I always found it peculiar when my father dropped casual references to the gangsters who hung out in Hollywood, making them sound like the slick kids in the schoolyard you had to learn how to appease. “Johnny Roselli was a nice guy—a good-looking guy. I always got along with Johnny,” my father would say. “Of course, he ended up floating in an oil drum.” At which point I might say, “Well, gee, Dad, maybe he wasn’t such a nice guy after all.”
My father did know what men like that were capable of. He knew very well, for example, what had happened to an entertainer at one of his favorite hangouts, the Trocadero. The Troc was the nightclub of the 1930s in Hollywood. It was a swell-looking place—low-slung, with a long striped awning and a beautiful neon sign spelling out “CAFÉ TROCADERO” in small, neat Deco letters. (You can see it in the 1937 version of A Star Is Born. Janet Gaynor and Fredric March go there for a party after the premiere of her first movie.) Inside, on the top floor, it had cream-colored walls with gold-tinged molding and a mural of Paris. The downstairs was a clubby bar, done up in red-and-black plaid. An observer at the opening night admired the hatcheck girls—“perfect soubrettes, with eyelashes and chic caps and sheer lawn aprons and a vast expanse of silk stockings with a general effect of being all knees.” But the regular entertainer my father remembered seeing most often there was a singing comedian named Joe E. Lewis, whose horrible backstory everyone knew.
Lewis had been a nightclub entertainer in Chicago and had performed in a cocktail lounge called the Green Mill, which was frequented by gangsters and celebrities and partly owned by Al Capone. In 1927, he took a better offer from a club owned by a rival gang, and told an Al Capone lieutenant named Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn what he’d decided. McGurn swore he’d make Lewis pay, and one November morning in 1927 he did. McGurn’s thugs burst in on the entertainer in his room at the Commonwealth Hotel. They beat him brutally, carved up his face with a hunting knife, and cut off part of his tongue. Though they left him for dead, Lewis managed to crawl out into the hall, where a chambermaid found him. Capone himself supposedly regretted the attack and helped pay for the comedian’s rehabilitation. But, as my father remembered, “Lewis required a long time to even learn to speak again. He had scars on his face and everything. But here he was staging his comeback at the Troc. He was a nice guy. Everybody liked him. We were all cheering him on. But it was gruesome, when you think about it now.” On Sunday nights, my father sometimes emceed the new-talent auditions. “You’d arrive at noon to rehearse, and they’d have food set out, and booze.” On the Sundays when he performed with Lewis, he found himself downing even more of the booze than usual.
My father did have some standards. Chatting with a violent gangster at a party was okay, enjoying a certain amount of mobster hospitality might be a good self-protective strategy, but he absolutely did not want to give one the keys to anything. The Guild, for instance. He liked to tell the story about how such a thing almost happened, and how the braver souls at the Guild averted it. And it was a good story.
In 1935, a man named Willie Bioff turned up in Hollywood. Bioff was a gangster from Chicago, and he controlled the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, or IATSE, the union that represented all the so-called crafts in theater and movies, everyone from projectionists to prop men and electricians. Within months, Bioff would be shaking down studio executives for millions of dollars in exchange for his promise that IATSE would not strike (deals that the rank and file of the union generally neither knew about nor benefited from). His reign in Hollywood was heavy-handed and lucrative; for several years in the late 1930s, he had the movie moguls dancing to his bidding, and he enjoyed the spectacle thoroughly. “I’ve found that dickering with these picture producers goes about the same all the time,” Bioff once said. “You get into a room with them and they start yelling and hollering about how they’re bein’ held up and robbed. That goes on and on. I’m a busy man and don’t get too much sleep. I always go to sleep when that roaring starts. After a while it dies down and the quiet wakes me up. And I say, ‘All right, gentlemen, do we get the money?’”
Bioff’s patient charade nearly always paid off—in thick, brown-wrapped parcels of cash. It took a combination of muckraking journalism by a gadfly columnist, the actions of a brave dissident minority in IATSE, and the Screen Actors Guild’s queasy unwillingness to play along to finally bring Bioff down.
