Daughter of the King

by Lansky, Sandra

  “It’s a German name,” Marvin offered.

  The policeman shined his flashlight over all of our faces. “What part of Germany ya’ll from? You from Berrr-lin?”

  “German a long time ago,” Marvin stuttered. “We’re from New York.”

  “Do I look stupid, boy?”

  “No, sir,” Marvin said, fearfully.

  “You people don’t look like no Germans to me.”

  He took us down to the station, following the Cadillac on his motorcycle, his large gun reflecting Dixie moonlight. Marvin’s father always travelled with his own pillow. Resigned to spending the night in jail, he brought his pillow in with him. Fortunately, there was a justice of the peace at the station who was there all night to hear such kangaroo proceedings. We paid a big fine and went on our way. It was my second encounter with southern justice, the first being the Kefauver hearings. High and low, they both seemed equally rigged.

  It took five days to drive to Miami, stopping to tour the antebellum landmarks in Charleston and Savannah en route. The very best part of the family holiday was getting a reprieve from the endless sex. Marvin couldn’t, or wouldn’t, perform his husbandly chores with his mother in the adjoining motel room. That might have been sacrilegious. However, Mr. Rapoport continued to proclaim how thrilled he was to have me as his daughter-in-law, punctuating every declaration of joy with an exuberant pinch or squeeze of my poor bottom.

  When we got to Florida, we stayed for two weeks at another Rapoport place called the Seagull Kosher Hotel. It was hardly the Roney Plaza. Then again, Teddy wasn’t there, which was a huge positive. With Daddy still out west, this was a Rapoport holiday more than a Lansky one, though we did get to see Buddy and introduce my new family to Grandma Yetta, who whispered something to herself under her breath that sounded like an exasperated “Gott in Himmel,” or “God in Heaven.” Mrs. Rapoport was very nice to me. I couldn’t understand, though, why she kept taking me aside and begging me to “make Marvin change his friends.” I hadn’t really met any of his friends other than the awful beautician and the guys in the Seventh Avenue showroom. Sure, I promised her, not knowing what I was in for.

  Back in New York, after I hand-wrote the thank you notes that Marvin carefully dictated to me to my uncles in Las Vegas, my next task was to try to master the art, or science, of being a housewife. Since I had never even learned to take care of myself, taking care of a husband was, at the outset, a major challenge. For my first breakfast, Marvin asked me for “three-minute eggs.” Clueless, I took three eggs from the fridge and laid them on the counter to unchill for three minutes. When Marvin cracked the shell, raw yolk exploded all over him. I had no idea I was supposed to boil them.

  Another night, Marvin asked me to try to make him tongue, a Jewish specialty. How could I cook a tongue when I could barely cut my own meat? Well, he asked for it, and he got it. Lighting the gas stove, the oven exploded, singeing what was left of my eyebrows. When Daddy learned that the maid Maddie only came in two days a week to clean, he volunteered to pay for her to come in seven days a week to cook as well as clean. In addition to our maid, Daddy also bought us two new horses. One was called Rex Lee Fashion, which sounded like the name of the showroom Marvin took me to buy my trousseau. The other horse was Moonbeam’s Golden Genius. We stabled the horses at a farm in the New Jersey hunt country and went out every weekend to ride. Marvin preferred New Jersey to Central Park. There was a lot more of it, and the air was better.

  In the city, I finally got to see the friends of my husband who had caused his mother such consternation. After working at Rapoport’s all day, he’d come uptown and take me out to dinner, never to the big, high-profile places like Dinty Moore’s or the Colony or Lindy’s or Luchow’s, but to cozy candlelit restaurants in Greenwich Village or on the Upper East Side. The weird part was that I seemed to be the only woman at most of these places. The tables were filled with men, young men, old men, sometimes famous men. I remember seeing the actor James Mason one night with a young man who was just as handsome as he was. They were holding hands. I had never seen that before. I figured movie stars could be eccentric. Then I noticed a lot of the other male couples were doing the same, or getting even closer.

