Category: Life
THE ST REGIS, THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, AND BOBBY SHORT
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I was about twenty-three at the time, living in one of the blandest bachelor apartments in Westwood, working in an office cubicle, and daydreaming about places in Travel & Leisure magazine. My father called one afternoon with a no reply command to come to his apartment.
“I have something to discuss with you.” Growing up with gangsters involves many face-to-face meetings because the telephones are tapped. It is of no consequence what I happen to be doing at 7:00 PM that night– if Dad has something to discuss, we have to meet in person.
“What about?” I ask.
“What did I say? Didn’t I say we have to discuss it here?”
In those years, my head was waxed with false perceptions that Daddy was what Daddy told me – in the oil business. It did not occur to me that all those meetings at his apartment, in restaurants and parks were because he did not want any uninvited listeners from the FBI or other government agency.
After clearing my passage with the receptionist, I rode up the elevator to his Century City Park apartment. After peaking through the peephole, and asking if I was alone, he opened the door. I greeted him with a kiss on the cheek, and he asked, what kind of out fit is that. My attire on any given occasion should be a colorful coordinated double-breasted pants suit.
“I have some zucchini and rice in the refrigerator –will you make your old dad that vegetable dish? My father didn’t cook anything beyond boiled eggs, and broiled fish. I nodded and started for the kitchen.
“Wait a second, I’m not through talking–sit down. Well– I’m finally able to do what I’ve wanted to do for some time. It hasn’t been possible until now; I’m sending you to New York. Can you take a week off work?”
“I will of course-but aren’t you going?
“No. I’ve lived New York in the best years and wouldn’t go back if you paid me a million dollars.
‘Why?”
“Why? Because I did it all, and now it’s your turn.” I moved closer to him on the couch so I could wrap my arms around and kiss his cheek.
“The first thing you have to do is get a new outfit. You won’t go to Manhattan in those jeans-for crying out loud. You’re staying at the St. Regis Hotel… I have it arranged, the guy owes me a favor and I had a bit of a windfall this month. Your mother and I stayed there. ”
“When? Where is the St. Regis?”
“Don’t interrupt-don’t you think I know where to send you? As I was saying, I booked a week for you. Now, I have it all set-up. You’ll have a driver, and do not get into a cab or any other car, you stay with the driver I hired, do you hear me Luellen?”
“Can’t I walk?
“You can walk after he takes you to the places you want to go. Do not argue with me, I know what I’m doing. You’re just a little naïve about New York. Anything can happen; it’s a jungle and you’re little red-riding hood. A fella will walk pass you on the street, clip your purse, and you’ll never know, a guy will carry your bag for you, and you’ll never see it again.”
The year was 1978, but I cannot remember which month. It was still cold enough to wear the mink coat he had given me for this occasion. I wrapped that mink around me everyday for a week. The Hotel Valet was familiar with the name Smiley, as was the hotel manager and the driver he hired was a double agent. He was also a bodyguard. The black Lincoln continental never left my sight.
The St. Regis is on West 55th, a few short blocks from Tiffany’s. That was my destination of choice, not for the diamonds, but a glimmer of where Audrey Hepburn sipped coffee and nibbled on a doughnut. I didn’t really care where the driver led me; I was visually climaxing on the traffic cops, the horses in central park, the side walkers streaming in one band as if all connected, horns blaring, lights flashing and the hi-rise silhouettes against slices of the sky.
My father expected me to have lunch at the World Trade Center, dinner at La Cirque, and in between long drives through Little Italy, Central Park, and Riverside Drive. My breath stopped when we were launched into the sky to have lunch at Windows on the World. While sipping my first Manhattan the city spun me around and for the first time I realized I was a real nobody-that I’d been no where– if I hadn’t been to Manhattan, and the impression cut off my short tail of confidence. The psychological departure that turned me from Daddy’s little girl into Luellen the woman will continue.
a continuation.
Windows on the World for anyone who has not been there supplied even the sourest puss, a great big slice of hope, because you were on the same level as the tallest building.
I wish I would have saved the matches or the napkins from that day. The fact that my father and Bobby Short are both gone, the World Trade Center is gone, and I am still a nobody amplifies the memory.
