Queen Bess

by Preston, Jennifer

  The race for the Democratic nomination was not over, however. With seven candidates in the race, Koch had come out on top but had still won only 20 percent of the vote. This meant that eleven days later he would face a runoff election with Mario Cuomo, who had finished second to Koch, trailing him by about 10,000 votes. The other mayoral opponents—Bella Abzug, Abe Beame, Joel Hartnett, Percy Sutton, and Herman Badillo—had been eliminated from the contest.

  In those eleven days Koch and Cuomo took to the streets and the television airwaves to battle for the thousands of votes that had gone to their defeated challengers. The pace was frenetic. Bess continued campaigning for Koch, joining him at rallies everywhere he went. She was a bold and passionate speaker and sometimes a little too fearless. During a rally at Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, Koch encountered a hostile crowd of Cuomo supporters who hurled anti-Semitic insults and called him a “fag.” The crowd frightened members of the campaign, who wanted to leave, but Bess refused. Pam Chanin, a campaign aide and friend of Bess’s who was at the scene that day, remembered that Bess insisted on staying. “She grabbed Ed with one hand, and she started to walk through the crowd. She began shaking hands with people, and the crowd parted like the Red Sea. She completely broke the crowd’s anger. It was amazing,” Chanin said.

  Much of the battle was being waged on television. Koch had already spent close to $500,000 on television advertising. Now he and Cuomo were each spending $50,000 a day on dueling television commercials. Cuomo launched the first attack with a TV spot that showed Koch’s face disappearing into Lindsay’s, the man many voters blamed for the city’s fiscal crisis. Cuomo followed up that commercial with another suggesting that Koch was the kind of candidate who would change his position when it was politically expedient. To make his point Cuomo showed a weather vane spinning in the wind.

  The Koch camp was furious. Garth retaliated with a final commercial that featured Bess in a powerful thirty-second spot. Staring directly into the camera, a serious-looking Bess asked: “What ever happened to character, Mr. Cuomo? We thought your campaign would do better than that.” It was played on every available commercial television slot in the final weekend of the runoff campaign.

  Bess said later that she agonized over whether to do the commercial. “But then I figured that if I didn’t, it would be cowardly. So I asked Cuomo, in our commercial, ‘What has happened to character?’ I thought it was time that Cuomo, this knight in shining armor, should be unhorsed,” she said.

  With the help of the Brooklyn and Bronx Democratic party bosses, hundreds of loyal party workers turned out the vote for Koch on September 19, 1977. He beat Cuomo in the runoff election by capturing 55 percent of the vote and became the Democratic candidate for mayor. Once again he stood at the podium celebrating his election-night victory with Bess at his side. “My role from the start of the campaign was to help Ed as much as I could. It’s been a long, hard road to victory,” she told the crowd of supporters.

  Ordinarily the winner of the Democratic mayoral nomination would not have to worry about an opponent in New York City’s general election. The Republican candidate that year, state senator Roy Goodman of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, was given little chance of winning. But Mario Cuomo refused to give up the fight and entered the general election race as the Liberal party’s candidate. Ed Koch would have to keep on running hard.

  During those two months Bess continued to appear regularly at Koch’s side. Susan Berman, writing a profile on Bess for New York magazine, joined Bess and Ed on the campaign trail in October. (Bess told Berman that she was glad to see that Berman was attractive. “I have had such trouble with fat, ugly reporters. They hate me,” Bess told her.) On the way to the Columbus Day parade, Berman wrote, the limousine carrying Bess, Koch, and other campaign aides kept turning up the wrong streets. Koch was worried that the parade up Fifth Avenue would be over before he arrived. Everyone in the car offered an opinion about what to do next.

  “Suddenly,” wrote Berman, “a tightly controlled melodious voice rises from the backseat above the din. An imperious voice. It is a ‘take charge’ voice that speaks in well-defined capital letters. The Voice says, ‘Ed, Get Out. I’ll Take Care of It. Just Make Like the Mouse That Roared.’” Bess then stepped out of the car, got directions from a nearby policeman, and navigated Koch to the head of the parade in what seemed like a matter of seconds.

