Melvin Belli (1907-1996) - 12 July 1996

We were talking the other week about the origin of slang and idiom and my failed attempt, long ago, to coin a new slang phrase, which was adopted by the cook at a nearby lunch counter for about a day and ignored by everybody else.

I thought afterwards of several American phrases common in my time, but by now long abandoned. And that led me onto a theory which has been proved over and over again, which is that the best idioms are very short, short stories. They vividly compress an experience that could happen to anybody and are remembered just so long as that experience happens in life. When it fades from life, the idiom vanishes from the language. For instance, barking up the wrong tree, which is going after the wrong culprit, it's still in use, I suppose, because everybody gets the picture of the original experience.

But how about "it's a cinch?" I'll bet not one American in five listening now, and not one Briton in a hundred, knows what it means. Yet when I arrived in America and, like all inquisitive Englishmen, started writing down in a little book all the current slang phrases that came my way, "it's a cinch" was the commonest response to asking somebody if they'd do you a favour, help you with something. Today people would say, would respond, no problem.

But the 1930s were only a few decades away from a regular routine of American life, which was organising an outfit, as they called it, of cowboys, cattlemen who rounded up their herd, packed and strapped everything down and started the long trail north to the feed lots of the Midwest. Now this had started in the American Spanish Southwest and the outfit was ready to move when the cincha, the Spanish word for the saddle-girth was tightened. Need I say by the 1950s, 60s, people could have no picture in their minds when the word cinch was pronounced, and so it's long gone.

Whereas so long as America plays baseball, billiards, poker, the idioms they sprouted will thrive. From poker, a shady player is still a four flusher. A man who can't get going in business, or perhaps got nowhere with his new girl is a guy who never got to first base. Somebody who's stymied, stuck in a spot from which he can't progress, is compared to the pool player who has the ill luck to find himself behind the eight ball.

By the way, stymied is an interesting case, a rare one, of a word still freely used by people who have no idea where it came from and never play golf. I was shocked to discover only recently, it can be a mystery even to young people who do play golf. It was a ploy abolished in, I believe, 1930-something, which is a long time ago even in the history of a game that was invented in the 15th century. The Dutch, incidentally, say they invented it long before that, by playing on ice and hitting a kolf ball – get it? – against posts on the end of the pond. The Dutch were, however, according to the Scots, too slow-witted to make the decisive step to forget the ice and the posts and substitute the brilliant idea of a hole in the ground.

Well stymie, we were saying. It used to be that as you approached the green, the putting green, an effective and entirely legitimate way of thwarting your opponent was to try and chip your ball between your opponents ball on the green and the hole, so that it was impossible for him on his next stroke to putt into the hole. He was blocked. If the immortal Bobby Jones had not laid a stymie against the ball of Cyril Tolley on the nineteenth hole at St. Andrews in, I believe, the third round of the British Amateur 1930, he would not have gone on to achieve his special glory, which was to perform what has never been performed before or since, winning the four main championships: the British and American Amateur and the British and American Opens in one year.

Among the phrases I wrote down in my little book, all those years ago was "shyster lawyer" tactfully defined by the Oxford dictionary as: "In America, a scheming or tricky lawyer." But isn't that true of all? Well never mind. A similar phrase and an allied profession that fascinated me, was an "ambulance chaser." In the early 1930s there was no way of avoiding the phrase or the institution because the movies were so often bouncing with ambulance chasers.

Originally the phrase described cheap lawyers who roamed the streets of New York at the beginning of this century, when the immigrant tide from southern and eastern Europe was at the flood, looking for poor immigrants who'd been bruised by a passing cab, horse, tram – often the lawyer would agree to arrange the bruising – wait for the police to arrive and the ambulance, hitch a ride. A cop would ask, "You a relative?" And the answer would come pat, "I'm her lawyer." Trouble for the cab driver, the street car company or whoever.

Originally the ambulance chaser split the damages, which, when they were granted, were indeed modest, but so long as a chaser didn't appear at the scene of too many accidents in one day, he could make a tidy living. Well the phrase faded through the second war. It has re-emerged in the past twenty years or so, all spruced up – dollied up you might say – in a three-piece suit, entering every morning, a slick office with a gilt inscribed name on the door. The word is now contingency lawyer, who takes one third of the damages if you win, nothing if you lose. He's there to see that you win.

