The Jews in America Trilogy (160 page)

Goldwyn then summoned Kaye to his office. “Do something about your nose,” Goldwyn ordered. But Kaye declined. If Goldwyn wanted him, he would have to take him nose and all.

More tests were made, and still more. In each of them, new
lighting was tried, and new makeup. But none of the takes seemed to draw the focus of Kaye's face away from the nose, and Goldwyn continued to be dissatisfied with his star's appearance. Meanwhile, the rest of the
Up in Arms
company stood idle, waiting for its star, and a number of the people at his studio whom Goldwyn most trusted and respected began—at first hesitantly, then with increasing insistence—urging Goldwyn to accept the loss in pride and money and call the picture off, to forget about doing anything with Danny Kaye, to buy out his contract, and cast someone else in the part. Danny Kaye would never “look right” for movies. He might be fine for Broadway and nightclub acts, but he would never be a film star.

Goldwyn could accept, albeit with difficulty, the loss of money. But swallowing his pride was impossible. He had “discovered” Danny Kaye. He had brought him to Hollywood. To lose face in the eyes of his peers, to admit a mistake, was not in Sam Goldwyn's nature. “In dealing with my husband,” Frances Goldwyn would recall later, “there was one thing you had to remember.
You
could be right. But he
could not be wrong.”
One night late in 1942 Sam and Frances Goldwyn sat up until dawn; Goldwyn paced the floor of the Laurel Canyon house, arguing with himself, and with his wife, about ways in which it might be possible to make Danny Kaye photograph-able. In the morning, having had no sleep, the Goldwyns drove down to the studio to run through, in the projection room, the long series of Danny Kaye screen tests one more time. After perhaps the third test, Goldwyn suddenly yelped, jumped to his feet, and cried, “I've got it! I've got it!” He seized the studio telephone and asked for the hairdressing department. “Expect Danny Kaye in ten minutes,” he shouted. “He'll be having his hair dyed blond.” It was done. And Danny Kaye's wavy mane of blond hair—it had been a dark, reddish brown—became his most enduring trademark, the one caricaturists would focus on for years. The blond hair drew the camera's, and the audience's, eye away from the telltale nose. It gave him a Nordic look. He looked like a jaunty Dane. He went on to such fame and popularity that, when he was at his peak, his daughter Dena recalls, and fan letters from abroad, addressed simply “Danny Kaye, U.S.A.,” arrived in the United States, the post office delivered them to his door.

The hard-to-please film critic Pauline Kael has named
Up in Arms
, the musical that almost didn't get made because of a Jewish nose, as one of the dozen or so best movie musicals ever made. Sam Goldwyn's brainstorm about the hair has been cited, in Hollywood, as an example of Goldwyn's production genius.

But in the process Danny Kaye, the Jew, had disappeared.

In an article for
Commentary
called “The Vanishing Jew of Our Popular Culture,” Henry Popkin wrote of this strange trend, observable during the war and immediately afterward. The Jew in popular culture, he noted, had become “the little man who isn't there,” and he offered a few very trenchant examples. In Irving Shulman's best-selling novel
The Amboy Dukes
, two characters had been named Goldfarb and Semmel; for the paperback reprint, they became Abbot and Saunders. Similarly, in the reprint of Jerome Weidman's
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
, the character Meyer Babushkin became transformed into Michael Babbin, and one Mr. Pulvermacher became Mr. Pulsifer. When Ben Hecht's own play
The Front Page
—co-written with Charles MacArthur—had been first produced on Broadway in 1928, and made into a film in 1931, a comic character had been named Irving Pincus. In a second movie version, called
His Girl Friday
, in 1940, Pincus was renamed Joe Pettibone. In George S. Kaufman's
Butter and Egg Man
, another comedy character had been named Lehman. He was still named Lehman in the first film version, under its original Broadway title, in 1928, and also in a second movie version in 1934 called
The Tenderfoot
. But by 1937, when the Kaufman story was resurrected in film for the third time as
Dance, Charlie, Dance
, Lehman, which was the name of a prominent Jewish banking family, had become Morgan, the name of a great Christian banker. And in yet a fourth incarnation of the same story in 1940,
An Angel from Texas
, Morgan became Allen. Prior to the war, the popular columnist Walter Winchell had been having periodic fun with a comic Jewish-dialect character he called Mefoofsky. Mefoofsky had disappeared from Winchell's columns by 1940, and Winchell had begun piously inveighing against the poor taste of dialect humor. Popkin went on to cite many more examples of ethnic revisionism, or ethnic evasiveness.

