by Alix Kirsta
That was a view shared by most people who knew her. Over the years, many New Yorkers, especially around Madison Avenue, either knew or knew of the gregarious and petite red-head whose outré lifestyle made her one of the more prominent personalities in this largely genteel area of the city. Her 19th century house, with its imposing carved limestone façade, menacing gargoyle, heavy wrought iron door and impenetrable security, conveyed the grandeur of a vanished age. A home like this would be the ultimate bastion against New York’s dangers and unwelcome intrusions. Or so it seemed.
As the mystery deepened, locals asked one another whether Irene Silverman had not simply acted on a whim, to change her life, move abroad and live out the rest of her days in more exotic surroundings and sunnier climes . Why not? She was wealthy, relished adventure and had no children or immediate family. Some believed that for her secretly to escape New York for some tropical paradise was not all that out of character. Colourful stories about this eccentric woman, part wealthy socialite, part zany Bohemian had made the rounds of Manhattan for decades. Most of them were true. Like the chilled half-bottles of Dom Perignon she always carried in her bag, ready to share with friends she was visiting. And the Renoir (or was it a fake?) which hung in her bathroom. Or the fact that she would only handle pristine, unused 100 dollar notes, and sent her caretaker, Mengi Melesse, to cash her tenants’ cheques at a nearby branch of the Bank of New York, with instructions to return only with crisp new currency. She had a keen financial instinct and an eye for investment. It was rumoured, correctly, that despite the millions she had inherited from her late husband Samuel Silverman, a leading real estate broker, after his death in 1980 she began investing in gold, which at the time was rising in value. A close friend, her former Columbia University history teacher, Professor James Shenton, remembered her travelling to Switzerland with a million dollars. When she returned, Shenton asked her what she had bought there. “She called four of her staff who returned after a few minutes between them carrying twenty 2lb bars of gold. Irene said to me: ‘Gold is the last resort. And you can take it anywhere with you’”.
Many in her circle also admired her determination, when she reached 59, having had only minimal primary education, to enrol as a mature student at Columbia University. There she excelled in American history studies and treated classmates and teachers to fine French cheeses and wine or lavishly catered afternoon teas. Her joie de vivre led to extravagant gestures that could verge on the outrageous, as James Shenton discovered. At a reception in his honour at Columbia University to mark his acceptance of the prestigious John Jay Award, he was given a standing reception led by an ermine-swathed Irene Silverman and ten handsome muscle men rented as her “escorts” for the evening. It was what James Shenton described as “this raunchy quality” that made Silverman’s hackles rise at being called a “wealthy socialite” with its connotations of idle, bored Upper East Side matrons who lunch. “Lots of people think I’m very rich – and I am. But I have always worked, and look where I began” she used to tell friends. “I’m a tough broad, a child of the depression. I had to be self-supporting from the age of sixteen”.
The story of Irene Silverman’s rise from the fleshpots of New Orleans, via Radio City Music Hall’s corps de ballet to an Upper East Side dream mansion seems like the script of a Broadway show. Born Irene Zambelli in New Orleans to an immigrant Greek seamstress and an Italian fishmonger – he was distantly related to Carlotta Zambelli, star of the Paris Opera Ballet – as a child she learned ballet and accompanied her father on his daily drunken trawls of the jazz bars and whorehouses in the French Quarter. In that louche environment she soon became street smart, developing a sharp wit and an unerring nose for trouble. Years later she confessed: “It was clear to me, even then, that I could always make a living as a stylish but tough madam.”
But her mother had other ideas. When Zambelli abandoned his wife and daughter in 1933, she brought Irene to New York, taking jobs as a dressmaker while Irene pursued a career as a dancer. At that time, Michel Fokine, the legendary dancer and choreographer from Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, had opened a ballet school in a large brownstone house owned by him and his wife, known to all as “Fokina”, on the corner of Riverside Drive and West 72nd Street. Although Mrs Zambelli could not afford the fees for Irene’s classes, the maestro agreed to let her sew costumes for the Fokines’ public dance recitals in return for Irene’s free ballet tuition. In 1934, Irene joined Radio City Music Hall which featured the only resident ballet company at the time in New York. The artistic director then was up and coming director, Vincente Minelli, who went on to direct major Hollywood movies and marry Judy Garland. Always insistent that she was purely a classical dancer and only shared the bill with the famous “Rockettes” chorus line, Irene earned $36 a week for four daily performances, 365 days a year. Together with her mother’s weekly $28 seamstress’s salary from various fashion houses, their earnings were barely enough to cover their food and the rent of a walk-up, cold water tenement apartment located beneath a brothel in Hell’s Kitchen. Despite her poverty however, Irene had no qualms about turning down the offer of a job from another supremo of the late Diaghilev’s company, Leonide Massine, to join his Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo for a European tour. Massine, with the innate meanness for which he was legendary, refused to pay her mother’s fare to accompany the tour, and Irene would not go abroad without her. Besides, it was becoming clear that being a ballet dancer in New York was seen as sufficiently glamorous and classy to open other doors. She was wooed by many wealthy stage door Johnnies including the Arctic explorer, Admiral Richard Byrd. In 1941 she married Sam Silverman, a banker who later became one of America’s most successful and wealthiest mortgage brokers.
Entertaining the rich and powerful, furnishing and running her homes in Paris, Athens, Honolulu and Manhattan was a role she carried off with regal style and confidence. Sam provided the security Irene craved. And she thrived on the variety of their life together. Visitors to their elegant Paris flat, adjoining the Theatre Louis Jouvet, used to comment on the fact that you could clearly hear the actors speaking their lines and the applause through the drawing room wall. Irene was fond of telling guests that she knew many of the artists and liked to think of her flat as their “home from home” where they would pop up for a cup of coffee and a chat in between rehearsals. When Sam died in 1980, leaving Irene his fortune, she sought greater informality, saw less of starchy financier friends and cultivated a more Bohemian circle. Her dinner parties at East 65th Street were just as likely to be held in the large basement kitchen as in the formal dining room. There you might find yourself sitting next to one of the Rothschilds, a director of the Rockefeller Foundation or the Metropolitan Museum as well as mixing with fashion designers, Greek Orthodox priests, Silverman’s butcher or carpenter as well as a sprinkling of academics, writers, pop singers – even a British aristocrat or two. Sam may have taken the girl out of show business, but not show business out of the girl. “These gatherings were a colourful improvised theatre over which Irene presided, revelling in the intrigue and drama of it all” recalled George Frangos, Dean at the State University of New York Health Centre, whose father, a Greek Orthodox priest had become close friends with Irene’s Greek born mother, who lived in the mansion.
Soon after Sam’s death, Irene pursued her dream of running what she called “something between a posh hotel and a grand boarding house”. Her house provided a palatial setting for all sorts of events, with its first floor ballroom, a replica of Queen Marie Antoinette’s Music Room at Versailles. Other rooms were decorated with marble, oak panelling and gilt, overflowing with works of art and theatrical memorabilia. On the roof terrace above Irene’s private duplex, a lush garden, which she tended expertly, was illuminated by night. Here she created nine luxury apartments. With average monthly rents of $6000, and double that for the grandest suites, this was no ordinary tourist B&B. Tenants included media tycoons and businessmen ; show business stars including Chaka Khan,
Daniel Day Lewis, actress Brooke Hayward and her former husband, the bandleader Peter Duchin. From England, regular visitors included the Marquess and Marchioness of Northampton. Some lived at the mansion for up to a dozen or more years and became friends.
Irene relied closely on instinct in choosing her tenants. She insisted they had to be interesting and easy to get on with, her ambition being to recreate the atmosphere of an 18th century Parisian salon. Seminars and lectures on art, fashion and history were held by visiting academics; there were fashion shows, book readings, music recitals. She often wined and dined her regulars and brought them expensive gifts. Some might find Silverman’s antique silver service and a bottle of champagne left in their dining room when she knew they were holding a special party. One, who embarked on a romance with a new girlfriend, came home one day to find his old bed had been replaced with a larger one. The venture flourished thanks to Silverman’s irrepressible humour and talent for enthralling guests with her stories. The one mistake you didn’t make, said Peter Duchin, was to dismiss her as a dizzy eccentric or to underestimate her acute business sense. “She conducted the business with meticulous attention to detail. She insisted on referrals and credit checks before allowing anyone to rent an apartment. Tenancy renewals and rent increases were conducted through her lawyers. She thought that in her universe, which was this house, she should know everything that goes on, and she did.”
Table of Contents
Chapter One - Operation Hellgate
Chapter Two - Barons of the Underworld
Chapter Three - Business as Usual
Chapter Four - The Tammany Machine
Chapter Five - Hunting the Tiger
Chapter Six - A New Regime
Chapter Seven - The Net Closes In
Extract from Manhattan Murder Mystery by Alix Kirsta
