Daughter of the King

by Lansky, Sandra

  Mommy and Daddy’s West Coast palace, 1933. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Ben (Bugsy) Siegel’s wife Esther and daughter Millicent, Los Angeles, around 1946. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  My first friend, Wendy, with me in the Boston Public Garden, 1941. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Daddy and I on the hospital grounds of the county jail outside Saratoga, N.Y., 1953. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Cutting the wedding cake with my new husband Marvin Rapoport, 1954. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Top Row: Daddy, Marvin, Harry Rapoport. Bottom Row: Me, Anna Rapoport, 1954. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Me, on Sunday Swing, Madison Square Garden, 1955. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Me, at the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida, trying to look sophisticated for Dean Martin, 1958. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Me, all dressed up, 1954. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Daddy and his old pal Ben Siegelbaum in Israel, 1971. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Top Row: Me, Daddy, my stepmother Teddy, Paul. Bottom Row: Annette (Buddy’s wife), Buddy, Grandma Yetta Lansky, Miami, 1957. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Dean Martin and I, 1957. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Daddy and I in Jerusalem, 1971. (COURTESY OF GARY RAPOPORT)

  Left: Paul, wife Edna, and Meyer Lansky II. Right: Daddy, Me, and Gary Rapoport, 1960. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Paul, Daddy, and I, Miami, six months before Daddy’s death, 1982. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Daddy, Teddy, Gary, and I, Miami, 1973. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Jimmy “Blue Eyes” Alo, Daddy, and Harry “Nig Rosen” Stromberg, Miami, 1982. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Vince and I, Miami, 1983. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  “You can’t be too careful. Even here.” I had absolutely no idea how brilliant and all-knowing Daddy would be. It took six years to find out, when I ran into Gabby Hartnett once again under very different circumstances. Right now, all I had was another foolish crush. I wanted so badly to have a boyfriend, any boyfriend. He didn’t have to go to West Point. But it would have been nice.

  I would have given anything to be able to show up at Calhoun, at Aldrich, with Gabby Hartnett. So I did the next best thing. At the Thayer gift shop, I bought the most expensive West Point pin I could find. I started wearing it to school. I told everyone I was pinned to one of my brother’s fellow West Point cadets. His name was Gabby Hartnett. I just hoped he didn’t win the Olympics and get his picture in the papers with his real girlfriend, who, for all I knew, could have been Miss America.

  What a lie I was living. I didn’t have a boyfriend; I didn’t even have a girlfriend. Terry’s family moved to California in 1952, and I wasn’t seeing that much of Eileen, who had fallen in love. Natalie and I weren’t all that close. All the girls at Calhoun were having sweet sixteen parties, big events where they all had beaus. Daddy had been promising me the biggest of all sweet sixteen parties, at the Copacabana, no less, for years. But how could I have a party without a boyfriend? I couldn’t pretend Gabby Hartnett was still in Helsinki. I was desperate. I dreaded turning sixteen. December 6, 1953, one day before Pearl Harbor Day, was a day I was sure would also live in infamy, the day Sandi Lansky turned sixteen, with no boyfriend, no nothing. Hoping against hope for a miracle, I didn’t tell Daddy that I didn’t want the party he was planning.

  Buddy had left New York. At the ticket agency, Buddy had picked up a bad gambling habit, betting on all the football games, basketball games, boxing matches. If there was a contest, Buddy would bet on it. To get him out of harm’s way, Daddy installed him in the middle of nowhere at a resort in the Florida Keys called Plantation Yacht Harbor that he had bought. Daddy was obsessed about Buddy having a job, if only running the hotel switchboard. He even set up nurses, drivers, and a whole clinic at the resort to care for him. One of the few times I talked to Buddy, he joked that “the only nightlife here is the mosquitoes.”

  When the city fathers of Broward County caught Kefauver fever and cracked down on the gambling that had made Daddy a fortune, Daddy sold the Colonial Inn to the owner of Minsky’s Burlesque, who thought he could make just as much money from naked strippers as Daddy had with roulette wheels and card tables. He made a big mistake. Daddy also closed Club Boheme and concentrated on local real estate like the isolated resort where he parked Buddy. I know Buddy loved the “action” of Times Square, and to take him away from it was like sending a junkie to rehab. I missed him, and I missed his advice. I certainly needed it now, at this low ebb of despair.

