Grant’s success as a lawyer was rooted in his development of the concept of deferred compensation, a tax strategy that allowed highly paid entertainers and executives to reduce their tax liability and plan for their futures by agreeing to be paid their big salaries over a period of years instead of in a single year. This strategy had some of the most famous Hollywood stars flocking to his offices in Beverly Hills and Manhattan. His client list included Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Lana Turner, Mary Pickford, Darryl Zanuck, Earl Wilson, Ed Sullivan, and Orson Welles. Grant’s tough bargaining style had also convinced Johnny Carson to hire him in his negotiations with NBC.
His reputation as a tax attorney and corporate strategist had also gained Grant entrance to the boardrooms of some of America’s major corporations. He sat on the boards of directors of the Hertz Corporation and Continental Airlines and at various times had served as a director of some of Hollywood’s biggest studios: 20th Century–Fox Film Corporation, Columbia Pictures, and RKO-Radio Pictures, where he was chairman of the board for a time.
Outside of business, he was active in Democratic party politics and strongly committed to Jewish causes. He had been born Arnold Goldstein, the son of a successful criminal lawyer from the Bronx who sent him to expensive private schools in New York. His mother, Hannah, had been among the founding members of the American Jewish Committee, which later would give Arnold its prestigious Human Relations Award “for sustained and active leadership on behalf of improved human relations.”
Arnold was generous with his money. He donated millions of dollars to Israel to build a library and also underwrote the construction of the law school auditorium at Syracuse University, his alma mater. The school named the auditorium after him.
Within six months of the awards dinner where they had met, Arnold slipped a $60,000 diamond ring on Bess’s finger and proposed marriage. Bess accepted. They celebrated their engagement at an elegant party at the posh New York restaurant 21. “I’m the luckiest man in the world,” Grant proclaimed in an eloquent toast. His declaration of love for Bess compelled the other men at the party to rise and toast their wives as well.
On May 2, 1962, they were married in a civil ceremony. He was fifty-three; she was thirty-seven. The small private ceremony did not include Barra, then fourteen, or Arnold’s two daughters, Sally and Nancy, who were both in their twenties. They were sent instead to a matinee theater performance. But that evening they all gathered together in a suite in the Plaza Hotel and sipped champagne in celebration.
A few days later Bess and Arnold departed on a Pan Am jet to London to begin a trip around the world that included a visit to Japan and two weeks touring the Greek islands on a luxury yacht. When they returned, they lived in a suite in the Plaza Hotel for almost seven months while decorators put the finishing touches on Arnold’s triplex apartment at 25 Sutton Place, in one of the most prestigious neighborhoods on Manhattan’s East Side.
The twelve-room maisonette included seven bathrooms and was enormous even by the standards of New York’s well-to-do. Arnold personally oversaw the extensive and costly renovations. The walls on the first floor were knocked down to create a vast living room and a formal dining room large enough for the dinner parties he loved to give. He installed special lighting to illuminate his works of art, and the rooms were filled with French and English antiques. The air-conditioning alone cost $5,000 a year to run.
Henry Morgan, one of the panelists with Bess on “I’ve Got a Secret,” was an occasional dinner guest of the Grants’ and remembers the apartment being “very impressive. It was the kind of elegance that didn’t oppress you. You were aware that it was elegant, but it didn’t bite you. On his mantelpiece were four or five children playing blind man’s bluff carved out of jade.… He had two Dalis. In fact, Salvador Dali was at dinner one night I was there. So was Johnny Carson.
“They always had very interesting dinner parties. They had quite a circle of friends. After dinner Bess would play the piano and two opera singers would sing. Name people who were dinner guests singing for their supper, I guess.”
