City of Nets (15 page)

The charge that it was all bribery came from a gaunt C.I.O. organizer named Jeff Kibre, who officially represented an organization called the Motion Picture Technicians Committee and who was subsequently accused of being a Communist. Kibre filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board charging that Schenck's $100,000 had been paid “to balk collective bargaining.” Kibre's complaint said that Bioff, “while purporting to act as an official representative of the head of the union,” was actually in the pay of the producers. This charge was later endorsed by a Chicago tax court, where Judge John W. Kern found that the studios “knowingly and willingly paid over the funds and in a sense lent encouragement and participated with full knowledge of the facts in the activities of Browne and Bioff.” Dealing with Browne and Bioff, according to one affidavit, saved the studios an estimated fifteen million dollars. The NLRB duly ordered an election to see who should represent the studio workers. Schenck and Bioff held a strategy meeting, according to subsequent testimony by a IATSE official, and Bioff said IATSE must win the election, and Schenck said, “You're damned right it must. You've got to win.”

Bioff did win. After all the threats and shouts, his IATSE received 4,460 votes in that 1939 election while the CIO's United Studio Technicians Guild got 1,967. But like any tragic hero, Bioff appeared unaware of the forces gathering to ruin him. He began planning still greater triumphs. Why should the union limit itself to mere stagehands and electricians? Why not take over the actors, collect a share of the fortunes paid to the stars, become a friend and protector to the pretty girls? Bioff saw his opportunity when a quarrel broke out between the Associated Actors and Artists of America and some officials of its subsidiary, the American Federation of Actors. Bioff's IATSE immediately took in the dissidents by granting the AFA a union charter and promising all of IATSE's muscular support. “We had about 20 percent of Hollywood when we got in trouble,” Bioff later said. “If we hadn't got loused up, we'd have had 50 percent. I had Hollywood dancing to my tune.”

Many of the actors were rather tempted by Bioff's overtures. Although a few big stars made big money, the vast majority of actors got very little. Their median income in 1939 was $4,700, and many of them were unemployed. Bioff's success in getting the stagehands a 10 percent raise sounded impressive in those Depression days (those who were impressed didn't realize that Bioff's contract also reduced overtime pay and thus saved the studios a lot of money). Bioff encountered strong resistance, however, from the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Robert Montgomery, who asked the union's board for $5,000 to hire a detective agency to investigate Bioff's background. If the board didn't provide the money, Montgomery declared, he would pay it out of his own salary. The detectives hired by the Guild soon discovered—and the Guild publicized—two embarrassing facts. One was Bioff's failure to serve his sentence for pandering; the other was the charge that he had taken a $100,000 bribe from Joe Schenck.

The Internal Revenue Service was already investigating Schenck, and Schenck urged Bioff to “be out of the way.” In fact, according to Bioff's later testimony, Schenck paid for Bioff to take his wife, Laurie, on the S.S.
Normandie
on a cruise to Rio de Janeiro and then to spend two months touring London, Paris, and the Low Countries. Bioff's extended vacation served no real purpose. When he returned, he was indicted in January of 1940 for evading nearly $85,000 in taxes in 1936 and 1937. Schenck was indicted the following June for tax frauds of more than $400,000, and for perjury in his explanations of why he had paid $100,000 to Bioff.

Only after Bioff was indicted did the Illinois authorities bestir themselves and ask that he be shipped home to finish serving the eighteen-year-old sentence for pandering. Bioff resisted extradition. “I would call my plight persecution,” he said. “Maybe I have been doing too much for the working man. The money interests want to see me out of the picture. So do the CIO and the Communists.” None of these writhings saved Bioff from being shipped back to Chicago to serve out his term in Bridewell prison from April to September of 1940. Released then, and departing in a rented car to return to Hollywood, he handed reporters a typewritten statement declaring: “I have paid my pound of flesh to society.”

The federal prosecutors artfully brought Schenck to trial first, in March of 1941. The producer tried to defend himself by marshaling an array of character witnesses—Charlie Chaplin, Chico and Harpo Marx, Irving Berlin—but he declined to testify himself. He was duly convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. A few weeks later, after contemplating the various possibilities, Schenck said to his prosecutors: “I'll talk, gentlemen. I don't want to spend three years in jail.”

