Daughter of the King (13 page)

After my parents’ divorce, I had actually seen Teddy a couple of times at Daddy’s new 36th Street apartment. I didn’t think much of it.
I assumed she was this old acquaintance, there for a visit. How blind I was! I didn’t feel threatened. She wasn’t Miss Rheingold. She wasn’t a chorus girl, not even a hat-check girl. Yes, she did have a very pretty face, with nice features and blonde highlights in her brown hair. But she had ugly legs, like fire hydrants. And she totally lacked Mommy’s quiet, ladylike refinement, which even at my age I associated with class and beauty. Whatever she was, she was persistent, and she was as secretive as Daddy.

My mother may have missed the papers, but eventually that same day she got the news. Paul got it by reading someone’s paper on the subway home from Horace Mann. That Daddy had gotten remarried was the biggest hurt of all in Mommy’s life with him. That destroyed her pride as a woman. To divorce Daddy was her idea. But when he chose someone new, it was as if he had rejected Mommy for that person. If that seemed a little crazy, there was some method to Mommy’s madness. Teddy was indeed someone whom Mommy had known, and who worked on Daddy for a long, long time, spinning her web.

The scandal of it all was overwhelming for Paul, who referred to Teddy with quiet, contempt, as “that woman.” He left New York and went for a year to the Sullivan School, a prep school in Washington, D.C., that specialized in placing graduates in the service academies, to prepare for West Point.

I
n the winter of 1948, the year before the Teddy romance went public, with Mommy staying home, Paul and I had gone to Miami to spend the Christmas holidays with Daddy. Teddy was there then, too, basically stalking our father. She had just divorced her husband, whose nightclub had failed. Imagine how she must have looked up to Daddy, whose Florida nightclubs, the Colonial Inn and the Club Boheme, were the talk of the town, and of the whole country, packed with stars
and millionaires who were reveling in postwar affluence. Daddy didn’t seem the type to be susceptible to flattery, though Teddy must have helped him feel good about himself and feel less bad about having lost Mommy. Whatever, Daddy never mentioned Teddy. Instead, he arranged flying lessons for Paul and trips for me to Pickin’ Chicken and the Lighthouse and the fancy toy store on Lincoln Road. Sometime in the midst of all that activity, Daddy managed to find time to secretly marry Teddy Schwartz. Buddy came down that January, after the marriage and was let in on the secret. He was the last person to be sworn to secrecy, but somehow he managed to button his lip.

Aside from Buddy, no one in our family knew that secret until the papers hit the stands that day in June 1949. When Mommy found out, she got furious with Buddy for concealing the papers from her. She never forgave him, and I think her anger had a lot to do with Buddy leaving us and moving in with Daddy, and Teddy, on 36th Street that fall. The friendship between Buddy and myself suffered from that move. I was Mommy’s girl, and he was Daddy’s boy, and never the twain could meet. But the presence of Teddy resulted in Buddy cutting me off as “the other side” if not the enemy. I missed having him to play and talk with. I didn’t want to choose sides; I didn’t really have a choice.

In the summer of 1949, I went off to the new camp, Camp High Point, in Ulster County, New York, up on the Hudson above West Point. I went with a friend named Natalie from the stables. Her family was rich from owning parking garages. I didn’t think that was a particularly good way to get rich, not compared to Daddy’s cool nightclubs and jukeboxes. Cool or not, those garages bought them a big black Cadillac, a fancy home in New Rochelle, and a nice horse for Natalie. High Point was known as a “Jewish” camp. At first that sounded scary, like a concentration camp in the war. But most of the campers were from prosperous Jewish families. There were no prayers or other religious stuff. And the food was really good compared to the junk at Highland Nature.

I still didn’t think of myself as Jewish, or Christian, for that matter. I didn’t have a label. I was just going to a Jewish camp. Like going to a Chinese restaurant. Natalie and I became pals with two of the boy campers whose fathers were famous singers at the Metropolitan Opera, Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker. The boys were good singers, too, but nothing fancy. We’d all sit by a campfire and sing songs from the Hit Parade, like “‘A’—You’re Adorable” and “Some Enchanted Evening” from
South Pacific
, which Daddy had taken me to see that spring on Broadway, right before he left on that secret European “honeymoon” with Teddy.

