Daughter of the King

by Lansky, Sandra

  Thomas Edison had lived here, and, most important to Daddy, Robert Lincoln, the son of Daddy’s revered “Uncle Abe.” I could only hope Daddy and my uncles could become as respected in their business as these Jersey Shore predecessors. I played with the children of all these powerful men, my “cousins.” It was simple, swimming and sunning and riding bicycles, going to Asbury Park, now famous for Bruce Springsteen, then famous for its boardwalk, its carousel, its imposing casino, which was a beach club that had nothing to do with gambling and was designed by the same architects who built New York’s Grand Central Station.

  I normally never liked to eat very much, but the salt air made me hungry for the cotton candy, the toffee, the popcorn, the hot dogs, the all-American junk. Daddy couldn’t have picked a more all-American spot to celebrate his birthday on the Fourth of July. His idea of relaxing was sitting outside overlooking the sea, drinking scotch, smoking cigarettes, and playing gin rummy with my uncles and other men like Uncle Benny, visiting from California. Here in the Jersey breeze, America’s highest rollers would get all worked up over their hands as they played for a penny a point. Daddy and Benny also enjoyed fierce handball competitions. You could see how intense they could be. In those games, you could see how these men could rule their world.

  Despite my summers in Deal and my travels with my parents all over the country and to Cuba, as a little girl my New York was a very limited slice of Manhattan, bounded on the north by 96th Street, the south by 42nd Street, the west by the Hudson, and the east by Fifth Avenue. I never visited the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building or Gracie Mansion, never saw Wall Street or Greenwich Village, never was taken to Macy’s or Gimbels. Daddy did take Paul and Buddy to Yankee Stadium to see baseball, but not me. They said I was too little.

  I certainly wasn’t shown my Daddy’s roots on the Lower East Side, where his gang had gotten its start running garages of hot cars that transported illegal booze. Occasionally we would go to Brooklyn to visit Daddy’s mother, Grandma Yetta. But this was fancy Brooklyn, not poor Brooklyn. Daddy had set his mother up in a luxurious apartment on Ocean Parkway, the grandest boulevard in the borough, supposedly modeled on a street in Paris. It went all the way out to Coney Island, where they never took me, either.

  Grandma Yetta was very sharp, and she didn’t seem very Old World at all, like Grandpa Lansky was supposed to have been. I was too young to remember him, but Grandma Yetta would later become a great friend to me. She knew everything and about everyone, and I could see sometimes how all her chattering, especially about Uncle Benny in Las Vegas and all his tsuris (trouble, I learned to translate), would make my reserved father very nervous.

  That, and stories like how her sister had also immigrated to the States and raised a family. This sister’s immigrant husband was so proud of his kids that he then took them back to Poland to show them off to the relatives who stayed behind. But his timing was terrible. Just on his visit, the Nazis invaded, and they took him and his kids to a concentration camp and killed them all. Neither Mommy nor Daddy had wanted my tender ears to hear horror stories like that, but Grandma had a mind and a mouth of her own. I could see where Daddy got his drive and power. Everyone said his brother Jack, who seemed weak and passive, was much more like their father.

  Some of Yetta’s horror stories turned out to be comforting. Yetta told me how she had lost two daughters, Lena and Rose, who would have been my aunts, Lena to walking pneumonia in 1915 and Rose in 1928, to skin cancer, just before Daddy married Mommy. That’s why he needed a wife, she told me. That’s why he treasured his daughter, she assured me. And that I would always be Daddy’s pet, the most important woman in his life. “More than Mommy?” I wondered.

  “More than anybody,” Yetta declared, in the same sweepingly confident tone that Daddy had when he made his pronouncements.

  Grandma Lansky liked to talk to Daddy in Yiddish, not to keep secrets like Mommy did, but because that was her first language, and Daddy’s, too. When Mommy was there with us, I think that made her uncomfortable. But she often let Daddy take me alone. The only old world she liked was France, not Russia. Yetta was a wonderful cook; all her Jewish classics, like lokshen soup, latkes, blintzes, and gefilte fish were, to me, better than Dinty Moore’s. Somehow with her, I had a big appetite, but nowhere else.