  I had to do something to change my life. So I did. I campaigned to get a nose job. Mommy, who didn’t want me to get my teeth pulled so I could get my braces, would have never let me get my nose fixed, even though Dr. Eagle had gone on record saying that it might help my chronic sinusitis. I was amazed that she had let them take my tonsils out when I was little. Instead, I turned to Daddy, who was distracted with lots of legal problems that the Kefauver hearings had stirred up. The government was constantly harassing him about taxes, licenses, anything. My harassing him about my nose, which I had decided I hated, was easy to deal with. Just say yes.

  Daddy told me to go see Uncle Georgie Wood, who would take care of everything. All the actresses that George represented, or dated, had nose jobs. He knew the best plastic surgeons, and he sent me to the best of the best, Dr. Scheer on Park Avenue. Talk about intimidation. I had never seen so many beautiful women in one place, not at the Copa, not at the Stork Club, not at Dinty Moore’s, not on the Miss Universe pageant on television. Maybe I would come out like that. I told the doctor that I wanted the same little nose I had when I was a baby. I had brought baby pictures to show him. He said, sure, I can do precisely that. For George Wood, he would have promised me anything.

  Before Uncle George could arrange an elaborate ruse for me to get away from Mommy so I could transform myself into a beauty queen, or at least someone who could get a date for her sweet sixteen party, I was once more upended by the cruel reality of Daddy’s famous life. My father was going to jail. Jail? Jail was for criminals. Then I realized that that was the point Kefauver had been trying to make two years before. Now the coonskin prophecy was coming true. A funny thing had happened on my way to the nose job.

  Saratoga Springs was a few hours’ drive north of West Point. Famous for its horses and summer race track since the Civil War era, Saratoga was New York’s answer to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and in the 1940s, Daddy came to be to Saratoga what Owney Madden was to that southern resort. Daddy owned two nightclubs there, the Arrowhead Inn and the Piping Rock Club. Both had casino gambling, which was technically illegal but was tolerated for years. In the summer high season, the clubs were packed with celebrities and politicians.

  But the Democrat Estes Kefauver, who had major presidential ambitions, had singled out Saratoga Springs as a massive den of iniquity and blamed the New York Republican Party, led by current Governor Tom Dewey, who lost the presidential election by a hair to Harry Truman, for allowing this ungodly corruption. If Kefauver was going to be holier than thou, the Republicans decided they had to be holier than Kefauver. Accordingly, they needed to blame someone. Those someones were Daddy and Uncle Joe Stacher, who were indicted on criminal gambling charges.

  Moses Polakoff wanted to fight the charges. He knew how two-faced they were. Daddy had proof of Kefauver’s own gambling habits that had been as effective in thwarting the senator during the hearings as showing a cross to Dracula. He had equal proof of the gambling habits at Saratoga of many top Republicans. The problem was too many. Daddy would be going up against the whole Republican establishment. A man who detested publicity, Daddy did not want a trial. To him a trial was all about complain and explain. He preferred to go quietly—and briefly—to jail.

  So the Professor bargained out a deal with the authorities. For the first time in his life, Daddy went behind bars. The sentence was for only three months and it wasn’t at some brutal prison like Sing Sing, but rather a county jail outside Sarato
ga in a town called Ballston Spa. There may have been one other prisoner when Daddy went in. However, the idea of Daddy in jail was a terrible shonda, a secret word I had picked up from my parents when they didn’t want me to know what they were talking about. Shonda was Yiddish for shame. Uncle Joe Stacher didn’t go to jail. He paid a fine of $10,000 and got a suspended sentence. But the authorities wanted to be able to brag they had caught the Big Fish. Before he went, Daddy sat me down at the 36th Street apartment and, for the first time in his life, tried to educate me a little about the gambling business. This was hardly a confession about a life of crime. As I said, Meyer Lansky didn’t explain, even to his daughter. The lesson was more about the politics, as I mentioned above, and government hypocrisy. “When I was young, I had a choice,” he said to me, with unusual difficulty for a man who was normally so sure of himself. “I had two roads I could have taken. There was one to the right, and one to the left. This was the road I took. This was my choice.” That was all he said.

