The Secret (9 page)

We were on our way.

18

LEN

During the years when my father was turning his little string of shops into the major chain that would be selling scores of millions of dollars worth of Cheeks products by the time I was old enough even to know what his business was, I was blissfully living in the care of my mother, then in good schools, having no idea what kind of struggles were going on. Those were my years of oblivion. I have memories, but the highlights are rare, and the rest is foggy.

—I remember that one summer we rented a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, so that we—that is, my mother and I—could go to the beach every day. I remember that the house was grand but the floors were deeply scarred. Last summer’s tenants had roller-skated over the parquet.

—I remember that Aunt Therèse came to Greenwich and stayed with us for two or three weeks that summer—Therése, the collaborator who had been stripped and shaved. By the time she wore her Cheeks international-orange maillot on the beach in Greenwich, it was no longer scandalous, though she turned heads. I had no idea my father manufactured and sold it.

—I am too young to remember the assassination of President Kennedy. I do remember the election of Richard Nixon and what my mother said about it. She said, “Well, that’s the end of optimism in America. The country has been taken over by the pancake eaters.”

—I remember Nixon’s resignation. I remember with what quiet, tearful horror the event was noted in the halls of Lodge, in contrast with the amused satisfaction I saw in my father and mother when I went home.

—I remember a lot of dumb things, like my fascination with the first color television set in our home; my pride in learning that my father went to business meetings in his own corporate airplane, a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron—named Cheeks, of course; understanding that my father and mother could, well,
do it
at eight thousand feet over some obscure town in Pennsylvania, and did, behind a curtain that hid them from the pilot.

It dawned on me, slowly, that my father was
somebody.

—I remember trips to Europe—to Paris, chiefly, but also to Lyon and to Nice and St. Tropez, where for the first time I saw topless girls on the beach. I remember eating
hamburger au cheval
without realizing it was horsemeat. (And why not? If we slaughter a steer to eat as flesh, why not a gelding?) I remember Paul Renard and visits to the Lido and Folies Bergère. I would learn only much later that my mother had once danced on the stage of a Paris nightclub as naked as those girls who gave me erections.

I should remember the symptoms of my mother’s fatal illness. I loved her, and I was not insensitive to her, but I suppose I thought—like many children—that my parents were invincible. You are so dependent on them when you are young that you cannot imagine what it might be like to have to try to live without them.

My father lost both his parents at once, in a car crash, when he was about the same age I was when I lost my mother.
Both!
I shuddered. I couldn’t even think about it.

Anyway, if I had been a more realistic boy I might have realized that it was not natural for my mother to be losing weight so fast. She turned into a pallid wraith within a few months. Suddenly she was delicate and vulnerable. I saw that, but still I had no idea that when my parents left for Europe that fall that it was for her last visit to her native land, her sister, and her friends. I guess they knew she would not return alive from that last visit.

Before I went to Amherst my father educated me a little.

“Len,” he told me, “we are Jews. Some people are proud of that. Some are ashamed of it. I am neither. It is a part of life. I am a Jew just as I am a male. Nobody asked me if I wanted to be. I am. Your mother was a Catholic. Same thing. She just was. There are some things you can’t change, and I would be disappointed in you if you tried. You can renounce Judaism, and you don’t need to practice it, but you are a Jew. Look at your pecker. The God of Israel commanded us to cut off our foreskins, which we do because we were so commanded. Many Christians do it, too, but they don’t have our excuse.”

Then he handed me a slender book: the annual report of Cheeks, a Partnership. I had no idea how to read a balance sheet or a profit-and-loss statement, but even to me it was apparent that I was scanning the report of a highly profitable business.

He left me alone with it for half an hour, then came to me and asked, “Have you ever heard of Cheeks stores? Your mother and I built the business together. We don’t compete, exactly, with Victoria’s Secret or with Frederick’s of Hollywood, but we sell a daring line of merchandise to daring customers.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Do Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky have anything to do with your business?”

