TROUBLE may be the only one left alive who will mourn Leona Helmsley.
Except for me.
She was cantankerous, hard to please and a convicted criminal who waltzed through New York carrying her nervous little Maltese, Trouble, whom she fed off of china and treated like a human baby. I’m not terribly fond of dogs. Even less of nasty broads. But Leona Helmsley was one of a kind.
I first met Leona in her declining years, when it seemed that everyone with a sexual fetish and credit-card debt thought it a sure bet to sue the old bat. I expected a broom-carrying witch. I was wrong.
The warrior woman was ill. The shrew was nothing of the kind. In 2003, a leather-loving freak named Charles Bell sued Leona – claiming she’d fired him as Park Lane Hotel manager because he was gay. Which, in the homosexual-heavy hotel biz, would be like firing an interior decorator for having good taste.
The Leona I met in the Manhattan courthouse had turned into a lonely old woman who cried frequently for her late husband, Harry – but still deployed a wicked sense of humor and a streak of charitable generosity for which she’ll never get due credit.
When she was found liable, because, as Leona aptly put it, the jurors “didn’t like me, I guess,” she quipped to me, “What am I going to lose now, my virginity?”
Two years earlier, a much-younger man, Patrick Ward, tricked Leona into believing he was her boyfriend. With great mortification, she discovered Ward was gay. Of course, he sued her, too.
The back-to-back scandals gave Leona a rep as a homophobe, when she was nothing of the kind. I tend to think she was misunderstood. Or an easy target. Perhaps she just never cared what anyone thought of her.
The government didn’t think much of her, sending her to prison in 1992 for tax evasion, though some thought she went in the place of Harry, who was found mentally unfit to stand trial.
When Martha Stewart, who has a much better publicity department, was off to prison, Leona told me to give her this advice: Behave!
“Darling, they’re not there to torture you,” she said, explaining that her 18 months were quite fulfilling. “If people are going to be contrary, there’s really nothing that’s going to help them.
“I once gave someone a quarter,” she cracked, “and she made my bed.”
As I reported, she freaked out when Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx blocked the view from Harry’s mausoleum by erecting a series of high-rise crypts. So in 2006, she furiously had Harry moved to Westchester.
Inside the tomb, these words are etched, “I never knew a day I did not love you – Leona.” And, “I wait for the time we can soar together again, both aware of each other – Harry.”
Soar in peace, darling.