Daughter of the King

by Lansky, Sandra

  Over the long meal, Uncle Charlie loved reminiscing about the good old days with Daddy, insisting, over and over, that he’d known everybody and Meyer Lansky was the bravest and finest man he’d ever known. He was so effusive about Daddy that he made me blush. While Daddy, true to form, had never told me anything about Uncle Charlie, Uncle Charlie delighted in telling me everything (well, not quite everything) about the “tough little Jew” who had “surprised the hell outta me” by standing up to his tough street gang that used to beat up the Jewish kids and force them to pay “protection” money of a penny a day so they wouldn’t get beaten up anymore. “We couldn’t beat ’em, so we had to join ’em,” he said of Daddy and Uncle Benny Siegel.

  Luciano’s other best friend was Uncle Frank Costello, and the two Italians and the two Jews became the four musketeers of Prohibition, making their first fortune in bootlegging and later, larger fortunes in gambling, bookmaking, nightclubs, construction, trucking, even restaurants. He amazed Marvin by knowing his family and all about Rapoport’s and Ratner’s. I guess it proved you didn’t have to be Jewish to love blintzes. He didn’t talk about the circumstances that had led to his being here, and not back home in New York where he clearly wanted to be. However, he was confident he’d see us back in New York “one day soon.” He told us how he and Daddy were cooking up “big things in Cuba, big, big things. Maybe we’ll all meet up in Havana,” Uncle Charlie suggested. I liked the idea.

  This was turning into one of the greatest days I’d ever had, and then, over cannolis and the sweetest gelato I ever tasted, Marvin had to go and ruin it. He told Charles Lucky Luciano that we were out of money, that we had spent too much, and that we couldn’t afford to get home. “As a favor to Meyer,” as Marvin so sleazily put it, could he be so kind and help us out so we wouldn’t be stranded in Naples and have to start sending cables home from American Express.

  He lied further by saying we didn’t have return tickets and that it was a terrible misbudgeting on our part. He had gotten “carried away buying Sandi clothes so she could look her most beautiful.” I wanted to take a knife and stab him at the table, right in front of the mob boss to end all mob bosses. I was sure Uncle Charlie would’ve been proud of me, if he’d known. Without batting an eyelash, Uncle Charlie called a waiter over and asked for a big envelope. He then reached into his coat pocket and peeled off a huge wad of Italian lira, put it in the envelope and handed it to Marvin, with a handshake. “Enjoy your honeymoon, kids,” he said. “You’re only young once.” He had his driver, in a big black Lancia, drive us back to the hotel. I gave him a kiss goodbye. It was like kissing Daddy. Petting Bambi farewell, I desperately wanted to apologize for my horrible greedy, uncouth husband. Then I remembered Daddy’s credo. Never complain or explain. I swallowed my shame.

  Back at the hotel, I let Marvin have it. How could he have done such a thing? “He’s rich!” Marvin said, “He’s one of the richest men in the world.” Besides, Marvin said, and here was the kicker, he had counted out the money, and, by the time it was converted into American currency, all he had given us was $50. “What a tightwad!” Marvin complained. One of the richest men in the world was also one of the cheapest, an Italian Uncle Scrooge. He had made a big show of generosity to his best friend’s daughter, and it was one big con. Then again, what would you expect of a gangster?

  That was Marvin’s excuse, and I didn’t believe a word of it. Let me count the money, I demanded, and he refused, claiming it was locked in the hotel safe downstairs, that I was a minor who needed Marvin’s adult status in red-tape-choked Italy to access the safe, and a million other dubious excuses.

  We sailed back to New York from Naples a couple of days later, and I refused to speak to Marvin for the entire crossing. Not that he seemed to care. He was too busy doing sports on deck and hanging around all the ship’s bars, drinking top-label Scotch and champagne and giving lavish tips (surely with Uncle Charlie’s money) to the dashing young stewards. Fittingly, the ship was the Andrea Doria, the Titanic of the 1950s, which would sink the next year in a tragic collision off Nantucket. But my second honeymoon with Marvin was already the voyage of the damned.

