Girl of My Dreams (59 page)

“You know this is extortion. You're nothing but a fucking chiseler! Blackmailer! I can call the police and have you arrested!”

Bioff chuckled. Daigle looked at him but didn't cut a smile. “I don't call you no names, Mr. Zangwill. Seems the police haven't really solved your problem, have they?”

Hop Daigle spoke only once. “We didn't do this, Mr. Zangwill. I know Willie Bioff here, from Chicago, but it wasn't your carpenters who broke up their own work.”

“Sure, Daigle, goddammit,” Mossy said, without indicating that he believed one word the carpenter had spoken. He turned back to Bioff and shouted. “My next phone call is to Edgar Globe! You know who he is, Bioff?”

Edgar Globe, the most important entertainment lawyer in Hollywood, represented Mossy and came to his parties. I'd seen his wife, Francesca, flirting with directors, holding off the tennis pro at the
soirée
that led to my humbling degradation. The mere mention of Globe's name was a potent threat. It was said Globe could make a tree grow downward into the ground if he felt like it.

“Yes, sure,” Willie Bioff said, “I know him, an honorable personage Edgar Globe is.”

An honorable personage? Shit, Mossy reflected. Globe was from Chicago too. Would Edgar know Bioff's superiors? Would he have mob connections himself? All right, he'd have to muscle this on his own.

“What you're talking about,” Mossy yelled, “Is completely impossible! I don't pay bribes. GET OUT!”

Without moving, Willie Bioff tilted his head from side to side. “I never used the word
bribe
, sir. Money is paid in exchange for a service, a service both sides need.”

Mossy came down from a yell to a modified bellow. “Your demand is outrageous. And Daigle, you're shitcanned off this lot immediately.”

“Oh, but it's Hop Daigle who brought us together, Mr. Zangwill,” Willie Bioff said. We both need him and the goodwill of the carpenters and the other workers at the studio, from set decorators to lighting people to sound engineers to drivers.”

“Are you threatening to put your union into every corner of this studio?” Mossy was incredulous.

“No threat, no threat. I'm just interested in all your many employees, Mr. Zangwill. I've only ever been interested in the plight of the workingman.”

Mossy's fury melted into worry. “Fifty thousand dollars is an outrage and it will destroy my studio. The bankers in New York are already screaming at me to cut costs.”

“Well, the motion picture industry is based on negotiation, isn't it? Why don't we negotiate?”

“I'll give you ten.”

“Then it's settled at twenty-five, Mr. Zangwill. Very good indeed. Everyone will work hard and your sets will be back up by Monday.”

“Shit!” Mossy said.

As nearly as anyone was able to find out, Bioff paid ten thousand to his mob handlers back in Chicago, kept ten for himself, and spread five among the Jubilee carpenters. It was his way of slicing the pie. When he was finally arrested years later, he claimed to be a labor peacemaker. He shook down virtually all the studio chiefs, often returning a few months later with another peace offering. The price of peace was as high as a hundred thousand dollars per shakedown for 20
^th
Century Fox, whose chairman, Joe Schenck, lied about his payoffs and went to prison, serving four months of a three-year sentence before, it was assumed, buying his way to a presidential pardon.

All the studio heads naturally wanted their own way. Mossy's way was to stonewall the unions where he could, subvert them where he couldn't, and make sweetheart deals where he had to. Willie Bioff was the perfect partner, a subverting co-conspirator and a sweetheart.

The Jubilee sets were rebuilt over the weekend. Everyone on the lot was frightened, depressed. What had happened could happen again. Cameras were rolling, but the studio was a hive of nerves. The whole town had the jitters, the other studios as well. The trade papers said Pammy had walked off the lot. She refused to return. “Everything at Jubilee stinks, there's a stench throughout the studio,” she told me when I called to see how she was. “I'm for the workers, all of them, but does anybody have a chance?”

I read her the latest telegram from Mike Quin. OWNERS WANT CONFRONTATION STOP WORKERS PLAN GENERAL STRIKE STOP QUIN.

“Tell me about San Francisco,” Pammy said.

