Queen Bess

by Preston, Jennifer

  During this time Andy seemed preoccupied and did not take as much interest as Nancy had anticipated in choosing the expensive furnishings and paintings for their new apartment. And although they were now living in Manhattan, only minutes from his company headquarters in Queens, Nancy saw even less of him in the evenings: “He was always disappearing. He was never around. He said he was meeting Matty all the time. He’d go out in the evenings, and he wouldn’t come home till three or four in the morning. It was awful. When he came home, he was horrible. He was cold and emotionally removed. I didn’t know what it was. I was totally cut off. I was a mess, and I didn’t know why.”

  Here she was, living in a fabulous Fifth Avenue apartment, able to buy virtually anything she wanted. She had two full-time maids. The family had a fleet of seven cars at its disposal, including a 1979 Mercedes with Nancy’s name in brass affixed to the dashboard. She also had her own limousine and driver to take her and the children to appointments around town and out to the Hamptons, shopping on Madison Avenue, and once a week to Balducci’s, a gourmet grocery store in Greenwich Village. She had unlimited credit at Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, Martha’s, Henri Bendel, and Bergdorf Goodman, where she spent $25,000 that winter on a sable jacket. “I had everything I wanted—materially, that is,” said Nancy. “He would give me anything I wanted, just to keep me quiet. If I wanted a pretty dress, I got a pretty dress. There was no question of money.”

  Why then, she wondered, did she feel so sad? Why did she one day find herself sobbing uncontrollably as she sat in the back of her limousine, wearing a $5,000 dress from Martha’s? “I sensed something was wrong with us, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was going crazy.”

  One night she met her old friend, Judith Yeager, for drinks at the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue, just a few blocks from her apartment. “She started telling me that she didn’t know what was happening to her life,” Yeager recalled. “Andy was never home. They had bought this gorgeous apartment, and she couldn’t even have company because she never knew whether he would show up. She never knew where he was and thought that he was hanging out with the guys at night doing deals. At that point she didn’t think there was another woman.”

  And Nancy did not suspect anything that weekday afternoon in January 1981 when she spotted Andy’s limousine and driver parked outside of Lenox Hill Hospital.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked one of her husband’s drivers, James White.

  He said, “I don’t know. You better ask him.”

  Just then Andy walked out of the hospital toward the waiting car.

  “Who were you visiting?” she asked.

  “A sick friend” is all she remembers he replied.

  At the time, Nancy said, she didn’t think much of his vague response. She assumed his “sick friend” was one of his numerous business associates. She never would have guessed that he was visiting Bess Myerson, much less having an affair with her.

  22

  The Other Woman

  Two weeks after Bess was released from Lenox Hill Hospital, Mayor Koch invited her to Gracie Mansion to celebrate her recovery. For whatever reason, Bess continued to lie to the press about her hospitalization. “I had a bad fall,” she told a New York Daily News reporter that night. “I fell off a painter’s ladder, my late father’s ladder, in fact, and hit my head on a table. I had a concussion and injured my back. It was all a lot worse than people thought.”

  She apparently did not want anyone to know that she had suffered a stroke or that she was rushed to the hospital, not from her apartment, but from her married lover’s company headquarters in Queens.

  According to a former friend who knew about the relationship at the time, Bess seemed to become even more dependent on Andy’s attention and generosity during the months following her stroke. With the stroke coming on top of her deep depression, she was very vulnerable. Andy was ready to meet her every need.

  Now that Andy was living in Manhattan and no longer had to commute, he could get together with Bess more easily. His new Fifth Avenue apartment was only ten blocks from her apartment building. He saw her several nights a week and sometimes early in the morning before he went to work, according to his driver, who remembered picking him up outside his home around 5:00 A.M. and dropping him off at Bess’s apartment.

  “I think he was in total awe of her,” said a former close friend of Bess’s. “He told her that he had been in love with her for years and that she was his ideal.”

  Andy was not always Bess’s ideal. Bess once said to a friend who had known her for years, “You think I don’t want to go out with someone who is my age, successful, and Jewish?” And to other friends, Bess would complain about Andy’s drinking and his “table manners.” Bess’s disparaging comments about Andy disturbed a former friend whose home Bess and Andy visited frequently during their secret affair. “He seemed like such a nice man, but he couldn’t do anything to please her. She would talk on the phone to him for hours and berate him. My mother was visiting once, and Bess was at my house, talking to him on the phone. My mother said to me, ‘Why does he put up with such things?’ It was unbelievable.”

  While Andy appeared to Bess’s friends to be very much in love with Bess at the time, he may also have been trading up, replacing his princess with a queen.

  “Money. Power. Social status,” said Judith Yeager, Nancy’s longtime friend. “Andy is always climbing a ladder, and he made his first step with Nancy, and then he saw national fame and political power, and that’s Bess.

  “Here is a guy approaching his forties who is a very appealing person. He is a helluva lot of fun, and he has the same charm that he has had since he was nineteen years old. And he is looking to run around. What would you have expected him to do? Well, all of us would have expected him to find a showgirl, some young actress, someone twenty years younger than he. Who does he pick? He picks a woman who is twenty years older than he, who may look good for a sixty-year-old—but why?”

