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

by Kieron Connolly

  Laynie Jacobs in court in 1991 when she was sentenced for murder. Eight years earlier she’d been a Mob-backed cocaine dealer in a relationship with a major Hollywood figure and had been hoping to become a producer.

  They drove into the desert where, in a remote canyon, Radin was shot 12 times. His body wasn’t found for six weeks.

  Cocaine and The Cotton Club Murder

  Roy Radin’s Hollywood connection began with a limousine ride. His life ended, a few months later, with another limousine ride when, on 13 May 1983, Laynie Jacobs, a business associate, who, like Radin, was trying to get into movies, invited him to dinner. She picked him up in a limousine from his Hollywood hotel, but instead of heading to a Beverly Hills restaurant, they set off in the other direction. Soon two bodyguards climbed into the limo and Jacobs skipped out. They drove north into the desert and sagebrush where, in a remote canyon, Radin was shot 12 times. His body wasn’t found for six weeks.

  Conceived as ‘The Godfather with music’, The Cotton Club’s off-screen drama proved more interesting – one murder, three Las Vegas casino owners financing the film and an out-of-control budget.

  Chicago, 1934. Bank robber John Dillinger admitted that he was ‘nuts about Clark Gable’. Followed on leaving the cinema on the left where he’d been to see Gable in Manhattan Melodrama, Dillinger was shot by federal agents in the alleyway on the right.

  Radin had recently become connected to major Hollywood players when producer Robert Evans, the head of production at Paramount at the time of The Godfather, wanted to make a film noir with music and dancing centred around The Cotton Club nightclub. It would be a big-budget story about bootleggers. Now working as an independent producer, however, Evans had failed to find finance from the studios and was looking elsewhere for investment. Then one evening an unemployed dancer working as a limousine driver, Gary Keys, got talking to him. If Keys could help find some financing for the film, he’d be given a role, Evans promised.

  Soon the dancer introduced Evans to Laynie Jacobs, who quickly became Evans’s girlfriend and fellow cocaine snorter. She was, in fact, a thirty-something mid-level drug dealer from Miami, and she introduced Evans to 33-year-old Radin, who had made a lot of money in vaudeville shows of chimps, jugglers and down-on-their-luck celebrities. Radin was willing to invest and had connections to other potential investors. And, like Jacobs and Evans, he also had a cocaine habit.

  MUTUAL ADMIRATION

  THE MOVIES AND the Mafia have always fed off each other, with bank robber John Dillinger admitting learning how to wear his hat, how to swagger and how to hold a gun from repeated viewings of Jesse James under the Black Flag (1921). He was, he said, ‘nuts about Clark Gable’. In fact, so ‘nuts’ about the star that he was followed to a cinema where he watched Manhattan Melodrama (1934), in which Clark Gable played a gangster on death row. On leaving the cinema, Dillinger was challenged by federal agents, attempted to flee and was gunned down.

  Bugsy Siegel liked to socialize with famous actors and even had some personal screen tests made – though nothing came of it. After George Raft’s success in Scarface (1932), a film based on the career of Al Capone and that glamorized mobsters, Siegel (pictured, below left, with Raft) even began to wear suits like Raft’s character in the movie.

  In Scarface, Raft, who’d grown up among gangsters in New York, was given a bit of business flipping a coin in one scene, whereupon several gangsters took it up to the point where it became a gangland trademark. Obsessed by the movie, Capone summoned Raft, wanting to know how closely the film was supposed to represent his life. After all, at the end of the film Scarface dies in a shoot-out with police. Raft reassured him the film was just fiction. As indeed it was. Capone developed dementia caused by syphilis and died following a heart attack in 1947.

  As Warren Beatty, who played Bugsy Siegel on screen, said: ‘Gangsters tried to copy Hollywood as much as Hollywood tried to copy gangsters … They were all part of the romantic swirl of American drama.’ Even the term ‘The Godfather’ wasn’t used among mobsters until Mario Puzo created it.

  Hollywood is as popular as ever with the Mafia. Advances in film technology have made piracy easier, with DVD piracy offering a higher profit margin than any drug.

