“Don’t you know who that is?” Ida asked me with a hiss. “Aren’t you even going to say hello?” She slowed her pace as the man who’d called out to me watched me keep on walking. “Talk about a high roller!” Penny chipped in. Both girls knew what they were talking about, hooked up as they were by then with Gus Greenbaum and Sidney Weiner, two of the biggest casino bosses in town. “You should at least go and have a drink with him,” Penny added.
“No way,” I replied, smiling as the man with the tumbler kept staring. “I don’t like dealing with drunks, and anyway, Joe’s waiting.”
So I kept on walking that night. I walked as fast as my aching feet could carry me past that dimly lit bar—past Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford—all of them. And past the forty-two-year-old Frank Sinatra too, in spite of his calls to me, the only blonde in our trio.
Frank may once have been the idol of my Wichita teens, but his personal life (or as much as I knew about it from the newspapers) was not a pretty picture. He’d sent shivers down my spine for his Oscar-winning performance as Private Angelo Maggio in From Here to Eternity, but he wasn’t someone I thought I’d care to know. His latest hit, “You’re Sensational,” from the movie High Society starring Grace Kelly, was being played on every radio across the nation, but that incredible voice alone wasn’t enough to tempt me in. His self-styled “Summit of Cool,” featuring the men alongside him who’d later become known as the Rat Pack, may have been the hippest set in town, but it was not the pack for me. Frank looked sexy that night, but I had other cards to play. It would be some time before I’d come to know just how sexy and dangerous he could be.
After I’d spent less than a year in Vegas, “Sin City” began to lose its shine, and so, sadly, did my relationship with Joe. He lost his job, and I became the main breadwinner, paying all the bills as well as half his alimony and child support. Money problems soured our once-beautiful romance. His world had changed. Rock ’n’ roll was here to stay, and his smooth style and slick presentation weren’t in vogue anymore. Unemployed and confused, he was short of cash, and we fought constantly.
In truth, we could never have sustained such a surreal, nocturnal existence. Each night we dressed up and plastered on makeup before going to work in places with no windows or clocks. We grabbed meals at all sorts of strange hours and snatched sleep whenever we could, scratching out a living along with so many others. Missing his own son and jealous that I was spending time with mine, Joe had never been keen to have Bobby around, and it began to show.
Even Boots the dog didn’t seem happy in our first-floor apartment. Bobby wasn’t having a great time either. He was taller than the other kids at school, who were mostly the children of craps dealers and waiters. As I had been, he was picked on. To make up for my long hours and his unhappiness, I spoiled him with toys, which were then stolen and sold. Increasingly, through my encounters with people such as Ice Pick Willie and Penny’s and Ida’s boyfriends, I began to realize how much crime and sleaze surrounded us. Vegas in those days was run by the Mob for the Mob; there was no getting away from it. They’d invested heavily in the town, and they had to spend the money they made there or be stung for taxes. That’s why people like Willie Alderman could be so generous with chips. But there was a downside to all those gangsters being around, vying against one another, and when Gus Greenbaum and his wife had their throats slit, I was truly shocked. Penny was understandably upset too, but to my surprise she almost immediately started dating someone else, a man who worked for Frank Sinatra. “You win some, you lose some,” she told me with a shrug. She definitely won; her new boyfriend took care of her until the day he died.
On a modeling assignment at the Flamingo Hotel (owned by Bugsy Siegel until he was murdered), I had to change in a small back room where dirty laundry was sorted. Pulling on an outfit, I glanced down at one of the wicker carts and shrieked. Lying in a heap was a sheet covered with blood—not just a drop but an entire body’s worth—shiny and fresh. “Oh, my God!” I cried, pointing. “What is that?” I thought the other girls would be as shocked as I was, but nobody flinched and everyone looked away.
A laundry maid fixed me with a frown and muttered, “Don’t you know better than to ask questions round here?”
Shivering, I thought, Uh-oh. My days in this town are numbered.
