The Jews in America Trilogy (169 page)

At Seagram, Mr. Sam's elder son, Edgar, was assumed to be the crown prince and heir apparent. But, again, Edgar Bronfman was given titles in the company but little in the way of authority, as Mr. Sam continued to test his son's “readiness.” Physically, Edgar resembled his pudgy father not at all. Tall, slender, dark, and handsome—even dashing—he looked like a youthful version of the actor Joseph Cotten. He also had a reputation for enjoying high living—nightclubs, fast cars, motorcycles, and the company of film stars. His father often accused him of being a “playboy.” But there was a toughness about Edgar that he had inherited from his father, and a quick temper, and employees at Seagram quickly learned to treat Edgar Bronfman with extreme respect. Edgar was shrewd. He had waited until he was old enough—shades of the days of the czars' forced conscriptions of Russian Jews!—to escape being drafted into the United States Army, before he became an American citizen. He and his wife then proceeded to build the first full-scale estate that had been built in Westchester County in over a generation—manor house, tennis court, stables, garages, pool, pool house, helicopter landing pad—hard by what amounted to the family compound of his wife's German-Jewish relatives, the Lehmans, Lewisohns, and Loebs.

In the 1950s, a writer for the old
Holiday
magazine described Edgar's new house as “a huge Georgian pile,” and Edgar was not amused. The editor of
Holiday
, Ted Patrick, was summarily summoned to appear, along with the writer of the story, at Edgar's office to apologize for the slight. The threat, if this was not done, was that Seagram's would cancel all its advertising in all Curtis magazines. These, at the time, included not only
Holiday
but the
Saturday Evening Post
. The Bronfman ultimatum was delivered to Ted Patrick while he was on a train between New York and Washington. Patrick's reply was: “Tell Mr. Bronfman to fuck himself.”

Later, Patrick would admit that he had taken this stand with some trepidation. The
Saturday Evening Post
was already in shaky financial circumstances, and the loss of Seagram's advertising would amount to several million dollars a year. But, in the end, Patrick's hunch proved right. Seagram did not cancel
its Curtis budget—reportedly because Mr. Sam had called his son into his office and reprimanded him for overstepping himself, muttering gruffly, “We advertise in those magazines because we need
them
, not because they need
us.”

But though the episode ended as a tempest in a teapot, it showed that Edgar Bronfman was a man to be reckoned with.

In the summer of 1957, Edgar Bronfman, then twenty-eight, confronted his father and told him that it was time for him to be made president of Joseph E. Seagram and Sons. Mr. Sam disagreed, and took the position that Edgar might be better suited to work in a field other than the liquor business. A stormy scene followed, at the end of which Edgar stood up and said, “If you're saying that the company isn't good enough for me, then I don't want to work for it.” It sounded like another ultimatum and Mr. Sam, after consulting with his wife, knuckled under, and gave Edgar what he wanted.

This might never have happened, however, had not Mr. Sam, over the previous few years, made an important marketing mistake for Seagram's—one of the very few mistakes, if not the only one, that he would ever admit to making in his life. He had refused to take seriously the growing popularity of vodka in the United States. He had been repeatedly advised by others in the company, including his son, of the trend toward vodka, and had been urged to get into the vodka business. But Mr. Sam, ever the believer in the supremacy of blended whiskeys, refused to accept the fact that Americans would take up a drink that had absolutely no taste or aroma, and one that was associated with Soviet Russia to boot. By the late 1950s, with competing companies capitalizing on the new vodka craze, Mr. Sam—while stubbornly maintaining that the fad would not last—reluctantly agreed that his judgment had been wrong. His son then had the exquisite pleasure of telling his overbearing father, “I told you so.”

A great deal has been written about Italian-American “crime families” in which sons were trained to follow in their fathers' footsteps. But Jewish criminals, with whom the Italians frequently did business, had different notions. Though, like the Italians, they were family men, the Jews did not have dynastic ambitions for their sons to succeed them in lives of crime—the “Godfather” syndrome, as it were. On the contrary, the
Jewish gangsters usually saw to it that their children were educated in the finest boarding schools and colleges, and that they were otherwise steered into lives of traditional American upper-class respectability and civic rectitude. Their sons were educated to be doctors, lawyers, scientists, and they guided their daughters into marriages with solid, upstanding young men who had charge accounts at Brooks Brothers. For the most part, the family of the Jewish gangster was kept unaware of what the breadwinner did for a living. (“In real estate,” Meyer Lansky's wife would say, which, in a sense, was true.) As Mickey Cohen put it, “We had a code of ethics like the ones among bankers, other people in other walks of life, that one never involved his wife or family in his work.” Like the socialists and reformers, the Jewish gangsters saw an American system that was skewed and bent in favor of the rich and well-established, where the cards were stacked against the immigrant and the poor. Gangsterism offered a simple shortcut, outside the system, to money and power and social mobility. Once these had been achieved, the next generation was supposed to give the family “a good name.”

