Daughter of the King (10 page)

“Liar!” was what I thought, but couldn’t bring myself to say the word.

Daddy couldn’t read my mind, but he gave me that dark look anyhow. But then he hugged me. He kissed my forehead. He wiped away my tears. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then, big businessman that he was, he made his forecast. “Your mother will be home in a few weeks. She’ll be fine. We all get a little crazy sometime. I’m taking care of it.”

I don’t know why, but I believed him. And Meyer Lansky was as good as his word. In about four weeks, I came home from Birch Wathen, and there was Mommy, not in a straitjacket, but looking as good as new, rested, fresh, in her Wilma finery. She took me in her arms and gave me a huge kiss on the lips, something she had never done. She gave me a sailor doll that she had actually made for me. They must have had an arts and crafts workshop at Mommy’s “spa.” Her craftsmanship was amazing. I had no idea she could do that. But there were no explanations, no apologies. It was as if the nightmare had never happened. It was don’t ask, don’t tell. I wanted to will away the whole episode, the worst nightmare I ever had. And so I did. And nothing happened again. It was the Lanskys as usual, Daddy mostly gone, Mommy mostly shopping, me mostly riding. That was as good as I could hope for, and good enough for me. About a year later, however, Mommy hit me with another big one: Daddy had moved out. He was gone. She had asked him for a divorce.

CHAPTER FOUR

H
OMELAND
I
NSECURITY

T
hree remarkable things happened to me between 1946 and 1947, though I’m not sure any of them were related. But they could have been. First of all, I saw my father’s penis. Seeing your father’s penis at age nine isn’t particularly remarkable in itself, but given how private my father was, my accidentally stumbling into the master bathroom while he was getting out of the shower was a pretty big shock for both of us. Our life at the Beresford was pretty buttoned up, and anything but a nudist colony. I’m not sure I ever saw Mommy naked either. But what was remarkable was the enormous size of Daddy’s penis. You couldn’t help but stare at it. It was the first thing you’d notice, like the trunk of an elephant.

I had seen my brothers’ penises before, when we shared a room together, and off and on. These were nothing out of the ordinary. Boy stuff. But Daddy! Talk about separating the men from the boys. This was something that belonged across the street in the Museum of Natural History. This was the most embarrassed I’d ever been, way worse than falling off my new horse Time Clock when showing off for Paul. I turned bright red, was stunned speechless, and then ran out of the bathroom. Like most controversial things at the Lanskys,
Daddy never brought it up, nor did I. However, the image stayed in my mind forever.

The second remarkable event of my ninth year was getting my period. I was about nine and a half, and from what I later learned from my girlfriends, this was happening about three years early. Of course no one had ever told me about the facts of life, the birds and the bees. Talking about sex at our house would have been like talking about crime. Both were unmentionable. There was no warning for me. I was a little horse-riding tomboy. I didn’t have breasts; I didn’t have anything. I didn’t have a clue. I thought I was bleeding to death, so I showed Mommy, thinking she would take me to the hospital. Instead, she flashed the biggest smile I had ever seen, and gave me a huge hug and kiss, as if I had won a riding competition, or gotten a great report card.

She soon told Daddy, who gave me a pat on the backside, I’m sure to feel the sanitary napkin Mommy had gotten for me. That was almost as embarrassing as seeing him naked. But he, too—dead serious Meyer Lansky—lit up with a huge smile. Still, nobody told me what it meant, other than “it’s part of growing up.” Mommy told me it hadn’t happened to her until she was sixteen. I guess that was supposed to mean I was a precocious, gifted child, or something like that. Instead, I just felt weird and confused. So I had to turn to Terry and Eileen, who clued me in. I never told them about the penis-sighting episode, but I couldn’t help but wonder if that accidental encounter with Daddy’s great white whale was so traumatic that it accelerated my adolescence.

Finally, the third remarkable thing of the 1946–1947 period was Daddy’s sudden disappearance from the Beresford, like a thief in the night. In one day, we went from happy family to nonfamily, just as suddenly as seeing my naked father or getting my period, out of nowhere. As it turned out, my parents has been planning the divorce for a long time—a year or so—but in the most cordial way, they kept it from me and my brothers. Like everything else Daddy did, the divorce
was a deal, a negotiation. Just business. Yet for me, it wasn’t business as usual, and it shook my ordered little world.

