West of Eden

by Jean Stein

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  MURRAY SCHUMACH (FROM HIS UNPUBLISHED BIOGRAPHY OF JULES STEIN): In September of 1933, Stein, with incredible aplomb, took what may have been the biggest chance of his life. In that month, when gangsters were becoming particularly unruly because Prohibition had ended that year and they were worried about new sources of revenue, James C. Petrillo, then head of the Chicago local of the American Federation of Musicians, telephoned Stein and urged him to come over to his office “right away.” Stein, who had dealt many times with Petrillo on union matters, trusted the union leader and knew that if Petrillo said this was an emergency, it could not wait.

  So the economy-minded Stein decided to take a cab the mile or so to Petrillo’s office. When he entered the mahogany-paneled office, with its bulletproof windows one floor above the street, the burly union leader immediately closed the heavy wooden door to prevent eavesdropping. Then he sat at his desk in a far corner of the room, out of range of the sidewalk, and in his gravelly voice said, “Your name is on the list. Better get a bodyguard.”

  This meant that Stein was marked for kidnapping. He was astounded. He asked Petrillo how he knew this, but Petrillo refused to tell him. Stein knew that Petrillo, who had frequently risked his life to keep gangsters out of the union, had excellent underworld sources.

  Not until 1975, when Petrillo was in his eighties, limping on a cane, did he feel he could finally discuss the event. By then he was living in a luxury apartment building in Chicago, and he proudly showed me a photograph on the wall of himself with President Truman, Petrillo blowing a trumpet and the president playing the piano.

  The tip, Petrillo said, while sipping brandy, had come from George E. Browne, who, with Willie Bioff, headed the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. Bioff and Browne were more than officials of the stagehands union. Federal investigators sent both to jail for extortion in 1941. The union was dominated by Al Capone and his associates, with Bioff as front man. During the 1930s, it extorted millions from the mightiest bosses of Hollywood studios, sometimes as much as fifty thousand dollars and one hundred thousand dollars at a clip.

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  JAMES PETRILLO (FROM MURRAY SCHUMACH’S UNPUBLISHED BIOGRAPHY OF JULES STEIN): George Browne was a good labor leader. He was a guy that never stole any money. But he loved to hang around with gangsters. I don’t know why. But if you go to bed with lice, you get lousy. Anyhow, he liked me and he trusted me. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t come to me with the story about Jules.

  George says to me: “What do you know about this guy, Jules Stein?”

  I tell him, “He’s a good guy.”

  Then George gives me the word. He says the snatch will be for fifty thousand dollars.

  So I called Jules and told him to come to the office. That is natural. It’s not something you discuss on the phone. Jules asks me how I know. I wasn’t going to tell Jules. How can I? What happens to George if that gets known? He gets killed. I was in the middle. I had to protect both of them. I never knew for sure which mob it was. People always like to say it was Capone. Why say Capone? It could be O’Banion. It could be Touhy.

  People don’t realize what it was like in those days. Yeah, I know they’ve seen a lot of movies about Chicago gangsters. But that’s not the same. It’s almost impossible for an outsider to realize that in those days if a guy sneezed everybody went for his gun. It was a son of a bitch. Guys would come to you to buy tickets and say: “Al sent me.” Or: “Touhy sent me.” Then they would send someone around a few days later and he’d tell you: “Everybody’s paying. So you pay, too.” There was lots of that. Nobody was bluffing in those days. If a guy said he would shoot you, you could bet on it. You would be shot.

  Well, I give the news to Jules. He is cool. That’s Jules. He just sits and bites his fingernails, the way he does when he’s excited.

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  JULES STEIN (FROM HIS UNPUBLISHED BIOGRAPHY BY MURRAY SCHUMACH): The next day, I took out a kidnapping insurance policy for seventy-five thousand dollars. I’d always known that Lloyd’s gave insurance on chancy things—like the weather. So I decided they would do this. I didn’t know who else to go to. I was pretty sure the Touhy gang was behind it. And the big gangsters in Chicago in those days, they had deals with the politicians and the police and the judges. I figured there was no sense going to the cops. Petrillo kept telling me, “Get out of town. Get out of town.” I refused to get out of town. I guess I was foolish. But I figured they just wouldn’t go after legitimate businesspeople.