  As Bess and Koch marched down Fifth Avenue together with big crowds lining both sides of the street, two little girls were overheard by a New York Times reporter.

  “See? That’s Bess Myerson,” said one of the girls to the other as they watched the parade pass them at 53rd Street.

  “Gee,” said the other.

  “And her husband is running for mayor,” the other added knowingly.

  Speculation about a wedding between Ed and Bess had moved off the gossip pages onto the news pages. A New York Daily News headline asked in late September, “Will Bess Be First Lady Come November?” In the story Bess played coy, telling the newspaper, “I have enormous respect and deep affection for Ed, but my private life has always been private and I have never talked about it.”

  Koch, for his part, encouraged the speculation. In a television interview that fall he was asked about the possibility of marrying Bess. “It’s always a possibility,” he said, “but I don’t want to talk about it. She’s an incredible person—a warm human being that I really adore.”

  Behind the scenes at campaign headquarters, however, no one on Koch’s staff ever believed there was a romantic relationship between Ed and Bess. Bernie Rome, the campaign treasurer, remembered bringing up the subject of wedding bells to Koch while the two were having dinner at Rome’s vacation house in Westhampton, Long Island. “I said to him that my mother-in-law had said that it would be a fine thing for his career to marry Bess Myerson. He didn’t look up. He didn’t answer. Nothing. There was a very awkward silence,” recalled Rome, who never again brought up the subject.

  Ten years later Koch would still deny that he had purposely encouraged speculation about a romance with Bess. He acknowledged, however, that the perception of such a relationship helped his campaign: “I didn’t hold press conferences denying the substance of that fantasy, but we didn’t create it. It was not a strategy on my part.”

  In late October, with Election Day fast approaching, Garth’s worst fears began to materialize. Rumors about Koch’s sexual orientation were beginning to swirl. Hints that Cuomo’s campaign workers had hired a private detective to find out whether Koch had any “boyfriends” had reached the Koch campaign. And in Queens, posters had been plastered on telephone poles urging voters to “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo.” There were also rumors that sound trucks were driving through Queens, blasting a similar message. Reporters began to question among themselves whether Bess’s very public role in the campaign was a strategy by Garth to head off these rumors early in the campaign.

  The first time the issue appeared in print was on October 30 in the New York Times Magazine. Reporter John Corry addressed the question of Bess’s role in the campaign head-on and added, “There is not the slightest evidence to suggest that Koch is now, or ever was, a homosexual or that his deepest passions have ever been engaged by anything other than politics.” Corry asserted, however, that one of Myerson’s functions in the campaign was to dispel rumors that Koch was gay.

  The same day, Koch and Cuomo appeared together on a television news program in which WABC-TV’s Peter Bannon asked Koch if his frequent appearances with Bess Myerson were made to “dispel rumors of any hint of homosexuality.” Koch replied in a calm voice that Bess was not a foil and that it was “crude to use false innuendo.” As Koch left the studio, radio reporters were waiting to ask him to elaborate on his answer, and in the course of being interviewed he flatly denied he was homosexual but added that, if he was, he would hope that he would not be ashamed of it. Radio programs reprised his comments throughout the day, and the story was carried on the local television new
s broadcasts that night. The newspapers that appeared the next morning, however, either had buried the issue deep in their campaign stories or had chosen not to mention it at all.

  With all these rumors flying about in the week before Election Day, Koch did his best to maintain a cool exterior. Bess, however, was livid. She called the rumors the Big Lie—a not-so-subtle reference to Nazi propaganda techniques. On the Sunday before the election she told a Sheridan Square rally that there was an “ugly, scurrilous and deliberate attempt to deny a man his potential because of a big lie.”

  When a New York Post reporter covering the event called in the story and told Joyce Purnick, the paper’s leading political reporter, about Bess’s comments, she realized that the issue was gathering momentum and that the newspaper would have to make a decision about how to handle this delicate and, for Koch, potentially damaging story. Bess’s comments to that rally marked the first time anyone in the Koch campaign had suggested publicly that the Cuomo camp was mounting a smear campaign against Koch. Purnick, now an editorial writer for the New York Times, checked the Koch campaign’s schedule and saw that she could catch Bess at a rally that night at Fordham University’s campus next to Lincoln Center.