At a time when I needed reassurance at home, Joe was far from reassuring. One night he demanded my key to our joint safety deposit box. I’d been cleaned out by Bob, and I wasn’t going to let that happen again. Refusing to hand over the key, I hurried off to work. Three hours later, just as I was about to go on for the finale, Joe burst through the fire exit door backstage. He’d been drinking. I was in a black satin gown and rhinestone tiara and carrying a white ostrich-feather fan with a six-foot wingspan. “I need that key,” he said, grabbing my arm. I managed to wriggle free and stepped onto the stage with the other girls as our cue—the opening bars of “Humoresque”—struck up.
In a scene reminiscent of a Marx Brothers sketch, each time I went anywhere near the wings, Joe would reach out to grab me and then rush to the other side. I, meanwhile, was teetering around with my enormous fan trying to stay in the middle and look graceful but forgetting my routine and bumping into the rest of the company. Hissing at Joe from behind my fan, I told him I’d meet him outside the fire door during the next break. As promised, I slipped there between numbers, but we had a terrible fight. Before I knew it, he’d knocked my headdress off and was pulling at my costume. The heel of my stiletto caught in the grate and bent backward. The door had slammed shut behind us, so I banged on it with my fists until one of the stagehands heard me. I fell into the building, my lipstick smeared, my tiara tilted forward, and several feathers missing from my fan. The other girls had already done the first half of the number when I came crashing onto the stage all askew with a wobbly heel and a missing earring. As I found my rightful place in the lineup, Penny hissed, “Jesus, Barbara! What the hell happened to you?”
A few days later, Joe did find my key and sweet-talked a girl at the bank into letting him open our deposit box. He took the lot—money, deeds, and legal documents. Fortunately for me, within days he decided he wanted me back, so he returned everything and I put the box in my name only.
To complicate matters further, Bob Oliver began flying into Vegas again. He’d drop in to the Riviera to see me or turn up unannounced at the apartment to visit Bobby. He never brought money. “I don’t have a dime!” he’d say, pulling on empty pockets. Even though he was still tending bar, he never gave up his dream of making it as a stage singer or breaking into movies. I think he always hoped we might get back together too, but I’d just shake my head and smile if he suggested it. Bob the dreamer, the romantic fool who’d asked me to marry him on our first date.
As if I didn’t have enough to worry about, a third suitor appeared out of the blue. He was a well-tailored, middle-aged man who’d sit alone at the back of the dinner theater to watch our rehearsals. He was a friend of the director Sammy Lewis, and I could tell he was important by the way the bosses reacted to him. Sammy came over to me one day and asked, “What have you done to Zeppo Marx? He’s been asking questions all around the hotel about you.” So that’s who he was—Zeppo Marx, the former straight-man member of the wacky team of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo. I’d not only seen Marx Brothers movies as a teenager in Wichita but met Zeppo once at a Miss Universe dinner in Romanoff’s restaurant in Los Angeles. I should have remembered him because I’d thought him very rude; I sat next to him, but he hardly said a word to me all night. It was only later that I realized he was deaf in one ear and I was sitting on his wrong side.
At fifty-six, with a surprisingly good singing voice and a dry sense of humor, Zeppo had taken early retirement to do the things he enjoyed, which included gambling, women, golf, management, and anything mechanical. He was successful at all five, especially the last, which made him more money than comedy ever did. He invested some of it in the El Ran
cho casino with his brothers and was a regular at the craps tables. Divorced with two adopted sons, he was carefree and single with lots of show business friends and plenty of girls. Now he’d set his sights on me. Eagle-eyed Penny was the first to spot him. “That Zeppo Marx can’t stop staring at you,” she told me. “He’s a good guy to know. Lucky girl!” I wondered how lucky I’d really be. After my experiences with Bob and Joe, I wasn’t looking to start afresh with anyone, least of all someone with a reputation as a womanizer, even if he was a funny, rich one.
One night just before the final show, I peeped out from behind the stage curtain to check how full the house was. To my surprise, Zeppo, Joe, and Bob were sitting together in a booth right at the front of the theater. A few nights earlier they’d sat separately, staring daggers at one another across the room, so when the show was over, I’d declined to sit with any one of them for fear of setting them off. Now, it seemed, they’d decided to join forces so that I’d sit with all three of them.
