“I used to,” I said.
“What do you know of him?”
I shrugged. “He used to be a pimp. He was a union slugger, too. He’s still involved in union organizing, isn’t he?”
“That’s an understatement. Ostensibly, he’s the bodyguard of a man named George Browne. In reality, he runs…” And here he paused, in order to spit each of the following words out like distasteful seeds: “…the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.”
“The Stagehands Union,” I nodded. “Yeah, I know Browne. He’s a drunk, and a blowhard. But when you prop him up he can make a speech and get the rank and file stirred up. He’s got patriotism and mom and apple pie and ten other kinds of baloney, for any occasion.”
“But you see him as a figurehead.”
“Yeah, sure. Bioff’s been the brains behind Browne for a long, long time. They say Browne drinks a hundred bottles of beer a day. He better have somebody’s brains behind him.”
Pegler drew on the cigarette; smiled a little. Just being polite, I thought. He said, “I met…or rather, encountered Willie Bioff once, many years ago. 1913, I’d say. That was the last time I worked a Chicago beat steadily. My father was the star rewrite man for the American, at the time, and they took me on as a favor to him.”
“You must’ve just been a kid.”
“Seventeen,” he said, his elaborate shrug not masking his pride. “And working for the United Press at the same time. I may live in the East, Mr. Heller, but I’m of the Chicago school of journalism. The New York school represents…” And these words, too, were distasteful seeds to spit. “…ethics and manners. Reporters on rival papers actually cooperated with each other in gathering facts when working on the same story.” The thought of it was beyond him, and he smiled as he described the Chicago school: “We, on the other hand, sanctioned the commission of any crime short of burglary in pursuit of an exclusive, and wouldn’t’ve helped a rival reporter if he was bleeding in the street. Ha! We fought and tricked and, to be honest about it, hated each other.”
He seemed lost in nostalgia; what this had to do with Willie Bioff or George Browne, or Nathan Heller, for that matter, was lost on me.
Then he answered my unasked question: “I saw Bioff when I was covering the police stations and police courts. I did a little bit of everything in those days-chased fires, took pictures, held down City Hall on weekends, where I lost at poker to the likes of Ben Hecht and Jake Lingle. The Harrison Street police court was perhaps the most eye-opening of my experiences…”
It would have been. West Harrison Street gave its name to a precinct that included one of the most depressed sections of the city, immigrants and colored and Chinese seeking the dream of America and finding the reality of tenements. And a red-light district second to none, the prostitutes a dreary rainbow of races and colors.
“The court enjoyed a steady diet of stabbings, shootings and sluggings,” Pegler said, pretending disgust at a memory he relished. “Judge Hopkins would get bored with the violence, and would shout, ‘Bailiff, bring me in some whores!’ The judge enjoyed badinage with the girls; he loved it when a girl would say she hadn’t the wherewithal to pay his five-dollar fine. ‘Oh, I think you do, dearie,’ he’d say, and give her time to earn the money. But he wasn’t a bad judge, just the same. It was a grim atmosphere, and gallows humor, especially from a judge, was to be expected. Winos, ginsoaks, stewbums, hopheads and lesser delinquents were a constant parade before the bench. And the ever-present ladies of the evening.”
“And where there are whores,” I said, “there are pimps.”
He smiled, not just being polite now, showing some teeth this time. “You anticipate me. I like that. Yes, it was in one of the police courts-Harrison Street, perhaps, though my memory isn’t exact on that account-that I first saw young Willie Bioff. It made an impression on me, barely eighteen myself, seeing a panderer who was younger than me, years younger. The judge asked him his age and he said, ‘Thirteen,’ proudly. He was fined and released. But I remembered him.”
“Why?”
“As I said, his age. Younger than me, but eons older. The street had done it to him, the liberals would say, and perhaps they’re right to a point. But even at his age he had a gleefulness about who he was and what he did. And cold, piglike eyes that bore no human compassion.”
“You had this impression just from a court appearance you were routinely covering?”
He shrugged facially; the bushy eyebrows danced. “Well, I saw Bioff again, a few months later. His name had stuck with me; I’m a literary man myself, after all, and the Dickensian name, ‘buy off,’ made its mark on my memory. Have you ever heard of the old Arsonia Cafe?”
“Bit before my time, but wasn’t that Mike Fritzel’s saloon?”
Nodding, the memory obviously a fond one, Pegler said, “Yes, back before the Great War, and a wild place it was. Fritzel’s gal Gilda Gray would allow herself to be hoisted up onto the bar for an impromptu performance of her well-known shimmy.”
Judging from the gleam in his eyes, the shimmy had made its mark on his memory as well.
