When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  A favorite gambling anecdote of Wasserman’s involved a trip he made to Cuba with Alfred Hitchcock. Of all the actors, writers, directors, and producers Wasserman cultivated, Hitchcock was probably the single most important to him. By the fifties—the decade in which Hitchcock’s productions included Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, and North by Northwest—it was plain that he was among the most gifted directors ever to work in movies. And he was probably the best known as well—in some large part because Wasserman had persuaded him to produce and host a TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which went on the air in 1955 and became one of the biggest shows on television. It was a great triumph not only for Hitchcock, but for Wasserman, too. Like so many of his peers, Hitchcock had disdained television at first; but Wasserman had been so decisive that he had succumbed. One day, when he was in Wasserman’s office and a passerby made some derogatory comment about TV, Hitchcock responded, “Go away and don’t bother us. We’re busy counting our money.” There was a great deal to count. Some friends of Hitchcock’s said that he had a complicated relationship with Wasserman, who he felt took advantage of him financially—but upon whom he felt quite dependent at the same time. He is said to have expressed his hostility in odd, subtle ways. One, perhaps, was the portrait of Wasserman by Bernard Buffet, which Hitchcock had commissioned and given Wasserman as a gift, and which hung in the foyer of the Wassermans’ home. The portrait has a slightly sinister air; Wasserman is wearing a black suit, seated, his hands—clawlike—resting on his knees. “His hands looked like black widow spiders!” exclaimed a former MCA executive. “I said to Hitch, ‘How could you do that?’ And he gave me that enigmatic smile.”

  Wasserman rarely took a vacation, but when Hitchcock and his wife, Alma, invited Edie and Lew to spend Christmas with them at the Round Hill resort in Jamaica in 1956, Wasserman agreed. Round Hill had opened just four years earlier, but it had already become a choice winter refuge for a mix of stars and the moneyed class; guests included Clarence Dillon, Noel Coward, Grace Kelly, John and Jacqueline Kennedy (on their honeymoon), Clark Gable, the dukes of Norfolk, Bedford, and Marlborough. The day the Wassermans arrived, it was raining, and it rained the next day, and the next. “The place where you had dinner was seventy yards away, and there was so much water you had to take off your shoes and socks to get there,” Wasserman said. “There were Babe and Bill Paley, carrying their shoes. Finally, I said to Hitchcock, can’t we go somewhere else? And I called my friends in Havana.”

  Wasserman’s friends were Moe Dalitz and Sam “Sambo” Tucker. Dalitz, Tucker, and other associates from the Cleveland syndicate had moved their base of operations to Las Vegas, where they had opened the Desert Inn in 1950. Now, several years later, in league with Meyer Lansky, they were expanding to Havana. Lansky had begun to focus on the prospects for a gambling empire in Cuba back in the thirties; Dalitz, Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, Lansky, and others had each put up $500,000 of their bootlegging profits to start a Havana gambling operation by paying off Fulgencio Batista, according to Lansky’s longtime lieutenant, Joseph “Doc” Stacher as quoted in Meyer Lansky by Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, and Eli Landau. By 1937, Lansky had organized one of the world’s most luxurious casinos at the Hotel Nacionál, where he lived for months at a time. (The hotel was owned, nominally, by A. S. Kirkeby, the front for Lansky in whose private company Jules Stein held shares.) During the war, Lansky’s gambling enterprise had become dormant. But in 1952, Batista, who had been living in exile in Florida, staged a coup to regain power, and that enabled Lansky to start rebuilding on an even more lavish scale than before. He invited Dalitz to come to Havana and invest in the hotels and casinos being built; Tucker, for a time, became the manager of the Hotel Nacionál (he had previously overseen another Lansky operation, the Beverly Hills Club in Kentucky). Referring to Dalitz, Tucker, and Lansky, Wasserman continued, “So these guys owned all the hotels. They took us to dinner in a great restaurant. We’re sitting there—Hitch, Alma, Edie, Lansky, and the rest. Hitchcock at that point was the biggest TV star, with Hitchcock Presents. Lansky says to my wife, ‘Is that Alfred Hitchcock?’ And Hitch says to me, ‘Is that Meyer Lansky?’

