Daughter of the King (27 page)

Barbara Lastfogel had fixed me up with Brownie. She was dating his roommate, the actor Paul Burke, after his divorce. We all went out together. What a foursome. Burke, a dashing New Orleanian whose father had been Jack Dempsey’s sparring partner, was the star of the NBC series
Noah’s Ark
, in which he played a veterinarian. The next year he was a detective on the hit ABC show
The Naked City
. Brownie Lassner was a real heartthrob. He looked like a young Robert Taylor, as pretty as a boy could be, and he dressed like Fred Astaire, often in black tie.

We went to all the greatest clubs and restaurants in the city as a group, always getting the best table, Le Pavilion, the Colony, 21, Toots Shor’s, the Stork Club, El Morocco, with sunrise breakfasts at the Brasserie in the Seagram’s Building. The only places I tried to skip were Dinty Moore’s and the Copa, where the word of my presence was most likely to get back to Daddy. Then again, I had nothing to hide. Brownie may have been an older man, but he was unattached and certainly eligible.

Not that I was looking for anything different from what I had gotten with Dean Martin and the others. The apartment Brownie and
Paul were sharing overlooked the East River and was furnished like a set in a Fred and Ginger movie. I had what must have been good sex, in that I looked forward to having more of it. Brownie’s hair was luxuriant and, unlike George DeWitt’s, real. So was his enthusiasm. My affair ended when Walter Winchell wrote in his column, “Congrats to Meyer Lansky on the engagement of his daughter to Wynne Lassner.” Daddy hit the roof. He had overdosed on weddings—mine, Paul’s, Buddy’s. He wasn’t ready for another, and he didn’t think I was, either. This was one of the rare times when Walter Winchell published a retraction, and a deep apology. The biggest columnist in the world didn’t dare cross Daddy. Brownie Lassner made a graceful exit.

Barbara Lastfogel remained my partner in crime. She was a celebrity magnet. One night we picked up Mr. Magoo himself, Jim Backus, at P. J. Clarke’s, the location of a famous scene in the alcohol addiction film
The Lost Weekend
. Jim lured us into a potential ménage à trois at his East Side apartment by pretending he was ill at the bar and needed our help to get home. Jim was a wild and crazy guy who regaled us with stories like the one where he was expelled from military school for riding a horse through the mess hall. When we tucked him into bed, alone, we went out into the night and couldn’t find a cab. A big fire truck finally came along. We lifted up our skirts and the firemen stopped very short and picked us up. We rode home at dawn swinging from a ladder. Walter Winchell would have paid a fortune for that tip.

I quickly got over Brownie. I had no shortage of handsome dates and glamorous nights on the town. Although I had given up the charade of wanting to model, I had not given up the obsession with being skinny and the equation of weight and beauty. I got deeper and deeper into diet pills. My “drugs of choice” were Dexedrine, the original diet pill, and Biphetamine, a stronger formulation that became known as the Black Beauty.

Both were basically speed. I had no idea that, as the antidrug slogan a decade later went, speed could kill. I loved the speedy feeling. I loved staying up all night dining and dancing and having sex, and still
being able to be a great and caring mom to Gary. And be as skinny as a rail, or as Tippi Hedren. The size I wanted to be was zero, and so was my self-awareness. Museums, concerts, galleries, those were all out. It was all fancy food, handsome men, hot sex. My only culture was the culture of narcissism.

Remarkably, in spite of our divorce and the humiliating way he left me, Marvin and I were able to kiss and, if not make up, at least remain cordial. That was far better for Gary, who needed a man in his life, even a man like Marvin. On the surface, he was man enough. His big successful steak house and his high roller clientele and the gorgeous actresses he dated were better for business than going public about the gorgeous actors he went home with. One of his girlfriends at the time was Dyan Cannon, who would go on to marry Cary Grant.

I would bring Gary, now three, to Spindletop. The waitresses would make the biggest fuss over him. Sometimes I would see Daddy’s friends there, with women who were not their wives. They looked so embarrassed, “outed” as it were, caught in the act. I’d just smile, and spare them the embarrassment of introducing Gary to them. He was the restaurant’s mascot, its pride and joy. Marvin was a very doting, beaming father. He’d show Gary off to everyone. Once he introduced him to Liberace, who was so nice that he took Gary to the circus and gave him a pet turtle. The first movie I took Gary to was
The Sun Also Rises
, the Hemingway bullfight film with Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner. When Gary saw the bulls enter the ring he yelled out, “Look, Mommy, cows!” and the audience cracked up.

