When Hollywood Had a King Read online

  The Depression had not hurt the entertainment business much, so the fact that Stein’s band booking continued to prosper was not surprising. What was remarkable, however, was the expansiveness of Stein’s activities. He had opened an MCA office in New York in 1927; that was followed by offices in Los Angeles, Dallas, and Cleveland. His dominance of the band-booking business he had started was almost complete; in 1934, Walter Davenport wrote in Collier’s that Stein (whom he described as “a smallish, dapper man, with cold, direct eyes”) “manages the affairs of more than ninety percent of the country’s dance bands.” Radio had been a great catalyst for this business, and also an opportunity in itself. By 1931, MCA booked dance orchestras for more than a dozen sponsored radio programs. But the greatest hit was the Lucky Strike Magic Carpet program, sponsored by the American Tobacco Company; it aired three nights a week, featuring bands in cities across the country. As Karl Kramer wrote, “Every band clamored to ride on the Magic Carpet, and many orchestras eagerly sought MCA management in the hope of getting on this radio program.” Stein also sold bands to provide the music for variety or comedy programs; and, in a further extension of what he had already started doing with nightclubs and hotels, he offered radio advertisers a package deal, including not only bands but also comedy writers, singers, producers, guest stars. Thus, he became the employer, presenting the network with a show ready to go on the air—and pocketing the difference between what he charged the advertisers and his cost, often recouping three times what he would have made as a mere agent.

  There seemed no end to Stein’s interests. Just as he was an undisclosed partner in some of the nightclub venues where he booked his bands, so he was, too, in radio. According to Karl Kramer, the radio networks, NBC Red and Blue and CBS, began to encroach on MCA’s territory in the early thirties. Bands by this time considered radio exposure a necessity, and the networks, which had the radio lines in the major hotels and cafés, also began booking dance bands, so they could promise the bands much desired exposure, and they could threaten the hotels that they would remove their radio lines if they didn’t buy the network’s bands. It was an MCA kind of two-step—but now, if Kramer is right, being carried out by a competitor with a big advantage. Whether defensively or not, this is what Stein did: he entered into what Kramer called “an informal agreement” with the powerful Chicago radio station WGN, a subsidiary of the Tribune Co., to install their lines in every Chicago hotel or café that used MCA bands. Since WGN offered excellent coverage—stronger in the Midwest than the networks’—some of those nightspots that had network lines switched to WGN. Then, Stein focused on the West Coast. The fourth national network, the Mutual Broadcasting System, was formed in 1934, and was controlled by the Tribune Co.—Stein’s informal partner—and R. H. Macy & Co. Plans quickly developed to expand Mutual to the West Coast, and Stein decided he could use Mutual to establish a beachhead for orchestra broadcasts there. So MCA made what Kramer called a “nonreturnable loan” of $50,000 to Mutual to finance this development. Up against an agent who, one way or another, controlled more than 90 percent of the country’s dance bands and the radio stations that aired many of them and had exclusives at the hotels that booked them, NBC soon capitulated and gave up the band-booking business; CBS stayed at it longer, but ceased to pose a real threat.

  With the Folies Bergère, Stein had begun to move into the floor show business as well; this was timely since Repeal led to the proliferation of new nightclubs across the country, all hungry for entertainment. Stein started supplying clubs with liquor, too—something that, were he not partners with the Outfit in some of these clubs, would have been almost unimaginable, considering the mob’s control of the liquor business. He also created a company that sold novelties; soon, his customers at the clubs and dance halls could obtain everything they needed from MCA—party hats, ashtrays, confetti, highball stirrers, admission tickets. And this one-stop shopping was not simply a matter of convenience. Harry Sosnik, the composer-conductor who signed on with MCA in the late twenties, recalled that it was a kind of block-booking sideline; MCA would say, “You want Guy Lombardo? You’ve got to buy your liquor from us, you’ve got to buy your novelties from us . . .” Stein’s commercial opportunism extended to his employees and clients as well. They could buy insurance from an insurance company in which he had an interest; cars from one of his automobile dealerships; and homes through a real estate firm of his. He owned music-publishing companies, too—sheet music was a big business—and he had a ready market in his clients’ music. Stein believed in leaving virtually no need unexploited.

