Fairy Tale Interrupted

by Rosemarie Terenzio

  It was particularly awful when others witnessed it. The daughter of Nancy Haberman—a high-powered publicist at Rubenstein Associates, who handled press for the magazine—was an intern at George, answering my phone one afternoon, when she called out to John that someone was on the line for him. He yelled back in an extremely nasty tone, “What are you saying? I can’t even hear you!” I heard him as I returned to my desk, where I found Nancy’s daughter in total shock.

  “John, that’s not me. It’s Maggie,” I said.

  “Oops,” he said. “Sorry, Maggie.”

  Maggie later called her mother and said, “I can’t believe how he talks to her sometimes.”

  When John was in a bad mood, Matt and I joked about it to ease the tension. Matt instantly would read my expression and ask if it was a “because I said so” or “opposite” day. He came up with the two categories as a joke based on a very real truth. On “because I said so” days, John fired off orders and then got on my case, as if expecting incompetence. “Did you send out that package?” he might ask five minutes after making the initial request. I knew better than to try to defend myself. On “opposite” days, I couldn’t get anything right. Even if I did exactly what he told me to do, it was wrong. If I ordered Thai food for lunch after sussing out what he was in the mood for, he’d act completely shocked and unhappy with the choice. “Thai food? I had Thai food last night for dinner.” At the end of either kind of day, I’d wind up in the bathroom, wringing myself out.

  The difference between me and John, though, was that I never lashed out at him in public—and not only because he was my boss. For me, it was just like the scene in The Godfather when Michael Corleone tells Fredo to never take sides against the family. John’s outburst at the staff retreat made me feel as if he didn’t have my back. If he’d blasted the shit out of me after the meeting, that would have been fine. But to admonish me in front of a roomful of people crossed the line.

  Back in my room, still seething, I was shoving clothes into my bag when John knocked on the door. I let him in, turned my back, and continued packing.

  “I just spoke to Carolyn,” he said. “She had no idea about the party tonight. Did you forget to tell her?”

  I almost shredded the tank top in my hands. The magazine was holding a party that night to mark its second anniversary. Celebrities such as Sheryl Crow, Donald Trump, and Adam Duritz from Counting Crows had been invited to celebrate at the hot new restaurant Asia de Cuba. After the day I’d had, I would rather have put a stiletto through my hand than attend the event. Carolyn, who had known about it for weeks, was trying to get out of it by playing dumb, and I had no patience for it today.

  “Boy, I’m getting it from all angles today. I can’t get a break.”

  “Well, that’s what she said,” John replied.

  “That’s bullshit,” I said, spinning around to face him. “Of course I told her. She just doesn’t want to go.”

  John, suddenly uncomfortable, tried to change the subject.

  “Look, I’m sorry about today’s meeting. But when you say stuff like that, people assume it’s coming from me. I can’t go around being negative all the time about Hachette. It’s bad for morale and bad for business.”

  Point taken. He’d just spent the whole weekend galvanizing the staff to do more with less, and I had to open my big mouth and rain on his parade. He was right to be annoyed. But I wasn’t going to let him accuse me of not informing Carolyn about the party.

  “Do you really think I’d forget to tell Carolyn about tonight? That’s what sucks. After every little thing that I do for this place, you think I would forget that?”

  He nodded and left me to finish packing, each of us understanding the other’s position and agreeing to drop it. I had the unenviable task of running interference between John and Carolyn when they didn’t feel like dealing with an issue. In moments like that—John needing Carolyn to attend the kind of public event she had come to dread and neither wanting to confront the other—I became a convenient pawn in their conversations, part assistant and part girl passing notes in class. It was the part of the job that neither of us wanted to examine too closely.

  I didn’t blame Carolyn for trying to skip the anniversary party (even if she did use me as the fall guy). The first year of marriage is hard for anyone; for her it was almost impossible. The meaner the stories in the press, the more Carolyn retreated into herself. The process was heartbreaking to witness and made me want to kill people who said, “Well, she knew what she was getting into when she married John.” Just because someone knows what she’s getting into doesn’t make her life any easier. And how could Carolyn possibly have known the extent of it beforehand? I sure had no idea what I was getting into when I took the job with John.

  After more than three years of working for him, I worried all the time. Every day, before the alarm clock went off, I woke up, popped out of bed, threw on some sweatpants and a T-shirt, and rushed to the Korean deli on the corner with my stomach in knots. I didn’t wait to get back to my apartment to scan the papers for mentions of John, Carolyn, and George; I braced myself and looked through them on my walk home. After all those years, I still worried I would slip up and say the wrong thing. (Although that was the last thing I needed to be concerned about. As my friend Michele said, “The only way something you know could appear in the paper is if Page Six’s editor slept inside your head, because you don’t say anything to anybody.”)

