Daughter of the King

by Lansky, Sandra

  My brothers were home, but not home. With Buddy selling tickets and Paul up at Horace Mann or locked in his room studying night and day, and without Nancy to keep me company, I depended on my best friends Terry and Eileen. But they were each in different parochial schools, so I couldn’t see them as much as I would have liked and needed. Mommy was spending a lot of her time at psychiatrists. Though she was certainly attractive and eligible, Mommy was nearing forty, and being in your forties in the forties was like being in your sixties, or more, today. There wasn’t a lot of dating among the “desperate ex-housewives” of Central Park West. Besides, despite her divorce, Mommy was still, in her mind, married to the great Meyer Lansky. She couldn’t imagine a life with any other man.

  The biggest shock after Daddy’s departure was the brutal murder of Uncle Benny in Beverly Hills in June 1947. He was shot to death in an unsolved rubout at the home of his moll Virginia Hill, while she was away in Europe. My “cousins,” Benny’s daughters Barbara and Millicent, had just left Scarsdale to spend the summer with their father. They were on the Super Chief when the train came to an unexpected stop in the desert a hundred miles from Las Vegas. Several of Benny’s friends were in a big black limousine to pick them up and break the terrible news and to avoid the reporters descending on them at the Las Vegas depot.

  I was away at camp for the first time that summer, so Mommy didn’t tell me until later, just as she had spared me the news that her own father had died that year on Daddy’s birthday, July 4. When she finally did tell me, at the end of the summer, it was just that Uncle Benny had passed away, just like Grandpa Citron. No mention of bullets, not for my tender ears. Daddy was even more vague, and Buddy, who loved to tell hair-raising stories, kept the ones about Benny to himself, maybe on Daddy’s orders. Some of those stories, I learned much later, suggested that Daddy had had advance knowledge of the planned mob hit on Uncle Benny for going grossly over budget on the Flamingo. It was supposedly “just business,” and the idea was that Daddy, the ultimate businessman, had his eye on the bottom line and harbored no sentimentality about his deepest friendship. I never believed that. Benny was pretty much Daddy’s brother.

  I’m not sure how sad Mommy, or even Aunt Esther, were at Uncle Benny’s death, but they must have been concerned about the terrible violence of his being riddled with bullets in Hill’s living room affecting Barbara and Millicent. The girls had surely seen the grotesque photos, with Benny’s eye blown out of its socket, on the front pages of every paper in the land. When I got older, Buddy went into full-disclosure mode and told me the gory details of the rubout. He also said both Mommy and Esther had the “he got what he deserved” attitude, for all the pain Uncle Benny’s Hollywood romances caused his wife. There was something to that.

  In the early fifties, Millicent Siegel married Jackie Rosen, whose father, Morris Rosen, worked for the syndicate of gangland financiers that supposedly ordered the hit on Uncle Benny for his wasteful extravagances with their money, mostly in the name of his obsession with Virginia Hill. This syndicate suspected that Virginia Hill had gone to Europe to hide money stolen from them and they feared that Uncle Benny was going to skip the country and join her. The termination orders had come from the very top, which meant Uncle Charlie Luciano, then in exile in Italy, was still pulling the strings—and the triggers.

  As a token of remembrance to Uncle Benny, and perhaps of remorse over being unable to stop Luciano’s edict, Daddy gave Millicent and Jackie their gala wedding party at the Waldorf-Astoria. That Daddy could have endorsed the union of Benny’s daughter to the son of someone connected with his assassination raised endless troublesome questions. The day Uncle Benny was killed, Morris Rosen and two other syndicate-appointed overseers seized control of the Flamingo and turned it into a huge success.

  Jackie Rosen, like Paul, was a graduate of New York Military Academy, though he didn’t make it to West Pont, just Las Vegas. We were all one big family. The idea that one of the family could kill another, or countenance the killing of another, would have blown my mind, so I was happy to be young, innocent, and sheltered from reality. Thinking of it now just haunts me. How could Millicent marry into the family that so bloodily replaced her father, unless she hated her father, way beyond hatred? How would Paul have felt if Daddy had run off with Virginia Hill? The odd thing was that Buddy would have loved it.

