6 
THE FIFTH-GRADER AND THE BOOTLEGGER
1939
Palm Island is a peculiarly Floridian invention, a narrow strip of land created by dredging and reachable by a causeway that connects the cities of Miami and Miami Beach. In the 1930s, with only a handful of houses on the site, it was famous mostly for the presence of Earl Carroll’s Palm Island Club, favored by big spenders and a fast crowd until the state outlawed slot machines in 1937.
Without profits from the casino, the club went bankrupt, but Lou Walters, as usual, had a vision of the possibilities. The Latin Quarter in Boston was going gangbusters. Now he saw the prospects of opening another one here. The big white building was a Hollywood version of what a nightclub should look like, with wide steps leading up to a marble entrance, seating inside for some six hundred customers, dormitories on the premises for the dancers. “I was in love with the big, beautiful Palm Island Club,” he wrote in his unpublished memoir. There was more, he added. “I was in love with the adjoining 15-room mansion.”
He signed a ten-year lease with a Baltimore mortgage company for the club, at $7,500 a year, and leased the mansion across the street for another $2,500. Uprooted from Miss Gillis’s fifth-grade class in Brookline, Massachusetts, Barbara moved with some reluctance from the family’s apartment there to the sprawling house on the bay. It was painted pistachio green—“just like the ice cream,” she said—and situated on five acres of hibiscus, bougainvillea, and palm trees. They moved into the house in November 1939.
A month later, a man named William Dwyer showed up at the front door, accompanied by his bodyguard or his chauffeur or, possibly, his partner in a more personal regard. Dwyer was the previous owner of the Palm Island Club; band leader Earl Carroll had been his front man, producing a show called the “Vanities Revue.” Dwyer had defaulted on the club’s mortgage, but he had continued to rent the house across the street. His lease had run out a year earlier, but he said he had an understanding that the owner wouldn’t rent it to someone else without letting him know.
Here he was, ready to move back in for the winter. “Mr. Dwyer is here,” announced Mrs. Speiler, a middle-aged housekeeper who also apparently came with the house.
Legally, Dwyer had no claim to the mansion, that was clear. But in the world of clubs and casinos, of gamblers and mobsters, “Big Bill” Dwyer was not a man to be casually dismissed. During Prohibition, he had been known as “king of the bootleggers.” He spent thirteen months in the Atlanta federal penitentiary in the 1920s—“a little vacation,” he called it—after being convicted of trying to bribe members of the Coast Guard to overlook his rumrunning operation. The jail time didn’t quell his ambitions. Once released, he bought an expansion National Hockey League franchise and introduced professional ice hockey to New York City; later, he bought a National Football League team and moved it to Brooklyn. He renamed it the Dodgers. But he had encountered a spot of trouble seven months before he showed up at the Walters’s front door. He had been convicted of tax evasion after a ten-minute trial in Brooklyn Federal Court and ordered to pay the government an astonishing $3,715,907 in back taxes and penalties.
Legal problems aside, Dwyer was still president of the nearby Tropical Park Race Track, and he remained a formidable figure around town. Lou understood exactly who was standing on his doorstep, surrounded by a pile of suitcases.
“They say your life passes in front of you in a flash when you are drowning, that a drowning man clutches at straws,” he said of that first encounter with Dwyer. Lou knew he had a signed-and-sealed lease for the nightclub and the house. But he was less certain about the extralegal repercussions for sending on his way a man known locally as “The Fixer.” “You took care of Bill, Bill took care of you,” he noted. The reverse might also be true: You crossed Bill, and perhaps he would take care of you in an entirely different way.
Fortuitously, only three of the mansion’s seven bedrooms were currently occupied by the Walters family, leaving spare rooms for Mr. Dwyer and his odd entourage. They would stay for five months, until spring, when the winter season ended and they would head back to his home in Queens.
With that began one of the closest and surely the strangest of Barbara’s childhood friendships. It was an early example of her comfort with men who had complicated backstories, even criminal ones.
“He took a shine to me,” she said as though that explained everything. She took a shine to him, too. She remembered him as a kind-faced man with round rimless glasses and combed-back hair. He was fifty-six years old; she was nine. Perhaps he took the place of the doting father she yearned to have. On the weekends, he would take her to his racetrack. She was too young to go inside, but they would park where she could see the horses run. Her father would slip her a few dollars, which she would give to Dwyer to place bets on her behalf.
“Magically I always won,” she recalled. That first winter in Miami Beach was “one of the happier times of my young life.”
Her only other friend at the time was Phyllis Fine, a girl of a more suitable age who was in her class at school. Her father was in show business as well, and he was also a gambler. Born Louis Feinberg, his stage name was Larry Fine, one of the renowned Three Stooges. (He was the one with the circle of bushy hair around a dramatically receding hairline.) They were living in a Miami Beach hotel, where Barbara would occasionally sleep over. But the remoteness of Palm Island, and the need to have an adult drive them back and forth, made getting together difficult.
