Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (65 page)

Kahn, R. T. “Amazing Grace.”
Ladies’ Home Journal,
September 1982.

Kelly, Mrs. John B., as told to Richard Gehman. “My Daughter Grace Kelly: Her Life and Romances.” Published in both the
New York Journal American
and the
Los Angeles Examiner,
January 15-24, 1956.

Kerr, Carson. “Grace Kelly: Record-Breaking Bombshell.”
Toronto Star Weekly,
December 11, 1954.

Kobler, John. “The Man with the Crocodile Briefcase.”
Saturday Evening Post,
March 24, 1962.

Levin, Robert. “Why Grace Kelly Became a Princess.”
Redbook,
February 1957.

LeVine, Lizanne Kelly. “Princess Grace of Monaco’s Sister Lizanne Kelly LeVine Recounts Exclusively for
Hello!
the Fascinating Life of the Kelly Clan.”
Hello!,
London, September 9, and October 3, 10, 17, 24, and 30, 1992.

Life.
“Hollywood’s Hottest Property.” April 26, 1954.

Mann, Roderick. “Why Princess Grace Gets Mad at Stories About Her Daughter.”
Sunday Express,
September 1, 1974.

Martin, Pete. “The Luckiest Girl in Hollywood.”
Saturday Evening Post,
October 30, 1954.

Morley, Sheridan. “How I Miss My Grace.”
Daily Mail,
October 2, 1984.

New York Times.
“New Monte Carlo Hotel Due.” May 30, 1971.

— “Monaco Palace Retracts Brake-Failure Story.” September 21,

1982.

— “John B. Kelly Jr., U.S. Olympic Chief.” March 3, 1985.

— “Margaret Kelly, 91, Grace Kelly’s Mother.” January 8, 1990.

O’Connor, Ulick. “Princess Grace Drops a Secret.”
Sunday Mirror,
August 24, 1969.

Parsons, Louella. “Louella O. Parsons.”
Los Angeles Examiner.
Dates as per the citations in the source notes.

Parton, Margaret. “What Makes Grace Kelly Different?”
Ladies’ Home Journal,
March 1956.

Pepper, Curtis Bill. “Princess Grace’s Problems as a Mother.”
McCall’s,
December 1974.

Philadelphia Inquirer.
“Doctor: Grace Had Stroke in Car.” September 17, 1982.

Playboy.
“Interview: Princess Grace.” January 1966.

Schallert, Edwin. “Critic Sees Monaco’s Gain as Filmland Loss.”
Los Angeles Times,
January 22, 1956.

Scullin, George. “The Girl Who Dares To.”
Motion Picture,
March 1955.

Sinden, Donald. “With Sinden on Safari.”
Sunday Telegraph,
February 28, 1982.

Skolsky, Sidney. “Hollywood Is My Beat.”
New York Post.
Dates as per the citations in the source notes.

Sunday Telegraph.
“Princess Grace to Get £357, 000.” April 1, 1962.

Time.
“The Girl in White Gloves.” January 31, 1955.

“Pennsylvania: The Philadelphia Princess.” January 16, 1956.

Tivey-Faucon, Madge. “Inside the Palace with Princess Grace.”
Cosmopolitan,
March 1964.

Vinocur, John. “For Princess’s Family, The Parting Is Forlorn.”
New York Times,
September 19, 1982.

— “High Society.”
New York Times Magazine,
June 18, 1978.

— “Princess Stricken Before Crash, Doctors Say.”
New York Times,

September 17, 1982.

Wall Street Journal.
“Loews, 2 Firms Abroad Plan $35 Million Complex For Monaco in Late 1974.” May 25, 1971.

Walters, Barbara. “How Now, Princess Grace?”
Ladies’ Home Journal,
November 1966.

Washington Post.
“Problem Child or Royal Scam?” January 19, 1994.

WFB (William F. Buckley). “Princess Grace, RIP.”
National Review,
October 15, 1982.