30

On Location

I squared my shoulders, shifted my weight, raised my eyebrows like someone who has the right idea, and nodded decisively with what I took to be directorial authority. “Ladies,” I said, “come with me.” I'd installed the delegation at the Fairmont on Nob Hill, and I bundled us into a taxi, telling the driver our first stop was City Hall. It was Independence Day. I'd come up the day before on the train, while Pammy, Teresa Blackburn, and Race Honeycut had just arrived at the presumed revolution in Largo Buchalter's private biplane. Knowing of her break with Jubilee—and Mossy—Buchalter was hoping to lure her to Fox, where he was negotiating for a big picture; he'd lent her his pilot and plane. Mike Quin had dropped off a note at the hotel: “Welcome to San Francisco, tense and sea-girt, tense and waiting, where the only instruction that can be made with confidence and intelligence is to expect the unexpected. Dust-up at mayor's office. See you somewhere. Quin.”

It had been the “Tell me” in Pammy's “Tell me about San Francisco” that got me. It meant I was not a handyman but an expert. On Pammy's road to activism, I was the tour guide to the potential as well as the challenges of the labor movement. Our futures were at stake; either we could make a difference in the picture business, or we could not. The idea was to find out in San Francisco. When they peppered me with questions—Race's was typical: “Tell me, Heartthrob, what do you-all want us to be lookin' at up here?”—I recognized that what these actresses, even Pammy, wanted was a director.

We were met at City Hall by little rivers of marchers and countermarchers. I asked the cabdriver to wait. The Industrial Association, representing the businesses of San Francisco and especially the shipowners, had marchers demanding the mayor open the port and get the city going again. Placards were lettered in paint slashes: CALL IN THE MARINES; HIRE NEW WORKERS; REDS—KEEP OUT THIS IS THE USA. Two signs had big swastikas on them; one carried the caption, THE GERMANS DO IT RIGHT, and the other blared, SIEG HEIL—BEFORE SF BECOMES MOSCOW. The opposition, mostly the wives of dockworkers and seamen, along with some radical sympathizers, marched with placards that said, MAYOR PLEASE—COLLECTIVE BARGAINING IS A RIGHT NOT A CRIME; SUPPORT THE ILA (International Longshoremen's Association); THE NEW DEAL STARTS ON THE DOCKS, and FAIR PLAY FAIR PAY FOR WORKING ALL DAY.

“It's not a set, is it?” Teresa said. It was the swastikas that caught Pammy. “I can't believe I'm looking at that in America,” she said. One of the men carrying a swastika brought his placard down on the head of a man holding a HELP THE SEAMEN sign. In an instant both sides were on each other. Police, acting like referees, separated the two lines of marchers, who resumed their circling on the City Hall Plaza.

Teresa wanted to go into the mayor's office and assured Pammy that she'd be able to see him. “What for?” Pammy said. “He'd have his picture taken with me and then tell us we didn't know what we were doing. True enough. Anyway, it's July Fourth and he's probably giving a speech at some picnic.”

“Now we go where the strike is,” I said.

As I herded them back into the taxi, the driver did a double take. “Ma'am,” he said to Pammy. “If I didn't know better I'd think you were Palmyra Millevoix.”

“People tell me that,” she said.

As we arrived at ILA union headquarters just off the waterfront, I caught a nervous glimpse of the alley where I'd almost been stabbed to death a few weeks earlier. No trucks or freight cars were operating on the holiday, but hundreds of pickets marched. I steered my charges toward a picket line of perhaps thirty men. They were standing guard around a pile of crates to make sure no scabs moved them to a warehouse or a ship.

“Hey, it's Palmyra Millevoix,” said a man with a placard that read, WE WANT FULL RECOGNITION—ILA. “Are you slumming, ma'am, or are you with us?”

“I came to see for myself,” Pammy said. “No place with working men and women is a slum to me. My friends and I are here to support what you're doing.” She and Teresa and Race were surrounded by strikers who were both curious and awed.

It quickly developed that Race and Teresa didn't belong on this picket line. The strikers saw them merely as pretty girls with a movie star for a friend. I was accepted as a chaperone. A couple of pickets whistled at Race, and one asked Teresa if she'd like to come up to his place later and hear all about the strike. That drew a brief horselaugh. Out of their element, the two actresses saw they had no real role since the pickets only wanted to talk to the star. “I'd really like to see my brother,” Teresa said.

Teresa's brother, Stubby Blackburn, had been sold by the Los Angeles Angels to the Sacramento Solons of the Pacific Coast League, which meant she seldom saw him, and the Solons were in town to play the San Francisco Seals in a holiday doubleheader. “Heartthrob's gonna take good care of you, honey,” Race said to Pammy, “Me and Teresa's gonna take care of each other.” They found a taxi and headed to the ballpark.

