Daughter of the King (24 page)

To be married to a gay fortune hunter was about as bad as it could get, I thought. Then it got worse. On Daddy’s birthday, July 4, 1957, when Gary was just one year old, the gay fortune hunter walked out on me and moved in with a new boyfriend. Now I had not only been used, but abused and abandoned. My only consolation was that Marvin had left me for a man and not another woman. That would have been worse, more of a failure on my part. How, though, could Daddy, who knew the ways of the world better than anyone, have not spotted what Marvin was all about? Maybe he had. Maybe he felt I was a lost cause and accepted the situation.

Shortly after Marvin departed, I had a dinner with Daddy and his friend Tony Salerno at Dinty Moore’s. Uncle Tony and I shared a love of horses. He had a big horse farm in Rhinebeck, New York, and often invited me up to ride. He was also considered New York’s “numbers king” and was the sponsor of all the biggest heavyweight championship boxing matches. Uncle Tony seemed far more upset about my being left as a single mother than my father was. “Something oughta be done,” he said, over and over, in a soft voice that belied his intense anger and determination. “Let me take care of him, Meyer.”

This was the first time in my life that I actually became aware of the role of violence in my father’s world. The ability “to teach Marvin a lesson” was a heady power to have at my disposal. Nevertheless, I could not bring myself to invoke it. Before Daddy could answer, I broke in, pleading for Marvin’s safety, if not his life. I couldn’t bear for anything to befall the father of my child, no matter how awful he had been to me.

One benefit of losing my husband was that I sort of got my mother back. Mommy seemed to thrive in crises, in helping me. She pulled herself together and began spending lots of time in my apartment, looking after and loving her new grandson. That made me happy when everything else made me sad. Uncle Julie’s wife, Ruth, came over almost every day, and Daddy chipped in with new full-time maids. He didn’t trust Maddie. She belonged to Marvin; she could be a spy. In a way, I was having my baby without having to do it myself. When people asked me how I managed as a young child bride, I told them the truth: “I had help.”

Aunt Esther’s lawyer husband drew up our divorce papers. Despite his greed for what I had, there was no way Marvin was going to cross Daddy by demanding anything he shouldn’t. Daddy was willing to give him Spindletop. That was enough of a going-away present. He would have limited visitation rights. I would have custody of the baby. Saying that I was better able to care for Gary than Marvin was
damning with faint praise. Again, I thanked my lucky stars for my family’s help.

Although I was now a mother and a soon to be divorcee, I was anything but grown up. Daddy knew this, and it bothered him. He sat me down for a heart-to-heart talk, one of our few. “You have two choices,” he told me rather sternly. “You can go to school or go to work. But you have to do
something
.” To me it felt like a choice between measles and mumps. I couldn’t bear to go back to school. I had never been much of a student, and now that I had tasted freedom, I couldn’t go back to the prison of a classroom. Besides, I would be older than my new classmates, so I would feel terribly self-conscious, a scarlet woman who had been held back. School was out.

The other choice was work, an equally alien concept. I had never worked a day in my life. What could I do? Not cook, that was for sure. Not type. I didn’t want to answer phones. “What do you
like
to do?” Daddy asked.

I liked horses, but I didn’t think I was good enough to be a riding instructor. What else? “Shop,” I came up with.

“Done,” Daddy said. “That’s it. You’ll go to work at Saks. You like Saks, right?”

Did I ever. Daddy had a friend, Connie Noonan, who was the big boss of the docks in New Jersey. Maybe because many of Saks’s imported goods came through the ports there, Connie Noonan was “connected” high up at the luxury store. One call and I had my first job. I was about to embark on the odyssey of becoming a grown-up. I was about to become a working girl. However, because of the glamour and temptations of being the daughter of one of the kings of New York, I was about to become a playgirl as well. Working girl and playgirl were at odds with each other, not to mention with being a good mother. But I was a big girl now, wasn’t I? About to turn eighteen, I was all ready to take a flying leap into maturity. But I would land in a three-ring circus of my own.