  All was going well until Radin decided to cut Jacobs out of the film. Somehow he hadn’t taken on board her Mafia connections who were supplying the cocaine. Jacobs thought that Radin had stolen a quarter of a million dollars and ten kilos of cocaine from her apartment, and now Radin had pushed her off the movie: she wasn’t going to be a film producer after all. Radin was first offered $3 million to walk away from the movie, leave Hollywood and keep his life. But he wouldn’t be persuaded. So, Jacobs organized Radin’s limousine ride into the desert.

  Years later, Laynie Jacobs was apprehended and in 1991 the case came to court. Robert Evans didn’t testify as a witness, protected from possibly incriminating himself by pleading the Fifth Amendment. Jacobs and the hit men were sentenced to life for murder.

  The Cotton Club did find financing in 1983 from Ed and Fred Doumani and Victor Sayyah, who were Las Vegas casino owners. The film went wildly over budget, was a flop at the box office and is now regarded as one of Hollywood’s bigger disasters.

  The Mob and Hollywood Today

  It might seem that the age of the Mob and Hollywood is over, but Hollywood is as popular as ever with the Mafia. Advances in film technology have made piracy easier with, for example, illegal Chinese immigrants imported to Spain to burn pirate DVDs (one unit could burn 150,000 DVDs a day). Regarded wrongly by many as a victimless crime, DVD piracy has a higher profit margin than any drug. A DVD that can be made for 50 cents in the US can be sold in London for £5 ($8). It’s also less risky than drug-dealing. The piracy business is estimated by US government agencies to be worth up to $350 billion a year and some major films are now released globally on the same day to try and beat the pirates.

  Nor is it only the Mafia who profit from piracy. Intellectual property crime has also become the preferred method of funding for some terrorist organizations, with illegal DVDs a major component. While buying a pirate DVD might seem as if it’s only cheating a movie studio out of a little money, the question to ask is, where is the money going instead? Towards terrorism? To the Mafia? Ever since the Mafia muscled in on the unions in the 1930s, organized crime has found a way to make money out of Hollywood. It continues to do so.

  Movies love mobsters, but mobsters also love movies. Warren Beatty (right) as mobster ‘Bugsy’ Siegel in Bugsy (1991), who extorted Hollywood studios but had private screen tests made, too.

  During the 1950s and 1960s Jayne Mansfield tried to follow in the wake of Marilyn Monroe as a peroxide blonde sex symbol, but never achieved the same degree of success. She was killed in a car crash in 1967.

  VI

  HOLLYWOOD

  SEX

  In Hollywood sex can help a starlet to success, or occasionally become the trade she plies if she doesn’t make it; it can be the secret the star has to hide or the indulgence the star can finally enjoy. Its appeal can make careers, but it can also ruin them; it can be cut out of films, but not out of life. And in Hollywood, where lives are heightened, the sex is always more extreme.

  ‘They can’t censor the gleam in my eye.’

  One might think that Hollywood films began tame and have become progressively more risqué, but in fact nudity was a popular feature of American cinema from its very early days. Theda Bara became known in the 1910s for vamp roles in exotic parts such as The Queen of Sheba and Cleopatra, in which she appeared in diaphanous robes and a bra seemingly made of serpents. While in a waterfall sequence in 1916’s A Daughter of the Gods, Annette Kellerman appeared totally naked, with only her long hair to protect her modesty. And then, just as now, there were criticisms that the nudity was gratuitous.

  But it wasn’t just the women. Writer Elinor Glyn insisted that the men in her films in the 1920s would be seen in tight silk tights and without jockstraps. �
�I do not believe in interfering with nature,’ she explained. Necessary for the plot or not, Cecil B. DeMille was so taken with the first nude bathing scene he filmed in 1919’s Male & Female that he ensured there was one in each of his next films.