Arnold showered Bess with gifts, including a diamond necklace, diamond clasp earrings, and a gold and diamond bracelet watch from Tiffany. Now that she was married to a wealthy man, Bess was able to give up scrubbing sinks for Ajax on television. She continued working one night a week on the set of “I’ve Got a Secret,” though, and still made appearances on daytime television shows and hosted television coverage of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Miss America pageant, and the Tournament of Roses Parade. Arnold took over her finances and worked his tax wonders by arranging for CBS to defer her $100,000 annual salary over an extended period to save on their taxes. Bess didn’t need to spend her money anyway, because Arnold paid for virtually everything.
For all he did for his wife, however, Arnold demanded a lot in return. He insisted that she move with grace and ease within his circle of wealthy and accomplished friends. Bess would later tell friends that he became her Pygmalion. He taught her how to entertain and how to run a household staff. A live-in French couple took care of all of the cleaning, cooking, and grocery shopping. On most mornings Bess would be served breakfast in bed by her French maid.
Bess had always been able to turn on an almost overpowering charm, and she turned it on for Arnold’s big clients. With only a dozen or so strands of gray in her lush dark brown hair, she certainly looked the part of the “beautiful wife.” Yet despite her seeming confidence and outgoing style, the glamorous Queen Bess felt very much like Bessie from the Bronx at Sutton Place. She was not at all comfortable in her new role as the wife of a “very important man.”
Although Arnold’s friends insisted that he loved his wife deeply, Bess soon came to feel trapped by what she regarded as Arnold’s domineering personality. Bess would later tell friends that Arnold castigated her whenever she questioned his judgment, browbeating her until she broke down in tears. She complained that Arnold turned social occasions into personal lecture forums on whatever topic was at hand, embarrassing her and alienating her friends and relatives. She came to see his dominance as a compulsion that extended to even the most trivial matters of household management.
Whenever anything was amiss at one of their dinner parties, Bess later said, Arnold would fly into a rage and then refuse to speak to her for days. Sometimes he did not wait until the guests had left. Henry Morgan recalled one evening when Arnold lambasted Bess in the middle of dinner for not having two sets of salt and pepper shakers on the table.
Once again Bess found herself with a husband who could be described as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. She later told the New York Daily News: “He was great fun around the track but awful in the stable. There were just tremendous flips and flops. We’d go and have a marvelous time at the opera, and suddenly at the end of the evening I’d say something and there would be four hours of argument.”
Three years into the marriage Bess began seeing a psychiatrist. She was depressed and anxious and tired of listening to Arnold’s endless complaining. She later said, “The bars on the windows of our home on Sutton Place began to look like a prison to me; I was so trapped by all the responsibilities of wealth that I had no chance to be me. There was no time to grow.”
Even so, Bess was reluctant to walk away from Sutton Place and the financial security that Arnold provided her. Moreover, she had already had one failed marriage and didn’t want a second. But those feelings seemed to change all at once at a dinner party one night in the fall of 1965 when Arnold again criticized the way she had set out the silverware. Suddenly, as she later remembered it, everything became clear.
“One night we had some political people over,” Bess said. “It was a terribly stimulating dinner party. After it was over, I said, ‘Arnold, I learned so much tonight, it was wonderful.’ And he said, ‘Yes, but Bess, sit down. I want to discuss something with you. These shrimp forks are too small.’ I knew then I had to leave.”
The psychiatrist Bess had been seeing advised the c
ouple to separate, and they agreed to do so in October 1965. Bess remained at Sutton Place, while Arnold took a suite at the Pierre hotel on Fifth Avenue, across from Central Park. Within seven months, however, they were back together, and they embarked on a summer of travel. They visited the Aspen Institute in Colorado, where they heard eighteen businessmen-philosophers discuss Greek democracy and its relevance today. They also visited Santa Barbara’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. The intellectual stimulation failed to rekindle their marriage, though, and Bess told Arnold that she wanted a divorce.
On December 21, 1966, Bess and Arnold signed a separation agreement. There was no dispute over community property. Having been married for only four-and-a-half years, Bess would have had a difficult time winning alimony and property from him in court. She settled for $95,000 from Arnold so she could buy an apartment for herself and her daughter. Arnold, who had adopted Barra after Allan Wayne died in 1962, agreed to share responsibility for the eighteen-year-old, who was a student at Bryn Mawr College on Philadelphia’s Main Line.