“I take your point,” my father said. “The answer is no. Those two men have helped me, mostly by giving me valuable advice. If you are asking me if I am involved in Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, that sort of thing, the answer is definitely no.”

I nodded—skeptically, I am afraid.

“I’ve known gangsters, Len,” my father said soberly. “Albert Anastasia, called The Executioner, who was murdered. Crazy Joey Gallo, who was murdered. When you start a new business in this city, you meet these people. You have to come to terms with them. I’ve come to terms with them. I might have been found floating facedown under a dock, otherwise. But I never joined them.”

I nodded. I glanced at the numbers he had shown me. I remembered the private plane named Cheeks. I had to say something. I didn’t know my father very well yet. But I was unable to believe my mother could have been involved in anything that involved the men my father said he wasn’t involved with.

I’d met Sal Nero, but knew nothing about him.

To me, he was Uncle Sal—though my father told me he was really Solomon Schwartz and as much a Jew as we were. He had a wife and children, but he was divorced as I recall, and his children were grown and saw him seldom.

I would hear many stories about Sal Nero as the years passed by, but I did doubt and do doubt that many of them were true.

He took an interest in his partner’s son—me—and when I was at home he would take me to baseball games. I suppose I went to half a dozen Yankees games with Uncle Sal. Usually his girlfriend, Truda, went with us. Always, we had box seats on the first-base line.

One evening I will never forget. Sal wrote a note and handed it to an usher with a twenty-dollar bill. In a few minutes a baseball player appeared just outside our box and greeted Sal with a hearty hello.

“Hey, ol’ buddy,” said Sal. “Meet Len Cooper, son of my business partner.”

I stretched out over the fence and shook hands with the player, Number 15, whom I could not identify. I had no idea who he was.

“Thought you might sign a ball for my little buddy,” said Sal.

“Sure thing,” said the baseball player. He summoned a bat boy and got from him a brand-new baseball. He scribbled on it and handed it to me.

The player saluted and returned to the field.

I read what he had written on the ball:

To Len with best wishes—Thurman Munson

I still didn’t know who Thurman Munson was, and had to look it up when I got home. He was the catcher for the New York Yankees—and a very big baseball star. He had less than twelve months to live when he signed the baseball I now display inside a Lucite box. He was killed in the crash of an airplane he was flying, in Canton, Ohio, the next year.

So … that’s the kind of guy Uncle Sal was. He was a guy who could walk into Yankee Stadium and call one of its all-time great players to come to his box and sign a baseball for a kid who didn’t know who he was.

19

When I was at Amherst and Yale I was conscious of my father’s fortune and how he had earned it. It was while I was at Friends School in New York and then at Lodge that I was ignorant of all he’d gone through, and my mother, to build their small chain of lingerie shops into a big business.

The problem was, there was no one to tell me. My mother would have, I am sure, if she had lived. My mother was open and honest. She told me what she wanted to tell me when she thought I was old enough to know it.

So has my father, though he has a very different idea of what I should know and when I should know it. My father has been honest with me—but in a different way, his own way.

I’ve had to pick up bits and pieces from here and there. From wherever I could get it.

I have never liked Buddy. He knows it. Still, when my father met my mother, Buddy had already been his best friend for many years, since my dad was a kid. Why Buddy so closely befriended my father was a mystery to me—and to my father, really. Inevitably I am thrown into Buddy’s company, and when that happens I encourage him to talk about the years when they were not just friends, but partners. Buddy knows more about my father than even my mother knew.

The sudden death of both his parents was a defining event in my father’s life. How could it not have been? Then he discovered that his Uncle Harry had snookered him out of what little inheritance he might have had. Though he had reason to hate Uncle Harry, he had to work for him. In 1941 jobs were not easy to come by for a kid just leaving high school. He was forced to work for a pittance and watch his uncle cheat everyone who came near him.

