Dark History of Hollywood: A Century of Greed, Corruption and Scandal behind the Movies (Dark Histories)

by Kieron Connolly

  And did HUAC achieve anything? According to Philip Dunne, it never found any evidence that wasn’t already known to the Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI, who had moles in the Hollywood Communist Party and therefore knew exactly who the Communists were. HUAC’s activities might have taken the more left-leaning edge out of the unions and snuffed out some of the criticism of American foreign policy, but it also left a great deal of bitterness that lasted for the rest of the lives of those concerned.

  Many believe that anti-Communism was an obsession that was more likely to destroy democracy in the USA than Communism itself – HUAC overriding the First and Fifth Amendments in the name of American democracy. While HUAC was rooting out Communism in the USA, the climate it created shared something with the Eastern Bloc totalitarian regimes it feared; and while Stalin’s show trials of political prisoners made a mockery of the proclaimed fairness of the Communist system, HUAC itself was unconstitutional. An unguarded word to one’s next-door neighbour against the Party in Russia could result in people losing their jobs, just as a member of the Hollywood community could denounce a friend for having uttered a slight criticism of capitalism. In Russia, an informer might receive a better apartment; in Hollywood the informer could be crossed off the blacklist and go back to work. As fellow Republican Senator Ralph E. Flanders said of Joseph McCarthy: ‘Were the Junior Senator from Wisconsin [McCarthy] in the pay of the Communists, he could not have done a better job for them.’

  Screenwriter Carl Foreman with Winston Churchill in 1964. Blacklisted, Foreman moved to Britain in the early 1950s, where he co-wrote, uncredited, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

  A member of the Hollywood community could denounce a friend for having uttered a slight criticism of capitalism.

  POLAND’S HIGH NOON

  A FORMER MEMBER of the Communist Party, Carl Foreman was called to testify while he was writing the screenplay for High Noon (1952), the story of an honest Western marshal who returns to defend his town against criminals but finds all the other townsfolk too cowardly to take a stand with him. Facing the Committee, Foreman refused to name names, was blacklisted and before the film was released he moved to Britain, where he worked for the rest of his life. The public, of course, just enjoyed a good story and High Noon went on to be regarded worldwide as a classic Western.

  In 1989, an image from High Noon was used for the Polish Solidarity Party’s election campaign – the first free elections held in Communist Poland. The blacklisted had been accused of inserting Communist propaganda into their films, but Foreman’s film was now being held up as a symbol of justice and used against Communism. The Solidarity Party went on to win almost all the seats eligible to them and were given a voice in the government. By the end of the year, Poland’s prime minister was a member of Solidarity.

  Mobster Johnny Rosselli had a varied career. Starting out in the Chicago of Al Capone he went on to extorting movie studios, working as a Hollywood producer, developing Las Vegas casinos and even testifying at the US Senate about an alleged 1961 CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro.

  V

  HOLLYWOOD

  THE MOB

  Al Capone only spent 24 hours in Los Angeles in 1927 before being escorted from the city, but in that time he managed to visit a movie studio and comment: ‘That’s a grand racket.’ As Hollywood grew during the 1930s, its wealth drew New York and Chicago mobsters west. They extorted the studios, befriended some of the actors and slept with the starlets. And Hollywood also enabled their influence to reach as high as Washington.

  ‘Don’t ever think Hollywood is some friggin’ Disneyland.’

  After Prohibition ended in 1933, and with Hollywood becoming more established, the Chicago and New York Mobs looked to the studios as a new area to be exploited. Understanding that you can’t make movies without film to put in the cameras, the Mob made sure that they were on the payroll of the Dupont Film Corporation; which supplied film stock to the studios.

  And when in 1933 the studios faced a strike by actors and technicians over a 50 per cent pay cut, it was mobster Johnny Rosselli to whom Nicholas Schenck, who managed a chain of cinemas and the MGM studio, turned for help. As scab workers were hired by the moguls to break the picket lines, Rosselli brought in outside muscle to hit any picketer who tried to stop them. The police, meanwhile, had been bought off, and within a week the technicians’ union – the International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) – gave up their strike, leaving the producers able to force an open shop. After that, Rosselli was put on MGM’s payroll.

