Did I Ever Tell You About My Unusual Job Running Bets to Vegas for a Hollywood Director?

True Story from this morning’s conversation with my daughter, Annabelle, and her boyfriend, Sam

Annabelle: Sam, my Mom was fired from 20 jobs before she was 22.

Me: Actually it was 22 jobs, and I was supposedly “laid off” of Polo Ralph Lauren, so that one doesn’t count.

Annabelle: She worked at Victoria’s Secret for 3 weeks and was fired for calling in sick.

Mom: Which I thought was rude. What if I actually was sick? Could I help it if I had someone paying me triple for the same hours of work? What was I supposed to do, refuse?

Annabelle: Oh Mom, tell Sam that crazy story! (Turns to Sam) She met this guy at Victoria’s Secret and he wasn’t allowed in Las Vegas anymore so he would send my Mom to place his bets for him, and once she went over to his place and he claimed someone had beaten him up with a baseball bat.

Me: Hold on, I didn’t meet him at Victoria’s Secret. I met him at 7-11 on Hayworth and Santa Monica Boulevard, right across the street from Strasberg where I was studying acting. And that’s true about the ribs, but let me start at the beginning of my time as a betrunner for infamous director and screenwriter, James Toback.

It all began with my sugar plum dreams.

I had often dreamed of living a highly glamorous life: The Plaza Hotel, glittering ruby necklaces, strawberries and champagne in a hot bubble bath… (I wasn’t rich on money, but I was rich in fantasy life.) I suppose it all began the first time I listened to Eartha Kitt sing. Visions of peacocks and jewels danced in my head. Ah yes, exit sugar plums stage left, enter Turkish delights stage right. Eartha isn’t Turkish, but she had wonderful adventures there involving royalty and precious baubles. Her Turkish song, “Uska Dara” took me to a land of exotic words, fairies and wizards, wish-granting genies, and magic lamps. It also inspired me to belly dance.

            As my orange carrot pocketbook never seemed to match my ten-carat dreams, I was constantly trying to make a buck, and this is when Jimmy entered my life. Jimmy was a sketchy gambler and filmmaker who was so crooked he could hide behind a corkscrew. He told me many questionable stories, like he had gambled away his twenty-million-dollar inheritance by age twenty-five; that he used to “throw” games when he played basketball at Harvard; and that he quit teaching Literature at Columbia because he got bored. But who knows if any of this was true? The only things one could believe when it came to Jimmy was what one witnessed with one’s own eyes. What I witnessed with Jimmy was the way he made money appear and disappear like a Turkish magician. He handed me $10,000 a day to run bets during payday time, and it was gone like a puff of apricot tobacco smoke from a golden hookah.

(Actually let me clarify, he handed me $9,999.00 a day, something about $10k got flagged by a bank, or a government, I don’t know… as I said, he was dodgy.)

            This is where I came in. For some unknown reason, Jimmy wasn’t allowed in Vegas, so he gave me large amounts of cash (after a stern lecture on the perils of dishonesty, which often resulted in the loss of thumbs or mysterious deaths) and I took it to Vegas and placed bets for him. This was the way it worked: Jimmy wrote down the sports bets he wanted, usually on a napkin or the inside of the cover of my romance novel, and all I had to do was hop a plane to Vegas, take a cab to whichever hotel was new and didn’t know him, and place the bets at the Sportsbook.

Easy, right?

Well, it was a lot more difficult and dangerous than it seemed, mostly due to some odd peculiarities belonging to Jimmy. For instance, cell phones weren’t yet invented, and Jimmy refused to give me a direct number to contact him. This made communication very difficult. When I needed to contact him, I had to find a payphone, call his answering service and tell them where I was, and Jimmy would call back and have me paged in the casino.

