Daughter of the King (12 page)

Eventually, life at Uncle George’s must have gotten too hectic. Daddy got his own place in a fancy doorman building in Murray Hill at 36 East 36th Street, right across the street from the august J. P. Morgan Library. He hired as his interior decorator Dorothy Hammerstein, the wife of composer Oscar Hammerstein, who had done
Carousel
and all the other shows I loved. No wonder Daddy got such great seats. Dorothy Hammerstein, who was from Australia and had a funny accent, had been an actress and was very theatrical. She was one of the first bi-coastal decorators, doing homes of the stars in both Los Angeles and New York. But what she did for Daddy seemed more appropriate for the Morgan Library, more for admiring than living in. I was always terrified I would rip some silk slipcover or break a priceless
vase. I was confused by Daddy’s hiring such a fancy decorator. At first I assumed that he must have missed the splendor of the Beresford; splendor was Mommy’s thing, not his. Daddy was a no-frills, no-nonsense guy. But this place had a woman’s touch. Little did I suspect there was indeed another woman involved. That mystery, however, took a while to solve, particularly with my inscrutable father.

There were certainly lots of women around. Next door to Daddy was an apartment that housed each year’s Miss Rheingold, the winner of a beauty contest sponsored by the Rheingold Brewery. That was the New York equivalent of Miss World, and there were more gorgeous creatures coming in and out of that unit than George Wood’s apartment. Again, Daddy never seemed to notice them, but that may have been for my benefit.

Another famous neighbor and friend to Daddy was Arthur Godfrey, the ukulele-playing redheaded radio superstar and host of the television show
Talent Scouts
. I got the biggest kick out of Godfrey’s number one single, “The Too Fat Polka.” I would sing the verse, “You can have her, I don’t want her, she’s too fat for me.” Godfrey once sang it to me and gave me an autographed record. He was a pilot who flew the big Constellation planes and helped popularize air travel. And he was a horse fanatic and would always talk to me about my riding. Daddy, who was also good friends with that other impresario Ed Sullivan, was totally in the loop.

Once it became clear that Buddy was not going to be heading for college, Daddy arranged for him to get a job. Because Buddy seemed to love show business, that was the business Daddy put him in. He started on the ground floor, answering the phones at the Hollywood Ticket Agency, right across the street from Dinty Moore’s. The connection, as usual, was George Wood, whose sister Annie was married to George Haden, who owned the agency.

The agency was in the lobby of Edison Hotel, which was filled with ladies of the evening, and the afternoon, but Daddy took Buddy
to Saks Fifth Avenue and dressed him up in a wardrobe worthy of a Wall Street tycoon. The agency was actually a fancy front for bookmaking and where Buddy got his first exposure to gambling. That bite of a poison apple would lead to Buddy’s addiction to a pastime that Daddy regarded as harmless entertainment. When his own son got hooked, Daddy, the Lord of Gambling, was as helpless as Buddy to stop the damage.

My brothers were home, but not home. With Buddy selling tickets and Paul up at Horace Mann or locked in his room studying night and day, and without Nancy to keep me company, I depended on my best friends Terry and Eileen. But they were each in different parochial schools, so I couldn’t see them as much as I would have liked and needed. Mommy was spending a lot of her time at psychiatrists. Though she was certainly attractive and eligible, Mommy was nearing forty, and being in your forties in the forties was like being in your sixties, or more, today. There wasn’t a lot of dating among the “desperate ex-housewives” of Central Park West. Besides, despite her divorce, Mommy was still, in her mind, married to the great Meyer Lansky. She couldn’t imagine a life with any other man.

The biggest shock after Daddy’s departure was the brutal murder of Uncle Benny in Beverly Hills in June 1947. He was shot to death in an unsolved rubout at the home of his moll Virginia Hill, while she was away in Europe. My “cousins,” Benny’s daughters Barbara and Millicent, had just left Scarsdale to spend the summer with their father. They were on the Super Chief when the train came to an unexpected stop in the desert a hundred miles from Las Vegas. Several of Benny’s friends were in a big black limousine to pick them up and break the terrible news and to avoid the reporters descending on them at the Las Vegas depot.

