The Mansions of Limbo

by Dominick Dunne

  She picked up a model airplane. “This was my G-II,” she said. “It had a sign saying, WELCOME ABOARD THE PHYLLIS SPECIAL. I’ve decorated the interiors of three planes. Do you feel like lunch?”

  “Sure.”

  The mail had arrived. “Enice, I don’t want to see the tabloids. The Searles across the street said there was something in them about us. Don’t show me.” We sat in the small dining room, and Enice, having given the mail to a secretary, brought in the lunch. “I have the greatest kitchens in the world,” Phyllis said. “I don’t cook, but I always have great chefs. And some of my maids have been with me for fourteen or seventeen years.”

  “How many people work for you in this house?” I asked, having noticed several in the background.

  She began to count, looking up, looking over at Enice for verification, placing the forefinger of her left hand against the pinkie finger of her right hand, then against the ring finger, then the center finger, then against the other forefinger, and then repeating the process, at the same time reeling off a seemingly endless list of names—maids, cooks, guards, gardeners, drivers, secretaries.

  “Twenty-eight,” she said finally.

  She thinks a great deal about security. “My limo driver carries a gun,” she said. “But if they want to get you, they’re going to get you. For me, it’s the most secure feeling in the world when those steel doors are down.”

  Phyllis McGuire has a more elaborate lifestyle than most television and nightclub performers of the fifties whose stars have dimmed with time and the fickle musical tastes of the public, and nowhere is her wealth more visible than in her wondrous jewelry. No one who knows about jewels has not heard about her fantastic collection, which ranks among the best in the world, right up there with the famous collections of Elizabeth Taylor, Imelda Marcos, Candy Spelling, Mrs. Marvin Davis, and the fifth Baroness Thyssen. Harry Winston, the great jeweler, once said to her, “If ever there was a lady meant to wear jewels, it’s you.” She told me, “There was a time when I was purchasing millions of dollars’ worth of jewelry. I was one of Harry Winston’s best customers.” She paused for a moment and then added, “Maybe some Saudis were ahead of me. Jewels really turned me on then, and they still do. I wear the jewels, they don’t wear me.”

  On the day I was in her house, most of her jewels had been put in the vault because she was leaving imminently for a singing engagement with her sisters at the Moulin Rouge in Chicago. But a few were still at hand. “Enice,” she called out, “bring in the canaries.” The canaries consisted of a forty-two-carat yellow diamond set in a ring, surrounded by smaller diamonds, and some loose yellow diamonds which she was planning to have made into earrings. She examined her stones like a jeweler. “I’m not sure I like the way they put the diamonds around the canary,” she said, “but I’m trying it this way.” From the same package she pulled a twenty-eight-carat marquise-shaped diamond ring, which she called “one of the babies” because of its small size—small, at least, in comparison with some of her other rings. The canaries brought to mind a fairly recent drama in her life.

  In 1979, she said, she took a D-flawless-diamond ring to Harry Winston’s to have it cleaned and to have the prongs checked. When the ring was returned to her, it didn’t seem to have the same sparkle it had had previously. Even now, a decade later, recounting the story, she held her hand up and examined her ring finger as if she were looking at the ring in question. She said that she had said at the time, “This can’t be my ring. It doesn’t sparkle the same.” She said she had begun to question her own sanity. “I said to Enice, ‘Is this my ring, Enice?’ and she said, ‘I think it is, Miss Phyllis.’ But there is a process called cubic zirconia, where a fake diamond can be cut exactly to match a real diamond. I knew that my ring had been switched. I turned in one to be cleaned, and they gave me back another. I sued Winston for $60 million. They countersued me for $100 million.” At the time, a spokesman for Winston denied the allegations “absolutely.”

  “I was only trying to recover my jewels,” she continued. “I deposed for three days at Foley Square in New York. I discovered the diamond wasn’t mine at Christmas of ’79, and the case was settled in ’82.” She seemed to be finished with her story.

  “But what happened?” I asked.

  “I’m not allowed to discuss the outcome of the suit. That’s part of the agreement,” she said, giving a helpless shrug, but neither her smile nor her attitude indicated any discontent with the outcome.

  A spokesman for Winston told me the company had no comment to make.