  Willie Bioff

  On the surface the powerful IATSE might have been representing the interests of its members, but it had been infiltrated at the top by the Mob, whose own interests came first. Thus, working through IATSE, Willie Bioff came to extort millions from the studios, in a criminal career that had begun in Chicago in the mid-1920s when he lured Illinois country girls into the big city and prostitution.

  While the studios were keeping mobsters on the payroll, they were also mixing with politicians. Here MGM’s Nicholas Schenck (centre) looks on as lawyer Basil O’Connor presents a cheque to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  With the threat of shutting down projectionists across the country, Bioff and Browne took kickbacks, each receiving $50,000.

  The Depression ruined his brothel business, so he began a protection racket on Chicago shops where he became aware of George E. Browne: while Bioff would be taking money off the Jewish shops, Browne would be targeting the Gentile establishments. Natural partners, they joined forces, aimed higher and settled on Chicago’s cinemas, offering a ‘no strike guarantee’ from the projectionists’ union in return for kickbacks. Winning the approval of the Mob, Browne took over as president of IATSE, with Bioff as his enforcer. In Hollywood, Browne and Bioff worked a similar scam. With the threat of shutting down projectionists across the country, they took kickbacks from the studios, each receiving $50,000 from the major studios, and, in return, only pushing for small improvements for their union members. Louis B. Mayer and other moguls estimated that they’d saved about $15 million by buying off Bioff and Browne.

  HOT TODDY

  ALTHOUGH THE CIRCUMSTANCES remain a mystery, the death of actress Thelma Todd could be an example of what can happen in Hollywood if you fall in and then out with bad company. From 1926, Todd acted in comedies alongside Laurel & Hardy and Buster Keaton. Then in 1932, she married former bootlegger Pasquale DiCicco, right-hand man in LA to mobster Lucky Luciano, head of the New York Genovese Family. Their marriage turned violent and she divorced him in 1934 when she began a relationship with director Roland West, with whom she opened a roadhouse on the coast – Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café. Luciano, who’d also been one of her lovers, wanted to start a private, and illegal, gambling room at the Sidewalk, but Todd resisted. With Luciano trying to muscle in on the Sidewalk, Todd sought help and contacted district attorney Buron Fitts. Her meeting with Fitts was scheduled for Tuesday 18 December 1935, but she didn’t live long enough to make her appointment.

  Three days earlier, on Saturday 15 December, Todd had attended an LA party, where she was seen merrily drunk, despite encountering ex-husband DiCicco there and having a brief argument. In the small hours, her chauffeur dropped her off at home. Then on the Monday morning her maid found her body slumped over the steering wheel of her car in her garage.

  The coroner’s verdict classed her death as accidental from carbon monoxide poisoning, but this didn’t take into account her missing teeth, her broken nose, fractured ribs and her blood-splattered dress. One explanation offered was that in her death throes she’d had a spasm and banged her head against the steering wheel. Well, that’s possible …

  The scheduled meeting with DA Fitts wasn’t in Luciano’s interest, but nor, in fact, was it in Fitts’s, because he was connected to the Mob. Thelma Todd’s friends claimed that she hadn’t seemed suicidal, so, was she really so drunk that she’d climbed into her car, turned the engine on and t
hen fallen asleep? And would a spasm be sufficient to fracture her ribs and knock out some teeth? Or was it possible that a broken-hearted DiCicco killed her? Or had she crossed two of LA’s most powerful establishments: the Mob and the corrupt legal system? The mystery remains unsolved.

  The wreckage after Willie Bioff was killed in a car bomb at his house in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1955. Bioff had been sent to prison in 1941 for running an extortion scam with the studios. Two years later, he had entered the witness protection programme.

  Another mobster was Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel; he moved from New York to Los Angeles in the late 1930s to muscle in on the existing gambling rackets, while getting kickbacks from the studios. ‘Suppose on your next picture,’ he said to the studios, ‘the script has been finished, the director is ready to go, the stars are ready, the stagehands, everybody is drawing a salary, and when you shout “Action!” the extras walk out.’ The studios understood Siegel’s hold over the Screen Extras Guild and paid him off: it’s estimated that Siegel was receiving at least $500,000 a year from them.