Whitaker, James. “ ‘I carried Stephanie from the car . . .’ “
Daily Mirror,
September 16, 1982.

White, Sam. “Grace and the Monaco Match-maker.”
The Standard,
September 17, 1982.

Winsten, Archer. “ ‘The Country Girl’ at Criterion.”
New York Post,
December 16, 1954.

Zee, Donald. “Grace, the Queen of Hollywood.”
Woman’s Sunday Mirror,
March 13, 1955.

Zolotow, Maurice. “Grace of Monaco.”
Cosmopolitan,
December 1961.

PRIVATE PUBLICATIONS AND PRIVATE PAPERS

Isaac D. Levy.
A memoir by Isaac D. Levy. Published privately in Philadelphia.

Kelly Is Brickwork.
A brief company history and publicity brochure, produced under the chairmanship of John B. Kelly, Jr., sometime after 1979.

Paramount News.
A publicity newsletter produced by Paramount Studios in the 1950s. It can be consulted today in the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Uncle Manie.
A memoir of Manie Sacks by Herman Rush. Published privately in Philadelphia.

DOCUMENTARYFILMS AND FILMED INTERVIEWS

Billington, Kevin (Director).
Once Upon a Time Is Now... the Story of Princess Grace.

NBC TV, 1977. Producers: William and Sandra Allyn. Presenter: Lee Grant.

— (Director and Producer).
These Humble Shores: A BBC TV Tonight

Presentation,
1963. Presenter: Alan Whicker.

Dornhelm, Robert (Director).
The Children of Theatre Street.
Peppercorn-Wormser, 1977. Producer: Earle Mack. Associate producer: Jean Dalrymple. Artistic director: Oleg Briansky.

Coming soon by Robert Lacey . . .

A revised and updated edition of his bestselling

LITTLE MAN – Meyer Lansky And The Gangster Life

T
hey called him the Godfather of the Godfathers, the Chairman of the Board of the National Crime Syndicate, the Mafia’s banker. They credited him with a personal fortune of $300 million, with having said “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.” He was portrayed on the screen in
The Godfather II
as Hyman Roth, dividing up Cuba with his fellow gangsters.

If, in the mythology of organized crime, Al Capone symbolized the crude menace of the machine gun and the baseball bat, Meyer Lansky stood for the brains, the sophistication, the hot money, the sheer cleverness of it all. And yet, when it came down to it, no law enforcement official in sixty years could find much to pin on the supposed boss of bosses, and within a few years of Lansky’s death, his crippled son was living on welfare.

LITTLE MAN is a book about organized crime unlike any other yet written. In this brilliant biography and social history, Robert Lacey separates the strands of fact and legend in Meyer Lansky’s career, revealing a truth about the gangster life in America that is far more fascinating and dramatic than fiction.

A Jewish immigrant from Russia, Lansky broke into a life of crime running crap games and acting as a
shtarke,
a strong-arm man for Jewish and Italian gamblers on the Lower East Side of New York. Teaming up with his pals Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Siegel, he graduated to bootlegging. Clever Meyer became the master of the “share out”, keeping all the figures in his head and dividing up the spoils from smuggled liquor shipments. In the thirties and forties he moved on to illegal gambling, running the classiest casinos around. He invested in modern Las Vegas -though he never really liked the place - and became the gambling consultant to President Batista during Havana’s glory days. In World War II he even acted as a go-between for the US Navy, organizing gangster help to the Allied Invasion of Sicily.

But in 1951 Senator Estes Kefauver’s Crime Committee named Lansky as one of the leaders of organized crime in America, giving fuel to the legend that would eventually destroy the gangster. Cuba’s revolutionary leaders expelled him as a corrupting influence. His attempts to go into legitimate business and later to settle in Israel were frustrated by the shadows of his past. His every step was dogged by the FBI and the IRS, as his family disintegrated and his health declined. His death was front page news, but at the end his power, influence and wealth were all gone.

