"… Months ago," Winchell wrote, "we called him 'On His Last Legs' Diamond… "
Jack wore his tuxedo and signet ring and held his rosary at the wake, which was given at the home of Alice's relatives in Maspeth, Long Island., The family sent four floral tributes, and I paid for one-third of the fifth, a pillow of red roses, the other two-thirds kicked in by Packy and Flossie, and signed, "Your pals." An eight-foot bleeding heart was dedicated to "Uncle John," and Alice sent a five-and-a-half-foot-high floral chair of yellow tea roses and lilies of the valley. On a gauze streamer in two-inch gold letters across the chairback she had inscribed: VACANT CHAIR, TO MY OWN, AFTER ALL, YOUR LOVING WIFE.
Owney Madden paid for the coffin, a dark mahogany box worth eight hundred dollars. Jack had seven hundred dollars' worth of industrial insurance once, but the company canceled it. The plan was to bury Jack in Calvary Cemetery alongside Eddie, but the church wouldn't let him be put in consecrated ground. Wouldn't allow a mass either. And the permission for the final prayer by a priest at the wake house, which I negotiated with Cardinal Hayes, was withdrawn at the last minute, putting the women in tears. A thirteen-year-old cousin of Jack's said the rosary in place of the priest, as a thousand people stood outside the house in the rain.
It rained yellow mud into the grave. A couple of hundred of Jack's fans went to the cemetery with the family and the press. Somebody from the undertakers picked up a shovel and tried to drive the photographers away from the graveside, but none of them gave an inch, and when the man screamed at them, the photographers chased him up a tree. Jack belonged to them.
It was all over quickly. Alice, heavily veiled, said, "Good-bye, boy, good-bye," when they began to fill the grave, and then she walked away with a single red rose in her hand. Ten minutes later most of the flowers on the grave were gone. Souvenirs.
When Kiki began her five-a-day stint at the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street ("See Kiki, the Gangster's Gal"), fifteen hundred people were in line before the theater opened at eleven in the morning, and the manager sold two hundred and fifty SRO tickets. "She is better box office than Peaches Browning," the manager said, "and Peaches was the best I ever had here." Sidney Skolsky reported Alice was in the balcony at the opening to see the wicked child (she was just twenty-two) tippy-tap-toe to the tune of twin banjos, then take four bows and never mention Jack. But Sidney was wrong. Alice didn't see the show. I called her to offer a bit of consolation after I'd read about Kiki's success.
"Only eighteen days, Marcus," Alice said. "He's dead only eighteen days and she's out there with banjos, dancing on his grave. She could at least have waited a month."
My advice was to stop competing with Kiki for a dead man, but it was an absurd suggestion to a gladiator, and the first time I made the mistake of thinking Jack was totally dead. Alice had already hired a writer and was putting together a skit that would be staged, thirty-five days after Jack's murder, on the boards of the Central Theater in the Bronx. The theme was crime doesn't pay. In one moment of the drama Alice interrupted a holdup, disarmed the gunman, and guarded him with his own gun until the police arrived. Then she said to the audience, "You can't make a dime with any of them. The straight and narrow is the only way," which brought to mind the era when she banked eighteen thousand dollars in about six months at Acra. Ambivalence, you're beautiful.
Kiki and Alice both took their acts on the road, in vaudeville and on the Minsky burlesque circuit, outraging any number of actors, the Marx Brothers among them. "A damn shame and a disgrace," said Groucho of Kiki's sixteen-week contract, "especially when so many actors are out of work. For what she is getting they could have hired five good acts, people who know their business. She's nothing but a gangster's moll."
The girls both played the same big towns, and both scandalized the smaller ones, Alice barred from Paterson, Kiki hustled out of Allentown, Alice presuming to teach a moral lesson with her act, Kiki the successful sinner against holy matrimony. Who drew the crowds? Ah.
By spring Kiki was still traveling, but Alice was no longer a serious road attraction. Alice and I talked a few times because she was having money problems, worried about the mortgage on the Acra house. She said then she was going to open at Coney Island and she chided me for never seeing her perform. So I said I'd come and catch her opener.
There is a photograph of her as she looked on the day her show opened on the boardwalk. I was standing behind the news cameraman as he caught her by surprise, and I remember her face before, during, and after the click: the change from uncertainty to hostility to a smile at me. Her hair is parted and wavy, falling over her forehead and covering her ears. A poster behind her advertises Siamese twins joined at the shoulder blades, and there is a girl outlined by a dozen long-bladed knives. A midget is in the photo, being held aloft by a man with dark, oily hair and a pencil-thin mustache. The sign says SIDE SHOW in large letters and to the right: BEAUTIFUL MRS. JACK LEGS DIAMOND IN PERSON.
The weather was unseasonably warm that afternoon, mobs on the boardwalk in shirtsleeves and unnecessary furs, camp chairs on the sand, and young girls blooming in summer dresses as Beautiful Mrs. Jack walked onto the simple unpainted board stage.
From the other direction came the tuxedo man with the little mustache. He introduced Alice, then asked if she wanted to say anything at the start.
"Mr. Diamond was a loving and devoted husband," she said. "Much that was stated and printed about him was untrue."
"People find it difficult to understand why a woman would stay married to a gangster," said the tuxedo man.
"Mr. Diamond was no gangster. He wouldn't have known how to be a gangster."
"It's been said he was a sadistic killer."
"He was a man in love with all of nature, and he celebrated life. I never saw him kill even a fly."
"How, then, would you say he got the reputation for being a gangster and a killer?"
"He did some very foolish things when he was young, but he regretted them later in life."
So it went. The sixteen customers paid ten cents each to enter, and after the show Alice also sold four photos of herself and Jack, the one with "my hero" written on the clipping found in her apartment a year later when they put a bullet in her temple. The photos also sold for a dime, which brought the gross for the first performance to two dollars. "Not much of a crowd," she said to me when she came off the stage. Her eyes were heavy and she couldn't manage a smile.
"You'll do better when the hot days come along."
"The hot days are all over with, Marcus."
"Hey, that's kind of maudlin."
"No, just honest. Nothing's like it used to be. Nothing."
"You look as good as ever. You're not going under, I can see that."
"No, I don't go under. But I'm all hollow inside. If I went in for a swim I'd float away like an old bottle."
"Come on, I'll buy you a drink."
She knew a speakeasy a few blocks off the boardwalk, upstairs over a hot dog stand, and we settled into a corner and talked over her travels, and her fulfilling of her own fragment of Lew Edwards' dream: John the Priest on the boards of America. He was there. The presence within Alice.
"Are you staying alive on this spiel?" I asked her.
"You mean money? No, not anymore. But I've got a little coming in from a dock union John did some favors for. One of his little legacies to me was how and why he did the favors, and who paid off. And when I told them what I had, they kept up the payments."
"Amazing."
"What?"
"That he's still taking care of you. "
"But she's living off him, too. That's what galls me."
"I know. I read the papers. Did you ever catch her act?"