by Ian Fleming
6
CHICAGO
THE EARLY PAPERS were saying ‘Great Lakes Freeze as Cold Snap Hits’. It had been summer all the way from Hong Kong, but now I was travelling back into winter and the prospect was depressing. The United Air Lines plane levelled out over the Hoover Dam and we made for the Great Divide and the Middle West across Utah and Colorado, Nebraska and Missouri and into Illinois, white with snow, while I consumed Old Forrester on the rocks and an early Nabokov, just published in the States, Invitation to a Beheading, which reminds me that, on my entire trip round the world, I never saw a single other passenger reading a book in any of the many planes in which I travelled. Everyone read magazines or studied business correspondence, or just sat and looked out of the window at nothing. One further small literary aside: on no airport bookstall after Zurich did I see a single British magazine or newspaper of any kind, though everywhere there was Time, Life and Newsweek. Come to think of it, we have no publication in England that could stand up to the remarkable technical job these publications do in covering world affairs from the American viewpoint. They are a splendid show-case for the American way of life – whatever that hackneyed slogan means – entertaining, splendidly illustrated, and remarkably frank about the dark side of America. Musing on the subject, it seemed to me that only a revamped version of the Illustrated London News could possibly provide comparable reading matter with an English and Commonwealth slant for the foreign traveller.
Chicago Midway Airport is one of the most congested in the world and one of the most dangerous. (A four-engined freight plane crashed into a neighbouring housing estate two days after my own landing and, when I came to leave, planes were queuing nose to tail and taking off at minute intervals.)
I should have taken the helicopter (chopper or whirlybird in the vernacular) to Meigs Airfield on Chicago’s lake front, but I did not know about the service, and it took me an hour, through some of the grimmest suburbs in the world, to get to my hotel, where, for the second time in succession – the same thing had happened at Las Vegas – I was shown at first attempt into an already occupied room. The much-vaunted American efficiency should look to its vaunt. When I had got to the correct room, I picked up the telephone and asked what the time difference was with New York, which I wanted to call (in fact, it is one hour ahead). The girl said she didn’t know but would ask the supervisor. The supervisor also didn’t know and connected me with long distance. Believe it or not, the long distance operator also didn’t know and offered to put me on to the Weather Bureau! I finally gave up and called New York anyway.
In Chicago, I had put myself in the hands of Playboy, the new magazine sensation that has already passed Esquire in sales. Playboy is a highly sophisticated cross between Esquire and Cosmopolitan, with a pinch of New Yorker and Confidential added. It is housed in the smartest modern newspaper building I have ever seen and peopled entirely by the prettiest girls in America and some of the brightest young men. My photograph shows the bearded editor, Ray Russell; Charles Beaumont, one of America’s newest novelists and a passionate writer on motor racing; and the back of the head of the prettiest private secretary in the world. She is just taking a note of what I wanted to do during my brief stay – learn about crime in Chicago today, pay a sentimental visit to some of the geographical high spots of the Capone era, and-no doubt to the reader’s surprise – spend one whole afternoon in the Chicago Art Institute.
My next visit was to Ray Brennan, the famous crime reporter of the Chicago Sun-Times, who was to instruct me on item one. Ray Brennan, for thirty years one of the toughest men on America’s crime beat, knew all the answers. Yes, of course Chicago was still riddled with crime, he said. But, as with Los Angeles, nowadays the gangster preferred to operate without guns. The labour rackets were just as effective and, on the face of it, law-abiding. The Mr Big of Chicago was now a certain Tony Accardo. Marshal Caifano was another big shot. Paul ‘The Waiter’ Ricca had temporarily left the stage to serve three years for income-tax evasion at Terre Haute, the country club of American prisons. Number four was Joey Glimco who was Hoffa’s local representative and head of the taxi-cab union. All these men had acted ‘The Great Stone Face’, i.e. pleaded the fifth amendment, before the Federal Grand Jury investigating organized crime in Chicago.
