Daughter of the King (23 page)

Ten days after Gary arrived, the Rapoports hosted the circumcision, or
bris
, at the new apartment. It was a big event, with over sixty guests, with lots of friends and relatives bearing lots of gifts, many big and expensive. For example, Evelyn’s husband, Raymond, arrived with a very fancy baby carriage from Best & Co. I wasn’t allowed to see the
bris
, not that I could have stood to watch. One funny detail was that for the event I dressed Gary in a girl’s christening dress I had bought at Saks, when I thought he was going to be she. I was still pretty ignorant about Jewish rituals and didn’t have my own religious identity.

Marvin had been thinking less about our new apartment and our first child and more about a second honeymoon. He was dying to go to Europe. His mother had a new deal with Perillo Tours and had
found us a baby nurse to stay with Gary while we went away for a month. This nurse, who looked like a stevedore and had a thick German accent, could have been a prison camp guard. I didn’t want to leave my baby at all, much less with this Nazi-like hausfrau.

But the Rapoports shamed me into going, insisting their Marvin needed a holiday, all the expenses of which, aside from the free airfare and hotels, Daddy would be paying, with an emphasis on clothes and furniture for our new place. Because Gary was being bottle-fed, not breast-fed, the Rapoports assured me that my presence was not essential. In early July, barely a month after Gary arrived, Marvin and I flew on Sabena to Brussels. My Calhoun French was nowhere as good as I thought. Nobody understood a word I said, so I gave up and stuck to English. Because we were on a tour, the trip was very much Europe’s greatest hits: “If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium.” We visited the Grande Place in Brussels, then were herded onto a train to Paris, where we checked off Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the flea market, the Moulin Rouge.

Marvin skipped most of the sightseeing and went on a mad shopping spree, buying half the men’s clothes on the Rue St.-Honoré. Who did he think he was going to be, Maurice Chevalier? Despite this supposedly being our second honeymoon, there was nothing at all romantic about it, no cozy hand-holding dinners, no gypsy violinists, no strolling on the banks of the Seine, no sex. None whatsoever. I concluded we were going to be a one-child family. What if I wanted a companion for Gary? Don’t think about it. After dinners with the tour group, Marvin would disappear into the Paris night, or the Venice night, or the night of wherever we were. Maybe he wanted to see the Paris churches and the Venice canals by moonlight. I was tired and glad to go to sleep.

After Rome, with the Coliseum, the Forum, the catacombs and more wardrobe building on the Via Condotti, Marvin arranged a week-long extension to the itinerary so we could go to Naples, Pompeii, and Capri. What he was really after, I soon learned, was not
culture but connections, Daddy’s connections. The biggest of them all was Charles “Lucky” Luciano, whom Marvin had managed to track down in Naples and arrange a “family reunion” with me, the honeymooning daughter of his dearest American friend. Did Daddy know about this? I pressed Marvin, who admitted he did not. “It’ll be a great big surprise,” he insisted. If I knew anything it was that Daddy did not like surprises. What could I do? Luciano had invited us to lunch. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse.

The meeting was at a fancy restaurant overlooking the sea in the port area of Santa Lucia. The name of the restaurant was the California, just in case we were homesick. But there was nothing American about the place, no hamburgers or anything like that. Vesuvius, the volcano that had buried Pompeii centuries ago, loomed menacingly across the bay. This wasn’t just the Old World; this was the ancient world, the world where all the myths came from. Now we were going to meet a modern one, Lucky Luciano, the emperor of the underworld. The California, which in fact was owned by Luciano, was the best restaurant in Naples, with a vast antipasto table that filled one whole room, and packed with elegant gentlemen eating lobster and crabs and other delicacies that the local fisherman delivered to the restaurant straight from their boats outside.

When the regal maître d’ led us to the prime banquette where Luciano was waiting for us, my first thought was that Daddy had played a brilliant trick and had flown over to surprise us. That was how much Luciano and Lansky looked like each other. The same size, the same face, the same custom suit. When we got closer, I saw that it was no joke. It was the real thing—the man who was supposed to be the ultimate “godfather,” the man the mob-busters said controlled the crime of America, through my father, even though he was an ocean and a continent away.

