Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  The camera movement was jerky and the print was filled with light scratches. When the woman spoke, I struggled to decipher her words and match them to the emotions flickering across her face.

  After three or four minutes, the film ran off the spool and the screen went white as the houselights came back on. We all sat there for a moment, still under her spell.

  “Maybe too foreign looking,” Harry Warner finally stood up. “The war’s over but people still like blond pin-ups in sweaters.”

  “What was she saying?” Jack asked.

  “Who knows?” Warner shrugged. “I think it was a scene from one of those Greek plays. Maybe the one about the guy who shtups his mother and then pokes his own eyes out to pay himself back for getting into her pants in the first place. Like I said, at first I looked at the test as a favor to Fortunato, but we think there’s something there. How much, I don’t know, but we offered her a part. Normally, my brother would have insisted on the usual audition by casting couch, but because Fortunato’s involved he waived that requirement for fear of getting his throat slit.

  “The picture is Tomorrow Is Too Late. It’s about people who don’t deserve it getting screwed when they come home from the war. It started shooting a month ago—a B that might do better than that if we can get it out before people start wondering what was the point of beating the shit out of the Germans and the Japs. This girl has a pretty big role for a nobody. Who knows what’ll happen? Maybe she’s the next Garbo, maybe she’s on the next gondola back to the old country.”

  “She certainly looks like a star,” I said.

  “There’s only one great actor in Hollywood,” Warner replied morosely as he led us out of the basement and back up the stairs into the jarring sunlight. “You know who that is? Lassie. She never forgets her lines, she doesn’t bitch about her salary, and she doesn’t want to fuck around with the script.”

  However much he needed women, Jack’s attitude toward them—although far more graciously expressed—was pretty much the same as his father’s: turn them upside down and they all look the same. But on the drive back to his place at Malibu, he kept talking about the woman in the film clip with an almost courtly awe.

  “There’s just something about her,” he said. “She’s gorgeous but she has something that comes from the inside. She’s on fire, but very cool.”

  “Oh, brother,” I said.

  He shot me a dirty look and ran on about her for a few minutes. When he finally let up I asked him about Fortunato.

  “Chicago crime figure turned war hero.”

  “How do you know about him?”

  “I had dinner with Wild Bill Donovan one night when I got back from the Pacific and he gave me the lowdown. He said Fortunato got his start in the Chicago crime scene as a teenager selling Jewish kids protection from other Italians at twenty-five cents a month. Then he got into numbers and other rackets. Apparently he was a smoother operator than the other knuckleheads he ran with, so Frank Nitti made him one of his lieutenants when he took over the Outfit after Capone went to prison, and Ricca promoted him to a colonel later on.”

  Jack was a dilettante at heart, but when a subject grabbed him, as Niccolo Fortunato obviously had, he focused all his attention on mastering it.

  “In Chicago it had pretty much been loan-sharking and gambling, until Fortunato convinced Nitti that unions were a growth industry. This opened up new vistas.

  “Donovan said he could have dropped his teeth when Fortunato showed up unannounced at OSS headquarters right after the Sicily invasion and asked to be sent over there to work with the underground. He said the Italian crime figures were pissed at Mussolini for jailing hundreds of them to break their power and he might convince them to cooperate with our guys in the mainland campaign. So Donovan decided it was worth a try, and he smuggled Fortunato into Calabria when the Allies staged a small landing there to support the Salerno invasion in fall ’43. Apparently Fortunato made some good contacts that paid off, but then he disappeared. Donovan said that he first thought the gangsters might have had second thoughts and thrown him overboard with concrete waders somewhere in Mare Nostrum. But early in ’44 he turned up in central Italy working with the Resistance. Donovan said nobody knew why.”

  “Maybe he felt patriotic about Italy.”

  “Maybe. Whatever the reason, Fortunato was the real thing.”

  The real thing. In other words, one of those men of action who always fascinated the Kennedys because they worried that their own authenticity was cooked. Men they would entrust with their black ops in the Caribbean or Southeast Asia and then invite to dinner at Hyannis or Hickory Hill, to bask in the reflected glory of their derring-do.

