The Madam's Mark

Poets are fond of saying that life imitates art--but does it have to imitate television? The fact that it doesn't is perhaps the reason that 32-year-old Mark Fein last week was on trial for his life.

As the prosecution told it, Fein shot his bookmaker to death in October, 1963, to avoid paying off a $23,890 World Series bet on the New York Yankees, stuffed his body into a trunk, and persuaded a bosomy, redheaded prostitute named Gloria Kendal to dump the trunk in the Harlem River for him. Somehow, the body floated clear, and when it was discovered a month after the murder, Gloria phoned Fein in a snit. "Don't you ever watch TV?" she asked him. "Didn't you ever hear of cement?"

$2,000 Tab. If Fein had no weakness for television, he had a couple of others to make up for it. As president of his father's thriving tin-can and cardboard-box business, he seemed to have everything he needed--the best clothes, a sleek, white Lincoln Continental, an eight-room Park Avenue apartment in which he maintained his attractive wife, Nancy, and their three children. But Fein, slender, bespectacled and Milquetoast-mild in appearance, frittered away a small fortune on a pair of extracurricular pursuits--gambling and Gloria Kendal. In her 37 years, the last 16 of them spent as a prostitute and a madam, Gloria has been known by at least 13 other proper names and by any number of improper ones. Whatever her name, Fein certainly did like her game. According to the prosecution, he spent up to $700 a month "in return for the sexual favors rendered by Gloria and her girls," once ran up a $2,000 tab before paying it up. Despite Fein's lucrative patronage, Gloria turned up last week as the star witness against him. On the stand in Room 1313 of Manhattan's Criminal Courthouse, she was a symphony of colors and curves, all sharps and no flats. One day she sported a clinging lavender suit, another a fuchsia sheath that kept the all-male jury wide-awake.

In her testimony, Gloria described in an incongruously little-girlish voice how Mark Fein had phoned her Oct. 10 in an obviously agitated state. He asked her to hurry over to the secret, $178-a-month apartment he maintained on East 63rd Street under the name Weissman to pursue his many outside interests. "I walked in and there was a big trunk in the middle of the living room," said Gloria. " 'What do you think is in the trunk?' " she quoted Fein as asking. She said she did not know, and he told her: " 'It's the body of a dead man, my bookmaker, Ruby.' "

Thump, Splash. Reuben ("Ruby the Bookie") Markowitz was a fortyish Brooklynite known to his more naive acquaintances as a $90-a-week grocery clerk. But Fein knew better. Gloria quoted Fein as saying: " 'I had to meet him this afternoon to pay him the money I lost on the World Series. I met him at 4 o'clock. He came up here. We were talking. We had words and I shot him.

Please, Gloria, help me. You're the only one. There is nobody else I can turn to. I can't call my family or friends.' "

Fein asked her to help him dispose of the trunk. "I took a good drink of straight vodka, and then asked him was he sure the man was dead," Gloria testified. " 'Gloria, he's stone-cold dead,' " she quoted Fein. "He lifted the lid of the trunk and I saw part of an arm. I said. 'Spare me the gory details.'" Added Gloria: "I just wanted to be assured that I was not getting rid of a trunk with a live body in it."

Fein asked Gloria to get a friend to help. "Why call a friend?" she demanded. "I'm strong." "But Gloria," protested Fein, "the trunk is very heavy." Gloria called two friends--Geri Boxer, 22, who described herself as a copywriter with a psychology degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and David Broudy, 32, a onetime cabbie and hairdresser. Gloria then sent Fein home "because he was in pretty bad shape," drove to the Harlem River with the others and pushed the trunk in. "There was a thump and a splash," she said. When the body surfaced, there was an even bigger splash.

"I Should Say Not!" Gloria's two friends corroborated parts of her story but not all of it. Geri Boxer, who said she became friendly with Gloria because she is "accomplished in a lot of respects a college girl wouldn't be," said she helped dump the trunk but did not know what was in it. Broudy said Fein told him that someone else had shot the bookie.

After Gloria put in two days on the stand for the prosecution, Defense Attorney William Kleinman had a go at her. "You cannot decide this case," he had warned the jury, "until you've probed very deeply into Gloria Kendal and her friends." Kleinman got her to admit that she had continued to ply her trade during two Carriages, that she had once had "a romantic attachment with a female," that she had given at least two accounts of the shooting, at one point denied to police that Fein had ever admitted shooting Ruby. But Gloria seemed rattled only when Kleinman, interested in how much she charged for her services, asked: "Your price was not $5?" Replied Gloria in a perfumed huff: "I should say not!"

At week's end Kleinman finished his crossexamination; the trial was expected to go on for another week or more.

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