From The Vault Of Art Shay: The Real Mickey Cohen
By Art Shay in News on Jan 16, 2013 8:00PM
(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. This week, Art notes the differences between how Hollywood treats gangsters with how they are in real life.)
There is a marvelous TV documentary that takes our newest Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor—a dumpy, feisty, wise Latina with Puerto Rican roots—back to New York. She grew up in "The Projects:" Tall, red, forbidding buildings erected on lots made desolate by the Depression, two miles from the apartment in which I grew up. Sotomayor has a grand old time chatting on the street, posing for telephone cameras thrust out the windows and assuring children on her aimless route that they can become somebody. She refuses to deny that the discriminatory laws that opened the doors of Princeton to her over two more qualified white students (the same laws that gave us the execrably silent Clarence Thomas and his shoddy moral baggage), refuses to deny that these patently unfair laws really helped her.
There are lots of unfair laws around.
Our heroes when I was a kid were Superman and Doc Savage. We played poker for the magazines that showed our heroes in impossible action against Evil. Doc Savage had a team: There was Monk, who was very strong; there was Doc himself who could work miracles; there were others.
In my research on New Yorker Mickey Cohen, who was born in Brooklyn, became a bad boxer and ended up working as a hit man for the Mob in Los Angeles, I stumbled on a Huffington Post interview with a wisecracking member of the team that has just presented us with a turkey named Gangster Squad, purportedly the story of the Los Angeles police's halfhearted war on Cohen, and something clicked for me: Like Doc Savage's team, each member of the "Squad" had a specialty
Ryan Gosling, as we know, has luck with the ladies (including Mickey's girlfriend). Anthony Mackie throws knives; a redolence perhaps of Mack the Knife? Giovanni Ribisi is a tech wizard, patching them phones together. And Robert Patrick has the ability to turn himself into liquid metal and conveniently assume the shape of any item that he touches.
All, all as outlandish as Sonia Sotomayor's and Clarence Thomas's ascent to the Supreme Court with the usual "based on" escape clause in the credits blaming an obscure novel for all the ‘36 Dodges, Packards and Studebakers filling the Los Angeles suburban air with flying cars afire from otherwise ineffectual machine gun bullets by the hundreds. Sean Penn is adorable as a smiling, overacting killer and ultimately as a fist-fighter against hero Josh Brolin, a head taller and much heavier than Penn—a Hollywood brawler of note who won a police decision over his wife Diane Lane and is Barbara Streisand's stepson. He beats up Mickey.
In real life Mickey first worked for Cleveland Mafia boss Moe Dalitz, then in Hollywood for Bugsy Siegel. His fulltime sidekick and bodyguard was mentioned only once in the movie: "Johnny Stomp" Stompanato was famous for allegedly being knifed to death by Lana Turner's sexy 14-year-old daughter, allegedly, because Lana made a midnight call to famed lawyer "Get me Giesler" about a problem she had with “The Stomp”—a former Woodstock choir boy now somehow dead on her bedroom floor.
Apparently, Geisler convinced Lana she was too small and maybe drunk to have done such a dastardly deed. Hmm … let me think. That's what Jerry was paid for, Hollywood thinking, out of the box so to speak. Wait a minute ... let me talk to your distraught, molested daughter.
Fiction has a real life of its own in Hollywood. Its working title: "Based On..."
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