“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,” the stunning young woman sang, as Joe Messina, Big George McCracken, the agent Lou Irwin and others in the Long retinue, male secretaries and what-have-you, crowded around, following her into the bedroom. All were gaily joining in except a glum Seymour who trailed after them.
“Happy birthday, dear Huey,” they all sang-even Seymour joined in, finally-as the Kingfish approached, his eyes damp, apparently genuinely touched.
He blew out the candles.
Huey P. Long was forty-two years old.
3
The Stork Club, that legendary habitat of cafe society and newspaper columnists, with its white-lettered navy blue canopy and entryway murals of top-hatted storks, seemed an unlikely venue for the birthday party of a Louisiana Kingfish. But the theatrical agent Lou Irwin, who had booked the orchestra in the club’s main room, told us owner Sherman Billingsley had just hired a new French chef who made the best onion soup in the world.
And Huey, through an enormous mouthful of frosted cake, said he liked the sound of that “jes’ fine.”
I still needed to check into the hotel, and several others wanted to tidy up before going out, so it was just after dark when the group-including the bodyguards, but unfortunately minus the blonde, who was a singer with Nick Lucas’s band in the New Yorker supper club-piled into two taxi cabs and headed uptown. I rode with two male aides and Seymour Weiss, who looked like a headwaiter in his tuxedo.
“Huey says you’ve come aboard,” he said, seeming in a better mood.
“For a week or two, anyway,” I admitted. I tried not to let my uneasiness show: thanks to the interruption of the birthday party, getting any details from Huey about his supposedly imminent assassination would have to wait.
Like the rest of the country, I’d seen in the papers that Huey had, on the floor of the Senate, accused FDR of aiding and abetting a murder plot against him; something about conspirators meeting at some hotel somewhere. But I’d really merely read the headlines, skimmed the stories. Nobody was taking it very seriously. After all, Huey made a habit out of such accusations. He was a wolf who kept crying little boy.
The Stork Club was, obviously, for the class customer-the affluent, the prominent. Seymour was the only one in the party in a tux, however, though Huey had traded his green-silk pajamas for a light tan poplin suit, an expanse of tie that looked to have been splattered by its green-and-red colors and a lavender shirt with a checkered pattern. Explosion in a paint factory was right.
Messina and McCracken were in their usual baggy mobster suits (McCracken had left his tommy gun in a bag behind), while I probably looked a little gangsterish myself in my rumpled dark suit. There hadn’t been time to have it, or my lightweight white spare, pressed at the hotel.
But we were part of Senator Long’s party, and none of the stuck-up Stork Club staff dared say a word or risk a disapproving glance; the hatcheck girl, a curvy little redhead, even gave me a wink, a smile and a celluloid token in return for my fedora.
Leaving the real world behind and entering into the fantasy realm of the rich, you were stopped at nothing so common as a velvet rope: the Stork Club had an eighteen-carat gold chain. This glittering barricade was lifted from our path by a dinner-jacketed captain who ushered us to the left, past a long, oval bar where, over cocktails, men in tails looking for tail murmured at frails in gowns that were no more expensive than your average Buick. Pretty chichi company for hoi polloi like me.
Beyond a scattering of bar tables was the main room, where the Frank Shields Orchestra, on its tiered stage, was performing a rather listless “Begin the Beguine.” I hoped the onion soup was better.
There were eight in our motley little party, all males, seated at a long table in the midst of the room like an island of riffraff in a sea of sophistication. All around us were men in white ties and ladies in dark gowns, both sexes smoking with that casual elegance only the rich (and, of course, movie stars who grew up in ghettos) can effortlessly affect, from barely legal debutantes to the barely living debauched, and all ages between, all dressed to the nines.
Whether they were Manhattan society or tourists from Peoria who slipped the maitre d’ a ten-spot, they were here to dine on the Stork Club’s specialty of the house: celebrity. You might see H. L. Mencken or Eddie Cantor; Ernest Hemingway or Claudette Colbert. Tonight, the main course was Kingfish.
Not that anybody-except, perhaps, a tourist or two-gawked or gaped or any such thing. These raised-pinky types were more discreet. But out around the edges of their elegance, they were watching the Kingfish’s antics, taking it all in. What were they thinking, these rich people whose money Huey wanted to reclaim for the poor (and himself)?
When a distinguished-looking older couple, on the way to the dance floor, stopped for a moment to pay their regards to the senator, he played modest. “Aw, I ain’t nothin’ much-only a little Kingfish from off yonder there.”
When our waiter came for his order, the Kingfish said, “All I want’s a bowl of this here onion soup I been hearin’ so much about. And if it’s not up to snuff, tell that French chef of yours, I’m gon’ be back there next to ’im, with my coat off, teachin’ him how the Cajuns cook.”
When the head bartender brought him over a complimentary gin fizz, a drink widely reported in the press to be Huey’s favorite, the senator at first declined, then relented, saying, “You know, I ain’t had a drink in eighteen months, but I’ll sample this, son, in order to be able to assure ya that it’s gen-you-wine.” He took a sip, said, “I think that’s all right, I think that’s all right…better be sure about it.”
And he took another big drink, and flashed his rascal’s grin of approval around at all the eavesdroppers.
But that was the last sip of anything alcoholic I saw him sip that night, or ever again, for that matter.
When the onion soup arrived, it was damn good, a flavorful broth under a crust of browned swiss cheese that passed Huey’s muster. But when other people’s meals began to arrive, Huey-who hadn’t ordered anything but the soup-began casually plucking this and that off the plates of those around him. A boiled potato here, a carrot there, a bite or two of fish.
Nobody at the table said a word about it, or even reacted; I wasn’t surprised, either-I’d noticed this behavior, back in Chicago in ’32. Par for the course, at mealtime with Huey. The only difference was, back then he ordered a plate of food for himself, as well.
But now he was slimming down; preparing for the battle royal against “Prince Franklin.”
In any case, I had positioned myself as far away from the Kingfish as possible. Nobody was getting a fork in this butter-smooth medium-rare New York strip steak but Nate Heller.
As Huey dined on morsels plundered from the plates of others, he expounded on his enemies: Roosevelt’s postmaster and confidant Jim Farley was “the Nabob of New York,” Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace was “that ignoramus from Iowa,” Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes was “the chinch bug of Chicago.”
Mostly, though, he railed about FDR.
“He’s very popular right now, Huey,” Seymour Weiss said quietly, eating the few tidbits of lobster tail that Huey had left on his majordomo’s plate.
“I can take him,” Huey said pugnaciously. “He’s a phony. I can take this Roosevelt. He’s scared of me, Seymour.” He snorted a laugh. “I can out-promise that son of a bitch any day of the week, and he knows it.”