Daughter of the King

by Lansky, Sandra

  Speaking of Daddy’s friends, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the Eisenhower Republicans were giving the Unclehood such a terrible time that I was certain Daddy would be doing everything in his power to get Joe Kennedy’s son elected. Then he would have a friend in the White House who could call off these dogs, these crime hounds. Unfortunately, the dogs weren’t imagining things. There was something to sniff, something that smelled awful. Starting in the middle of 1957, the blood started flowing in Daddy’s world and the bodies began to pile up.

  If I had once enjoyed a Pollyanna-ish rationalization that Daddy’s “entertainment” business was just another all-American road to riches, that illusion was permanently shattered. Ben Siegel’s unsolved murder, then a few years later Willie Moretti’s, had led to tremors shaking my worldview that Meyer Lansky was a high financier, a Wall Street guy working a different street. Now the tremors became an earthquake that was off the Richter scale. First was the May 1957 assassination attempt on Uncle Frank Costello right in the lobby of the Majestic, where my parents used to live.

  Uncle Frank was coming home from a night out at the glamorous French restaurant L’Aiglon, next to the St. Regis, then nightcaps across the street at Monsignore, a romantic Italian boîte with strolling musicians. His large entourage included Gene Pope, Jr., who owned the National Enquirer, and John Miller, the paper’s top gossip columnist, who had become my friend as well, from the nightclub circuit we all rode together. At the Majestic, a man stepped out of a limo, broke through the doormen, shot Uncle Frank in the head, and then fled into the getaway car on Central Park West.

  This was my turf, now running with blood. The assassin was bold, but was a bad shot. Uncle Frank only had a grazing head wound. The police quickly arrested a man named Vinnie “the Chin” Gigante, a muscleman who worked for Vito Genovese, a jealous would-be usurper of Uncle Frank’s throne as “Prime Minister.” Like Daddy, Uncle Frank despised publicity. He had never forgotten how badly he had been hurt by the Kefauver circus. Accordingly, he refused to accuse Gigante. Glad to be alive, he dismissed the violence as an isolated incident. Wishful thinking.

  A few months later the bullets flew again, hitting their target. This was the brutal rubout of Albert Anastasia in the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel on Seventh Avenue and 56th Street. I had been there many times with George Wood, who got his hair cut there and loved to be pampered by the staff, with manicures, steams, shaves, the whole spa treatment. George wanted Daddy to go there, too, but Daddy was loyal to the Waldorf. Besides, he had no time for all the pampering that George loved. In late October, Anastasia was in the midst of his own beauty regimen. He needed it. I had met him a number of times with George and Daddy. A former dock worker who had worked his way up to be Uncle Frank Costello’s right hand on the Brooklyn waterfront, Anastasia was an early version of the “Teflon Don,” a crime boss accused of many murders, convicted of none.

  Today the justice came outside of court. Two men with scarves covering their faces ran in, threw the barber aside, and fired a round of bullets at Anastasia, blowing him out of the barber chair and his riddled body onto every front page and television screen in the world. In basically every article, Daddy was mentioned as well, in high profile. This was the same hotel where Daddy’s predecessor as the Jewish brains of organized crime, Arnold Rothstein, who supposedly fixed the 1919 World Series, was shot to death in 1928. The press said Daddy was the “new Rothstein.” The comparison, and its terminal implications, made me very anxious for Daddy’s safety.

  The anxiety became a cold sweat when the coolest of all my uncles, Abe Zwillman, was said to have lost that cool and hanged himself with a rope in the basement of his West Orange mansion in February 1959. A new Kefauver-like crime commission, the McClellan Committee, had been formed in 1957 to investigate racketeering in the big labor unions, and they went hard after Uncle Abe. The chief lawyer for the Senate Committee was Robert Kennedy, the brother of the man Daddy was supposed to help put in the White House. Wasn’t he feeding the hand that could bite him, I wondered?

  “He’s just a rich kid,” I had heard Daddy tell one of his friends. “Just playing cops and robbers.” Daddy was certain the ambassador would exercise a fatherly restraint if need be. No such luck. When it came to the battle between labor and management, Daddy was naturally on the side of labor. No matter what excesses people like Jimmy Hoffa may have committed, those were small infractions compared to the felonious exploitation, as Daddy saw it, of the workers, poor immigrant people like the Lanskys, by the fat-cat capitalist owners, the establishment that would never let him in. If he couldn’t join it, he had to beat it. Sure, it was easier for a millionaire Harvard brat like this Robert Kennedy to take on the labor leaders than to face the truth that his own father got to the top in league with Daddy, Uncle Abe, and other of McClellan’s prime targets.

