyhow, he’s sitting there feeling real virtuous or something when the plane hits a mountain and every bastard on board gets creamed. Naturally, the contract don’t get canceled, and the hit comes off on schedule. It’s all a little tough on the doll, I guess, losing her old man and her boyfriend too. Makes you wonder what it’s all about. Seems sort of meaningless. But hell, what doesn’t? When you stop to think about it, that is.
Does this mini-sketch sound familiar when stripped to the basics? It should. For in essence it is the plot of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished epic of Hollywood in the 1930s, The Last Tycoon, which the late Edmund Wilson called Fitz- gerald’s “most mature piece of work.” Fitzgerald has been the subject of much sentimental nonsense by an intelligentsia which still finds stimulating that period when movies were silent and gangsters were folk heroes. Along with Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker, he was and remains a symbol of the “Lost Generation,” that self-centered group of juvenile delinquents who came on stage at a time when it was possible to believe that all wars were won, all challenges met. He was lucky to die at just the right moment, unlike Hemingway and Parker, and the cult has continued to grow as succeeding generations look wistfully backward in an innocence born of ignorance.
In their concern with building and cultivating a literary legend, few critics have devoted much time to Fitzgerald the reporter. That Jay Gatsby was a bootlegger is obvious to any reader of The Great Gatsby, and some have even acknowl- edged that one character was based on a real personality, Arnold Rothstein, the first mastermind of organized crime.
But the critics have been more concerned with the polo players, the flat-chested flappers, the idle and aimless rich.
Similarly, while Wilson can note that Fitzgerald intended in The Last Tycoon to "exploit the element of racketeering and gangsterism” in Hollywood, emphasis has always been placed on other qualities. Philip French, no friend of the movie industry, was bolder than most when he wrote that Fitzgerald, "a romantic to the last, saw his hero as the dying representative of a vital tradition.” Perhaps he did, and for those concerned with the legend of Fitzgerald there are scores of works analyzing every facet of his personality — every facet, that is, but the one with which we are here concerned: Fitzgerald the reporter. Indeed one could, if necessary, go a long way toward proving that Fitzgerald’s fiction was only as good as his facts. When he ceased to be a good reporter, he fell flat in his fiction. As with every other writer, he was most effective when dealing with characters and situations drawn from personal experience. The Last Tycoon, unfinished as it is, can be called “mature’’ only be- cause it was concerned with a Hollywood Fitzgerald knew only too well — a Hollywood controlled by gangsters.
For what was the “vital tradition”’ his last tycoon fought to save? Nothing less than art for art’s sake in the motion- picture business. Under the pressure of gangsters, art was being abandoned in favor of fast-buck productions designed to appeal to the largest common denominator of society.
In the Twenties, for which Fitzgerald had been considered a spokesman, the gangster became accustomed to big money and luxury. Almost incidentally he put his foot in the stage door during a “nightclub era” spawned by bootleg booze.
With the coming of legal liquor, the development of “talkies” made the motion-picture business a major target. And as always, when the gangster goes into business, art takes second billing to the fast buck.
This process noted by Fitzgerald continued long after the death of his last tycoon. Nightclubs boomed once more, with the economic heart being the casino instead of the speakeasy.
The coming of television permitted even tighter control as the old “‘star system” died and a new breed of money men established conglomerates. Just ahead looms the potential bonanza of pay television. As Ezra Goodman, one of the more objective students of show business, has put it: “Movies and TV hope to be married, after which the happy bride and groom plan to raise a large family of slot machines.” It is perhaps ironic that F. Scott Fitzgerald, the sentimental symbol of the Lost Generation, should have been one of the few writers of the Thirties to discover what was happening in Hollywood. It is perhaps even more ironic that his legion of admirers should fail to note that in his last book “‘Fitz,” at last, found a cause. Ironic but hardly surprising, for to acknowledge Fitzgerald as a reporter is also to ask why no one caught up the fallen banner and carried on the fight.
If there’s hypocrisy in this failure it is hypocrisy that flows naturally from a society which finds the tragic figure more acceptable than the heroic. We can identify with him more easily. ““No one,” said Groucho Marx, “is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend.” Certainly, few citizens are truly shocked when a public idol proves to have a hollow core. Some politicians never achieve popularity until the public discerns a humanizing streak of larceny in them.
