The Ugly American

I know this blog is already getting longer than the itemized national debt, but I simply can’t resist delivering up these sparkling and pithy tableau vivant from the past. I could keep you up all night just with funny stories about Mussolini.

Here’s a good one: Did you know that the “Kosher mob” gangster and founder of that ultimate American icon, Las Vegas, Bugsy Siegel, almost blew Muss’ brains out one night at the dinner table? Here’s the 411.

There once was a lady (well, sort of a lady) who was quite a character; the Countess Carla Dentice di Frasso, known as Countess Dorothy di Frasso, born Dorothy Caldwell Taylor in Watertown, New York. Like all American poor little rich girls, she just had to have a title, and Daddy’s money bought her a much older Italian gentleman, Count Dentice di Frasso. Together they poured her money into a run-down but gorgeous villa north of Rome called the Villa Madama. She had affairs with the best and brightest, devoured both Hollywood and Gary Cooper, and was a regular in what was once known as “cafe society.” (That's a photo of her and the Coop.)

But after Coop, the biggest love of her life was Bugsy Siegel, gangster, professional killer, the blue-eyed Lothario who had all the starlets swooning when his New York bosses sent him to Hollywood. Of course, he had a nice Jewish wife he kept tucked away in New Jersey with his two daughters, but, like the Countess, he didn’t let it cramp his style. Hearing that Chicago was going to muscle in on the Hollywood rackets, one more time, (a passel of them had just been thrown in the clink for doing same to the projectionist’s union) the mobsters in New York sent Siegel out to beat them to the punch. He’d grown up in Hell’s Kitchen with actor George Raft, who was mucho big at the time; Raft got him into the homes, and beds, of some of L.A.’s finest. Bugsy went totally Hollywood. In fact, he became so vain he was constantly applying cosmetics to his skin and his, he feared, thinning hair. Which didn’t, of course, mean that he ever went anywhere unarmed.

That’s because he was also a Grade A sociopath, one of the founders of Murder, Incorporated.


But la Countess thought she could make a gentlemen of Bugs. Unfortunately, traveling abroad (so to speak) and dating a countess hadn’t really broadened him much. In fact, he knew about as much about international relations as Warren Christopher. And so, he wasn’t really aware of the fact that the Axis powers, prodded by Germany, had declared war on “World Jewry.” The Japs, of course, had never even seen a Jew. The story is not apocryphal that, before the signing of the Tripartite Pact, the Japanese ambassador to Germany, after touring the new highways, weapons factories and buzzing nationalized industries that had bound the nation together once more in the health and joy of their shared Aryan heritage, commented, “Yes, it’s a wonderful system. But we don’t have any Jews.”

Juden Raus! The hot board game for Nazi kids in 1936. Really.

All of this is a little sad in and of itself, since Mussolini didn’t really go along for the ride on this one. In fact, most people don’t know that, in the beginning, it was Hitler who idolized Mussolini rather than the reverse, while as time passed, of course, Italy fell under Germany’s heavy-handed shadow. Of course Mussolini was a bully; his war of conquest in Ethiopia, airplanes and machine guns against spears, illustrated that full well. But despite his weaker military, Il Duce nevertheless had the balls, at first, to inform the world’s most murderous former house painter that Italy’s Jews were still Italians, and that he had no intention of turning them over to Herr Himmler. In his 18 previous years of iron rule, he’d never shown a whiff of anti-Semitism, and in fact, he made fun of Hitler’s Aryan obsession constantly. Of course, later, after relentless pressure from Berlin, he passed a pile of crap called the Manifesto of Race, stripping Italian Jews of their citizenship and barring them from government jobs. Italians were for the most part appalled. He often said later that he regretted having done it, and that race was a matter of “the heart,” rather than biology. Anti-Semitism as a national policy was never enforced much beyond this, the truth of which can be seen in the fact that there is no Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen in Tuscany. Would that Poland or the Ukraine could say the same.

Nevertheless, he was still Hitler’s closest ally and personal friend, and the countess was swelling up with “society circuit” pride that he was coming to the villa for dinner. Unfortunately, their other dinner guest that evening was that perennial Nazi favorite, Joseph Goebbels, come to soak up a little sun. So, as they were dressing for dinner, when the countess casually mentioned this little quirk of the Axis, Bugsy got very, very pissy. Already feeling she’d put her foot in her mouth, she realized she was going to get a boot up the arse if she didn’t explain it all to him.

At which point, true to his nickname, (totally bug nuts) Bugsy pulled out his favorite pocket .38 Special, waving it in the air, proclaiming that he was going to go downstairs and 'blow that goddamn Wop greaser’s brains out,' then take out the Kraut for good measure. Needless to say, this would have created something of a faux pas at the countess’ table. It took her a lot of diplomacy, and perhaps some quick intercourse, (Bugs was, as the French say, toujours prêt) to calm him down.

No question about it. Jew baiting makes for strange bedfellows.