Daughter of the King by Sandra Lansky Read Free Book Online

and Daddy would take long walks along the Charles River Esplanade. I used to watch them from our windows, or when I was playing in the park by the Charles with Nanny Minnie and my one friend, Wendy, whom I named my very first doll after. Wendy was always my favorite name, long before I even knew about Peter Pan .
    Notwithstanding Buddy’s daily therapy with Dr. Carruthers, we seemed to be travelling all the time. In family scrapbooks, I have pictures of myself as a very little girl in Florida, Arizona, California, and Cuba, all hot spots to escape the icy Boston winters and, more important, for Daddy to do his endless deals. He understood how much Americans loved betting, and he was betting his own career on it. I remember fondly one train trip to Phoenix, where we visited Daddy’s dog track there. He had chimpanzees dressed as jockeys riding the dogs on their backs. That made a huge impression on me. I also had a wonderful trip to Cuba, my first international journey. Mommy made a scrapbook with a bunch of press clippings of me in 1940 at the legendary Hotel Nacional in Havana, where the Cuban daily El País wrote that the Lanskys were in residence there for ten weeks. A world war was erupting. Europe was freezing and dying. Most of America was still getting over the Depression. And here we were amidst the palms and the hibiscus, the happiest kids on earth. Charmed lives.
    Even with Daddy’s philosophy of staying under the radar, he was front-page news and a VIP all the way. There were pictures of me with my curly blonde hair in a white bonnet and white sundressconfidently pushing my own stroller, the little golden girl. And there was my brother Paul at the racetrack, dashing in a rep tie and white Bermudas, a pair of binoculars around his neck so he could see the precise result at the finish line. But for all the copy about Daddy, he and my mother and Buddy were never photographed for the paper.
    Even when we were in the Cuban paradise, education always took precedence for Daddy. He sent Buddy and Paul to the American School in Havana, figuring a few months of lessons were better than none at all. For all his limitations, Buddy could still use his hands a bit. He spoke beautifully. And he walked by holding on to you. Under the circumstances, he had amazing poise.
    What was Daddy doing in Cuba? In his travels, Daddy had become good friends with Cuba’s military ruler, Colonel Fulgencio Batista. Batista, impressed with Daddy’s success in the carpet joints across America, offered him a plum contract to renovate and manage Havana’s famed Oriental Park racetrack and its two casinos. Oriental Park had been a haven for American millionaires in the Roaring Twenties. But the Yankee millionaires had gone home in the Depression, and Batista wanted them back. Daddy brought in a New England friend named Lou Smith, one of the disciples of King Solomon, who ran horse and dog tracks in the Boston area, to run the racetrack at Oriental Park for him.
    Daddy was like a business consultant, the McKinsey of the Mob. However, where gambling was legal, there was no Mob stigma to running a casino, only the huge prestige that got Daddy written up in the papers. The respect must have felt good, so good that he took his family to Havana for the whole season to bask in it. The millionaires started coming back: the Vanderbilts, the ice-skating star Sonja Henie, who had been the obsession of Adolf Hitler and had rejected him cold. But she liked my father, who wore a white dinner jacket and ran the places just like Humphrey Bogart did as Rick in Casablanca . Being the patrón of Oriental Park was a dry run for creating Vegas a decade henceand for turning Havana into the Las Vegas of the Caribbean, another decade after that. Meyer Lansky would soon own the Nacional, where we were staying. That was like owning the Waldorf in New York.
    In 1941, we faced the reality that medical miracles were not going to happen in Boston. We moved back to New York