When Hollywood Had a King Read online

  Jules Stein (rear, second from right) with Bette Davis (right), the first big Hollywood star to sign with MCA. Gene Lester Collection/Screen Actors Guild

  “I was always cool,” Stein added. “This attitude, in which I was trained . . . gave me an advantage over my competitors. And I instilled the same attitude in my associates.”

  Stein pointed to his dealings with Bette Davis as a case in point. His signing of Davis in June 1939 was the most momentous event that had occurred since he had opened the Beverly Hills office; it rang through the industry like the starting bell of a world-title fight. Until then, MCA had not been able to sign a single major star; after that, others began to follow Davis’s lead. There was much speculation, at the time and long afterward, about how Stein achieved it. The most prevalent story was that Davis had succumbed to Stein’s entreaties after MCA had put Davis’s husband’s best friend, who was out of work, on the company payroll. Another was that Stein had offered to invest Davis’s money and promised her a great return. (He had been investing other clients’ money for a number of years; he is said to have invested part of Guy Lombardo’s paycheck, without his knowing, and turned over the profits to him when they amounted to $1 million.) Yet another—which had considerable currency even within Stein’s family many years later—was that Stein and Davis had an affair. However her MCA representation had come about, its chances of being long-lasting were slim; Davis was notorious for her temper, and the Hollywood landscape was littered with agents she had discarded. Of Davis, Stein said, “She can fly into a rage at the drop of a hat. She would fight over her properties with her producers (particularly Warner Bros., where she was mostly under contract), her directors, her cameramen, and her agent, which in this instance meant me. I had the benefit of understanding her tantrums particularly because of my medical background, which included psychology and psychiatry. She would often send for me to come to her house immediately to discuss some serious picture problem. I always did, and usually agreed with everything, only to return within a few days when her reaction was more normal and solve the issues. . . . Many people would think she was a manic-depressive, and while the reactions are often similar, Bette was simply a highly emotional, sensitive individual whom I considered more as a patient than an artist on those difficult days. It never occurred to me that she not only admired me, but might also be falling in love with me, even though I never gave her any encouragement.

  “On one occasion when I was asked to come to her home immediately, she was sitting in her bed clothed in magnificent white lingerie. She complained about some insignificant studio problem, while the balance of the time it was chitchat. She was too much of a lady to invite me into bed with her but it was obvious she expected me to do so. The next half hour or so was very uncomfortable,” Stein concluded, “but I finally left like I came in.”

  The interlude did no irreparable damage to their relationship. Stein continued to represent Davis for many years. The two of them were also the prime movers behind the Hollywood Canteen, the wartime club on Cahuenga Boulevard where soldiers on leave could go for free entertainment and a chance to dance with movie stars. Not long after Stein joined the Canteen’s board, filled with leaders of the Hollywood community, the club’s financial director was relieved of her responsibilities and Stein took over that role. Regarding it more as a business than a charity, he quickly saw the opportunity to make money for the Canteen by appealing to the general patriotic fervor—convincing radio chains to pay for the right to broadcast Canteen shows commercial-free, for example, and persuading Warner Bros. to agree to make a movie, Hollywood Canteen, in a profit-sharing deal (from which the Canteen made $750,000). By the time the war ended in 1946, the Hollywood Canteen had a $500,000 surplus—used to start a foundation for wounded soldiers’ rehabilitation.

  Even before Stein relocated to Beverly Hills, his sometime partners in the nightclub business in Chicago had recognized Hollywood’s potential. The studios were, in a way, a natural next step from the nightclubs for the mob. “The mob infiltrated the studios,” said Shelly Schultz, who started his career as an agent at MCA in Chicago, and whose uncle had worked at Colosimo’s. “They selected that industry. It was a new business, with so much money to be made, and it was glamorous (don’t forget the gangsters were celebrities themselves, they were in the columns). You could control it from the bottom up, through the unions—with the ability to make it function or stop functioning. And also from the top down. The guys who started these studios, like Jack Warner and Harry Cohn, were rough, uncouth—the boys could sit with them. They understood each other. It was all about relationships. If the boys said we don’t like this guy, cancel his contract—they would!” And, perhaps most important, the studios always needed money, and the mob was looking for legitimate investments in which their cash could be laundered. Indeed, when Harry Cohn—struggling with his brother, Jack, for control of Columbia Pictures in 1932—needed $500,000, he turned to his friend and gambling partner, Johnny Roselli. Roselli, a henchman for Johnny Torrio who had become close to Capone and others in his organization, had arrived in Los Angeles in the twenties, establishing himself in its criminal underworld and eventually in Hollywood, through his relationship with Cohn, Joseph Schenck, who founded Twentieth Century Studios, and many others as well. Roselli relayed Cohn’s request to New Jersey rackets boss Abner “Longy” Zwillman, who forwarded the $500,000 in cash.

