Rothstein (38 page)

Perhaps Arnold was finally trying to meet Abraham’s standards, though in his own way. “It has been interesting to me,” Carolyn continued, “to observe that as time went on Arnold took on a manifestation of this side of his father’s character. He would go about New York offering his services in delicate matters which required adjustment-perhaps between the law and a victim of it, perhaps between a criminal and a victim, perhaps between a man and his employer.”

At first glance, this shared habit might reflect positively on the son. But what was virtue in Abraham may have proved the key to the successful criminal nature of his son.

“Much has been written about [A. R.] by men who knew him well,” noted journalist Nat Ferber. “I cannot understand why he has not been revealed in his true role. Arnold Rothstein was chiefly a busybody with a passion for dabbling in the affairs of others. He was also a fixer, a gobetween, not merely between lawbreakers and politicians, but between one type of racketeer and another. Because he measured his success in these roles by only one yardstick, money-he was always on the make. It follows that I might have placed his penchant for making money first, but this was a trait he shared with many. As a fixer and a gobetween, he stood alone.”

It fell to Carolyn Rothstein to make the connection-and to understand the difference between father and son:

Invariably Arnold came out of these affairs of mediation successful, but usually at a sacrifice of time and money to himself. He had to be a big shot, and a big shot couldn’t afford to be cheap. It was one of the many ways in which he fed his inordinate vanity, a vanity which grew hungrier and hungrier as the years rolled past.

I am not trying to compare the social, religious or moral qualities of the father and son. I am merely submitting the fact that where the father in legitimate channels made sacrifices to help persons in trouble, the son did exactly the same service in the purlieu of the half-world and the underworld, and in the great world too, for that matter.

Arnold Rothstein’s relationship with his parents remained difficult, even into the 1920s, even into his middle age. It was not entirely his fault. In his own way, A. R. tried to be a good son. When Abraham Rothstein fell into financial hard times, his son assumed responsibility for $350,000 in debts-but that was not enough to erase his unforgivable sin, marrying outside his father’s faith.

In 1923 sixty-year-old Esther Rothstein contracted pneumonia. Her physician advised the family that she lay very near death. Her children-including A. R.-hastened to her side. But it being the Sabbath, his wife dying or not, Abraham prepared for synagogue, taking Edgar and Jack with him.

A. R. tried joining them.

“You cannot,” his father stopped him quietly but firmly. “Have you forgotten? You are dead.”

A. R.‘s limousine brought him home, but he couldn’t remain there. Carolyn’s presence only reminded him of his father’s displeasure. He headed for Reuben’s, taking his grief with him. No one dared approach-except Sidney Stajer. Stajer asked what was wrong.

“I’d like to go to the synagogue and pray for my mother, but I can’t,” Arnold responded. “Besides, I’ve forgotten the prayers.”

“I know them,” said Stajer. “I’ll go to the synagogue and pray for her in your place.”

Maybe, that kind of caring, that occasional break from the fast buck, was why Arnold liked his drug-addicted friend.

Arnold’s siblings married, but their unions brought him scant happiness. Sister Edith wed Henry Lustig, a former produce pushcart vendor now in wholesale. A. R. loaned Henry money to enter the restaurant business, forming Manhattan’s Longchamps chain. In return, Arnold not only found a tenant for one of his numerous properties, he became Lustig’s partner. The chain prospered. But Rothstein suspected Henry of skimming profits. One day, Lindy’s received a delivery from Lustig’s wholesale business, Henry Lustig Co., and Arnold noted the price of each item carefully. The next day he phoned Longchamps’ comptroller, inquiring what he paid for the same items. Lustig charged Longchamps more. A. R. was being taken. Lustig was shifting profits from his partnership with Rothstein to his own business. “Buy me out or I’ll close up the place,” Arnold threatened. The partnership ended.

Arnold’s relations were hardly better with a young relative named Arthur Vigdor. Vigdor needed assistance for medical school. Arnold provided help-all of $25.00. Decades later Vigdor, whose first job on graduation was at Longchamps, still referred to Rothstein as a “rotten bastard.”

In early 1928, A. R.‘s youngest brother, Jack, eloped with wealthy heiress Fay Lewisohn-wounding Arnold grievously. Virginia Fay Lewisohn represented New York’s Jewish aristocracy. Her late father had been a wealthy and respected Manhattan real estate baron. Her maternal grandfather, Randolph Guggenheimer, founded (with halfbrother Samuel Untermyer) Guggenheimer, Untermyer and Marshall-not just the nation’s premier Jewish law firm, but among the most prestigious of all American firms.

