Daughter of the King (20 page)

We ended up going together for the entire remainder of the show, three magic nights at the old Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue. For me, the time was an Arabian Nights fantasy, the horses, the riders, the rich and glamorous patrons, and a man in my life, my own blond Valentino, my sheik of Araby. We never got tired of each other. We talked about his love life, which seemed so sophisticated compared to my adolescent innocence. Marvin had dated showgirls and actresses, he confessed, including Dyan Cannon, who years later would marry Cary Grant. But he hadn’t liked any of them.

He said he was looking for someone “pure and special.” Me, me, me, I prayed.

Marvin would pick me up at the Westover, downstairs, of course, and take me back. We also went over to the Aldrich Stables, the thing I missed most about New York. Daddy had sold Time Clock when I moved to Florida, so we rented other horses and rode in Central Park. It was wonderful to ride together with Marvin. We were Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, a natural pair.

Marvin was my first real date, and I felt like Cinderella. I hated for it to end. When it did, I popped a very impulsive question. I asked
him if he would escort me to my sweet sixteen party. I was trembling, waiting for the answer. Marvin smiled and said he’d be delighted to go. Then he kissed me goodnight, my first kiss since Jimmy C. Amazing! An older man had just kissed me. He was almost as old as Gordon MacRae, and almost as handsome. My life was transformed. I was dancing on air.

If I had been thinking about leaving Florida and staying with Mommy, I gave up those plans. I had to go back to Florida and hold Daddy to his promise of a sweet sixteen party, a party I had wanted to avoid until I met Marvin. Teddy wouldn’t bother me now. I had a mission to accomplish. Marvin drove me to the airport. He kissed me goodbye. I was madly in love. Daddy turned out to be easy. He was a man of his word. Marvin called and wrote me letters, almost every day. I wrote back, mostly telling him how excited I was about coming back to New York. I didn’t have much to report from dull Florida.

The month passed quickly, and in early December I flew back on Eastern to La Guardia, where Marvin greeted me with a big kiss. So romantic, so grown-up. Daddy didn’t come. Instead he called in instructions for the big night, December 13th, where we had two huge tables at the Copacabana on 60th off Fifth Avenue, filled with my friends from Calhoun and the stables, including Eileen, there with her future husband. There were no relatives. I would have liked Daddy there, but he might have had to bring Teddy. It was
my
party, and he knew she would have spoiled it.

I invited Mommy. As expected, she refused. She wouldn’t leave the apartment. Nor were there any relatives, from either side of my family. It was the kids’ night. Marvin was by far the oldest one there, and I could see how envious all the girls were, with their teenage, pimply dates in badly fitting rented tuxedos. Marvin looked like Cary Grant by comparison. He dressed and danced beautifully. I was the belle of the ball dancing with him, and he was so smooth that he made me look like Ginger Rogers.

The headliners that evening were the Kean Sisters, a comedy duo who also sang. They had a famous number with Ethel Merman from
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
about three little girls from Little Rock. That night they did it with two girls. Then there were the famous Copa Girls, the stunning chorines with those huge towering headdresses. They were gorgeous, though not topless. For a nightclub, the Copa was pretty much family entertainment, a live version of Ed Sullivan.

The waiters, who treated me like a queen, brought out the biggest birthday cake I’d ever seen. Then the whole restaurant stopped, and every table joined in “Happy Birthday to Sandi.” I had a feeling the whole place knew that Meyer Lansky’s girl was the guest of honor, and they paid appropriate respect. The only awkward moment was at the end of the party, when the valets couldn’t find Marvin’s Cadillac convertible. We worried that they had stolen it. One word from the boss, Julie Podell, who took his orders from the
real
boss, Uncle Frank Costello, and it magically reappeared.

Returning to Florida couldn’t have been more of an anticlimax to my magic night. There were endless letters and endless flowers from Marvin, but I soon injected some drama in early January by getting appendicitis. They took me to a place called Doctors’ Hospital, where Grandma Yetta took charge and grilled the doctors, making sure they did the operation properly. “You better do the right thing! You take out her appendix,” she ordered them. “But nothing else!” Then she turned to me and kissed me. “I took care of it,” she said confidently. I could see where Daddy got his authority. Between the nose job and now this, I was getting to be an old hand at hospitals. For a second I thought about becoming a nurse.