Tony Accardo, openly described in the newspapers as ‘Crime Syndicate Kingpin’, is a typical example of the new-fashioned mobster. He is handsome, well-dressed, well-educated and an excellent golfer. He lives in a large mansion in the smartest section of River Forest, the fashionable suburb of Chicago. He gives generously to charities and takes his wife and children regularly to Mass on Sundays. His famous Fourth of July parties are attended by leading citizens including high-up politicians, and he had just completed a European tour to London, Venice, Rome and the Riviera with his wife, giving interviews to the local press as if they had been Chicago’s mayor and mayoress. An interesting feature of this semi-royal tour was that his companion throughout the tour was a Lieutenant Anthony Degrazio of the Chicago Police Department, who, not long before my arrival in Chicago, had been charged by his furious Department with ‘conduct unbecoming an officer and disobedience – consorting with a known criminal’. Civil service proceedings against him were then under way.
Marshal Caifano, ‘convicted auto thief and bank robber’, has an equally respectable front: in his case, the famous Tam o’ Shanter Golf and Country Club, whose election committee were perhaps ignorant of the fact that Caifano was arraigned as a suspect in the Chicago gangland-style killing of Francis ‘The Immune’ Maritote and Charles ‘Cherry Nose’ Gioe in half of it. In comes a cop who has been waiting for just that. The guy with the beard is sixteen years old, a minor, and you’ll be in real trouble for serving liquor to a minor. The gang has got plenty of these bearded teenagers available and they just planted one on you to teach you not to be troublesome. And so it goes on. You’re just little people. The bigger ones have fires and sabotage and strikes if they don’t pay up or deal through the merchants they are told to deal through. Quite simple really. If you manage to dodge these troubles and you’re going ahead and doing good business, the mob comes along and says they’d like to invest – just twenty-five per cent maybe. But of course they don’t actually put up any money. They just get the twenty-five per cent. So there you are, ending up as an employee of the gangs, a front man for a mob enterprise.
Brennan agreed that of course plenty of violence still went on. ‘Give you an example. Only last month a man called Richard Hauff who’s got a golf club around here and is a bit of a mystery man about town, was pistol-whipped one evening while he was out on a midnight date with a hoodlum’s ex-wife. A few minutes later the police picked up for questioning a certain Cosmo Orlando who used to own the Melody Casino – a local honky-tonk. Orlando’s an ex-convict. The police found him hiding in bushes a block from the beating up. You know what his alibi was? He said, “I was out for a walk.” Not so long before that, a man called Carlo “Bananas” Urbaniti got five years for the possession and sale of heroin. He and two F.B.I. agents called Love and Ripa were all wounded in a gun battle when the G-men raided a River Grove tavern. Around about that time a certain Joseph Broge, a so-called beer distributor, was ambushed and shot down. Turned out he had been distributing pornographic gramophone records for a company belonging to a certain Sam Giancana who was once Capone’s chief gunman. We get something like that from time to time, but it’s nothing like the old days when there were pitched gun battles going on all over the town.
Brennan had just written the life story of Roger ‘The Terrible’ Touhy of the famous Touhy Gang that had brewed beer in Prohibition days and had stood up to all the other gangs, including Capone’s. Touhy had been mixed up with Jake ‘The Barber’ Factor, now a real-estate operator in California and at one time wanted for extradition to England for a two-million-pound stock swindle. Touhy was arrested, falsely he says, for the ‘kidnapping’ of Factor and he had just cleared himself of that charge and of the remainder of h
is ninety-nine years’ sentence. He came out of jail the day after I left Chicago. Brennan’s book, The Stolen Years, brings back all the gun-smoke scent of the blood-stained ’thirties in Chicago.
The next day, with two friends from Playboy, I took a car and we revisited some of the famous gangster black spots of the era. The first on our list was the Cathedral of the Holy Name on the steps of which a gangster in search of sanctuary had been shot down in broad daylight. Opposite the cathedral was the site of O’Bannion’s famous flower-shop on the corner of State and Superior.
O’Bannion was the victim of a famous handshake murder. He was clipping the stems of a bunch of chrysanthemums in the florist’s which was the cover for his bootlegging and hijacking operations, when a blue sedan stopped outside the entrance and three men came in.
‘Hallo, boys, are you from Mike’s for the wreath?’ O’Bannion held out his hand.
‘Yes,’ replied the leading man, firmly grasping the hand. ‘We are.’
