say that? Last night you were so kind…. How can you….” And she put her right hand over her face and began to cry.
She was trembling a little too, but I was afraid it had more to do with the stuff she was starting to crave than any sorrow or shame she might be feeling.
I sat forward. “Now listen to me—a friend of mine got hooked on morphine. He was on it for years, and he kicked it. You’ve only been riding the horse for a few months. Do you want to get off it?”
Shuddering, she said, “Oh yes…oh yes.”
“I can help arrange that. I’ll have to make a few calls, but I can arrange it.”
Her eyes searched my face. “How can I pay for that…for treatment?”
“I’ll float you a loan.” I had a sip of coffee. “And until we can get you into the right clinic, I’m going to make a few other calls.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Somebody’ll be around this afternoon with what you need.”
“Do I…understand you right?”
“You do. For the next few days, I’ll support your habit. The guy who comes around, he’ll be colored. You can trust him, far as it goes. You’ve got the works?”
“The what?”
Christ, she was a junkie and she didn’t even know the lingo. Can you beat that? A sheltered drug addict. Fucking Rocco Fischetti.
Patiently, I asked, “You have your own needle and so on?”
“In my suitcase, yes.”
“Do you have something nice to wear?”
“What? Why?”
“Because once you’ve had your medicine, and’ve had a chance to relax, I want you to make yourself presentable. We’re going out tonight.”
She was shaking her head, as if trying to clear her ears. “You’re taking me out?”
“That’s what I said.”
So when I came back to the St. Clair—after my meeting with the Kefauver crowd, and my encounter with Sam Giancana and Bill Drury, at the Stevens—she was herself again…a lovely, doll-faced innocent in a dazzling black cocktail dress, black crepe off-the-shoulder V-neck top and ruffled tiers of black net over a taffeta skirt. The sleeves of the black top, however, came down midforearm, covering sins. Pearls at her throat, cherry lipstick, white gloves….
“Do you approve?” she asked, bright as a penny, again outstretching her arms in
Her medicine had done wonders.
“You’re a knockout.”
She took my arm; she smelled wonderful—Chanel No. 5. “Where are we going tonight, my love?”
I grinned at her. “My pal Frankie is opening, tonight.”
“Frankie? Sinatra? Isn’t he…isn’t that…the Chez Paree?”
“That’s right.”
She looked horror-struck. “But Rocco and his brothers are bound to be there….”
“I know.”
“Oh, Nate…Rocco could start something.”
“One can always hope,” I said.
Like most of us in Chicago, the Chez Paree—that garish, glitter-and-glamour nightclub at Fairbanks Court and Ontario—had humble roots: the Near Northside’s fabled bistro had once been just another warehouse, before Ben Hecht’s artist pal Pierre Nuytens turned it into a fortress of festivity in the late twenties. A few years later, tired of paying off cops and fending off gangsters, Nuytens sold his Chez Pierre to Mike Fritzel, an old hand in the nightclub game, who, with Joe Jacobsen, immediately redubbed the gaudy barn the Chez Paree, inviting “the Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” Sophie Tucker, to crack a bottle of bubbly over the building’s name plate. Twenty years later, Sophie was still returning annually to celebrate that christening with maudlin tunes and filthy jokes.
The bright, immense showroom seated five hundred, and presented entertainment of the first magnitude, including such $10,000-a-week stars as Jimmy Durante, Henny Youngman, and Martin & Lewis, with orchestras like Ted Lewis, Paul Whiteman, and Vincent Lopez, all augmented by the prettiest chorus line in America. Add fine dining (not your typical nightclub’s third-rate food at cutthroat prices), and the joint almost didn’t need its backroom gambling casino, the Gold Key Club, to make it the top after-dark spot in town.
Almost.
Not that the celebrated showroom didn’t have drawbacks: its very size and noonday-sun brightness seemed at odds with the postwar trend for intimate clubs. Then there were the massive square pillars, causing patrons viewing problems; an art moderne pastel wall mural of the planets that dated the joint; and all those linen-covered tables mashed together treating high-class customers like passengers in steerage. Plenty of good seats to be had, though, arranged as they were around the dance floor onto which the Chez Paree showgirls frequently spilled down from the stage/bandstand to do their elaborate production numbers.