Bess took a Dali, her Picasso lithograph, their massage table, some pieces of furniture, and their wedding gifts. Two weeks after Arnold gave her the $95,000 check, she went to Mexico to finalize the divorce. It came through on January 5, 1967. When she returned to New York, she bought an apartment at 14 East 75th Street and moved into the Volney, a small residential hotel on Madison Avenue, to wait for her new apartment to be vacated.
At forty-two Bess was again a single woman, and with Barra away at college she was alone. At last she was free from her husband’s domineering presence. Yet even though she was earning $100,000 a year, Bess, the daughter of poor parents and a child of the Depression, worried about her financial security. As it turned out, she would have reason to worry.
In March 1967, only three months after her divorce and departure from Sutton Place, CBS canceled both “I’ve Got a Secret,” which she had appeared on for nine seasons, and “Candid Camera,” where she had just begun as a hostess opposite Allen Funt. “I’ve Got a Secret” had just run its course, recalled Chester Feldman, the show’s producer: “Television was changing. CBS wanted to drop all its game shows and concentrate mostly on sitcoms.”
Within weeks of the cancellations Bess was living with Arnold again at Sutton Place. How this came about would later become a subject of bitter dispute between them. Bess claimed that Arnold had invited her to live there temporarily while she was waiting to move into her new apartment. Arnold claimed, however, that Bess had asked to move into the guest room at Sutton Place for a few weeks to recuperate from an illness.
Once back at Sutton Place, Bess later said, she found her ex-husband a seemingly changed man. He appeared to be more relaxed, gentle, and romantic. It wasn’t long before they were sleeping together again in the master bedroom and attending parties and social events as a couple; Arnold sometimes even introduced Bess as his wife. Her new apartment on the Upper East Side was sold, and Bess remained at Sutton Place. This newfound romance in their once disastrous relationship continued for thirteen months and led to their remarriage.
Arnold later contended to a close friend that it was Bess who first broached the subject of marrying again. Claiming that he never understood what had gone wrong in their first marriage, Arnold quickly consented. But this time he was cautious. He asked Bess to sign a prenuptial agreement in which she promised to give up her rights to alimony and the Sutton Place apartment in the event of another divorce.
Bess signed the agreement, and they were married for the second time on May 28, 1968, in the fashionable oceanfront town of Deal, New Jersey, by Arnold’s close friend, David Wilentz, New Jersey’s former attorney general.
Once remarried, Bess told Arnold that she wanted another child—even though she was forty-four and had a daughter in college and despite the fact that Arnold was sixty with two daughters in their twenties. According to one close friend of Arnold’s, “No way in the world did he want to have more kids.”
Yet Bess insisted that summer on becoming pregnant, and she underwent surgery that August to make it possible for her to conceive. Bess was ecstatic when told that the surgery had succeeded.
Her husband had a different reaction. To Bess he seemed indifferent, almost disappointed that the surgery had been effective. Arnold withdrew from her, and they began arguing once again. He saw a sinister motive in Bess’s desire for another child. He believed that it was a clever ploy by Bess to circumvent the prenuptial agreement so that she could obtain part of his fortune upon another divorce.
If things weren’t bad enough at Sutton Place, the fall of 1968 was a difficult time for Bess professionally as well. Although she made frequent appearances on daytime television and radio shows and occasionally co-hosted “The Mike Douglas Show,” she had not been a regular on a television show since CBS canceled “I’ve Got a Secret” and “Candid Camera.”
Then, in September, Al Marks, the chairman of the Miss America pageant, told her she would not be asked back for next year’s pageant. For years Bess had guided television viewers through the pageant’s annual festivities, and she had become a familiar, expected presence to the viewers at home. But Marks thought the pageant needed updating and a younger former Miss America as a hostess.