  Another former friend of Andy’s also saw his relationship with Bess as part of his continuing quest for social respectability and political power. Nancy agreed. She believed Andy might have been seeking the one thing that had eluded him despite all of his hard work, determination, and millions of dollars: entrée into Manhattan’s powerful and political social circles. “Bess gave him all of that,” Nancy said. “I guess, with her, that’s where he could get into a new circle.”

  In return, “Mr. Capasso” gave Bess almost anything she wanted. To some of Bess’s friends the key to the relationship seemed to be money. Although Bess was worth millions, she constantly complained to Andy that she did not have any money because of her staggering campaign debt and medical bills.

  Andy paid for virtually all of her expenses, from her dry cleaning to her groceries. He gave her credit cards and use of his limousine. His driver picked Bess up regularly and drove her to Rhode Island, Connecticut, and southern New Jersey, where she delivered speeches to women’s groups and Jewish organizations, usually for a $5,000 fee. Andy also later gave Bess a fur coat and expensive jewelry. He once said to his other chauffeur, Tony Bailey, “The best is for Bess because she is ‘Queen of the Jews.’”

  Within months after getting out of the hospital, Bess started work on a diet book with literary agent and writer Bill Adler, based on diets developed by the New York City Department of Health’s Bureau of Nutrition. It was her second book. She had published a guide for consumers in 1979 that did not sell as well as she had hoped. But the diet book became an overnight success with its catchy title, I Love New York Diet, and its promise that dieters could lose ten pounds in seven days. The book was panned, though, by Jane Brody in the New York Times. In her “Personal Health” column she quoted experts who complained Bess “took the whole diet out of context” and “makes promises the average person can’t possibly hope for.”

  In 1981 Bess also started work with her good friend and psychiatrist, Dr. Ted Rubin, on a cable television show c
alled “Please Make Me Happy.” Bess and Rubin were cohosts of the show in which guests were invited to discuss their problems. “It was a curiosity. In a strange way, she needed that therapy herself. She needed to be made happy,” said a woman who worked on the show, which aired only a few times before it was canceled.

  After “Please Make Me Happy” went off the air, Bess found another television opportunity, this time as a consumer reporter. It made perfect sense for Bess to combine her two most successful careers: television and consumerism. That November of 1981, almost a year after she had suffered her stroke, Bess signed a six-figure contract with WCBS, the CBS network affiliate in New York, to report consumer news. She started working the following February when the station started its “News at Five” show, appearing on the air three or four times a week with consumer-oriented reports.

  Television news producer Mort Fleischner was lured away from WABC to work with Bess at WCBS. “She was the selling point,” said Fleischner, who grew up in New York and had always admired Bess. “At that point in her life she was still Queen Bess. She was perceived to be the most powerful woman in the city. When she walked into City Hall, the waters would part. Television crews don’t ordinarily get that kind of reception.”

  Fleischner remembered, “Being her producer was wonderful in the terms she made my life very easy.” She was a natural with the camera, and she made up for her lack of experience in daily news reporting with her expertise on consumer issues and by calling on her powerful and influential friends for stories. She carried a fat address book filled with names and telephone numbers. “She was capable of calling up anyone at anytime and getting them on the telephone,” added Fleischner. “Her phone book was enormous, and from the standpoint of CBS that made her invaluable.”

  Fleischner recalled the day they were doing a story on IRAs. As they approached their deadline for getting the story on the air, they did not have a bank official willing to go on camera. “We were stuck, so Bess picks up the phone and says, ‘Walter, I need your help.’” By airtime they had Walter Wriston, then the chairman of Citicorp and one of New York’s most powerful corporate executives, on camera to answer all of her questions about IRAs.

  Fleischner said that overall he found Bess professional and easy to work with. Despite her stardom at the station, he described her as a “hard worker” who “took direction well.”

  “She is the type of woman who is capable of being tough. No bullshit. At times she came down very hard on me. She was at the same time capable of being a Jewish mother.”

  Reporting a consumer story out on the street must have reminded Bess of her days as consumer affairs commissioner. While visiting a video arcade for one story, Bess noticed violations of city regulations. She walked outside, found the nearest pay phone, and reported the arcade to the city’s commissioner of consumer affairs. City inspectors were immediately dispatched to the arcade, and summonses were issued.

  In late 1981, almost a year after her husband had become deeply involved with Bess, Nancy Capasso still did not know that her husband was having an affair. But tired of his never spending any time at home, she decided to take a full-time job as a realtor for Sotheby’s International Realty, one of Manhattan’s most prestigious real estate firms. Through her new job, she had heard about a waterfront estate in Westhampton Beach on the market for almost $1 million. It was a huge, wood-shingled, five-bedroom house built in 1920, with a swimming pool and a small cottage on the property. Ever since she had moved from Old Westbury into Manhattan, Nancy had missed not having a house. “I thought maybe that was the problem. I thought I needed a house.” Andy seemed enthusiastic about the idea, she said. He later said he saw investment potential in the property, which was located on almost two acres of land, overlooking Quantuck Bay.

