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The New York Times
August 21, 2007
LEFT]Leona Helmsley, Hotel ‘Queen,’ Is Dead at 87[/LEFT]
By ENID NEMY
Correction Appended
Leona Helmsley, the self-styled hotel queen whose prison term for income tax evasion and fraud was greeted with uncommon approval by a public who regarded her as a 1980s symbol of arrogance and greed, died yesterday at her home in Greenwich, Conn. She was 87.
The cause was heart failure, her longtime spokesman, Howard J. Rubenstein, said.
Mrs. Helmsley came to public attention after her marriage in 1972 to one of New York’s pre-eminent real estate investors and brokers, Harry B. Helmsley, who had divorced his wife of 33 years to marry her. In his heyday, Mr. Helmsley controlled real estate worth $5 billion, including the Empire State Building, the Helmsley Building on Park Avenue and the Flatiron Building. He died in 1997.
Mrs. Helmsley’s real power began to develop in 1980, with her appointment as president of the Helmsley hotels. At the time, the chain ran 30 hotels around the country, including the Park Lane and the St. Moritz in New York, as well as the Harley (now the Helmsley Hotel New York) and the flagship Helmsley Palace.
“It was Harry’s idea,” she said at the time. She added, “He said the best thing about it was that the board of directors meeting was over when we got out of bed.”
Although hotel employees throughout the Helmsley empire were aware of Mrs. Helmsley’s hair-trigger temper and arranged a warning system when she left her apartment on the way to one of the hotels, it was not until she was featured in glossy advertisements for the hotels that she became a household name. The first ads, for the Harley, showed a smiling Mrs. Helmsley proclaiming that she wouldn’t settle for things like skimpy towels, and “why should you?” Occupancy increased to 87 percent from 25 percent, according to Joyce Beber, chairman of Beber Silverstein & Partners, the agency that created the campaign.
The Harley success led to ads for the Helmsley Palace. Mrs. Helmsley, in evening dress in various settings in the hotel, proclaimed, “It’s the only palace in the world where the queen stands guard.” Such advertisements appeared for a decade. They worked, ad executives said, because Mrs. Helmsley and her insistence on first-rate service gave the Helmsley hotels a personality.
Some of the queen’s luster was tarnished in 1986 when court documents and law enforcement officials said she had failed to pay sales taxes in New York on hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry from Van Cleef & Arpels. Two senior store officers pleaded guilty to operating a scheme in which customers with out-of-state addresses could have their purchases recorded as being mailed to them.
Mrs. Helmsley, who had received a grant of immunity, could not be charged.
In 1987, a series of articles, based on information from a disgruntled employee, was published in The New York Post. The next year, the Helmsleys were indicted by federal and state authorities on charges that they had evaded more than $4 million in income taxes by fraudulently claiming luxury items for one of their homes as business expenses. The home, Dunnellen Hall in Greenwich, has 28 rooms on 26 acres overlooking Long Island Sound.
In 235 counts in state and federal indictments, the Helmsleys were accused of using money from their hotel and real estate empires to buy a $1 million marble dance floor above a swimming pool, a $210,000 mahogany card table and $500,000 worth of jade objets d’art. Mrs. Helmsley was also charged with defrauding Helmsley stockholders by receiving $83,333 a month in secret consulting fees.
Mr. Helmsley, then 80 and suffering deficiencies in reasoning and memory, was found mentally unfit to stand trial. As Mrs. Helmsley was tried, a series of prosecution witnesses described a spiteful, extravagant, foul-mouthed woman who terrified her underlings. In the most celebrated line of testimony, a former Helmsley housekeeper testified that Mrs. Helmsley had once told her, “Only the little people pay taxes.”
Mrs. Helmsley’s lawyer, Gerald A. Feffer, did not deny the truth of such testimony but told jurors not to hold her personality against her, saying, “I don’t believe Mrs. Helmsley is charged in the indictment with being a bitch.”
Mrs. Helmsley was convicted of evading $1.2 million in federal income taxes but acquitted of scheming to extort kickbacks from contractors and suppliers. Judge John M. Walker Jr. of Federal District Court sentenced a sobbing Mrs. Helmsley to four years in prison and imposed a fine of $7.1 million. She also had to pay some $1.7 million in back taxes.
Mrs. Helmsley began her sentence in 1992 and was freed in 1994 after 18 months in a federal prison in Connecticut, one month in a Midtown Manhattan halfway house and two months confined to her Manhattan penthouse. She was barred from executive involvement in the Helmsley Hotel organization and was supposed to perform 750 hours of community service during the next three years. The sentence was later increased by 150 hours when a federal judge determined that employees had performed some of her service.
They had not done it out of kindness. Mrs. Helmsley had difficulties getting along with her employees for most of her career.
In 2001, she settled a lawsuit out of court with an employee who claimed that Mrs. Helmsley had wrongfully fired him after learning he was gay. In 2003, another employee won a jury award of $11.2 million after alleging he was also wrongfully fired because he was gay. The award was subsequently reduced to $554,000, after which Mrs. Helmsley settled for an undisclosed amount.
