Daughter of the King

by Lansky, Sandra

  Charlie had an apartment in the Waldorf Towers that had belonged to Herbert Hoover. He must have had a staff of ten, liveried butlers, uniformed maids, French chefs, though all he’d ever eat for lunch were Geisha brand tuna sandwiches, alternating with sawdust-lean corned beef sandwiches with very old dill pickles. God help it if he detected a note of sweetness. He’d throw as big a fit as Daddy would if he was served a hamburger with an onion on the side. Picky, picky, picky. His was the coldest apartment I’d ever been in. Charlie was an air-conditioning freak. The apartment was like the North Pole. He bought me a mink coat to keep me warm in bed.

  Charlie knew that the way to a woman’s heart was through cosmetics. He’d take me on tours of his factory in the Bronx that were amazing turn-ons. He’d send me yellow roses every day, but I preferred lipstick. So I got huge care packages of every Revlon product, every color, every fragrance. Once when I was in Florida, he fouled up. I asked him for a case of bubble bath. He sent me a case of talcum powder by mistake. We broke up soon after that. I don’t recall if the events were related. I was too drugged out.

  What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. I even went to bed with Marvin again one night on the eve of his flight to Greece for a very gay holiday with his new boyfriend on Mykonos. He had not improved with age. What drugs and alcohol could do! And then the craziest thing happened. I got pregnant again. Not that I had taken any precautions. I had no idea what birth control was. I had been lucky it hadn’t happened before. Also, I was so skinny that I was missing periods left and right. I wasn’t keeping track. I also had an eighteen-inch waist and wore cinch belts. I didn’t figure it out until two weeks before I went into labor on January 23, 1961.

  My water broke. The only person I could turn to was the janitor in my building on West End Avenue. There was a blizzard outside. Driving like a race driver in the Monte Carlo rally, he made it through the icy, snow-drifted streets out to Long Island Jewish Hospital, to the same OB-GYN who delivered Gary. My new baby was three months’ premature. It was a boy. He weighed a pound and a half. They immediately put him in an incubator. I was too out of it to recognize the tragedy, the pathos of the situation, the fragility of his tiny life. All I could think about was how to keep Daddy from finding out.

  That wasn’t easy. Buddy happened to have called for some reason to speak to me. Frances the maid told him I had gone to the hospital. She didn’t say why. She didn’t know the whole story, and she knew better than to blab even if she had, but Buddy couldn’t help from blabbing. Just the word to Daddy that I was in the hospital had him on the first plane to New York. He found me in the maternity ward. Why, he asked, are you here? Thank God the doctor was away. I had pledged my nurse to secrecy. I gave her a hundred dollar bill. That helped.

  “Female trouble,” I lied to Daddy as fast as I could. “There was no room in the regular ward. The whole city has the flu. The place is full.”

  I think Daddy was so sick of hospitals after his recent siege that he wanted to get out of there in short order. That’s why he fell for my story. He got me out of there, too. The baby, whom I didn’t even name, remained in the hospital, in the incubator from January until May, while Daddy brought me down to Miami to recuperate. He put me up at the Aristocrat Hotel on the beach. I called the hospital every day to check on my child. He was still very fragile. I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t tell anyone except my hairdresser, who was the only friend I had at that point. I was in no shape to raise another child. Without Frances, I couldn’t have handled Gary. My plan, if I had one, was to come back to New York and give the child to my hairdresser’s mother, who lived in Hell’s Kitchen. She lovingly volunteered to raise the baby for me.

  In May I came back to New York and brought my still-tiny little baby home to organize giving him away. Mommy, who was there caring for Gary, saw him, and saw something that totally transformed her. “That baby is sick,” she said. “We have to take care of him. We can’t let him go.” I had assumed Mommy was too lethargic to even notice. Instead she was galvanized by the sight of the child clinging to life. “We,” she kept saying. “We.” I figured out that in my baby she saw her own baby, my brother Buddy. Mommy somehow took charge, organizing appointments with some of the doctors she had taken Buddy to, thirty years before. Some were dead, some were old men. But some were there.

