The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  He had noticed that most upper-crust Americans voted Republican, and so Mayer became an enthusiastic supporter of Republican causes, both in California and nationally. Convinced that after Roosevelt’s long presidency, Americans would put a Republican in the White House, Mayer contributed large sums to promote the candidacy of Thomas E. Dewey. Like Sam Bronfman, who secretly dreamed of being knighted, Mayer had a secret ambition—to be posted as American ambassador to some important foreign country. He would then be entitled to the designation “Honorable.” There is evidence that Dewey had discussed such an appointment with him but, alas, Dewey never made it to the White House.

  Mayer had also heard that the breeding of thoroughbred racehorses was an occupation of true aristocrats—the Sport of Kings. And the show-biz aspect of the racing world also appealed to him. He had known nothing at all about horses until a writer-producer friend named Leon Gordon invited him to a race in which Gordon happened to have a horse running. Gordon’s horse won, and down went Gordon into the winner’s circle to great applause and cheers, to be awarded encomiums and presented with wreaths of flowers. That, Mr. Mayer decided, was where he himself would like to be—at the center of the stage and the cynosure of all eyes.

  He immediately sent out for all the books that could be found on the care, feeding, and breeding of racehorses. There turned out to be quite a number. Of course, he had no time to read all these lengthy volumes, so he ordered his story department to reduce each book to a one- or two-page synopsis, just as he did with novels that he was thinking of buying for the screen. With no more information than this, Mayer proceeded to buy a thoroughbred named Busher. Busher had the distinction of becoming the first western horse to be entered in the Kentucky Derby. Unfortunately, Busher did not win. Mayer then decided to concentrate on breeding, and purchased Beau Père, a famous Australian stud.

  Breeding racehorses, he liked to say, was a gamble very similar to that of show business. You could breed a prize stallion to a prize mare, but you still had no guarantee that the result would be a winner. It could just as easily turn out to be a dud. It was like putting William Powell in a picture with Myrna Loy, pairing Tracy with Hepburn, or Ginger Rogers with Fred Astaire. If the chemistry of the combination was right, you had a hit—and from then on a string of hits, with luck. It was no wonder Mayer referred to his MGM contract players as his “stable.”

  Sam Goldwyn was also touchy on the subject of his own lack of formal elegance and formal education. When each new Goldwynism made the rounds, instead of laughing it off, he vociferously denied he had said any such thing, which only added fuel to the story and made more people chuckle over it. He was, at best, an indifferent speller, but his secretarial staff had learned that it was unwise ever to correct the boss, and so, in his handwritten memos that went out, “research” became “researsh,” “immediately” became “immediantly,” and so on. He often had difficulty reading the scripts that his writers placed on his desk, and once, in a screenplay about pharaohs in ancient Egypt, Goldwyn protested that a slave would not respond to his master with “Yessiree!” Politely, the writer explained that the line of dialogue read, “Yes, sire.” He just as often mispronounced the names of his actors, but did not like to be corrected on that score, either. He always called Loretta Young “Lorella,” and Joel MacRae was “Joe MacRail.” Once, in a meeting, MacRae said quietly, “It’s Joel MacRae, Mr. Goldwyn.” Goldwyn cried, “Look! He’s telling me how to pronounce his name, and I’ve got him under contract!”

  He was always convinced that his rival L. B. Mayer was up to dirty tricks. When, in the 1940s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer began using the slogan “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven,” it was too much. “Frances!” Goldwyn bellowed at his wife, “Find out how many stars there are in heaven. L.B. says he’s got more.” When Frances replied that the answer was probably billions, if not trillions, Goldwyn telephoned his lawyer to see if MGM could be sued for using false and misleading advertising. When his lawyer informed him that MGM was just using “hyperbole,” and that nothing much could be done to stop it, Goldwyn shot back, “That’s all Mayer is—a goddamned hyper bully!” He fumed over this for weeks.

