Category: LIFESTYLE

THE DOHENY TOWERS-HOLLYWOOD LIFE

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

I was thirteen the summer I moved into my father’s apartment in The Doheny Towers. My mother just died, and my father had weird habits. I didn’t understand why suddenly I had to ‘behave like a lady.’   It seemed like yesterday that I was running with a pack of friends up and down the hallways of the Hilgard House in dripping wet swimming suits, while Mommy was barbequing hamburgers on the balcony  for all of us.

My father wasn’t prepared for a teenager; I had to grow up quickly, or pretend I was grown up.  I sat on my bed in my new bedroom looking at the drapes. They matched the lime green and royal blue crushed velvet bedspreads.   The drapes and spreads were so heavy I could barely lift them, and when the drapes were closed, the room was so black I couldn’t see my feet. My father had the room decorated by a friend who owed him a favor.  Friends were always doing us favors.

Every morning I opened the drapes, and wrapped them around my body, pressed myself against the glass, and watched the Hollywood sunrise. Some days there was a coating of thick brown paste that hung over everything.  Other days, after a rainstorm, or in the aftermath of a Santa Ana wind, all the soot dispersed. The colors splashed across the Spanish tiled roofs, palm trees, the big dreamy Sunset Boulevard billboards, and the crystal sharp edges of the San Bernardino Mountains. The East was my favorite view from the 12 th floor; because I didn’t know what was out there.  It got me to thinking a lot about the East.   The farthest I’d been was downtown Los Angeles to the Good Samaritan Hospital.

My father ran back and forth in the apartment barking orders to house maintenance, decorators, and telephone installers. He was adjusting things–furnishings, phone lines, new locks on the door; and he was removing guarded personal items. As I observed all this preparation, he kept telling me, ‘everything’s going to be all right, he has everything in order, new phones, more hangers, food in the refrigerator.’ I had no idea how many adjustments my presence required. Thinking back now, I know he was trying to erase any evidence of  gambling, or mafia activities.

My father’s apartment belonged to him as a bachelor, and we did not fit together comfortably at the dining room table because it was really a card table.  The hifi ensemble was polished mahogany wood with gold leaf trim. My father liked gold; it seemed to frame everything in the house, even the silverware. I ran my fingers along the corners of his record collection to see whom he liked: Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mercer, and Tommy Dorsey.  The records were in perfect condition and I wanted to play them.

“ I spent all my life in night clubs with music–I can’t stand it in my home. You can play the stereo when I’m out.”

“When were you in nightclubs all the time?” I asked.

“What? Don’t be concerned with my life; concentrate on yours.”

From our terrace facing west, the view was organized beauty. Every thing was in squares and straight lines in Beverly Hills 90210.  I liked to sit on the terrace and look out; imagining all the lives going on at once. Every time I sat down, my father asked me to come inside and do something.  He didn’t like me sitting on the terrace, exposed and vulnerable.  When he came in to say goodnight, he reminded me to close the drapes.   The drapes pestered him all his life; ever since the night the bullets shattered the glass of Benjamin Siegel’s undraped window.

I loved my father’s shadow in the door before I went to sleep. He blew me a kiss, and said, “Sweet dreams my little girl.”  He liked me being a little girl at certain times.

I came to live my father in 1966, when he was fifty-nine. He wasn’t active int he oil business, but he received royalty checks every month .  He had tiny gold oil-well paperweights on his desk. When his checks came in, he showed them to me and said, “That’s royalty income from my oil wells in Texas.”  I heard him talk about his friend, Lenoir Josey, who sponsored him in business.  Josey died the same year I was born, but my father wanted me to know the name–Lenoir Josey. I was proud to fill in “Oil Engineer” as my father’s occupation on school applications.  None of my friends had fathers in the oil business. I imagined my father was very rich.

When he left the apartment,  I studied his possessions.  He had a black-and- white photograph of my mother hanging on the wall above the couch.  It was one of those glossy modeling photographs that she had hidden from us.   My father told me it was published in the newspaper, an advertisement for Bullock’s.   After inspecting my own reflection in the mirror, I considered myself adopted.  At thirteen, I was flat-chested,  with thick frizzy brown hair that I continually tried to straighten, long shapeless legs, and braces on my teeth. My lips quivered when I was forced to smile, and my eyes were so light that the sun bothered them.  I despised the way I looked.

There was a swimming pool on the roof garden of the Doheny Towers. On the weekends, a lunch counter opened and served hot dogs and hamburgers.  Every Saturday my father went up to the roof to swim, and kibbitz with the neighbors.  He cheerily demanded that I join him, because he said, “I want to get to know my girl.”  I think he wanted me to watch him as he entertained everyone. He told the best stories. Even tough I didn’t understand most of them–the neighbors laughed like they do on television shows when the applause sign flashes on and off. All of them sat around Allen Smiley and listened. Telling stories was my father’s favorite past time.

GET OUT, I’M WRITING

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

The throw of the dice this week falls on chapter One. Like any creative endeavor, the work is organic and has a life of its own.  A garden doesn’t always grow with your plans; there are seeds that fall outside of the planter. There are disasters that drift though our arrangements and cause chaos. I am beginning to believe nothing ends how we imagine it.   A beautiful day is hijacked by a tornado, a child is murdered while taking a walk with a girlfriend, and a chapter runs away from the author.

The desk where I sit and write is engulfed with books files, index cards citing important events, and characters, note pads, FBI files, and outlines. Period photographs are scattered through-out the room to further sedate any intrusion of the present. I live in a cubicle of my parent’s and famous gangsters.

I was writing a lengthy portrayal of Ben Siegel one day and it occurred to me that he had become a major character in my life.  He played a role that someone else should have; a noted author, or journalist, or poet.  Ben Siegel changed my history because I had to learn to love him.  Learning to love him, meant erasing everything I had read or heard.    It is said he was a ruthless killer, a savage, violent, and he loved to kill.    I turned my head to look at a photograph of my mother.  I was told that she loved Ben too.

Where once I believed my mother was naïve and uninformed about Ben; now I know this wasn’t the case. She knew from the beginning. I‘ve read the news articles of the day, the columns, and I’ve spoken to people who were there. My mother traveled by train to New York with my father, Ben and Esta, and the FBI was in the next compartment.    My mother fit into this strangely singular and controversial group of people.  A long stemmed Irish Catholic beauty, an original John Robert Powers Model with a future on stage, in film and in print was friends, very close friends with the wives of Ben’s group.  I see her in the full frame of who she was, and not the imaginary mother.  I like her this way because it reduces the outrageousness of my former years.

Why I continue to seek answers and probe into their lives is because they never told me anything. Children feel the repression of truth as clearly as they do the pain of bruise.  The more you hide the more they seek. At my root is the inclination to question the world around me, and to mend the breaks in our lives.

Along the way of the first chapter, I discovered that people like to know how it works, how we write in a state of solitude and selfishness.  It seems unnatural until you pick up a book. While a story is moving through the author, they or at least I refrain from answering the phone, checking email, or listening to the voices downstairs. A story or any work of art lives in the artist, it sounds sort of spooky, but that is how it feels to me.  So when intrusions come, these disturbances are exaggerated into surrealistic proportions.

I could easily write about the life of the hotel across the street, the many characters that take care of the guests, and the grounds.  It would be an easy writing assignment because I am not related to the hotel.  But writing about your parent’s, the people who introduced you to the world  is like grinding down your memories from stone to powder, and then picking up each grain and examining it’s meaning.

At the end of the day, as other lives intersect with mine, I see people engaged in human activity, the stimulation of common interest comes from living among people and their needs. In writing you interact with your head.   The narrative is like water; it can run smooth like a river over all the rocks and debris or it can break into a million bubbles and lose everything.

