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Queen Bess
An Unauthorized Biography of Bess Myerson
Jennifer Preston
For my parents and for Chris
Contents
Introduction
Preface
1 A Fall from Grace
2 A Shtetl in the Bronx
3 Beauty from the Bronx
4 Miss New York City
5 Atlantic City, 1945
6 Pride and Prejudice
7 “You Can’t Be Beautiful and Hate”
8 A Practical Prince
9 The Lady in Mink
10 The Custody Battle
11 “I’ve Got a Secret”
12 A Pygmalion on Sutton Place
13 An Urban Folk Hero
14 For Love and Money
15 “Bess Myerson for Mayor”
16 The Struggle Against Cancer
17 First Lady Bess
18 Obsession
19 “Too Tall, Too Beautiful, Too Rich”
20 The Letters
21 Andy and Nancy
22 The Other Woman
23 Cultural Affairs
24 Mother and Daughter
25 Seduction
26 “Tough Love”
27 Capasso v. Capasso
28 The Fifth Amendment
29 “The Bess Mess”
30 “Oh, No, Bess!”
31 The Trial
32 The Verdict
Image Gallery
Afterword
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
For more than five decades, Bess Myerson dominated headlines in New York, so it was not surprising that her death on December 14, 2014, at age ninety was noted on the front page of the New York Times, an honor reserved for the world’s most compelling and significant public figures. Old black-and-white photographs showed her with Jacqueline Kennedy and former mayor Edward I. Koch, and of course, in a bathing suit, wearing the crown as Miss America 1945. For the most part, Bess would have been pleased by the attention her life story generated online and on social media.
She is remembered as the first Jewish Miss America, a “beauty with brains,” who confronted anti-Semitism during her reign by speaking out against bigotry and hate, and a television pioneer who evolved from game show host to serious and sophisticated TV personality to celebrated consumer advocate. The press noted her contributions to the city’s cultural life and the role she played in helping elect Ed Koch as New York City’s mayor in 1977. The stories also recounted the disastrous turn her career took in the 1980s when a love affair with a much younger man found her swept up in a municipal corruption scandal.
The scandal, dubbed the “Bess Mess” by the tabloids, led to her dismissal as New York City’s cultural affairs commissioner and a federal trial on charges of bribery, conspiracy, mail fraud, and obstruction of justice brought by Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the US attorney in Manhattan. Embarrassing and bizarre details emerged about her private life, destroying the public image she had carefully cultivated since she was a young woman. When she was acquitted of all charges in 1988, Myerson disappeared from public view for more than twenty-five years. She lived her final days in relative obscurity in Santa Monica, California. Her death went publicly unnoticed for nearly three weeks. Unable to confirm rumors of her death through family or friends, journalists used public records.
When I first began working on this book, I was in my late twenties, a reporter in the City Hall Bureau of New York Newsday, covering the municipal corruption scandal that consumed much of the third term of the Koch administration. I could not help but be intrigued by Bess Myerson’s spectacular rise and fall and the personal challenges she faced while leading a very public life.
Looking back now, I wonder whether I was too young to write a biography of someone twice my age. I knew I had much to learn about life before writing someone else’s biography. That’s perhaps why this story of Bess Myerson relies less on opinions and assumptions, and more heavily on in-depth reporting, public records, transcripts, and interviews. I let the reporting lead me on the journey to tell her story.
When Queen Bess was first published in 1990, one reviewer noted I had taken an empathetic approach to Bess Myerson’s life. I worried that meant I wasn’t tough enough. Now I am glad I followed my instincts. I wanted to understand what was behind some of her decisions, and the gender barriers she faced as a powerful and formidable woman. Also, I sought to report as deeply on her achievements as her mistakes.
To this day, I am reminded of Bess whenever I find myself checking prices at the grocery store. It was Bess Myerson who introduced unit pricing as New York City’s first consumer affairs commissioner. That’s just one way she used her celebrity that first came from winning the Miss America competition in 1945.
Jennifer Preston
January 15, 2016
Preface
I first met Bess Myerson in October 1987. I was working as a newspaper reporter for New York Newsday; she was promoting a book about her early life and her reign as Miss America, 1945. We arranged to meet in the office of her publisher in midtown Manhattan at about three o’clock one afternoon. She had another appointment earlier in the day: her arraignment on criminal charges that she had bribed a state judge to lower her lover’s substantial alimony payments.
