Daughter of the King (9 page)

After our summers in Deal, we spent our winters in Miami, travelling down to Florida on trains with names like the Havana Special. Courtly black porters waited on us in the luxurious Pullman cars. I loved sleeping on the trains, although I never slept, too excited to look out the window all night as Baltimore became Washington became Richmond became Rocky Mount became Columbia and on through the swamps down to Miami, sunny and perfect, while New York was gray and cold. The one thing I didn’t like about Miami was seeing two lines of people at the water fountains, with big signs “White” and “Colored.” That seemed mean and wrong. It was just water. I wondered where Nig Rosen would be allowed to drink.

Otherwise I loved Miami Beach. And the Roney Plaza Hotel where we stayed. The Roney Plaza was also the winter headquarters for Walter Winchell, who broadcast from the lobby and always said hello to me in the nicest way, although I gathered he could be very nasty to everyone else. My favorite restaurant was a run-down roadhouse called Pickin’ Chicken. The place was a dive, but the food was great there. I’m sure Daddy would have preferred that I go to a real restaurant, but he was so grateful to see me eat that he endured sitting through our excursions there.

If Dad co-owned New Jersey, he had an even bigger stake in Florida, with a number of grand nightclubs in Broward County, just over the line from Miami’s Dade County. That line was significant, because the officials of Broward were much more enlightened toward entertainment than their compatriots a little to the south. They welcomed Daddy with open arms, and probably open wallets, which was one of the costs of doing business with them. Bribery was normal when gambling was involved. Daddy’s two great clubs were the Colonial Inn, which looked like Tara in
Gone with the Wind
and served up southern-fried chicken and Hollywood-level stage shows, and the Club Boheme in the former mansion of the founder of the beach town of Hallandale. Big stars and high stakes were the attraction. Meeting Ginger Rogers was a special treat.

All the travel was great for my suntan, but it wreaked havoc on my early education. Daddy and Mommy seemed to think that a school was a school was a school. They’d take me out of Birch Wathen in December and send me to the Colonial School in Miami Beach for three months, then come back to Birch Wathen in March. Wherever I was I was always out of sync, and I couldn’t make any friends, because I was the stranger everywhere. That’s my excuse for not even trying to be the great student Daddy would have liked. I wasn’t much at reading, writing, or arithmetic, but I enjoyed the colonial stuff, like learning to make candles and churn butter. To be fair, Daddy never pushed me about school the way he pushed the boys. That only worked with Paul, anyway.

Maybe Daddy didn’t place much of a premium on a woman’s education. Maybe he just expected me to get married young like Mommy and shop all the time. In his own family, his sister Esther had majored in French at Brooklyn College. Daddy had gotten her a great job at Schenley Whiskey in the Empire State Building, through the company’s owner, Lewis Rosenstiel. An old friend of Daddy’s from Prohibition, Mr. Rosenstiel was from a distinguished German Jewish family from Cincinnati who had been in the distilled spirits business long
before the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920 made it illegal. During the dry era, Rosenstiel kept his fortune by starting Schenley as a legal, medicinal whiskey company, which made a still bigger fortune in bourbon once Prohibition was repealed.

For Daddy Rosenstiel’s success surely represented the road not taken, playing by the rules, absurd as they may have seemed. For all his legitimacy, Rosenstiel was branded as a gangster simply by being in the liquor business, a label that Joe Kennedy managed to avoid by using his wealth and patronage with President Roosevelt to get appointed chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and ambassador to England. Then again, Kennedy had the leg up with his Harvard degree. The Lanskys would have to wait for Paul, Daddy often said. He never said anything about waiting for me.

Even if Daddy didn’t think of me as being the family’s future messiah, I took comfort in being his pet. When he was in New York, he’d take me everywhere with him, and not just to Dinty Moore’s and to the theatre. He took me to his gym, a place called George Brown’s Gymnasium and Health Club on West 57th Street, to watch him play handball and paddleball, rarely with my uncles, whom Daddy ridiculed as being lazy, but with young pros from the club. He was good, fast, strong, and very competitive, always beating the much younger and bigger pros. And no, they didn’t let him win because he was Meyer Lansky. Both he and they sweated way too much for that. After school, he would also take Paul to Brown’s for some sweaty father-son bonding.

