Daughter of the King

by Lansky, Sandra

  As Buddy got older, he also became a walking encyclopedia, with information gleaned from relatives and lesser employees, about my father’s secret life, about gangland yesterday and today. This, alas, was a knowledge that, in the eyes of my father, was a very dangerous thing. It was an unspoken commandment at the Lansky home that Daddy’s underworld associations were never to be spoken of, or even suggested. Buddy didn’t dare flaunt his acquired knowledge in my father’s presence, but as I grew up, he became the source of endless rude awakenings and disturbing suspicions that Daddy’s business and normal business were much different than they seemed to be on the surface.

  While Buddy loved gossip about celebrities both high and low, Paul was always very, very serious. He denounced Mommy at the table for spending so much money on me at FAO Schwarz, which he declared was “owned by Nazis.” The Schwarz family was German in origin, Daddy, with judicial restraint, pointed out, but just being a German didn’t make you a Nazi. During the war years, that argument was probably a hard sell to many other New Yorkers.

  Paul tried his best to be a big brother to me, taking me to Bambi and Dumbo and Song of the South at the Broadway movie palaces, and across the street to the Hayden Planetarium and to the Museum of Natural History to see those amazing dinosaurs. But Buddy was more fun. He educated me about pop culture—the music, the movies, the shows, the stars. While I read comic books, Mickey Mouse, Archie, Richie Rich, Little Lulu, Wonder Woman, he read magazines like Photoplay, which were full of gossip about “Daddy’s employees,” as Buddy called them.

  We spent hours together listening to the radio, especially the music program Make Believe Ballroom, a great show where America’s premier disk jockey, Martin Block, played the best dance music and jazz, enabling Buddy to introduce me to the wonders of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. Block was famous for coining the phrase “LSMFT” for his show’s chief sponsor Lucky Strike cigarettes. “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” Buddy and I tried to come up with our own secret letter codes, like BLLBG, Buddy Lansky Loves Beautiful Girls. He had his dreams, if not his body. When I grew up I wanted to be one of the Beautiful Girls that Buddy loved, a living version of the beautiful dolls I collected. Make Believe Ballroom’s other big sponsor was a line of diet pills called Retardo. I filed that away. Retardo could make me beautiful. It would come back to haunt me.

  Buddy and I were riveted to the radio soap operas like Stella Dallas, inspired by the Barbara Stanwyck movie, about a mother who sacrifices everything in her life for her daughter. Buddy would say things like, “Can you see Mommy doing that?” Mommy didn’t have to sacrifice, because Daddy took care of everything for us. We also liked the detective series Boston Blackie. I wanted Buddy to become a private eye, because he seemed good at figuring out clues. But it was sad that he couldn’t chase down the bad guys.

  As a big shot in the jukebox business, Daddy was connected enough to get us one of the very first black and white television sets. But there wasn’t very much to watch, except boxing. Buddy liked it and always wanted to bet me as to which guy would win. The names were great: Sugar Ray Robinson, Willie Pep, Jake La Motta, Manny Ortiz, Rocky Graziano, Joe Louis. I tried to show some interest. I got Mommy to buy me my own boxing ring from FAO Schwarz, where I’d have boxing matches with a punching bag on a stand that kept snapping back and knocking me down. I couldn’t even beat a punching bag, so boxing got old fast. For Buddy, though, his early desire to wager turned out to be a seed of destruction. Betting would become one of his many roads to ruin.

  I loved being friends with my brothers, as long as they wanted me. I had buck teeth, and they called me “Bucky” like in the Westerns. They also reported me to Mommy when I didn’t brush my teeth. I think I subconsciously wanted them to fall out. I was grateful to be noticed by my brothers, good or bad, but one day I fought back. I found a naked baby picture of Buddy in Mommy’s china cabinet and displayed it in the living room when my parents were having a holiday party. After that I used to bribe Buddy for five or ten dollars to hide the nude shot before his friends came over. Eventually Buddy figured out where I was hiding it, and the picture disappeared

  I loved money. I used to go into Daddy and Mommy’s bedroom during the day after school. There were piles of cash everywhere. Twenties were the smallest bills. Hundreds were abundant. It was like Monopoly money, but it was real. I knew it worked because I would help myself to some of the twenties, knowing they wouldn’t be missed. I wasn’t stealing. Mommy gave me anything I asked for. I was just playing banker. This was my way of learning math. Then I took my American Flyer wagon and went to the newsstand on 81st Street, where I stocked up on comics. I had seen my Daddy tip the doormen, so I imitated him and gave the doorman a dollar to keep his mouth shut that I had gone out all by myself, which was supposedly a no-no. I was like a little gangster girl.