  “We went to the Hotel Nacionál casino to gamble. Sambo takes out this enormous wad, it must have been tens of thousands of dollars. Hitch gives Alma fifty dollars. And she can’t win a bet! They wanted her to win, but she kept losing. We were walking back to our hotel, about five in the morning, and I said to Moe, ‘Why are you guys here? You own Las Vegas, and here, you risk losing it all.’ Castro was already in the hills, it was reported. And he said, ‘Sambo loves to fish, and this is the best fishing in the world. But then, there was nothing to do at night—so we built the casinos.’ ” Wasserman paused. Then, with a small smile, he added, “Do you know that when Batista bet, he never lost?”

  Jules Stein, of course, would never have joined this group in Havana, but Wasserman was in his element. Dalitz and he seemed almost familial. Dalitz was tall, smooth, engaging, with a keen business sense and an avuncular manner, nothing hard-edged visible to a casual observer; he and Wasserman spoke the same language. And their rapport, natural as it seemed, was eminently useful for Wasserman and MCA. It was not only the narrow though lucrative business relationship in Las Vegas, but the more global one as well. For this group (Lansky, Dalitz et al.) was, in its way, a kind of highly select social club; and, as in any such organization, the connections provided could be highly beneficial. The relationship between Dalitz and Lansky had been formed in the twenties, when they had set up a national network for bootlegging. In that same period, Dalitz had gotten to know Jimmy Hoffa, whom he introduced to Lansky. As Doc Stacher explained, “We knew Jimmy Hoffa right from the early days, because of Moe Dalitz. . . . Jimmy Hoffa met Moe when he was just a young man in a group of Jewish boys who worked for Norman Purple in the Purple Gang [in Detroit]. There was a war among the Detroit gangs, and when Dalitz’s boys got the worst of it, Moe left the Purple Gang and set up on his own in Ohio.” Now that Hoffa was well on his way to becoming the most powerful and feared labor boss in the country—and someone vitally important to Wasserman—it was helpful to be part of this circle.

  But probably nothing was quite as helpful as Wasserman’s friendship with Sidney Korshak. Since the days when Korshak had advised Willie Bioff, his power—as consigliere to the Outfit, with unions his special portfolio—had continued to grow. He still spent a good deal of his time in Chicago, where he maintained a law office with his younger brother, Marshall, and where Korshak’s efficacy as a labor consultant had given him entrée into establishment circles. Many business executives were caught in a dilemma—they wanted to resist attempts by honest labor unions to organize their employees, since that would be costly; but they did not want to deal personally with mob-dominated unions. Using Korshak was one solution. In 1946, he had been retained by Joel Goldblatt, president of a chain of department stores, who had been pressured for payoffs by a number of labor officials; Korshak functioned as Goldblatt’s intermediary and got him labor peace. Walter Heymann, Jules Stein’s longtime banker at First National Bank, was Goldblatt’s banker, too; and though Heymann (perhaps influenced by Stein’s much touted distaste for Korshak) at first opposed Goldblatt’s retaining Korshak, he then did an about-face, recommending him to other First National clients as well.

  Soon, Korshak was ubiquitous. Herbert Siegel, later the chairman of Chris-Craft, recounted how he had first met Korshak. Siegel and his partner, Delbert Coleman, had bought the J. P. Seeburg Corporation, which manufactured jukeboxes, and the Teamsters were threatening a strike. “Someone said, hire Sidney Korshak,” Siegel said. “So we called Jay Pritzker [chairman of the Hyatt chain]. ‘Is Korshak the best?’ ‘Absolutely.’ We called the chairman of Motorola. Same question. ‘Absolutely.’ We hired him. The problem went away immediately. And what he wanted for his fee was a new Cadillac, which then was worth about $5,000. I guess he didn’t want there to be any record of it.”

  The Korshak ma
gic worked because the unions with which he dealt—especially, giant organizations like the Teamsters, the laundry workers, and the hotel and restaurant unions—recognized the power behind him. Korshak operated in close league with Murray “the Camel” Humphreys, a quick-witted, charming Welshman who had organized protection rackets under Capone, and was widely viewed as the mastermind of the Outfit’s infiltration of labor unions. Korshak also enjoyed a strong bond with Hoffa, forged when Hoffa was a young man trying to fight his way up in the Teamsters, and Korshak helped him, according to Chicago columnist Irving Kupcinet. “Sid was the closest person to Hoffa,” asserted Leo Geffner, a lawyer in Los Angeles who dealt with Korshak in racetrack labor negotiations in later years, and became his friend. “He was close to people all the way up and down the line in the Teamsters. He made cash payoffs to business agents—$5,000 here, $3,000 there. I know that. That’s the way it was—to keep labor peace, you’d find a corrupt business agent, and pay him off.”

