Queen Bess

by Preston, Jennifer

  In Bess, Framer found an articulate, glamorous hostess, a woman who could both model and sell the stylish fashions he would give away as prizes. “She was the best thing around at the time,” he said. “I thought she had a lot of possibilities. She was a wholesome Miss America and the epitome of the American woman. She was beautiful. She still is. And she had a wonderful smile. She had personality.”

  Framer had to overcome only one problem to put Bess on the air: her height. Since he didn’t want her towering over the host, Framer said, he launched a nationwide search for a host who was at least six feet tall. In Minnesota he found Randy Merriman, a tall, thin man in his early thirties with light brown hair and a booming voice.

  Bert Parks and Robert Paige followed Merriman and worked with Bess, who remained on “The Big Payoff” during the entire eight years it aired on CBS television, weekdays at 3:00 P.M., right after “The Ernie Kovacs Show.” At one time the show aired on two networks. In the summer of 1953 NBC broadcast the show as a replacement for “The Colgate Comedy Hour.”

  Soon after Bess took the job, she became known as “The Lady in Mink.” At the show’s climactic moment she stood with her back to the audience in a luxurious mink coat, then wheeled around to face the camera and lovingly caress the fur. She was the Vanna White of the 1950s. It was her job to introduce the contestants to Randy Merriman, and describe the prizes and the clothes that she and other models wore. In her mink coat and evening dresses from New York’s leading designers, she was the epitome of high fashion and glamour.

  On the set Jeff Hayden, who directed the show on NBC, remembers Bess as “gracious and charming, a very dear, sweet person. She was wonderful. She was a top, top professional. I adored her. She gave as much as anyone I had ever worked with. She was a very warm human being, and that came across on the air.”

  Betty Ann Grove, a singer and model on the show, recalled that Bess was a “mother hen” on the set. “She wanted everybody to be wonderful,” Grove recalls. “We had only two-and-a-half hours of rehearsal, and as people were twirling around she wanted to know exactly what was going on. She was very smart and very professional.”

  On most afternoons, as soon as the show ended at 3:30, Bess was on her way home to her apartment on East 93rd Street. She would try to get home soon after Barra returned from school. She was very close to her young daughter, teaching her how to play the piano and taking her on horseback rides in Central Park. “I’ve always made it my business to see that my career doesn’t interfere with my private life,” Bess told the Daily News at the time.

  During the first years of their marriage Allan and Bess often invited her sisters and Allan’s brother to their apartment. Allan was very close to his family, and they saw his parents frequently. They would also often visit Bella and Louis in the Bronx. They rarely went to nightclubs or big parties. Allan liked to spend most nights and weekends at home.

  Approaching the sixth year of her marriage, Bess’s career was soaring as “The Big Payoff” led to more television appearances. They had talked for a couple of years about having another child, but Bess insisted they wait. She was only twenty-eight years old, and she was just beginning to earn a huge salary. Allan confided in a friend that he was unhappy with his marriage now that Bess was working at least five days a week, sometimes six, making appearances on television panel shows such as “The Name’s the Same” and working as a commentator at fashion shows in New York and Philadelphia.

  And every September she would return to Atlantic City for the Miss America pageant. At a time when most women would not have dreamed of working outside the home, Bess faced the difficult problem of balancing her family and her career and being married to a man who seemed to run into failure each time she achieved success.

  Allan was no longer working with his father in the toy business. Too much travel was involved, and he did not like to be away from home. His father found him a well-paying job in sales for a lingerie company that was owned by the brother-in-law of an old family friend. Still, he was not earning as much as Bess.

  “She was making a bigger income,” said a longtime family friend. “There was a lot of aggravation between the two of them. I think all the problems started when she went into the television business. She would tell people, ‘I let my husband handle my affairs’ to make him feel big. Instead, to his family and old friends, it made Allan sound pathetic.”