  My own father was unable to save his best friend, a man who was more a brother to him than his real brother. Daddy couldn’t help but have guilty feelings, being the man who arranged the financing to bail out the Flamingo, getting in business with Morris Rosen and ending up making a fortune on the ashes of Uncle Benny’s lost dream. Plus Daddy gave that wedding bash for Millicent and Jackie. How could Daddy have forsaken the man he loved above all others? I’ll never know, because nobody ever kept his feelings more to himself than Meyer Lansky.

  Without Daddy to care for, Mommy devoted herself to me, more than ever. She got me braces for my buck teeth, but she kept cancelling appointments when the orthodontist planned to extract a tooth. Mommy couldn’t bear the thought of my losing a good tooth, so her delays pushed back getting the braces for months. Meanwhile my brothers continued to tease me. I was ready for the dentist to pull all the teeth if he wanted to.

  Mommy and I seemed to be spending all our time at doctors’ offices, either for her mind or my body. I had awful sinus problems. Whenever I had sinus headaches, which was often, she’d put sandbags on my bed to keep the mattress from making any movements that would cause me pain. In the process, I developed a big crush, my very first, on the sandbag-prescriber, Dr. Max Eagle, a general practitioner whose offices were downstairs in the Beresford. I liked his moustache for some reason, and what really drew me to him was the fact that his shots never hurt. I thought he was Jesus.

  Now that my parents had broken up, going to Deal, New Jersey, for family summers was a thing of the past. Mommy now sent me away to camp. For two years I went to a place called Highland Nature Camp, up in Naples, Maine. I hated it because of the mosquitoes and because I seemed to be allergic to everything. My poor sinuses. And I was too timid to ask the camp for sandbags. I refused to see the camp doctor and began writing letters, love letters I guess, to Dr. Eagle, asking him to miraculously cure me by mail. He never replied. Instead, he gave all my letters to Daddy, who drove up to Maine with Nig Rosen’s brother Dan to bring me home. I felt betrayed.

  On the way home we stopped in Boston to have dinner with our old Filipino houseboy Tommy, who was working in a Chinese restaurant. On the road, we almost got killed when Dan ran a blinking red railroad crossing light and we came inches from being crushed by a speeding train. When we got out of the car to catch our breath, Daddy, who was fuming, noticed that Dan’s socks didn’t match. He gave him a quick color quiz and found out that poor Dan was color blind. That blinking red light had looked green to him. Daddy turned volcano red and cursed Dan out, using even more expletives than George Wood, words I never heard Daddy use before, or again. “You shit-eating idiot! You goddamned fool! You almost killed my daughter!” These weren’t businessman words; these were gangster words. Daddy was tougher than I ever thought. I’d never seen Daddy lose his temper like that; it was much worse than if a coffee shop garnished his hamburger with lettuce and tomato. The next summer Daddy paid for my friend Terry to go to Highland Nature with me. I enjoyed it a lot more that time. Misery loved company.

  A measure of how close Daddy held his cards to his chest came in June 1949, just before I left for a new summer camp, this one in the Hudson Valley, much closer to home. There, splashed on the front page of the mass-circulation New York Sun, was a big photo of my father under the banner headline “Lansky Sails in Luxury for Italy.” The article was about my father’s departure on the ocean liner Italia for a European trip. But the big news wasn’t that my father was on the front page described as the “underworld big shot” or the speculation that he was going to Europe to confer with his big business partner Uncle Charlie Lucian
o, now living in Rome. No. The big, big news was that he had “sailed with his wife.”

  Wife? What wife? Mommy was at home in the Beresford, getting me ready for camp. This was no Mommy. This was, as the Sun described, “a slender, attractive brunette, whom he married last winter.” The paper described how Daddy and this new mystery wife “departed in an atmosphere of champagne and orchids, in the manner befitting Lansky’s reputation as a powerful and wealthy underworld figure. The Regal Suite, which they occupied, is the most luxurious that the Italia affords . . . Lansky’s passage for himself and his wife cost him a cool $2600, one way.”

  Luckily, I didn’t find out for quite a while, not until I came home from camp in the fall, and I never saw the paper until many years later. Thank God for that; ignorance was bliss. Those were the pre-Internet days of “yesterday’s papers,” when one day’s headlines became the next day’s wrapping paper, when most news, good or bad, was quickly forgotten. Besides, at age eleven, I wasn’t a newspaper reader. I was a comic book girl.