So why discourse upon the obvious? Suffice it in the pages following to show that the most ‘‘mature”’ stories of sex and crime are those that, like The Last Tycoon, are based on fact.
Hopefully the reader realizes what veteran journalist Quincy Howe was said to know — “that things are rarely what they seem and even more rarely what they’re said to be.” If such insight is lacking, prepare, then, to find some surprises wait- ing down these mean streets.
HANK MESSICK
Peace River, Arcadia
***
Afterword
The history of the gangster in show business teaches one the value of entertainers in those other worlds where their names are not the ones in lights.
In the beginning, the bootlegger enjoyed nightclub stars because they enjoyed the nightclubs the bootleggers owned — the clubs were places to throw around easily earned cash, to play the big shot, to enjoy the entertainment.
The more astute soon recognized there was economic profit in owning both the clubs and the stars who performed in them — a way, in other words, to combine pleasure with business. Similarly the movies were first a toy, a means of gratifying the ego. Soon the businessmen of the developing syndicate saw the vast potential for profit. Every method that came to hand was used to control the studios, the theaters, the stars. By the time Las Vegas and plush regional gambling centers came along, the star had become largely a shill for gangsters. And at mid-century Las Vegas was the capital of organized crime and of show business.
Las Vegas had survived repeated scandals and economic recessions. In the summer of 1972 the suckers were standing in line to see the high-priced “name” drawing cards: Elvis Presley, Liberace, Englebert Humperdinck, Sammy Davis, Jr., Perry Como, Andy Williams, Barbra Streisand, Don Rickles, Debbie Reynolds, Johnny Carson, and Rowan and Martin.
The gambling handle for the year was up 17.2 percent above 1971, and 1971 had been 10 percent above 1970. The city had grown to 300,000 permanent residents, almost all of them dependent one way or another upon gambling. The tourist population was estimated at eighteen million per year, most of them traveling on the 250 airline flights daily. In every major city the syndicate had ‘‘junket organizers’’ whose duty it was to arrange chartered flights of high-rollers and to collect gambling debts. And John Reible of the Las Vegas News Bureau issued the same old statement in 1972 that had been put forth regularly since the murder of Bugsy Siegel:
“The skimming scandals are behind us. Gamblers and tourist alike feel that they are getting a fair shake now. Some people, though, miss the aura of the criminal element.” Since the gangster owners of some Las Vegas casinos were patterning themselves after so-called legitimate businessmen — and vice versa — it isn’t surprising that eventually the show-business personality should become a leverage for political influence. The Watergate scandal has brought home the realization that the cowboy with the white hat may be just as big a crook as the villain in the black hat. But Water-gate is, in fact, a logical development. It flows naturally from individual actions which have gone largely unheeded and unreported. Why is it surprising that ex-FBI agents should use electronic devices illegally when for a decade the FBI had engaged in a massive illegal campaign of electronic snooping against gangsters, newspaper reporters, and liberals? Why should anyone be astonished to learn that ex-CIA agents v1o- lated the law when for decades the CIA allied itself with gangsters and followers of Caribbean dictators in a no-holds- barred battle against Red spies and Rad-Libs? And lastly, why should it shock anyone to learn that corrupt business- men contributed millions to help re-elect a politician known since his career began as “Tricky Dick’’? Only naive people who allow their choice for high office to be influenced by such astute political observers as Shirley Temple Black, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and Frank Sinatra would be bewildered by Watergate. Unfortunately, a majority of Americans were in that group.
Much of show business had been thoroughly corrupted over the decades by organized crime and its allies — those businessmen who believe that money and power are the twin goals of free enterprise and that the freer one is with his enterprise the more of both he will achieve. Show business isn’t unique in being corrupted, but show business has been a key conquest of the fast-buck boys. Not only did it influence the way the public dressed, the way the public talked, the way women shaved their eyebrows, but it proved a bland, unrealistic concept of life itself. Put bluntly, show business helped create the illusions which blinded Americans as to what was really happening and why.
