by Peter Davis
It took almost two years for Cyrus Henscher to complete the process that began in the suite at the Beverly Wilshire. Elise called him before lunch, gave him the suite number, and said she’d be there by eight o’clock. She knew Henscher was invited to a sneak preview by Mossy that evening. He apologized to Elise that he’d be late. “That will not be a problem,” she told him.
The concierge at the Beverly Wilshire remembered Henscher waddling to the registration desk for his key around ten o’clock. He brought Champagne to the suite and uncorked it in the bedroom after reading Elise’s note. As the police reconstructed what happened next from his fingerprints and what he stammered to them, he picked up a whip and laid it across the corpse. When nothing happened he repeatedly struck the presumed torso of Elise Millevoix with a chain. Apparently he was so worked up with lust that at length he pulled back the covers to apply the chain directly to his date’s buttocks. That was when he recognized what he was dealing with. He shrieked. His scream was loud and long enough to alarm other guests in the hall, who summoned help from the lobby.
By the time the hotel management burst into the suite, Henscher had had a mild heart attack and was rolling on the floor, still bellowing. Police found him babbling, and they booked him downtown, turning him over to the vice squad. After they held him overnight he made bail and was permitted to check into the Good Samaritan Hospital with what was was generously termed nervous exhaustion as well as his heart condition.
Chastened by the fright they’d had when Trent Amberlyn was arrested picking up a boy, Jubilee executives now had excellent paid contacts at the Los Angeles Police Department. The next morning Dunster Clapp alertly called attention to the morals clause contained in all Jubilee contracts. The composer was not only charged with half a dozen crimes, including the desecration of a corpse, but also fired from Jubilee for extreme turpitude and depravity as well as bringing disgrace upon the institution that had placed such trust in him. His salary ended immediately and he was forced to fight his medical and legal battles on his own, battles that kept columnists and photographers happy for many months. When he reached Elise on the phone she told him she had no idea what he was talking about and hung up. By 1936 Cyrus Henscher was working again, playing in a piano bar in Fort Worth.
29
Mossy Schemes, Pammy Walks
IF YOU’RE WAITING FOR THE APOCALYPSE IT’S ALMOST HERE STOP COME SEE THE SHOW STOP QUIN
The telegram peeked out from under my door on Sumac Lane. The end of June had arrived, and it was as though a roller coaster had reached the top of its tracks. My view momentarily was of everything—the motion picture business, strikes, plots, the Communists, the wider confused country, my lonely heart floating on the breeze. Shortly the ride would dip and curve and plummet. But for an instant the world’s breath was held.
At the studio, Mossy was furious, though not as furious as he soon would be. He had to stop the troubled picture Cyrus Henscher had been working on, pay off the actors and crew, renege on his obligations to theaters around the country waiting for the Atlantic City romance, and swallow a huge loss. He cast wary looks in all directions, on and off the lot, suspecting that someone from Jubilee had set up Henscher but not knowing who. If he thought the Millevoix sisters were behind what newspapers were calling the Aunt Cornelia caper, or that I was their accomplice, he gave no sign.
Labor strife was everywhere. Secretaries and elevator operators, even manicurists, were walking out. The West Coast seethed, with shut downs and dock violence from Seattle to San Diego. At the studio Pammy was trying to help the Mexican seamstresses get organized. The stagily affable Colonel DeLight, who remained in charge of the sewing brigade, dropped his charm and told Pammy to get off his plantation. “I always knew he was overseer material,” Yeatsman said, “a southerner all other southerners despise. Scrapped his insincere charm and now shows us what he’s made of.”
Pammy thought injustice at the studio was everyone’s business and said so to Colonel DeLight. Like bears emerging from hibernation, Jubilee people were blinking their eyes and stretching. Wilkins, the senior carpenter, had lost control of the set-builders and came over to the writers building to tell Yeatsman he realized they’d been bought off cheaply. Writers themselves—I along with them—poked their heads out of their holes and began to fuss, more noisily every day. Everyone was restless.