The divorce business had its origins on the long-distance telephone line to Beverly Hills. Even though Mommy and Aunt Esther Siegel were separated by a whole continent, they seemed to lead copycat lives. They were like the Bobbsey Twins of the aristocracy of what would soon be referred to as “organized crime.” Mommy and Esther both lived in splendor and raised their children like pampered little lords and ladies. On the other hand, they were equally miserable in exactly the same way, singing the same blues over their absentee husbands.

If Mommy went away for a “rest,” as Daddy had called it, you could be sure Esther had gone to at an equally posh sanitarium, Esther’s Malibu to Mommy’s Riverdale. And if Mommy had electroshock therapy, which Buddy claimed she had, you could bet that Esther had it, too. Although electroshock sounds like some kind of terrible treatment, in those days it was cutting edge—technology, not torture. Daddy never complained about Mommy’s huge bills at Wilma’s and Saks, but I did hear him complaining about her huge long-distance bills. She was on the phone to California day and night with Aunt Esther, bemoaning their mutual mistreatment by their husbands. The American gambling empire that Daddy and Uncle Benny were creating in the mid-1940s was probably the world’s most jealous mistress.

Uncle Benny, who was always considered one of the world’s great ladies’ men, had also acquired a flesh-and-blood mistress who was giving him even more aggravation than the new wagering mecca of Las Vegas that he and Daddy were laboring to turn into a desert version of Monte Carlo. The challenge was just as absurd as it sounds, trying to turn sand into gold. They pulled it off, although at a horrible cost to both of them; Daddy, his family, Benny, his life.

One thing Daddy did not seem to have was a weakness for women. In all our nights out on the town, whether in New York or
New Jersey or Florida, I never once saw Daddy’s eyes lingering on the hat-check girl at Dinty Moore’s or a showgirl at the Riviera or the Colonial Inn. Broads were for suckers, was how Damon Runyon might have put it, and Daddy was the last guy on earth to be hoodwinked by a doll. However, given what I had seen of Daddy’s huge “asset,” there may have been more romance and intrigue to Daddy’s life than met the eye. Daddy was the master of never showing emotion or weakness. God knows how many showgirls there might have been.

On the surface, Uncle Benny was just the opposite of Daddy, a true romantic. My brother Buddy, who was the ultimate Hollywood fan, loved to read the movie magazines and recount Benny’s exploits with likes of Jean Harlow, Mae West, and Wendy Barrie, the elegant British actress who got her stage name from her godfather, the author of
Peter Pan
. Uncle Benny was Buddy’s hero. Uncle Benny’s mistress, or at least his chief mistress, was named Virginia Hill. She had also been the mistress of Uncle Joe Adonis, just as Jean Harlow had also been the mistress of Uncle Abe Zwillman. It was all very incestuous; the family that played together, stayed together. My brother Buddy had met Virginia Hill with either Benny or Joe, or maybe both, at Dinty Moore’s. I guess there was no such thing as too close for comfort.

Buddy always went on and on about how beautiful Virginia Hill was and how she had kissed him on the lips. What a teenage fantasy that was. He was maybe fourteen at the time, in 1945, and had just moved back with us at the Beresford. He showed me his red lips, and he didn’t want to wash the lipstick off for days. I was reminded of the fairy tale where the princess kisses the frog and turns him into a prince. Poor Buddy just wanted to be loved. I guess we all did.

Virginia Hill had kissed a lot of frogs. She was a voluptuous, brassy redhead who had escaped Georgia poverty to become a waitress in Chicago. There she had become the pet of the Al Capone mob, ferrying money and jewels around the country for them, hidden in the linings of expensive mink coats they had bought her. She was a
real gun moll, a cool character, and a Hollywood character, and Buddy told me how she had gone west to be in movies. There, through Uncle George Raft, who had become the “family star,” she connected with other stars like Errol Flynn and, most dramatically, with Uncle Benny, much to Aunt Esther’s deep dismay. His nickname for her was “Flamingo,” the name he would give to the new resort in Las Vegas that he would build and Daddy would finance, when Benny’s money ran out.

