Chapter VIII: Part 8

Pat had the answer: “You can give her $100 a month as long as she lives, plus a home in Westchester County.” Al was happy to escape so lightly. She outlived him and collected an additional keepsake of the glorious days that used to be. In Jolson’s will he left her $100,000, and nobody knew who she was, except the lawyer who drew up the document.

Measured either in love or money, Marion did much better than that. To Hearst she was a golden, blue-eyed princess, and he showered her with treasure until ultimately she was worth more than $8,000,000 in her own right. When she died she owned three skyscrapers in New York City, the Desert Inn in Palm Springs, plus an estate in Beverly Hills.

From the moment he saw her, he fell under her spell. She didn’t waver in the affection she gave him. Toward the end, though, she had different feelings about his family. She had a special reason for being pleased with her Manhattan skyscrapers. “Wherever the Hearsts walk on the East Side, if they ever do,” she said, “they have to pass one of my buildings--on Fifth Avenue, Park, or down Madison.”

No princess in a picture book enjoyed such gifts as were heaped on her by W.R., history’s most extravagant spender. In their early days he decreed that she was to be the greatest star in motion pictures. In New York she lived with her family, was surrounded with instructors in every subject under the sun that might further her career. She was cast in an inconsequential drama, _Cecilia of the Pink Roses_, for a start, and his newspapers and magazines started promoting her.

He insisted that she play only ingénue roles, though her talent was as a comedienne. If he’d let her play comedy, she could have been the real success he’d set his heart on. But she worked only to please him. “I was never crazy about making pictures,” she told me. “It was all right once we got started. But to me it was wasting time. You live only once; you’ve got to have fun, and you can’t work all the time.”

Another typical bit of Hearst’s fancy didn’t do Marion any good. One cocktail was the rule for her at San Simeon. If she wanted an extra drink, she had to sneak it. In each of the castle’s countless powder rooms she kept a bottle of champagne hidden in the tank of the toilet. Friends like Carole Lombard and Frances Marion knew the secret and shared the bubbles. I’ve seen Marion Davies drink a pint of champagne in half a dozen gulps and walk out singing. If W.R. had been less strict on the subject of liquor, she wouldn’t have drunk so much.

After _Cecilia_, Marion had her own movie studio to reign over. Hearst bought the River Park Casino up on 127th Street in Harlem and converted it as the production center for his Cosmopolitan Pictures. There all the stops were pulled out for a hang-the-expense Tudor epic, _When Knighthood Was in Flower_, designed to put her in the front rank of the movies in a single leap. She cared no more for this sword-and-cloak stuff than for anything else about the business she’d been pushed into. “The only thing I liked about making pictures was the fun we had on the side,” she said. “But there was always somebody pulling your hair, powdering your nose, and those hot lights!”

Hearst wasn’t a man to listen to argument, much less admit defeat. She went on making pictures, some of them winning enough praise from critics other than his own men to justify his relentless ambitions for her. _Little Old New York_ was “exquisite,” according to the New York _Times_. _Janice Meredith_, another costume cutup, also came in for _Times_ approval. “No more brilliant achievement in ambitious motion pictures ... has ever been exhibited.”

He failed in his movie plans for Marion and himself as he failed in many other things he attempted, except making money. He didn’t become the greatest producer in the world; he missed laying hands on the governorship of New York; he never got into the White House. The biggest irony of his life was the deal he made by telephone from San Simeon to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1932 to swing most of the California delegates behind a candidate he didn’t like, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. More than any other man, the deeds of Roosevelt ruined Hearst. Then World War II made Hearst another fortune.

The Shepherd of San Simeon had a long way to go before he let Marion ease her way out of the career he had chosen for her. The arrangement he came to with Louis Mayer and the Cosmopolitan company brought Marion from New York to Culver City in such style you’d imagine it was Louis XVI transferring Marie-Antoinette from Paris to Versailles. Near the front of the lot a fourteen-room bungalow was built for her as a combined dressing room and summer home.

Later, when Marion left for Warners, it was transported lock, stock, and barrel there. When she departed from Warners, an addition was made and the whole thing moved to Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills. Louis Mayer bought it and lived in it. Then it became the home of Kay and Arthur Cameron. But they were divorced, and Cameron lived on there alone.

San Simeon, two hundred miles from Culver City, was too far for daily travels to Metro. Hearst built a new castle for his princess on the gold coast of Santa Monica. This new ninety-room Georgian mansion, with two swimming pools, three drawing rooms, two dining rooms, and a private movie theater, was called the “beach house.” It cost $7,000,000.

W.R., in his sixties now, and the gorgeous young girl, whose stutter only added to her charm, had dreamed that someday, somehow they would be man and wife. Mrs. Hearst--who was Millicent Willson, a chorine in a group called “The Merry Maidens” when she first met W.R.--thought otherwise. Her husband’s hopes of marriage to Marion seemed about ready to bloom when Millicent was being escorted by Alexander Moore, once married to Lillian Russell and once United States Ambassador to Spain. As an inducement to divorce, W.R. was offering Millicent $10,000,000 together with the huge apartment house in which they used to live.