I was having a good time at High Point until I had a nasty accident, tearing the ligaments of my hand while getting out of the pool. Mommy came up to rescue me. Instead of going back to hot and sticky New York, she took me to stay at a fancy resort hotel nearby at a pretty place called Lake Mahopac. We stayed for a whole month, until school started in September.

I’m not sure what the name was, but, like the camp, it was the first “Jewish” resort I had ever been to, this place with lots of rabbis and kosher food and comedians like you’d see on television on Milton Berle’s
Texaco Star Theatre
and handsome counselors and dance teachers (like the Patrick Swayze character in
Dirty Dancing)
who clearly weren’t Jewish. Mommy seemed depressed and barely spoke. All she would eat was cold borscht three times a day and an occasional hot knish. She must have found out about Teddy by then and was staying away from the city, ashamed to show her face. Mommy wasn’t there because she had rediscovered her heritage. She was there to hide out.

I did my best to have fun at the hotel. One night I went out on the lake with some girls I met without telling Mommy. She would have said no. She was totally overprotective, particularly with my injured hand. The boat flipped over and sank. Somehow we made it back to shore. I was a good swimmer, bad hand and all. Luckily Mommy was asleep when I came in. She would have gone crazy.

Aside from my boating accident and until I met “that woman,” my stepmother, face-to-face that winter in Florida, the most eventful thing that happened to me that year was meeting a hotel kids’ counselor whom we called Jimmy C. Tall and rugged, Jimmy was more like a young dockworker than the fancier boys who rode at the Aldrich Stables. You might say he looked like what people in a few years, inspired by the likes of James Dean and Marlon Brando, would call a juvenile delinquent. He had a big, Cheshire cat grin, and I liked him. Jimmy took me for a ride in his car, parked in the woods under a full moon, and asked if he could kiss me. I said yes. Why not?

Jimmy was eighteen. I was eleven and a half. Theoretically, though, I was a woman. This was the first time I was treated like one. I got an even bigger crush on Jimmy C than I had on Dr. Max Eagle. This one was flesh, the other fantasy. But not too much flesh. Consumed with guilt over my transgression, I went to Mommy to confess. “Mommy, I think I did something wrong,” I said, very sheepishly.

“What did you do, Darling?”

“This guy kissed me.”

“Which guy?”

“Jimmy . . .” I told her all.

Mommy wasn’t particularly excited. She was distracted by her own miseries. “If that’s all you did, you didn’t do anything wrong,” she rendered her judgment. “But,” she added, “Don’t do anything else. Kissing is enough,” she declared, and I followed her dictates. Sadly, it was not enough for Jimmy C. He stopped taking me out. Thanks for the memories.

CHAPTER FIVE

T
HE
M
AN IN THE
C
OONSKIN
C
AP

M
y brother Paul was a perfect gentleman who would never say an unkind word about anyone. That he said absolutely nothing about Teddy, other than calling her “that woman” spoke volumes to me. Although Paul’s loud silence about “that woman” had led me to expect the worst, my new stepmother turned out not to be as horrible as I had feared. I think Daddy could have married Eleanor Roosevelt, and Paul would have resented him for it. Teddy Schwartz—I could never come to call her Teddy Lansky—was perfectly nice to me, though I never told Mommy that. In the winter of 1949, the year after their European love cruise on the
Italia
, I flew down to Miami to spend the Christmas vacation with Daddy. It was just a two-week break, and Mommy didn’t come. She didn’t want to be in the same state as Teddy if she could help it.

Mommy, perhaps distracted by her own depression over the marriage, somehow was much less smotheringly protective of me. She even let me fly to Miami by myself, on a big Eastern Airlines Super Constellation. Her brother Uncle Julie, who lived near us on the
Upper West Side and was in the family produce business, drove me to Idlewild Airport. They put a little tag around my neck in the shape of a teddy bear that said “Unaccompanied Child,” but I took it off the minute I got on the plane. In my mind, and actually in my body, I was no “child.” I had just turned twelve. I may have looked like a little tomboy, but there was something starting to stir in me. I had just been kissed. I was flying to the tropics all by myself, to be alone, or kind of alone, with my famous Daddy. Some child!

