From gangster's moll to Hollywood hostess: the life and death of Virginia Hill

The heroic goodbyes shared by Annette Bening as Virginia Hill and Warren Beatty as Bugsy Siegel in the movie Bugsy were a romantic fantasy.

Paul Byrnes

Film critic

 
Virginia Hill has been portrayed in two movies so far, but neither of them did her justice. She's a hard case for a movie character: gangster's moll, Hollywood hostess, Mob courier, a gal with a smart mouth and bad attitude. Her friends said she was also charming, funny, flamboyant and gorgeous.

 Hers is a particularly American story – a kind of mirror inversion of Breakfast at Tiffany's, where Audrey Hepburn is Holly Golightly, a charming girl-on-the-make. Holly carries messages to her Mob benefactor in Sing Sing. She has her own secrets – a dirt poor southern childhood, a backwoods husband.

 Virginia Hill's secrets put Holly in the shade. They share the dirt poor childhood, but Virginia didn't stop at one mobster – she had a whole stable of the most powerful gangsters in America, and I do mean had. With flaming red hair, a sharp mind and very long legs, she moved up the chain of power – from Joe Epstein, a chubby bookie for the Chicago outfit in the early 1930s, to Joey Adonis, a capo for the Genovese family in New York, and finally to Los Angeles, where she was the girlfriend of Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, New York's man on the coast. He was shot to death in her house in June 1947, a crime that has never been solved, except that everyone believes his "friends" in the Mob killed him for spending too much of their money building the Flamingo Hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Hill had flown to Paris a few days before the hit – and may have known it was coming.
That's a far cry from the laughable final moment of Barry Levinson's otherwise excellent Bugsy (1991), where Annette Bening and Warren Beatty kiss and make up in the rain in Vegas, as he's about to fly back to Los Angeles, and a bullet in the head. It's a Casablanca finale – the plane propeller flashing as she offers to go with him, even though she's terrified of flying. The film is a fictionalised biography of Bugsy, with a brilliant performance from Beatty, who was nominated. Bening gives Virginia Hill a tonne of personality – spitfire one minute, sexpot the next. She loves this man deeply when she doesn't want to kill him. That might be true, or it might not. Solid information about her life is hard to come by, given all the cheap and racy stuff written about her. If she loved Ben Siegel, it was not enough to warn him before she flew to Paris.

Virginia Hill's hard-bitten story was a kind of mirror inversion of Breakfast at Tiffany's with Audrey Hepburn. Photo: Supplied
 

Hill was one of 10 children, born August 26, 1916, which makes this her centenary year. Michael Munn, in one of the aforementioned racy accounts (The Hollywood Connection: The Mafia and the Movie Business), says she was 15 when she arrived in Chicago from Bessemer, Alabama, with an older man she soon dumped. She began working as a waitress and prostitute. Joe Epstein, a bookie for Capone, is said to have called her The Flamingo because of her long legs. By some accounts he was crazy for her; by others, he was gay and never laid a finger on her, but became a lifelong friend. That's how he's portrayed by Allen Garfield in Virginia Hill, an atrocious 1974 TV movie in which Dyan Cannon sleepwalks through the role.

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From Epstein she moved on to Joe Fischetti, Capone's cousin, then to Adonis in New York, where she first met the handsome Siegel, who was a well-established killer and a long-time associate of Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano.

Hill was by now a dancer, a courier, a Mob tomato, but she thought she wanted to act. In Hollywood she did the rounds of the studios. She took a few small parts, notably as a hat check girl in Manpower (1941) with her friend George Raft (who was himself pretty close to being a gangster), but she didn't need the work. Once she hooked up with Bugsy Siegel, she had her hands full with parties, the racetrack and the Mob businesses Siegel was sent to take over in Los Angeles.

Annette Bening's Virginia Hill in Bugsy was an alluring firecracker. Photo: Supplied
 

The Warren Beatty movie perpetuates the myth that Bugsy looked at the Nevada desert and saw a gold mine – a paradise where gambling was legal. In fact, the Flamingo Hotel project was started by Billy Wilkerson, publisher of The Hollywood Reporter. When he got into debt, Siegel and Lansky saw an opportunity to move in. Construction costs rocketed to $6 million, most of which was Mob money. Siegel knew the rules: Mob loans came with stiff penalties for late repayment. In the movie, Hill is partly to blame for his death, because she has siphoned $2 million from the project to a Swiss bank account, without Siegel's knowledge. That seems fanciful. She would have been dead before him
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Virginia Hill went downhill after his murder. She stayed in Europe and tried four times to take her own life. In 1966, she succeeded, under a tree in a snowbank outside Salzburg. A few writers say she was murdered because she was threatening to sell her little black book, containing everything she knew about the Mob, to the US government. They were pressing for $80,000 in unpaid taxes. She died on March 24, 1966, 50 years ago this week, aged 49 years. It was a sad ending to an eventful, somewhat tragic life.

Twitter: @ptbyrnes