  Her conversation is peppered with the names of the very rich and very famous, with whom she has spent most of her time over the last twenty-five years. “I met Imelda Marcos at a party at Adnan Khashoggi’s,” she told me, and she and her sisters were scheduled to sing at the ninety-fifty birthday party of Armand Hammer, the billionaire philanthropist. Ann-Margret’s name came up, and she said, “Let’s call her.” Ann-Margret was playing at Caesars Palace. She dialed the number. “This is Phyllis McGuire,” she said to the telephone operator. “I’d like to speak to Ann-Margret. She’s still sleeping? At two o’clock in the afternoon? My God, she only had one show last night. OK, tell her I called.”

  “New York is like roots for me,” she said. “It was the first big city we saw after Ohio.” For years she kept a Park Avenue apartment. Then she bought a town house on one of the most exclusive streets on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “Do you know where Givenchy is? Two houses behind that.” She bought the house, she said, “lock, stock, and barrel, including antiques, china, crystal, and silverware, from a son of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia,” who was afraid of being assassinated, following the assassination of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, and took up residence instead in the Waldorf Towers, where many heads of state, and families of heads of state, stay for purposes of security. Phyllis loved the house dearly but spent only twenty-one days in it in 1987, so when her great friend Meshulam Riklis, the vastly rich ($440 million) financier husband of Pia Zadora, asked if he could buy it, she sold it to him. In order not to be without a nest in New York, she borrowed the Pierre Hotel apartment of another great friend, the vastly rich ($950 million) financier Kirk Kerkorian, and liked it so much that she talked Kerkorian into selling it to her, completely furnished.

  “I’m a good businesswoman,” she said, a fact that is borne out by most of her acquaintances. “If I weren’t performing, I would have to constantly be working at something. I love business.”

  I didn’t have to mention Sam Giancana. She brought him up. “I’ve had four serious involvements in my life, and one was a marriage. That was only for about ten minutes. Two of the men are still my friends, Simon Srybnik and Dr. Stanley Behrman, the head of oral surgery at New York Hospital. Even after Simon married Judy, and Stanley married Nancy, we stayed friends.” She paused before continuing. “And then there was Sam.” When she said Sam, she whispered his name. There is no doubt she loved him.

  Even William Roemer, the former FBI agent who dogged Sam’s life for a decade, says, “Phyllis really loved Sam, and Sam loved her.” Phyllis’s great friend the Broadway producer Dasha Epstein says, “She disappeared out of our lives when she was going with Sam. She said, ‘I know it’s difficult for my friends, and I understand.’ That was so like Phyllis.”

  “My life is so much more than that—with Sam,” Phyllis said. “That was only a chapter. I’m not ashamed of my past. I was doing what I honestly felt.” She sat back in her rose damask Bergère chair and continued. “Sam was the greatest teacher I ever could have had. He was so wise about so many things. Sam is always depicted as unattractive. He wasn’t. He was a very nice-looking man. He wasn’t flashy. He didn’t drive a pink Cadillac, like they used to say. He was a beautiful dresser. Dorothy Kilgallen thought he was my attorney when she met him. The two great losses of my life were my father and Sam.”

  She is now working on her autobiography to set the record straight. “I’ve got to get this out. I’ve got to get on
with my life. It’s holding me up. I have things to say that haven’t been said,” she told me. “Like about the late Mayor Daley of Chicago, even if his son is the new mayor.” “It’s a heavy-duty story,” she was quoted in Marilyn Beck’s column as saying. “I’ve been in thirty-four books in the last twelve to fifteen years, and it’s time my story was finally told correctly. I don’t need a Kitty Kelley doing to me what she did to Sinatra and [what she’s doing to] Nancy Reagan.”

  She denies, for example, the story about the $100,000 marker that Giancana told Moe Dalitz to eat. “I never lost more than $16,000 gambling at any one time,” she said. She also discounts many of the stories about her in the book Mafia Princess, written by Sam Giancana’s daughter Antoinette. “I tried to stop that book,” she said. “It wasn’t accurate. Toni got all her information through the Freedom of Information Act. She didn’t know any firsthand. She and her father hadn’t been close. She used to come and stay here, in the guesthouse.”

