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Jack Ruby was the quintessential wanna-be but never-was. Full of big
stories, bigger dreams and lusty braggadocio, the strip show
operator was first and foremost a lowlife, a man who searched for
class as though he understood what it was.
Often he would tell his pals that someday he'd have
a club in Las Vegas. That, to him, was class. Once he told his
lawyer Stanley Kauffman that when he made it big in the Nevada city,
he wouldn't have to worry any more about years and years of
difficulties with the Internal Revenue Service. "He said, 'They
never bother the big, important guys. You don't see guys hassled
once they become somebody in show business.'"
Hardly a week went by in Dallas when you wouldn't
see Ruby promoting some inane product, chasing fire trucks, pushing
himself into public displays or passing out his Carousel Club
calling cards at the fights, in the bars, or on downtown streets.
One time it might be promoting a young black
singer/dancer, another time an exercise board, or a potion
"sure to make you thinner and more powerful." Once he
touted a gangly Arkansas girl as a "dancer," predicting
she would be a smash hit at the Carousel. "She'll be the only
Jewish stripper Dallas has ever seen," he told Don Campbell,
the News ad executive. The girl never graced his stage.
Ruby never married, was somewhat of a health nut,
and I never found a person who recalled his drinking alcohol.
Because he was at times almost prissy and had a very slight lisp,
some thought he was homosexual. For several years, he dated a shy,
pretty woman named Alice Nichols, but by November 1963, they hadn't
been together in months. Their usual dates, only periodic, meant
dinner and a movie.
Mrs. Nichols testified briefly at his trial, but
then faded into obscurity as the media, showing more sensitivity
than usual, left her alone.
Even those who should have known him well usually
admitted they didn't. "He had this big, big heart," said
sister Eva. Sister Eileen Kaminsky once described him to me as
"this great big puppy dog. He might slobber all over you, but
you couldn't dislike him."
Fact was, I and many others disliked him intensely.
Bob Larkin, once Ruby's bouncer and later a club
owner on his own, said that while Jack was warm-hearted to many, he
had a "weird, unusual" bent. He said that one time he had
been stabbed in the stomach and was writhing on the sidewalk-not
dangerously injured but in a lot of pain-when Ruby walked up to him.
He said Ruby kicked him. "And kept saying, 'Get
up Bob. Get up.'"
Melvin Belli, during his first weeks as Ruby's
lawyer, got in trouble with the local bar association (and the Ruby
family) for describing his client as "a Damon Runyon character,
a scrounger with a million and one different ventures. He builds up
in his own mind all sorts of grandiose ideas."
Carl Freund, the News' main courthouse reporter, a
prolific contributor and fast writer, had stepped into the role that
Paul Crume had played with the Nov. 22 JFK murder story. He
processed and fine-tuned reportage from several reporters handling
various aspects of Ruby's thrust into history that Sunday.
Freund dropped by my desk the following morning to
apologize for not using more of my file in the Nov. 25 story. And in
the course of discussing the possibility of my doing a feature on
Tom Howard, Ruby's initial lawyer, another reporter dropped by,
grinning, with Freund's story in hand. "Look at this," he
said to Freund, tossing down the newspaper and walking away.
Freund looked, and read a little bit-then it hit
him. The headline read: "Nightclub Man Takes Roll of
Executioner."
I had not noticed the misspelling of
"role," nor had anyone else that I saw that morning.
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