Ex-staffer sets the record straight on Leona Helmsley

Newsday ^ | August 21, 2007 | Ellis Henican

[jjm2111]

He's the star of the perfect Leona Helmsley anecdote.

Not the old chestnut about the day the haughty hotelier was dubbed the "Queen of Mean." Not even the story behind her famously snobbish comment, a comment she hotly denied, that "only the little people pay taxes."

This story is better than any of those. It involves a lavish indoor swimming pool, a silver platter of shrimp and a svelte Leona Helmsley in bathing cap and swimsuit.

And Victor Colicchio was standing right there.

These days, Colicchio is a well-regarded actor and screenwriter.... But to my surprise, he wasn't doing cartwheels at his evil boss' demise. He wasn't humming, "Ding dong! The witch is dead!" He sounded more like a man who had one last chance to set a record straight.

"She was a millionaire long before she married Harry," Colicchio said. "She would not have gotten as far as she did in real estate with the kind of personality that was painted as being her. She was intelligent, dedicated. She could be charming if she wanted. And her hotels were union hotels. She didn't have the authority to just fire people left and right. The union would have held a hearing. Those people would have been hired back with back pay. It wouldn't make business sense."

The famous Helmsley tantrums, her former shrimp-plopper said, were almost always aimed at conniving hotel managers - not the maids, bellmen and other union workers who staffed the hotels.

"Back in the 1980s, a lot of those managers didn't believe a woman belonged out of the kitchen - much less as the boss of a big hotel. They said awful things behind her back."

[Gondring]

She gave more to the community than either you or I are ever likely to.

As a percentage of wealth, I am sure you are wrong.

And if one is stealing from people, giving to charity isn't giving one's own money, anyway, so it's less than worthless.

Not that I'm saying that's what she did for sure, and I do think she was demonized, but to just base it on charitable giving is not very sound reasoning.

[Orange1998]

Yes but only after she served jail time, it has a way of changing people view on life. Here is a quote from Wiki, she sounds like a heartless person..

On March 31, 1982, her only child, Jay Panzirer, died of a heart attack. Leona then sued her son's estate for money and property that she said he had borrowed, and her son's widow Mimi received an eviction notice. Mimi Panzirer - the mother of Leona's four grandchildren - later said the legal expenses wiped her out and "to this day I don't know why they did it."