When it breaks apart like a wave on the beach, you begin again, and the erosion of impatience and self-doubt allows you to continue.

READING OUR OWN SHORT STORIES-LAX

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

It began last week when I received a phone call requiring me to go back to Los Angeles.

The next day it snowed in Taos. I walked around town on a deserted Sunday morning, just wandering through museums and garage sales. The absence of signs, people, cars, and signals lent the mind a transparency of thoughts. All the things you want to think about are set free.

I looked out at a distant field, scrubbed clean of grass and trees, now just a brown paper bag laid flat. The chill urged me to keep walking, so I continued past the little adobe homes, listening to the barking dogs and the sound of church bells.

It occurred to me on this walk how unfamiliar I was with my surroundings, air so clean it hurt to breath deeply, traditions so ancient they only can be known by ancestral storytelling. I was thinking of how it feels to walk on the sand on a winter day.

The next day, as I crossed over a Southwest Airlines flight to the threshold of LAX, the sounds of silence suddenly exploded into a symphony of discordant blurbs. The Rolling Stones were playing at one kiosk. The television displayed a CNN broadcast. A football game was blaring from the bar, and everyone’s lips seemed to be steadily moving into a cell phone microphone or headset.

The clamp went down, and I was swept into the dance of the talking heads. It’s a familiar homecoming, more familiar than I had suspected. All at once, I recalled the many times my father picked me up at LAX.

I could see him standing in an expectant crowd of awaiting arrivals. He wore those big dark shades and dressed in a suit. He collected my carry-on bag and we rushed down to baggage claim.  I did not understand why we were rushing or why he wouldn’t come with me to the baggage claim.

“Meet me out front,” my father said, “just hurry up.”

I asked: “Why are we rushing?”

“Because I said so,” my father said, taking off in long strides, never running.

After I retrieved my luggage, I met him out front. He drove with a peculiar, hunched suspicion, halfway leaning over the steering wheel. It was very recognizable. He never listened to what I was saying. He was too busy looking in the rear view mirror.

“Aren’t we going home?” I asked.

“What?” he said. “What’s the rush to get home?”

“No rush really,” I said. “I just wanted to call some friends.”

“Yeah, well, aren’t you happy to see your Dad?” he said.

“Yes.”

Then, he said something like why you don’t act like it, or lectured me about my outfit, or how my hair looked uncombed. We drove to some delicatessen off La Tijera Boulevard and he’d leave me in a booth with a corn beef sandwich. I was used to being left in delicatessen booths. It was part of growing up with gangsters.

I was not aware of the FBI airport task force. They assigned special agents to sit at the airport and wait to see whom my dad was meeting. When a member of the Mob came to Los Angeles, my father would greet them. They counted on my dad to make all their  arrangements.

The FBI knew when Dad was going to the airport because of constant on-site, and telephone surveillance. Dad knew they knew because he had an inside source at the Doheny Towers where he lived.

The source alerted dad when the FBI were parked out front. Sometimes, he liked to play practical jokes on the agents. The delicatessen stop was set up so they followed us to a public place. After we got there, the agent had to sit in a hot car in the parking lot, and wait for us to leave. My father would detain the agent for hours.

As those memories filtered through my mind, I walked outdoors into the path of taxis and limos at the airport. I wondered if the FBI still had a mob task force. It seemed so long ago, so out of proportion with the security measures against terrorism.

That day, I landed at LAX. The sky was underlined in brown. The smog smear made the San Bernadino Mountains look like warped inventions.

I trotted behind SC with my laptop and purse until we were next in line to get a taxi. We shot through the airport tangle of cars, and onto the 405 Freeway. When we passed the exit to La Tijera Boulevard I was inclined to tell SC one of my LAX short stories. Instead, all that came out was, “La Tijera Boulevard.”

“What about it?” SC asked.

“I used to go there with my Dad,” I said.. The story was mine, and I was retelling it to myself as we drove along, amongst the cars, the trucks, and signs of Los Angeles. We can read from our own short stories in all kinds of weather and they can be very entertaining.

DREAMS OF A FLAMINGO HOTEL WEDDING

~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

San Diego.

On Sunday afternoon, while I was sitting in the bridal room of  Neiman Marcus, I had a head on collision with the past and the present.

I was not in the bridal room to buy a wedding dress; I was there to store my mink coat. While I waited for a sales clerk, I imagined myself in the chic trench coat with diamond buttons hanging from the rack. If I did have to choose a bridal gown, it would have to be something unconventional, like my mother chose. She wore navy blue taffeta to her wedding. If I did get married, I would have to save my coins for a long time to pay for the reception. Where would I get married? At one time, I dreamth of the Bel Air Hotel, but that was in the 1970s. With inflation, the wedding would cost no less than $200,000 today. By the time, I saved that much, I would be 100 years old! Besides the hotel is not the same. The last time I dropped by, I was chased out of the river walk for taking photographs of the swans.

Just before my father took ill in 1982, he told me my wedding would be at the Flamingo in Las Vegas. I remember it, as if it was yesterday.

We were walking together in Holmby Park, where he walked his five miles everyday. Very often, he stopped at the public phone booth and made a few calls. He whispered so I could not hear his conversation. I know now he was laying his bets for the day.   I waited on the green lawn watching the older men and women playing Croquette. When my father returned from the phone booth, he looked perturbed. That meant he lost money on that day’s sporting event.   We walked a long time in heavy silence until he decided to break it.

“You know, I’m very proud of you.” He said looking straight ahead.

“You are?” I was stunned.

“Of course I am! I hope you don’t think any different. I have not said it often, because I’m coaching you all the time, so you will be independent, and know how to look after yourself, after I’m gone. I don’t want you to fall into a rut with the wrong fellow, like so many women. It can ruin your whole life.”

“But I haven’t accomplished anything really great…. like you.”

“What the hell are you talking about!” he stopped in the middle of the path.

“ Are you kidding sweetheart, I broke all the rules, and made some new ones, and I’ve paid. Like I’ve always said, you make your bed, and you lie in it. I’m proud of the career you made in real estate, without any help from me. Now you have to concentrate on the right fellow. When you do get around to finding the right one, we’ll have the wedding at the Flamingo.

“The Flamingo? Do you still know people there?” I asked timidly.

“Of course, I was a major stockholder … at one time.” Then he cleared his throat, and I wondered if he was choking on the memories.

“That’s where Mommy and I had our wedding reception.” I thought of the photographs of Mommy cutting the white cake. It was the first time he ever mentioned my wedding. It was the first time, he seemed to say, okay find a fellow, and I’ll let you go. I sensed his detachment from everything around us except for me.

“I would like that. How long has it been since you were there?”

“I didn’t want to set foot in that place after Benny…  (Benjamin Siegel)  I didn’t care if the whole place burnt to the ground. There’s no reason why you can’t have your wedding there. I can still arrange a few things.”

The vision of father, my future husband, and me was an aberration without incident or purpose at that age. However, he was dreaming that the day would come soon.

When the sales clerk finally appeared, I was glazed over, in some marbled state of melancholy, clutching the mink coat on my lap. The mink is the oldest garment in my closet, vintage 1978.   It’s as if it happened yesterday.

My father called one Saturday and asked me to meet him at Mannis  Furs in Beverly Hills. When I arrived, my father was seated in a chair, facing a three-way mirror.  Manny rushed over to greet me.

“This is my daughter, Luellen, “Manny bowed and kissed my hand. In the other hand, he was holding a mink jacket.

“Try it on for size,” my father ordered. I hesitated, and looked at him for explanation. It never occurred to me I would be trying on mink coats. He was always asking me to meet him in shops, and restaurants. He held meetings wherever he knew people, so I assumed he had a meeting with Manny.

