Five months after the cancer diagnosis, in April of 1974, Bess was scheduled to undergo a hysterectomy. On the night before she was to go into the hospital she hosted a CBS television special, “Women of the Year,” broadcast live from Lincoln Center. Advance publicity had generated a lot of interest in Bess and the show. The Chicago Sun-Times, for instance, said that it was “unlikely that any of the recipients will be more deserving of that title than the woman presiding at the awards program.”
Although she had already started her chemotherapy treatments, no one watching her on television that night would have guessed that she was ill. She looked vibrant and glamorous, as always, standing onstage in a flowing evening gown with Billie Jean King, Barbara Walters, Patricia Harris, and other prominent women.
The next morning Bess checked herself into Mount Sinai and underwent surgery. Doctors found no other trace of the disease. Awakening from the anesthesia that afternoon, she felt tremendous comfort when she learned that her daughter, Barra, had returned home from California to be with her. “I sort of felt this body lying next to me. There was Barra, sort of stretched out. When I came to, she said, ‘You’re fine. You’re fine, Mom.’”
Although her doctors were optimistic about her chances, Bess was nonetheless aware that in ninety-seven out of every hundred cases ovarian cancer resurfaces within two years. Her doctors told her that it would be five years before she could feel confident that she had beaten the odds and had overcome the disease. For the next five years, she would later recall, the fear that the cancer would return was an almost constant preoccupation: “To know the statistics as I did. To know the possibility of it happening. To be so shocked and shattered when it happened. When you don’t even have a history of that happening to you in branches and branches of the family.”
Having come face to face with her own mortality, Bess seemed to undergo a dramatic change in her personality, close friends recalled. “She became hard,” said a man who was dating her at the time she learned she was ill. “She was fighting with everyone. She became defensive and tough. When you have something that you cannot control, you lose your self-confidence, and she lost her self-confidence. She changed overnight. She was no longer invincible. The world had been her oyster, and now she could lose everything.”
Bess acknowledged years later that her struggle against cancer conferred a cynicism and bitterness on her. When she remembers overcoming cancer, she speaks in terms of waging battles, gathering all of her forces together: “This was the priority. No matter what else happens, no matter what else they throw at you—the fears of other people—you do what you have to do. I did what needed to be done. I knew I had to be strong. If you have to win a battle, whether it is to maintain the position of working or whatever, you have to hold on to it; you fight.”
While Bess had always been concerned about her financial security, she was now committed to earning and saving as much money as possible. She wanted to have enough money to provide herself with the very best in medical care. Two months after her surgery she signed a $150,000-a-year contract with Bristol-Myers to work as a consumer consultant. And despite her illness and the chemotherapy, she continued her $100,000-a-year job at Citibank and her columns for the New York Daily News and Redbook. “I felt that because I was ill I would need to be very independent, financially independent, so that should anything happen, I would be able to treat myself well,” she remembered. “Would you have done anything differently? You would have made sure that you worked and that you made sufficient money so that you could invest in your illness if you had to or in your health.”
Not until five years later, in 1979, would she publicly disclose her battle with the disease. The occasion was a conference she attended for women with breast cancer at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan. After a doctor on the panel told the audience that eating the right foods, quitting smoking, and reducing alcohol intake could help reduce the chance of cancer, Bess stood up and announced that she had followed a proper diet, rarely took a drink, and never smoked and still got cancer.
The chemotherapy continued for the entire eighteen months that her doctors had first recommended. Although she didn’t suffer the hair loss associated with some rigorous chemotherapy treatments, Bess sometimes became nauseated. But she said that she tried to overcome those side effects by never giving in to the treatments. She continued with her daily routine, even scheduling appointments and forcing herself to attend meetings after her chemotherapy sessions.
Yet friends remember that her moods seemed to change in the days immediately following a treatment. “There was this really bizarre behavior,” said a close friend of Bess’s at the time. “She would be very erratic, short-tempered, just strange. She would lash out at people in a vindictive way, become very cold and mean-spirited. It was just bizarre, and the explanation was that it would be the effects of the chemotherapy.”
Within months of her surgery Bess forced herself to return to the social circuit and a regular television show. In June she attended a dinner dance for Nancy and Henry Kissinger hosted by former governor Nelson Rockefeller and his wife, Happy. By the fall of 1974 she was the host of a new monthly show for public television called “In the Public Interest.” It was critically acclaimed and was nominated for an Emmy award.
She resumed her political activities as well, campaigning that September for Brooklyn congressman Hugh Carey, the Democratic candidate for governor that fall. She appeared side by side with Carey at rallies and made a television commercial endorsing him. Carey won the election and appointed Bess to head a statewide task force on consumer protection that he charged with recommending what new laws would be put on the books to protect consumers. He also wanted Bess to join his administration as the state’s commerce commissioner and made an appointment to discuss it with her at her Manhattan apartment.
When Carey and an aide arrived, however, Bess was sick in bed from her chemotherapy. Olga Baum, her maid and wife of her former driver, Joseph Baum, served the governor-elect and his aide tea while Bess tried to get dressed for the meeting. With Olga’s help she was finally able to dress and emerge from her bedroom to speak with Carey about the job. She told him she was not interested in returning to government at this time. Her priority was to get well and make money.
