The Mansions of Limbo (11 page)

Phyllis McGuire met Sam Giancana, according to legend, in Las Vegas in 1960, when the McGuire Sisters were performing there four times a year and pulling down $30,000 a week. Sam was a widower of fifty-two, and Phyllis, barely thirty, had already divorced Neal Van Ells, a radio/television announcer from Dayton, Ohio. Like many another Vegas performer, Phyllis had taken a liking to the gaming tables and had run up a hefty marker. As the story goes, Sam, spotting her, and liking her, went to Moe Dalitz, who ran the Desert Inn, and asked him how much the McGuire girl owed. Moe told him $100,000, a large marker at any time but enormous then. Sam is alleged to have said to Moe, “Eat it,” meaning, in gangland parlance, erase the debt, which is different, of course, from paying the debt, but nonetheless it was a gesture not without charm and romantic appeal, especially since Sam followed it up with a suiteful of flowers. They fell in love.

For a time, the romance remained a well-kept secret, but wherever the trio traveled, Sam was there. In 1962,
when the sisters were appearing at a nightclub in London, they were photographed there with their hairdresser, Frederic Jones, and Sam Giancana was also in the picture, with his arm wrapped around Phyllis. The photograph was flashed around the world, with enormous repercussions. The press and the public expressed a sense of outrage that the popular singer would associate with a person like Sam Giancana. In a tearful interview with the late gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, Phyllis McGuire denied the rumors that she and Sam had been secretly married in Sweden, and also swore that she was never going to see Sam again. In 1968, the McGuires performed for the last time as a trio on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” broadcast from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Since then, Phyllis has occasionally appeared as a solo act, as well as in musicals around the country, most recently in
Applause!
in Atlantic City.

Sam Giancana’s life was ended in 1975, while he was cooking Italian sausage in the basement kitchen of his Oak Park, Illinois, home, by a shot from a High-Standard Duromatic .22 target pistol, with a silencer attached, fired into the back of his head. That shot was followed by a second, fired into his mouth after he fell to the floor, and then by a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh, which were fired upward into his chin, shattering his lower jaw, ripping through his tongue, and lodging in the back of his skull. The FBI believes to this day that the deliverer of the blasts was a friend of many years, who still lives in the Chicago area, and that Sam was murdered because he had refused to cut the Chicago Mob in on the gambling empire he had set up outside the United States, in Iran, Haiti, and Central and South America, as well as on five gambling ships he ran in the Caribbean. Furthermore, Sam had become old, he was in poor health, and it was time for a change.

Long before then, Phyllis and Sam had ceased being lovers, but they had remained friends and she had visited him on numerous occasions during his eight-year exile in Mexico. Both the Mob nobility and the show-business greats with whom Sam had hobnobbed snubbed his Chicago funeral. Only Phyllis McGuire and Keely Smith, who had once sung with Louis Prima, arrived to pay their respects to Giancana’s three daughters and to say farewell to Sam in his $8,000 silver casket.

For several years the McGuire Sisters have been planning a nightclub comeback. In February they performed at Rainbow & Stars in New York, and shortly after that, I made arrangements to interview Phyllis McGuire. “Don’t mention Sam Giancana to her,” people warned me, but not mentioning Sam Giancana when writing about Phyllis McGuire would be like not mentioning Richard Burton when writing about Elizabeth Taylor, or, in a more parallel situation, like not mentioning Nicky Arnstein when writing about Fanny Brice. As it turned out, I didn’t have to bring up Sam’s name, because Phyllis McGuire brought it up first. Their story has all the stuff of which myths are made.

I arrived in Las Vegas with elaborate directions for how to get from the airport to Rancho Circle, the exclusive enclave behind a guarded gate where she has lived for years. “Past the Lit’l Scholar Schoolhouse,” I read from my instruction sheet, but the driver said he didn’t need any instructions. “Everybody in Vegas knows where Phyllis McGuire lives.”