  The two worlds of the Mafia and Hollywood mixed socially, too. Although he had a wife and family, Siegel, a friend of George Raft’s from his New York days, began going out with bit-part player and Mafia girl Virginia Hill, while Johnny Rosselli had affairs with actresses Donna Reid, Lana Turner and Betty Hutton. Mickey Cohen socialized with Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis and Robert Mitchum, and Jean Harlow had a relationship with mobster Abner ‘Longy’ Zwillman, who gave Harry Cohn the $500,000 he needed in 1932 to buy out his partner Joe Brandt at Columbia Pictures.

  When the racketeering trial began in 1943, Bioff and Browne vanished into the witness protection programme.

  Although a union man, Willie Bioff made no effort to disguise his new wealth in Hollywood. He bought a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, built a house with a pool, filled his home with antiques, and flashed around his gold and diamond business cards. Eventually the law caught up with him, and in 1941 he and Browne were given 20-year sentences for tax irregularities and union pay-offs. In the same case, Joseph Schenck, Nicholas Schenck’s brother and chairman of the board of 20th Century Fox, who’d been Bioff and Browne’s contact in the studio, was sentenced to five years for his involvement – though he only served 12 months before being released with a full presidential pardon. He’d earlier contributed $500,000 towards Harry S. Truman’s campaign and now Truman was President.

  When Bioff went to prison, his Mob associate Nicholas Deani Circella went on the run. With the Chicago Outfit nervous that Bioff or others might talk about their involvement, it’s believed that a hit was put on Circella’s girlfriend, Estelle Carey. She was attacked at home, stabbed with an ice pick and a broken whiskey bottle, before being tied to a dining chair, doused in petrol and set on fire.

  If it was a Mafia hit, the murder of Estelle Carey was the first known Mafia hit on a woman in America. If it was intended to silence Bioff, it had the opposite effect. Appalled by the murder, Bioff agreed to talk and named many Mob connections, including Frank Nitti, who fronted the Chicago Outfit. When the indictments were handed out, Nitti, who’d already served 18 months in prison with Al Capone for tax evasion, shot himself.

  When the racketeering trial began in 1943, Bioff and Browne vanished into the witness protection programme. (In 1955, Bioff was working in a Las Vegas casino when he was killed by a car bomb.) The Chicago mobsters involved and Johnny Rosselli were found guilty and sentenced to ten years each. However, all were paroled in August 1947, having served less than three years, without the parole board even seeing the notes on the cases. Through bribes, the Mob had managed to buy influence with lawyers and politicians and also pay off the $200,000 in taxes and fines that were due.

  One crucial link was Paul Dillon, a lawyer connected to the Mob, who’d also been Harry Truman’s campaign manager during his first attempt to reach the Senate in 1934. One legislator asked if the parole board had taken $500,000 in return for the gangsters’ freedom. The charge wasn’t denied.

  Mafia Movies

  On his release from prison, Johnny Rosselli began working directly for Hollywood with a job at Eagle-Lion Studios where Joe Schenck’s nephew was a producer. Ironically, one of Eagle-Lion’s best films was T-Men (1947), a story about a group of Treasury agents investigating a counterfeiting ring.

  Johnny Rosselli may have been sentenced to ten years in prison, but within three years he was released and back in Hollywood. Moving up from extorting the studios, he now worked as a producer of B-pictures, including the very successful T-Men.

  Mobster Aniello ‘Neil’ Dellacroce, who later became an underboss of the Gambino crime family, with Frank Sinatra in 1950. Sinatra’s life would be tainted by his connections to some of the most infamous mob families.

  In 1950 Rosselli testified to the Kefauver Committee investigating interstate organized crime. Rosselli admitted to Senator Kefauver that he knew nearly all the Mafia leaders throughout the country, which led Kefauver to declare the Capone syndicate a national organization, the first time such an accusation had been made.

  After the Kefauver hearings, Rosselli had trouble finding work in Hollywood and moved to represent the Chicago Mob developing the casinos in Las Vegas, but not before using his Mob influence to revive the career of a fading singer and actor – Frank Sinatra.

