by Noel Hynd
Mike was back on top. I was again happy for him. But there was a personal casualty around then, also, a victim of changing times. The Boston Post, where I had begun my career in crime writing, went out of business. People were starting to get their news from television. Newspapers were in trouble and so were the men and women employed by them.
CHAPTER 34
Ten years before Sir Harry took it in the head, there was a young sergeant in the Cuban army who was good at organizing people and things. When the repressive government of General Gerardo Machado collapsed in 1933 the young sergeant, Fulgenio Batista, organized a rebellion of non-commissioned officers. The so-called Sergeant’s Rebellion grabbed control of the entire armed forces. Battista created alliances with student groups and unions. He was a charming guy in those years. Good-looking, slick. They called him El Mulatto Lindo because he was a mutt: a mix of Spanish, African and Chinese. All that mixed blood must have made him a smart guy, in addition to a good-looking guy.
Batista ruled the country. He eventually broke with the student groups because they were pink and a pain. A student activist group called the Revolutionary Directorate became his enemy.
In 1938, Batista ordered a new constitution. He ran for president. In 1940, he was elected. The balloting was rigged. His party won a majority in Congress. Everything was rigged.
Batista soon legalized a pro-fascist organization linked to Hitler’s buddy in Spain, Francisco Franco, in Spain. Uncle Sam saw him a possible headache. Would the handsome sergeant align his country with the Axis or the Allies?
An Axis alliance would have played poorly in El Caribe. Fulgencio sent the British army a few shiploads of sugar as a gift. Later, Batista travelled to Washington to suggest to the United States that Cuba launch a joint US-Latin American invasion of Spain to overthrow Franco and his regime. Washington didn’t buy it. The wartime plate was already full.
Batista kept thinking. The United States was ninety-miles away. Europe was twenty-five hundred miles away. In February 1941, Battista ordered all German and Italian consular officials to leave his country. Cuba entered the war on December 8, 1941, by declaring war on Japan, which a day before had attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Then Cuba declared war on Germany and Italy on December 11, 1941 and broke relations with Vichy France on November 10, 1942.
Batista signed an agreement with the United States that gave permission to build airfields in Cuba for the protection of the Caribbean Sea lanes. He also signed a mutual defense pact with Mexico for the defense against enemy submarines in the Gulf of Mexico. The United States sent Cuba modern military aircraft, which were vital for coastal defense and anti-submarine operations. The American taxpayers also refitted the Cuban Navy with modern weapons and other equipment.
The Cuban Navy escorted hundreds of Allied ships through hostile waters, sailed nearly 400,000 miles on convoy and patrol duty, flew over 83,000 hours on convoy and patrol duty, and rescued over 200 U-boat victims from the sea, all without losing a single warship or aircraft to enemy action. It was a no-brainer: Cuba’s military was the most cooperative and helpful of all the Caribbean states during the world war. Its navy was “small but efficient” in its fight against German U-boats. Then came 1944. There was another election. This one wasn’t rigged. Battista lost.
The handsome one raided the treasury and took off for the United States, where he had made many friends. He bought a plush place in Daytona Beach. He took a snazzy long-term suite at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, again financed by the hard-pressed American taxpayers who didn’t know they were paying for it. He prepared to sit things out in luxury and plot a return when the proper time and circumstances presented themselves.
He knew they would.
After the war, Batista returned to Cuba, while maintaining his residences and contacts in the United States. He ran for president in 1952. Soon, it became apparent that he would lose. So, he did the next best thing to being elected. Batista and his allies in the military staged a coup in the early hours of March 10, 1952 and took over the government.
Batista quickly reasserted himself, placing his old cronies back in positions of power. A young Cuban lawyer named Fidel Castro tried to bring Batista to court to answer for the illegal takeover, but nothing came of it. Many Latin American countries quickly recognized the Batista government. On May 27 of the same year, the United States also extended formal recognition.