“Go on—try it on. I didn’t say I was buying it, I just want to see what it looks like.” Manny tucked me into the mink coat, and pulled the waist sash through. He stroked the fur up and down, and then I did the same. The coat felt like a cloth wall that buried my body in warmth. I stood before the mirror and watched the transformation.

“Turn around, “my father ordered. I took a few steps in a half circle and slipped my hands into the pockets, and turned around slowly as I’d seen my mother do. Suddenly his eyes welled up with tears and he took out his handkerchief.

“If you dressed in a proper outfit and not those silly jeans all the time, you might look like something!” he barked.

“Well I didn’t know I’d be trying on minks today.”

“What the hell did you think you’d be trying on, pianos? For crying out loud!

“I don’t know what you’re thinking sometimes. Take it off.”

Manny untied the sash and took the coat. My father was in a mood, it was my fault again. I shouldn’t have worn jeans. Why did he start crying? Manny disappeared, and my father stood in front of the mirror to affirm his reflection. After he took off in his Cadillac, I stood in front of Manny’s and looked at the mink coats. He never mentioned it again, but I knew the coat was going to show up one day.

Six or seven months after that first meeting at Mannis, the mink appeared at Chanukah.

“Daddy, this is so extravagant, I won’t have any where to wear it.”

“Oh yes you will! Just wait and see. If you quit going out with those misfits and find yourself a decent fella you’ll have numerous occasions. That’s the reason why I gave it to you, so don’t misuse it!”

When I left Neimans I was drenched in his memory. The mink coat has outlived all of my possessions. Every time I put it on, I’m reminded of his wisdom. It’s not the expense or signature status. When I put it on, I feel transformed.

I discovered the bill of sale from Manny’s, and the balance due, after my father died. I called Manny and asked him for more time, to pay it off. He told me to forget about it, my father had brought in so much business to the store.

When the sales clerk took the mink away, I made a speedy dash out of Neimans, before I started buying things I couldn’t afford, or trying on bridal gowns.

MEETING MEYER LANSKY

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

I was 26 years old when the company I worked for sent me to Miami to investigate, The Carriage House, a residential property assigned to my management portfolio. One of the partners discovered the rents hadn’t been raised in five years and blew his top. My mission was to evaluate how much we could raise the rents. My father said as long as I was in Miami, I should meet his good friend Guy.

“I haven’t seen the little guy in a long time. It’s safe now. Teddy and Meyer want to see you.”

“Have they met me before?”

“You were too young to remember.”

“Meyer’s retired now right?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing. You said it was safe, I just wondered if he was still working.”

“Sweetheart, don’t try and outsmart your old dad, and by all means, don’t embarrass me and try and out smart Meyer. He’s a mind reader. You’ll fall on your face. Just be yourself, and listen, you’ll never meet another man like him.”

The Carriage House on Collins Avenue was miserably neglected. The paint peeling, the carpet frayed, and the glass windows smudged with dirt. The lobby was a centerfold of action; women dressed in Tahitian bathing wraps and high-heeled sandals, and men in melon and lime colored suits converged on the sagging sofas.   There was a distinctive smell of chicken soup as great numbers of retired Jewish men and women shuffled through the lobby carrying big beach bags, and transistor radios.

Dinner was prearranged through Dad and Meyer. All I had to was stand in front of the Carriage House at seven o clock. At precisely seven a vintage four-door gray Mercedes pulled up in front. Neither one of the passengers moved. As I moved to open the back door, Teddy reached out and grasped my hand.

“Oh my God! Look Meyer, she is exactly like her mother!”

Meyer turned around once, and grinned. His face was a historical map: the lines were carved like mountain roads, and the curve of his nose twisted like a sharp curve, but his eyes– unmistakable eyes that hooked you to his.

“Oh darling I’m so thrilled to see you. Meyer isn’t she just exactly like Lucille?” Teddy peered through twinkling brown eyes, radiating warmth and eagerness. She had a rapacious smile, petite frame, with lovely blonde hair pulled back at the nape of the neck. My father called her Tiger because he said she was untamable.

“No. She looks like Allen,” Meyer protested.

“Oh Meyer, she’s her mother’s image, she would be so proud of you, wouldn’t she Meyer…”

“Teddy will you please shut up so Luellen can speak.” Meyer never turned around. He studied me through the rear window. They continued to argue about whom I looked like. They hoped I took after my mother because she was a saint. Meyer drove tentatively, hitting the brakes every few feet, while Teddy chided him about his driving.

When we arrived at the restaurant, Meyer turned around and   faced me directly for the first time. He just stood there and examined me without speaking. Though his face was creased with deep permanent lines, when he smiled they all melted together, and he looked almost youthful.

“So tell me, is your father still as sensitive as he used to be?”  I didn’t know how to answer Meyer.  I had never thought of my father as sensitive.“Well, he yells a lot.” I answered. Meyer chuckled and nodded his head in agreement. Teddy took my hand and we went inside the restaurant. It was like meeting family. They made so much fuss over me, I felt remiss in not visiting sooner. They wanted to know everything about my life. Meyer sat very still; Teddy was kinetic and consumed with the turmoil of emotions.

“So, he yells a lot does he?” Meyer continued once Teddy stopped talking.

“Yes, in fact his friends call him the “Warden.” They both burst out laughing. They were sharing a private history   beyond my understanding. Meyer was methodical in everything he did; his mannerisms, the direction of conversation, and ordering food. Teddy sat beside me intermittently squeezing my hand and dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex. She immediately wanted to talk about my mother. She could not even mention her name without a tear.

“Your mother was ravishing, and I don’t mean her looks, though she was prettier than any movie star, she was beautiful on the inside. She had a quality of kindness and sincerity every one adored.” Meyer’s eyes bonded to mine, and I felt him almost whispering to me. He was examining my character, what I was really thinking, if I was hiding conflict, what was in my heart, and if I could be trusted.

“We loved Lucille, everyone did,” Meyer interjected sadly. He changed the subject and spoke about my father in the very same praiseworthy fashion my father talked about Meyer. I did not sit there thinking, this is the Meyer who collaborated with Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, and Ben Siegel to operate organized crime in America. I did not think of him as any sort of criminal, mobster, or organized crime boss. My interest was in what he knew about my father and mother.  After a glass of wine it was my turn to ask a question.

“When did you meet my mother?”

“I can’t remember,” he answered. “A long time ago.” Meyer skirted over my question just as my father did.

“How do you like your job?” he asked.

“I love it.” His eyes narrowed and darkened as I spoke. He encouraged the discussion and yet I felt he was displeased with my answers. I wanted to impress Meyer Lansky, because I wanted to make my father proud.

“What exactly are doing on this trip?” he asked.

“I’m reviewing the rents of the Carriage House, and looking over the condition of the property.” I answered. Teddy smiled supportively but Meyer suddenly went silent.

“I have a number of friends who live at the Carriage House.” Meyer looked into my eyes.

“You do?” I replied dumbly.

“Yes I do—and they live on social security every month–fixed income. Are you going to raise their rents?” he asked. I blushed red as the tablecloth.

“NO NO! I can exclude them somehow,” I said in haste. Teddy pressed at Meyer’s side with her delicate hands.

“No, you cannot do that. I just wanted you to know is all,” he said in finality.

It was just like my father, that crescendo of stupidity that follows a mob trap.  Teddy interjected something to break the seriousness, and we returned to lighter conversation. I could think of nothing else than the inconvenience of my job at that moment.

“I lived at the Carriage House before we moved to the Imperial.”

“ It needs a lot of work.” I said.

“ Your people haven’t made any improvements.”

I thought he hated me. Teddy kept close and sort of held me up while he pulled me down.

