City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

  Once the contracts were signed, Hoffenstein set to work writing a script, and Dreiser, who had discovered a new girl, set off with her for Cuba, leaving no forwarding address. When Hoffenstein finished his script and wanted to get Dreiser’s approval, Dreiser could not be found. Paramount sent out official notices that filming would soon begin. Dreiser reappeared in New Orleans, and denounced all previous correspondence as “the usual Hollywood swill and bunk.” He demanded the right to discuss Hoffenstein’s script. With some trepidation, Hoffenstein sent his screenplay to New Orleans and asked if he could meet Dreiser there. “IF YOU CAN DISCUSS THIS AMICABLY OTHERWISE NOT,” Dreiser wired back. Amicable as could be, Hoffenstein flew to New Orleans, to find at his hotel a note from Dreiser saying that the script was “nothing less than an insult,” and that “to avoid saying how deeply I feel this, I am leaving New Orleans now without seeing you. You will understand, I am sure.”

  Hoffenstein understood. Paramount understood. The studio went ahead and started making the movie. Dreiser publicly denounced it, before filming even started, as “a cheap, tawdry, tabloid confession story.” He threatened legal action if Paramount went ahead. Paramount delayed long enough to invite him to state his views and objections, then resumed work on the film. Dreiser denounced all of Hollywood as “Hooeyland” and declared that An American Tragedy had been “traduced” into “a Mexican comedy.” And he did sue, demanding that Paramount show cause why it should not be restrained from distributing the film. Since such a suit by an artist defending his work against Hollywood adaptation was extremely rare, almost unprecedented, cultural historians tend to see Dreiser as the hero of the trial in White Plains, New York, in 1931, but in fact the Paramount attorneys blackened Dreiser’s reputation and the judge rejected his petition.

  Nearly ten years later, ten years poorer and wearier, Dreiser moved back to Hollywood, partly to negotiate a movie sale of Sister Carrie. He hated the place. “This region is stuffed with hard boiled savage climbers,” he wrote to his old friend H. L. Mencken, “the lowest grade of political grafters, quacks not calculable as to number or variety, all grades of God-shouters . . . and loafers, prostitutes, murderers and perverts.” To another friend, he offered another objection: “The movies are solidly Jewish. They’ve dug in, employ only Jews with American names. . . . The dollar sign is the guide—mentally & physically. That America should be led—the mass—by their direction is beyond all believing. In addition they are arrogant, insolent and contemptuous.”

  But he thought he could sell Sister Carrie to Universal, and he wrote the decaying John Barrymore to urge him to “live to present Hurstwood for me.” For the sake of “the dollar sign,” the once-uncompromising Dreiser was even willing to make compromises with the Johnston Office. To the objection that Carrie’s “sins” were never punished, he proposed that this “can be adjusted.” He even suggested, about his first and best novel, that “a different ending could be used—a somewhat more optimistic ending—several of which I have in mind.” So now that Dreiser was willing to be reasonable, as the phrase goes, a deal could be made. It was not Universal, though, but RKO that rescued Dreiser from deepening poverty in the fall of 1940 by buying Sister Carrie for forty thousand dollars.

  In his politics, however, Dreiser was anything but reasonable. The only constants, tenuously linked by his sympathy for the downtrodden, were an unreasoning devotion to Stalin’s Russia and an equally unreasoning hatred of the British Empire. This led Dreiser into some weird positions. He rather admired not only Stalin but Hitler, and so, almost alone among American radicals, he felt no shame over the Hitler-Stalin pact. “Hasn’t anyone ever bothered to tell you the facts of life?” he demanded of one skeptical interviewer. “Don’t you realize that France and England were all set to attack Russia?” And of President Roosevelt, who failed to share his fantasies, Dreiser wrote to Mencken: “I begin to suspect that Hitler is correct. The president may be part Jewish.”

  To organize these views, Dreiser hired for a thousand dollars a young British novelist, Cedric Belfrage, to help him write an antiwar book to be called “Is America Worth Saving?” Belfrage marveled at the great man’s obscurity in Hollywood. “I can recall introducing him to movie people whom I knew . . .” he said, “who obviously had never heard of him.” He marveled even more at Dreiser’s working habits: “Along about noon he would begin to sag with weariness and he and I would stroll along to the drugstore . . . to get a pint of whisky. With this in a paper bag we returned . . . and within a few minutes Dreiser was out of action. . . . Dreiser began to ramble and could not organize his thoughts.” Somehow, the dreadful book got patched together, acquired a new title, America Is Worth Saving, and then appeared just before Hitler’s invasion of Russia made it obsolete. Dreiser sent one autographed copy to Stalin.

