Leona HelmsleyThe Queen of Mean was never the apposite title for Leona Helmsley, who has died aged 87.
When she became the public face of New York's Helmsley Palace hotel, she acted up to ad copy - "It's the only palace in the the world where the queen stands guard" - but her ideas of power went beyond mere regality. Her family had lived under Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, and when her inner autocrat was unleashed, she thought of herself as an empress. Employees were serfs.
Even in Ronald Reagan's America, this was too much, and they invoked the law, the internal revenue and popular opinion against her. The revolution did not overthrow her: she died about the 250th richest person in the world, lonely, forgetful and litigious.
Morris and Ida Rosenthal from Poland had migrated to Manhattan before the first World War; their third daughter, Lena, dropped out of school, renaming herself Lee, Mindy and Leni before settling on the classier Leona Roberts. She claimed to have modelled for cigarette ads (she certainly chainsmoked) before her first marriage, at around 18, to lawyer Leo Panzier: their son Jay was born in 1942. Her second, and third, marriages to a rag trade executive, Joe Lubin, ended in divorce in 1960.
She worked as a secretary in a property company. When the firm changed hands, she persuaded the new owners to license her as a property broker on Manhattan's Upper East Side. She had a gift for high fantasy and low dealing, charm and bullying, and rose to be president of Sutton & Towne Residential.
But she was still only property nobility. Harry Helmsley was property king. He managed office space, including the Empire State Building, and owned hotels. Accounts of their first encounter are mythic. She claimed he "heard of my reputation and he told one of his executives, 'Whoever she is, get her.' Finally, he gave me a deal I couldn't refuse." A more plausible scenario is that she hunted him at an industry dinner in 1969, danced with him - dancing the night away became their party piece - and was invited to join a Helmsley subsidiary as sales director. Harry divorced his wife of 33 years and married Leona in 1972.
As business turned nastier through the 1970s, the couple withdrew from residential property to Harry's other realm, 30 hotels across the US, including the St Moritz and Park Lane, the Harley and the 51-storey Helmsley Palace. When it opened in 1980, he appointed her president of Helmsley hotels: "He said the best thing about it was that the board of directors' meeting was over when we got out of bed." Leona swanked about in ads and room occupancy rose from 25 per cent to 70 per cent.
Her absolute rule worsened her sense of entitlement. The most significant line attributed to her is not "Only the little people pay taxes" (quoted by a servant in court) but "That's how the rich get richer," said when she ordered a jeweller to rewrite a bill to save her $4 sales tax. Larger-scale scams led to her first major court appearances in the mid-1980s, but her testimony gained her immunity, and she was not charged in cases involving avoidance of sales taxes on jewellery.
That was petty cash beside the 1987 scandal. The Helmsleys had adorned their place in Connecticut with a million-dollar marble floor above the swimming pool, and contractors complained that they were cheated out of fees and forced to collude in invoice fraud. Criminal investigations led in 1988 to 235 state and federal counts. The Helmsleys had pioneered the diversion of stockholders' funds for personal luxury and were accused of evading more than $4 million of income tax by writing off personal as business expenses, plus mail fraud, conspiracy and extortion.
Harry (89), suffering after a mild stroke, was found unfit to stand trial. Leona (69) was the defendant in 1989. The jury convicted her of 33 counts and the evasion of $1.2 million in federal taxes. She was sentenced to pay $1.7 million and go to jail for four years. After appeals and negotiations, she was ordered to serve 18 months from April 1992. Her community service was extended after a judge heard her servants did her chores.
Harry died in 1997, leaving her all his $1.7 billion, and she sold much of their property. Their charity foundation was munificent but she needed ever less expiation - contemporary brokers admired her ruthlessness (though Donald Trump abominated her). She recently sued a Bronx cemetery for $150 million, claiming its plans for a mass mausoleum would ruin the serenity of the monument to Harry and son Jay, who died in 1982. At his funeral, she insulted Jay's wife, and soon evicted the family from their Helmsley-owned home; she sued her four grandchildren's estate almost to bankruptcy. They and her 13 great-grandchildren survive her.
Leona Helmsley (Lena Mindy Rosenthal): born July 4th, 1920; died August 20th, 2007