  It was dusk when Jack turned off the Pacific Coast Highway and aimed the Zephyr down a short driveway of packed sand leading to a bungalow wedged between two larger beach houses.

  As we entered, he tossed me a spare key. “Mi casa es tu casa,” he said, adding sardonically, “as usual.”

  I would mechanically transfer this key from one chain to another over the next few decades, keeping it, I sometimes told myself, to help me someday unlock the full meaning of what happened those next few weeks in Hollywood.

  The interior of the bungalow had the undercover elegance Jack always liked. Two facing sofas whose chocolate-colored leather was scarred with the perfect patina of wear faced each other in a living room filled with nautical objects: a gleaming sextant, an old anchor crusted with green corrosion, a woodcut of a giant stylized wave in the manner of Hiroshige—all of it organized around an immense plate-glass window staring out at the infinite horizon of the Pacific Ocean.

  I whistled in appreciation.

  “Yeah,” he kicked off his shoes and did a back dive into one of the sofas. “It’s a splurge, but during the time I had to bunk in that armpit of a PT boat I always told myself I deserved better.”

  After dinner we went outside, where the searchlight moon had turned the sand to snow. We sat silently on the deck watching the waves phosphoresce as they broke and began their long roll to shore. Then Jack went in and got the big box of his portable record player, connected it to an extension cord, and put on the disc that Yip Harburg had given us.

  It was a scratchy demonstration cut sung a cappella by a so-so female voice and sounded like it had been recorded in a coffee can, but the words lit up the night. Jack only pretended to scorn Irish sentimentality; he allowed the song to cast a spell on him from the first note. He played it over and over again and was soon harmonizing the refrain:

  How are things in Glocca Morra?

  Is that little brook still leapin’ there?

  Does it still run down to Donny cove?

  Through Killybegs, Kilkerry and Kildare?

  After perhaps a half hour of this, he turned the record player off and stood for a long time with his hands in his pockets, looking out into the night. Finally he shrugged and said, more to himself than to me, “What’s the point of being Irish anyway if you don’t think the world will break your heart?”

  Then he went back inside, poured himself a glass of milk, grabbed the phone and propped up his feet on the kitchen table. He gave a New York number to the long distance operator, and when he was connected he said, “Tell syndication that Kennedy will not be filing tonight.”

  FIVE

  The clank of silverware rousted me out of my nest on the living room couch early the next morning. Jack was in his underwear at the kitchen table eating Wheaties and drinking orange juice from the bottle as he scanned the LA Times. Although he had been out of the Navy for well over a year, he still wore his dog tags.

  “I’ve got to play the boy reporter today.” He got up and stretched his spine, which was slightly serpentined from scoliosis. “You can be my copy boy. We’re starting in downtown LA.”

  I followed him into his bedroom, where plates with moldering crusts of bread and dried wisps of ham and cheese sat on the dresser. An uncapped tube drooled Brylcreem onto his nightstand; shorts and soc
ks lay on the floor in a little fabric Stonehenge where he had been stepping out of them for the last few days. It reminded me of the chaos he’d created at Choate, where I once found a four-month-old birthday cake, still in its box, under layers of magazines and newspapers and athletic gear in a corner of our room. The salutation had sunk like an intaglio in the petrified frosting: Happy 15th Jack!

  “Why downtown?” I asked.

  “Because that’s where Selkirk the union guy has his office,” he said, sitting down on the bed and setting about to examine his toes for athlete’s foot.

  “I thought you just did international stuff.”

  “I may not have worked for the Daily Princetonian, but I know a good story when I see one. And that little war we saw at Warners yesterday is a good story. I pitched it to New York this morning while you were in there with your snorechestra going full blast and they’re gung ho. “Labor Turmoil in the Dream Factory,” by John F. Kennedy! Guaranteed at least page three. Selkirk first, then Geist, then Harry Warner to expand on his scorpions-in-a-bottle theory, then back to the typewriter for an hour or two and roll the presses!”