  It is strange and marvelous how some dying artists are unable to die until they have finished what they feel to be their essential work. Wagner, for example, held himself together until the premiere of Parsifal and then journeyed to Venice and died. Dreiser, now past seventy, both physically and mentally infirm, determined to finish The Bulwark, that novel about the Quaker for which Horace Liveright had paid him a four-thousand-dollar advance back before the First World War. And he did it. Then he determined to complete the story of Frank Cowperwood, the raging entrepreneur who had not been heard from since the publication of The Titan in 1914. The Stoic, this last volume was called, and though Dreiser had little strength left, he kept laboring away all that summer. “While he dictated much of the writing which I took down directly on the typewriter,” Mrs. Dreiser said, “there was always the necessary discussion about scenes, action, structure, and he tired easily. . . . Day after day, we worked on opposite sides of his long work table, Teddie in his old-fashioned yellow-winged rocking chair and I at the typewriter. . . . It was all he wanted to do.”

  There was one other thing. Back in 1932, Dreiser had told Earl Browder, the head of the Communist Party, that he wanted to join. Browder, who regarded the novelist as “not . . . quite adult,” politely turned him away. But now, in the summer of 1945, Browder was expelled from the party and replaced by Dreiser’s old friend William Z. Foster. Dreiser was also getting regular visits now from John Howard Lawson, the screenwriter, who talked about literature and politics and the possibilities of Dreiser’s joining the party. And besides, Dreiser’s popularity in Russia contrasted sharply with his fading celebrity in America. When the UN was founded in San Francisco that spring, several Soviet delegates came to Los Angeles and paid courtesy calls on Dreiser. And when Dreiser wrote a letter to Stalin to ask why he never earned any royalties from Russia (the Soviets had never signed the Bern Convention and acknowledged no obligation to pay royalties to foreign authors), he soon received a check for $34,600. So there was a certain inevitability in Dreiser’s writing to Foster from Hollywood on July 20, 1945, “to tell you of my desire to become a member of the Communist Political Association.” There was an inevitability, too, in the fact that Dreiser only corrected and approved the letter of application that was actually written by a party functionary. “Dear Comrade Dreiser . . .” Foster replied. “I . . . extend to you this official welcome into our organization.”

  Shortly before Christmas, Helen Dreiser had a strange dream. “Teddie and I were operating an open plane of peculiar design,” she recalled. “He was sitting in the rear, steering it with a rudder like that of a boat. We were flying over water toward a shore on which there were hundreds of people and I was concerned with the problem of gliding into a safe landing over the heads of the crowd. Glancing back to see if all was well with Teddie, I became terrified when I saw he had fallen over to one side. I went back quickly to where he was sitting and kissed him on the side of his mouth. Then I realized I must rush back to my place or we would crash. We glided to safety on the shore. . . .”

  Christmas was not a very happy time. Dreiser sat at the piano beside an old friend and grew tearful as she played “On the Banks of the Wabash”
and other songs written by Dreiser’s celebrated brother, Paul Dresser. To another woman, he said morosely, “I am the loneliest man in the world.” He had finished a draft of The Stoic and sent it to a younger colleague, James T. Farrell, and Farrell had just sent back a nine-page commentary, suggesting revisions, particularly in the ending. “I simply stopped writing at the end because I was tired,” Dreiser confessed, adding a vow that he would somehow rewrite the last two chapters. He rewrote the next-to-last chapter on December 27, but at five o’clock he had to stop, exhausted. Mrs. Dreiser drove him to the beach at Venice, and they went for a stroll on the boardwalk, admiring a spectacular sunset, which Mrs. Dreiser described as “all blended in neutral shades of grays and blues with streaks of turquoise and cerise.”

