CHAPTER FIVE
THE MAN IN THE COONSKIN CAP
My brother Paul was a perfect gentleman who would never say an unkind word about anyone. That he said absolutely nothing about Teddy, other than calling her “that woman” spoke volumes to me. Although Paul’s loud silence about “that woman” had led me to expect the worst, my new stepmother turned out not to be as horrible as I had feared. I think Daddy could have married Eleanor Roosevelt, and Paul would have resented him for it. Teddy Schwartz—I could never come to call her Teddy Lansky—was perfectly nice to me, though I never told Mommy that. In the winter of 1949, the year after their European love cruise on the Italia, I flew down to Miami to spend the Christmas vacation with Daddy. It was just a two-week break, and Mommy didn’t come. She didn’t want to be in the same state as Teddy if she could help it.
Mommy, perhaps distracted by her own depression over the marriage, somehow was much less smotheringly protective of me. She even let me fly to Miami by myself, on a big Eastern Airlines Super Constellation. Her brother Uncle Julie, who lived near us on the Upper West Side and was in the family produce business, drove me to Idlewild Airport. They put a little tag around my neck in the shape of a teddy bear that said “Unaccompanied Child,” but I took it off the minute I got on the plane. In my mind, and actually in my body, I was no “child.” I had just turned twelve. I may have looked like a little tomboy, but there was something starting to stir in me. I had just been kissed. I was flying to the tropics all by myself, to be alone, or kind of alone, with my famous Daddy. Some child!
Daddy picked me up at Miami airport in a rented Chevrolet. No big Cadillacs, no sporty convertibles for him. No show. Though I wondered what had possessed him to get that flashy suite, fit for an emperor, on the cruise ship. I guess Teddy possessed him, that’s who. This winter he wasn’t staying at the Wofford or the Roney Plaza. Instead he told me he had rented a house. Given his lavish New York apartments, I thought he might have installed Teddy in a mansion like the Firestone Estate that would soon be torn down to build the Fontainebleau Hotel. Showy cars were a no-no for Daddy, but showy homes were okay. Was I ever surprised when we pulled up to this flimsy little cottage in Hollywood. It was about as fancy as Nancy Attina’s family home in Bayshore, Long Island. This one wasn’t even on the water. Inside was just as plain as outside. Instead of being decorated by Dorothy Hammerstein, it seemed to have been decorated by the welfare office. Maybe Daddy was doing this to test Teddy, to see how much of a gold digger she really was. If she could stay in this dump without complaining, her love for Daddy was been more genuine than Paul gave her credit for.
True to form, Daddy didn’t say a single word of explanation about who Teddy was or that he had a new wife, and certainly not why. The expression, “Never complain, never explain” could have been Meyer Lansky’s motto. This was just life as it was, and my only choice was to accept it, to go with the flow, as they say now. So I did. There Teddy was, amidst the indoor wicker garden furniture on the lawn. She didn’t hug or kiss me like my new mother. She shook my hand, a little nervous and a little standoffish. Under Daddy’s unforgiving microscope, she didn’t want to seem too familiar. At the same time, she didn’t want to seem too cold. I felt for her. I thought she was pretty, though I couldn’t help but keep noticing her heavy legs. With all the showgirls who worked for Daddy, he could have had Betty Grable, the wartime pinup who had the most famous legs in America.
Teddy had to have something more, something special. I couldn’t figure it out. I was just happy to have my own room. She gave me whatever I wanted to eat, and gave Daddy and me a lot of time to ourselves, only joining us for big dinners with all my “uncles” at the Colonial Inn and Club Boheme. It was as if Dinty Moore’s had transferred their whole clientele south for the holidays, Broadway on the sand. Until then, I only got to go to nightclubs, the Riviera in New Jersey or the Copacabana in New York, on rare occasions. Now I was right at center stage, with the best seat in the house.
One night at the Boheme, Daddy caused a big stir when he threw out Howard Hughes, the millionaire aviator and film producer who owned Trans World Airlines. Daddy had no idea who he was. He thought he was a bum. Hughes was wearing tennis shoes and a stained open shirt, and everyone else was in black tie and fancy jewels. Daddy didn’t recognize him, and even after someone pointed out who he was, Daddy said to throw him out and keep him out. Hughes left without a fight. He wouldn’t mess with Daddy. Daddy ran a tight ship.
