Leona Helmsley, who died yesterday at 87, reigned unserenely from her lavish pink office in the Helmsley Palace, at first over the Helmsley empire of more than 30 hotels around the country decorated and run according to her ragingly uncompromising standards.

Later, she oversaw all of her husband Harry Helmsley’s holdings, one of the grandest assemblages of real estate ever amassed in New York City. Harry Helmsley, at his height, controlled an estimated $5 billion worth of properties, including the Empire State Building, the Flatiron Building, and Tudor City. Leona Helmsley unwound much of it in recent years, but still held the lease to the Empire State through 2075 and was estimated this year by Forbes magazine to have been worth $2.5 billion.

Helmsley nurtured a dragon lady image even as she was prosecuted by federal authorities who imprisoned her for income tax evasion, by tabloids that dubbed her the “queen of mean,” and by embittered staff who accused her of everything from withholding wages to cheating at backgammon.

Helmsley’s tiara and décolletage adorned ads that boasted of “The only palace in the world where the Queen stands guard.” But everyone knew that when the photographers disappeared, she was the royal executioner, too.

Her imperious ways were testified to at her 1989 tax evasion trial. According to a former employee, Helmsley once said, “Only the little people pay taxes.” (She denied it, and records show that the Helmsleys paid $53 million in taxes for the years she was accused of evading payment of an additional $1.7 million.) The quote struck a chord, and huzzahs rang from the peasantry as the queen was trundled off to 21 months in the dungeon. The story played out like one of Grimm’s sourer fairy tales.

The prosecution was directed in part by a U.S. attorney named Rudolph Giuliani. The defense was handled by the unlikely legal team of Alan Dershowitz and Robert Bork. After being found guilty, Helmsley surrendered on April 15, 1992 — tax day. While in jail, she reportedly paid another inmate, in cigarettes or scrip, to clean her cell, then fired her big house maid for a cheaper one. Paroled in 1994, she was sentenced to additional community service when it was discovered she was having her employees perform it for her. Her lawyers later sued her for thousands in unpaid legal bills.

Harry Helmsley, who avoided prosecution on grounds of mental incompetence, died in 1997. “My fairy tale is over,” Leona Helmsley said in a statement. Despite the pettiness and the titanic rages, the strong impression remained that the queen truly adored the king. The “I’m Just Wild About Harry” party she threw each year on his birthday attracted the city’s most glamorous social strata, minus Donald Trump, with whom she was perpetually at war.

Harry Helmsley returned her affection on the city’s most prominent citadel, the Empire State Building, where each July 4 he bathed the upper floors in red, white, and blue light, not for the nation’s birthday but for hers.

She “makes Harry feel like King Kong,” a rival real estate developer told the Wall Street Journal in 1982.

The daughter of a Polish hat manufacturer, Leona Mindy Rosenthal was raised in Brooklyn and later spoke of selling Eskimo Pies at her family’s Coney Island candy stand. She quit Hunter College after two years and took up modeling, and she claimed to have at one point been the Chesterfield cigarette girl. A marriage at 20 to real estate lawyer Leo Panzirer produced her only son, and she was divorced a decade later, in 1950.

In 1960, a second marriage was dissolved, and she took work as a secretary in a Manhattan real estate firm, Pease & Elliman. She eventually got a broker’s license as Leona Roberts and made a small fortune converting rentals to co-operatives. She went on to found the residential arm of the real estate firm Sutton & Towne, where she was senior vice president and once claimed to have earned $400,000 in commissions in a single quarter of 1968.

It was as one of the most successful women in Manhattan real estate that Leona met Harry Helmsley, who eventually hired her and then in 1972 divorced his wife of more than 30 years to marry her. The speculation was that he agreed to the nuptials only after she agreed to drop 20 pounds. If so, she kept off the weight; the visage was that of a painted fury, but the body was better.

In the mid-1970s, he built the Harley Hotel, near Grand Central Station, named by a portmanteau of the couple’s first names. Leona handled the interior decoration there and at the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel on Central Park, where the couple had their New York penthouse, featuring a swimming pool. In 1980, Harry Helmsley made Leona president of Helmsley Hotels Inc., which had come to comprise the flagship Helmsley Palace in New York, built on property sold by the Catholic Diocese of New York adjacent to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as well as a chain of Hospitality Motor Inns and many others.

Leona Helmsley’s reputation began to grow for a ruthless insistence on elegance and perfection; during a 1982 press tour of the Helmsley Palace, someone invoked royal displeasure. “The maid’s a slob,” Helmsley commanded. “Get rid of her.” The Helmsley Palace became the first hotel in the city to garner a five-diamond rating from the American Automobile Association.

Ostentation was part of the formula as well, and when the Helmsleys’ tax problems surfaced in the late 1980s, the press breathlessly reported on the $130,000 sound system in their Connecticut residence, which had been billed as a business expense. Among Leona Helmsley’s let-them-eat-cake moments was her retort to a painting contractor who pleaded that her withholding payments meant he was having trouble feeding his six children. Thus spake the queen: “Why doesn’t he keep his pants on, he wouldn’t have so many problems.”

For such was Helmsley humiliated and punished, and yet somehow she was never quite humbled. In 1990, in the midst of her legal problems, she took out a full-page ad in the New York Times urging the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, to step down: “Mr. Hussein, it is time to check out.”

A late foray into romance went very publicly awry when it was alleged that her boyfriend was gay and liked to dress up in her lingerie. She was later sued for sexual discrimination against a homosexual hotel manager.

After Harry Helmsley died in 1997, childless, his estimated $1.5 billion personal fortune passed entirely to Leona Helmsley, who unwound some of it but retained significant holdings in the Empire State Building, the Lincoln Building, the Park Lane Hotel, and many others.

Her only son died of a heart attack in 1982. The twisted denouement, in which Helmsley sued her former daughter-in-law allegedly to the brink of bankruptcy for minutia such as the return postage on her son’s casket, became the stuff of queen-of-mean legend. But Helmsley did leave four grandchildren, at least two of whom held executive positions in the Helmsley business.

Helmsley’s spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, said yesterday that the will had not yet been read and so it remained uncertain what would become of the remains of Harry Helmsley’s storied realm. A public memorial service was to be announced shortly.

Leona Helmsley

Born Leona Mindy Rosenthal on July 4, 1920, in Ulster County, N.Y.; died August 20 at her summer home in Greenwich, Conn., of heart failure; survived by four grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren, and a brother, Alvin Rosenthal.