Daughter of the King

by Lansky, Sandra

  At Mathews, I became friends with a pretty blonde girl from Queens named Joy, who was the girlfriend of Murray Kaufman, a song plugger who had made a hit of How Much Is That Doggie in the Window? He would soon become the famous disc jockey Murray the K. Murray was married, though that didn’t seem to bother Joy, who went out with lots of married men, as long as they “took care” of her. Joy had the bright idea of fixing me up on a date with Murray’s friend George DeWitt, the handsome and famous host of Name That Tune, one of the biggest game shows on television. Two contestants would face off, and an orchestra would begin to play. Then, as soon as they could recognize the song, the contestants would race each other across the stage to ring a big bell and “name that tune.” The winner would get money and the chance to keep racing and ringing. What innocent times we were in, though Joy was anything but innocent.

  At first I was too intimidated to go out with George, who was not only a huge celebrity but was married. Not that I was looking for a new boyfriend. I was too shell-shocked by Marvin for that. Joy insisted I needed an adventure, so I gave in. Murray sent me over to the studio, where I watched them shoot Name That Tune live. I was so impressed at George’s charisma. He was a real TV star! I hoped I wouldn’t be boring to him. After the show, George took me to a very dark restaurant called Roma di Notte, where the seating was in grottos. I supposed that since George was both famous and married, he wanted to lay low. I wasn’t insulted.

  But I was overwhelmed. George, in his late thirties, was so good looking, with the thickest, most amazing dark hair I had ever seen. He was also charming and funny. He had been a fighter pilot in the war, so Paul’s being in flight school gave us something in common. The fact George knew my father seemed to make him a little nervous at first. “I don’t want to get rubbed out if you don’t like me,” he joked. That put us on a more equal footing, and we both relaxed.

  George, an Italian whose real last name was Florentine, had gotten his start as a singing waiter in Atlantic City, where he grew up. His dad had been a policeman. In addition to starring with Frank Sinatra at Daddy’s friend Skinny d’Amato’s 500 Club in Atlantic City, George had been a mime, specializing in impersonations of black stars like Jack Benny’s valet, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. Today he might have been boycotted by the NAACP. Those were the days of Amos ’n’ Andy, and that was the humor then. He also had been a regular at the Riviera on the Palisades. In a way, we were almost family.

  Then came the moment of truth. George invited me back to his apartment on Central Park South, in the very same building as George Wood, when Daddy was living with him. Uncle Georgie would have been the last person I wanted to run into. The risk of exposure did add to the thrill of it all, but we made it into the apartment unobserved. The view of the park was very romantic. George had the fanciest record player I had ever seen. He put on the number one hit of the week, Dean Martin’s Memories Are Made of This. George had a big bar in the apartment. Having just turned eighteen last December, I had finally started drinking, sweet things that tasted more like soda than alcohol. George concocted something for me. We held hands, kissed. At a certain point, George began to lead me into the bedroom. I stopped in his bathroom to prepare for the main event. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw there: two head molds with toupees on top. All that great hair was a fake. I wanted to flee. But how could I be rude, and to a star?

  Adding irony to injury, when I emerged from the bathroom, another big hit of the moment, Frankie Laine’s The Great Pretender was blaring away. In bed all I could think about was the hair. I was nervous to touch it, but too curious not to. It didn’t move. Not a hair. And it had looked so real. I can’t even remember the sex. I think it was better than with Marvin. I’m not sure. When I was leaving, George seemed awkward. It had nothing to do with the toupee. “I’d love to give you . . . something,” he stammered. “But I know you, of all people, don’t need the money.” Because Murray Kaufman gave Joy money, George may have thought I was moonlighting as a call girl as well. Until he found out who my father was. What a joke! I almost wanted to accept it, for fun, but I was too much of a lady to be a lady of the evening.

