Queen Bess

by Preston, Jennifer

  The Times polls worried members of Holtzman’s staff, and a campaign aide told a New York Times reporter that day that Holtzman intended to get tough with Bess. She fulfilled her promise. Minutes into the debate that night, Holtzman launched her harshest attack on Bess’s integrity, accusing her of failing to stand up to the president of Citibank when the bank had bowed to the Arab boycott of Israel. “You had a choice of resigning in public protest or staying on and drawing a paycheck,” Holtzman said. “You chose to stay on. I couldn’t have stayed on and drawn a paycheck. That is the difference between us.”

  Bess looked stunned, according to the coverage of the debate in the New York Times and the New York Daily News the following day. Her jaw tightened as she chewed on the end of her glasses. Unable to come up with a sharp retort, Bess repeated her well-rehearsed campaign theme that the federal government was shortchanging New York. Then she paused. “Let me take a few seconds to respond to a woman who questions my loyalty to the Jewish community and the state of Israel.” Bess argued that she had tried to persuade the bank to change its policy but was unsuccessful. “But I don’t quit. I stay and work from the inside.”

  Bess struck back at Holtzman the following morning. Furious that Holtzman had questioned her loyalty to Israel, Bess replaced the commercials emphasizing her business and government experience with one attacking Holtzman’s congressional votes “against every defense appropriation, every defense authorization.”

  Acting against the advice of her top campaign aides, Bess insisted that the commercial against Holtzman run up until the September 9 primary. Some strategists believe she hurt herself with the party’s heavy liberal vote by emphasizing her hawkish position on defense.

  In the closing days of the campaign Bess was exhausted, but she kept her sense of humor with members of the press. While waiting for a radio debate to begin, Bess told Maurice Carroll, then working for the New York Times, that she intended to have Bert Parks as her emcee on election night. “If I win, he can sing ‘Here she comes, the next United States senator,’” Bess told Carroll. “And if I lose, he can sing ‘There she goes.’”

  The strain of campaigning for months, however, was evident to some members of her staff. “She was yelling and screaming at everybody,” said a former friend who was a campaign aide. “She said to me, ‘I can’t stand you anymore. Go home.’ And so I never came back to the campaign. I shouldn’t have paid any attention to her. Emotionally, I was wrung out. She was losing, and I was sad about it.”

  On her way home on the Sunday night before election day Bess stopped by her daughter Barra’s apartment on the Upper East Side. Bess was with two of her closest friends, Marilyn Funt, a writer, and Pam Chanin, who worked at City Hall. As they were about to leave, there was a phone call for Chanin. It was campaign headquarters with bad news. The New York Post was running the results of its latest poll in the next day’s newspaper. The survey showed that Bess would lose.

  Holtzman’s television campaign, combined with her attack on Bess for not leaving Citibank, had turned the election around.

  Now Bess was ten points behind Holtzman, according to the Post poll. Pam Chanin hung up the phone and wondered how she was going to break the news to Bess.

  They went downstairs and got into the car. Bess wanted to stop at her health club before going home. As they headed to the club, Bess began wondering aloud about the possibility of losing the race. “Imagine all of this time, all of this energy, and my money,” Chanin recalled Bess said at the time.

  “Stop imagining, Bess,” Chanin said and then told Bess that she was trailing Holtzman by ten points.

  “Oh,” Bess replied in a calm voice. “That’s what you were talking about on the phone upstairs.”

  “She was very quiet, very calm,” Chanin recalled.

  On Election Day, September 9, more than eight hundred thousand voters went to the polls throughout New York state. Bess was hoping for a heavy turnout to offset the effectiveness of Holtzman’s statewide organization. While Holtzman had five thousand volunteers distributing leaflets throughout the state, Bess was relying heavily on her $800,000 television campaign.