  Maybe I was my father’s daughter after all. But then I had no idea what my father was all about. All I knew was that I was his pet, that after dinner, he’d hold me in his arms in his paneled library, door closed, and read to me wearing his silk Sulka robe over his silk Sulka pajamas and smelling like Benson and Hedges and English lavender. For some crazy reason, he liked to read to me from Thomas Paine, the Revolutionary War writer, Common Sense and the Rights of Man. He said that Thomas Paine was his favorite writer and these were brilliant ideas, ideas that made America free.

  Paine said unforgettable things like “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” and “these are the times that try men’s souls” and “the duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government,” things that would hit close to home for Daddy years later when the government was dead set to ruin our lives. Some things kind of spoke to me, or us: “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” But it was all very heavy stuff, hardly bedtime stories.

  Obviously these were way over the head of a six-year-old, or even a twenty-six year-old. I think Daddy was reading them for himself and just taking me along for the ride. Whatever, I didn’t care. The ride was enough; if I wanted to read, I had my comic books. I just loved Daddy’s strong, quiet voice, which, like Mommy’s, had no trace of a New York accent. I loved being in his arms. Too bad Daddy was gone most of the time, and tortured by them or not, I felt very sad and abandoned when my brothers would leave, too. Until I started school, I didn’t have anyone else.

  But then I began making friends, though not exactly the ones my mother assumed I would connect with in my fancy school. One day when one of the maids had taken me to play in Central Park, I met a girl my own age named Terry Healy, who was a brilliant roller skater. She lived on 82nd Street across from the back of the Beresford. I brought her home to play, and she was amazed at our apartment. When I went to her house, I understood why. She lived on the second floor of a big, twenty-unit old brownstone where her father was the superintendent. We liked to hang out with him when he was fixing the boilers and the pipes. It was like an adventure movie, and I loved it, even when we saw a big rat.

  For all her aspirations to glamour and culture, Mommy was anything but snobbish about my friendship with an Irish Catholic janitor’s daughter. She was delighted I had such a nice companion. She just didn’t want me running around outside by myself. Maybe it was her Lindbergh kidnapping fear. Not that I paid much attention to her. I would sneak out of the apartment and cross 82nd Street by myself to go play at Terry’s. The Healys took me to mass with them. I liked it almost as much as Radio City. One day a yellow cab almost hit me running across 82nd Street. It had to screech on its brakes. And who was in the cab? Mommy. She threw a fit and confined me to my room.

  In 1943, Mommy decided to turn me into a fancy horsewoman. To add to all my other lessons, she began taking me for riding lessons at the Aldrich Stables between 66th and 67th Streets on Central Park West. Mommy herself had liked to ride, but she lost her passion for it after a horse threw her down in Hot Springs. She tried to brainwash me into the sport by getting me kids’ horse books, l
ike My Friend Flicka, and dragging me to see National Velvet at least three times.

  The books and movies didn’t inspire me, but the horses did. At first I hated the lessons as punishment, but I quickly took to riding and all the cool outfits, leather boots and hats, and saddles and riding accessories. Daddy was so proud that I could ride and had the potential to become a sportswoman that for my seventh birthday he bought me a horse. I named her Bazookie, not my misspelling of the bazooka weapons that I’d constantly heard about because of the war, but rather a tribute to an older girl neighbor named Sookie in the Beresford who was nice to me. Grandpa Citron was so amazed that I could ride, and so proud, that every week he’d send his chauffeur, Major, in his limousine to deliver a case of the freshest carrots to Bazookie, straight from one of Grandpa’s produce suppliers in New Jersey. What luxury!