  Over the years, it would be handy for Cohn, having the mob as his backer. Gangster Mickey Cohen, who achieved some celebrity in Los Angeles, wrote an autobiography late in his life, in which he recalled Frank Costello’s telling him to call Harry Cohn, and “go along with him in every way ya can.” Going along with Cohn, in this instance, meant killing Sammy Davis, because he was romantically involved with Kim Novak, and Cohn said he was “worried that her image doesn’t get ruined in the country.” Mickey Cohen said he refused, because he liked Sammy Davis—and he threatened that if anything happened to Davis, he would inform on Cohn.

  In 1934, Johnny Roselli visited Chicago to propose a plan for the Outfit’s obtaining a cut from the Hollywood studios. The plan was not novel, except in its scope. Once the end of Prohibition stanched an almost limitless flow of cash, the Outfit had focused more intensively than before on labor unions, which often had large reserves of loosely controlled cash; and, during the thirties, the organization would intimidate or take outright control of numerous local and international unions (siphoning off membership dues, putting relatives on payrolls, extorting money from company managements). In 1934, the Outfit placed its own man, George Browne, in the presidency of the stagehands and projectionists union, known as the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). Browne, of course, had informed his friend Petrillo of Stein’s planned kidnapping; he and Petrillo had worked hand in hand, since Browne had been head of the stagehands local, and they often dealt with theaters together. Browne quickly installed Willie Bioff—an erstwhile pimp who took his orders from the mob—as his assistant. Before they were thus elevated, Browne and Bioff had been freelancing on their own. Representing the stagehands, they had threatened Barney Balaban with a strike in his theaters, and he had responded by giving them a cash payoff in exchange for peace. It had become almost routine; Balaban had been initiated into this way of doing business earlier, having made a similar deal with the head of the projectionists union—something for which he was investigated by a grand jury, though charges were not brought.

  The latest idea was to carry out the Bioff-Balaban scheme but on a much bigger scale. Since most of the studios owned chains of theaters, they were vulnerable to strikes not only on the movie lot, where production could be halted and a perishable product lost, but also at theaters, from which they needed box office receipts to fund production. Moreover, their relations with labor were abysmal. They had just experienced a very violent strike in 1933; Roselli had commandeered his thugs to help break it, and from then on was employed by the studios’ labor liaison on a co
nfidential basis. Conservative businessmen who detested the union leaders on principle and also feared their power, the studio owners had never tried to establish the kind of rapport Stein had with Petrillo. (Actually, Stein was just as politically conservative as they, but when it came to his business interests he was a pragmatist.) So it was entirely plausible that these men would make the same calculation Balaban had made earlier; payoffs to union officials were the cost of doing business—and far cheaper than meeting real demands on wages, or taking a strike. (Interestingly enough, Balaban would become the head of Paramount in 1936, and Leo Spitz, his Chicago lawyer who had arranged for those earlier payments to be made to Bioff, would head RKO; so these were men who knew from personal experience how the game was played.) What the studio heads had no way of knowing, however, was the Outfit’s audacious long-term plan: 20 percent of studio profits within five years, and, ultimately, a 50 percent interest in the studios themselves.