  Daddy, who could be very cryptic and evasive, didn’t mention the word “jail.” He just said he would be “tied up” for a little while, and that everything would be fine. He didn’t say he had made the wrong choice. There were no regrets. But there was this silent undercurrent of shame, the shame of being behind bars, of being in a jail, when, just down the highway, his son was marching on the parade grounds of West Point, preparing for a career on the right side of the law.

  I went up to visit Daddy several times while he was at Ballston Spa, which was a funny-sounding place to be in police custody. One of Daddy’s errand-men, Billy Blanche, would drive me up there. I couldn’t go with my mother. If Mommy wouldn’t visit her son at West Point, she surely wasn’t going to visit her ex-husband in jail. I’m not certain how much Paul came over, either, as long as Teddy was around. I doubt he wanted his pals at the academy to know where his father was. I stayed with Teddy at a rooming house where she was renting space. She smoked all night. It was like sleeping in an ashtray. The first time I got there, I learned that Daddy wasn’t in jail. He was in a local hospital, where he was recovering from a bleeding ulcer. I got very upset, but when I saw him, I was so relieved.

  Daddy looked fine, wearing his expensive Sulka silk robe and smoking his cigarettes, eating a big plate of lamb chops and watching a show about the Civil War on television. The only concession to his ulcer was a big glass of milk, which he never normally drank. Buddy later told me that Moses Polakoff got a doctor’s note so Daddy could get out of jail. I didn’t know much about ulcers, but when I learned they could be caused by the stress of bottling up your emotions, I thought they could have been for real. Eventually Daddy’s sentence was reduced for good behavior. He was out of Ballston Spa and back in action in less than two months.

  Teddy was nice enough, though very cheap. She took me to the stores in Saratoga and encouraged me to get whatever I wanted. Then, trading on the now-famous Lansky name, she’d have the stores send the clothes to my mother . Teddy was an incredible miser, and only lavish with someone else’s money. Nevertheless, I saw Teddy could be useful to my beauty scheme. I used my new “relationship” with my stepmother as a cover to get that nose job. Teddy, unlike Mommy, was all for it. As an ex-beautician, she believed in doing whatever it took to look your best, including going under the knife. Now that school was out and Mommy was too depressed to even go to the Lake Mahopac resort this season, I was pretty much on my own. Surgery would be my summer camp this year. Teddy helped me plan a “cover” visit to Brooklyn to spend some time with Daddy’s sister, Esther Chess, who was married to a lawyer there. Mommy didn’t really care where I went at this point, as long as she knew I was “safe.” Aunt Esther secretly took me for the plastic surgery at St. Clare’s Hospital just west of the theatre district in Manhattan.

  The surgery was awful. I came out with a swollen face that looked like I had been in the ring with Joe Louis. The bruising was so bad that the doctors gave me radiation treatments to reduce the swelling. That was state-of-the-art in the fifties. God knows what I was exposed to. I spent three days at St. Clare’s then went to Brooklyn to recuperate. The swelling finally went down, but Dr. Scheer didn’t deliver what he had promised. I did not get back my baby nose. When I went to his fancy office to complain, he assured me that it would get smaller over time, that it had to “settle.” The new nose was bad. Mommy was worse.

  When I went home after my extended “vacation,” during which I had pretended that I had caught a severe cold, Mommy went psychotic. She shrieked when she saw me. “What have they done, what have they done?” she wailed. This was the only real emotion I had seen in my listless mother for the longest time. It was a kind of shock therapy. Too bad it didn’t last, or make her better. Luckily, Daddy was away, so she couldn’t call him. I gave Mommy a song and dance about health rather than vanity. I did this for Dr. Eagle. I did this for my sinuses. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to worry you. Sure . . .

  Things had been going from bad to worse. Mommy’s father had passed away, so she had lost that ballast. She never spoke to Esther Siegel anymore, or to Flo Alo. She had no friends, other than the television, which she never turned off. For the last year I could barely do my homework. Mommy insisted on the rooms being so dark, no overhead lighting allowed, so that the only light I had was the sliver of light from the bathroom or the flickering light from the television screen.

  I wasn’t a very inspired student to begin with. Adding darkness to laziness was not a good formula to prepare me for Vassar, which was near West Point and where so many of the Calhoun girls were planning to go. Aside from the fit she threw over my new nose, Mommy barely spoke to me at all, about my education, or anything else. She spent a lot of time talking to herself, in a mumble I couldn’t understand. “What, Mommy?” I’d often ask her, thinking, hoping, she was saying something to me. “What’d you say?”

