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

Los Angeles-area law enforcement was just getting started. Prosecutors decided to throw the book at Cohen on the traffic jam charges. That summer he was convicted—and fined $11. He vowed to appeal the decision. The following month, Beverly Hills police arrested Cohen as he was tucking into a ham-and-eggs breakfast (at 2:30 p.m.) at one of his favorite restaurants. The charge was failing to register as an ex-felon. (The Beverly Hills municipal code limited convicted felons to five visits to Beverly Hills every thirty days.) Police hauled Cohen, “screaming epithets,” into Chief Anderson’s office for questioning. A scuffle ensued, and Anderson ordered that Cohen be charged with disorderly conduct as well. A. L. Wirin and the ACLU stepped forward to defend him, arguing that the registration requirement was unconstitutional. A Beverly Hills municipal court judge agreed and threw out the charges against Cohen. A jury later acquitted Cohen on the remaining charge.

Mickey’s courtroom successes didn’t extend to his business ventures. Exotic plants apparently were not, in fact, “a tremendous racket”—at least, not to someone who had never managed (or bothered) to figure out which plant was which. That summer, Cohen announced that he was leaving the green house business.

“I didn’t know a plant from a boxing glove,” he confessed to the press, “but I would have made a go of it if those cops had left me alone. We couldn’t go into the greenhouse without their hot breath wilting the plants.”

Henceforth, Mickey would focus his business endeavors in an area where he was an acknowledged expert—ice cream. Together with his sister and brother-in-law (and investors from Las Vegas), Cohen was preparing to open the Carousel ice cream parlor in Brentwood. He also announced that he would be focusing on his book with Hecht and on a movie spin-off, The Mickey Cohen Story. Whispers of a huge movie deal soon filled the press. Cohen attorney George Bieber claimed that Cohen had been offered $200,000 in cash and 80 percent of profits but that Cohen was holding out for 20 percent of gross box office receipts. Beiber also predicted that Hecht’s book would bring in $500,000 to $700,000.

Back in New York City, Mike Wallace wasn’t entertaining visions of the silver screen. Instead, he was trying to save his job. ABC’s promises to back Wallace through controversies were now forgotten. Instead, John Daly, the head of the network news division, stepped forward to deal with the man he saw as a loose cannon. A minder was assigned to vet the script before every show and to monitor Wallace’s performances on the set—“a balding, humpty-dumpty kind of guy,” as Ramrus recalled him. He was also humorless. Typical of the petty obstacles the show now faced was the minder’s reaction to a proposed question for the architect Frank Lloyd Wright:

Wallace: Mr. Wright, I understand you designed a dream home for Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. As an architect, what do you think of Marilyn Monroe’s architecture?

“Objection,” came the response from the minder. “Indecent question.”

“What’s indecent?” replied Wallace and Yates, innocently. The answer, of course, was the thought that had arisen in the mind of the minder.

For the most part, Wallace just brushed aside objections of this sort and did what he wanted to do. Still, the new regime was demoralizing. Although ABC eventually settled Parker’s suit for $45,000, ABC’s insurer, Lloyd’s of London, took a dim view of the controversy. It insisted that henceforth a lawyer monitor every show, complete with cue cards. When Wallace approached a controversial subject, the attorney (who sat just outside the range of the camera) would hold up a “BE CAREFUL” cue card. The most dangerous conversational forays resulted in “STOP” or “RETREAT” cards. This was no way to run a TV show whose entire point was to be daring and provocative, and it took its toll. That December, ABC had another brush with a libel lawsuit after Wallace guest Drew Pearson charged that Senator John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage had been ghostwritten. In the spring of 1958, Philip Morris announced that it would not be renewing its sponsorship of The Mike Wallace Interview. Wallace’s days as a national TV personality seemed numbered. The following fall, Wallace left ABC and returned to local television on Channel 13, a station even smaller than his old employer, Channel 5. Not until 1963, when Wallace managed to convince CBS News president Dick Salant to take a chance on him, did Wallace get another job at a network, this time as the host of a radio interview program and the anchor of the new CBS Morning News. In 1968, Wallace finally got another shot at a show that offered to make him a national media star. That program was 60 Minutes.