Daughter of the King

by Lansky, Sandra

  All Daddy’s businesses seemed to make lots and lots of money—the nightclubs, the dog tracks, and the casinos, which I never saw. Actually I did see one once. It was at the Riviera, where Frank Sinatra had spilled the ice, and which was primarily owned by Uncle Willie Moretti, even though they had another guy’s name on the door, first Ben Marden’s, then Bill Miller’s. Spotlights were for the stars, the “help,” Uncle Willie would joke. The owners didn’t have to show off. Daddy was asked to meet someone unexpected and he didn’t want to leave me alone at the table, so he took me with him. It was like a maze in an amusement park, up stairs, down stairs. Then we went into a janitor’s storage closet, full of mops and light bulbs and cleaning supplies.

  A big bouncer, who was sitting there, plugged in an electric fan. I had no idea why, until, like in the movies, a secret wall opened, which led down another corridor into a big bright room with chandeliers and men dealing cards in tuxedos and roulette wheels spinning. It was a real casino, my first one. Daddy met his friend, who was so wrapped up in his gambling he couldn’t leave the table. I had a ginger ale and got a lot of smiles and winks from the pretty showgirls sitting with their dates. They seemed bored to death.

  Aside from his outbursts at waiters or waitresses who served him his hamburger the wrong way, I never saw my father lose his temper. Nor did he and my mother ever fight. Except once. Mommy was angry with me about something and she slapped my face in front of Daddy. I’m sure she didn’t mean to whack me very hard, but my ear turned all red. Daddy went crazy, jumped up and grabbed Mommy’s arm. I thought he would break it. “You fool!” he raised his voice to a pitch I had never heard. “Do you want her to end up like you?”

  Daddy stormed off to his library, maybe to read Thomas Paine and calm down. Mommy begged my forgiveness. She hugged me and put ice on my ear. I was easy. “Sure, I forgive you. You can even hit me again. It didn’t hurt. I love you. You know I do,” I comforted her. She smiled a little. I liked seeing what words could do. Mommy explained to me how her brother Julie had hit her as a child and punctured her eardrum, causing her to have surgery and all sorts of problems. Then Daddy came out, all calm himself, and we all hugged and kissed like a normal all-American family. The next day Mommy took me to the doctor, just to make sure my ear was all right. It was. She never hit me again.

  I had a hard time forgetting my shock at that fight. I had an even bigger shock one day when Daddy came to pick me up at Birch Wathen instead of Mommy. “She’s gone away for a rest,” was all he would tell me. Rest? She was tired, he explained. Women did that all the time. No big deal. When would she come back, I pressed him. I had never been without her. “Soon,” he said in a tone that told me not to continue the questioning. Back at the Beresford, our regular maids looked after me, as Daddy drove me to and from school. He also had another maid come in, just to help out.

  Mommy did come back, a week later, but not the way I ever expected to see her. She showed up in the middle of the afternoon, just as Daddy had dropped me off from school. She was wearing a nightgown in the middle of the afternoon. But it wasn’t one of her fancy silk gowns from Saks or Wilma’s. It was gray and made of some rough fabric. Her normally perfect hair was all scraggly and a mess. She had on no makeup. Her eyes were all bloodshot. Some “rest” she had gotten!

  “Don’t make me go. Don’t let them take me,” she begged me. I had no idea what she meant, but I was terrified to see her like this. No sooner had she issued her plea than the door to the apartment opened. The elevator man and the doorman were there. Four men in white coats rushed in. They looked like waiters. But I knew they couldn’t be waiters. Mother screamed and ran to the master room and locked herself in. Soon Daddy arrived. He pounded on the door. She refused to come out. Daddy ordered me to go to my room. “What’s wrong with Mommy?” I begged him to tell me.

  “She’s sick,” he said. “I’m here now. She’ll be fine.”

  Ha! I thought. I went to my room and heard the terrible banging noise of the men breaking down Mommy’s doors. “Don’t let her jump,” I heard Daddy instructing them. “She could jump.”

