Daughter of the King (3 page)

“Fucking, cocksucking, motherfucking, kike, sheenie, guinea wop bastard son of a bitch” was the kind of stream-of-consciousness profanity that Uncle Georgie’s mouth might unleash. Yet all of Hollywood, and all of Broadway, was crazy about him. They were also mortally afraid of him, not just because of his booking power, but because of his closeness to my father and his circle. If George Wood told an actor or actress “You’re dead in this town,” they would take it literally. Because I knew how incorrigible he was, whenever Uncle Georgie dropped by our table, at Dinty Moore’s or wherever we might be, on his nightly rounds of every famous joint in New York, I was smart enough to head for the hat-check girl and leave him and Daddy to themselves.

Uncle Willie was famous as a second father, or godfather, to Frank Sinatra, the man who got Frank out of Hoboken to Hollywood, the man who freed him from his servitude to Tommy Dorsey and made him a star. The first time I met Frank was at Uncle Willie’s lavish art deco Riviera supper club in New Jersey, atop the Palisades. There were floor-to-ceiling windows with the most spectacular view across the Hudson to the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and the roof opened so the stars of screen could see the stars of heaven. The Riviera was Vegas before Vegas ever existed. The talent had to be great to distract the audience from the view, which was up there with the one from the top of the Empire State Building. But Uncle Willie always had the best: Hope and Crosby, Martin and Lewis, Sammy Davis, Jr., and, of course, the pride of Jersey, hometown boy Frank Sinatra.

One night, when I was ten or eleven, Frank came over to our table after his set to say hello to Daddy and to meet little me with my bottle of ginger ale in a chilled champagne bucket. Again, how grown-up I felt, out with Daddy, out on the town, in a
nightclub
. Wow! I had never seen anyone so nervous, particularly a star who had all the teenagers in New York screaming for him. But Frank was more fidgety in Daddy’s presence than any bobby-soxer would have been in his. He was so anxious that when he reached over to shake my hand, he knocked over the champagne bucket of ice right into my lap. He nearly died.

Maybe he was worrying about dying for getting me all wet. Maybe Daddy had given him one of his looks. Frank got on his knees, grabbed a bunch of napkins and frantically tried to dry me off. The only relief came when I started laughing and said that he was tickling me. The twinkle returned to Daddy’s eyes. I rarely saw him laugh. The twinkle was as good as it got, but it was good enough for Frank to breathe easier. He gave me a big hug, as if I had saved his life by forgiving him, like getting a thumbs up from a Roman empress.

Frank, to make more amends, even sang a song for me. He improvised lyrics on “You’re the Top.” “You’re the top. You’re cotton candy. You’re the top. You’re a doll named Sandi.” I can see him winking at me from the stage. No last names, naturally. But I was much more interested in Señor Wences, the famous Spanish ventriloquist with his puppets Pedro and Johnny, who was sharing the bill with Frank. When Daddy introduced me to him, that made my night.

There was Frank Sinatra, and then there was Uncle Frank. Frank Erickson looked just like Santa Claus, if you shaved off Santa’s beard. He was a big, jolly, ho-ho-ho sort of man, whose high spirits concealed the fact that he was supposed to be, after Daddy, the biggest brain in the uncle group. Uncle Frank, like Daddy, was a largely unschooled math wizard and considered the biggest bookmaker in the country. He was the architect of most of America’s betting systems, including the wire services where the odds on every race, every fight,
every game, were communicated around the country to the delight of gamblers everywhere. Uncle Frank not only looked like Santa; he had the heart of Santa as well. He was one of the most generous of men, donating millions to children’s charities, giving even more than Uncle Frank Costello gave to his pet cause, the Salvation Army.

No star, no performer at the Riviera was bigger, or more handsome, than my Uncle Bennie, Ben Siegel. The world knew him as Bugsy, a name that referred to his having been “crazy as a bug” in his hot-tempered youth, a past that he was always trying to obliterate by chasing success and glamour. Uncle Bennie had moved to Beverly Hills. I first met him there on a trip I took with Mommy and Daddy. We went on the Twentieth Century Limited to Chicago and then we changed to the Super Chief to California. I remember Daddy leaving us at the Chicago train station once to go a meeting that he was very secretive about. “Who are you meeting?” Mommy nagged him, “Al Capone?” My mother was joking; my father, as usual, did not laugh. Capone was out of prison then, in the early forties. Of course I had no idea what any of this meant until later, and it was just as well, because it would have scared me to death.