I never understood why Jimmy didn’t just use a bookie in Vegas to place his bets for him as it would have made his life a lot simpler, but Jimmy had a lot of unexplainable eccentricities. One unusual eccentricity? He would never plan ahead. It was always a midnight phone call or ungodly-hour-of-the-morning call and with his devilish voice, I received my instructions and I was off. The biggest problem with this method is that the bets usually had to be placed by 10 a.m. due to some nutty gambling rules and that meant with a 7 a.m. phone call, I had to race to the airport, park, and run to the ticket counter as fast as my leopard-print-Dr.-Marten -boots would carry me.

After pleading with the entire security line to help me make my plane, I would run all the way to the gate. The process repeated itself in Vegas where I always paid extra to the cabby to “step on it” and had to jump out of the cab and literally run all the way to the Sportsbook counter. And when I say run, I don’t mean walk briskly or a light jog, I mean pumping-my-arms-run like the MGM lion was chasing me. To make matters worse, Jimmy often wired money to me in LA or Las Vegas and I had to pick up the money on the way and still make the bets on time.

This job always sounded glamorous to others.

If only they knew the truth.

            When I first met Jimmy, I was eighteen years old and had just arrived in Hollywood. I had my blond hair curled and puffed like I’d seen in books about Mae West, Bette Davis, and Marilyn Monroe. I wore polka dot dresses and white gloves to my acting classes like a character in a 1950’s movie. As I had only been in LA for three weeks, I hadn’t met enough wolves to make me wary. Jimmy started talking to me while I was buying a soda pop at 7-11. He told me the usual “let me make you a star, dahling” spiel and instead of realizing he was making a pass at me, I was delighted he had recognized my charms so quickly.  

Once he realized I wasn’t going to sleep with him, he offered to triple my daily pay at Victoria’s Secret, where I had worked for 3 weeks, to take his bets to Vegas. I would run to the airport, grab a cinnamon bun for breakfast from a new bakery called Cinnabon, fly to Vegas, place the bets, then return to LA where I’d take a cab to Jimmy’s latest film screening. Ironically, when I met him, the film he was screening was a little film he wrote called The Pick Up Artist starring Robert Downey Jr. I think Jimmy fancied himself a bit of a real-life pick-up artist.

Back then, I was drunk with the glamour of it all; the money, the celebrities, the daily trips to Vegas…. I was also under the delusion that cinnamon rolls were healthy and made a perfect breakfast, until one day I came across the calories in one Cinnabon. My “healthy breakfast” of one bun was more than 800 calories. My cinnamon fantasies were nearly as thick as my 5-star hotel fantasies.

But just as quickly as Jimmy appeared in my life, he disappeared. I didn’t see or hear from him for several years when out of the blue he tracked me down and invited me to his suite at the Chateau Marmont. I knocked and he answered with his usual wild-eyed greeting: “Do you want to make some money today?” My answer to that question was (and still is) always a resounding “YES!” At that time, things weren’t going well for me financially. He sat down on the couch and sat across from me. “It’s the Chavez-Camacho fight tomorrow night. The odds are six-to-one. I talked to Camacho and he’s hungry. He’s a killer. I know he’s going to win. He wants it more than Chavez. Chavez is too confident. I want you to take $50,000 dollars and place it on Camacho.” Jimmy was so convincing, I placed a little bet myself when I arrived in Vegas later that day. I borrowed $100.00 from my cousin, Guy, and put it on Camacho. Camacho lost, Jimmy disappeared again, and now I owed my cousin $100.00. In this situation, I actually lost money thanks to Jimmy. That’s the last I heard from him for a while.

Over the next few years, I followed my delightful Turkish dreams and made a living belly dancing and performing in musicals —far more glamorous jobs than gambling. I created my own little luxurious world, even on my small income. I wore feathered robes and high-heeled marabou slippers around my single apartment, playing Billie Holiday and old musical soundtracks on my stereo, and pretending the world was soft and romantic with no jagged edges.  

I performed onstage most nights, belly dancing, circus acts, and in several different musicals. I didn’t care if my dressing room was a broom closet, I just pretended I was at the Ziegfeld Follies and sashayed around in my own world.