My father became a hustler. Buddy was a hustler. A certain bitterness lay behind it—Buddy’s probably because he was a victim of racism, my father’s because he was a victim of his Uncle Harry and also, in a far larger sense, because he was a victim of the way too many people had to live in New York City in those years. I know about poor people. But poor people today don’t live the way poor people did when my father was a boy—with no so-called “safety net” offered by welfare, and no hope.

Why Buddy chose to befriend my father is a complete mystery to me—and I wonder if it’s not a mystery to my father.

But then came Pearl Harbor Day. There was something irregular about the way the two friends went into the service. I am not sure what happened. It was even a scam when my father was given noncombat status and somehow managed to get the same for Buddy, though Buddy didn’t deserve it. The two of them had all kinds of resources and knew how to use them. They were hustlers. Not only that, they were hustlers who were willing to take risks.

They wound up in Paris, which is where my father met Paul Renard and Giselle, my mother.

*   *   *

My father liked to eat at the Palm. I went there to meet him one day and found Buddy waiting for me. He said my father would be a little late, but we would have a glass of wine and wait for him.

As we sat I made a few comments about Sal Nero, specifically that I found him an bad character. “In fact,” I said, “I’d think he was Mafia connected, except for one thing.”

“What thing is that, Lenny?”

“Well … when he joined my father in the business, my mother was still alive and active. My mother would never have consented to be associated with—”

“Lenny, for Christ’s sake! What do you think your mother was, some kind of plaster saint?”

“She was a good woman,” I said truculently. “She was a
good
woman.”

“Damn right she was,” said Buddy. “A good woman. Brave. Smart. But you want to know what she was the first time I saw her?”

“What?”

“Stark staring mother naked. She was a stripper in a Paris club called the Blue Note, which was run by Paul Renard. A stripper. No funny business. She didn’t hustle. But she danced in the nude. I don’t mean in a G-string and bra: I mean in the
nude,
showing her … well, she didn’t have any. She shaved.”

I knew he was telling the truth. Why not? What motive could he have had for lying to me about that? And that’s how I found out that my mother had been a nude dancer.

It made no difference. I have never thought less of her. And I have never told my father that I know about the Blue Note. I have never mentioned either that I also know that my mother modeled skimpy lingerie in Cheeks stores during the early years. The truth is, I respect her and regret her death even more, now that I know she was a whole person. I’m glad she was not a saint. I’m glad Buddy didn’t tell me until I was old enough not to be judgmental any longer. But I am glad he told me.

20

JERRY

We were almost wiped out by one colossal foul-up.

To start with, Sal wondered just what American women would wear. At the beginning we sold
lingerie française
—meaning that we imported our merchandise from France where, supposedly, the most daring lingerie in the world was produced and worn. It
was
bold and brief, when most American women were still wearing white panties with waistbands at their navels, with legs cut so that nothing of their hips or hinder cheeks showed. Most American women were still wearing bras that were
contraptions:
gizmos of nylon and rubber designed to shove the breasts into unnatural pointy shapes. French women had liberated themselves from this sort of thing. They wore bikini panties and soft, sheer bras—if, in fact, any bras at all. Even so, what was sold in French lingerie shops was timid compared to what was about to be offered in America.

The time was passing when France was the naughty nation. When we went into business, to suggest your lingerie was from France generated a sexy image. Today in France you can generate a similar image by suggesting you sell lingerie imported from the States. The picture keeps getting better.

Larkin Albert designed, and Charlie Han sewed up, thousands of dozens of sheer bikini-style panties, opaque only in little triangles in the crotch—until we eliminated even the little triangles. Giselle modeled for me—and me alone—one without the triangle. With her shaved pussy, the panties were exciting. One of the most popular models of those was studded with rhinestones.

We decided to introduce a new line, holding a style show: this one at the Hilton. Here again we had a runway for the models, dramatic lighting, and music that would be anything but subdued. Again, most of the invited guests were from the news media. We did not allow cameras.