City of Nets (14 page)

And life with Alma had its own difficulties. Benedictine was by now an important part of her diet. She “has the bosom of a pouter pigeon,” Stravinsky's friend Robert Craft wrote maliciously in his diary, “and the voice of a barracks bugle in one of her first husband's symphonies.” Behrman was no less malicious. He described a dinner at the Schoenbergs' at which Mrs. Werfel relentlessly analyzed the comparative merits of her various husbands and lovers. “She went on and on,” Behrman recalled, “till she came to Werfel; she included him in her list as if he weren't there. Finally, looking straight at her husband, she made a grand summation: ‘But,' she said, ‘the most interesting personality I have known—
was Mahler.
' ” Then, as a last twist, there was a man who reappeared out of the Werfels' past, who had occupied an adjoining room at their hotel in Lourdes, and who now went to court to claim that Werfel had stolen his life story, that he was Jacobowsky. . . .

Werfel suffered his first major heart attack in September of 1943. “He was running a fever and fighting for breath,” Mrs. Werfel recorded. “The doctors gave him injections, but in his agony he kept crying, ‘Morphine! Morphine!' ” He recovered and wrote a poem about his encounter with Death, who ended by speaking “two words only:/‘Not Today.' ”

Jacobowsky and the Colonel
finally opened on Broadway in the spring of 1945, to rave reviews. Werfel hated the final version and never saw it on stage. He was working on a futuristic novel,
Star of the Unborn,
and shortly after writing the last page that August, he collapsed. “He lay on the floor in front of his desk, a smile on his face, his hands limp, unclenched,” Mrs. Werfel wrote. “I screamed—screamed as loud as I could scream. The butler came running. . . .”

The funeral was, of course, a great Hollywood event. Not on the scale of the funeral of Rudolph Valentino, or even Harry Cohn, but still, within the large refugee community, a great event. Lotte Lehmann sang Schubert lieder. Bruno Walter, who lived next door to the Werfels, accompanied her on the organ. Werfel himself was decked out in what his wife said had been his own wish, a tuxedo and a new silk shirt, with, mysteriously, a spare silk shirt and several handkerchiefs tucked away inside the coffin. But Alma herself was not there. “ ‘I never come to these things,' this grand woman had said,” according to Thomas Mann, who added that her remark “affected me as so comic that I did not know whether the heaving of my chest before the coffin came from laughing or sobbing.”

Bruno Walter's organ playing went on and on, while everyone waited for the Franciscan abbot Georg Moenius to deliver his commemorative address. “At the last moment, Alma had insisted on seeing the manuscript,” Mann said, “and was giving it a vigorous going-over.” Stravinsky was there too, of course, waiting like all the rest. He had admired Werfel as a man of “acute musical judgment,” a rare compliment from so caustic a judge as Stravinsky, but when he came to write of the funeral in his memoirs, the thing he remembered most vividly about the occasion was that it had “confronted me for the first time in thirty-three years with the angry, tortured, burning face of Arnold Schoenberg.”

 

Willie Bioff ran the stagehands' union, with the help of the mob.

3
Treachery

(1941)

M
oney attracts deals—and dealers, men with a talent for various combinations of lures and threats and deceptions. As money kept flowing into Hollywood, and all of Los Angeles, the whole place increasingly acquired the seductive glitter of the City of Nets, where, as in
Mahagonny,
everything was permitted. Raymond Chandler's emblematic detective, Philip Marlowe, observed and hated the change. “I used to like this town,” he remarked as he drove westward along Sunset Boulevard with a scrumptious model named Dolores (in
The Little Sister
). “A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. . . . Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style. . . . Now we've got the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast-dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago. . . . We've got the flashy restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The . . . riffraff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.”

Hardly anyone could fit Marlowe's indictment better than Willie Bioff—alias William Berg, alias Henry Martin, Harry Martin, and Mr. Bronson—a jowly, blubbery figure from Chicago who had great plans for Hollywood. “I want from the movie industry two million dollars,” Bioff said to Nicholas Schenck, president of Loew's, Inc., and thus ruler of M-G-M. “Schenck threw up his hands and raved,” Bioff recalled. “I told him if he didn't get the others together we would close every theater in the country.” Schenck got the others together, and they negotiated an annual tribute to Bioff.

Schenck went to Bioff's room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York with fifty thousand dollars in cash wrapped up in a paper bundle, Schenck testified at Bioff's trial for racketeering in October of 1941. He laid the bundle of money on the bed. Bioff handed the bundle to George Browne, president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and a vice-president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and told him to count it. While Browne counted, Schenck stood by the window, smoking and looking thoughtfully out over Manhattan. As he stood and smoked, another visitor arrived, Sidney Kent, president of 20th Century–Fox. He, too, had a paper-wrapped bundle that he placed on the bed. Bioff told Browne to count that as well. Kent's bundle also contained fifty thousand dollars.

