Queen Bess

by Preston, Jennifer

  Her attacks on the business community had some Lindsay aides worried that the mayor would have trouble raising funds for a possible presidential campaign. “She did not always carry the message that the political people wanted,” recalled Sid Davidoff, one of the mayor’s aides at the time. “[Lindsay] was much more tolerant. He felt it was her department, her area. She could do no wrong. She was unimpeachable.”

  Bess and the mayor became something of an item in the City Hall gossip mill as catty rumors circulated that there was more than just a professional relationship between the handsome mayor and his beautiful commissioner. At one point Bess felt compelled to walk up to Lindsay’s wife, Mary, and put the rumors to rest. As Bess recalled, at a party in 1972, “I said to Mary, the rumor about my having an affair with John was, unfortunately, not true. If you knew my mother, I said, you’d know this was one Jewish girl from the Bronx who would never dare take home a shagetz [a gentile boy].”

  Since Lindsay had been so supportive of her efforts, his top aides were surprised and angered in the spring of 1972 when Bess declined a request from them to campaign for Lindsay in Florida, where he was running in the Democratic presidential primary. Bess might have been enormously helpful to Lindsay in Florida, particularly in Miami Beach and its surrounding environs, where there was a large Jewish population. She told one of the mayor’s campaign aides, however, that she didn’t want to mix politics with consumerism. “She said it was not in keeping with ‘my image,’” recalled the aide. “I was livid. To me it was the final straw. She had been given a great appointment, and she owed it all to John Lindsay. I considered her ungrateful and told her so. I told her to get the hell out of my office.”

  Bess returned to her own office from that meeting and drafted a letter of resignation. But the mayor refused to accept it and asked Bess to remain at her post until the end of his administration.

  Lindsay returned to New York from his failed presidential campaign to find himself fighting the image of a lame-duck mayor. With only about a year left in his second term, some of his aides began to depart the administration. Those departures fueled speculation that Lindsay would not seek a third term and led to considerable political jockeying among Democrats and Republicans interested in succeeding him.

  Bess found herself being mentioned frequently in the newspapers as a possible successor. May Okon, a reporter for the New York Daily News, spent time with Bess in the fall of 1972 while working on a profile for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. Okon found Bess vacillating between “wide-eyed innocence and embarrassment at her name being linked with the mayoralty.”

  Bess insisted in a lengthy interview with Okon that she had no interest in running for elective office. The very night following that interview, however, Bess called Okon at her home and asked her to serve as her campaign manager.

  “What are you going to run for?” Okon asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Bess replied. “I’m trying not to think about it.”

  “Why? Are you afraid if you run you’ll lose?”

  “No,” Bess said. “I’m afraid I’ll win.”

  Exhausted from working ten-hour days for almost four years, Bess, it turns out, was not interested in running for mayor. She wanted to step down as commissioner and parlay her celebrity as a consumer advocate into a high-paying job in the private sector. “I wanted to put my life together,” she explained several years later. “I couldn’t afford to run. I had this apartment which had been unfurnished for three years.”

  Nevertheless, she was so popular that people walked up to her on the street and asked her to run for mayor. One night in early 1973, while she sat on a crowded dais during a banquet, the headwaiter approached her and whispered in her ear, “I’m here to tell you that I represent all the waiters at the Hilton, and if you run, we’ll all vote for you.” In February matchboxes imprinted with “Bess Myerson for Mayor” mysteriously appeared around town.

  On the first Saturday of March 1973 she called Lindsay at Gracie Mansion and told him she intended to resign before the end of his term later that year. Lindsay asked her to postpone her resignation until after he made his own intentions public the following week. She agreed, and a day after he announced he would not seek a third term Bess submitted her resignation, effective March 31.

  Her decision to resign angered some of Lindsay’s aides, who felt she should have remained until the end of the mayor’s term. Henry Stern, however, would later say, “She had done four years, and four years is what she promised herself. It was the right time. If she stayed through the end of Lindsay’s term, it would have looked as if she were holding on to the job.”

  The timing of her resignation announcement created a political firestorm of rumors and speculation that she was running for public office. On the night of her announcement the telephone rang incessantly in her apartment as friends called to ask about her plans. Rita Delfiner, a reporter for the New York Post, spent three hours with Bess that night in Bess’s apartment. Claiming she was under “overwhelming pressure” to run for office, Bess told Delfiner: “I know people want me to run for mayor, but it’s just not for me. I am not going to run for any public office in the foreseeable future. I want to take what I’ve done and learned, and move it forward.”

  For all of her public disavowals, Bess, a liberal Democrat, nonetheless agreed to meet with Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller the next day about running for mayor, possibly on the Liberal and Republican lines. The governor had conducted a secret poll in the last days of February to find the most electable candidate and to help the city’s Republican leaders decide whether to form an alliance with the Liberal party in the mayoral election. He wanted to talk with Bess about the results. Bess took Max Kampelman, who later became the chief U.S. arms negotiator during the Reagan administration, with her to the meeting for a steadying hand. She was dating Kampelman at the time, and she trusted his advice.

