When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  Through Music Corporation, Stein was able to fulfill his early sense of responsibility for his siblings; ultimately, he would employ all of them (directly, or indirectly through a spouse). He hired his sister Adelaide’s husband, Charles Miller, in the first couple of years, and, not long after, his brother Bill. Though Bill was older, it was Jules who had always been the provider; when Bill had wanted to start a dress business, Stein—then still in his late teens—had given him money he’d saved; the business failed. And when Jules was seventeen, he had obtained a summer job for Bill, playing with Jules’s band, in its engagement at the Hotel Ottawa, in Ottawa Beach, Michigan. “Since Bill could not play any instrument, I rented a string bass and rubbed soap on the bow so there was no sound,” Jules recalled. “Bill was a good singer, so he got by for a while by energetically sawing away on his silent bow until one night the hotel people got suspicious of so much activity resulting in so little music. That was the end of Bill’s first and only employment as a musician. . . . But really he was born to be an agent and after he joined us in 1925 he became our number one talent scout, probably bringing into the MCA fold more big attractions than any other single individual.” Bill, who had no direct duties or responsibilities, and kept no regular hours, spent his nights making the rounds of the dance spots. Karl Kramer later wrote that Bill Stein “knew everybody and talked to everybody: head waiters, song pluggers, secretaries to hotel managers, phonograph record bosses and trade journal reporters.” His extreme sociability, so different from his brother Jules’s reticence, paid off; among those he was responsible for signing were Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians (he discovered them in Cleveland when they were little known) and Kay Kyser, who would later become famous as the quizmaster in the Kollege of Musical Knowledge radio show.

  By May 1926, Stein and his troops had moved to new quarters in the Oriental Theater building, part of the Balaban & Katz chain, which owned large, rococo-style movie houses throughout Chicago. Barney Balaban and Stein were good friends, and they did business together as well; for motion picture theaters had become major bookers of orchestras, which played during intermission, and Stein booked Balaban’s theaters. This Music Corporation office displayed, for the first time, what would be a signal penchant of Stein’s—creating an office that made a statement, and one distinctly at odds with the tawdry, flesh-peddling image of an agent. The mundane wooden desks and stiff chairs from the two-room Capitol office had been banished. Instead, Stein had an ornate, Spanish-style desk and comfortable chairs in his office, and on his walls there were none of the usual amusement business photos but, rather, Viennese etchings he had acquired during his medical study abroad. Karl Kramer stressed that the appearance of the office—opulent and glamorous for that time, and one that created a general impression that the young company was intensely prosperous—didn’t quite match reality. Music Corporation’s profits in 1926 were $12,000. Its half-dozen employees all lived in modest rented apartments, and not one owned a car. When Stein bought his first car, it was indeed a Rolls-Royce, as he had vowed it would be; but it was secondhand, owned by one of the band leaders, Zez Comfrey, and all Stein’s men had to go for a ride and put their approval on the deal before Stein paid the $1,800. “There were many times that our bank account was strained to the last buck, and on some occasions we even had to wait months to cash our bonus checks, small as they were, because there were not sufficient funds available,” Kramer wrote. “But you never would have known it from the front office.”

  Stein’s apparent prosperity made it inevitable that he would attract the attention of Chicago’s ruling class, the gangsters who controlled the city in the twenties—and who were, in addition, his customers, at many of the nightclubs he was booking. Stein would later claim that it was in 1928 that they began demanding payoffs and a piece of Music Corporation. The only surprise is that it took that long.