And then one morning, my phone rang. It was seven a.m., but it was the middle of the night for me as I never awakened before noon. My princess bed consisted of five lumpy futon mattresses stacked on top of each other, ala princess and the pea, all given to me by various friends. I sleepily rolled over and reached for my phone, an old-fashioned 1930’s style phone with a white handle and a giant gold ear and mouthpiece. I always felt like Ava Gardner when I talked on it, especially with my husky sleepy voice.

“Hello?”

“Hey, how you doing?” The slippery hushed New York accent was unmistakable even though I hadn’t heard it in years.

“Jimmy?”

“Yeah,” he cooed. And then he asked me my favorite question: “Do you wanna make some money today?”

            “Sure,” I said. He had no idea how much I needed that money. I hadn’t paid my rent in two months. My motto always prevented me: “Take care of the luxuries, the necessities will take care of themselves.” This quote came from my literary love Dorothy Parker, and I had underlined it in a book about Caresse Crosby, a dashing expatriate who lived in Paris in the twenties, my favorite literary era. The luxuries in my life were well taken care of. I had a closet full of sparkling belly dance costumes, but my landlord was fed up with me. He had no vision—all he could see was the bottom line. I told him if he asked me for my rent one more time, I was going to move out. He sputtered something about how amazing my mind worked and told me in a curt voice I had one week to pay up. No matter how much money I made, it seemed to fly out of my hands as if it had little sparkling wings of its very own. Theater in Los Angeles pays shamelessly low, and the Egyptian nightclubs where I danced—similar to the old Ciro’s of Hollywood—minus the movie stars—also didn’t pay well.

            Jimmy cut right to the chase. “I’ll give you $500.00 and pay all your expenses if you can go place these bets for me.”

            “Now?” I asked, wanting the money, but horrified at the thought of leaving my warm bed at this hour.

            “Yeah. You would have to leave now to make an 8 a.m. flight. The bets have to be placed by ten-thirty. I am wiring you $16,000.00 to a Western Union on Pico. Stop on the way and pick up the cash.”

            “Okay, hold on, let me get a piece of paper and write everything down.”

            Big sunglasses, a cappuccino, and I was off. Jimmy sent me to Vegas every day for the next two months. I stayed overnight once, making the early morning betting a lot easier for me, but Jimmy had somehow reasoned out that my pay was for flying to Vegas. If I was already there, there was no reason to pay me. I knew it didn’t make sense, but another of my motto’s kept me from questioning Jimmy too much: “never look a gift-horse in the mouth.” I really have no idea what it means, but something like: “don’t ask questions when the cash is right.”

 Between late night shows and early morning gambling, I was exhausted. I had always hated Vegas, and here I was flying there every day. I had spent a lot of time in Vegas, as my grandparents had moved from a beautiful house in La Jolla to a trailer park in Vegas, ironically called The King’s Court, with stacks of gossip magazines cluttering up every available space and a neighbor named Cornelia who had a talking parrot. My grandmother’s Mexican accent turned Cornelia’s name into “Corrrrrrrrnelia” with multiple rolling r’s, and we were made to walk over and sit with Cornelia and her parrot while my grandparents and parents performed their own disappearing act–to a casino. Sitting with Cornelia waiting for her parrot to say something was actually better than all the times my parents pulled into a casino parking lot, leaving my little sister and me in the car while they ran in for “10 minutes.” We waited outside in 110 degrees and after 45 minutes, we’d beg the security guards to let us in to look for them, but the guards refused as we were underage. This was old Vegas, 1980’s Vegas, before they built The Mirage, the Bellagio, and all the other new luxury hotels. This was Vegas of the seedy parking lots and run-down casinos. My parents would eventually return to the car with a cup full of coins, giggling and giddy, and no amount of our rage could put a damper on their fun.

