Bugsy Siegel's Marriage With Esta Was Much Nastier Than 'Bugsy' Movie Showed

Bugsy Siegel's Marriage With Esta Was Much Nastier Than 'Bugsy' Movie Showed December 13, 1991. Movie theaters across America opened Barry Levinson’s film Bugsy. In one of the film’s central scenes, Warren Beatty as Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel stands in a Scarsdale kitchen wearing an apron, helping his wife frost a birthday cake for their daughter Millicent. Meyer Lansky and the others appear in the living room to talk business. At the same time Bugsy keeps calling to find Virginia Hill, the mistress who has vanished. He moves quickly between kitchen, living room, and telephone, juggling father, crime boss, and adulterer with an almost comic grace. The audience laughs. Critics call it one of the most entertaining scenes in the film. The movie received ten Oscar nominations and won two. Warren Beatty and Annette Bening fell in love in real life from the picture and married in 1992. And at the edge of all of it, almost invisible in the very film that tells her husband’s life, Wendy Phillips plays Esta Siegel, the wife of seventeen years, given a few minutes of screen time and a gentle, enduring face. In the opening scene Siegel says goodbye to his wife and two daughters at the train station and boards a train for Los Angeles, leaving the family in Scarsdale, New York. According to the script he is ordered to go for four days. He never comes back. He buys a mansion in Beverly Hills with $50,000 in cash, seduces Virginia Hill on his first day in L.A., and though he promises Virginia he will ask for a divorce, he never brings it up with Esta. The film turns all of that into a romance. Hollywood decided that a seventeen-year marriage was only worth using as backdrop for the love story of Bugsy and Virginia. Reality was completely different.