Based on dramatic new documentation and on first-hand interviews with Lansky’s close friends and business associates, with law enforcement experts and with members of the Lansky family, LITTLE MAN is a powerful and irresistible narrative of a man and a way of life never before truly told. Robert Lacey has written, in this one of his finest books, a ground-breaking exploration of organized crime in America and of our enduring fascination with criminals.

Bonus material

LITTLE MAN – Meyer Lansky And The Gangster Life

M
eyer Lansky walked into the Miami Beach Public Library several mornings every week, a short, rather slight man, who kept himself to himself.

“Mild mannered,” remembers the librarian. “Very pleasant. He was never pushy in any way.”

When he picked himself out a book, it was a work of history, usually, or a biography of some sort, seldom fiction. If a book was important and a little difficult, it appealed to Meyer Lansky the more. In his later years, he came to sample the philosophers.

“He was always a great reader,” remembers Joséph Varon, who became Meyer Lansky’s lawyer in the early 1950s. “He brought me a book once when I was in the hospital — a book of economics. ‘This is just marvelous,’ he said. I had to stop on the second page. I couldn’t understand a word of it.”

It was the hallmark of Meyer Lansky that he was always trying to improve himself, forever striving to tighten up his mind that notch or two more. The thinking man’s gangster. Bugsy Siegel and Joe Adonis, his partners in the 1940s, loved him for it. “That Meyer!” they would marvel, chewing over his cleverness, his love of figures, the way he did sums in his head as a form of recreation. Why, he even had his own private tutor in math! Then, lowering their voices, they would pay tribute to what had to be Meyer Lansky’s ultimate achievement — the very crowning touch.

“Can you believe it? He’s a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club!”

Meyer Lansky was a little man — five foot four and a half, according to the FBI.

“Five foot three,” says Gerry “Mad Dog” Coyle, a croupier who worked in several of Lansky’s casino operations. “He was a very little guy — seriously small. He was not an inch over five foot three.”

Close scrutiny of Meyer Lansky’s heels revealed a definite lift — nothing vulgar, or flamenco-dancer-like, but a stacking which could only betray the wish to stretch things in the direction of five foot five. His light gray socks matched his light gray trousers. His wrinkle-free shirt was always in a harmonious tone of blue, white, or gray, and he wore it on the outside of his pants, dropping in straight suspension from the profile of his paunch, which was by no means excessive, the roundness appropriate for a gentleman of his age. In 1974, Meyer Lansky was seventy-two years old.

From the library, Meyer Lansky would walk a few yards across a sun-baked patch of grass to Wolfie’s (proprietor, Wolfie Cohen), on the corner of Collins Avenue and Twenty-first Street.

It is a route that is trodden to this day. Wolfie’s, a pink-painted temple to the glories of bagels and smoked whitefish, is one of the basic points of reference on Miami Beach. Daily in January and February — and on almost any Sunday morning throughout the year — the lines spill out onto the sidewalk fifty yards or more, their destinations neatly segregated: parties of two, parties of three or more, counter seats only. Brunch at Wolfie’s would be no fun without half an hour’s wait.

In the moist, mushroomy air of an off-season morning, Meyer Lansky would not have to wait. His friends were already at the table, coffee steaming. Hymie Lazar, Yiddy Bloom, Benny Sigelbaum, Meyer’s brother, Jake. They were short and old and neat, just as he was — except, perhaps, when it came to the shortness department and brother Jake. Jake Lansky was quite a large man — five foot eight — the bigger and baggier of the two brothers since anyone could remember.

It was a daily ritual, this gathering over the coffee and cake. Meyer Lansky did some of the best deals of his life in deli booths, the bowl of pickles on the table, the ashtray filling up with butts. The morning “meet” over coffee and Danish was the daily partners’ conference, where the progress of existing business was checked upon, and where new business got done.