Her Miss America title gave her strength in other ways, too, that fall of 1987. One afternoon, she recounted, a woman approached her on the street and said, “Excuse me. Are you Bess Myerson?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“I have to tell you something,” the woman said.
“She was little more than waist high,” Bess remembered. “I am looking down at her, and she was looking up at me, and she said, ‘In 1945, I was in a DP [displaced persons] camp. My father had been killed by the Nazis. My mother had to bury him, and children in the family had been killed. I somehow was rescued out of that moment, and my mother survived. And then of course, we went to a DP camp, and one day in September in 1945 there was a paper that was distributed, and it said that a Jewish girl had become Miss America.’
“She said, ‘I will tell you that my days were dark and continually dark. It was the only light day of my memory … and I had to tell you that.’”
Then the woman reached up to touch Bess’s face, pulling her head down so that she could kiss her. “And she said, ‘You don’t know what it is to come full circle and to finally meet you. I have been nourished and fed by that all my life.’”
A few weeks after the indictment, on November 6, 1987, Nancy Capasso drove out to Long Island to inspect the Westhampton Beach estate for the first time since the court had awarded it to her as part of her new $6.4 million divorce settlement. The court had said that she could not take possession of the house until she had moved out of the Fifth Avenue cooperative. It had taken her almost four months to find another apartment on the Upper East Side.
Since the andirons episode, Nancy wanted to see in what condition Bess had left the house, which she had continued to use after Andy went to jail. According to a court order, Andy was enjoined from “interfering with, damaging, defacing or removing” any of the items in the house that had been acquired during the marriage and before the divorce proceedings began. The house was supposed to have been left fully furnished for her, but neighbors had already warned her that she might not find it that way. A moving truck had been in the driveway a few weeks before.
When she walked into the house that afternoon, however, she was unprepared for the sight that greeted her. The house had been virtually stripped of all of its furniture and appliances. Gone were four television sets, the VCR, a $10,000 Oriental rug, an antique clock, expensive lamps, and thousands of dollars’ worth of sofas, chairs, tables, and paintings.
In the living room, where once had sat two $5,000 couches, two chairs, a coffee table, and an antique side table, she found only a wicker settee. Also missing from the living room were a $7,500 collection of hand-carved wooden decoys, two paintings, an antique barometer, and the andirons.
Upon checking the kitchen, Nancy found more items were missing. Gone were the kitchen chairs, along with all of the dishes, silverware, and glassware that she contends she bought for more than $2,000 at Henri Bendel. A cappuccino maker and a set of Farberware pots and pans that Nancy expected to find were also nowhere to be found.
Upstairs she noticed that a number of valuable items had been taken from the five bedrooms, including an antique doll’s cradle that had belonged to her eldest daughter, a Stieff animal collection, all of the antique quilts that she had bought at Sotheby’s, and an armoire, a couch, a barrel chair, and two night tables. In the attic she had expected to find the eighteen place settings of Rosenthal china that her mother had bought for one of her daughters, but that was gone, too. Instead all she found was a Saks shopping bag filled with the electronic bugging equipment that Andy must have used during their divorce to record their telephone conversations.
Nancy called her lawyer, Myrna Felder, to ask what she should do. The first thing, Myrna advised, was to photograph each room so they could present the photographs as evidence in court that Andy had violated the court’s order.
Within three months, in February 1988, Nancy’s attorneys, Myrna and her husband, Raoul Felder, were able to schedule a court hearing to determine whether Bess, acting at Andy’s behest, had violated the court’s order prohibiting the removal of any items from the house that had been there during the time that Andy and Nancy had been married.
The Felders hired a private detective to find Bess and serve her with a subpoena requiring her to appear in court and answer their questions under oath about the disappearance of the furnishings and other items.
The private detective was Bo Dietl, a highly decorated former New York City police detective who had recently traded in his gold shield to start his own private investigation firm. Dietl assigned four investigators to track down Bess after discovering that she was not staying at her two-bedroom apartment in the East Seventies off Fifth Avenue. They found that she apparently had taken up residence in Andy’s huge duplex apartment on Park Avenue.
At six o’clock on Monday, February 22, Dietl left his office in Queens and drove into Manhattan so that he could deliver the court summons to Bess. To make sure that Bess was home, he called Andy’s apartment from his car phone, hanging up as soon as he recognized Bess’s distinctive voice. “I couldn’t let on to her that I was coming,” he said later.
When he pulled up outside the Park Avenue apartment, he made his way past the doorman, went upstairs to the apartment, and banged on the apartment door. There was no answer. The law required him to hand her the summons in person. Finally he left, returned downstairs to his Cadillac, got on his car phone, and dialed her telephone number again.
At the same time, he noticed that a black limousine was waiting outside the building, and he suspected it was waiting for Bess to take her to a restaurant or the theater.