  In Hollywood, Louella Parsons was the closest thing to a society columnist, and though her own command of the King’s English was limited, she wielded great power through her nationally syndicated column.* Sam Goldwyn feuded with Miss Parsons on and off for years, alternately flinging abuse at her and showering her with praise. When she wrote disparaging things about him, his movies, or his stars, he would dash off an angry letter to her. And yet, when she once was taken to a hospital for minor surgery, he filled her room with flowers. And when she appeared on a Goldwyn set to view the filming of an important sequence, Goldwyn hovered over her, murmuring, “How long have you and I known each other, Louella?… How long have you and I been friends?”

  When Sam Goldwyn’s film The Best Years of Our Lives was released in 1946, it won more Academy Awards than any previous film in motion picture history. As for the fifty-four- (or fifty-seven-) year-old producer, this was treated as the crowning achievement of his career, and it was certainly a source of great pride for him. The film bestowed upon him, personally, large helpings of class. Also, though L. B. Mayer might claim more stars than there were in heaven, Goldwyn’s picture had collected more Oscars than any other, ever. Though Goldwyn would always claim that his personal favorite of all his films was Wuthering Heights—a classy English classic written by an English gentlewoman—there was no doubt that all the critical and audience praise for The Best Years bolstered his ego enormously.

  Coming as it did at the war’s end, and telling the story of the homecoming of a soldier mutilated by the war, The Best Years found itself described, by certain critics, as an antiwar film—a picture with that element Sam Goldwyn claimed to disdain the most, a message. Goldwyn didn’t see it that way at all. To him, it was a tribute to the selflessness and bravery of America’s fighting men, and a testament to the values that made America great: the fabric of the American family, its tragedies and its triumphs, particularly in small communities across the country—its strengths, its resilience, and most of all, its durability—“a kind of love song to this country of ours,” he once said, “in war or out of it, it doesn’t matter. The war theme is strictly coincidental.” (He probably meant “incidental.”)

  While basking euphorically in the critical praise for—and the box-office receipts of—The Best Years, Goldwyn received a letter with a postmark he had not thought about in years: Gloversville, New York. The letter was from Gloversville’s mayor. The mayor had heard that the great motion picture producer of the great new patriotic film classic was going to be on the East Coast. Would Mr. Goldwyn possibly be able to come up to Gloversville to attend a banquet that the town wanted to give in his honor? Gloversville wanted to name Sam Goldwyn its favorite son.

  Its favorite son! It was astonishing. Sam Goldwyn had certainly not forgotten Gloversville, but it seemed inconceivable that Gloversville remembered him. And now none other than the mayor of the little upstate city had remembered him, and wished to make the poor immigrant youth from Poland an honorary native. He was overwhelmed.

  Sam and Frances Goldwyn had by then dined at the Roosevelt White House a number of times. In their own house at 1200 Laurel Lane they had entertained for the likes of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Queen Marie of Rumania. One would have assumed that Goldwyn could have taken an invitation to visit Gloversville (pop. 19,677) in his stride. Not at all. He reacted to the mayor’s letter as though he had been placed on the king of England’s Birthday Honours List. It was almost too much for him. He struggled over the wording of his response to the mayor’s invitation for several days before he was satisfied that he had it right, then humbly wrote to the mayor, accepting the high honor.

  The next few weeks were spent in furious preparation for the trip, and the event. For days beforehand, he fretted over what Frances ought to wear—should it be a dress or a suit? Rummagi
ng through her closets, he finally settled on a dark blue suit. When that was decided—which coat? Since it was fall, and it could be chilly in the Adirondack foothills, Frances suggested her mink. “Too showy,” said Sam, though the mink had not been new for some time. Frances then proposed a somewhat older nutria. In the end, her husband decreed that it be the mink after all—but without any jewelry. Though that meant merely removing her wristwatch, she did as she was told. Then Sam could not decide which suit, shirt, and necktie he himself should wear.

  The Goldwyns had arranged to travel from New York City to Saratoga Springs by Pullman, and from there to Gloversville in a hired chauffeur-driven car. On the train, Sam was tense and fidgety, and said hardly a word. When Frances suggested a snack in the dining car, he could not eat. By the time they reached Saratoga, he was so pale that Frances worried that he might be ill.