  The storefront headquarters of the Association of Studio Employees was sandwiched between a dry cleaner’s and a locksmith on Spring Street not far from Pershing Square. When we opened the door we were immediately braced by two burly, crewcut men, both wearing naval bellbottoms and white T-shirts with cigarette packs rolled up in one sleeve high on the shoulder.

  “That’s okay,” an Australian-accented voice yelled from an alcove in the back. “This is the writer guy I told you about. Bring him over here.”

  Clive Selkirk was a bulky presence whose big-featured face conveyed a disconcerting blend of sincerity and cunning. His close-cropped ginger-colored hair was pomaded so it stuck up in quills; his lower lip was mangled from the previous day’s action. He was sitting at a desk strewn with scratch pads and newsletters, mugs half filled with a slurry of old coffee, and an overflowing ashtray the size of a chafing dish. The wall behind his chair was decorated with posters in the heroic Soviet socialist style showing muscular workers using heavy, stylized wrenches to smash stone swastikas. Several picket signs were stacked upside down in a corner.

  “My longies,” Selkirk nodded at the bodyguards, who hovered around until he released them with a nod. “They watch over me.”

  “Longies?” Jack frowned.

  “Longshoremen. On loan from my fellow internationalist Harry Bridges. They are hell on scabs and Pinkertons and all the other…”

  When he paused to sip his coffee, Jack goaded him by finishing the sentence: “… enemies of the people?”

  Selkirk gave a hard look: “You took the words right out of my mouth.”

  “Speaking of mouth,” Jack pointed at his lip.

  Selkirk flashed a gold-capped molar and winced: “It only hurts when I smile.” Then, more seriously: “You don’t have to worry, we give as good as we get. A few months ago Geist dials Chicago, talks to the owners of his circus, and gets them to send out some of their torpedoes to terrorize us. These guys spend a couple of days driving around town in a big boat of a Packard with their jackets open so everyone can see the heaters flapping around under their arms. But a half dozen of my longies were waiting one afternoon when that Lincoln parks across from Paramount. They turned it over and beat the hell out of the wop bastards who climbed out of it and sent them back where they came from with their tails between their legs.”

  Jack was focusing on a framed photograph of Upton Sinclair on the desk. It was autographed under the inscription, “To Clive, one of the best Workers of the World. Unite!”

  “Not bad to have the author of The Jungle in your corner, eh?” Selkirk exulted. “Become a mate of mine, old Upton. I visit him at his place over in Monrovia every week or two. Amazing house. He’s getting on, but he’s still got a mind like a razor blade.”

  “A rise-up light?” Jack mocked the Australian accent with phony innocence.

  Selkirk squinted at him, and then said, “You think I talk funny? You ought to listen to yourself.”

  Jack frowned.

  “Say America,” Selkirk commanded.

  Jack reluctantly obeyed.

  “Now say Africa.”

  Jack said it.

  “See!” Selkirk pounced. “You said Americker and Africker.”

  Always sensitive about his Boston accent, Jack grabbed the fountain pen in his shirt pocket and opened his steno pad. “So let’s start at the beginning,” he said in a refrigerated voice. “How did you get into the studio unions in the first place?”

  Pleased to have gotten under his skin, Selkirk leaned back in his chair. “When I came over here, a friend of my dad’s in the film business in Sydney got me a job as a scene painter at Paramount. I joined the local and wound up running for president after a couple of years because the fat asses supposedly representing me and my brothers there were actually sucks to the bosses. We did okay with the painters so we decided to form the Association of Studio Employees and began…”

  “So it’s better for Communists to control the unions than gangsters?” Jack interrupted.

  Selkirk stubbornly finished his thought: “… began with Disney’s cartoonists and had some good luck there and just kept going.”

  Then he eyed Jack and answered the other question. “We’re a union, not the Communist Party. But as far as the Communists go, they’re for world peace, for treating Negroes like human beings, for giving people a living wage. These things sound a little bit of all right to me.”

  “I’m sure Solomon Geist can also give an inspiring speech about how he’s for the working man,” Jack continued to bait him.