  The diagnosis was grim. The baby, my baby, had severe birth defects, far worse than what Buddy had. There was no way I could give him to my hairdresser’s struggling mother. This child had special needs she couldn’t begin to deal with. Amazingly, it was the two unlikeliest partners, Mommy and Marvin, who teamed up to take command. First, the poor child needed a name. Marvin agreed to take paternal responsibility, and Mommy came up with David Jay Rapoport, naming him after the early Supreme Court Justice John Jay. For all the legal troubles we had had, Mommy thought we could use a lawyer in the family. D.J., as we began calling him, needed the best medical care money could buy. That meant we had to turn to the money. That meant telling all to Daddy.

  For Mommy, D.J. was a second chance at motherhood, someone to love, to nurture, to rescue. To Daddy, on the other hand, D.J. was one more slap in the face, another exhibit of failure, proof that he lacked what it took to achieve the American dream. The way Daddy looked at me made me feel as if it were all my fault. All the drugs, the drink, the tight dresses. Did I cause D.J. to enter the world this way? Had I ruined his life before it began? My guilt was overwhelming. But so was my joy. D.J. had brought Mommy fully back to life, and back to my life.

  When Daddy came to my apartment to have a summit conference, there were my two parents, together again. They hadn’t seen each other, hadn’t spoken, for over a decade. Both seemed shocked by how old the other looked. We were all speechless. Then Mommy broke the ice by dropping D.J. into Daddy’s lap. “Our grandson, Meyer,” she announced. Daddy had no comeback. He just embraced D.J. For that one brief moment, we were a family once again. Now it was up to me to rise to the occasion, as she had, and make my own life worth living. Given my own addictions and misdirection and a lifetime of spoiling, stepping up to the challenge was going to be a tall order indeed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  NOTORIOUS

  Unlike my mother, I didn’t need a psychiatrist to turn me into a drug addict. I did it all by myself, first with the diet pill doctors, then with the drugstores, then with friends who helped me buy what I wanted on the street. I had occasionally gone with Mommy to her shrinks. I always suspected that they were exploiting her, a suspicion confirmed by the fact that the challenge of looking after Gary and then D.J. was the one thing that made her act like her old self. She had at least as many pills as I did: Milltown, Librium, Lithium. Pill-curious, I tried them all, but they really made me sick. Mommy needed to go down. I needed to go up. I never went to a psychiatrist for my own problems. What problems? My only problem was getting enough Biphetamines to make me feel anywhere from secure to omnipotent. An unexamined life was the only life I could continue living.

  And then I met someone who forced me to take a good hard look at myself. For the first time in my life, aside from Gordon MacRae and a brief delusion with Marvin, I thought I was falling in love, madly in love. It happened at the Harwyn Club, a converted carriage house on East 52nd Street off Lexington. The owner, Ed Wynne, was as handsome as any movie star. A former manager of the Stork Club, this six-foot-tall blond Irishman reversed the usual formula for nightclub success. Instead of using pretty girls as the lure to attract a male clientele, he somehow attracted the city’s handsomest men, whom the pretty girls would all follow.

  Before entering the nightclub business, Ed had been a baseball umpire, of all things. That was very fortuitous, because his former life in the sport enabled him to bring in the most famous Yankees, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Don Larsen, Billy Martin, Yogi Berra, to drink at the Harwyn. The place also became A-list when Grace Kelley used the Harwyn, her favorite New York hangout, to announce her engagement to Prince Rainier of Monaco. Where t
he Yankees went, all New York followed, particularly the hard-driving, baseball-obsessed Madison Avenue types. It was one of these striking “Mad Men” who knocked me off my barstool one fateful night in 1962.

  He was tall, athletic, dapper. They all were at the Harwyn, but there was something extra about this one. I racked my brain. Did I know him? Had we had a fling? If so, had I done something shameful? My nights were an endless blur of handsome men, of wild times. Did I dare say, “Have me met?” He was too good-looking for me to risk blowing it. So I kept staring, out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t want to seem desperate. There was something about the way the guy carried himself that seemed less Madison Avenue than West Point. There was a military correctness, a confidence that reminded me of Paul.

  Ah, that was it. Just as I was about to grasp the wisp of memory, the Mad Man saved me the trouble. “Sandi,” he said with a billion-dollar smile, crossing the crowded barroom to meet me. “Sandi, right? I know you . . . Gabby Hartnett.”