So then Bioff was brought to trial in October, not only for tax evasion but also for racketeering and conspiracy. He was charged with extorting $550,000 from the four big studios. With characteristic
élan,
he admitted to having taken more than twice that much, but always at the producers' request. The testimony was rich and colorful. “Now look, I'll tell you why I'm here,” Bioff had said, according to Nick Schenck. “I want you to know that I'm the boss—I elected Mr. Browne.” Schenck said he protested against Bioff's financial demands, but Bioff told him, “Stop this nonsense. It will cost you a lot more if you don't do it.” Schenck said the meeting was “terrifying.” He further testified that Bioff blamed Louis B. Mayer for the official investigation of his affairs, and he threatened revenge. “There is not room for both of us in this world, and I will be the one who stays here,” Schenck quoted Bioff as warning. “Mr. Mayer was terribly scared,” Schenck added.

Bioff described his encounters in more amiable terms. “He don't eat no lunch, he eats an apple,” he said of Nick Schenck. “I had an apple with him.” Bioff told his bizarre tale about borrowing money from Joe Schenck to buy an alfalfa farm, and then he was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. His nominal boss, the pitiful George Browne, who did not testify at all, was sentenced to eight. Once Bioff had been consigned to Alcatraz, he decided in 1943 that he wanted to testify more fully about his activities. He told for the first time of the fortune he had been forced to pay to Frank Nitti and Nitti's associates in Chicago. Delighted federal prosecutors duly indicted Nitti and five of his peculiarly named lieutenants: Paul “The Waiter” de Lucia, Phil “The Squire” D'Andrea, Charles “Cherry Nose” Gioe, Louis “Little New York” Campagna, and Frank “The Immune” Maritone. On the day the indictments were handed down, a drunken man clutching a bottle was seen reeling alongside some railroad tracks at Riverside, near Chicago. Several people called out to him, jeering. The drunken man pulled out a pistol and fired wildly at them. Then he put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger. That was the end of Frank Nitti, “The Enforcer.”

Bioff was a star witness against Nitti's friends. He admitted under cross-examination that he had “lied and lied and lied” in his previous court appearances, but he declared that the outbreak of war had greatly affected him. It was solely to join the fight against the Axis, he said, that he had petitioned for his release from prison. The assorted gangsters whom he accused were duly convicted and sentenced to ten years each. Bioff and Browne were paroled after three years of their sentences. Joe Schenck served four months and five days, then received a presidential pardon.

On emerging from prison, Willie Bioff disappeared from sight, or at least from public view. He called himself Bill Nelson and moved to Phoenix. He bought a small house just outside city limits and planted a flowering hedge of lantana and plumbago. He told neighbors that he was a retired businessman, but it was said later that he dabbled in diamonds, or in cattle brokerage, or that he occasionally did some work for old friends in the Las Vegas casinos, or that he acted as an FBI informant. One day in November of 1955, he waved goodbye to his wife, walked out to his Ford pickup truck, and started the engine. The explosion flung his body about twenty-five feet from the wreckage of the truck. “He was so good and kind . . .” his wife said later. “He didn't have an enemy in the world.” The murder has never been solved.

Joe Schenck spent his last years in a state sometimes called “confused,” at his penthouse suite atop a Beverly Hills hotel, and there he died of a heart attack in 1961. Many friends and associates praised him as one of Hollywood's founding fathers, and Anita Loos eulogized him by saying, “One of the best Christians I've ever known was a Jew.” He left an estate of $3.5 million.

 

At a meeting of the Motion Picture Producers Association, one day in 1941, Louis B. Mayer worked himself into a rage about a novel that had just been published by the son of another one of the producers.

“God damn it, B.P., why didn't you stop him?” demanded Mayer, whose patriarchal authority was such that he refused to allow his own daughters to go to college because their morals might be corrupted there. “How could you allow this? It's your fault.”

“Louis, how can I stop him?” retorted Ben Schulberg, the longtime chief of production at Paramount. “It's a free country.”

“Well, I don't care,” Mayer grumbled. “You should have stopped him, and I think it's an outrage, and he ought to be deported.”

“Deported? Where?” Schulberg laughed. “He was one of the few kids who came out of this place. Where are we going to deport him to? Catalina? Lake Helena? Louis, where do you send him?”