  My first inkling that I was Jewish came from Yetta. I was totally confused, going from her world in Brooklyn back to our world on West End, from blintzes to bacon. Somehow I had a sense that Brooklyn, even fancy Brooklyn, was more real than West End. In a few years I would see exactly how right I was, how the Beresford, the ultimate New York building where we would soon move, was one big mirage.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MAKE BELIEVE BALLROOM

  In 1942 we moved to the Beresford at 211 Central Park West, on the corner of 81st Street. This was a real castle in the sky, built in 1929, just before the crash, when rich people thought that the sky had no limit. Our apartment on the 19th floor was vast (Jerry Seinfeld lives next door today), with a huge terrace overlooking Central Park and an army of doormen and elevator men in fancy uniforms to wait on us.

  Our unit, 19J, was as close to a palace as you could have in New York. There were four bedrooms, two maid’s rooms, a restaurant-sized kitchen and pantry, a breakfast room, a dining room, a marble foyer, a paneled library for Daddy and clothes closets Mommy could live in, a vast living room, and more bathrooms than I could count, with black tiles and stall showers with multiple shower heads. The bathrooms were so art deco that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Fred Astaire coming out of one of the showers. Daddy’s library was my favorite. It looked like it came from a European university. He had walls and walls of books and three sets of encyclopedias: Colliers, the Book of Knowledge, and the Britannica. There was nothing he didn’t want to know about. For an eighth-grade dropout, he was the most learned man I ever saw.

  I had a huge room where I could see the spires of the new George Washington Bridge in the distance over the water towers of the Upper West Side. They sort of looked like space ships. The room was blue and white with fleur-de-lys wallpaper and French provincial furniture. Throughout the apartment were priceless Oriental rugs and silk carpets that the maids took up in spring to display the parquet floors. Summer was too hot for rugs. Mommy got her help from Mrs. Gooding, who ran an employment agency in Harlem. She looked just like Aunt Jemima on the pancake mix boxes. Mommy kept Mrs. Gooding very busy, because no maid could get the apartment clean enough. She was always on her hands and knees cleaning up after the maids. A microscopic amount of dust would drive her crazy, and she would be on the phone to Mrs. Gooding to find her someone new.

  If I thought Mommy was away all the time buying clothes and getting beauty treatments, decorating this apartment would take her away forever. Mommy loved to decorate, to design built-in furniture and discover rare pieces. Her impeccable, refined taste ran to French antiques, hence my French nursery school. I later learned that the buildings across Central Park on Fifth and Park Avenues were more “exclusive” than the Beresford, which was another way of saying they didn’t accept any, or many, Jewish families, not with poor Russian roots like Daddy’s. In the 1950s bestseller Marjorie Morningstar, Herman Wouk’s Jewish princess heroine lived in the Beresford. Given that my parents didn’t see us as a Jewish family, I’m surprised, particularly given my mother’s Francophile cultural fantasies, that she didn’t have us living on the WASPy Upper East Side.

  Maybe the Lansky name was a deal breaker. Or maybe it was the Lansky deeds. But Mommy was a cultural striver, rather than a social climber. She wasn’t conflicted about her roots. She didn’t try to conceal her Jewish background. She didn’t want to become a WASP. She didn’t care about getting her name in the columns. She just wanted to live like a queen, and her children to live like princes and princesses. And in this regard, at least in the material sense, Daddy made her dreams come true.

  No sooner had we moved in than the lessons started. At age fi
ve I was taking ballet lessons, piano lessons, ice skating lessons at the rink in Rockefeller Center. Mommy would watch from one of the two cafés beside the rink. The best part was Mommy taking me for hot cocoa at Schrafft’s after the lessons. I could actually ice skate on our terrace; it was that big, so the lessons had some utility. The ballet lessons were Daddy’s idea. He was a good friend of Leon Leonidoff, a Russian-born ballet master and impresario who staged all the shows at Radio City Music Hall. He did the “Living Nativity” Christmas show, with live camels and elephants, re-creating the Holy Land on stage.

  We had the best seats at that show and at the equally famous “Glory of Easter” show, which re-created St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Easter Parade right on stage. It was funny how all these Christian spectacles were created by Jewish men like Mr. Leonidoff and his boss Roxy Rothafel, another friend of Daddy’s who had built the famous Roxy Theatre. Mr. Leonidoff also created the Rockettes, and we’d see them, too, dressed as daffodils with the longest legs on earth.