  In 1961, at the height of Phyllis’s fame, her affair with Giancana was still not known to the public. The FBI, which tracked Giancana’s every move, had chosen not to expose the relationship, understanding that such publicity would be detrimental to McGuire’s career. But in the spring of that year, agents bugged their motel room in Phoenix and learned they would be traveling on American Airlines to New York with a stopover at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. The FBI decided to subpoena Phyllis with the proviso that if she cooperated with them by answering their questions in a room within the terminal, they would withdraw the subpoena and she would not have to appear the next day. She knew that if she were to appear, it would become publicly known that she was the mistress of the Mob chief. What the FBI agents asked her to do was cooperate with them in the future by letting them know where Sam was at all times. Phyllis agreed to do what they asked, and they took the subpoena back, but, according to several reliable sources, she didn’t keep her promise.

  William Roemer’s job that day was to keep Giancana occupied while Phyllis was being questioned, and he and Giancana got into a screaming match at the airport, climaxing when Sam said he was going to have his friend Butch Blasi machine-gun him down. Roemer, probably the greatest authority on Sam Giancana, remembers him very differently from the way Phyllis does. His book, Roemer: Man Against the Mob, will be published in October by Donald I. Fine. He told me on the phone from his home in Tucson, “Sam was ugly, balding—wore a wig at the end of his life. Little, slight, dumpy, a deese-dem-dose guy, scum of the earth, killer, the dregs of society, the worst kind of person. We hated each other. I hated him, and he hated me.”

  Roemer said that the Mob was extremely upset with Giancana when he was going with Phyllis. They thought he wasn’t minding the store. “He fell in love with her and traveled all over the world with her,” Roemer said. He agrees that Phyllis, in the tradition of wives, daughters, and lovers of Mob members, knew little of Sam’s life away from her. He told me that when Phyllis first thought about writing her book, she called him—Sam’s nemesis—to say that she had met a lot of people during her years with Sam but that she didn’t actually know who they were or what they had done. Some of them, she said, she knew only by their nicknames, like “Chuckie” (English), “Butch” (Blasi), and “Skinny” (D’Amato)—all figures in the racketeering life of Sam Giancana.

  “Did Sam leave any money to Phyllis?”

  “Nobody could ever prove that he left her money,” answered Roemer. Although Giancana left an estate valued at only $132,583.16 when he died, that meant nothing. The kind of money that people like Sam Giancana have is not banked or left in the ordinary ways of money management. Roemer said it is possible that Giancana had a hundred million dollars.

  “It very definitely hurt our careers for about a year,” Phyllis McGuire said about her affair with Giancana. “We were blacklisted on TV, but that ended.”

  “In your interview with Dorothy Kilgallen, you said you were going to give him up,” I said.

  “Yes, I know. I said in that interview that I’d never see him again. Well, I did.” She shrugged, and then threw out one of the amazing bits of information that flow freely from her tongue. “Kilgallen was murdered,” she said. “She didn’t commit suicide.” Dorothy Kilgallen, who supposedly died of a sleeping-pill overdose in 1964, had in that same year interviewed Jack Ruby, the assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated President Kennedy. “I saw her three days before, dancing at El Morocco with Johnnie Ray. She was murdered. I didn’t believe the suicide story then. I don’t believe it now. Dorothy was the most beautiful corpse I ever saw.”

  Although Phyllis McGuire did not mention him in her list of suitors, there has been another romantic involvement since Sam, a bigger-than-life character named Mike Davis, and they are still close friends. The owner of Tiger Oil, Davis is based in Houston, but he is always on the move. Phrases like “my jet” pop up in his conversation, as do such names as Bunker Hunt, of the Texas Hunts, and Adnan Khashoggi, the international arms dealer, currently in hot water, with whom Davis has been a sometime partner. “Tiger Mike,” as some people call him, is of Lebanese extraction. He was once the chauffeur of Phyllis’s great friend Helen Bonfils, and married Bonfils upon the death of her husband in 1956. Helen Bonfils was reportedly in her late sixties at the time, and Davis was in his late twenties. Bonfils, who took over the running of the Denver Post when her father died, was also involved in producing Broadway shows. She helped finance Davis’s start-up in Tiger Oil. Davis’s interest in Phyllis began while she was still involved with Giancana. McGuire told me she once pulled him behind a slot machine and warned him, “You better stay away from me. Do you want to end up on the bottom of Lake Mead?”