  And he was always alert to meeting a new one as it emerged. In 1935, a successor program to the Magic Carpet, called the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, began. Twenty winning musical pieces were played on each program, and, according to the sponsor, American Tobacco, 75 percent had been selected by the public. “None of the numbers was selected by the public,” recalled Sosnik, who was a conductor on the Hit Parade. “There was quite a racket going on at that time. The MCA controlled . . . all the commercial conductors in New York on radio. They also controlled this hit parade. They booked all the orchestra leaders and the orchestra, and they had a contract with which they collected a certain amount of money, I heard it was $1,000 a week, from American Tobacco, for taking care of the selection of those numbers for the public. Now, their sales pitch to the client was that they had so many orchestras all over the country that they would have the orchestra leaders ask the dancers what their favorite songs were, and then fill out the forms and send them in to New York, and that was supposed to be a legitimate and fair way of doing this. Well, it was anything but fair, because the orchestra leaders put in whatever they felt they wanted to put on the list to send. Not only that, most of them, if not all of them, were paid off by the music publishers. . . . It meant a lot to them, you know. A performance on the Hit Parade made a song a hit, because everybody tuned in . . . to try to find out what was number one. You see, then each week the selections moved up, and number one would be a big seller in the stores.” MCA’s control and profit potential in this situation was even greater than Sosnik realized, however—because of Stein’s interest in music publishing through his phalanx of privately owned companies not publicly associated with MCA.

  Sosnik knew MCA was powerful, but it was not until he ran afoul of the agency that he understood just how powerful it was. He had been a docile client. He had paid commissions to MCA even when he had gotten conducting jobs on his own. And when he had worked at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago, where the manager refused to deal with MCA and where Sosnik had been given the responsibility for engaging orchestras for private parties, he had quietly turned that business over to MCA, and asked nothing for it. Now, in 1935, he was working on the Hit Parade—another job he had gotten without MCA’s help—and he received a call from an agent in MCA’s New York office, Harold Hackett, asking him to come over. When he arrived, he found another MCA client there, Carl Hoff, who was very close to Hackett. “Harold excused himself, and then Carl said, ‘Harry, you know, we all pay Harold.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ . . . He said, ‘Well, every orchestra leader who works out of the MCA here pays him $100 cash under the table every week.’ I said, ‘You mean to say that after my paying commission on two programs, which they had nothing to do with, I’m supposed to pay Hackett $100 a week?’ Now, $100 was a lot of money then. This is 1935. . . . So I hit the ceiling. I said, ‘I’ve never heard of anything like this. I pay all the legitimate commissions. I just don’t understand it, and I refuse.’ I got up and walked out.” Suddenly, Sosnik found that he was out of work. He had a contract with the Hit Parade, but it was canceled. He called George Washington Hill, Sr., the head of American Tobacco, with whom he had a good relationship—and found he couldn’t get through. When he met advertising people on the street whom he knew quite well, they were cool. He had no idea what was happening. Then Hackett called him and said he had a job for him in California—Sosnik was so desperate that he went to L
os Angeles, only to find that there was no job. Eventually, he found work. And about two years later, his wife took a trip back to New York and went to “21,” the restaurant popular with the show business crowd. There she saw Hackett, who told her, “You know, if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to see that Harry never works again in radio. I got him off the Hit Parade. I took him to California. I didn’t want him to get anything out there.”

  “Then I started talking to people,” Sosnik continued, “and I found out the story, which they had refused to tell me. Everybody had been warned not to touch me.” He had had no inkling of his blacklisting. He had been out of work for nearly two years.

  Sosnik wanted to return to New York—but he didn’t want the MCA contract hanging over his head. He had signed it as a young man, without understanding it. “It went on page after page. If I had read it, I wouldn’t have been able to understand it. . . . It was a contract which committed me to permanently pay a commission on everything I did until they reached $1 million in commissions. . . . That would be a couple of lifetimes.” His lawyer told him it was not binding, because it did not contain a time-period clause. Sosnik went with his lawyer to see Jules Stein, and asked to cancel the contract. Stein refused. “He said, ‘We’ve got a contract. Business isn’t done that way.’ ” Sosnik pointed out that he had always paid his commissions, and even sent business to MCA from the Edgewater Beach Hotel, behind the manager’s back. “I said, ‘I can’t go back with that crook you’ve got in New York, Harold Hackett, after what he did to me.’

  “He said, ‘I don’t know anything about that.’ He refused to release me.” Sosnik went to see Joseph Weber, the president of the American Federation of Musicians union, who happened to be in Los Angeles at the time. “He read the contract, and he said to me, ‘Harry, this contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, but if you try to break it in a court of law without going through the union board of directors, I’ll kick you out of the union.’ ” Like Petrillo, Weber was extremely close to Stein. Sosnik’s lawyer urged him to sue Stein, but Sosnik said he couldn’t afford it, and Stein was too powerful. (Several years later, the union would outlaw this type of contract.) Sosnik returned to Stein’s office. “I said to Jules, ‘I just have to get out of this contract. I’m not saying that I won’t do business with you in New York, but I want to be able to make up my own mind.’ So it wound up where I bought my contract. He named a figure, I wrote out a check. It was all the money I had at the time. And I walked out a free man.”