After his workouts, Daddy would often go for simple food, and not the grand restaurants we’d go to at night with my uncles. We’d often go to Jewish delicatessens, so brightly lit, smelling so strongly of garlic, and so New York. Daddy was very specific about his order: a hot corned beef on seedless rye, extra fatty, with just the tiniest smear of hot mustard. Anything else and back it would go. If we went to a coffee shop counter and ordered a hamburger, it had to be medium rare on a toasted, buttered bun. One of the few times I saw him get angry was when the waiter or waitress dared to garnish his burger, even
with the best of intentions. The worst mistake a coffee shop could make was to put a pickle, slices of lettuce, tomato, or onion on the plate. Daddy was a purist and he wanted things nice and simple.

He’d give the wait staff a vicious lecture that would inevitably leave them near tears and trembling. Dessert also had to be just so, either a chilled bowl of precisely half chocolate and half strawberry ice cream, or a heated plate of warm apple pie with a small wedge of cheddar cheese. Dessert mistakes didn’t provoke the same rage, probably because the hamburger had taken a bit of the edge off. One thing I noticed about Daddy, who may have loved eating good food more than he loved making money, was that he’d always be talking about his next meal while he was eating the one at hand.

After lunch, we’d go to Daddy’s office, which gave me my first tangible look at what he did as a businessman. Emby Distributing Company was the name elegantly stenciled on the big oak door in the office on West 43rd Street, just down the street from the headquarters of the New
York Times
, which is how Times Square got its name. Inside was a huge space with several secretaries and walls of files and a big office for Daddy. What did Emby Distributing mean, I asked him. He told me: The first letter “E” was for a partner, whose first name was Edward; the “m” was for Meyer; and the “by” was for another partner whose last name was Bye. And what did they distribute? He took me towards the back of the office and then opened a door, like a magician saying “Presto,” to reveal a whole illuminated showroom full of Wurlitzer jukeboxes, just like the one Buddy had in his room in the school in Maryland.

The machines were beautiful and futuristic, something from another planet, chrome and glass and with neon tubes of all different colors. They reminded me of the pinball machines I’d seen on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, but instead of noise, they made beautiful music. Though not at Daddy’s office. There they stayed silent, just on display. Bye had worked for Wurlitzer as a salesman, and now he and
another former Wurlitzer representative were working for Daddy, selling or leasing these magic machines to bars and restaurants all up and down the East Coast.

Talk about cash cows. Teresa Brewer’s number one song of 1950 “Music, Music, Music” would say it all: “Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon . . .” captured the essence of what enormous money machines these jukeboxes were. And here was Daddy at the heart of it all. Daddy was the king of the party America was throwing for itself for winning the war. I found out that these jukeboxes cost over a thousand dollars apiece, and since every bar and every restaurant seemed to need to have one, the sound of music seemed to add up to the sound of money. Daddy had huge Christmas parties at Emby, and he always hired a Santa Claus to give out gifts, as well as to pour champagne. I had never seen a Santa pour champagne, but Daddy had a way to get people to do what he wanted them to.

All Daddy’s businesses seemed to make lots and lots of money—the nightclubs, the dog tracks, and the casinos, which I never saw. Actually I did see one once. It was at the Riviera, where Frank Sinatra had spilled the ice, and which was primarily owned by Uncle Willie Moretti, even though they had another guy’s name on the door, first Ben Marden’s, then Bill Miller’s. Spotlights were for the stars, the “help,” Uncle Willie would joke. The owners didn’t have to show off. Daddy was asked to meet someone unexpected and he didn’t want to leave me alone at the table, so he took me with him. It was like a maze in an amusement park, up stairs, down stairs. Then we went into a janitor’s storage closet, full of mops and light bulbs and cleaning supplies.

A big bouncer, who was sitting there, plugged in an electric fan. I had no idea why, until, like in the movies, a secret wall opened, which led down another corridor into a big bright room with chandeliers and men dealing cards in tuxedos and roulette wheels spinning. It was a real casino, my first one. Daddy met his friend, who was so wrapped up in his gambling he couldn’t leave the table. I had a ginger ale and
got a lot of smiles and winks from the pretty showgirls sitting with their dates. They seemed bored to death.

