It was in 1955, against the concerned urgings of the FBI (still uncertain of her ideological allegiances), that Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the U.N., hired her as a personal assistant. True to their very close working relationship, she died with him in 1961 when his plane crashed in West Africa on its way to Kinshasa.
JOHN CLAY
Sterling Hayden in The Killing, 1956,
directed by Stanley Kubrick
On a windless night, a little after nine p.m., how long would it take the engines on a DC-7, warming up, to disperse the contents of a large suitcase full of notes to the value of two million dollars?
John Clay, Johnny, was born in Oakland, California, in 1920. His father was a railroad conductor and his mother looked after the seven children. Twice a week the father was home with dry accounts of how the train had made its way between Seattle and Los Angeles. There were men who rode the freights then, going up and down the coast looking for work. Mr. Clay tipped them off, awake or not, whenever he found them, in the way he took a toothpick and coaxed shreds of meat from between his teeth after a meal. “Don’t you ever let ’em ride?” asked Johnny. “No, sir,” said his father, “against the rules.” “You miss some, I bet,” reasoned his son. “If I see ’em, I don’t miss ’em.”
A suitcase forty-six inches long, twenty-eight high and a full fourteen inches deep—18,032 cubic inches. All those numbers, and all the notes with numbers on them. These were the notes taken in at Bay Meadows racetrack that day, small bills, crumpled, torn, some put back together again with Scotch tape in a last hope of a killing.
Johnny Clay was too big for school by the time he was fourteen. So he went away from home and down to the San Joaquin Valley. There were supposed not to be jobs, but Johnny knew where to go and he spent his teens following work between Modesto and Bakersfield. He picked almonds, artichokes and so on, all the way to zucchini. He was picking things he’d never eaten. By the time he was eighteen he was as hard and straight as a pole, and he smelled of onions. No washing could get rid of it. He used to think he was growing in that Valley himself, that strange reformed desert where canals and aqueducts patrol the earth and will not let it die. He counted the vegetables as he picked them, the boxes where he and the other pickers stacked them, the trucks that went out every night, and then all the other operations like the one he was on. It gave him a feeling for the millions in America.
No one ever knew for sure—the beauty of this robbery was that no one ever knew just how much—but about 4,000 fifties, 20,000 twenties, 80,000 tens, 100,000 fives and 60,000 ones. Over a quarter of a million bills, and an estimated total of two million dollars.
Johnny rode the trains in those days, and he still knew which ones his father was on. All the Clays had the timetable by heart. So sometimes he would slip aboard at dusk on a long uphill, and he’d be back home just a few minutes ahead of his father—with dust in his hair still—and he’d look up when his father came in and he’d say, “Still throwing ’em off the freights?”
He boxed a little, he was so impressive physically, but Johnny didn’t know how to put another man away, and they said he didn’t punch his weight. He looked good in the ring, but no one believed he was going anywhere. In 1941 he went into the navy. He served all the war as a seaman. Torpedoed once, and then again, his ship was sunk at Leyte Gulf. He was in the water once, and a small boat the other time, thirty-one hours and eleven days, seeing sharks all around the first time, and counting out the food and the days the second time. If he had been a prince or a president’s son there would have been a book about him.
This case had been purchased at a pawnshop. It was strong, and it had metal corner pieces. But one of the fasteners didn’t work; it flapped like a broken wing. And Johnny had no time to get a strap to put around the case. A strap would have made it all right. Johnny thought afterward that he could have used the belt on his pants.
When he came back from the war he was two hundred pounds and only twenty-five, so he fought some more. He wasn’t as gentle a man either; anyone could see that the war had hardened him. They called him “Seaman” Clay on the bills, but it wasn’t quite right, and though Johnny kept winning he never looked confident. People would always bet against him, no matter that he was the stronger man. Then one hot August night in Stockton in 1948, Ezzard Charles nearly killed him. People relaxed and said they’d always known it was going to happen.
