One of Fritz’s secrets could be gleaned from a small black-and-white photograph that he kept in the apartment, which showed him arm in arm with a sweet young woman named Minna Rothschild, whom he had married while young, and who had died shortly after giving birth to their first child, Lora. Minna was twenty-seven years old when she left her thirty-five-year-old husband a widower with a baby girl, a single parent before the term had come into existence. With no other recourse, Fritz followed Jewish tradition and in 1920 took Minna’s younger sister, Hilda, as his bride. That year she gave birth to Margot.
—
Now Margot was leaving for America. After an agonizing wait, her visa had been approved, and if all went well she would soon join Lora, who had departed for Chicago the previous year.
What must she have thought as she left the city of her birth? Did she ache for the friends she had known all her life, many destined to die? Did she fear for her parents, still waiting for their visas, and her grandmother Jette, later to be murdered in Theresienstadt? All this is unknown, as Margot never said a word—not of her departure, nor of Mainz, nor of her teenage life. She sealed it up deep inside, walling it off from all who knew her, and with it some part of herself.
On May 17 she boarded the SS Washington and embarked on the eight-day crossing to New York.
The ship was enormous and state-of-the-art, a 24,000-ton floating megalopolis that carried 1,100 passengers and 478 crew members, and dwarfed any of the boats Margot had seen on the Rhine. It had its own orchestra and was packed with travelers from around the world, according to others who made the voyage, their recollections vivid in interviews conducted by the USC Shoah Foundation.
If Margot wanted to talk, she had to be careful. Spies could relay word of anything that was hostile to the Nazis. Danger was in the very air.
On the morning of May 26, the ship’s horn blasted loud and clear, and its passengers hurried on deck, hundreds cheering, others in tears as the Statue of Liberty loomed before them and they beheld the New World, many for the first time.
Following a cross-country train ride, Margot arrived in Chicago and was reunited with her beloved Lora.
—
It was hardly the most auspicious of times. Weeks earlier, a banner headline in the Chicago Tribune had touted the arrest of three German spies, and the hunt was on for other members of their ring. A serial killer had just been caught after bludgeoning his latest victim with a brick. But normal life was at last returning to the city after the Great Depression had cost half its residents their jobs and spawned a crime wave that fueled the city’s reputation as a mob magnet, and for Margot, all that mattered was that she was safe.
As spring gave way to a stifling summer, hotter and stickier than any she had known, she found work as a seamstress and then switched to sales at the Marshall Field & Co. department store. She embraced her new environment and lost all but a trace of her German accent.
Whatever fears she had about her parents ended in September, when they, too, arrived in America. Now the family was under one roof, at first with Max and then in a place of their own, as Fritz eked out a living going door-to-door selling ties.
At nineteen, Margot became engaged, though nothing is known of her fiancé except his name, Alan Joseph. Their betrothal was announced in the Tribune, but like so many youthful romances, it fizzled, and Margot remained single until her early twenties, when she met a young man named David Duhl.
David was Jewish, like her, a blue-eyed Chicagoan ten years her senior. He was warm and funny and so loving that Margot could almost become Muschi again with him. He liked ballet and classical music, and when he was not running his family’s residential hotel, he would play her excerpts from the operas that always moved him to tears. Everyone remembered his brilliance: he had started buying apartments in the poorer parts of the city as soon as Chicago broke free of the Depression, building on a tiny business left him by his father, and had made enough money to put his siblings through the University of Chicago. But he was an artist by nature, a businessman by necessity.
On February 8, 1942, the couple married, and on July 31, 1944, Margot gave birth to a girl. Her name was Sherry Lee Duhl.
—
The baby was willful and would throw tantrums in her crib, but she and her father were inseparable. Each time someone came to the house, he would put his arm around her and say, “Isn’t she the most beautiful child you’ve ever seen?” As she grew older, he would take her into the yard of their South Side house and toss a ball back and forth, always patient, never bored. Playing ball with her father would become one of the girl’s fondest memories.
On Saturdays, he would drive her to the Museum of Science and Industry. “It was a magical palace with a huge lagoon in the back,” she recalled. “The steps to the middle pavilion were the widest I’d ever seen, and inside was like something from Alice in Wonderland. There was a reproduction coal mine, and a cage where chicks hatched before my eyes, and a TV screen where I could watch myself, which felt like a miracle.”
There was even an adult-size dollhouse resembling a fairy-tale castle, with the tiniest Bible in the world and a reproduction nickelodeon that played reruns of Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. It was here that Sherry Lee fell in love with film. Sitting at her father’s side, gazing at the screen in the dark, she laughed when he laughed and cried when he cried. “Watching my father, I saw the joy the movies gave him and experienced that joy myself,” she said.
Their relationship continued unimpeded even after Margot gave birth to a second daughter, Judy, in 1949. Rather than be jealous, Sherry Lee took the baby in hand. For years, Judy would be her sister’s playmate, but it was David who was closest to her heart.
“Listen,” he’d urge, tears running down his cheeks as Madama Butterfly crackled from his record player and he tried to explain the tale of a geisha abandoned by the man she loves. “He’s not coming back. Do you understand? He’s not coming back again.”