  Back in New York, our excitement over our new son brought Marvin and me back together. Not that Marvin spent that much time with Gary. Now he had a new mission. He wanted Daddy to set him up in his own restaurant. Having given Meyer Lansky a grandson, the least that Marvin, Mister Entitlement, felt that Daddy could do for him was to set him up in his own business. The better to support Gary, that was the idea, though everyone knew the support all came from Daddy.

  Wanting the marriage to work, Daddy found Marvin the situation he wanted. The restaurant was called Spindletop, a luxury steak house at 254 West 47th Street, in the heart of the theatre district. The name came from the rich east Texas oilfields near Beaumont that started the whole Texas boom. The typical New York steak houses, like Gallagher’s or Christ Cella, were austere, sawdust-on-floors affairs, but Spindletop was a New York fantasy of Texas excess: giant steaks, giant cocktails, a red plush bordello atmosphere, and waitresses in low-cut costumes and black net stockings that prefigured the Bunnies of the Playboy Clubs. At Spindletop, Texas was the thing.

  Spindletop was owned by an old acquaintance of Daddy’s named Joe Marsh, who had been a captain at the Riviera nightclub/casino on the Jersey Palisades. Joe was coarse, a bit of a tough-guy street thug, though he always made a big fuss over me. “I used to take you to the toilet,” he’d never cease to remind me. Joe, who was handsome in a brutal way, had a stunning showgirl wife named Joan who was a Texan herself. One of her former boyfriends was a Texas oilman who had never gotten her out of his system. To keep her in it, he put up the seed money for Spindletop. Now Joe wanted to cash out. He approached Daddy, who bought a half-interest in the place for Marvin, but insisted that Joe stay on to teach Marvin the world of steak. After all, Marvin’s whole life had been spent in a meat-free dairy restaurant. Spindletop would be a brave new red-blooded world for him, and, hopefully, for Gary and me, a wildly successful one.

  Marvin came into Spindletop in the fall of 1955. He was a fast learner. This kosher dairy man got an education in beef and soon became known for serving some of the best and biggest he-man sirloins in the ultimate steak town, the home of the New York Strip. Under him, the restaurant continued to thrive. I wish I could have said the same for our marriage. We had less time to ourselves than ever, and when we did go out, it was to those same all-boy Village boltes. “Why am I the only woman here?” I exasperatedly asked Marvin one night.

  Marvin immediately went on the defensive. He was deeply insulted and ceased speaking directly to me. We only spoke through Maddie, the maid. We had dismissed the German storm trooper baby nurse when we returned from Europe. Marvin stopped taking me out, spending most of his spare time with his two best friends, whom I had finally met, Jay, a decorator, and Cary, a sales manager at the I. Miller shoe salon. They were two of the handsomest men I had ever seen, the kind of men girls would die for.

  In time I figured out that girls would have died before these men would notice them. Marvin, I finally came to realize, was, at best, bisexual. His mother already knew. That’s why she hoped, against hope, that our marriage might “reform” him. That’s why she begged me to make him change his friends. Fat chance. The reason Marvin wanted a wife and child was to have cover for his secret life, the life after hours in Paris and Venice, the life in the Village clubs with the pretty boys.

  In the fifties “gay” meant happy. I had no idea what a homosexual was. I had no idea what being in the closet meant, other than you liked to shop. To have a gay husband was the cruelest blow to self-esteem any wife could have. To an innocent child bride it was even more devastating. But not only was Marvin a closeted gay man, he was an unabashed fortune hunter. He had married me, this silly little kid, not only for the cover of a marriage and a family, but also for the cover of my wealth and the big future that Meyer Lansky could buy him.

  To be marrie
d to a gay fortune hunter was about as bad as it could get, I thought. Then it got worse. On Daddy’s birthday, July 4, 1957, when Gary was just one year old, the gay fortune hunter walked out on me and moved in with a new boyfriend. Now I had not only been used, but abused and abandoned. My only consolation was that Marvin had left me for a man and not another woman. That would have been worse, more of a failure on my part. How, though, could Daddy, who knew the ways of the world better than anyone, have not spotted what Marvin was all about? Maybe he had. Maybe he felt I was a lost cause and accepted the situation.