  In the car, he tied and retied his necktie a number of times, and fussed with the points of his handkerchief in his breast pocket. Several times he had to ask the driver to pull off to the side of the road so that he could empty his nervous bladder. As the Goldwyn limousine approached the outskirts of the little factory town, Sam Goldwyn suddenly began to scream, “Turn back! Turn back! I can’t go on!” Gently, his wife reminded him that it was too late to turn back now. The whole town would be waiting for him.

  For years, Sam Goldwyn had regaled his wife with tales of Gloversville—of his boss, Mr. Aronson, of the rooming house where he had lived, and particularly of the splendors of Gloversville’s proudest hotel, the Kingsborough. Sam had never stayed at the Kingsborough, nor had he ever eaten a meal there—that would have cost a whole dollar—but he had got to know its magnificent lobby intimately, and had described it to Frances in lavish detail: The floors were of marble, the walls of carved mahogany. There were potted palms, polished brass spittoons, enormous leather armchairs and sofas, and tall plate-glass windows through which, standing outside on a Saturday night, the young Sam Goldwyn had watched the elite of Gloversville disporting themselves in their evening finery. The dinner in Sam’s honor would of course be held at the Kingsborough.

  Though, when they arrived, Frances Goldwyn did not find the Kingsborough Hotel to be quite the palatial establishment of her husband’s memory, it was very crowded. There were little ceremonies. Frances Goldwyn was presented with a box containing a pair of Gloversville gloves, which she quickly put on. Sam’s old boss, Mr. Aronson, was there, and Sam was presented to a Mr. Libglid, who asked if Sam remembered him. At first, Sam could not recall Mr. Libglid, but then they fell into each other’s arms. Mr. Libglid had been the benefactor in Hamburg who had taken up a collection for Sam in the ghetto in order to pay for his passage to England. Mr. Libglid had emigrated to America, and Gloversville, during the Hitler period. It was all very emotional.

  During dinner, Sam reminisced with his old friends and former fellow employees about the old days, how he had started as an errand boy, become a glove cutter, and eventually a salesman in the Hudson Valley territory. There was also some more serious talk about the current state of the glove business—of market and fashion trends, of the quality of skins, cutting, and so on. From the way Sam Goldwyn joined in on the business talk, Frances got the distinct impression that her husband could still manage to do rather well in the glove business, should necessity ever force him to return to it.

  Finally it was time for Sam to make his speech. He was introduced by the mayor and started up the aisle, carrying his hat. Halfway up the aisle, he dropped the hat, and had to stoop to pick it up. Then he stood for a moment, uncertain whether to walk back and place the hat on his chair or to continue up to the stage with it. He decided on the latter course, and carried the hat to the speaker’s platform, where he placed it, and where it looked somewhat awkward and conspicuous. He then tried to place the hat underneath the lectern, and it fell to the floor again. He left it there. Then he faced the audience, stood there for a moment, and began, “I’ve always been honest—”

  Then he burst into tears.

  The war had shot a large hole through the gambling business. Gambling, as Meyer Lansky saw it, was an outgrowth of the tourist industry, and tourism had understandably languished during the war years. The capital of Lansky’s gambling empire had been the gaily glittering resort capital of prewar Havana, where the Lansky group had controlling interest in a number of casinos, including the largest at the Hotel Nacional. There were also other casinos—both legal and illegal—in the Caribbean, in the Catskills and the Adirondacks, in New Jersey, in Kentucky, in California, and in gambling boats anchored off the coast of Florida. All these could, and would, be revived from the wartime doldrums. But there was another, more pressing, business problem.

  During the war years, while Lansky, Mickey Cohen, and their friends—now beginning to be known as the “syndicate”—had been devoting much energy and money to the cause of Israel’s independence, huge reserves of capital had been lying, untouched, in Swiss bank accounts, quietly accruing interest. In Lansky’s personal accounts reposed something in the neighborhood of thirty-six million dollars, most of it from Prohibition profits. All this was fine, though Lansky did not consider earning interest a very exciting way to make money. The problem was that the syndicate was cash poor. It had an excess of venture capital, but no new venture to invest it in. On the drawing boards, in the meantime, lay Benny Siegel’s idea for Las Vegas.

