History Lesson 
Who Was Jack Ruby?
How a small-time strip joint operator ushered in America’s age of violence.
(Page 2 of 4)
The other strippers and champagne girls hated Jada. She was a star and acted the part. The bus-station girls from Sherman and Tyler came and went—Ruby automatically fired any girl who agreed to have sex with him—but Jada treated Ruby like a dog. She called him a pansy and worse, and she spread word among the customers that the hamburgers served out of the Carousel’s tiny kitchen were contaminated with dog shit.
One night while Jada was ravaging her tiger skin, a tourist stepped up and popped a flashbulb in her face. Ruby threw the startled cameraman down the stairs. Jada popped her G-string about a foot, and Ruby threw her off the stage. All this took a few seconds, but for those few seconds Ruby was an absolute madman. Then he walked over to our table and said in this very weary, clear, huckster voice. “How’s it going, boys? Need anything?” I don’t think he remembered what had just happened.
On the morning of the assassination, Ruby called our apartment and asked if we’d seen Jada. Shrake said we hadn’t. “I’m warning you for your own good,” Ruby said. “Stay away from that woman.” “Is that intended as a threat?” Shrake inquired. “No, no,” Ruby apologized. “No, it’s just that she’s an evil woman.”
Unlike the other clubs on The Strip, the Carousel was strictly a clip joint where Ruby’s girls hustled $1.98 bottles of champagne for whatever they could get.
“We kept the labels covered with a bar towel,” a one-time Ruby champagne girl told me. The woman, who is now married to a well-known musician, went to work for Ruby when she was seventeen. “Jack would tell us to come on to the customers, promise them anything—of course he didn’t mean for us to deliver, but sometimes we did on our own time. The price for a bottle of cheap champagne was anywhere from fifteen to seventy-five dollars. We’d sit with the customer as long as the bottle lasted, drinking out of what we called spit glasses—frosted glasses of ice water. We worked for tips or whatever we could steal.
“Actually, Jack had a soft heart. He was always loaning us money and knocking the snot out of anyone who gave us a bad time. He liked that image of himself—big bad protector. He’d fire you, then ten minutes later break in on you in the john and demand to know why you weren’t on the floor pushing drinks. One girl there got fired about three hundred times.”
The only “decent” woman in Jack Ruby’s life was Alice Nichols, a shy widow who worked for an insurance company. He dated her on and off for eleven years. The reason Ruby couldn’t marry Alice, he told many of his friends, was that he had made his mother a deathbed promise that he wouldn’t marry a gentile. Ruby’s mother had died in an insane asylum in Chicago.
Ruby had the carriage of a bantam cock and the energy of a steam engine as he churned through the streets of downtown Dallas, glad-handing, passing out cards, speaking rapidly, compulsively, about his new line of pizza ovens, about the twistboards he was promoting, about the important people he knew, cornering friends and grabbing strangers, relating amazing details of his private life and how any day now he would make it big. He once spotted actress Rhonda Fleming having a club sandwich at Love Field and joined her for lunch. You could always spot him at the boxing matches. He’d wait until just before the main event, when they turned up the lights, and he’d prance down the center aisle in a badly dated hat and double-breasted suit, shaking hands and handing out free passes to the Carousel.
He was always on his way to some very important meeting, saying he was going to see the mayor, the police chief, some judge, Stanley Marcus, Clint Murchison. And every day he’d make his rounds—the bank, the Statler Hilton, the police station, the courthouse, the bail-bond office, the Doubleday Book Store (Ruby was a compulsive reader of new diet books), the delicatessen, the shoeshine parlor, radio station KLIF.
KLIF was owned by Gordon McLendon, whom Ruby once identified as "the world’s greatest American." McLendon, who billed himself as “the Old Scotchman,” made his reputation recreating baseball games on the old Liberty Broadcasting System until organized baseball conspired to shut him down. The Old Scotchman would sit in a soundproof studio a thousand miles from the action he was describing, reading the play-by-play from the ticker, his voice shrill and disbelieving, while his sound man (Dallas’ current mayor Wes Wise was one of them) beat on a grapefruit with a bat and faked PA announcements requesting that the owner of a blue 1947 Buick please move his car out of the fire lane. Later McLendon pioneered the Top Forty music/news format, introduced a series of right-wing radio editorials, ran unsuccessfully for Ralph Yarborough’s Senate seat, and launched a one-man campaign against dirty and suggestive songs like “Yellow Submarine” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” The Old Scotchman, Jack Ruby liked to say, was his idea of “a intellectual.”
