The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir

Chapter One: Hot Springs

10 C H A P T E R O N E HOT SPRINGS IF WE COULD RETURN TO THE MOMENT CAPTURED IN A 1948 PHOTO, this couple, Mom and Dad, Ruth and Rodney, might catch our eye as they stride down Central Avenue in Hot Springs, Arkansas. In full sunlight, Ruth holds the crook of Rodney’s right arm and gazes at the camera with self-assurance and an easy smile. While women behind her clutch their bags tight, she carries a handbag by its strap. She wears heels with bows. That sunny day in Hot Springs, an unseen ornate gold barrette tooled in her initials—RUF—holds her hair swept back from her high brow. The barrette is a gift from her husband, whose family is in the trade—pawnshops. His face in shadow and wearing sunglasses, not unaware of the camera himself, her husband gazes at her with fondness and regard. Rodney sports a tie with bold ovals and in his right hand he carries a folded paper, probably the Daily Racing Form. He wears his shirtsleeves rolled. His left arm swings forward with a watch on his wrist, the first of many gold Rolexes , and a cigarette in the tips of his fingers—he has yet to give them up. One can almost see the “insouciant challenge of his loping walk,” as Terry Teachout, Louis Armstrong’s recent biographer, paints it.3 Dad shared with Pops the same neighborhood, New Orleans’s South Rampart Street. It is three years since the end of the Second World War in which Rodney Fertel (né Weinberg) did not serve (-F for reasons that have always been obscure). It’s two years since Ruth Fertel (née Udstad) graduated from Louisiana State University with honors in physics and chemistry. She is HOT SPRINGS 11 twenty-one, he is twenty-seven. In less than a year, their firstborn son, Jerry, will enter the world. In two years, I will arrive. They come from a watery world and they’ve found another here. In the hills to their left and right are Hot Springs Mountain and West Mountain where forty-seven underground springs spew a million gallons of water a day, no matter the weather. Carbon dating shows that four thousand years ago the water fell as rain upon the Ouachita Forest of central Arkansas. Since then it has seeped slowly down through the earth’s crust until, superheated by the earth’s core, it gushes rapidly to the surface, a constant 13 degrees Fahrenheit. Mountain Valley Water, Rodney’s lifelong favorite brand, was founded nearby. Since the dawn of time, spring floods have coursed south, building with alluvial ooze the deep Mississippi Delta where Ruth was born. In this year, 198, Hot Springs is a wide-open town, dominated by the Southern Club, a gambling house in operation since 1893. In Las Vegas, 1.1 Ruth and Rodney in Hot Springs, Arkansas, c. 1948. HOT SPRINGS 12 Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel is only two years old and “the Strip” still but a dream. The mineral baths and the gambling tables draw Rodney and Ruth here from their home in New Orleans for long stays. Rodney enjoys independent means inherited from his pawnbroker grandparents; no job pulls him home. The horses bring them, too. In 198, the Fair Grounds in New Orleans celebrates its Diamond Jubilee, seventy-five years of continuous Thoroughbred racing. Hot Springs’s Oaklawn Park is almost as old. This very summer , Louisiana governor Earl Long, Huey’s brother and an inveterate gambler , comes to Hot Springs“for his arthritis.” Governor Long begins his day with the Daily Racing Form and the tout sheets. He helped the Mob install slots throughout Louisiana; they let him know when the fix is in. Ruth and Rodney Fertel share Governor Long’s taste for racehorses. In a few years, Ruth will earn her Thoroughbred trainer’s license. 1.2 Ruth and Rodney cutting up in Hot Springs. HOT SPRINGS 13 Rodney and Ruth sometimes stay at the Hotel Arkansas, a spa and casino run by Owney Madden, a gangster from Liverpool by way of Manhattan ’s Hell’s Kitchen. Owney Madden, or“Owney the Killer,”as he was called, had turned the Cotton Club in Harlem into a success before going upriver to spend seven years in Sing-Sing—which didn’t prevent his owning a casino...