  On several occasions, Frank Sinatra’s name came up in our conversation, and I sensed a certain amount of animosity. “We are cautiously friends,” she said slowly. “He is the most talented but most contradictory person. He has surrounded himself with an entourage who yes him to death. How can you expand yourself surrounded by yes-men? I’ve stayed in his house, and he has bored me to death. He tells the sa-a-ame stories he’s been telling for years, and all I ever heard were his records, which he played over and over again.” She covered her ears as she told this. “I thought to myself, I’ll never do that in my house with my records. You never hear my own music played on my system.”

  She recounted to me a story that I had read in Kitty Kelley’s unauthorized biography of Sinatra, His Way. Sinatra, who was making $100,000 a week in Las Vegas, agreed, along with Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, and Eddie Fisher, to appear for nothing in a club called Villa Venice, which was a front for Giancana. Afterward, Giancana wanted to send a gift to each of them, and Phyllis picked out Sinatra’s gift. She suggested sending Steuben crystal, having seen stemware in Sinatra’s house that he told her was Steuben. “I say Steuben. Frank said Steubanne. He thought what he had was Steuben, but it wasn’t. Steuben always says Steuben on the bottom, but his didn’t. I called Gloria, who was Frank’s secretary, to see if they should be monogrammed, but she said no to the monogram, because people tended to walk off with anything that had Sinatra’s monogram on it. I sent him a service for thirty—martini glasses, white-wine glasses, red-wine glasses, champagne glasses, and water tumblers. I spent over $7,000 on that gift, and the S.O.B. never sent a thank-you note.”

  “Did you get any flak from Sinatra from telling Kitty Kelley the story about the Steuben glasses?”

  “None whatever,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. “He knows better. Let me tell you about Frank. He doesn’t know how to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and he doesn’t know how to say, ‘Thank you.’ He could never admit he made a mistake. I sent my Lear to Houston to pick up Dr. DeBakey when Frank’s mother was killed, because they were friends, but he never said thank you for that either.”

  “Didn’t you make a movie with Sinatra?”

  “Hmmm,” she answered, nodding her head. “Come Blow Your Horn. Everyone said Sam got that movie for me with F
rank, which was not true. I played a buyer from Neiman-Marcus, a part that was not in the stage play. He was supposed to kiss me in one scene, and I was wearing my diamond drop earrings.” She held up her fingers to indicate a good three inches of diamonds, from the lobes to the shoulders. “When he kissed me, he put his hands over my ears like this.” She covered her ears with her hands. “That was the last important picture Frank did.”

  “Why did you ever stop singing?”

  “Oh, we lost our confidence at different times—me less than Dorothy and Christine,” said Phyllis. “Dorothy got married. Christine got married. They had guilt trips thinking they should be home with their children.”

  When she sings, she said, she feels tidal waves of love coming from the audience, “like a full moon when the ocean is active.” On the night I flew to Chicago to watch the McGuire Sisters perform at the Moulin Rouge in the new Fairmont Hotel, the room was packed. The crowd was an older crowd, but then, the cover charge was twenty-five dollars per person, on top of drinks and dinner. “People feel they know us,” said Phyllis. “They love us. They watched us grow up on TV.” Sitting at a front-row table was Irv Kupcinet, the dean of Chicago columnists, and his wife, Essie. “Ladies and gentlemen,” came the announcement over the loudspeaker, “the McGuire Sisters!”

  And there they were, Dorothy, Christine, and Phyllis, with Phyllis, as always, in the middle. Fake eyelashes, glitter on their blue eyeshadow, honey-colored falls on their honey-colored hair, and peach dresses covered with crystals. When they sang their familiar hits, like “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane,” “Melody of Love,” and “Sugartime,” which put them on the cover of Life magazine in 1958, they got excited applause of recognition. Phyllis gave the audience their cover charge’s worth. She did vocal impersonations of Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Merman, Pearl Bailey, and other stars of her era. And she was right: the audience loved them.