While there are exceptions to the rule, the men and women of show business have as a class deliberately denied their additional roles as human beings and citizens. For themselves they have claimed the extra-legal, extra-moral status of neutrality. In return for high salaries and ego-satisfying publicity, they too often became shills, prostitutes, pimps. They sold themselves to the highest bidder and, by doing so, they sold out the American public. More than anyone else they contributed to the cynicism of the corrupt, the belief that success justifies any means or methods, the decline in private morality. For they were the heroes of this country and, despite the protective insulation, the country sensed they were amoral. Instead of rejecting the heroes, however, the country — by and large — either rejected morality or, in lieu of that, refused to think about it at all. As a result this nation came very close to losing its freedom to a right-wing dictatorship.
Until we shed our illusions, until we look at movie stars and public officials with what might be termed skeptical compassion, the danger remains. And next time chance may not be our friend, and we may by a large majority elect a President for Life. While we must never assume that everyone is a crook, we must never conclude that anyone is a saint. Above all, we must stop confusing illusion with reality — on screen or Off.
And so it might be well to remember one moment at the Republican National Convention at Miami Beach in 1972.
When the President of the United States spoke of the fight for “law and order,”’ all the TV cameras naturally focused on him. But one network turned its camera briefly from the President and panned to the box occupied by the family of Vice President Spiro Agnew where Frank Sinatra sat as a special guest. No comment was made, and, for the informed, none was necessary.
***
Up the Fill with Sid and Jill
Jill St. John, born Jill Oppenheim in 1941, was a late- bloomer on the Hollywood scene, but her beauty and intelligence have given her active associations that effectively make her a bridge between the sordid past and the sophisticated future.
The daughter of a Beverly Hills restauranteur, Jill began toddling in a town where almost every mother remembered the success of Shirley Temple and was certain their own little darling could duplicate it. At five Jill was performing in a little-theater production of Pigtails. A year later she was starring on the Red Rider radio serial and, according to her press agents, standing on a box in order to reach the microphone.
By age seven she had graduated to that long-running soap opera One Man’s Family, and there she stayed for six years.
Between shows she modeled children’s clothes.
When Jill was eleven her mother changed the budding star- Zo Zoe let’s name to St. John, because it was “‘musical’’ and would fit better on a theater marquee. Other preparations for the future included plastic surgery to reduce the size of her nose. Nothing more was needed, for her body was reaching the right size in the most pleasing proportions. In fact Time was later to comment on her auburn hair, sparkling brown eyes, and “‘gothic chest.”
In the pattern of previous sex queens, Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe, Jill sought escape by an early marriage.
Unlike the others, however, she displayed a certain maturity of judgment in her choice — Neil Dubin, the heir to a laundry fortune. Jill was only sixteen and lied about her age to the justice of peace who married them. “I wanted to get away,” she said. Although the marriage ended in divorce a year later, the young couple had lived together for only a month. “I realized I had made a bad mistake,” said Jill.
Two years after her divorce she tried again. And once more, finance was at least as important as romance. Her second husband was Lance Reventlow, described as a “millionaire playboy,” the sole child born to Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton in seven marriages. The now nineteen-year old Jill set up housekeeping in a $350,000 home in Beverly Hills. Given to Lance by his mother on his twenty-first birthday, it was located high above Sunset Boulevard. Its most notable feature was the indoor-outdoor swimming pool which ran from deep inside the living room out onto a wide patio.
While Lance played with his Scarab, a Grand Prix racing car he had spent a large fortune developing, Jill fed the wild animals on the three-acre estate, rode her horses, and shopped for clothes. “I love to spend money,” she once told an interviewer. “It’s fun.” Eventually even the pleasures of unlimited charge accounts were insufficient compensation for a girl with an IQ of 162. Nineteen months of this marriage was enough. She moved out. Later, in an uncontested hearing, she was awarded a $ 100,000 settlement.
Two men were primarily responsible for Jill’s decision to quit marriage and resume her career: Frank Sinatra and Sidney Korshak.
Sinatra was the man out front, the lightning rod to attract publicity. He co-starred with Jill in the movie Come Blow Your Horn and became her close friend and escort. As usual there was much talk of marriage, but apparently both parties decided there was no need to tie each other down. Yet Jill, as one of Sinatra’s girlfriends, was automatically entitled to inner-circle privileges. As she once put it, “Fortunately, all Frank’s friends happen to be very influential.” Less conspicuous than Frank but very much behind the scenes was Korshak, a man of even greater influence who had been around much longer.