The night I went to see Bobby Short I was seated at a table, and while I tried to inhale the glitterati of the evenings crowd, I was ineffectually blowing cigarette smoke into the thick stream of smoke lingering above our heads. The room was New York jammed every table a colorful mixture of cocktails, handbags, and beautiful arms adorned with strands of gold. I had been on the town in Hollywood, seen movie stars up close, and dined with them. This crowd generated more mystery. Their body language was fluid; they did not purposely draw attention, because they were not there to be discovered by Lefty Lazar, or Robert Altman.
Bobby Short was a nightclub piano player after everyone went home. You could picture him sitting at the piano, as you would Will Rogers on his horse, long after the image was diluted. His eyes tap-danced with the eyes of the audience; they were all together. I was young, naïve and impressionable, and that is why my father sent me so I would get the impression.
During the day we were driven around by the tight lipped body guard, and we watched New York. It wasn’t until we met Al Davis (not the Raiders Owner) but a man who owned a distillery in Kentucky and liked my father enough to buy him a new Cadillac. Dad told us we were to meet Al at the Carlyle for Sunday Brunch. There is a stage like ambiance walking on 5th Avenue on a Sunday in New York. New Yorkers dress for a walk and I was again impressed at how sophisticated everyone looked so early in the morning.
Al Davis brought along a tall good looking man, that reminded me of a run around guy; he does everything he’s told and is of good temperament until somebody insults his boss. He poured Champagne, made phone calls, and Al Davis was WC Fields liquored by the time the eggs benedict arrived. He was not only a prankster, and a tease, he was bloated with years of drink and laughter, and anything else was just not worth his time. Knowing that my father was not going to walk in and surprise us, allowed us to feel slightly deserving of fanning that freedom. Al’s associate moved closer to me, and taunted my feminine prowess, which until that particular day had not been taunted by any friend of my father’s. It was then that I felt like a woman in New York. I have not felt that particular brand of womanliness since. No offense to any other gentlemen that spoiled me on occasion. It was that Sunday in New York, sitting in a booth, with worldly older men that made the lasting impression my father didn’t anticipate. During the brunch Al kept repeating, “ Don’t tell your father, he’ll have me shot.”
Several weeks later Al and his friend were in town and asked me to join them at a nightclub for dinner. Was I to tell my father, or just go along. I decided to go. We ended up going to Pip’s, an exclusive night club in West Hollywood. That evening, I tossed my adolescence around and swirled on the dance floor with frightening vulnerability. I didn’t get home until very late. The next day, my father called.
“ What time did you get home?”
“ I went out with Al Davis, he kept me there.”
“ I know where you were, and I know who you were with, and everything else you do. Don’t you ever accept an invitation from one of my friends unless I am with you! What kind of idiot are you? Haven’t I taught you anything? I cannot be responsible for a guy like Davis if I’m not there! I’m too upset to look at you; don’t bother coming to see me. ”
I returned to the Carlyle one more time to see Bobby Short, but I have never enjoyed a more outrageously mischievous Sunday in New York like that day with Al Davis.
THE MID-LIFE NOVEL WE LIVE
I read in one of my books on writing that the middle of the novel is where most writers face the demon. The beginning is a gallop, the end is a relief, but the middle wiggles in and out of your grasp. The middle of our lives reflects this same obscurity.
The middle of a life span reflects all we have accomplished and all we have left incomplete. This is what they call a mid-life crisis. I get it every year. This year it is more comical. I’ve finally accepted that my constant relocating, reinventing, and being restless are not going to be solved. I am going to keep doing these. At the bottom of the restlessness is the fear of finding rest more enjoyable than movement. This flotation of comedy rotated around me last night while I was standing out on the porch observing the peacefulness. The scenery of Santa Fe is a comforting, ethereal beauty that comes at all times of the day and night, and the flow of people is integrated and festive. All I could think of was where I should go next. The discomfort of mid-life comes from trying to assimilate what you have and what you want.