“Miss Myerson,” he said. “My name is Detective Dietl. I would like to give you your court summons. If need be, I will follow you to dinner, and I will serve you in front of two hundred people. I think it would be a little embarrassing to serve you in public. Please accept it as the gracious lady that you are.”
Bess paused for a moment, he said, and then invited him upstairs.
She opened the apartment door just a crack and took the summons. “She gave me a very nice smile,” Dietl said.
The summons demanded that she appear in court two days later at 9:30 A.M. on Wednesday, February 24, 1988. Even so Bess had no intention of going to court to answer Nancy’s charges.
On that morning Nancy Capasso put on a chic black wool dress and rode downtown to the courthouse with her lawyers in their Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce. Known as the Duke and Duchess of the matrimonial bar, Raoul and Myrna Felder were the flashiest divorce lawyers in town and the most potent team in court. Outside the courthouse were more than two dozen reporters and photographers, plus camera crews, waiting to chronicle the first face-to-face encounter between Nancy and Bess in more than five years.
Nancy let her lawyers do the talking. She was careful not to show her desire for revenge in front of the television cameras. “I have no comment,” she told reporters politely as she walked alongside her lawyers into the courthouse. She was clearly enjoying all the havoc she was causing for Bess, though. Smiling widely, she whispered to Myrna, “I don’t believe this. This is too much.”
When the hearing began that morning at ten o’clock, there was no sign of Bess. Her lawyer, Fred Hafetz, and Andy’s divorce lawyer, Samuel Fredman, were trying to quash the subpoena, arguing that Bess’s appearance in a Capasso divorce matter might compromise her upcoming criminal trial. Manhattan supreme court justice Walter Schackman, who was assigned to rule on the remaining motions and issues in the Capasso v. Capasso divorce case, still insisted that Bess respond to the summons, like anyone else, and show up for the hearing. He asked her lawyers to have her in his courtroom by noon.
Out of concern that a face-to-face meeting with Nancy in open court might turn his courtroom into a media circus and cause Bess more adverse publicity, thereby making it even more difficult to pick a non-biased jury for her criminal trial, the judge agreed, however, to hold the hearing in the privacy of hi
s robing room.
While everyone waited for Bess to arrive, Schackman heard testimony from other witnesses whom Felder had called in his effort to prove that Bess had taken items out of the house. One of the witnesses was Tony Jerome, the photographer from the New York Post who had captured Bess on film carrying the andirons from the house and into the car. When Felder held up the photograph and asked Jerome if he could identify it, Nancy burst into laughter.
At 12:25 P.M. Bess finally arrived for the proceedings. Accompanied by one of her lawyers, Jeremy Gutman, she managed to avoid the press by slipping into the courthouse through a back door and climbing two flights up a back stairwell leading directly to the judge’s robing room.
“The queen has arrived,” quipped Raoul Felder.
Moments later the judge walked into the robing room and greeted Bess. He was followed by the lawyers, three pool reporters, and Nancy, who did not take her eyes off the woman she believed had stolen her husband and ruined her life.
Bess took a seat next to the judge, who sat at the foot of the long, battered wooden table. Nancy sat between her lawyers at the opposite end of the table. She stared coldly at Bess, who averted her gaze by twisting around in her chair to face the judge.
Nancy couldn’t help feeling somewhat gleeful at Bess’s appearance that afternoon. She looked pale and drawn, in a black sweater and skirt. Her shoulder-length hair was pulled back severely from her face by a tortoiseshell hairband. So this was the beauty queen who had become involved with her husband? “I looked at her and thought, this is where it all started,” Nancy said later. “What a mess.”
Sucking hard on a lozenge, Bess appeared subdued, almost stoic, as she was sworn in and gave her name and address to the court stenographer. She fingered a piece of yellow paper in her hands.
“You were subpoenaed to be here, weren’t you?” demanded Felder.
She looked at him quizzically, and then Gutman reminded the court of Bess’s upcoming criminal case. “I have advised her to assert the Fifth Amendment,” he said. “It is her fundamental, constitutional right to do so.”
“What questions do you want to ask?” the judge inquired of Felder.
“What happened to the missing stuff?” Felder shouted. “Who took what where? It seems hard to see how that would affect her criminal case. The Fifth Amendment should be a shield, but it is not a sword.”
Turning to Bess, the judge said: “Miss Myerson, is it my understanding that you intend to invoke the Fifth Amendment privilege on any questions asked by Mr. Felder today?”
“I do,” Bess replied in a low, firm voice.
“I don’t see the necessity of asking all the questions,” Schackman concluded.
Felder objected angrily, saying that he wanted to ask Bess about “the looting” of the house. “You can’t just wave it like a flag!” he argued, referring to the Fifth Amendment.