Millicent sought advice from one of the biggest men in the country, who was a good friend of Marion’s, too. His reasoning prevailed with her: “Mrs. William Randolph Hearst is a very important name in America and the world. What would you gain if you gave it up?”

Marion made friends with Moore in later years when he was in California very ill. She sat by his bedside during his last days. “Before the end comes,” he murmured, “will you put your arms around me and kiss me?” She didn’t hesitate a moment.

She performed that same, final act of compassion for another man, her father, long after it was clear that, in spite of all Hearst did for her, he could never give her his name. Bernard Douras, like the rest of Marion’s family, had shared in W.R.’s generosity. As a result of ties with “Red Mike” Hylan, mayor of New York, Douras had been appointed a city magistrate and was invariably referred to in Hearst papers as “Judge” Douras. He had been a stanch Catholic all his life. He, too, died in Marion’s arms.

She had a heart big as the Ritz Tower, which was one of the hunks of New York real estate W.R. owned in those days, after taking it over from Arthur Brisbane when he couldn’t meet the payments. Socially, in Hollywood she was the queen bee for more than thirty years. Friends fallen on hard times could rely on a check from Marion to see them through. A girl who wanted to impress a producer or land a job could borrow Marion’s best dresses, furs, and fabulous jewels--whatever the occasion called for.

When talking pictures arrived, Marion had problems like everybody else; she got going with _Marianne_ and went on to _The Floradora Girl_. “Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure the stuttering. That goes back to the days of the Greeks, the pebble treatment. During a scene the first day, I swallowed the pebble, and that was the end of the cure.”

She had no cause to worry that speech trouble would put an end to her career. The birth of the talkies ruined many another reputation. Two of the cruelest, most primitive punishments our town deals out to those who fall from favor are the empty mailbox and the silent telephone. But Marion was a hostess who took no notice of who was in and who out of the social swim. Her friends, rich or poor, were invited up to San Simeon. Her parties and picnics mixed the important guests with people you saw no other place. Mighty executives rubbed shoulders with has-beens still living under her protective wing. Quite a few careers were started all over again as a result.

In her bungalow she had a complete household staff, including a fine cook, Mrs. Grace, with a young daughter, Mary. When Mrs. Grace fell fatally ill, as a last favor she asked Marion to look after her Mary. The little orphan was raised like a daughter. When she reached school age, she went away to be educated, then returned to live with her foster mother.

Mary begged for a photograph of Marion autographed “To my darling daughter.” And on that deceptive bit of pseudo-evidence was built the juicy rumor that W.R. had children by Marion. Only after some years did she retrieve the picture from Mary Grace, but the damage had been done, prompting Hearst in his will to testify: “I hereby declare that the only children I have ever had are my sons....”

Marion did some matchmaking on Mary’s behalf by introducing her to one of Hearst’s band of trouble shooters, William Curley, publisher of the New York _Journal American_, who had five children of his own by a former marriage, plus grandchildren, and was old enough to be Mary’s grandfather. Mary was married to William Curley at San Simeon.

Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress, was one of the bridesmaids, and her husband of the moment, Jimmy Cromwell, one of the guests. Before the ceremony Curley changed his will in Mary’s favor; which later left her a rich widow. Marion was a bridesmaid on that occasion, as on many others. I knew how much she envied any bride.

I stayed in Hollywood largely because of her. When picture parts grew scarce as hen’s teeth, I holed up in a three-room basement flat with my son. I was ready to quit and return to New York when Marion heard about it from Frances Marion and put me into a picture of hers, _Zander the Great_, for which Frances wrote the script. That also opened the door to San Simeon for me. It was the springboard to more jobs, and that kept me, for better or worse, in the movies.

Wealth came to mean nothing to Marion except in terms of the good it could do. “You’re rich not because of money but only through what you give,” she used to say. She built a children’s wing on UCLA’s Medical Center, with a trust fund added to maintain it. With her wry humor that remained intact to the end, she shrugged off any fancy talk about the building being her memorial: “It won’t do me any good; I’ll be down below where I can’t see so high.”

This Lady Bountiful extended her warmth to Hearst’s close family and employees. She mothered John R., Jr., the Chief’s twelve-year-old grandson, nicknamed “Bunkie,” when he came to live at San Simeon after his parents were divorced. She interceded with the iron-willed man to save his sons--William, Jr., John, David, Randolph, and George--from their father’s wrath. She supported one of the five for years after he had spent his inherited money as if it would last forever.

For thirty years she protected the boys from W.R.’s anger and disapproval; covering up their sins in his eyes; lending them money when they needed it; taking them and their friends in under San Simeon’s roof and into her Santa Monica home. In return, the sons behaved as if she was one of their nearest and dearest friends. No hostility was ever shown until after W.R.’s death.

She bestowed the same kind of favors on Hearst’s staff. Thanks to Marion, Louella’s job was enlarged for her, with steady increases in salary. Through Marion, she got to know all the stars and greats of the world. Cobina Wright picked up her stint as society columnist by Marion’s pleading on her behalf with W.R.