—
Six years after Sherry Lee’s birth, David felt short of breath. Concerned, Margot drove him to the local hospital, where a doctor told her he had bacterial endocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, likely caused by an earlier infection. He had been unwell as a child, and his mother had taken him to Texas, where they remained a year as he recuperated from rheumatic fever, which may have weakened his heart. What neither he nor Margot knew was that his illness was fatal.
Much to his daughter’s confusion, David began to decline. His illness upset her. Why were all the other fathers so strong, when he was so weak? How come those other fathers ran around with their children, when he could barely move? She was embarrassed and ashamed, much to her later regret. Once, coming home, she saw him sitting on the ground, catching his breath, and was terrified her friends would recognize him. A storm of conflicting feelings welled up inside her: adoration for this man who meant everything to her and horror at his illness.
Soon he could no longer go to work and had to run his business from a basement office. His breathing grew weaker, his skin pale, and eventually Margot set up a bed for him on the ground floor, because he could not manage the steep stairs alone. He clung to life, hoping against hope for a few more years. “I just want to stay alive long enough to be at my daughters’ weddings,” he told his wife.
For months he slept in the living room. A breeze wafted through the open window and cooled him as winter gave way to a warm spring. Then on June 20, 1953, he died. He was forty-two years old.
—
Hours before her father’s death, Sherry Lee woke from a deep sleep, startled to see him pass through her room, heading toward the outside porch.
“Dad!” she shouted. “Be quiet! You woke me up!”
They were the last words she would remember saying to him, and for years they filled her with guilt—though her mother insisted she could never have said them, because David could not climb the stairs.
The next day, oblivious to the anguished sounds, the muffled voice
s and ambulance sirens that had wailed through the night, Sherry Lee rose from bed, pushed aside her dolls and bounded downstairs. Strange—there were people here at this ungodly hour, all looking so sad when she was in a mood for fun. A woman whispered that her father was in the hospital, but he had been to the hospital many times before and Sherry Lee thought no more about it. Out she went into the street, her bicycle arcing from side to side. Then she turned around and spotted two Siamese cats staring from a window, and they filled her with dread. For the rest of her life she had a morbid aversion to cats.
Hurrying back, she ran into the yard and climbed onto a swing, until she overheard her grandmother say: “What’s wrong with her? Doesn’t she care?”
She slowed, jumped off the swing and ran inside, clambering up the stairs until she reached Margot in the bathroom with Lora, leaning over the tub, scrubbing and scrubbing at a ring of dirt.
“Mother, why’s Grandma Yetta being so mean?” asked the girl.
“Your father’s sick,” said Margot.
“But he’ll come home soon, won’t he?”
“No, sweetie,” said Margot. “He’s not coming home.”
“I don’t understand,” said the girl.
“Sweetie,” said Margot. “He’s dead.”
The girl began to scream.
“It’s not true! It’s not true!” she yelled.
“Be good, Sherry Lee,” said Lora, “or the same thing will happen to your mother.”
—
Days later, overwhelmed with grief, Margot packed the eight-year-old off to Elgin, a town forty miles from Chicago, where Lora lived with her husband, Harold Seigle, and their two children in a house with a tennis court and a lawn that led down to a pond.
The house dwarfed the girl, adding to her feeling of isolation, and Margot’s decision to keep three-year-old Judy at home while sending the older child away only compounded her pain. It was because she was bad, she believed. She had shouted at her father and therefore he had died. “Everything was my fault,” she reasoned. From now on, she told herself, she would never be bad again. She would be better than good: she would be perfect.
Her cousin Marsha shared her dolls, but dolls meant nothing to the lost girl. Nor did the big cake with nine candles that Marsha’s family baked for her birthday, trying to make her feel as if she belonged. But she did not—not here, not anywhere, not now and perhaps not ever. “I was lonely,” she said. “I felt abandoned.”
Weeks passed before Margot came to fetch her home and normal life resumed, or something bordering on the normal, because a new reality set in of long hours filled with anguish and nights haunted by recurrent dreams. In one, Sherry Lee would walk down a narrow hallway and slow as she beheld a cold slab with her father’s body. In another, fire would sweep through her home while she watched from the street, unable to do anything as the flames licked around her mother, who stood as still as the Statue of Liberty that had once beckoned her, with Judy in her arms. There were no therapists or fairy godmothers to take the young girl by the hand and assure her none of this was her fault—that life and death, her father’s or anyone else’s, were not hers to control.
At temple on Mother’s Day, Sherry Lee sat frozen beside Margot as the rabbi delivered a muddled but terrifying sermon about a badly behaved girl whose parents gave her a dollhouse for her birthday. “Every time you’re bad, we’ll drill a hole in it,” the girl was told. But she did not change and the parents kept drilling their holes until there was nothing left of the dollhouse, when the mother dropped dead from disappointment. Only then did the girl repent, throwing herself on her mother’s grave, screaming, “Mommy! I’m so sorry.”
“Too late,” the rabbi intoned. “And I say to you, girls, be good to your mothers. Do whatever they ask.”