  George called me again a few times. I always found excuses. Then I found another star to go out with. This one was like hitting the celebrity jackpot, and way, way, way over my teenage head. My next beau was Dean Martin, one of the hottest stars in the country in the fall of 1956. I met Dean through a new friend, a singer named Micki Marlo. I had met Micki when she was a guest on the radio show of Bea, one of the first female disc jockeys in New York and an early and prominent talk show hostess. My mother and Bea’s mother had been good friends, and Bea had invited me to sit in and watch her spin the platters and patter on her broadcast from the International Club, next door to the Latin Quarter. I was bored and idle, so why not? Micki looked just like Elizabeth Taylor. Her real name was Moskowitz. She was married to one of the Mayo Brothers, a white dancing act that had enough rhythm to play the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Micki’s husband, Bobby, was a great friend of Dean, who was depressed and at loose ends after breaking up with Jerry Lewis that year after a decade of remarkable success. They thought I might cheer Dean up. Talk about the blind leading the blind.

  Not knowing that I would ever meet Dean, much less date him that summer, weeks after Marvin left me I had gone to see the last Martin and Lewis show at the Copacabana with Barbara Lastfogel and another girlfriend. Barbara was the niece of the head of William Morris. I had met her in the agency offices when she was waiting to see Uncle Abe Lastfogel and I was there to see Uncle George Wood. Abe Lastfogel may have been one of the most powerful agents in the business. He was surely the smallest, the Napoleon of Broadway.

  Barbara was, on the other hand, tall and beautiful. Her mother may have been a showgirl. All eyes were upon her. She was a great girl to go out with, as she was catnip to men, and there was always an overflow for me. At the Copa, we saw Jackie Gleason rush on stage and beg the guys not to break up the act. Martin and Lewis were crying. The Copa girls were crying. All the girls in the audience were crying. I might have been crying, too. What a silly reason to get upset, I had thought, over two comedians. Gordon MacRae, maybe. But Martin and Lewis?

  All I knew was that I preferred Dean to Jerry. Jerry, who was the bigger star at this point, was too corny and goofy for me. Dean felt more like my uncles. That wasn’t far from the mark. Dean had grown up in Ohio, with Italian as his first language. He had been a boxer, a rum runner, a blackjack dealer, and, finally, a struggling singer at clubs run by Daddy’s partners in the Midwest. Now he was struggling with how to get out from under Jerry Lewis’s long shadow.

  Dean called me and asked me to meet him for drinks at Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel with its murals of surreal animals frolicking in Central Park. I rode horses at the stables, now the fancy “riding club,” with Barbara Bemelmans, the painter’s daughter. I felt pretty surreal listening to this famous star lamenting that his career might be over. Stars weren’t supposed to lament. They weren’t supposed to have anything to be sad about. Dean had just gotten back from Rome, where he was shooting his first film without Jerry, a sex farce called Ten Thousand Bedrooms. In it Dean played a rich hotel tycoon, like Conrad Hilton, or Meyer Lansky for that matter, who goes to the Eternal City on a real estate deal and gets in romantic trouble, stuff that I doubted would have happened to Daddy. Dean said the movie, still not finished, was a lost cause, a guaranteed bomb. He was looking for serious dramatic stuff to do next, “if anyone’ll have me.” Poor Dean.

  If he was looking for sympathy, he more than got it from me. We didn’t stay long at the bar. We walked out into a lobby and into a service entrance, where Dean led me up some back stairs to a suite on the second floor that overlooked an airshaft. Why would you stay at the Carlyle, which had some of the best views in the city, and look at an air shaft, I asked him, without trying to be rude. “Because I’m afraid of heights, baby,” he admitted. He also told me his buddy Frank Sinatra was over at the W
aldorf. He would take me over to see him were it not for Frank being forty stories up in the Waldorf Towers, a trip Dean simply could not take. Dean began kissing me so I would shut up and not dwell on his phobia, one that put him on lots of trains and boats, and on a sea of booze when there was no other way to go but to fly.

  Dean’s acrophobia did nothing to diminish his masculinity. I had never seen anything like it. We made love six times in a night that wouldn’t stop. I counted. He wasn’t a big man, just about five foot nine, but he was strong, a boxer from a steel town, and he made me feel that he was ravenously grateful for a woman’s softness after being locked in the blast furnaces all day. He had wonderful wavy hair, sort of like George DeWitt’s hair, but Dean’s was real. His image as a heavy drinker was for the press. With me he wanted to be fully conscious and savor every moment. Between rounds of lust, we’d split a Coke.

