She was relying on what she described at the time as her “special magic.” As she explained to a reporter during the campaign, “I have a history of really impacting on audiences, of getting standing ovations and having people embrace my concepts, and it’s a very powerful feeling, and it must be used very carefully as well, you know. I feel people, and they feel me. And I think that is an enormous responsibility. I felt it all through my life, and I feel it doubly now in terms of the Senate. They’re waiting for something to happen, and I really think I can make the difference for them and make something happen and give them hope, which is something they haven’t had for a long time.”
The question remained, though, whether Bess, with all her charisma and persuasive powers, was talking about the concerns that would win her votes at the polls.
In January 1980 Bess rolled up the Bedouin rug in her living room and took down the Picasso and the fifth-century Byzantine mosaic from her walls. The clay pot that had been a gift from Moshe Dayan was packed up. So was the sculpture of horses from the kingdom of Amenhotep that graced the refectory table in her living room. Her black Steinway grand piano was covered and moved into a corner.
As she set up temporary campaign headquarters in her apartment to save money for the summer and fall, it soon became clear that Bess was going to have her work cut out for her. Liz Holtzman, in the days after declaring her candidacy that January and unveiling an issue-oriented campaign that stressed her eight years of experience in the U.S. Congress, began surging ahead in the polls. Bess, meanwhile, wanted to hold off for as long as possible before formally declaring her candidacy so she could hold on to the consulting and writing jobs that had paid her nearly $493,000 in 1979.
Bess bided her time, studying hard and cramming onto three-by-five index cards facts and figures about the MX missile system, the B-l bomber, federal mass-transit aid, and the state’s balance of payments crisis. “Bess had amazing dedication to put all of this stuff in her head. For the most part, she was diligent,” Dick Eaton recalled. Positioning herself as the moderate-to-conservative candidate, Bess prepared to attack Holtzman’s liberal congressional record and consistent votes against defense appropriations. It was the only chink in Holtzman’s armor, the Myerson camp concluded, and they intended to link a strong American defense to the integrity of Israel.
With her artworks stored away and her piano shoved into a corner, Bess’s apartment was transformed into a suite of offices that buzzed with activity. The dining room was the nerve center. Files filled the drawers of her buffet. Position papers and fund-raising lists were strewn across Bess’s heavy chrome and glass dining table. Eaton, her campaign manager, worked out of her second bedroom. Another campaign aide was assigned work space in the kitchen and told to use the kitchen counter as her desk.
In those early days of the campaign Bess was preoccupied by money. She wanted to cut as many corners as possible to save for an upcoming television advertising blitz. She typed letters herself and hopped onto the Fifth Avenue bus to go to a campaign event. “Bess had no concept of money,” one campaign aide recalled. “The woman had a lot of neurotic tendencies. She once asked me, ‘How do I know if I have enough money to buy a car?’ I was astonished. When you have four million dollars, you have enough money to go out and buy a car.”
One of Bess’s worries during the spring of 1980 concerned who was eating the Schrafft’s chocolate candies she kept in the crystal bowl on her living room coffee table. “She thought that the volunteers who came to work at the apartment were helping themselves to things. She would always ask two things. She would want to know the latest jokes, and is anybody out there taking those chocolate candies?” recalled a volunteer in the campaign.
One night Bess’s parsimonious ways led her on a raiding party to her office at Citibank. The incident would become known within the campaign as the “liberation of the typewriter.” After delivering a speech about the history of women at the Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue, Bess directed her driver to pull up outside of Citibank’s midtown Manhattan headquarters. It was approaching midnight.
“She knew the doorman,” recalled one of the two campaign aides who accompanied Bess inside. “He waved us all through, and we went up. She took a typewriter. She also happened to have in her bag a couple of garbage bags, which she filled with file folders, Scotch tape dispensers, notebooks, pens, and paper. She was going to use their supplies. She felt that maybe Citibank owed it to her.”