Marks remembered that Bess did not take the news well. “Wasn’t I good enough?” Marks recalled she asked when told she would not be invited back.
Despite that setback, Bess kept busy with appearances on daytime television shows and with raising money for Israel. She also worked that fall in the presidential campaign of Hubert Humphrey, a friend of her husband’s, serving as a co-chair of Women for Humphrey. She attended rallies on his behalf in New York and in Anchorage, Alaska.
By the end of 1968 she found herself slipping again into depression, just as she had during her first marriage to Arnold. According to her friends, she realized that marrying him again had been a terrible mistake. The tension at Sutton Place was palpable, so she must have been grateful to escape to the West Coast for her annual New Year’s appearance as the television commentator for the Tournament of Roses Parade.
When she returned to New York early in 1969, a message was waiting for her from a top aide to New York mayor John Lindsay, the liberal Republican who had promised reform when he took over City Hall in 1966. The aide was calling to find out whether she might be interested in meeting with the mayor to discuss a job in his administration.
13
An Urban Folk Hero
It was mid-January 1969, and Mayor John Lindsay’s senior aides were gathered at City Hall for their regular weekly staff meeting. On the agenda was the Department of Consumer Affairs. For months Lindsay and his aides had been struggling to come up with a big name to head the newly created city agency. Facing an uphill battle for reelection in November, Lindsay wanted a star, someone who could attract the media’s attention and portray his administration as a protector of the little guy.
Deputy Mayor Robert Sweet reported that the mayor’s first choice, Betty Furness, had turned him down. She had just completed a two-year stint as President Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant for consumer affairs, and she wanted to devote more time to her new marriage. With her White House experience and television celebrity, Furness would have been perfect for the job. No one at the meeting could think of anyone who could match her credentials and charisma.
Then Robert Blum, an assistant to the mayor, wondered aloud why they had even considered Furness, a “Johnson castoff,” when they should have been thinking about appointing a “Lindsay original.” At that point Sweet challenged Blum to come up with a “Lindsay original” within twenty-four hours.
By the end of the day Blum still had not thought of a single person for the job. When he arrived home, he asked his wife, Barbara, for suggestions.
“‘What should the person be?’” Blum said his wife asked.
“I said, ‘First of all, it ought to be a woman. I think the public interest in consumerism i
s going to call for a woman. Secondly, I think she should be Jewish.’ We were coming up to an election in 1969. Lindsay had enjoyed the support by and large of Jewish organizations, and Jewish groups in the city were an important part of his constituency. I thought a highly visible appointment of someone who was Jewish would be more attractive politically, other things being equal.
“Then she said, ‘You know who might be interesting? Bess Myerson.’
“I said, ‘Gee, she would be terrific. Do you think she would do this?’”
The Blums had met Bess three or four times over the years at fundraisers and meetings for the League School in Brooklyn, a private school for autistic children, where Bess was on the board of directors. “We were impressed by her commitment,” said Blum, who, with his wife, was a founding parent of the Association for Autistic Children. “Here was a person who was willing to give her time and her heart and her talent to a relatively obscure organization because she thought it was good.”
The next morning Blum walked into Deputy Mayor Sweet’s office and recommended Bess Myerson for the job. Sweet approved of the idea and immediately took the suggestion into Lindsay’s office.
“He came right back out and said, ‘Gee, do you think she’d serve?’” Blum recalled.
After Lindsay offered Bess the position, she asked him to give her forty-eight hours to think it over. Bored with her appearances on daytime television game shows, she was intrigued by the offer. “She told me she was tired of the artificial world,” recalled Lenora Slaughter, who was still running the Miss America pageant at the time. “She said, ‘Lenora, I am sick and tired of cosmetics and phony new dresses and always having to be on a show. I want to be me.’”
Although Bess was interested, she hesitated. The pay was $75,000 less than her previous income, and her marriage to Arnold was unstable. “When you were brought up the way we were brought up, and you saw what happened to evicted people, you were always concerned about having financial security,” she explained later.
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