For many Americans, Mrs. Helmsley was a symbol of an unbridled arrogance and philosophy of entitlement during the 1980s. She was the subject of a 1990 television film, “Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean” with Suzanne Pleshette in the title role; and at least three books, “The Queen of Mean,” by Ransdell Pierson; “Palace Coup,” by Michael Moss; and “The Helmsleys: the Rise and Fall of Harry and Leona” by Richard Hammer.
She was born Leona Mindy Rosenthal, the third child of Ida and Morris Rosenthal, on July 4, 1920, in rural Ulster County, New York. Her father was a hat maker.
The family moved to Brooklyn, where she grew up. She was, for a time, a teenage model. Soon after high school, she had her name legally changed to Leona Roberts.
Her first marriage, to Leo E. Panzirer, a lawyer, ended in 1952 after 11 years. The couple had a child, Jay Robert Panzirer. He died in 1982.
Mrs. Helmsley is survived by her brother, Alvin Rosenthal; four grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.
In 1953 she married Joe Lubin, an executive in his parents’ dyeing and finishing company. That marriage, which she seldom mentioned, lasted seven years.
By the 1960s she had a successful career selling luxury cooperative apartments on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. By 1969 she had become a vice president of Pease & Elliman, a real estate company. She later became president of the its cooperative division, Sutton & Towne Residential.
She told The New York Times that she met Mr. Helmsley when he “heard of my reputation and he told one of his executives ‘whoever she is, get her.’ ” Colleagues remembered the circumstances differently. One recalled being asked to point out Mr. Helmsley at a real estate industry dance, and watching as the future Mrs. Helmsley made a beeline for him and danced with him the rest of the evening. However they met, within weeks she was offered an executive position as director of cooperative sales at Brown, Harris, Stevens, a Helmsley subsidiary.
In April 1972, Leona Mindy Roberts married Harry Helmsley, after his divorce from Eve Helmsley, whom he had married in 1938.
Immediately after the marriage, Mrs. Helmsley began redecorating his Park Lane Hotel penthouse, a 10,000-square-foot duplex with a swimming pool and a terrace with a four-way view of Manhattan. It was the site of an annual “I’m Just Wild About Harry” party, with several hundred prominent guests.
The couple also commuted by $4 million jet to a penthouse in Palm Beach, Fla. There, in 1973, both Helmsleys were stabbed by an intruder. From then on, they were accompanied by bodyguards.
After the stabbing, Mrs. Helmsley’s son, Jay, flew to her side after a five-year estrangement and Mrs. Helmsley made him an executive of a Helmsley subsidiary. Soon after he died, at the age of 40, Mrs. Helmsley demanded that his estate repay a $100,000 loan and ordered his third wife and his teenage son from a previous marriage to vacate their home, saying that it belonged to the Helmsley organization.
Among the charitable contributions the Helmsleys made was a $10 million gift toward a new $117 million hospital in Greenwich. In 1986, the couple donated $33 million to what became the Helmsley Medical Tower at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan.
Even after her conviction and imprisonment, Mrs. Helmsley was not a stranger in the courts. In 1996, a New York State Supreme Court justice ordered her to pay $1.5 million to the chief financial officer of the Helmsley enterprises, who was fired by Mrs. Helmsley while she was in prison.
And in May of that year, Harry Helmsley’s two top associates at Helmsley-Spear, Alvin Schwartz and Irving Schneider, filed a lawsuit against the Helmsleys, accusing Leona Helmsley of stripping the realty company of its assets and essentially rendering it insolvent to avoid paying millions of dollars it owed them.
They said that Mr. Helmsley had granted them an option in 1970 to buy the firm upon his death. If they chose not to, they would receive a cash payment of $10 million each.
Mrs. Helmsley denied the charges. The suit was settled in late 1997, with Mrs. Helmsley selling Helmsley-Spear to the two men.
It is doubtful that Mr. Helmsley was aware of his wife’s business dealings for many years. His memory virtually gone after a series of strokes, he spent most of his declining years in Paradise Valley, Ariz.
In 1998, Mrs. Helmsley made a triumphant return to the real estate industry’s annual dinner. Around that time, she sold much of her property empire in a booming market.
Correction: August 22, 2007
An obituary yesterday about Leona Helmsley, the widow of the real estate magnate Harry Helmsley, misstated the title of a book about them by Richard Hammer. It is “The Helmsleys: The Rise and Fall of Harry and Leona,” not “Unreal Estate: the Rise and Fall of Harry & Leona Helmsley,” which was one of the prepublication titles.
eM.
Kind of a record for her. But I've got to say that a lot of the terrible things she was accused of were blown way out of proportion. That is not to say that there weren't even more things she did that weren't even worse! 
We called her The Dragon Lady. But like everyone else in the real world, she was not one dimensional. She was also quite kind and thoughtful on her terms. She was a prolific letter writer in the gracious old-school way. She sent encouragement and thanks with the same ferocious passion that she'd use to tear someone a new asshole. 