  At the stables, which became my second home, and sometimes more like my first one, I also made another less-privileged friend, who, like Terry, would become a pal for life. This was Eileen Sheridan, whose father was a trainer at the stables. The family lived in an unfancy part of the Upper East Side, all the way over near the Third Avenue El, the elevated line that was torn down in 1955. Eileen, who was there to help her dad, was rough and ready and afraid of nothing. I wanted to be alone with Eileen, but my overprotective mother always came with me to Aldrich. I had to figure out a route to independence, and eventually I did. One day Mommy and I were riding together, and I used my riding crop to startle her horse, so it would run off in the opposite direction. After that, Mommy stopped riding with me. She would drop me off and pick me up, and I felt free for the first time in my young life. Like Terry, Eileen was also a Catholic and went to parochial school. Daddy liked both Terry and Eileen and was impressed that both were hard-working students at Catholic schools, which he held in high regard. That man had a huge thing for education. I think he was hoping, against hope, that some of it would rub off on me. Eileen’s parents, like Terry’s, took me to their Catholic church. However, after the priest did something to bless my throat, sprinkling holy water or crossing it with candles, I came down with a terrible case of the mumps. I stopped going to any church after that. I thought God was trying to tell me something, giving me a sign.

  After our summers in Deal, we spent our winters in Miami, travelling down to Florida on trains with names like the Havana Special. Courtly black porters waited on us in the luxurious Pullman cars. I loved sleeping on the trains, although I never slept, too excited to look out the window all night as Baltimore became Washington became Richmond became Rocky Mount became Columbia and on through the swamps down to Miami, sunny and perfect, while New York was gray and cold. The one thing I didn’t like about Miami was seeing two lines of people at the water fountains, with big signs “White” and “Colored.” That seemed mean and wrong. It was just water. I wondered where Nig Rosen would be allowed to drink.

  Otherwise I loved Miami Beach. And the Roney Plaza Hotel where we stayed. The Roney Plaza was also the winter headquarters for Walter Winchell, who broadcast from the lobby and always said hello to me in the nicest way, although I gathered he could be very nasty to everyone else. My favorite restaurant was a run-down roadhouse called Pickin’ Chicken. The place was a dive, but the food was great there. I’m sure Daddy would have preferred that I go to a real restaurant, but he was so grateful to see me eat that he endured sitting through our excursions there.

  If Dad co-owned New Jersey, he had an even bigger stake in Florida, with a number of grand nightclubs in Broward County, just over the line from Miami’s Dade County. That line was significant, because the officials of Broward were much more enlightened toward entertainment than their compatriots a little to the south. They welcomed Daddy with open arms, and probably open wallets, which was one of the costs of doing business with them. Bribery was normal when gambling was involved. Daddy’s two great clubs were the Colonial Inn, which looked like Tara in Gone with the Wind and served up southern-fried chicken and Hollywood-level stage shows, and the Club Boheme in the former mansion of the founder of the beach town of Hallandale. Big stars and high stakes were the attraction. Meeting Ginger Rogers was a special treat.

  All the travel was great for my suntan, but it wreaked havoc on my early education. Daddy and Mommy seemed to think that a school was a school was a school. They’d take me out of Birch Wathen in December and send me to the Colonial School in Miami Beach for three months, then come back to Birch Wathen in March. Wherever I was I was always out of sync, and I couldn’t make any friends, because I was the stranger everywhere. That’s my excuse for not even trying to be the great student Daddy would have liked. I wasn’t much at reading, writing, or arithmetic, but I enjoyed the colonial stuff, like learning to make candles and churn butter. To be fair, Daddy never pushed me about school the way he pushed the boys. That only worked with Paul, anyway.

  Maybe Daddy didn’t place much of a premium on a woman’s education. Maybe he just expected me to get married young like Mommy and shop all the time. In his own family, his sister Esther had majored in French at Brooklyn College. Daddy had gotten her a great job at Schenley Whiskey in the Empire State Building, through the company’s owner, Lewis Rosenstiel. An old friend of Daddy’s from Prohibition, Mr. Rosenstiel was from a distinguished German Jewish family from Cincinnati who had been in the distilled spirits business long before the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920 made it illegal. During the dry era, Rosenstiel kept his fortune by starting Schenley as a legal, medicinal whiskey company, which made a still bigger fortune in bourbon once Prohibition was repealed.

