Read Daughter of the King Online
Authors: Sandra Lansky
Daddy had several meetings with Kefauver, at first by himself, then accompanied by his famous criminal lawyer, Moses Polakoff. Polakoff was a tough, powerful man who looked more like a boxer than a lawyer. Maybe that’s why his most famous client, Jack Dempsey, liked him so much. Polakoff also was the lawyer for Lucky Luciano and many of the big nightclubs in Manhattan. Despite his tough façade and louche clients, Polakoff was a real intellectual. As I said, I always called him “Professor” because he was so scholarly. Before the divorce, Daddy and the Professor used to sit for hours in Daddy’s study at the Beresford talking about American history, Thomas Paine, and democracy. I’m sure Daddy would have loved to scrap the jukebox business and just go and enroll in West Point with Paul and lead a life of the mind. If anyone would have appreciated a college education, it was he.
Even if Daddy hadn’t gone to Yale Law School like Estes Kefauver, he wasn’t at all intimidated by Kefauver’s education and by his power. Daddy got exactly what he wanted, which was to
not appear
at the official hearings, and to
not
be photographed or televised. In most businesses, the rule was that any publicity was good publicity. But as we saw with Frank Costello, for Daddy and my uncles, any publicity was bad publicity.
Although Daddy’s meetings with Kefauver were behind closed doors and supposedly top-secret, word leaked out, just as it had with Virginia Hill’s famous line about her special amorous skills. There were just too many assistants and reporters snooping around the Kefauver road show. What captured the public’s imagination was the exchange that leaked out between Daddy and Kefauver about the senator’s passion for gambling. Kefauver reportedly admitted that he liked to gamble, but he didn’t like the idea of “you people,” as he said to Daddy, running the gambling show in the U.S.A. “You people.” In New York City, those were fighting words. In the capital city of America’s melting pot, right versus wrong, cops versus robbers, may have mattered less than us versus them. The immigrant population of New York was “you people” and on the other side was a drawling, arrogant, white churchman from Tennessee, of the Old Confederacy, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.
Southern nativists were often equal-opportunity bigots. They hated blacks, Jews, Asians, Catholics, whom they called “Papists,” whether Irish or Italian, all with equal venom. I had seen the separate water fountains in Miami, and I just knew they were wrong. Kefauver may have been a liberal Democrat, but he was still a southern man, a Dixie man, and New Yorkers didn’t trust him anymore than he trusted them.
Daddy was quoted in the papers as having said to Kefauver, “I will not let you persecute me because I am a Jew.” Those words made him something of a folk hero in New York City. They made him my
hero as well. Until that moment, I had never even thought of him, or myself, as a Jew. Suddenly I realized what I was, what we were, and that anti-Semitism was worth fighting against, whether in World War II, or in America. Moses Polakoff, the Professor, was also a master of public relations. He let it slip to the press that not only had Daddy thwarted Hitler’s agents on the docks in the war, but he was a major financial supporter of Israeli independence in 1948, by buying Israel bonds and providing arms for Israel’s freedom fighters. Daddy could not stand back and allow the country where his own refugee grandparents were buried to be extinguished by the Arabs, who were being supported by our ostensible friends, the British.
Polakoff also played on the sympathy that New Yorkers had for their beloved but deposed mayor, Bill O’Dwyer, who had done so much for so many poor citizens, but whom self-righteous politicians like Kefauver had driven from office. Daddy was standing up to Kefauver, who was shown to be just one more bully. This man Meyer Lansky was tough, a living rebuke to anyone who said Jews were meek and weak. In a lot of local circles, Meyer Lansky, previously under the radar, or if known, then feared, was now embraced as a hometown boy, the pride of the Yankees.
Now I knew my father was a gangster. Now I knew he was a Jew. Wow! What was I going to do with this knowledge? I was still too scared, too polite, too intimidated, to speak to him about it. Or to speak to Mommy. I didn’t speak much to Buddy now. I rarely spoke to Paul. I didn’t dare talk to my friends. This was family stuff; it had to stay in the family. So I just tried to keep living the life I had, Calhoun, Aldrich Stables, Lake Mahopac, Gordon MacRae.