Daddy picked me up at Miami airport in a rented Chevrolet. No big Cadillacs, no sporty convertibles for him. No show. Though I wondered what had possessed him to get that flashy suite, fit for an emperor, on the cruise ship. I guess Teddy possessed him, that’s who. This winter he wasn’t staying at the Wofford or the Roney Plaza. Instead he told me he had rented a house. Given his lavish New York apartments, I thought he might have installed Teddy in a mansion like the Firestone Estate that would soon be torn down to build the Fontainebleau Hotel. Showy cars were a no-no for Daddy, but showy homes were okay. Was I ever surprised when we pulled up to this flimsy little cottage in Hollywood. It was about as fancy as Nancy Attina’s family home in Bayshore, Long Island. This one wasn’t even on the water. Inside was just as plain as outside. Instead of being decorated by Dorothy Hammerstein, it seemed to have been decorated by the welfare office. Maybe Daddy was doing this to test Teddy, to see how much of a gold digger she really was. If she could stay in this dump without complaining, her love for Daddy was been more genuine than Paul gave her credit for.

True to form, Daddy didn’t say a single word of explanation about who Teddy was or that he had a new wife, and certainly not why. The expression, “Never complain, never explain” could have been Meyer Lansky’s motto. This was just life as it was, and my only choice was to accept it, to go with the flow, as they say now. So I did. There Teddy was, amidst the indoor wicker garden furniture on the lawn.
She didn’t hug or kiss me like my new mother. She shook my hand, a little nervous and a little standoffish. Under Daddy’s unforgiving microscope, she didn’t want to seem too familiar. At the same time, she didn’t want to seem too cold. I felt for her. I thought she was pretty, though I couldn’t help but keep noticing her heavy legs. With all the showgirls who worked for Daddy, he could have had Betty Grable, the wartime pinup who had the most famous legs in America.

Teddy had to have something more, something special. I couldn’t figure it out. I was just happy to have my own room. She gave me whatever I wanted to eat, and gave Daddy and me a lot of time to ourselves, only joining us for big dinners with all my “uncles” at the Colonial Inn and Club Boheme. It was as if Dinty Moore’s had transferred their whole clientele south for the holidays, Broadway on the sand. Until then, I only got to go to nightclubs, the Riviera in New Jersey or the Copacabana in New York, on rare occasions. Now I was right at center stage, with the best seat in the house.

One night at the Boheme, Daddy caused a big stir when he threw out Howard Hughes, the millionaire aviator and film producer who owned Trans World Airlines. Daddy had no idea who he was. He thought he was a bum. Hughes was wearing tennis shoes and a stained open shirt, and everyone else was in black tie and fancy jewels. Daddy didn’t recognize him, and even after someone pointed out who he was, Daddy said to throw him out and keep him out. Hughes left without a fight. He wouldn’t mess with Daddy. Daddy ran a tight ship.

People dressed up then, and so did I, in clothes Daddy bought me at Burdines, the Saks of Miami. All I needed was a cocktail and not my ginger ale, but I felt very grown up. It was good to be twelve. Oddly, at these dinners, nobody, uncle nor aunt, ever asked about Mommy. Not Uncle Doc Stacher or Uncle Jimmy Alo or even Aunt Flo Alo, Mommy’s dear friend. It was as if Mommy had never existed. Teddy was the new queen, the only queen. I felt bad for Mommy. As always, I kept it to myself.

Back in New York, Mommy didn’t ask me a single thing about my trip. If my uncles didn’t mention Mommy, Mommy didn’t mention my uncles. However, the sounds of silence at the Beresford got louder and louder. Buddy had gone, to 36th Street, and Paul was still in Washington, at the Sullivan School. It was just Mommy and me. Paul enrolled in West Point in July 1950. This was Daddy’s dream come true, and a lot of people said he had made sure it would come true by putting the pressure on Representative Arthur Klein to secure Paul’s appointment. Klein was the congressman for New York State’s 19th District, where West Point was located. Daddy’s dear friend and colleague Uncle Frank Costello, who used to be my parents’ neighbor in the Majestic, also had a lot of influence on Congressman Klein, who was elected by the Tammany Hall democratic political machine that Costello was said to control.