Audition by Barbara Walters Read Free Book Online

first I was very lonely. I missed Brookline. Who needed this huge, ice-cream-colored house?
    The reason we were there was the even bigger, white shiny building across the street—the Palm Island Club. The building, which has since been demolished and the grounds turned into a public park, had housed a famous nightclub and casino until the late thirties, when gambling was outlawed and the casino/club went bankrupt.
    Enter my father.
    It was love at first sight. Not only did the dozen steps leading to the Palm Island Club’s marble entrance make it look like a nightclub movie set, the building came fully equipped with a state-of-the-art kitchen, cutlery, china, tables, chairs, everything except linens. There was seating for six hundred, three times the capacity of the Boston Latin Quarter, dormitories for the dancers, a ten-room house for the management staff, and, across the street, the pistachio mansion. “I was in love with the big, beautiful Palm Island Club,” my dad wrote later in his memoir. “I was in love with the adjoining 15-room mansion.”
    In short order my father leased the club for $7,500 a year for ten years from a mortgage company in Baltimore. Even better, the mortgage company told him, he could lease the house across the street for just $2,500 more. It was a steal. Then came the hitch.
    The hitch was named Bill Dwyer. My childhood memories are of a big, distinguished-looking man with rimless glasses, whom I called Mr. Dwyer, and who inexplicably lived with us in the pistachio house. As did his chauffeur or bodyguard, I never quite knew which he was. And then there was Mrs. Speiler, middle aged, also distinguished looking, who, we were told, was the housekeeper. She, too, came with the house.
    It was not until I read my father’s memoir years later that I learned the story of Bill Dwyer. His arrival in the house one December morning in 1939 had simply been announced by Mrs. Speiler. “Mr. Dwyer is here,” she said. And there he stood, in front of a pile of suitcases, with his bodyguard/chauffeur. My father had heard of Bill Dwyer. He had owned the Palm Island Club and Casino and was known locally as the “Fixer.” During Prohibition it was Mr. Dwyer who could arrange to have a shipload of rum land without trouble from the police, and who was the payoff man between the Mob and the law. “You took care of Bill, Bill took care of you,” my father wrote. And there was the “Fixer” in our living room, prepared to move in.
    There was a rational explanation. Mr. Dwyer had mortgaged and lost the club across the street to the mortgage company in Baltimore and had no claim on that. My father owned it now. But Mr. Dwyer still thought he had a claim on the house, which he had been renting for years. His lease had run out the year before, but it was his understanding that the Baltimore company would not rerent it without informing him. He hadn’t heard from the company, so he had simply come home for the winter months.
    “They say your life passes in front of you in a flash when you are drowning, that a drowning man clutches at straws,” my father wrote about this first encounter with Bill Dwyer. On the one hand, my father had an airtight lease on the house and the nightclub across the street, which was due to open in two days. He could have thrown him out. On the other hand, he did not know what Bill Dwyer was thinking behind his big smile or what role his henchman might play.
    It seemed inconceivable to my father that he would allow a gangster to live in the house alongside his wife and two daughters. But then again, he knew that Mr. Dwyer was president of Tropical Park, a popular racetrack in Miami. He couldn’t be all bad. Nor, to the best of my father’s knowledge, had Mr. Dwyer murdered anyone or spent time in jail. The house had seven bedrooms, after all, of which we occupied only three. The prudent choice, my father decided, was to invite Mr. Dwyer to be his guest in the house until he had