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.


Adventures in Santa Fe Livingness.

GROWING UP IN LOS ANGELES,  under the umbrella of powerful, wealthy, and stylish wings.  Women were models and men were moguls.   A lot of wealth came overnight in the film business – some  it took years to acquire,  but mostly it was a time to spread your wings and ride life. Polo matches, speeding yachts in the Marina,  horseback riding in Bel Air, movie premieres, and nightclubs.  By the time this congregation was in their fifties  the wick of life had waxed over, and a new generation was born to carve  their statutes.  That is the billboard  that I didn’t like, resisted, rebelled against, and scrutinized.  At twenty it was easy to jump ship by enrolling in Sonoma  State College and transforming.  My thirties were  career driven and at forty I saddled up for rebellion.  It jumped out of the birthday cake and sent me on  a jolly ride. Here now, at 60ish, a reversal of rebellion has popped up;   I want to walk a panoptic view.   phone-pics-291.png

Living in Santa Fe has forged a masters thesis on reinventing my rhythm, opinions, tolerance, affinity, and creativity.  That is why I’ve been stationed here for nine years;  it has taken that long to strip down the prongs of my LA umbrella.   If only I could homogenize both parts, but it always feels like oil and water. I’m a city gal and a villager. That word balance bounces up a lot. I find it an abstraction that I cannot untangle.  Oh well, there is always the surprise of life, the moment when you go down the drain and then a hand reaches out and places you on a new path.

LouLou

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