  Even as his business expanded, the principles Stein had utilized from the start continued to apply. Thus, what gave Music Corporation its singular power was Stein’s cultivation of that sublime circle, in which exclusive bookings led to more top clients which led to more exclusive bookings—which, over time, led to almost no meaningful competition. Martin Baum, who began his career as an agent in New York in the forties—not working for MCA—recalled the system as he knew it. “MCA got exclusives with many of these clubs, first in Chicago and then in every big city in the country. I mean, other agents could place people here and there—but nothing like MCA.” The system was built on the commonality of interests between the owners of the clubs (mainly, the Syndicate), Stein, and Petrillo, Baum continued. The Syndicate wanted to be protected from escalating musicians’ salaries, and the threat of strikes; these were things Petrillo could deliver. Stein wanted the booking business; this, the Syndicate could deliver, and to someone who was, in at least some enterprises (if not Music Corporation itself), a partner. And Petrillo wanted ever more power as a union leader, and perhaps—something always speculated, even asserted in government documents, but never proven—money. “What do you think Jules gave Petrillo,” Baum asked rhetorically. “I’ll tell you a story. In 1943, I was working as an office boy for Blaine Thompson, which did all the advertising for theaters. And every Friday afternoon I was given envelopes full of cash to bring to [the offices of] Warner and Shubert. It was kickbacks for the advertising—all cash.”

  Certainly Petrillo by the mid-thirties was living in a style not commensurate with his salary of $26,000 a year. He took his wife to Europe, stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel when he was in New York, wore expensive silk shirts, and—in the sovereign style of Capone—sported a two-and-a-half-carat blue-white diamond on the index finger of his left hand. He also had a country home. As Petrillo told the story, he had wanted a place in the country and his “boys” had learned of his desire; so they bought him the old Edward G. Uihlein estate at Fontana on Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. In 1937 alone, according to Local 10’s books, these expenditures were made on behalf of Petrillo: $25,000 for the country house, $12,000 to furnish it, $1,700 to take care of its evergreen grove, $16,000 to pay income taxes, $25,000 for a bulletproof car and bodyguards, and $5,000 for incidental expenses. (The bulletproof car and bodyguards were not without reason; in 1936, an assassination attempt was apparently made on Petrillo—bullets chipped but did not pierce his windshield.) Over the years, there was continued speculation that at least some of the funds that supported Petrillo so lavishly came from Stein. It was also rumored that Stein had helped raise the $100,000 to ransom Petrillo when he was kidnapped. In an interview in a Collier’s article in 1947, Petrillo (who by this time had succeeded Joseph Weber as international president of the AFM) responded to a question about Stein’s financial favors this way: “They said the same thing about my predecessor [Weber], that he was a stockholder in MCA. It ain’t true. Would I lie to ya?” But Herbert Rosenthal, a longtime MCA executive who had joined the agency in 1940, said, “Petrillo retired and never had to work again, because of MCA stock.”

  The relationship between Stein and Petrillo continued to flourish for decades in a kind of happy symbiosis, though its benefit to Stein was more visible. Petrillo was fiercely protective of his turf—or, as he would have put it, his boys’ welfare; and although his audacity would reach new heights with his ascension to international president (he would put a stop to all recording activity in the U.S. for over a year, until the record companies finally caved in to his demands), he had already been nicknamed “the Mussolini of Music” when his sole dominion was Local 10. In 1931, for example, Chicago’s new mayor, Anton Cermak, decided he wanted a high school band to play for his inauguration. Petrillo was outraged. He protested to Cermak, but got nowhere. When he learned that Cermak was to deliver his speech over the National Broadcasting Company, however, he sprang into action. He gave the local radio station an ultimatum: either Cermak hired a union band, or he could not broadcast. When the network officials objected, Petrillo said, “Ya hafta deal wit’ me 365 days in the year and with Cermak on Sunday. What’ll it be?” As usual, Petrillo got his way. But when it came to Jules Stein, Petrillo was the soul of flexibility. If someone other than Stein had a piece of a nightclub and also booked musicians there, Petrillo would almost certainly have deemed that a conflict of interest. But for Stein, there was no problem. AFM bylaws did prohibit a booking agency from also functioning as a production company—as in the case of Stein and his radio shows—but Stein was able to perform this dual role because Petrillo had helped him to obtain an exclusive waiver. And while there were also severe restrictions on traveling bands appearing in Petrillo’s jurisdiction, these, too, became negotiable for Stein. Stein’s ability to hold sway over Petrillo was a well-known feature of the local landscape. And it apparently was a factor in the strike at the French Casino that Kramer described, though he did not mention it. For in July 1934, several unions went on strike at the popular Edgewater Beach Hotel, but the musicians continued to perform; the Edgewater’s striking unions then called the strike at Stein’s French Casino—and, according to a bill of particulars later filed by the government, their business agents told Stein that they would call off the French Casino strike on the condition that he induce Petrillo to call a musicians strike at the Edgewater.