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Queen Bess
An Unauthorized Biography of Bess Myerson
By Jennifer Preston OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1990 Jennifer Preston
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3130-1
CHAPTER 1
A Fall from Grace
At 7:00 A.M. Bess Myerson pulled open the blinds in her living room on a sunny, crisp autumn morning. It was Thursday, October 15, 1987, and from her apartment window on Manhattan's posh Upper East Side she could see the treetops of Central Park, where the leaves were beginning to turn, brightening the city with their red, orange, and yellow hues.
In just four hours she was due downtown at the U.S. District Courthouse in Foley Square. Four photographers had been waiting outside her apartment building since before dawn to chronicle her departure. Photographers seemed to follow her everywhere now — to the drugstore, to the supermarket, even to the Hamptons waterfront estate of her boyfriend, Carl Andy Capasso, where a photographer from the New York Post had caught her in his telephoto lens just that week, carrying a pair of andirons from the house to the car. She was shocked when she saw the paper's front page the next day. There she was, looking old and haggard in a rumpled gray sweatsuit, without any makeup, her unwashed hair pushed behind her ears, holding the andirons. And there was a story accusing her of stealing them. So there was little doubt that today the photographers would be out in force to document her trip to Foley Square.
She was to answer charges that she conspired with Andy to bribe a state supreme court judge to lower his $1,500-a-week alimony payments to the woman he had left behind for her. It was an untidy business that had been played for all it was worth, and more, on the front pages of New York's merciless tabloids. It seemed that the public could not read enough about the case and Bess's affair with Andy, who stood almost a head shorter than she and who was now in federal prison on an unrelated tax evasion charge.
Yet their very incongruity was fascinating enough. Andy was twenty-one years her junior, a heavyset, street-smart contractor who lacked a college education and Manhattan sophistication but who had made millions of dollars installing sewers under the streets of New York. Bess was tall and statuesque, a woman whose beauty, even at age sixty-three, turned heads. She had parlayed her 1945 Miss America crown into a successful television and political career that had brought her wealth and admiration, even in a city of cynicism that seemed to take a special delight now in watching her fall.
This would be Bess's first public appearance since she had resigned six months earlier as New York City's commissioner of cultural affairs, and she selected clothes and accessories that would make her look every inch the former beauty queen that she was. From her closet, filled with size twelve and fourteen designer suits and dresses hung according to color, she chose a black knit Chanel-style suit with brass buttons, a crimson silk blouse, and low-heeled black patent leather shoes. From her toolbox-size jewelry case she picked out a strand of black beads and pearl earrings set in gold filigree.
Bess had spent enough years in television to know that she should apply a heavy foundation for the cameras and extra color over her high cheekbones. She brushed aquamarine eye shadow around her almond-shaped hazel eyes and dark red color onto her full, expressive lips. She put her chestnut-brown hair in electric rollers, and after she took them out she fluffed layers of curls on top of her head.
When she was dressed, the reflection in the full-length mirror contrasted sharply with the Bess Myerson in a sweatsuit who had stared from the front page of the New York Post only days before. She looked stunning in her black suit, weighing only a little more than the 136 pounds she weighed when she had competed for the title of Miss America forty-two years earlier.
Her younger sister, Helen, a retired high school music teacher, was due to arrive around nine o'clock and take her to the Conservative Synagogue of Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village. Today was a Jewish holiday, Sh'mini Atzereth, and Bess wanted to attend Yitzkor, a memorial service for the dead. Perhaps prayer would help her face what promised to be the most difficult day of her life.
A few minutes after nine the doorman rang upstairs to announce that Helen had arrived and was waiting in the lobby. Bess took the elevator down and walked outside with her sister into what was now a crowd of photographers. Smiling for the cameras, she followed Helen into a waiting dark blue Cadillac, which pulled away, turning left on Fifth Avenue and heading downtown through heavy traffic in midtown Manhattan and into the Village. A reporter and photographer from the New York Post followed right behind all the way.
They reached the synagogue in twenty-five minutes and took a seat in the back, where Bess picked up a black Hebrew prayer book. In her prayers she asked her mother and father, Bella and Louis, for strength.
At the end of the service Bess hurried out of the synagogue before the rest of the worshipers, the prayer book still in her hands. Knowing the next few hours would be a media circus, she thought it would be best to go to the courthouse without Helen, so she kissed her sister good-bye. Her lawyer, Fred Hafetz, a former federal prosecutor-turned-defense attorney who had represented Andy Capasso on other matters, was waiting outside in the back of a chauffeur-driven black Lincoln Town Car.
