With a writing style like that of a reverential version of an old Hollywood tabloid, Benson and Singer present even legitimate tales and anecdotes of showbiz bigshots Joe and Nick Schenck as apocryphal. Recreated dialogs, sometimes in script form, are wince inducing. Surprisingly the acknowledgements mention hours spent in information gathering in the Motion Picture Academy Library and the USC Library (spent by a third, earlier contributor, Al Marill, whose project this was until his death in 2010) because everything in
Moguls screams armchair research; I'm not sure what details here couldn't be gotten with a couple of dozen books on the golden age of cinema (bibliography provided) along with a subscription to newspapers.com. You could've written this.
The sections on the brothers Schenck owning and running Paradise Park in NYC and then Palisades Park in Fort Lee were kind of interesting at first, but I was eager for the action to move to the movie business, specifically at MGM, UA, and Twentieth-Century Fox, all of which the guys, together or separately, helped create and run.
The stories of a pair of unwanted infiltrations into Hollywood—by gangsters and Nazis—worked wel
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Based entirely on memories recalled four decades after the fact, Chuck Giancana, Sam Giancana’s half brother, dictated to his son, also named Sam in honor of his uncle, an odd quasi biography entitled Double Cross: The Explosive, Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America. Therein, Chuck asserted unequivocally that Marilyn was an Outfit pawn, a lost and hapless drug addled alcoholic who was sleeping with virtually every mobster from Los Angeles to New York City and from Chicago to Havana. According to Chuck, Marilyn’s association and obligation to the Outfit had existed over a long period of time.
Marilyn’s first real break in Hollywood, according to Double Cross, came through her lover, Joseph Schenck, a Hollywood producer who became embroiled in the already mentioned union bribery scheme perpetrated by George Browne and Willie Bioff in the late-nineteen-thirties and early-nineteen-forties. In Chuck’s account, Schenck was deeply involved in bribery along with income tax code violations, for which federal authorities tried, convicted and imprisoned Schenck. By the time Schenck met Marilyn and they began their frequently alleged intimate affair, not long after his release from prison, the former producer was already seventy years old; b
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