  For Daddy Rosenstiel’s success surely represented the road not taken, playing by the rules, absurd as they may have seemed. For all his legitimacy, Rosenstiel was branded as a gangster simply by being in the liquor business, a label that Joe Kennedy managed to avoid by using his wealth and patronage with President Roosevelt to get appointed chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and ambassador to England. Then again, Kennedy had the leg up with his Harvard degree. The Lanskys would have to wait for Paul, Daddy often said. He never said anything about waiting for me.

  Even if Daddy didn’t think of me as being the family’s future messiah, I took comfort in being his pet. When he was in New York, he’d take me everywhere with him, and not just to Dinty Moore’s and to the theatre. He took me to his gym, a place called George Brown’s Gymnasium and Health Club on West 57th Street, to watch him play handball and paddleball, rarely with my uncles, whom Daddy ridiculed as being lazy, but with young pros from the club. He was good, fast, strong, and very competitive, always beating the much younger and bigger pros. And no, they didn’t let him win because he was Meyer Lansky. Both he and they sweated way too much for that. After school, he would also take Paul to Brown’s for some sweaty father-son bonding.

  After his workouts, Daddy would often go for simple food, and not the grand restaurants we’d go to at night with my uncles. We’d often go to Jewish delicatessens, so brightly lit, smelling so strongly of garlic, and so New York. Daddy was very specific about his order: a hot corned beef on seedless rye, extra fatty, with just the tiniest smear of hot mustard. Anything else and back it would go. If we went to a coffee shop counter and ordered a hamburger, it had to be medium rare on a toasted, buttered bun. One of the few times I saw him get angry was when the waiter or waitress dared to garnish his burger, even with the best of intentions. The worst mistake a coffee shop could make was to put a pickle, slices of lettuce, tomato, or onion on the plate. Daddy was a purist and he wanted things nice and simple.

  He’d give the wait staff a vicious lecture that would inevitably leave them near tears and trembling. Dessert also had to be just so, either a chilled bowl of precisely half chocolate and half strawberry ice cream, or a heated plate of warm apple pie with a small wedge of cheddar cheese. Dessert mistakes didn’t provoke the same rage, probably because the hamburger had taken a bit of the edge off. One thing I noticed about Daddy, who may have loved eating good food more than he
loved making money, was that he’d always be talking about his next meal while he was eating the one at hand.

  After lunch, we’d go to Daddy’s office, which gave me my first tangible look at what he did as a businessman. Emby Distributing Company was the name elegantly stenciled on the big oak door in the office on West 43rd Street, just down the street from the headquarters of the New York Times, which is how Times Square got its name. Inside was a huge space with several secretaries and walls of files and a big office for Daddy. What did Emby Distributing mean, I asked him. He told me: The first letter “E” was for a partner, whose first name was Edward; the “m” was for Meyer; and the “by” was for another partner whose last name was Bye. And what did they distribute? He took me towards the back of the office and then opened a door, like a magician saying “Presto,” to reveal a whole illuminated showroom full of Wurlitzer jukeboxes, just like the one Buddy had in his room in the school in Maryland.

  The machines were beautiful and futuristic, something from another planet, chrome and glass and with neon tubes of all different colors. They reminded me of the pinball machines I’d seen on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, but instead of noise, they made beautiful music. Though not at Daddy’s office. There they stayed silent, just on display. Bye had worked for Wurlitzer as a salesman, and now he and another former Wurlitzer representative were working for Daddy, selling or leasing these magic machines to bars and restaurants all up and down the East Coast.

  Talk about cash cows. Teresa Brewer’s number one song of 1950 “Music, Music, Music” would say it all: “Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon . . .” captured the essence of what enormous money machines these jukeboxes were. And here was Daddy at the heart of it all. Daddy was the king of the party America was throwing for itself for winning the war. I found out that these jukeboxes cost over a thousand dollars apiece, and since every bar and every restaurant seemed to need to have one, the sound of music seemed to add up to the sound of money. Daddy had huge Christmas parties at Emby, and he always hired a Santa Claus to give out gifts, as well as to pour champagne. I had never seen a Santa pour champagne, but Daddy had a way to get people to do what he wanted them to.