And so, the big deal was done: for the next several years, Havana would flourish as a center of gambling, sex shows, whoring, and drug dealing, with the American Mafia raking in millions on top of millions of post-war dollars. Control of gambling in the Caribbean was like a license to print money.
Castro, who would likely have been elected to Congress had the elections taken place, quickly saw that there was no way of legally removing Batista. On July 26, 1953, Castro and a handful of rebels attacked the army barracks at Moncada, igniting the Cuban Revolution. The attack failed and Fidel and Raúl Castro were jailed, but it brought them a great deal of attention.
Many captured rebels were executed on the spot, resulting in a lot of negative press for the government. In prison, Fidel Castro began organizing the 26th of July movement, named after the date of the Moncada assault. Six and a half years later, Castro’s revolutionary army marched into Havana. The mob grip on the city was broken, the casinos were looted, smashed and closed. Those who controlled them fled if they weren’t shot.
Gambling interests moved quickly to the Bahamas.
Casinos are a way of mugging the public without an arrest.
The late Sir Harry Oakes would have been horrified.
I always wondered, conjuring up images of Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano and their heirs, whether this was the final shoe dropping in the murder case of Sir Harry Oakes.
CHAPTER 35
On the first anniversary of the release of Around the World in 80 Days, the film was still playing in first run theatres coast to coast. Mike Todd continued to rake in the money. To keep the film in the public eye, Todd and his wife Elizabeth Taylor invited eighteen thousand of their “close friends” to a Madison Square Garden extravaganza. Boasting a long list of celebrities, an enormous cake and music from Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler, Todd conned the CBS program Playhouse 90 into covering the tacky spectacle live. He induced the executives at CBS to pay him three hundred thousand dollars to televise his publicity stunt. Inevitably, the crowd got out of control, a giant food fight ensued and the party turned into one of early television’s most memorably vulgar events.
My wife and I were invited. We didn’t go. But that didn’t mean the party didn’t cause my phone to ring. Shortly after the television show, I received a call from a senior editor at Look Magazine. Todd was hotter than ever.
“Alan,” he said, “you’re an old acquaintance of Mike Todd, aren’t you?”
“We go back to about 1940,” I said. “Seventeen years.”
“We’re hearing a lot of stories about Mike that have never hit the press,” the editor said. “Dicey contacts. Shady deals. How he may have strong-armed people in Hollywood to vote for his move for Best Picture. Interested in doing a three-part exposé on your old buddy?”
“It sounds like a hatchet job,” I said. “Is that what you’re asking?”
“Mike Todd. The Real Story. Everything. Good and bad,” he said.
“A hatchet job,” I said again.
“If you don’t do it, someone else will.”
They offered twenty thousand dollars, a fortune for a magazine work.
“Interested?”
I needed the money. “I’m interested,” I said.
I put the phone down. Sure, I needed the money. But I also wanted one more big assignment. I knew things about Mike that no one knew. Mike could be a bastard. There were things he’d done that I hated him for. But I also considered him, warts and all, a friend. If I had to tell the bad, I would also tell the good, and hope that it didn’t get edited out.
I was dam
ned tempted. But I didn’t want to write it from a bunker or ambush the man. Like anyone else, Mike deserved the opportunity to defend himself.
I gave Look a tentative yes. I made some phone calls. I wanted to meet with Mike to tell him what was being offered.
As it happened, Mike and Elizabeth had taken a summer rental three miles away. It was on the Westport-Fairfield line in Connecticut across from the polo field of the Fairfield County Hunt Club.
I called. Mike graciously said he’d see me. I drove over with my daughter, who was a teenager, and wanted to catch a glimpse of the now-grown-up little girl who had ridden horses in National Velvet.
Mike was cordial. We sat down in the living room of a sprawling home where the brilliant composer Richard Rodgers had once lived. A maid brought sandwiches and sodas. I told Mike what Look asking for.
“Oh, yeah? It’s a hatchet piece, right?” he laughed. “They want you to trash me.”
“I wouldn’t make stuff up, Mike, like some of the others would.”