Bioff was born in Odessa, Russia, around 1900, and had emigrated with his family and settled in Chicago a few years later. A third-grade dropout who’d gone to work for local gangsters when he was still a kid, he was barely literate, and certainly no charmer. The historian David Witwer describes him as “abrasive, boastful and foul-mouthed. . . . Bioff himself told federal authorities that had he stayed in Chicago, he believed his organized crime associates there essentially would have killed him out of sheer irritation.” He was also single-mindedly avaricious—drinking and womanizing never seemed to tempt him—and scarily strong. “Talking to him, I sensed the relentless drive concentrated in his burly body,” wrote the L.A. newspaperwoman Florabel Muir. “He told me . . . with pride, that he could lift an ordinary man off the floor with one hand at arm’s length, and his yes-men nodded corroboration.”
Bioff’s first venture into a business of his own involved trying to lock up Kosher chicken dealers into a collusive organization from which he’d skim money. His plan fizzled, but along the way he met George Browne, an Irishman who was trying to lock up the non-Kosher chicken market. For Browne, plucking poultry dealers clean was a mere sideline. His main gig was as a business agent for the local chapter of IATSE. Soon he and Bioff had given up counting their chickens and turned to fleecing Chicago theater owners with threatened strikes by the projectionists. Bioff and Browne had caught the attention of the Capone organization, which maneuvered Browne into the presidency of the national IATSE. Bioff secured his own position by allegedly ordering the killings of several rival powerbrokers in the union, including one Fred “Bugs” Blacker, who won his nickname by dint of a memorable tactic: releasing bedbugs in the theaters of owners who wouldn’t do business with him.
Bioff started out in Hollywood by putting the squeeze on the chairman of the board of Twentieth Century–Fox, Nicholas Schenck, and when that worked out to Bioff’s liking, he made the rounds of all the studios. “To the Hollywood moguls,” notes the film historian Neal Gabler, “most of them Eastern European Jewish immigrants who aggressively promoted the American dream in their films for fear their adopted country might reject them as aliens, this bumpkin, himself an Eastern European Jew, was the American nightmare.” If Bioff was mainly interested in the tidy handover of large sums of cash, he hadn’t entirely shed the brutality of the Chicago streets, either. At one point, he decided that he didn’t like James Cagney. While visiting the set of a movie Cagney was making, Bioff and his associates supposedly came up with a plan to drop a klieg light on Cagney’s head. It wasn’t clear why: maybe they’d had it with Cagney’s loyalty to SAG, which was steadily becoming an annoyance to Bioff; maybe they just wanted to show the sort of mayhem they were capable of. Only the presence of George Raft, an actor who was both close to the mob and friendly with Cagney, dissuaded them.
By this time, Bioff had automatic entrée to all the studios and was rich enough to buy himself eighty acres in the San Fernando Valley with a thick-walled adobe house set in the midst of alfalfa fields and olive trees. He called it his ranch, and named it the Laurie A. after the wife he doted on. He wore bespoke suits and collected first editions he couldn’t read.
Like a lot of people living in Hollywood, Bioff wanted a little more of its glamour to accrue to him than was realistic. He wanted the people in front of the camera in his fiefdom, as well as those behind it. And that desire would lead to his downfall, for the actors wanted no part of Bioff. Or not, anyway, after an initial flirtation.
In 1937, the actors, under the leadership of Robert Montgomery, had vo
ted overwhelmingly to go out on strike as a means of getting the producers to recognize their union. The meeting at which the strike vote took place was well attended and sober in mood. “Furs and jewels were not worn by the feminine stars,” a newspaper account noted. “The men were informal in slacks and polo shirts. All were grim-faced.” As part of their strategy, the actors had made common cause with a union called the Federation of Motion Picture Crafts, a progressive would-be alternative to the mob-ridden IATSE that was already on strike. The FMPC had gotten protection from longshoremen who worked at the San Pedro harbor. And the longies had been engaging in public fistfights with the men from IATSE, whom Bioff and Browne had provided with Lincoln-Zephyr cars and sinister-looking backup brought in from Chicago.
