Deborah Friedman
Appearances
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
Shirley DeSack, welcome to the Shan. The Shan people love you. Welcome. It was insane. I think that my mother was even shocked.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
And she's sitting there in her little Chanel suit and gloves like butter couldn't melt in her mouth. And she is so elegant. And she's just in her glory. She was treated with such respect. She was at the zenith of her existence. And everything that happened after that had to be so anticlimactic and so hurtful.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
It was cut and it exposed all these flaws and she ended up losing all this money on it.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
And basically he's saying to her, is it a problem? Can you move this money? I mean, they show up with a cash machine. And you all make money.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
I remember feeling very angry. I remember feeling that she risked my husband, my family's safety. She would have risked us all.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
I was angry, but I was very sad for her, too. You know, because I had heart for her. There's my mother.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
She was so close to spending years in prison, and that would have been the end of it for her.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
He was so upset that my mother was complaining that they had no money and she had been arrested in 2001 and he had to get rid of their life insurance policy and he had to spend a fortune of money on lawyers to get her out of this. And she was complaining that she didn't have life insurance, that she didn't have money. And he was like, I did it for her. She got herself in trouble.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
Mary Cassatt, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec. But none of those paintings were real. There are these fantastic copies, and all these people that are dealers and very wealthy people who come into the apartment. I always wondered, what the hell are they thinking? You know, my mother wouldn't say anything.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
It was all the bold, colored headlines with my mother and the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe. And I remember thinking to myself, everyone knows about my mother now.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
I know that people were always asking her, what do you think? And people were very impressed with her, her style. She really knew how to put things together and understood how to dress up a house. Like you dress yourself up and accessorize.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
For example. My mother had some beautiful Emilio Pucci dresses, the best of what he was producing at that time. She created a fire in that closet with all those poochy dresses, and she was supposed to get a return for that, like an insurance scam.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
She had his canvas, his easel, his paints, everything set up for him to just come in and paint. And here I am, I don't know, I'm eight or nine, and I thought I'd have some fun with a drunk artist. So he says, you have a cigarette? You have a cigarette? I gave him candy cigarettes. And he was trying to light them up.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
The insurance company would rather negotiate with a thief than have to pay out the claim on the insurance. So my mother thought that it was a viable way of doing business. Other people were getting away with it. Why not her?
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
My mother loves to eat and loves a grilled burger. And the smell from the grill a block away would waft in. She used to say, they make the greatest burgers there.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
I thought, this is a mensch above all mensches. This is an uber-mensch. What were they like together early on? Albert was like a schoolboy. I mean, he would look at her with these eyes. He never saw her ugly qualities at the beginning.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
Every weekend, Albert would religiously visit my mother and bring Dunkin' Donuts and pizza and nail polishes and beauty products. Albert remained devoted. They even married. Despite the disapproval from his family, they would say, why can't you find a woman who can make chicken soup? Why did you pick such a complicated, crazy woman? And Albert was defiant.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
He loved her, and he thought she was the most exciting, gorgeous, entertaining, charming, brilliant person.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
But Albert accepted Shirley's... He said he thought the price of marrying a beautiful woman was to marry a crazy one.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
My mother was having her hair done there, her nails. She sat in the sun, so she had a nice tan there. She looked like she was in a resort.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
Deborah again. There were people that shunned him. There were people that would invite him to things and not invite her. He would not allow that. I think she felt like being Albert Sack's wife, she would achieve the level of respectability that she always wanted. That she would reach a certain upper echelon that she had always desired.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
But as much as she cared about Albert, it bothered her that it wasn't her. That she wasn't the one that was getting the acclaim. She wasn't the one that was getting all the attention.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
She designed this gorgeous, gorgeous necklace. So she really did have exquisite taste. It was sapphire and diamond. It was beautiful.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
Ruby was like the cashmere sapphire to her. There was a romantic allure.
Big Time
The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7
The entire village, like 1,200 people, line up on this dirt road. And they hold up signs.