People dressed up then, and so did I, in clothes Daddy bought me at Burdines, the Saks of Miami. All I needed was a cocktail and not my ginger ale, but I felt very grown up. It was good to be twelve. Oddly, at these dinners, nobody, uncle nor aunt, ever asked about Mommy. Not Uncle Doc Stacher or Uncle Jimmy Alo or even Aunt Flo Alo, Mommy’s dear friend. It was as if Mommy had never existed. Teddy was the new queen, the only queen. I felt bad for Mommy. As always, I kept it to myself.
Back in New York, Mommy didn’t ask me a single thing about my trip. If my uncles didn’t mention Mommy, Mommy didn’t mention my uncles. However, the sounds of silence at the Beresford got louder and louder. Buddy had gone, to 36th Street, and Paul was still in Washington, at the Sullivan School. It was just Mommy and me. Paul enrolled in West Point in July 1950. This was Daddy’s dream come true, and a lot of people said he had made sure it would come true by putting the pressure on Representative Arthur Klein to secure Paul’s appointment. Klein was the congressman for New York State’s 19th District, where West Point was located. Daddy’s dear friend and colleague Uncle Frank Costello, who used to be my parents’ neighbor in the Majestic, also had a lot of influence on Congressman Klein, who was elected by the Tammany Hall democratic political machine that Costello was said to control.
I had met Congressman Klein with Daddy at Uncle Frank’s famous annual Salvation Army Christmas children’s party at the Copacabana in 1949, before I flew to Florida. Paul, the object of Klein’s supposed charity, refused to go, as always, even though he was applying to West Point and may have needed Klein’s help. Paul had no interest in nightclubs or in any inside connections. He just wanted to be his own man. He and Buddy both knew Daddy was a gangster, maybe the gangster, but they were both kind enough to keep me in the dark. Little ladies like me were not supposed to know such things. I probably wouldn’t have believed it, anyway. For a million reasons, Paul didn’t want his help.
A nightclub may have been a strange place to raise money and give toys to the orphans of New York, but it certainly got the job done. Frank Costello may have made more city kids happy than Santa Claus. And Santa Claus couldn’t have given Paul a better gift that his fat letter of acceptance to the U.S. Military Academy. When the press soon focused on the Lansky-Costello-Klein connection, it tarnished Paul’s achievement. He wanted to do it his way, and he had worked so hard that he surely would have made it there all by himself.
That Daddy was seen to have greased the wheels of power, that he may have “fixed” one of the country’s noblest competitions, had to be hurtful to Paul. If Paul suffered, he suffered in silence. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he told us all to stay away. One Lansky at the academy was enough. Nevertheless, he showed no hard feelings and opened the doors of West Point to us. For all his militariness, Paul was at heart a spiritual hippie before his time. He was a rebel against his family’s materialism, which I must admit was extreme even in the highly materialistic postwar times. He liked living purely, like a monk, and if that monk had to be a soldier, so be it.
With Daddy, Buddy, and Paul all gone from the apartment, Mommy, for all her own conspicuous consumption, eventually decided we had more room than we needed, even with our two live-in maids. She made plans to leave the Beresford and move into a brand new building, the Schwab House, which was going up on Riverside Drive between 73rd and 74th Streets. If Paul could overlook the Hudson, so could we, from this spectacular building, one of the first and finest luxury residences to be built in Manhattan after the war. This was an era when m
odern was better, so the Beresford, grand as it was, seemed obsolete, like a medieval castle, compared to the space-age Schwab House. The Beresford was also a castle haunted by the ghosts of Daddy. Time to go. Mommy was excited to move, and the transition seemed to lift her spirits and alleviate her depression.
Unfortunately, the Schwab House construction, like most construction, took far longer than anyone anticipated. By the end of 1950 we were all packed up with no place to go, so we moved into the St. Moritz Hotel at 50 Central Park South, basically next door to the building where Daddy had lived with George Wood. I liked having Uncle George there as my “boy next door.” Daddy always assured me that George could fix anything. He could, and, in time, he did. Not that Mommy would have asked him. She saw him as the serpent in the garden, a dreadful influence, and she was probably right.
