Daughter of the King (2 page)

Of course, Sandi’s marriage soon ended in divorce, when Lansky found out that Sandi’s husband was basically a con man. By then, however, she had given birth to a son, Gary, Meyer Lansky’s first
grandchild. Freed from the marriage while still a teen, Sandy went back to the club life on the New York–Miami dating circuit, going out with guys like Dean Martin, Gary Crosby (Bing’s son), and Charles Revson, who ran the Revlon cosmetics empire.

When my wife, a screenwriter and Hollywood director, met Sandi, she was both charmed and intrigued. Nora wasn’t as interested in the Meyer Lansky organized crime story as she was in a young woman’s coming of age in her father’s world. As the years passed, however, and after turning down countless offers from newspapers, magazines, book publishers, and movie producers looking for the story about her dad, Sandi began to change her mind. Just about every one of her father’s friends was dead, and Sandi finally began to maybe feel free enough to tell her story.

It wasn’t until Bill Stadiem came along, however, that things began to come together. Bill has an amazing gift for relaxing people and unlocking their great stories. He did it with Marilyn Monroe’s maid, with Frank Sinatra’s valet, with Strom Thurmond’s secret black daughter. And now he has done it with Meyer Lansky’s daughter.

Bill Stadiem has written a wonderful book I never thought would be written. But she told it, he wrote it, and we get an inside look into a world only Sandi Lansky could show us. I’m delighted.

CHAPTER ONE

T
HE
U
NGLEHOOD

I
opened my big mouth, and I thought Daddy was going to kill me. We were at the Majestic Theatre on West 44th Street in April 1945. He had taken me to
Carousel
, which was the hottest ticket on Broadway. It was a huge treat. Daddy loved Broadway musicals, and so did I. Two years before, when I was just six, he had taken me to my first one,
Oklahoma!
I don’t know why Mommy didn’t come. She hadn’t come to
On the Town
or
Mexican Hayride
, either. I know she loved the music, and I know she loved dressing up and dressing me up in the beautiful clothes she bought me in the children’s department of Saks Fifth Avenue. Maybe she went to matinees with her girlfriends. Whatever, I was thrilled to be one of the youngest people at the show. I felt so grown up. I had Daddy all to myself. I adored being his little princess.

We had the best seats in the house, five rows back, right in the middle. What was really unusual was that, even though the house was packed—the show had sold out months in advance—no one was sitting in any of the seats in front of us. Had all of these people somehow gotten sick? I later learned that Daddy had bought all the seats so nothing would block our view. He seemed like a giant to me, but he wasn’t very tall, maybe five foot four or five, in a stretch, so those
empty seats were a real luxury. And no luxury was too much for my father. He had the nicest clothes, custom-made dark suits made of the softest cashmere, custom shirts, custom shoes, custom hats. My older brother Buddy told me Daddy got all his clothes made because he was too little to fit into ready-to-wear. Buddy was a wiseguy, a big tease. Daddy dressed this way because he
could
. He looked rich. He was rich.

People at the theatre seemed to know him. We got a lot of looks, not stares, because nobody seemed to dare look at us for too long, but people were definitely noticing us in a very respectful way. That made me feel important, and I liked it. One usher greeted us. “Good evening, Mr. Lansky.” My father gave the usher a chilling look. When his eyes twinkled, Daddy was full of joy, but when those eyes turned dark, it was like a devastating gamma ray, some kind of secret weapon that had been used in the horrible war that had just ended. The usher shriveled. Then I saw why. When a couple near us heard his name, they cut quick glances to each other as if to say, we’re in the presence of someone special. Special for what, I did not know, but maybe it wasn’t good. The moral seemed to be that the Lanskys should be seen but not heard. Low-key was the rule.

And then I blew it. I was loving the play, the dance numbers, the great Rodgers and Hammerstein songs, like “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over.” But then, in the second act, things turned dark, as dark as Daddy’s look when the usher dared speak his name. The romantic hero, Billy Bigelow, turns into a criminal. Apprehended by the police, Billy falls onto his knife and dies. Dies! I was devastated. I already loved him, and he was dead. “Daddy, they
killed
him!” I gasped at the stage. Suddenly, the silent theatre somehow became even more silent. All eyes were upon us. And Daddy gave me one of those “if looks could kill” terminal stares. It only lasted a moment, but it seemed like an eternity. And then he took my hand and gave it a loving squeeze. The twinkle came back to his eyes, and he stroked my hair. All was forgiven.

The show went on, though I cried my eight-year-old eyes out before it was over. My little outburst had given at least a few people in the theatre who knew who Daddy was the scary thrill of a lifetime. “They killed him.” I had no idea, but Daddy had surely heard that accusation before, just as he would hear it again. As America’s Gangster Number One, the architect of Murder Incorporated, and a million other deep and dark rumors, Meyer Lansky was one of the most feared men in a fearsome city. If I said “Daddy, they killed him,” there were a lot of people who believed that my father had arranged it.

Daddy took me to Times Square a lot to have dinners with my “uncles.” They weren’t really uncles, but they certainly felt like family to me. Again, Mommy never seemed to come, just Daddy and me. The place we went to most was Dinty Moore’s on West 46th Street. The actors may have gone to Sardi’s, and the Damon Runyon “guys and dolls” may have gone to Lindy’s, but everybody who was anybody went to Dinty Moore’s—the big politicians, the big Broadway impresarios, the big newspapermen, and my uncles. It was a favorite of all the New York legends: Florenz Ziegfeld, Mayor Jimmy Walker, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Meyer Lansky. With its gleaming white tiles and polished brass, white tablecloths, white starched napkins, you almost needed sunglasses to go into the place. It was as brightly lit as a Broadway stage, a place to see and be seen. Moore’s was very masculine, with an endless mahogany bar. The tinkling of ice cubes in the ocean of scotch that the men drank could sound as loud as wind chimes. I was pretty much the only kid there. The only other girls were basically arm candy, beautiful actresses and models less than half the age of their big-shot consorts. It wasn’t a wife place. Maybe that’s why Mommy stayed home.

Daddy always had the seat of honor, the top table, the first one on the left as you entered the dining room. The waiters treated him like a pasha and made a great display of cutting up my food for me. At age eight I still had no clue how to cut up my food, particularly the steak
or chicken that called for a knife. It would take me years to learn. I had no need. Maybe the idea was that knives were for hoodlums, not for little ladies like me. Maybe young royalty weren’t supposed to cut their own food.

Whatever, nobody had bothered to teach me. I didn’t think about it. I accepted being waited on as my way of life. I was that spoiled, way beyond mere princessdom.

The Irish ran Moore’s, which had been around since before World War I, back in 1914, but the restaurant’s menu was pure New York melting pot. Where else could you get the city’s best corned beef and cabbage and gefilte fish under one roof? Back in 1931 the city’s reigning food critic, Rian James, declared that it had “the best plain, foody food in all New York.” James also noted that “Dinty Moore’s charges more for its good, homey, foody food than any similar establishment in America.” No problem. Daddy and the other bigwigs who made Moore’s their home could afford it. It was what today might be called a “power” restaurant, a favorite of the men who ran New York and the world, catered to by old pro waiters in crisp black Eisenhower military jackets. It was the kind of place where General Eisenhower, or MacArthur, or Patton might come if they were in town. No other restaurant, except for maybe the 21 Club, had as illustrious a clientele. Still, even as a little girl, I got the sense that the generals, the politicians, the big bankers all lived in a different world from that of Daddy and my uncles. At least in public, it was a parallel universe, very close, but it did not intersect with ours. They didn’t say “Hi” to us, and we didn’t say “Hi” to them.

Whenever Daddy and an uncle seemed to want to talk about something serious, I didn’t really need a cue to exit. That dark look on his face told me when to take off and go hang out with the pretty blonde hat-check girl, who would let me help her sort the ladies’ mink stoles and the gents’ vicuña topcoats.

Daddy was always having dinners with my uncles, not only at Moore’s but at seemingly half the top restaurants in New
York—Longchamps, Gallagher’s, Cavanagh’s, L’Aiglon. My own favorite wasn’t any of these grand white tablecloth places, but the Automat, where the food was delivered by magic from behind glass doors. That wasn’t an uncles place, but Daddy knew I loved it, so he would take me there. Wherever he went, the restaurant owners all bowed down to him. He conducted so much of his business at meals because he believed the government had tapped our phones at home. I never saw a man more laconic on the telephone. While Mommy loved to chatter away forever with her girlfriends, Daddy’s phone conversations were like Morse Code.

W
ho were these uncles of mine? To begin with, they were unique, in how they looked, in what they did. Like Daddy, they were great dressers. They dressed like Cary Grant, like Fred Astaire, like movie stars. But their voices echoed the mean streets where they had grown up. They often sounded like the Brooklyn, Bronx, and Harlem first-generation immigrants that they were. But how they had risen, proof that America was truly the land of opportunity, open to any and all. Daddy was born on the Fourth of July, in Russia, but he took the date as a sign, a good omen, of an all-American future.

There was “Uncle Frank” Costello, who was the king of New York, and there was “Uncle Abe” Zwillman, who was the king of New Jersey. Uncle Frank may have taken an Irish name and dressed in bespoke English pinstripes, but he was straight out of the boot of Italy, with a deep raspy voice that he blamed on a botched throat surgery. He had a huge Italian nose that made me want to call him Pinocchio, but I didn’t dare.

Uncle Abe was taller than most basketball players, a real giant. Unlike most of the other uncles, Uncle Abe sounded as good as he looked, maybe because he was born in New Jersey and English was his first language. His real name was Abner, but his nickname was
“Longy,” both in honor of his height and his “length.” When I was old enough to hear such things, my brother Buddy told me about the legendary endowment of Uncle Abe. He must have had something, because he stole away movie star Jean Harlow from Howard Hughes.

If Uncle Abe was the king of New Jersey, Uncle Joe and Uncle Willie were his crown princes in this presuburban realm of green hills and horse farms that was considered the Camelot of gangland. Uncle Joe was Joe Doto, but the world knew him as Joe Adonis. The name fit him perfectly. He was the handsomest man I ever saw, a rugged Clark Gable type but more put together, slicked back hair, and oh, what clothes. There were lots of mirrors at Dinty Moore’s, and sometimes I could catch Uncle Joe stealing an admiring glimpse at himself. Why not? He was worth looking at.

Uncle Willie wouldn’t have won any beauty contest or fashion show, but he would have taken the charm sweepstakes. He was also a natty dresser and had everything custom-made in Italy. His trademark was a priceless diamond stickpin in his ties. He was Willie Moretti to us, sometimes Willie Moore to others, and he was even shorter than Daddy, which, at first, I thought was why Daddy liked him—he was a man he could look down on. When the two rulers of New Jersey, Zwillman and Moretti, stood together, they looked, not like kings, but like the cartoon Mutt and Jeff. Unlike Daddy, who was as quiet and controlled as a Supreme Court justice, a man who never showed his hand, Uncle Willie was a storyteller and the court jester of our extended family. That was not to say he wasn’t powerful; he just played it light. He was our link to the other Broadway, not of power, but of flash. He knew all the stars at Sardi’s and all the operators at Lindy’s.

Our other main connection to the stars was Uncle George Wood, the all-powerful William Morris Agency executive who arranged for talent to be booked into the grand nightclubs all around the country that were controlled by Daddy and my uncles. If I thought about it, and I did not, I probably would have said that my father, as straight and
low-key as he was, was in the entertainment business. Which I guess was the truth. But Daddy didn’t seem very entertaining. Uncle Willie was, and Uncle Georgie even more so. He was Mister Showbiz, incredibly dapper, fast talking, name dropping, with the filthiest mouth I had ever heard. And no number of baleful disapproving stares from Daddy could force Uncle Georgie to censor himself. Today they might call it Tourette’s Syndrome. Back then, Buddy called it “fuck-ese.”