“At any rate,” he continued, putting out his cigarette, getting the gold case back out again, “we reporters would occasionally congregate at the Arsonia, which was frequented by prostitutes and their panderers, and other denizens of the night.”
“And that’s where you saw Bioff again.”
“Precisely. Like any good reporter, I observed these creatures closely-it was an education of sorts for a lad like myself. I happened to spot Bioff, the teenage pimp, wearing a silk shirt, talking with some older examples of his ilk; there he stood, gesturing with his mug of beer, its contents sloshing onto the floor as he bragged.” This memory seemed anything but a fond one, but it was vividly recalled: “I assumed a spot at the bar nearby, and soon discovered Bioff was regaling his fellow panderers with his technique for ‘keeping his girls in line.’ Do you have a strong stomach, Mr. Heller?”
“I’ve lived in Chicago all my life, Mr. Pegler.”
“Sound answer. Here, more or less, is what I heard him say: ‘If you slug a girl half silly and then tie her down, you can stuff her…’” He paused, shook his head. “‘…her cunt with powdered ice. They tell me it’s so cold in there it feels like fire. You got to gag the girl, she screams so loud, but you don’t really hurt her permanent. But after ten minutes of that, she will get down on her knees to you any time you say the word ice.’”
He lighted a new cigarette; his hand was shaking. I didn’t blame him. It was an ugly story.
“You have a memory any reporter would envy you for, Mr. Pegler.”
“Is it any wonder I remember it?” he said, a bit defensively. “I was an impressionable lad of eighteen, and I was hearing detailed and horrid descriptions of sexual perversion from a boy four or five years my junior. A boy whose polished nails caught the light, shining his financial success in my ten-dollar-a-week face. Is it any wonder I viewed it as an insult?”
I didn’t point out that Pegler had in fact been eavesdropping, that Bioff hadn’t intended to impress anybody but his fellow pimps. Still, I could see this man, as a boy, taking it as an insult.
“I saw him again, years later, in another bar,” Pegler continued, “on the North Side. He looked familiar, and I asked my drinking companion if he knew the fat, dapper little man, and my friend said, ‘Why, that’s Willie Bioff-the union slugger and pimp.’”
“And of course the name rang a bell. When was this?”
“Nineteen twenty-seven, perhaps,” he said. “I didn’t know you were in Chicago then.”
“I didn’t live here. I was working for the Tribune Syndicate, however, and touched bases often. Working a sports beat, traveling all over. Got here quite often.”
“I see.”
“Let me bring you up to date,” he said, sitting forward. “If you’ve indeed read my columns, you must know that I’ve waged something of a war against the crooked unions.”
“Yeah.”
He was getting wound up, his eyes staring, not looking at me, as he said, “The newspaper guild soured me on unionism once and for all, you see; it was a hotbed of Reds, and as for the AFL, that great, arrogant, corrupt, hypocritical, parasitic racket, well, I…”
“I’ve read your column,” I said. He was starting to irritate me, now. My father was an old union man, he gave his heart and soul to the movement, and while Pegler’s opinions weren’t entirely baseless, they still rubbed me the wrong way.
He sensed it. “Let me stress that the idea of unionism is something I can admire; what it is rapidly degenerating into is something I can only abhor.”
“Understood.”
“At any rate. I usually make two or three cross-country jaunts each year, looking for material for my column. I think of myself as a reporter, and while I’m paid handsomely to air my opinions, those opinions mustn’t be formed in a vacuum. I need to get out and be a newspaperman from time to time. Last week I was in Los Angeles, that modern Babylon, and I found a real story.” He drew on the cigarette, relishing the moment. “I was at a party given by Joe Schenck, the Twentieth Century-Fox film executive. Across a wide room, filled with Hollywood stars and directors and producers, with all the fancy trimmings, cocktails and caviar, I spied a familiar face.”
“Bioff?”
Pegler nodded, smugly. “Oh, he was older than a teenager, now, by some distance. As was I. But that fat round smiling face was the same, and, as I drew nearer, the hard little pig’s eyes, behind wire-rim glasses now, were as cold and inhuman as ever. Oh, he was handsomely turned out, in the Hollywood style, double-breasted pinstripe suit, a handkerchief with a monogram, WB.”
Except for the initials, Pegler might have been describing his own wardrobe.
“I asked my host if that man’s name wasn’t Bioff,” Pegler said, “and he replied, ‘Yes it is-that’s one of our most illustrious citizens. Would you like to be introduced to him?’ I said I wouldn’t shake hands with Willie Bioff if I were wearing gloves.”
“I wasn’t aware Bioff was in Hollywood; I didn’t know what became of him, frankly.” I shrugged. “I guess I assumed he was still involved with Browne and the Stagehands Union. Browne moved his office to the East Coast years ago.”