Hearst’s staff treated Marion fondly during her protector’s lifetime. Richard Berlin, the organization’s strong man who emerged as president of Hearst Corporation, was one of the many who scrupulously saw to it that every birthday and similar anniversary in her life was marked by flowers and the cordial words of congratulations.

When W.R.’s fortunes crumbled and his empire faced sudden ruination, Marion came to the rescue. She lent him one million dollars. “You’ll be left without a penny,” said I, always the practical one, to her.

“What would you do?” she asked. “It came from him. Would you deny him when he needs it?”

In 1947 the two of them took refuge from the storms that blew increasingly around him--old age and an America entirely changed from the land he’d left his stamp on. They closed down San Simeon and moved into a Spanish stucco house on North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills. W.R. was reluctantly facing the fact that he was no more immortal than any other man.

For Marion herself, W.R. had a special warning--against the wife of one of his sons. “Be careful of her,” he said in his quavering, high-pitched voice. “She will be far more hostile than Mrs. Hearst.”

The final act in Hearst’s eighty-eight years began on the night of August 13, 1951, as he lay dying. Marion could sense it, though she would not put it into words. She summoned her nephew, the writer Charles Lederer, to the house. She had been drinking and was on the verge of hysteria. W.R.’s two physicians, Dr. Prinzmetal and Dr. Corday, were already in attendance. Presumably summoned by one or the other of them, Bill and David Hearst and Richard Berlin also arrived at the house.

When things got too hot to handle, Lederer persuaded Dr. Corday that Marion should be taken to her bedroom and given sedation. The wrangling continued after she had left, and in the course of the evening Lederer returned to his house, close by on North Beverly Drive.

Early next morning Lederer received a telephone call that Hearst was dead. He had died in the arms of his Catholic valet, Henry Monahan, now with Conrad Hilton, who said prayers for him. Two hours later the body was flown to San Francisco.

When Marion’s nephew arrived back at the Hearst house, he was greeted by Berlin: “Where do you think you’re going?”

“To see Marion.”

“Make sure you go to her room and nowhere else.”

“This house belongs to Marion Davies,” Lederer said, “and I’ll go where I please.”

Marion couldn’t be roused from her drugged sleep until after the body was being flown to San Francisco, escorted by Bill, David, George, and Randolph Hearst. Mrs. Hearst, Bill’s wife, “Bootsie,” and other members of the family flew from New York for the service. Louella was one of the hundreds of mourners who gathered in San Francisco. Marion read about the funeral arrangements in the paper. What W.R. had planned before his death was a quiet service in his home with only Marion and an Episcopal minister reading from the Bible.

The day he was buried, I sat with Marion in her dining room. We prayed silently together. “I had him while he lived,” she said. “They can have him now.” Though she disguised it, she was still in a state of shock at the loss of the man she had loved for nearly forty years.

When the announcement came, a few months later, that she had eloped to Las Vegas with Horace Brown, a hell-for-leather Merchant Marine captain who looked somewhat like a younger version of William Randolph, the Hearst paper in Los Angeles, the _Examiner_, reported with satisfaction: “It was Miss Davies’ first marriage.”

* * * * *

I decided one day to write a piece about what happens to a retired movie star and went to Marion to talk about it. With Horace and Dennis the Menace, a small brown dachshund, she lived in the house where W.R. died. Its long front hall retained a touch of the beach-palace days, with life-sized portraits of her in her leading roles hanging on the walls. In the library there were three more pictures. On a table stood a “Lucky Lindy” photograph of Charles Lindbergh autographed “To Marion Davies, best wishes and many thanks.” On the mantel were two photographs of Bernard Shaw, one of them inscribed, “This is what is left of me--1948.” Shaw, said Marion, was the only man that Gandhi, W.R.’s favorite dog, didn’t try to bite. “He wanted to listen to what GBS had to say, but Gandhi took it out on me later.”

She was wearing dark brown slacks, cinnamon-colored silk blouse, and flat-heeled leather shoes. The blond hair looked as though it had just been washed and set. On the coffee table in front of her she kept a compact and two lipsticks which, while we talked, she applied almost unconsciously, with perfect aim.

She said: “I don’t look at motion pictures any more, most of all my own. I used to see one every night. I have prints of most of mine, but they’re slowly molding in a vault downstairs. I have _Little Old New York_, but my projector goes too fast to run it off.”

“Wasn’t Bill Powell in that one?”

“No, he was in _When Knighthood Was in Flower_. Remember those symmetricals he wore to make his legs look pretty? When we ran that at San Simeon, Carole Lombard was with him. She never got over his symmetricals. He was a real villain in that picture.”

“I saw him in Palm Springs. He said it wasn’t exciting, but it’s adding years to his life. Would you like to make another picture?”

“Not if they offered me Mars on a silver plate. I have other ideas along the theatrical line. Something big, like washing elephants.”

“What was your favorite picture?”

“_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.

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.”