America seemed to have reentered an era of Victorian nicety,
when mild expressions were substituted for disagreeable truths; an era of euphemism, when to
die
became to
pass away;
when
toilet
became
rest room
or
convenience
or
powder room;
when
poverty stricken
became
underprivileged
or
disadvantaged;
when
crippled
became
handicapped
, a
garbage collector
became a
sanitation engineer
, and a
defeat
became a
strategic withdrawal of troops
. Of course even
anti-Semite
is a euphemism for
anti-Jew
, since a true anti-Semite would be one opposed to all Semitic people, including Arabs. And even the term “Jewish” could be construed as evasive or defensive, since there are no equivalent terms, such as “Christianish” or “Moslemish.” Hitler was himself fond of euphemisms, and instead of
murder
spoke of a
final solution
.

Mr. Popkin did not note that euphemism is a characteristic form of expression in totalitarian countries, where
assassination
becomes
liquidation
, where an
invasion
is a
liberation
, and where a
military takeover
is an
appropriate action
. But he did conclude that the gradual elimination of the Jew from the American public consciousness was not a matter of anti-Semitism, exactly. “This,” he wrote, “originates not in hate, but in a misguided benevolence—or fear … [and the source of it] is Hitler. When Hitler forced Americans to take anti-Semitism seriously, it was apparently felt that the most eloquent reply that could be made was a dead silence.”

13

AT LAST, A HOMELAND

In 1937, Benny Siegel—whom everybody called Bugsy, though never to his face—had left the East for Hollywood with the idea of becoming a movie star. After all, he was a friend of George Raft, and Benny knew that he was handsome and bore more than a passing resemblance to Errol Flynn. Nothing much had come of the acting ambition, but he had also been given an assignment by his old friend Meyer Lansky, which was to set up the organization's own racing wire to the West Coast, to supervise bookmaking operations there, and to introduce Lansky's numbers game to the Mexican-American population of Los Angeles. At all three of these tasks he had succeeded.

He had also, on his own, made a number of trips to investigate a dusty little desert crossroads called Las Vegas. Gambling had been made legal in Nevada in 1931, and its capital had become Reno, in the north, where gambling operations were pretty much under the control of two or three Christian families. But when the federal government started work on the Hoover Dam in the early 1930s, the nearest town of any size where the construction workers could come to gamble was Las
Vegas. And when the dam was finished, Siegel figured, Las Vegas would have something that it desperately needed if it was to sustain any growth at all—a water supply. Siegel began to dream of turning Las Vegas into a huge, luxury resort dedicated to gambling. Las Vegas was only a little over five hours' drive from Los Angeles, and it would attract the high rollers from the movie crowd. These glamorous types, furthermore, would attract tourists. Siegel shared his idea with Lansky, and Lansky liked it. There was little likelihood that he and his group could invade the claims that other casino operators had already staked out in Reno, but there was no reason why they couldn't have the southern part of the state to themselves.

Lansky carried the idea of Las Vegas one step farther. The resort should offer the most luxurious accommodations, the most elegant restaurants and bars, topflight entertainment in its nightclubs—the proximity to Hollywood made that feasible—all at rock-bottom prices, affordable to almost anyone. The money, after all, would be made at the gaming tables. Plans to develop Las Vegas would probably have got off the drawing boards in the late 1930s if the war and wartime shortages had not intervened.

Meanwhile, Benny Siegel cut quite a swath in Hollywood. He was impeccably tailored, favoring cashmere sport jackets, monogrammed silk shirts from Sulka, snappy ascots, and hand-benched English shoes. He was swept up by the movie crowd, invited to all the best parties, seated at the best tables at Romanoff's and the Brown Derby, and dated the likes of Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Betty Grable. Meyer Lansky had also supplied him with a plump little sidekick, assistant, and bodyguard named Mickey Cohen.