  There were rival gangs, led by men like Bugs Moran, Dion O’Bannion, and Roger Touhy, and they certainly had their territories and perquisites, but by the late twenties Al Capone was supreme. And if Capone or those operating on his behalf made a demand of a businessman or labor union official, there was no meaningful authority to appeal to, so thoroughly had Capone subsumed the majority of the police and the politicians. The price of resistance, of course, was well known. Someone who had the opportunity to observe Capone close up during this period was a member of his entourage—filled in the main with triggermen like Machine Gun Jack McGurn—who was rather out of place: a young piano player and law student (he was at the time clerking for a federal district court judge) named Luis Kutner. Kutner had gone to Lane Tech High School in the heart of the Black Hand, or Mafia, district; status there came from being accepted at the Buffalo Ice Cream Parlor, where the gangsters recruited. Although Kutner was a slight, blond kid who played in the school orchestra and led literary discussions, he also became a good fighter and cultivated the right friends; so he eventually made it into the ice cream parlor and, from there, to Colosimo’s, the famous eating and cabaret spot at Wabash and 22nd Streets, which had been run by Big Jim Colosimo, the Chicago overlord of crime, until he was killed there in 1920. Johnny Torrio had taken Colosimo’s place in the crime hierarchy, as well as the café, and he hired young Kutner to play piano there a couple nights a week. As Kutner tells it, a lowly foot soldier named Al Capone, moody and withdrawn, sitting by himself in a corner, asked Kutner if he could play “Roses of Picardy,” which, as it turned out, was Capone’s favorite song. Kutner did—for the first of many hundreds of times. “Piano was my open sesame,” Kutner said in a series of taped interviews conducted with him in the seventies.

  Kutner learned from Capone that he had quit school after the fourth grade and started out as a shoeshine boy in Brooklyn, then graduated to looting trucks and warehouses on the wharves, then to hijacking and murder. Torrio, who had been one of the original heads of the Five Points gang in Manhattan, wrote to Capone to come to Chicago, and soon Capone was able to invite other members of his family to move there and work for Torrio, too. “It seemed to be a good town to hustle in, because the police and politicians were so thoroughly owned by the gangs that every imaginable manner of larceny, skullduggery, and illegitimate enterprise could flourish in Chicago in relative safety,” Kutner said. “Only chicken stealers and common bandits went to jail. The gangs bought their freedom at so much a head.” In Kutner’s view, it was Torrio who had the acumen to spot the business potential in Prohibition, and who created the structure of the crime empire that Capone simply inherited. After Torrio was shotgunned and nearly killed, he decided to retire, and left for Italy. “Al had never dreamed at any time that he would suddenly be the one to be head of the gang. He had not displayed particular talents, or leadership, or anything else of that sort except muscle . . . he didn’t have a head for business . . . he squandered millions out of everything that came in and eventually died penniless, supported by the Outfit.” But, with Torrio suddenly gone, “nobody was around to give orders. They began to ask Al for answers to their questions. Where was the booze for 41st Street? What garage was repairing Tortorelli’s truck? Was the precinct sergeant supposed to get a hundred or a thousand? A million little facts that Al had at his fingertips because he had been Torrio’s aide-de-camp. It was as if the secretary to the president of IBM had suddenly become the chief officer.

  “Even then I had the mind of a lawyer,” Kutner added, “and I told Al very strictly, ‘Don’t pass out information freely, make them struggle for it. Hold in everything that you can.’ And he did this. He wasn’t sure that I knew what I was doing, because I was just a punk. But fellows in the rackets have a tremendous respect for anybody with an education. So he listened to me.”

  Kutner said he became a fixture in Capone’s headquarters, on the fourth floor of the Metropole Hotel. There, Capone—always very particular about the chair in which he sat—presided in an elaborate high-backed throne (lion heads with open, menacing mouths protruded from its arms), which had been t
aken from a Balaban & Katz theater. Often, after midnight, Kutner would bring kosher corned beef to the Metropole, make Capone a sandwich, and play the piano softly, while Capone talked a little, or just stared out the window. Capone, who spoke with a thick Brooklyn accent, wanted to improve his diction; Kutner advised him to do this by reading aloud whenever he was in the john; he says that Capone followed his instructions (to the amusement of his listening henchmen), and became well spoken, with a good vocabulary. Kutner told him how to dress—persuading him to give up white socks, and to buy a velvet-collared coat at Marshall Field’s. (“All the salesmen gulped when he pulled out this tremendous wad, because he had about a hundred $100 bills and about fifty $1,000 bills, all held together by a little rubber band.”) No matter how gentlemanly the rest of his attire, Capone sported a diamond ring that was like a searchlight—a symbol of power that would continue to be worn by Chicago businessmen and politicians for many years.

  Capone discovered that he loved the limelight, and he cultivated the press. “He threw press conferences like confetti,” Kutner said. “He was the original gangster-showman. Can you imagine Sam “Mooney” Giancana making these statements to the press the way Al did? . . . Nobody showed such disregard for the traditional rule of silence. He operated with complete disdain and utter braggadocio.” And, Kutner continued, “Once the publicity machine got going, a lot of guys wanted to work for Al for the glory. You were a Capone man; that was important. Better than being a movie star, in Chicago of those days.”

