New Insight On `Bugsy' - From West Seattle

Hollywood has done a lot for hoods, or perhaps I have the order reversed. If it were not for gangsters, film tycoons would have had fewer pictures to make.

This randumb thought occurred after I saw the latest (and probably all-time best) gangster film, "Bugsy," based more or less on the life of the late Benjamin Siegel.

Known as "Bugsy," Siegel was a pathological killer of the 1930s and 1940s who built the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, the first of the classy "strip" casino hotels whose neon sunbursts light up the night skies over much of Nevada.

I am not pushing this film on you. The script, while sharp, is a repository for some words that should not be permitted within 300 miles of any respectable household.

But it's still a superior film. The problem with all gangster films is that movie mobsters are somewhat sanitized, if not glorified, and you get your emotional values screwed up. The gangsters end up being the "good guys" you pull for.

By a corny coincidence, my phone rang the morning after I saw "Bugsy."

"My father and Bugsy Siegel were good friends, I mean very good friends," the lady's voice said. "Bugsy was always very nice to me."

The lady turned out to be Mary Lou Bekkala, who lives in West Seattle with her husband, Art. They have been married a long time and their family is impressive - six children and 17 grandchildren. They are very nice people, and we sat at the Bekkala's kitchen table to talk about Benjamin Siegel.

"My father was a bootlegger," Mary Lou said. "He and Bugsy had a nightclub in Spokane, lots of pretty girls and lots of neon signs. I was only a child when I saw it, and I thought it was beautiful.

"My father's name was Paul James Karlye. When my mother got pregnant with me, he decided to get out of the bootlegging business and go legal. He sold two of my mother's fur coats so there would be some money for his little girl."

Mary Lou said she spent a very exciting childhood. Rather mixed up, but exciting. "I had nothing to fear," she said. "Bugsy was wonderful to me. Bugsy and my father took me to the dancing hall. They bought me dolls and a little canoe and, oh, they spoiled me rotten!" (Accompanying this column is a picture of the pair.)

Of course, this was in the mid-30s in Spokane, and certain arrangements had to be made for even Bugsy to survive. "My dear grandmother was a wonderful woman," Mary Lou said. "My dear grandmother paid off the police because my father and Bugsy were using bootleg liquor in the club."

Mary Lou's father and her mother, split by divorce, were at terrible odds.

"One time," she said, laughing, "my father and Bugsy kidnapped me. They picked me up at a corner, put me in the car, and took me to an ice cream parlor. They only had me for a little while, but it was sort of like a kidnapping."

Mary Lou confirmed, more or less, the image of Bugsy as played in the film by Warren Beatty. In the film, he could be alternately savage and charming, a charismatic fellow with a tender side to him.

"That was Bugsy," she said. "He seemed to love children. He was marvelous, charming, very nice to me, always saying nice things to me."

Mary Lou remembers that Bugsy had a visitor one time in Spokane, the legendary mobster Dutch Schultz. "He came out to Spokane to see Bugsy and I remember he had some beautifully trained German Shepherds. He was very nice to me, too."

In addition to paying off the cops, Mary Lou said, her grandmother also performed another function for Bugsy's nightclub. "Her name was Evaretta Bargar, and she would go with my father, Paul, when they delivered liquor to the nightclub.

"My grandmother would put on those big hoop skirts and she would hide the bottles under her skirt. In those days, of course, the cops were not allowed to ask a woman to lift her skirt."

One gathered, as we talked, that all was not peace and harmony. There would be raging arguments about things Mary Lou can't remember. But she does remember that Virginia Hill, Bugsy's lady, had a nice home on South Spokane Street.

"One night during a fight," she said, "Bugsy gave my father permission to shoot out all the lights on the chandeliers. Oh, it was a mess!"

Among Bugsy's mobster friends, Mary Lou's father, Paul James Karlye, was known as "Little Whitey." Another mobster was known as "Big Whitey."

Many years later, Mary Lou said, she was in Fairfield, Calif., sitting in an establishment called Tiny's Pizza Place. She said a big Rolls Royce drove up. A large man got out, came into Tiny's Pizza Place, and sat down three seats away from her.

He kept looking at Mary Lou until he made her nervous. Finally, he said to her, "Your father is a very good friend of mine and he told me to look for you. So now I've found you. I'm Big Whitey, and I have some money for you."

Mary Lou cried, "No, No, I don't want the money," and ran outside, away from Big Whitey.

She said the reason she wouldn't take the gangster's money is because of what her grandmother had always said.

"My grandmother said, `No money is yours unless you've earned it.' That's why I wouldn't take the money."

Emmett Watson's column appears Sunday and Thursday in the Northwest section of The Times.