“You wouldn’t need to,” he said, amused. “Anything you wrote would be at least partially true.”
“Anything I write would be completely true,” I said. “I can make errors like any other man with a typewriter. But I won’t submit anything false.”
“How much are they offering you?”
“Twenty thousand dollars.”
He whistled low. “Wow. That’s good money for scribbling.” His eyes drifted away for a moment. Then he looked back to me. “Listen, schnook. I’ll give you forty grand not to write it.”
I was stunned. “That’s an outright bribe, Mike,” I said.
“Yeah. A pretty good one.”
“That’s true, too,” I said.
“Think about it,” he said.
There was an uneasy silence between us.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “I’ve know you for a long time. You’re a charming bastard. A lot of the stuff you’ve done is disgraceful. But I don’t dislike you.”
He laughed. “Join the club,” he said. “Sounds like an interesting article. I might read it.”
I rounded up my daughter and we departed.
Several weeks later, Mike was back on the West Coast with his wife. Liz was in the throes of bronchitis and a 102-degree fever. Mike walked over to her bed and hugged her. His twin-engine Lockheed Lodestar, The Lucky Liz, was on a Burbank airstrip, waiting to take him to New York, where the Friars Club was to honor him the next night as Showman of the Year.
Mike reported to the Burbank airstrip an hour later. He boarded the Lockheed Lodestar he had named for her, Todd picked up the air-to-ground telephone to say goodbye to Liz one last time. “I’ll call you when we stop in Tulsa to re-fuel,” he told her.
Across the aisle from him sat the newspaper columnist Art Cohn, a screenwriter and former columnist for The Oakland Tribune. Cohn was writing Todd’s authorized biography.
The plane’s interior was pure Mike: plush, with an oak conference table, a couch, a bar, thick carpeting, and bronze ashtrays. The toiletries were engraved LIZ and HIS. The pilot radioed in from the cockpit. Despite the bad weather, it was clear above the clouds. There was a pilot and a co-pilot. Everyone was expecting a smooth flight.
At 10:41 p.m. on March 21, 1958, its lights flashing through the downpour, The Lucky Liz zipped down the airstrip, wheeled up and headed to New York.
At six a.m. on March 22, 1958, the West Coast correspondent for the Associated Press, a man named Jim Bacon, got a phone call. A fellow AP reporter near Albuquerque had found Bacon’s name on the passenger list of a Lockheed Lodestar that had crashed into a mountain in bad weather. Bacon had agreed to go with Todd on his trip to New York but hadn’t been able to make it.
“Is anyone injured?” Bacon asked.
“Everyone’s dead,” the reporter said.
Mike had never made the call from Tulsa. The aircraft crashed that night in bad weather in the Zuni Mountains near Grants, New Mexico.
Dick Hanley, Todd’s personal secretary, took a call from Elizabeth Taylor early that morning; she was worried that she hadn’t yet heard from Mike. Rex Kennamer, her physician, and Hanley went to the house in Coldwater Canyon to break the news. As the pair opened the door to Taylor’s bedroom, she shrieked, “No!”
In New York, Eddie Fisher was walking into the Essex House, where he’d been staying as a guest of Chesterfield cigarettes, one of the sponsors of his television show, but a product I no longer consumed. Eddie had just finished a sixteen-verse parody of the theme song to Around the World in 80 Days, which he planned to sing at the Friars roast. Jim Mahoney, his press agent, intercepted him. Fisher went into his hotel room, closed the door, and collapsed into tears.
The funeral was held on a cold day in Chicago. Howard Hughes provided Liz his private plane to transport the funeral party. Press and gawkers swarmed like gnats. The trashy Los Angeles Mirror News erroneously reported that Taylor had thrown herself on top of the coffin. It seemed almost fitting that Mike Todd’s last show degenerated into spectacle. There wasn’t much in the coffin, by the way. Mike had been incinerated in the plane crash.
“Kids were sitting there eating ice cream cones,” Eddie Fisher later remembered. “They were howling yelling to see Elizabeth. There was all kinds of noise. It was awful.”