Ruby wasn’t a big man—five-foot-nine, 175 pounds—but he had thick shoulders and arms, and he was fast. He swam and exercised regularly at the YMCA, and was a compulsive consumer of health foods. He had an expression that dated from his street-fighting days in Chicago: “Take the play away.” It meant to strike first. He usually carried a big roll of money, and when he carried money he also carried a gun.
Hugh Aynesworth saw the many personalities of Jack Ruby as clearly as anyone. Aynesworth recalled a night at Ruby’s second club, the Vegas, when a drunk came in after hours with a bottle bulging from his inside coat pocket. Ruby took the man’s two dollars, showed him to a table, then smashed the bottle against the man’s rib cage. Another time Aynesworth encountered a dazed, bleeding wino staggering near the Adolphus Hotel. The wino had tried to bum a quarter from Ruby, who smashed him in the head with a full whiskey bottle. Yet at times Ruby could be embarrassingly sentimental.
“Ruby was a crier,” Aynesworth recalls. “I mean, he could go to a fire and break out crying.”
Aynesworth has been investigating the events of that week for twelve years and has concluded that the Warren Report is mostly accurate. Two nuts, two killings. “In Ruby’s case the conspiracy theory is totally ridiculous,” he told me. “Ruby would have told everyone on the streets of downtown Dallas. Ho, ho, ho, they asked me to help kill the President. Of course I’m not gonna do it.
Joe Cavagnaro, one of Jack Ruby’s best friends, made the same observation.
“Nobody would have trusted Jack with a secret,” he said. “He talked too much.”
Cavagnaro is the sales manager of the Statler Hilton, a neat, manicured, gregarious man who exudes the personality of downtown Dallas, but he was just a man in need of a friend when he arrived in 1955. Cavagnaro was eating at the Lucas B&B Restaurant next to the Vegas Club one night when Ruby sauntered in, said hello, and picked up the check.
“He was a fine person,” Cavagnaro said. “Much different than the picture you read. He had a big heart. He was good to people. Anyone down on his luck, he’d help them out to the point of excess. There was a policeman whose wife and kid were in an accident, he took over a sack of groceries. He’d read something in the paper about some poor family and he’d go to the rescue. Sure, he had a short fuse, but remember, he had to police his own business; otherwise they’d close him up. The vice squad was always hanging around his place. Some drunk would act up and Jack would remove him without the vice squad being aware it ever happened.”
Cavagnaro and Ruby had coffee at the Statler a few hours after the assassination. Ruby was extremely upset, and blamed the Morning News.
“He said it would be a cold day in hell before he placed another ad with the News,” Cavagnaro told me. “Jack was a true patriot. He was also a Democrat. He thought Kennedy had done a lot for the minorities. Just from a business standpoint, he said, something like that could kill a city.”
Did he say anything about killing Oswald?
“I think everyone in Dallas said something to the effect that ‘I’d like to kill that SOB.’”
But Ruby did it; that is the difference. What did Cavagnaro think when he heard the news?
“I thought, yes, Jack could do that. I’d seen him hit a guy once for insulting a girl. The guy practically left his feet and flew across the street.”
In the same block as the Statler Hilton and the Dallas police station, in a spot called the Purple Orchid, Ruby’s ex-champagne girl joined 80 million viewers of Ruby’s astounding crime on television. The girl turned to the bartender, who had also worked for Ruby, and she said: “Well, Jack’s finally gonna get recognized.”
Times Herald editorial page editor A.C. Greene and his wife had just driven home from church. Betty Greene ran ahead to answer the telephone, and when A.C. walked in the kitchen door she told him that someone had just killed the man who killed the President. He was someone who owned a downtown nightclub. Betty Greene said, bewildered. Oh, God, A.C. thought: Jack Ruby!
While Ruby was shooting Oswald, Jo and I were driving from Columbus, Ohio, where I had just met my new in-laws, to Cleveland, where the Cowboys were playing the Browns. The NFL was the only shop that stayed open that weekend. They claimed that it was a public service, and in retrospect I think they were right. Shrake met me at the press box entrance and told me what had happened.
“Jack Ruby!” I said. “Why not.”
“Why not,” Shrake said, shaking his head.
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