Queen Bess

by Preston, Jennifer

  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.

  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 tom
orrow,” Bess assured her.

  “You’ll come tomorrow, I’ll be dead.”

  “I’m not going to let you die,” Bess countered. “I’m not going to let you die until you’ve told me I’ve done something right.”

  With that Bella rose up from her pillow and looked squarely at her daughter. “I’ll never tell you you did anything right,” she shot back, her head then falling back on the pillow.

  I’m fifty-five years old, Bess thought at the time, and she’s still telling me I don’t do anything right.

  A short, frenetic woman, Bella Podelaky Myerson arrived in New York from her native Russia in 1902 at the age often. Friends who grew up with her remembered her as a beautiful, outgoing teenager with flowing brown hair who was always quick to take to the dance floor or to tell a joke.

  But Bess would never know that woman.

  On December 19, 1922, almost two years before Bess’s birth, Bella’s first and only son died of bronchial pneumonia at the age of two after lying sick from whooping cough for weeks at Manhattan’s Willard Parker Hospital for Communicable Diseases. One of 268 children to die of complications from whooping cough that year, little Joseph Myerson was buried the next day at the Baron Hirsch Cemetery on Staten Island.

  Family friends remember that the death of Bella’s little boy transformed her in a way that would cast a shadow over her family for the rest of their lives. It was as if Joseph’s last pained breath had extinguished Bella’s own sense of life, leaving her, at age thirty, a stern, bitter, and seemingly affectionless woman who was impossible to please.

  Her depression lingered for months as Bella all but ignored her husband, Louis, and her only surviving child, five-year-old Sylvia. Her doctor, hoping to boost her spirits, finally advised Bella to try to have another baby. Within a year of her son’s death Bella was pregnant again and wishing for another boy. On July 16, 1924, Bess Myerson was born instead. Named for her paternal grandmother, Bessie, she was such a beautiful child that her mother would tie a red ribbon in her hair to ward off the evil eye—an old Jewish superstition that warned of bad luck for anyone too rich, too successful, or too beautiful. Bess would ultimately come to believe that her blessings were also a curse and that her humiliation at the hands of federal prosecutors years later might have been a fulfillment of her mother’s superstitious fears.

  Bess grew up in a small but sunny one-bedroom apartment in Kings-bridge Heights in the northwest corner of the Bronx. The apartment was in a castlelike complex of eleven four-story red-brick buildings that had been built in 1926 as a cooperative by a group of Jewish intellectuals. Their hope was to protect secular Yiddish culture from assimilation into the American melting pot by living together in a community where their language, traditions, and art could be preserved and passed along to the next generation. They named the complex the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses after the famous Yiddish writer whose story about Tevye the dairyman was later made into the hit Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof.

  Perched on a hilltop on Sedgwick Avenue between 238th Street and Giles Place, the two hundred apartments encircled a courtyard and were a sharp contrast to the single-family homes that made up the rest of the neighborhood. The neighborhood and complex had everything Louis and Bella could want for their family. Across a quiet, tree-lined street was Fort Independence Park, a shaded playground with wooden benches for parents and swings for children. A newly built public school, P.S. 95, was nearby, and within the complex itself the children could study Yiddish in the afternoon at shul, the Yiddish folk school. Here the Myerson girls would grow up among their own, near uncles and aunts in a tightly knit working-class Jewish community that must have reminded Bella and Louis of the shtetls, the small Jewish towns they had left behind in their native Russia.

  Louis Myerson was eighteen when he arrived in New York from Russia in 1907, five years after his future wife. Both Louis and Bella were part of a massive Jewish exodus fleeing from discrimination and violence in Eastern Europe and czarist Russia between the 1880s and the outbreak of the First World War. The violence of their homeland had touched Louis directly as a young boy when Russian soldiers were carrying out savage pogroms in the shtetls, terrorizing Jewish families and conscripting the young men of the villages into the Russian army. When soldiers descended on the shtetl where Louis and his family lived, his father hid him and his cousin under the floorboards of their kitchen. When his father removed the boards after the soldiers had left, he found Louis unconscious from lack of air and his nephew dead.

  Like both Louis and Bella, many of the Eastern European Jews who emigrated to New York in the early years of the twentieth century first made their home in the crowded tenements of Manhattan’s predominately Jewish Lower East Side. Discriminated against in Russia, they ran into religious intolerance in their newly adopted home as well. When they sought to move out of the inner city to the outer boroughs, they found some neighborhoods simply closed to them. This prejudice was summed up neatly by the owner of one Queens apartment complex, who posted a rental sign that advised “No Catholics, Jews, or dogs.”