But Arnold had heaped such shame upon the family name that Jack Rothstein could not bring it to this union. He became “Jack Rothstone”-and broke his brother’s heart.

By 1928 Arnold and Carolyn had separated, but the “Rothstone” news so upset A. R., that he phoned his estranged wife, asking to see her. It was the “only time I ever saw Arnold show great emotion,” she recalled. “When he arrived he began to weep. Tears rolled down his cheeks…. I am sure that this was by far the worst blow Arnold ever suffered in his life.”

Arnold Rothstein’s marriage to Carolyn had not been good for quite some time. He claimed to love his wife. He claimed to need her, and on a certain emotional level, he did. As he cut himself off from parents and from normal morality and decent society she became his emotional anchor, someone to come home to, someone waiting there for him.

He should have gotten a dog.

Carolyn Rothstein was kept on an emotional leash, increasingly isolated from her friends, a web of fear imprisoning her and her husband behind iron doors and barred windows and a cordon of thuggish bodyguards. And while A. R. professed love for Carolyn, his actions spoke a different language. When she would travel and write or wire her husband, he would toss the correspondence to his secretary contemptuously, ordering her to respond. “You know how to answer that-,” he would bark, “the usual junk.”

It wasn’t any better when Carolyn was in New York. He might take her to the track, but generally he left her alone, night after night, as he pursued the additional millions that were never enough. When he returned, it was to a separate bedroom. Rothstein biographer Leo Katcher tells a tale of sexual incompatibility. Katcher didn’t footnote, didn’t cite sources, so his allegation is difficult-if not impossible-to verify. But it may indeed be true.

Carolyn Rothstein claimed ignorance of Inez Norton, but she knew of other “other” women. Most are now unknown, but we do know that A. R. set aside a $100,000 trust fund for former Follies showgirl Joan Smith. But she died in 1926, and the fund reverted to Carolyn. An even earlier conquest by A. R. was minor actress Gertie Ward.

Most important was Barbara “Bobbie” Winthrop, another Ziegfeld girl, a beautiful blonde, with wide blue eyes and an upturned nose. Carolyn Rothstein knew about Bobbie Winthrop. She read it in the papers.

Not directly, but she knew. A wife often does. The paper wasn’t even a real newspaper, just a scurrilous scandal sheet called Town Topics, and one day it carried this item:

A tailor-made man prominent in the guessing fraternity is seen nightly in the Broadway restaurants with beautiful Bobbie Winthrop.

“Guessing fraternity” translated into gambling fraternity. That part was clear to all, but it was the phrase “tailor-made man” that convinced Carolyn. Few members of the Broadway fraternity were as fastidious as her husband. Feminine intuition took hold.

She confronted her husband.

He confessed. He admitted everything-everything except that Bobbie Winthrop meant any thing to him. He promised to leave her, but hadn’t he also promised to leave gambling? At one point he presented Bobbie with an envelope containing $100,000 in bonds. Bobbie liked the good life, expected to be cared for in showgirl fashion, expected a luxury apartment and lavish and numerous presents. But she never touched those bonds. And one day Arnold came to her-as he had approached Carolyn in Saratoga-and wanted back his largesse to invest elsewhere. She handed the envelope back untouched.

They had first met in 1913, when Bobbie accompanied Peggy Hopkins Joyce and American Tobacco Company President Percival S. Hill to Arnold’s gambling house-and Hill dropped $250,000 in a single night of play. Arnold considered her a good-luck charm. Then he considered her something more.

They kept company through the years. She was, after all, an attractive woman and one-unlike his wife-that he could simply enjoy. “She [Bobbie] was a very beautiful girl, with blonde hair and blue eyes,” Carolyn Rothstein wrote bitterly, “noted for her dancing, and her figure-just the sort of young woman with whom a man, vain of his position in a false society such as that of Broadway, might enjoy being seen.”

Yet, while A. R. may not have kept Bobbie Winthrop on a pedestal, he often put her in a lonely corner of his busy life. “I never knew a man who neglected women more,” detective Val O’Farrell said of Rothstein, and so it was with Bobbie. Miss Winthrop was enjoyable company but could not compete with cards and dice and thousanddollar gold notes.

