Nate: No, sir.
And I heard in his voice that ping.
There were then questions about the many different kinds of businesses Nate had owned, from which I slowly understood Kefauver believed Nate had funneled all the money garnered from that illegal gambling, hence all the surveillance and auditing and examination, as Kefauver noted, of Nate’s tax returns for the past two decades or more.
Kefauver: Do you own or have you ever owned the Mason Brothers Plumbing in Pittsburgh, the Southland Meat Supply in Chicago, the Mills Valley Ironworks in Pennsylvania, the Central Hardware and Maintenance in Michigan, the Kildare Catering Company in Ohio, the Tent Taxi Service in Kentucky, the Prince Paper Supply in Miami?
Nate: No.
Kefauver: So you had no investments in any of these enterprises?
Nate: I was an investor, yes, but I did not own them and had no control of their operations.
Kefauver: May I remind you that you are under oath.
Nate: I do recall that.
There were questions to Nate about investments in larger enterprises like railroads and oil companies and various banks and realty firms, and I understood that Nate was much, much wealthier than I knew, with businesses all over the country, that his interests stretched far, far beyond the perimeters of Las Vegas Boulevard, the perimeters of which might be the perimeters of my provincial world, but not his. Not at all.
Then Nate was asked about his relationships with Mickey Cohen, Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Gus Greenbaum, Moe Sedway, and Tony Cornero, all of whom I knew and I knew Nate knew, even though he said he had never met most of them, ping ping ping, and finally Nate was asked to account for how he came into his controlling interest in the Desert Inn.
Kefauver: How much money did you put in to start with?
Nate: One hundred thousand dollars.
Kefauver: What percentage of the company did you receive for your investment?
Nate: Thirty percent.
Kefauver: (incredulously) For a hundred-thousand-dollar investment?
Nate: Yes, sir.
Kefauver: Do you draw a salary from the Desert Inn?
Nate: I don’t as yet, no.
Slowly, patiently, Kefauver determined that not only did Nate draw no salary, he was also paid no dividends. Implication: he profited somehow, illegally, from the gambling revenue. From the skim. Legitimate income, legitimate businessman? Not to Kefauver and his fellows.
My father had put down his fork, too, to better listen. “There’s a lot of money flowing into the counting rooms, now, E, a lot of drug money. More than when Benny was alive.”
Drugs. A new medium for these old bootleggers and one even more profitable than liquor had ever been. And apparently, over the last eight years, the trafficking had gotten somewhat more sophisticated than Benny’s carting those bags of baby powder over the border in his roadster.
My father, pushing his pie plate away, told me how Mr. Lansky had seemingly endless suitcases of drug money coming in via bagmen, bearing the profits from his networks in Mexico and Turkey and Marseilles, profits swept into the credit cages and from there out into the casinos and through the counting rooms, where the managers kept watch over all the bills and coins and where they kept two sets of books, a clean book that tracked dollars coming in and going out—some for the casino, some for the government, those dollars going back out into the world again, clean—and then the other book, the real book, that recorded everything, including the secret dollars going in and out via bagmen to Lansky, to be apportioned to everybody who really mattered to these men all across the country—the routine division of this money performed out of sight in the counting room three times a day at the end of every shift, cameras turned off.
I watched Nate step delicately around all these questions, unruffled, perfectly comfortable, polite, until he was asked about his involvement in the murder of a Detroit city councilman in the early thirties, before I was born, that councilman about to reveal, in Kefauver’s words, “some crooked deals” in which Nate was involved, this councilman killed by a man Nate shared the company of just a few hours before the murder, an involvement in which Nate vociferously denied.
And then, finally, Kefauver asked about a club Nate had owned in Detroit. Ten men had robbed the backroom of that club, and all ten men were killed, one by one, over the next year. And Nate said he didn’t know anything about that. Sir.