  Purnick pulled Bess aside just outside the entrance of the university’s auditorium. “I said, ‘Listen, I understand that you said something, that you are upset,’” Purnick recalled. “She proceeded to unload on me. She was very upset. ‘This man has worked all of his life. How dare anyone try to impugn his integrity!’ she said. She put the entire issue on the public record. She was very emotional and very excited.”

  Word reached Koch campaign headquarters that Bess was going public with her accusations and raising the very issue that Garth had worked so hard to defuse since first signing on with Koch. As Bess and Purnick continued their conversation in Bess’s car, a call came over the car phone from the Koch campaign. “Whoever was on the other end was giving her hell,” Purnick recalled.

  “Why shouldn’t I talk about it?” Bess demanded of the caller. “Why should he get away with it?”

  Purnick returned to the Post’s newsroom that night with Bess’s comments in her notebook. Purnick recalled being “very troubled. I really agonized, given the timing, over what to do.”

  She talked it over with fellow reporter Michael Rosenbaum, and together they decided it wasn’t fair to raise this issue with only one day left before the election. Had the story appeared on election eve, there would not have been enough time for Koch to adequately discuss the issue and for Cuomo to respond to the charges made by Bess. After conferring with an editor, they decided instead to spell out all the details in a lengthy piece to run right after the election.

  On Tuesday, November 8, the voters once again went to the polls. Ed Koch was elected the city’s 105th mayor, getting 713,000 votes, or 50 percent, to Cuomo’s 587,000, or 42 percent. Goodman, the Republican, ended up with only 60,000 votes. At 11:30 that night Ed and Bess stood together at the victory podium and held their arms aloft in triumph. As the band played “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the crowd chanted, “First Lady Bess.”

  The next day, however, for the first time since the campaign had begun that spring Bess made it clear that she had no intention of becoming New York’s first lady or returning to government as a member of the Koch administration. “I must have my privacy,” she told a reporter. “I don’t want to go back into government. I want … to have my freedom. I don’t want to be devoured by the administration of an office again.… I served my four years. I don’t like repetition.”

  It was difficult, though, to destroy the political fantasy created by David Garth that fall. The gossip pages continued to speculate on wedding plans at Gracie Mansion. Even the mayor’s seventy-four-year-old father, Louis, said he expected a wedding announcement before the mayoral inauguration.

  But Bess, wise to the way of city politics, wasted little time trying to arrange for a city job for her brother-in-law. Koch sent him over to Bernie Rome, who was now heading the city’s Off-Track Betting Corporation. Rome interviewed Bess’s brother-in-law but was unable to offer him a job because none were available. Calls soon started coming in from City Hall. “Bess is coming back from vacation, and I know that she is going to ask about her brother-in-law,” one mayoral aide told Rome. “It was her understanding that he was going to have a job at OTB.”

  Rome was furious. He was trying to fire people to meet fiscal constraints, and now Koch’s aides were telling him to come up with a patronage job for Bess’s relative. “Have Bess call me,” Rome said. A few days later, she did.

  “Why don’t you hire my brother-in-law?” he said she asked.

  “We don’t have any jobs here, Bess. We are overstaffed, and we are not hiring anyone,” Rome replied.

  “Oh, I was in government. I know how that works. You fire someone’s ass out of there and hire my brother-in-law.”

  “I can’t do that, Bess,” Rome said.

  “Well,” Bess replied, according to Rome, “you will hear from the mayor.” Then she hung up.

  Koch himself called Rome the next day.

  “He said to me, ‘Bernie, why can’t you hire Bess’s brother-in-law?’” Rome recalled. At the mayor’s insistence, Rome finally offered Bess’s brother-in-law a job—as a $12,000-a-year clerk. Bess’s brother-in-law, hoping to earn at least $25,000 a year, turned it down.

  Bess and Ed continued to see each other occasionally after the election. They went to the movies and to dinner in Chinatown, and in December they attended the glittering ball for the Council for a Beautiful Israel at the Plaza Hotel.