Many years ago, in the summer of 1987, I was seated in a café in Monaco, truly, and a man that I was traveling with told me, “You have to make a choice.” He embarked on a long discussion about choices we make in life and how everything depends on these choices: how you live and with whom, and what you do. He pointed out to me over my first really authentic Salad Niçoise that I was an oblivious example of a woman refusing to choose. I was more interested in the salad, the yachts, the casino around the corner, and the fact that I didn’t have an evening gown to wear to dinner. I listened without argument or insult, but I was disturbed by what he said. I didn’t understand completely, but he was older and had much experience and conviction. That conversation now fits into the mid-life crisis, the comedy of errors in my life, and maybe in yours, and just how much travesty we can ignore. For my fault, as it is, I do not want to sign, commit, or make final decisions. I want it all to be a temporary placement that allows me the freedom to change.
I have lost track of my European friend, but if he met me today, he would say, “You have not changed at all.” So that is why I was standing there in the darkness on the porch and laughing like a silly girl, because it is true. I have not changed at all.
The choice facing us at mid-life is making a change now, risking losing all we have accomplished, compiled, and attached, or throwing the dice.
Beyond the obvious changes in activity, relationships, and scenery are the internal travels. They are not so easily booked. You cannot wake up one day and say, “I ‘m off to become more compassionate, or more practical, or more generous.” These journeys are taken when other factors play into our lives, such as when we get sick, demoted, or experience a trauma.
It is a very subtle inconsistency. When I unplug all the voices and listen to the one that understands, that is when I write. The middle of the story and the middle of life are the same. We and our characters have to make a choice.
***
ADVENTURES IN LOVINGNESS.
The course we choose to study doesn’t begin in school; it begins the moment we recognize that life is our teacher. I chose the course of love between a man and a woman. Yet all I’ve learned from Anais Nin, Joan Didion, and Lawrence Durrell, about love isn’t guiding me. I have to start over, and develop wisdom based on my own experiences.
The morning is crisp as iceberg lettuce, a day of clarity and stillness. Outside my bedroom window, the light illuminates portions of the pine tree, and the walls of our neighbor’s home. On my side of the glass, there are shadows and dissonance. It feels like months since the last column, and unwinding what events took place since, is going to be as piercing as the southwest sun when it shines in my eyes.
A few days before Christmas, I was in the kitchen with two friends, visiting from Boulder. Aaron, whom I’ve not seen in four years, and Lilith, whom I’ve just met. Aaron was the subject of one of my columns, the lone man standing on a mountain top, climbing the rocks of life and nature, as he ascends to the distant and dangerous vistas of life. Lilith, an angelic petite woman, with eyes wide as moons, and uncontrollable affection for what is reachable. I am preparing dinner, and our discussion is about love, about me and John, and about Rudy, whom Aaron has rendered a mentor since we all met in Saratoga Springs, 2000. We celebrated Aaron’s twenty-first birthday with him. He was ignited by individual far from conventional thinking even back then.
“Remember the time you and Rudy moved the farm table outside the window, over the second story roof, and down to the porch. How did you do that?” I said.
“Ropes. I couldn’t believe this guy– half my size and he’s carrying this eight foot wooden farm table over one shoulder. “
“ Yea, and now he’s carrying a Dragon. Oh Aaron, those were innocent days weren’t they? ”
“ Yea. Was that really eleven years ago; it feels more like a century.”
“ That’s because you live without any boundaries.”
Lilith picked up the camera and started shooting a video. I put on a hat and sunglasses for the camera, and began using the pots as instruments. They frivolity reached a high note, just as the phone rang.
“ Hi, it’s me. I’m coming back. It’s over.”
“ I’ve heard that before Rudy. “
“ I’m almost in Flagstaff, I’ll be there tomorrow.”
I sat down on the stool, and looked to Aaron for something wise and assuring to settle my spoon-stirring anxiety.
He was expressionless. The intervention of Rudy, who moments ago I was raking with hopelessness was on his way here, arriving the first night of Chanukah, which had a similar mystical tune to it.
“ John’s coming in on Friday — Oh God! I don’t know, this sounds too much like a Hallmark movie. I don’t believe this. When is it going to end?”
“ Lue, you amaze me. “
“ I wish I’d stop amazing people.”