It was a short ride downtown to the massive granite courthouse in Foley Square, a few blocks north of City Hall, where Bess had reigned for years as the city's unofficial first lady to her one-time friend, Mayor Edward I. Koch. Approaching the courthouse, she could see a mob of almost two hundred reporters, photographers, camera crews, and curious onlookers, all jostling for position as they awaited her arrival.
As the Lincoln pulled up, the crowd pushed and shoved its way down the courthouse steps, a human tide with microphones, flashing cameras, and tape recorders that seemed to engulf Bess as she stepped from the car. They shouted their questions:
"Any comment, Bess?"
"How do you feel, Bess?"
"Turn this way for the cameras, Bess."
She smiled into the cameras but ignored their questions as she inched her way into the swarm and up the courthouse steps. She would make a brief public statement after the arraignment. The crowd parted as she urged Hafetz to "go straight, go straight." It took a full two minutes to climb the thirteen steps to the revolving door entrance.
Once inside she sighed in relief and let her body sag. Three federal marshals blocked the entrance while she put her black purse and Hebrew prayer book on a conveyor belt that took them through an airport-style x-ray machine. Then she turned left down a long hallway, following her attorney to Courtroom 110.
Nearly a hundred reporters and spectators were waiting inside the vast courtroom with black marble walls and oak panels. When Bess entered the room all heads turned and watched her take a seat in the middle of the fourth row on the right. As she thumbed through her prayer book, state supreme court justice Hortense Gabel was arriving at the courthouse. She was the judge whom Bess and Andy had been accused of attempting to bribe, and she was here now because federal prosecutors had charged her with conspiracy in the alleged scheme.
A tiny woman with short brown hair, Judge Gabel, at age seventy-four, looked frail and almost lost inside the oversized silver-and-black brocade suit that she had borrowed from her daughter. Nearly blind, she peered out at the crowd through thick glasses, looking confused and frightened as she walked slowly on the arm of her eighty-one-year-old husband, Milton, a tall, slender, gray-haired dentist, now retired.
As the Gabels walked up the courthouse steps through the crush of reporters and the curious, their only child, Sukhreet, grabbed her mother's arm and whispered encouragement in her ear. "Just pretend you're Madonna, Mother," she told her as she smiled and waved for the cameras.
A big woman who was so round she looked as if she had been blown up like a balloon, Sukhreet had become a central figure in this drama after she agreed to cooperate fully with prosecutors and willingly point a finger at her own mother. It was Sukhreet to whom Bess was accused of having given a city job in exchange for her mother's lowering Capasso's alimony payments. And now it was Sukhreet's revelations that were threatening to bring down both her mother and Bess. For without Sukhreet's testimony it was unlikely the federal government would have been able to bring any charges at all.
Bess glanced over at Sukhreet, sitting between her parents. She thought Sukhreet looked like a clown in her bright green suit and black and green sweater. Bess was surprised, too, at how much weight Sukhreet had gained. She hadn't seen her for more than a year — since the night she learned a federal investigation was under way and went to Sukhreet's Upper East Side apartment to talk to her about the case.
A few minutes after eleven U.S. Magistrate Leonard A. Bernikow called the court to order. The first item on his calendar was criminal case no. 796, United States of America v. Bess Myerson, Carl A. Capasso, and Hortense W. Gabel.
Two federal marshals led Andy from behind a heavy wooden door and into the well of the court. He looked trim in his impeccably tailored dark blue suit, having lost almost forty pounds since the past June when he entered Allenwood federal prison in northcentral Pennsylvania to begin serving a three-year sentence for tax evasion. He looked older than his forty-three years, with dark circles under his large, heavy-lidded brown eyes. His chin faded into his white starched shirt, and his thin, jet-black, wavy hair barely covered a bald spot on the back of his head. As he took his place before the magistrate he appeared subdued and solemn. His arms hung loosely at his sides.
Bess never took her eyes off him as she waited in the back of the hushed courtroom for the clerk to call out her name. Finally she heard the clerk's voice shout, "Bess Myerson." She rose slowly from her seat, leaving the prayer book on the bench, and climbed over a few spectators into the center aisle. All eyes were on her as she walked slowly toward the well of the court, moving directly to Andy's side. He extended his arm. Taking his hand, she leaned toward him and kissed him on the cheek. He whispered something in her ear. She turned her head without a reply.
Moments later the clerk called out, "Hortense W. Gabel." The judge walked haltingly to the front of the court, nervously twisting a handkerchief in her hands. She stood next to her attorney, Michael Feldberg, and put her hand on his arm.
The court clerk asked the defense attorneys whether they wanted the charges of conspiracy, mail fraud, and use of interstate facilities to commit bribery read aloud in open court. They each said no.
