Smiley’s Dice
Adventures in Livingness
By: Louellen Smiley
SOME children are silenced. The pretense is protection against people and events more powerful than them. As the daughter of Allen Smiley, associate and friend to Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, I was raised in a family of secrets.
My father is not a household name like Siegel, partly because he wore a disguise, a veneer of respectability that fooled most.
It did not fool the government. My father came into the public eye the night of June 20, 1947, when Benjamin Siegel was murdered in his home in Beverly Hills. My dad was seated inches away from Siegel, on the sofa, and took three bullets through the sleeve of his jacket.
He was brought in as a suspect. His photograph was in all the newspapers. He was the only nonfamily member who had the guts to go to the funeral.
When I was exposed to the truth by way of a book, I kept the secret, too. I was 13. My parents divorced, and five years later, my mother died. In 1966, I went to live with my father in Hollywood.
I was forbidden to talk about our life: “Don’t discuss our family business with anyone, and listen very carefully to what I say from now on!”
But one night, he asked me to come into his room and he told me the story of the night Ben was murdered.
“When I was spared death, I made a vow to do everything in my power to reform, so that I could one day marry your mother.
“Ben was the best friend I ever had. You’re going to hear a lot of things about him in your life. Just remember what I am telling you; he’d take a bullet for a friend.”
After my father died, I remained silent, to avoid shame, embarrassment and questions. But 10 years later, in 1994, when I turned 40, I cracked the silence.
I read every book in print – and out of print – about the Mafia. Allen Smiley was in dozens. He was a Russian Jew, a criminal, Bugsy’s right-hand man, a dope peddler, pimp, a racetrack tout. I held close the memory of a benevolent father, wise counselor, and a man who worshipped me.
I made a Freedom of Information Act request and obtained his government files. The Immigration and Naturalization Service claimed he was one of the most dangerous criminals in the country. They said he was Benjamin Siegel’s assistant. They said he was poised to take over the rackets in Los Angeles. He didn’t; he sold out his interest in the Flamingo, and he went to Houston to strike oil.
I put the file away, and looked into the window of truth. How much more could I bear to hear?
Born in Kiev, Ukraine, my dad’s family immigrated to Canada. He stowed away to America at 16, and was eventually doggedly pursued for never having registered as an alien. He had multiple arrests – including one for bookmaking in 1944, and another for slicing off part of the actor John Hall’s nose in a fracas at Tommy Dorsey’s apartment.
He met my mother, Lucille Casey, at the Copacabana nightclub in 1943. She was onstage dancing (for $75 a week), and my father was in the audience, seated with Copa owner and mob boss Frank Costello.
“I took one look, and I knew it was her,” was all he had told me on many occasions.
On a trip to the Museum of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, I was handed a large perfectly pristine manila envelope, and a pair of latex gloves with which to handle the file.
Inside were black and white glossy MGM studio photographs, press releases, and biographies of my mother’s career in film, including roles in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “Ziegfeld Follies of 1946,” “Meet Me in St. Louis” and “Harvey Girls.” She was written up in the columns, where later my father was identified as a “sportsman.”
The woman who pressed my clothes, washed my hair, and made my tuna sandwiches was an actress dancing in Judy Garland musicals, while her own life was draped with film noir drama.
My father wooed her, and after an MGM producer gave her an audition, he helped arrange for her and her family to move to Beverly Hills, where she had steady film work for five years. He was busy helping Siegel expand the Western Front of the Costello crime family and opening the Flamingo casino in Las Vegas.
They were engaged in 1946.
Still, the blank pages of my mother’s life did not begin to fill in until I met R.J. Gray. He found me through my newspaper column, “Smiley’s Dice.”
One day last year, R.J. sent me a book, “Images of America: The Copacabana,” by Kristin Baggelaar. There was my mother, captioned a “Copa-beauty.”
Kristin organized a Copa reunion in New York last September. I went in place of my mother, but all day I felt as if she was seated next to me. I fell asleep that night staring out the hotel window, feeling a part of Manhattan history.
Now, the silence is over.
I don’t hesitate to answer questions about my family. I have photographs of Ben Siegel in my home in Santa Fe, NM, just as my father did. Every few months I get e-mails from distant friends, or people who knew my dad.
It seems there is no end to the stories surrounding Ben and Al. I am not looking for closure. I’ve become too attached to the story.
The throw of the dice this week falls on chapter one of the memoir. Like any creative endeavor, the work is organic and has a life of its own. A garden doesn’t always grow with your plans; there are seeds that fall outside of the planter. There are disasters that drift though our arrangements and cause chaos. I am beginning to believe nothing ends how we visualize it will. A beautiful day is hijacked by a tornado, a child is murdered while taking a walk with a girlfriend, and a chapter runs away from the author.
