Daughter of the King (6 page)

Uncle Hy Abrams took over King Solomon’s vacant, bloody throne. He and Daddy would take long walks along the Charles River Esplanade. I used to watch them from our windows, or when I was playing in the park by the Charles with Nanny Minnie and my one friend, Wendy, whom I named my very first doll after. Wendy was always my favorite name, long before I even knew about
Peter Pan
.

Notwithstanding Buddy’s daily therapy with Dr. Carruthers, we seemed to be travelling all the time. In family scrapbooks, I have pictures of myself as a very little girl in Florida, Arizona, California, and Cuba, all hot spots to escape the icy Boston winters and, more important, for Daddy to do his endless deals. He understood how much Americans loved betting, and he was betting his own career on it. I remember fondly one train trip to Phoenix, where we visited Daddy’s dog track there. He had chimpanzees dressed as jockeys riding the dogs on their backs. That made a huge impression on me. I also had a wonderful trip to Cuba, my first international journey. Mommy made a scrapbook with a bunch of press clippings of me in 1940 at the legendary Hotel Nacional in Havana, where the Cuban daily
El País
wrote that the Lanskys were in residence there for ten weeks. A world war was erupting. Europe was freezing and dying. Most of America was still getting over the Depression. And here we were amidst the palms and the hibiscus, the happiest kids on earth. Charmed lives.

Even with Daddy’s philosophy of staying under the radar, he was front-page news and a VIP all the way. There were pictures of me with my curly blonde hair in a white bonnet and white sundress
confidently pushing my own stroller, the little golden girl. And there was my brother Paul at the racetrack, dashing in a rep tie and white Bermudas, a pair of binoculars around his neck so he could see the precise result at the finish line. But for all the copy about Daddy, he and my mother and Buddy were never photographed for the paper.

Even when we were in the Cuban paradise, education always took precedence for Daddy. He sent Buddy and Paul to the American School in Havana, figuring a few months of lessons were better than none at all. For all his limitations, Buddy could still use his hands a bit. He spoke beautifully. And he walked by holding on to you. Under the circumstances, he had amazing poise.

What was Daddy doing in Cuba? In his travels, Daddy had become good friends with Cuba’s military ruler, Colonel Fulgencio Batista. Batista, impressed with Daddy’s success in the carpet joints across America, offered him a plum contract to renovate and manage Havana’s famed Oriental Park racetrack and its two casinos. Oriental Park had been a haven for American millionaires in the Roaring Twenties. But the Yankee millionaires had gone home in the Depression, and Batista wanted them back. Daddy brought in a New England friend named Lou Smith, one of the disciples of King Solomon, who ran horse and dog tracks in the Boston area, to run the racetrack at Oriental Park for him.

Daddy was like a business consultant, the McKinsey of the Mob. However, where gambling was legal, there was no Mob stigma to running a casino, only the huge prestige that got Daddy written up in the papers. The respect must have felt good, so good that he took his family to Havana for the whole season to bask in it. The millionaires started coming back: the Vanderbilts, the ice-skating star Sonja Henie, who had been the obsession of Adolf Hitler and had rejected him cold. But she liked my father, who wore a white dinner jacket and ran the places just like Humphrey Bogart did as Rick in
Casablanca
. Being the
patrón
of Oriental Park was a dry run for creating Vegas a decade hence
and for turning Havana into the Las Vegas of the Caribbean, another decade after that. Meyer Lansky would soon own the Nacional, where we were staying. That was like owning the Waldorf in New York.

In 1941, we faced the reality that medical miracles were not going to happen in Boston. We moved back to New York City, to a grand art deco high-rise at 411 West End Avenue. The feature I remember most was the sunken living room, like the dance floor on an ocean liner. I had to share a room with my brothers, who both liked to tease and torment me. But it didn’t last long. At the tender age of nine, Paul was sent away to boarding school at the New York Military Academy (NYMA), a “feeder” school for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, further up the Hudson, where Daddy’s friend, Philadelphia publisher and
Racing Form
owner Moe Annenberg, had sent one of his grandsons. A lot of Daddy’s friends, in the upper world as well as the underworld, were sending their sons and grandsons to military schools. That was the big thing in those days. Instead of preparing Paul for Harvard, Daddy had decided that West Point was the pinnacle of American education. It was wartime, and the military had way more prestige than big business, which had spotted its blotter in the 1929 crash.

