When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  It was an odd fastidiousness, considering Stein’s own relationships in Chicago. When Judge Marovitz was told of Stein’s outspoken avoidance of Korshak, he said he did not find it difficult to understand. “Jules had to do certain things, to not be harmed, to be able to do business,” he said. “But some of these guys want to brag that somebody’s their friend—and Jules wouldn’t want someone like Korshak bragging that Jules is his friend. So Jules kept him distant.”

  Such scruples were uncommon in Hollywood. Even Johnny Roselli had been accepted to a degree; and while he had remade himself (he dressed in an understated way, avoided using profanity, and cultivated an appreciation for fine wines), one could still see, beneath the veneer, the thug he was. At one time he even held the job of associate producer, despite the fact that he was illiterate. (Arturo Pettorino, a maître d’ for the Outfit at many of the clubs and restaurants they controlled, recalled Roselli one night summoning him into the men’s room, where he showed Pettorino a note a woman had just written him, and demanded to know what it said.) And Ben “Bugsy” Siegel—so nicknamed because as a youth, in league with Meyer Lansky in New York’s Lower East Side, he had killed with such ferocity that even his cohorts questioned his sanity—had arrived in Los Angeles in 1937, and he, too, had found a measure of social acceptance. He was handsome, meticulously groomed, and favored cashmere suits. Hillcrest Country Club, where the Jewish moguls belonged, was their elegant, nicely understated answer to the posh clubs that barred them, and it mirrored those clubs in reverse: only Jews were eligible, and they had to be sponsored by existing members and approved by a committee. Siegel was duly nominated, and he passed the test. (According to club legend, however, the members had not realized who he was, and when they did, he was asked to resign—by someone chosen for the task because of his advanced age and infirmity.) In the late thirties, Richard Gully began seeing Siegel socially because Siegel was having an affair with Gully’s friend, Countess Dorothy del Frasso, an American heiress who had married an Italian nobleman. Gully mentioned to Siegel that he needed a job. “He said, ‘You’ll have a job tomorrow,’ ” Gully recalled. “He called Mark Hellinger, a producer who did gangster pictures for Warner Bros., and said, ‘Put Gully on the payroll.’ I had nothing to do, I used to wander around the sets. The power of the underworld!”

  In the early forties, Siegel was having an affair with another woman, Virginia Hill, notorious for her liaisons with a number of mobsters; and her brother had an apartment at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont (then home to many writers, including Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley), where Siegel and Hill often stayed. Screenwriter Edward Anhalt lived there at that time as well; a New Yorker, he had known Frank Costello and Charles “Lucky” Luciano fairly well, and he and Siegel became good friends. “Ben Siegel was fearless,” Anhalt said. “He drove around in this convertible woodie, the only one I ever saw. For a guy who shouldn’t have been so visible, it was crazy. I said that to him, but he said, ‘Nobody’s gonna bother me.’ ” They would go to Rothschild’s barbershop together (“It was above a clothing store,” Anhalt recalled, “but you wouldn’t have known it was there—the wiseguys all went there, and the owner didn’t want anyone there he didn’t know”) and to dinner at Dave’s Blue Room. They talked a lot about Anhalt’s writing a script about Siegel. Siegel was keen on the idea—he had theatrical ambitions, and was taking voice lessons, in an effort to overcome his Brooklyn accent. “Ben introduced me to Sidney Korshak, who he said was his consigliere,” Anhalt said. “He said Korshak would help on the movie.” These plans, however, were cut short on June 20, 1947, when Siegel was killed by several shotgun blasts as he sat in the living room of a Spanish-style mansion Virginia Hill had rented in Beverly Hills. Over the years, Anhalt continued, he came to know Korshak fairly well. “People were afraid of him, of course, but he was meticulously polite, unlike many of his contemporaries,” Anhalt commented, smiling. “And I thought he was fascinated with crime, and with show business.”

