SUSAN BERMAN'S LADY LAS VEGAS - AUTHORSHIP AS LEGACY

  You may have just recently heard of a woman named SUSAN BERMAN, because a man named Robert Durst's on trial for her murder, years after it happened.  The new evidence that was revealed in a documentary called THE JINX, involves a secretly recorded confession as well as letters sent in the U.S. Mail.  Durst comes from a very wealthy New York City real estate fortune family, like Ivanka Trump, and like Ivanka's husband, Jared Kushner.  The Durst family has avoided the controversy.  Durst's money provides him the lawyers.





Reading some news articles about the trial, after having watched The Jinx, I learned that Susan Berman supposedly took a loan from Robert, who she had been good friends with since they met as students at UCLA.  She was an author who was perhaps not able to depend on her income as a writer to pay her bills.  So I wondered if she was a good writer.  I read her book LADY LAS VEGAS and thought she was an excellent, creative non-fiction author.  She managed to have a bit of her and her family's story, since her father was instrumental in the development of Las Vegas, woven through later chapters about the development of the town famous for "What goes on in Vegas, stays in Vegas." 


Here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot, Virginia Hill, who was the mistress of Ben Siegel, the subject of the Warren Beatty film, Bugsy, credited with building the Flamingo Hotel in the middle of nowhere, was covered in March 2013.  Well, Susan's father and associates took over the Flamingo when Siegel was gunned down in Los Angeles while Virginia was out of town.


Susan, may she be resting in peace, left Vegas as a child, after her father died young of natural but stress related cause, and then her mother had a mental breakdown and eventually commited suicide.  Because of her family's participation in Organized Crime, her murder has been blamed on the Mob, rather than Durst. Was she really a woman who knew too much for her own good?  The Susan in this book was not associated with Organized Crime herself.  On the other hand it has been claimed that because of her family background, Durst was able to confess to her that he killed his wife, Kathy, also a long missing person that there is likely a murder mystery that may involve Durst.  After she was left an orphan, her guardian became her dad's brother, her uncle with a big gambling problem.  She left Vegas and eventually lived in Los Angeles.


As an adult, gone from Vegas for 40 years, and distanced from it though the years and therapy, though with very fond memories of her childhood there as the only child and daughter of Davie Berman, credited as a builder of the town, she went back.  The part about going to the family home in a suburb that had been turned into a law office, her old playhouse in the back yard still there but used for storage, was a bit of a heartbreaker.  Always in her memory as a good time in her life, proud of the achievements that her dad had made, Vegas had changed so significantly it was hardly what she'd remembered as an insider behind "American's Neon Oasis."


There are other books by and about Susan Berman, but I thought my readers might be interested in this one because of some of the people she mentions in the book who have been mentioned here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot.  Besides Ben Siegel and Virginia Hill, she mentions Elvis Presley (who sang happy birthday to her), Liberace, and Howard Hughes, who bought hotels and had a mistress in each of them.  We covered Scott Thorson, who Liberace Kept, here in October 2012, and Howard Hughes's Mistress Faith Domergue in May of 2014.  (The Mistresses mentioned here do not include Faith!)


To find these people in this blog, try running a search for their names in the search feature on the sidebar.


Missy.

A BLOG DEDICATED TO BUGSY AND VIRGINIA

A BLOG DEDICATED TO BUGSY AND VIRGINIA  some great pictures!

FRANK COSTELLO AND VIRGINIA HILL KNOW NOTHIING : THE KEFAUVER HEARINGS 1951

A MOB HISTORIAN TELLS HIS TALE OF VIRGINIA HILL

  "They were both dynamic characters."

VIRGINIA HILL : THE FLAMINGO : ONE OF THE MOST INFAMOUS MISTRESSES EVER!

Virginia Hill: She really liked BAD BOYS, some of the Baddest... 

Born in 1916, Virginia became entangled with bad boys in her teens.  Those where Great Depression years and she came from a violent childhood.  She may've been struggling for survival. She moved from Marietta, Georgia to Chicago to New York to Los Angeles.
At 18 she became a courier for the organized crime syndicate - The Mafia - and so Virginia became a mobster herself.  She wanted to be an actress. 

In those early days of the 19th century it was a rare woman who was so promiscuous. Had she been molested or raped as a kid?
She made her own commissions from carrying cash around.  Some say she also went to Mexico to negotiate a drug route.

She slept around with gangsters.  Though she earned her keep, she had boyfriends who were generous.  She was considered beautiful, capable, strong willed, and, well, she had red hair.  So she got called "The Flamingo."

She is most known though for her relationship with the traditionally married Ben Siegel, also called Bugsy because he was said to go crazy at times, a man who was violent, but not to his wife and children, and who, though excellent at compartmentalizing his life, eventually left his wife for her.
By 1943 Virginia lived with Ben in luxury in Beverly Hills waiting on the divorce. 

When Siegel dreamed of a Las Vegas as we known of now, and decided to build a a hotel called "The Flamingo," which was named after Virginia, she was on his team.

Ben, who hated his nickname of Bugsy, was a business man whose dream went over budget.  He as also a hit man. 
How much Virginia knew really is unknown.  Called The Queen of the Mob, she claimed not to know much at all but in 1951 she was summoned to testify by the Kefauver Rackets Committee where she denied a lot and used some foul language to shock everyone. 

Was she in on the fact that Ben was to be murdered himself? She wasn't in Los Angeles when he was killed.  Maybe she was tipped off.  Maybe she was shocked.  Maybe she had just lost the best thing she'd ever had going.

Eventually Virginia fled to Europe as a tax evader.  She married a ski instructor named Hans Hauser and they may have had a son.  In 1966, with that relationship failed and no hope of returning to the  United States, some say still heartbroken over Ben, she took a heavy dose of sleeping pills and was found dead in the snow on the ski slopes of Salzburg, Austria.  You see, most people don't kill themselves outdoors with pills so some people thought the mob had caught up with her and forced her to take the pills. 

Dead at the age of 49, Virginia Hill had lived many years full of intrigue and betrayals.

Of great fascination, there have been television movies and then some depicting their relationship.  One of the best stars Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.
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