So Johnny got out of boxing. He knew some gangsters, from Tahoe, and he fell in with them. They used him as muscle in the casinos. Johnny heard of jobs they were on, and he asked to be let in, but the others kidded him that he was punchy. So he watched these jobs and worked it out why most of them failed. And then in 1950 he went after one of the casinos in Reno. All on his own, with a plan. He studied the place and saw how at five a.m. on the third Sunday of the month there was a way to take everything. It was over a million, they said. The job worked, and Johnny was free for two months because no one could believe it was just one man. But they caught him, in Eureka, with all the money, except what he’d spent on meals and gas. He could have lived four hundred years on it at the rate he was going.
The case was on the top of two layers of luggage at the outside corner, so when the little motorized cart taking it to the plane swerved, the case fell off and a bump on the concrete broke it open.
They sent Johnny to Alcatraz in 1951. He was mild and patient about it, and he never ate all the heavy foods they gave the cons there. He ate moderately and worked in the yard while the others were up on the top bleachers looking across the Bay at the city, asking themselves how all the people could go about their business every day with the prison only a mile and a half away in the sunshine, and men festering there. But a prisoner is likely to be more philosophical than a free man.
Johnny was in a cell with Kola Kwarian, and Kola taught him chess. It nearly broke Johnny’s brain to see how many moves you could figure. But there were just sixty-four squares and just thirty-two pieces to play with. So he worked it all out and got to be a fair player, though he could never beat Kola. One day the Russian told him a story about how an emperor once had held a city to ransom. He’d said he’d take a sack of grain on the first square of the chessboard, two on the next, four on the next, and so on, geometric progression. At first, the people thought that would be easy. But Kola laughed and he told Johnny there would never be that much grain in all the history of the world. Johnny nodded quietly, for he had always known the world must end.
The cart swerved because of a dog. Today, there’d be no chance of a dog getting out there. But in 1956 airports were less formal.
In Alcatraz, Johnny planned the Bay Meadows robbery, and when he got out he went straight ahead with it. It only needed five of them. Marv Unger put up the seed money. George Peatty, the cashier, opened the door to let Johnny in behind the scenes. Mike O’Reilly, the barman, had brought the gun in earlier in the day, and left it in his locker so Johnny could use it for the holdup. Randy Kennan, the cop, would put the bag of money in his car and drive out; who was going to stop a police car? There were two others for smaller things: Nikki Agoglia to shoot Red Lightning on the far turn so everyone was diverted, and Kola to start a fight in the bar to get all the cops’ attention.
Two million dollars, and it worked. Except that Johnny could see notes spilling no matter how careful the cashiers were. And then later, out in Daly City, when he transferred the money from the duffel bag to the suitcase, there was some left on the ground. So maybe it was only $1.9 million in the case, going to the plane, warming up to fly to Boston, with Johnny and his girl Fay at the gate. Then the dog and the swerve. When the case opened it still took eleven seconds for all that money to be whirled away by the aircraft engines, and they were only thirty feet from the case. The money had been thrown in like dirty laundry. There were people at the airport for years afterward looking, and you still hear of notes being found. But officially they recovered $632,127.
They sent Johnny back to Al
catraz and he died there in 1960.
Is the order of these entries significant? I do them as they come into my head, but my head keeps running back to system. So design and randomness bump together, skirmishing, like lovers.
AXEL FREED
James Caan in The Gambler, 1974,
directed by Karel Reisz
“We will see that the boy is brought up nicely,” A. R. Lowenthal encouraged his daughter, Naomi, in 1943. She was holding her baby, a foot long, with yards of fine white robes reaching to the floor. The child was born swarthy, with piercing brown eyes and a sensual mouth. No one could remember seeing a baby who paid such attention so early. “He has the stare of a victorious general,” said Lowenthal. “Or a painter?” suggested Naomi. Her husband, Lowenthal’s son-in-law, a frail man named Rudolf, stood by like a stranger in the three-stage family rapture. He noticed his own weakness in his new son’s face, but he was too reticent to say the word gambler out loud. Anyway, he died a year later, of a perforated stomach ulcer, with so many things unsaid.
