THE CORPSE

GEORGE KENNEDY, dressed in his best blue pinstriped suit, stepped over the body of the man who had been his employer for the last thirty years. Billy Wilkerson, my father, lay facedown on the linoleum floor of the master bathroom, naked and emaciated, a plastic tube with a metal clamp protruding from his abdomen. A few feet away, a cigarette had burned itself out, charring the white floor in a brown, wormlike trail. It was a little after 6:30 AM on Sunday, September 2, 1962.

It was the first time Kennedy had seen his employer naked. He was shocked at how undignified he looked. "Death swept away all his greatness," he would later recall. He bent down and placed two fingers on Wilkerson's neck to check for a pulse. Tichi, my mother, was waiting, standing there. He told her that her husband was gone. Then he broke down, sobbing uncontrollably, dropping to his knees. When he had sufficiently recovered, he nervously began reciting the Lord's Prayer over the dead body. "It was a futile gesture," he admitted decades later, "but I was at a loss for what to do at that moment."

Wilkerson's small beige poodle Pierre came in. It licked its owner's cold face and immediately launched into a fit of howling so haunting it raised the hair on the back of Kennedy's neck. Tichi, unnerved, interrupted Kennedy's prayer abruptly and asked him to remove the dog. Kennedy muffled his sobs with his handkerchief, picked up the dog, took it downstairs, and locked it in the kitchen.

Billy Wilkerson had apparently risen from his bed at approximately 3:30 AM and, in the dark, made his way unsteadily, limping, to the bathroom. His widow remembered the sounds of her husband feeling his way along the walls in the darkness. In the pitch blackness of the bathroom, he sat down on the toilet and, out of sheer habit, lit a cigarette. Judging by what was left of it, he had inhaled only a few times before a heart attack overcame him. The cigarette fell onto the floor. Wilkerson's own fall was precipitously halted when his open mouth caught the small reading table in front of him. The coroner later determined that he was dead before his face made contact with the table.

Tichi told Kennedy that her husband had risen twice during the night to go to the bathroom. At approximately 4:30, when he did not return to bed the second time, she went to investigate. She switched on the bathroom light and found him on the toilet, his upper jaw clinging precariously to the reading table. With great effort, she unhooked his head from the table and shifted his body to the floor. Not knowing what to do after that, she immediately summoned Kennedy, who made the long drive from his Pasadena home to his employer's Bel-Air residence to find my mother still dressed in a white silk bathrobe and utterly bewildered.

A few evenings before, Wilkerson had slipped and fallen on that same linoleum floor in his bathroom. His dog had tipped over its water bowl. My father's screams, which echoed throughout the house, were so agonizing that I had plugged my ears with my fingers. I was only ten years old.

But on that Sunday morning, my sister, Cindy, and I were still asleep. After my mother called the coroner's office, she locked the master bedroom door to prevent us from inadvertently entering.

The coroner arrived just before 7:00 AM and officially pronounced Billy Wilkerson, age seventy-one, dead. The death certificate later listed the cause of death as heart failure. At 7:30 AM, Cunningham & O'Connor Mortuary collected the body.

It was close to eight o'clock when I came downstairs and found my mother and George Kennedy seated in silence in the dark, wood-paneled den where my father had spent so much of his leisure time.

When my mother spotted me in the doorway, she quickly escorted me upstairs and sat Cindy, who had just risen, with me on my bed. She put her arms around us and told us that our father had passed away during the night. Cindy cried. I didn't.

"It's a relief," said our mother. "It's over." We knew what she meant. For years our father had been struggling with poor health. His suffering had come to seem unendurable.

At that moment we heard howling coming from the kitchen. It was the same beige poodle. We couldn't stand it. My mother told Kennedy to take the animal away.

* * *

Billy Wilkerson perished one day before the thirty-second anniversary of the Hollywood Reporter. The trade paper he created had come to dominate the entertainment industry, and by the end of the following day, all three of Los Angeles's major newspapers carried a prominent notice of Wilkerson's passing.

To moviegoers, Billy Wilkerson was not a household name like Frank Sinatra or Lana Turner. He never made studio policy, nor did he run a motion picture company. His name appeared on the movie screen only a few dozen times, and that was in the 1920s. Yet the publisher was universally eulogized in print. Newspapers and magazines hailed Wilkerson as one of Hollywood's pioneers, one of its founding fathers and architects, the "Mentor of the Sunset Strip."

Hundreds of cables and phone calls poured into our residence and to the Reporter offices by the hour. Tributes mounted. Film producer and director Joe Pasternak, who made his first movie, Help Yourself, with Billy Wilkerson, wrote, "There comes a time in our lives when we cannot find adequate words to express our great sorrow." (Pasternak would later recall that the day my father died "it seemed like the whole world stopped.")

Those same sentiments were echoed in a cable from radio columnist Walter Winchell: "There are no words."

"As a matter of fact," wrote Thomas M. Pryor, the editor of Daily Variety, "a memory I cherish, Billy was the first to call and congratulate me and wish me good luck when I became editor of this paper. Our friendly relations remained unchanged when we became, in a sense, competitors in the same field."

"It is always a matter of deep sorrow to see fine, vibrant leaders taken away from our industry, and particularly so in the case of your late husband," wrote Barney Balaban, president of Paramount Pictures. "For his was a voice of great significance to the entire film business, and his powerful vision was dedicated in every way to the furtherance of the motion picture both as an art and a worldwide entertainment."

Spyros P. Skouras, chairman of 20th Century Fox, who knew Wilkerson during his salad days when he worked in Kansas City under Carl Laemmle, head of Universal Pictures, wrote, "He was a wonderful human being and will be greatly missed by all who knew him."

"He was a part of Hollywood and his departure leaves a void no one else can fill," wrote Harry Brand, Fox's head of publicity.

"I am one among thousands," wrote actress Joan Crawford, "who considered Billy a dear and wonderful friend." Actor Kirk Douglas wrote, "He was a marvelous man and a dynamic leader in our industry. He will be sorely missed."

Billy Wilkerson should have lived longer than seventy-one years. But his self-destructive lifestyle made that impossible. Amid the tributes, newspapers were quick to note his five failed marriages and his long battle with ill health.

What they neglected to mention were his ties with organized crime; or how he had been instrumental in the rise of Las Vegas; or how he had helped orchestrate the Hollywood blacklist; or his role in the assassination of Bugsy Siegel; or his involvement in United States v. Paramount Pictures, the case that broke Hollywood's distribution monopoly. Nobody mentioned that Billy Wilkerson had once been the most powerful man in the entertainment industry. Nobody mentioned it because almost nobody knew.

But condolences arrived, too, from those who knew some of his secrets, including his gangster friend Johnny Rosselli. "I did not see Bill too often in late years," he wrote. "I always considered him my very good friend." Considering the criminal favors they had done for each other, that tribute might have been the most understated we received.

* * *

Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, a large beige building in the style of the Italian Renaissance, dominates a block not far from the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue in Hollywood and can accommodate approximately fourteen hundred people. But on Wednesday, September 5, 1962, at 10:00 AM its capacity was tested. The numbers swelled to more than double that as relatives, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, and industry figures crowded the large church to pay their final respects to Billy Wilkerson. Rows of nuns lined the back pews, their faces pressed in handkerchiefs, quietly whimpering. The overflow of mourners from the standing-room-only crowd spilled out of the church onto the pavement.

"We come into this world with nothing," said Rev. Harold Ring, SJ, in his eulogy, "and it is for certain we take nothing out. But Billy Wilkerson has left us a very rich legacy which will stand for all time."

A simple spray of white roses adorned the bronze casket. The pallbearers were all men who had worked under Wilkerson for decades, like his secretary, George Kennedy, who visibly struggled with his grief.

The day before, a fight had broken out between Kennedy and my mother. She had insisted on a closed casket, but Kennedy protested. "The closed casket infuriated mourners wishing to pay their final respects," Kennedy later recalled. But Tichi Wilkerson was adamant. "I wanted them" — meaning us, the children — "to remember him as he was when he was alive."

There were detractors, opponents, and enemies by the score who avoided Wilkerson's funeral. Tom Seward, my father's right-hand man for close to a decade and a half, was noticeably absent. "A lot of people hated Billy's guts," Seward remembered, "myself included. It made no sense to attend."

Still, a three-hundred-car cortege wound its way to the interment. On that balmy, overcast afternoon near a large poplar tree that still shadows his grave, void of fanfares or salutes, Billy Wilkerson was laid to rest at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California, where his mother, Mary, had been buried two years earlier.

The man people in Hollywood considered their godfather, whom they came to rely upon as their guiding spirit, had finally expired. The question on everyone's lips now was how the industry would survive without Billy Wilkerson.

ROSEBUD

WHEN BILLY WILKERSON DIED, his longtime secretary, George Kennedy, at the instruction of his widow, cleaned out the desk at his Hollywood office. In the top left drawer he found a small cardboard box containing a wooden printing block, a copperplate of Billy Wilkerson's first infant picture. For a moment Kennedy mused over it before adding it to the box containing everything else. He knew that some of his employer's happiest memories were of his childhood and speculated that he had kept the printing block as a reminder.

"We all have our Rosebuds," said Kennedy, referring to the Orson Welles epic Citizen Kane.

The story goes that on the night Wilkerson was born, his father sat at a poker game in a Nashville saloon, inebriated. After losing a considerable sum, he passed out in a corner booth. The next morning when he came to, it was pouring rain. Hungover, he walked the short distance to the hospital, where he learned that his wife had given birth to a boy. Cleaned out at the card table, he couldn't afford the hospital bill. But Wilkerson Sr. was one of the most recognized figures in Nashville, and the hospital knew he was good for the money.

All his life, William Richard Wilkerson Sr. had been a professional gambler whose fate and fortunes were dictated by the turn of a card. Indeed, in the 1900 US Census, "Big Dick," as he was affectionately known, would list his occupation as "gambler." The game of choice for the portly man with the flamboyant waxed handlebar mustache was poker, and people speculated that his nickname derived from the size of his sexual organ. No one who was in a position to know ever verified this, and it seems more likely the name derived from his girth.

What we do know is that Big Dick loved to drink, so much so that his imbibing often deteriorated into barroom brawling. For certain, it interfered with his gambling. "He always lost when he was drunk," said Wilkerson Jr.'s business partner Tom Seward.

When Big Dick was sober and coherent, he managed to amass fortunes at the card tables. By all accounts, he was erudite and eloquent, an engaging storyteller, an orator par excellence who left audiences spellbound. Drunk or sober, Big Dick was something of a gambling legend in the Old South. He would make gambling history one night in 1902 when he won the Coca-Cola concession and bottling rights for thirteen southern states in a poker game. Such a boon could have made him a legendary financial titan, the Warren Buffet or Bill Gates of his day, but Big Dick was a professional gambler, not an investor. Thinking the franchise was worthless, he traded the rights for a movie theater, which he sold two weeks later for $4,000. After another night of heavy drinking and card playing, the cash evaporated too.

Just the opposite of the alcoholic gambler was Big Dick's wife, Mary, whom everyone affectionately called "Mamie." The petite, frail Mary Maher from County Cork, Ireland, gave the outward appearance of being almost saintly. Governed by common sense, patience, and steely determination, traits sadly lacking in her husband, Mary became the pillar Dick leaned on. Although they were an unlikely pair, everyone noted she was devoted to her husband.

"She quickly learned how to roll with the punches," said Kennedy.

Indeed, Big Dick's gambling led to a turbulent domestic life. At times, the couple knew untold riches; then, just as easily, Dick's losses tumbled the family into debt. They could go from owning plantations with cotton fields as far as the eye could see and employing hundreds of African American workers, to picking cotton in the very fields they'd once owned.

Mary, especially, had ugly memories of the bailiffs arriving at their door, coming to confiscate all their possessions. Dick ordered his wife into the next room while he fought off the bailiffs, but they returned hours later with police reinforcements, who restrained Big Dick while they removed the family's belongings.

It was into this domestic turmoil that Billy Jr. was born in Nashville on September 29, 1890. He was to be Big Dick and Mary's only child and would inherit all his father's obsessive and dangerous passions — despite his mother's best efforts. By the time of Billy Jr.'s birth, Mary had had enough of her husband's drinking and gambling and decided the remedy was relocation to a new life in the country, where they could offer a safe and decent upbringing for their son. They would take up farming. It would be hard work but a welcome distraction from the Nashville saloons and gambling parlors.

Mary always had the final word, so the Wilkersons purchased a hundred-acre farm in Springfield, Tennessee, thirty miles south of the Kentucky line. The seat of Robertson County, Springfield boasted rolling hills and woods traversed by rivers and creeks. Cash crops during the 1890s included tobacco, corn, and soybeans. The Wilkersons grew tobacco.

But Big Dick could always find action; as Kennedy put it, "He had an uncanny gift for smelling out a poker game." The next decade would regularly find him straying from the farm in search of his next big score, occupying pieds-à-terre in Knoxville, Birmingham, even back in Nashville. Though records sometimes indicated that his wife and son were with him, according to Kennedy they rarely visited him at these "gambling addresses." Instead, Billy Jr. spent his formative years in Springfield, just as his mother had planned. In a life saturated with intrigue, controversy, and tragedy, the Hollywood Godfather would count those years on the farm among the happiest of his life.

* * *

At the close of the nineteenth century, styles were changing: the ragged look that had defined the Tennessee frontiersman was being replaced by the Parisian look, favoring a cleanly cropped head of hair. At age five, Billy Jr. sported golden curls that cascaded down his shoulders, so Big Dick transported his son to a local barber, where Billy Jr. sat patiently while the barber did his work. When he was done, he handed young Wilkerson a mirror.

"I turned the mirror from side to side," said Wilkerson, "and felt my head to see if it matched the image in the mirror."

Wilkerson Jr. burst into tears, threw himself onto the floor, and vainly tried to reattach his curls. Back home, he locked himself in his room and did not reappear until the following morning.

This was my father's earliest childhood memory, and a story he recounted at dinner tables for the rest of his life. There is no obvious reason why this event would tug at him perpetually, but it apparently did. Perhaps he saw it as the moment that inaugurated a long train of abuse at his father's hands.

My father also recalled reaching school age and tying his belt around his books, slinging them over his shoulder, and following the sun to school. He described the single-room red schoolhouse, remembering its dilapidation in detail, down to the ceilings that leaked during thunderstorms. "It was just a single room crammed with twenty students and there was a stove in the middle for heat."