LUELLEN SMILEY ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS

Where Gaps of Expression are Liberated

ABOUT

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.

CATCH THE ART IN SANTA FE PART ONE


 

Portrait of Eugenia Huici (Eugenia Errázuriz)
Portrait of Eugenia Huici (Eugenia Errázuriz) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

CATCH THE ART WAVE OF SANTA FE    

Living in Santa Fe is a fertile landscape of more than sage, lavender, mud and ancient dwellings. It is where art branches out in new directions of livingness.

Along the path of adventures in the arts, I attended “AT HOME WITH FASHION, presented by ShowHouse Santa Fe in collaboration with Artgraze; a league of interior designers, artists, and galleries to embellish our homes with, “the art of living with art.” They patterned classic and chic Fashion Design on Interiors selected by ShowHouse Santa Fe founders, David Naylor and Jennifer Ashton. The Santa Fe Interior Designers set up shop in a quintessential Santa Fe home and opened the doors to the public to eat, drink, dance, get lost, or be discovered.  Along the interior paths of the home, artists, designers, home buyers, and sponsors conversed while behind the scenes; funds were dispersed from a generous monarchy to support the Community Foundation of Dollars4Schools. The designers worked for eight weeks, to transform a modest décor, into a stage setting of flamboyance, élan, and their secret design techniques. The designers; Jennifer Ashton, Jackie Butler, Gloria Devan, Pam Duncan, Emily Henry, Edy Keeler, David Naylor Annie O’Carroll, Lisa Samuels, Paul Rochford and Michael Violante. They schlepped all the furnishings, and accessories, including wardrobe accents, and art work to the home and coutured the house as if it was a model.  The epervescese of this lively group spread outdoors, onto a glittering garden patio designed by Catherine Clemens where the best Barbeque chicken I ever tasted permeated the painted postcard silhouette of sunset on the mesa.  Who was there?  A man in yellow rubber suit, fashion models, filmmakers, photographers, art collectors, and Antique Activists. In the crowd I noticed a distinctive gathering of men and women stylists bearing: squash necklaces, Concha belts, O’Keefing hair styles, and jewelry to stop traffic at Paseo Peralta and Cerrillos Road. The 4747 square foot Las Campanas Estate is listed with Ashley Margetson of Sotheby International Real Estate.

 

 

 

LouLou

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