  For Korshak to operate in the legitimate business world, it was important that his mob associations be discreet, so that those executives of major public corporations who wanted to deal with him could. Arturo Pettorino, the maître d’ for many Outfit restaurants in Chicago, said that Korshak was careful not to be seated at such places with Tony Accardo or Sam Giancana (who succeeded Accardo as head of the Outfit), though Korshak was close to them both. And, according to the FBI, though Korshak and Humphreys kept in frequent touch, the two attempted to disguise their communication; when Humphreys left phone messages for Korshak, he would use the alias “Mr. Lincoln.” Indeed, since Bioff had testified about Korshak’s affiliation with the mob, Korshak for years had managed to escape any more damning publicity—until an article by Lester Velie, entitled “The Capone Gang Muscles into Big-Time Politics,” appeared in Collier’s in September 1950. “Legal advisor to some of the mob is Sidney Korshak,” Velie wrote; he also described Korshak as “the closest man” to Jacob Arvey, then Democratic party chairman for Cook County, and the political boss who was Abraham Lincoln Marovitz’s patron. Korshak charged that the Velie story was “a series of diabolical lies.”

  Shortly after the article appeared, Senator Estes Kefauver arrived in Chicago to hold committee hearings on organized crime, and subpoenaed Korshak to appear in a closed session. It was an unnerving time, and not only for Korshak and his underworld associates; apparently legitimate businessmen—even, for that matter, Jules Stein—had cause for concern. Just before the hearings were scheduled to begin, a former police lieutenant, William Drury, was machine-gunned at his home, and Marvin Bas, a lawyer, was shot to death on a street corner. Both had been interviewed by investigators for the Senate committee, and were about to be committee witnesses. Luis Kutner, who later wrote about his experiences with Capone as a young man, was now a practicing lawyer. His son, Tony Kutner, said, “We had been living in a not fancy place and all of a sudden, I came back from camp and we’d moved to this big house and I was Tony the rich kid—my father had gotten some big fee from the mob. And I remember the night Drury and Marvin Bas were killed. My father got a call that he was next, and we turned out all the lights and went down in the basement, where we spent the night, and there were police guarding outside.”

  Like many hundreds of other gang murders in Chicago in these years, the Drury and Bas killings were never solved; those who knew would not speak, and those who chanced by incriminating information understood the virtue of silence. In the late forties, Ted Raynor, a young lawyer in Chicago whose uncle had been a bartender at Colosimo’s, and whose small law office was next door to the Korshak firm, began representing a trade association of mostly nightclub owners. “Sid got hold of me,” Raynor began, “and he said, ‘Listen, kid, you’re getting involved with people that maybe you don’t want to get involved with. You’re a nice young man, you’re doing well—’

  “I said, ‘It’s okay, I understand, I can handle myself.’

  “He said, ‘Give me your word of honor that if anything disturbing happens, you’ll tell me and get your ass out of there. And if I hear something, I’ll tell you.’ ”

  Raynor assented. Then one night, he continued, “I was at a meeting of nightclub owners. They were talking about some lawyer who’d been shot on a street corner. The next day, Sidney said, ‘I think you have to get out of there. They should not have said what they said in front of you. You’ve got three kids, you can’t afford to get in trouble. What if you’re called to testify?’ So,” Raynor concluded, “I stopped representing them.” Asked whether the lawyer whose murder they had been discussing was Marvin Bas, Raynor said he did not recall.

  It was an illustration of the warning that Korshak would give others, too, according to his close friend Hollywood producer Robert Evans, who had received the admonition himself. “Sidney’s first commandment was, the greatest insurance policy for continued breathing is continued silence,” Evans said.

  Korshak himself assumed a more active role vis-à-vis Kefauver, according to an article by New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh, which was published more than a quarter century later. “One trusted Korshak friend and business associate recalled in an interview that shortly after the committee’s visit Mr. Korshak had shown him infrared photographs of Senator Kefauver in an obviously compromising position with a young woman.” According to Hersh’s source, the young woman had been supplied by the Chicago underworld, and the camera planted in Kefauver’s room at the Drake Hotel. Kefauver left town abruptly—before the public hearings had even begun. This master stroke against Kefauver was said to have been Korshak’s; and once again, in the circles where such things were common knowledge, his talents were much admired, and his power grew.

