Luellen Smiley is a creative nonfiction writer, author, columnist, and historian whose writing is deeply rooted in a controversial personal history. She is the daughter of Allen Smiley, a close friend, associate, and business partner of notorious Las Vegas gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Her father was sitting only feet from Siegel when Siegel was murdered in Beverly Hills on June 20, 1947.
That extraordinary childhood history became the foundation for Smiley’s first book, Cradle of Crime: A Daughter’s Tribute, published in 2017. The memoir explores what it was like to grow up as the daughter of a man connected to organized crime while trying to reconcile her love for her father with the secrecy, fear, and criminal world surrounding him.
Smiley’s work has appeared in publications including the New York Post, MORE Magazine, Southern California newspapers, and Authorlink. She wrote the newspaper column Smiley’s Dice—Adventures in Livingness, which earned a Blue-Ribbon Award from the California Newspapers Association for her Growing Up With Gangsters columns.
Her interest in her father’s history also led her to become a researcher and commentator on organized crime history. She has participated in television, radio, and documentary interviews.
Smiley’s next book, Gaslighting Greta, will be published this year. A personal story that reads like fiction. Her own website describes the project as exploring a woman whose life is destabilized by gaslighting and psychological manipulation.
Her writing career reflects a recurring theme: using personal experience and research to uncover the truth behind complicated relationships and extraordinary lives. From the secretive world surrounding her father and Bugsy Siegel to the deeply personal territory of Gaslighting Greta, Smiley’s work transforms difficult experiences into stories of survival, discovery, and ultimately reclaiming one’s voice.
Luellen Smiley is an author whose life has given her an unusual perspective on secrecy, manipulation, family loyalty, betrayal, and survival—and she uses that perspective as the raw material for her nonfiction storytelling.
Movie recommendations:Bread & Tuplips, Angel Face, Head in the Clouds,Late Marriage, Water for Elephant’s, Sarah’s Key,Pierrot Le Fou, No Where in Africa, The Lives of Others, Gangster, A Love Story, The Counterfeiters, Senso, Croupier, El Grido, The Wide Blue Road, Deja Vu, The Whistle Blower, The Young Adult, John Rabe.
The Movie Star (Photo credit: Cowgirl111)
Our nest, is something we build on our own to give us permission to explore, and then question, and we go back to our little nest, and add a bit more certainty because the dinner was great, and the party lasted longer than we thought, and someone smiled at you in a special way, and then you saw a rainbow.
Some things happened last week; that liquefied into a mirage, of an opinion I inhabited. I directed this opinion with outdated information, and second hand narratives by writers in print. I believed what I’d always believed; that actors aren’t like you and me. I was wrong! Some actors are like you and me. They have open hearts, and inquisitive minds, they drink beer, and dress without designer labels, they like to hang out, and not talk about the movie business, they have interests beyond their Imdb star rating, and they answer questions, if you ask them. Unless we infiltrate what we criticize, we’re adding to the hypocrisy of the human condition.