  I wasn’t just worried about a leak to the press. I was concerned about everything—wondering how the latest issue had sold on newsstands and whether John and Carolyn should attend an event, making sure John’s editor’s letter was in on time and that every aspect of his life was in check. I couldn’t let my guard down and just relax. And I certainly couldn’t rely on John to put me at ease.

  Unfortunately, John didn’t understand why the paparazzi made Carolyn so upset or why I was so neurotic. “It’s no big deal,” he said to Carolyn over the phone in response to her complaining about a particularly vicious incident. “Just don’t pay attention to it. I don’t.” I cringed. “There are worse things that could happen than a few photographers following you around,” he said, putting the nail in the coffin of my afternoon; I now would have to clean up the mess he created by minimizing her feelings.

  I knew that John’s dismissive attitude was due to his frustration. He had no control over the situation and was angry that he couldn’t protect his wife from it. He should have told her as much—I know she really wanted to hear it—but instead he was flippant.

  And I had to appease both sides. I couldn’t tell John off or dismiss Carolyn’s complaints. Instead, I acted as a mediator, which was instinctual, having spent most of my childhood trying to assuage my mom. That early training made me an expert at finding a rationale for someone else’s less-than-perfect behavior. I could always see the other side.

  To John, I would say, “Give her a break”; to Carolyn, “He doesn’t get it.” Seventy percent of the time I was successful in resolving the situation, which is what happened with George’s anniversary party at Asia de Cuba. Carolyn actually didn’t want to go because she was mad at John for not calling her from the retreat all weekend. I smoothed things over between them, but it left me completely and utterly depleted, as mediating always did.

  Once I sorted out the drama and returned from the retreat, I barely had time to shower and change before going to the party. I raced around my apartment, quickly throwing on a dress I bought a week before, and dashed out to hail a cab.

  As I sat in the back of the taxi, it dawned on me that I didn’t have anyone to ask me how I felt. My job didn’t leave much room for a life outside George, John, and Carolyn. By becoming a protective vault 24/7, I sacrificed my own needs. I couldn’t give attention to a relationship of my own, yet I was stuck in the middle of theirs. But as soon as I walked through the doors of the party, I hid behind a big smile. It was all part of the gig.

  I hadn’t seen Frank in weeks,
family gatherings had taken a backseat (my mother would say, “You mean to tell me you aren’t coming home again for Sunday dinner?”), and I hadn’t been on a real date in months. My most important relationship was with John Kennedy, and he just didn’t do it for me. By the time I landed at John’s place in Hyannis for my weeklong vacation during the summer of 1998, I was spent and looking forward to turning everything off, including my brain.

  At 7:30 a.m. the second morning of my vacation, still groggy from Provi’s amazing daiquiris the night before, I heard a knock at my door. “Rose, your sister’s on the phone.” It was Billy Noonan, John’s friend, who was also a guest at the house. When I opened the bedroom door, he wore an unmistakable look of concern. As I made my way to the phone, I passed Provi in the hallway wringing her hands. Phone calls from family that early in the morning were never a good sign. My father’s dead. I just know it, I thought.

  My sister Amy was crying hysterically when I picked up the phone.

  “I’m so sorry, RoseMarie,” she sobbed.

  “Is it Dad?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Oh my God. It’s Mom?”

  “No, no.”

  The guessing game was getting on my nerves. “Please tell me what’s going on. You’re freaking me out!”

  “Frank passed away last night.”

  “Who’s Frank?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Frank Giordano,” my sister said, crying even harder.

  “What are you talking about? Frank’s on Fire Island. He’s not dead.”

  “RoseMarie, he had a heart attack.”

  Frank. My Frank. My best friend—the person I spoke to on the phone four times a day, the person who eased me into my new life, the person I loved more than anyone else—was gone. As the realization hit me, I dropped the phone, doubled over, and screamed in horror.

  Frank, at thirty-six years old, had died of a drug overdose. I was stunned. It didn’t make sense. And yet, just one month earlier, I had received a disturbing message on my answering machine from a state psychiatrist informing Frank that he had missed his court-appointed rehab date. What the fuck is she talking about? I wondered. Frank must have gotten into trouble and left my phone number as a contact. I immediately called him and he fessed up.

  “I got arrested,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For possession of cocaine, and I didn’t even have that much on me.”

  I went ballistic. He got arrested for drugs and didn’t call me? I worked for JFK Jr. for Christ’s sake. I could have called someone to help him out. Instead, Frank had taken the matter into his own hands, choosing rehab over jail time. But, he told me, he didn’t want to go because it was filled with depressing homeless heroin addicts. No shit.

  Frank wasn’t the only one in denial. Despite his run-in with the law, which had escalated into a full-on crisis, I was still ignoring his enduring problem with drugs. I thought he was on the cusp of getting his shit together. About a month earlier, Matt had given Frank a serious, tough-love pep talk at a nondescript hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant we went to when we didn’t want to run into anyone we knew. “Frank, it’s ridiculous. You have to get an apartment and move out of your mom’s house,” Matt said. “Buy an apartment. We know a million people. You’re a great person. We can help you make this happen.” Frank listened to him. Matt, a success at twenty-nine, introduced Frank to his broker, who found him a perfect one-bedroom on Spring and Bowery for $100,000. He had enough money saved up from his job with Brad Johns to make a down payment, which he did one week before he died.