  At around three o’clock that afternoon Bess was in her apartment when she got a call from her campaign director, Ken Lerer. The exit polls confirmed what the New York Post had reported the day before. Holtzman looked like the winner. She thanked him for calling and then hung up. “Bess was really devastated by losing the race,” Marilyn Funt later told New York magazine. “When she heard the news, she just broke down and cried like a child.”

  Bess would later say she lost the race because she was “too tall, too beautiful, too rich.”

  After the polls closed at 8:00 P.M., Bess went over to the Sheraton Centre on Seventh Avenue and spent the next couple of hours cloistered in a hotel suite waiting for the numbers with Koch, Garth, Connelly, her daughter, and a few close campaign aides and friends. The exit polls were accurate. Holtzman had captured 41 percent of the votes to Bess’s 31 percent. Lindsay got 16 percent, and Santucci won 12 percent. Santucci’s late entrance into the race had hurt Bess. He had won the moderate-to-conservative ethnic votes that might have gone to Bess.

  Holtzman had won the Democratic nomination with overwhelming margins in Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and suburban Westchester County. Bess won the Bronx, Staten Island, and upstate New York by a small margin. The Jewish vote that Bess had thought was hers also went to Liz Holtzman. Her loss among Jewish voters was particularly devastating to Bess, the self-proclaimed “Queen of the Jews.”

  The telephone rang nonstop in the hotel suite as people called to offer their regrets. Garth took most of the calls. “She was in another world,” recalled Ken Lerer. At around eleven o’clock Bess went downstairs to make her concession speech in a hotel ballroom that held more than two hundred disappointed supporters.

  There was no trace of disappointment on her face, no tears in her eyes when she strode into the ballroom, smiling, with a bouquet of American Beauty roses in her arms. With Barra and Mayor Koch at her side, Bess delivered what Maureen Connelly would remember as the best speech of the campaign. She thanked her campaign workers for their effort and told them she was proud of the campaign. Gracious in defeat, she promised to support the Democratic ticket, although she added with a laugh that she would first try to convince Liz Holtzman that she was “not accurate in her appraisals of the reality of what is going on.”

  Then, still smiling as if she had won, she threw her American Beauty roses one by one to the crowd.

  20

  The Letters

  As Bess’s Senate campaign progressed through the spring and summer months of 1980, the harassment of J. Gordon Marcus and Charlotte Ames not only continued but escalated. The anonymous threatening letter that had been left for Gordon at the desk of the Carlyle that spring had proven right on one point: more was to follow.

  In March 1980 Charlotte Ames also began receiving crude and obscene letters filled with anti-Semitic references and details about Gordon’s alleged affairs with a multitude of other women. A few months later Gordon learned that four other women he had dated in recent months were receiving similar anonymous letters. After the hang-up telephone calls in 1979, Gordon had immediately suspected that Bess might be responsible for the harassment. She had been furious with him when he finally ended their relationship in the spring of 1980, asking him to explain why he no longer loved her at a joint meeting with her psychiatrist and friend, Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin. He went to the meeting hoping that he might persuade Bess to accept his decision. She said she did.

  Gordon was convinced Bess was responsible for the letters that summer until she called him in July and complained that she too was receiving anonymous letters, warning of a plot to undermine her Senate candidacy. She was only two months away from the September 9 Democratic primary, and the letters, Bess told Gordon, alleged that he and Charlotte were masterminding a campaign of rumor and innuendo to ruin her.

  Gordon told Bess tha
t he had no such plans. Bess angrily suggested to Gordon that Charlotte might be writing the letters and covering up her role by sending some to herself. “Call off your girlfriend,” Bess warned Gordon.

  When Gordon later told Charlotte of his conversation with Bess, Charlotte said that she would like to talk to Bess directly and compare their letters. Working together, perhaps they could figure out who was harassing them.

  Charlotte’s first letter had been hand-delivered to her doorman that March by a taxi driver. It was typed on white stationery with a sketch of a cat at the top. “Do you know that Gordon has another woman?” the letter inquired. “She’s beautiful and bright. They carry on at the Carlyle and at her place in Scarsdale. They’re in constant touch with each other. Check his phone bills. Nick and Barbara introduced them and are delighted it took. Don’t think you’re good enough for their buddy. Are these pimps your friends? More follows.”