  Rockefeller’s poll showed that Bess had been rated as the strongest potential candidate among six mayoral possibilities: Lindsay, who had already ruled out a third term; Abe Beame, the city’s comptroller; Congressmen Mario Biaggi and Herman Badillo; and former mayor Robert Wagner. Forty-nine percent of the 406 registered voters polled believed that Bess would make an “excellent or good” mayor. Beame was a distant second with 39 percent. Lindsay was last.

  It was an impressive showing, and Rockefeller offered to support Bess in a citywide campaign under a joint Republican-Liberal party banner. The poll and the governor’s support put heavy pressure on Bess to run. Ever since she was a young girl, she had been instilled with ambition by her mother and had been driven all of her life to achieve. How could she say no to the governor of the state of New York?

  “I’m very moved by this show of confidence,” Bess told reporters after the meeting. “My immediate reaction is that it’s fantastic and incredible. It’s a great honor to have the confidence of the people. It’s extremely flattering. A very wise person who once offered counsel said, ‘Keep your options open.’”

  Amid all the speculation about her political plans Bess resigned as planned at the end of March. At a final press conference as consumer affairs commissioner on March 30, tears welled in her eyes as she talked about her “mixed emotions” about stepping down. She listed the thirty-five consumer laws and regulations enacted during her tenure but said the task of defending consumers would never be finished. “You helped me get our message across,” she told the reporters who crowded into the Blue Room. “You made us happen.” Bess made a final plea to President Richard Nixon to “freeze all foods at the present prices” and begged the public to be “alert shoppers and be aware of the consumer protection laws which exist.”

  Bess refused to talk about her own political plans, but in response to a question about whether a woman could govern a city she replied that a woman can and should be mayor of a major city. “I think one day a woman will be mayor, possibly even in New York,” she said.

  In the weeks that fol
lowed her resignation the newspapers were filled with speculation about a possible bid by Bess to become mayor. Judith Michaelson of the New York Post asked prominent New Yorkers whether they thought Bess would make a good mayoral candidate. Former mayor Robert Wagner, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, then head of the city’s Commission on Human Rights, thought Bess would be a formidable candidate.

  On April 3 the New York Post ran an editorial suggesting a Myerson-for-mayor campaign. In a highly complimentary commentary the paper said: “In a time of deepening cynicism about government, she had obviously established her credentials as a public servant who can be trusted—whose independence, concern and dedication are recognized and appreciated. She had simultaneously shown the capacity to administer a vital department effectively and tough-mindedly to evoke the intense loyalty.… We do not disparage some earnest contestants now in the field. But we believe Bess Myerson’s advent would impart freshness, spirit and hope to the city’s political landscape.”

  Others, however, questioned whether Bess had enough experience to run New York City. One of them was Brooklyn Democratic boss Meade Esposito, who said, “As consumer affairs commissioner, she alerted a lot of people to what it’s all about. My wife loves her. But as far as the mayoralty is concerned, I don’t know. Bess lacks the experience. We’re dealing with a $10 billion budget.”

  Despite her strong showing in Rockefeller’s poll, Bess had no illusions about the hard realities of running for office in New York City and knew a citywide campaign would be a tough and possibly ugly battle. She was also aware that breaking the gender barrier that had kept women out of high political office would be no easy task. One veteran operative of New York City politics recalled, “In 1973 and 1974 it was not easy for a woman to run for citywide or statewide office. People just didn’t think a woman in New York, anyway, could win. Yet her name always came up among insiders as the first woman because she was so well known as a consumer advocate and a beauty queen. She was Jewish. She had everything going for her.”

  Bess also knew how dirty political campaigns could get in New York, and she must have worried that her arrest on shoplifting charges in London might be discovered and that excerpts from her diaries, now kept from the public in sealed divorce papers, might be leaked to the press.

  Within a month of stepping down from her consumer affairs post Bess ended the speculation and said that she would not run for mayor—that year. She was careful not to rule out a future campaign for political office. Then she flew off to Los Angeles for a visit with her daughter, Barra, who had left London to try to make it in Hollywood.

  Bess continued to date Max Kampelman but, according to a close friend who had urged Bess to marry him, did not take the relationship that seriously. Bess was also dating another man who was in the broadcasting industry. And she found time to date a very rich young businessman in the shipping industry whom she had been seeing off and on since 1968, when she was still married to Arnold Grant.

  None of the relationships were serious. It would be several years before she would fall passionately in love with a man.

  Bess also turned her attention to buying works of art and furnishing her two-bedroom apartment off Fifth Avenue. The apartment was virtually bare but for a piano, a bed, a tree, a small table, and a few chairs. She redecorated it, painting it beige and emphasizing the soft hues of the desert, which she loved. She purchased a large beige velvet sofa for the living room and chrome and glass end tables. She filled the apartment with Greek, Roman, and Coptic treasures and a newly bought Byzantine mosaic from the fifth century.