  As Bess earned new fame as a television celebrity, Allan complained that her career was taking too much time away from him. He wanted her home more often, fulfilling the traditional responsibilities of a wife and mother. One night, over a couple of drinks in a bar on Broadway, he told his childhood friend Stephen Posner that he was no longer happy in his marriage. He warned Posner, who was to be married in just a few weeks, not to do it.

  “It was a diatribe on marriage and unhappiness,” Posner said. “He was vociferous about his dislike of the whole married state, except for his daughter.”

  Considering Allan’s upbringing, Posner was surprised by his friend’s discontent with his own marriage. Allan and his only brother, the late Colonel Leonard Wayne, had been very close to their parents. “It was a very, very tight family. They were very, very close to each other,” Posner recalls.

  “Allan was crazy about his dad,” said another longtime family friend. “I think he tried to follow in his footsteps, but it was just too much. It was difficult for Allan to fill his father’s shoes.”

  When his father, Gus, died on October 15, 1953, Allan was devastated. A private parlor car carried the family and a few close friends from New York to Baltimore, where he was to be buried. Allan rode in the railroad car with the coffin. “He did become very upset,” remembers his aunt, Pearl Maged.

  According to Bess, in the years following his father’s death Allan underwent a radical change. She believes his overwhelming grief brought to the surface buried memories of the war and that he perhaps suffered postwar stress syndrome. He started drinking and didn’t stop. He began staying out all night. When he was at home, he would awake in the middle of the night from terrifying nightmares. The drinking also made him impotent. He blamed Bess and her career for the difficulties they were facing in their marriage.

  Her colleagues on the set of “The Big Payoff” could see the pain in her beautiful face. “She was very concerned,” recalled Louise McKinney, the show’s fashion coordinator. “She loved him very much. They were beautiful together. I loved Allan. He was a fine person. But you’re dealing with a situation that was very difficult. Alcoholism was not out in the open then. It was hidden away in the closet.”

  Bess kept waiting for the drinking to stop. It didn’t. In early 1956, three years after his father’s death, she went to the Bronx and told her parents that she was going to leave Allan. She was hoping her mother and father would understand and provide her with support.

  “I wanted some kind of emotional support,” Bess remembered. “I wanted to go home again, and I said to my father, having this little nine-year-old girl with me, my daughter, ‘I have to get a divorce.’

  “My father looked at me. He shook his head and said, ‘No divorce. You go back and make it better.’ I was shocked by what he said. Then my mother said, ‘How could you get a divorce? You just put up new drapes in the living room.’

  “All of my energy and my hope and my will to move forward just left me. She had that power.”

  Bess returned home to her Manhattan apartment and tried to make it better, but it would not work. That summer of 1956 they argued bitterly. Then Bess said that Allan began to beat her after a night of heavy drinking. Betty Ann Grove remembers having to fill in as hostess of “The Big Payoff” a couple of times when the arguments and the beatings made it impossible for Bess to come to work. “I used to have to replace her at the last moment,” Grove recalled.

  On one hot August night, while Barra was away at camp, Bess said that during one of their arguments Allan beat her savagely with his fists, chased her into the street,
and dragged her across the sidewalk. She told him that she wanted a divorce. But he refused to agree to a quiet separation, so Bess plotted an escape.

  10

  The Custody Battle

  Four days later, at ten o’clock on Sunday evening, August 26, 1956, Allan was lying on the couch, half asleep, when he heard the apartment door buzzer. Bess went to the door and admitted two uniformed New York City police officers and two men she later identified as her “agents.” Allan rose from the couch and demanded to know what was going on. Bess announced she was leaving him and led the men into the bedroom, where she had stored suitcases that she had packed earlier that day. Following Bess and the men into the bedroom, Allan ordered the men to leave, but they ignored him as they moved next into Barra’s room and collected her things. When Allan protested her leaving and taking their nine-year-old daughter, Bess became hysterical.

