Daughter of the King (28 page)

Close to sixty, Daddy seemed to be facing the end. Paul flew in across country. I flew down. Picking me up at the airport, Uncle Jack gave me his grim summary of the situation. “Your father is broke. Your father is dying. You’re getting nothing.” Such were the charms of Jacob Lansky. As serious as Daddy was, he was a stand-up comic compared to his younger brother. The usually dour Uncle Jack was as dull as dishwater, the last guy you would expect to run a casino. With his thick hair and bushy eyebrows, he looked like the head of the mine-workers’ union, John L. Lewis, but minus the fire. He had no drive, no dynamism. Fortunately Daddy had enough for two, and took care of his baby brother, installing him as his front man. But Daddy made all the decisions; he didn’t trust Jack’s judgment.

Jack’s wife, Aunt Anna (so many Anns and Annas in my family) had come from a poor family on the Lower East Side. She was forever whining to Jack, “You shoulda stayed a furrier,” which was Jack’s career until Daddy put him in the fast lane. Anna was convinced Daddy had lured poor Jack into trouble, and that their now-lavish lives could be snatched away from them at any minute, that she and Jack would
be snared in any government dragnet that was after Daddy. In short, though Daddy had
made
their lives, he had also
ruined
them. With Cuba gone, Uncle Jack was all dressed up in the white tux he wore at the Riviera, all dressed up with no place to go.

Jack had the ultimate Depression mentality. Every glass wasn’t half empty. It was completely empty. He expected the worst: misery, poverty, and death. Daddy’s illness was a long and tense siege. I quickly ended up in a fistfight with Teddy over Daddy’s care. Blaming me for Daddy’s illness, she leapt upon me and tried to strangle me. Uncle Jack, stronger than I had ever given him credit for, had to pull her off. In his oxygen tent, Daddy didn’t look like the king of crime, or the king of anything. Gasping for breath, he looked like a sick little old man, hanging to life by a thread. There was no power there, just loneliness. And if that life ended, what did he have to show for it? A pile of subpoenas from J. Edgar Hoover? Two wives, one on the edge of insanity, the other terminally superficial and greedy? Me? A disgrace. Buddy, another disgrace? A foreclosed high-rise gambling den in a banana republic? A bunch of craps tables in the Nevada desert? Paul was the one and only point of honor. All I could do was pray for Daddy to extend his life so he could leave it at a later day on more dignified terms than these.

Miraculously, Daddy survived the heart infection. But no more handball. Maybe golf, if he were lucky. The days of vitality were behind him. But he was still here, still standing. Thanks a lot, Uncle Jack, thanks for the confidence. In some ways, Daddy was a man without a country, that country being Cuba. But he still had Las Vegas. If one dream turned into a nightmare, he would roll over and dream again. However, life did not begin at sixty, especially with Washington, D.C., breathing down your back.

A new administration and a friend on Pennsylvania Avenue seemed to be Daddy’s best insurance policy, so he threw himself into his promise to get Ambassador Kennedy’s son elected that November
1960. Working with him was the big boss of Chicago, Sam Giancana. “Mooney” (Italian American slang for “crazy”) Giancana was more father than godfather to Frank Sinatra, who happened to be Jack Kennedy’s very best friend. Maybe, maybe, the power tables would turn in Daddy’s favor.

While Daddy rode bravely through his valley of fear, I continued to sleepwalk through my own valley of the dolls. Mine was the Oz of amphetamines. I was becoming a total drug addict. When Daddy was sick in Florida, I needed all the pharmaceutical help I could get to make it through those months of fearing I would lose my own Galahad, the only man on earth who could protect me. I could not face the possibility that all my comforts and security and money could suddenly vanish, like Uncle Jack had warned me that they were about to.

Uncle Jack was wrong. But it could happen. I wasn’t prepared for such a cataclysm. I refused to think about it. I didn’t have time to go to diet doctors. Instead I went directly to the source and began cozying up to and bribing pharmacists. My big connection was the drug store at the Fontainebleau, where I sweet-talked and high-tipped the druggist into giving me whatever I wanted, pills not by the dozens, but by the hundreds. A doctor may have told me to take them twice a day, at most. I popped them at all hours, whenever I felt I needed them, which was all the time. Once at the Fontainebleau pharmacy on a drug run, I ran into Joe DiMaggio, who sent profuse regards to Daddy. I had met Joe with Daddy many times, often at Toots Shor’s. I couldn’t have been more ashamed at what I was doing. Alas, I wasn’t ashamed enough to stop.