The St. Moritz was a thirty-six-story skyscraper designed by Emery Roth, who was the architect of most of New York’s ultimate luxury buildings built during the Roaring Twenties, before the stock market crashed. Aside from the antiques-filled rooms and the stunning park views of our two-bedroom suite, plus room service from the hotel’s fancy dining room, the Café de la Paix, the best thing about the hotel for me was Rumpelmayer’s, the ice cream parlor of the rich and famous. Mommy said she saw people there like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, though I was much more interested in the stupendous hot fudge sundaes and nearly life-size stuffed animals that I would make Mommy buy for me.
At this stage, however, I was moving beyond dolls to guys. Unwilling to pine away for Jimmy C, I found a Jimmy substitute at the Aldrich Stables, which had been renamed the Manhattan Riding Club. I still called it Aldrich, though. The boy’s name was Curtis, a rich young socialite whose family split its time between New York and Santa Barbara, California. He was so handsome, again, in that blond, insolent, James Dean way, but very charming and polite, especially when Daddy sold Bazookie and bought me a new gelding named Time Clock. T.C. was one of the top horses at Aldrich. If anything, Curtis was too polite. He’d ride horses with me, but that was as far as it went. No Jimmy C make-out session in the hidden glens of Central Park, no scandal in the Ramble (the thick park underbrush area). I didn’t feel rejected, because Curtis didn’t notice any of the girls at Aldrich. Today, I’d probably say Curtis was gay. But then I didn’t have any idea what gay was. I would soon enough.
Even if Curtis, who was at most twenty-one, had made a move on me, I probably would have said no. You see, I was saving myself for my true love. Who was that? Gordon MacRae. The movie star. I was crazy about him and turned my room at the St. Moritz into a Gordon MacRae shrine, messing up the silk-papered walls with Scotch tape putting up every photo of my idol I could get my hands on. Of course George Wood could have introduced me to Gordon MacRae with one call. He probably could have gotten him to take me for a sundae at Rumpelmayer’s. But I didn’t dare speak my love, because George would tell Daddy, and Daddy would have not approved.
I first became aware of Gordon (our fantasy first-name basis) when I saw him starring in the movie The West Point Story in 1950. Paul had just gotten in, and the Lanskys had gone West Point–crazy. We assumed that the movie was written for us. The story had echoes of the Lansky life. A Broadway impresario played by James Cagney gets involved in a scheme to convince a cadet with a fabulous voice, played by Gordon, to give up his dreams of generaldom for the certainty of stardom on Broadway, where his father, Cagney’s friend, is a major mogul. Sounds like Daddy wanting Paul to give up the army for the Mob. Here, however, was a case of life not imitating art. The last thing Daddy wanted was for his brilliant son, his golden boy, to follow in his footsteps.
Gordon had just become a big star opposite Doris Day in Tea for Two, a remake of the musical No, No, Nanette. It was still playing when The West Point Story came out, and I must have gone down to Broadway five times to see the films at after-school matinees, skipping Curtis at the stables for my new true love. When Gordon sang “I Only Have Eyes for You,” I was convinced he was singing to me. I was turning into a little bobby-soxer. Probably the West Point connection was the aphrodisiac. Paul was the idealized boy, but since I couldn’t have my brother as my boyfriend, I would find a cadet of my own. There was Gordon MacRae, waiting in the wings.
Gordon was anything but a rough boy like Jimmy C. He was a gentleman, the son of professional musicians, educated at the posh Deerfield Academy, a prep school football hero, a navigator in the Air Force during the war, and now a movie star—at twenty-nine. Sure, he was a little old for me, and he had been happily married since 1941, but those were only details. We could work it out. My fantasy romance, however, came to a crashing halt in the spring of 1951, when I came face-to-face with the hard reality of my father’s life in crime.
I was coming home from Calhoun by myself, in a cab. Mommy was not only trusting me on my own, but giving me tons of cash, just to be “safe.” I took yellow cabs everywhere. They were my magic carpet. I arrived at the lobby of the St. Moritz and stopped at the newsstand to look for the newest Photoplay and Modern Screen in hopes that Gordon’s marriage had suddenly unraveled.