  Oh, no, I despaired. I wanted to go out and plead with Mommy not to kill herself, to tell her I loved her, and that whatever bad things I had done to make her feel this way, I would never, ever do again, whatever, making her horse run away, not studying, playing with Terry, anything. As afraid as I was for Mommy, I was just as afraid of Daddy, of disobeying him. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I ran out into the hall, just as the men in white coats smashed open the great French double doors to her room.

  When I saw Mommy, I was somehow vastly relieved. She hadn’t jumped. But I’ve never seen anyone so haunted, so tormented. She just looked at me, almost as if I had betrayed her. “You . . . you?” Was she accusing me? I don’t know. She just went limp, and then the men put her in her own white coat, one with lots of straps that made her their prisoner. It was a straitjacket. I hated it. Then they took her away.

  I couldn’t stand the pitying looks the doorman and elevator man gave me. I guess they felt sorry for me. They had always been so nice. The whole place, the Beresford, had always seemed so perfect. I’m sure they weren’t used to this. I felt like a trespasser, a part of a crazy family that didn’t belong in this royal residence.

  I truly thought I would never see my mother again. But once the men in the white coats left, Daddy appeared and did his best to comfort me. “She’s going to be okay, darling.”

  “Liar!” was what I thought, but couldn’t bring myself to say the word.

  Daddy couldn’t read my mind, but he gave me that dark look anyhow. But then he hugged me. He kissed my forehead. He wiped away my tears. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then, big businessman that he was, he made his forecast. “Your mother will be home in a few weeks. She’ll be fine. We all get a little crazy sometime. I’m taking care of it.”

  I don’t know why, but I believed him. And Meyer Lansky was as good as his word. In about four weeks, I came home from Birch Wathen, and there was Mommy, not in a straitjacket, but looking as good as new, rested, fresh, in her Wilma finery. She took me in her arms and gave me a huge kiss on the lips, something she had never done. She gave me a sailor doll that she had actually made for me. They must have had an arts and crafts workshop at Mommy’s “spa.” Her craftsmanship was amazing. I had no idea she could do that. But there were no explanations, no apologies. It was as if the nightmare had never happened. It was don’t ask, don’t tell. I wanted to will away the whole episode, the worst nightmare I ever had. And so I did. And nothing happened again. It was the Lanskys as usual, Daddy mostly gone, Mommy mostly shopping, me mostly riding. That was as good as I could hope for, and good enough for me. About a year later, however, Mommy hit me with another big one: Daddy had moved out. He was gone. She had asked him for a divorce.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HOMELAND INSECURITY

  Three remarkable things happened to me between 1946 and 1947, though I’m not sure any of them were related. But they could have been. First of all, I saw my father’s penis. Seeing your father’s penis at age nine isn’t particularly remarkable in itself, but given how private my father was, my accidentally stumbling into the master bathroom while he was getting out of the shower was a pretty big shock for both of us. Our life at the Beresford was pretty buttoned up, and anything but a nudist colony. I’m not sure I ever saw Mommy naked either. But what was remarkable was the enormous size of Daddy’s penis. You couldn’t help but stare at it. It was the first thing you’d notice, like the trunk of an elephant.

  I had seen my brothers’ penises before, when we shared a room together, and off and on. These were nothing out of the ordinary. Boy stuff. But Daddy! Talk about separating the men from the boys. This was something that belonged across the street in the Museum of Natural History. This was the most embarrassed I’d ever been, way worse than falling off my new horse Time Clock when showing off for Paul. I turned bright red, was stunned speechless, and then ran o
ut of the bathroom. Like most controversial things at the Lanskys, Daddy never brought it up, nor did I. However, the image stayed in my mind forever.

  The second remarkable event of my ninth year was getting my period. I was about nine and a half, and from what I later learned from my girlfriends, this was happening about three years early. Of course no one had ever told me about the facts of life, the birds and the bees. Talking about sex at our house would have been like talking about crime. Both were unmentionable. There was no warning for me. I was a little horse-riding tomboy. I didn’t have breasts; I didn’t have anything. I didn’t have a clue. I thought I was bleeding to death, so I showed Mommy, thinking she would take me to the hospital. Instead, she flashed the biggest smile I had ever seen, and gave me a huge hug and kiss, as if I had won a riding competition, or gotten a great report card.