  I had the guts of a fool. Since then I’ve seen lots of those movies about Chicago and the gangsters. An awful lot of ketchup has been poured in those movies. But the funny part is that when you’re living right in the midst of all this stuff, it doesn’t seem as important. I had no fear. I don’t know why. I was either too dumb or something. I walked around the streets of Chicago and I did my business the same as ever. But at the same time, before I’d get into the car, I’d look in the back to make sure there was nobody hiding there who could knock us on the head.

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  OSCAR COHEN: And who owned Petrillo? There were ten guys in Chicago who owned him.

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  JEAN STEIN: And those would have been from the Capone mob?

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  OSCAR COHEN: I guess the bad boys. I don’t know. I don’t think you could have been the head of a union, and not be, you know…any union. I mean, the American Federation of Musicians was out of Chicago. I was a kid. I couldn’t fathom all of the things that were going on. And I said to myself, maybe I just shouldn’t pay attention to it, because it can’t be true what’s going on.

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  JULES STEIN (FROM HIS UNPUBLISHED BIOGRAPHY BY MURRAY SCHUMACH): The relationship between Jimmy Petrillo and myself became a very close one over the years and it was because he found me honest. And I found that he was honest. When I made a request, there was a reason for it. If he told me, “I don’t want you to do this because it will embarrass me,” I wouldn’t do it. If I wanted to bring an orchestra into his local, for instance, and he said, “This is a tough time for me to swallow; you will have to forget it,” I forgot it. I knew Jimmy had special problems of a different sort. He was running his local with an iron hand in Chicago. And he was running up against gangsters who tried to take over his union. But he never let them do it. You never fight unions. You outthink them.

  In the early days, there were people who believed I was being backed by mobsters. But these people never realized that my medical background gave me a strong sense of ethics. Basically, medicine is an ethical profession. All my life, I never wanted to be associated in any way with anything that would tarnish my medical background.

  FROM Collier’s, MARCH 10, 1934:

  In the lobby of the building wherein Doc Stein holds forth in Chicago, Mr. Joe Kospar of East St. Louis was trying to buck up his two jaded companions. He spoke in a loud Mississippi River dialect. Many years of side-show barking and tent spieling had robbed Mr. Kospar of whatever native ability he may have had to speak in conventional conversational tones. Besides, it was six o’clock in the evening and the nightfall roar of the Loop, to say nothing of the bleating crowd in the lobby, gave him tough competition….

  “There’s the Doc now,” said Mr. Kospar, breaking through the crowd toward a smallish, dapper man with cold, direct eyes. “Hey, Doc. Doc, just a minute. Listen.”

  But somebody with the adroitness of one much practiced shouldered Joe Kospar of East St. Louis aside, and a second blocker completed the shunting by depositing Mr. Kospar back where he had come from. Doc Jules C. Stein—who manages the affairs of more than ninety per cent of the country’s dance bands, the Big He of the night club floor shows in Chicago, strode on uninterrupted, surrounded by celebrity. He was not going to a night club. Night clubs to Doc Stein are a business. He wouldn’t go to one unless business expediency commanded. It seldom does….

  Doc Stein practiced medicine for two years before diverting his talents to public amusemen
t. Under his energetic direction, there arose what his puny rivals called the band trust—the Music Corporation of America, which as I told you, manages, books, routes and dictates the engagements of more than ninety per cent of the dance bands in America.

  To sum it up, if you want a nicely polished dance orchestra guaranteed to produce no sour notes you see Doc Stein, whether it’s for the coming out party of your daughter Mary or for a movie, radio or a high-hat reception.

