Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  First arrest, 1921: narcotics peddling.

  In 1925, Filippo Sacco becomes Johnny Roselli. Works with Al Capone on liquor shipments. Reported expert at extortion, gambling, labor racketeering, Roselli becomes a West Coast cohort of Willy Bioff and George Brown of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Machine Operators. Early in World War II, Roselli became close friends with Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Lent money by Cohn at no interest to buy into Tijuana Race Track, Roselli, in gratitude, purchased matched twin star rubies set in matching rings for Cohn and himself. Both men still reputed to wear such rings.

  When Sammy Davis, Jr., was conducting a “torrid” love affair with Kim Novak, Roselli, as a favor to Cohn, is reputed to have convinced the Negro singer to forgo any further favors. Novak was Cohn’s number-one blonde star at Columbia during this period. It is reported that Sammy Davis, Jr., blind in one eye, was told by Roselli: “Cool off on the blonde, or you lose the other eye.” Davis complied.

  In 1943, Roselli served 3 years, 8 months of ten year prison term for extorting reported two millions plus from the film industry. On release, became the Top Coordinator for Las Vegas and Southern California rackets. His appointment was overseen by Sam Giancana, reputedly head of Mafia’s Grand Council.

  Roselli is now known as Don Giovanni of the Mafia. Ambassadorial in appearance. Is called the Silver Fox. Reputed to be a loner. Has family but never visits them. Has, however, put his younger sisters through college.

  Physical description: Slim. Medium height. Well-chiselled features. Silver-gray hair. Reported credo: “Never threaten me. I have nothing to lose.”

  I sent this printout to my father by SPECIAL SHUNT/HALIFAX, and added a note that I had looked up RALSTON in VILLAINS and found nothing, but happened to come across ROSELLI AKA RALSTON, a fortuitous accident, I added, since there were thousands of entries under R.

  Next day a call came in from Cal on open phone. “Get thee to a nunnery at 4:00 P.M.,” was all he said, and it meant, “Call my private line from an outside phone at 1:00 P.M.” When I reached him during my lunch break, he was as garrulous as if he’d just had three cups of coffee. “Thank you,” he said. “I went right over to K Building to bring Bissell up to date on the meeting between Maheu and Roselli. Thank you. I didn’t feel like telling Bissell that Maheu was meeting someone whose name I could not offer. Well, Rick, right there in Bissell’s office was Allen Dulles, and, of course, he couldn’t resist looking at what I’d brought over on Johnny R. I could see that Allen was reading the printout upside down. For that matter, Bissell kept the paper well out on his desk so as not to obstruct Allen’s view.” My father began to chuckle. “Have you practiced reading upside down lately?”

  “Not daily,” I said.

  My father laughed louder. “Son, in OSS days we used to believe that was the only ability you needed other than a little moxie.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Allen has made it clear he’s to be kept one watertight compartment away from all of this, but, just the same, he couldn’t resist comment. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘these are fishy waters, aren’t they, Cal?’ ‘Damned fishy waters, sir,’ I said. He smiled. ‘Cal, I’m just going to make one remark: Use your judgment. Use your judgment, Cal, because it’s always kept you out of the very worst trouble, hasn’t it?’ ‘No, sir,’ I said, and we both laughed, because we both knew that if anything goes wrong, the tar is on my fingers. All the same, this one appeals to me. It’s lopsided, but it’s fancy, isn’t it?” he said, and added, “I wonder if you can find out where the lunch took place. Maheu was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, so it could have been the Polo Lounge.”

  “I’ll do some research,” I told him.

  SERIAL: J/38,961,601

  ROUTING: LINE/QUARTERS EYE—OPEN

  TO: HALIFAX

  FROM: ROBERT CHARLES

  10:46 A.M. SEPT. 6, 1960

  SUBJECT: RESTAURANTS

  I presume to take up Company time and encoders sufficiently to bring you up to date on Los Angeles restaurants you might like. I’d pick the Brown Derby. I hear via the Yale grapevine—an old classmate, of all things, is working for Harry Cohn—that that’s where the cognoscenti go.