A. R. Lowenthal, Armyan Lowenthal—he added the R much later for rhythm—had come to America from Lithuania in 1911, when he was fifteen, with “nothing except wit and balls and will.” He had won a reputation as a king of style, and a killer in business. By the middle 1920s he owned a chain of furniture stores in the New York area which he still supervised and for which he remembered every smallest detail. He was an awesome figure for any family, a giant of achievement and appetite, nearly a monster of success. No flaws showed in his castle.
His own wife had dimmed in his light. Their daughter Naomi had elected very early to please him. In bringing forth a son, she had met the wish always uppermost in his mind. A.R. looked on Axel—a name he had urged—as if he were a golden bowl smuggled across a continent for his delight alone. The old man loved to hold his grandson, humming long passages from Mahler and swaying the tiny bundle in time with the sweep of his own romantic longings. Secure, old, and weak in the heart, A.R. dreamed of further glories. Axel’s chestnut eyes watched him with intense curiosity, certain somehow, no matter how immature, that he would have a contest of wills with this gray-haired dear. He conceived the urge not to please his grandfather, even if it destroyed him, Axel, in the process.
A dedicated mother and a rich grandfather made a brilliant child. He was eloquent at five. He could sketch quickly, dance with grace, play the piano by ear, tell stories to his elders, captivate strangers, play games with a skill ahead of his years. He was like a perfect child. But he had a momentous temper that could turn him into a dervish of violence in an instant. It was beyond his control, a passionate anger always directed at playmates or people on the street, but so dramatic it served to put a dark cloud around him in the eyes of others. It was self-destruction, not yet aware of its true target.
He went to Harvard in 1961, becoming best friends with the sons of Latin American dictators and Brahmin families. He wooed the daughter of a branch of the English nobility and married her. He was, for the short duration of the marriage, mentioned in Burke’s Peerage. But he moved with equal ease among mobsters, bookmakers and loan sharks. As his father had known, Axel could have been a lord, a poet, a banker or a killer, but gambling became his abiding interest. He would be locked in writing a textual analysis of Donne and Marvell, only to reach out for the phone and put a thousand dollars on Boston College to beat the spread against DePaul. He read every newspaper he could find, but only the sports sections. He loved the games, not for their beauty or the prowess they required but because of the odds and the likelihood that hovered above them, like bees near flowers on a hot day.
This went on for several years, the scale rising. He could be breathtakingly rich one day, and then a week later forced to borrow twenty dollars from Naomi. Sometimes he was a center of cheerful groups; sometimes he hid from his creditors. Not that either state pleased him. The indecision was his greatest gratification, the risk. There was no winning so great, no luck so magical, that he would not bet until it crashed down.
Nineteen seventy-four was the last chance, the last crisis. After that there was no going back. One night at a private casino in Manhattan, he lost $44,000. It was the largest debt he had ever had. Axel got up from the table exhilarated by the magnificent danger, smiling with love and a killer’s kiss at the casino management, discussing how he would pay them back. “Soon, Axel, soon,” they said. “Sure,” he answered, “soon.” They were so businesslike; he was such an amateur. His amusement always hurt them and made them feel shabby. They could guarantee an extra slash of the razor when the time came.
Then he went to see Billie, his current girl. She was a model, lithe, thin, blonde, Californian, the most unsuitable sexual prize he could find for a scholar and a Jew. She was butter next to his anchovy. He went to the college classroom and talked about Dostoyevski: he was a part-time professor, a natural at existentialism, a firebrand for The Idiot, The Gambler and Karamazovian bargains with destiny. He went to his mother for $10,000, a stay against execution. He went to a birthday party for A. R. on the beach. He explained his whole predicament to Naomi. So as not to spoil her father’s day, she gave Axel a check for $44,000 along with the advice, “Come to terms with why you’re doing this.”
He scooped up Billie, and took her to Las Vegas. “I’m hot as a pistol,” he assured her, and there in a Nevada casino, at blackjack, with 18 showing, he did not so much ask as tell the croupier, “Give me the 3,” with a force so great that the woman was not surprised when she flipped it over for him. He won $90,000, the most he had ever won. But he lost half of it again when Brown beat Harvard at basketball, and another $50,000 went away when, in the last second, Seattle turned it on the Lakers 111-110. He bet all he had left on another game, and won. It was desperate and ecstatic. “If all my bets were safe,” he said, “there wouldn’t be any juice.”