Within months of her meeting with Carey in the spring of 1975, Bess’s name once again surfaced as a potential candidate for the Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate.
The pressures on her to run were enormous. David Garth, the New York political wunderkind who had scored victories for Lindsay, Carey, and New Jersey governor Brendan Byrne, believed the Democratic nomination was hers for the asking. “There was no doubt about it. She would have had all the money. She would have had both lines starting off,” said Garth, referring to the Democratic and Liberal parties’ support.
In November 1975, however, Bess ruled out a campaign. Since she was still keeping her cancer a secret, some people in politics and in the press speculated that she wanted the nomination on a silver platter. She had recently completed her chemotherapy, but she was reluctant to give up her high-paying consulting jobs and television appearances and make a commitment to politics until November 1978—which would mark five years since her cancer had been discovered. By then she could feel confident that she had won her battle with the disease.
Determined not to disappear completely from the public and political landscape, however, she attended political doings and lent her support to certain candidates seeking citywide and statewide offices. Though another woman, Bella Abzug, was running in the primary, Bess chose to throw her support to former United Nations ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan instead.
Speculation is the fuel that drives politics, and it was not long after Moynihan’s victory over Buckley in the 1976 Senate race that Bess was being mentioned by politicians as a possible New York City mayoral candidate for 1977. Once again the polls showed her leading a pack of City Hall hopefuls, including incumbent mayor Abraham Beame. She
also was shown running ahead of her close friend, Ed Koch, the tall, plain-speaking congressman serving his fifth term from the East Side’s affluent “silk stocking district.”
Even so, Bess still wasn’t interested. She told one reporter back then: “It’s an extremely harsh experience for any candidate. I am not addicted to the limelight. Right now I like to have the choice of when I want to be public and when I don’t. Let’s face it, I’m not the same 21-year-old girl whom everyone remembers from Atlantic City.”
Ed Koch was interested in running, though, and had been seeking Bess’s support for almost a year. To Bess, Koch was auf den tisch, a Yiddish expression meaning that the vocal, candid Koch was on the table, on the level. She liked his style. They were from similar backgrounds: they had both grown up during the Depression and were both children of hardworking Jewish immigrants.
Koch had entered the mayoral race briefly in 1973 but withdrew when it became clear he did not have the money or the support he would need to win. This time, however, with Bess’s backing, he stood a chance of winning.
17
First Lady Bess
In September 1976 Bess invited Ed Koch and David Garth to her Upper East Side apartment for a dinner party. Koch had asked Bess to arrange the gathering so he could meet Garth, the media wizard he was hoping to persuade to mastermind his impending mayoral campaign. “I knew him by reputation,” Koch said later. “I hoped that when I ran, he would be willing to become my media consultant and run the campaign.”
Bess had known Garth since 1969, when he had put together the package of television commercials that helped John Lindsay win reelection as mayor. Garth had the reputation of being a kingmaker, and he charged fees commensurate with that stature—upward of $15,000 a month. Few disputed that he was worth the money. Garth had transformed Hugh Carey from a little-known Brooklyn congressman into New York’s governor in 1974. Now Bess was hoping that he would work the same magic for Koch, another little-known congressman, and make him the mayor of New York City.
Garth, however, didn’t hold out much hope that Koch could win. What persuaded Garth to take Koch on as a client was Bess, who believed Koch could win and pressed Garth to go with her good friend. “She liked him very much,” Garth recalled. “She was very supportive of him. She was the best name. She was the only name that was supporting Ed.”
With her celebrity status and charisma, Bess brought star power to the campaign of a man whose own early polls showed him to be known by only about 6 percent of the city’s population outside his congressional district. Her support and Garth’s decision to join his campaign gave Koch immediate credibility with the city’s major political contributors. Raising money was essential to a candidate running in the high-priced New York media market, and Bess worked hard for Koch in those early days of 1977, speaking at political fund-raisers and drawing audiences for him to make his pitch.
One looming problem, however, threatened to derail Koch’s campaign. As a middle-aged bachelor from Greenwich Village, he had endured rumors about his sexual orientation since his first political battle in 1963 against Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio, whom he had defeated for the Village’s Democratic leadership post. A homosexual becoming mayor—even of New York City—was considered impossible.
Before taking on Koch, Garth had confronted the congressman with these rumors and asked him point-blank whether they were true. Koch assured Garth that there was nothing to the talk. But convincing his consultant and convincing the public were two different matters. Garth worried that a cleverly orchestrated whisper campaign of innuendo might be enough to destroy Koch’s chances.
The solution Garth came up with was to link Koch and Bess so closely together in the minds of New Yorkers that the public would fully expect her to become the city’s first lady at the conclusion of the campaign. Village Voice writers Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett would later call this strategy “the immaculate deception.”