  “Nothing. Nothing . . .” she trailed off. Other times she would say stuff to herself, then burst out laughing. I felt so creepy being around her. You don’t want to think of your mother as a crazy person, like the bag ladies who walked up and down Broadway near the Westover, talking, laughing, cursing to themselves. She’d only go to Steinberg’s Dairy Restaurant, which had to be the most depressing restaurant in New York

  Mommy had greatly reduced her frequent trips to the psychiatrists. I’m sure they wanted to see her, but she had gotten too despondent to keep her appointments. However, she still was hooked on their prescriptions. Her medicine cabinet looked like one big drugstore. I saw a lot of bottles of Lithium. Sometimes she would come to get me at Calhoun looking ragged and unkempt, which was embarrassing. It was bad enough not having a boyfriend. I wanted to disappear. The very worse thing was the day I found my mother in her bedroom arranging something in a cigar box. I walked over to see what it was. I screamed! In the box was a collection of dead cockroaches. She was arranging the bugs in military file, like a marching platoon. “My West Point cadets,” Mommy said, without a smile or a change in her flat tone of voice.

  I wasn’t sure what was scarier, the cockroaches or Mommy. I never told anyone. I was too afraid, too ashamed. My brothers never saw her. Daddy never came up, always dropping me off downstairs. She was my secret. But her brother, Uncle Julie, who lived very close by on Riverside Drive, would come by weekly. He was clearly distressed at his once elegant sister’s tragic decline. He didn’t tell me to find a way out, but I could see in his eyes that he wanted to try to save me.

  Instead Daddy came to the rescue. When he got out of Ballston Spa, I met him at Dinty Moore’s to show off my now healed and un-swollen nose. He seemed impressed. Then I told him I’d love to live with him and Teddy in Florida, where he was spending more and more time. I told him if I lived there, I could see more of him. He didn’t ask me about what Mommy would say. But he asked about my horse, about my school. I told him that school would come first, that I had always liked going to school in Florida during our winters when we were a family, that the
horses could wait. So Daddy said yes. He always said yes to me. That was the good part.

  The hard part was telling Mommy. The sadness on her face when I told her was different from the shock at my redone nose. She looked crushed, betrayed. She had taken many blows in recent years, losing Daddy, then Buddy, then Paul going away. And now me. This was, as they say, the unkindest cut of all. Yet Mommy was too defeated, too far gone, to try to argue with me. She didn’t cry. She just stared into space, like someone in court who just heard a guilty verdict they knew was coming.

  Mommy had come to expect everything in her life to go wrong. This was one more awful and final thing. I tried to give her some hope to cling to, saying that this was just an experiment, that I wanted to try a new place, some place where I could finally meet some cute boys. I sensed that she didn’t believe me. She knew her daughter, the last life preserver in a life that was sinking fast, had drifted away from her reach. I don’t know how I got through that hideously sad farewell.

  I started public school in Hollywood, Florida, in August. New York schools started in September, but before widespread air conditioning, Miami schools started in the brutal heat of summer, but finished in the relative coolness of early spring. The luckier kids could then head north for the summer. This lucky New York kid was going in the opposite direction, hoping for the best, or for better than I had had it. Daddy and Teddy had a new rental in Hollywood. It wasn’t much nicer than the first one, but it was better than the Westover. And, aside from the endless smoking, Teddy seemed friendly enough, better than Paul had given her credit for.

  Daddy enrolled me in the tenth grade at South Broward High School. My younger cousin Linda Lansky was in seventh grade there. Her parents, Uncle Jack and Aunt Anna, had been living in Florida for years. Jack was Daddy’s man in Miami, running his clubs and properties. He lived in a fancy white Spanish mansion, much grander than Daddy’s place, but Daddy’s rule was don’t attract attention. At South Broward I broke the rule right away. I hated the way the teacher made me sit in typing class. It made my back ache really badly. I was also placed in beginning Spanish. At Calhoun I’d taken intermediate French, but they didn’t teach French here. I had no idea how valuable that typing would have been—much more useful than the French. I complained to Daddy about the public school, and he immediately, put me in the private Pine Crest, in Fort Lauderdale, where they taught French and not typing.