Queen Bess

by Preston, Jennifer

“How much are you prepared to pay?” Leventhal asked.

  “Well, my client isn’t prepared to pay anything,” Leventhal remembered Abramowitz told him.

  “Well, I will take it in to the judge,” Leventhal replied.

  While Abramowitz waited in the anteroom, Leventhal took the request into Judge Gabel’s chambers and told her that Al Abramowitz wanted to reargue the Capasso decision. “He thinks it’s too much,” Leventhal told the judge.

  “Well, let me see the papers,” he recalled the judge replied.

  Leventhal handed over the documents and waited while she read them.

  As he remembered it, a few minutes later she looked up and said, “Well, I think perhaps we were a little too generous with Mr. Capasso’s money, and we should reduce it a bit.”

  Over Leventhal’s protest, Judge Gabel granted Andy Capasso’s request to reargue the case and, pending the outcome, slashed the alimony payments in half, from $1,500 a week to $750 a week. She also reduced the child support payments by another $100 a week to $250.

  By the middle of July both sides in Capasso v. Capasso had submitted their arguments to Judge Gabel in writing. Andy’s lawyers contended that Andy could not afford to pay the alimony as well as pick up all of the other bills. While his annual income approached $1 million a year, his attorneys argued that most of that income was already committed to pay income taxes and debt service on money he had borrowed for real estate and tax shelters. They contended, too, that Nancy was earning a substantial salary as a real estate broker and that she had access to about $200,000 in savings accounts.

  Nancy disputed her husband’s claim that he couldn’t afford to pay her. “He has substantial monies which will enable him to continue his luxurious life style,” she claimed in court papers. “If I do not receive relief from the court, then my husband will be able to force me to use up my limited resources in order to attempt to get me to settle this case on his terms.”

  Departing from the usual practice of referring all motions to the pool of law assistants for review, Judge Gabel decided to handle the Capasso v. Capasso case herself that July. “I think I will do this one myself, Howie,” Leventhal recalled the judge told him.

  Of the thirty-seven hundred motions that passed through her chambers during the entire twenty-seven-month period she presided over the matrimonial division, the Capasso case was the only one she handled alone. She explained years later that she wanted to handle it herself because it was “one of the biggest, if not the biggest, income-type cases that I had.”

  On July 21 the lawyers in Capasso v. Capasso appeared in her courtroom to make their arguments over how much Andy should pay. His lawyers called Nancy’s request for $1,500 a week “unfair.” Nancy’s lawyers retorted that Andy wanted Nancy to “starve” out of “vengeance” for having been thrown out of their Fifth Avenue home.

  Although Judge Gabel was more impressed with the arguments made by Andy’s lawyers than Nancy’s that day, she reserved her final decision in the case. In fact, she did not reveal her decision for almost two more months. By the time she did, Bess Myerson had given the judge’s daughter a city job.

  Just a few days after the two had met at the dinner party on that Friday night in June, Bess called and invited Sukhreet to the opening of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park and to the dinner Papp was giving for VIP guests before the performance. Sukhreet was delighted to accept and happy about making a new friend.

  Bess later said she found Sukhreet to be charming and bright that summer. So did Bess’s close friend, Sandy Stern, who attended the performance in the park with them that night. “And Sandy is not impressed by anyone,” Bess said later.

  Sukhreet got another call from Bess a few days later, suggesting they meet for dinner at the Chinese restaurant Foo Chow on Third Avenue, just a few blocks from Bess’s apartment. Over dinner, Sukhreet recalls, Bess appeared to be intensely interested in what she had to say.

  Sukhreet remembers telling Bess how she became interested in the sociology of culture at the University of Chicago and how she had always been intrigued by museum administration. She said Bess told her that her background might possibly qualify her for a job at the Department of Cultural Affairs. “We can certainly find you something to do with museums,” Sukhreet recalls Bess said that night.

  “She also suggested that I should go to law school,” Sukhreet said. “I told her, ‘I’ve just come from a Ph.D. program, a pretty tough place. I don’t know if I’m prepared for law school and to start a whole other career.’

  “And she said, ‘You could go to Fordham,’” referring to Fordham University Law School. “It’s right next to the Department of Cultural Affairs. I can fix it so that if you have classes during the day or if you have to study, your hours can be arranged so that you can work and go to law school together.’”