  That one night with Dean compensated for two years with Marvin. I didn’t expect that I would ever hear from him again. I was just doing this to satisfy my bobby-soxer, groupie fantasy. I had expected nothing but sex, and I had gotten exactly that. We didn’t talk about our personal lives at all. It was a one-night stand, or what Erica Jong, in Fear of Flying, would celebrate as a “zipless fuck,” no strings, no guilt, no tomorrow. How surprised I was when tomorrow did indeed arrive. The next day Dean called me at home and told me what a wonderful night he had and how he couldn’t wait to see me again.

  In January 1957 I went to Florida for six months to fulfill the residency requirement for my divorce. Dean was going to be doing a series of shows at the Diplomat over the Christmas holidays. Could I come early and meet him? What an offer. The only problem was that Paul had caught everyone by surprise by planning to get married in Tacoma, Washington, of all places, at the very same time. While he was at flight school out there Paul had fallen for a pretty blonde, a very gentile Unitarian divorcee six years older than he was. Her name was Edna Shook, and she was from Tacoma. By comparing the situation to mine with Marvin Daddy was able to find a lot of reasons to celebrate the match. And celebrate it he planned to do, reserving a whole floor at Tacoma’s one old-guard hotel, the Winthrop, and preparing to spare no expense. How could I refuse to attend?

  Nothing worked out as planned. Buddy was ailing; it became too hard to fly him out. Mommy was acting better, for Gary and me, but she couldn’t handle a long trip either, not even for her son. Uncle Jack and his family had some excuse. There were no uncles in the Pacific Northwest to join the party, so the party shrunk to three—Daddy, Teddy, and me. I didn’t feel anybody there cared whether I was there or not. The big fuss was being made over Edna, as it should have been. She was already pregnant. Their son, Meyer Lansky II, would be born in August. Paul was flouting Jewish tradition in naming his firstborn after Daddy, and with a “II” on top of it. To hell with tradition; honor was the word. For my father it must have been the thrill of a lifetime.

  I was a nobody in Tacoma. However, in Miami I knew there was one lonely star who cared whether I was there or not. Two days before the wedding, I snuck out of the Winthrop to fly back to Florida. The airport in Tacoma was fogged in, but I wouldn’t go back to the wedding party for anything. Instead, I took a bus for hours and hours to Portland, Oregon, where I was able to get a plane to Miami. Paul was hurt, but gentleman that he was, he turned the other cheek. Only later, when my behavior got totally out of control, did he give up on me.

  Dean had had no idea I was actually going to make it. The huge smile on his face when I appeared in the front row of his last show on opening night at the Diplomat made the wrath of my family worth enduring. Dean wasn’t concerned about the wrath of his family, either. About a week before we saw each other, his wife, Jeannie, gave birth to their daughter Gina. I read about it in the fan magazines. I didn’t mention it, and neither did Dean. That was our unspoken pact: no families, no strings.

  Giving a twenty dollar bill to the captain to let me backstage, I sat with Dean for about forty minutes after the show, as he accepted the well-wishes of a long line of fans rich or connected enough to get to his dressing room. When everyone was gone, he sat back, thanked me for the “miracle” of my coming and told me how great I looked. I was wearing a black chiffon dress and high heels. I’d come a long way from the tomboy at the stables and the matron at my wedding. We exited the hotel’s nightclub and went through the fragrant gardens to Dean’s second-floor room. All the fancy suites were higher up. Dean didn’t care. He’d leave all the “Come Fly with Me” business to his buddy Sinatra. Dean’s pleasures—and mine—were strictly on the ground.

  I didn’t dare let Daddy know of my affair. Dean asked me to travel with him to Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco, to go with him on the road, to be his girl. But not his wife. That would have been the rub for Daddy. I never thought of him as vindictive, but he was over-protective. He would have felt Dean was using me. That I was using Dean would not have occurred to old-fashioned Daddy. Where misbehavior was concerned, Daddy had a policy of zero tolerance.

  Daddy had recently caught Buddy running up a tab of $25,000 in losses gambling on sports. Daddy warned the leading local bookmakers he would shut them all down if they took another of Buddy’s bets. Daddy had the power to end Dean’s minus-Jerry career before it ever got started. Whether he would have done that, I will never know, as I was pretty good at keeping secrets and keeping my mouth shut. After all, I had learned discretion from the master.