  Why hadn’t I insisted Frank come with me to Hyannis? He said his friend had already paid for the room on Fire Island so that they could go to the White Party—a raucous annual beach party to benefit the Gay Men’s Health Crisis Center—and he was reluctant to back out at the last minute.

  “I don’t want to go, but I have to,” he said.

  “You’ve been to that party a million times. Come on.”

  I should have persisted—I knew his going to Fire Island was a bad idea. For as much as I prided myself on my ability to take care of people, I had let down the most important person in my life, the one to whom I owed everything. If not for Frank, I wouldn’t have been working for John or living in Manhattan. Ironically, if not for Frank, I wouldn’t have grown up and taken responsibility for myself. Unconditionally my champion, he made me feel like I could do anything. He was my confidant and partner in crime. I could murder someone and come to him with the smoking gun, and he would say, “Okay, here’s what we need to do.” He wouldn’t even ask what happened. It wouldn’t have mattered.

  At the beginning of the summer, Frank and I dog-sat at John’s house on Martha’s Vineyard and had an amazing weekend: we went skinny-dipping for the first time at the private beach and cooked delicious meals. One night, while we were making dinner in the kitchen, Frank looked up at me and said, “Rosie, you know, this is what it’s like to be married. We are as close as any couple.”

  And now he was gone. I felt like a widow as I threw my clothes into a suitcase and caught a 9:30 a.m. flight out of Hyannis. As I raced to the plane, my body was numb, but my emotions were on overdrive. Sitting in the first seat of the puddle jumper, I couldn’t stop sobbing.

  “Are you okay, miss?” the passenger next to me asked.

  “No, I’m not,” I whispered through my tears.

  When I got back to my apartment, Nancy, my best friend from high school, was already there. She didn’t want me to be alone when I listened to dozens of answering machine messages from the night before. Carolyn arrived a few hours later and insisted we order a pizza. I hadn’t consumed anything other than cigarettes all day.

  Less than a week later, after a surreal funeral with Frank’s inconsolable mom and everyone treating me like his widow, I dove back into work. It felt like all I had left. Although John, who was traveling in Vietnam, would be away for another week, I cut my own vacation short and returned to the office. I was grateful for the enormous pile of mail I found waiting for me. Opening John’s mail was how I started every day. The routine was the only thing that felt good that day.

  I hadn’t made it through a quarter of the letters when John phoned from Vietnam.

  “Rosie, I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice crackling and thin as if it had traveled to me from the past.

  “Thanks,” I choked.

  “Do you want me to come home?” he asked.

  “It’s sweet of you to offer, but that’s the last thing I want, because it will be about me for five seconds. And then it will be all about you,” I said, sort of joking.

  I was wrong—when John returned, it wasn’t all about him. Although everyone in the office clamored to get a minute with him as soon as they saw him walking down the hallway (“How was your trip, John?” “Let me know when you have a minute. I need to talk to you about something important”), he put his hand up and said, “Not now. Where’s Rosie?”

  John came right up to me. “Come here,” he said, putting his arms around me. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” I said, and broke down.

  He ushered me into his office and closed the door. I sat down and sobbed almost as hard as I had when I first heard the news of Frank’s death.

  “You have to grieve and mourn, but Frank lived his life the way he wanted to,” John said. “The reason he loved you so much was because you accepted him for that. Very few people allow others to live their lives on their own terms. Now that he’s gone, don’t glamorize or demonize Frank. Remember him for who he really was. If you don’t, you will never get past it.”

  I held on to each of John’s words. He knew what he was talking about.

  “Whenever there’s a tragedy, a tiny nub of green starts to grow inside you. It’s a regrowth,” John continued. “You have to hold on to that little nub until it grows into the tree that is the next part of your life.”

  Christmas of 1998 looked like it was going to be a wash for many reasons. W
ith Frank gone, it was sure to be the worst holiday season ever. And now Negi and I had to throw a holiday party on the measly budget Hachette had provided.

  “Two hundred and fifty dollars? We can’t do anything with that. We should just forget it and give the money to charity,” I said. I didn’t feel like celebrating this year anyway.

  John walked by and, overhearing my last comment, he said, laughing, “I thought you were the charity, Rosie.”

  I ignored him. But after learning about the tiny party budget, he decided to pitch in some money of his own—ten thousand dollars, to be precise.

  John’s one stipulation for footing the bill was that no one could wear black to the party—a radical request since we all constantly wore black. But ten thousand dollars was ten thousand dollars, and Negi, Biz, and I set about planning a blowout—a DJ, open bar, the works.