M
oe Annenberg had just pled guilty to tax evasion to save his only son (he had seven daughters), Walter, Reagan’s future ambassador to England, who had also been indicted, from prison. NYMA would later be the alma mater of director Francis Coppola, mogul Donald Trump, and John Gotti, Jr., the son of the gangster. A number of my uncles’ sons ended up there as well. There was nothing like a military education to counter charges that a family was “un-American.”

After Buddy was sent to a rehab school in Cockysville, Maryland, outside of Baltimore, under the care of another supposed miracle worker, Dr. Phelps, I was home alone in New York and had my parents
all to myself. The problem was that they were never around. Daddy was always on the road, and Mommy was shopping on 57th Street, often with Flo Alo, Uncle Jimmy’s wife, and Aunt Esther Siegel, before she moved to Beverly Hills.

She was shopping her lonely blues away at a store called Wilma’s, a more exclusive version of Bonwit Teller, just down the block. She bought hand-embroidered linens at an expensive place called Leron. If they had actually served breakfast at Tiffany’s, Mommy would have been there to eat it. One time her sister Sadie told Mommy to buy herself a “little” birthday present and send the bill to Sadie. Poor Sadie nearly had a heart attack when the bill came for over $200, which was a fortune for silk pajamas in the Depression. Mommy had expensive tastes; she couldn’t help herself.

Mommy also was addicted to beauty salons. Elizabeth Arden, one of her favorites, was like something out of Marie Antoinette and the French court at Versailles. It was a long way from the men’s barbershop on the Lower East Side where she and Aunt Esther had gotten their hair cut as girls. I still can’t imagine what Mommy was doing there. Slumming, I guess. Taking a walk on the wild side. Maybe she wasn’t always so refined and proper. After all, she did marry Meyer Lansky.

Please don’t get the idea that Mommy was selfish, sending my brothers away and shopping all the time. She shopped for me as much as she shopped for herself, buying me clothes at the Saks children’s shop, getting my hair cut at Best & Co., and spending more money on dolls at the enormous toy emporium FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue than any other customer in its history. I was the doll queen: my room was filled with at least fifty dolls. I had a whole set of Jane Austen dolls; a collection of Alice in Wonderland dolls; Red Cross war nurse dolls; Princess Elizabeth English royalty dolls; and Cinderella dolls, all from the famous doll designer Madame Alexander, who was to dolls what Chanel was to clothes.

I thought Madame Alexander, with a fancy name like that, was royalty herself, but it turns out she was just a Jewish princess like my mother, although one who created a big business. She was born in the same part of Russia as Daddy. If I had known, I would have begged him to get out of the gambling business and into the doll business. I had dolls from other doll makers than Madame Alexander, boy dolls, too, General MacArthur dolls and Rhett Butler dolls to go with my Scarlett O’Hara dolls and a whole city of dollhouses, the nicest one fully lighted, an electric dollhouse. Plus I had enough big stuffed animals to fill the Central Park Zoo.

Mommy bought me books, too, and lots of them. The first one I remember was “The Goops and How to Be Them: A Manual of Manners for Polite Infants,” which she would read to me until I could read myself. Mommy was raising me as a little lady, and she wanted to be sure I behaved like one. Perfect manners were essential. As was generosity, at least from Daddy’s point of view. When Buddy was a therapy outpatient at Bellevue Hospital, Daddy thought it would be nice to give something to the kids on the children’s ward. “It’ll make them feel good, and it will make you feel even better,” he promised me.