Cohen was by no means as dashing and debonair as his boss. Short and round, a chewed-up cigar usually stuck between his teeth, he looked like a character Damon Runyan might have invented, and talked like one, too. But there was something about Mickey Cohen that struck people—women, particularly—as
cute
. He was teddy-bear cuddly, and he was fun to be around. Mickey Cohen, too, had no trouble making friends in the movie capital, and no trouble dating movie stars. He brought out their mothering instincts. Among his celebrated friends he counted Judy Garland, Betty Grable, Alice Faye, and Don Ameche. As a criminal, Mickey Cohen was something
of a joke, but he was an affable joke. He had a neurotic obsession about cleanliness and would wash his hands hundreds of times a day. Even in prison—through a miscalculation, Cohen had spent some time in the penitentiary—his daily consumption of Kleenex and toilet paper was monumental.

But, like his superiors, Lansky and Siegel, Cohen insisted that he didn't think of himself as a criminal, but as a man in a service type of business. Crime, as Cohen defined it, was when a father and his ten-year-old son got off a plane at the Los Angeles airport after a holiday in Hawaii, and were held up at gunpoint by a band of young hoodlums. The father and son turned over their money, their watches, their rings. The gunmen then shot them both, killing the boy and paralyzing the father for life. This had actually happened and that, to Cohen's mind, was crime—pointless murder. To speak of that sort of thing in the same breath with what Mickey Cohen did for a living gave his livelihood a bad name. That sort of criminal, as he put it, was “not good for anyone's image.”

In Hollywood, Mickey Cohen was a good friend to have, in more ways than just helping place a bet at an out-of-town track. If one was hoping for a particular movie role, or was having difficulty negotiating a contract, or was having union problems at one of the studios, Mickey would make a phone call or two and work it out. He was Hollywood's Mr. Fixit. As an example of the kind of power he wielded, a young and ambitious California politician named Richard M. Nixon had sought Cohen's support. But Cohen hadn't liked Nixon, who reminded him, he wrote, of “a three-card Monte dealer … a rough hustler of some kind.”

Mickey Cohen had what he called his “code of ethics,” as his story of how he became Betty Grable's friend illustrates. Early in his career, on orders from Lansky and Siegel, Cohen had organized a holdup at a Los Angeles nightclub operated by one Eddie Neales, who had not been “cooperating” with his protection payoffs. Cohen had been “at the stick,” meaning he had a shotgun trained on the room while the others carried pistols. The patrons were instructed to put their wallets and jewelry on the tables, where they were collected. One of the jeweled ladies at the club was Miss Grable. Later, when Cohen had been promoted to less menial chores in the organization, he met Miss Grable socially, and, like the gentleman he was,
apologized to her for the incident at Eddie Neales's place. Miss Grable giggled and confessed that she and her friends had found the whole thing pretty exciting. Then she whispered in Cohen's ear, “We were insured anyway.”

Mickey Cohen also became a good friend of, and did favors for, Ben Hecht. But of how they became friends, and of what the favors were, each man would tell a different story.

In his 1954 autobiography,
A Child of the Century
, Hecht wrote that Mickey Cohen had first approached him in 1941, not long after the disappointing fund-raising rally at the Fox studio commissary for Peter Bergson's Jewish Brigade. According to Hecht, Cohen also had the notion that “millions” could be raised from the studio heads for the Bergson cause, though presumably Cohen had somewhat different fund-raising tactics in mind. According to Hecht, when he explained to Cohen that this had already been tried, and had failed miserably, Cohen had said, “Knockin' their own proposition, huh?”

But in his own 1975 autobiography, Mickey Cohen gave this version of their meeting and its purpose: First of all, said Cohen, Ben Hecht approached him, and not the other way around. And the year was not 1941, but 1947, an important difference considering the fact that a whole world war had begun and ended in the interval. At that point, Cohen said, he had never heard of Hecht, and learning that the writer wanted to see him, had asked, “Who the hell is Ben Hecht?” Finally, Cohen recalled an entirely different reason for the meeting. It had nothing to do with Bergson's Jewish Brigade—by then a dead issue, anyway—but had been to enlist Cohen's support for Israel in its bitter war of independence. This would seem to make sense, because by 1947 Hecht had become a militant Zionist.