"How do you plead, Ms. Myerson?" the clerk asked.
Bess, no longer smiling, tapped her teeth with the frame of her tortoiseshell glasses — a gesture familiar to millions of television viewers from her years on quiz and panel shows during the late 1950s and 1960s.
"Not guilty," she replied.
"How do you plead, Mr. Capasso?" the clerk asked Andy.
"Not guilty."
"How do you plead, Justice Gabel?"
"Not guilty," she said in an unwavering voice.
Bail was set at $250,000 for Bess, and she was ordered to surrender her passport. Andy was to return to prison. Judge Gabel was released on her own recognizance. The entire proceeding lasted eight minutes.
Afterward Bess leaned over and again kissed Andy on the cheek. She would see both him and the judge in just a few minutes in the booking room, where they would be fingerprinted and photographed.
Escorted by her attorney, Bess took the elevator to the third floor, where she was led into the U.S. marshal's booking room. A black steel door closed behind her. A cage door opened into a small room. Bess took a seat on a bench next to Judge Gabel and across the table from Andy. They exchanged a few formal pleasantries and then fell silent.
Bess was the first of the three defendants to be led into an adjoining room to be processed. Black ink was daubed on her fingers and thumbs. Each was pressed to three cards to produce three complete sets.
After washing the ink from her fingers, she took a seat in front of a camera. A deputy marshal handed her a black oblong frame with white plastic numbers underneath. She held the frame up to her chest while a photographer took color photos, front and profile.
Judge Gabel followed her into the room. Bess kissed Andy good-bye and joined Hafetz, who was waiting in the hallway. On her way to the elevators she rehearsed her short speech, the only public statement she would make about the federal charges until the end.
By the time she emerged from the courthouse more than five hundred people had filled Foley Square. Four bulky federal marshals pushed and shoved their way through a horde of photographers, carving a path for Bess to the battery of microphones set up at the bottom of the steps. When she finally reached the microphones, the marshals locked their arms around her. She looked directly into the cameras, as she had so many times before. Nervously fingering her prepared speech, she began in a slightly shaky voice:
"This morning I pleaded not guilty to the indictment. I am innocent of all charges brought against me and have not committed any illegal acts. These have been difficult and troubling times for me and my family. For a long time I have been the target of ugly accusations and false rumors. I now look forward to having my day in court and am totally confident that I will be vindicated there.
"I believe my work as a consumer advocate and as a spokesperson for the arts has made significant contributions to the people of the city of New York. I considered it a privilege to have had the opportunity to serve them and the many humanitarian causes to which I've lent support over the last forty years.
"This is the only statement that I will make about the case."
Refusing to answer reporters' questions, she lowered her head and stepped away from the microphones, moving slowly through the crowd to the waiting Lincoln Town Car.
"Bess! Good luck, Bess!" someone shouted.
She lifted her head and searched the crowd for her admirer. Then, still holding the black prayer book, she disappeared with her lawyer into the waiting car.
CHAPTER 2
A Shtetl in the Bronx
Bella Myerson once dropped some change in the center of the kitchen table as her teenage daughter Bess was sitting down for dinner in their crowded three-room apartment in the Bronx. The money was Bella's meager earnings from a part-time job scrubbing the floor of a neighborhood restaurant. "See that?" she demanded of her middle daughter. "That's what I earned from all my work. If you don't go to college, if you don't turn out to be something, that's what is going to happen to you."
Bess took her mother's words seriously. Prodded and pushed by Bella to achieve from her earliest years, Bess would grow up to exceed virtually any mother's expectations for a daughter. "I think I spent a lot of time trying to get my mother's approval," Bess once said. Yet for all of her accomplishments — her Miss America title, the lucrative years as a television celebrity, the praise she won as New York City's tough and precedent-setting consumer affairs commissioner, and more — she was never able to win a single word of approval from her mother, Bella, the most domineering and influential person in her life.
Once, while Bess was campaigning for New York's U.S. Senate seat in 1980, she stopped by a Bronx hospital to visit her ailing, elderly mother, then in her eighties. All the polls showed Bess ahead of her opponents for the Democratic nomination. It was shaping up as another triumph for Bess, possibly her biggest yet. It was not enough, however, for Bella Myerson.
When Bess was turning to leave after the two had visited, Bella demanded to know where she was going. To Manhattan to campaign, Bess replied.
"Sure, for everybody else you have time. For me, you don't have any time. What do you care?" Bella retorted.
"I'll see you tomorrow," Bess assured her.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Queen Bess by Jennifer Preston. Copyright © 1990 Jennifer Preston. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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