  Nearly ten years later, in 1943, seven high-ranking members of the Chicago organization would be indicted on federal charges of extortion—Roselli, Frank Nitti (who committed suicide when the indictment came down), Paul Ricca, Louis Campagna, Charlie Gioe, Phil D’Andrea, Ralph Pierce, and Frank Diamond. During the trial, the studio heads, testifying for the prosecution, claimed that they had made payoffs to Bioff out of fear for their lives. That seemed unlikely; each major studio had been paying out $50,000 a year through the mid-thirties, and not one had ever complained to law enforcement. Harry Cohn, moreover, admitted his closeness to Roselli on the witness stand—testifying that they used to go to the Santa Anita racetrack together, that Roselli had found him an apartment and for several years they had lived in the same building, and that they had exchanged valuable gifts (Cohn was wearing a ruby ring Roselli had given him). Moreover, on one occasion, when the union had struck the Columbia lot (Bioff had ordered the strike in a fit of anger, because Cohn had not made his payment), Cohn had immediately called Roselli, who ordered Bioff to call off the strike, which he did. The mob’s lawyers argued that what had occurred here was not extortion by their clients, as charged, but bribery by the producers, who wanted to buy labor peace at a bargain; but the truth probably lay somewhere in the gray region between the two.

  Bioff, in any event, was such an excellent, expansive witness that he evidently dispelled any gray from the jurors’ minds. He and Browne had been tried and convicted of tax evasion and racketeering in 1941, and now he testified about how he had been coached in concocting his story for that earlier trial by the lawyer for the Outfit, Sidney Korshak. A couple of years earlier, with his legal troubles escalating, Bioff had had a series of conferences with members of the Outfit, including Frank Nitti, Charles Gioe, and others at the Bismarck Hotel in Chicago; and at one of these meetings, Bioff testified, Gioe had introduced him to Korshak, saying, “Willie, meet Sidney Korshak; he is our man. . . . I want you to pay attention to Sidney when he tells you something, that he knows what he is talking about. Any message he might deliver to you is a message from us.” After that, Bioff and Korshak met frequently (“I had lunch with him and went to cafes with him I would say a dozen times,” Bioff testified). Bioff was indicted on May 23, 1941, and a day or so later, Korshak called, wanting to see him. By this time, federal investigators had found evidence of a $100,000 payment that Joe Schenck, of Twentieth Century, had made to Bioff; Schenck, who claimed it was a loan, had been convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to three years in prison. When he and Korshak met, Bioff testified, Korshak asked him if he had prepared a defense; when Bioff responded that he had not, Korshak told him that he had studied the transcript of Schenck’s trial and it had shown many transactions Schenck could not explain. Therefore, Korshak had continued, Bioff’s alibi should be that he had collected the money from the producers to give to Schenck, to be used as a legislative slush fund for the industry “so Joe Schenck could fix things in Washington.” Korshak also said that “Joe would be a good victim, for he is known as the playboy of the industry, and the politician of the industry; to dump it into his lap, and think in that direction, and collect everything I can that would point in the direction that Joe Schenck would be the man I gave the money to,” Bioff testified.

  Before Bioff went to trial, he began to have second thoughts, and he told Charlie Gioe that he might resign from the IA, as the IATSE was known—which amounted, in effect, to a statement that he wanted to go his own way. Shortly, he received another visit from Gioe, this time accompanied by Louis Campagna. “Campagna said, ‘I understand from Charlie that you told him you were going to resign; is that right?’ ” Bioff testified.

  “I said, ‘Yes, sir.’

  “He says, ‘Well, anybody resigns, resigns feet first . . . you understand what that means.’

  “I says, ‘I do.’

  “He says, ‘Now go ahead,’ and that was the end of it, and I didn’t resign.”

  At his trial, Bioff presented the fiction about having collected the money for a slush fund. He and Browne were both convicted. Korshak—who, according to Bioff, had brought him $15,000 from Gioe to be used to pay his defense lawyers—continued to make himself useful. He represented Browne for a time after he was convicted, and brought messages to him from members of the Outfit. The critical question was whether Bioff and Browne, facing ten- and eight-year prison terms, respectively, would cooperate with the government and expose their bosses. The same question pertained to a confederate of theirs, Nick Dean, an Outfit member who had been placed in the IA and was indicted at the same time as Bioff and Browne. He had gone underground; been arrested after they had been tried; pled guilty; and was sentenced to eight years in jail. Assistant U.S. Attorney Boris Kostelanetz, who had tried the case against Bioff and Browne, was trying to prod the three to cooperate; Dean, wavering, began to talk a little; and the fact that he was doing so leaked out. The response in Chicago was swift. The body of Dean’s mistress, Estelle Carey, was found in her apartment; she had been beaten, slashed, ice-picked, and then set afire. Dean’s cooperation ended. But Bioff, rather surprisingly, reacted differently. “We sit around in jail for those bastards and they go around killing our families,” he told Kostelanetz. “To hell with them. Whataya want to know, Boris?”