“See?” said Margot, poking her daughter in the ribs.
Nor did the young girl get any closure with David’s funeral. The rabbi warned that it would be too traumatic for her to attend. And so she never saw her father’s dead body, and instead, in an extraordinary leap of imagination, she came to believe he was alive and had simply abandoned her for a better child. Desperate to find him, she peered into neighboring houses and through restaurant doors, and craned to see inside the home of a hermit she had once glimpsed down the street as he peeked from behind his curtains. She gazed through shop windows and stared into abandoned lots, longing to discover her father, though of course she never did. And each time she drove with her mother she strained to see the passengers in the passing cars, hidden from her by the reflections in the windows, always searching, searching, for the father she never could find.
—
Margot was thirty-two years old, still so very young and struggling to survive. She had lost her country, many of her family members and friends, and now her husband.
One evening, shortly after David’s death, there was a knock at her door and two of his employees appeared in fedoras and dark suits. They shook her hand, and Margot ushered them into the basement office while Sherry Lee snuck downstairs and hid behind the door. After giving their condolences, the men got to the point.
“We don’t want you to worry, Mrs. Duhl,” one said. “You won’t have to trouble yourself about a thing. We’ll take over the business.”
“No, you won’t,” Margot shot back. “You’ll teach me how to run it myself.”
Surprised, the men took their leave and Sherry Lee scurried away, only to creep back down when they had gone. She found her mother in tears.
“Mom, what is it?” she asked.
“It’s nothing, sweetie,” said her mother. “Just dust.”
—
Margot immersed herself in her husband’s work, learning about the tenants, the buildings, the law—each and every stitch in the thick tapestry of David’s professional life. Much had been hidden from her, just as it was from so many wives of her generation. Locked away in the basement, deep into night, she pored over the ledgers, determined to succeed.
“Watching my mother had a profound effect on me,” said her daughter. “She was my first role model. She took over my father’s business and refused to be a victim.”
No matter how tempting it was to turn to David’s employees, Margot soldiered on alone, and if she had to visit one of her properties, she would bundle the girls in the car, driving to the poorest parts of the South Side, where she would encounter other women whose troubles often seemed worse than her own, though she was heartbroken when a resident manager ran off with the rent.
“She loved this woman who betrayed her,” said Lansing. “But when the woman wrote and begged for forgiveness, my mother forgave her. Her dignity had been taken from her in Germany, and she didn’t want to take anyone else’s dignity away here.”
Margot encouraged her daughters to help others, even if it meant spending hours outside a local grocery store, holding out a can to passers-by and soliciting funds for Hull House, a neighborhood community center that provided social services for the needy. Sherry Lee raised so much money that the local paper ran a photo of her—all of which deepened the bond between mother and daughter, even as the pressures on each one tugged them apart.
“Our relationship was complicated,” said Lansing. “I never doubted her love, but she couldn’t express it. She couldn’t say ‘I love you’ and she couldn’t hug me. She never told me I was attractive or intelligent, but she demonstrated her love. One night when she was dressed up for a party and I was sick, she said, ‘I’m not going. I would never leave you.’ ”
She struggled to understand her mother’s contradictions: how her passion for life could co-exist with her deep anxiety, how her innate optimism could live in tandem with a learned pessimism. “She used to say over and over again, ‘Sing before breakfast, cry before dinner,’ ” said Lansing. “That’s just the way she was raised.”
Once, when Sherry Lee was distraught at having no father to join her in a three-legged race, Margot insisted on racing with her, though the race was
intended for fathers and daughters alone. She bound her daughter’s leg to her own, and they tore across the field and won. “I felt she could do anything,” said Lansing, “and that meant a woman could do anything, too.”
—
One summer evening, Sherry Lee was playing outdoors when an air-blue Cadillac pulled into her driveway, its horn tinkling like the Good Humor van.
Sherry Lee hopped and skipped toward the house, praying that one of her mother’s many suitors had returned—the men who would court her, bestowing gifts on her daughters, only to vanish once it became clear she would never be theirs—then bounded into the living room and stopped in her tracks. A stranger was sitting there, immaculate in his sharp suit, with monogrammed cuffs and polished black shoes. He dangled a scotch in one hand, a cigarette in the other.
“Sherry, this is Mr. Norton Lansing,” said her mother, flushed.
The man raised his dark eyes to the girl.
“Hello, Sherry,” he said, without moving.
The girl shrank back. Why didn’t he behave like the others? Why didn’t he tease her or joke around? He was tough and radiated power, and she knew she must never cross him.
Over the following months, Margot began to see Norton more. He was forty-five years old, Chicago born and bred, a salesman and furniture maker. But this wasn’t any furniture: he sold only top-of-the-line products, including a reclining chair his company had invented called a Stratolounger; and he had two clients, but they were the giants Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. His wife had recently died, following an allergic reaction to anesthesia during an otherwise routine operation. He had few friends, and the ones he had were as disposable as his cigarettes. He disliked most people and only had eyes for Margot. He was David’s antithesis, which made perfect sense: Margot had married an artist and he had died; this time she would marry a rock.
Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker Page 2