He went back to New York, and the Mob sent men out to catch him, hold him by the ears and bring him in. “You owe us,” they said. “Sure,” said Axel. “But I’m broke. Stake me again.” They said, no more. He would have to do something for them. There was a black kid in his class, Carl Spencer, on the basketball team, the star forward. Get him to fix the spread against Syracuse. “How?” said Axel. Impress him, they said, the kid respects you, genius. And as he was going on this drab mission, one of the mobsters called out, “Hey, Axel, one day you’ll be killing someone for us.”
He grinned, lustrous with exaltation. The game was fixed. Spencer was ashamed. The debt was canceled. Axel had a clean slate. So he went up to Harlem into a black club, demanding the best whore in the place. He insulted the pimp. “What do I have to do, nigger?” And the whore cut his face with a knife. With the bliss of nearing disaster, Axel looked at his wound in the mirror.
EILEEN WADE
Nina Van Pallandt in The Long Goodbye, 1973,
directed by Robert Altman
Frederick Gould was an eminent King’s Counsel. He specialized in litigation and society divorces, and he acted in England for Mrs. Wallis Simpson in the divorce that freed her to marry King Edward VIII. Eileen, born in London in 1938, was his second child. The family stayed in town, living in the Boltons throughout the Blitz, though Eileen and her brother John, with their mother, were evacuated to Devon for parts of 1941–42.
Eileen grew up a tall, attractive blonde girl, a pupil at St. Paul’s School for Girls. She sang at school, and took the part of Ado Annie in a production of Oklahoma! Her father wanted her to go on to Cambridge, but an unfortunate misunderstanding over her entrance exams sent her instead to a finishing school in Switzerland. While there, she added several foreign languages to her education and perfected the straightfaced lie, a ploy that some had noted in her at an early age. It was while in Switzerland, in 1957, that she became the mistress of the American business tycoon J. J. Cord. The affair lasted only one summer, but through Cord’s graces she was able to go back and forth between Europe and America for the next few years, an assured resident alien.
> She did this and that: she managed an antiques store on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, she had a stud farm in Galway, and she was a literary agent in Paris. But in 1962, in London, she set up the first of a small chain of health-food shops—Nuts—that were known during the sixties as a trendsetter. Eileen herself traveled in the Mediterranean and North Africa, obtaining the best possible supply of grains, nuts and pulses, raisins, dates and other dried fruits. In 1966, she wrote her Health Food Cookbook, which was a big success when published by Penguin.
In London, in the mid-sixties, Eileen Gould was a frequent figure in the gossip columns: she was alleged to be a close friend of Albert Finney, Andrew Oldham and Tony Godwin, then the editorial director of Penguin Books. She also spent several summers on the island of Ibiza, and it was rumored that she had acted as a middleman in the sale to major galleries of paintings done by Elmyr de Hory—who had a studio on the island—but “signed” by Dufy, Matisse or Utrillo.
Late in 1967, the British Customs and Excise confiscated a consignment of dried apricots sent from Morocco to London for Nuts. The barrels were found to contain several pounds of high-grade hashish. Eileen Gould protested that she had no knowledge of this secret ingredient; and the police could find no clinching evidence that she had been involved in the illegal importation of drugs. However, the affairs of Nuts came under close scrutiny, and in 1968 Eileen sold the company for £1.1 million to the Trust House Forte group.
With the proceeds, she traveled—to the Mediterranean and to America—and farther afield, to Africa and the South Seas. It was in Tahiti, in 1970, that she met Roger Wade, the novelist. Wade (1918–73)—real name Billy Joe Smith—had been a soldier captured at Bataan and a prisoner of the Japanese. A wanderer and a sailor, after the war he had lived in Sausalito, and started to write—A Man Cannot Stand Confinement (1949), Vienna and Johnny and Old Nick (1957) and Undertow (1964). These were all best-sellers, and they allowed Wade—his adopted name as a writer—to buy a series of sailboats. However, by the time he met Eileen, Wade was an alcoholic, more inclined to talk about his next novel than get on with it.
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