At first I didn’t want to give away my dolls. They were my friends, my only friends, and they were real to me. But you didn’t say no to Daddy. There were twenty-one kids, and I picked out twenty-one dolls, one for each. Daddy was right, that it was better to give than to receive. The smiles of those kids will stay with me forever. I wish I could have brought them all home to be my friends. I would have rather had real people than dolls to play with. For all the stuff I had, I couldn’t have been lonelier.

One of the reasons Paul had been sent to military school, aside from Daddy’s West Point dreams for him and the fact that Daddy’s friends’ sons were being sent to such places, was that he was a little rambunctious. On a visit to the Citrons in New Jersey, Paul had broken some things in the tightly ordered house, a boy being a boy. That
wouldn’t do. If he needed discipline, who better to instill it than a military school? Not wanting to get sent away myself, I took the Goops to heart and memorized its illustrated etiquette rules as insurance against deportation. My little world was too good to lose.

Nanny Minnie Mullins had stayed behind in Boston. So Mommy sent me to a French nursery school for four hours a day. Mommy wanted me to have European culture the same way Daddy wanted Paul to go to West Point and become a general. I hated French. At five proper English was hard enough. It was like being on Mars, and I didn’t last very long.

The best part of the boys being gone, aside from having the room all to myself, was travelling whenever Daddy took Mommy with him, like the trip to California to see the Siegels. Until 1945 my childhood summers would be spent on the beach in Deal, New Jersey. Deal, and the neighboring towns of Long Branch and Elberon on the Jersey Shore were known as the Jewish Riviera, where many of the old German Jewish families who had become the pillars of Wall Street at the turn of the twentieth century had imposing Victorian summer homes. From the post–Civil War days until the 1929 crash, this part of the Jersey Shore was as grand a resort as Newport, Rhode Island, frequented by seven presidents, from Ulysses S. Grant to Woodrow Wilson. There was even a Church of the Presidents in Long Branch, where all the chief executives worshipped.

By the forties, the Jewish Riviera had become the Gangster Riviera. In addition to Daddy, many of my uncles owned or rented great estates there—Willie Moretti, Ben Siegel, Jerry Catena, Doc Stacher. These were the people who controlled the nightlife of the Garden State; it was only fitting that they summered in the state that was making them rich and not running up to Maine to cool off. They lived in homes that decades before had belonged to such important American families as the Hartfords of the A&P food stores, the Woolworths of
those
stores, and the Seligmans, one of the Jewish investment banking
baronies of Wall Street who financed the railroads that we took out west to visit Uncle Benny Siegel.

Thomas Edison had lived here, and, most important to Daddy, Robert Lincoln, the son of Daddy’s revered “Uncle Abe.” I could only hope Daddy and my uncles could become as respected in their business as these Jersey Shore predecessors. I played with the children of all these powerful men, my “cousins.” It was simple, swimming and sunning and riding bicycles, going to Asbury Park, now famous for Bruce Springsteen, then famous for its boardwalk, its carousel, its imposing casino, which was a beach club that had nothing to do with gambling and was designed by the same architects who built New York’s Grand Central Station.

I normally never liked to eat very much, but the salt air made me hungry for the cotton candy, the toffee, the popcorn, the hot dogs, the all-American junk. Daddy couldn’t have picked a more all-American spot to celebrate his birthday on the Fourth of July. His idea of relaxing was sitting outside overlooking the sea, drinking scotch, smoking cigarettes, and playing gin rummy with my uncles and other men like Uncle Benny, visiting from California. Here in the Jersey breeze, America’s highest rollers would get all worked up over their hands as they played for a penny a point. Daddy and Benny also enjoyed fierce handball competitions. You could see how intense they could be. In those games, you could see how these men could rule their world.

Despite my summers in Deal and my travels with my parents all over the country and to Cuba, as a little girl my New York was a very limited slice of Manhattan, bounded on the north by 96th Street, the south by 42nd Street, the west by the Hudson, and the east by Fifth Avenue. I never visited the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building or Gracie Mansion, never saw Wall Street or Greenwich Village, never was taken to Macy’s or Gimbels. Daddy did take Paul and Buddy to Yankee Stadium to see baseball, but not me. They said I was too little.