Meanwhile, I was still living the glamorous life of the madcap Manhattan heiress/gay divorcee. I would still see Dean Martin from time to time, meeting him for a secret rendezvous in Chicago or Boston. Dick Shawn would call when he was in the city. There were plenty of other stars: Jeff Chandler, David Janssen, Hugh O’ Brien—Wyatt Earp himself. I met a lot of these men at Danny’s Hide-Away,
a riotous steak house on East 45th Street near Grand Central Station owned by Danny Stradella, a tiny jockey-size impresario who loved introducing famous men to pretty girls. That was probably why this smallest restaurateur in New York had the biggest celebrity clientele. I was also a regular at 21, where the famous and charismatic manager Chuck Anderson would never let me pick up a check. Ditto Edwin Perona at El Morocco. Ditto Ed Wynne at the Harwyn Club. In fact, I don’t think I ever paid a check in any New York nightclub either when I was by myself or with some girlfriends. Instead of charging it to the Diners Club, my Meyer Lansky plan was far better—there were no monthly statements. How, I puzzled, could a man so revered in New York be so reviled in Washington? With all my craziness, I was lucky never to be robbed or kidnapped. One rich guy, whose father owned the Kinney Parking lots, did slip me a Mickey Finn at The Living Room, across from the United Nations. I woke up the next morning somewhere in Westchester County, a farmhouse. I didn’t want to think what had gone on. I took a cab back to New York. The driver loved the fare.

I kept avoiding the Copacabana. That was Frank Costello’s club, and master gossip John Miller was guaranteed to convey my every excess to Daddy. But one of the captains there had borrowed $700 from me, and months later, he still hadn’t paid me back. I was profligate, but welching on debts in my family was considered bad form. So one night I arranged to meet Uncle Augie Carfano at the club, to get him to use his charms on the captain to collect the marker.

I got to the Copa fifteen minutes later than our scheduled appointment only to find him gone. I was upset that I had been stood up. What’s fifteen minutes when a girl like me could be hours late? I was even more upset the next morning when they found the bodies of Uncle Augie and his date that night, ex–beauty queen Janice Drake, shot to death in his Cadillac in Queens. Janice was the wife of comedian Allan Drake, whose faltering nightclub career Augie had bolstered the way Uncle Willie Moretti had bolstered that of Frank Sinatra. Drake
may have traded his wife to Augie as a career move. Those things were known to happen. And so were murders, in the long mean season of bloodshed that had kicked off with the failed Frank Costello hit. Outsiders, and even insiders like me, may have thought the Copa the most glamorous club in America. These clubs were fun, for sure, but they weren’t worth dying for.

Another of my main hangouts, one where there was never a body count, was the Carlyle Hotel, where I had met Dean at Bemelmans Bar. Because of my stablemate Barbara Bemelmans, I always thought of horses at the Carlyle. After the split with Marvin, I lost what had been our only shared passion—for horses. I thought about riding again, but instead I’d pop another Black Beauty and stop thinking. At the Carlyle I met a really older man, someone nearly as old as Daddy. Maybe with Daddy’s health in the balance, I was looking for a father substitute. This one would have been close. Charles Revson, the nail polish king, the creator of Fire and Ice, was what Daddy might have become had he played it straight and taken an interest in beauty products.

Revson was near sixty, close to Daddy’s age and just about his size. We had a lot in common, starting that we had both been born in Boston. His family was even poorer than Daddy’s. His father worked as a cigar roller. Charlie had a huge chip on his shoulder, a drive to succeed like Daddy’s. He was an even bigger control freak. When his company Revlon sponsored
The $64,000 Question
, he insisted on fixing the show, making it more suspenseful, so that the audience would grow and he could sell more cosmetics. In doing this, he provoked the quiz show scandals of the fifties. But the government didn’t dare come after Charlie. He was Teflon, too.

Charlie had an apartment in the Waldorf Towers that had belonged to Herbert Hoover. He must have had a staff of ten, liveried butlers, uniformed maids, French chefs, though all he’d ever eat for lunch were Geisha brand tuna sandwiches, alternating with sawdust-lean corned beef sandwiches with very old dill pickles. God help it if he detected a note of sweetness. He’d throw as big a fit as Daddy
would if he was served a hamburger with an onion on the side. Picky, picky, picky. His was the coldest apartment I’d ever been in. Charlie was an air-conditioning freak. The apartment was like the North Pole. He bought me a mink coat to keep me warm in bed.