When we got to Beverly Hills, Uncle Ben did scare me to death, but not because of any of the Murder Incorporated stuff he was associated with in his wild and crazy young manhood. What frightened me out of my wits was the creepy stuff he did to stay young like a Hollywood star. The Siegel mansion in Beverly Hills was like a country club, with a pool and towering palms and vast gardens. Nothing in New Jersey, at its green nicest, could match this, especially the smell of the night-blooming jasmine. But when I was awakened early by the brilliant California sun, my new Eden suddenly became Hell. I had gone to bed in the huge bedroom of my Aunt Esther, Benny’s wife (they had separate rooms), and suddenly I saw that the sweet woman I had gone to bed with had been replaced by a witch. Esther was wearing a black sleeping mask to block the sunlight, but I thought she had turned into
a witch. So I screamed and ran into Uncle Benny’s bedroom, and what I saw there was even worse. If Aunt Esther was a witch, Uncle Benny had become the devil himself. Not only was he, too, in a black eye mask, but he had this crazy black elastic vise around his cheeks and chin. It turned out to be some device Hollywood stars wore to bed to prevent wrinkles, and Uncle Benny had bought into it. But to me, he was Satan himself, and it took me a day to recover from my first brush with the vanity of the movie colony.

Mommy and Aunt Esther had been best girlhood friends growing up on the Lower East Side, when Daddy and Uncle Benny had had their own bootlegging gang, known as the Bugs and Meyer Mob, in the Roaring Twenties. They double dated, fell in love at the same time. Daddy and Benny were each other’s best man at their weddings. Now they were both rich and wildly successful. Benny had gone Hollywood, trading in my father’s dark discreet suits for flashy plaid sport jackets and silk Hawaiian shirts decorated with palm trees and flamingos. When the two of them stood together, one looked like an undertaker and the other a circus clown. Growing up in formal New York, I had a hard time adjusting to how casual California was.

Aside from Benny’s flashy wardrobe and the swimming pool, the Siegel family was very similar to the Lanskys. There were two daughters, Millicent and Barbara, a few years older than me, who went to exclusive private schools, rode horses, were outfitted by Bullock’s of Wilshire, and generally led the kind of refined, pre-debutante finishing-school life that Mommy seemed to be preparing for me. It seemed like Mommy and Aunt Esther were reading the same child-rearing playbook. Although both my parents and the Siegels had grown up in Orthodox Jewish families, none of them made any effort to keep the faith. We always had a Christmas tree, as did the Siegels. We ate a lot of bacon. In fact, I had no idea I was Jewish, or what being Jewish was, until I was a teenager. I thought my grandparents’ religion was some sort of exotic Old World custom. When my parents spoke
what I later discovered to be Yiddish with each other, I assumed it was a special code to keep secrets from me.

T
here were dozens of uncles. What a big family I had! Half my uncles turned out to be Jewish. The other half were Italians. Daddy seemed totally at home in both camps, and, actually, one camp didn’t seem any different from the other. Most of them had assimilated so well they all seemed like WASP businessmen, a big bunch of bankers. God knows what my uncles may have done as boys, but they had grown up into very serious, civilized gentlemen. The Al Capone image of the gangster as brutal, volatile and ignorant, propagated by such stars as James Cagney (“You dirty rat . . .”) and Edward G. Robinson (
Little Caesar
), simply didn’t apply here.

Daddy’s group, the Unclehood, I’ll call them, were all about rationality and control. Their business wasn’t murder. Their business was business, big business. High leverage, low visibility. Mob family warfare, Cicero rubouts, and Valentine’s Day massacres were the stuff of medieval Sicilian peasants and maybe of Hollywood movies, but not of these modern men. Theirs was a new world where Longy Zwillman, a Jew from New Jersey, and Frank Costello, an Italian from Calabria, could embrace each other like brothers and get rich together under Daddy’s brilliant guidance. That was the beauty of America. Or so it seemed.