Aside from his outbursts at waiters or waitresses who served him his hamburger the wrong way, I never saw my father lose his temper. Nor did he and my mother ever fight. Except once. Mommy was angry with me about something and she slapped my face in front of Daddy. I’m sure she didn’t mean to whack me very hard, but my ear turned all red. Daddy went crazy, jumped up and grabbed Mommy’s arm. I thought he would break it. “You fool!” he raised his voice to a pitch I had never heard. “Do you want her to end up like
you
?”

Daddy stormed off to his library, maybe to read Thomas Paine and calm down. Mommy begged
my
forgiveness. She hugged me and put ice on my ear. I was easy. “Sure, I forgive you. You can even hit me again. It didn’t hurt. I love you. You know I do,” I comforted her. She smiled a little. I liked seeing what words could do. Mommy explained to me how her brother Julie had hit her as a child and punctured her eardrum, causing her to have surgery and all sorts of problems. Then Daddy came out, all calm himself, and we all hugged and kissed like a normal all-American family. The next day Mommy took me to the doctor, just to make sure my ear was all right. It was. She never hit me again.

I had a hard time forgetting my shock at that fight. I had an even bigger shock one day when Daddy came to pick me up at Birch Wathen instead of Mommy. “She’s gone away for a rest,” was all he would tell me. Rest? She was tired, he explained. Women did that all the time. No big deal. When would she come back, I pressed him. I had never been without her. “Soon,” he said in a tone that told me not to continue the questioning. Back at the Beresford, our regular maids looked after me, as Daddy drove me to and from school. He also had another maid come in, just to help out.

Mommy did come back, a week later, but not the way I ever expected to see her. She showed up in the middle of the afternoon, just
as Daddy had dropped me off from school. She was wearing a nightgown in the middle of the afternoon. But it wasn’t one of her fancy silk gowns from Saks or Wilma’s. It was gray and made of some rough fabric. Her normally perfect hair was all scraggly and a mess. She had on no makeup. Her eyes were all bloodshot. Some “rest” she had gotten!

“Don’t make me go. Don’t let them take me,” she begged me. I had no idea what she meant, but I was terrified to see her like this. No sooner had she issued her plea than the door to the apartment opened. The elevator man and the doorman were there. Four men in white coats rushed in. They looked like waiters. But I knew they couldn’t be waiters. Mother screamed and ran to the master room and locked herself in. Soon Daddy arrived. He pounded on the door. She refused to come out. Daddy ordered me to go to my room. “What’s wrong with Mommy?” I begged him to tell me.

“She’s sick,” he said. “I’m here now. She’ll be fine.”

Ha! I thought. I went to my room and heard the terrible banging noise of the men breaking down Mommy’s doors. “Don’t let her jump,” I heard Daddy instructing them. “She could jump.”

Oh, no, I despaired. I wanted to go out and plead with Mommy not to kill herself, to tell her I loved her, and that whatever bad things I had done to make her feel this way, I would never, ever do again, whatever, making her horse run away, not studying, playing with Terry, anything. As afraid as I was
for
Mommy, I was just as afraid
of
Daddy, of disobeying him. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I ran out into the hall, just as the men in white coats smashed open the great French double doors to her room.

When I saw Mommy, I was somehow vastly relieved. She hadn’t jumped. But I’ve never seen anyone so haunted, so tormented. She just looked at me, almost as if I had betrayed her. “You . . . you?” Was she accusing me? I don’t know. She just went limp, and then the men put her in her own white coat, one with lots of straps that made her their prisoner. It was a straitjacket. I hated it. Then they took her away.

I couldn’t stand the pitying looks the doorman and elevator man gave me. I guess they felt sorry for me. They had always been so nice. The whole place, the Beresford, had always seemed so perfect. I’m sure they weren’t used to this. I felt like a trespasser, a part of a crazy family that didn’t belong in this royal residence.

I truly thought I would never see my mother again. But once the men in the white coats left, Daddy appeared and did his best to comfort me. “She’s going to be okay, darling.”