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
HAT’S
A
MORE

I
wasn’t the only poor little rich girl walking the perfumed floors at Saks Fifth Avenue. A few days after I started, in September 1956, I ran into Maria Doto, the gorgeous daughter of Joe Adonis, doing the same jobs. Connie Noonan had also gotten Maria into Saks. We were called “floaters,” working umbrellas one day, women’s lingerie another, men’s socks the third. There were many heiresses, debutantes, girls from top families, doing exactly what we were doing, some to have something to do, some to meet men, some to get the employee discounts so they could dress better than the customers they were selling to. Working at Saks was to fashion what working in the William Morris mailroom was to entertainment. You had to be connected at the top to get in at the bottom.

I got to know the young comic Jackie Mason, in men’s pajamas. I sold Loretta Young a scarf. I was surprised that she was wearing braces on her teeth, years after being a big star. I guessed being beautiful was a never-ending effort. I met Ed Sullivan browsing in the Stag Shop. He recognized me from my name tag and made a huge fuss over me, declaring what a great man my father was. In terms of the bottom line, Saks was a losing proposition for me. I spent everything I made,
and a whole lot more, buying Gary clothes in the children’s department, the best in the city, and the one where Mommy had spent so much money on me when I was little. I sent all my purchases at Saks C.O.D. to Mommy, who graciously covered the bills, as ever. I was too embarrassed by my extravagances to send them to Daddy. One day when I was walking home from work, I was hit by a cab. My leg was injured, not enough to go to the hospital, but enough that I couldn’t walk to work. Taking cabs back and forth would eat up my salary.

I used the injury as an excuse to quit. My next job was modeling. Modeling? Me? Well, in those days, you didn’t have to be as tall as a giraffe to be a model. The top models of the era, Suzy Parker and her sister Dorian Leigh, were only about five foot seven. That was just three inches taller than I was. Daddy may have been tiny for a man, but I was close to normal for a girl. Plus I was skinny for the time, 110 pounds, having shed my pregnancy weight and then some. It all started when I met a woman named Lillian Birnbaum at Saks. Lillian sold luxury clothes wholesale and below, at her apartment near mine on West End Avenue. A coat that would be $350 at Saks would be $75 at Lillian’s. Some people suggested she was selling stolen merchandise. I didn’t ask. A deal was a deal.

Lillian invited me to shop at her place, which was full of rich girls looking for bargains. Then she asked me to model for her. She told me I reminded her of the new French actress Brigitte Bardot, who had become the talk of the world by running down the beach in St. Tropez close to naked in
And God Created Woman
. Several of Lillian’s customers told me the same thing. I guess we were both petite and blonde and had bosoms, though I was too embarrassed to show off mine, certainly not like Bardot. I suspect Lillian, who was a master of flattery, told me of the resemblance and hired me as a model so I would spend even more money on her clothes and recommend her to the wives of Daddy’s powerful circle.

Whatever, I was totally lacking in self-awareness and totally in need of self-esteem. So I took the flattery to heart, so much so that
I decided, skinny as I was, that to be a model I needed to be even skinnier. The only real model I had ever met was Tippi Hedren, the future Hitchcock star, who used to ride at the Aldrich Stables, whose name had been changed to the Manhattan Riding Club. Hedren was even thinner than I was. She was also professionally beautiful, which I was not. But being in dire need of illusions that may have been delusions, I took the modeling goal seriously. To that unhealthy end, I found a fancy diet doctor on Central Park South who prescribed amphetamines, or diet pills, to suppress what little appetite I managed to have. These were part of the pill culture Jacqueline Susann would write about in her 1966 best-seller
Valley of the Dolls
, her “dolls” being the downers, or barbiturates, that her characters knocked themselves out with. My pills were taking my slender body and ego on a soaring trip. I had been down so long, up wasn’t a bad way to go. For a while.

I made my drug and other connections at my new beauty parlor, the Larry Mathews Salon, on West 57th Street in the slightly seedy Great Northern Hotel. Larry Mathews was to Elizabeth Arden what the Carnegie Deli was to Dinty Moore’s, nothing fancy but wild and, oh, what a crowd. When Marvin ran my beauty program, he had turned me into an aging frump. Now, with him gone, I felt entitled to a walk on the wild side. Larry Mathews was as wild as beauty got. The place was open around the clock, like an all-night diner. The clientele was pure show business. Marilyn Monroe was said to go there, though I never saw her. I didn’t see the Sardi’s opening night crowd, but rather burlesque strippers from 42nd Street, chorus girls from the Copacabana, struggling actresses from Stella Adler and the Actor’s Studio, and lots and lots of pretty women without day jobs who turned out to be fancy call girls. This was a long, long way from Birch Wathen and Calhoun.