  By the time Ed Koch was sworn into office on January 1, 1978, Bess had another man on her mind. Within months, he would become an obsession.

  18

  Obsession

  On a Saturday night in October 1977, near the end of Ed Koch’s mayoral campaign, Bess arrived alone at a formal dinner party at a friend’s huge Park Avenue duplex apartment. About thirty guests—most of them wealthy real estate developers and investment bankers who sat on the boards of the city’s leading cultural institutions—were already sipping cocktails in the wood-paneled study. At a few minutes after eight they were ushered into a dining room where place cards guided them to their chairs. Bess was seated next to a wealthy private investor named J. Gordon Marcus.*

  At forty-eight, Gordon owned a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and lived in his own apartment in the Carlyle, the city’s only five-star hotel. His family had grown rich through New York real estate, but Gordon, armed with an MBA from Harvard, had set out on his own and made a fortune through savvy investing in the stock market.

  Gordon could be a charming dinner companion. He spoke rapidly, and jokes and funny stories seemed to tumble out of him. He cut an impressive figure as well. A stylish dresser, Gordon was tall and angular, with broad shoulders, wavy brown hair, and intense green eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses.

  Gordon had arrived at the party that night with Charlotte Ames,* a beautiful, blond, vivacious thirty-four-year-old writer who had grown up outside of Boston and later married a wealthy theatrical producer who was much older than she. They had recently been divorced, and she was living on upper Park Avenue with their seven-year-old daughter. Gordon was in the midst of a divorce himself after almost twenty-five years, and now Charlotte was hoping to marry him once his divorce became final.

  Gordon was usually attentive to Charlotte at the dinner parties they often attended, but on that night he became so engrossed in conversation with Bess that he virtually forgot about Charlotte. Bess, who was then fifty-three years old, was regaling him with stories about the campaign trail and turning on her considerable charm, telling him, “I should have married someone like you at twenty-four and moved to Scarsdale.” After dinner they moved to the living room and sat together on a couch, talking for another couple of hours until Charlotte finally approached them and suggested quietly to Gordon that it was time to leave.

  A few days later Bess le
ft a message at the Carlyle that she was looking for him. He had enjoyed their dinner party conversation and called her back to ask her to dinner. Soon they were seeing each other regularly. Bess began telling her friends that she was in love and that Gordon seemed to be everything she was looking for. “Here was someone who was Jewish, who was younger than she, and who was also presentable,” said a woman who knew Bess at the time. “She was completely captivated by this man. He was the first man since her divorce from Arnold whom she said she could marry.”

  Gordon was taken with Bess as well and began juggling his relationship with Charlotte to make time for Bess. For a while Charlotte had no idea there was another woman in Gordon’s life. Then, in late January 1978, during a week-long vacation with Gordon in Jamaica, she began to suspect he was seeing someone else because he frequently made telephone calls from a phone booth instead of from their hotel room.

  When they returned to New York, Charlotte confronted him with her suspicions. At first denying there was another woman, eventually he acknowledged that he had been seeing Bess. Moreover, he said he wanted to continue to see her. Charlotte was shocked that Gordon was throwing her aside for a woman who was twenty years older than she.

  With Charlotte out of the picture, Bess and Gordon began seeing each other almost every night and were practically living together at his apartment in the Carlyle. They enjoyed doing the town together. They went to Harry and Leona Helmsley’s “I’m Wild About Harry” birthday party. They were also seen at Elaine’s, the popular East Side restaurant, at Broadway openings, and at Studio 54, where they watched the Academy Awards on television that spring with actor Yul Brynner.

  Bess was often on Gordon’s arm at political functions and dinners at Gracie Mansion. She introduced him to Governor Carey and Mayor Koch. That spring they traveled together to Arizona and spent a few days at tennis pro John Gardner’s tennis ranch. By the spring of 1978 New York’s gossip columnists were no longer speculating about wedding bells for Bess and the mayor. They were now writing about Bess and Gordon. The Daily News reported they were “very much in love.”