As part of our Spike Jones floor show that night, we had to do a crazy high-kick routine with the chorus girls in which only our legs showed through long slits in a heavy black curtain. The show went down well and I didn’t mess up, but it was with some reluctance that I wandered out front afterward. As soon as Joe saw me approaching, he jumped up and asked, “Where were you placed in the lineup?” Flashing me a warning look, he added, “I’ve got twenty-five bucks riding on this.”
I thought for a moment and began to count.
Bob piped up, “I said you were the twelfth.”
Joe shook his head. “No,” he said with conviction. “Barbara was in the middle. Twenty-second along.”
Zeppo gave me a quiet, intelligent smile. “You were at the end, fifth from the left,” he said. I laughed and nodded. He was right, much to Joe’s dismay.
Sitting down next to Zeppo and making sure I was on his right side this time, I asked him, “How did you know?”
He gave me a wry grin. “Easy,” he said. “You were the lowest high kicker.”
Knowing I was the worst dancer in Vegas, Joe and Bob roared with laughter. While they made jokes at my expense, I looked across at Zeppo, seeing him in a new light.
I can’t remember what it was exactly that made me realize I might end up with Mr. Marx, although marriage was truly the last thing on my mind. Maybe it was that he sent Bobby a bicycle for his birthday—a gift that infuriated Bob and Joe, neither of whom had bought Bobby anything. Perhaps it was Zeppo’s ardent pursuit with dinner invitations and flowers or the new Thunderbird convertible he bought for me. Or was it the time he stood behind a group of strangers in an elevator and pulled faces until I was laughing so hard I had to get off?
Not only did Zeppo have the caustic wit of the Marx Brothers but he made fun of himself rather than of those around him. I think that may have been why he was always given the role of romantic lead while his brothers insulted him. Underpinning Zeppo’s charm was his promise that he could offer a better life for me and my son. That thought was compounded for me when I took Bob to court over Bobby’s nonexistent support payments only to discover that he’d skipped off to Europe.
The event that finally set me in motion toward Zeppo came when I returned to our apartment one morning and couldn’t find my son anywhere. Smelling smoke, I looked into the backyard and screamed. Bobby was tied with rope and sitting on a pyre of dried wood and desert brush. The tent I’d just bought him was wrapped around his legs. Some of the rougher neighborhood boys stood in a circle laughing as they set fire to the heap with matches. As soon as they saw me running toward them, they dashed off. I unfastened the ropes and pulled Bobby free as the flames began licking at his feet. Within minutes, the tent was ablaze. My heart pounding, I hugged my child to me and thanked God I’d arrived home in time. “I was being initiated into their club,” Bobby tried to explain, still coughing as I carried him inside.
“Pack up,” I told him. “We’re leaving!” I’d had it with Vegas. This was no place to bring up my son. There seemed little left to stay for anyway. Bob had fled, never to pay child support. Joe had cleaned out half of all I’d saved and was driving me crazy. He’d poured sugar into the gas tank of the car Zeppo had given me, ruining the engine. I was tired of our adrenaline-fueled existence in a city where reality blurred into fantasy as easily as day melted to night. As I explained to Bobby in no uncertain terms, we were leaving that afternoon. I had no idea where we’d end up, and Zeppo was the last person on my mind, but I knew we had to get out of town.
“Boots! I can’t find Boots!” Bobby cried, searching all over the apartment and then the backyard. Wearily, I stopped what I was doing and went looking with him. We hunted all over for that darn dog; we even drove around in the car, but he was nowhere to be found. Maybe he’d been scared off by the other boys when they’d tied Bobby or had taken off by himself as he sometimes did. Perhaps a neighbor had taken him in. I was too exhausted and upset to look anymore, so I promised Bobby we’d alert the animal welfare agencies the minute we reached California and come back for Boots once he was found.
“But, Mother, we can’t just abandon him!” Bobby cried, his eyes filling with tears.
“We have to!” I insisted. I wanted out of Vegas there and then. If I’d waited a day longer, I might have lost the courage to leave Joe, to walk away from my friends and the life I’d made for myself. “I’m sorry, Bobby, but we have to go—now!”