  ROBERT CHARLES

  On the next morning, another letter bound in strapping tape was in the pouch for me:

  Sept. 7, 1960

  Son:

  Your restaurant guide is most useful. It helps to bring a transcript to life.

  Now, I confess that I did not fill you in on all the details of Maheu’s first meeting with Roselli. Such reserve is pro forma since you had no real need to know, but, considering your good work lately, it makes me happier to bring you up to date. Roselli has a friend named Sam Gold whom he needs to take into the project. So he claims. Gold has deep contacts in our target country. Next question is whether Sam Gold happens to be Meyer Lansky or Sam Giancana. I’ve had a talk with the case officer I’ve assigned to work on this in Washington and New York, an ex-FBI worthy I believe you know. Says he had you in training, one dour but most capable gent named Raymond Burns, Bullseye Burns. According to Ray, these Mafia boys have the predictable habit of holding on to their first names while using a false last name with the same initial, viz—Johnny Ralston for Johnny Roselli. Sam Gold puts us on track for Sam Giancana. Maheu, however, warns me not to assume Lansky is out of the game—Sam Gold could also be the redoubtable Meyer. Whoever he is, Gold is ready to come in. I assume that the mobster who recaptures the gambling casinos will then have a clear and dominating position in the Syndicate.

  For the interim, a meeting has been set up at the Plaza Hotel in New York on September 14 involving Maheu, Roselli, and Bullseye Burns. Since Roselli insists on meeting a “top-drawer associate,” it is up to Bullseye to rise to the occasion.

  Keep the Hubbard fortunes prospering, son. Yours, and love,

  Dad

  On the next day, another message came from Cal:

  Sept. 8, 1960

  Son:

  I enclose a copy of Maheu’s report on the Plaza meeting at Trader Vic’s:

  Dear Mr. Halifax,

  The restaurant din made for low-level accuracy in our recordings. Neither Mr. Burns’ take, nor mine, has proven satisfactory. I am, thankfully, a longtime hand at keeping mental notes when there are obstacles to viable recording. So I offer my recollections of the proceedings, and place reliability at 90 percent for substantive matters, and 60 percent, at least, on precise word-to-word reconstruction. On the other hand, given the noise, our Bureau friends could not possibly have tapped in.

  Ralston sized up Case Officer Burns quickly, and was rude. Ralston said: “Take no offense personally, fellow, but I can see you are on the kiss-ass level. That is inadequate for this operation. Pass the word to your boss: Do not try to fuck me over.”

  I must say that the language came as a shock since Ralston, in appearance, is as silky and well gotten up as George Raft.

  Burns had to spend time assuring Ralston that the next meeting would be on a “higher level” and was a good soldier about it, but from old days in the Bureau together, I know his temper. Raymond Burns has a virulent hatred of hoodlums high and low. I do not wish to denigrate old “Bullseye” since I am aware of his bulldog tenacity and other sterling virtues, but for liaison with Ralston, we cannot anticipate any hope of future compatibility.

  Burns, however, had the massive discipline to be silent, and I kept pursuing the main subject. In response to my inquiry, Ralston finally stated that our next meeting would take place in Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau, September 25.

  We proceeded to modes and methods. Ralston said, “You don’t want a fire-hose for the job. This can’t be St. Valentine’s Day.”

  My understanding from our initial meeting is that you want the signature of the operation to suggest the Mafia. Five hoods with machine guns would offer a clear message to the world that gangland did the job.

  Those fellows, however, want none of
that. I think we have to forgo the most useful option. The question may then arise whether we still want to work with these particular elements. While I, of course, make no recommendation, Ralston also said, “We have all the contacts needed to get to El Supremo.”

  “What method do you propose?” I answered.

  “Pills,” said Ralston. “Powder it into his chow. He’ll be sick for three days before he gets sick enough to call for a priest.” We ended by agreeing the pills would be passed on to Ralston on September 25, at which time it might be advisable for you to meet him.

  Sincerely,

  R.M.

  A note from Cal followed this memo:

  I’m naturally concerned. We’ll have to make haste to be ready by the 25th. The order, via suitable intermediaries, has been placed with the Office of Medical Services, who will probably have to use some of the more exotic labs in TSS. There is no possibility that Hugh won’t sniff out some of this. The question is: How much?