  “Rhymes with heist,” Selkirk growled, “and that’s what we’re dealing with here—a thug who steals the labor movement from the working man.”

  He paused a moment before asking, “You ever heard of the Balaban brothers?”

  Hating to confess ignorance about anything, Jack gave a minimal shake of his head.

  “They had a chain of movie houses in Chicago back in the early Thirties,” Selkirk explained. “It was Depression time and they decided to up their profits by forcing their employees to take a 20 percent pay cut. Geist was a smalltime villain back then, but he knew an opportunity when he saw one. He makes an appointment with the brothers and says he needs two thousand bucks to prevent their employees from organizing. The Balabans laugh in his face. But over the next couple of weeks there are accidents in the projection rooms at all their movie houses. Film upside down and backward, breaking and melting and projectionists getting beat up. The Balabans decide to pay Geist off to get things back to normal and he uses the money to organize a projectionists’ union anyhow. Charges each worker two dollars a month dues and does fuck-all for them while pocketing the money. When Frank Nitti and Paul Ricca hear about this, they’re impressed by his ingenuity. They can do the math: hundreds of movie houses in Chicago, thousands in Illinois, tens of thousands nationwide. And the projectionists are just the beginning. After he takes over the Outfit, Ricca moves in on the International Brotherhood of Technicians and Actors, installs one of his stooges as president and sends Geist out here as the power behind the throne to get down to the real business—extorting the producers in return for selling out their workers.”

  “If this is true, why would the studios put up with it?” Jack couldn’t repress his interest.

  “Because when Geist gets established there, he makes a deal: wages won’t rise and there won’t be any work stoppages, and in return he gets recognition of his union and regular payoffs to himself and the guys who pull his strings. So Sam Goldwyn makes a trip to Geist’s office every year with a paper bag with fifty K in it for the IBTA ‘strike fund.’ Ten rolls of a hundred $50 bills with rubber bands around them. Nick Schenck at MGM does the same thing. So does one of your friend Jack Warner’s lackeys. And so on. Close to half a million every year for Geist and his friends back home in Chicago and well worth it to the studios. />
  “The working man doesn’t have anywhere to go for help. The LA County DA Fred Howser is crooked as a dog’s hind leg. Police Chief Horrall is so corrupt he sells detective badges for thirty dollars apiece. Both of them have their living rooms in the Outfit’s pocket.”

  “Sounds like you’re pissing into the wind, then,” Jack needled, still smarting over the comments about his accent.

  “Except for one thing.” Selkirk jumped up, making his powerful body even bigger by self-parodying soapbox gestures, slicing the air with flattened palms, and brayed, “Social justice! Social justice always bats last!”

  Then he laughed at himself and sat back down, resuming his normal tone: “We’ve got six thousand members now, almost as many as the IBTA, and unlike them we’re clean. Our time has come.”

  Jack looked like he was about to say something, but Selkirk kept on the offensive.

  “Come on, mate, it’s 1945, time for this town to finally get its own New Deal. Everybody knows it. That’s why the Warners and all the other captains of the entertainment industry are starting to think maybe paying blackmail is outdated and not just a drain on profits. They gag at the thought of us representing the set dressers or anyone else, but they’re beginning to wonder if we might not be the lesser of two evils. So the big boys in Chicago are getting nervous. That’s why they sent out one of their heavy hitters, some guy named Fortune.”

  “Fortunato,” Jack perked up. “What’s his role?”

  “From what I hear, he’s just consulting for now,” Selkirk shrugged. “But maybe the bosses in the Outfit will decide that we’re too hot for Geist to handle and they need someone with more juice out here. Then Fortune could become the man. Who knows? Who cares? The bigger they come …”

  For the next half hour Jack kept shooting out questions. He was a surprisingly astute and forensic interviewer, partly because he had learned that questioning others was a way of deflecting attention from himself all those years when he didn’t want people asking about his health, but also because he was genuinely interested in the human comedy. Selkirk came right back at him, both of them enjoying the combat until Jack glanced at his watch and said he had an appointment.