Lilith and Aaron took off the next day and I busied myself with brooms and sponges; the activity most relied upon when life is messy. I did not want to shell-shock John with the news, because he was in the final stages of his script, and Rudy was on the road, where at any point, the Dragon might reappear, and whisk his tail back to her nest. Until he drove up, there was still a screen of fuzzy details.
I’d just come from Luminara Lounge where I’d met Jewels, my confidante and baby-sitter through the last four months of Dragonfaire.
“ Is he here?” She said breathless from rushing.
“ I saw him pull in the driveway. I left earlier and drove around until I could reach you. I don’t want to be in the house when he arrives.”
“How are you going to handle things with Rudy?”
“ Beats me. I know I have to suppress my anger; that’s like suppressing my appetite after a week of starvation.”
“ Which reminds me, are you eating?”
“ More or less?”
” LouLou. You have to eat! How do you think he’ll feel?”
“ Like a turkey on Thanksgiving.”
“What do you think John will say?
“ He’ll be speechless.”
Jewels lifted her thirty pound life jacket that a mother of two children, wife, business owner, and adventurer swings with the ease of a dancer and wrapped her arms around me.
I returned to the garden path at La Posada and in the moonlight, paced the icy walkway waiting for John to answer the phone. “ Hi baby.”
“ Hi sweetheart–how are you?”
“ I’m still working.. but it’s going really good. I got the latest storm report, and it looks like I’ll have to drive out Christmas Eve day.”
“ I made reservations for five, is that too early?”
“ I’ll be there way before that. Got to get up early and load up the car with presents.”
“ I’ll be there way before that. Got to get up early and load up the car with presents.”
I grinned, and kicked the stones in the pathway.
“ John… Rudy’s here. I didn’t want to tell you until he actually arrived.”
” John. Are you there?”
How do I word his laughter, a long winded guttural explosion without pause, that struck my humor and I joined him, and our laughter sort collapsed into one, like making love or something, and it felt so good, I didn’t want to stop.
“ Never a dull moment at Gallery LouLou.”
“ I haven’t seen him yet, he’s in the house. “
“ Call me later, I need a drink.”
You couldn’t cut the tension with a semi-truck head on, as Rudy and I stood feet away in the Staab House at La Posada. I was leaning against the bar, observing his new leather Puma’s.
“ Well, I’m here.” His crooked smile faded when I didn’t step forward or greet him with a smile.
“ Yes, you are.”
Then the staff engulfed him in warmth and greetings and I just about threw my head back and howled from the absurdity, and the bedazzlement I felt lifted me out of myself, because I couldn’t really stand there and be a part of the abstraction of life.
“ Can we have dinner together?” He uttered.
“ I’ll be here.”
I got through half the dinner, and then suddenly felt the drum beating in my rage cage and dashed out. The next few days were like waiting for a frozen chicken to thaw out. I poked at him, and he was solid, I poked a day later, asking questions, and he released a mumble of words, “ I can’t open up yet. I will in a few days. Just tell me what we need to do.”
“ John’s not coming out. He changed his mind.”
“ Why?”
I glared at him with blade sharp eyes.
“ Because of me. That’s not what I want to hear. I’ll call him.”
“ NO. Do not call him. You have no idea what your … dragon episode did to us. Are you sorry Rudy? Are you truly sorry or are you still pining for the Bird. And I would like to know the chances of you going back before I get any ideas about smiling or laughing. ”
“Yes, of course I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ll go back.. but I have to be honest.”
I turned my back and kept walking. The next turn came from John, “I’m coming out; I just pray that we’ll have a chance to be together, and have a peaceful Christmas.”
To be continued.
LIFE TEACHES
On adventures in lovingness. The course we choose to study doesn’t begin in school; it begins the moment we recognize that life is our teacher. I chose the course of love between a man and a woman. .
THE SHOVEL OF TRUTH
It seems once a month; I am jarred into this part of my family history. Just last week, a woman emailed me information she pulled off a website that I’d never seen. There in the document, was a story about my mother and father.
I began my research fourteen years ago. It started with what I had, one of my father’s books; “The Mark Hellinger Story.” I leafed through the index and there was my father’s name along with Ben Siegel’s. According to the biographer, my father visited Mark at his home the night before he died. Mark had stood up in court for my father and Ben at one of their hearings. He was fond of Ben, like so many people were, that aren’t here to tell their story.