One morning in early May, a delegation of actors held a meeting with Louis B. Mayer at his beach house. It was a Sunday, and Mayer was annoyed at the interruption of his weekly bridge game. To everybody’s surprise, Willie Bioff showed up, uninvited, to argue for the actors. “He boasted afterwards that his barging in threw such a fright into the producers that they promptly granted the actors all they had asked,” wrote Florabel Muir.
That very evening, at the Hollywood Legion Stadium, where the Friday-night boxing matches were held, Montgomery told an audience of stars, contract players, and extras that the moguls had finally capitulated: SAG was now the official voice and bargaining agent for the actors. They’d be guaranteed a minimum wage and twelve hours between the end of one working day and the start of another. Lyle was elated, and loved the symbolism of the setting: a fight arena. “I can remember Bob coming out and standing in the ring and announcing that we had won. The place was packed, and it probably seated fifteen hundred people. And we were all on our feet, cheering.” At first, the actors were grateful to Bioff, the pudgy tough guy who’d faced down the bullying moguls. The Guild stopped throwing its support behind IATSE’s would-be rival, the leftist FMPC, canceled its own plans to strike, and published a long letter in its magazine thanking Bioff for his intervention. But before long the actors were anxious to shed their new friend—and to expose him in the process.
Robert Montgomery was particularly suspicious of Bioff. “I give Bob so much credit,” my father recalled, “because he got wise to Bioff pretty soon, and he went after him like a bulldog. He was quiet about it at first, and he was always a personable guy, but at the same time he was relentless. And courageous.”
If you were casting the role, you would never have picked Robert Montgomery for the man who faced down the bulldozing thug from Chicago. In person, Montgomery was slim, elegant, and dapper—one profile said he “refused to carry cigarettes because he felt that their bulk spoiled the drape of his coat”—and on screen in the 1930s he was frequently cast as a stylishly intoxicated bon vivant. “The directors shoved a cocktail shaker into my hands,” he once said, “and kept me shaking it for years.” Clearly, Bioff was counting on Montgomery’s being a “frivolous dandy,” who could be easily pushed around or manipulated, as David Witwer notes in his history of racketeering in 1930s Hollywood.
In fact, Montgomery was a man with an uncommonly firm backbone. His politics were a bit atypical for Hollywood, where, with a few high-profile exceptions, liberal affinities have always been more in vogue than conservative ones for actors. Montgomery was a lifelong Republican and anti-Communist, who would become an adviser to President Eisenhower (his brief was to help the president look his best in the new medium of television) and a friendly witness in front of the HUAC. But unlike some ritualistic invokers of patriotism, Montgomery put himself on the line. In 1940, while making a film in Europe, he abruptly suspended his acting career to become a volunteer ambulance driver. He distinguished himself evacuating wounded French soldiers under German machine-gun fire and was named to the French Legion of Honor for his bravery. After the United States entered the war, Montgomery became a naval officer, first in the Pacific, where he commanded PT boats, then in the North Atlantic, where he was on the first destroyer to enter the harbor during the Normandy invasion.
If he was a capital-R Republican, he was also a little-d democrat. Though he’d been born to wealth—his father had been vice president of New York Rubber Company—his family’s fortune vanished when the father committed suicide in 1922. Montgomery, who was then eighteen, went to work as a railroad mechanic’s assistant and then as a deckhand on a tanker. It didn’t take long for him to realize, though, that his good looks and privileged origins had equipped him for the pleasanter lot of impersonating the kind of young man he’d been brought up to be.
Maybe his experiences on both sides of the class divide were what endowed Montgomery with his empathy for the little guy and his aristocratic allergy to being told what to do. Both qualities served him well in his capacity as president of a beleaguered new union that lots of people in and out of Hollywood regarded as a lightweight. One of his colleagues in the Guild remembered a parlay in 1938 at which Montgomery, by then a popular leading man at MGM, was negotiating with recalcitrant studio executives over the rights of extras. “Finally Bob Montgomery hit the table, and he said, ‘You know, you people should be ashamed of yourselves. You have no compunction about robbing an extra. You won’t challenge me, but an extra you will take on like this. You take advantage of the helpless. Why don’t you pick on people your own size?’”