  The Lansky compound in Miami, where I would spend the divorce waiting period, was a plain, efficiency motel Daddy had bought, not far from the Diplomat in Hollywood. It was called the Tuscany, but there was nothing Italian about it. The man who controlled the grandest hotels in Las Vegas and was spending his time building the grandest new hotel in Havana housed himself and his family in a very unprepossessing motor court far from the glitter of Miami’s gold coast. Daddy was spending most of his time in Cuba now anyway. He didn’t need the Fontainebleau or the Eden Roc, the new twin towers of Miami Beach hospitality, which were the closest things to what he owned elsewhere. His attitude was the opposite of that espoused by Zero Mostel in The Producers: “If you’ve got it, flaunt it!” Meyer Lansky’s was: “If you’ve got it, hide it.” The masterpiece, the jewel in the Lansky crown, which Daddy was building in Havana, was to be called the Riviera, like the club in the Palisades. But this place would be a skyscraper hotel, a temple of pleasure, of legal gambling, of superstars entertaining the super-rich, doing everything legally that puritan America forbade.

  In 1952 Fulgencio Batista, who had been living in exile in Florida, returned to power in a coup d’état. He was a big fan, and a big pal, of my father’s, who had run the casinos at the racetrack for him when I was a little girl. Now Batista was back and the casinos were roaring. Daddy and Batista went way back to the Prohibition era, when Daddy had a huge operation smuggling Cuban cane sugar into the States to make bootleg whiskey. Ever since then, Daddy also had interests in Cuban casinos. He knew how much Americans loved to gamble, and nearby Cuba was an ideal place for Yanks to bet their lives without breaking the law. Nobody knew gambling better than Daddy, and Batista knew it. To make sure the visiting Americans weren’t being fleeced at the tables in this exotic foreign environment, Batista, back in power, appointed Meyer Lansky as his “gambling czar.” In America my father was being hounded as a criminal; now in Cuba he was set up as the law unto himself. The reversal of fortune just ninety miles offshore must have felt like sweet vindication to Daddy. He would never gloat.

  Then Daddy was in charge of the new casino in Havana’s grandest hotel, the Nacional, and set up Uncle Jack there as his man in Havana. The hotel was now being managed by Pan Am’s Intercontinental chain. That this most establishment of American companies turned to Daddy to run the hotel’s moneymaker was testimony to the respect that he deserved and was getting, albeit not at home. Soon he put together backing for the Riviera, which would not only be grander than the Nacional, but would be the biggest gambling hotel
on earth, outside of Las Vegas.

  Twenty-one stories, nearly five hundred rooms all with ocean views, central air-conditioning (the first ever in the Caribbean), a nightclub called the Copa Room that was an exact replica of the site of my sweet sixteen party. The Riviera was scheduled to break ground the next month, January 1957, and open to the world in December, a year after my hibiscus-scented Miami night with Dean. Meyer Lansky’s Riviera would be a destination unto itself. Conrad Hilton, make room for Daddy.

  The dumpy Tuscany was not in the same universe as the fantasy Riviera. But the Tuscany was my reality, and the means to the necessary end of getting Marvin Rapoport legally out of my life. In New York Daddy had set me up with a wonderful and beautiful nanny for Gary named Frances Roe. She looked just like Lena Horne and was from Kentucky, with a black mother and a white father who had abandoned them. I took her to Florida with me, along with Gary and the two poodles, Nappy and Maria. Florida was not the best place for Frances, who hated the sun. She wore huge hats to protect her fair white skin.

  Frances had only one downside. She was a kleptomaniac. Since good help was hard to find, I solved the problem by buying two of everything for Gary, knowing we’d invariably end up with one. The Tuscany was something of a family reunion for me. Buddy was living there now, running the switchboard, which was a natural occupation for him; he was practically a human switchboard. Whatever was happening in Miami, he knew about it. Grandma Yetta Lansky lived at the Tuscany as well. Although Daddy and Teddy had an apartment at the Tuscany, luckily for me, Teddy preferred Cuba, where she was decorating another, fancier apartment for them to move into when the Riviera was complete. Daddy bribed someone to pass me on my driving test and rented me the cheapest Chevrolet. Such was the no-frills life of the crown princess of casinos.