  Daddy never told me about his trip. I guess he figured I would be away at camp. I didn’t care about his trips. He was always away. But what was horrible to me was that he didn’t tell me about his wife. The amazing thing was that Mommy was spared the news by Buddy, who took cabs all over the city buying up all the copies of the Sun at just about every newsstand from Times Square to 96th Street, to keep this awful truth away from Mommy and from me. Buddy loved Mommy, and he knew how weak she was. It took one to know one. Buddy sensed that the news would devastate Mommy and did everything to keep it from her. That was remarkably thoughtful of Buddy, who was as big a gossip as Walter Winchell. Holding no grudge about the secret marriage, Buddy would move out of the Beresford and in with Daddy and his new bride on 36th Street that fall. Ah, and that explained the Dorothy Hammerstein décor. This romance was no spur-of-the-moment infatuation. It had been going on for years. That apartment was a woman’s place. Now we had the woman.

  Her name was Thelma Schwartz, but she called herself Teddy. With a name like that, I thought she was a boy. She and her husband had a young son and had lived in the same building at 201 West 85th Street as my parents did when they first got married and had Buddy. Thus Teddy and Daddy went back, way, way back, to 1931. They had history. Teddy’s husband had been in the fashion business, but Teddy pushed him into starting a nightclub, and with Daddy being the king of clubs, she naturally sought all the advice she could get from him for free. Because her husband had worked on Seventh Avenue, Teddy had nice clothes. Still, there was something cheap and flashy about her, more Virginia Hill than Jane Froman. Buddy later told me she had been a manicurist. Once I saw her, I saw what Buddy meant. She looked like a manicurist who would do Mommy’s nails. She didn’t look like Mommy.

  After my parents’ divorce, I had actually seen Teddy a couple of times at Daddy’s new 36th Street apartment. I didn’t think much of it. I assumed she was this old acquaintance, there for a visit. How blind I was! I didn’t feel threatened. She wasn’t Miss Rheingold. She wasn’t a chorus girl, not even a hat-check girl. Yes, she did have a very pretty face, with nice features and blonde highlights in her brown hair. But she had ugly legs, like fire hydrants. And she totally lacked Mommy’s quiet, ladylike refinement, which even at my age I associated with class and beauty. Whatever she was, she was persistent, and she was as secretive as Daddy.

  My mother may have missed the papers, but eventually that same day she got the news. Paul got it by reading someone’s paper on the subway home from Horace Mann. That Daddy had gotten remarried was the biggest hurt of all in Mommy’s life with him. That destroyed her pride as a woman. To divorce Daddy was her idea. But when he chose someone new, it was as if he had rejected Mommy for that person. If that seemed a little crazy, there was some method to Mommy’s madness. Teddy was indeed someone whom Mommy had known, and who worked on Daddy for a long, long time, spinning her web.

  The scandal of it all was overwhelming for Paul, who referred to Teddy with quiet, contempt, as “that woman.” He left New York and went for a year to the Sullivan School, a prep school in Washington, D.C., that specialized in placing graduates in the service academies, to prepare for West Point.

  In the winter of 1948, the year before the Teddy romance went public, with Mommy staying home, Paul and I had gone to Miami to spend the Christmas holidays with Daddy. Teddy was there then, too, basically stalking our father. She had just divorced her husband, whose nightclub had failed. Imagine how she must have looked up to Daddy, whose Florida nightclubs, the Colonial Inn and the Club Boheme, were the talk of the town, and of the whole country, packed with stars and millionaires who were reveling in postwar affluence. Daddy didn’t seem the type to be susceptible to flattery, though Teddy must have helped him feel good about himself and feel less bad about having lost Mommy. Whatever, Daddy never mentioned Teddy. Instead, he arranged flying lessons for Paul and trips for me to Pickin’ Chicken and the Lighthouse and the fancy toy store on Lincoln Road. Sometime in the midst of all that activity, Daddy managed to find time to secretly marry Teddy Schwartz. Buddy came down that January, after the marriage and was let in on the secret. He was the last person to be sworn to secrecy, but somehow he managed to button his lip.