Half a dozen other men were questioned next, refusing to answer questions directly, laughing at their own jokes, declining to acknowledge misdeeds or crimes or to be shamed by these men in suits, the establishment’s inquisitors they faced across the table. They would not bow and scrape, these men who had, by hook or by crook, chased a caper, a scheme, an opportunity. I could only imagine my grandfather’s face if he had been watching these hearings with us. I wondered what my own looked like. I could see my father’s.
When the waitress came by to ask if we wanted more coffee, my father said no, and he asked her to turn off the television set.
I understood now why Nate hadn’t wanted me to watch him on television. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t want me to see who he was as that he didn’t want me to see the disdain with which Kefauver and the rest regarded him and his kind, and by extension, my father and me. I might not be fully literate, I might read with the sounding-out stumble of a first-grade child, but I could understand exactly what was happening that day. These men, the Cohens and Smihoffs and Steins, were being hung on a cross-continental clothesline where they flapped and preened and joked and bragged about themselves before this senator and this committee and the press. They were defiant. Unrepentant. Disingenuous. They might be enjoying the big show they were putting on, but I understood the contempt with which the Senator and the larger country saw us Jews—as foreign and venal and corrupt. And these men were.
32
Los Angeles
1939
When my father went to work now, that summer of 1939 after the big brawl at the Deutsches Haus, he was all purpose and energy. But stuck home with my bed-besotted mother, I was as aimless and out of sorts as she. I would sit outside on the street curb in the late afternoons, waiting for my father to come home and break this monotony, wearing one of my mother’s nightgowns and a thick cuff of her bracelets, too miserable even to play with my limp-haired doll in the summer Los Angeles heat, which was so flat and so merciless it drove even the insects into the ground.
I could clearly see the Hollywoodland sign when I looked northwest to Mount Lee. It had never seemed so far away. The Santa Ana winds blew in from the desert, making the city oven-warm and dry and blinding it with sunshine, igniting fires, making the city a place where nobody was ever sick, where a body just wore out, eventually, from all that heat and light, like a piece of paper. I thought of my parents as pieces of paper, too, flapping in that hot wind. Which way would they blow—would my mother fly back up to the roof, my father be swept into the alley?
So I was there to see my father pull up in our green Cadillac, hat tipped back on his head, attired in one of his crisply pressed new suits, one of a dozen new expensive suits, bought in imitation of Mickey Cohen who was himself assiduously imitating Ben Siegel’s sartorial splendor, knowledge of which Ben was busy acquiring from his paramour of the moment, the fifty-year-old Countess di Frasso, whom he referred to as his “fancy lady.” The one who came before his painted lady, Virginia. The two had met at Santa Anita, L.B. Mayer’s Stage 14, and whatever Ben had subsequently learned from her about class and style was passed from one mobster to another, all the way down the totem pole, and it had, apparently, made its way now to the very bottom spot occupied by my father, who jumped out of our freshly washed and waxed Cadillac to tell me, “Look what I’ve got for your mother.” With a wink, he pulled a leather box from his jacket pocket and opened it to show me a diamond ring. And it wasn’t the one he had pawned last month, either.
I looked up at him.
“It’s a bigger one
,” my father said. “Close your mouth. Mickey Cohen pays a lot better than Sy Wolfkowitz Painting Co.”
The diamond was three times the size of the other, four times the size of it, with a circle of diamonds winking all round it, the ring I’ve inherited and still have and keep locked in the hotel vault, a dozen years later. It dazzled me that day. As I’ve said, we Silvers like all that glitters. I was dazzled but I was a child, a real Baby E, so it didn’t occur to me that my father must be doing more for Cohen than taking bets on the Culver City dog track to have earned that kind of money.
“Just wait till your mother gets a load of this,” my father said with one of his great grins, the grin of possibility, as if he could see great good luck stepping her way in her high heels right around the corner.
Little as I was, I knew that with a diamond that size my father just might be able to lure my mother from her bed and back to the land of the living in a way all my foot-stamping and arm-pulling and wailing could not. The diamond was proof his fortunes were rising. One of their fortunes had to be on the rise at all times for their marital machinery to clank onward.