  Colonel Robert McCormick, who was the owner of the Chicago Tribune, seemed to agree. In 1928, when a strike of the Tribune’s chauffeurs and drivers union was threatened, Max Annenberg, the Tribune’s director of circulation, called Capone, who attended a meeting with Annenberg and Daniel Serritella, a city official who was a Capone protégé (and, also, a good friend of Petrillo’s for many years). According to a signed statement by Serritella, Capone agreed to use his influence to stop the strike, and Annenberg then brought in McCormick, who thanked Capone and said, “You know, you are famous like Babe Ruth. We can’t help printing things about you, but I will see that the Tribune gives you a fair deal.”

  At that time, Capone appeared invincible. The strength of the system over which he presided was that it was based on mutuality, a perfect mesh of interlocking needs: the gangs’ operations provided the aldermen and committeemen with thousands of patronage jobs, as well as the gunmen to supervise the polls on election day; and the aldermen and committeemen chose the police captains in their districts. So the politicians and the gangsters and the police were all bound to one another. “By 1928, Al’s police payroll was topping $30 million,” Kutner said. “Mayor [William ‘Big Bill’] Thompson alone got a million a year. On [Capone’s] payroll were over half the police force, and the remaining half would have liked to be. . . . Money was delivered in O’Connor and Goldberg shoe boxes in bills of one thousand denominations. The weekly lineup of police at various warehouses was common knowledge, but no one cared. . . . The bribery was really complete, always including the chief of police, detectives, state senators and state representatives, and right into the governor’s office, where pardons awaited Capone’s friends on the first day of their arrival at Joliet penitentiary. This was Governor Len Small, of whom it was said that he belonged in jail more than the gangsters he pardoned. . . . Al made and broke politicians at will, and many of their mouthpieces were in due course elevated to the bench, state and federal. Jury fixing became an art, usually with the rolled-up money stuffed into a cigarette which was handed to a juror in the men’s room by a cooperative judge’s bailiff.” It was an expensive system to operate, but the money was pouring in from Capone’s interests in booze, vice, gambling, and labor racketeering; Kutner claims that at one point Capone had a gross income of as much as $10 million a week.

  Nightclubs were the center of Capone’s business and, also, his source of relaxation. Kutner recalled that he went along with Capone time after time to hear Isham Jones at the College Inn, “a big hangout for the boys.” And he remembered when Bing Crosby, then an unknown from Spokane, Washington, was in town with Paul Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys, and showed up at the Three Deuces (a Capone cabaret). “He came into the Three Deuces with Bix Beiderbecke, who said that some dude had invited them to play in Cicero. They had been told they would be picked up at the Deuces. . . . Crosby sat there biting his nails and drinking Coke. Chicago made him nervous, he said. . . . Finally one of Al’s limousines called for them. I went out with them and introduced myself to the driver: ‘You know me, I play piano for Mr. Brown [Capone’s pseudonym].’ Capone had set up the Greyhound Club for them to play in, with his boys patrolling the streets armed to the teeth like a small army. Bing stepped out of the door of the limousine, looked around at all the mugs toting submachine guns in the open, and asked me, ‘Is this a jazz joint or World War II?’ He had never before seen men carrying arms like this in the heart of an American city.” Capone would hand out cash freely to the bands—often a thousand to a band leader, and at least a hundred to each musician. And he was a great fan of some entertainers, like George Jessel (Capone grabbed him and kissed him on both cheeks after he saw him in The Jazz Singer) and Joe E. Lewis, who was a kind of forerunner of Lenny Bruce.