The Rothsteins never had children, though Arnold was surpris ingly sympathetic to youngsters. In 1924 Rothstein nearly adopted one-a nine-year-old creature of the streets and speakeasies named “Red” Ritter. Filthy and dressed in clothes barely better than rags, Red sang and danced for passersby and for patrons of such chic clubs as Owney Madden’s Silver Slipper and Texas Guinan’s El Fay Club, where he was a particular favorite. Arnold took a liking to him and brought Red to Wallach’s, where he bought him a complete new outfit before taking him home to Carolyn-or “Momma” as Arnold called her.

A. R. wanted him in Carolyn’s care, exposed to manners and society, to outings in the country and golf and tennis and horsemanship.

Red wasn’t easily tamed. He retained his ragged outfits-“Dem’s my workin’ clo’se”-and his late-night, early-morning working hours. Still, things might have worked had not the boy’s mother displayed unnecessary avarice, hinting strongly that she desired a house or at the least an apartment if Arnold adopted the boy. A. R. hired a detective to investigate the waif’s family, and the results were disappointing, if not surprising. The mother had a boyfriend who exploited and beat her. A supposedly sick older brother was actually in Sing Sing for armed robbery. None of this was Red’s fault, but Arnold had enough, his paternal instincts were exhausted quickly, and that was the last of little Red Ritter.

Arnold thus had no kids, but he always had his girlfriends. Until late 1927 he also always had his wife. One night he reached their Fifth Avenue home and, as usual, headed silently for his own bedroom.

“Arnold!” he heard her voice. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Are you all right? Is there anything wrong? Do you want me to call a doctor?”

“I’m feeling fine,” she said. “I want to talk with you.”

“You had me worried. What’s happened?”

“I want a divorce, Arnold.”

“Why? What have I done?”

“We cannot go on like this. You have more money now than we need. Why don’t you retire-get out of the life you have been living, and let us enjoy ourselves together?”

“It’s too late. I can’t do it. You know there is no one I love except you, and that you always have been the only woman in the world, but I’ve gotten into it, and I can’t get out of it. Why, every one would think I was a welsher if I quit now that I’ve got a few millions.”

“I can’t stand this any longer.”

“All right, you go ahead and do whatever you think will make you happy. I’ll give you twenty-five grand a year unless you marry again. If you marry I’ll give you fifteen grand as long as you live with your husband. If he dies, or you leave him, I’ll make it twenty-five grand again. But I wish you wouldn’t leave me after all these years.”

Arnold responded to Carolyn’s demand for divorce in a way oddly progressive for the times and for him. He suggested that they see a psychologist, Dr. John Broadus Watson, founder of the behaviorist school of psychology. She agreed. A. R. visited Dr. Watson first. Rothstein revealed the basic problem in their relationship, likening his wife to a beautiful doll in a glass case that he could not bear to defile or tarnish. In other words, to have sex with her.

Dr. Watson relayed this to Carolyn. He didn’t have to wait for her response. “I’m a woman, not a doll,” she snapped.

“Not to him,” explained Watson. “It isn’t that he doesn’t want you to be a woman. It’s just that he’s unable to think of you that way. It’s all in his conditioning. It might be possible to change him, Mrs. Rothstein, but it would take a long time. I’ve told him that.”

Carolyn wanted to know her husband’s response. Watson said Arnold gave almost no response, just a shrug of disappointment: “I think he believed I could give him a pill or give you one and then everything would be all right.”

Thus ended the Rothsteins’ experiment with therapy-and basically their marriage. Dr. Watson recommended that they separate formally, and A. R. honored the generous financial offer he had previously made Carolyn.

Separations are difficult. No matter how great the hurt, part of you wants to make it work, to try again. While preparing for a trip, Carolyn confided to her maid Freda, a woman she felt close to, that she was considering reconciliation. Freda literally fainted. On reviving, she pleaded: “I couldn’t bear to see you go back to Mr. Rothstein” and explained that while Arnold begged for forgiveness, he continued to see other women. That finished it. Carolyn Rothstein never again considered reconciliation.

One night in 1927, after Carolyn and Arnold had first separated, he called her. He often called, but this time he was distraught. Bobbie Winthrop had died after a long illness. In fact, she had committed suicide. “Sweet,” Arnold said, fighting back tears. “Bobbie is dead.”