Sidney Korshak is a mystery man. Not too much of his background has reached the public record. He apparently was born about 1907 and grew up on the West Side of Chicago. Charles “‘Cherry Nose” Gioe told the Kefauver Committee in 1950 he had known Korshak “‘maybe sixteen or seventeen years.” When asked how he met the lawyer, Gioe replied, “Through some fellows on the West Side when he opened his office. He had just finished school and opened an office, I believe, at that time.” “What fellows?” “Oh, some kids he knew around there that I just happened to know. It was just a casual acquaintance at the time when I met him.”
Gioe knew a lot of people. He went to school with Tony Accardo — a modern successor to Al Capone — and even had the honor of once being arrested with him. They were charged with concealing the weapons they allegedly were carrying. Gioe also was arrested with “Machinegun Jack” McGurn, the Chicago killer who ordered Joe E. Lewis’ throat cut back in the Twenties. But Cherry Nose didn’t really know McGurn very well. He was “‘just riding with him” when the cops picked them up. Gioe admitted he had done a little bootlegging in his time and said he had been in a handbook business.
At the time Gioe was questioned he owned an interest in Chicago’s Seneca Hotel, at 200 East Chestnut Street. His partner was Alex Greenberg, who got acquainted with Frank “the Enforcer” Nitti because Frank was a good barber. Both Gioe and Greenberg lived at the Seneca in 1950 and so did Sidney Korshak, By then they all were good friends. Yet the lawyer and the gangster had more in common than residence at the same hotel.
Gioe, it will be remembered, was one of those gangsters involved with Willie Bioff in the Movie Extortion Plot. Along with Nitti and some others, he had been indicted after Bioff squealed. Nitti had killed himself, but Gioe had gone to prison.
And what was Attorney Korshak doing at the time? An official fifty-five-page report by two special agents of IRS Intelligence, dated July 25, 1942, gives an answer in the course of a thorough review of the then still developing investigation. It notes:
Our informers have stated that Sidney Korshak, a lawyer in Chicago, Illinois, is often delegated to represent the Chicago gang, usually in some secret capacity. Since the conviction of Browne and Bioff on charges of racketeering, Korshak acts as Browne’s attorney. He paid Browne’s $10,000 fine and we are reliably informed that the gang, and not Browne, produced that money.
This, of course, was before Bioff and Browne talked, and it was good policy to provide them with an attorney and pay their fines. The memo continues:
John Smith testified that about one year and a half ago, Frank Olsen telephoned him that George Browne had expressed the opinion that Local 110 should employ an attorney. Korshak subsequently appeared on the scene.
Smith states that he was not employed or paid any money. He [Smith] did testify, however, with respect to the election of union officials on March 4, 1942:
Q: How much money did you draw to pay off the policemen?
About $1,000; made out a check for them.
Made it out to cash?
I don’t know whether Pete cashed the check or I cashed the check.
Did the police get the entire $1,000?
Yes.
Was Sidney Korshak in the picture?
Well, he asked me if I want protection and I said No. At that time he thought I was going to hire him as attorney for the local and since there is trouble here I don’t want no part of Korshak.
On August 28, 1942, another memo by IRS Special Agent A. P. Madden made mention of Alex Greenberg, Gioe’s partner in the Seneca:
Alex Greenberg has commonly been regarded as the “fiscal agent” for the Capone group. He formerly operated a business known as the Roosevelt Finance Company. Some years ago, in the midst of the Capone investigation, an effort was made to examine the records of that company. The examination had barely gotten under way when the records disappeared over night.
Interrogations of Greenberg and others, before the grand jury and elsewhere, failed to produce the records. Greenberg stated that they had been taken in a robbery and, while no one representing the Government believed him, they were never found.
The following year, when the Chicago gangsters came to trial, Bioff testified that it was Cherry Nose Gioe who introduced him to Korshak in 1939. According to Willie, Gioe laid it on the line in these words: ‘Sidney is our man and I want you to do what he tells you... Any message he may deliver to you is a message from us.” To help Gioe win his parole as quickly as he was eligible, Korshak persuaded Harry A. Ash, Illinois superintendent of crime prevention, to write a favorable letter to the federal parole board on behalf of Cherry Nose.
