Susan Berman - Biography

Biography

Berman's father was mob figure Davie Berman, who had replaced Bugsy Siegel in Las Vegas at the Flamingo Hotel after Siegel's murder by the mob. Berman always maintained that her father died mysteriously on an operating table when she was 12. Berman also believed her mother Gladys' overdose suicide a year later was under mysterious circumstances.

Susan Berman was known affectionately as a "Jewish Mafia Princess." In 1981, Berman published the memoir Easy Street about life as the daughter of a mobster. Susan Berman was represented in the 1970s by the William Morris Agency, who talked with several Hollywood producers interested in adapting Berman's book into a screenplay. The movie rights were purchased from Berman, but the film project never got off the ground.

Various published accounts have reported possible connections between Berman's murder and the 1982 disappearance of Kathie Durst—the wife of Berman's college friend and heir to a New York real estate fortune Robert Durst. Durst was considered a prime suspect in his wife's disappearance, along with another person of interest, but he was never charged in the case. Berman remained a friend of Durst after the disappearance of his wife, and Durst gave large cash gifts to Berman in the months before Berman's death. Almost two decades after Kathie Durst's disappearance, New York State Police, at the request of Jeanine Pirro, the district attorney at the time in New York's Westchester County, contacted Susan to interview her about the Durst case. She was killed within a few days of the query.

Berman lived just off the Sunset Strip on Alta Loma Road in West Hollywood for several years prior to moving to her last residence in Benedict Canyon. Nyle Brenner, Berman's manager, said to the Los Angeles Times days after the murder that "many details of Ms. Berman's personal life are unclear" and added "she had been married once in the 1980s, and later helped rear the two children of a boyfriend." Her only husband, Mister Margulies, died of a heroin overdose. She kept close ties to friends on Alta Loma Road, where she once lived, the Las Vegas Strip and in New York City, including Durst.

Berman was a novelist and author of two memoirs. She was a reporter for The San Francisco Examiner and also wrote for Francis Ford Coppola's City Magazine, the Westinghouse Evening Show on KPIX and the "People" show on CBS. She was a contributing writer for New York, Cosmopolitan and Family Circle. Shen wrote Driver, Give a Soldier a Lift! and Lady Las Vegas, which accompanied the 1996 release of an A&E documentary for which Berman was a co-writer and for which she was nominated for a Writers Guild of America award.

At the time of her death, she was working on a project for Showtime with attorney Kevin Norte. The title of the project was Sin City and was being planned as a Showtime's version of the HBO hit The Sopranos.