  The two hired men carried the suitcases out to a waiting car, and the police officers escorted Bess and Barra out of the apartment onto East 93rd Street. Allan followed them out into the street, shouting at Bess that she had no right to take their daughter away. But he was powerless to stop her that night. The police officers threatened to jail him if he impeded their departure.

  Once inside the car, Bess must have felt relieved. She and Barra were whisked away to a hotel in midtown Manhattan. They remained there in hiding for several days. Bess told no one, except her lawyer and her parents, where she was staying.

  Allan knew that he and Bess had been having problems, but he later said that he did not understand why she left that night. He called his lawyer, Richard Rudell, and three days later, on August 29, Allan filed court papers charging that Bess had deserted him and had “unlawfully spirited away” their daughter. He stated that he had been searching the city for his daughter since they left and that Bess “has no home and is physically, mentally, and spiritually unable to provide and care for the child.”

  Bess’s lawyers responded with an affidavit in which she accused Allan of threatening to “do away with himself” and their little girl. She also contended he was not a “fit or suitable person to have custody” and could not maintain a suitable home for Barra.

  On Tuesday, September 4, for the first time since Bess’s dramatic escape, the estranged couple met in a courtroom downtown. Photographers and reporters from the city’s daily newspapers were waiting to record the bitter custody battle between the thirty-one-year-old former Miss America and the thirty-seven-year-old handsome war veteran whose romantic elopement had been chronicled in the city’s tabloids only ten years before.

  Bess arrived at the courthouse that morning in a crisp cotton striped shirtdress, dark sunglasses, and white gloves. Barra, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, was at her side. When the child walked into the courtroom and saw her father, she ran to his side and flung her arms around him. There were tears in Allan’s eyes as he held his daughter close.

  Since both Allan and Bess insisted on being with the child, they all shared a hard wooden bench in the front row. Barra, smiling as she sat between her parents, kissed one and then the other. Allan and Bess did not even look at each other.

  When the proceedings began, state supreme court justice Matthew Levy called both attorneys to the bench. After hearing both sides, Levy postponed the hearing until 10:00 A.M. Saturday. “I hope I will not have to hear this case then and that further efforts at an amicable arrangement will be successful,” Levy said. “I also hope the parents will become reconciled.”

  Barra gave her father a final hug and kiss in the corridor and then left with Bess to return to their midtown hotel hideaway.

  Any hopes Allan may have had for a reconciliation were dashed on his way out of the courthouse, where he was served with a summons for a formal separation action.

  On Saturday morning, September 8, 1956, Allan was the first to arrive at the courthouse with his mother, Cathryn, and his lawyer, Rudell. He was standing outside the courtroom, waiting for the proceedings to begin, when he saw Bess walking down the hallway with her parents, Louis and Bella, and little Barra. The child again rushed into her kneeling father’s arms and showered him with kisses. Bess turned icily away as Barra grabbed her father’s hand and then took her mother’s. She looked up at her parents as if to try to make them smile, but Bess and Allan remained silent as they walked into the courtroom.

  As soon as the court proceedings began, a nurse escorted Barra out of the courtroom. Allan, looking solemn and glum, took the witness stand. Denying under oath that he had ever assaulted Bess, he also insisted that he had never drunk to excess, nor had he dragged her across the sidewalk.

  Under his lawyer’s questioning he said he did not know why Bess had walked out on him, but under cross-examination he acknowledged that they had argued frequently in the last six months. Their difficulties, he believed, arose from Bess’s “working like a horse for the past four years.” He said her workload resulted in “extreme moments of anxiety and pressure for her.”

  He also said he had “never stopped trying” to effect a reconciliation: “My life has been centered around my home, my wife, and my daughter, whom I still love very much.”

  Bess appeared to be listening intently to Allan’s testimony as she sat next to her lawyer at a large oak table. She did not take the stand herself.

  After more than two hours of testimony and private conferences at the bench, Allan conceded that Bess was able to care for Barra. The judge then decided to allow Bess to retain custody and grant Allan visitation rights and scheduled a hearing on those rights for the following week. “Since I think both parents love the child, they ought not to fight to the last drop of the child’s blood because of disagreement arising among themselves,” Judge Levy said. “I think Barbara [Barra] deserves more than that.”