From outside, the place looked like a suburban ranch-style house built in the fifties, but all resemblance to ranch-style life ended at the front door, which was opened by a man wearing a gun in a holster under his open suit jacket. Paul Romines has been her bodyguard for fourteen years. I
stood for a moment in the hallway. To the right was a dining room with a mirrored floor. Through a door was a men’s lavatory with two wall urinals side by side. Ahead was a replica of the Arc de Triomphe, which separated the hall from the living room. The living room was one of the largest I have ever been in, so large that a forty-four-foot-high replica of the Eiffel. Tower did not seem to cramp the space. Beyond that was a vast area which included the formal dining room and, to the right of it, a bar with twelve bar chairs. To the left was an area identified by the bodyguard as the Chinese area, and to the right an area he designated as the French area. The windows, he informed me, were all bulletproof and could take a magnum shot, and at the touch of a button steel doors would drop from the eaves over all the windows, securing the house completely, fortress-style.

The floor of the living room was black and white marble. The rugs in the French area were Aubusson and Tabriz, and the walls were covered in rose damask. The chandeliers and sconces were Bavarian, with amber light bulbs. The mirrors on the walls were Venetian, and the chairs and sofas were all French, in multiple groupings, so many chairs that I lost count at sixty. That was when Phyllis McGuire came in.

She was dressed in a nautical style, with white flannel trousers and a white cashmere sweater with naval insignia on it. Her earrings were anchors. She was not at all what I was expecting, and from the moment she spoke I liked her. She was friendly, funny, gracious, utterly enthusiastic, constantly up, with boundless energy. And pretty, very pretty.

“Did anyone offer you a cup of coffee?” she asked. “Or anything?” She flung up her hands in mock exasperation and called into the kitchen, “Enice, take care of Mr. Dunne. And I’ll have some coffee too. And some Perriers.”
She asked me, “Did you meet Enice? Enice Jobe? She’s been with me for thirty-three years.”

We sat on French chairs in the French area. “Is the music too loud?” she asked. “I can turn it down. Turn it down, Enice, will you, and put the coffee right here on this table.”

I asked about the sisters, Dorothy and Christine, and she said, “We’ve been singing together since I was four years old. We sang in the car, using the windshield wiper for a metronome. My sisters are the most incredible harmony singers. I can start in any key, and they pick it up.” The sisters got their start singing in the First Church of God in Middletown, Ohio, where their mother, an ordained minister, was an associate pastor.

“We were middle class,” she said. “My father worked for forty-six years for Armco Steel. He made steel before there were jet furnaces, working at an open hearth, shoveling in the pig iron. He wore safety shoes and long thick underwear, safety shirts and gloves, and a hard hat. At night after work, his clothes were coated with salt from his sweat. When my sisters and I started making money, we asked our parents what they owed, and we paid off everything. We made my father retire, and ordered a custom-made Cadillac with a gold plaque on it that said,
FOR ASA AND LILLIE MCGUIRE, FROM DOROTHY, CHRISTINE, AND PHYLLIS
. We sent them all over the world.”

Looking around the French area, she said, “Some of this furniture is very valuable, and some is just personal to me. That Aubusson should be hanging on the wall rather than be on the floor. A lot of the furniture and the paneling came from the house of Helen Bonfils in Denver, Colorado. Her father was the editor and publisher of the
Denver Post.
She was one of the finest women I ever knew. That desk belonged to Helen’s father.”

One thing I’ll say about Phyllis McGuire, she’s not hard to converse with. Raise any topic—with few exceptions—and she will talk away. She told me that one of the newspapers had called her a motor-mouth.

“Do you want to see everything?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She took me through the house and grounds. There are eight acres and two guesthouses. “That’s where my sisters stay when they come here to rehearse. The rest of the time they live in Arizona. They came to Vegas during the week and went home on weekends while we were getting ready for the comeback. We worked six to eight hours a day. We worked out and did stretching exercises in the mornings and did three hours each afternoon with Jim Hendricks, our pianist. One night I had Altovese and Sammy Davis over to hear the act. Chris and Dorothy each have their own bedroom and television set, and they share the living room and kitchen.”

Sister Dorothy is no stranger to romantic headlines herself, having engaged in 1958 in a steamy love affair with fellow Arthur Godfrey singing star Julius La Rosa, which resulted in a public scolding on-air by Godfrey. Although the choirgirl image was tarnished, that affair caused no lessening of the group’s popularity.

Behind the main house, we came to a moatlike area where Phyllis’s twenty-three swans swim. “Those are the black Australian swans there,” she said. “That one is about ready to hatch.” Pointing to her tennis court, she said, “That’s where Johnny Carson learned how to play tennis. It needs to be swept,” she added, shaking her head.