Speaking of Daddy’s friends, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the Eisenhower Republicans were giving the Unclehood such a terrible time that I was certain Daddy would be doing everything in his power to get Joe Kennedy’s son elected. Then he would have a friend in the White House who could call off these dogs, these crime hounds. Unfortunately, the dogs weren’t imagining things. There was something to sniff, something that smelled awful. Starting in the middle of 1957,
the blood started flowing in Daddy’s world and the bodies began to pile up.

If I had once enjoyed a Pollyanna-ish rationalization that Daddy’s “entertainment” business was just another all-American road to riches, that illusion was permanently shattered. Ben Siegel’s unsolved murder, then a few years later Willie Moretti’s, had led to tremors shaking my worldview that Meyer Lansky was a high financier, a Wall Street guy working a different street. Now the tremors became an earthquake that was off the Richter scale. First was the May 1957 assassination attempt on Uncle Frank Costello right in the lobby of the Majestic, where my parents used to live.

Uncle Frank was coming home from a night out at the glamorous French restaurant L’Aiglon, next to the St. Regis, then nightcaps across the street at Monsignore, a romantic Italian boîte with strolling musicians. His large entourage included Gene Pope, Jr., who owned the
National Enquirer
, and John Miller, the paper’s top gossip columnist, who had become my friend as well, from the nightclub circuit we all rode together. At the Majestic, a man stepped out of a limo, broke through the doormen, shot Uncle Frank in the head, and then fled into the getaway car on Central Park West.

This was my turf, now running with blood. The assassin was bold, but was a bad shot. Uncle Frank only had a grazing head wound. The police quickly arrested a man named Vinnie “the Chin” Gigante, a muscleman who worked for Vito Genovese, a jealous would-be usurper of Uncle Frank’s throne as “Prime Minister.” Like Daddy, Uncle Frank despised publicity. He had never forgotten how badly he had been hurt by the Kefauver circus. Accordingly, he refused to accuse Gigante. Glad to be alive, he dismissed the violence as an isolated incident. Wishful thinking.

A few months later the bullets flew again, hitting their target. This was the brutal rubout of Albert Anastasia in the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel on Seventh Avenue and 56th Street. I had been
there many times with George Wood, who got his hair cut there and loved to be pampered by the staff, with manicures, steams, shaves, the whole spa treatment. George wanted Daddy to go there, too, but Daddy was loyal to the Waldorf. Besides, he had no time for all the pampering that George loved. In late October, Anastasia was in the midst of his own beauty regimen. He needed it. I had met him a number of times with George and Daddy. A former dock worker who had worked his way up to be Uncle Frank Costello’s right hand on the Brooklyn waterfront, Anastasia was an early version of the “Teflon Don,” a crime boss accused of many murders, convicted of none.

Today the justice came outside of court. Two men with scarves covering their faces ran in, threw the barber aside, and fired a round of bullets at Anastasia, blowing him out of the barber chair and his riddled body onto every front page and television screen in the world. In basically every article, Daddy was mentioned as well, in high profile. This was the same hotel where Daddy’s predecessor as the Jewish brains of organized crime, Arnold Rothstein, who supposedly fixed the 1919 World Series, was shot to death in 1928. The press said Daddy was the “new Rothstein.” The comparison, and its terminal implications, made me very anxious for Daddy’s safety.

The anxiety became a cold sweat when the coolest of all my uncles, Abe Zwillman, was said to have lost that cool and hanged himself with a rope in the basement of his West Orange mansion in February 1959. A new Kefauver-like crime commission, the McClellan Committee, had been formed in 1957 to investigate racketeering in the big labor unions, and they went hard after Uncle Abe. The chief lawyer for the Senate Committee was Robert Kennedy, the brother of the man Daddy was supposed to help put in the White House. Wasn’t he feeding the hand that could bite him, I wondered?

“He’s just a rich kid,” I had heard Daddy tell one of his friends. “Just playing cops and robbers.” Daddy was certain the ambassador would exercise a fatherly restraint if need be. No such luck. When it came to the battle between labor and management, Daddy was
naturally on the side of labor. No matter what excesses people like Jimmy Hoffa may have committed, those were small infractions compared to the felonious exploitation, as Daddy saw it, of the workers, poor immigrant people like the Lanskys, by the fat-cat capitalist owners, the establishment that would never let him in. If he couldn’t join it, he had to beat it. Sure, it was easier for a millionaire Harvard brat like this Robert Kennedy to take on the labor leaders than to face the truth that his own father got to the top in league with Daddy, Uncle Abe, and other of McClellan’s prime targets.