  The following week they worked out what Levy called a “mutually and agreeably resolved” custody arrangement in his chambers that allowed Allan to visit with his daughter on alternate weekends and for seven to ten days around the Christmas holiday.

  But six months later Bess stopped her efforts to seek a legal separation. Allan had convinced her they should give their marriage another try for Barra’s sake. They moved into a new apartment on the tenth floor of a luxury building on fashionable East 88th Street, near Madison Avenue. In the foyer of their apartment Allan had the words “Bess, I Love You” imprinted in gold letters on the large white tiles.

  “Allan worshiped the ground she walked on,” said Anne Rudell, widow of Allan’s attorney. “He really loved her.… He was crazy about her. But he didn’t fulfill her needs. I can’t fault her for that.”

  Their reconciliation lasted less than a year. “He was in the background,” said his cousin, Sam Kramer. “It was difficult for him. His ego could not take the fact that she wanted out. I would go up to New York many, many times to talk with him about it. He wanted her to raise a family. He wanted her to be a housewife and have more children.”

  Bess was uninterested, however, in being just Mrs. Allan Wayne. “She was beautiful and brilliant,” Anne Rudell says. “She was not going to let her achievement as Miss America go down the drain and be a little nobody. She said, ‘I am somebody.’ And she proved it.”

  Allan was not going to let Bess go easily, though. Barra still remembers hiding in the closet during one of his rampages. Years later she told writer Patricia Morrisroe: “My father had a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality. He was obsessed by my mother and didn’t want to lose her. My mother physically protected me. Her main focus was that I survive.”

  When Allan Wayne’s drinking worsened that fall, Bess once again planned to leave him—this time for good.

  On Friday, November 1, 1957, after Allan had left for work, Bess changed the locks on their apartment and had a messenger deliver an envelope to his office. Inside was a court summons requiring him to appear in court the next week to hammer out a formal separation agreement. The court papers also demanded that he account for $100,000 in money she cla
imed belonged solely to her. With the court papers she enclosed a letter asking, for the sake of their daughter, that he get a hotel room and not return to the apartment that night.

  Allan was furious. He returned to the tenth-floor apartment that night and broke the new locks with an electric drill. Inside the apartment he found Bess and an armed guard. Allan pleaded with Bess to reconsider. When she insisted it was over, he still refused to leave the apartment, contending that it was just as much his home as hers.

  Bess then called her lawyer, and Allan called Rudell. Both attorneys agreed to go to the apartment that night. They sat around the living room until after 1:00 A.M., trying to work out an amicable separation agreement. When they got up to leave, they tried to persuade Allan to leave with them, but he refused.

  Exhausted, Bess went into her daughter’s room to sleep. Allan took their bed. The armed guard remained inside the apartment. At about 4:00 A.M., Bess later told the police, she awakened to find Allan standing over her. “He ripped my pajamas off and put his hands around my throat, hurting me,” she told the police. She also claimed that he shoved her against a desk. Her screams alerted the guard, who was in the kitchen getting a glass of water. He ran into the room and separated them. Bess then called the police.

  When the officers arrived, Allan went quietly with them to the nearby station house on East 104th Street, where he was jailed for about an hour, until his lawyer put up $500 bail. “We flatly deny the charges,” Richard Rudell told reporters as he left the station house with Allan at his side. “There was no violence and no assault.”

  The assault accusations and the separation action were a “sneak Pearl Harbor attack,” Rudell told reporters. “Everything was fine Friday. He kissed her good-bye in the morning, and they were supposed to go out in the evening. But during the day she changed the locks on the door.”

  Rudell claimed that Bess had accused Allan of assault as a ruse to get him out of the apartment. “The whole thing boils down to the same issue we had a year ago in court,” he said, referring to the custody of Barra and the struggle over their property.