Sometime in 1946, Esther decided she couldn’t take it anymore. She got a lawyer and demanded a divorce. She got what she wanted and moved her daughters back east to their Scarsdale estate. At exactly the same time, Mommy did exactly the same thing, though I had no idea until the divorce was final in 1947 and Daddy moved out, virtually overnight, that things had changed between them. I still can’t understand why Mommy asked for the divorce, other than to copycat Esther Siegel. Maybe it was a ploy to get Daddy to stay home more. There certainly weren’t other men in Mommy’s life, nor would there ever be.

That divorce had been the greatest trauma of my life so far, and it was impossible, as usual, to get Daddy, or Mommy, to explain what had happened. Only Buddy would provide some clues. Mommy had apparently been going to psychiatrists several times a week after that terrible trip to the sanitarium. The doctors, Buddy said, had told her a divorce was a good idea, and Daddy was simply giving Mommy what she asked for, as he always did.

When they went to court to get their divorce, it was more like a business closing than a war. In those days, people couldn’t just get a divorce because they wanted to. They had to show cause. So Daddy got Uncle Jack and Mommy got Aunt Sadie as their witnesses, all very amicable, and they went as a group before the family judge and said how they simply couldn’t get along and how they made each other unhappy. And the judge said fine, if you’re unhappy, I’m happy. Divorce granted. Bang went the gavel.

Buddy had sneaked a peek at some of the divorce papers, which Mommy had left lying around. They said that Daddy didn’t like the rigid order of meals and everything else Mommy had planned to the split second, like a cruise director, or a drill sergeant. Why did it have to be liver and bacon only on Thursday? Why couldn’t we have it Wednesday, too? I hated it any day, but Daddy liked it. I couldn’t believe that they’d split the family up over liver and bacon. The problems obviously were a lot deeper than that.

Until Daddy left, everything had seemed fine, now that Mommy was home again after that awful incident with the men in the white coats. Mommy was back. Paul was back, after years at the military school, enrolled in high school at Horace Mann, the very exclusive boy’s prep school up in Riverdale, where everyone went on to some great college, be it Harvard, Columbia, or West Point. By 1945, the war was over, and somehow the great American victory had not only liberated Europe from Hitler, but had also liberated Paul from the New York Military Academy.

One of Daddy’s proudest possessions was a memorial book commemorating the Japanese surrender on the battleship
Missouri
, personally autographed by General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz, as well as by other dignitaries. It was a gift to Daddy from the U.S. Navy for his secret wartime service in purging the waterfront of Axis saboteurs. Daddy treasured that book, and, even if Paul had decided that he now wanted to be a corporation president instead of a general, Daddy would have still pushed him to West Point. The Lanskys, in Daddy’s mind, had a duty to our country, and he wanted Paul to pay our family’s huge debt to America. Still, I’m pretty sure that Paul was also so caught up in our winning the war that West Point would have been his choice under any circumstances.

Buddy was back, too, freed from his handicapped boarding school in Maryland. Now he went to a tutoring day school on the Upper East Side, but Daddy had pretty much given up on Buddy as a
student. The important thing was that Buddy get well, that he learn to stand on his own two feet. Quite literally. To that goal, Daddy put him in a therapy program at Bellevue Hospital, with another famous doctor named Howard Rusk.

Daddy had met Dr. Rusk through his good friend, the singer Jane Froman, who had often been a headliner in Daddy’s nightclubs around the country. Jane had come to New York from a small town in Missouri and become the lead singer in the Ziegfeld Follies. Her trademark song was “Blue Moon.” During the war, while on tour in Europe entertaining the troops, her plane crashed in Portugal. She barely survived; everyone thought she would be crippled for life. Daddy had taken me to visit her in the hospital in New York. Aside from the crash injuries, she had giant shark bites on both her legs. Despite her pain, she was always cheerful and kissed me and smiled when we came to see her. She seemed to adore Daddy.

Dr. Rusk, a fellow Missourian, saved Jane’s life, and made her walk again, with crutches, like Buddy. She rallied and went back to Europe and serenaded the troops on those crutches. With the war over, she was ready to get back out there and serenade Daddy’s customers. Jane naturally took a deep interest in Buddy and introduced Daddy to Dr. Rusk, who became our newest medical messiah. Buddy had a much bigger crush on “bad girl” Virginia Hill than “good girl” Jane Froman, but that was a different story.