Old associations are sometimes hard to shake. In 1962, three decades after Willie Bioff set up a soup kitchen in Chicago, Korshak became part of a consortium to bid on the parking franchise at the new home of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Associated in the deal was Ben Teitelbaum, a Holly- wood film supplier. Five years later, in 1968, Teitelbaum was one of several men convicted of crooked and illegal gambling at the Friars Club in Los Angeles. One of the other men convicted was John Roselli, who had gone to prison with Gioe and the rest in the movie extortion case.
As previously noted, Bioff died when his booby-trapped car blew up in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1955. Gioe’s body was found stuffed in a car trunk in 1953, and Greenberg was burned down with four bullets in 1955. But Korshak survived and prospered.
Somehow out of the Bioff—Browne era and the bloody excesses of Chicago gangsters, Korshak emerged as a suave, sophisticated “consultant” — numbering among his clients all sorts of people, from movie stars to union executives. As counsel for a talent agency, Associated Booking Corporation, Korshak personally represented many top stars in their dealings with Las Vegas hotel-casinos and other institutions with mob connections. It was Korshak who arranged a $1 million contract for the nightclub debut of Debbie Reynolds in Las Vegas. He was helpful to Barbra Streisand and to such Sinatra pals as Dean Martin. But prior to Jill St. John he was perhaps most famous for his assistance to Dinah Shore.
Dinah once described Korshak as ‘‘a friendly man, sweet and sort of shy,” with the irritating habit of getting telephone calls at parties and “disappearing’”’ for the evening.
Dinah was partly responsible for some information about Korshak’s income becoming public knowledge. It seems Sidney listed $5,612 allegedly spent on her 1963 wedding as a business expense. In 1971 the IRS sought to collect an additional $149,153 in taxes and penalties for the four years from 1963 through 1966 on the grounds the Korshaks had improperly deducted $38,767 for travel and entertainment, $64,686 for use of their twelve-room home as “branch office,”’ and $8,510 as business gifts. Even with these deductions their net taxable income listed averaged about a half million dollars a year for the period.
While his associations with Dinah Shore may have been more publicized, Korshak’s arrangements with Jill St. John have capitalized on her brain as well as her body. While starring in a series of “dumb broad” movies, she has been involved by Korshak in multimillion-dollar financial deals so complicated only a Meyer Lansky could easily understand them. A key individual in many of these deals is another figure from Chicago, Delbert W. Coleman.
The Seeburg Corporation, founded in 1902, was for many years an exception to the rule that gangsters dominated any business involving coin-operated machines. As late as 1954 Seeburg was given a clean bill of health by Virgil Peterson, head of the Chicago Crime Commission. Two years later Coleman became chairman of the board. Exclusive distribution rights to Seeburg’s ‘jukeboxes’ was granted to Worldwide Distributors, Inc.
Insight into the manner in which Coleman got control of Seeburg came from Robert Sunshine, a Denver attorney.
(...)
Jill St. John, following her divorce from Lance Reventlow, was presented as “Hollywood’s Carefree Child.”’ Stories had her playing with toy railroad trains, riding elephants, and swimming with porpoises. The theory behind this frantic activity was said to be her desire to enjoy the childhood she never had. Those days, if they ever existed outside a PR man’s imagination, are long gone. Today the still curvy red- head is one of Hollywood’s richest women, thanks to her friendship with Sidney Korshak. If she plays today, it is not with toys or animals but with real railroads, resort hotels, and a chain of jewelry-boutique shops.
A businesswoman Jill may be, but a woman she still is too. Her combination of brains and beauty enabled her in 1972 to visit the California White House on the arm of Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s confidential agent in international intrigue.
Considered a “‘swinger”’ as well as an intellectual, Kissinger and St. John were as perfectly matched as vodka and caviar.
So what if some of her associates were friends of gangsters?
After dating Jill, Kissinger was also looking ahead. Asked about his post-government plans, he smiled and commented, “[’m thinking of going into the movies. I’ve got the connections now.” Which may very well be the understatement of show-business history.
Hank Messick
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