  When I pointed this out to Marvin, wide-eyed, he just laughed and told me how sheltered I had been, that I had no idea how “sophisticated” the city could be. I’m not sure if any of these men were the friends his mother had wanted me to try to get him away from. There was always someone in these places to whom he nodded hello, though he never would introduce me. Maybe he thought I wasn’t ready to move in such fast company. If not, I had a worldly mentor to bring me up and out. The idea was that my husband would teach me to be sophisticated, too. And what girl in Manhattan didn’t want to be sophisticated? As a sixteen-year-old, I realized I was a babe in the woods, with a lot to learn.

  One of the highlights of 1954, aside from my marriage, was my brother’s graduation from West Point. I don’t remember why, but Marvin didn’t come. I think he had to work at the restaurant. Sadly neither Mommy nor Buddy attended, either. I sat with Grandma Yetta, while Daddy and Teddy sat, seemingly miles away from us. That was the first and only time Teddy had come to West Point. The graduating cadets all hurling their caps in the air was a spectacle I’ll never forget. In a touching moment, Paul gave my father his graduation ring. Daddy gave Paul a new car, a Ford sedan, which Daddy ended up having to sell, because Paul was going off to pilot training school and wouldn’t need it. Marvin couldn’t understand why the great Meyer Lansky hadn’t given his son something fancier, if not a Cadillac, at least a convertible. Marvin’s style wasn’t Daddy’s style. The training school was in Washington State. It was far away, but I had long ago gotten used to Paul being out of my life.

  After months of never-ending sex and the never-ending query “Are you pregnant yet?” I finally gave Marvin the answer he had been waiting for. The lucky day was, of all days, Labor Day, September 3, 1954. We were up in Syracuse to attend the horse show at the state fair there. Marvin was the happiest I had ever seen him. I learned months later that he celebrated by buying himself a new horse with money from a bank account Daddy had set up for me that Marvin figured out how to access. He kept the horse at a separate farm, and with a different trainer, from our other horses.

  When I discovered Marvin’s little caper, I was too busy planning my maternity to be angry with the father of our child. Whatever was mine was his, I supposed. As soon as they learned I was pregnant, Marvin’s family took over. His oldest brother Raymond’s wife, Evelyn, took me to her gynecologist in Queens. Why go all the way out there? I complained, but Marvin insisted. I think they got a deal on that, too, as the doctor always had a menu from Rapaport’s open on his desk. In the end, Daddy would pick up all the medical bills.

  While Marvin was away all day at work, I tried to acquire some homemaking skills. Going to camp had already made me an expert on making beds and creating hospital corners, and Mommy, when she still cared about things, had taught me how to dust. I tried to learn to iron, but when Marvin got mad at me for burning his silky nylon undershorts, I gave up and sent them to the cleaners. I also learned to shop at Bloomingdales for linens and crystal and cooking gadgets that I then had to figure out how to use.

  Sometimes I’d give up on the homemaking and just buy clothes for myself, or cashmere sweaters and English shirts and other gifts for Marvin. Interestingly, the minute Marvin found out I was pregnant, our sex life immediately stopped. At first I thought he was protecting the baby from needless trauma. Then I realized that he wasn’t interested in sex for sex’s sake. Sex was a means to the end of parenthood. Whatever, I wasn’t insulted. I was relieved.

  In December, I finally realized how real my pregnancy was when I passed out while Christmas shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue. The salesgirl who came to my rescue went through my pocketbook to see who I was and whom to call. As I came to, I watched her nearly faint when she saw how much cash was jammed into my purse, maybe thousand
s of dollars. She told me she had never seen so much money. I’m not sure she saw my name or figured out who my father was. That might have knocked her out as well.

  Unable to go riding anymore until the baby arrived, I had to escape our small apartment and go for a walk. Greta Garbo lived a few blocks away, on the cul de sac of 52nd Street overlooking the East River. I’d see her wandering around in a slouch hat and dark glasses, looking as lost in her life as I was. Eventually Marvin bought me a dog, a little poodle named Nappy, for Napoleon, for whom Marvin later bought a companion, named Maria, for Napoleon’s Austrian wife Maria Luisa. The poodles would become my best friends and walking companions. Some days I’d take a cab up to Calhoun to meet my old classmates on their lunch break and go to a soda shop. I would alternate between feeling very grown up and feeling like a dropout loser.