Everyone also knew the studio was under pressure from New York to make more cuts. The amiable dunce among Mossy’s entourage, Goddard Minghoff, was told to start saving money fast. Pammy was shooting scenes on a picture called Love Is for Strangers when the blue-eyed, silver-haired yes-man Minghoff, looking like a senator, came to the set and told her grievously untalented director, Wick Fairless, that he’d have to lay off one of the camera assistants, a set decorator, the assistant sound man, and a grip. Fairless did this with barely a wave of his hand, but Pammy was enraged.
With the encouragement of set decorators and designers, her sister among them, Pammy complained bitterly to Mossy about the crew layoffs and brought up the issue of the Mexican seamstresses. Mossy told her he didn’t give her advice on how to act and he’d appreciate her not telling him how to run his studio. The next day she didn’t report to work. Wick Fairless shot around her but called her to say she had to come in the following day. She didn’t. Mossy simmered, held his fire, but told the suave, overeducated Englishman, Percy Shumway, to let it be known around town that disobedience at Jubilee would not be tolerated. Of all Mossy’s retinue, Shumway was the most delicate at running indelicate errands.
The following day Louella wrote in the Examiner, “A certain Miss who oughta be a Mrs. is acting like she owns her studio instead of being lucky enough to work there. The ungrateful girl is making demands when she should be making a picture, causing scenes when she should be filming them. She seems to be under the influence of foreign ideas that are no good where they came from and worse here. Let’s hope she comes to her senses and trundles her shapely derrière back onto the lot as fast as it can wiggle.”
The planted item infuriated Pammy and she quit her picture outright. Mossy summoned her. Elena Frye, with her hypersensitive secretarial ears, heard him remind her she was under contract. She reminded him he’d promised her her pick of pictures, and she was stuck with a terrible script, a nearsighted tin-eared director, and a drunk costar. She also reminded him he was responsible for Joey Jouet’s death in more ways than one, and that planted items in gossip columns could cut both ways. “Oh shit, Pammy,” Mossy said, “what do you want me to do?”
“Pay people what they’re worth, right down to the bottom of the ladder.”
“I do better than other studio heads.”
“That’s like telling me Mussolini is better than Hitler. You have to recognize the right of everyone here to bargain collectively like people in any factory.”
“We’re not a factory, dammit. Look, you know I want to make a picture about your own life, the Palmyra Millevoix story. It’ll be a smash. Let’s get back to work so we can do that. No more factory talk.”
“Oh but we are a factory,” she shot at Mossy. “You’ve said so yourself. That’s what we are, factory workers, so treat us like factory workers and recognize our unions. Bank tellers, grocery clerks are joining unions. Pretty soon no one will be able to die and be buried, for Christ’s sake, unless the gravediggers have a contract with the cemeteries.”
“You can’t unionize artists,” Mossy said a bit lamely.
“Oh yes you can if you put them on an assembly line, and pictures are made on assembly lines. We’re all on one, even you, our foreman.”
“Aw, come on, Pammy dear,” Mossy said, trying to tap a bank account that was already overdrawn.
“Aw, come on, Mossy dear,” she said, uncharmed.
“You know I can’t break with all the other studios even if I wanted to, which I don’t. We’re getting nowhere.”
“That’s right,” Pammy said on her way out. “But we’ll get somewhere soo
n.”
She drove off the lot right after paying a call to her set and informing Wick Fairless, who she didn’t think could direct traffic anyway, that she would not be returning to Love Is for Strangers. From what he’d seen of the dailies, Mossy knew he had a dog on his hands and considered canceling the film. But he couldn’t take the assault to his authority, the precedent it could set, and suspended his star.
Two mornings later Jubilee directors reported for work to find that three of their sets on as many sound stages had been broken into splinters overnight. Apparently the carpenters were restive, though it could have been teamsters, janitors, anyone. Mossy sent out the hatchet men Curtt Weigerer and Dunster Clapp to discover what was going on, but everyone hated them and no one talked. The police filed their reports, snooped around the lot, coming up with nothing. That night four more sets were destroyed. An ornate living room, a banquet hall with faux crystal chandeliers, a Chinese opium den, even the interior of a police station—all reduced to rubble. The sets looked as if they’d been bombed, walls imploded on themselves, doors blown off their hinges, lights and lamps and tables shattered. All the structures were fake, of course—the walls themselves were beaverboard or papier-mâché—yet you could imagine actual people dead underneath them, war victims. Mossy hired more security guards, but no one trusted them either.