Then once again, a big event shook up my world. I was back in New York after another summer with Mommy at Lake Mahopac. I had come back, without a Jimmy C this time, to find out that I would be uprooted. Mommy decided to move us out of the St. Moritz. The Schwab House still wasn’t ready. I had gotten spoiled at the grand
hotel. I was Eloise before
Eloise
, the series of books about a pampered brat at the Plaza Hotel that first appeared in 1955. I may have been the inspiration. All the doormen and maids and concierges and bellmen knew me, and I adored room service from Rumpelmayer’s, ice cream night and day.
I’m sure the hotel luxury was horribly expensive, even for Mommy, even with her family money and her Daddy money. We moved to the Westover Hotel on 253 West 72nd Street, off Broadway. If I thought Daddy’s rented home in Florida was a dump, this place was dumpier. The Westover was a residential hotel, nothing like the St. Moritz, with a lot of European refugees who had fled Hitler on the eve of World War II. The place smelled like a deli, and the furniture was ratty.
Mommy had all her fancy antiques and carpets in storage waiting for the Schwab House; I assumed this was very temporary. It was funny that, after spending a lifetime not even realizing I was Jewish, now I was surrounded by Jews, at the Westover, at all the stores and kosher markets on Broadway, at a kosher eatery called Steinberg’s Dairy Restaurant. In the past, Mommy would take me to Schrafft’s and Longchamps and Rumpelmayer’s, where we ate among stars and socialites. Now we always went to Steinberg’s where I ate scrambled eggs, and Mommy ate borscht amidst old, sick people, many of whom had suffered in concentration camps. I went to Calhoun, with all the rich girls, but the huge contrast now between my fancy school, my fancy stable, and my unfancy home was giving me a split personality. The way Mommy was headed, I might have been better off in a girls’
yeshiva
, or special Jewish school. However, whenever I asked her anything about all the Jewish people around us, she’d brush off the question and say she didn’t know.
I obviously had much more fun with Daddy, who, alas, was spending much more time in Florida and elsewhere than he was in New York. And because of all the publicity at the Kefauver hearings,
Meyer Lansky was now a household name in New York, even though he hadn’t appeared. Daddy didn’t like going out and being recognized. Our nights at the theatre dwindled to an end. One of the last musicals he took me to was
Call Me Madam
in 1950. We went backstage to meet Ethel Merman, whom I had loved in
Annie Get Your Gun
and who always made a big fuss over Daddy and me at Dinty Moore’s.
Call Me Madam
, in which she played a wacky ambassadress, was all I knew about Washington, D.C., until I was rudely awakened by Estes Kefauver. The play had made me think politics was great fun, one big party. Was I naïve.
Despite his new notoriety, Daddy still frequented Dinty Moore’s, which is where he had most of his business meetings. In early October 1951, he took me there to dine with Uncle Willie Moretti. We met him out front of Moore’s. As a young prizefighter he had been known as Willie Moore, and he often joked that he was Dinty Moore’s Italian cousin. He was the funniest of all my uncles. He lived in high style, arriving in a chauffeur-driven white Packard convertible, the kind of entrance stars would make at Hollywood premieres.
Speaking of which, Uncle Willie was all abuzz about his new protégés Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, who were becoming the biggest stars in the country. His old protégé Frank Sinatra had hit the skids and was at a low point in his career. He had just released a dumb song called “Mama Will Bark,” filled with yapping sounds. “Song’s a dog,” Uncle Willie wisecracked, expecting Daddy to laugh at his joke. That was expecting way too much of my always somber father, who was more somber tonight than usual.
We ordered our meal, and they began talking business, mostly about Kefauver. While the senator had wrapped up his road show months before, Daddy expressed concern about all the damage the hearings had done to his nightclubs in Florida. Until the hearings, Daddy had expected Miami to vote to legalize gambling in Dade County. Now the spotlight Kefauver had shown on Daddy’s hugely
successful, tolerated, but technically illegal gambling operations in adjacent Broward County was about to bring the whole party to a crashing end. The waiter, in his Eisenhower jacket, brought my broiled chicken, all cut up for me, even though I could have done it by myself at this point in my life. I ate the bite-size pieces.
The men kept talking over their big steaks. Although everyone loved to gamble, nobody liked the word “crime.” The main crime Kefauver was after was his own vice of gambling. Daddy was certain Miami would vote down any referendum. Uncle Willie regretted to agree. “It’s like asking a broad to go to bed with you,” he said, “She may do it, but she sure as hell won’t agree to it in advance.” That comment was my cue. I went to hang out with the hat-check girl. Jack Benny came in the restaurant. I thought it was Uncle George Wood, because they could be doubles for each other, their thinning hair combed straight back, professorial eyeglasses, great clothes. “Hi, Uncle Georgie,” I said.
“This is how George steals all my women,” Jack Benny said, and the hat-check girl laughed out loud. I blushed at my mistake. “And she’s just my type.” He winked at me.
“I’m sorry, “I apologized.
“That’s okay, sweetheart. If I had a nickel for every time that happened, I could afford a date of my own.” The entourage with the comedian, famous for jokes about his own cheapness, roared with laughter.
When I returned to the table, Daddy and Uncle Willie were talking about Havana. “If Florida goes down, there’s always Havana,” Uncle Willie said. Daddy was quiet, thoughtful, and a little sad. Uncle Willie liked to reminisce about old times, about how he taught me to ride his nephew’s two-wheel bike at Deal, our day trips down to the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. “Remember our first convention in Atlantic City, Meyer?” he asked Daddy. “Me and you and Charlie Lucky and Waxey G. and Nig Rosen and King Solomon. All yids and wops, yids and wops. And your bride, what a honeymoon.” Willie turned to me. “He took your beautiful mother on her honeymoon with Dutch
Schultz. Is that any way to treat a lady?” He turned back to Daddy. “Meyer, Meyer, where is the romance?”
Daddy was growing very uncomfortable. “Willie, you talk too much,” he said and asked for the check.
The next day at Calhoun, during outdoor play period in the early afternoon, one of the school janitors was reading a newspaper. On the cover was Uncle Willie. I wanted to brag to my classmates that I had had dinner with him just last night. Then I saw the other half of the paper. “Dead!” it read. “Mob Boss Exterminated in N.J.” There was a photo of a man on the tile floor of a bar, a pool of blood around his head. There was a café sign above the body: “Chicken in the Rough. $1.50.”
I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his tie with the diamond stickpin gleaming. I knew from the tie it was Uncle Willie. I ran to the bathroom and threw up. I got an excuse to go home. But I had the cab drop me at a Broadway appliance store first so I could see the news. The story was everywhere, on every channel. Uncle Willie, on his way to lunch with Martin and Lewis, had stopped for a quick meeting with someone at a place called Joe’s Elbow Room in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, right on the Palisades near the Riviera, where Willie’s godson Frank Sinatra spilled the ice on me. Daddy had taken me there before to meet Willie, before we would go to Palisades Park. Whoever Willie met that day had shot him to death. Newsmen speculated that Willie was hit because he had run his big mouth to Kefauver, to the press. I thought of Daddy’s sad last words, “Willie, you talk too much.” The news shows reported that Martin and Lewis thought he had stood them up.
Back at the Westover, Mommy was out. She was always out, at the psychiatrist’s. Every month it got harder and harder to talk to her. Uncle Willie was family, but he wasn’t
her
family anymore, so I didn’t bring it up. If only Daddy had called me, to calm me down, to tell me why. In Daddy’s mind I was still too innocent to even know what happened. What could I understand about murder?
Uncle Willie’s murder, like Uncle Benny’s murder, was never solved. But for me, Uncle Benny was a death, while Uncle Willie was a killing, my first real murder. I hadn’t seen what happened to Ben Siegel. I only heard about it, and much later. Uncle Willie’s violent demise was right in my face, alive and laughing one night, blown away the morning after. What Daddy didn’t get was that television had been the end of innocence, for me and everyone else. You couldn’t keep secrets from kids anymore. However, Daddy had me trained. Never complain, never explain. And never, ever ask to be explained to. Although Mommy had assured me during the Kefauver assault that Daddy was a good man, I began to have my own nagging doubts. What kind of business, what bloody business, was my father really in?
I
knew Mommy was dangerously depressed because she never wanted to go up to West Point and visit Paul. Her son had achieved an American citizen’s holy grail by getting into the U.S. Military Academy and walking in the footsteps of legendary leaders from Grant and Lee to MacArthur and Eisenhower. Now Mommy wouldn’t go to see her own legend being made. To get out of it she’d say, “He doesn’t want us there. Would
you
like it if I came to Calhoun? You don’t even want me at the stables.” “Mommy, that’s not so,” I said. And she knew I was lying. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.