“How are your families doing?” Pammy asked the pickets nearest her. “The strike's already two months old, isn't it?”

“We're on wartime rations like I had in France, ma'am,” a bearded longshoreman said, “but it's worth it if we get our union recognized. Wife and kids say the same.”

“Trouble is, the employers have the full pockets,” a shy young picket said, “and they can last out so much longer than we can.”

“Yah, but they're losing
millions
,” the bearded man said. “That's the part I like. Lot of dead whales in the harbor.”

Completely misunderstanding him, I asked, “What's killing them?”

“I'm talking about the commercial ships—they're out there floating but they're not moving, and their cargo's going nowhere.”

“The bosses treat us like dirt,” another marcher said. “They set all the work rules, the penalties, enforcement, wages of course. Working men have no say at all.”

“Except they don't call us men,” said a burly older man with graying hair. He was carrying the American flag. “All the men on the docks is called boys. End of every day, Miss Millevoix, we're out of work. Have to hope we get picked the next day by the company's little duke, a straw boss who does the hiring. You don't bring a bottle to one of the little dukes, or kick back to him, you don't get hired.”

“We ain't Reds, ma'am, but the times is drastic,” said the man who had asked Pammy if she were slumming, “and people are looking for drastic solutions.”

“Some are Reds,” the burly man said, “but we don't need them to tell us we're working under desperate conditions for slave wages or that the owners are selfish.”

The bearded man again: “They're hiring rich white boys and poor black men to scab and break the strike, and they're using cops paid for by all of us to protect their side alone. The bosses want to destroy the union, and they don't mind losing money to do it.”

“They'd bottle up the sun if they could,” the shy young picket said, stuttering a little, “and make us pay for it. The strike's our only weapon to make them give an inch.”

“I wish I could help,” Pammy said.

“Cheer for us, Miss Millevoix,” said the young man, “and let your friends know.”

“Yah, can you sing us a song?” the bearded man asked.

“You know ‘Solidarity Forever'?” Pammy asked them.

“Sure,” said several of the strikers.

“Here's a verse just for you. I'll start and you join me after you've heard the verse.” She stood on a packing crate. “Let's sing,” she said.

The longshoremen, the seamen and at last the teamsters too—

We are fighting for their rights and that means me and that means you;

We won't stop till San Francisco sees the unions get their due,

And the bosses know that's true.

Solidarity forever,

Solidarity forever,

Solidarity forever,

And the bosses know that's true.

How the hell she came up with that I wasn't going to ask, but they all joined her for two more repetitions of her riff on the old Wobbly song of solidarity taken from the even older Civil War “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” We spent the rest of the afternoon walking along the waterfront, talking to groups of picketers, Pammy singing when asked. Whenever I was alone with her my talk was stilted, like an inexperienced schoolteacher. I was grateful when the dockworkers invited us to dinner in their union hall.

As we climbed the stairs to the ILA headquarters I shivered at the memory of the knife attack by that big side of beef Widdelstaedt. If he recognized me he might want to finish the dark work he'd begun before. I looked around furtively, relieved not to see him or his buddy Cromartie. The person who did remember me was Nick Bordoise, the Greek chef. “If you're back here,” he said, “it means we'll have some action, yes?”

When I introduced him to Pammy, he didn't recognize her but since the dockworkers did, he understood she must be special. Nick stammered an unnecessary apology. “The food here, I'm sorry, miss, it's not what you're used to.” Pammy said she was starved, and he brought us bowls of chili with cornbread and iced tea. “But this is delicious,” Pammy said. “Do you have enough for two friends of mine?”

While Pammy was on the phone to the hotel, Mike Quin showed up. Racing around town, he'd found out shipowners were planning a forcible opening of the port, and he'd heard businessmen in a club telling each other that machine gunning the strikers was the best way to preserve the sanctity of private property except for stringing up Harry Bridges on a lamppost. Quin had seen Bridges himself coming out of a meeting with federal officials, complaining that President Roosevelt gives with one hand and takes away with the other. The governor was threatening to call in the National Guard to patrol the docks for the shipowners. I told Quin I couldn't believe the National Guard would protect only one side in a dispute. “Ah, Skinny, stick around,” Quin said. “The stage is set for a showdown between all the forces that have been aching to collide for two months, or maybe twenty years.”