Being Oscar Read Free Page B

Your Horn . It ran for 677 performances, and FrankSinatra starred in the movie. The investment returned tens of thousands of dollars on the one point.
    It was the last time my father asked for my advice.
    But you have to have confidence; I always did. I had something else, too. The Yiddish word is bashert . It’s a sense that even though the odds look insurmountable—even though there’s no way in the world you can win this thing—somehow you’re gonna do it. I went into a lot of criminal cases with the attitude that I would find a way to win; that somehow I’d catch lightning in a bottle. Often, I got lucky.
    I believe in two expressions that say a lot about luck. Ben Franklin, another Philadelphian, supposedly once said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” There’s something to that. It’s a different spin on that other great expression, “Luck is the meeting of preparation with opportunity.”
    I guess, in a way, I was prepared when I came out here. And Las Vegas in the 1960s provided me with all kinds of opportunities.
    How we got here, Carolyn and I, is where this story starts. Neither one of us knows yet where it’s going to end.

    I’m a gambler. I have been all my life. I’ll bet on anything: baseball, football, basketball. Two cockroaches having a race. I just like the action. It gets my adrenaline going. I remember my first bet. I was in grammar school in Philadelphia, and this bookie used to come around the school yard during the baseball season. You could bet ten cents and you got to pick three players. If they combined for a total of six hits in that day’s game, you won. It paid ten-to-one. I was one of his best customers.
    My Dad sensed that I liked to gamble. Early on, he wanted to teach me a lesson that the odds were always against you. WhenI was eleven years old, he took me to the Chester County Fair, just outside of Philadelphia. The carnies were out and about, the smell of cotton candy floated on the air, and there were all kinds of “games of chance” waiting for suckers.
    We played the one where you pitched a quarter at a stack of plates. If your quarter landed on a plate and didn’t fall off, you won. The higher the plate, the better the prize. Well, I was a big winner. One of my quarters (and I must have spent five dollars that night) landed on a top plate.
    “What prize do ya’ want, young man?” the operator of the game asked.
    With great pride, I chose a “very expensive perfume.”
    “I’m going to give it to Mom,” I told my Dad.
    When we got home that night, I couldn’t wait for her to open the carton with the perfume in it. With great aplomb she took out this bottle of “perfume.” It smelled like tap water sprinkled with two cloves.
    A gambling lesson learned: even when you win, you may not come out on top.
    But it didn’t stop me from placing bets. And the problem was, very often I won.
    In college at Haverford, I remember betting on a horse named Sherluck in the Belmont Stakes. Sherluck had finished fifth in the Kentucky Derby and in the Preakness, which I had watched on TV. And even though he had only won once in ten starts that year, I had a feeling about him. He went off at 65-to-1 in the Belmont. The track was damp, and I thought anything could happen.
    I bet $10 on him and he won going away. He creamed the favorites. He paid an astounding $132.10. I won $650 based on my $10 bet. It was a veritable fortune to me at the time. I’ve been betting horses ever since—Del Mar, Santa Anita, Fairplex—and I have never seen another horse pay 65-to-1.
    I think I spent most of my winnings at the Blue Comet, a diner near campus that we used to call the “Blue Vomit.” Carolyn and I ate a lot of hamburgers there on Sherluck.

    I’m also a drinker; I tell everyone not to call me after five o’clock. When I finish working, I enjoy a martini or two. You call me on the phone and I’ll be perfectly lucid, but there’s a good chance I won’t remember our