  Shortly after Marvin departed, I had a dinner with Daddy and his friend Tony Salerno at Dinty Moore’s. Uncle Tony and I shared a love of horses. He had a big horse farm in Rhinebeck, New York, and often invited me up to ride. He was also considered New York’s “numbers king” and was the sponsor of all the biggest heavyweight championship boxing matches. Uncle Tony seemed far more upset about my being left as a single mother than my father was. “Something oughta be done,” he said, over and over, in a soft voice that belied his intense anger and determination. “Let me take care of him, Meyer.”

  This was the first time in my life that I actually became aware of the role of violence in my father’s world. The ability “to teach Marvin a lesson” was a heady power to have at my disposal. Nevertheless, I could not bring myself to invoke it. Before Daddy could answer, I broke in, pleading for Marvin’s safety, if not his life. I couldn’t bear for anything to befall the father of my child, no matter how awful he had been to me.

  One benefit of losing my husband was that I sort of got my mother back. Mommy seemed to thrive in crises, in helping me. She pulled herself together and began spending lots of time in my apartment, looking after and loving her new grandson. That made me happy when everything else made me sad. Uncle Julie’s wife, Ruth, came over almost every day, and Daddy chipped in with new full-time maids. He didn’t trust Maddie. She belonged to Marvin; she could be a spy. In a way, I was having my baby without having to do it myself. When people asked me how I managed as a young child bride, I told them the truth: “I had help.”

  Aunt Esther’s lawyer husband drew up our divorce papers. Despite his greed for what I had, there was no way Marvin was going to cross Daddy by demanding anything he shouldn’t. Daddy was willing to give him Spindletop. That was enough of a going-away present. He would have limited visitation rights. I would have custody of the baby. Saying that I was better able to care for Gary than Marvin was damning with faint praise. Again, I thanked my lucky stars for my family’s help.

  Although I was now a mother and a soon to be divorcee, I was anything but grown up. Daddy knew this, and it bothered him. He sat me down for a heart-to-heart talk, one of our few. “You have two choices,” he told me rather sternly. “You can go to school or go to work. But you have to do something.” To me it felt like a choice between measles and mumps. I couldn’t bear to go back to school. I had never been much of a student, and now that I had tasted freedom, I couldn’t go back to the prison of a classroom. Besides, I would be older than my new classmates, so I would feel terribly self-conscious, a scarlet woman who had been held back. School was out.

  The other choice was work, an equally alien concept. I had never worked a day in my life. What could I do? Not cook, that was for sure. Not type. I didn’t want to answer phones. “What do you like to do?” Daddy asked.

  I liked horses, but I didn’t think I was good enough to be a riding instructor. What else? “Shop,” I came up with.

  “Done,” Daddy said. “That’s it. You’ll go to work at Saks. You like Saks, right?”

  Did I ever. Daddy had a friend, Connie Noonan, who was the big boss of the docks in New Jersey. Maybe because many of Saks’s imported goods came through the ports there, Connie Noonan was “connected” high up at the luxury store. One call and I had my first job. I was about to embark on the odyssey of becoming a grown-up. I was about to become a working girl. However, because of the glamour and temptations of being the daughter of one of the kings of New York, I was about to become a playgirl as well. Working girl and playgirl were at odds with each other, not to mention with being a good mother. But I was a big girl now, wasn’t I? About to turn eighteen, I was all ready to take a flying leap into maturity. But I would land in a three-ring circus of my own.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THAT’S AMORE

  I wasn’t the only poor little rich girl walking the perfumed floors at Saks Fifth Avenue. A few days after I started, in September 1956, I ran into Maria Doto, the gorgeous daughter of Joe Adonis, doing the same jobs. Connie Noonan had also gotten Maria into Saks. We were called “floaters,” working umbrellas one day, women’s lingerie another, men’s socks the third. There were many heiresses, debutantes, girls from top families, doing exactly what we were doing, some to have something to do, some to meet men, some to get the employee discounts so they could dress better than the customers they were selling to. Working at Saks was to fashion what working in the William Morris mailroom was to entertainment. You had to be connected at the top to get in at the bottom.