I was away at camp for the first time that summer, so Mommy didn’t tell me until later, just as she had spared me the news that her own father had died that year on Daddy’s birthday, July 4. When she
finally did tell me, at the end of the summer, it was just that Uncle Benny had passed away, just like Grandpa Citron. No mention of bullets, not for my tender ears. Daddy was even more vague, and Buddy, who loved to tell hair-raising stories, kept the ones about Benny to himself, maybe on Daddy’s orders. Some of those stories, I learned much later, suggested that Daddy had had advance knowledge of the planned mob hit on Uncle Benny for going grossly over budget on the Flamingo. It was supposedly “just business,” and the idea was that Daddy, the ultimate businessman, had his eye on the bottom line and harbored no sentimentality about his deepest friendship. I never believed that. Benny was pretty much Daddy’s brother.

I’m not sure how sad Mommy, or even Aunt Esther, were at Uncle Benny’s death, but they must have been concerned about the terrible violence of his being riddled with bullets in Hill’s living room affecting Barbara and Millicent. The girls had surely seen the grotesque photos, with Benny’s eye blown out of its socket, on the front pages of every paper in the land. When I got older, Buddy went into full-disclosure mode and told me the gory details of the rubout. He also said both Mommy and Esther had the “he got what he deserved” attitude, for all the pain Uncle Benny’s Hollywood romances caused his wife. There was something to that.

In the early fifties, Millicent Siegel married Jackie Rosen, whose father, Morris Rosen, worked for the syndicate of gangland financiers that supposedly ordered the hit on Uncle Benny for his wasteful extravagances with their money, mostly in the name of his obsession with Virginia Hill. This syndicate suspected that Virginia Hill had gone to Europe to hide money stolen from them and they feared that Uncle Benny was going to skip the country and join her. The termination orders had come from the very top, which meant Uncle Charlie Luciano, then in exile in Italy, was still pulling the strings—and the triggers.

As a token of remembrance to Uncle Benny, and perhaps of remorse over being unable to stop Luciano’s edict, Daddy gave Millicent
and Jackie their gala wedding party at the Waldorf-Astoria. That Daddy could have endorsed the union of Benny’s daughter to the son of someone connected with his assassination raised endless troublesome questions. The day Uncle Benny was killed, Morris Rosen and two other syndicate-appointed overseers seized control of the Flamingo and turned it into a huge success.

Jackie Rosen, like Paul, was a graduate of New York Military Academy, though he didn’t make it to West Pont, just Las Vegas. We were all one big family. The idea that one of the family could kill another, or countenance the killing of another, would have blown my mind, so I was happy to be young, innocent, and sheltered from reality. Thinking of it now just haunts me. How could Millicent marry into the family that so bloodily replaced her father, unless she hated her father, way beyond hatred? How would Paul have felt if Daddy had run off with Virginia Hill? The odd thing was that Buddy would have loved it.

My own father was unable to save his best friend, a man who was more a brother to him than his real brother. Daddy couldn’t help but have guilty feelings, being the man who arranged the financing to bail out the Flamingo, getting in business with Morris Rosen and ending up making a fortune on the ashes of Uncle Benny’s lost dream. Plus Daddy gave that wedding bash for Millicent and Jackie. How could Daddy have forsaken the man he loved above all others? I’ll never know, because nobody ever kept his feelings more to himself than Meyer Lansky.

Without Daddy to care for, Mommy devoted herself to me, more than ever. She got me braces for my buck teeth, but she kept cancelling appointments when the orthodontist planned to extract a tooth. Mommy couldn’t bear the thought of my losing a good tooth, so her delays pushed back getting the braces for months. Meanwhile my brothers continued to tease me. I was ready for the dentist to pull all the teeth if he wanted to.

Mommy and I seemed to be spending all our time at doctors’ offices, either for her mind or my body. I had awful sinus problems. Whenever I had sinus headaches, which was often, she’d put sandbags on my bed to keep the mattress from making any movements that would cause me pain. In the process, I developed a big crush, my very first, on the sandbag-prescriber, Dr. Max Eagle, a general practitioner whose offices were downstairs in the Beresford. I liked his moustache for some reason, and what really drew me to him was the fact that his shots never hurt. I thought he was Jesus.

Now that my parents had broken up, going to Deal, New Jersey, for family summers was a thing of the past. Mommy now sent me away to camp. For two years I went to a place called Highland Nature Camp, up in Naples, Maine. I hated it because of the mosquitoes and because I seemed to be allergic to everything. My poor sinuses. And I was too timid to ask the camp for sandbags. I refused to see the camp doctor and began writing letters, love letters I guess, to Dr. Eagle, asking him to miraculously cure me by mail. He never replied. Instead, he gave all my letters to Daddy, who drove up to Maine with Nig Rosen’s brother Dan to bring me home. I felt betrayed.

