Daughter of the King (11 page)

Howard Rusk was a no-nonsense, aw-shucks Midwesterner, sort of like Harry Truman, who had developed a renowned rehabilitation program for severely injured airman in World War II. But this master of rehab, known as “Doctor Live Again,” was aided by a team of equally crack physicians, all affiliated with New York University. If anybody could make Buddy walk on his own, this was the place, on the cutting edge. How I prayed that Buddy could one day throw away his “Canadian crutches,” which wrapped around his frail forearms, and walk like a man.

A few times, I rode down to Bellevue with Daddy to take Buddy to therapy. In the city, we now usually took cabs rather than the Oldsmobile, because the traffic and parking had gotten so difficult, with everybody buying cars after the war. One day I overheard one of the doctors talking to another. “What’s the point of all this?” the doctor groused. “The kid won’t
live
that long.” My heart totally sank. I wanted my brother to
walk
. I didn’t want him to
die
. Doctor Live Again? What a lie. I wanted to tell Daddy about how cruel these doctors were. They were taking his money for a hopeless case. Again, I didn’t dare. But it made me treasure every second with Buddy, whose amazing bravery I learned to appreciate the older I got.

Almost in anticipation of the divorce Daddy and Mommy were planning but keeping a secret from me, Daddy found me a permanent nanny to serve as a mother substitute. In the back of his mind, he must have worried that Mommy might have another nervous breakdown. What made Daddy such a brilliant businessman was that he thought like a lawyer, anticipating everything that might go wrong, no matter how long the odds. His was a worst-case scenario mentality.

My new nanny’s name was Nancy Attina. I think Daddy thought of her as potential family as well, the idea being that she would have been a great wife for Buddy. We had met her in the winter of 1945 on our three months’ stay in Florida. That season, instead of the Roney Plaza, we stayed a short ways down Miami Beach at the equally exclusive and right-on-the-sand Spanish colonial Wofford Hotel. It was Uncle Augie’s headquarters and Nancy worked there as a waitress.

She was a very pretty, wholesome Italian girl in her early twenties from Bayshore, Long Island. The men were crazy about her, and she was always going out on dates, often to Daddy’s Colonial Inn, which was the hot ticket in Miami, having just opened that season. Her dream was to go out with Frank Sinatra, a dream Daddy could have made come true if he didn’t subconsciously think she’d make a great wife for Buddy.

“Little Augie” Carfano used to “own” Brooklyn and now, with my father’s guidance, he was in the process of “owning” Miami. The western half of Florida was owned by Uncle Santo Trafficante in Tampa, who was always sending Daddy handmade cigars that Daddy refused to smoke because they smelled so strong. Instead he saved the cigars as collectors’ items and gave them to his friends on special occasions, like births, weddings, and casino openings. Uncle Augie, who smoked Uncle Santo’s pungent stogies with macho and gusto, dressed nearly as well as Uncle Benny Siegel. He was very proud of the huge scar down the whole side of his face and considered himself just as handsome as his best friend, Uncle Joe Adonis. Buddy told me he had gotten the scar in some gangland battle, but Uncle Augie, who had a great sense of humor, liked to call it a “dueling scar” incurred in a fight for the favors of an Italian countess. Suffice it to say, Uncle Augie had an eye for women and had married a series of showgirls.

One girl Daddy insisted Augie keep his hands off of was Nancy, saving this bobby-soxer for Buddy. He had hired her, I assume, at a very generous salary. I thought of her more as a big sister than a caregiver. During that winter, Nancy would drive me to my favorite restaurants, Pickin’ Chicken, where we would eat outside, and the Lighthouse, a seafood palace you got to by crossing a rickety wooden causeway that was on the verge of collapse and always made the trip there an adventure. I didn’t like fish, but I loved that bridge and the giant turtles that lived in a pond that was part of the restaurant.

During the day, Daddy would play cards with assorted friends or play golf with Jimmy Alo and other old buddies. But mostly he worked, up all night at the Colonial Inn. Mommy never went with him. I’m not sure what she did. She shopped a lot and slept a lot. Her best friend there was Flo Alo, Uncle Jimmy’s Irish wife. The Alos had moved to Florida to a big house in Hollywood right on the water. Uncle Jimmy said New York was finished, overcrowded, falling apart, a decade before its urban problems became obvious; Miami to him was the shining future.