On Friday, March 4, 1977, Koch rented a room at the New York Hilton Hotel and formally announced his candidacy for the Democratic mayoral nomination. Bess, now the chairman of his campaign, stood next to him at the podium and appeared with him in most of the newspaper photographs the next day. Over the next few months Bess divided her time between the Koch campaign and her own business affairs. She would hit the big political events with Koch and spend the rest of the time during the late spring and summer of 1977 tending to her consulting jobs at Citibank and Bristol-Myers. Just a week after Koch’s announcement, for example, Bess held her own press conference for Bristol-Myers at the St. Regis Hotel to unveil the Consumer Guide to Product Information, a 129-page booklet that Bristol-Myers ultimately distributed free to more than a million people and that was later criticized because it failed to warn consumers of possible cancer-causing ingredients in hair dyes made by the company’s Clairol division.
Through the spring and summer Koch gradually inched up in the polls. His campaign slogan, an attack on the administrations of Lindsay and Beame, who was seeking reelection, was catchy and succinct: “After eight years of charisma and four years of the clubhouse, why not try competence?”
Koch also seized on the crime issue at the right time. The public was horrified by the looting in the city’s poor neighborhoods during the Consolidated Edison power outage in July and terrified by Son of Sam, a serial killer who had shot thirteen young men and women. It was in this atmosphere that Koch began calling for restoration of the death penalty for certain crimes. By doing so, he was shedding his liberal Greenwich Village image and striking a chord with many more conservative New Yorkers, particularly those in the city’s vote-rich outer boroughs. Television commercials created by Garth portrayed Koch as the tough-on-crime candidate New Yorkers were looking for.
“We had the blackout and the looting, and right after that the city went crazy,” recalled former congresswoman Bella Abzug, who was running against Koch in the primary and had been leading him in the polls. “And then he campaigned on the death penalty.… He turned the whole race around.”
Koch’s message caught the attention of Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the New York Post. On August 19, three weeks before the primary, Koch got his biggest boost when Murdoch delivered an extraordinary front-page endorsement. A few days later the New York Daily News followed with its support. Suddenly big contributions began filling Koch’s campaign coffers, which allowed him to continue airing his television commercials. By late summer Koch had received endorsements from the New York Post and New York Daily News. An unlikely victor six months ago, he now stood a chance of winning the September 8 primary.
As primary day closed in, Bess was in Aspen, Colorado, on vacation. Koch and Garth wanted her back in New York to help with the campaign, and she arrived home at the end of August, ready to pitch in.
Bess proved to be a formidable street campaigner as she traveled with Koch around the city, greeting voters at subway stops and street corners and standing at his side at rallies in the Bronx and street festivals in Little Italy. She was a big celebrity who the public remembered had fought passionately for their interests as commissioner of consumer affairs. She exuded warmth and charm on the street and in front of the television cameras. “More people knew her than me,” Koch said. “She walked with me, and people said, ‘There’s Bess.’”
Around the campaign office she could be everybody’s mother. She instructed campaign volunteers to take vitamins and warned them against eating junk food. She always seemed to be touching people, straightening their ties, tucking in their shirts, or pushing their hair back behind their ears.
Bess could also be difficult, if not impossible, to handle. “She was a prima donna,” said one aide, who was shocked when he saw Bess hand her sneakers to a campaign staff member and ask that they be polished white.
Until she grew to trust the campaign aides who had been assigned to work with her, Bess sometimes would call ahead to scheduled events to make sure that the directions for getting to the site were accurate a
nd that the event had been planned properly. “She could be a nightmare,” said another campaign worker. “She went through people. She could be very tough. She gets angry and she blows up. You have to ignore her, though.… She has to have trust in somebody.”
In those final days before the primary Bess went everywhere with Koch. It was Ed and Bess, Bess and Ed. Koch told voters that, if elected, he would make Bess deputy mayor for economic development. At rallies he would ask the crowd: “Wouldn’t she make a great first lady of Gracie Mansion?”
They held hands and smiled for the television cameras, looking as if they were very much in love. The gossip columnists began to speculate about a romance between the former beauty queen and the unattached bachelor. Voters no longer wondered whether Koch was gay. They wanted to know when Ed and Bess were getting married. “He needed her desperately,” said Abzug. “She went around with Koch holding his hand as if they were going to get married. That was what her role was. It seemed to me she was always with him.”
Garth, in effect, was offering voters a package deal: they would get not only competent Ed Koch but beautiful Bess too. Garth reinforced what he would later call this “subliminal message” by putting both of them on a campaign poster, the only poster in recent memory, he noted, that featured someone in addition to the candidate.
On the night of September 8 Koch watched the primary returns with Bess and about fifty other supporters at his Madison Avenue headquarters. It was almost eleven o’clock when they made their way to the upstairs room at Charley O’s for a victory party. Ed Koch, who only three months before had not been taken seriously as a mayoral candidate, had won, capturing 180,914 votes.
He beamed as he strolled with Bess into the room packed with more than four hundred cheering campaign workers and friends chanting, “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.” At the microphones he warmly embraced Bess and introduced her to the crowd as “the most important person of the campaign.” When they held their arms aloft, the crowd started yelling, “First Lady Bess.”
Queen Bess Page 15