  Hays’s Formula

  So, if audiences, with a few vocal exceptions, were enjoying a bit of nudity or near-nudity in the melodramas, who stopped all the fun? Well, in part, Hollywood itself. After the scandals of Roscoe Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin and William Desmond Taylor, the Dream Factory had not only become the spinner of stories, but the story itself. So when President Harding’s postmaster-general Will Hays was made president of the newly created Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America in 1922, his function was not only to clean up what Hollywood got up to off screen but on screen as well. The defence of artistic free speech in film had been lost in 1915, when the Supreme Court had declared that movies were not protected under the First Amendment, after which individual states began running their own censorship boards. Under Hays, the idea was that the film-makers would release their films already censored, and so they wouldn’t need to be cut depending on different states’ standards.

  One way around the censors of the 1920s was to film classical stories about sinful characters who might ultimately be redeemed or punished. Pictured is Claudette Colbert bathing in ass’s milk in The Sign of the Cross (1932).

  At first the Hays list wasn’t taken seriously: in Queen Kelly Gloria Swanson was seen taking off her knickers and throwing them at an army officer, who then caressed his face with them.

  Hays quickly introduced a list of recommendations on suitable screen content, while a Doom Book was compiled of 117 Hollywood names deemed unsafe because of their no-longer-private lives. At first, Hays’s list wasn’t taken seriously by the industry – as seen in 1929’s Queen Kelly, when Gloria Swanson was still taking off her knickers and throwing them at an army officer, who then caressed his face with them.

  But when, the same year, a Jesuit priest, Fr Daniel A. Lord and a lay Catholic, Martin Quigley, editor of the Motion Picture Herald, proposed a new code as a means of the industry policing itself, changes did begin to take place. Not only did the code state what could be seen on screen, it also adopted a moral tone on the messages conveyed in films: thus adultery couldn’t be portrayed as attractive, crime mustn’t pay and authority should be respected. Cecil B. DeMille’s reaction to this was to replace his more racy contemporary films about flappers with seemingly worthy Old Testament and ancient Roman subjects about sin, which still delivered a great deal of bare flesh, including a topless Claudette Colbert bathing in ass’s milk in 1932’s The Sign of the Cross.

  Historian Thomas Doherty described Hollywood under the Production Code as ‘a Jewish-owned business selling Roman Catholic theology to Protestant America’.

  The flouting of censorship finally ended, however, with the establishment of the Production Code Administration (PCA) in 1934, and for the next 30 years all American films required a certificate from the PCA to be released. Under Joseph Breen, who headed the PCA for 20 years, on-screen married couples’ bedrooms were to have two single beds, navels had to be covered and kisses couldn’t last more than eight seconds – script girls had stopwatches to time them. And there were to be no inter-racial relations.

  Even cartoons, such as Betty Boop, weren’t exempt from the Production Code. The sexy jazz character in a cocktail dress was from the more liberal 1920s, but in the 1930s she became more demure with a less revealing dress, less jewellery and even fewer curls. Having lost the sharper edge to her character, her popularity shifted from adults to children.

  So what changes did the Hays Office make to movies? One example: in the 1952 Broadway play The Seven Year Itch, a married man pursues and ultimately sleeps with a neighbour while his wife and son are away on holiday. In the film version, the Hays Office wouldn’t allow his pursuit of his neighbour, played by Marilyn Monroe, to stretch beyond his longing and fantasy. George Axelrod and Billy Wilder, the playwright and the director of the movie, felt that these restrictions had left their film toothless.

  Later, historian Thomas Doherty described Hollywood under the Production Code as ‘a Jewish-owned business selling Roman Catholic theology to Protestant America’.

  Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell as her married neighbour in The Seven Year Itch (1955). The film-makers wanted to show a hairpin being found in the man’s bed to indicate that he’d been adulterous, but the censors wouldn’t allow it.

  In screwball comedies the studios began producing feisty female characters who were equal, or superior, to their men.

  Censorship, however, could have its virtues. ‘When the censor objects to something,’ said director Robert Mamoulian, ‘you invent a different way of doing it that is much more interesting, much more erotic.’ So as the film-makers of the 1930s were unable to make films that lingered on women’s semi-naked bodies, they had to come up with something else, and in screwball comedies began producing feisty female characters who were equal, or superior, to their men. Rather than shy, pretty girls, the attractiveness of the women in Bringing up Baby and His Girl Friday was down to their intelligence and wit.

  Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in the comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938). Stricter censoring during the 1930s led Hollywood to develop intelligent, wittier roles for women.

  TUT, TUT, TUT

  MOVIES UNDER THE Hays Office had much in common with St Augustine of Hippo’s famous prayer: ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ Herman J. Mankiewicz explained the screenwriting of the era: ‘In a movie … the hero, as well as the heroine, has to be a virgin. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants, cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants. But you have to shoot him at the end.’ As long as the film-makers ultimately delivered the virtues that the Hays Office required, they could get away with a lot of vices first.

  That’s what happens in the Chicago gangster film Scarface (1932). The Hays Office banned the script, but the film was shot anyway, and, when it was released, the producers dodged the censor by adding a subtitle: ‘The Shame of a Nation’ and an exhortation: ‘This is an indictment of gang rule in America, and the careless indifference of the Government. What are you going to do about it?’ By those few words, they seemed to distance themselves from the content of their own film, when in fact they were gleefully serving up 90 minutes of exciting gang warfare and violence. St Augustine would have understood.

  Today, a similar hypocrisy remains with film-makers insisting that because they show the consequences of violence, they are justifying its graphic depiction. The truth is, many film-makers and audiences enjoy screen violence, just as they do screen sex.

  Ingrid Bergman with director and lover Roberto Rossellini in 1949. When it was revealed that Bergman, who was married, had become pregnant by Rossellini, she was hounded out of Hollywood.

  THE RAZOR’S EDGE

  PRODUCER DARRYL F. ZANUCK didn’t want to cast Anne Baxter (pictured with Tyrone Power) in the role of sexy Sophie in The Razor’s Edge (1946), because to him all women were either frumpy librarians or loose broads, and Anne Baxter was the former. So, a producer friend of Baxter’s, Gregory Ratoff, lied to Zanuck that he’d slept with Baxter … and had had a wild time. Surprised by this, Zanuck called Baxter in for a screen test and cast her in the role. She won an Oscar.

  Ingrid Bergman

  The great no-nos of Hollywood life are all sex-related: homosexuality, sex with a minor, and, previously, illegitimate pregnancies. Not only was the revelation of these damaging enough in the public eye, the Hays Office involved itself, too.

  When the rumour circulated in December 1949 that Ingrid Bergman, who was still married to her first husband Petter Aron Lindström, was pregnant by Italian film-maker Roberto Rossellini, she received a letter from Joseph Breen: ‘It goes without saying that these reports are the cause of great consternation among large numbers of our people who have come to look up
on you as the first lady of the screen, both individually and artistically … Such stories will not only not react favourably to your picture, but may very well destroy your career as a motion picture artist. They may result in the American public becoming so thoroughly enraged that your pictures will be ignored, and your box-office value ruined.’ The letter ended with Breen urging Bergman to deny the rumours, which she ignored.

  When talk circulated that Ingrid Bergman was pregnant by Italian film-maker Roberto Rossellini, the Hays Office urged her to deny the rumours.

  Errol Flynn flanked by his lawyers Jerry Giesler (left) and Robert E. Ford (right) at a court hearing for his statutory rape trial in November 1942. Peggy Satterlee, the teenager Flynn was accused of seducing, can be seen in the background.

  Ingrid Bergman said: ‘People saw me in Joan of Arc and declared me a saint. I’m not. I’m just a woman, another human being.’

  Comment was even made on Capitol Hill. Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado argued that Bergman had perpetrated ‘an assault upon the institution of marriage’. Hollywood executives threatened not only to ban Stromboli (1950), the film she’d made in Italy with Rossellini during which they’d fallen in love, but also her recent Hollywood movies, including Joan of Arc (1948). ‘If out of the degradation associated with Stromboli,’ the senator said, ‘decency and common sense can be established in Hollywood, Ingrid Bergman will not have destroyed her career for naught.’ Ed Sullivan even chose not to have her on his TV show.