On the way home we stopped in Boston to have dinner with our old Filipino houseboy Tommy, who was working in a Chinese restaurant. On the road, we almost got killed when Dan ran a blinking red railroad crossing light and we came inches from being crushed by a speeding train. When we got out of the car to catch our breath, Daddy, who was fuming, noticed that Dan’s socks didn’t match. He gave him a quick color quiz and found out that poor Dan was color blind. That blinking red light had looked green to him. Daddy turned volcano red and cursed Dan out, using even more expletives than George Wood, words I never heard Daddy use before, or again. “You shit-eating idiot! You goddamned fool! You almost killed my daughter!” These weren’t businessman words; these were gangster words. Daddy was tougher than I ever thought. I’d never seen Daddy lose his temper like that; it
was much worse than if a coffee shop garnished his hamburger with lettuce and tomato. The next summer Daddy paid for my friend Terry to go to Highland Nature with me. I enjoyed it a lot more that time. Misery loved company.

A measure of how close Daddy held his cards to his chest came in June 1949, just before I left for a new summer camp, this one in the Hudson Valley, much closer to home. There, splashed on the front page of the mass-circulation New
York Sun
, was a big photo of my father under the banner headline “Lansky Sails in Luxury for Italy.” The article was about my father’s departure on the ocean liner
Italia
for a European trip. But the big news wasn’t that my father was on the front page described as the “underworld big shot” or the speculation that he was going to Europe to confer with his big business partner Uncle Charlie Luciano, now living in Rome. No. The big, big news was that he had “sailed with his wife.”

Wife? What wife? Mommy was at home in the Beresford, getting me ready for camp. This was no Mommy. This was, as the
Sun
described, “a slender, attractive brunette, whom he married last winter.” The paper described how Daddy and this new mystery wife “departed in an atmosphere of champagne and orchids, in the manner befitting Lansky’s reputation as a powerful and wealthy underworld figure. The Regal Suite, which they occupied, is the most luxurious that the
Italia
affords . . . Lansky’s passage for himself and his wife cost him a cool $2600, one way.”

Luckily, I didn’t find out for quite a while, not until I came home from camp in the fall, and I never saw the paper until many years later. Thank God for that; ignorance was bliss. Those were the pre-Internet days of “yesterday’s papers,” when one day’s headlines became the next day’s wrapping paper, when most news, good or bad, was quickly forgotten. Besides, at age eleven, I wasn’t a newspaper reader. I was a comic book girl.

Daddy never told me about his trip. I guess he figured I would be away at camp. I didn’t care about his trips. He was always away. But what was horrible to me was that he didn’t tell me about his
wife
. The amazing thing was that Mommy was spared the news by Buddy, who took cabs all over the city buying up all the copies of the
Sun
at just about every newsstand from Times Square to 96th Street, to keep this awful truth away from Mommy and from me. Buddy loved Mommy, and he knew how weak she was. It took one to know one. Buddy sensed that the news would devastate Mommy and did everything to keep it from her. That was remarkably thoughtful of Buddy, who was as big a gossip as Walter Winchell. Holding no grudge about the secret marriage, Buddy would move out of the Beresford and in with Daddy and his new bride on 36th Street that fall. Ah, and that explained the Dorothy Hammerstein décor. This romance was no spur-of-the-moment infatuation. It had been going on for years. That apartment was a woman’s place. Now we had the woman.

Her name was Thelma Schwartz, but she called herself Teddy. With a name like that, I thought she was a boy. She and her husband had a young son and had lived in the same building at 201 West 85th Street as my parents did when they first got married and had Buddy. Thus Teddy and Daddy went back, way, way back, to 1931. They had history. Teddy’s husband had been in the fashion business, but Teddy pushed him into starting a nightclub, and with Daddy being the king of clubs, she naturally sought all the advice she could get from him for free. Because her husband had worked on Seventh Avenue, Teddy had nice clothes. Still, there was something cheap and flashy about her, more Virginia Hill than Jane Froman. Buddy later told me she had been a manicurist. Once I saw her, I saw what Buddy meant. She looked like a manicurist who would do Mommy’s nails. She didn’t look like Mommy.