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?
CHAPTER SIX
TEENAGE WEDDING
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.
Daddy, on the other hand, went to West Point twice a month. The unspoken deal between them was that Daddy could come up as much as he liked, as long as Teddy wasn’t in tow. So Daddy would drive up to West Point by himself, sit in the reviewing stands, and watch Paul and the other cadets drill for hours. Daddy knew how Paul felt, and he didn’t inflict his new wife on him. Instead Daddy began taking me with him on weekends.
We’d get a suite at the Thayer Hotel right on campus, with an amazing view over the Hudson. Daddy refused to use the phones. He once said that the biggest stool pigeon in the world was the telephone. He was convinced that since we were on federal property they must be tapped. And there was no way any of my fed-fearing uncles would be caught dead at the place. Without any business to transact, Daddy was all mine, which was great. He seemed at home here, even more than he did at Dinty Moore’s. Because of his love of American history, he was right in his element. I learned a lot more from him on his weekend tutorials than I did at Calhoun.
We had Cokes on the hotel’s Thomas Jefferson patio and watched a cotillion at the George Washington ballroom. Daddy reminded me of my dancing lessons that I had dropped in favor of riding and teased me about what I would do if one of the handsome cadets in their gray uniforms asked me for a waltz. I was actually nervous one of them would. Wishful thinking. I was dressed in a skirt and sweater and white bucks, hardly waltz material. Daddy rarely teased me, but he did here. I think West Point made him relax. He showed me plaques honoring some of the Thayer’s many famous guests. Daddy pointed out one for General Sherman, who burned down Atlanta. “Too bad he missed Tennessee,” Daddy said, referring to his nemesis, Kefauver.
Daddy showed me a sign on a room where General MacArthur’s mother lived while he attended West Point. Daddy didn’t say anything, though I couldn’t help but wonder why, if Douglas MacArthur’s mommy could live at West Point, Paul Lansky’s mommy, my mother, couldn’t even come for a little visit. During the day we toured the austerely grand Gothic campus. Daddy told me it looked a little like Oxford, in England, though centuries newer. I could see how much he longed to have had a different life, one that would have enabled him to attend schools like this.
Daddy also took me to visit the grave of his Brooklyn friend, Colonel David “Mickey” Marcus. Daddy told me that Marcus had been one of the rare Jewish graduates of West Point and went on to become a lawyer and served as an assistant U.S. attorney. In that position, he had worked with crime-buster Thomas Dewey to send Lucky Luciano to prison. Daddy had hated him for that. It took New York’s most famous rabbi and Zionist leader, Stephen Wise, to change Daddy’s mind. The anti-Nazi work Daddy had spearheaded before and during the war had brought him into the circles of New York’s highest and mightiest. He just didn’t brag about it, but he was in the loop. Totally.
A highly decorated World War II hero, Mickey Marcus had left New York and the law for the battlefield, leading Israel’s Haganah, or freedom fighters. Rabbi Wise urged Daddy to forget the Luciano past and think of Israel’s future and provide backing for Marcus. Daddy put aside his grudge and stepped up to the challenge. Daddy donated a lot of money to the cause of Israeli independence and provided the soldiers there with stores of weapons. Tragically, Colonel Marcus was accidentally killed in Israel by his own sentry in 1948. Kirk Douglas would later star in a movie about him, Cast a Giant Shadow. Having learned the Marcus story, I could see how Daddy might have wanted to lead same kind of hero’s life, but if he couldn’t do it, Paul, he was confident, would do it for him.
I finally saw Paul marching on the parade ground. It was hard to tell him from all the other cadets, and that was a good thing, a wonderful thing. He fit in. No one could have been prouder than my father. Meyer Lansky’s son was at West Point. The family was now part of the American ruling class. We weren’t “you people” anymore. We were the people, the chosen people. We met Paul’s roommates. One, Jaime Ortiz, was a handsome boy from Puerto Rico. He reminded me of a very proper version of Lucille Ball’s husband, Desi Arnaz, on the I Love Lucy show. Paul’s other roommate was Eddie Freeman, whose father was the colonel in charge of the Old Soldiers’ Home in Washington, D.C.
Colonel Freeman was a real military bigwig and liked Daddy so much that he sent us special VIP invitations to Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953. Daddy refused. He told the colonel he didn’t want to do anything to embarrass anyone, but the one he would have embarrassed, just by showing up, was Estes Kefauver. Yet that was Daddy, low-profile, low-key. Never show off, even when you have the advantage.
The boys at West Point all looked handsome. Obviously I was presold, because of Paul, and because of Gordon MacRae in The West Point Story. Too bad none of them noticed me. Actually one did. Kind of. I met him in the Thayer gift shop, where he was buying some souvenirs for his parents in Buffalo. His name was Gabby Hartnett and he was two years ahead of Paul, graduating in 1952. He was a star athlete, earning four letters, in football, baseball, skiing, and boxing. The summer of his graduation he was going to the Olympics in Helsinki, Finland, to represent America in the pentathlon.
Was this guy ever fantastic. It was almost as good as meeting Gordon MacRae. I thought about telling Gabby that I knew Champ Segal and Frankie Carbo, the big fight managers, but I was sure a proper West Pointer wouldn’t have approved. Then again, maybe he would have. He wanted to know all about me, my school, where I lived, my last name. Naturally I told him. I had nothing to hide. My brother went here. I belonged. Then Daddy walked in and gave me the dirtiest look, that look. Gabby seemed to want to meet Daddy, but I didn’t dare.
“You have a friend?” Daddy asked.
“I wish,” I said.
“Who is he?”
I told him his name, that he was going to be an Olympic champion.
> “You believe that?” Daddy was raining on my parade. Daddy didn’t believe anything.
“He goes here, Daddy. He’s going to graduate.”
“You believe that?’
“Look at his uniform. What do you think he is, some kind of spy?”
“You never know.”
“Daddy!”
“I never saw him with Paul,” Daddy said.
“He’s an upperclassman.”
“Then why was he talking to you?”
That stung. Why not talk to me? I guess Daddy thought this heartthrob was way out of my league. And he was right. Who was I, who couldn’t even get Jimmy C or Curtis, to go after a West Point Olympian? “Just nice, I suppose,” I answered Daddy. Father knows best.
Me in Havana, age 2, 1939. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
Mommy in 1938, shortly after I was born. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
From left: Paul, home from military school; Buddy, looking elegant; Me; Mommy: Daddy, the Big Businessman, Boston, 1941. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
Daddy, in his trenchcoat, with me in New York, 1940. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
Me, at Birch Wathen School, age 6, 1943. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
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