At the same time, there was still a kind of begrudging admiration for the Jewish criminal in the Jewish community at large. For one thing, he competed physically, and successfully, with the non-Jewish enemy, showing the hostile and violent anti-Semite that he could be beaten at his own game. When the Jews of Europe were under threat of annihilation, the gangster offered American Jews a secret and vicarious sense of satisfaction and pride.

The fact was that the gangsters provided a real social service to the Jewish community, as protectors and defenders of their own people. At a time when America was awash with anti-Semitism coming from high places—Henry Ford, the Ku Klux Klan, Gerald L. K. Smith, Father Charles Coughlin, the German-American Bund—the Jewish community appreciated anyone who would come to its defense, regardless of the means. Meyer Lansky's men had helped break up Bund rallies in New York and New Jersey. In Detroit, Jewish mobsters had saved Jewish peddlers and store owners from having to pay protection money to Polish and Italian hoodlums. In Chicago, more than five thousand Jews had turned out for the funeral of the Lansky-connected gangster Samuel “Nails” Morton to express their
gratitude for his helping to protect poorer neighborhoods against raids by anti-Semitic and Jew-baiting Irish and Italians. In a sense, men like Morton were community servants, and in a sense, they were good Americans. And their children would be even better.

This was certainly the attitude of Meyer Lansky. Lansky liked to recall how, as a boy, he had watched in bewilderment as the older Jews in his Delancey Street neighborhood shuffled past—in their
yarmulkes
and prayer shawls, with beards and side curls—on their daily rounds of worship at the synagogues and yeshivas. “Where are they going, I asked myself? Where were they getting in the new world? They had simply carried the old world across the ocean with them. They had gone nowhere. They were going nowhere. They were at a dead end.”

Lansky, who had gone far, was determined that his children would go much farther. He was devastated when his first son, Bernard, suffered a birth trauma that resulted in a diagnosis of cerebral palsy, and Lansky was told that Buddy, as he was called, would be severely handicapped for the rest of his life. But his second son, Paul, was born normal and healthy, to Lansky's great relief, and it was on Paul that he centered his ambitions. He doted, meanwhile, on his daughter, Sandra, who was called Sally. But the children were soon a cause of dissension between Lansky and his wife.

For one thing, Anna Lansky accused her husband of blaming her for Buddy's pathetic disability. She also accused him of spoiling Sally with too many expensive toys and gifts. And, as for Paul, Anna Lansky wanted her son to be a rabbi. Lansky had quite a different plan for Paul. He wanted to send his healthy son to West Point, and have him become an American army officer. These disagreements ended, in 1947, with the Lanskys' divorce. The following year he married Thelma Scheer Schwartz, a pretty blond divorcée who had been his manicurist in the barbershop of the Embassy Hotel in Miami Beach. “Teddy” Lansky was five years younger and several inches taller than her new husband, but these discrepancies seemed to bother the newlyweds not at all, and theirs would be a long and singularly happy marriage.

Of his three children, the only one he would permit to work for his organization was the crippled Buddy, and Lansky saw to it that Buddy was employed only in licit businesses—in one
of the hotels Lansky operated legally in Florida, Nevada, or Cuba, where Buddy worked as a switchboard operator. Of course, it would be darkly suggested that its switchboard was a hotel's nerve center, and that Buddy's real assignment was to tap and monitor calls between underworld figures and other important guests. Lansky himself ridiculed this suggestion, pointing out that a simple, sedentary job as a telephone operator was probably the only sort of work poor Buddy would ever be able to perform in life. Even at that chore, Buddy was frustratingly slow.