As they followed Bess’s instructions and carried the garbage bags and typewriter out of the building, one of the campaign aides turned to the other, rolled her eyes, and whispered, “Can you believe we are doing this?”
Like many candidates caught up in a high-stakes campaign, Bess was a demanding boss whose moods could swing widely and unpredictably. “If you want to work on the campaign, call so-and-so right now, raise some money, or leave,” Bess would shout to volunteers working on weekends. Then, in the next breath, she would offer to fix dinner for everyone or suggest they all go to a movie.
She also promised to help her volunteers find jobs once the campaign was over. One volunteer recalled, “Her favorite thing to say was ‘We are going to find you a great job where you can make piles of money.’ She was very good at opening doors, and then she expected you to make the most of that opportunity.”
Again Bess fell into the role of being everybody’s mother, scolding her staff for eating junk food and for failing to take vitamins and for not getting enough exercise. Bess herself gulped a myriad of vitamins several times a day without the benefit of water and tried to find time to keep in shape by pedaling her bicycle around Central Park or jumping rope.
“She showed many sides of her personality,” recalled a former longtime friend who worked on the campaign. “She could be very sweet and giving. She really tried to extend herself in certain ways, but she used to take her pound of flesh in return. She would treat me very badly at times. Then she would be very contrite and loving.”
A senior staff member encountered few problems with Bess, which he attributed to his senior position in the campaign: “She is a very smart, very shrewd person who was nice to people when she needed to be nice to people, and if she sized them up and realized that she didn’t have to be nice, she wasn’t nice. If you were a peer, she didn’t give you problems. If you were a worker, she could be pretty tough.”
Bess, it struck some of her campaign workers, had a powerful need to be in control. On the way to campaign events she invariably complained that her driver wasn’t driving fast enough and threatened to drive herself.
“In the campaign she always had to be in control,” recalled the former longtime friend who worked on the campaign. “She couldn’t let go. But then again, there was no one to let go to. It was amateur night at the races. With all of her contacts, all of her money, there was no organization. When Ed Koch ran, there was a real organization around him. Bess didn’t have that.”
Bess had been trying to persuade her old friend David Garth, the political media wizard, to oversee her campaign. But for all she had done for two of his major candidates, Governor Carey and Mayor Koch, Garth was playing hard to get. As early as the spring of 1979 Garth told her he wasn’t interested. “I told her I want to stay out of the Senate race in New York. It’s just a pain in the ass,” Garth said at the time.
But Bess persisted and finally convinced Garth to help. Garth’s reluctance was based on his belief that Bess would lose the Democratic primary. After Holtzman’s announcement in January private polls showed that Bess would have great difficulty beating the Brooklyn congresswoman. As Garth later recalled, “There was no way that Bess was going to beat that. We advised Bess not to run. The poll was that strong. I wanted to let her know what she was in for.”
Despite the strong possibility of defeat and the likelihood that she would have to use almost $1 million out of her $4 million in savings to mount an effective media campaign, Bess insisted on running. She was convinced th
at 1980 was her year. “She said she still wanted to do it,” Garth recalled. “I told her, ‘If you want to do it, we’ll do it.’”
Garth put his top associate, Maureen Connelly, in charge of the campaign. At thirty-one, Connelly was a veteran of a dozen political campaigns, a smart, savvy political professional who had been Koch’s press secretary at City Hall after working at Garth’s side in the 1977 mayoral campaign. Her first challenge was to help Bess shed her celebrity image and show voters that Bess was a serious candidate who would bring her experience in government and business to Washington. On the biographical sheet handed out to reporters by the campaign there was no mention of the Miss America contest that had first brought Bess to public attention.
The campaign message was virtually a carbon copy of the one that had worked so well for Senator Moynihan in his 1976 campaign. The plan was for Bess to take a hard line on defense, a risky move in a primary that attracted many liberal voters, and to complain that the state of New York was not getting back as many federal dollars each year in services and aid as its citizens were paying into the government in taxes.