  Frank Sinatra

  Rumours of Frank Sinatra’s links with the Mafia shadowed him throughout his life. According to released FBI files, they concluded that he was neither a member of the Mafia nor had business relations with them, but he couldn’t deny knowing Mafia members socially.

  On 22 December 1946, the senior members of the American Mafia families held a conference in Havana, Cuba. This was chaired by Lucky Luciano, who’d been exiled from the US, and Meyer Lansky, head of the Jewish Syndicate, and included representatives from all the major syndicates in organized crime. Sinatra, it’s said, provided the entertainment. Some even say he flew down to Cuba with Luciano’s cousin. It’s also alleged that he gave Luciano a gold cigarette case with the inscription: ‘To my dear pal Charlie from his friend Frank.’

  Then, years later in 1962, Sinatra, along with Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr and Eddie Fisher, gave a concert at the Villa Venice Supper Club in Wheeling, Illinois. Why did they perform in such a small place when they could play Vegas? Because, the FBI believed, the Villa Venice was owned by Mafia boss Sam Giancana.

  It would seem to be an association Sinatra could enjoy: he provided the Mafia with glamour and legitimacy, and they offered him at the very least a little toughness in the public eye, if not actual muscle. Sinatra had always fancied himself as a tough guy, but if he began a fight he’d most likely let one of his minders finish it for him. With Mob connections, he had some edge.

  Sinatra provided the Mafia with glamour and legitimacy, and they offered him at the very least a little toughness in the public eye, if not actual muscle.

  From Here to Eternity

  When it came to casting the film From Here to Eternity in 1952, Sinatra’s name wouldn’t have been high up the list. At that time, he’d appeared in 12 movies but definitely wasn’t a movie star, his singing career was on the slide and he’d been dropped by Columbia Records. When it was suggested to Columbia Pictures’ head Harry Cohn that Sinatra be given a supporting role in From Here to Eternity, Cohn responded: ‘Who the hell wants to see that skinny asshole in a major movie?’

  HOLLYWOOD NITE LIFE

  IN 1945, MICKEY Cohen involved Frank Sinatra in investing in Hollywood Nite Life, a weekly entertainment newspaper. Run by Jimmy Tarantino, the magazine would dig up dirt on Hollywood celebrities and then threaten to publish the information if the stars didn’t pay them off. According to Tarantino, Sinatra put up $15,000 to launch the magazine. Ultimately, the stars had had enough and brought Tarantino to trial. He was convicted for extortion.

  Frank Sinatra with Donna Reed in From Here to Eternity (1952). With Sinatra’s music and movie careers having stalled, it was rum
oured that Johnny Rosselli put Mob pressure on Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures to cast Sinatra in the movie.

  Sinatra signed to Capitol Records, recorded the songs for which he’s best known, and became a far bigger star than before.

  But, the story goes, Johnny Rosselli threatened Cohn with the consequences if Sinatra wasn’t given the part. Sinatra was subsequently offered the role and it won him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. His film career was re-launched, he signed to Capitol Records, recorded the songs for which he’s best known, and became a far bigger star than he’d been before.

  Lana Turner and Johnny Stompanato

  Lana Turner married eight times and was known for having many lovers, but when she found herself in bed with the Mafia it led to a fatal stabbing and a scandal that dogged her for the rest of her life.

  In 1957, Turner’s fourth marriage to Lex Barker, an actor who played Tarzan, ended. According to Cheryl Crane, Turner’s teenage daughter from her second marriage, Turner threw Barker out after Cheryl revealed that Barker had been molesting her for years.

  SAMMY DAVIS JR

  BEST KNOWN FOR her role as Hitchcock’s icy blonde in Vertigo (1958), Kim Novak was under contract to Columbia when, in 1957, she began a relationship with Sammy Davis Jr Anticipating the reactions of some to an inter-racial relationship, they tried to keep their affair quiet. When Harry Cohn heard about them, he was appalled. ‘What’s with this nigger? If he doesn’t straighten up he’ll be minus another eye.’ Three years earlier, Davis had lost his left eye in a car crash.