That was the way Willie Bioff did business in Hollywood. “I've found out that dickering with these picture producers goes about the same all the time,” he observed. “You get into a room with them, and they start yelling and hollering about how they're being held up and robbed. That goes on and on. Me, I'm a busy man and don't get too much sleep. After a while it dies down, and the quiet wakes me up, and I say, ‘All right, gentlemen, do we get the money?' ”

His real name was Morris Bioff, according to the testimony of his sister, two brothers, and a second cousin, who all said that not only Morris preferred to be called William but so did his older brother Peter, who joined the navy during World War I and was never heard from again. When the prosecutors cited to Bioff the 1916 naturalization papers of his father, Louis, born Lazar Bioffsky, they asked him to sort out the listed children, and he said, “Morris is me.”

Brought from Russia at the age of five (“Don't let nobody hand you the bunk that I wasn't born in Chicago,” he told one reporter. “There's been talk that I'm a foreigner”), Bioff quit school in the third grade and lived mainly on the streets of Chicago's West Side. He was a newsboy. He worked in an icehouse. He ran errands for various local hoodlums. “I got wise to the trick of stealing hams from Swift's warehouse back of the yards,” he said. “Some weeks I wouldn't have nothing but hams to eat except maybe apples that I would sneeze from peddlers' carts in South Halsted Street.”

Bioff was arrested a few times, but only one charge counted. A prostitute named Bernice Thomas, working in a brothel on South Halsted Street, serviced thirteen men one day and gave Bioff twenty-nine dollars as his share of her earnings. He was convicted in 1922 on a charge of pandering, sentenced to six months in jail and a fine of three hundred dollars. He served eight days, then was released on an appeal, and the case somehow went into a kind of official limbo. “I made mistakes as a boy,” Bioff cried when the charges resurfaced two decades later. He blamed the new publicity on “plutocrats in Hollywood who are attacking me because I am fighting for the little fellows in the picture studios.”

As an obscure noncom in the ragged armies trying to maintain the empire of the imprisoned Al Capone, Bioff was maneuvering unsuccessfully to organize the kosher butchers of Chicago when he happened to meet George Browne, the hard-drinking business agent for Local 2 of the Stagehands Union. (“Is it true,” a reporter later asked Bioff, “that Browne drank 100 bottles of beer a day?” Bioff pretended to be shocked.) Times were hard. Franklin D. Roosevelt had just been elected President on his promises of a new deal, but 250 members of Browne's local were unemployed, and the rest had recently been forced to take a wage cut. The union was running a soup kitchen to keep its workers going. Bioff talked Browne into hiring him as an assistant at thirty dollars per week, then offered his new boss a proposal. Why not ask the candidates running in the next local elections to contribute to Browne's soup kitchen in the hope of winning the union members' votes? Bioff's idea promptly earned some handsome donations for the soup kitchen. Then he had another idea. “Let's put the clout on the Balabans,” he said to Browne.

John and Barney Balaban (the latter was eventually to become president of Paramount) ran a chain of movie theaters in Chicago and had succeeded in forcing their employees to take a 20 percent wage cut. It was supposed to be temporary, until a specified date. When that date came and went without any changes, Browne demanded that the old pay scales be restored. The Balabans complained of hard times and offered Browne $150 a week for his soup kitchen if he would forget about any restoration of the old wages. Browne reported this offer to his friend Bioff, and Bioff thought he could strike a better bargain.

Bioff began grandly. He demanded fifty thousand dollars. The Balabans pleaded poverty, misery, the ruin of their business. That evening, all the Balaban theaters began to be plagued by a series of accidents in the projection rooms. The projectors ran film upside down, or showed the pictures out of sync with the sound, or put different parts of the film in the wrong order. Customers began demanding their money back. The Balabans, richly aware that Browne's union controlled what was shown in all their theaters, agreed to pay Bioff twenty thousand dollars.

Bioff was triumphant. He and Browne went to an expensive nightclub and ordered champagne. The operator of this nightclub, Nick Circella, naturally wondered how two such unimpressive characters had managed to acquire such impressive amounts of cash. Circella told some of his friends about Browne's mysterious riches, and the friends took Browne for a ride in one of their cars. When they returned from the ride, they knew all they needed to know. Browne and Bioff were thereupon summoned to the home of Frank Nitti, one of Al Capone's chief lieutenants and heirs, known as “The Enforcer.” Also in attendance was a visitor from new York, Louis Lepke Buchalter, the head of an organization later known as Murder Inc. The end of prohibition meant that the underworld had to find new ways of making money. Buchalter, too, had begun investigating the possibilities of profit in the film projectionists' power over the movie theaters.

Nitti saw opportunities on a grand scale. In June of 1934, in Louisville, Kentucky, IATSE would hold its national convention. Fat, amiable, alcoholic George Browne had foolishly put himself forward for president in 1932 and been defeated. “Well, you'll run again and you'll win,” Nitti supposedly told him now. “Louis [Buchalter] here will talk to Lucky [Luciano] and the eastern outfits will vote for you.” And of all the money that could be made from all this, Nitti told Browne, Nitti and his associates would take half (a little later, Nitti raised his share to two thirds). Nick Circella, the sometime restaurateur, would join Browne's staff to keep watch on all the accounts.