  Well integrated in the Hollywood social scene as the mob’s emissaries had been before, Korshak would achieve a level of recognition and respect that was different not only in degree but in kind from his predecessors’. The fact that he was a lawyer gave him a patina of legitimacy, particularly for those who wanted to rationalize their association with him. But legitimacy really was not the coin of the realm. Korshak had presence (“When he entered, it shook up the room,” recalled Pettorino); and in this community, that counted for nearly everything. His physical attributes were passable—he was tall, with regular enough, if rather fleshy features, in an undistinguished countenance—but this one barely noticed. For Korshak had perfected the intimation of power (and dark power, at that), subtly conveyed. He exhibited none of the clichéd attributes of his compatriots, in their white ties on white shirts, with their icy eyes, bejeweled, meaty hands, and hair-trigger tempers. Korshak, one felt, wouldn’t deign to raise his voice; his kind of threat was, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” uttered ever so quietly; he was debonair, beautifully dressed in hand-tailored suits, and so smooth that the boys in Chicago called him “Mr. Silk Stockings.”

  Lew Wasserman, an MCA agent who arrived in Los Angeles in 1939, recalled that he, Korshak, and a young actor named Ronald Reagan, who was one of MCA’s handful of movie clients at the time, used to socialize together. “In those days, money was not something people talked about. It didn’t matter that Reagan was making $200 a week, I was making about $300, and Sidney, much more.” Wasserman paused, seeming to consider. “We didn’t know just what Sidney was making, or what he was doing. He was a lawyer, very accepted in the community. And he was a good friend of mine for fifty years.”

  When Wasserman, a candidate for MCA’s publicity department, had appeared in the doorway of Stein’s Chicago office in 1936, Stein made a quick appraisal. A tall, spindly twenty-three-year-old in a suit Stein considered tasteless, Wasserman had not gone to college; hiring him, therefore, would mean an exception to the rule. But Stein’s brother Bill was keen on Wasserman. So before Wasserman even stepped into his office, Stein agreed to give him a chance, but warned him that the position might be only temporary, and he should “arrange his personal affairs accordingly.” Wasserman did not have much to arrange. He was doing advertising for the Mayfair Casino in Cleveland, making $100 a week, and living with his wife’s parents. He’d already worked at several Cleveland theaters, including the Palace and the Hippodrome (where he did a publicity stunt using hearses and caskets for a Dracula show); and he had been booking MCA bands for several years. It had become standard practice: MCA would send Wasserman its advertising materials, a source of considerable pride at the company—and he would redo them. “Finally, Bill Stein came down to see me and asked why I was doing that. And I said, ‘Because I don’t like it, I think it’s old-fashioned.’ You know,” Wasserman added, “when you’re twenty, you know everything.”

  His taking the MCA job meant a move to Chicago and a pay cut (Stein would pay him only $60 a week)—but Wasserman was well aware that MCA was a national powerhouse in the band-booking business, and that Stein had just decided to break into the movie business as well. He was very impressed by Stein. “He was a new breed of agent. He was a doctor, he wore a pince-nez, he dressed like a doctor—not like those guys in plaid jackets hanging around the Brill Building in New York,” Wasserman remarked. In addition, Wasserman’s prospects at the Mayfair Casino were bleak, despite its having opened with great fanfare just the year before. “They spent eight to ten million building the Mayfair,” Wasserman said. “It was modeled on the Chez Paree. It was really beautiful, with a dramatic entryway, a long narrow lobby, a big oblong-shaped bar. There was to be gambling—but then a new mayor was elected, and he said, no gambling!” The Mayfair was limping along at the time Stein interviewed Wasserman, but by the following year it went bankrupt. As at the Chez Paree, there were front men and then the real owners. Herman Pirchner, who sold his interest in the Mayfair Café, a family restaurant,
to the new owners, was quoted in The Last Mogul by Dennis McDougal as saying that those with the biggest stake were four members of the Syndicate: Moe Dalitz, Sam “Sambo” Tucker, Lou Rothkopf, and Morris Kleinman, all members of the Mayfield Road Gang, who had controlled much of Cleveland’s gambling, bootlegging, and prostitution during Prohibition. Since Wasserman had married Edie Beckerman the previous summer, he had family ties to Dalitz, too. Edie’s father, Henry Beckerman, was a lawyer and power broker in Republican political circles in Cleveland, often referred to as one of the “powers behind the throne” of GOP county boss Maurice Maschke. Beckerman and Maschke were close friends as well as political allies, and Maurice Maschke, Jr., was in business with Dalitz. Beckerman had made a small fortune in the stock market and the real estate market as a shrewd speculator. Before the crash of 1929, he was a millionaire, he later testified. But he had been hit hard by the crash—and since then he had been indicted for attempted arson and embezzlement. He was acquitted in a trial on the embezzlement charges, but a mistrial was declared in the arson case because of efforts at jury tampering. Beckerman was indicted on the arson charges again. At that time, an editorial in the Cleveland Plain Dealer commended the prosecutor for his perseverance. “For years Beckerman’s name has been dodging in and out of the local picture,” the editorial said. “His Beckley Realty Co. has more than once figured in improvement proj-ects in which the city was interested. Mystery has clouded the public understanding of some of his operations. . . . It has never appeared that the whole story of the arson case has been told.” Ultimately, Beckerman was acquitted—but the cost of his defense in these cases had further depleted his funds. Unlike her older siblings, Edie had not been able to afford to go to college. When she met Wasserman, she was working at the May Company for $18 a week.