  As they were talking about Sukhreet’s future, Sukhreet remembers, a dark-haired, heavyset man in his late thirties wearing an expensive suit approached their table, came up behind Bess, and put his arm around her. “C’mon, Bess, let’s go,” Sukhreet remembers the man said. “My friends are waiting for us at Abe’s Steak House next door, and we’re all waiting for you, Bessie. C’mon.”

  “Really, I’m here with Sukhreet,” Bess replied, according to Sukhreet. “I’d much rather finish my dinner and be with Sukhreet for the time being. I’ll join you when I’m done.”

  From the proprietary way he put his arm on her shoulder, Sukhreet assumed the man was a romantic friend, but Bess did not identify him, and Sukhreet thought it would be impolite to ask who he was.

  Over the next few weeks, Sukhreet said, Bess called her several more times, inviting her to go with her to the movies, to join her on long walks, and to meet her for dinner or visit her at her apartment.

  Sukhreet was delighted with her new friendship. Bess was helping her with all areas of her life, promising to help fix her up with men, to put her on a diet, and to advise her on subjects ranging from what makeup she should wear to what quality of paper her résumé should be typed on. Bess even gave the résumé to a professional writer on her staff to jazz it up.

  Sometime in the middle of July, Sukhreet remembers, Bess suggested that she consider joining the Department of Cultural Affairs staff as a volunteer until a full-time position became available. Sukhreet said she was told that she could begin the job as soon as Bess returned from her two-week trip to Europe. Sukhreet agreed in the hope that it might turn into a full-time position.

  She recalled telling her mother that summer about all of the wonderful things Bess was doing for her and about the possibility of a job at the Department of Cultural Affairs.

  Judge Gabel did not let on that she already knew about her blossoming friendship—from Bess. “Sometime in July, if I’m not mistaken,” said the judge, “Bess called me up and told me that she was taking Sukhreet on as a volunteer, a full-time volunteer, and then later on she told me that she was trying to get her put on the payroll but didn’t know how successful she would be, and then eventually she did.”

  What Sukhreet, and, for that matter, Nancy Capasso and her lawyers, did not know that summer of 1983 is that Judge Gabel and Bess were communicating regularly. They had at least five face-to-face meetings according to a specially commissioned mayoral report, and they frequently left messages for each other at their offices, usually on their private lines, according to telephone logs. Judge Gabel’s secretary and top aide remembered answering the judge’s private line on several occasions that summer and taking messages from Bess, who usually identified herself as “the commissioner.”

  Other times, in an apparent attempt to disguise her identity, Bess left messages under assumed names: Barbara Goodman or Mrs. Robinson. Once when Howard Leventhal asked Judge Gabel about the Mrs. Robinson who left frequent messages, he said that she told him: “Oh, that’s Bess. She’s byzantine.…”

  Remembering those phone conversations, Judge Gabel later said they usually spoke about
Sukhreet. “I was very eager for Sukhreet to find this kind of interesting work, and I wanted her to be in public life. I was certainly being nice to Bess, not only because I liked her, but because Bess showed an interest in my daughter.…”

  On July 22, the day after Andy Capasso’s lawyers made an oral presentation before Judge Gabel on why he could not afford, to pay $78,000 a year in alimony, Andy and Bess departed for a trip to Europe. “Mr. Capasso was extremely distressed by the divorce,” Bess later said. “All these reports that I stole this man—I was appalled by it. I could just see the tension in his face. So I said, ‘I’m going to Europe. Would you like to come?’” They spent a few days on a yacht in the Mediterranean and then a few more days in the south of France.

  If Andy was hoping to escape his marital troubles and his ex-wife, he was to be disappointed.

  At the elegant Hotel du Cap in Cap d’Antibes, where Bess and Andy were staying, they ran right into Nancy in the lobby. “I guess the world isn’t big enough for both of us,” Nancy remembers telling her husband. She was staying with a girlfriend at a nearby Monte Carlo hotel, and they were going to have lunch at the Hôtel du Cap, but they decided to leave.