  Aside from Buddy, no one in our family knew that secret until the papers hit the stands that day in June 1949. When Mommy found out, she got furious with Buddy for concealing the papers from her. She never forgave him, and I think her anger had a lot to do with Buddy leaving us and moving in with Daddy, and Teddy, on 36th Street that fall. The friendship between Buddy and myself suffered from that move. I was Mommy’s girl, and he was Daddy’s boy, and never the twain could meet. But the presence of Teddy resulted in Buddy cutting me off as “the other side” if not the enemy. I missed having him to play and talk with. I didn’t want to choose sides; I didn’t really have a choice.

  In the summer of 1949, I went off to the new camp, Camp High Point, in Ulster County, New York, up on the Hudson above West Point. I went with a friend named Natalie from the stables. Her family was rich from owning parking garages. I didn’t think that was a particularly good way to get rich, not compared to Daddy’s cool nightclubs and jukeboxes. Cool or not, those garages bought them a big black Cadillac, a fancy home in New Rochelle, and a nice horse for Natalie. High Point was known as a “Jewish” camp. At first that sounded scary, like a concentration camp in the war. But most of the campers were from prosperous Jewish families. There were no prayers or other religious stuff. And the food was really good compared to the junk at Highland Nature.

  I still didn’t think of myself as Jewish, or Christian, for that matter. I didn’t have a label. I was just going to a Jewish camp. Like going to a Chinese restaurant. Natalie and I became pals with two of the boy campers whose fathers were famous singers at the Metropolitan Opera, Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker. The boys were good singers, too, but nothing fancy. We’d all sit by a campfire and sing songs from the Hit Parade, like “‘A’—You’re Adorable” and “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific, which Daddy had taken me to see that spring on Broadway, right before he left on that secret European “honeymoon” with Teddy.

  I was having a good time at High Point until I had a nasty accident, tearing the ligaments of my hand while getting out of the pool. Mommy came up to rescue me. Instead of going back to hot and sticky New York, she took me to stay at a fancy resort hotel nearby at a pretty place called Lake Mahopac. We stayed for a whole month, until school started in September.

  I’m not sure what the name was, but, like the camp, it was the first “Jewish” resort I had ever been to, this place with lots of rabbis and kosher food and comedians like you’d see on television on Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theatre and handsome counselors and dance teachers (like the Patrick Swayze character in Dirty Dancing) who clearly weren’t Jewish. Mommy seemed depressed and barely spoke. All she would eat was cold borscht three times a day and an occasional hot knish. She must have found out about Teddy by t
hen and was staying away from the city, ashamed to show her face. Mommy wasn’t there because she had rediscovered her heritage. She was there to hide out.

  I did my best to have fun at the hotel. One night I went out on the lake with some girls I met without telling Mommy. She would have said no. She was totally overprotective, particularly with my injured hand. The boat flipped over and sank. Somehow we made it back to shore. I was a good swimmer, bad hand and all. Luckily Mommy was asleep when I came in. She would have gone crazy.

  Aside from my boating accident and until I met “that woman,” my stepmother, face-to-face that winter in Florida, the most eventful thing that happened to me that year was meeting a hotel kids’ counselor whom we called Jimmy C. Tall and rugged, Jimmy was more like a young dockworker than the fancier boys who rode at the Aldrich Stables. You might say he looked like what people in a few years, inspired by the likes of James Dean and Marlon Brando, would call a juvenile delinquent. He had a big, Cheshire cat grin, and I liked him. Jimmy took me for a ride in his car, parked in the woods under a full moon, and asked if he could kiss me. I said yes. Why not?

  Jimmy was eighteen. I was eleven and a half. Theoretically, though, I was a woman. This was the first time I was treated like one. I got an even bigger crush on Jimmy C than I had on Dr. Max Eagle. This one was flesh, the other fantasy. But not too much flesh. Consumed with guilt over my transgression, I went to Mommy to confess. “Mommy, I think I did something wrong,” I said, very sheepishly.

  “What did you do, Darling?”

  “This guy kissed me.”

  “Which guy?”

  “Jimmy . . .” I told her all.

  Mommy wasn’t particularly excited. She was distracted by her own miseries. “If that’s all you did, you didn’t do anything wrong,” she rendered her judgment. “But,” she added, “Don’t do anything else. Kissing is enough,” she declared, and I followed her dictates. Sadly, it was not enough for Jimmy C. He stopped taking me out. Thanks for the memories.