  Daddy didn’t want me to be a Rockette, but he would have liked if I had become a ballerina. To that end, Mr. Leonidoff set me up in the best school in the city, right behind Carnegie Hall. The main reason I went was because I wanted to get the ballet shoes. I wasn’t that great at the dancing part, though I lasted there longer than the French nursery school. Mommy herself took me into Central Park and taught me to roller skate. I had never thought of her as athletic. I assumed she was too delicate and pampered for any sports. But she really surprised me. Mommy loved taking me to parks, Central, Riverside, and she loved the Central Park Zoo, probably more than I did. She was big on chimps. One of them she named “Jimmy,” and he responded to her whenever she called his name, coming over and reaching his hand to her out of the cage, pure beauty and the beast.

  The fall before I turned six, in 1943, Mommy enrolled me at Birch Wathen, a fancy finishing school twelve blocks away up on West 94th Street. The school building was a limestone townhouse that looked like it belonged in Paris. Maybe that’s why Mommy picked it. She took me up there each day in the morning and picked me up in the afternoon, either driving Daddy’s Oldsmobile or in a cab. She refused to let me go by myself, even though the school was so close to us. All she could ever talk about was the Lindbergh kidnapping. Although that crime took place in 1932, Mommy treated it as if it had happened yesterday and could happen again to me tomorrow. Most of my new classmates were WASPy debutantes in training, though not every girl was in the Social Register. One who wasn’t was Barbara Walters, who was closer to Buddy’s age. Her father, Lou, owned the Latin Quarter nightclubs in New York and Miami and was a friend of Daddy’s, as both men were working the same beat. Barbara would have been a perfect match for Buddy. I wish my parents had fixed them up.

  When we moved into the Beresford I got my first dog, a smart and elegant fox terrier. He could have been a double for Asta, the dog in the Thin Man films who was as much of a star as William Powell and Myrna Loy. The Thin Man movies were selling the same art deco damn-the-Depression fantasy as the Astaire/Rogers films. Mommy bought it hook, line, and diamond tiara.

  That year that I started Birch Wathen, Mommy took me to a movie that she surely thought was the Hollywood fantasy version of her life. This was the romantic comedy-drama Mr. Lucky, starring Cary Grant as Meyer Lansky, or rather as a devious gambler-promoter-criminal named Joe “the Greek” Adams who plans to rob a war-charity casino that he is running. Laraine Day played the glamorous East Side socialite who falls for him. Of course there was a happy ending; Cary Grant goes straight and love conquers crime. If only. Mommy loved it and sat through it again with Flo Alo, and maybe even more times with her other friends, as if to say, see, I married Cary Grant. Not bad, eh?

  Our Asta, whom we named Petey, for God knows whom, was a gift from one of my uncles, Uncle Nig Rosen, whose name I should have been ashamed to say in front of our two black housekeepers. Uncle Nig’s real name was Harry Stromberg. They called him Nig because of the dark tropical tan he cultivated to cover his terrible acne scars. Nig looked scary. Nig and his brother Dan Stromberg were major Philadelphia mobsters. The Rosen boys had succeeded their mentor Max “Boo Boo” Hoff, who had been the preeminent bootlegger in the City of Brotherly Love, sort of what King Solomon was to Boston.

  Unlike Daddy, who made a big point of abjuring drugs, Uncle Nig, according to Buddy, my fount of inside information, was said to have made his post-Prohibition fortune in trafficking heroin through Mexico. Maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe the tan came not from the Mexico drug routes but from Florida or somewhere innocent. Nig and Dan seemed too nice to be doing anything bad. But then again, so did Daddy. I wasn’t about to call Daddy on the carpet. Mommy, too, was willing to look away from the possibly awful truth.

  We all adored the dog, even when he would invariably bite any deliveryman who happened to cross our threshold. At first Petey would be docile, tricking the deliveryman into saying what a cute, sweet dog. Then Petey would spring and bite. Petey cost Mommy a fortune in tips. We even sent him to obedience school, but he failed. Daddy and Mommy both took turns walking Petey in Central Park, and I would always tag along. Petey never bit any of the family.