Lucky Luciano leapt up from the table and gave me a bigger, warmer hug and kiss than I had ever gotten from anyone in my family,
or Marvin’s, either. He gave Marvin a kiss and hug as well. That, I presumed, was the Italian style. Marvin must have been used to it, from the restaurant world. This guy was family, for sure. I instantly began calling him Uncle Charlie. He liked that. Up close, he looked a little older, late fifties, and a lot rougher than Daddy. His skin was badly pockmarked. One of his eyes drooped, giving him a permanently sad appearance, even when he was laughing. (The pockmarks had come from smallpox, the droopy eye from a murder attempt. This man was a survivor.) Sitting at Luciano’s feet was his beloved and well-behaved miniature Doberman. The dog’s name was Bambi, after the Disney film. Uncle Charlie still had an accent, less the florid Italianized English we had been hearing in our hotels but more like something from Little Italy, an immigrant’s English that had never gotten fancied up even when his suits did.

We must have had a dozen courses. He ordered lots of bite-size things, ravioli, rigatoni, fried vegetables, little clams and mussels and shrimp. Marvin was impressed with the California. When he told Charlie how New York had nothing like it, the big boss got wistful and homesick. He said he’d do anything for a big plate of linguini at Angelo’s on Mulberry Street.

Over the long meal, Uncle Charlie loved reminiscing about the good old days with Daddy, insisting, over and over, that he’d known
everybody
and Meyer Lansky was the bravest and finest man he’d ever known. He was so effusive about Daddy that he made me blush. While Daddy, true to form, had never told me anything about Uncle Charlie, Uncle Charlie delighted in telling me everything (well, not quite everything) about the “tough little Jew” who had “surprised the hell outta me” by standing up to his tough street gang that used to beat up the Jewish kids and force them to pay “protection” money of a penny a day so they wouldn’t get beaten up anymore. “We couldn’t beat ’em, so we had to join ’em,” he said of Daddy and Uncle Benny Siegel.

Luciano’s other best friend was Uncle Frank Costello, and the two Italians and the two Jews became the four musketeers of Prohibition, making their first fortune in bootlegging and later, larger fortunes in gambling, bookmaking, nightclubs, construction, trucking, even restaurants. He amazed Marvin by knowing his family and all about Rapoport’s and Ratner’s. I guess it proved you didn’t have to be Jewish to love blintzes. He didn’t talk about the circumstances that had led to his being here, and not back home in New York where he clearly wanted to be. However, he was confident he’d see us back in New York “one day soon.” He told us how he and Daddy were cooking up “big things in Cuba, big, big things. Maybe we’ll all meet up in Havana,” Uncle Charlie suggested. I liked the idea.

This was turning into one of the greatest days I’d ever had, and then, over cannolis and the sweetest gelato I ever tasted, Marvin had to go and ruin it. He told Charles Lucky Luciano that we were out of money, that we had spent too much, and that we couldn’t afford to get home. “As a favor to Meyer,” as Marvin so sleazily put it, could he be so kind and help us out so we wouldn’t be stranded in Naples and have to start sending cables home from American Express.

He lied further by saying we didn’t have return tickets and that it was a terrible misbudgeting on our part. He had gotten “carried away buying Sandi clothes so she could look her most beautiful.” I wanted to take a knife and stab him at the table, right in front of the mob boss to end all mob bosses. I was sure Uncle Charlie would’ve been proud of me, if he’d known. Without batting an eyelash, Uncle Charlie called a waiter over and asked for a big envelope. He then reached into his coat pocket and peeled off a huge wad of Italian lira, put it in the envelope and handed it to Marvin, with a handshake. “Enjoy your honeymoon, kids,” he said. “You’re only young once.” He had his driver, in a big black Lancia, drive us back to the hotel. I gave him a kiss goodbye. It was like kissing Daddy. Petting Bambi farewell, I desperately wanted to apologize for my horrible greedy, uncouth husband. Then
I remembered Daddy’s credo. Never complain or explain. I swallowed my shame.

Back at the hotel, I let Marvin have it. How could he have done such a thing? “He’s rich!” Marvin said, “He’s one of the richest men in the world.” Besides, Marvin said, and here was the kicker, he had counted out the money, and, by the time it was converted into American currency, all he had given us was $50. “What a tightwad!” Marvin complained. One of the richest men in the world was also one of the cheapest, an Italian Uncle Scrooge. He had made a big show of generosity to his best friend’s daughter, and it was one big con. Then again, what would you expect of a gangster?