By that time, the editors at Look had already contacted me. No profit in speaking ill of the dead, they said. The contract to write the story, which I had never actually signed, was cancelled.
Tough break for me. Tougher break for Mike. Somehow, I had never really wanted to write this one, anyway. And it started me to thinking about the murder of Sir Harry Oakes for a final time.
CHAPTER 36
A few months after Mike Todd’s death, I picked up the telephone and phoned Raymond Schindler. I knew Ray still maintained his agency in New York and went to work every day. I also knew that sometimes after a busy day at his desk, he sat pondering the strange geometry of the Oakes case. Schindler had made several public statements saying that he still believed that he could crack the mystery of the killer’s identity if he went down to Nassau and were given a free hand. But time was running out. Raymond Schindler was well into his seventies and no one was offering him a free hand.
Ray had moved to Tarrytown, New York, Washington Irving’s old haunt, and lived not far from the legendary Sleepy Hollow. That would have been enough to spook lesser men.
But not Mr. Schindler. And not me.
“Hello, Alan,” Ray said, sounding not the least any weaker than the last time we had spoken, maybe five years earlier.
“Hello, Ray. I’m hoping we can have a conversation.”
“For you, always, old pal. What’s on your mind?”
“A conversation in person,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. There was a pause on the line. “The Oakes murder case.” His words did not carry the intonation of a question.
“None other,” I said. “May I drive up and see you sometime soon?”
“You know where to find me?”
“I have a map,” I said.
He laughed. The same laugh I used to hear in the Bahamas, the one that punctuated so many late nights in bars and hotel lobbies.
It was a crisp fall day when I took off. I drove up the Merritt Parkway and arrived at Raymond’s estate in mid-afternoon. He had done well for himself. He had a big sprawling place in Duchess County, an estate with high walls and a long driveway. I drove a two-year-old De Soto. Ray had three cars in his driveway, one an antique.
He had household help. A cook made us some sandwiches, we exchanged small talk and then went to his den. He eased heavily into a leather chair by a lattice window. His appearance would not have given away his age, but his movements did. He labored like an old man. I was saddened. I was only in my mid-fifties myself but aging was a specter that never escaped a man after the mid-century mark, even if he hid it well.
“I see you have a new book coming out this Christmas,” he said. “M
urder, Mayhem, and Mystery. Do I have the title right?”
“You have it, Mr. Detective,” I said.
“Congratulations.”
“It’s a compendium of my best cases,” I said. “About fifty of them. A life’s work, you could call it.”
“I assume your take on the Oakes case is in there,” he said.
“Lindbergh and Oakes. Ponzi, too. And maybe fifty others.”
“So? A few are unsolved?”
“Lindbergh and Oakes,” I said.
We were playing verbal chess. I knew the game.
“Drink?” he finally asked.
“My drinking days or over,” I said. “I’m better off for it.”
He nodded. “Glad to hear it,” he said. A slight beat and he added, “Don’t touch the booze much myself anymore,” he said. “Don’t blame you. Not healthy. What’s on your mind, Alan?”
“I’m wondering how much more you can tell me about the Oakes case,” I said.
“Ha! Not much. Not anything, in fact.”
“Come on, Ray,” I said. “Level with me.”
“Whoever did in the old boy is still wielding a lot of power on that hot little sandbar.”
“And?” I asked.
“And nothing. That’s where it ends.”
There was an uneasy silence between us. He fixed me in that gaze that I knew so well from so many cases. I hesitated, then knew there was no point to trying to conceal the truth from one of the greatest detectives our country had ever produced.
“I haven’t had a bestseller since 1943, Ray,” I said. “Same year as the Oakes case. That’s fifteen years. I could use another big book.”
“How’s your wife?” he asked.
“She’s fine.”
“You had a daughter,” he said.
“Fine, also. Lovely young woman now. She’s at a private school in New York City.”‘
“And a son.”
“You’ve kept tabs on me, haven’t you?” I said.