  More did follow. Over the next few months a succession of similar letters arrived at Charlotte’s apartment typed on the same stationery as the first. One of the letters suggested that Gordon was carrying on affairs with Bess and a prominent New York socialite at the same time Charlotte was seeing him. The letter, signed “a friend,” said that Charlotte’s own friends thought Gordon was treating her like a “doormat” and that “He wipes his feet and his penis on you when he is finished with his other ladies. He is a male whore.”

  Charlotte didn’t believe the allegations, but the letters frightened her. She worried that whoever was writing them was so unbalanced or obsessed that he or she might try to harm Charlotte or her daughter. “I used to be so scared I would go to a friend’s apartment to open them. It was just awful,” she recalled. But Charlotte did not go to the police with her concerns. She figured the letters would be of no concern to police in a city that has up to ten homicides a day.

  When a letter arrived naming her own mother as one of the women Gordon was supposed to be having an affair with, Charlotte’s concerns eased. “It was the happiest day of my life,” she said, having concluded that the letter writer had somehow seen Gordon’s address book and was simply pulling out women’s names and including them in the letters.

  On July 15, a few days after Charlotte learned from Gordon that Bess too was getting threatening letters, she put in a telephone call to Bess at her Senate campaign headquarters. Charlotte recalled that a secretary answered the telephone and said Bess was unavailable.

  “Who’s calling?” the secretary asked.

  “Charlotte Ames.”

  “Charlotte Ames,” the secretary repeated. “Mmmm. Your name sounds familiar. I think I just put something in the mail to you.”

  Charlotte left her telephone number and hung up, wondering what Bess’s secretary possibly could have mailed to her.

  Later that night, Charlotte said, Bess returned her call. They talked for almost an hour about Gordon and the letters. Bess told Charlotte that she had received three or four letters filled with threats and that she had been shaken by them.

  Charlotte suggested to Bess that they bring the matter to the attention of the police. But, Charlotte recalled, Bess asked her not to go to the police: “She said that she thought the letters might fall into the hands of the press and ruin her campaign.” Instead Bess asked Charlotte to turn over the letters to her. She said she would show them to a close friend who was a lawyer and ask for his advice. Charlotte agreed and said she would leave her letters with Bess’s doorman.

  Before Charlotte hung up, she remembered to ask Bess what her secretary had put in the mail to her. Probably some campaign literature or an invitation to a fund-raiser, Bess replied.

  Charlotte thanked Bess, but after the conversation she couldn’t imagine why Bess would invite her to a campaign function. After all, Gordon had finally ended his relationship with Bess because of her, and she had heard from Gordon that Bess was unhappy about being thrown over for a younger woman.

  The next morning Charlotte received another vulgar, anonymous letter in the mail. The following day an invitation to attend one of Bess’s campaign events arrived in the mail. That sequence led Charlotte to wonder whether Bess had sent the anonymous letter and then sent her the invitation to mask her possible involvement. But after thinking about it, Charlotte couldn’t imagine Bess taking the time or the risk to write such vile, anonymous letters while at the same time campaigning for the U.S. Senate.

  In the days following her conversation with Bess, the letters continued. At the end of July Charlotte’s mother received one at her home in Virginia, about Charlotte and J. Gordon Marcus. A magazine headline, “Get Rich Quick,” was pasted on the top of the letter and was followed by this message:

  J. is the way. Have your say and Charlotte will play. Come today then J. will pay. He may seem gay but he makes hay. Tell him what you may. A girl he’ll lay, not always Charlotte A. So what you’ll say is buy. We hear you say J. will pay. Be nice and play the game your way. It will pay. Your Jew for Charlotte you’ll have one day.