  The only time we all enjoyed our palatial apartment as a family was in our ritual six o’clock dinners. It was just Mommy, Daddy, Buddy, Paul, and me at this big table, waited on by our cook and maid, always in crisp black and white uniforms. Mother was too spoiled to have ever learned to cook. Most people would have found our cook’s southern-style cooking, with lots of hot biscuits and sweet potatoes and collard greens delicious, but I didn’t really like any of it. All I wanted were Kellogg’s Rice Krispies drowned in applesauce. Kids . . .

  Daddy, the epicure who knew all the best restaurants in America, was as appalled at my lack of interest in fine food as he was at Mommy’s. Never forgetting her mother’s weight, she picked at her dishes and shuffled the food around on her plate. I tried to give my food to Petey under the table, but when Paul was home he would eat my food for me. He said the military school was starving him to death, and he made up for it in New York.

  Mommy liked being super-organized. She hated any surprises. Aside from holidays, when we’d have ham and turkey, every night had a set main course, roast chicken Mondays, lamb chop Tuesdays, roast beef Wednesdays, liver and bacon Thursdays, meatloaf Fridays. Thank goodness we never had fish. For dessert there would always be a big cake baked by Mrs. Gooding, who ran the employment agency but who was also a great cook. Saturdays my parents went out, and Sunday the maids were off, so we’d go out together for Chinese or Italian. The coolest thing at dinner was watching Daddy carve the food. He had the hands of a surgeon. You should have seen what he could do to a chicken, or a turkey on Thanksgiving. He couldn’t bear seeing anyone pick up a wing or a drumstick with his hands. When his brother, Uncle Jack, did that, he called him a “savage.”

  I didn’t learn to cut up my own food until I was ten. I saw Buddy’s food being cut up for him by the maid, and I didn’t think it was fair that I should have to cut my own. I was too self-centered to realize that Buddy wasn’t strong enough to cut his food. As I said, I was that spoiled. Not that Buddy wasn’t spoiled himself. Daddy had Julie Fink, one of his Baltimore sales representatives from the national jukebox company he owned, install a Wurlitzer in Buddy’s dormitory room at his school in Maryland. Julie became Buddy’s valet and took him to his row house in Baltimore on weekends to join his wife and family. I visited a few times and couldn’t figure out how to tell one house from another except by the numbers. They all looked exactly alike from the outside. I was glad we didn’t live in Baltimore.

  I’m sure Buddy was the only boarding school student in America with his own private jukebox. No one begrudged him the luxury, and he became a great expert on popular music. Daddy was frustrated that he wouldn’t spend half the time on his studies that he did on the big bands, but Buddy could tell Artie Shaw from Glenn Miller from the first few notes, and he was a big fan of Sinatra,
Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, and all the other big stars who worked in Daddy’s nightclubs. Buddy did get stronger (miracles did happen!) and was able to walk with braces. Daddy would urge him on, “If Roosevelt can do it, so can you!”

  I never thought of Buddy as handicapped. I got so used to his disabilities that I only could admire his many abilities. He was a master at board games, and strong enough to move the pieces. I could never learn chess, but Buddy was great, a real Bobby Fischer. He must have had Daddy’s strategy gene. But Buddy’s prime passion was show business. Once Buddy could go out, Daddy would have George Wood, who knew them all, introduce Buddy to the singers or take him to their shows, usually at the Copacabana. I was so jealous, but my time would come.

  When we were all home together dinners were formal affairs, Daddy in a suit, Mommy in a fancy dress, Paul in his uniform, Buddy in jacket and tie, and me in one of my custom dresses from Saks. Daddy would run the show, constantly asking my brothers about history and geography, and, most importantly, mathematics. He would come up with all sorts of math exercises, addition, multiplication, division, and the boys were supposed to answer. Dinner was like a quiz show, with the reward being Daddy’s satisfaction. Paul always won. He was a great student. Buddy couldn’t seem to care less. He might not have been able to beat Paul at math, but Buddy ruled the table in current events and sports. Buddy was smart as a whip. He might have made a great agent, like George Wood, and maybe that’s why Daddy cultivated George so much, to be Buddy’s mentor when he finished school and started a career.