  She soon told Daddy, who gave me a pat on the backside, I’m sure to feel the sanitary napkin Mommy had gotten for me. That was almost as embarrassing as seeing him naked. But he, too—dead serious Meyer Lansky—lit up with a huge smile. Still, nobody told me what it meant, other than “it’s part of growing up.” Mommy told me it hadn’t happened to her until she was sixteen. I guess that was supposed to mean I was a precocious, gifted child, or something like that. Instead, I just felt weird and confused. So I had to turn to Terry and Eileen, who clued me in. I never told them about the penis-sighting episode, but I couldn’t help but wonder if that accidental encounter with Daddy’s great white whale was so traumatic that it accelerated my adolescence.

  Finally, the third remarkable thing of the 1946–1947 period was Daddy’s sudden disappearance from the Beresford, like a thief in the night. In one day, we went from happy family to nonfamily, just as suddenly as seeing my naked father or getting my period, out of nowhere. As it turned out, my parents has been planning the divorce for a long time—a year or so—but in the most cordial way, they kept it from me and my brothers. Like everything else Daddy did, the divorce was a deal, a negotiation. Just business. Yet for me, it wasn’t business as usual, and it shook my ordered little world.

  The divorce business had its origins on the long-distance telephone line to Beverly Hills. Even though Mommy and Aunt Esther Siegel were separated by a whole continent, they seemed to lead copycat lives. They were like the Bobbsey Twins of the aristocracy of what would soon be referred to as “organized crime.” Mommy and Esther both lived in splendor and raised their children like pampered little lords and ladies. On the other hand, they were equally miserable in exactly the same way, singing the same blues over their absentee husbands.

  If Mommy went away for a “rest,” as Daddy had called it, you could be sure Esther had gone to at an equally posh sanitarium, Esther’s Malibu to Mommy’s Riverdale. And if Mommy had electroshock therapy, which Buddy claimed she had, you could bet that Esther had it, too. Although electroshock sounds like some kind of terrible treatment, in those days it was cutting edge—technology, not torture. Daddy never complained about Mommy’s huge bills at Wilma’s and Saks, but I did hear him complaining about her huge long-distance bills. She was on the phone to California day and night with Aunt Esther, bemoaning their mutual mistreatment by their husbands. The American gambling empire that Daddy and Uncle Benny were creating in the mid-1940s was probably the world’s most jealous mistress.

  Uncle Benny, who was always considered one of the world’s great ladies’ men, had also acquired a flesh-and-blood mistress who was giving him even more aggravation than the new wagering mecca of Las Vegas that he and Daddy were laboring to turn into a desert version of Monte Carlo. The challenge was just as absurd as it sounds, trying to turn sand into gold. They pulled it off, although at a horrible cost to both of them; Daddy, his family, Benny, his life.

  One thing Daddy did not seem to have was a weakness for women. In all our nights out on the town, whether in New York or New Jersey or Florida, I never once saw Daddy’s eyes lingering on the hat-check girl at Dinty Moore’s or a showgirl at the Riviera or the Colonial Inn. Broads were for suckers, was how Damon Runyon might have put it, and Daddy was the last guy on earth to be hoodwinked by a doll. However, given what I had seen of Daddy’s huge “asset,” there may have been more romance and intrigue to Daddy’s life than met the eye. Daddy was the master of never showing emotion or weakness. God knows how many showgirls there might have been.

  On the surface, Uncle Benny was just the opposite of Daddy, a true romantic. My brother Buddy, who was the ultimate Hollywood fan, loved to read the movie magazines and recount Benny’s exploits with likes of Jean Harlow, Mae West, and Wendy Barrie, the elegant British actress who got her stage name from her godfather, the author of Peter Pan. Uncle Benny was Buddy’s hero. Uncle Benny’s mistress, or at least his chief mistress, was named Virginia Hill. She had also been the mistress of Uncle Joe Adonis, just as Jean Harlow had also been the mistress of Uncle Abe Zwillman. It was all very incestuous; the family that played together, stayed together. My brother Buddy had met Virginia Hill with either Benny or Joe, or maybe both, at Dinty Moore’s. I guess there was no such thing as too close for comfort.