The negro porter who related this then heard six deliberate shots and, after a pause, the finishing shot through the head.
O’Bannion’s funeral was the greatest gangster funeral ever seen. The body was borne through the town in a solid silver coffin resting on a bed of roses; twenty-two bearers carried floral tributes, and they were followed by a famous jazz band which played hymns during the procession. Ten thousand mourners attended the funeral, at which the finest wreath, costing a thousand dollars, came from the man who had ordered the killing, Al Capone.
The property has not flourished since O’Bannion’s day. Now it is half a deserted parking-lot and half a grimy rooming-house whose ground floor is devoted to the Cappa Club for Young Christian workers.
We proceeded to Wabash Avenue, between State and Michigan, where Big Jim Colossimo had the warehouses where the hijacked whisky was taken. Now the warehouses have gone, and instead there is the Three Minit Car Wash, the Thompson Electric Company (truck parts), Madam Eden, Phrenologist, and the Sun-Kist Lanes Bowling Alley, together with a small shop advertising ‘Live Bait, Nite Crawlers’. But behind this block, the El still crashes by on its way to the famous Loop in central Chicago, and the police sirens distantly wail. It is an area full of ghosts.
Then to the site of the famous garage where the St Valentine’s Day Massacre took place at 2108 Clark Street, another grimy neighbourhood, with the garage area replaced by the Belle Vue Hand Laundry and Balaton’s Barber Shop.
After killing off the O’Bannion gang, Al Capone went for Bugs Moran and his mob, and seven of them were the victims of the famous St Valentine’s Day Massacre: they were machine-gunned in a garage by three mobsters dressed in police uniforms, though Bugs Moran himself was not among the dead.
Opposite, the grimy lace curtains in the windows were drawn as they must have been when the gunmen, disguised as police, peered from behind them, their tommy-guns at the ready, as they watched for Bugs Moran’s gang to come to their last rendezvous.
The Biograph on Lincoln Avenue, where John Dillinger was shot down, is unchanged, with dusty naked lights in the roof and round the small central box office where Dillinger bought the tickets for himself and the famous Girl in Red who had informed on him to the police and knew that he would die as soon as the film was over. While the film was going on, police surrounded the cinema with orders to shoot to kill and, when Dillinger and the Girl in Red came out, she dropped her bag, stopped to pick it up, and Dillinger walked into the flaming guns. He shot back and got into the little alley next door. He was finally killed in the mouth of the alley and the second telephone post in the alley still has the bullet holes of the killing. The girl got a $30,000 award ‘for information’ and Dillinger’s gang never caught up with her.
Today it is still a, meagre, depressed area with its ‘Biograph Barber Shop’, ‘Schneider’s Tuxedos’ and ‘Valentine Pest Control’ staring from across the road at the fateful cinema, outside which the crowd had fought for a scrap of the great killer’s clothing or a lock of his hair. Two hundred dollars was bid for his silk shirt, and for days afterwards scraps of paper ‘stained with his blood’ were sold outside the Biograph for a dollar apiece. Today the old Biograph, dingy in its black and red paint, clamours for you to ‘See our laff and thrill show’. This place, too, is haunted. It was time for a drink.
That afternoon, to wash the smut of ancient crime out of my mind, I repaired to the Chicago Art Institute. I had been there once before when it firmly established itself as my favourite picture gallery in the world. Here, if you like the French Impressionists, there is everything – rooms full of Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Monet, with at least twenty superb examples of each. The Toulouse-Lautrecs are as fine as any in the world and the Cezannes and Gauguins, let alone the Picassos, are of a quality not to be seen at the Jeu de Paume, and possibly not even in Russia. It was a Saturday afternoon, but the spacious, beautifully lit gallery was almost empty, though the Christmas-card shop on the ground floor was crowded. This was the first really peaceful time I had had to myself for three weeks, and I made good use of it before getting back to my accustomed beat – dinner with my newly found friends in the famous Pump Room of the Ambassador Hotel and a visit to the hottest strip-tease in town at the Silver Frolics, a display in a large ballroom, full of commercial travellers and other businessmen, of positively exquisite boredom and lack of finesse.
And so, my brains boiling with a fine confusion of impressions, to bed.