After reading the book I rented, The Roaring Twenties, written by Mark, and from there the connections, relationships, and characters began to leap out from all directions. I submerged myself in history and photocopied pictures of my father’s movie star friends, George Raft, Eddie Cantor, Clark Gable, and his gangsters friends. I found photographs of the nightclubs he frequented, the Copacabana, El Morocco, and Ciro’s and nightclubs that he referred to in his mysterious conversations. I made a collage of the pictures and posted them board above my desk. I played Tommy Dorsey records while I wrote. This microcosm of life that was created, allowed me to listen to the whispers and discover the secrets.
I dug into my father’s history without knowing how deep I had to go, or what shattering evidence would cross my path. In my heart I felt this was crossing a spiritual bridge to my parents. The flip side was a gripping torment, tied to my prying mind. I needed to break into the files in order to break my silence, and discover real people, not glamorized stereotypes that fit into the category of Copa dancer and gangster. No matter what I uncovered, I always knew it would be ambiguous, and controversial. I did not expect to find a record of murder, dope peddling, and prostitution. I believed that his crimes were around the race track, and in gambling partnerships. Even so, I could never understand the similarities we shared, unless I knew them as people. Though I have not rebelled against authority as my father did, I‘m not a team player, I resist authority, and I don’t like waiting in lines.
I had to reinvent my mother through the subconscious. I skated over thin ice trying to set her truth apart, from what I had invented, dreamed, or had been told. I listened to Judy Garland’s recordings, and premonitions surfaced, of how my mother loved Judy, how it felt to be under the spot lights of MGM, and dancing in ginger bread musicals while her own life was draped with film noir drama.
I studied my mother’s face in all her films, rewinding and stopping the tape, as if she might suddenly return my glance. She had dancing and background shots in the musicals produced by Arthur Freed. I remembered dad talking about Arthur, and how prestigious it was to be in his department.
When I discovered the Museum of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, I went down and filled out a slip of paper with my mother’s name on it and waited for my number to be called. I felt something like a mother discovering her child’s first triumph. They handed me a large perfectly stainless manila envelope, and a pair of latex gloves to handle the file. I had to look through it in front of a clerk.
“That’s my mother,” I proclaimed. He blinked and returned his attention to a memo pad. Inside the envelope were black and while glossy studio photographs, press releases, and studio biographies of my mother. The woman who pressed my clothes, washed my hair, and made my tuna sandwiches. There she was in front of the train, for Meet Me in St. Louis, and a promotional photograph in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, dated 1947. That was the year Ben was shot. I looked further to find more clues. I needed to know where she was the night Ben was murdered. Maybe she was on location when it happened. Maybe she was in New York at the opening of the film. I could not place her on June 20, the day Ben was murdered. I imagined my father called her and told her the news. The marriage plans were postponed, their engagement suspended. My father had to get out of town.
I spent everyday picking through the myths I’d heard and read. I heard a clear chord of scorn, for exposing family secrets, “It’s nobody’s business what goes on in our family, don’t discuss our family with anyone, Do You Hear Me!” I must have heard that a thousand times.
I began to dig with an iron shovel. I asked every question I wasn’t supposed to ask, and preyed into every sector of their life. I wanted to know about his childhood, where he grew up, and why he left home when he was thirteen years old. Who were my grandparents, and why didn’t he talk about them. How did he meet Ben Siegel and Johnny Roselli, and when did he cross over into the rackets?
I contacted historians, archivists, judges, attorneys, Police Chiefs, FBI agents, authors and reporters across the United States. He always said, “Reporters can destroy your life overnight.” And here I was, uncovering what he had sheltered all his life.
I wrote to the INS in WDC and asked for their assistance. Six months later I received a letter from the INS in Los Angeles. They acknowledged his file, it was classified and they could not locate it. The progress was tediously slow, and the waiting oppressive.