  Buddy always went on and on about how beautiful Virginia Hill was and how she had kissed him on the lips. What a teenage fantasy that was. He was maybe fourteen at the time, in 1945, and had just moved back with us at the Beresford. He showed me his red lips, and he didn’t want to wash the lipstick off for days. I was reminded of the fairy tale where the princess kisses the frog and turns him into a prince. Poor Buddy just wanted to be loved. I guess we all did.

  Virginia Hill had kissed a lot of frogs. She was a voluptuous, brassy redhead who had escaped Georgia poverty to become a waitress in Chicago. There she had become the pet of the Al Capone mob, ferrying money and jewels around the country for them, hidden in the linings of expensive mink coats they had bought her. She was a real gun moll, a cool character, and a Hollywood character, and Buddy told me how she had gone west to be in movies. There, through Uncle George Raft, who had become the “family star,” she connected with other stars like Errol Flynn and, most dramatically, with Uncle Benny, much to Aunt Esther’s deep dismay. His nickname for her was “Flamingo,” the name he would give to the new resort in Las Vegas that he would build and Daddy would finance, when Benny’s money ran out.

  Sometime in 1946, Esther decided she couldn’t take it anymore. She got a lawyer and demanded a divorce. She got what she wanted and moved her daughters back east to their Scarsdale estate. At exactly the same time, Mommy did exactly the same thing, though I had no idea until the divorce was final in 1947 and Daddy moved out, virtually overnight, that things had changed between them. I still can’t understand why Mommy asked for the divorce, other than to copycat Esther Siegel. Maybe it was a ploy to get Daddy to stay home more. There certainly weren’t other men in Mommy’s life, nor would there ever be.

  That divorce had been the greatest trauma of my life so far, and it was impossible, as usual, to get Daddy, or Mommy, to explain what had happened. Only Buddy would provide some clues. Mommy had apparently been going to psychiatrists several times a week after that terrible trip to the sanitarium. The doctors, Buddy said, had told her a divorce was a good idea, and Daddy was simply giving Mommy what she asked for, as he always did.

  When they went to court to get their divorce, it was more like a business closing than a war. In those days, people couldn’t just get a divorce because they wanted to. They had to show cause. So Daddy got Uncle Jack and Mommy got Aunt Sadie as their witnesses, all very amicable, and they went as a group before the family judge and said how they simply couldn’t get along and how they made each other unhappy. And the judge said fine, if you’re unhappy, I’m happy. Divorce granted. Bang went the gavel.

  Buddy had sneaked a peek at some of the divorce papers, which Mommy had left lying around. They said that Daddy didn’t like the rigid order of meals and everything else Mommy had planned to the split second, like a cruise director, or a drill sergeant. Why did it have to be liver and bacon
only on Thursday? Why couldn’t we have it Wednesday, too? I hated it any day, but Daddy liked it. I couldn’t believe that they’d split the family up over liver and bacon. The problems obviously were a lot deeper than that.

  Until Daddy left, everything had seemed fine, now that Mommy was home again after that awful incident with the men in the white coats. Mommy was back. Paul was back, after years at the military school, enrolled in high school at Horace Mann, the very exclusive boy’s prep school up in Riverdale, where everyone went on to some great college, be it Harvard, Columbia, or West Point. By 1945, the war was over, and somehow the great American victory had not only liberated Europe from Hitler, but had also liberated Paul from the New York Military Academy.

  One of Daddy’s proudest possessions was a memorial book commemorating the Japanese surrender on the battleship Missouri, personally autographed by General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz, as well as by other dignitaries. It was a gift to Daddy from the U.S. Navy for his secret wartime service in purging the waterfront of Axis saboteurs. Daddy treasured that book, and, even if Paul had decided that he now wanted to be a corporation president instead of a general, Daddy would have still pushed him to West Point. The Lanskys, in Daddy’s mind, had a duty to our country, and he wanted Paul to pay our family’s huge debt to America. Still, I’m pretty sure that Paul was also so caught up in our winning the war that West Point would have been his choice under any circumstances.