Charlie knew that the way to a woman’s heart was through cosmetics. He’d take me on tours of his factory in the Bronx that were amazing turn-ons. He’d send me yellow roses every day, but I preferred lipstick. So I got huge care packages of every Revlon product, every color, every fragrance. Once when I was in Florida, he fouled up. I asked him for a case of bubble bath. He sent me a case of talcum powder by mistake. We broke up soon after that. I don’t recall if the events were related. I was too drugged out.

What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. I even went to bed with Marvin again one night on the eve of his flight to Greece for a very gay holiday with his new boyfriend on Mykonos. He had not improved with age. What drugs and alcohol could do! And then the craziest thing happened. I got pregnant again. Not that I had taken any precautions. I had no idea what birth control was. I had been lucky it hadn’t happened before. Also, I was so skinny that I was missing periods left and right. I wasn’t keeping track. I also had an eighteen-inch waist and wore cinch belts. I didn’t figure it out until two weeks before I went into labor on January 23, 1961.

My water broke. The only person I could turn to was the janitor in my building on West End Avenue. There was a blizzard outside. Driving like a race driver in the Monte Carlo rally, he made it through the icy, snow-drifted streets out to Long Island Jewish Hospital, to the same OB-GYN who delivered Gary. My new baby was three months’ premature. It was a boy. He weighed a pound and a half. They immediately put him in an incubator. I was too out of it to recognize the tragedy, the pathos of the situation, the fragility of his tiny life. All I could think about was how to keep Daddy from finding out.

That wasn’t easy. Buddy happened to have called for some reason to speak to me. Frances the maid told him I had gone to the hospital.
She didn’t say why. She didn’t know the whole story, and she knew better than to blab even if she had, but Buddy couldn’t help from blabbing. Just the word to Daddy that I was in the hospital had him on the first plane to New York. He found me in the maternity ward. Why, he asked, are you here? Thank God the doctor was away. I had pledged my nurse to secrecy. I gave her a hundred dollar bill. That helped.

“Female trouble,” I lied to Daddy as fast as I could. “There was no room in the regular ward. The whole city has the flu. The place is full.”

I think Daddy was so sick of hospitals after his recent siege that he wanted to get out of there in short order. That’s why he fell for my story. He got me out of there, too. The baby, whom I didn’t even name, remained in the hospital, in the incubator from January until May, while Daddy brought me down to Miami to recuperate. He put me up at the Aristocrat Hotel on the beach. I called the hospital every day to check on my child. He was still very fragile. I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t tell anyone except my hairdresser, who was the only friend I had at that point. I was in no shape to raise another child. Without Frances, I couldn’t have handled Gary. My plan, if I had one, was to come back to New York and give the child to my hairdresser’s mother, who lived in Hell’s Kitchen. She lovingly volunteered to raise the baby for me.

In May I came back to New York and brought my still-tiny little baby home to organize giving him away. Mommy, who was there caring for Gary, saw him, and saw something that totally transformed her. “That baby is sick,” she said. “We have to take care of him. We can’t let him go.” I had assumed Mommy was too lethargic to even notice. Instead she was galvanized by the sight of the child clinging to life. “We,” she kept saying. “We.” I figured out that in my baby she saw her own baby, my brother Buddy. Mommy somehow took charge, organizing appointments with some of the doctors she had taken Buddy to, thirty years before. Some were dead, some were old men. But some were there.

The diagnosis was grim. The baby, my baby, had severe birth defects, far worse than what Buddy had. There was no way I could
give him to my hairdresser’s struggling mother. This child had special needs she couldn’t begin to deal with. Amazingly, it was the two unlikeliest partners, Mommy and Marvin, who teamed up to take command. First, the poor child needed a name. Marvin agreed to take paternal responsibility, and Mommy came up with David Jay Rapoport, naming him after the early Supreme Court Justice John Jay. For all the legal troubles we had had, Mommy thought we could use a lawyer in the family. D.J., as we began calling him, needed the best medical care money could buy. That meant we had to turn to the money. That meant telling all to Daddy.