Chapter Thirty-Six
When I was twenty-nine I met a man on a trip to Las Vegas. Bobby Montgomery. A cowboy from Kentucky with a Southern drawl and biceps built like a bison.
We fell in love almost immediately. I don’t use that term lightly.
I’m old, and I have no reason to lie anymore, to narrate my life in any way other than what it was.
Love, yes. I had never felt it the way I felt it for him, and nothing later came close, either—although there was a split for second place a mile long.
But back to Bobby.
The Rat Pack—Frank and Sammy and Dean—called the shots right along with the Family.
Elvis had just come out with “Viva Las Vegas,” and people were pilgriming in droves.
I already knew I had a knack for the tables—call it luck, intuition, who knows.
Mostly it was bravery. I had the silver ticket, you see.
Any mistake I made, any bad thing that happened, I could take it back. I was invincible. I lived without fear.
“Excuse me, miss, you seem to have dropped something.”
He appeared at my side, all six feet four inches of him, with a cowboy hat tipped forward on his head and his palm outstretched. I was at the Trop—not staying there, too rich for my blood—but posted up at the Theatre Restaurant. It was the see and be seen of 1964.
The something I had dropped, apparently, was his hand.
Bobby was in town working a slot route—he’d been hooked up with Phil Kastel somewhere in Louisiana and was in Vegas seeing the fruits of his friend’s new venture.
We became inseparable. He had a suite with two rooms and offered me the second, but by our third night it was obvious—there really wasn’t a need for more than the one.
I’d had sex before. I was an unmarried woman in the fifties, which was a tough thing to be if you were anyone else, but I’d grown up with a mother who left me to my own devices.
Bobby and I fell fast. The Little White Chapel had been built in 1954 and he asked me to go.
“Little lady, won’t you be my bride?”
I was a Jewish girl with a Ukrainian mother, and he was a Southern heir with one dead father, and together, we were an absurdity—but dear, did I want to.
We spent four and a half months all over the strip. Dinner at Louigi’s, Golden Steer Steakhouse to hear Sinatra grab the mic after two martinis. It was like living in a movie. I knew, even in it, how rare the air was. I loved every minute of it.
It was the closest I ever came to being married, but in the end, there just wasn’t enough time.
Kastel was getting pushed out of the casino because of his connections to mob boss Frank Costello. I was worried Bobby would get caught in the crosshairs. Carlos Marcello was taking over, and he didn’t like anyone who was left from the old regime. That was Bobby.
It was a Friday morning. I remember because I was going to tell him that night at dinner—our Shabbat. I was going to light candles in the room and order up the chicken and open some nice Scotch.
I had suspected it for a week or two and then called the doctor to confirm. An old guy who went by Dr. Sam and came to the room.
“You’re about two months along,” he told me. I’d been in Las Vegas eighteen weeks.
Bobby never came back for dinner. He didn’t come back the next night, either. It was Sunday before I went downstairs and asked for Kastel. No one knew. Then I went and found Lefty.
“He’s gone,” Lefty said. He worked the International but he knew it all, everything that went down on the strip. “You don’t want to know a lot more.”
I never found out what happened, although I suspect I knew. He was killed, dumped the way they all were. There were no news stories that would come out, no cell phones. I had nothing but a name.
I told myself if I didn’t hear from him in a month, I’d use it. I’d turn the clock back and I’d be with him again. I’d tell him I’d make sure we never parted. But a month went by, and then I felt her kick for the first time—my feisty, fiery, fierce baby.
I went to Los Angeles. I didn’t know where else to go. Bobby had been generous, in those few brief months, and I had a nice stash of cash. What was left in the room—plenty, more than you can imagine, for those days—I took, too.
I was pulled out to Malibu—by fate or destiny or just the smell of the ocean, I’m not sure. There was nothing much along Point Dume then—a couple of houses. The Colony was already buzzing with movie stars, and Gidget was riding the waves at Surfrider Beach.
I had enough for the down payment in cash. An architect had built the home two years prior and had never intended to keep it. The house was too big for me—I knew that—but I needed somewhere to be, somewhere to put myself and this child—and the beach seemed as good a place as any.
Marcella came screaming into the world at home the following summer. She had a mess of curly straw-colored hair at birth and Bobby’s bright green eyes, and I loved her with a ferocity I knew I’d never feel for a man, had never even felt for her father, who came close.
I put the ticket in a lockbox under my bed and swore that I would never use it, that with every new and painful turn I’d remember this child, this product of marching forward, and I would let time continue to unfold.
It still sits in that box—now not under my bed, but somewhere else. I rarely think about it anymore, except when my daughter brings it up—still, even as an adult, demanding to know.
She is not a foolish woman, and yet—it has never occurred to her that maybe it remains.
After all, my dear—who would take back a night with Kennedy?