“Someone told me all the flowers in your garden are fake,” I said. She laughed and said, “Honey, I keep five gardeners.”

In the pool house, noticing a crack in one of the windows,
she picked up the telephone and called the main house. “Enice, tell maintenance there’s a crack in the window of the pool house. Have him replace it, will you?” A bit farther on, she said, “Over there’s my putting green. My waterfalls aren’t on today—sorry.”

Back in the house, she took me downstairs. “This is my nightclub. It even has a neon sign. The carpet rolls up and it’s a dance floor underneath. The dance floor is in the shape of a piano. There have been lots of parties in this room. Over here is a blackjack table. Moe Dalitz gave me this table as a gift. I’ve taught more people how to play blackjack here at this table.”

There is a beauty salon in the house, with several chairs and dryers so that the sisters, or houseguests, can have their hair done at the same time. In the health club, next to the beauty salon, are three changerooms and three massage tables next to one another, where three masseurs can work on three guests at the same time. “The steam room is always ready,” she said, peering into a window of the steam room.

Her huge bathtub is part of her bedroom, and her closets are enormous. “This is all Chanel,” she said, pointing to one area. “Over there, it’s all Galanos, and there in that room is all Pauline Trigère.” It was a tour she was used to giving. “This is for my furs. The lynx, ermine, and sable are here. The older furs are over there. I keep a record of everything I wear so that I don’t ever repeat with the same people. All my clothes are on a computer. So are all the books in my library, and all the furniture. They’re all on video as well.”

She picked up a model airplane. “This was my G-II,” she said. “It had a sign saying,
WELCOME ABOARD THE PHYLLIS SPECIAL.
I’ve decorated the interiors of three planes. Do you feel like lunch?”

“Sure.”

The mail had arrived. “Enice, I don’t want to see the tabloids. The Searles across the street said there was something in them about us. Don’t show me.” We sat in the small dining room, and Enice, having given the mail to a secretary, brought in the lunch. “I have the greatest kitchens in the world,” Phyllis said. “I don’t cook, but I always have great chefs. And some of my maids have been with me for fourteen or seventeen years.”

“How many people work for you in this house?” I asked, having noticed several in the background.

She began to count, looking up, looking over at Enice for verification, placing the forefinger of her left hand against the pinkie finger of her right hand, then against the ring finger, then the center finger, then against the other forefinger, and then repeating the process, at the same time reeling off a seemingly endless list of names—maids, cooks, guards, gardeners, drivers, secretaries.

“Twenty-eight,” she said finally.

She thinks a great deal about security. “My limo driver carries a gun,” she said. “But if they want to get you, they’re going to get you. For me, it’s the most secure feeling in the world when those steel doors are down.”

Phyllis McGuire has a more elaborate lifestyle than most television and nightclub performers of the fifties whose stars have dimmed with time and the fickle musical tastes of the public, and nowhere is her wealth more visible than in her wondrous jewelry. No one who knows about jewels has not heard about her fantastic collection, which ranks among the best in the world, right up there with the famous collections of Elizabeth Taylor, Imelda Marcos, Candy Spelling, Mrs. Marvin Davis, and the fifth Baroness Thyssen. Harry Winston, the great jeweler, once said to
her, “If ever there was a lady meant to wear jewels, it’s you.” She told me, “There was a time when I was purchasing millions of dollars’ worth of jewelry. I was one of Harry Winston’s best customers.” She paused for a moment and then added, “Maybe some Saudis were ahead of me. Jewels really turned me on then, and they still do. I wear the jewels, they don’t wear me.”

On the day I was in her house, most of her jewels had been put in the vault because she was leaving imminently for a singing engagement with her sisters at the Moulin Rouge in Chicago. But a few were still at hand. “Enice,” she called out, “bring in the canaries.” The canaries consisted of a forty-two-carat yellow diamond set in a ring, surrounded by smaller diamonds, and some loose yellow diamonds which she was planning to have made into earrings. She examined her stones like a jeweler. “I’m not sure I like the way they put the diamonds around the canary,” she said, “but I’m trying it this way.” From the same package she pulled a twenty-eight-carat marquise-shaped diamond ring, which she called “one of the babies” because of its small size—small, at least, in comparison with some of her other rings. The canaries brought to mind a fairly recent drama in her life.