The mother of all celebrity brawls occurred on the balcony of bandleader Tommy Dorsey’s apartment at 1220 Sunset Plaza Drive* off the Strip in the wee hours of Aug. 5, 1944.
The primary combatants in what came to be known as “the Battle of the Balcony” were Dorsey and Jon Hall, a top star at Universal who’d recently played Kit Carson in a biopic. Dorsey had been drinking for the better part of eight hours. He and his wife, the actress Patricia Dane, had spent the evening nightclubbing on the Strip celebrating her 26th birthday. They were hosting a nightcap party at their apartment, which was just winding down when the fight broke out around 4 a.m..
Dorsey, who was known as the “Sentimental Gentleman of Swing,” was a violent drunk. He had taken offense when he’d seen Hall give Mrs. Dorsey what was likely a chaste, brotherly hug at the front door. Dorsey called Hall out to the balcony of his second-floor apartment and promptly smashed him in the nose with a bottle. In the fight that ensued, Dorsey got the upper hand and wrestled Hall up onto the balcony railing, threatening to heave him over the side. It was when Hall, who had his hands around Dorsey’s neck, shouted, “If I go, I’m taking you with me.” As they were getting into their cars in the driveway below, other partygoers heard the commotion and rushed back upstairs.
At the same time, Mrs. Dorsey rushed next door and returned with the Dorseys’ neighbor, Allen Smiley, gangster Bugsy Siegel’s wingman. Precisely what happened in the few wminutes after Smiley dove into the fray on the balcony is a mystery. What is known is that someone slashed Jon Hall multiple times about the face and neck, slicing one of his nostrils clean through. Hall’s doctor said the nose was sliced with an instrument as sharp as a surgeon’s knife.
When his rescuers arrived, Jon Hall stumbled out of the apartment, got into his car and drove himself to a hospital. He required over 50 stitches to his face, neck and upper body. To protect the surgical stitching of his sliced nostril, he was seen about town wearing a nose guard. It is possible his noseguared inspired the one worn by Jack Nicholson “Chinatown.”
There were a dozen or so witnesses to the Battle of the Balcony, but come sunrise the morning after, they all developed collective amnesia. No one could recall the particulars–especially about who wielded the weapon or even what the weapon might have been.
The Dorseys speculated that Hall might have been cut with shards from broken flower pots. There was a suggestion that the petite Mrs. Dorsey inflicted the wounds. One witness, Jane Churchill, told a reporter that she had been approached by associates of Allen Smiley and Bugsy Siegel, who advised her to keep silent about the fight. And when her knee turned up broken after her statement to the Times, she told reporters it was injured in an automobile accident.
Jon Hall adamantly refused to press charges, but the District Attorney went forward with charges of felonious assault against Tommy and Pat Dorsey and Allen Smiley. This was a significant inconvenience to Smiley. He and Bugsy happened to be out on bail after being busted for bookmaking at the Sunset Tower Apartments in May. A conviction on the assault charge would be problematic when they faced the judge.
There was more witness amnesia when the trial started after Thanksgiving. When she took the stand, she provided a cogent description of the lead up to the Battle only to answer, “I don’t remember,” to nearly every question about the fight. The proceedings started out badly for the prosecution, but went even farther south when the defense revealed that a key witness to the Battle had hidden his convictions on two felonies.
in a rare move the prosecution asked the judge to dismiss the charges. He refused, and ordered the prosecution to complete its case. Two days later, however, on the morning of December 7, the judge dismissed the jury and dropped the charges, citing the witnesses’ unreliable testimony .
As Al Smiley left the courthouse, reporters asked him how he felt. “I’m glad it’s over,” Smiley said, perhaps tellingly adding, “but I wasn’t worried.”
By the end of 1944, Bugsy Siegel had enough of Los Angeles. He turned his attention to Las Vegas and set about building a gambling empire in what was then empty desert. He managed to stay off the front pages until June 20, 1947, when he was assassinated in the living room of a Beverly Hills mansion. The gunman hit him squarely in each of his remarkable blue eyes.
Sitting nearby, unscathed, was Allen Smiley. He was by Bugsy’s side to the end.
*The Sunset Plaza Apartments where the fight took place were demolished in the 1980s. This map shows the location where they stood.