RIP Leona Helmsley

I was brought up to believe that if you can't say something nice about somebody, don't say anything at all.

Of course, that advice stopped making sense the minute my mother got behind the wheel of her car and started impugning the parentage and IQ of every other driver on the road. Despite the lesson on offer, what I really learned was that there's often a difference between what we ought to believe and what we actually do.

Despite her well-publicized bouts with tax evasion and homophobia, I have nothing against Leona Helmsley. After all, there are bigots and shady capitalists literally everywhere, and who has the time or the energy to get bent out of shape every time one of them spews hubris? Or even dies?

The fact that Leona Helmsley made a fortune converting apartments into condos in the late sixties, long before her last name was Helmsley, makes her seem far more loathsome than hearing her subsquently saying "Only little people pay taxes" and firing her staff for being gay. The two events in her life that made her famous seem inconsequential beside the far-reaching ramifications of the real estate development which cost Manhattan its affordability.

If anything the most offensive thing Leona Helmsley ever did was to be portrayed in a TV movie by Suzanne Pleshette; linking that lovely and talented lady to this Skeksi-in-drag was downright immoral.