  The government was one relentless crime machine. They had just driven Uncle Joe Adonis out of the country, harassing him so badly that he self-deported to Italy, where he lived in splendor with Uncle Charlie Luciano. But it was a homesick splendor, and it wasn’t his choice. I doubted that hanging himself was Uncle Abe’s choice, either. In addition to the McClellan investigators, the IRS had also targeted the King of Jersey. Yet no one had seemed more mellow, more fearless, than Abe Zwillman. What were a few agents compared to the likes of Al Capone and Dutch Schultz? Buddy, our family crime reporter, insisted that he had been strangled, then strung up.

  Uncle Abe had done a lot for the people of New Jersey, and they knew it. Over two thousand people stood outside the Newark funeral home where his body lay to pay respects. Daddy did not attend the funeral, just as he had not attended that of Uncle Abe’s partner Willie Moretti. Too much publicity, guilt by association. Anyhow, in early 1959, Daddy was stuck in Cuba. Havana, and Daddy’s vast success there, the success that was intended to make him the legitimate world leader in legal gambling, had proved too good to be true. Overnight, on New Year’s Eve, 1958, Batista surprised Daddy and the world by fleeing, with his family and his money—money Daddy had made for him—to Florida. In his place was the triumphant underdog rebel leader, the one no one, including Daddy, took very seriously, Fidel Castro.

  Daddy’s bet on the continued strength of the Cuban strongman Batista had turned out to be the worst gamble in a lifetime of taking risks. He had invested over $20 million in the Riviera, a lot of it his own money. Today that would be over $200 million. Now he could lose it all, because nothing was more of a red flag to Castro’s Communist philosophy than a lavish gambling casino. Even worse was a casino run by American fat-cat capitalist mobsters for other foreign fat-cat hedonists, all exploiting the poor local peasants, who got none of the spoils. In fact on the first day of 1959, when Castro declared all the casinos closed, a mob of Cuban farmers stormed the Riviera, bringing their pigs, goats, and sheep into its marble halls before Daddy’s security forces ejected them. There were stories on the news of Teddy, armed with a mop and a giant bottle of Spic ’n’ Span, on her knees scrubbing the floors after them. They made for great copy, but struck me as pure tabloid invention. Teddy was too lazy, too used to the maids Daddy paid for, to clean up after herself, much less a herd of Cuban pigs.

  The casinos soon reopened. As much as Castro hated American capitalism, he liked the jobs that those capitalist pigs had created for his people. Money talked, even to Fidel. Yet it was just a matter of time, Daddy feared, before the money from Moscow would start talking louder than the money from New York. If the Communists had their way, the casinos would be closed for good. And there was the new public relations nightmare of getting American high rollers to come back to play in a country that had gone from playground to Cold War battleground in a split second. The threat to Daddy’s fortune, his future, his life, was as real as Castro himself.

  Before that fateful New Year’s Eve, the only Castro I had heard of was the Times Square sofa bed store, Castro Convertibles. Now the name took on a menacing air. The new liberator, or dictator, dep
ending on how you saw him, was capable of converting my privileged life into a peasant pigsty. The danger was physical as well as financial. In May, Castro’s police arrested Uncle Jack and threw him in prison, along with one of his top managers. Daddy was able to bail them out and send them back to Miami, where he went himself. He was so desperate for his own situation that he actually took long meetings with FBI agents there, describing the imminent Communist threat and warning America about the potential of “Russians Next Door.” No one would listen. In October 1960, Castro took over the Riviera, as well as all other American properties in Cuba, from Woolworth’s to Westinghouse.

  Daddy, who had the soul of a revolutionary, ended up betting on the dictator Batista over the populist Castro. He was betting against himself. But he, like most of the world, had seen Castro as a million-to-one long shot, not worth thinking about. Now Castro closed the tables and had Meyer Lansky’s millions. The stress of the revolution had also stolen Daddy’s health. In addition to his digestive ailments, his bleeding ulcers, Daddy developed pericarditis, a deadly heart lining infection. He was at Memorial Hospital, in Hollywood, Florida, in intensive care, for over a month.