            Sometimes Jimmy sent me to the Hollywood Racetrack on the way to the airport and paid me an extra $100.00. Once I lost an $800 ticket at the Racetrack, and I asked everyone standing around to help me look for it, which they did, a little too eagerly. One man told me firmly that I should never ever tell this particular group of people that I lost a ticket, and once he mentioned this and I saw the glazed eyes of everyone around me, I agreed and dashed out to my car to head to the airport, making sure I wasn’t followed. Like I said, these bet-running jobs for Jimmy were basically sending a cream puff stumbling into a cave of agitated dragons guarding treasures, but somehow they always missed me. I later found the ticket hiding in the bottom of my purse.

Other times Jimmy sent me on funky errands, sending me to cash his checks from the Writers Guild and wire the money to him in New York. Once he sent me to cash two $50,000.00 checks that some legendary celebrity had written to him. (I try not to name names, although it’s difficult to resist. Take me out for a cocktail one night and I’ll spill.) He wanted me to send him $80,000.00 and to take the other 20 to Vegas. This particular time, there wasn’t enough funds to cover the checks, and with no cell phones, I had to leave Jimmy a message on his machine, he’d eventually check it and call the bank from his location, usually at the OTB (off-track Betting) in NYC, and voila! I took the cash and was off to Vegas yet again.

So now Jimmy was coming into town. It was hard to believe I had only seen my “sugar gambler” a handful of times during the several years I had known him. I had been running bets for him this time for five months solid, and I was doing my best to save a few bucks for a rainy day. With no bank account, I kept my cash in various places. Not under my mattresses of course, that’s too obvious. I smoothed it out and kept it hidden in the lining of my top hat, in hat boxes, and laid flat in my coffee table books on the Moulin Rouge girls, Josephine Baker, Kiki Montparnasse, and of course Eartha Kitt.

So on this particular trip, Jimmy arrived in town and told me to meet him in his suite at the Beverly Wilshire hotel in Beverly Hills. My platform heels sunk into the carpet of the lobby, dripping with Swarovski chandeliers. One could only reach Jimmy’s suite on the tenth floor—the suite took up the whole tenth floor—by taking the elevator to the ninth floor and climbing a secret set of stairs.

            Jimmy answered the door and I greeted him with the affection one reserves for their gift-horse. (I could almost picture him tossing his mane.) I hadn’t seen him in three years.

            “Hi,” we both cooed and hugged. He was, of course, mad as a hatter, but I had a certain fondness for his unique insanity, and the pleasant plumpness he infused into my coffers. When I hugged him, I felt something foreign and hard around his middle.

            “What’s that?” I was almost afraid to ask.

            “Oh, these *@#%$* guys took a baseball bat to my ribs,” he said as he ushered me into the room.

I hesitated stepping foot through the door, but my curiosity (and greed) got the best of me.

            “Why?”

            “Oh, I owed their brother some money and I ran into him on the street. “He starts buggin’ me, ‘Where’s my money? Where’s my money?’ I was tired of hearing his pipsqueak voice, so I had him down on the sidewalk and I was beating him and out of nowhere, his two @$%&*&@# brothers show up with baseball bats. They broke a coupla of my ribs, but they didn’t get any money.” He chuckled. “Do you want a piece of cheesecake? I am on this diet where I eat all health food but somehow these ended up in my room.”

            I looked at the coffee table laden with two tempting pieces of creamy cheesecake. His room looked the same as always—massive chaos. I pushed aside the papers and books, making room for myself on the couch and Jimmy sat down next to me.

            “So, how are you doing?” Jimmy’s eyes looked more demented than ever. If I didn’t know better, I would have guessed he was high. He said he never drank or did drugs—his vice was gambling, and he had made many movies to prove it. The Gambler starring James Caan and later remade with Mark Wahlberg;  Fingers starring Harvey Keitel, Two Girls and a Guy starring Heather Graham and Robert Downey Jr., and at the time he was working on the script that would get him nominated for an Oscar: Bugsy with Annette Bening and Warren Beatty.