  On one hand, the girls were so impressed that I had become the very first of them to get married and get pregnant. On the other, I felt that something was terribly wrong with me and my family. Buddy didn’t finish high school. Now I was following in his sad and crippled footsteps, without his excuse of being crippled. Mommy’s mental problems haunted me as well. Would I end up the way she did? And what about Daddy, constantly being mentioned in the news, sounding like Public Enemy Number One. I tried to banish those fears from my mind, as well as the constant nausea that began to plague me, by watching a lot of television quiz shows and listening to a lot of music on the radio.

  My tastes ran to Doris Day, Nat King Cole, the Four Aces, and the Ames Brothers, Hit Parade stuff from people who would appear in Daddy’s nightclubs. Elvis and the rock ’n’ roll explosion were almost two years away. Whenever I didn’t feel too sick to get out of the apartment, I went to the movies—From Here to Eternity and A Star Is Born. Marvin went with me to the latter. He was a major Judy Garland fan, playing her records endlessly. I wasn’t sure why he loved her so. In real life, as I learned from the movie magazines, she seemed more depressed than Mommy.

  I didn’t have to wear the maternity clothes I had bought until I was seven months’ pregnant. At five foot four, I normally weighed 115 pounds, which made me tall for a Lansky and skinny for the time. I weighed 130 at the peak. The Queens doctor and his nurses had led me to believe that I was having a girl. Accordingly I spent a fortune at Saks on girls’ baby clothes and picked out the name Wendy, after my first friend in Boston, as well as my first doll.

  Was I ever surprised when on June 3, 1955, a beautiful bouncing baby boy came into the world in the Queens hospital where the Rapoport doctor was affiliated. I had had no idea what going into labor was. It started at the Devon Horse Show in Pennsylvania, and it was so bad that I had to beg Marvin to take me home. The amateur gynecologist had no idea that the baby was coming. He and I both thought that what I had was a belly ache. Back in New York I tried to heal myself with Alka-Seltzer, until Maddie figured it out and called the ambulance. The doctors called the slow process “lazy labor.”

  Marvin named our blessing Gary Van Rapoport. When Daddy, who flew up from Florida, heard the name, he made one of his rare attempts at humor by asking why we were calling his grandson a truck. Uncle Abe Zwillman and a lot of other uncles came to see Daddy and me at the hospital. I don’t remember who else, I was so out of it. Teddy was not there. Daddy didn’t want to upset me at this tender moment. All I do recall was that my room seemed like a flower shop. I don’t know where Marvin got the name Van, whether from the actors Van Johnson or Van Heflin, or maybe from the grandest of the old New York Hudson Valley Dutch families, the Van Rensselaers. Maybe Marvin was acquiring snooty airs from all the riding. Maybe my new married name would be Sandra Van Rapoport. Maybe we would start spending summers in Newport, Rhode Island, with the rest of the socialites.

  We weren’t on Fifth Avenue yet. Instead, we were back on the Upper West Side, in a big apartment Daddy rented for us at 451 West End Avenue at 82nd Street, to accommodate the baby and the live-in help Daddy would be providing. We were very nearby to Mommy, who perked up and bought us the entire layette from the same saleswoman at Saks who had waited on her when Buddy and Paul and I were born. We were equally near to Mommy’s brother Uncle Julie Citron, who could be counted on in times of trouble.

  Ten days after Gary arrived, the Rapoports hosted the circumcision, or bris, at the new apartment. It was a big event, with over sixty guests, with lots of friends and relatives bearing lots of gifts, many big and expensive. For example, Evelyn’s husband, Raymond, arrived with a very fancy baby carriage from Best & Co. I wasn’t allowed to see the bris, not that I could have stood to watch. One funny detail was that for the event I dressed Gary in a girl’s christening dress I had bought at Saks, when I thought he was going to be she. I was still pretty ignorant about Jewish rituals and didn’t have my own religious identity.

  Marvin had been thinking less about our new apartment and our first child and more about a second honeymoon. He was dying to go to Europe. His mother had a new deal with Perillo Tours and had found us a baby nurse to stay with Gary while we went away for a month. This nurse, who looked like a stevedore and had a thick German accent, could have been a prison camp guard. I didn’t want to leave my baby at all, much less with this Nazi-like hausfrau.