  At three o’clock in the morning, he called out, “Helen, I have an intense pain.” He struggled out of bed and then fell down. Mrs. Dreiser called a doctor, who provided drugs and an oxygen tent. Dreiser survived the night. A friend came the next day and asked him how he felt. Dreiser said only, “Bum.” As Mrs. Dreiser sat alone next to the dozing man, she noticed that his hands were cold. Then he suddenly said, “Kiss me, Helen.” “I did, on the side of the mouth,” she said, recalling her dream, “and then I kissed him again.” Dreiser kept sinking, fading, until, at about six o’clock in the morning of December 28, “his breath became shallower and shallower until I felt it stop.”

  There were some of Dreiser’s leftist friends who thought that the old radical wouldn’t want to be buried in Forest Lawn, but Helen Dreiser knew better. She remembered that they had been at a funeral in the Whispering Pines section that August, and Dreiser had remarked to her that he had “never seen a more beautiful resting place.” So she had the funeral service held at Forest Lawn’s Church of the Recessional, and the organist played Bach’s “Come, Kindly Death.” To an audience of less than a hundred people, John Howard Lawson delivered a eulogy on the forces that had led Dreiser to communism. Charlie Chaplin then recited one of Dreiser’s poems, which Mrs. Dreiser later had inscribed on a plaque at the grave:

  Oh, space!

  Change!

  Toward which we run

  So gladly,

  Or from which we retreat

  In terror—

  Yet that promises to bear us

  In itself

  Forever.

  Oh, what is this

  That knows the road I came?

  Then he was buried in an expensive lot in the Whispering Pines section. It was not far from the grave where Tom Mix lay, still wearing the belt buckle that spelled out his name in diamonds.

  Bugsy Siegel, Hollywood’s favorite racketeer, came to a bloody end (top). Below, he enjoyed joking with his friend George Raft.

  8

  Treachery

  (1946)

  In the summers, the temperatures in the Mojave Desert rise to more than 120 degrees. Along what is now U.S. Route 15, running northeast from Barstow, the creosote bushes and the samphire stand like miniature skeletons in the grayish alkali flats. Everything seems lifeless, lifeless and eternally hot. So the two men who drove here one day in 1945 had loaded cans of extra gasoline and water into the back of their car for the three-hundred-mile trip from Los Angeles, but the bigger of the two kept grumbling about the hardships of the journey to this remote outpost known as Las Vegas. The smaller man, who stood barely five feet four but seemed to be in charge of the expedition, admitted later that Las Vegas was “a dinky, horrible, little oasis town,” but he said that the two of them would be pioneers. Here in the middle of nowhere, as he subsequently told an interviewer, here in this baked and parched wasteland, they would build the greatest gambling casino in the world. (“Here we’ll have fun . . .” the Widow Begbick had said, “Gin and whiskey/Girls and boys. . . .”)

  “We decided to . . . call it the Flamingo,” said the little man, a Polish-born entrepreneur named Maier Suchowljansky, better known as Meyer Lansky. “We thought up the name one day when we were at Hialeah Race Track, in Florida. There’s a pretty little lake there and in the evening you can watch the flocks of pink flamingoes rise in the sky. There’s a local legend that flamingoes are a sign of good luck and anyone who shoots the birds will have seven years of misfortune. So because of the good luck connection, Bugsy had the idea of naming our Las Vegas project.”

  Bugsy was the nickname hated by the man who bore it, Ben Siegel. He and Lansky had grown up in the slums of New York, Lansky on the Lower East Side, Siegel in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. According to one hardly credible tale, they first met when Lansky acted as Good Samaritan and rescued the twelve-year-old Siegel from a girl’s bedroom, where he was being furiously assaulted by the girl’s young lover, Salvatore Lucania, later to become Lucky Luciano. More likely, all three of the future gangsters met in the ordinary course of New York street warfare.

  Both Lansky and Siegel came from poor but respectable families. Though neither boy got beyond grammar school, the elder Lanskys found their son a job as a tool and die maker; Siegel’s brother Maurice eventually became a successful physician in Los Angeles. New York’s East Side provided endless temptations to a pair of ambitious boys, however, particularly when Prohibition brought to organized crime a quasi-legitimacy, even glamour. The New York underworld was roughly divided, during these years of the late 1920’s, between the Italian mobsters like Luciano, Frank Costello, and Joey Adonis, and the Jewish gangs headed by Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. Lansky and Siegel soon organized their own bootlegging operation, with the help of such future celebrities as Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer and Abner “Longie” Zwillman. They apparently did not control any specific “territory” but simply imported large quantities of high-quality liquor, notably from the Canadian distilleries of Samuel Bronfman, and sold it wherever profits were to be found. By the mid-1920’s, Lansky and his partners were estimated to be making, after such expenses as five million dollars per year in graft, an annual profit of four million dollars.