 

Later that night I allowed myself to recall the stories I heard and read over the years, shaved by years of denial. I shuddered to think how Meyer felt about my raising the rents on his friends. Guys he played poker with once a week, while Teddy sliced corn beef sandwiches. I wanted to bury my head in the Miami sand. My father’s words reclaimed my denial.

“This is what life is about, making decisions that you can face years later.”

I called my father the next day and he said, “ Don’t call me from the hotel and hung up.”

I knew not everyone who assumes the veneer of affluence has money. Not even Meyer Lansky who reporters allege was worth  millions. My father facilitated a wealthy lifestyle, but he lived month to month. Meyer may have had a million one day, maybe he had it a year, but eventually the bankroll is gambled on some long shot dream.  That is what they do with money. If these men invested their money wisely, they would be richer than the government. The next time I called Meyer and Teddy to have dinner, Meyer was gratuitously polite,

“We don’t want to interfere with your job.” I sensed a twitch of sarcasm; just enough to let me know that he was on to me.

We exchanged more than an exaggeration of emotions the second night. I could not extort any specific information from either one of them. Meyer was interested in discussing my job again.

“Are your people going to convert the Carriage House to condominiums?” Meyer caught me off guard again. I knew he and my father had talked. My company specialized in condo-conversion.

“I haven’t heard that. Why do you ask?” I said.

“I want to protect my friends,” he answered. A ripple of a smile passed over his lips.

“I’ll tell my father right away if I hear anything Meyer. And about the rents; I m not recommending an increase on any units, until we refurbish the place. It needs a lot of work.” Teddy took hold of my hand.

“That’s very thoughtful,” she said.

“Don’t let me interfere with your job,” Meyer emphasized.

“I hope I can interfere on your account.” He nodded acknowledging our little understanding. I got a glimpse of the Meyer that negotiated peace treaties between different factions of the underworld, with Cuban emissaries, Army Generals, and the Israeli government. Meyer emulated power, without any gestures or expression. It came from inside. At the end of the evening I dove for the check like I’d seen my father do a thousand times.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Meyer, my father will kill me if I don’t pick up this check.” I said in jest. Meyer chuckled, captured my focus, and snapped the check right out of my hand.

I could see how difficult it would be to cross this man. Part of America’s history was sitting with me that night. He was a man that could extract the truth from a thousand lies and no one would know. When I met Meyer I’d heard stories about “Murder Inc,” and his friendship with Lucky Luciano, Benjamin Siegel and Frank Costello.

When I returned to Los Angeles my father made me sit for hours and recount every detail of the meeting.  He assured me Meyer was not disapproving of me or my job, but, he would be grateful if I didn’t raise the rents.

“My daughter had to go up against Meyer. What a story.” My father laughed uproariously.

 

 

BITTERSWEET LEGEND OF MACEDONIO

~ LouLou ~ 13 Comments

I was in New York when the story was percolating and I went searching for the  Macedonio Obledo. After living with one stable, loving man, and knowing enough men to distinguish the characters from the counterfeits, I realized how singular Mace lived. I wanted to know his story. I searched the Internet and discovered a Macedonio Obledo in Florida. I wrote him a letter, circumventing the possibility of a hang up or bad news.

The last time I’d seen Mace, he was sitting across from me, drawing a picture of the exotic life we’d lived together in Florida. He showed up in an older Cornice Rolls Royce dressed in a dark blue pin-stripped suit and tie. He was a lot like the early criminally chic Jean Paul Belmondo of the French new wave films.

It was twenty years since we’d love nested in Marin county.   I sat very still while Mace served me lunch and talked euphorically about Boca Raton. He was magnificently persuasive as he outlined his love for me and the destiny we would share. We would travel to Argentina, ride horses across the Pampa, and dance the tango. There was an immediacy in his gestures, as if he was being chased, that overlapped his ruminations of life at age 52. His hair was still blue black and closely framed his forehead. His bronzed skin stretched tight across his Indian cheekbones, and his farcical humor punctuated each sentence. He possessed an ethereal view of life that nullified the effects of aging. He tempered his Latin sensuality with Greek philosophy.

It was not easy to let Mace go, because I never stopped loving him. I was not considering his proposal, but I wasn’t ready to let him go either. He waited several weeks for me to make up my mind.

For the past nine years, Mace had lived a few miles away. Once we were reunited speeding on the freeway; and exchanged phone numbers at the next exit. That was the kind of serendipity in our history. I could not seem to move without Mace rising in the background with a force majeure to undermine whatever I happened to be doing—with whomever. He defied the laws of my father years ago, when he asked for an introduction into the Mob!

Mace left without me in early 1993. Eight years passed before I went looking for him. My life piloted me in different directions until two years ago. I began searching again. This time the Internet showed Mace living on San Marcos Island. Throughout our history, Mace had skinned off clippings of his adolescence. His abbreviated childhood began in Chicago. His mother died while they were on a plane. His father was wealthy and mean. Mace served in the Korean War. He later moved to Los Angeles, and married a wealthy Swedish woman. He ran with a fast crowd, and hung around Brentwood.

What he did not reveal was his interior self: the origin of his philosophy, his parent’s ancestry, and what trials of life he’d suffered. What fire burned at his heels? Why did he want to marry a woman with a distinctive background, and where’d he get the nerve to ask my father for an introduction into the Mafia? How can you write about such a character without knowing the entire story?

This year I went searching again. The Internet had him living in Ft. Lauderdale. No address or phone number. I remembered what he’d said, “Just think about me and I’ll know, and come find you.” I wrote a three part series in my column about him. Still, no sign of Macedonio.

Two weeks ago, I tried another search. This time his name came up in a puzzling excerpt on a church website. I emailed the Minister. A few days later, I received a note from his sister. I don’t have to tell you what it said.

Mace lived the rest of his life in Costa Rica. I imagine him living in a tropical villa with a beautiful woman. He is dressed in white tennis shorts, and spends his days surfing, riding horses, and dancing the tango.

PART TWO, MY LOVE, MY GANGSTER

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

MACEDONIO

Mace and I returned to San Rafael and rented a little cottage of our own. Mace painted the rooms lemon yellow, and I glided around in dreamy domestic ecstasy.  In the sensuous seventies, the preamble to the essentials of living was not a prospering career, and getting ahead. It was with a minimal amount of work, improvise, meditate, and stay high. Some Indian guru coined it, “going with the flow.”

I learned to cook fettuccine, entertain Mace ’s guests, and polish tennis shoes. Above all, I learned how to read adults, in a way I had never considered before. Mace explained the concealed messages in spoken language, and how to recognize the signals of deception, arrogance, racism, and affectation.  He was continually pointing out, people’s affectations, while he drove me around in our vintage MBZ 250 SEL.

For money, resources fluctuated between teaching tennis, calling his agent in San Francisco, (he did commercials for Gallo Wine) and working on various deals.  There was never one steady job, he was the Rocket Man, and people gravitated towards us. After meeting someone one day, they would be at our dinner table that night.

Amidst all the activity, I was suffering the guilt of watching my college funds vanish. That was the tragedy, but there is always sacrifice in this kind of passion. Just as my father had warned me, Mace did not refrain from spending my money.  I withdrew from the College of Marin, and for a while worked part time in a small bohemian cafe in Mill Valley.

One very early morning, while we were still sleeping, the doorbell rang. Mace rushed to the door prepared to admonish whomever was knocking.  When I came striding over in my silk Rita Hayworth negligee, I was astounded.

“Luellen, who is this guy, he says you know him?”

“Dale, it’s all right Mace, I know him, he’s a friend of my father’s.

“What kind of friend?” Mace demanded. Dale stood there in the archway, dressed in a wrinkled suit, his sandy hair heavily slicked to appear arranged, and eyes shaded behind rose tinted sunglasses.