I heard about Mathews through the Copacabana grapevine. Other customers, who earned their living from the neck down, went for elaborate hair removal and coiffure of the nether regions, an art pioneered by Mathews, an ex-GI and head shot photographer who had a
talent for getting his customers more camera ready than they thought they were. A lot of the strippers would want to dye their private areas the most exotic colors, and the salon accepted all challenges. Suffice it to say, it was an education.

At Mathews, I became friends with a pretty blonde girl from Queens named Joy, who was the girlfriend of Murray Kaufman, a song plugger who had made a hit of
How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?
He would soon become the famous disc jockey Murray the K. Murray was married, though that didn’t seem to bother Joy, who went out with lots of married men, as long as they “took care” of her. Joy had the bright idea of fixing me up on a date with Murray’s friend George DeWitt, the handsome and famous host of
Name That Tune
, one of the biggest game shows on television. Two contestants would face off, and an orchestra would begin to play. Then, as soon as they could recognize the song, the contestants would race each other across the stage to ring a big bell and “name that tune.” The winner would get money and the chance to keep racing and ringing. What innocent times we were in, though Joy was anything but innocent.

At first I was too intimidated to go out with George, who was not only a huge celebrity but was married. Not that I was looking for a new boyfriend. I was too shell-shocked by Marvin for that. Joy insisted I needed an adventure, so I gave in. Murray sent me over to the studio, where I watched them shoot
Name That Tune
live. I was so impressed at George’s charisma. He was a real TV star! I hoped I wouldn’t be boring to him. After the show, George took me to a very dark restaurant called Roma di Notte, where the seating was in grottos. I supposed that since George was both famous and married, he wanted to lay low. I wasn’t insulted.

But I was overwhelmed. George, in his late thirties, was so good looking, with the thickest, most amazing dark hair I had ever seen. He was also charming and funny. He had been a fighter pilot in the war, so Paul’s being in flight school gave us something in common.
The fact George knew my father seemed to make him a little nervous at first. “I don’t want to get rubbed out if you don’t like me,” he joked. That put us on a more equal footing, and we both relaxed.

George, an Italian whose real last name was Florentine, had gotten his start as a singing waiter in Atlantic City, where he grew up. His dad had been a policeman. In addition to starring with Frank Sinatra at Daddy’s friend Skinny d’Amato’s 500 Club in Atlantic City, George had been a mime, specializing in impersonations of black stars like Jack Benny’s valet, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. Today he might have been boycotted by the NAACP. Those were the days of
Amos ’n’ Andy
, and that was the humor then. He also had been a regular at the Riviera on the Palisades. In a way, we were almost family.

Then came the moment of truth. George invited me back to his apartment on Central Park South, in the very same building as George Wood, when Daddy was living with him. Uncle Georgie would have been the last person I wanted to run into. The risk of exposure did add to the thrill of it all, but we made it into the apartment unobserved. The view of the park was very romantic. George had the fanciest record player I had ever seen. He put on the number one hit of the week, Dean Martin’s
Memories Are Made of This
. George had a big bar in the apartment. Having just turned eighteen last December, I had finally started drinking, sweet things that tasted more like soda than alcohol. George concocted something for me. We held hands, kissed. At a certain point, George began to lead me into the bedroom. I stopped in his bathroom to prepare for the main event. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw there: two head molds with toupees on top. All that great hair was a fake. I wanted to flee. But how could I be rude, and to a star?

Adding irony to injury, when I emerged from the bathroom, another big hit of the moment, Frankie Laine’s
The Great Pretender
was blaring away. In bed all I could think about was the hair. I was nervous to touch it, but too curious not to. It didn’t move. Not a hair. And it had looked so
real
. I can’t even remember the sex. I think it was
better than with Marvin. I’m not sure. When I was leaving, George seemed awkward. It had nothing to do with the toupee. “I’d love to give you . . . something,” he stammered. “But I know you, of all people, don’t need the money.” Because Murray Kaufman gave Joy money, George may have thought I was moonlighting as a call girl as well. Until he found out who my father was. What a joke! I almost wanted to accept it, for fun, but I was too much of a lady to be a lady of the evening.