The desk where I sit and write is engulfed with books, files, index cards, note pads, FBI files, and outlines. Period photographs are scattered through-out the room to further sedate any intrusion of the present. I live in a cubicle of my parent’s and famous gangsters.
I was writing a lengthy portrayal of Ben Siegel one day, and it occurred to me that he had become a major character in my life. He played a role that someone else should have; a noted author, journalist, or poet. Ben Siegel changed my history because I had to learn to love him. Learning to love him meant erasing everything I had read or heard. It is said he was a ruthless killer, a savage, violent, and that he loved to kill. I turned my head to look at a photograph of my mother. I was told that she loved Ben too.
Where once I believed my mother was naïve and uninformed about Ben; now I know this wasn’t the case. She knew from the beginning. I‘ve read the news articles of the day, the columns, and I’ve spoken to people who were there. The volumes of truth surfaced because of a club of researchers that have rallied around my book. These people, who gain insightful and intimate details of your life, form a friendship that is unlike any other. Alice Syman, who has dug into the archives of every newspaper in the country found some disturbing articles. She wrote to me beforehand, and asked if I wanted to read the slanderous headlines. RJ has an alert button built into his computer. Every time someone writes about my family, his button goes off. This week he sent me a column he’d found in the Los Angeles Times about my father’s fracas with Tommy Dorsey. Kristin Baggelaar, who authored , “Images of America, The Copacabana,” introduced me to women who knew my mother.
What I’ve learned and accepted, is that she knew who Ben Siegel was and what he did. My mother fit into this strangely singular and controversial group of criminally engaged people. An Irish Catholic, convent raised, John Robert Powers Model, with a future on stage and in film, was very close friends with my father’s associates. I see her in the full frame of who she was; and not the puritan I had imagined. I like her this way because it blends with the outrageousness of my former years.
While writing about my father I questioned my prolonged interest in his choices, his behavior, and his secrecy. I asked Uncle Myron who shares the same history as my father. Myron reaffirmed that my father was a true to the code gangster. No one ever got him to talk about what he knew or had seen. He assured me that descendants of men like my father suffer a similar disassociation with society, and share the same struggles to fit in as I have.
Why I continue to seek answers and probe into their lives is because they never told me anything. Children feel the repression of truth as clearly as they do the pain of bruise. The more you hide the more they seek. I more so than my sister, because at my root is the inclination to question the world around me, and to mend the breaks in our lives.
Along the way of writing the first chapter, I discovered that people like to know how I work in a state of solitude and selfishness. It seems unnatural until you pick up a book you love and read. While a story is moving through the author, they– or at least I — refrain from answering the phone, checking email, or listening to the voices downstairs. A story or any work of art lives inside the artist. It sounds sort of portentous but that is how it feels to me. So when intrusions come, the disturbances are exaggerated into surrealistic proportions.
A knock on the door followed by a question unrelated resembles the feeling of being flung out of my chair and into mid-air. Grating truck noise, loading and unloading of hotel uniforms and supplies is part of the landscape of my writing stage; as is the occasional worker singing Mexican love songs. I could easily write about the life of the hotel across the street; the many characters that take care of the guests and the grounds. It would be an easy writing assignment because I am not related to the hotel. Writing about your parent’s, the people who introduced you to the world, is like grinding down your memories into sand, and sifting through the grains for meaning.
I write through the day starting at noon and finish around six. Not all that time is writing; a great portion is lifting one pile of notes, to find another pile, indexing, reading, and just stretching out on the sofa and listening to the voices. When I feel the prick of defeat rising from the page, I take a break outdoors, and watch my bird family dipping in the fountain or munching in the bird feeder. I dream of diving into the Mediterranean, and take an imaginary plunge into the clear water where facts and fiction merge together.
At the end of the day, as other lives intersect with mine, I see people engaged in human activity, the stimulation of common interest from living people and their needs. In writing you interact with your head. The narrative is like water; it can run smooth like a river over all the rocks and debris, or it can break into a million bubbles and lose everything. When it breaks apart like a wave on the beach, you begin again, and the erosion of impatience allows you to continue.
It is what we all face collectively, the strength to return to a flawed or broken piece of our lives ,and make it work for us. Any dice to throw email: folliesls@aol.com
If you are looking for a researcher. I have recommendations:
Expert research: Genealogy, Newspaper archives, Internet articles
Alice Syman
P.O. Box 5495
St. Augustine, FL 32085
904-810-5596
Email: asyman@earthlink.net