Sally Lansky was sent to the exclusive Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, where she earned very good grades. After graduating, she delighted Lansky with her marriage to a Jewish boy named Marvin Rappaport. The Rappaports were old family friends from Prohibition days, and were now legitimately and respectably in the liquor business.

Meanwhile, Lansky moved forward with his plan to have Paul appointed to the United States Military Academy.

A gangster's son at West Point! It seemed an idea right out of a Hollywood movie. It seemed an impossible dream. But Lanksy wanted Paul to be shaped into a true American, and in the service of his country. (This unswerving patriotism was rather typical of Jewish gangsters, despite the fact that they had gotten rich by bending America's laws.) And the dream came true, as most things in Meyer Lansky's life had a way of doing. Despite a deep undercurrent of anti-Semitism at West Point, Paul Lansky received his appointment. (Like many sons of immigrants, Paul was taller, huskier, and handsomer than his father.) How had Lansky done it? Naturally there were mutterings that he knew and dealt with a number of important Washington politicians, many of whom were bribable. Meyer Lansky would always hotly deny that any bribery or arm-twisting was involved in getting Paul his appointment; he had got it on his own academic and athletic merits—and, indeed, that appeared to be the case.

At West Point, Paul Lansky comported himself admirably. One of his roommates was the son of Colonel Monroe E. Freeman, an aide to General Eisenhower. After graduating in 1954, Paul became a captain in the air force, and an ace pilot in the Korean War. Following that, he toured American college and university campuses as a lecturer and recruiter. In the latter
capacity, he was considered one of the finest in the military—a salesman of American ideals in war and in peace.

When Paul had married and Meyer Lansky's first grandson was born, Paul informed his father that the baby was to be named Meyer Lansky II. Lansky was appalled, and begged his son not to do this. So much ill fame had gathered around the name of Meyer Lansky, he argued, that it seemed unfair to ask this child to bear the same burden for the rest of his life. But Paul was adamant. He was proud of his father, and wanted to honor him this way. Lansky was deeply touched.

When Eisenhower was elected President in 1952, Meyer Lansky was rather surprised to receive, through Colonel Freeman, an invitation to the inaugural and ball. Feeling that it would be inappropriate for someone of his tarnished reputation to attend the inauguration ceremonies of a United States President, Lansky demurred. Colonel Freeman wrote back, “Don't you know that in our clubs we play the same slot machines that you've got in your casinos, and that we used to drink your bootleg whiskey?”

Lansky was touched by this sentiment as well. But, ever the gentleman, always the believer in seemliness and propriety, Meyer Lansky nonetheless wired back his regrets.

*
He never took out American citizenship papers, however, in the faint hope that the Canadian honors might still someday be forthcoming.

*
In 1959, for example, Robert Sarnoff predicted that “for home use the 1969 set will replace the present picture tube with a thin, flat screen that can be hung on the wall like a painting.”

17

WITCH-HUNTING

The 1950s were troubled times for the entertainment industry. With the war over, but with wartime energies still at a peak, America once again turned, with superpatriotic zeal, to the task of rooting out enemies, real or imagined, at home. It was the same kind of sentiment that had gripped the country after the first war, and that had brought Rose Pastor Stokes to trial for sedition. Soviet Russia had been America's ally in the second war, but that no longer mattered, and Russia was now America's archenemy again. Communists and Communist sympathizers were suspected of lurking in high places, and the target of the Red hunt became show business, and particularly that “pervasive shaper of American thought,” the motion picture industry.

The Communist witch-hunts of the early 1950s were not motivated by anti-Semitism exactly—at least, no one on the House Un-American Activities Committee had the courage to come right out and say so. But, since the movie business was heavily Jewish, and most of HUAC's targets in Hollywood were Jews, the effect was the same. And, though the cause of Russian-Jewish radicalism—in Hollywood and elsewhere
—had been quiescent for at least a dozen years, as American Communists had become disillusioned with the party in the wake of news of Stalin's excesses in the 1930s, the phrase “Jewish radical” still had an inflammatory ring. The idea that Jewish radicals pervaded the film industry was an easy one for the committee to sell to the public, which had been whipped into a frenzy of fear that Russia was about to conquer the world. And, of course, Hollywood, with all its connotations of wealth, glamour, and excess, made an obviously tempting target for HUAC. The subpoenaing of movie stars to testify as to their political leanings assured the committee that its abundance of anti-Communist zeal would be well publicized.