The isolation was hard on Dena, who had never learned to drive. She finally took lessons and practiced by driving Barbara to and from appointments with her orthodontist in Miami. The parking lot outside his office meant she didn’t have to parallel park, a daunting challenge. But she was never a confident driver, and as the streets became more congested, she stopped trying. It was a life skill Barbara would never acquire, either.
Big Bill Dwyer was in Florida without his wife and five children, who presumably had stayed at their home in New York. Later, Barbara would wonder if Dwyer was gay, not a question that occurred to her at the time. “In those days the only reference to ‘gay’ I’d ever heard was in the Latin Quarter’s theme song, ‘So This is Gay Paree,’ ” she said. “But in retrospect it seems somewhat logical.” For one thing, despite the surplus of bedrooms in the mansion, he and his bodyguard/chauffeur shared the same one.
The new Latin Quarter opened on Palm Island on December 23, 1940, just in time for Christmas. It was an instant smash.
The $6 minimum promised what Lou billed as “delicious food” and “startling shows,” presumably a reference to the scant attire of the showgirls. At first, he couldn’t afford top entertainers; instead, he booked novelty acts. An ad in the Miami Daily News depicted a pair of dramatic Apache dancers, purportedly from the streets of Paris, both smoking thin cigarettes, the man in a beret. Their act included a choreographed brawl between the man and several women that ended, twice a night, when a woman shot him for two-timing her.
The club’s second winter season opened three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The surprise Japanese assault on the Pacific fleet prompted the United States to enter World War II, but the show went on anyway. It did reflect some wartime realities. In one routine, titled “Blackouts in Rhythm,” the showgirls dressed as lightning bugs.
By then, the success of the club meant Walters could book some of the biggest names in show business, from Jimmy Durante and Sophie Tucker to Joe E. Lewis and Martha Raye. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, then a comic duo before each pursued individual movie careers, took the stage. So did exotic dancer Sally Rand and her white feather fans. In 1947, actress Jane Russell would command $15,000 a week. Comedian Milton Berle became such a regular that Barbara could mimic his opening gag decades later.
“He would walk up to the standing microphone, touch it, then jump back as if in shock and say, ‘I’ve just been goosed by Westinghouse,’ ” she said. It always got a laugh. She could also re-create on demand the patter of a Spanish ventriloquist known as Señor Wences, who would later gain fame with forty-eight appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. He would make a fist, color his closed finger with lipstick to form a mouth, create two “eyes” with black chalk, and drape a floppy orange wig across the top. With that, the falsetto-voiced “Johnny” would mercilessly tease Señor Wences, whose real name was Wenceslao Moreno Centeno.
There were also the showgirls, of course, balancing towering headdresses as they strode and posed onstage. Tiny sequined pasties covered their nipples, a nod to the laws barring nudity, and their G-strings were constructed of feathers and fur. One showgirl carried an actual black kitten in a fur-lined muff over her private parts.
“This place puts on perhaps the most elaborate show in the Miami area,” read the most unusual of reviews, a memo written in 1944 by the FBI Miami field office and sent to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. “Due to this fact, it attracts… the hoodlum and gangster element.” The regular visitors included eccentric business magnate Howard Hughes and Joseph P. Kennedy, father of John F. Kennedy; his chauffeur would drive him from the family’s summer compound in Palm Beach. The most notorious resident of Palm Island visited occasionally, too.
Al Capone had bought a ten-thousand-square-foot home with a hundred-foot dock in 1928 from Clarence Busch, a prominent local real estate investor. More than a decade later, after a stint in Alcatraz, he and his bodyguards drove to Florida, arriving on Palm Island in March 1940, a few months after the Walters family had moved in down the street. Increasingly frail and suffering from dementia, Capone was a shadow of the fearsome criminal nicknamed Scarface. He would sit at the Latin Quarter, sip a club soda, and pull a crisp twenty-dollar bill from his pocket to pay. “He never interfered with anyone and believe me, no one wanted to interfere with him,” Lou recalled.
Barbara would ride her bike past Capone’s house, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, though she never did. She spent her days reading books and playing with her elaborate dollhouse. She would walk to the docks to wave at the tourists on the sightseeing boats. Until she was sent to bed at 10 p.m. on weekends, she was allowed to watch the evening shows at the Latin Quarter, tucked into her favorite spot in the lighting booth.
In 1972, when Barbara was beginning to attract attention as a correspondent on the Today show, she was interviewed by Sonya Hamlin, host of a Boston program called People Games. “Free-associate,” Hamlin said. “Give me one word for your childhood.”
“Lonely,” Barbara replied.