  Close to sixty, Daddy seemed to be facing the end. Paul flew in across country. I flew down. Picking me up at the airport, Uncle Jack gave me his grim summary of the situation. “Your father is broke. Your father is dying. You’re getting nothing.” Such were the charms of Jacob Lansky. As serious as Daddy was, he was a stand-up comic compared to his younger brother. The usually dour Uncle Jack was as dull as dishwater, the last guy you would expect to run a casino. With his thick hair and bushy eyebrows, he looked like the head of the mine-workers’ union, John L. Lewis, but minus the fire. He had no drive, no dynamism. Fortunately Daddy had enough for two, and took care of his baby brother, installing him as his front man. But Daddy made all the decisions; he didn’t trust Jack’s judgment.

  Jack’s wife, Aunt Anna (so many Anns and Annas in my family) had come from a poor family on the Lower East Side. She was forever whining to Jack, “You shoulda stayed a furrier,” which was Jack’s career until Daddy put him in the fast lane. Anna was convinced Daddy had lured poor Jack into trouble, and that their now-lavish lives could be snatched away from them at any minute, that she and Jack would be snared in any government dragnet that was after Daddy. In short, though Daddy had made their lives, he had also ruined them. With Cuba gone, Uncle Jack was all dressed up in the white tux he wore at the Riviera, all dressed up with no place to go.

  Jack had the ultimate Depression mentality. Every glass wasn’t half empty. It was completely empty. He expected the worst: misery, poverty, and death. Daddy’s illness was a long and tense siege. I quickly ended up in a fistfight with Teddy over Daddy’s care. Blaming me for Daddy’s illness, she leapt upon me and tried to strangle me. Uncle Jack, stronger than I had ever given him credit for, had to pull her off. In his oxygen tent, Daddy didn’t look like the king of crime, or the king of anything. Gasping for breath, he looked like a sick little old man, hanging to life by a thread. There was no power there, just loneliness. And if that life ended, what did he have to show for it? A pile of subpoenas from J. Edgar Hoover? Two wives, one on the edge of insanity, the other terminally superficial and greedy? Me? A disgrace. Buddy, another disgrace? A foreclosed high-rise gambling den in a banana republic? A bunch of craps tables in the Nevada desert? Paul was the one and only point of honor. All I could do was pray for Daddy to extend his life so he could leave it at a later day on more dignified terms than these.

  Miraculously, Daddy survived the heart infection. But no more handball. Maybe golf, if he were lucky. The days of vitality were behind him. But he was still here, still standing. Thanks a lot, Uncle Jack, thanks for the confidence. In some ways, Daddy was a man without a country, that country being Cuba. But he still had Las Vegas. If one dream turned into a nightmare, he would roll over and dream again. However, life did not begin at sixty, especially with Washington, D.C., breathing down your back.

  A new administration and a friend on Pennsylvania Avenue seemed to be Daddy’s best insurance policy, so he threw himself into his promise to get Ambassador Kennedy’s son elected that November 1960. Working with him was the big boss of Chicago, Sam Giancana. “Mooney” (Italian American slang for “crazy”) Giancana was more father than godfather to Frank Sinatra, who happened to be Jack Kennedy’s very best friend. Maybe, maybe, the power tables would turn in Daddy’s favor.

  While Daddy rode bravely through his valley of fear, I continued to sleepwalk through my own valley of the dolls. Mine was the Oz of amphetamines. I was becoming a total drug addict. When Daddy was sick in Florida, I needed all the pharmaceutical help I could get to make it through those months of fearing I would lose my own Galahad, the only man on earth who could protect me. I could not face the possibility that all my comforts and security and money could suddenly vanish, like Uncle Jack had warned me that they were about to.

  Uncle Jack was wrong. But it could happen. I wasn’t prepared for such a cataclysm. I refused to think about it. I didn’t have time to go to diet doctors. Instead I went directly to the source and began cozying up to and bribing pharmacists. My big connection was the drug store at the Fontainebleau, where I sweet-talked and high-tipped the druggist into giving me whatever I wanted, pills not by the dozens, but by the hundreds. A doctor may have told me to take them twice a day, at most. I popped them at all hours, whenever I felt I needed them, which was all the time. Once at the Fontainebleau pharmacy on a drug run, I ran into Joe DiMaggio, who sent profuse regards to Daddy. I had met Joe with Daddy many times, often at Toots Shor’s. I couldn’t have been more ashamed at what I was doing. Alas, I wasn’t ashamed enough to stop.

  Meanwhile, I was still living the glamorous life of the madcap Manhattan heiress/gay divorcee. I would still see Dean Martin from time to time, meeting him for a secret rendezvous in Chicago or Boston. Dick Shawn would call when he was in the city. There were plenty of other stars: Jeff Chandler, David Janssen, Hugh O’ Brien—Wyatt Earp himself. I met a lot of these men at Danny’s Hide-Away, a riotous steak house on East 45th Street near Grand Central Station owned by Danny Stradella, a tiny jockey-size impresario who loved introducing famous men to pretty girls. That was probably why this smallest restaurateur in New York had the biggest celebrity clientele. I was also a regular at 21, where the famous and charismatic manager Chuck Anderson would never let me pick up a check. Ditto Edwin Perona at El Morocco. Ditto Ed Wynne at the Harwyn Club. In fact, I don’t think I ever paid a check in any New York nightclub either when I was by myself or with some girlfriends. Instead of charging it to the Diners Club, my Meyer Lansky plan was far better—there were no monthly statements. How, I puzzled, could a man so revered in New York be so reviled in Washington? With all my craziness, I was lucky never to be robbed or kidnapped. One rich guy, whose father owned the Kinney Parking lots, did slip me a Mickey Finn at The Living Room, across from the United Nations. I woke up the next morning somewhere in Westchester County, a farmhouse. I didn’t want to think what had gone on. I took a cab back to New York. The driver loved the fare.

  I kept avoiding the Copacabana. That was Frank Costello’s club, and master gossip John Miller was guaranteed to convey my every excess to Daddy. But one of the captains there had borrowed $700 from me, and months later, he still hadn’t paid me back. I was profligate, but welching on debts in my family was considered bad form. So one night I arranged to meet Uncle Augie Carfano at the club, to get him to use his charms on the captain to collect the marker.

  I got to the Copa fifteen minutes later than our scheduled appointment only to find him gone. I was upset that I had been stood up. What’s fifteen minutes when a girl like me could be hours late? I was even more upset the next morning when they found the bodies of Uncle Augie and his date that night, ex–beauty queen Janice Drake, shot to death in his Cadillac in Queens. Janice was the wife of comedian Allan Drake, whose faltering nightclub career Augie had bolstered the way Uncle Willi
e Moretti had bolstered that of Frank Sinatra. Drake may have traded his wife to Augie as a career move. Those things were known to happen. And so were murders, in the long mean season of bloodshed that had kicked off with the failed Frank Costello hit. Outsiders, and even insiders like me, may have thought the Copa the most glamorous club in America. These clubs were fun, for sure, but they weren’t worth dying for.

  Another of my main hangouts, one where there was never a body count, was the Carlyle Hotel, where I had met Dean at Bemelmans Bar. Because of my stablemate Barbara Bemelmans, I always thought of horses at the Carlyle. After the split with Marvin, I lost what had been our only shared passion—for horses. I thought about riding again, but instead I’d pop another Black Beauty and stop thinking. At the Carlyle I met a really older man, someone nearly as old as Daddy. Maybe with Daddy’s health in the balance, I was looking for a father substitute. This one would have been close. Charles Revson, the nail polish king, the creator of Fire and Ice, was what Daddy might have become had he played it straight and taken an interest in beauty products.

  Revson was near sixty, close to Daddy’s age and just about his size. We had a lot in common, starting that we had both been born in Boston. His family was even poorer than Daddy’s. His father worked as a cigar roller. Charlie had a huge chip on his shoulder, a drive to succeed like Daddy’s. He was an even bigger control freak. When his company Revlon sponsored The $64,000 Question, he insisted on fixing the show, making it more suspenseful, so that the audience would grow and he could sell more cosmetics. In doing this, he provoked the quiz show scandals of the fifties. But the government didn’t dare come after Charlie. He was Teflon, too.