“Mace , I’m just here to make sure Luellen is all right.”  Dale shifted his weight between both legs. He looked taller than I remembered.

“She’s fine, you can see that.” Mace replied.

“Mace , let Dale in the door.”  I embraced Dale momentarily, as I always had in the past. His edginess did not alarm me; he was always burdened by some desperate measures. My father was continually counseling him about his tribulations.

Mace hustled Dale into the living. I went into the bedroom to get dressed. My mind raced between images of my father and Dale, the run-around guy that obeyed orders. He did not resemble a tough guy; he was the Sterling Hayden type, the guy always on the run. Mace appeared in the doorway, and rushed over to me.

“Who is that guy?”

“He’s just a friend of my Dad, don’t worry he’s not dangerous…. I don’t think. ”

“He came to get you, your father sent him Lue,” he looked at me apprehensively.

“Is that what he said?”

“He doesn’t have to. We’ll take him out to breakfast; I want to be in public, just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“Just get dressed quickly.”

“You won’t let him take me will you?” I said panicking.

“NO! I can handle it.” Mace assured.

We drove into Larkspur to our favorite café. Mace led us to a table outside in the garden, in the warmth of sunlight. Mace orchestrated the meeting, so it was relaxed and enjoyable for Dale, and slowly Dale began to unwind. He removed his suit jacket and ate heartily after the long drive. They talked, and I confirmed what Mace offered.

“We live modestly now, but not for long, I’m going to manage the Tennis club, and Lue’s going to get her real estate license.  Isn’t that right honey?”

“Yes, that’s right.” I acknowledged. Mace had been advising me to get a license.

“Dale, you should hang out with us a while, I’ll take you around. You can see for yourself what our life is about. I’m not hiding anything Dale, I love Luellen, and her father knows it.”

“How is my father Dale?” I interrupted.

“Luellen, your father isn’t angry with you. He just wants to make sure you’re all right.”

“Why didn’t he come with you?” Dale hunched over the table and looking directly at Mace .  “He was afraid of what he might do.”  Mace stood up suddenly.

“ Dale, I’m not a stupid man. I know about him too.”

Things deteriorated from there.  Mace and Dale argued, I pleaded to leave the restaurant. In the car, I managed to dissuade the arguing with a hysterical outburst, and tears. Then I mediated Mace and Dale, whose conflicting assignments were bordering on a hit in an alley.

“I need you both to calm down. Dale has to return without me, and my father is going to be angry. Mace , Dale needs our help.”  Mace responded by retiring his grudge and substituting some personal stories along with several rounds of backgammon. When Dale was ready to leave, I took him aside.

“ See Dale, I’m happy here,  I can’t go back with you.”

“Are you sure? I can still take care of Mace !  I will not hurt him, just stall him so you can get in the car. I’m not coming back again Luellen.” He said.

“Dale, he won’t let me go. He really loves me.”

“If that’s so, let him prove it. Come with me now, he’ll follow after you when he can handle things.”

“Dale, I just can’t go with you.”

“Luellen, your father’s gonna blame me.”

“I’m sorry Dale, please understand.”

“ He’s going to be furious.”

“Well, you’ve seen him that way before right? He’ll calm down.” I spoke with feigned confidence. I had no idea how he would respond, but I knew he would blame Dale. He passed me his telephone number on a piece of paper, shook hands with Mace and told him to take care of me. Then he took of in his Cadillac.

Mace returned to the living room boasting of his conquest.

“Dale was supposed to threaten me with a gun, but he liked me too much to go through with it.”

“Did he show you the gun?”

“Yea. Lue, I told you-I am not easily intimidated.”

In the next six months, I passed my real estate exam and Mace was setting up a business.  Mace had a friend who owned a Mortgage Banking Company in San Francisco. I was going to sell new residential developments and Mace was going to secure clients.  We moved into a charming little house in Ross and commuted to the city to have meetings. We dined with successful men and their wives and I tried to read all the signals. Soon my father would see me on the sophisticated side of the street, leaving the hippie hibernating spell for good.

Then one day the meetings stopped. Mace retreated to the tennis court and played the rocket man. He ignored my questions and concern for our future.  The car was sold, the guests stopped coming over, and Mace lived in stubborn silence.   The day came I had to make the phone call.

“Hi Daddy, it’s me.”

“Yea, what is it you want?”

“I want to come home and start over.” I replied.

“On one condition.”

“What?”

“You never go back to him; you have to be absolutely sure.”

“I’m sure; I want to leave right away.” I said.

Within a week, I was back in my father’s apartment sitting on the blue and green crushed velvet sofa.

“Look now sweetheart, stop your crying, at least you didn’t come back pregnant. There is nothing to cry about now, you made a mistake and it’s over, you got your whole life ahead of you. Don’t bury yourself in the sand, nothing to be ashamed of; you ought to know the mistakes I’ve made. You couldn’t come close.”

Mace continued to pursue me. He was met by my father’s warning, ”If you come within ten feet of her, I’ll scratch your eyes out and stuff them down your throat.”  Any dice to throw Email:folliesls@aol.com

MY LOVE, MY GANGSTER

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

I was 20 years old in 1973 and living in Marin County. I was an Au Pair for a family of five, living in a hillside suburban neighborhood, overlooking Tiburon. I lived downstairs in the converted wood paneled library.

I drove a faded yellow VW Bug and dressed in a long wooly vintage coat. I attended classes in Women’s studies at The College of Marin, and my father was a good two thousand miles away.

During the hours I was not in class or tending to Inge’s three children, I sat in the coffee house across the street from the college, reading, smoking and drinking coffee. Each of these was an enormous, individual adventure, but to have all three together, was a star spangled banner sort of freedom. There in the café, at the varnished wood tables, I could read, write, study, and practice solitary delight.  These were the activities my father tried to beat out of me, with all good intentions.

One day in April, while sitting at my table, I was approached by a man in a tennis outfit. He was dark skinned, with birch brown eyes, thick defined lips, and wavy, blue black hair that draped one eye. He could have been Hawaiian, Italian or Spanish, all those ethnic features melted in his face.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“Play It As It Lays,” do you know of Joan Didion?”

“I think so. Why do you like it?”

“What, the book you mean?”

“Yea.”

“Her character, the woman in the story takes risks, she’s not afraid.”

“Are you?”

“I … sometimes.”

“What for? You can have anything you want.”

“What about you?” I replied, blushing.

.           “I’m a man that lives by my own rules. I have a lot of fun, and that’s how I live my life.”

“That’s nice.”

“Why the sarcasm. Don’t you believe me?”

“Why should I? I don’t know you.”

“Yes you do.” Then I lost his attention, and his eyes scouted the room.  I stood up to leave.

“Why are you leaving?” he asked.

“I see you are looking for someone else.”

“I’m not interested in anyone except you.” He said twirling his tennis racket.

“I’d like to see you again. Do you want to give me your number?”

I stalled him, glancing at his muscular legs.

“I have nice legs don’t I?” he teased.

“You have okay legs, what’s your name?”

“Macedonio Batzani Obledo.”

“What?” 

“Oh don’t be so American, it doesn’t suit you. Are you a student?”

“Yes, are you?”

Laughter ruptured out of him. I didn’t think it was so funny.  He quickly regained his composure and added that he was a student of life, and he studied all the time. He added something clever that diffused the next question, which was, “how old are you?” He continued to pinball my mixed up emotions, until I handed him my phone number on a piece of paper. He walked me to my car, twirling the tennis racket,and I could not take my eyes off him.

