elizabeth anne frenkel
IT GOES TO MY HEAD LIKE BRANDY; I ENJOY BEING A GIRL!
On July 30, the hottest day on record that year (though which year, exactly, is up for debate), the woman who would grow up to be Betty Belle was born in the disadvantaged Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Christened Elizabeth Anne O’Dorney, she was the illegitimate daughter of department store mogul Arthur Frenkel and his seventeen-year-old mistress, Rosemarie. Conscious of his responsibility to the child but unwilling to trouble his legitimate family by claiming it, Arthur sent Rosemarie O’Dorney and the baby to live in Chicago, on sizable monthly stipends afforded by his steadily burgeoning consumer enterprise. Rosemarie lived a life of moderate luxury and Baby Betty was pampered and provided for – until their finances finally dried up in the wake of Arthur’s death. Unsurprisingly, Rosemarie and Betty were mentioned nowhere in the will that divided his retail fortune among his four adult sons. Still rather naïve at age fifteen, Betty was too young to comprehend the reasons behind their abrupt shift in lifestyle but old enough to realize she was suddenly missing out. Her mother – once a vibrant, sonorous spirit now without a marketable skill or a penny to her name – fell prey to the bottle, a habit which diminished her smile but increased her candor, and in the throes of her disease one night, she confessed to her daughter what she swore never to tell: between her loud sobs and expletives, Betty learned she was a bastard Frenkel.
Unlike her despondent mother, Betty’s optimistic naivety left her undeterred by the news, seeing it instead as an opportunity to improve their lot. Pinching pennies for five years straight, she eventually managed to purchase a train ticket and travel to New York to plead her case with her father's family. To her shock and embarrassment they outright shunned her, calling the redhead a fool or a liar and sending her back on her way. Dismayed though she was, it didn’t stop Betty from taking their name and positing herself as an heiress back in Chicago. And it was true, after all; will or no, she was by blood a Frenkel. To hear as much impressed the gentlemen who sought to woo her back in the Windy City, where Betty had failed to return to her mother and instead found a small apartment above a laundry service. Though she’d left her behind, Rosemarie’s teachings weren’t lost on her daughter; by the only example she'd ever known, Betty learned to live off the men whose attentions she attracted, batting thick eyelashes at them over fancy dinners and asking if they knew anyone who could make her a famous singer. She'd taken her inspiration from listening to her mother serenade them with Irish folk ballads while she polished her jewelry, but unbeknownst to Betty, she hadn't inherited the woman's pipes. Plenty of her suitors offered promises of stardom - some toying with her to the extent of elaborate hoaxes, introducing her to so-called bigwigs at Victor and Columbia and staging fake auditions in desolate nightclubs - but try as she might, her singing career simply refused to take wing. By the time she turned twenty-one (maybe for the second or third time), Betty's prospects for an affluent and glamorous life were growing shallow – as was her bank account. It was around this time that prohibition crept in and with it, a profit boom in organized crime, and the girl who had always managed somehow to manipulate food onto the table (and all despite not being the sharpest knife in the drawer) made a drastic decision in the name of her survival: if the public didn't want to hear Betty Frenkel sing, she'd peddle the one thing she knew that they did want.
Chicago's South Side had the corner on the sex commodity, and it was trembling and nauseated that Betty called on the city's most infamous madame. Donatella “La Donna” Segreti was swift in her dismissal of the doe-eyed girl, telling her to come back when she wasn’t entertaining a visit from her nephew Raffaele – more commonly known (although not to Betty) as Ralphie the Cat, then-underboss of the Chicago Outfit. Through the doorway past his aunt, Ralphie set eyes on and immediately took a shine to Betty, inviting her in despite Donatella’s protests. Likewise taken with his inscrutable good looks and the cut of his imported three-piece suit, she warmed right up to the Cat and within the hour would move out from beneath the shadow of looming poverty and into the dubious limelight of being a Mafia girlfriend. Ralphie Segreti had a lean build and a ruthless nature and – however inconsequentially – a wife. He put Betty up in a room at the Congress and ensured that her every whim was catered to. It was a familiar arrangement for Betty, who saw nothing abnormal about living alone on an allowance and even considered her beau’s frequent visits a blessing and a treat compared to the solitude she’d known growing up. (IN PERMADEVELOPMENT...)