  For many years, Chicago remained Korshak’s home base. He had an office there, and the fact that his brother and law partner, Marshall, served for many years as a state senator and then, remarkably enough, city treasurer, lent a degree of legitimacy to the Korshak name. By the fifties, however, Sidney had established his wife, Bernice, and their two small boys in Los Angeles. There, his professional existence seemed almost chimerical. He never took the California bar exam, so he was not licensed to practice law. At first, he worked out of the Associated Booking Company office in Beverly Hills. (Ted Raynor, who visited Korshak there, recalled that “the door was locked, it was really hard to get in. I thought that was strange—but then I figured, that’s Sidney. And he had this beautiful big office with his desk completely clear. There might just be a message on it, if it wasn’t from one of the boys.”) Later, Korshak would use the Beverly Hills office of Las Vegas’s Riviera Casino, or, occasionally, the law offices of one of his friends. He took no notes; at most, he might scribble a number on a torn piece of paper or matchbook cover. (As he told reporters once, with lawyerly precision, “My records will show I never represented any of the hoodlums.”) He was said to run his phone lines at times through friends’ offices. Even so, he used the phone only guardedly. A good friend of his, who was an MCA agent, recalled, “He would never talk to you on the phone. ‘C’mon, let’s take a walk,’ he’d say, whenever he had something to talk about. And we’d walk through the streets of Beverly Hills.”

  It is hard to imagine how anyone familiar with his habits could have thought he was simply “a lawyer,” as Wasserman had commented. Indeed, there seems to have been among Korshak’s friends little mystery about whose interests he represented. Many years later, Bernice and Sidney celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary at a party at the Wassermans’ home. Robert Evans toasted them by reading a passage from his newly written autobiography, in which he described the Korshaks’ having just returned from their honeymoon, and Bernice’s scanning a batch of messages that had been left for Sidney. “ ‘George Washington called, everything is status quo. Thomas Jefferson called, urgent, please call ASAP. Abraham Lincoln, must speak with you, important . . .’

  “She began laughing. ‘Your friends sure have a strange sense of humor. Who are they?’

  “
‘Exactly who they said they were. Any other questions?’

  “Fifty years later, Bernice has never asked another question,” Evans concluded.

  It was a punch line that could be appreciated by the people gathered that night at the Wassermans’. For most of Korshak’s friends in Los Angeles understood that while he might on occasion volunteer (telling stories about the Capone era, for example), they were never to inquire. That was just fine; they were, by and large, incurious. Many of them—people like Tony Martin, Cyd Charisse, Dinah Shore, Robert Evans, Jill St. John—were helped by Korshak in various ways, and regarded their benefactor with a mix of gratitude and awe. But Korshak’s relationship with Wasserman was different. If power was the measure, the two men were essentially peers—each wielding vast influence in companion worlds that sometimes overlapped. And though they were connected by business, several people who knew them both asserted that Korshak was Wasserman’s closest friend.

  Certainly Korshak was his most useful friend—which, for the profoundly utilitarian Wasserman, may have amounted to the same thing. Wasserman knew Hoffa, but Korshak knew him much better; Korshak was the most valuable intermediary to the Teamsters that Wasserman could have. And once MCA moved into TV production, the Teamsters were critical to the company’s success. In the tightly scheduled television business—much more than the movie business—a strike could be devastating. And if the Teamsters were to strike, the world of production would stop. They controlled everything that had to be driven to and from a set—props, food, portable toilets, the film itself. Moreover, the Teamsters were so feared that few attempted to cross their picket lines, and their throwing in with one side or the other in a labor war could be critical (as when they sided with the IATSE against the CSU). It was almost like having a private army at your disposal. Weldon Wertz, who joined the Teamsters in 1941 and spent decades in Hollywood, said, “The Teamsters were rough. Jake Nunez was a Teamster. He did something bad. He was crucified in a freight car here in L.A.—and they found him when the freight car was opened in Chicago.” And the Teamsters pension funds (most notoriously, the Central States Pension Fund) provided pools of hundreds of millions of dollars for those with the right connections to draw on for loans. Roy Brewer said that Wasserman had used Teamsters money when MCA had started to go into TV production aggressively in the early fifties, and when he employed many of the stars, longtime contract players in the MGM stable who had just had their contracts liquidated. Asked how he knew that was so, Brewer replied, “Everyone knew it! I was very close to the Teamsters. They’d helped me in the strike. And Korshak, I believe, was the one who arranged that financing.”