“Go on. Go on in and tell your mother,” my father told me. “Tell her I’ve got something special for her and that we’re going out.”
I ran into the house, into my mother’s hushed bedroom, and told her what my father told me to say. The words were like the incantation of a magi. My mother, attired in one of her ice-green movie-star negligees—even in a slump, she looked camera-ready—rose groggily from the bed and slowly, dreamily, brushed her hair. Come on, I thought, but I didn’t say it. Hurry up. It was impressive enough that she’d actually gotten out of bed, as if she’d been waiting for this, for something to get up for. And, luckily, it appeared she remembered how to stand. And walk. And put on lipstick. “Where is he?” she asked me. Finally.
I gestured. Out there.
He was at the open front door, kneeling on one knee on the uneven, cracked concrete porch and holding out the ring in a posture I fully approved of. My mother screamed when she saw that big diamond ring, shoved her finger into it, and held it up to the big flat sun in the flat sky, the better to make it sparkle, and I didn’t hear her ask a single question about where it had come from or what he’d done to afford it. Nor was there one word about her old ring. If it had been offered up with a tear in that pawnshop, that tear, her whole torrent of tears, was now forgotten. As was that ring. And this wasn’t all my father had brought her. He’d brought her an offer, a nightclub lounge act all her own.
Mickey Cohen and Ben Siegel were in the process of taking over the Clover Club, a nightclub up on what was then the somewhat desolate unincorporated Sunset Strip, which was soon to flower in a way my mother didn’t live to see, but my father and I did. To come were Ciro’s, the Trocadero, the Mocambo, the Chateau Marmont, Sunset Tower, the Players Club, the Garden of Allah, Club Gala. La Rue’s. At this point, though, there was just the Clover Club.
The Clover was a deliciously beautiful place with red lacquered doors and white tablecloths, with secret panels, one-way mirrors, and a backroom illegal casino called the Bacon Club, where men with machine guns watched over the players and the money. The bacon. This was a club where photographers weren’t allowed, where David O. Selznick and Budd Schulberg gambled each night, a club Cohen and Siegel were in the process of wrestling from its owners, whereby Mr. Siegel had charged Mickey with wrecking one by one all of their gambling operations. Just as later Benny would later muscle Billy Wilkerson out of his interests in the Flamingo, so now Benny took over the Clover Club. And my mother got her gig.
As my father said that night, “If you’re a live performer, baby, then here’s your venue.”
And at this, my mother whooped again, her malaise of the last weeks thrown off like a useless plaster cast. By this time my father was swinging my mother around on the front lawn, one of his arms about her waist, her bare feet nowhere near the ground, big setting sun now their enormous backlight, while I jumped around them clapping my hands, the two of them loving each other, and all was once again marvelous.
33
And when we walked down South Broadway later that night to celebrate, the street made a white circus against the black sky, the stars and the streetlights a million colored filaments, as raucous as the Las Vegas Strip at midnight, which hadn’t yet been invented. Broadway was our Strip, trolley cars on the rails running down the center of the avenue, automobiles north and south at either side of the tracks, the sidewalks crowded with men in summer suits and white straw hats with striped bands like my father’s, older men in dark fedoras like the ones my grandfather used to wear. Women of all ages wore stockings and heels, their hats big or small, plain or pinned with false flowers, their hair curled and bouncing at their shoulders, but no matter what they did or wore, none of them was as pretty as my mother, who, black hair swinging and long legs flicking prettily, strolled arm in arm with my father.
I trailed behind them, blinking my eyes a bit at my mother’s abrupt transformation. And I could see my father looked at her as if he couldn’t quite believe it, either. My mother had been a flat sheath of bones and skin and now she was suddenly revivified, full and fleshy. And all this had been done by a ring and a promise. Occasionally she’d turn around to me and wink, wiggle her ring finger. Most attention she’d paid me in weeks.