That was Marvin’s excuse, and I didn’t believe a word of it. Let me count the money, I demanded, and he refused, claiming it was locked in the hotel safe downstairs, that I was a minor who needed Marvin’s adult status in red-tape-choked Italy to access the safe, and a million other dubious excuses.

We sailed back to New York from Naples a couple of days later, and I refused to speak to Marvin for the entire crossing. Not that he seemed to care. He was too busy doing sports on deck and hanging around all the ship’s bars, drinking top-label Scotch and champagne and giving lavish tips (surely with Uncle Charlie’s money) to the dashing young stewards. Fittingly, the ship was the
Andrea Doria
, the
Titanic
of the 1950s, which would sink the next year in a tragic collision off Nantucket. But my second honeymoon with Marvin was already the voyage of the damned.

Back in New York, our excitement over our new son brought Marvin and me back together. Not that Marvin spent that much time with Gary. Now he had a new mission. He wanted Daddy to set him up in his own restaurant. Having given Meyer Lansky a grandson, the least that Marvin, Mister Entitlement, felt that Daddy could do for him was to set him up in his own business. The better to support Gary, that was the idea, though everyone knew the support all came from Daddy.

Wanting the marriage to work, Daddy found Marvin the situation he wanted. The restaurant was called Spindletop, a luxury steak house at 254 West 47
^th
Street, in the heart of the theatre district. The name came from the rich east Texas oilfields near Beaumont that started the whole Texas boom. The typical New York steak houses, like Gallagher’s or Christ Cella, were austere, sawdust-on-floors affairs, but Spindletop was a New York fantasy of Texas excess: giant steaks, giant cocktails, a red plush bordello atmosphere, and waitresses in low-cut costumes and black net stockings that prefigured the Bunnies of the Playboy Clubs. At Spindletop, Texas was the thing.

Spindletop was owned by an old acquaintance of Daddy’s named Joe Marsh, who had been a captain at the Riviera nightclub/casino on the Jersey Palisades. Joe was coarse, a bit of a tough-guy street thug, though he always made a big fuss over me. “I used to take you to the toilet,” he’d never cease to remind me. Joe, who was handsome in a brutal way, had a stunning showgirl wife named Joan who was a Texan herself. One of her former boyfriends was a Texas oilman who had never gotten her out of his system. To keep her in it, he put up the seed money for Spindletop. Now Joe wanted to cash out. He approached Daddy, who bought a half-interest in the place for Marvin, but insisted that Joe stay on to teach Marvin the world of steak. After all, Marvin’s whole life had been spent in a meat-free dairy restaurant. Spindletop would be a brave new red-blooded world for him, and, hopefully, for Gary and me, a wildly successful one.

Marvin came into Spindletop in the fall of 1955. He was a fast learner. This kosher dairy man got an education in beef and soon became known for serving some of the best and biggest he-man sirloins in the ultimate steak town, the home of the New York Strip. Under him, the restaurant continued to thrive. I wish I could have said the same for our marriage. We had less time to ourselves than ever, and when we did go out, it was to those same all-boy Village boltes. “Why am I the only woman here?” I exasperatedly asked Marvin one night.

Marvin immediately went on the defensive. He was deeply insulted and ceased speaking directly to me. We only spoke through Maddie, the maid. We had dismissed the German storm trooper baby nurse when we returned from Europe. Marvin stopped taking me out, spending most of his spare time with his two best friends, whom I had finally met, Jay, a decorator, and Cary, a sales manager at the I. Miller shoe salon. They were two of the handsomest men I had ever seen, the kind of men girls would die for.

In time I figured out that girls would have died before these men would notice them. Marvin, I finally came to realize, was, at best, bisexual. His mother already knew. That’s why she hoped, against hope, that our marriage might “reform” him. That’s why she begged me to make him change his friends. Fat chance. The reason Marvin wanted a wife and child was to have cover for his secret life, the life after hours in Paris and Venice, the life in the Village clubs with the pretty boys.

In the fifties “gay” meant happy. I had no idea what a homosexual was. I had no idea what being in the closet meant, other than you liked to shop. To have a gay husband was the cruelest blow to self-esteem any wife could have. To an innocent child bride it was even more devastating. But not only was Marvin a closeted gay man, he was an unabashed fortune hunter. He had married me, this silly little kid, not only for the cover of a marriage and a family, but also for the cover of my wealth and the big future that Meyer Lansky could buy him.