  Three weeks later, the indictments were handed down. At trial, one of the defense lawyers, trying to undermine Bioff’s credibility, confronted him with his perjury about his transactions with Schenck at his earlier trial. Bioff responded with an unvarnished self-appraisal. “I am just a low uncouth person. I’m a low type sort of man. People of my caliber don’t do nice things.” But when pressed about having lied, he emphasized, again and again, that he had done so “on advice of a member of your profession. . . . I had no choice much. They were my orders.” He also admitted that he had lied to the lawyers who had represented him during that trial. But he said he had never lied to Korshak. “He was in my confidence, sir. . . . I was ordered to discuss the truth and facts with him.”

  It was one thing to be a lawyer who represented members of the Outfit, another to be someone who spoke as though they and he were one, conveying messages and orders from them—and suborning perjury on their behalf. Korshak could have been prosecuted, Kostelanetz acknowledged years later, but all he had was Bioff’s word, and he had other targets that, at the time, were bigger. All the gangsters but Pierce were convicted and given ten-year terms. These were cut to a third, at least in part through the efforts of Korshak, who obtained a letter recommending their parole from the Illinois state superintendent of crime prevention, Harry Ash, who happened to have been Korshak’s former law partner. Their release in 1947 was sufficiently shocking that it triggered a congressional investigation—and elevated Korshak’s standing within the organization.

  This kind of status carried a price. Another lawyer in Chicago, Harry Busch, recalled that he had known Korshak since the thirties, and used to see him frequently in those early years. “We had our law offices in the same building as Sidney’s, and it had an opening into th
e Bismarck Hotel. On Fridays they had a filet of sole lunch that was so good, you used to see everyone there. I liked Sidney as a person. Whom he advised, what he did—that was different.” Over the years, Korshak would tell some friends that he had gotten his start with the Outfit by advising Capone when he was still in law school. Now, Busch commented, “However Sidney got his start, I think it was inadvertent. Something that was just too tempting, and then he couldn’t get out. I remember once I was walking down the street—this was probably in the forties—and he said, ‘Wait, I’ll walk with you, where are you headed?’

  “I said, ‘It’s a court recess—I’m going to pick up my car.’

  “And he said, ‘How I envy you!’

  “I said, ‘Why? I know you’re making far, far more money than I am—’

  “He said, ‘I’d rather make less money, and be out of this.’ Well, I didn’t ask what ‘this’ was—I mean, I knew, but I didn’t want to know any more. The thing was, by then, he couldn’t get out.”

  And, thanks to Bioff, Korshak had become a known quantity, his relationship to the mob no longer just a part of Chicago lore. The trial received heavy coverage in newspapers across the country; and in some papers, like the Herald-American, it was headline news (“Bioff Names Sid Korshak as Mob Aide”). In 1943, Korshak married an ice skater and dancer, Bernice Stewart, and the couple lived in Chicago; but by the mid-forties, Korshak was coming to Hollywood quite regularly. “Already the word was that he was a spokesman for the underworld,” Richard Gully recalled. “So people were leery, though fascinated. Mervyn LeRoy [the director who, among other things, had started the Warner Bros. cycle of gangster movies in the thirties, and who was working with Stein on the Hollywood Canteen] launched Korshak. Mervyn’s wife, Kitty, was from Chicago, and she talked Mervyn into giving a party for Korshak. Now Jules was very close to Mervyn—but he said, ‘As fond as I am of you, Mervyn, I will not come to your party.’ And he stuck to that always. Jules barred Korshak socially.” Indeed, many years later, when Korshak’s annual Christmas party had become the ultimate event of the season in Hollywood—the one where everyone who was anyone wanted to be—Stein’s daughter Jean decided to go. Stein was furious at her, and told her that he would never think of setting foot in Korshak’s home.