The next morning the notorious fixer and labor racketeer Willie Bioff, who had begun his union career running a stagehands’ local in Chicago, appeared in Mossy’s office. The jowly cigar-chomping Bioff, with more connections to organized crime than to organized labor, was accompanied by Hop Daigle, the jelly-eyed carpenter. Bioff loved his work; he lived to shake down bosses, which he managed with a dash of humor.
According to Elena Frye, the meeting was punctuated with Mossy’s shouts and curses. For a big man Bioff had a high-pitched, foggy voice which he never raised. “This damage to your studio property, Mr. Zangwill,” Bioff said, “it’s so sad. You have my deepest sympathies.”
Hop Daigle didn’t speak. He looked at the ceiling, which created a strange effect because only one of his eyes shot upward; the other one focused its jelly on Mossy. This was momentarily disconcerting, but Mossy quickly looked away from Daigle and focused his rage on Bioff.
“All right, Mr. Bioff, what do you want to stop this criminal vandalism?”
“Oh, I want what you want, Mr. Zangwill. I want the destruction of your property to come to an end.”
“Let’s cut to the cash register. How much will it cost?”
“Not so much, Mr. Zangwill. Fifty thousand dollars should solve this problem.”
That’s when Mossy screamed. “FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS WILL BREAK THIS STUDIO!”
“I like to stay calm, Mr. Z. If that will kill grandma, then grandma must die.”
“You know this is extortion. You’re nothing but a fucking chiseler! Blackmailer! I can call the police and have you arrested!”
Bioff chuckled. Daigle looked at him but didn’t cut a smile. “I don’t call you no names, Mr. Zangwill. Seems the police haven’t really solved your problem, have they?”
Hop Daigle spoke only once. “We didn’t do this, Mr. Zangwill. I know Willie Bioff here, from Chicago, but it wasn’t your carpenters who broke up their own work.”
“Sure, Daigle, goddammit,” Mossy said, without indicating that he believed one word the carpenter had spoken. He turned back to Bioff and shouted. “My next phone call is to Edgar Globe! You know who he is, Bioff?”
Edgar Globe, the most important entertainment lawyer in Hollywood, represented Mossy and came to his parties. I’d seen his wife, Francesca, flirting with directors, holding off the tennis pro at the soirée that led to my humbling degradation. The mere mention of Globe’s name was a potent threat. It was said Globe could make a tree grow downward into the ground if he felt like it.
“Yes, sure,” Willie Bioff said, “I know him, an honorable personage Edgar Globe is.”
An honorable personage? Shit, Mossy reflected. Globe was from Chicago too. Would Edgar know Bioff’s superiors? Would he have mob connections himself? All right, he’d have to muscle this on his own.
“What you’re talking about,” Mossy yelled, “Is completely impossible! I don’t pay bribes. GET OUT!”
Without moving, Willie Bioff tilted his head from side to side. “I never used the word bribe, sir. Money is paid in exchange for a service, a service both sides need.”
Mossy came down from a yell to a modified bellow. “Your demand is outrageous. And Daigle, you’re shitcanned off this lot immediately.”
“Oh, but it’s Hop Daigle who brought us together, Mr. Zangwill,” Willie Bioff said. We both need him and the goodwill of the carpenters and the other workers at the studio, from set decorators to lighting people to sound engineers to drivers.”
“Are you threatening to put your union into every corner of this studio?” Mossy was incredulous.
“No threat, no threat. I’m just interested in all your many employees, Mr. Zangwill. I’ve only ever been interested in the plight of the workingman.”
Mossy’s fury melted into worry. “Fifty thousand dollars is an outrage and it will destroy my studio. The bankers in New York are already screaming at me to cut costs.”
“Well, the motion picture industry is based on negotiation, isn’t it? Why don’t we negotiate?”
“I’ll give you ten.”
“Then it’s settled at twenty-five, Mr. Zangwill. Very good indeed. Everyone will work hard and your sets will be back up by Monday.”
“Shit!” Mossy said.
