Reluctant Model

After my mother pulled me out of 12^th grade, we made the rounds of department stores and shops and photographers. To my surprise, I was hired by Halle’s to model in the tearoom at lunchtime; by Higbee’s and May’s for their fashion shows; photographer Harry Cole for his fashion shoots and catalogues and Quinn-Maas, an expensive specialty shop. I strutted on runways, stretched my legs and pointed my toes for the photographer, and in fashion’s convoluted calendar, posed in fur coats and rivers of sweat in July and bathing suits and goosebumps in January. I demonstrated vacuum cleaners at conventions, sprayed cologne at ladies in department stores, paced runways in my new hip-swinging stride, all the while feeling an immense sorrow. I had become my mother’s creation, her idea of me, a no-brainer not even fit to finish high school, a moving, speaking walking size 8, her windup girl-toy, an early pioneering Barbie, pushed down the road of her vicarious fantasies. With no idea of who I was or wanted to be, I went along, riveted by her will as she sat in the dark corner of the photographer’s studio, the front row of the style shows, the table in the tearoom.

           

Backstage I changed outfits in 50 seconds. Or rather the two dressers did, one of them stripping the clothes off my back while the other pulled the next change over my head. They grabbed the shoes from my feet, thrusting my toes into another pair (you hold onto the dresser’s back for balance) hung my neck with jewelry, patted down my hair and there I was, out on the runway again. 50 seconds flat. If it was a swimsuit show you were stripped naked but no one looked at you, not even the male buyers and merchandisers who were milling around backstage. They’d watch the audience through a part in the curtain or appraise the clothes hanging on racks, or ask someone why numbers 26, 14 and 43 weren't in the show.

            Every day from twelve until two I modeled in Halle’s tearoom. In the dressing room, staring at my reflection at the stranger in the mirror with the breasts and shimmering silver gown and silver sandals, I seemed to have emerged overnight willed into being by my mother.

Read more of Lost & Found by author and model, Babette Rosen Hughes

OR read her novel, The Hat, a story of a bootlegger's wife.

Sequel, The Red Scarf, to be release in July 2013

Bugsy Siegel

“My friends call me Ben, strangers call me Mr. Siegel, and guys I don’t like call me Bugsy, but not to my face.”

 

Still the name Bugsy stuck—even if it was behind his back. It’s unknown whether the media—who loved writing about the violent and dangerous-- or his cohorts-- gave him the name. But whether he liked it or not, it was his during his lifetime and beyond.

            He was born Benjamin Hymen Siegelbaum on February 28, 1906. Although he was a contemporary of my bootlegging father, he lived to the ripe old age of 41 while my dad was murdered in a turf war with the mafia when he was 29.

            Siegel was known as the father of Las Vegas because of his early establishment of the Flamingo Hotel & Casino in the desert. He was the son of immigrants as were other Jewish bootleggers of the time, like Morris Kleinman, Abe Landau, Moe Dalitz and my father, Louis Rosen. Raised in the crime- ridden section of Williamsburg, Siegel met Meyer Lansky with whom he built an empire of bootlegging, gambling and murder, known as Murder, Inc. They became lifelong friends--that is, until Lansky ordered his friend’s assassination in 1947 for skimming mob money from the Flamingo Hotel.

            With an eye out for getting into the movies (Siegel was very handsome) he moved his operations to the West Coast. Maintaining an extravagant lifestyle in Beverly Hills he bought a palatial estate and established friendships with Hollywood moguls and movie stars, as well as a relationship with the infamous Virginia Hill.

            He was murdered in the house rented by her at 810 Linden Drive, Beverly Hills. She was out of town at the time--there are those who say it was highly recommended to her that she “leave town for her health.” He was buried in a $5000.00 casket in the Beth Olam section of Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Only five family members showed up for the service which took place before the cemetery opened. Among his possessions were a billfold with $408 in cash, a watch, a money clip, a key chain with 6 keys (one being for a hotel room) a ring and a pair of cufflinks.

 

Here is a great documentary about Bugsy!

 

And for you Boardwalk Empire Fans...

 

 

Next: Gun Molls

Secrets

 I was an infant when my bootlegging father, and innocent uncle were murdered in my father’s turf war with the Mafia.

When I was old enough to ask my mother about my daddy, she told me that he died of pneumonia and never acknowledged my uncle’s existence. I think I knew even at three or four years old that she was lying.

So at the age of 18, I began a search for the truth. I read old newspapers in the Cleveland Public Library that described the murders in screaming headlines. I asked questions of surviving relatives and researched a book about the Jewish Orphanage where my mother grew up from the time she was 3 years old until she graduated at 15. The book, “Inside Looking Out” provided a  profusion of information about the orphanage in 1900 to 1915 during my mother’s time, that was like something out of Dickens. I read the family history my older brother wrote, who remembered the night of the murders--the police, the reporters, the neighbors, the screams of our mother and aunt.

Part catharsis and part an author’s recognition of a good story, I wanted to write a book about my family. I also wanted to protect its secrets. Which meant that it had to be a novel.

 But for the first time in my life I had writer’s block. Draft after draft filled my wastebasket but, I finally I got it. It was as if there was some voice within me, or in the air, or somewhere, that said simply, "It’s time for the truth to come out of the shadows."

 I started over. As if truth has an intimate power and life force, the words now flowed as in a dream. And my memoir, LOST AND FOUND was born.

When the book was published, I went on a publicity tour and got a huge surprise. Each time I spoke to a group there were always two or three people who would pull me aside and tell me THEIR family secrets. Listening, I felt released from my feelings of shame and isolation and connected to others in a new and dynamic way. It was like opening a window into fresh clean air.

HOW TO WRITE YOUR LIFE, Part Two

As long as you’re not hurting anyone who is still alive, reveal family secrets. It is what your children and grandchildren want to know, it will bring your story to life and it can be an important cathartic experience for you.

            Martha Norman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, writes, “Every family has something they don’t want to talk about. In my family it was epilepsy and suicide. In other families it’s violence, or depression, or stupidity, or sex, or money, or even genius.The human condition can probably be defined as the stuff families won’t talk about.”

            In my very own family, it was murder. Or murders. My bootlegging father and my uncle (who was innocent and just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time} were murdered by the Mafia in a turf war during Prohibition.

            I was an infant at the time, and when I became old enough to ask Mother about my father’s death, she told me he died of pneumonia. To the end of her life, she was unable to tell me the truth, and it remained a tightly held secret within the entire family.

            After my mother died, I researched my father’s life and death and wrote about the secret in my memoir, Lost And Found. When the book was published, to my surprise, it was received with compassion and fascination by my family and my readers (who often took me aside at book signings to tell me their family secrets. And I experienced first-hand the liberating, life-changing, power of the truth.