Free Daughter of the King by Sandra Lansky Page B

Daddy with open arms, and probably open wallets, which was one of the costs of doing business with them. Bribery was normal when gambling was involved. Daddy’s two great clubs were the Colonial Inn, which looked like Tara in Gone with the Wind and served up southern-fried chicken and Hollywood-level stage shows, and the Club Boheme in the former mansion of the founder of the beach town of Hallandale. Big stars and high stakes were the attraction. Meeting Ginger Rogers was a special treat.
    All the travel was great for my suntan, but it wreaked havoc on my early education. Daddy and Mommy seemed to think that a school was a school was a school. They’d take me out of Birch Wathen in December and send me to the Colonial School in Miami Beach for three months, then come back to Birch Wathen in March. Wherever I was I was always out of sync, and I couldn’t make any friends, because I was the stranger everywhere. That’s my excuse for not even trying to be the great student Daddy would have liked. I wasn’t much at reading, writing, or arithmetic, but I enjoyed the colonial stuff, like learning to make candles and churn butter. To be fair, Daddy never pushed me about school the way he pushed the boys. That only worked with Paul, anyway.
    Maybe Daddy didn’t place much of a premium on a woman’s education. Maybe he just expected me to get married young like Mommy and shop all the time. In his own family, his sister Esther had majored in French at Brooklyn College. Daddy had gotten her a great job at Schenley Whiskey in the Empire State Building, through the company’s owner, Lewis Rosenstiel. An old friend of Daddy’s from Prohibition, Mr. Rosenstiel was from a distinguished German Jewish family from Cincinnati who had been in the distilled spirits business longbefore the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920 made it illegal. During the dry era, Rosenstiel kept his fortune by starting Schenley as a legal, medicinal whiskey company, which made a still bigger fortune in bourbon once Prohibition was repealed.
    For Daddy Rosenstiel’s success surely represented the road not taken, playing by the rules, absurd as they may have seemed. For all his legitimacy, Rosenstiel was branded as a gangster simply by being in the liquor business, a label that Joe Kennedy managed to avoid by using his wealth and patronage with President Roosevelt to get appointed chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and ambassador to England. Then again, Kennedy had the leg up with his Harvard degree. The Lanskys would have to wait for Paul, Daddy often said. He never said anything about waiting for me.
    Even if Daddy didn’t think of me as being the family’s future messiah, I took comfort in being his pet. When he was in New York, he’d take me everywhere with him, and not just to Dinty Moore’s and to the theatre. He took me to his gym, a place called George Brown’s Gymnasium and Health Club on West 57th Street, to watch him play handball and paddleball, rarely with my uncles, whom Daddy ridiculed as being lazy, but with young pros from the club. He was good, fast, strong, and very competitive, always beating the much younger and bigger pros. And no, they didn’t let him win because he was Meyer Lansky. Both he and they sweated way too much for that. After school, he would also take Paul to Brown’s for some sweaty father-son bonding.
    After his workouts, Daddy would often go for simple food, and not the grand restaurants we’d go to at night with my uncles. We’d often go to Jewish delicatessens, so brightly lit, smelling so strongly of garlic, and so New York. Daddy was very specific about his order: a hot corned beef on seedless rye, extra fatty, with just the tiniest smear of hot mustard. Anything else and back it would go. If we went to a coffee shop counter and ordered a hamburger, it had to be medium rare on a toasted, buttered bun. One of the few times I saw him get angry was when the waiter or waitress dared to garnish his