  HALIFAX

  22

  BY THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER, I HAD SUBLET AN APARTMENT, AND MOdene and I entered our first crisis.

  It began with a change in her schedule. Due to a temporary shortage of stewardesses in the Southwest, her base, she informed me, was to be shifted to Dallas for a few days, and she would have to absent herself from Miami for four nights in a row.

  If I sensed she was lying, I kept such bad news away from myself. She would call me at my new lodgings every evening with detailed accounts of the day’s trip: Once she telephoned from New York; on the following night from Dallas; once she went to Memphis and back to Dallas on the same day. She underwrote these trips with tales of passengers who had been particularly good or horrendous.

  By the fourth day, I could believe her no longer, and checked her story. Given the number of exiles who flew on Company business to New York, Washington, New Orleans, Mexico City, and points south, not to speak of the alert that was always on in Miami for Castro agents coming into southern Florida, we had a number of Agency contacts at the airport. It took our pool secretary no more than fifteen minutes and two phone calls to bring me the information that Eastern Airlines stewardess M. Murphy had been on four-day leave and would be returning to town this evening, September 14.

  Jealousy lives for the facts. Meeting Modene in downtown Miami, I felt purposeful. It was late, and we went at once to my new apartment in Coconut Grove on the second floor of a small made-over Spanish Colonial house, and I made love to her before we had done any talking, a military matter; if our bridges were blown, it was crucial to get new pontoons across. So I knew what it was to be desperate with love. I fucked in hate. There, in my own modern, furnished apartment which I could desperately not afford, I was desperately in love with half of me, and that half could find but half of Modene. Speak of being drawn and quartered by love, I remember looking with hatred at her long fingernails. They had ruined pieces and parts of many evenings for us, those fingernails lacquered, even elegant on the upside, patched and splinted beneath. The fingernails belonged to her vision of an exotic (if still unrealized) dragon lady who shared very little of her existence with that other girl who lost her temper when she could not beat me at tennis, poor Alpha-girl with her handicap. Alphie had to wear gloves to protect her nails, and what with adhesive tape and putty fillets on the fingertips for underpinning, paid for it at a rate of about two lost games a set, and still ripped her nails. She wept over that, more, I suspected, than she would ever cry for me, furious tears at the wasted hours and contradictory purposes of those mandarin nails, but how well she could use them at night by the light of a candle in a restaurant, how perfect was the poise of her cigarette in its holder, yes, her spiritual roots, I decided, were as far from one another as the orchid and the weed.

  On this night when she came home, I did not speak of what I knew. If I was not incapable of killing her, all the same, I never could. Was that what it meant to be desperately in love? She made no effort to explain why after four days and nights of the hardest dislocations of her former flight schedule, she had no time off, but, to the contrary, would be out again tomorrow on a Miami-to-Washington-and-back-to-Miami in the same day, only to be booked like that for the next two days as well (an unheard of gymkhana—seven working days in a row!), no, she must have known I was bright enough to calculate that she had been on some species of vacation, yet I learned no more until a week later when a BLUEBEARD–AURAL transcript was delivered to me at Zenith by GHOUL’s resident baboon. Modene had spent the four days in Chicago with Sam Giancana. Polishing the transcript, I could see that Willie’s curiosity was at least equal to mine. Had Modene slept with Giancana?

  No, Modene insisted, she had not gone to bed with Sam. She had come to like him. “Frankly, Willie, he is all too human.”

  “Do you feel sorry for him?”

  “No. He is too strong for that. But there is sorrow in his life.”

  “Such as?”

  “Stop cross-examining me.”

  Their exchanges became repetitive. I compressed their conversation to manageable length and offered Harlot a portrait of Giancana.

  WILLIE: Did he take you to his home?

  MODENE: Absolutely.

  WILLIE: Is it a palatial mansion?

  MODENE: No, but it’s elegant on the outside and very well built. Like a fort. Lots of careful stonework. And it’s way out in Oak Park.

  WILLIE: North of Chicago?