  A few days later Charlotte got another letter. This one was typed on the torn-out cover of a recent issue of New York magazine with the headline “Perfect Weekends.” Typed directly on the page below the headline was this message, which referred to friends of Gordon’s:

  Perfect weekends can be yours if you spend them with a nice man. When will you have yours? Only if you find out the truth. Why don’t you call Ron or Anna or Bess or Pat? Because you are chicken and J. is a shit, which makes you chicken shit. Call Kay and she will show you evidence of times spent together. Better to find out now than to live more days and months and years in sadness. Be smart. We are your friends. The only ones you have.

  Charlotte had sought to escape the harassment that summer by moving with her daughter into Gordon’s rented house in the Hamptons, which had an unlisted telephone number. But whoever was writing her letters and making occasional hang-up phone calls to her apartment in the city had managed to track her down at the rented house on Montrose Avenue in Watermill. One night in early August, only a few days after she had received the “Perfect Weekends” magazine cover, a woman called and asked, “Is this the Montrose Avenue jewelry store?” There were no jewelry stores or commercial businesses on Montrose Avenue. The next day the phone calls started up at the rented house. “I really thought that whoever it was wanted me to know that they knew where my house was,” Charlotte said. “I was terrified. I would be there alone at night with my daughter, while Gordon was in the city, and I was scared. It was a big house with lots of windows. I packed up my stuff, put Katherine into the car, and drove back to my apartment in the city. The number had been unlisted. Now that she had it, I knew that it would just never stop.”

  The telephone call to the Hamptons that August was the last straw. Sick and tired of strange phone calls and bizarre letters because of her relationship with Gordon, she told him she wanted to break up. They agreed not to see each other for a few months. “I didn’t see him again until the fall,” Charlotte said.

  Whoever was writing the anonymous letters, however, apparently did not know that Charlotte Ames was no longer seeing Gordon. The letters continued in August, with many having an anti-Semitic tone. One arrived in the form of a ditty:

  He conned her. He donned her in clothes. He brought her a jewel and a rose. She cried that’s a sin. He lied and he’d win. Then a new cunt felt his Jewish nose. He came from the family of wealth. She was after this Jew for his gelt. But he wouldn’t commit. He chased every tit, and he cared not a shit how she felt.

  The end of the saga. More follows.

  A few days later, perhaps the most vulgar and obscene of the letters arrived at Charlotte Ames’s apartment:

  We now know that with Kay he has been ruthless. Her daily calls to him are fruitless. He played her all summer. Took his piece from her. One weekend he fucked her cunt juiceless.…

  Charlotte stopped reading and threw down the letter in disgust. She decided to go to the police. It was late August, almost
a month had passed since she had turned her letters over to Bess, and still she had not heard anything.

  Charlotte called Bess and asked whether her lawyer had reached any conclusions about the letters. According to Charlotte, Bess told her the lawyer was still reviewing them. Exasperated and tired of waiting, Charlotte told Bess that she wanted her letters back and planned to take them to the police. But Charlotte said that Bess again pleaded with her not to go to the police. With only a few weeks until the Democratic primary, Bess reiterated her worries that word of the letters would leak to the press and hurt her campaign. Charlotte reluctantly agreed to wait until the campaign was over.

  On September 23, two weeks after Bess lost the primary to Liz Holtzman, Charlotte got another anonymous and obscene letter in the mail. She called Bess again and asked Bess to return the letters she had given her two months before. Once again, Charlotte recalled, Bess said that her lawyer friend was still investigating. This time Charlotte insisted on getting the letters back. A week later Bess finally sent a package containing the letters to Charlotte’s apartment. Included in the package were a few letters that Bess claimed she had received threatening her campaign. One said:

  Dear Loser,

  Read Suzy’s column, Tuesday of next week. The story about your illness will appear. She will not reveal your cancer to begin with. A drop of news at a time until it spreads. You will be sorry you played around with Gordon. You took him away from Charlotte. As it always happens another woman took him away from you. More follows.

  Yet another suggested that Charlotte was behind a countercampaign: