Daughter of the King (8 page)

I
didn’t learn to cut up my own food until I was ten. I saw Buddy’s food being cut up for him by the maid, and I didn’t think it was fair that I should have to cut my own. I was too self-centered to realize that Buddy wasn’t strong enough to cut his food. As I said, I was that spoiled. Not that Buddy wasn’t spoiled himself. Daddy had Julie Fink, one of his Baltimore sales representatives from the national jukebox company he owned, install a Wurlitzer in Buddy’s dormitory room at his school in Maryland. Julie became Buddy’s valet and took him to his row house in Baltimore on weekends to join his wife and family. I visited a few times and couldn’t figure out how to tell one house from
another except by the numbers. They all looked exactly alike from the outside. I was glad we didn’t live in Baltimore.

I’m sure Buddy was the only boarding school student in America with his own private jukebox. No one begrudged him the luxury, and he became a great expert on popular music. Daddy was frustrated that he wouldn’t spend half the time on his studies that he did on the big bands, but Buddy could tell Artie Shaw from Glenn Miller from the first few notes, and he was a big fan of Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, and all the other big stars who worked in Daddy’s nightclubs. Buddy did get stronger (miracles did happen!) and was able to walk with braces. Daddy would urge him on, “If Roosevelt can do it, so can you!”

I never thought of Buddy as handicapped. I got so used to his disabilities that I only could admire his many abilities. He was a master at board games, and strong enough to move the pieces. I could never learn chess, but Buddy was great, a real Bobby Fischer. He must have had Daddy’s strategy gene. But Buddy’s prime passion was show business. Once Buddy could go out, Daddy would have George Wood, who knew them all, introduce Buddy to the singers or take him to their shows, usually at the Copacabana. I was so jealous, but my time would come.

W
hen we were all home together dinners were formal affairs, Daddy in a suit, Mommy in a fancy dress, Paul in his uniform, Buddy in jacket and tie, and me in one of my custom dresses from Saks. Daddy would run the show, constantly asking my brothers about history and geography, and, most importantly, mathematics. He would come up with all sorts of math exercises, addition, multiplication, division, and the boys were supposed to answer. Dinner was like a quiz show, with the reward being Daddy’s satisfaction. Paul always won. He was a great student. Buddy couldn’t seem to care less. He might not have
been able to beat Paul at math, but Buddy ruled the table in current events and sports. Buddy was smart as a whip. He might have made a great agent, like George Wood, and maybe that’s why Daddy cultivated George so much, to be Buddy’s mentor when he finished school and started a career.

As Buddy got older, he also became a walking encyclopedia, with information gleaned from relatives and lesser employees, about my father’s secret life, about gangland yesterday and today. This, alas, was a knowledge that, in the eyes of my father, was a very dangerous thing. It was an unspoken commandment at the Lansky home that Daddy’s underworld associations were never to be spoken of, or even suggested. Buddy didn’t dare flaunt his acquired knowledge in my father’s presence, but as I grew up, he became the source of endless rude awakenings and disturbing suspicions that Daddy’s business and normal business were much different than they seemed to be on the surface.

While Buddy loved gossip about celebrities both high and low, Paul was always very, very serious. He denounced Mommy at the table for spending so much money on me at FAO Schwarz, which he declared was “owned by Nazis.” The Schwarz family was German in origin, Daddy, with judicial restraint, pointed out, but just being a German didn’t make you a Nazi. During the war years, that argument was probably a hard sell to many other New Yorkers.

Paul tried his best to be a big brother to me, taking me to
Bambi
and
Dumbo
and
Song of the South
at the Broadway movie palaces, and across the street to the Hayden Planetarium and to the Museum of Natural History to see those amazing dinosaurs. But Buddy was more fun. He educated me about pop culture—the music, the movies, the shows, the stars. While I read comic books,
Mickey Mouse, Archie, Richie Rich, Little Lulu, Wonder Woman
, he read magazines like
Photoplay
, which were full of gossip about “Daddy’s employees,” as Buddy called them.

We spent hours together listening to the radio, especially the music program
Make Believe Ballroom
, a great show where America’s
premier disk jockey, Martin Block, played the best dance music and jazz, enabling Buddy to introduce me to the wonders of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. Block was famous for coining the phrase “LSMFT” for his show’s chief sponsor Lucky Strike cigarettes. “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” Buddy and I tried to come up with our own secret letter codes, like BLLBG, Buddy Lansky Loves Beautiful Girls. He had his dreams, if not his body. When I grew up I wanted to be one of the Beautiful Girls that Buddy loved, a living version of the beautiful dolls I collected.
Make Believe Ballroom’s
other big sponsor was a line of diet pills called Retardo. I filed that away. Retardo could make me beautiful. It would come back to haunt me.

Buddy and I were riveted to the radio soap operas like
Stella Dallas
, inspired by the Barbara Stanwyck movie, about a mother who sacrifices everything in her life for her daughter. Buddy would say things like, “Can you see Mommy doing that?” Mommy didn’t have to sacrifice, because Daddy took care of everything for us. We also liked the detective series
Boston Blackie
. I wanted Buddy to become a private eye, because he seemed good at figuring out clues. But it was sad that he couldn’t chase down the bad guys.

As a big shot in the jukebox business, Daddy was connected enough to get us one of the very first black and white television sets. But there wasn’t very much to watch, except boxing. Buddy liked it and always wanted to bet me as to which guy would win. The names were great: Sugar Ray Robinson, Willie Pep, Jake La Motta, Manny Ortiz, Rocky Graziano, Joe Louis. I tried to show some interest. I got Mommy to buy me my own boxing ring from FAO Schwarz, where I’d have boxing matches with a punching bag on a stand that kept snapping back and knocking me down. I couldn’t even beat a punching bag, so boxing got old fast. For Buddy, though, his early desire to wager turned out to be a seed of destruction. Betting would become one of his many roads to ruin.

I loved being friends with my brothers, as long as they wanted me. I had buck teeth, and they called me “Bucky” like in the Westerns.
They also reported me to Mommy when I didn’t brush my teeth. I think I subconsciously wanted them to fall out. I was grateful to be noticed by my brothers, good or bad, but one day I fought back. I found a naked baby picture of Buddy in Mommy’s china cabinet and displayed it in the living room when my parents were having a holiday party. After that I used to bribe Buddy for five or ten dollars to hide the nude shot before his friends came over. Eventually Buddy figured out where I was hiding it, and the picture disappeared

I loved money. I used to go into Daddy and Mommy’s bedroom during the day after school. There were piles of cash everywhere. Twenties were the smallest bills. Hundreds were abundant. It was like Monopoly money, but it was real. I knew it worked because I would help myself to some of the twenties, knowing they wouldn’t be missed. I wasn’t stealing. Mommy gave me anything I asked for. I was just playing banker. This was my way of learning math. Then I took my American Flyer wagon and went to the newsstand on 81st Street, where I stocked up on comics. I had seen my Daddy tip the doormen, so I imitated him and gave the doorman a dollar to keep his mouth shut that I had gone out all by myself, which was supposedly a no-no. I was like a little gangster girl.

Maybe I was my father’s daughter after all. But then I had no idea what my father was all about. All I knew was that I was his pet, that after dinner, he’d hold me in his arms in his paneled library, door closed, and read to me wearing his silk Sulka robe over his silk Sulka pajamas and smelling like Benson and Hedges and English lavender. For some crazy reason, he liked to read to me from Thomas Paine, the Revolutionary War writer,
Common Sense
and the
Rights of Man
. He said that Thomas Paine was his favorite writer and these were brilliant ideas, ideas that made America free.

Paine said unforgettable things like “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” and “these are the times that try men’s souls” and “the duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government,”
things that would hit close to home for Daddy years later when the government was dead set to ruin our lives. Some things kind of spoke to me, or us: “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” But it was all very heavy stuff, hardly bedtime stories.

Obviously these were way over the head of a six-year-old, or even a twenty-six year-old. I think Daddy was reading them for himself and just taking me along for the ride. Whatever, I didn’t care. The ride was enough; if I wanted to read, I had my comic books. I just loved Daddy’s strong, quiet voice, which, like Mommy’s, had no trace of a New York accent. I loved being in his arms. Too bad Daddy was gone most of the time, and tortured by them or not, I felt very sad and abandoned when my brothers would leave, too. Until I started school, I didn’t have anyone else.

But then I began making friends, though not exactly the ones my mother assumed I would connect with in my fancy school. One day when one of the maids had taken me to play in Central Park, I met a girl my own age named Terry Healy, who was a brilliant roller skater. She lived on 82nd Street across from the back of the Beresford. I brought her home to play, and she was amazed at our apartment. When I went to her house, I understood why. She lived on the second floor of a big, twenty-unit old brownstone where her father was the superintendent. We liked to hang out with him when he was fixing the boilers and the pipes. It was like an adventure movie, and I loved it, even when we saw a big rat.

For all her aspirations to glamour and culture, Mommy was anything but snobbish about my friendship with an Irish Catholic janitor’s daughter. She was delighted I had such a nice companion. She just didn’t want me running around outside by myself. Maybe it was her Lindbergh kidnapping fear. Not that I paid much attention to her. I would sneak out of the apartment and cross 82nd Street by myself to go play at Terry’s. The Healys took me to mass with them. I liked it almost as much as Radio City. One day a yellow cab almost hit me
running across 82nd Street. It had to screech on its brakes. And who was in the cab? Mommy. She threw a fit and confined me to my room.

In 1943, Mommy decided to turn me into a fancy horsewoman. To add to all my other lessons, she began taking me for riding lessons at the Aldrich Stables between 66th and 67th Streets on Central Park West. Mommy herself had liked to ride, but she lost her passion for it after a horse threw her down in Hot Springs. She tried to brainwash me into the sport by getting me kids’ horse books, like
My Friend Flicka
, and dragging me to see
National Velvet
at least three times.

The books and movies didn’t inspire me, but the horses did. At first I hated the lessons as punishment, but I quickly took to riding and all the cool outfits, leather boots and hats, and saddles and riding accessories. Daddy was so proud that I could ride and had the potential to become a sportswoman that for my seventh birthday he bought me a horse. I named her Bazookie, not my misspelling of the bazooka weapons that I’d constantly heard about because of the war, but rather a tribute to an older girl neighbor named Sookie in the Beresford who was nice to me. Grandpa Citron was so amazed that I could ride, and so proud, that every week he’d send his chauffeur, Major, in his limousine to deliver a case of the freshest carrots to Bazookie, straight from one of Grandpa’s produce suppliers in New Jersey. What luxury!

At the stables, which became my second home, and sometimes more like my first one, I also made another less-privileged friend, who, like Terry, would become a pal for life. This was Eileen Sheridan, whose father was a trainer at the stables. The family lived in an unfancy part of the Upper East Side, all the way over near the Third Avenue El, the elevated line that was torn down in 1955. Eileen, who was there to help her dad, was rough and ready and afraid of nothing. I wanted to be alone with Eileen, but my overprotective mother always came with me to Aldrich. I had to figure out a route to independence, and eventually I did. One day Mommy and I were riding together, and I used my riding crop to startle her horse, so it would run off in the
opposite direction. After that, Mommy stopped riding with me. She would drop me off and pick me up, and I felt free for the first time in my young life. Like Terry, Eileen was also a Catholic and went to parochial school. Daddy liked both Terry and Eileen and was impressed that both were hard-working students at Catholic schools, which he held in high regard. That man had a huge thing for education. I think he was hoping, against hope, that some of it would rub off on me. Eileen’s parents, like Terry’s, took me to their Catholic church. However, after the priest did something to bless my throat, sprinkling holy water or crossing it with candles, I came down with a terrible case of the mumps. I stopped going to any church after that. I thought God was trying to tell me something, giving me a sign.