So it was that George Browne was elected head of the labor union known as IATSE. And so it was that Willie Bioff, newly appointed as Browne's international representative, summoned the Chicago Exhibitors Association and told its representatives that they would henceforth need two union projectionists in each theater.

“My God! That will close up all my shows,” said Jack Miller, labor representative for the theater owners.

“If that will kill grandma, then grandma must die,” said Bioff, according to his subsequent testimony. “Miller said that two men in each booth would cost about $500,000 a year. So I said, ‘Well, why don't you make a deal?' And we finally agreed on $60,000.”

There were more such deals to be made in both New York and Hollywood, so Browne and Bioff began traveling. In New York, they quickly won $150,000 from the theater owners. In Hollywood, where IATSE had been crippled by a strike in 1932, Browne and Bioff coolly announced to the badly divided locals that they, Browne and Bioff, were now in charge of the twelve thousand assorted members, and that they would soon get all these members a 10 percent raise. Then back to New York, where Bioff first made his demand for two million dollars then took Schenck aside and told him, “Maybe two million is a little too much. I've decided I'll take a million.” After what Bioff called “yelling and screaming,” they all agreed that the four major studios (M-G-M, Warners, Fox, and Paramount) would each pay $50,000, and the minor studios $25,000. Then back to Hollywood, where Bioff told his members that they would have to pay the union 2 percent of their wages for a war fund, in case of strikes. Of that war fund, which totaled about $1.5 million per year, two thirds apparently went to Nitti and his friends in Chicago, the rest to Browne and Bioff. There were a few stirrings of protest, but Browne and Bioff sent some burly assistants to deal with them. Besides, times were hard and jobs scarce.

There actually was one short strike in the spring of 1937, called not by Bioff but by a loose coalition of painters, plumbers, grips, draftsmen, and others who had named themselves the Federated Motion Picture Crafts. Bioff did not approve of such independent maneuvers. “There was disorder, fisticuffing, free-for-all fights,” reported Florabel Muir of the
New York Daily News.
“At the height of the trouble a group of strange outlanders arrived in town. Some of these men told around that they came from Chicago. Bioff . . . testified under oath . . . a few months later that all stories of the importation of Chicago gunmen to smash the F.M.P.C. strike were lies. My testimony on this point is not hearsay. I saw these fellows in action. They all drove Lincoln-Zephyr cars and obtained gun permits from the Los Angeles police. The F.M.P.C. people heard of their arrival and immediately sent to the port of San Pedro for C.I.O. longshoremen to protect them. The longies, tough mugs all, came trooping up to Hollywood eager for battle, scorning guns, brandishing only gnarled fists. . . . Four of the Lincoln-Zephyrs filled with gunmen were attacked and rolled over bottom-side up. I saw one major engagement between the longies and the invaders near the Pico Boulevard gate of the Twentieth Century–Fox studio in which fists proved a far more potent weapon than guns. . . .”

Willie Bioff, however, had a still more powerful weapon: the IATSE union card that he issued to anyone who wanted to walk through the picket lines. He issued thousands of them, and in about ten days the strike fizzled out. A few days after that, Bioff received a check for $100,000 from Joseph Schenck, who happened to be not only the chairman of 20th Century–Fox but also the president of the Motion Picture Producers Association. Why Schenck paid this $100,000 to Bioff has never really been explained, though there have been many explanations. Schenck first claimed that it was just a friendly loan, but when the matter ended in court, he declared that Bioff had extorted the money from him as the price of labor peace. Others claimed it was a bribe by the producers to keep the union docile. Schenck's charge of extortion played well in the newspapers, which savored the image of union racketeers preying on respectable businessmen. But bribery and extortion can turn out to be much the same thing. Money is paid in exchange for a service; both sides agree on the price and the service; the only question is who is corrupting whom; perhaps both, perhaps neither.

The antithesis of union racketeers versus respectable businessmen also depends on antithetical images of personality and class. Bioff and Schenck were not exactly opposites. Schenck, too, was an impoverished immigrant from Russia, where his father had sold vodka to riverboats plying the Volga. As boys in New York, he and his younger brother, Nick, had gone to work in a drugstore, a good sort of place for a wide variety of deals. They soon bought the store, then invested in a dance hall across the Hudson, then added a Ferris wheel, then bought all of Palisades Park. Their partner in that last maneuver was a nickelodeon operator named Marcus Loew, who urged them to join in buying some theaters in Hoboken. From there to the presidency of Fox was just another series of deals.

Bioff may not have been the Schencks' third brother, but his version of the $100,000 check made it sound as though they were all members of some sort of family. Bioff actually provided two versions, both fantastically complicated. One story, quite implausible, was that he wanted to invest some of his money in an alfalfa farm, and feared that a large cash payment might look suspicious, and thought that if Schenck loaned him the money, which he would soon repay . . . and so on. Bioff's other story, which sounded a little better but was never publicly investigated, claimed that the studios were raising a fund to lobby for their interests, and that Nick Schenck had asked Bioff to act as a conduit to carry money to his brother Joe. “The motion picture industry is being sandbagged in different parts of the country through legislation,” Bioff quoted Nick Schenck as telling him.