(Ten days later, in London, editing these notes on Chicago, I read in the evening paper that, while I was editing them, Roger ‘The Terrible’ Touhy was ambushed and killed by two gunmen dressed as policemen in West Side, Chicago. He and a retired police sergeant, with whom he had spent the night discussing Brennan’s book, were mown down from behind by five sawn-off shotgun blasts. Touhy had been released from prison on November 24th after serving twenty-six years. Somebody from the blood-stained Capone era has a very long memory indeed!)
INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE
Hotels
Reservations should be made in advance, for ever since the days of Abraham Lincoln Chicago has been inundated with conventions and conferences.
If the aim is somewhere central, the big hotels in the area of the Loop – like the Palmer House, the Sheraton, the Pick-Congress, the Sherman, the Sheraton-Blackstone – would be the obvious choice. To give an idea of price range, a single room at another of these Loop hotels, the Conrad Hilton, can be had for $7 to $17 a day.
Rush Street, on the Near North Side, is the centre of Chicago night life, and the Ambassador Hotels (the Ambassador East and the Ambassador West) are within easy range of it. Expect to pay about $15 for a single room in these quietly expensive five-star hostelries.
Executive House, where prices for a single room start at $12, overlooks the Chicago River, which flows backwards through the city; it has attractive modern furniture and a generally new look. In the same bracket is the Drake Hotel (starting price $9).
Newspapermen favour the St Clair, which is not extravagantly priced and houses what is probably the most handsomely appointed Press Club in the United States. This is one block off elegant Michigan Avenue, and near it is the Eastgate, another comfortable place to stay.
People who bring their cars would be well advised to put up at a motel. The Lake Tower Motel is conveniently placed in the middle of town, while a good one on the north side is the Sands. To the south, there is the 50th-on-the Lake Motel. Advantages of staying in a motel include the absence of a tipping line.
Restaurants
Chicagoans boast that their restaurants of many and varied nationalities enable a visitor to ‘eat around the world’ without leaving the city. This is true, and Chicago’s Chinese and Japanese restaurants are probably the best in America outside San Francisco.
At the Azuma House one can sit on cushions, having removed one’s shoes, round a table where excellent sukiyaki is prepared sur place. The Shangri-La offers a lavish Cantonese menu.
At the Epicu
rean, chicken paprika and other Hungarian dishes attract many musicians and artists: the host calls himself the Strudel King. In most American cities you can find a moderately priced Italian restaurant where that vast wheel, the pizza pie, is consumed by a single customer with ease and relish; the Chicago specialists are at the Pizzerias Uno and Due. You can have cocktails outdoors at Riccardo’s sidewalk cafe and restaurant, which has Neapolitan food and singing waiters. Also recommended is El Bianco, featuring a cheese and antipasti trolley.
The Red Star Inn is German, with a long and not expensive menu which includes stuffed young goose. A modest place where you bring your own wine is the Cafe Azteca, where, as one would expect, the food is Mexican. Don’t miss Jacques’ French Restaurant, where you dine outdoors in summer.
Among the deluxe restaurants, the most fabulous is the Pump Room at the Hotel Ambassador East, which is supposed to recall Beau Nash and eighteenth-century Bath, but throws in waiters bearing flaming food on swords and Gertrude Lawrence ice-cream, flambé at your table.
Also extremely expensive but smaller and more intimate is the Red Carpet, whose cuisine is mostly French with a Haitian accent.
If among-the-tables musicians are no objection, try Sasha’s, a small place with a daily ‘gourmet’s choice’. This is fairly new, and so is Maison Lafite, which also offers exotic dishes, mostly French.
Just one whiff of that vast butchery, the Chicago stockyards, is enough to make a sensitive person abjure meat for ever. Yet the Sirloin Room at the Stock Yard Inn is listed among the thirty best restaurants in America. You mount the ‘steak throne’, pick the piece you want, and put your brand on it. The raw meat is then cooked the way you like it, and if this is bleu, better specify very, very rare. Not surprisingly, there are many other Chicago restaurants which specialize in steak.
With its splendid waterfront, Chicago also has first-class ‘seafood’ restaurants, and one of the best is the Cape Cod Room at the Drake Hotel.