Mommy hated Uncle Jimmy for his endless womanizing, a continual slap in Flo’s face. Flo and Jimmy didn’t have children, so the marriage lacked that focus, though she did have two of her own with a previous husband. Flo never felt secure with Jimmy, no matter how many jewels and antiques and dresses she bought. But somehow they stayed together, thick or thin. Though Daddy didn’t insult Mommy with open affairs like Uncle Jimmy did with Flo, Mommy felt her pain. She even threw a drink in Uncle Jimmy’s face once, Buddy told me, and the two never spoke again. Flo was loyal to Mommy, and they kept their friendship, while Daddy and Jimmy kept theirs, separate but equal.

When Nancy came back to New York with us, Mommy seemed much more relieved than jealous. The divorce was already in the planning stage, and the jealousy days, if they ever existed, were behind her. The only thing that bothered my mother was when Daddy began buying expensive jewelry for Nancy. That didn’t stop him, though Nancy swore me to secrecy. In New York, Daddy moved an extra bed into my bedroom and Nancy slept there. It was like having a big sister. I loved it. Nancy really opened up the city to me, driving me everywhere in her brother’s roadster. I claimed the rumble seat in the back as my own. She’d take me to Bayshore to stay with her old-fashioned Italian family for weekends. I’d sleep in her bed with her, and go with the Attinas to the wrestling matches to see Gorgeous George. I had no idea the whole thing was staged. The spectacle was the thing.

The Attinas would eat pizza and spaghetti and meatballs and exotic Italian delicacies like the fried scungilli, which Mommy would probably have had quarantined if she had seen them. And somehow, around all this food, I developed an appetite. I couldn’t help thinking that this simple family in this simple home was infinitely happier than my rich one back at the Beresford, just like Terry’s family was happier and Elaine’s was happier. Everyone was happier. What good was being rich? I often prayed Nancy would fall in love with Buddy. Alas, it was not to be. She was saving herself for Frank Sinatra.

Nancy lived with us for a year and a half, until the divorce. Then Mommy let her go, to my great sadness. I think she thought Nancy was Daddy’s spy. She certainly was Daddy’s hire. If Daddy had to go, so did Nancy. We stayed friends, and I was greatly honored years later when she named her first child after me. But Mommy decided that she couldn’t delegate my upbringing to a young stranger, however kind. Whatever her depression problems, she was my mother, and she was going to rise to the occasion. After the divorce, in early 1947 (I believe it was on Valentine’s Day, of all times), Mommy, Buddy, Paul, and I had the huge Beresford apartment all to ourselves, with the two live-in black maids that Mommy had hired.

That same year, Mommy had decided to take me out of Birch Wathen and try public school. P.S. 87 was just a few blocks from the Beresford, but every morning Mommy would take me there in a cab. She would pick me up for lunch in a cab, take me back in a cab, then pick me up at school day’s end in a cab. We were making the Yellow Cab Company rich. The public school was very crowded, and I didn’t get much attention, not that I wanted any.

One day I ran away from school to play hooky and go swimming at Coney Island with my friend Terry. I had asked Mommy if I could go and she had said no. So I vowed to teach her a lesson. I took the subway to meet Terry all by myself. I felt like a big African explorer. It was wonderful. Mommy freaked out when she came to school to pick me up and I wasn’t there. I doubt she called the police, because Daddy didn’t believe in ever calling the police, because it would always backfire and hurt him in some way. So she probably just went crazy for a few hours until I came home. She gave me a lecture on the dangers of the city and what foolish risks I had taken, then confined me to my room for two days. I still loved what I had done.

The next year, Mommy gave up the public school experiment and put me back in private school. Mommy chose Calhoun, a fancy girls’ school on West 74th Street that catered to fancy Jewish girls,
like myself, although I still wasn’t fully aware of my heritage. The art collector Peggy Guggenheim had been a Calhoun girl, as had lots of Strausses, Gimbels, and Morgenthaus, all rich German Jewish banking and mercantile dynasties. It was an old money, old Europe, Citron kind of place. Lansky, not.

To me Calhoun was just another school. Public, private, it didn’t really matter. Despite my father’s wish that I could be an academic star like Paul, academic stardom wasn’t in the cards for me. The only place I was happy was at the Aldrich Stables, my home away from home. Eventually Mommy gave up on the ballet and other lessons, and let me devote myself to riding. Even though I had technically hit puberty, I had no thoughts, and no idea, about boys. I was a little nature girl, and Central Park was my domain. I got to know so many of the park’s denizens. My favorites were a pair of squirrels whom I named Oscar and Oscarette.

The only man in my life was my riding instructor John, who dressed like an English country squire. When we rode through the park, I thought we were in some Camelot time warp. I did meet another boy at the stables who would become my first husband eight years later, but you would have never guessed it at the time. This teenager, who was Buddy’s age, had the nerve to steal my horse. Not steal, precisely, but he did take Bazookie out on his own without getting my permission.

His name was Marvin Rapoport. He was tall and fair-haired and snazzily dressed. I hated him. He seemed like a spoiled rich entitled brat, a real Jewish prince. Imagine how upset I was when I got to Aldrich and found Bazookie gone. Mommy was with me that day, looking very regal in her jodhpurs, leather boots, and black riding coat. You would never have guessed she had a care in the world. But she threw a fit at Marvin and gave him a tongue lashing. Marvin smiled and tried to charm Mommy out of her rage, profusely apologizing to her and to me and offering to take me riding, anything I wanted. Mommy
said Marvin’s family was in the restaurant business, so he knew how to soothe the feelings of angry customers. She saw him as insincere, a flatterer, something of a con artist, and I think she scared him to death. Suffice it to say he never touched Bazookie again, and I didn’t notice him for years, until he decided to reappear as my Prince Charming. As it would turn out, my mother was a good judge of character.

Although Daddy vanished from the Beresford, he didn’t by any means vanish from the lives of his children, only the life of his now ex-wife. At first he moved in with Uncle George Wood, the famous William Morris agent, at George’s apartment at 40 Central Park South. George was one of the ultimate playboys in New York, with unequalled access to the top models and ambitious actresses. He was also one of the city’s sharpest dressers. The only thing wrong with him was his filthy mouth, which would have gotten an X rating or a “condemned” by the Legion of Decency.

If fame was an aphrodisiac, George Wood was a one-man Spanish fly dispensary. His legend was that he could make any girl a star. By milking that legend, Uncle George could “make” any girl, and his conquests were legion. His apartment, with its dramatic views of the park and the twinkling lights of Fifth Avenue and Central Park West, had to have been one of Manhattan’s top bachelor pads. What in the world was my straitlaced, all-business Daddy doing there? Flashing on what I had seen that time in his bathroom, maybe I didn’t want to know.

Daddy would often come get me at the Beresford and take me out on the town, just like old times. Except now he would usually wait for me in a cab or in the Oldsmobile downstairs and drop me off with the doorman on the way home. If he and Mommy talked, it was usually over the phone, if he could ever get past the busy signal caused by her endless chats with Aunt Esther and Aunt Flo. Daddy had his own friends, and now that he was single again, he spent more time with the bachelor types like George Wood and other great characters like Champ Segal and Swifty Morgan.

Champ, who was from a well-to-do Jewish family, had shocked his parents by becoming a boxer and then a major fight promoter. He was the right hand of boxing czar Frankie Carbo in a group of powerful promoters who were believed to have fixed most of the fights we watched on television. Champ, as you might have expected, was a superb athlete, and Daddy, very scrappy for a man in his forties, loved to compete with him in handball games at George Brown’s gym.

Swifty Morgan’s only exercise was running his colorful mouth. Swifty, who looked just like Colonel Sanders, string tie and all, was the inspiration for Damon Runyon’s “Lemon Drop Kid,” the loveable racetrack tout later played by Bob Hope in the movie. Swifty was the best friend of comedian Joe E. Lewis, who had been mentor to Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, so Swifty was their best friend as well. His friendship knew no bounds. Swifty used to cruise from one nightclub to another—whether in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, he was everywhere—selling hot jewels to rich men for their expensively kept women. Always in money trouble, he loved telling the story of how, in one moment of deep distress, he had telegrammed Frank Sinatra asking his pal to bail him out. With his own wicked sense of humor, Frank sent Swifty a parachute.