Montgomery decided it would be worthwhile to look into the background of the man he and the Guild were up against—especially after Bioff made an official announcement in October 1938 of his plan to fold SAG into one big motion picture union under IATSE’s control. Montgomery asked the Guild to appropriate $5,000 for a discreet investigation of Bioff, and said he’d personally refund the money if it didn’t turn up anything noteworthy. But it did. “Nobody knew what exactly Bioff had been up to with the studios at that point,” my father recalled. “But we knew he was a shady character and we knew he wanted to take over the Guild.” The detectives the Guild hired found that Bioff had been convicted of pandering back in Chicago, and that he had mysteriously managed to avoid serving out his sentence.
More important, they got hold of a $100,000 check that Nicholas Schenck’s nephew had written to Bioff for one of their transactions, providing the first solid evidence of the extortion racket linking Bioff and the studio chiefs. By late 1939, Bioff’s rule was starting to unravel. Montgomery was on the case, and had presented the SAG detective’s findings to the Roosevelt administration; so were Westbrook Pegler, a flamboyant conservative columnist who’d been digging into the mob’s connections in Hollywood, and a group of IATSE dissidents who called themselves the White Rats.
But Bioff wasn’t going to give up his cash cow that easily. Montgomery and the Guild vice president, George Murphy, started getting threats, including one directed at Murphy’s children that had Bioff’s signature style all over it: his children would have acid thrown in their faces if SAG didn’t call off its campaign against him. Eddie Mannix, an executive at MGM who’d had his own dealings with the underworld, warned Murphy to stay out of it. “You’re playing with fire. These boys are tough. They’ll think nothing of smashing your brains out. They’ve done it before and they’ll do it again.” My father recalled that a group of stuntmen volunteered as bodyguards, accompanying Montgomery and Murphy to and from their cars after meetings.
In 1941, Schenck was convicted of tax evasion, a charge that had come to light as a result of criminal investigations into his relationship with Bioff. Hoping to reduce his three-year sentence, Schenck decided to cooperate with the authorities who were seeking Bioff’s arrest and tell the full, unsavory story. Bioff and Browne were indicted for extortion, and studio chiefs from Warners, MGM, and Twentieth Century–Fox now all lined up to testify for the prosecution. “The stories they told over and over again of carrying fifty-thousand-dollar payments to Willie’s New York hotel room in paper sacks were more fantastic,” wrote Florabel Muir, “than any movie scenario written for a B p
roduction.”
In November 1941, Browne and Bioff were convicted in a New York federal court. Browne was sentenced to eight years in prison, Bioff to ten. That was the end of Bioff’s reign in Hollywood, but it was not quite the end of Bioff. In prison, he turned state’s witness and told authorities he was ready to reveal everything he knew about the Chicago mafia bosses to whom he’d been delivering, he said, two-thirds of the Hollywood money. In March 1943, the New York attorney general indicted nine men from Capone’s organization, including the handsome Hollywood operative Johnny Roselli and Frank “the Enforcer” Nitti, who promptly shot himself in the head. The eight who went to trial were all convicted. At previous trials, Bioff said he had “lied and lied and lied” to the authorities, but now he was telling the truth, and at great length. “I’m just a low uncouth person, a low type of man. People of my caliber don’t do nice things.”
Nor, generally, do people do nice things to them. One morning in November 1955, Bioff stepped on the starter of his pickup truck and was blown to bits. Bioff had been living quietly in a tract-house suburb of Phoenix, where he represented himself as William Nelson, a retired businessman of modest habits and means. Unassuming though he may have been, “Nelson” had managed to befriend a rising Arizona politician named Barry Goldwater. Goldwater always claimed he had no idea who the dumpy, bespectacled retiree with a keen interest in Republican politics really was. But Bioff’s craving for power had not, it seemed, entirely been extinguished.
The Entertainer Page 29