On May 6 Bess returned to the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses in the Bronx with her ninety-year-old father, Louis, to officially open her campaign. Her mother, Bella, then eighty-eight, was confined to a bed in a Bronx nursing home and unable to accompany them. Although most of the working-class Jewish families from the original cooperative had moved out years ago, a few old neighbors remained, and they greeted Bess warmly and led her to the basement, where they had put out a punch bowl and plates of cookies in celebration of her return. Her father said at the time, “I’m very proud of her. There is only one Bess.”
As the Senate campaign got under way, Bess saw J. Gordon Marcus less frequently, but she remained obsessed with him and would later be accused of engaging in a harassment campaign against him and his girlfriend. It had finally become apparent to her that he had no intention of giving up Charlotte Ames and his other girlfriends to have a serious relationship with her. That spring she began to focus most of her attention on another man, Jeffrey Endervelt, a rich, successful shoe manufacturer who was in his thirties and who would later marry Polly Bergen. Endervelt took an active role in the campaign and often accompanied Bess to fund-raisers. “We liked him,” said a member of the campaign staff. “He was tall, good-looking, and even-tempered. He put up with a lot of nonsense from her.” Bess was seen on his arm at political fund-raisers and other affairs until another younger man attracted her attention at the annual Queens County Democratic party dinner.
Unlike Democratic dinners held in Manhattan hotel ballrooms, the Queens annual bash at Antun’s, a huge catering hall on Springfield Boulevard, was an informal affair. There was no dais or long-winded political speeches. The buffet-style dinner tables were lined up against the wall with chafing dishes filled with heaping piles of roast beef, ham, and lobster. With almost six hundred people milling around the room, it was the perfect setting for Bess to mingle with scores of loyal party workers, city contractors, and potential campaign contributors.
Bess made her entrance shortly after 9:00 P.M., looking like a movie star in her white dress. Donald Manes greeted her warmly. As borough president and Queens Democratic county leader, Manes was widely considered to be the second most powerful politician in New York. A strapping, bulky, gregarious man in his late forties with short brown hair, pasty skin, and a big smile, he called himself the “King of Queens.” He led Bess through the crowd, introducing her to party workers from his large and disciplined party machine and to city contractors who often made big political contributions. Toward the end of the night Manes introduced Bess to his old friends, Carl Andy Capasso and his wife, Nancy, as they were about to walk out the door.
Andy Capasso was a thirty-five-year-old multimillionaire, a big-time city contractor who laid sewer pipes for a living. His grandfather and father had been in the sewer construction business, and he had started his own company from scratch in 1968, not long after he met his wife, Nancy. Funny and charming, he is somewhat handsome when he smiles. As a city contractor, he understood the importance of knowing the pols, attending fund-raisers, and contributing to their campaigns. Andy was usually generous with candidates, giving them huge donations.
From the first night he met Bess, he was taken with her, his then-wife Nancy recalled. “He fell for her hook, line, and sinker,” she said. A few days after the fund-raiser Andy called Bess at her campaign headquarters and offered to do whatever he could to help her raise money. Bess was grateful for his support and invited him to a fund-raiser that Ben Heller, a New York art dealer, was throwing for her at his summer home in the Hamptons.
Andy accepted the invitation and showed up with Nancy. Bess was accompanied to the party by Jeffrey Endervelt. A campaign worker remembers that Endervelt was miffed that Bess seemed to be paying most of her attention to Andy that day. “Andy Capasso was really putting on the moves,” a campaign aide said. “He was jumping around her, and she was jumping around him. I was really pissed that she was going for this guy over Endervelt.”
After the fund-raiser Bess began to talk regularly with Andy on the telephone. He amused her with his one-liners, and she found his lack of airs refreshing. He was smart and down to earth. That summer he collected thousands of dollars on her behalf from his friends in the sewer and construction business.