  During this time she was approached by several magazines to write about consumer issues and soon was earning considerably more than she had in the Lindsay administration. She wrote a column called “Buying Time” for Vogue. She also joined Redbook magazine’s staff as a contributing editor but hired her old friend and speech writer, Walter Canter, to actually write the articles.

  By the end of the summer new responsibilities crowded Bess’s schedule. She was writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column that ran twice a week in the New York Daily News and other papers around the country called “Listen, Bess.” Readers would write in with their consumer-related problems, and Bess would respond with practical answers. She also joined Hunter College’s political science department as a visiting professor to work with students on a guidebook for local government officials interested in establishing consumer agencies in their communities.

  Six months after leaving city government she returned to television in September as the narrator of an ABC special, “A Woman’s Place,” in which she examined the role of women in society. She said she turned down several opportunities to make television commercials that would have paid her six-figure sums, including an offer of $350,000 to spend six days shooting commercials for an auto manufacturer. She wanted to earn money, but she had promised herself that she would not trade her name for the money she could earn doing television commercials.

  For all that high-mindedness, however, she went to work in November 1973 for Citibank as a $100,000-a-year consumer affairs consultant, at the same time that the bank was under attack by Ralph Nader for being more concerned with its well-heeled customers than its small depositors. Bess defended taking the job by saying she intended to help the bank adopt pro-consumer policies. “I wanted to work for companies where I could make changes,” she explained later to the New York Times. Citibank, she went on to say, was more responsive than the city council had been when she first approached it with the Consumer Protection Act.

  But Bess’s decision to work at a major bank surprised and disappointed some consumer advocates who had regarded Bess as a strong and powerful voice in the consumer movement. They saw her move to the private sector as a sellout.

  Meanwhile politicians were eyeing Bess in early 1974 as a potential candidate for another contest: the U.S. Senate race. Brooklyn Democratic boss Meade Esposito, who had publicly questioned whether she was qualified to be mayor only a year earlier, approached Bess about running. He thought she might be an effective senator, but more importantly, she was a Democrat who the polls said could beat the Republican incumbent.

  Bess did not even flirt with the idea that March of 1974. “At the moment, I’m not running and I’m not interested because I don’t see how it would be feasible,” she told a reporter. She did not, however, tell the reporter why.

  16

  The Struggle Against Cancer

  As Bess was beginning her career as a highly paid consultant for Citibank in late 1973, she felt tired and run-down and told friends that she thought she was anemic. She was also running a low-grade fever that she couldn’t seem to shake and had a slight pain in her side. Finally she went to see a doctor. He told her not to worry and suggested she return for another checkup in six months.

  Sensing that something was wrong, however, Bess sought an opinion from another doctor, who sent her to the radiology department at Mount Sinai Medical Center. X-rays indicated that Bess had a growth of some kind on one of her ovaries. Years later Bess would remember the call from her doctor: “He said, ‘You are going to have to come into the hospital right away, and if there are no beds, then we will make up a bed for you.’”

  Bess checked into the hospital the next day and underwent surgery to determine the extent and seriousness of the problem detected by the x-ray. Surgeons removed what she would later describe as a tumor on her ovary. She felt a tremendous sense of relief when her doctors came to her hospital room after she had awakened from the anesthesia and told her that the tumor was benign and posed no health risk. “I was on my way down in the elevator to go home when they told me they were wrong. It was not benign. It was malignant,” Bess remembered.

  She returned to her hospital room, and that afternoon her doctors gathered around her bed and told her that she had ovarian cancer, a particularly deadly malignancy that kills roughly 65 percent of the women it strikes because it has usually spread too far by
the time it is detected. “I wanted to know exactly what the prognosis was,” she recalled. “They wanted me to undergo more surgery at that point, and I said, ‘I can’t do it. I just cannot assault my body again that way.’”

  Her doctors believed they had caught the cancer early enough and agreed to postpone surgery for a hysterectomy for a few months, though they insisted that she immediately begin a rigorous eighteen-month-long regime of chemotherapy.

  The news that she was stricken with cancer stunned and terrified Bess. She was forty-nine years old, single, and alone, and she had been looking forward to a new life of freedom after her time-consuming and demanding job as a top city official. If the cancer wasn’t bad enough, Bess also found herself facing a costly operation and prolonged chemotherapy with no health insurance. She had inadvertently allowed her insurance to lapse after leaving the city government. Deluged with medical bills, she worried whether she would have enough money to pay for continuing medical care.

  Bess was frantic that Citibank would cancel her contract upon learning she had cancer, then a misunderstood disease. “The big C was much more scary,” she remembered. “People would say, ‘How could you work with anybody who has that?’ People were afraid to invite you to dinner.” So she kept it to herself, telling only her closest friends, and continued to go to work each day holding her terror inside. “I didn’t tell anybody then. I was determined not to talk about it,” she recalled. She also worried that her elderly parents would be devastated if they knew she was ill.