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  LEW WASSERMAN: I literally didn’t see your father again until I came to Los Angeles in the early part of ’37 and MCA had just moved into the Beverly Hills building. Your father and mother were renting Douglas Fairbanks’s home in Santa Monica. I was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and your father picked me up Sunday morning in a yellow Rolls-Royce convertible and drove me to the beach. It was a beautiful home. And a beautiful white sand beach. Not a soul, no people in those days. I borrowed some trunks, got a towel, and started walking to the beach. And your father said, “Where are you going? We don’t swim in the ocean, we have a swimming pool.” I had never seen a swimming pool before. I’ll never forget that.

  We were not doing much in the movie business when I came out here. I became a good friend of this gentleman named Nat Deverich, who was Leland Hayward’s partner. They had originally both worked for Myron Selznick and William Morris. They owned the town. One day Deverich had me come to the office. Hayward was on the couch, his shoes off, his tie open, no jacket. He was sprawled out having a drink. And he never got up. We never shook hands. He said, “Nat Deverich thinks you’re very bright. Why don’t you come over here? We’ll give you a third of the company and you run it.” So Leland Hayward said, “Well, I hate being in this business. My wife doesn’t like me being in it. I’m bored with it.” So I said, “If you feel that way, why don’t you sell it to us? To MCA?” Your father was in Asia, so I spent a week with Nat working out a deal. We bought the business. Now, the war was on and Gene Kelly, Jimmy Stewart, and David Niven, all these people were off in the service. When they came back, that was really the big explosion for MCA. We went from a nonentity to the number-one company in the United States.

  I let Hayward pick out any office he wanted, except your father’s and Taft Schreiber’s. The office he picked had beautiful French wallpaper and he hated French wallpaper. I said, “I’ll take it off. Anything to make the deal.” He put up a picture by Paul Klee—you know, one of those half faces with a dot in the middle. And your father came storming into my office: “This crazy painting….,” he said. “I’m gonna talk to him.” “Whatever you do, Jules, don’t upset him.” A few days later, your father came in and said, “I worked it out. He’s very happy.” Jules had the French wallpaper taken down and paneled the whole office. It cost about forty thousand dollars. And the painting stayed up.

  I started buying the lots behind the MCA building for seven to nine thousand dollars each. And your father said, “What the hell do you keep buying these lots for?” I said, “Someday, we’ll need expansion. The war’ll be over.”

  Jules kicked me upstairs in ’46 and I became CEO. He owned the entire company. He said to me, “You run it. I’m going to devote the rest of my life to medicine.” He said that at the suggestion of your mother. From that day to the day he died, we had only one disagreement. And he never once said to me, “Why didn’t you do it that way?” He never second-guessed. From ’46 till ’54, when they distributed shares to the executives, he owned the whole company. And I bought, I don’t know, a dozen more talent agencies all over the world. We had offices in Germany, France, Italy, England—we had a monopoly. I made twenty-seven trips in one year before there were jets from here to England.

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  JIM MURRAY: The relationship among us at MCA was a caste system. Lew Wasserman was on the moon. I couldn’t tell you what your father did, because it was unknown to us as linemen, me being a line agent. Like Taft Schreiber. If you asked me what Schreiber did, I couldn’t tell you, but you knew that he was very, very big. It went down the caste and there was the Picture Department, the Television Department, and the Personal Appearance Department. We were considered the lowest, and yet we generated an awful lot of money, we found a lot of unknown talent that became motion picture stars, but we were in that caste down there. The Picture Department were all snobs, very snobbish. When I say snobs, they didn’t make fun of us or anything, we were just beneath them.

  I’ve got to say this to you, in the twenty years I was at MCA, none of what we’re talking about with the boys with the crooked noses, or the mobsters, was visible. None was. You couldn’t say these guys were connected with the mob. It was so classy, and so clean, and professional, that for me, all those years, I did not see it. I knew it, but I didn’t see it. That’s how I feel MCA operated in the day of your dad. They were all in shirts and jackets. The mob affiliation was kept really top secret. MCA was too classy to be involved with that kind of a story.

  My name was changed from Murray Fusco to Jim Murray when I became an agent. MCA did not give business cards that easily. They had to make sure that you looked like an agent, acted like an agent, and then they’d give you a business card. So in those days when people asked me for my business card, I’d say, “Oh, I forgot it.” So I’d write it out on napkins.

  There was an agent by the name of John Dugan. He was an Irishman. He looked like the actor James Cagney, he was that small, and he called me into his office, and he says, “Murray, we’ve got to change your name.” I said, “Why do we have to change my name?” He said, “Because it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t sound right, so we’re going to give you a new name.” I said, “What’s my name?” He said, “Jim Murray.” So my first name became my last name. He made an Irishman out of me. I loved it, because I was getting a business card. How many times can you write your name on a napkin?

  We had an act called Divina. She was a girl that swam in a tank nude. Nude. She worked out of a tank that was maybe eight feet square, and we would book the act in bars, and they would have to tear the walls down to get the tank in and then put the walls back up.

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  JEAN STEIN: What did Divina look like?

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  JIM MURRAY: Oh, we had a different one every week. It didn’t matter. You didn’t have to be anything but a stripper. We even had one in Staten Island. We had five or six units.

  I went through three years in Chicago. When Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis split, I got Jerry the first job at Chez Paree. So I book him, and I go to the opening at the Chez, and the line was around the block. I knew they were all gangsters. Everybody at the Chez was gangsters. That was the start of Jerry Lewis’s career alone, without Dean, and he did very well at the Chez.

  Later, when I was working in Vegas, Woody Allen, a nice man, arrived at the airport. I pick him up. I picked up all the stars. I pick him up and he’s got a little case that he’s carrying his clarinet in and a carry-on on his arm, a very small piece of luggage. He had one sports jacket that he did the entire show with, every show, a brown tweed sports jacket. And I booked him with Petula Clark. Petula was basically the star of the show. It was a fantastic show. It did so much business you can’t believe it. My selfish thought was that I want to separate them now. By separating them I got two deals, right, so I split them up. She comes in, does a big, big job. Now he arrives, with the clarinet, same thing, and he dies, no business at all. Had him there for three weeks. First week he says, “Jim, I don’t want my check, I don’t deserve to get paid.” So he had me go to the crooked noses and say, “He wants you to keep the check.” “Absolutely not! He gets the check whether he likes it or not.” He wouldn’t take it. He’s the only one I ever heard of that wanted to give seventy-five thousand back to Caesars Palace. His act was very dry. It wasn’t the kind of comedy you could listen to and drink and smoke.

  I was transferred to the Miami office in ’58 because I was supposed to be the agent for Cuba based on my expertise in the nightclub business. My function
would be to book acts there and in Miami. I went twice to Cuba, and once I introduced myself to George Raft at the Capri. I was amazed to see the shows after going to Vegas. There were more showgirls, not as staged as they were in Vegas, and they had a lot of big-boob girls dancing. But it all came to a dead end one day when one of the agents in the Miami office came to me and said, “Jim, it’s not going to work for you. Cuba is dead, Castro’s there. What are you going to do now?” I said, “What do you want me to do? I’ll clean swimming pools.”

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  CONNIE BRUCK: Lew Wasserman was good at navigating private deals seamlessly and untraceably, so Ronald Reagan’s reputation somehow emerged unscathed from the corruption, but it was no secret that the relationship between Reagan and MCA went beyond the usual symbiosis of agent and client. In 1941, for example, Wasserman sought to extend Reagan’s deferment from active military duty by writing a letter for Jack Warner to sign, then made him the biggest deal in the agency’s history. Wasserman tripled Reagan’s salary, and by adding a few extra weeks to the seven-year contract, made it an even one million dollars. As the two men got closer, Wasserman guided Reagan through the political thickets of Hollywood. Sidney Korshak was close with the actor, too. Much attention has been paid to Reagan’s appearance as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, but Reagan made his political debut before that, taking the side of the studios—and the mob—in a critical episode in Hollywood’s long-running, violent labor wars. His 1946 presentation in front of the Screen Actors Guild during that battle probably paved the way for his election as SAG president the following year. It was from this position that Reagan and Wasserman, by then MCA’s president and CEO, really got into business together.