While I waited for the files, I read Damon Runyon, and Raymond Chandler stories and attempted to identify which character personified which gangster. The stories were about the people that came to my birthday parties, Swifty Morgan, Nick the Greek, Frank Costello and Abner Zwillman,(the Boss of the New Jersey syndicate.) The dialect of Runyon and Winchell mimicked the same anecdotes my father used over and over! By understanding Runyon’s characters I began to know my father. At night I watched old gangster movies and that opened another door of familiarity.
I read almost every book in print about the Mafia and ordered out of print books from all over the country. They began to topple on my head from the shelf above the desk. Allen Smiley was in dozens of them. Every author portrayed him differently, he was a Russian Jew, a criminal, Bugsy’s right hand man, a dope peddler, a race track tout, and sometimes the words bled on my arm. To me, he was a benevolent father, a wise counselor and a man who worshipped me.
The INS claimed my father was one of the most dangerous criminals in the United States. They said he was Benjamin Siegel’s assistant. They said he was taking over now that Ben was gone.
That day I put the file away, and looked into the window of truth. How much could I bear to hear more?
LOVING
A woman’s heart is fluid in her body, and a man’s heart is In his sexuality. That is why there is a headache, and a mood, and an exhaustion of feeling. We have to express this to our man so he understands.
2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,800 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 30 trips to carry that many people.
NEW YEAR RESOLUTION
SMILEY’S DICE Adventures in Livingness
Adventures in beginnings, starting over, and rewriting a story you’ve lived many years is the same as re-writing a story. It takes the same blind courage.
About half between forty and fifty years old, you hear people say, “It’s too late to start over,” It’s not true. I hope it never feels like that when I wake up. Just thinking about it makes me run in circles. Behavioral change is essential to living a full life. In the middle of the night I woke up as if it was morning. When I looked out the window, the moon was white as a laundered tablecloth, staring back at me. It said get up and write.
I retreated to my corner of the world, a tiny room bathed a blush pink and gold, and wrote from beneath the goose down comforter. The moon watched. Now that the lights and decorations are placed in the cartons, the wrapping and ribbon tossed away, a landfill of disturbing, distressing, and terrifying global news is dumped on us. I do not understand the external world of political and international power, wealth, and motivation.
I fled that world a long time ago when I learned that men who controlled the paths of others were dangerously self-serving. I recall my father sitting on that green velvet sofa, holding the remote in one hand and watching a news program. He turned it off and said to me, “Luellen, everything that goes on is fixed; you cannot hide your head in the sand and think otherwise.” I nodded my head in understanding, while internally I thought my father was suffering from his usual psychosis. Eventually I crossed over, and forfeited my interest in politics. The forces of evil have shattered that glass of indemnity.
This year is not about vapid resolutions catering to our comfort, it is about survival. It’s about transforming behavior and habits, excesses and denial. Doing it in a group, makes us feel less traumatized. Imagine, all the thousands of people paddling the same current; forcing back the mortgage lender, relinquishing precious possessions, driving a car with a shattered windshield, wearing coats without any down feathers left, and wondering when the pink slip will arrive. Alienation and neurosis are at the root of people’s aggression and discontent. It can lead to unexpected violence, and then to massacre and war. It is a collection neurosis that grows worse every year.
The inner world, where each of us faces a truth no one else knows, is ruptured. All I can think of is bringing a little bit of light to someone you know is in darkness.
NO CHOICE WRITING
The decision was made for me, I must write no matter how
infective of my life. That’s frighting.
DON’T GIVE UP
“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.”
Anais Nin. 1931
Expecting snow, expecting pleasure… we are all in some range of expectation. Where you may be hunched under an umbrella waiting for the light to turn green, so you can find shelter inside a café, a shop, where someone else waits for the arrival of a friend, the death of a loved one, the offer in writing, the publication, the house to sell, the decision to resonate, the pain and suffering to subside.
I think of something my father used to say, “You made your bed, now you lie in it.” And another one, “It’s your lot in life.” I began writing Smiley’s Dice in 2002 from a desk in a Solana beach rental. Maybe in two years I’ll have a column in a newspaper or magazine, and maybe I won’t. It’s my lot: to not give up.