  Still, business was business. Lewis was working for Capone at a nightspot, Green Mill Gardens, and had promised Capone that he would work for him at the Vanity Café as well. The Vanity Café was run for Capone by a man named Mike Fritzel, who had arrived in Chicago on a cattle train in 1898, gotten a job as a bartender, and, eventually, operated a string of cafés. “Now, if someone couldn’t do a job for Al, you were supposed to tell him in advance,” Kutner said. “Because once a promise had been made, Al expected one to keep it, very definitely. When Joe E. Lewis reported that he had been offered a better job and wouldn’t be available for the Vanity Café, Al was furious. . . . He told Jack McGurn, ‘Take care of it.’ That was all the instruction Jack ever needed. . . . So Lewis was cut up, and his tongue was hanging out of his open jaw. . . . Actually it was not intended to kill Joe, but just to let him know that next time he was to keep his word. Do you suppose that if Jack McGurn had wanted to kill someone he wouldn’t have known how? But this was just a warning. The scar on Lewis’s face was a big Z, like Zorro’s, a slash from the eye down to the mouth and coming across the jaw.” Lewis never identified his assailant—and continued to be employed by Capone and his successors for the rest of his life.

  When Stein many years later would reminisce about this period, he repeatedly asserted that he “had the guts of a fool”—because he had rebuffed the gangsters when they had wanted a piece of his company; and when, in the early thirties, he was informed he was a kidnapping target of theirs, he had not tried to appease them or even deigned to hire bodyguards, but had merely taken out a life insurance policy and gone about his business. His compatriot Petrillo, too, would make it a point to boast of his stubborn independence back in those fearsome days. “About 1924 or ’25, a guy comes to see me . . . says he’s a cousin of Al’s and I should get him a job,” Petrillo recounted when he was interviewed by Murray Schumach. “I listened to him play and he wasn’t so bad, and I thought there was no use getting into a fight with the Capone gang so I got him a job. Pretty soon another guy turns up, then another. . . . I got to thinking that this Capone is going to have ten thousand cousins and my men need those jobs. They would take over . . . so I had to throw them out . . . to protect the union.”

  The story of that era, however—and of the parts that Petrillo and Stein played vis-à-vis the gangsters—appears more complicated. A close friend of Petrillo’s for nearly fifty years who delivered the eulogy at his funeral, U.S. District Court Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz first met Petrillo in the late twenties, when Marovitz was a young lawyer in the state attorney’s office in Chicago. “Petrillo was a tough guy, but I was lucky—he took a liking to me,” Judge Marovitz said. “He made me an honorary member of his union.” They discovered
that they had grown up in the same neighborhood, a West Side ghetto ward that had gone from Irish to Jewish to Italian, and was so riddled with gang violence that it was known as the Bloody Twentieth. They were the children of immigrants; Petrillo’s father was a sewer digger, Marovitz’s a tailor, and his mother ran a small candy store on Maxwell Street; both families had barely subsisted. Petrillo had played the trumpet in a band, sold newspapers, operated elevators, and helped run a saloon before spotting opportunity in the unions when he was twenty-two. Marovitz’s world was limited, too, but he was a bright, ambitious youth, and he caught the eye of well-placed people. A speech he gave at a boys club led to an $8-a-week job in the law library at Mayer, Meyer, Austrian & Platt; senior partner Al Austrian then offered to pay his tuition at night law school (the only prerequisite at that time was a high school diploma), and, upon his graduation, got him a job in the state attorney’s office; and Jacob Arvey—an alderman during the Capone era who was a protégé of ex-convict and political boss Moe Rosenberg, and who would in turn become the boss of Chicago, and then the entire state—tapped Marovitz for his ward organization and, over the years, would support him for all his posts: state senator, superior court judge, and, ultimately, federal district court judge.

  Judge Marovitz was a local personage in Chicago, someone whose nearly century-long history was intertwined with that of the city, and of the politicians and businessmen and gangsters who controlled it for so long. He was on good terms with most of them. More, he was supported by them, or he would not have been able to rise politically as he did. Arvey, whom Judge Marovitz called his “godfather,” had among his closest associates men who were connected to the Syndicate, or Outfit, as it was long known in Chicago. One long-standing member of that organization, a contemporary of Judge Marovitz’s who would not allow his name to be used, said that Marovitz was “a great person”—and while he would not answer questions himself for fear of being labeled a “stool pigeon,” he insisted that Marovitz “knows everything.” Another longtime associate of former Mafia head Sam Giancana declared that Marovitz was more powerful than the Outfit because he had legitimacy, and could serve as a bridge between his world and theirs. Using an expression that refers to the Hanukkah candle with which one lights all the others, this person said, “Marovitz was the shamas.”