  Any hopes that Nancy had about the new house bringing them closer together were dashed just before the closing. “He said, ‘You don’t have to be at the closing.’ I said to myself, something is fishy here, because he had never said anything like that before when we purchased something.”

  Her name did not appear on the deed. “He wouldn’t put anything in my name,” she said.

  Nancy decided it was time to consult a lawyer, who assured her that in the event of a divorce the Westhampton Beach house would be considered marital property whether or not she had her name on the deed.

  Then the lawyer asked her what she wanted to do. Proceed with a divorce?

  “No,” Nancy told him. She decided to wait.

  All during their courtship Andy and Bess had been discreet about appearing together in public. One night in early 1982, however, Andy made the mistake of taking Bess to a popular Chinese restaurant, Fortune Garden, where he had often taken his wife.

  Nancy happened to be having dinner with a friend in the restaurant’s front room when Andy walked in alone and headed toward the back room. She caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye just as she was preparing to leave. After paying the check and putting on her fur coat, she walked to the rear of the restaurant to see whom he was with. He had told her earlier that evening that he had a “business meeting.” As she walked into the restaurant’s back room, she could hear her heart pound under her coat. What if he was with another woman? What would she do? What would he say?

  She spotted him at their favorite table, partially hidden behind a column, having dinner with Bess Myerson. “I was stunned. He said he had just got there, and they were having a business meeting.”

  Bess looked up at her and smiled sweetly. “Oh,” Nancy remembered Bess said to her. “Andy tells me you’re so successful as a real estate broker. Maybe I should be a broker, too.”

  Nancy left the restaurant completely confused. If Andy were having an affair, she told herself, it would not be with a woman “old enough to be his mother.” She didn’t see Bess Myerson as heavy competition.

  When Andy returned home late that night, she asked him about his relationship with Bess Myerson. He told her they were “just friends.”

  She didn’t think much more about it until a few months later, when she and Andy were invited to the wedding of Bess’s daughter, Barra. She couldn’t understand how they had come to be invited. How close were Bess and Andy, anyway?

  Barra, then working as a screenwriter, was marrying Brian Reilly, who was also a writer. Bess was not thrilled that her daughter was marrying a Roman Catholic, and before the wedding she told Brian that she had made sure he would not see a penny of her money. The wedding was held at the Harkness House in Manhattan, which Bess arranged at a reduced rate. (When she was preparing her federal income taxes the following year, she returned to the Harkness House and asked the rabbi to write her a letter saying that the fee she had paid for her daughter’s wedding ceremony was a charitable contribution.)

  Nancy was surprised that she and her husband were among the small group of guests. She thought it was strange, too, that Andy seemed to know so many of Bess’s friends. “How could this be?” Nancy recalled saying to herself. “I don’t know these people. It didn’t add up, but I wasn’t making it add up. Everybody knew but me.”

  At the reception Bess whispered to some of her friends, “Be nice to Nancy.” Some of Bess’s friends were appalled that she had invited Nancy to the wedding, particularly when so many people were aware of Bess and Andy’s affair. One friend of Bess’s was so disgusted that he walked up to Nancy in the middle of the reception and said to her: “Hey, can’t you see what is going on?”

  Nancy gave him a puzzled look. “What are you talking about?”

  He would not say more. Startled by the stranger’s comments, Nancy walked over to Andy and insisted they go home.

  Finally Nancy was convinced her husband was having an affair, though she still did not suspect fifty-seven-year-old Bess. When they returned home that night, they argued bitterly. She said Andy told her she was paranoid.

  Despite his disavowals, Nancy became even more doubtful of his fidelity during a family vacation that spring
at their Palm Beach condominium. “He used to go wandering off to the Breakers Hotel to ‘important business meetings’ and not let me go,” she said. Only later did Nancy learn that Bess was staying at the nearby Breakers Hotel at the same time.

  It was during Bess’s visit to Palm Beach that she learned that her mother had died in a Bronx nursing home at the age of ninety. Bess flew back to New York and was met at the airport by Andy’s driver, Tony Bailey, who took her to the funeral service. Bailey later said that he was surprised by Bess’s lack of emotion over her mother’s death. Instead of driving out to the cemetery for her mother’s burial, Bailey said that Bess wanted to go back to the airport so she could catch a flight back to Florida. But Bailey claims he persuaded Bess to go to the cemetery and that she finally agreed. He drove the Nanco limousine carrying Bess in the funeral procession.

  Nancy had hoped that she and Andy would spend more time together now that they had a house in Westhampton Beach. But she was wrong. Although Andy came out to the Hamptons on weekends during the summer of 1982, he rarely spent time with her.

  Bess made elaborate arrangements to meet secretly with Andy in the Hamptons at homes owned or rented by her friends. One of Bess’s friends remembered leaving the back door open on Friday nights for Andy, who usually arrived at her home about 3:00 A.M. to slip into bed with Bess. “I never knew whether he was going to be there at breakfast or not,” said the hostess. But she never considered Andy a freeloader. “He would get up early and get bagels and lots of stuff to pay the rent on his end of the table.”