  Although Bess was convinced that Nancy was following them, Nancy later claimed she had no idea Andy and Bess were staying at the hotel and called the episode an “unfortunate coincidence.” “I thought I was hallucinating. It was freaky. Halfway around the world, at the same moment, at the same place. It was just awful. I’ve never been back to the south of France.”

  Shortly after Bess and Andy returned from their European vacation, Bess invited Sukhreet out to Andy’s Westhampton Beach house for the weekend. Sukhreet was grateful for an opportunity to escape the scorching summer heat of the city, and she drove out to eastern Long Island on the first weekend in August.

  Soon after she arrived and found Bess sitting by the pool, Bess led her on a tour of the house, which included a stop inside a small room used as a walk-in closet. Sukhreet watched as Bess bent down and opened a chest of drawers, revealing a drawer full of bikini tops and bottoms. “She pointed them out to me and mentioned that they were not hers, but that they were her friend’s ex-wife’s.” Bess must have been obsessed with Nancy’s bikinis. The maid once recalled Bess trying on Nancy’s swim-suits and modeling them for Andy.

  After the house tour, Sukhreet was introduced to Andy. She found Andy to be “polite but distant.”

  Over the weekend Sukhreet spent time beside the pool, watched Andy and Bess play tennis, and joined them for dinner at a seafood restaurant. She met Bess’s daughter, Barra, who had rented a house nearby for the summer with her husband, Brian, and daughter, Samantha. At one point that weekend Bess and Andy went off to a party and left Sukhreet at the house. She was livid. “I was shocked. I thought this was incredibly rude.… I felt, gee, if I ever had a houseguest, I would take them along. But again, I didn’t have the assertive skills that I have now, and I didn’t know what was going on. What could you say? I put up with it.”

  Bess did invite her, however, to accompany them to a gathering at the home of her close friend, Dr. Ted Rubin, and his wife, Eleanor. As Bess was getting dressed, Sukhreet said Bess started thinking aloud: “I don’t know whether I ought to be doing this, whether I should bring you or not, and Andy is not in favor of it, but I am going to do it. Oh, by the way, what was your married name?”

  “I told her that my married name was Revis,” Sukhreet later said.

  “Well, I want you to use that name at the party. If you tell anyone your name, you tell them your name as being Revis,” Sukhreet remembered Bess told her.

  Sukhreet thought Bess’s request was peculiar, but she agreed to go along with the plan. As it turned out, she didn’t have to identify herself as Miss Revis. “No one asked. No one cared,” she said, adding that Andy and Bess did not introduce her to anyone at the party, not even to the host and hostess who greeted them at the front door when they all arrived.

  Before Sukhreet left the next afternoon for the long drive back to New York, Bess said she expected to see her in the office at the Department of Cultural Affairs the following morning to begin work as a volunteer. Sukhreet said Bess had told her that she wanted her senior staff to get to know her so they would help find room in the budget to hire her.

  As a volunteer, Sukhreet accompanied Bess to performances of the New York Philharmonic and board meetings at the Henry Street Settlement House. She also accompanied Bess one night that August to the Jamaica Arts Center in Queens, where Bess had been asked to deliver a speech. As they walked into the building, Sukhreet said, they spotted a photographer from the New York Daily News. Bess told Sukhreet not to stand next to her: “It’s too early for us to be seen next to each other. My staff won’t like it,” Sukhreet remembers Bess saying. It seemed plausible to Sukhreet, and she stepped back. After the speech Bess instructed Sukhreet “to work the room” and introduce herself as Bess’s assistant. “I was a diplomat’s wife and a politician’s kid. It was standard operating procedure for me.

  “I thought that Bess was, in a sense, you know, giving me a chance to strut my stuff to see if I could try and do these things. I thought that I had a very thorough interview process. I mean, I couldn’t have been more thoroughly looked over.”

  On the weekend of August 20 Sukhreet returned to Westhampton Beach for another visit with Bess and Andy. This time they spent more time together. On Saturday afternoon they drove to nearby Mattituck to spend an hour visiting with her mother, who was staying with friends. Sukhreet said she felt close enough to Bess that summer that she asked for advice as a friend, not as her boss. “I am not your boss. I am not your friend. You are my child,” she said Bess told her at the time.

