L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

      SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER Mickey’s return to Los Angeles, the screenwriter Ben Hecht was talking with the director Otto Preminger. Hecht was Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter, the person responsible for such films as Scarface (the first gangster movie), The Front Page (based on his days as a newspaperman in Chicago), Gone with the Wind (an uncredited rewrite), His Girl Friday, Spellbound, and Notorious. Preminger was an Austrian Jewish emigre with a deep interest in abnormal psychology and crime. (His father had been the equivalent of the U.S. attorney general during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) His breakout hit was the 1944 noir thriller Laura, which told the story of a detective investigating the slaying of a beautiful young woman who had been murdered despite—or because of—her ability to make men love her. As the investigation progressed, the detective himself fell under her spell. Laura’s success made Preminger one of the top directors in Hollywood. In 1955, he had begun work on another noir drama, The Man with the Golden Arm. Based on the novel by Nelson Algren, the film told the story of a heroin addict (Frank Sinatra) with dreams of big band greatness. The aspiring drummer gets clean in prison, but after his release, he encounters two old temptations, heroin and Kim Novak. (He succumbs to one.) Hecht was helping Preminger with the screenplay. Although Preminger was not unfamiliar with the American underworld—he was, among other things, the lover of the world-famous striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee—it still wasn’t his native idiom. One day, Hecht realized that he knew someone who could provide Preminger with just the right sort of color—Mickey Cohen.

It took a while to find Cohen. The haberdashery was long since closed. The Moreno manse in Brentwood had been sold. The papers had reported LaVonne’s new address in West Los Angeles—a nice apartment just off Santa Monica Boulevard near the Fox back lot (today’s Century City)—but Cohen wasn’t living there. Eventually, Hecht tracked him down at the Westwood Motor Inn, Mickey’s temporary work address. Cohen suggested that Hecht stop by his apartment for a visit.

On the appointed day, Hecht arrived at a small, nondescript apartment building. The only outward sign of Cohen’s residency within was a gleaming new Cadillac (“as luxurious and roomy as a hearse,” thought Hecht). When Hecht arrived, Mickey was in the shower. It was his third of the day.^* Hecht knew this could take a while, so he looked around. The apartment was tiny—“so small it was almost impossible to walk swiftly in it without bumping into the walls”—but tastefully (indeed, professionally) decorated (albeit in a “bourgeois” fashion). It was also crammed with luxury items.

“There are thirty pressed and spotless suits crowded in the closet, all in tan shades,” jotted Hecht in his notebooks. “Twenty-five Chinese, Japanese, and Persian robes of silk hang there and thirty-five pairs of glistening shoes stand on the floor, neatly.”

Finally, Mickey himself appeared—“nude, dressed only in green socks held up by maroon garters.” He seemed lost in thought, scarcely bothering to acknowledge Hecht. Instead, he put on a new Panama hat and wandered about the small room, powdering himself with talcum, washing his hands, and looking for the perfect suit. Every twenty minutes or so, Mickey would dash over to the phone, place a call, and proceed to have a lengthy cryptic conversation “devoid of proper names.” (Cohen was convinced—no doubt correctly—that his phones were tapped.) Two hours later, the two men left for dinner at Fred Sica’s place.

Hecht was fascinated by Cohen’s odd behavior. But Mickey soon did something that was even more surprising. He started talking. When Hecht had first met Cohen in 1947 at Hecht’s home in Oceanside, Cohen had been “a calm, staring man in a dapper pastel suit.” He had conveyed an unmistakable air of menace (only slightly offset by his ice-cream-and-French-pastry-fueled pudginess). In those days, Mickey sometimes went for days without saying a word.