Oh, God, the tears. I broke my young son’s heart that day, as well as my own. Leaving poor Boots behind is a memory that haunts us both to this day. I had friends drive around looking for the scruffy little mutt for weeks, calling out his name. I must have telephoned the city’s dog pound and the Humane Society twenty times or more in the weeks and months that followed, but the answer was always the same: “We have no dog answering that description.” I never found out what happened to Boots. I only hope and pray that someone kind took care of him and gave him a happy life.
Having said good-bye to Vegas, Joe, and Zeppo, I headed back to Long Beach. Living with my parents was never going to work, so I found an apartment. To pay the rent, I tried to get work locally as a model, but I’d been out of the loop for so long that I didn’t know the right people anymore.
My modeling school was being closed, and my services weren’t required. Before too long I was broke, all my savings gone. Neither Marge Oliver nor my parents could help, and I had no idea what to do. One day Zeppo called to see how I was. When I told him the truth, he made me an offer. “Come to Palm Springs,” he pleaded. “I’ll set you and Bobby up in your own place. You can commute back to L.A. to model whenever you want.” With all other options running out, I had little choice but to accept.
I fell in love with Palm Springs during the winter of 1958, but not with Zeppo Marx. At least not enough to marry him then, which was what he really wanted, but I was off marriage for good. “The Springs” was a little desert town with a tremendous sense of style and glamour. Those who lived there behaved as if they were permanently on vacation, which I guess they kind of were. Zeppo rented me a two-bedroom apartment in a motel next to the famous Racquet Club, where I quickly found work modeling in the poolside fashion shows. The clothes were divine and the work not remotely as frenetic as Vegas had been.
Zeppo’s house on Halper Lake Drive in the Rancho Mirage district was one of the first built just off the fairway of the Tamarisk Country Club. A dramatic, modern three-bedroom building in white tile and stucco, it stood alone overlooking the second green. Along with almost every high roller in town, Zeppo was a member of Tamarisk, which had been set up by the Jewish community for Jews. The rival club, Thunderbird, was for Gentiles, including members Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. At Tamarisk, Zeppo played golf with his friends and his brothers Chico and Gummo. Wonderfully secluded, his home nestled in citrus trees and oleander bushes with a fifty-yard lawn. Beyond a topiary garden and a high privet hedge, in what was known as the Compound, lived his neighbor Frank Sinatra.
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sp; The two men had known each other for years; Frank and Groucho even appeared in a movie together in 1951. The first time Zeppo walked me around his backyard he told me, “Frank’s never around much. He’s always working or on the road.” I glanced across the seventeenth fairway at the hedge that separated the two properties and thought that, given Frank’s reputation as a late-night-party thrower, that was probably a blessing.
Bobby and I tried to settle into our new life, but it wasn’t as easy a transition as I’d hoped. Zeppo gave me such a hard time about having my son with me that, realizing I had no wriggle room, I found a good but expensive military school near the ocean in Long Beach. Zeppo agreed to pay all Bobby’s tuition fees and expenses; anything to get rid of him. Although Bobby would board all week, I could still visit him every weekend and take him out. My resilient son, who’d been bounced around so much of his life already, adjusted to the Southern California Military Academy amazingly well. After a few visits, I discovered why. My lanky boy had been selling or bartering my stash of glossy eight-by-ten modeling shots, in which I was posed in anything from ball gowns to swimsuits. In return, his pubescent fellow pupils gave him sweets, polished his shoes, or made his bed. I was the school pinup! Whenever I went to visit, boys would rush up and ask me to sign photographs. I was so relieved that Bobby had found a way to make friends, even if it was cheeky. Promoted to master sergeant, he looked so dashing and handsome in his braid and brass buttons that I couldn’t wait to show him off at the Racquet Club. I even commissioned an oil painting of him in his uniform, which still hangs in my bedroom today.
Alone in Palm Springs with Zeppo, I soon realized that I’d only swapped one surreal existence for another. Being a “desert rat” took some getting used to, especially after Vegas. Most “rats” played golf early in the morning, when it was cool, followed by lunch, a round of tennis, and a game of gin rummy before cocktails and dinner. I didn’t play golf, tennis, or gin, so—if I wasn’t modeling—I sunbathed and swam, went horseback riding in the desert, or had lunch with a girlfriend. I dined each night with Zeppo and his friends, but they were never late nights because everyone was up early the following day.
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