Mace called several days later, and we made a date. Inge greeted him with bubbly European warmth, followed by Espresso in the living room. The children emerged from their playrooms to meet the stranger. Inge engaged in conversation for several hours, without ever sacrificing her smile or sparkle.  She found out Max’s age, that he was recently divorced, had lived in Brentwood and played tennis at the Riviera Country Club. I was on the verge of a rebellion jackpot. Not only did I find a man 17 years older with a mysterious past, who was divorced and his ancestry unknown, but he embodied a brand of sensuality, that either enraged or imprisoned women.

Mace unhooked the lid that had caged my spirit, and opened the door. He was the wild card, the impostor, poet, musician, and artist of life. He embraced my insecurities, questions and doubts, and then gave them back to me with a seal of approval.  My flat chest became sexy, my lanky frame elegant, and my restraint classy. I was 20 years old and in a hurry to understand what love was all about. We rode around San Francisco in my VW singing, “Midnight at the Oasis”. I dressed up like Rita Hayworth and he bought me a vintage silk negligee.  He was 37 and worldly, my sexuality burst threw the ceiling.

We moved into a stately mansion in San Rafael, befitting of his grandiose dreams and my romantic vision. We lived with ten other outcasts, sharing the same traditional vintage Victorian furnishings.  All of the characters were acting out parts; Jimmy wore a white tunic and spoke in clipped passages from books.  Gail was her hometown Queen, a single mother and skilled husband hunter.  Terence was the pensive astrologer, living crossed legged on the floor of the den amongst a pile of books and charts.  Katie was a sharpened New Yorker recently stripped of conventions and migrated to California.  Invisible Doobie lived in the attic and spent all day sucking laughing gas. Ann, an alternating fragile and fierce aging hippie with utopiaian ideas, managed the house.

Mace decorated our room and I posed on the canopy bed.  At dinner sometimes all twelve of us sat in the formal dining room and conversation scintillated around crystal chandeliers.  It was a bohemian Great Gatsby commune, complete with volleyball matches on summer evenings, piano concerts in the parlor, and unconventional seventies living.  Mace played and taught tennis, and I lounged around Country Clubs looking for jobs. Just the environment my father had ordained for meeting the right fellow.

Six months later, I made the immutable decision to introduce Mace and my father.  Mace was not disturbed when I confided my father and his alleged Mafia connections. He alluded that he had known wise guys in Chicago, and was not intimidated in the least. Nothing I told him was shocking. He had heard all about my father’s closest friend, Johnny Roselli.

“ Lue, Johnny is the Mafia boss in Los Angeles, I know- I’ve lived there and read about him.”

“You shouldn’t believe the newspapers. Johnny and my father go to the barber shop, and out to dinner.”  I contested his allegation and insisted Johnny was a harmless retired Italian businessman and I adored him.

“Your father is Johnny’s right hand man.” He persisted.

“Can you prove that?”

“Lue, I’m not judging him, and neither should you.”  I was years away from understanding anything about my father.

We arrived at my father’s Hollywood apartment doorstep with mutual anticipation and excitement.  Mace thrust his hand out to my father.

“How do you do Mr. Smiley?”  I recognized my father’s feigned approval. How could he be indignant so quickly?  He put on his best social manners, but I felt the examination beginning.

“ Macedonion,  is that what you go by?”

“No, Mace is easier.”

“And your last name, how is that pronounced?”  My father sharpened his blade on Max’s elusive identity.

“ Spanish Italian, I am a mixture, Batzani Obledo.”

My father’s expressions are recognizable, and the one he uses when he suspects a fraud is equally deceiving. His lips purse together and he nods his head very slightly, imitating approval, but his eyes are unforgiving stainless steel blue.

I tried to ignore the signals; it was such a special day for me.  While I was preparing dinner, my father invited Mace to go for a walk. There I was in my dream world, cooking stuffed zucchini for my father and the man I loved, unprepared to accept the distortion of my father’s repellent reaction and Max’s eagerness for approval.

When they returned, my father went into the living room to watch television and Mace came into the kitchen.

“How’d it go? Did he ask you lots of questions?” I said.  Mace pranced nervously.

“Your father’s a heavyweight, but we got along.  I know how to talk his language. He’s a powerful man Lue, more so that I thought.   ”

“What did he ask?”

“What I plan on doing, he could help us you know.”

“That won’t happen, I’m sure of it.”

The evening was weighted, with long heavy silences, and jokes my father ignored.  I made nervous table conversation, and my father ate quickly.  He most likely used more restraint that night with Mace than I will ever realize. My father sent Mace to the motel and asked me to stay for a while. Some moments later my father began pacing the living room, and then all at once he exploded.

“He’s a filthy punk! A small time con! He gave me a lot of mumbo jumbo about his tennis, and some deal with a country club. Luellen, this is a gigolo, he will take you for everything you’ve got.  Drop him now before it’s too late.  He’s not qualified for anything, he has no business, and he’s a street wise nothing.”  His voice was threatening, face reddened in anger, and his entire body trembled. I sat limply on the couch caught between his truth, and my illusions.

“You’re wrong. He does have contacts with the Tennis Club in Marin and he knows a lot of people.” I argued.

“So what! He can tell you anything. You don’t have any common sense when it comes to him. I’m telling you what you’re dealing with, he’s a fake.”

“I think you’re wrong. You never liked anyone I’ve introduced.”

“You never brought a man I could look in the eye. You make a choice right now, if you want him after what I’ve told you, then walk out that door and don’t ever come back. I mean it now, you decide!”  I looked into his narrowed eyes.  I went into the kitchen, picked up my purse and opened the front door. He rushed over and slammed the door as I crossed the threshold. It was the first time I did not back down. After the door shut, the world looked different.

On the drive back to Marin, we stopped one night in Santa Barbara.  We had breakfast early that morning.  Mace was reading the newspaper, he pushed the paper to my side, “Read this,” he said.  I read the article, and was ejected out my dream all at once.  My father along with twelve other Mafia members were under investigation for their part in an alleged plot to extort money from various legal and illegal business enterprises. Smiley, it said, was indicted a year ago in an investigation of alleged Mafia activities in the Los Angeles area. The other names were Frankie Carbo, Frank Milano, Samuel Sciortino and De La Rosa.

“See, I told you your father is a powerful man Lue.” Something shifted in both of us after that. I couldn’t put the covers over my eyes any longer. I sat in the ray of sunshine rising above the mountains, and studied that newspaper article.  I realized then why the newspapers were hidden, why my father behaved as he did, why he distrusted everyone. I felt betrayed, I felt shattered, but I said nothing. I was tangled in my own family history, and it would take years to find a way out.

“Are you afraid of him?” I asked.

“He wouldn’t do anything to me, not with the government on his back,” Mace assured me.

LIVING ON THE EDGE

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

Fifteen years ago, the summer of 1993, I was having lunch in a restaurant in Los Angeles. Across from me was the only other woman of importance in my father’s life, besides my mother, that I had known. Sandy Crosby, a leggy brunette with bark brown eyes, arched brows, and a showcase smile.

She always had a response that outwitted her opponent, including my father, who relied heavily on, ‘don’t be so smart.’  Half-way through the first course at Jimmy’s, she looked at me and grinned.

“You’re so much like your father.”

“I am?”

“Oh yes.”

“Your father loved living on the edge, he really did.”

I rested on that thought for a long time. I was temporarily living with a friend in Los Angeles. I lived out of a suitcase, with a broken down Cadillac, and a folder of resumes.  My dad  never lived out of a suitcase, or needed a resume to find a job. After he met Benny Siegel, he had multiple offers in organized crime.

What I discovered, is Dad didn’t truly settle down until he had to raise my sister and I. He was 56 years old when Mom died, and we were tossed into his lacquered bachelor pad in Hollywood. The same age I was two years ago.