Santa Fe is blistery cold, the street dry and the sidewalks baking sheets of white snow. Out my window is a metallic sky that hints of more snow. This sky slows the rhythms of the body and mind; it invades the hurried motions of pedestrians, vendors and hotel staff. There is an absence of light that intercepts outward vision, so we turn inwards. I do anyway. And because I gorge myself on the emotionalism, and interior life, I have not slid into home base.
That is why it has taken me longer to launch my writing for worldly consumption. Some of us are not in a rush to wave the “I made it” flag. Some favor holding back, until the other elements of our character life are lived; our destructiveness, fear, pettiness, falsity, greed, so many steps to climb.
You and I have to trust in the pattern of our lives, the invisible thread that taunts us, teases us, and even torments us. My lot, postponed progress, maturity, development.
I was an A cup until college, without direction, a major in English, Art, and Psychology, before dropping out. My major interest was the countryside beyond Sonoma State campus walls, the roaming cows, and flock of geese over the swamps, the crooked paths winding through eucalyptus woods, the poetry pasted on bulletin boards in the coffee house, the farmers in the pasture.
“When are you going to start taking your life seriously?” My father asked this question every few years, and every few years, I lied.
I was adulterated when I was first employed at the old Gibraltar Savings & Loan on Wilshire Boulevard. I was serious about how they measured my performance, and was vicariously unconcerned with personal gratification. How excited could I be about trust deeds? I cannot even recall what I was doing; just the name of the department, the Beneficiary Demand department.
All that restrictive training, in punctuality, production, and prudence, exploded late in life. I did not discover my passionate interest in writing until I was forty.I didn’t own a home until I was forty-seven, did not stop biting my nails until I was fifty-four, did not learn to love and trust until last year.
I developed friendships late in life, now I honor a treasure chest of sterling gems that glitter from near and far. Friends that abandon tasks to listen to me talk about moving the furniture again, and consent to my absence because the victor of writing has kidnapped me.
It is a day later, the sky is unchanged; still the cloud cover is nailed to the sky. In random conversations I have heard of people’s hardships, of sacrifice and compromise during this holiday season. No more travel talk about Paris, and the Orient. No more extended vacations or extravagances. We have to give ourselves a holiday from lament, from error, and from exasperation. I tell myself not to be combative, not this year, and don’t polish the guilt and remorse, just let it fade away. Don’t open those links to real estate values, retirement funds and investments; open the link to History. Remember what the greatest generation was handed; remember soup lines, suicides, and World War II.
Mostly don’t reprimand your partner for unrealized expectations; They are most fragile to your voice and touch. The adventure in livingness is to look at your lot; and ride it with amusement and wonder.
MOB MEMORIES
A LITERARY AGENT I know emphasized the importance of rounding up readers. That’s not so easy when you’re exposing your own guarded family secret.
My mother married my father two years after Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was murdered. Sitting beside Ben the night of the murder provoked an immediate response from my father; it was time to get the hell out. He promised to reform, and she agreed to marry him. One of her compromises was her religious faith. She was Irish Catholic. She stopped going to church, and she didn’t convert. It was a bitter irritation between them. My father raised us Jewish, we attended Hebrew School and went to Synagogue every Saturday morning. The complexity of being half Jewish and half Catholic surfaced, when some classmate told me I wasn’t really Jewish. I told this to my father. I still remember his answer coming at me like a round of bullets.
” That’s an idiot! It doesn’t matter if you’re half Jewish or a quarter, you’re a Jew! Don’t you ever forget it, and don’t let anyone tell you different. DO YOU HEAR ME?” To this day when people remind me that I’m not really Jewish I say,” For my father, God made an exception.”
Friends are different for men in the Mafia, and for their wives. Real friends have to be connected. You cannot trust anyone else. My mother had three friends. Marianne was married to Gus Alex a powerful political fixer in the Chicago syndicate. She had been a model like my mother. She was the stunning Grace Kelly sort of beauty with coolness much like my mother. She and my mother whispered when I was in the room.