My room at Doctors’ Hospital looked like a botanical garden, there were so many bouquets from Marvin. In one of them, Buddy, who came to see me, found a note, with a big question: “
WILL YOU MARRY ME
?” in all capitals. Buddy, the gossip king, went into overdrive, showing the card to Daddy. Naturally, even with an IV in my arm, I was
ready to say yes, yes, yes, I do, I do. Teddy would have been delighted to let me, just for good riddance. But Daddy, who hadn’t yet met Marvin, was typically cautious. He advised me that I was way too young, and that I should at least finish high school before making such major life plans.

Daddy may have controlled the world, but the one thing he could not control was his teenage daughter. I was so willful. I wanted Marvin. Was it love, or was it a way of escaping the twin terrors of Mommy and Teddy? Right now I thought it was love, love, love. When I got out of the hospital, Daddy and I must have had dinner together at every famous restaurant in Miami, a different one every night, the Embers, Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast, and Joe’s Stone Crab. He tried to ply me with glamor and luxury and convince me that at sixteen, marriage was not the greatest idea, that I should give this relationship some time to develop. His pitch was that of the future Supremes’ hit “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Mine was “Get Me to the Church on Time.” To me, love at first sight was what love was all about—head over heels.

Daddy and I were in a Mexican standoff. To break it, he offered to fly to New York to meet Marvin and, more important to him, Marvin’s parents. I hadn’t met them, either, which shows how blindly I wanted this to work. If they agreed, he would agree. My father, who thought he could out-negotiate anyone, was sure he could talk the Rapoports out of what he considered to be sheer madness. The appendectomy gave me the excuse to drop out of school for a while. Once out, I wanted to stay out. School seemed so trivial for this newly adult bride-to-be.

In early February Daddy and I flew back to New York. I was turning into a real jet-setter, five years before the first jets started flying. Marvin picked us up in his Cadillac and drove us to his parents’ home in Long Beach, Long Island. Marvin, at five foot ten, towered over Daddy. I normally could never read Daddy, but when he first laid eyes on Marvin, he gave him
that look
of his. He covered it up quickly; that
look had me worried. I sat in the back seat. Daddy and Marvin talked, mostly about Rapoport’s. Daddy knew more about restaurants than anybody in the world. He loved to eat, and he loved to talk about the business. That was a good sign, because Marvin talked with great authority and experience.

Marvin gave us a tour of Long Beach, which, he told us, used to be known as the “Riviera of the East.” He showed us the French and Spanish-style mansions where some famous residents lived or used to live, Valentino, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, John Barrymore, Florenz Ziegfeld, all also patrons of Rapoport’s, Marvin proudly noted. His parents’ large house was near the ocean, though it was so cold the Atlantic looked frozen. Anna Rapoport was the boss of the family, glamorously dressed and just as assertive as Grandma Yetta. Anna was from Hungary, and she seemed as if she wanted to be as glamorous as fellow Hungarian Zsa Zsa Gabor. She was the front woman at the restaurant. Daddy Harry, a reserved, quiet man, did the books. But Harry was anything but back office. Harry Rapoport, after all,
was
Rapoport’s. He had his own charm, and a dry wit, and the customers loved him.

We were sitting in the living room by a roaring fire. We had barely begun talking when Marvin stood up and presented me with a three-carat diamond engagement ring. I had never before seen Daddy at a loss for words. He was speechless. This was supposed to be a discussion, not a
fait accompli
. Awkwardly, the parents suggested Marvin and I go driving somewhere so they could talk to Daddy. They talked for hours and hours. In the end, I got my way. Mrs. Rapoport, I was told, had promised to treat me like a daughter, her daughter, to be the mother I currently lacked. She said, with two of her three sons all grown (the third was close to my age), she welcomed the chance to be a real mother again, and to have a girl in the family she could fuss over the way she never could with her boys. This somehow broke down Daddy’s resistance.

Marvin drove Daddy and me back to the Warwick Hotel on 54th Street and Sixth Avenue. With Miami now his main base, Daddy had given up the 36th Street apartment. The Kefauver hearings had made him too famous in celebrity-mad New York. In Miami he could still be anonymous. I could barely contain my joy that the marriage was moving ahead. I didn’t want to rub it in, because I knew I had beaten Daddy in this negotiation, and Daddy never wanted to be beaten. The next day I surprised Mommy by visiting her with my wedding ring on. That was my own
fait accompli
. Now she was the one who thought I was the crazy one. The tables had turned. I hadn’t told her about Marvin before, just as I had not told her about the appendectomy. That nose job was enough of a trauma for her. The marriage, she declared, was absurd, ridiculous. Just meet Marvin, I begged her. You’ll see. “I’ve
already
met Marvin,” she reminded me, fully alert and in control for the first time in a long time. “I have met him and I have seen.” Suffice it to say, I did not get her blessing. I returned to the Warwick; Marvin and I decided that the wedding should take place right away. If we weren’t going to wait, why wait at all?

We planned a big ceremony for a few days off. Then Marvin and I went downtown to the courthouse to get a marriage license. Problem! As a minor, I needed both parents’ written permission. Daddy was on board; Mommy was dead set against it. So Daddy, who obviously couldn’t talk to Mommy, had to address himself to the one person who could—Paul. Paul, in his final year at West Point, thought the marriage was ridiculous as well, but Daddy made his request, and Paul relented. Paul would never refuse Daddy, even for something crazy like this. He took a train down to New York that night and somehow convinced Mommy to sign the paper. I still don’t know how or why he did it. Maybe just to get rid of me.

Now it was all systems go. Two days to the wedding and I realized I had no trousseau, nothing to wear. Daddy took care of the money part. But I had no idea how to be a wife, or dress like one. Marvin came to the rescue. He said he knew everything about beauty
and fashion. First came the clothes. Marvin loved to shop more than Mommy ever did in her happy days. Daddy had given me enough money for Saks or Bonwit Teller or both of them combined. Marvin took the cash and said why pay retail. He had connections.

So we drove to Seventh Avenue to some dingy showroom in what looked like a warehouse. I tried on a lot of ugly dresses that Marvin dismissed because he said I was “too hippy.” It was over a decade before hippie meant something cool. Marvin meant I was too fat, which hurt my feelings. I was willing to starve to please him. Finally, he settled on a red dress with white polka dots that I thought belonged in a circus, and a bunch more, for our upcoming honeymoon in Mexico and Las Vegas. What did I know? He was the fashion plate, the man of the world. I bought what he told me.

The morning of our wedding, Marvin picked me up and drove me to Brooklyn. A hairdresser friend of his worked in a beauty shop there. I didn’t realize Brooklyn even had beauty shops. From Mommy’s high-fashion days, I thought all salons were on 57th Street. When they finished with me, I might have been right.

Marvin’s friend, who was very theatrical and flamboyant, decided to make me a blonde, a real blonde, not the natural dirty blonde I already was. To begin, the friend stripped my hair to a bright ghastly orange. “My God, I look like a carrot,” I gasped. Then he completely waxed off my eyebrows. Marvin himself penciled new ones in. He loved this stuff. He and his friend applied makeup and eye shadow, supposedly in the style of Zsa Zsa Gabor, but more like that of Marvin’s mother. This so-called beautician was better suited to doing special effects for monster movies. They oohed and aahed, but I felt like a freak. I walked into that beauty shop a sixteen-year-old and walked out a silver-haired, overly made-up matron, the spitting image of my mother-in-law to be.

There was no time for vanity. Marvin then drove me to the Westover, where I had to pick up a lot of things for our honeymoon, and where I had decided to put on my wedding dress. Mommy was
even more horrified than she was by my nose job. “I warned you, I warned you,” she cried, cursing herself for signing the consent form for Paul. “You look like your Grandmother,” she said, referring to her mother, who was anything but a beauty. “Please, darling, please. I beg you with all my heart. It’s not too late to stop this. It’s all wrong! Stay with me. Don’t do it.”

I left her in tears. If Marvin had come up, she might have killed him. In my clown dress and old lady hairdo, I rode with Marvin down to an old synagogue on the Lower East Side that had served as a congregation for members of the Yiddish theatre. This was my second synagogue. The first was on a Calhoun field trip to the enormous and ornate Temple Emanu-el on Fifth Avenue. This place was very run down, though Marvin called it “historic.” Daddy was there waiting, as were Uncle Jack Lansky and his wife. Daddy and his brother looked funny to me in their skullcaps, which I had never seen them wear before. I know I looked even funnier to them. Poor Daddy. When he saw my hair and dress, tears came to his eyes, and they were not tears of joy. I had no one else there, no Citrons, no Paul, no Buddy, no Grandma Yetta.