Living on the edge is a term used to describe infinite lifestyles. The momentum, or ignition that fuels that lifestyle, is uncertainty. We live by impulse and imagination. Our plans are last minute, we never buy in bulk, and we are always dreaming of the voyage. We run from stationary life because at heart, we are gamblers.

This time, the edge is the very place I spent two years creating, the photography gallery and home in Santa Fe. Up until this winter, it operated as a gallery by appointment, while I polished my memoir proposal. After several months, I went to the edge and decided to convert the gallery into a vacation rental. I needed to roam; I longed to gather new material.

The winter climbed back into bed, and then spring ripped through the ground, and the roses and poppies bloomed. The memoir remained unpublished, and the house began to transform from gallery to a real home. The long uneventful winter punctured my prudent habit of writing, remaining secluded, and avoiding everything but the essentials. By May, I made a silent vow under a stream of sunlight, to enlist into the human race.

The reinvention resembled nature, like today. The day began with  a feverish sky of culminating clouds, a long dreary silence, and an absence of light. The street was empty, just the valet from La Posada running to the garage to fetch the cars. They were bundled in winter coats, while the party rental truck loaded the furniture from last evening’s wedding. The storm struck with impetuous force. The valet’s ran with umbrellas, small children yelled for cover, and I took a seat on the back porch. Suddenly, the storm rescinded, and the sun burst through the cloud cover.

My emancipation back into the flow of mixing strangers and friends was alchemy to the house. Now it’s a home; to cook, entertain, and fill with music, laughter and conversation.  I can see the faces of the people I’ve met, imagine the next meeting, and anticipate the next outing. The windows and doors are opened, the people who pass by look in. I was cooking dinner one night this week, and noticed a man peeking in the window. He looked like Harrison Ford, just back from the Lost Arch.

“ Is this a museum?” he asked when I went to the door.

“ No. It’s a gallery, a home. Well come in, and take a look around.”

Opening the door to a stranger returned the affirmation that impulse socializing is still possible in the banal and sterile world of FACEBOO.   You don’t have to be a teenager to recognize a good time, but you need to be an adult to recognize a good fellow.

Some of us lone roamers cannot reverse the inclination to retreat from life; because we find too much confusion, agitation and adversity in the world. Between all of those elements, there are treasures waiting to be discovered: opportunity collaboration, adventure, and most of all companionship.

Even though the comfort of this home has replenished my spirit and temporarily produced a yawn of security, I am preparing to go to the edge. Though I imagine it is another place of endearment, another address, and another gamble, it may be the inner voyage that will transcend.

When I tell people we’re renting the house, they ask me where will you go?

I don’t know yet. Sandy was right; I am like my father. The edge I picked wasn’t a green felt jungle of dice and chips, it’s an artists’ life.

Any dice to throw Email: folliesls@aol.com

 

MY MOTHER-A RACKETEER’S WIFE

~ LouLou ~ 2 Comments

How could I have known 15 years ago?  Back then I had but a fingerbowl of resources, a blue chair, a desk, and a typewriter.  Everyday I wrote into the flame of discovery looking for my mother.  My notebooks were sketches of a  woman I never knew.   The absence of the most ordinary information, like where she grew up in Newark, what sort of neighborhood, what her father did for a living, what schools, she attended, and later on, what experiences she had modeling in New York.

The closest I got was by reading John Robert Powers, The Powers Girls,  about the modeling agency he started in 1923.   He assigned unemployed Broadway talent to his advertising agency to promote American products.  According to John he was the innovator of the modeling agency concept- beautiful women and men will sell products, the public never would have thought of buying.

I found her name in the index, Lucille Casey, and she joined the agency when she was 16 years old.   John groomed the models; they were assigned disciplinary perfection in dialect, manners, appearance, character, and intellect.  Powers Girls married anyone they wanted.  They were invited to all the important society events, they were given card blanche at the Stork Club, and the Morocco and they were transported to celebratory city functions. They met men of all means, character, and class.

After I read the book, I thought about what my father used to say,  ‘Your mother could have had any man in the world, but she picked me. Don’t you make the same mistake. “  That is a complex summons for a teenager to understand.

I sat in the blue chair and waited for flares of information to come down to earth.   After two years, I had very little to fill one page.  My mother’s history was lost, her friends had vanished, or would not talk to me.  She did not leave a diary.  Her photo album as a model was all I had.  What could I see in those eyes, and smile?   I gave up the search, and switched over to my father. The government documented his daily activities, and what they didn’t hear or see, was exploited in newspapers, documentaries, and books.

There was one woman who was alive, that knew intimate details of my mother, because I had met her, and she made it known to me she knew. That was Meyer Lansky’s wife, who went by the name Teddy.  Women have a distinctive look when they are withholding secrets.  Teddy always had that look when she brought up my mother.  I told her I was writing about my father and mother and she said, “Let them rest in peace.”    I didn’t take her advice.

SIDEWALKING TO BREAKING MY SILENCE

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

SIDEWALKING TO BREAKING MY SILENCE

 

This is the beginning of the journey, to write my way home.

“The fall was impulsive. All the misguided messages and warnings tumbled over me. When I finally found the bottom of self-defeat, the shelves of my soul empty, I was 43 years old.   Beyond getting married and having children, career, or stability, there were the untold stories of my gangster father and glamour girl mother. The struggle to break my silence began to erupt.  The problem was, they were both dead, and no one knew their stories.

The journey began one day in 1994. I was standing on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Barrington, in West Los Angeles.  This was the crossroads of my adolescence; a few blocks from my high school, where I learned to survive silently.

I was in the phone booth, the same booth from which I used to call my father, and report where I was going after school. The fellow next to me was talking on the phone to his agent, about a script.  I was dialing UCLA, Emergency Psychiatric Counseling, inquiring about treatment.  Choking on my tears and the lopsided humor of our juxtapose conversations, I screamed silently.  The next week I found myself inside the UCLA center, seated next to a woman with a clipboard ready to document what I said.  I kept looking out the window. The Hilgard House, where I lived with my mother, was visible from where I sat. I remembered the days we would all go swimming and would later walk in the village, eat cheeseburgers and shop at Bullocks.  I remembered my cats, my friends, my records and my joy.

“You have sadness and pain, how would you describe that?” the counselor asked.

“What do you mean?”

“How do you handle your sadness?” she said, leaning forward.

“By myself, I just live with it.”

“Do you feel pitiful?” she asked.

“Yes. I have nothing.

“Are you eating and sleeping properly?” she asked making a note.

“No, I ‘m not hungry and I can’t sleep. Today’s my birthday.” I said.

“You’ve made a conscious decision to change haven’t you?”

“I suppose.”

She put the notebook away, and with appeasing eyes assured me she would find a therapist suited to my problems.  I walked outside into the light of day. Across the street from the building was where the Hasty House used to be. We used to have dinner there with my grandmother.  I didn’t know if my grandmother was even alive. We had lost touch.  I lost touch.

There were two people to call, Rudy, my ex-boyfriend and Florence, my adopted Jewish mother, whom I had known fifteen years.  My choice was guided by instinct.

“Hi Florence, its Luellen.”

“Darling, how are you? Oh for heaven’s sake it’s so good to hear your voice. What are you doing?”  I didn’t have an answer.

“How are you?”

“I’m fine, fine. Well, you know since the earthquake, the place is a mess and I don’t have time, I’m so busy. Oh, everyone keeps asking me if I’m all right, the girls think I should go to a therapist… did I tell you I was pinned under my oil painting for three hours before the paramedic arrived.”

“You feel all right though?” I asked.

“Well, to be honest, I’m scared– who wouldn’t be all by herself.”

“What are you doing, you haven’t told me a thing?” she said.