  But the Rapoports shamed me into going, insisting their Marvin needed a holiday, all the expenses of which, aside from the free airfare and hotels, Daddy would be paying, with an emphasis on clothes and furniture for our new place. Because Gary was being bottle-fed, not breast-fed, the Rapoports assured me that my presence was not essential. In early July, barely a month after Gary arrived, Marvin and I flew on Sabena to Brussels. My Calhoun French was nowhere as good as I thought. Nobody understood a word I said, so I gave up and stuck to English. Because we were on a tour, the trip was very much Europe’s greatest hits: “If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium.” We visited the Grande Place in Brussels, then were herded onto a train to Paris, where we checked off Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the flea market, the Moulin Rouge.

  Marvin skipped most of the sightseeing and went on a mad shopping spree, buying half the men’s clothes on the Rue St.-Honoré. Who did he think he was going to be, Maurice Chevalier? Despite this supposedly being our second honeymoon, there was nothing at all romantic about it, no cozy hand-holding dinners, no gypsy violinists, no strolling on the banks of the Seine, no sex. None whatsoever. I concluded we were going to be a one-child family. What if I wanted a companion for Gary? Don’t think about it. After dinners with the tour group, Marvin would disappear into the Paris night, or the Venice night, or the night of wherever we were. Maybe he wanted to see the Paris churches and the Venice canals by moonlight. I was tired and glad to go to sleep.

  After Rome, with the Coliseum, the Forum, the catacombs and more wardrobe building on the Via Condotti, Marvin arranged a week-long extension to the itinerary so we could go to Naples, Pompeii, and Capri. What he was really after, I soon learned, was not culture but connections, Daddy’s connections. The biggest of them all was Charles “Lucky” Luciano, whom Marvin had managed to track down in Naples and arrange a “family reunion” with me, the honeymooning daughter of his dearest American friend. Did Daddy know about this? I pressed Marvin, who admitted he did not. “It’ll be a great big surprise,” he insisted. If I knew anything it was that Daddy did not like surprises. What could I do? Luciano had invited us to lunch. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse.

  The meeting was at a fancy restaurant overlooking the sea in the port area of Santa Lucia. The name of the restaurant was the California, just in case we were homesick. But there was nothing American about the place, no hamburgers or anything like that. Vesuvius, the volcano that had buried Pompeii centuries ago, loomed menacingly across the bay. This wasn’t just the Old World; this was the ancient world, the world where all the myths came from. Now we were going to meet a modern one, Lucky Luciano, the emperor of the underworld. The California, which in fact was owned by Luciano, was the best restaurant in Naples, with a vast antipasto table t
hat filled one whole room, and packed with elegant gentlemen eating lobster and crabs and other delicacies that the local fisherman delivered to the restaurant straight from their boats outside.

  When the regal maître d’ led us to the prime banquette where Luciano was waiting for us, my first thought was that Daddy had played a brilliant trick and had flown over to surprise us. That was how much Luciano and Lansky looked like each other. The same size, the same face, the same custom suit. When we got closer, I saw that it was no joke. It was the real thing—the man who was supposed to be the ultimate “godfather,” the man the mob-busters said controlled the crime of America, through my father, even though he was an ocean and a continent away.

  Lucky Luciano leapt up from the table and gave me a bigger, warmer hug and kiss than I had ever gotten from anyone in my family, or Marvin’s, either. He gave Marvin a kiss and hug as well. That, I presumed, was the Italian style. Marvin must have been used to it, from the restaurant world. This guy was family, for sure. I instantly began calling him Uncle Charlie. He liked that. Up close, he looked a little older, late fifties, and a lot rougher than Daddy. His skin was badly pockmarked. One of his eyes drooped, giving him a permanently sad appearance, even when he was laughing. (The pockmarks had come from smallpox, the droopy eye from a murder attempt. This man was a survivor.) Sitting at Luciano’s feet was his beloved and well-behaved miniature Doberman. The dog’s name was Bambi, after the Disney film. Uncle Charlie still had an accent, less the florid Italianized English we had been hearing in our hotels but more like something from Little Italy, an immigrant’s English that had never gotten fancied up even when his suits did.

  We must have had a dozen courses. He ordered lots of bite-size things, ravioli, rigatoni, fried vegetables, little clams and mussels and shrimp. Marvin was impressed with the California. When he told Charlie how New York had nothing like it, the big boss got wistful and homesick. He said he’d do anything for a big plate of linguini at Angelo’s on Mulberry Street.