  The wide-open spaces of the city’s highlands in the Bronx were different. Jewish developers had bought large tracts of land there during the 1920s and had built dozens of new apartment buildings along the northward extension of the city’s rapid transit lines. Attracted by this new development, thousands of Jews migrated north from the Lower East Side to the Bronx. So many made their way there during the 1920s that by the end of the decade Jews comprised more than 45 percent of the borough’s 1.3 million people.

  Louis and Bella were living in an apartment on Prospect Avenue in the South Bronx in 1926 when they first heard about the plans to build the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses from Bella’s sister, Fanny. Fanny’s brother-in-law was building the complex, and she and her husband, Samuel Brodsky, were planning to buy an apartment there. Fanny convinced Bella and Louis to buy one, too. The following year the Myersons paid $1,000 for an apartment with five rooms, which they figured ought to provide plenty of space for their young family: Sylvia, who was then ten; Bess, three; and Helen, only a year old. Eventually Bella’s other sister and her two brothers moved into the complex, as did Louis’s two sisters and two brothers.

  Bella decided soon after moving in, however, that she didn’t like their new apartment, which faced the courtyard and, as a result, was dark and poorly ventilated. Worried that Helen’s asthma might be exacerbated by the stuffy atmosphere, Bella asked Louis to find another flat in the complex. The problem was that the only apartment available had just one bedroom. But it was on the third floor, overlooking the Jerome Park Reservoir, and sunlight streamed through the windows. So Louis and Bella gave up their five rooms for three.

  The three girls shared the only bedroom until they left home to be married. Bella and Louis slept in the living room on a bed that Bella covered each morning so it looked like a couch. The apartment’s big eat-in kitchen became the center of the family’s life.

  Bella and Louis were among the original 135 members of the cooperative experiment, which included Yiddish poets and writers, sculptors and painters, meatcutters and garment workers. Their common thread was a love of their culture and Yiddishkeit, the Yiddish language. Peretz Kaminsky, a writer whose father was one of the founders of the cooperative, remembered, “We had to cry in Yiddish. That is what we did to preserve the language. What was central and important was the preservation of the culture. We had a very strong Jewish identity.”

  Culture was the glue of the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses. Ruth Singer, a childhood friend of Bess’s who grew up with her there, recalled, “Religion was nothing. Culture was the important thing.… I don’t remember anybody being bar mitzvahed. I don’t remember ever seeing a rabbi there. Bess’s family was the same.”

  In keeping with the hope of preserving their traditions, the residents enjoyed a rich cultural and artistic life. The complex had been designed with artists’ studios and an auditorium for lectures, concerts, a
nd Yiddish theatrical performances. Abraham Maniewich, an artist who was widely known then for his painting The Ghetto, lived and worked there. So did writers Isaac Raboy, the author of seven novels, and Jacob Levine, whose textbooks were used in Jewish schools. Sculptor Aaron Goodelman, who also lived and worked at the apartment complex, sometimes invited Bess and the other children of the complex into his studio to see his work. And though not all who lived in the complex devoted their days to art or writing like Goodelman, many studied or wrote Yiddish poems and stories at night after returning home from their jobs in the factories or garment district.

  While culture was the cohesive factor at the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses, politics was the subject of considerable disagreement and heated debate. The rifts were not between Democrats and Republicans, however, but between Communists and Socialists. The disputes were such, recalled Judy Sanderoff, whose family lived upstairs from the Myersons, that “people of the same family wouldn’t talk with each other.” Her husband, Sam, who was also raised at the complex, said the politics could be “bitter. Neighbors would gather for a card game every weekend. One of the rules was that no one could talk politics.”

  Some former residents remember the Myersons as Communists, but Bess has said that her father stayed above the political divisions that beset the complex. Bess attended Yiddish shuls and day camps run by the Communists at some times and the Socialists at others. She recalls marching with her father in the Communist-sponsored May Day parades in New York’s Union Square, but she also remembers her father joining the Socialist-run International Workers Order for its burial program.

  Despite the political bickering, Bess would later say of the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses, “You had a very safe and secure feeling here in this insulated communal place. Although the journey was only about forty minutes by train from Manhattan, it was as long a journey as coming from Muscatine, Iowa.”