“Florence, I quit my job at the Terraces, and moved out of the condominium.  I was supposed to take over an Art Gallery in Laguna Beach; it’s not working out well.  Do you think I could stay…..?”

“Oh would I love it, come right over. I’ll be home.”
That’s how I ended up at Florence’s home in the summer of 1994. We hadn’t spent much time together since I moved back to San Diego from Los Angeles.  Though 30 years separated us, she was the friend that could be mothering one minute and girlfriend the next.

***

“Oh darling you look wonderful,” she cooed.

“You do too Florence.”

“You think so… really?” she said glancing down at her waistline.

“Yes, you look gorgeous.”

“You’re so skinny? Have you lost more weight?”

“A little, you can fatten me up.”

We sat in the dining room, drinking coffee and I answered questions.  I told her selected chapters from the last scene in my life.  I left out the part about PJ’s alcoholic binges and his partner Aaron’s daily dosage of marijuana.  There was the twisted, anti semantic charge between PJ and all Jewish people, and why I fell into a hole with all the alarms of dysfunctional behavior ringing at once.   Florence told me how she survived the earthquake, and how her daughter Madeleine had sensed she was in trouble, and sent the paramedics.  We were both afraid; we needed daily encouragement to face the unsteadiness. Florence put me upstairs in Sam’s old room, her husband who had passed away several years prior.  I flopped on the fold out bed. I was as close as I’d ever come to giving up on myself.”

 

CHRISTMAS WITH A JEWISH GANGSTER

~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

It you were to ask my father, a man of Jewish faith, raised in a strict Orthodox home, why he celebrated Christmas, this is how he would answer.

“You can’t get away from it, what are you going to do, hide your head in the sand?”  He didn’t voice resentment or personal humiliation celebrating Christmas. My father ignored regulations and conventions for a living, so a religious variance was no different. Half his associates were Jewish, and the other half were Italian. This may account for his interpretation of the Holidays.

In the first weeks of November, I would get a call asking to meet my father in Beverly Hills and pick out the Holiday cards. The meeting began like this every year.

“Is that all you have to wear to go shopping?” examining   my unmatched jeans, and pull over sweater.

“What’s wrong with this outfit?”

“For crying out loud! You look like a gypsy.” After we finish here go to Saks and pick out something for the holidays, you can’t go to Arthur’s like that!”
Then I would follow behind him, twitching with scorn until we sat down to look through the sample books. First, we looked over the messages suited to both Jewish and Catholic faiths. Then we chose a card, a font style, a color, and then he began editing the message. It usually took several hours. He wore his thick reading glasses and studied each sample card, and asked the sales clerk many questions. I remember showing signs of waning interest, and then he’d take off his glasses, stare  directly in my eyes, and say,

“What is it Luellen, am I asking too much of you again?”

“No, I answered. He could feel my impatience with the assignment.

“Which color do you like?” he asked.

“I like the gold.”

“We did gold last year, this year should be different.”

Once he settled on all the details, he ordered two-hundred cards. It never occurred to me that he wanted my participation because I had something to offer. I thought he just wanted company. He could not stand to be alone during the holidays.

Once the cards were delivered, I was told to come over and help address the envelopes because he liked my handwriting. We sat on the same blue and green crushed velvet sofa he had since he moved into the Doheny Towers.  While I crouched over the glass coffee table, he held his guarded black telephone book, and watched me write out each envelope. He compared all the cards he had received from the previous year against his own list, to avoid missing anyone. Sometimes I did not finish until after midnight, and left him sitting there studying and counting the envelopes. Every year, the completion of the cards, was the event that signified the beginning of the holidays.

The next phone call would be to come over and wrap the Christmas presents. I failed in this category, and my sister took over. It was worse than the cards because if her wrapping was unsatisfactory, she had to do it all over.

The next ritual was the outfit, the one I would wear to Arthur’s Thanksgiving party. This had to be classic and colorful. He always said to avoid black, because I should save that for when I’m older. He had to preview the outfit before, and if he disapproved, he would accompany me back to the store to select something else. Appearances were not every thing he used to say, they were number one in making an impression.

All through my twenties, I had to maintain two wardrobes, one for him, and one for me. I’m still dressing one part Al Smiley’s daughter and one part Loulou.

On Thanksgiving Day, the tradition was to arrive at his home at noon to walk.  Like the cards, and the outfit, the walk, wasn’t negotiable, it was part of my tutorial. We walked two hours along Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. He walked with his head a notch above everyone else, to diffuse any interference. People often greeted him, and he kept walking. If I asked who that was he would say, “A lot of people think they know me, just keep walking.”  He walked with his eyes, as much as his legs. He walked with the intention of continuing to school me on human relationships, right down to meeting a stranger in the street.

“Now, be at my house at 3:00 sharp for Arthur’s.”

“Same crowd going this year?” I asked

“Why? Does the same crowd bore you?”

“No, I’m just asking.”

“Well don’t ask silly questions. Arthur can have any crowd he wants, who the hell cares. He saved my life– many times. He asked us to be a part of his family, you should be grateful; one day you’ll figure it out. Not everyone gets invited to Arthur Crowley’s home.”

Every year we were greeted by Arthur’s slightly tipsy blond bombshell wife, who opened the front door and cooed, “Allen dawling, where have you been?”  She kept us standing there;  as long as her routine lasted. My father said she was a showgirl. When I knew her, the shocking pink skintight outfits were Vegas outdated.  She was Ziegfeld Follies beautiful, and always at least two scotches ahead of everyone else. My father wowed her with compliments; I could tell she needed desperately.

We headed to the bar, where the Crowley crowd was admiring Arthur, dressed in a black tuxedo with a red rose, and mixing cocktails. He beamed like a Christmas bulb.  The home was Beverly Hills garish luxury: sunken living room facing the pool, and heavily decorated with dead animals head, Arthur’s trophies, from big game hunting in Africa. I was informed the display was, strictly for show.

At every party there was at least a handful of token celebrities, a comedian to keep the party alive, old clients that became friends, and mutual friends of my father. Dad was in control of the party. If someone dipped too far into obscenity, or tasteless cynicism, he would close in with a subtle reprimand, and remind them, “Careful, my daughters are here.” He was not a big drinker, but he held his glass up, as if he were, and I watched while all the others got drunk, and my father was the only one left with sober humor.

Each year, as I matured, the people became more transparent and likeable. There was one woman in particular I remember. A woman in her fifties, with a face recently chiseled of time by a surgeon. She hovered over me, with her diamond encrusted hands on my shoulders, and unwound the lament of the rich, older, divorced woman. She was envious of my youth, my uncluttered life, my complexion, and my father. Mostly, she was disturbed by her loss of innocence; there was not any trace of it left.  While I sat there, self-conscious of my inexperience and sheltered life, she symbolized a life of bad experiences, ones she could not take back, and ones that were mixed up in greed, power and money. I asked my father who she was, and he warned me to keep a distance. I tried to explain what I felt, but I did not know how. All these years later, I understand that woman.

Then there was the stainless scrubbed beauty that had been discovered in Hawaii and married a wealthy tycoon. She appeared in the Hawaii Five O series for a few years.  She never spoke; she just sat on the bar stool, smoking and wore her clothes with ornamental style.

During the dinner at the formal dining table, all the guests ate with minimal appetites and talked with dragging dry tongues.  After dinner, we returned to the bar for nightcaps. Gradually the cajoling and antics turned into literary chopped liver.  I left the gathering and sat on the sofa with their young daughter, Princess. She was blonde and fair skinned as albacore. She sat on my lap in silence and apprehension. I tried to influence her mood, but she just stared back at me, in the same manner I had with the divorced woman in diamonds.

The Crowley parties were dreaded every year, except when there were no more. Like my father once said, be thankful you are invited, and understand that they will not always be there.