Instead, what I saw on the newsstand was my father. There he was, the title Meyer Lansky, over his picture on a softcover magazine-sized book. Next to him, in big piles, were two other titles: Frank Costello and Joe Adonis, with my uncles’ pictures on the respective covers. I bought all the copies and jammed them in my book bag, crazily trying to prevent guests or employees in the St. Moritz from seeing them. I had no idea what was in these books, though I had a pretty good idea that whatever it was couldn’t be good.
Luckily, Mommy was away at the psychiatrist’s. She was gone most afternoons. If she hadn’t been going to these headshrinkers, as they were called, she would have surely needed one after she read the books I brought home. Basically, the three books accused Daddy, Uncle Frank, and Uncle Joe of being the kingpins of crime in the New York metropolitan area and portrayed them as three of the most powerful men in the world. The problem was that the books made the point that their power was evil, that they were the lords of crime, the pinnacle of a sinister aristocracy. There was one aristocracy of the Roosevelts and the Cabots and the Lodges and all the old names I heard in Boston and of the parents of my classmates at Birch Wathen and Calhoun. Then there was our aristocracy, the aristocracy of Deal and the Jersey Shore and South Orange and Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. There was a war going on between the good people and the bad people. And the Lanskys were not only bad people, we were the worst of the whole bad bunch, the brains behind the brawn, the ones who gave the orders. And sometimes, orders to kill.
The books were short, and I read each one, cover to cover. I had no idea what most of it meant. There were a lot of legal terms and lots of police and FBI jargon that was beyond my thirteen-year-old vocabulary. In summary, the books were three long rap sheets outlining the crimes and misdemeanors of Daddy and his friends. They talked about Daddy and Uncle Benny and their gang in the twenties, with all these allegations of terrible violence and murders and corruption that got them all to the top so they could live at the Majestic and the Beresford and eat at Dinty Moore’s with the distinguished mayor of New York, William O’Dwyer, whom the books claimed Daddy and Uncle Frank basically “owned.”
Mayor O’Dwyer had just resigned his office to become ambassador to Mexico, which was highly unusual, because mayor of New York was a much more important job. The books made it clear that he went south of the border because the heat was on over his gangland associations. They called Uncle Frank “Prime Minister of the Underworld,” and they called Daddy “Chancellor of the Exchequer.” Whatever that was. The books implied that the law was after Daddy and company the same way it was after the fallen mayor, that justice was near. I was actually worried that Mommy and I would be arrested ourselves. I felt like a teen version of Virginia Hill, whom everyone had blamed for Uncle Benny’s downfall and death. The books went one step beyond that and blamed Daddy for ordering Benny’s assassination. Heavy
stuff. And I thought all Daddy did was sell jukeboxes and own nightclubs.
I glued myself to the television to see the news, and I quickly got an education in what was going on. Something called the Kefauver Hearings were just getting under way, and they were drawing a bigger television audience than the World Series or the heavyweight championship fights. This was like the heavyweight fights, the Feds versus the Crooks, and guess who the bad guys were? Us! Kefauver, Kefauver, Kefauver. That was the weirdest name I ever heard, and when I saw the man himself, he was the weirdest guy.
Estes Kefauver was the senator from Tennessee. His trademark was his coonskin cap, something that Daniel Boone had worn to fight the Indians and the symbol of the all-American, all-natural, God-fearing, homespun, good guy. A few years later, in 1955, Walt Disney had one of his biggest hit series, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, about a heroic Tennessean in a coonskin cap. Every boy in America had to have one of those hats. It was Estes Kefauver who ignited the craze. He was the king of a new frontier, the frontier of crime. In the movies, before Davy Crockett, they said you could tell the hero by his white hat. In 1951’s real life, you could tell him by his coonskin cap. To me, the senator didn’t look like any hero I had ever seen on screen. With his cap and his thick glasses and long anteater-y nose, he looked like a cross between a furry mammal and a funny Martian.
Kefauver was with a big team of lawyers and other Washington lawmakers down at the federal courthouse in Foley Square doing what was known as the “Mafia Roadshow,” which was kind of a legal travelling circus, a rolling witch hunt. This was the last stop on a national tour of fourteen cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, Miami, and more, where Kefauver held public hearings on “organized crime” and interviewing my “uncles.” I had no idea what “organized crime” was. Yet I found out that the main guy who organized it was Daddy!
Daughter of the King Page 10