  Wasserman may have felt some pressure to succeed from a new wife who remembered what it was to be wealthy and wanted to be again—but the real drive plainly came from within. His background was somewhat similar to Stein’s, though even more destitute and restrictive, in that he had to work to help support his family from an early age and was unable to obtain a scholarship to go to college. His ambition, thwarted, had been to become a lawyer; and no amount of success would ever erase a lingering self-consciousness about his lack of education. His parents, Isaac and Minnie Weiserman, were Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from Russia, arriving in this country in 1907; a few years later, they changed the family name to Wasserman. Along with approximately 35,000 other Russian Jews arriving between 1905 and 1912, they settled in the bleak, overcrowded Woodland Avenue area of Cleveland. William Zorach, who grew up in this neighborhood in the early 1900s, wrote in his autobiography, Art Is My Life, that “Woodland Avenue, once a beautiful, wide, tree-lined street with handsome houses,” had by this time become “a dilapidated slum, a market street where farmers lined their produce up along the sidewalks and cried their wares. Across the street, houses seemed a long way off, set in back of dried up lawns. . . . A small boy seldom walked across the street.” Wasserman had two older brothers, Max—who was born in Russia in 1906, and who died of epilepsy at sixteen—and William, born here in 1908. Louis Wasserman was born on March 22, 1913—though he later would use March 15 as his date of birth instead. His father worked as a paper cutter, a book binder, a box maker; he tried opening small restaurants but they failed. By the time he was twelve, Louis was selling candy in a theater, and at fifteen he had a regular job, working as an usher in the Palace movie theater from 3:00 p.m. to midnight, seven days a week. “I wanted to get out of things like gym, so I could work that schedule. I went to my principal, and I said, ‘If I can raise money for school athletic uniforms, will you let me out?’ Yes. So I brought movies to the school, and charged each kid 3 cents to go. Eight thousand kids times 3 cents! I knew they’d go. Because what the principal didn’t realize and I did was this: to show movies, it has to be dark. And don’t you think kids would pay 3 cents to sit in the dark?” Wasserman demanded, deadpan. “Then I went to my chemistry professor—I’ve always been pretty good in math,” he added, with wry understatement, “and I said, I’ll make you a deal. Will you allow me to miss class, as long as I pass every test? So, for two years, the only times I went to chemistry class were to take a test.” In his family Louis became the acknowledged star. Lou Ratener was a longtime close friend of Bill Wasserman’s; regarding the two brothers, Louis and Bill, he said, “They were two different personalities. Bill was a nice young man, but not charismatic like his brother, Lou. They were not close. And their parents were very ordinary people. Isaac, their father, was a very pious Jew, went to shul, the mother kept a kosher home. Isaac’s only pleasure was Cleveland baseball—he listened to the Cleveland Indians games, day and night—and his son Lou. Lou was god to his parents.”

  Soon after Wasserman joined MCA (he had changed his name by this time from Louis to Lew), Stein began to notice his energy and resourcefulness. Wasserman went to Detroit and came back with a signed contract for a show at the Michigan State Fair, subject to Stein’s approval; Wasserman had opened up a new area of business for MCA, and he wasn’t even an agent. “Can you believe in those days you could put a DC-3 on a fairground, and people would come to see it?” Wasserman marveled. “They would, because they’d never seen a plane—the only people who did were those who traveled!” What he liked to call his claim to fame came about with Kay Kyser. Kyser and his orchestra had been performing at the Blackhawk restaurant in Chicago; he was very popular, but his fame was strictly Midwestern, because the radio broadcasts from the Blackhawk were not on a network. Chicago’s WGN was a powerful station, but it was the networks that spanned the country. And by the late thirties, one needed a rich sponsor to get on a network. Kyser, therefore, had to distinguish himself in some way—and the way he could occurred to Wasserman one night as he was driving back from the Edgewater Beach Hotel, on the shores of Lake Michigan, with several executives. They were all listening to the radio. “There was a quiz show on the air. People in the car would act like they knew the answers but they wouldn’t say anything—they were afraid of being wrong. Then, when they heard the answer, they would say they’d known it. You know,” Wasserman paused, looking at his visitor, “you’ve been in groups like that. So I thought, let’s do something where they know the answer. Because music is something that a lot of people know a lot about.” It was an intuition that may have sprung from his own insecurity listening to that quiz show; but it was, in any event, a very clever idea. Wasserman took an audience participation routine of Kyser’s, added musical quiz elements to it, and named the program Kay Kyser and His Kollege of Musical Knowledge. Soon, he and Stein had persuaded the American Tobacco Company to sponsor this show on Mutual Broadcasting, the smallest of the national networks (and with which Stein had some affiliation). Within a few months, it became such a hit that it moved to NBC, where it would remain on Wednesday nights for years, with over 20 million listeners a week.

  Relieved of his publicity position, Wasserman became an MCA agent. He began working closely with Bill Stein, selling shows in Detroit, Kansas City, and Fort Worth. In 1938, Stein sent him to New York, to work under Billy Goodheart. MCA’s success had not mellowed Goodheart; if anything, he was more tyrannical than he’d been in the pioneering days in Chicago. Irving “Swifty” Lazar, who had begun working as an agent in MCA’s New York office in 1936, later described Goodheart, his boss, as someone “who had an ice tong for a tongue and reverence for no one.” He was famous for abusing his subordinates. David “Sonny” Werblin would eventually become one of MCA’s most powerful executives and, later, the owner of the New York Jets football team, but he had started out as one of Goodheart’s lackeys, whose responsibilities included keeping Goodheart’s pencils freshly sharpened. On occasion, Goodheart would start his day by breaking all the pencils and scattering them about his office; as soon as Werblin appeared for work, he would scream at him for being so derelict. Others tolerated Goodheart (he was, in fact, a remark
able agent), but Wasserman would not—the job, important as it was to him, was not worth being treated that way. He developed a strong dislike for Goodheart and, after working for him for a few months, called Stein and said he wanted to be transferred, or he would quit. Stein told him to join him in Los Angeles.

  When Wasserman arrived in 1939, MCA’s Hollywood business was still nascent. “We had about seven agents in the picture department,” Wasserman said. “Our biggest clients then were Ronnie Reagan, Richard Dix (whose career was almost ending), and Hattie McDaniel (she had just been in Gone With the Wind). The total income of the theatrical department was less than one day’s income for the band department.” Wasserman found this anything but dispiriting; to him, it meant a clean canvas. Director George Sidney recalled the first time he saw the tireless young agent. “I was staging a big affair at the Coliseum, and I had eighteen or twenty of the top people in the industry at a planning session. I was saying, ‘I want a marching band here.’ This guy at the end of the table said, ‘I’ll take care of that.’ ‘I want planes to fly over March Field.’ ‘I’ll handle that.’ ‘I want pink lemonade.’ ‘I’ll handle that.’