The government was one relentless crime machine. They had just driven Uncle Joe Adonis out of the country, harassing him so badly that he self-deported to Italy, where he lived in splendor with Uncle Charlie Luciano. But it was a homesick splendor, and it wasn’t his choice. I doubted that hanging himself was Uncle Abe’s choice, either. In addition to the McClellan investigators, the IRS had also targeted the King of Jersey. Yet no one had seemed more mellow, more fearless, than Abe Zwillman. What were a few agents compared to the likes of Al Capone and Dutch Schultz? Buddy, our family crime reporter, insisted that he had been strangled, then strung up.

Uncle Abe had done a lot for the people of New Jersey, and they knew it. Over two thousand people stood outside the Newark funeral home where his body lay to pay respects. Daddy did not attend the funeral, just as he had not attended that of Uncle Abe’s partner Willie Moretti. Too much publicity, guilt by association. Anyhow, in early 1959, Daddy was stuck in Cuba. Havana, and Daddy’s vast success there, the success that was intended to make him the legitimate world leader in legal gambling, had proved too good to be true. Overnight, on New Year’s Eve, 1958, Batista surprised Daddy and the world by fleeing, with his family and his money—money Daddy had made for him—to Florida. In his place was the triumphant underdog rebel leader, the one no one, including Daddy, took very seriously, Fidel Castro.

Daddy’s bet on the continued strength of the Cuban strongman Batista had turned out to be the worst gamble in a lifetime of taking
risks. He had invested over $20 million in the Riviera, a lot of it his own money. Today that would be over $200 million. Now he could lose it all, because nothing was more of a red flag to Castro’s Communist philosophy than a lavish gambling casino. Even worse was a casino run by American fat-cat capitalist mobsters for other foreign fat-cat hedonists, all exploiting the poor local peasants, who got none of the spoils. In fact on the first day of 1959, when Castro declared all the casinos closed, a mob of Cuban farmers stormed the Riviera, bringing their pigs, goats, and sheep into its marble halls before Daddy’s security forces ejected them. There were stories on the news of Teddy, armed with a mop and a giant bottle of Spic ’n’ Span, on her knees scrubbing the floors after them. They made for great copy, but struck me as pure tabloid invention. Teddy was too lazy, too used to the maids Daddy paid for, to clean up after herself, much less a herd of Cuban pigs.

The casinos soon reopened. As much as Castro hated American capitalism, he liked the jobs that those capitalist pigs had created for his people. Money talked, even to Fidel. Yet it was just a matter of time, Daddy feared, before the money from Moscow would start talking louder than the money from New York. If the Communists had their way, the casinos would be closed for good. And there was the new public relations nightmare of getting American high rollers to come back to play in a country that had gone from playground to Cold War battleground in a split second. The threat to Daddy’s fortune, his future, his life, was as real as Castro himself.

Before that fateful New Year’s Eve, the only Castro I had heard of was the Times Square sofa bed store, Castro Convertibles. Now the name took on a menacing air. The new liberator, or dictator, depending on how you saw him, was capable of converting my privileged life into a peasant pigsty. The danger was physical as well as financial. In May, Castro’s police arrested Uncle Jack and threw him in prison, along with one of his top managers. Daddy was able to bail them out and send them back to Miami, where he went himself. He was so desperate for
his own situation that he actually took long meetings with FBI agents there, describing the imminent Communist threat and warning America about the potential of “Russians Next Door.” No one would listen. In October 1960, Castro took over the Riviera, as well as all other American properties in Cuba, from Woolworth’s to Westinghouse.

Daddy, who had the soul of a revolutionary, ended up betting on the dictator Batista over the populist Castro. He was betting against himself. But he, like most of the world, had seen Castro as a million-to-one long shot, not worth thinking about. Now Castro closed the tables and had Meyer Lansky’s millions. The stress of the revolution had also stolen Daddy’s health. In addition to his digestive ailments, his bleeding ulcers, Daddy developed pericarditis, a deadly heart lining infection. He was at Memorial Hospital, in Hollywood, Florida, in intensive care, for over a month.