  MODENE: Yes. Oak Park. I impressed Sam when I said to him, “This is the small town where Ernest Hemingway grew up.” “Who is this guy Hemingway,” asked Sam, “one of your boyfriends?” and of course I said, “Wouldn’t you like to know.” And Sam said, “You think I’m an ignoramus, don’t you? Well, we got newspapers out here. I see this man’s name, Hemingway; Hemingway and me, we’re the two most famous people in Oak Park,” and he started to laugh. He always laughs the loudest at his own jokes. I guess he’s been living alone with himself for a long time.

  WILLIE: The house. What’s the story on the house?

  MODENE: Will you wait? Inside, it’s nothing fabulous. Small rooms, heavy Italian furniture. Down in the basement there’s one room without windows that is his office. It has a long table for meetings, I guess. But he also keeps a breakfront cabinet down there with some amazing glass pieces. He is a collector. You see another side of him altogether when he reaches in and takes out a piece. His finger movements are so delicate. Willie, if I were ever going to have sex with Sam, this is exactly what would initiate such impulses.

  WILLIE: So one thing did lead to another?

  MODENE: Stop.

  WILLIE: Why won’t you tell me?

  MODENE: Nothing to tell.

  WILLIE: What did you do at night?

  MODENE: He loves piano bars. The smokier, the better. He calls for a number and then he sings along with the pianist. Only, Sam keeps changing the words. You know: “Why won’t you take all of me? Me and you and all of me. Just put out the lights and go to sleep.” The poor pianist. Sam has a voice like a broken foghorn. I couldn’t believe it—I was having fun.

  WILLIE: Did he get serious?

  MODENE: Yes. He told me about his mother’s death. I found that heartbreaking. She saved his life, you know. When he was about five and growing up in the Italian slums of Chicago, she heard a car come whipping around the corner, and there was Sam playing in the gutter. His mother leaped out to get her child back on the sidewalk and so she got hit by the car. She died. I felt so sorry for Sam. Then he told me about his wife. She was very delicate. She was born with a weak heart, and her family, although an immigrant Italian family, must have been a cut or two above his because all her folks looked down on him. And then, to top it off, he had been in jail for car theft. When he came out, he and his wife were so poor that they lived in a cold-water flat and sat around the stove and held their two little girls and toasted orange peels for candy. And one of the little girls had a weak heart too. It was all kind of touching. You see, before she knew Sam, his wi
fe had a fiancé but he died early. So, she was always mourning the dead fiancé. It took a long time for Sam to feel like the true husband.

  WILLIE: That’s so clever of him.

  MODENE: Why?

  WILLIE: He’s letting you know that he can put up with the idea of Jack Kennedy.

  MODENE: He keeps calling me Miss Classy.

  WILLIE: I wonder if he’s afraid to go near you. Because of Frank Sinatra. What if he doesn’t stack up by comparison?

  MODENE: Willie, you are so inaccurate. In the first place, Sam knows I would never tell Frank. And in the second, Sam would be a different kind of lover. Much more emotional.

  WILLIE: I am sorry, but Sam sounds lugubrious to me.

  MODENE: Well, he’s not. He can make you laugh till you don’t stop. He told me a story about Bobby Kennedy, when Bobby was getting ready a couple of years ago to have Sam called up before the McClellan Committee. Do you remember the McClellan Committee?

  WILLIE: Yes. They investigated crime.

  MODENE: Well, Sam made a point of getting himself decked out like the cheapest kind of gangster, you know, suit and shirt all black, with a silver tie, and the moment he came into Kennedy’s office, he knelt and fingered the wall-to-wall carpet and said, “This would be great for a crap game.” Just then a lawyer came into the room and Sam grabbed him, patted his back and thighs and yelled out, “Don’t get near Mr. Kennedy. If Bobby gets killed, they’ll all blame me.”

  WILLIE: I guess it is kind of funny.

  MODENE: Absolutely. I needed a break in the mood.

  WILLIE: Pardon me for asking, but what’s wrong with Tom?

  MODENE: Nothing. I don’t want to talk about Tom.

  WILLIE: Will you tell him you saw Sam?

  MODENE: Certainly not.

  WILLIE: Are you sure you won’t? You said the more jealous Tom became, the better he was as a lover.