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`Family Love’ - And How It Vanished
Mimi Panzirer says that on the day of her husband’s memorial service, Leona Helmsley told her: `I will destroy you.’
Newsday (Melville, NY)
May 25, 1988
Author: Ellis Henican

EXCERPT

Then, on March 31, 1982, Jay died. * * *

He had fallen unconscious during a meeting at the Orlando Harley and was pronounced dead at Lucerne General Hospital. His heart had virtually disintegrated.

“One of the most difficult things I had to do was tell his mother that her son was dead,” Mimi said. The Helmsleys were aboard their private Bach 111 jet, heading for their home in Palm Beach, when Mimi made the call.

The reaction was not surprising. “I got Harry. I told Harry. Then I told Leona. She broke down and screamed.” Friends say that Leona still cries when the name of her son is mentioned.

The funeral in Florida went relatively smoothly, and the Helmsleys wanted a memorial service in New York as well. When Jay’s brass casket wouldn’t fit through the cargo door of the Helmsley plane, Harry arranged to have the body shipped via commercial air freight.

Almost immediately, Mimi said, strange things started happening to her.

After the memorial service in New York, a few close friends and relatives moved back to the Park Lane to be with the parents and the widow: Leona’s sister Sylvia; Mimi’s brother John, then a top aide to Connecticut Sen. Lowell Weicker, and of course, Jay’s four children, Craig, David, Meeganand Wally.

The chit-chat was rolling on, Mimi said, when all of a sudden Leona spoke up. “Leona looked me right in the eye and she said, `I will destroy you.’ Out of the clear blue sky. And she looked at Craig and she said, `You killed your father.’

“Craig went bananas. He [was] 14 years old . . . I was on the other side of Craig, trying to explain to him that in times of grief, people say things they don’t mean . . . My brother came dashing over from wherever he was and said, `Come on. It’s time to go home.’ “

Mimi said she was flabbergasted.

But after returning to the house in Florida, she said she received another suprise: an eviction notice. The house was actually owned by Deco, Jay’s company. The Helmsleys wanted it back, she said.

Mimi said she promptly called Harry, who was staying at the Harley. He rode out to the house.

“I asked him, `Why are you doing this?’ And he explained to me, quite in detail, that the house was worth X amount of dollars and he could sell it for X dollars and realize such and such a profit. He could no longer amortize the cost of leasing the house to Jay against Jay’s salary . . . And the final line was, basically `I need the money.’ “

“And I thought, `Harry Helmsley is standing here telling me `I need the money.’ “

His fortune is estimated to top $5 billion.

“And I said, `What about Craig . . . Craig is in Maitland Junior High School. He graduates this year, which was the latter part of May. We’re already in April.”

Harry let them stay the extra month, Mimi said, then they moved out.

Other legal demands appeared, Mimi said. For the cost of the Florida funeral. For the air-freight bill on the casket. For $100,000 Jay’s parents said they had loaned him to purchase a share of stock in the Helmsley Palace Hotel. For Mimi’s 1982 DeLorean automobile - Florida license plate “LE TOY.”

For a particularly ornate topaz ring.

Leona had bought it at Buccelatti, the Fifth Avenue jeweler, Mimi said. It was signed and numbered, a perfect 24-carat white stone set in white, yellow and pink gold, surrounded by 136 cut diamonds.

Leona presented it to her as a special gift, Mimi said, in celebration of young Craig’s bar mitzvah. The couples were in New York together, and the women were visiting in Leona’s dressing room.

“She’s having her hair done, makeup done, that sort of thing,” Mimi said. “She said, `I have something for you,’ and she went into the closet. In the closet she had a vault. She came out with the ring. She handed me the ring. I said, `That’s very kind . . .’ “

Mimi never much cared for the ring, she said - “I mean, it’s not me, I make most of my own jewelry.” But after Jay’s death, when Leona demanded it back, Mimi said, she wasn’t about to give in. * * *

Mimi’s remarried now, to a man from Kentucky who is in the construction business. She’s opened up her own business, Panzirer Purchasing Corp., buying supplies for hotels, apartment complexes and local governments.

By now, all the legal disputes have played themselves out. The estate is closed. The Helmsleys got $146,000 from the estate to cover the hotel stock and some money in a Florida brokerage account, according to previous reports. Harry had to eat the coffin-shipment bill. Leona dropped her claim on the topaz ring after Mimi came up with a news clip in which Leona seemed to describe it as a gift.

Mimi still owes money to her lawyers.

And although Mimi lost the DeLorean, she got it back and drives it now. The day it was to be auctioned on the courthouse steps, Mimi said, the construction man from Kentucky - not yet her husband - showed up with a briefcase full of cash, outbidding the Helmsleys’ lawyers.

“They had an absolute unwillingness to negotiate,” said one of Mimi’s lawyers, Frank Finkbeiner of Orlando. “Everything had to be litigated.”

“She went through a very difficult period,” said Rabbi Larry Halpern of Orlando’s Congregation Liberal Judaism, where she and Jay attended services.

“I think a lot of people are pleased, because Leona Helmsley is a very difficult lady,” Halpern said. “I don’t feel that is a proper reaction for a rabbi to have.” Still, he added: “I had dealings of my own with Leona that were not entirely positive.”

And now that they’re back in the news, Mimi Panzirer is thinking again about her old in-laws.

“The kind part of me wants to say, `She just lost her son. Children are not supposed to pre-decease their parents, it’s not the normal course of events. It’s not the way it’s supposed to work. That she just snapped. The realistic part of me says, `Her son loved something other than her. I was the focus of taking that modicum of love away from her, and she hated me for it.”

There’s a tension there.

“I think that I would be extraordinarily hypocritical if I did not stick to my guns and say, `We must remember - despite what the press does - everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

“On the other hand, I also believe in - I suppose kharma, if you want to call it that. I believe that what goes around comes around.

“The worst thing that can happen to Harry and Leona - it’s not the bad press, any press is good publicity to a certain extent - the only way it can hurt Harry is get him in the pocketbook. The only thing that can hurt Leona is growing old.”

Mimi went on.

“It’s been a long time since anybody made Harry do anything,” she said. “He had to write a check, not because he wants to write a check, not because he can’t afford it - that’s not the point. He’s being forced to do something he has no control over, or he may be forced to do something. He has lost control. Harry is a controller. Harry is the ultimate chess player. He plays chess with the world. Or Monopoly, if you would. He is always in control. For the first time in probably 60 years, he is not in control.”

To Mimi, Harry was always the more complicated one. But it is Leona, who retains - still, after all these years - the tightest emotional grip on her, like the one she had on Jay.

“I think Leona is a very sad story,” Mimi said. “It’s very basic, and it goes back a long, long time. She raised Jay to believe - he never had a best friend until he was 39 years old, best male friend, best male buddy - because his mother had told him no one will be your friend. They’re only after your money. That is her philosophy. You have no friends. They only want your money.”