Daughter of the King by Sandra Lansky Page A

I never once saw Daddy’s eyes lingering on the hat-check girl at Dinty Moore’s or a showgirl at the Riviera or the Colonial Inn. Broads were for suckers, was how Damon Runyon might have put it, and Daddy was the last guy on earth to be hoodwinked by a doll. However, given what I had seen of Daddy’s huge “asset,” there may have been more romance and intrigue to Daddy’s life than met the eye. Daddy was the master of never showing emotion or weakness. God knows how many showgirls there might have been.
    On the surface, Uncle Benny was just the opposite of Daddy, a true romantic. My brother Buddy, who was the ultimate Hollywood fan, loved to read the movie magazines and recount Benny’s exploits with likes of Jean Harlow, Mae West, and Wendy Barrie, the elegant British actress who got her stage name from her godfather, the author of Peter Pan . Uncle Benny was Buddy’s hero. Uncle Benny’s mistress, or at least his chief mistress, was named Virginia Hill. She had also been the mistress of Uncle Joe Adonis, just as Jean Harlow had also been the mistress of Uncle Abe Zwillman. It was all very incestuous; the family that played together, stayed together. My brother Buddy had met Virginia Hill with either Benny or Joe, or maybe both, at Dinty Moore’s. I guess there was no such thing as too close for comfort.
    Buddy always went on and on about how beautiful Virginia Hill was and how she had kissed him on the lips. What a teenage fantasy that was. He was maybe fourteen at the time, in 1945, and had just moved back with us at the Beresford. He showed me his red lips, and he didn’t want to wash the lipstick off for days. I was reminded of the fairy tale where the princess kisses the frog and turns him into a prince. Poor Buddy just wanted to be loved. I guess we all did.
    Virginia Hill had kissed a lot of frogs. She was a voluptuous, brassy redhead who had escaped Georgia poverty to become a waitress in Chicago. There she had become the pet of the Al Capone mob, ferrying money and jewels around the country for them, hidden in the linings of expensive mink coats they had bought her. She was areal gun moll, a cool character, and a Hollywood character, and Buddy told me how she had gone west to be in movies. There, through Uncle George Raft, who had become the “family star,” she connected with other stars like Errol Flynn and, most dramatically, with Uncle Benny, much to Aunt Esther’s deep dismay. His nickname for her was “Flamingo,” the name he would give to the new resort in Las Vegas that he would build and Daddy would finance, when Benny’s money ran out.
    Sometime in 1946, Esther decided she couldn’t take it anymore. She got a lawyer and demanded a divorce. She got what she wanted and moved her daughters back east to their Scarsdale estate. At exactly the same time, Mommy did exactly the same thing, though I had no idea until the divorce was final in 1947 and Daddy moved out, virtually overnight, that things had changed between them. I still can’t understand why Mommy asked for the divorce, other than to copycat Esther Siegel. Maybe it was a ploy to get Daddy to stay home more. There certainly weren’t other men in Mommy’s life, nor would there ever be.
    That divorce had been the greatest trauma of my life so far, and it was impossible, as usual, to get Daddy, or Mommy, to explain what had happened. Only Buddy would provide some clues. Mommy had apparently been going to psychiatrists several times a week after that terrible trip to the sanitarium. The doctors, Buddy said, had told her a divorce was a good idea, and Daddy was simply giving Mommy what she asked for, as he always did.
    When they went to court to get their divorce, it was more like a business closing than a war. In those days, people couldn’t just get a divorce because they wanted to. They had to show cause. So Daddy got Uncle Jack and Mommy got Aunt Sadie as their witnesses, all very amicable, and they went as a group before the