Every now and then, one brushes against the flow of history. It isn’t a meeting, or any sort of real contact, but more like getting out of someone’s way at the supermarket, or holding a door in a movie theater. I’ve had several, and the Webster Film Series’ showing of “Ruby,” a film of “speculative fiction” about the Dallas strip club owner who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, yanked me back more than 45 years.
The film, starring Danny Aiello and made in 1992, shows on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at the Winifred Moore Auditorium on the Webster University campus.
I knew Jack Ruby, and I also knew one of his strippers, Jada, who was his headliner at the Carousel Club in Dallas on the November weekend when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I met her in the spring of 1964, and we were talking on the phone on Saturday morning, March 14, when suddenly she shrieked, almost triumphantly “They convicted him! They convicted him! The son of a bitch is gonna die!”
Stephen Davis wrote a play, “Love Field” (the name of the Dallas airport at that time) and then adapted it as the screenplay for “Ruby,” released in 1992. John Mackenzie directed.
Unlike Oliver Stone’s “J.F.K.,” which had a massive conspiracy at the root of Kennedy’s murder, Mackenzie keeps the conspiracy small, with some Chicago mob figures engineering the hit because of a Cuban connection, and because they feared Bobby Kennedy more than John. Ruby, originally Jacob Rubenstein, had been slightly connected in his younger days in Chicago, but was not trusted because he talked too much and too loudly. He didn’t make many more friends in Dallas because he ran a sleazy strip joint, was not a Texan and was Jewish. But there were free drinks for cops at his Carousel Club on Commerce Street.
Coincidentally it was only a few blocks from the Dallas Press Club in the 1950s and early 60s, which was the cause of my visits to both clubs, usually with Dallas sports writers.
Aiello is a perfect physical fit for Ruby, and he is extremely believable. Sherilyn Fenn, as a headline stripper (remember her in “Twin Peaks”?) is excellent as a composite of a number of women, and her movie name is Candy Cane. That’s also a reference to Candy Barr, a long-time stripper at the Colony Club down the street and Dallas’ biggest name as a stripper. Barr, born Juanita Slusher, became a classic headline when she was busted for marijuana possession and convicted as a Dallas paper emblazoned, “Candy Barr gets 5-Year Wrap.”
Fenn is outstanding as Cane. According to the movie, they had a long and platonic relationship. She looks like Marilyn Monroe when she plays Las Vegas and Frank Sinatra and Kennedy are in town. She vanishes into a lavish hotel suite with Kennedy (played in Las Vegas by Willie Garson, in Dallas by Gerard David), and in Dallas she is dressed and with a hair-do reminiscent of Jackie Kennedy. The “Twin Peaks” connection continues with the presence of David Duchovny, in a small part as J. D. Tippit, the Dallas policeman shot and killed by Oswald shortly after the assassination.
The movie is slipshod in its relationship to truth and to history, but it’s another in the hundreds of books and movies that promote the conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Kennedy, and it’s surprisingly well-acted.
Ruby’s real headliner that weekend was Jada, who told me her real name was Janet Adams and that she had been born in Brooklyn. That was all she told me. In my sportswriting and Football Cardinals days, I was in Dallas fairly often. I was visiting in Dallas in the winter of 1963-64 when I was invited to a party for the late Bud Shrake, who was leaving the Dallas Morning News to join Sports Illustrated.
We were talking in a corner of Gary Cartwright’s living room when the phone rang on the end table between our chairs. He said hello, listened for a few minutes, exploded in laughter and said, disbelievingly, “You got arrested! In New Orleans! For indecent exposure!”
He told her he would send bail money, asked her about her schedule, said, “You’re going to be in St. Louis? In two weeks? Well, when you get there, you have to get together with friend Joe Pollack. He’ll show you around. Tell me where you’re staying and he’ll call you.”
She was at the old Mark Twain Hotel, about 7th and Pine.
I called , and after the interruption for the verdict, we met for lunch at the old O’Connell’s in Gaslight Square. She hated Ruby, claiming he abused the girls, cheated them, was generally a rotten guy. In St. Louis, she was the headliner at the Grand, which was destroyed to make room for the first downtown Busch Stadium, proving once and for all that St. Louisans, and the pooh-bahs who control the city, prefer night baseball to sex. We had lunch at the old O’Connell’s in Gaslight Square, and I watched the show from backstage, which was fun. Then we went for a late snack at Jack Carl’s 2-Cents Plain, also in Gaslight Square. She left him an autographed picture, which hung on his wall there and at two downtown locations; I got it back when he closed. I can see it from my desk. Eventually, I took her back to her hotel, and I never saw her again, though we talked on the phone during the next week and we talked about lunch, but we couldn’t work it out.
But like so much about the Kennedy assassination, there’s an epilogue. A few years later, in a conversation with a sportswriter I know from Newark, he mentioned her name as a bartender he’d met in San Francisco. He said he went back a few months later and she was gone, vanished without a trace like so many who even had a tangential relationship to that November weekend in Dallas. I was told later that she had moved to Albuquerque and reportedly had died in a motorcycle accident in 1980.
So you can see why “Ruby,” the movie, was of particular interest. Now someone has to make a movie about a dumpling of a woman from South Carolina who sneaked an innocent girl out of a banana republic. . . .
—Joe