  It seemed a natural. Not only was gambling legal in Nevada, but so was prostitution. Lansky disapproved of that, but he conceded that prostitutes would provide Las Vegas with an added attraction. And he liked Benny Siegel’s concept of Las Vegas providing a luxury resort for the “little man.” Las Vegas would not turn away the big-time gambler, but it would appeal primarily to the middle- to lower-income American. To do this, it would not only be inexpensive, but it would at the same time project the kind of classiness that middle- to lower-income Americans associated with the way rich folk lived, which was the way they saw rich folk live in movies—chandeliers, mirrors, swimming pools, hovering servants, sunken bathtubs, gilt, velvet, plush, velour. A new luxury had appeared on the market since the war. It was called air-conditioning. Las Vegas would have that—and, indeed, it would need it.

  To Siegel’s original concept, Meyer Lansky added a few new wrinkles of his own. The average American’s idea of a gambling casino, he argued, again came from movies—the swank casinos of Evian and Monte Carlo, where men wore white ties and tails and monocles, and women sported tiaras and jeweled cigarette holders. A Las Vegas resort, he suggested, should not be so intimidating. There should be no dress code. Should a gambling patron wish, he or she should be able to enter the casino in swimming trunks or a nightie. In the midst of opulence would flourish a mood of libidinous abandon. Lansky also recommended that nowhere in the proposed resort should there be any clocks, since nothing was so distracting to the gambler as an awareness of the passage of time. To this end, the casino should be located at the heart of the hotel, without windows, where night would fall and dawn would come up with no one noticing the difference. This would also mean that no guest could pass from the reception desk to the elevators, from the swimming pool to the tennis court, from the bar to the dining room, without passing through the casino.

  No one knew more about gambling than Meyer Lansky. He had other suggestions. Among them, he proposed that slot machines be placed at the arrivals gates of the Las Vegas airport. These would be adjusted to yield a high payoff, so that the arriving visitor, dropping a dime into the machine, would usually be rewarded with a handful of shiny coins. Flushed with the possibilities of winning big, he would then head immediately for the casino, where, of course, the odds of winning would be much less favorable. All these details were worked out at a meeting of the syndicate in 1945, and Benny Siegel was placed in charge of the Las Vegas project, with a budget of a million dollars.

  Siegel and Lansky, meanwhile, had often watched the dancing and precision marching of the trained flamingos in the
infield of the Hialeah racetrack. Not only was the flamingo a beautiful and exotic bird, but, it was said, the Seminole Indians believed the flamingo was a symbol of good luck, and that to kill a flamingo was to invite misfortune. What better name for the ultimate gambling palace? It was settled that Siegel’s Las Vegas resort would be called the Flamingo.

  Benny Siegel was the obvious choice to head the Flamingo project. Las Vegas had been his brainchild from the beginning, and he had served Lansky and the syndicate well during his years in southern California. There was no reason not to trust him completely with a million dollars of the syndicate’s money. There was, on the other hand, something going on in Siegel’s private life in 1945 that Lansky and his partners were aware of but chose to overlook. Benny Siegel had always been a notorious womanizer, and had taken out, at one time or another, nearly every star in Hollywood. He also had a nice Jewish wife, the former Esther Krakower, whom everybody liked, and two lovely daughters. Since Esther Siegel must have been aware of her husband’s well-publicized philanderings, and since she seemed to accept them, and since after each fling Benny always came home to Esther, no one saw fit to criticize Benny’s behavior.

  Recently, however, Benny had embarked upon an affair that seemed far more serious than anything he had been involved in before. He was then forty, and may have been undergoing some sort of midlife crisis, but at any rate he fell head over heels in love. The lady’s name was Virginia Hill, and she was not even a movie star. She was an empty-headed blonde who had been a sometime model, sometime showgirl, and all-time plaything who liked gangsters. Most of the members of the mob had bedded down with Virginia at one time or another, and no one had any use for her, nor could anyone understand how Benny Siegel could have become so smitten by her. Still, an Old World code, observed by the Russians as well as the Italians in the organization, decreed that a man’s sex and domestic lives were his own business, and no one would have dreamed of criticizing Benny’s choice of girl friends. Among other things, there was Benny’s hot temper to contend with—he had killed people in arguments over matters much more trifling than this. Still, behind his back, Benny’s sidekick Mickey Cohen referred to Virginia as “that tart.”