Bess needed all of the campaign contributions she could get as she began a series of television commercials that would ultimately cost her campaign about $800,000, much of it her own money. The strategy was to build up Bess as someone experienced in the world of business and government, someone voters could imagine as a United States senator. The commercials all closed with the same tag line: “She knows government. She knows business. She knows how to get things done … for New York.”
Koch lent his support to the effort and taped a commercial in which he told viewers, “She’s a fighter.… She’s effective.” So did Senator Moynihan, who said, “Bess and I can work together effectively.”
Anyone who spent a day on the sweat-and-shoe-leather circuit with Bess that summer would have found it hard to conceive of her losing. “Everybody knew her by first name,” recalled her campaign director, Ken Lerer. “She was everybody’s daughter or everybody’s mother. She was terrific.”
Though Bess knew her campaign stump speech by heart, she was unsure of herself when forced to discuss issues off the top of her head. Candy Jones, the former model whose late husband, Harry Conover, had been one of the judges in the 1945 Miss America contest, recalled being “shocked” by Bess’s performance when Bess appeared on her radio talk show on WMCA-AM. “She was not together at all. She was not well versed in the issues. Whenever I would ask her a question, she would fumble through this big fat binder, looking for the answer,” Jones said.
This spelled trouble for the impending debates. As Lerer later recalled, “I think she has a large intellectual capacity. But she wasn’t comfortable in the debate format. She had never done it before.… This was her first campaign, and Liz Holtzman was a tough character. In the debates she always had Bess off balance.”
As the summer progressed, the fighting got rougher on the campaign trail and in the debates. Holtzman went after Bess in radio ads in early August for her role as chairman of the board of a community-based, nonprofit consumer counseling service that had been accused of engaging in deceptive practices by the very agency Bess once headed—the city’s consumer affairs department.
As the front-runner, she was also the target of attacks by Lindsay. In one radio debate Lindsay accused her of selling out consumers by leaving her job as the city’s consumer affairs commissioner and going to work for Citibank and Bristol-Myers as a highly paid consumer consultant. “When you left my administration, you traded that experience for protecting the interests of banks and corporations,” John Lindsay said. “You just went to the other side. You made a hell of a lot of money, and a lot of that income was sheltered.” He
went on to charge that Bess’s heavy television spending—which Lindsay could not hope to match—was being underwritten by anticonsumer “special interests.”
At a loss for an effective comeback, Bess stumbled, saying merely, “I have no question about my loyalty to consumers at all.”
Despite her lackluster performance in debates, newspaper polls published in early September gave Bess hope. On September 1 the New York Daily News published a poll that showed that residents of the New York City metropolitan area, by a two-to-one margin, believed Bess would win the Democratic primary. Her closest rival was Holtzman, followed by Lindsay and then Santucci.
The next day a New York Times poll also showed Bess leading the field. Among Democrats likely to vote in the primary, Bess led Holtzman 38 percent to 27 percent. Lindsay had 15 percent, and Santucci, who had been a late entry in the race, had 8 percent. The Times noted, however, that the sampling for the poll had ended on August 28, just as Holtzman’s television campaign was about to begin.
While the polls must have been encouraging to Bess and others in the campaign, Maureen Connelly, who was heading the campaign effort for Garth, was unimpressed. In New York Democratic primaries the liberal vote is heavy, and liberal voters in most campaigns do not start thinking about a race until after Labor Day. “If you are the moderate candidate in the Democratic primary, you have to be pretty far ahead by Labor Day,” Connelly said. And Bess was not. She also had to face her opponents in yet another debate.
On the day the Times poll was published Bess headed over to an auditorium at 823 United Nations Plaza for a debate sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the same organization that had launched her career making speeches against racism and anti-Semitism during her 1945 Miss America reign. Almost three hundred people, most of them Jewish, attended. Lindsay, Santucci, and Holtzman were all there. Soon after their opening statements, however, it became clear it would be a contest between Bess and Liz.
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