More than any other person, Aunt Bess was beholden to my mother. She wasn’t really an aunt. Bess was Benjamin Siegel’s little sister. The one he favored over the others. I suppose Bess met my mother way before I was born, when Benjamin was alive. She had the same bedroom eyes of her brother, big hound dog eyes that swept sentiment in every glance. She had a heart too big for the turmoil in her life, and she cried about everything. She squeezed my face, and forever referred to me as her gorgeous baby. Bess was as content crying as she was laughing. There wasn’t any in between. She dressed in high heels, tailored suits and carried a hand bag with lots of tissue. She and my Nana, my mother’s mother were very close friends. Bess, her husband, and daughter lived in a house on Doheny Drive that Ben Siegel bought for her. Bess’s husband Solly never uttered a word, and worked for Ben doing odd jobs.
In later years I would live across the street from them, but by then my father had distanced Bess’s family for reasons never revealed.
How I loved to watch Miriam; a saucy brassy Italian from Brooklyn. She propped up her bosom like two statues, waved a long red lacquered nail, and smoked one cigarette after another without ever taking a breath. She shopped everyday, charged everything, and when we were in the room she did not change her act, she let us see what it was really like to be a gangsters wife. Beneath all the enamel and cosmetics she loved my mother unconditionally. Although their characters were strikingly different, they shared that bond. Miriam was married to Doc Stacher, who rose in the ranks to become enforcer for Abner “Longy” Zwillman, the boss of New Jersey. Doc walked with his hands clasped behind, a cigar stub lived on his lip, and he was bald and heavy lidded. He lived in short pants and little white sneakers. Beneath his somewhat harsh and metallic skin was a wreath of worship for Joanne. He didn’t restrict her humor, appetite, or spirit. The more outrageous her behavior the more he approved.
Mafia men make the most outrageously entertaining hosts; nothing is ever out of the question. All they have to do is pick up the phone, and someone in the network will make it happen.
Mafia men don’t get up and go to work. Not one day in his life did my father ever report to an office. When I wasn’t in school, he took me with him in the powder blue Cadillac and we drove the streets of Hollywood visiting friends in delicatessens. We sat in big leather booths while my father and the owners talked. I didn’t know what work was all about. No doubt the conversation was the rackets, the races, or Vegas. I was a very good decoy. What kind of a man takes his daughter to mob meetings? The kind that doesn’t want to look like a mob guy. My father didn’t think I was listening, but I heard a lot.
Rory Calhoun was one of the characters that stood out. He was a western movie star; the Clint Eastwood of his day. Rory was also in the same reformatory as my father as a teen. The Calhoun family and ours spent a lot of time together. They had two daughters and lived in an exotic Spanish villa on a corner of Sunset Boulevard. Inside it was like a movie set, with animal rugs, oil paintings of Spanish Troubadours and Moorish decorations. Rita, Rory’s wife, wore tiny stacked high heels and she clicked across the Spanish tiles like a flamenco dancer. The whole family was blessed with dreamy looks. I remember looking at my reflection in the mirror as Rita combed my hair, and discovering I was not at all pretty. I didn’t realize that I was surrounded with extraordinary beauty; everyone had these exceptional vogue looks. The importance placed on that kind of beauty was just as distorted.
Rita exhumed a stern feminine demeanor, extremely seductive but not without a battle. I learned my first lessons about temptation just by watching her. She fanned the room with perfume and laughter, and men just succumbed like drugged animals. I felt my first tingle of sexuality in the arms of Rory. He was a treasure of natural emotion, conversation, and jokes. They both gambled, borrowed money from the other, and bet on everything.
My mother was raised in East Orange, New Jersey, before the neighborhood changed. My grandmother always said that East Orange used to be a very nice place to live. There is a photograph of my mother at age seven or eight posing in the garden with her German Shepard. She is holding a ruffled parasol, and dressed like a doll. Her face is a bud of innocence, but with a hint of pained modesty. She didn’t flaunt her beauty; it was more of an embarrassment. When her father died suddenly, she elected to help her family financially, and entered her photograph in a Redbook magazine contest. At seventeen years old she won a modeling contract with John Robert Powers in New York City. My mother ascended to an identity that suited her in some ways and restricted her in others. The Powers girls were invited to grand openings of hotels, restaurants and nightclubs. She appeared on stage at New York’s Copacabana Night Club in 1943. On one of those nights my father was in the audience, and that was where the Smiley Casey bridge from East Orange to Hollywood began.
ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS 