Playland (42 page)

“I wouldn’t get through,” Jacob King said. “I didn’t want to talk to one of your yes-men.”

“I don’t have yes-men. I have no-men.”

“You say no, they say no.”

J. F. French smiled. “A smart boy. So why am I here getting sand in my shoes?”

“Because, Mr. French, you’re up to your neck in shit. Your studio is shut down and Benny Draper wants two million to let you start it again. It’s you today, it’ll be Fox tomorrow, Paramount the next day. Until you come up with that two million. And what that buys all of you is two years without a strike. Unless Benny gets up on the wrong side of the bed one day and starts to squeeze.”

“You mean I get sand in my shoes to hear something I already know.”

Jacob King picked his words carefully. Jimmy Riordan did not give him much credit, but he had watched Jimmy talk and he had watched Morris talk, and with them each word meant something, and too few words were often better than too many. “I can have your studio operating again by Thursday morning,” Jacob said. “I’ve got the people available. No more strikes anyplace for the length of the contract.”

“And what do we have to pay you for all those bones I think you’re going to have to break?”

“Nothing.”

“So who are you, Prince Charming? I made that picture already. Another fairy tale I don’t need. What’s it going to cost? I need a price. Free means trouble.”

Jacob King looked up at the Pacific Coast Highway. For a moment he watched J. F. French’s chauffeur following behind them in his employer’s Bentley. Jacob had never seen a car before with a right-hand drive. It was something he would like to have, and the driver, too. “I want to go into Nevada,” Jacob King said slowly. “I want to build my own place. I want your support. I want Lilo Kusack out of my hair. I want you and the other studios to supply the entertainment. Your best people. I
want a break in the price. If I can let the right people know you’re not going to try and stop me, then that’s like money in the bank, Mr. French. I’ll take care of the rest.”

“By the right people you mean Morris.”

Jacob King did not reply.

“Did Morris tell you to burn down my hotel?”

Now it was Jacob King’s turn to smile.

“So you burned it down yourself?”

“Prove it.”

“Okay, we let sleeping cats lie,” J. F. French said, his command of metaphor as always insecure. “You think Benny Draper’s going to let you get away with this?”

“I don’t lose any sleep over Benny Draper.”

“He wants to stick a pipe up your ass.”

“I heard that. He’s free to try.”

J. F. French turned and waved to his chauffeur. The car stopped on the highway, and the chauffeur got out and held open the right rear door. “Benny wanted to fuck that little girl who’s going to marry my son.”

“That little girl’s old enough to make up her own mind who she’s going to fuck, Mr. French.”

“So I hear,” J. F. French said, heading up the sand toward the Bentley. “You talk to Morris, I’ll talk to Lilo.”

According to Arthur French, Jacob King told his strike-breakers they were to carry no firearms, no knives, and no explosives. It was Eddie Binhoff, wielding a baseball bat, who led Jackie Heller’s electricians, all of whom were carrying ax handles, through the OMPCE picket lines outside the Cosmo studio gates. The Cosmo Newsreel showed a montage of labor violence, invoked the Red threat, and then showed a scene of Benny Draper, screaming obscenities and with blood gushing from a cut over his eye, being arrested and led into a paddy wagon by studio policemen who had been made special deputies by the Los Angeles Police Department, Lilo’s doing. The headlines in the trade papers told the story:

He lit a cigarette. By the light of the match she could see that he had shaved after the last time. He smelled of baby powder and shaving lotion. Now he had her doing it. Afterward she would sit on the bidet and let the water spray up into her. It made her feel sophisticated. Like a grown-up. She did not have a bidet in her own house on Tower Road, and she would have to ask Arthur who she could get to install one, a plumber she supposed, anyway it was the kind of household detail she left to Arthur.

She seemed so small. “There’s something I want to tell you,” Jacob King said, blowing a perfect smoke ring in the darkness. “Don’t ever come here if I’m not here.”

“Why?” Blue Tyler said. “Because of Benny?”

Jacob did not reply.

“Remember I said I was lucky.”

“You’re not that lucky.”

T
he
Valiant
was a gambling ship that operated off San Pedro just beyond the three-mile limit, and thus beyond the jurisdiction of Los Angeles municipal and county authorities. It had Panamanian registry, but in fact it was a buried asset of the national racing wire Morris Lefkowitz had given Jacob King to supervise. Acting through layers of intermediaries, Jacob King was lavish in the gratitude he dispensed to the appropriate officials in the appropriate agencies of government for not seeking redress against the motor launches that took guests from the Santa Monica and Paradise Cove piers to the
Valiant
and back, guests who would never return to the
Valiant
should the authorities seek to intercept these water taxis while within the three-mile limit, and book the passengers into county jail for violation of various anti-gaming statutes.

It was Blue Tyler who broached to J. F. French the idea of holding the wrap party for
Red River Rosie
on the
Valiant
, the inducement being that Jacob King would comp the studio, with everything on the house, or on the ship, as the case would be. Moe’s such a cheapskate, he’ll love it, Blue said, he squeezes a nickel until the buffalo craps. While J. F. French appreciated a
bargain, he was a cautious man, and before he agreed to Jacob King’s offer, he had Lilo Kusack check his sources downtown to make sure there would be no watery police raid that would bring embarrassing headlines about Cosmopolitan Pictures, and also to find out what Benny Draper was up to, he did not want Benny doing something rash. My people downtown say they never heard of the
Valiant
, Lilo told J. F. French, so you’re clear there, and Benny’s having dinner in Boyle Heights with his Chicago guys, they’re giving him a lot of heat, more than he can handle, but I’m not so sure you should do this, Moe, you can afford a wrap party, pay for it yourself, don’t get too tight with Jakey King, it might look bad.

So pay for it yourself, you’re so rich, Lilo, J. F. French said, and he told Blue that the
Red River Rosie
party would be held on the
Valiant
, no expenses to be incurred by Cosmopolitan Pictures.

That Jacob had made the offer was in itself a small surprise, as he himself had never even been on board the
Valiant
, the reason being that he was susceptible to seasickness, the slightest rolling motion while under way putting his stomach in a turmoil, and he hated any situation where he appeared not entirely in command. But on the night of the party, he stood at the top of the gangplank, resplendent in a white dinner jacket, greeting his guests as they came aboard, Blue at his side, and just behind her Eddie Binhoff, wearing a midnight-blue tuxedo, Eddie Binhoff, who Jacob did not introduce to anyone and who Blue told one and all was Jacob’s bodyguard, Eddie Something. Chuckie O’Hara was there, and both J. F. and Arthur French, Arthur reluctantly, but under orders from his father to attend, and Chloe Quarles and Shelley Flynn and Walker Franklin, and the French Fillies, and the boys in the chorus, and Billy Teasdale with Victor Higgins, and Reggie Ford and Sonya Rose, the screenwriters, and Walter Sklar, the D.P., even Lilo Kusack and Rita Lewis, as well as the A.D.s and the set decorators and the camera loaders and the grips and the best boys and the makeup men and the wardrobe mistresses and the script girls. Everything
was free, the champagne and the food, and everyone was given a pile of chips, no one was to take the launch back to the Santa Monica pier a loser. There were fireworks and there were staterooms below for those who wished to grab a Filly or a chorus boy for a quick fuck. Jacob King was a most extravagant host, and he danced with Blue, and he also danced with Sonya Rose, the writer, all two hundred pounds of her, and with Chloe Quarles, several Fillies, both script supervisors, and with Blue’s personal maid, Rosalia Jefferson. Blue danced with Chuckie and Arthur and Billy Teasdale and Reggie Ford, but it was with Walker Franklin that she was at her most energetic, tap dancing alongside him, all energy and splits, matching him step for step, almost competitively. It was funny, Chuckie said. On a picture, Walker was never supposed to make eye contact with Blue during a dance number. J.F.’s orders. Eye contact with a white woman wouldn’t go down in the South. So I always designed the sequence in such a way that Walker was looking at the extras or at Shelley Flynn but never at Blue. No eye contact, only cock contact, it turned out. A little secret Blue shared with Aunt Chuckie. The performance was clearly distressing and distasteful to J. F. French, who was thankful that it was taking place on this boat and not in a more public venue where photographers might be present. There’s something you got to tell Blue, he whispered to Lilo Kusack. There’s only two kinds of colored people. Entertainers and dangerous.

It was around ten o’clock when mal de mer began to ravage Jacob King, and Blue and Eddie Binhoff took him out on deck, where he leaned over the rail and threw up, gallons of puke, Melba Mae Toolate remembered four and a half decades later, perhaps more graphically than the situation actually warranted. It was green-and-yellow barf, it really fucked up that white dinner jacket, Melba Mae said, and his breath was so bad this Eddie guy gave him some Sen-Sen, you don’t really like to see the guy who went down on you last night and who you thought was going to go down on you again tonight puking over the side,
his hair all matted with sweat, and he stunk, you know that puke smell that stings your nose.

In other words, Jacob King was on the
Valiant
in full view of two hundred people the night that Benny Draper was shot in the face by Schlomo Buchalter.

Buchalter, Schlomo
Syndicate Gangster, Hit Man (1890–1947)

BACKGROUND
: Born Schlomo Bookhouse in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, distant cousin of Louis Bookhouse, later Louis (“Lepke”) Buchalter, head of Murder, Incorporated. Description: 5′7½″, brown hair, brown eyes, stocky. Education ended 1906 at Oneida State Reformatory for Boys, to which he had been remanded in 1901 for assault with intent to do bodily harm, i.e., with lug wrench, on one Wong Fat while robbing complainant’s laundry on Mott Street in lower Manhattan. No occupation other than crime. Upon release from Oneida Reformatory, became free-lance murderer and Syndicate hit man performing contract assassinations for Murder, Inc., and reputedly for Morris Lefkowitz and various crime families in Chicago and New Jersey. Alias: “Round Trip,” so called because he would take a contract any place in the United States, and return to New York immediately thereafter. Because of his fear of betrayal, his modus operandi was always to work alone. Law enforcement agencies estimate that over the years Buchalter carried out at least forty contract hits, but while often arrested for murder, he was never formally charged with the crime. Served three-year term in New York’s Attica State Penitentiary for bookmaking, then an additional five-year term for assault with intent to kill, to wit, a guard at Attica, the assault taking place on the day of his release for his first offense. Also served three-year term in Joliet State Penitentiary (Illinois) for arson, the bombing of a labor union local opposed to Chicago Labor Leader and Mobster Benjamin (“Benny”) Draper. Upon release from Joliet, Buchalter became Draper’s chief enforcer. When Draper moved his activities to California to consolidate his hold on the corrupt Organization of Motion Picture Craft Employees (OMPCE), Buchalter followed, continuing his enforcer role. Ill health subsequently forced him to curtail his activities. Then on April 2, 1947, Buchalter shot and killed Draper in a Mexican restaurant in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles, and
was in turn shot and killed by Draper’s bodyguards. The dispute allegedly involved Draper’s failure to fulfill the monetary terms of a contract hit Buchalter had carried out for his former mentor some years previously.