  I got to know the young comic Jackie Mason, in men’s pajamas. I sold Loretta Young a scarf. I was surprised that she was wearing braces on her teeth, years after being a big star. I guessed being beautiful was a never-ending effort. I met Ed Sullivan browsing in the Stag Shop. He recognized me from my name tag and made a huge fuss over me, declaring what a great man my father was. In terms of the bottom line, Saks was a losing proposition for me. I spent everything I made, and a whole lot more, buying Gary clothes in the children’s department, the best in the city, and the one where Mommy had spent so much money on me when I was little. I sent all my purchases at Saks C.O.D. to Mommy, who graciously covered the bills, as ever. I was too embarrassed by my extravagances to send them to Daddy. One day when I was walking home from work, I was hit by a cab. My leg was injured, not enough to go to the hospital, but enough that I couldn’t walk to work. Taking cabs back and forth would eat up my salary.

  I used the injury as an excuse to quit. My next job was modeling. Modeling? Me? Well, in those days, you didn’t have to be as tall as a giraffe to be a model. The top models of the era, Suzy Parker and her sister Dorian Leigh, were only about five foot seven. That was just three inches taller than I was. Daddy may have been tiny for a man, but I was close to normal for a girl. Plus I was skinny for the time, 110 pounds, having shed my pregnancy weight and then some. It all started when I met a woman named Lillian Birnbaum at Saks. Lillian sold luxury clothes wholesale and below, at her apartment near mine on West End Avenue. A coat that would be $350 at Saks would be $75 at Lillian’s. Some people suggested she was selling stolen merchandise. I didn’t ask. A deal was a deal.

  Lillian invited me to shop at her place, which was full of rich girls looking for bargains. Then she asked me to model for her. She told me I reminded her of the new French actress Brigitte Bardot, who had become the talk of the world by running down the beach in St. Tropez close to naked in And God Created Woman. Several of Lillian’s customers told me the same thing. I guess we were both petite and blonde and had bosoms, though I was too embarrassed to show off mine, certainly not like Bardot. I suspect Lillian, who was a master of flattery, told me of the resemblance and hired me as a model so I would spend even more money on her clothes and recommend her to the wives of Daddy’s powerful circle.

  Whatever, I was totally lacking in self-awareness and totally in need of self-esteem. So I took the flattery to heart, so much so that I decided, skinny as I was, that to be a model I needed to be even skinnier. The only real model I had ever met was Tippi Hedren, the future Hitchcock star, who used to ride at the Aldrich Stables, whose name had been changed to the Manhattan Riding Club. Hedren was even thinner than I was. She was also professionally beautiful, which I was not. But being in dire need of illusions that may have been delusions, I took the modeling goal seriously. To that unhealthy end, I found a fancy diet doctor on Central Park South who prescribed amphetamine
s, or diet pills, to suppress what little appetite I managed to have. These were part of the pill culture Jacqueline Susann would write about in her 1966 best-seller Valley of the Dolls, her “dolls” being the downers, or barbiturates, that her characters knocked themselves out with. My pills were taking my slender body and ego on a soaring trip. I had been down so long, up wasn’t a bad way to go. For a while.

  I made my drug and other connections at my new beauty parlor, the Larry Mathews Salon, on West 57th Street in the slightly seedy Great Northern Hotel. Larry Mathews was to Elizabeth Arden what the Carnegie Deli was to Dinty Moore’s, nothing fancy but wild and, oh, what a crowd. When Marvin ran my beauty program, he had turned me into an aging frump. Now, with him gone, I felt entitled to a walk on the wild side. Larry Mathews was as wild as beauty got. The place was open around the clock, like an all-night diner. The clientele was pure show business. Marilyn Monroe was said to go there, though I never saw her. I didn’t see the Sardi’s opening night crowd, but rather burlesque strippers from 42nd Street, chorus girls from the Copacabana, struggling actresses from Stella Adler and the Actor’s Studio, and lots and lots of pretty women without day jobs who turned out to be fancy call girls. This was a long, long way from Birch Wathen and Calhoun.

  I heard about Mathews through the Copacabana grapevine. Other customers, who earned their living from the neck down, went for elaborate hair removal and coiffure of the nether regions, an art pioneered by Mathews, an ex-GI and head shot photographer who had a talent for getting his customers more camera ready than they thought they were. A lot of the strippers would want to dye their private areas the most exotic colors, and the salon accepted all challenges. Suffice it to say, it was an education.