  The end of Prohibition in 1934 forced the bootleggers to find new fields of endeavor. Some, like Joseph P. Kennedy, became eminently respectable. Sam Bronfman evolved into the philanthropic patriarch of Seagram’s Distilleries, and Lewis Rosentiel did much the same at Schenley’s. Others shifted their efforts into various forms of what is commonly called racketeering. Buchalter, for one, built a substantial commercial empire by simply extorting money from Jewish enterprises, notably clothing and fur stores, butcher shops, groceries, and restaurants. He was all too successful. His notoriety soon made him a prime target for Thomas E. Dewey, who had received a state appointment in 1935 as a special district attorney in charge of racketeering. Lansky was more discreet. He decided to leave New York and to organize a gambling empire in the South. From his new headquarters in Miami, he developed the casinos of Florida’s Gold Coast, the luxurious resorts around New Orleans, and the pleasure domes of Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba. Lansky always remained in the background, a quiet, polite little man, rarely seen, and never convicted of anything, and yet he played as large a part as anyone in creating the flamboyant social style of what is known today as the Sunbelt.

  Lansky’s friend Siegel also decided to leave New York at the end of Prohibition, but the place that lured him was Los Angeles, and particularly Hollywood. In contrast to Lansky, Siegel loved display, glitter, celebrity. When he moved west in 1936, he first rented a mansion on McCarthy Drive from the opera singer Lawrence Tibbett. Then he began building a mansion of his own on Delfern Avenue in Holmby Hills. He had red marble walls installed in his bathroom, and a tier of slot machines in his lounge, and secret passages from the sliding bookshelves in his library up to the attic. He enrolled himself in the Hillcrest Country Club and his two daughters at the DuBrock Riding Academy.

  In a society that regarded Jack Warner and Harry Cohn as distinguished feudal barons, Siegel fitted quite well. Raymond Chandler, who took note of such things, saw a band of studio executives trooping back from lunc
h one day and paused to marvel at the sight. “They looked so exactly like a bunch of topflight Chicago gangsters moving in to read the death sentence on the beaten competitor,” he wrote to a friend. “It brought home to me in a flash the strange psychological and spiritual kinship between the operations of big money business and the rackets. Same faces, same expressions, same manners. Same way of dressing and same exaggerated leisure of movement.”

  Siegel seems to have nourished a secret ambition to become a movie star. He was good-looking in a rugged, square-chinned way, certainly as much so as his old friend George Raft, who had once been a New York street-corner tough named Georgie Ranft and who now made four thousand dollars a week. Siegel was vain about his looks; he massaged his face with skin creams and slept with an elastic strip tied under his chin. But it was beneath him to seek work as a mere actor, for he was already rich and successful. He called himself a “sportsman.” His sponsor in Hollywood society was a wealthy woman, born Dorothy Taylor, who preened herself on bearing the title of Countess Di Frasso. Her wealth, estimated at between ten and fifteen million dollars, came from her father’s leather-goods factory in upstate New York, and her title came from her second husband, a penniless Roman who remained in Rome while his countess gave parties in Beverly Hills. She had just finished a stormy affair with Gary Cooper when she met Siegel at the Santa Anita racetrack and decided that he would do nicely as Cooper’s successor.

  What Bugsy Siegel really did in Los Angeles remains half hidden in clouds of police speculation, for nobody knows with much precision what actually happens in the underworld. Siegel liked to gamble, and he often bet as much as five thousand dollars a day on horse races, which generally came out as he expected. That, he told the Internal Revenue Service, was the only source of his income, which he claimed was about fifty thousand dollars a year. Any reports that said otherwise were hearsay. To the extent that the eastern gangs did form a national crime syndicate, though, Siegel seems to have been their chief representative in Los Angeles, and to the extent that they dominated all forms of gambling, Siegel controlled a large share in these operations—bookmaking, roulette, crap games, numbers, everything. According to one account, he also explored, like Willie Bioff, the possibilities of organizing a union of movie extras—the kind of union that would be paid by the studios not to strike—but Siegel’s real profession was gambling.