“I don't care where you send him,” said Louis B. Mayer of Minsk, “but deport him.”

What Makes Sammy Run?,
the novel that had just been published by the twenty-seven-year-old Budd (originally Seymour) Schulberg, was not a very distinguished work. Its hero, Sammy Glick, was a crude caricature of the Jew as betrayer.
*
From his boyhood in the East Side ghetto to his apogee as a producer in Hollywood, Sammy Glick lied and cheated, stole ideas, plagiarized stories, double-crossed everyone he knew—not just because it was in his interest, as one former Washington official said of a recent secretary of state, but because it was in his nature. Schulberg kept explaining that nature in terms of social Darwinism. Sammy had been rocked in “his cradle of hate, malnutrition, prejudice, suspicions, amorality, the anarchy of the poor.” So he grew into a creature trained only for combat. “I saw Sammy Glick on a battlefield where every soldier was his own cause, his own army and his own flag,” said Schulberg's narrator, Al Mannheim. Perhaps anticipating the inevitable charge of anti-Semitism, Schulberg made his preachy narrator a Jew as well, so that in one of his sermons about Sammy's swindling of yet another Jew, Mannheim could urge, “as a last resort, the need of Jews to help each other in self-defense.”

“ ‘Don't pull that Jewish crapola on me,' Sammy said. ‘What the hell did the Jews ever do for me?—except maybe get my head cracked open for me when I was a kid. . . .'

“ ‘Jews,' he said bitterly and absently.

“ ‘Jews,' he said, like a storm trooper.”

Jewish anti-Semitism, Jewish self-hatred, is the standard accusation applied to such an outburst, and it comes easily to accusers who did not experience the gentile anti-Semitism of the 1930's, or the desperation of the victims' efforts to escape it. But if Sammy Glick was a caricature, he nonetheless achieved the durability of such older paradigms as Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt or Ring Lardner's Jack Keefe. This was partly because of an element of truth at the heart of the caricature and partly because of the richly ornamented detail surrounding the portrait. When Mannheim went to visit Sammy in his new house in upper Beverly Hills, Sammy insisted on turning on the floodlights that illuminated the garden. “I've got my own barbecue pit and my own badminton court,” he proudly announced. “And have I got flowers! Do you realize you're looking at twelve hundred dollars' worth of hibiscus plants?” A bit later, when Sammy's boasting made Mannheim feel “as if I were watching
The Phantom of the
Opera
or any other horror picture,” he could not resist setting a trap. “ ‘Sammy,' I said quietly, ‘how does it feel? How does it feel to have everything?' He began to smile. It became a smirk, a leer. ‘It makes me feel kinda . . .' And then it came blurting out of nowhere—‘patriotic.' ”

Hollywood was accustomed to such barbs from visiting English novelists, but what made
Sammy
so wounding was that Schulberg had grown up in Hollywood and had known it from the inside all his life. He and his best friend, Maurice Rapf, the son of M-G-M producer Harry Rapf, spent their boyhood playing hide-and-go-seek on the stage sets of “their” studios, watching the creation of
The Merry Widow
and
Ben Hur.
The young Schulberg had been petted and kissed by Mary Pickford and Clara Bow. His mother, Adeline, built the first house on Malibu Beach and spent her time trying to elevate the cultural tastes of Sylvia Thalberg, Rosabelle Laemmle, and the Mayer girls. So Schulberg was intensely pleased when Dorothy Parker praised him by saying, “I never thought anyone could put Hollywood—the true shittiness of it—between covers.” For that was indeed what he had done.

The element that Dorothy Parker thought so characteristic of Hollywood appeared most noxiously in its labor union struggles, which Schulberg, almost alone among the novelists of the subject, explored in considerable detail. But that Hollywood struggle can only be understood within the framework of Los Angeles as a whole, which had been for more than half a century the capital of the open shop, and thus of the open labor market, and thus of low wages. Indeed, Los Angeles' officially organized resistance to unions was one of the major reasons why it overtook San Francisco as the great metropolis of California. San Francisco in the late nineteenth century boasted not only a great natural harbor and a rich agricultural hinterland but an established base of commerce and industry and even a cultural heritage of sorts; Los Angeles had relatively nothing.