Watching her walk up the steps of the U.S. District Courthouse in Foley Square that morning, I found it easy to understand why over the years she had become known as Queen Bess. Despite the tremendous embarrassment that the indictment had caused her, she moved through a crowd of curious onlookers on the courthouse steps with regal bearing and her head held high.
It was her first public appearance since she had resigned in disgrace six months earlier from her post as New York City’s commissioner of cultural affairs. She had stepped down after a specially commissioned mayoral investigation concluded that she had abused her power as a public official to help her boyfriend. Once a symbol of achievement, dignity, and ethnic pride, Bess had been reduced to another politician swept up in the city’s municipal corruption scandal.
I was following Bess Myerson’s troubles for New York Newsday. As I interviewed her longtime friends and read dozens of yellowing newspaper clips detailing her victory as the first and only Jewish Miss America, her career as a game show hostess and panelist during television’s Golden Age, and her ascent in New York politics as the city’s crusading consumer advocate, I became intrigued by her rise and fall.
Although she began her public life as Miss America, she aspired to be more than just a beauty queen, and she succeeded like no other before or since. With her crowning, she became a powerful symbol to Jews still suffering from bigotry and discrimination at the end of World War II. And long before American women rebelled against their traditional roles of wife and mother, Bess had made a determined decision to try to balance the demands of a family and career. Instilled with a fierce ambition, she went on to become one of the most powerful women in New York.
I had been trying since her indictment to arrange an interview, but nearly six months passed without a response to my letters or phone messages. Finally, in the fall of 1987, Bess relented, hoping an interview might help sales of her new book about her year as Miss America. Despite the federal indictment, she was embarking on a nationwide tour to promote Miss America, 1945, about her early life in the Bronx and the anti-Semitism that she encountered during her reign. But she warned that she would not discuss her present troubles or her boyfriend, Carl Andy Capasso, the multimillionaire sewer contractor the
n in federal prison for tax evasion. I reluctantly agreed.
Bess Myerson was waiting when I arrived at her publisher’s office that afternoon. She rose to meet me as I entered, and my most immediate impression was of her size. Standing nearly six feet tall, Bess’s mere presence in a room commands attention. Her thinness accentuates her height. And though she was then sixty-three and had endured nearly six months of scrutiny from the press and prosecutors, her face bore no sign of the strain. Her smile—a big, wide, dazzling show of perfect white teeth—completed the picture.
She was exceedingly gracious and solicitous, and her deep, resonant voice conveyed a sense of intimacy. As she spoke about the years leading up to her triumph in Atlantic City, she chose her words carefully, furrowing her brow in concentration as she turned thoughts over in her mind. She made her points clearly and forcefully, sweeping her hands slowly through the air for emphasis.
She spoke animatedly about growing up in the Bronx with her strong-willed Russian Jewish immigrant mother, who was determined that her three daughters be outstanding achievers. Hers was a tale of an awkward young girl whose dream of owning a Steinway piano led her to Atlantic City for a beauty contest, only to be handed the heartbreak and pain of bigotry along with her scepter and crown. As Bess described the difficulties she faced as the first Jewish Miss America, I became increasingly curious about how she had gone from Atlantic City to the federal courthouse. What had happened during those forty years?
My curiosity was not satisfied by the interview, and her life after 1945 was left unchronicled in her book. I began researching the rest of her life in the hope that she might agree to talk with me about her life after Atlantic City. But she was not interested in revisiting the past four decades.
“Much of what happened to me has been exciting, glorious, and some of what has happened to me was painful,” she told me. She did not want to relive those painful times: the highly publicized custody battle with her first husband over their only child, the bitter divorce from her second husband, her arrests on shoplifting charges, her struggle against ovarian cancer, her devastating loss in the United States Senate race, and her obsessive jealousy over a man who had jilted her for a younger woman. And finally, she did not want to talk about the events that had led up to her fall from grace.
Over successive months, however, Bess was gracious enough to discuss and clarify some aspects of her life. For those discussions I am grateful because they helped me understand some of the choices and decisions that she has made during her life and tell the story of what happened to the nation’s first “beauty with brains” after she left Atlantic City in 1945.
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 t
hey 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.
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