            “I’m doing great. Last night I belly danced for Saudi royalty, doing folk dances back and forth across the room with the prince and his grandmother, and my musical is still running.”

            Just then the phone rang, and Jimmy lowered his voice to a covert whisper and walked out on the balcony, so I went to explore the suite. The powder room was bigger than my whole apartment. I was especially enchanted by massive sparkling tub and white fluffy robes hanging on the back of the bathroom door. I quietly walked back into the hotel room to try to eavesdrop on the end of Jimmy’s conversation, just in case he was committing some crime, a necessary part of dealing with El Diablo, but he was hanging up.

            “Let me give you the bets for tomorrow, and tell the valet downstairs to charge your car to my room.” He took the ever-present book out of my hand, this time “Ulysses” by James Joyce, and wrote his bets inside the back cover.

            I stood at the valet stand and heard the engine of my beat-up VW Bug coming long before the valet reached me. If I squinted my eyes enough, my car looked very similar to a convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche, just a bit shoddier. I tipped the valet and drove back to my bungalow, thinking about the Jimmy’s stories. He told me that he had been a piano prodigy and at age twelve had gone to study with some big composer—Leonard Bernstein or Aaron Copland or someone of that magnitude. He had become their “boy,” whatever that means. He told me about mob hits, car shootings, terrible things. It never occurred to me I could be in any danger– I always felt as if I was in a romantic old gangster movie.

            The next day I dragged myself to the airport. There was always an interesting array of characters on their way to Las Vegas: old people who had gambled away their retirement but kept winning just enough to keep them coming back: bright-eyed hopeful young couples; tired ex-celebrities; and a man who carried a photo of his one-eyed cat, Lucky. I kept my purse on my lap as I observed the people around me, since it was contained my fuzzy purple Filofax stuffed with $25,000 in cash.

            When I arrived in Vegas, I raced to the Sportsbook which was unusually crowded. I pulled over to a side table to write Jimmy’s bets down on all the little forms as fast as possible. The games started early today, and I ran over to stand in line, anxious over whether I would make the bets on time. The other gamblers in line started chatting with me, and I patted my pink fluffy purse for reassurance, but there was no pink fluffy purse on my body. Panic shot through my body. In the five seconds it took me to run back to where I had been filling out my betting cards, newspaper headlines flashed in front of my eyes: “The Thumbless Marci Darling Found Dead of Mysterious Causes.” Of course, no one really knows who I am so they would more likely read: “Anonymous Showgirl Found Dead.” I thanked my lucky stars when I saw my precious bag sitting nonchalantly on the side table. The million-dollar question: was the money still in there? I opened the bag and nearly burst into tears–the money was still there, which is a bit surprising. Wads of cash don’t usually stay put in a Sportsbook in Vegas, surrounded by desperate gamblers. When the cash finally left my hands in exchange for betting tickets, I sighed in relief, flew home, stopped at the hotel to drop the tickets to Jimmy and headed to the theater for my show. That was the last time I ever spoke with Jimmy. He disappeared, and I used the money I made to spend 6 weeks in Europe with my best friend. When I returned, I was  tired of scrambling for money, so I decided to go back to school. I attended UCLA and Harvard, and spent a year on Martha’s Vineyard teaching preschool.

Instead of the lights of Vegas, I spent each night watching the lights of the sunset. My passion for glittering jewels around my neck switched to a passion for the arms of glittering children around my neck, and I never looked back. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I do still take hot baths while eating strawberries and drinking champagne. When I step out of the tub, I wrap myself in a fluffy white robe.

I still dance around my kitchen listening to Eartha Kitt;

I still put on my big sparkling necklaces to go to dinner with my Martini Club, and I still do the occasional circus trick on the back of my couch to the great delight of my pets.

And just like Scarlett swore she’d never be poor again (only in my vision she’s wearing a belly dance costume and genie slippers with upturned toes), I swear that no matter where life takes me next, I will never stop dancing and dreaming of peacocks, jewels, Turkish delights, and sugar plums.