The most important thing to me about my uncles was that they seemed to love me like one of the family. They hugged me, they kissed me, they picked me up, and I never felt more secure than in the arms of these powerful men. What did they talk about? How could I, at six, seven, eight, have any idea? It was all names and numbers. Mostly numbers. Sometimes I thought my father and my uncles had their own language of numbers. I was more interested in the scene, the noise, the action. Half the time I was running off to my friend the
hat-check girl. Those big furs and the candies she gave me were much more fun than Daddy’s numbers. Was I the mascot of the Mob? I had no idea. All I knew was that these were family men, in the nicest sense of what could have been an ominous term.

Aside from Benny Siegel, one of Daddy’s best friends, particularly after Benny moved to the West Coast, was Uncle Jimmy. His real name was Vincent Alo, but he was known as “Jimmy Blue Eyes.” The confusing thing about that was that his eyes weren’t blue at all. They were dark brown. Uncle Jimmy apparently got his nickname from having survived endless beatings as a young man. The poor kid was forever black and blue. Why they didn’t call him Jimmy Black Eyes, I’ll never know. What I did know was that it was not for me to ask. Uncle Jimmy was tall and austere. In his dark suits, all he needed was a white collar and he could have passed for a priest.

In fact, film director John Huston went one better. He met Uncle Jimmy in Rome when he was shooting his epic
The Bible
and he offered to cast him as God Himself. No one I ever met, including Daddy, was more low-key and low-profile than Uncle Jimmy, who often joked with Daddy about the ludicrousness of the director’s casting gambit. In the end, God proved impossible to cast, so the egomaniacal Huston took the part himself.

Whatever my father may have lacked in religion, he had the deepest faith in success. And he was inordinately proud of being American. He worshipped Abraham Lincoln; large bronze bookends of the head of Honest Abe dominated the bookshelf of Daddy’s study. He refused to be limited by the ancient Jewish traditions of his parents, who had escaped the pogroms of the Russian czar in Grodno, on the Russian-Polish border. Daddy, who was born in 1902, came to New York with his mother, Yetta, in 1911, two years after his father, Max, had made the brutal voyage in steerage to establish a beachhead in the poor Brownsville section of Brooklyn and worked as a pants presser.

It was a long, long way from Brownsville to the Beresford, our palatial apartment house on Central Park West, across from the Museum
of Natural History where a statue of Teddy Roosevelt astride his horse dominated the entrance. What could be more American than that? And what could have been more American than my favorite picture of my father, looking positively Roosevelt-like, jauntily astride his own horse on vacation in Hot Springs, Arkansas, my parents’ favorite resort when they first got married.

Yet even on vacation in the South, even on horseback, there was something slightly off about my father. He was rich. He was successful. He had a beautiful wife. He was living the American dream. But he wasn’t by any means all-American. Nor was Hot Springs. It was a lavish resort, the best in Dixie, but it was controlled by a famous New York gangster named Owney Madden, who had owned, among other Prohibition hot spots, Harlem’s Cotton Club. Hot Springs may have looked like a magnolia paradise, but it was in fact a cesspool of illegal gambling, prostitution, and far worse.

Maybe all Daddy did in Hot Springs was relax, swim, ride, take the federally protected radioactive waters, but there was a sinister undercurrent in Daddy’s very presence in Hot Springs. The water was just about the only thing that was legal there, and my parents sent the family postcards from the Arlington Hotel, where they stayed, which had been Al Capone’s southern headquarters. Owney Madden wasn’t exactly an uncle, but he went way back with Daddy. He was born in England, came to New York, and led a Hell’s Kitchen gang called the Gophers. He went to Sing Sing for killing a number of his rivals. With a background like that you would think he’d be doomed for life, but Prohibition could turn abject notoriety into success and celebrity. Madden, paroled from Sing Sing, became an overlord of New York nightlife. His driver was the future movie star George Raft, or Uncle George, who didn’t have to act when he played a gangster.