We ducked beneath the yellow-and-red canvas awnings over the store windows and past the doors of Loew’s State Theatre, once a vaudeville theater and now, like all old vaudeville theaters, a motion picture theater, its big green-and-blue sign protruding above us, an oval thrust into the space of the street itself, glowing neon and promising riches of entertainment within from Jack Benny and Dorothy Lamour in Man About Town, and the Tower Theatre, its architectural ornaments gold gilded, and the letters
T
O
W
E
R
spelled out vertically in sparkling silver script down the tower itself, and the big clock, blue-faced and encircled with gold at the tower’s apex, telling the time, a magical nine o’clock, not too early and not too late, and at this time of the summer, just dusk.
We passed Tally’s Theatre and the new Orpheum and Grauman’s, the Majestic, the Paramount, the Broadway, the Rialto, each of them showing movies with Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo and James Stewart and Clark Gable and William Powell, all the Hollywood gods and goddesses come down from the heavens just for their fans, none of whom had ever paid any attention to my mother on the lot, but they would take notice of her now as she performed for them at the Clover, and beyond those theaters lay the Western Costume Company, which had outfitted all the actors in all the movies playing in all those theaters, actors and dancers like my mother. Or like my mother used to be. Because now she would be something else. A solo act.
And for the poor people who played only their own parts in their own regular lives, there was the May Company department store and the Broadway department store to outfit them.
Eh.
Not for us. Not anymore.
Anything my mother wanted that night, my father bought for her, and any movie poster she wanted to linger to look at, he allowed her to look at, telling her she had more beauty in her little finger than any of those goddesses put together. And when she studied the jewelry in Sifton’s Jewelers and declared that the ring on her finger was more beautiful than any ring in the window, and for sure it was bigger, my father smiled his big smile, and when she turned to me and said, “Isn’t your father wonderful?” that, I could tell, made him feel better than any long shot that ever came in at any horse park in California. They both held out their hands to me. Even now, eleven years later, that night is edged with silver glimmer.
Far away, two radio towers gleamed in the distance, two promises, two scaffolds with the big letters spelling out the call numbers of the station,
K
R
K
D
At night it broadcast Aimee
Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple services, in which McPherson would sermonize about Jesus and the Devil as twin airplane pilots, one flying up and the other down. Sometimes McPherson would speak in tongues or heal the sick or the crippled, who right then and there threw away their crutches or stood up from their wheelchairs, which was exactly what my mother had done tonight.
McPherson was a one-woman show, with a team of artists, carpenters, and electricians on her payroll who built her a new set for each Sunday’s big production number and with an orchestra who played while she preached. My mother must have been musing over this, gazing at those radio call letters, because she said, “That McPherson. She’s a regular Louise B. Mayer. Must be nice to have your own stage and hire your own help and star in your own show.”
My own exact thought, eleven years later.
And my father stopped in his tracks then and said to her, “Who needs Mayer, Warner, or Cohn, anyway?”
And before you knew it, we were sitting in a coffee shop, talking about buying our own club, the Wells, once my mother had become a draw, and then renting offices back in the Hollywood flats near Paramount Studios, where all the old production companies had set up shop in the teens, a row of storefronts like those on Brooklyn Avenue in Boyle Heights, except instead of selling neckties and herring, they had sold short films, silent films, even talkies. And I would be Wells Pictures’s child star, better than any Shirley Temple.
My mother said, “I’ll take her over to Daddy Mack’s for some real dance lessons. She’s old enough now.”
I sat up straight. My mother was trying to make it up to me because she knew how much I had wanted to be a child extra in the “La Conga” number from Strike Up the Band. Its catchy lyrics and trill of congas and maracas would have accompanied me as I shook my way with all the others in a snake pattern around the high school auditorium, somebody’s little sister. But when my mother had taken to her bed instead of dancing in Band, I didn’t get to dance in it, either.
The Magnificent Esme Wells Page 18