Now don't get me wrong. A contingency lawyer, like Brutus, is an honourable man. He can be as legitimate as a bishop, and he can at the same time be the terror of airlines, shipping companies, banks, estate agents. Name any institution that can be plausibly labelled the establishment, so long as their victim can equally plausibly be called poor or simple, or, in the famous phrase of President Franklin Roosevelt, we have a bounden duty to come to the aid of the forgotten man.

Well certainly the most flamboyant, probably the most successful contingency lawyer in the United States has just died in the state where he was born, California, in the city where for so long he flourished, San Francisco. And I do mean flourished – a word that has the same root as florid or flowered – and he flowered alright, an exotic bloom in his dress, his office, his manners, his swooping, insinuating, florid speech. In front of a jury, that is. In life, his speech across a desk was admirably to the point: who are you defending? A little helpless guy. And who are you defending him against? A bunch of bastards. And they could be a prosecution team in a murder case, a tobacco company, often as not a doctor, as he liked to say, "unqualified men of medicine".

Among his more famous helpless little guys were Muhammad Ali, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Mae West. His name Belli, Melvin Belli, spelled Belli, pronounced, for obvious reasons, Bell-eye.

His grandfather – a thoroughly qualified surgeon incidentally – was Swiss, and in the wake of the gold rush emigrated to California. His father was a banker, so nobody could say that his career compensated for a poor, persecuted childhood. In fact the psychiatrists would have a rough time trying to figure out how Melvin Belli developed his extraordinary flair for showing off in every visible and audible way. He dressed in beautiful Swiss silk suits, blindingly checked, he looked like a walking chessboard.

His office, on a rather select downtown street, faced on the street and he could be seen there, by any passer-by because the only wall was of plate glass. And there he sat, presumably working away, amid certain permanent beloved objects: a full-size human skeleton, a jewelled crown that seemed to have no point other than show, until he picked it up when it played an old Broadway song of the 1910s. There was a wildly patterned rug and a tiger skin and various clocks and velvet bound boxes. He himself on some days was velvet bound in a smoking jacket, in which I don't believe he ever smoked. Indeed with the latter day emphasis on the social and clinical crime of smoking, Melvin Belli was so down on the tobacco companies, embraced so many alleged victims of passive smoking, that I'm sure he had a lot to do with San Francisco's uniquely rigid laws about smoking anywhere in public or in buildings, offices, theatres, schools, bus stations open to the public. Belli pioneered what he called "demonstrative evidence." "Juries," he said, "don't only listen, they see. They attend with all their senses".

So fifty years ago, he led a compensation case brought by a young woman who'd had her leg severed by a San Francisco street car, tram. As he addressed the jury, from time to time, he looked down at a large yellow package on the table in front of him. Only at the end of his closing did he open it. "Look, ladies and gentlemen," he said, "feel the warmth of life, the pulse of the blood, the rippling muscles of the calf." It was the artificial limb made for the wounded defendant. She got 65,000 dollars damages, an enormous sum in 1941. Another time he mysteriously bade a young woman who'd claimed she'd been scarred by breast surgery, led her into the judges chambers, begged the jury to follow and asked the young woman to strip to the waist. She did. She cried. She was visibly scarred. Heavy damages.

In old age, he grew careless, if not slightly batty. He brought suit for a man badly burned in a fire and then found the man had died twelve years before the date of the fire. But for most of his life, he flourished as the last defender of the little man against the big bully, in the well-known Western tradition of Robin Hood, who has usually been an outlaw like Billy the Kidd, the James Brothers, Butch Cassidy. Melvin Belli was Robin Hood, the law man.

And no question, he was for years and years, a hero to the forgotten man, the hurt man who'd forgotten to sue. Belli notably secured as high damages as anybody could for a wounded bride for her alimony. As for himself, he was married six times and at the end was drained penniless by five alimonies. He died bankrupt. Duped, you might say, by his own chicanery.

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