  Until that weekend in Westhampton Beach, Sukhreet said, she had no idea her mother was ruling on the Capasso divorce case. She found out on Sunday morning from Bess and Andy’s maid.

  Sukhreet awakened at around 9:00, got dressed, and walked across the lawn from the guest cottage to the main house for breakfast. In the kitchen she found Shirley Harrod peeling vegetables at the kitchen sink. As Harrod fixed her toast and tea, it occurred to Sukhreet that she had never formally introduced herself, so she stuck out her hand and said, “Oh, by the way, my name is Sukhreet Gabel.”

  “Oh, hello. I’m Shirley Harrod,” the maid said, and then she began thinking aloud. “Gabel? Gabel is a very familiar name. Isn’t there a Judge Gabel?”

  “Yes,” Sukhreet replied.

  “Oh, you know there is a judge—isn’t Judge Gabel presiding over Mr. Capasso’s divorce?”

  Sukhreet said she was stunned. “Secretly, silently, internally, I went, oh my God. It had never occurred to me in a million years. I knew that my mother was a judge. I knew that she was in Part V, which was divorce court. I knew that Andy Capasso was getting a divorce, but I never put it together. It never entered my mind. So I was absolutely taken aback, but I didn’t think that it was appropriate to show that feeling to the maid, so I quickly changed the subject to the most bland thing I could think of. As I recollect, I was talking about the swimming pool. I wanted to talk about anything under the sun but that.”

  When Andy and Bess finally came downstairs for breakfast around 10:00 or 11:00, Sukhreet said, she did not bring up her conversation with the maid. “I mentioned absolutely not a word of it. I was their houseguest. If they hadn’t mentioned it to me and hadn’t hinted to me, … it was simply good manners not to bring it up.”

  That afternoon she sat by the pool and then walked over to the court to watch Andy and Bess play tennis. Before leaving for the drive back to the city, Sukhreet said, Bess told her that she might be able to go on the payroll that week.

  On the three-hour drive back into the city, Sukhreet thought about what the maid had said about her mother ruling on Andy’s divorce. She later said she suspected it “wasn’t kosher” for her mother to be ruling on the case while Bess was trying to find her a full-time job. But what bothered her even more was that sh
e thought that her mother was once again intervening in her life. “I felt, oh, for Christ’s sake. I am thirty-four. Am I ever going to escape my mother? Can’t I have my own friends and my own relationships without my mother getting involved?”

  When she arrived home at about 5:30 P.M., she called her parents in Mattituck, where they were staying for another week. As she remembered it, her father answered the phone.

  “Hi, Dad. How are you? How’s your weekend? I was out at Bess Myerson’s place in the Hamptons—you know she stays out there with her boyfriend, Andy Capasso … and I learned that mother is presiding over Andy’s divorce case. What in the hell is going on?”

  “Never mind. Don’t get involved. Your mother knows all about this,” is what Sukhreet later recalled her father said. “Let her handle it. You keep looking for a job. Just don’t get involved.”

  Years later her father would not remember that conversation at all.

  Following her father’s advice not to get involved, Sukhreet did not mention anything to Bess at the Department of Cultural Affairs the next day, when she resumed her responsibilities as a full-time volunteer. She was close to getting a job. That afternoon Bess sent Sukhreet downstairs to the agency’s personnel director to fill out a job application form so all of the paperwork would be ready for Sukhreet to go on the payroll as soon as a “budget line” could be found.

  Two days later, on Wednesday, August 24, Bess called Sukhreet into her office. It was Sukhreet’s thirty-fourth birthday.

  “Happy birthday,” she said Bess told her. “How about the title of special assistant to the commissioner?”

  After eighteen months Sukhreet finally had a job. She called up her parents, who were still vacationing in Mattituck, and told them the good news. “My mother was delighted,” Sukhreet said.

  On the following Monday, August 29, Sukhreet went on the payroll. The same day, her mother returned from Mattituck and was back on the bench at the state supreme court in Manhattan. After having been away for almost two weeks, Judge Gabel faced a crowded calendar and a stack of papers to go through on her first day back in the office. One of the cases on her calendar that afternoon was Capasso v. Capasso. The lawyers from both sides were scheduled to be in her chambers at two o’clock that afternoon.