  “The gift shop at West Point,” I recalled.

  “Absolutely.” He shook hands, very properly, very officer-and-gentlemanly. He had the firm handshake of someone in command, with all the self-confidence that I had completely lacked.

  “What a memory,” I said. “I was just a kid.”

  Gabby looked me up and down. “You’re not anymore,” he replied and insisted we sit down and he buy me a drink.

  I ordered a J&B on the rocks. That was a man’s drink, a Mad Man’s drink. Gabby, whose real name was Edward, filled me in on what he had done since graduating from the academy in 1951. He had indeed gone to the Helsinki Olympics. He didn’t win any medals there, but he did in Korea, where he commanded a howitzer battery and rose to become a captain. Back in New York in 1954, he had just graduated from law school at Fordham by going to night school for five years while working in an advertising agency. He had not gotten married. He was too busy. I was so impressed with his motivation, the opposite of mine.

  Rather than tell Gabby my torrid, sordid history since he last saw me in my white bucks and bobby sox, I focused on what Paul had been doing. I told him about flight school, and now about the army’s sending Paul to get a master’s degree in industrial engineering at the University of Michigan. Paul was so outraged by the whole D.J. episode, that it was the last straw for him regarding my decadent behavior. He stopped speaking to me and would keep a stony silence for years. But I still loved him and kept up with his adventures through Daddy and Buddy. Paul was soon heading over to Vietnam, to advise the Kennedy administration on the escalating war over there. How exotic Saigon sounded. How boring, I laughed to myself, compared to all the action at the Harwyn Club. Why leave New York? Everything on earth was right here.

  “But what about you?” Gabby pressed. “I want to hear about yourself.”

  I was embarrassed enough about my crazy marriage. I was convinced my child, make that two children, would be a deal breaker. Daddy had paid a small fortune to send D.J. up to Boston to the Crippled Children’s Hospital, to try to do everything for his grandson that he had done for his son. Hopefully, D.J. would turn out better than Buddy, who, despite his marriage, was constantly getting into gambling trouble and other hot water. Annette wasn’t as good an influence as everyone had hoped.

  I didn’t tell Gabby about D.J., or about Buddy, or even about Gary. He was single. He didn’t want someone else’s kids or their baggage. He’d want to start his own family. The less said the better if I wanted a chance with this guy. He seemed like the first normal man I had ever met. He could be my hero, my new Galahad, to take the place of Daddy, whose vulnerability haunted me in my thoughts and in my nightmares. So I hid behind Paul’s normalcy, behind their old school tie, even if they had never met. The West Point connection gave me dignity, gave me cover. How bad could I be?

  Not too bad. I gave Gabby my number, shook hands goodnight. Two weeks later he called me up and asked me to dinner. It was nothing fancy, not the Brownie Lassner celebrity circuit. Instead we went down to Chinatown, to Bo-Bo, an authentic Cantonese restaurant where the highlight was Gabby ordering in Chinese. He had learned the language in Korea, liberating the Chinese Communist prisoner-of-war camps. Gabby tried to teach me how to use chopsticks. I had barely mastered the knife and fork, but when he took my hand in his to guide me about the proper chopstick placement, I swooned. I blamed my giddiness on the MSG.

  It was the first meal I had had in New York in years without a drink and cigarettes. We sipped tea. Aside from my diet pills, I was on my best behavior. Gabby picked me up at West End Avenue, downstairs, and took me back there. We shook hands good night. That hadn’t happened to me for a long time. He was a devout Catholic, a former altar boy. Husband material.

  We had a number of dates, altar boy dates, that always ended with a handshake. No smoking, the rare cocktail or glass of wine. We went to French bistros where Gabby spoke French, sukiyaki parlors where he spoke Japanese, and paella places in the Village where he spoke Spanish. Gabby could have been a diplomat, I told him. He said he did a lot of work with foreign accounts. We went up to the Cloisters for art and to Yankees games for sports. I took him riding, renting horses at the stables, now the Riding Club. All the people there remembered me. They were so impressed.

  I took a crazy chance and told Gabby about Gary, though not about D.J. That was too dark. Gary was six. He went to school right across the street from our apartment. I was like Mommy had been with me, taking him to school, home to lunch, back to school, home again. It wasn’t much of a commute. Gary was following in my “democratic” footsteps, gravitating to the poor kids. His best friend was the son of the Puerto Rican handyman. His name was Jesus, an adorable kid straight out of West Side Story.

  Jesus used to take Gary home and to church. One day they skipped school together. The school said they were missing. I found them at the church. Jesus had brought Gary to meet his priest. He wanted the priest to convert Gary. I had thought Jesus was a little gang kid in the making, a junior Shark or Jet. Instead he was a missionary. One night Gary was playing outside with Jesus, when Gabby was picking me up. I introduced them. He lifted up both boys and swung them over his head. What a great dad he would make.

  At another authentic meal in Chinatown the conversation turned to communism and then to communism in Cuba. It was right after the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco, after which Castro felt justified in closing the casinos, once and for all, ending Daddy’s hopes of ever getting his investment back. At the same time, Castro formally embraced communism and Nikita Khrushchev. Daddy had been 100 percent right about Castro, that he would fall for the Russians. Somehow this led to a discussion about Daddy, who never, ever wanted me to talk about him, and his business, to anyone.

  Gabby didn’t seem like anyone. He was special. He listened so sympathetically. He made me feel smart, like I knew something. He would understand. So I started talking, saying what little I knew, about how unfair Castro and Washington had been to Daddy. Even crueler than Cuba had been the Kennedys’ betrayal. Daddy had helped put John Kennedy in office. All he had wanted in return was to be “left alone.” For a while President Kennedy kept his father’s promise.

  Then, in late December 1961, Joseph Kennedy suffered a debilitating stroke, from which he would never recover. Suddenly Daddy became fair game. John Kennedy couldn’t control his rabid brother, who immediately ended John’s friendship with Frank Sinatra. Then he went after the two underworld figures who may have done the most to put the Kennedys in power: Sam Giancana and Daddy. I felt so safe with Gabby, I’m sure I went on and on too much about all this. After all, how could I not trust him? I was equating chastity with respect, maybe even love. Sex was easy. Restraint was hard. The man hadn’t even tried to kiss me. He was, I assumed, saving me for something special.

  Indeed he was. While I was seeing Gabby in 1962, another big Lansky wedding came on the horizon. Uncle Jack’s daughter, my cousin Linda, was getting married. How I would have loved to invite Gabby down to Miami fo
r the big event, to show to my family that I, too, could get a West Point man. How I wanted to rub it into Paul, one academy man to another. I knew Daddy would be proudest of all, that his crazy little girl had finally settled down and come through with flying colors, a war hero, a lawyer, a star. Instead, Uncle Jack and his wife didn’t even invite me to the wedding. They thought I was a bad girl, a bad person, a mess, that I would spoil their big party.

  I’m sure I ran my mouth about my misgivings about Uncle Jack and his family, how he owed Daddy everything, what an ingrate he was. I didn’t hear from Gabby for a couple of weeks. Maybe he was turned off by my family, although I hadn’t even scratched the surface with him. He had been born in Colorado, brought up in Buffalo. They probably didn’t have people like the Lanskys there. I wanted to call and apologize for dumping my family garbage in his lap. I didn’t. Nice girls didn’t call guys, and I was trying my damnedest to be the nicest girl I could be. Then one afternoon, while Gary was in school and Mommy was at her place, the doorman rang and said Gabby was downstairs. With another man. Could they come up? Sure. Any friend of Gabby had to be a friend of mine.

  If Gabby looked like Gary Cooper, his friend looked like Wally Cox. I don’t remember his name. He was short, with glasses and a cheap suit. Today the word is “nerd.” He had a sweaty handshake. If he’d been on What’s My Line? I’d have bet that he was an accountant. The last thing I would have guessed was FBI agent. I invited them in and offered them instant coffee, the only kind I knew how to make. “Beautiful apartment,” Gabby offered, a little nervously. This was the first time I had ever seen him nervous. This was the first time he’d ever been in my apartment. I offered to bring out some appetizers. “No, Sandi, thanks,” Gabby said. “We need to talk business.” That’s when the nerd flashed his badge. Reluctantly, Gabby pulled out his. “I’m so sorry,” he apologized. “Procedure.”