As nearly as anyone was able to find out, Bioff paid ten thousand to his mob handlers back in Chicago, kept ten for himself, and spread five among the Jubilee carpenters. It was his way of slicing the pie. When he was finally arrested years later, he claimed to be a labor peacemaker. He shook down virtually all the studio chiefs, often returning a few months later with another peace offering. The price of peace was as high as a hundred thousand dollars per shakedown for 20th Century Fox, whose chairman, Joe Schenck, lied about his payoffs and went to prison, serving four months of a three-year sentence before, it was assumed, buying his way to a presidential pardon.
All the studio heads naturally wanted their own way. Mossy’s way was to stonewall the unions where he could, subvert them where he couldn’t, and make sweetheart deals where he had to. Willie Bioff was the perfect partner, a subverting co-conspirator and a sweetheart.
The Jubilee sets were rebuilt over the weekend. Everyone on the lot was frightened, depressed. What had happened could happen again. Cameras were rolling, but the studio was a hive of nerves. The whole town had the jitters, the other studios as well. The trade papers said Pammy had walked off the lot. She refused to return. “Everything at Jubilee stinks, there’s a stench throughout the studio,” she told me when I called to see how she was. “I’m for the workers, all of them, but does anybody have a chance?”
I read her the latest telegram from Mike Quin. OWNERS WANT CONFRONTATION STOP WORKERS PLAN GENERAL STRIKE STOP QUIN.
“Tell me about San Francisco,” Pammy said.
30
On Location
I squared my shoulders, shifted my weight, raised my eyebrows like someone who has the right idea, and nodded decisively with what I took to be directorial authority. “Ladies,” I said, “come with me.” I’d installed the delegation at the Fairmont on Nob Hill, and I bundled us into a taxi, telling the driver our first stop was City Hall. It was Independence Day. I’d come up the day before on the train, while Pammy, Teresa Blackburn, and Race Honeycut had just arrived at the presumed revolution in Largo Buchalter’s private biplane. Knowing of her break with Jubilee—and Mossy—Buchalter was hoping to lure her to Fox, where he was negotiating for a big picture; he’d lent her his pilot and plane. Mike Quin had dropped off a note at the hotel: “Welcome to San Francisco, tense and sea-girt, tense and waiting, where the only instruction that can be made with confidence and intelligence is to exp
ect the unexpected. Dust-up at mayor’s office. See you somewhere. Quin.”
It had been the “Tell me” in Pammy’s “Tell me about San Francisco” that got me. It meant I was not a handyman but an expert. On Pammy’s road to activism, I was the tour guide to the potential as well as the challenges of the labor movement. Our futures were at stake; either we could make a difference in the picture business, or we could not. The idea was to find out in San Francisco. When they peppered me with questions—Race’s was typical: “Tell me, Heartthrob, what do you-all want us to be lookin’ at up here?”—I recognized that what these actresses, even Pammy, wanted was a director.
We were met at City Hall by little rivers of marchers and countermarchers. I asked the cabdriver to wait. The Industrial Association, representing the businesses of San Francisco and especially the shipowners, had marchers demanding the mayor open the port and get the city going again. Placards were lettered in paint slashes: CALL IN THE MARINES; HIRE NEW WORKERS; REDS—KEEP OUT THIS IS THE USA. Two signs had big swastikas on them; one carried the caption, THE GERMANS DO IT RIGHT, and the other blared, SIEG HEIL—BEFORE SF BECOMES MOSCOW. The opposition, mostly the wives of dockworkers and seamen, along with some radical sympathizers, marched with placards that said, MAYOR PLEASE—COLLECTIVE BARGAINING IS A RIGHT NOT A CRIME; SUPPORT THE ILA (International Longshoremen’s Association); THE NEW DEAL STARTS ON THE DOCKS, and FAIR PLAY FAIR PAY FOR WORKING ALL DAY.
“It’s not a set, is it?” Teresa said. It was the swastikas that caught Pammy. “I can’t believe I’m looking at that in America,” she said. One of the men carrying a swastika brought his placard down on the head of a man holding a HELP THE SEAMEN sign. In an instant both sides were on each other. Police, acting like referees, separated the two lines of marchers, who resumed their circling on the City Hall Plaza.
Teresa wanted to go into the mayor’s office and assured Pammy that she’d be able to see him. “What for?” Pammy said. “He’d have his picture taken with me and then tell us we didn’t know what we were doing. True enough. Anyway, it’s July Fourth and he’s probably giving a speech at some picnic.”