Andy’s lawyer, Sam Fredman, interjected a contention that Bess’s decision to take the Fifth was not an indication of guilt or innocence. “There hasn’t been a shred of proof to show that there has been any looting of the house,” he said, his voice rising.
Bess nodded in agreement. Nancy continued to stare at her, but Bess never once caught her eye.
Felder repeated his request to be able to ask Bess specific questions. “I want to ask her about the stuff itself,” Felder insisted. “Did she take the stuff? What did she do with it?”
But Judge Schackman cut him off. “Miss Myerson has, from her own lips, stated to the court that she intends to invoke the Fifth Amendment. I see no point in going any further.”
He told Bess that she could go.
“Thank you,” she said to the judge, shaking his hand. Then, without ever looking at Nancy, she headed toward the door and disappeared down the back stairs, out of the courthouse, past a crowd of television reporters, and into a waiting cab.
“This was a case of what the French would call noblesse oblige,” Felder complained to reporters after leaving the judge’s robing room and returning to the courtroom. “The queen kept us waiting for two-and-a-half hours, and then she took the Fifth Amendment to every question I asked.”
Schackman resumed the hearing with Nancy on the witness stand. She testified for almost three hours about all of the furniture and items that had vanished. She estimated the value of the missing belongings at $65,000.
Several weeks later, “in view of the total lack of defense,” Schackman ruled that Andy had, in fact, violated the court order and wrongfully had Bess remove items from the house: “The photographs of Ms. Myerson removing andirons from the premises … [are] certainly strong evidence that there was a removal process in effect.” Schackman said he could not “conceive” of Bess removing the items without Andy’s permission.
Marcia Kramer, the New York Daily News City Hall bureau chief, had heard from one of her sources that the FBI had conducted an international background check on Bess, which had turned up records indicating that she had been arrested for shoplifting in London in 1969. After dozens of phone calls to Scotland Yard, she confirmed the arrest and published the story on Sunday May 8, 1988.
Bess had ignored her arrest at the London boutique until after she had been indicted on the federal bribery charges. She must have worried that her London arrest would show up on FBI records when she was fingerprinted and photographed following her arraignment. A few weeks later she quietly pleaded guilty to the charge and paid London authorities a $100 fine.
After the Daily News published details about Bess’s arrest, many people who knew her found it difficult to believe. Then two weeks after Kramer’s story ran, Bess was arrested for shoplifting again.
The arrest was made in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania, just eight miles north of the federal prison camp at Allenwood, where she had gone to visit Andy. He had been in prison for almost a year, and Bess had tried to visit him at least once a month. They could spend hours together at a table in the prison’s huge visiting room. On warm days they could move out to the adjacent patio and sit at a picnic table under a white umbrella, looking out at the surrounding five hundred acres of rolling hills.
On Thursday morning, May 26, 1988, she made the four-and-a-half-hour drive from New York City to northcentral Pennsylvania in Andy’s gray 1987 Lincoln. Instead of returning to New York that night, she checked into the ten-unit Northwood Motel, across the road from the prison, which cost $23 a night. She planned to visit Andy again the following morning and then drive back along Interstate 80 to New York.
To pass the time between visiting hours, Bess usually drove into nearby South Williamsport, up U.S. 15, to do some shopping. A favorite store was Hill’s discount department store, which is similar to K mart. She had visited Hill’s eight or nine times during the past year.
At about eleven o’clock on Friday, May 27, Bess parked the Lincoln in Hill’s parking lot and walked into the store carrying a Hill’s shopping bag that contained a wall clock she had purchased the night before.
Once inside, she took a shopping cart and put her brown leather purse into the cart’s seat. She stuffed the shopping bag behind it and then pushed the cart over to the jewelry counter. She picked out a pair of bright red earrings shaped like seashells, and as she tried them on in front of a small mirror she caught the attention of Nancy Hill, the store’s security manager, who first became suspicious of Bess when she saw Bess walk into the store carrying the shopping bag. Hill, who is not related to the store owner, decided to watch her every move.
A few minutes later she watched Bess take five pairs of the earrings, ranging in price from $1.97 to $8, and carefully put them on top of the Hill’s bag. Bess next moved over to the cosmetics aisle, only a few feet away, and picked up two bottles of red nail polish, three bottles of clear nail polish, and Sally Hansen’s “No Chip Acrylic Top Coat.” She put them in her purse.
Bess then pushed the cart to the back of the store toward the shoe department. She chose a pair of white woven leather sandals, and put them on
top of the Hill’s bag, next to the earrings, and then hurried over to the hardware department. Apparently thinking that no one could see her, she put the sandals and earrings into the Hill’s shopping bag.
All she needed now were batteries for the wall clock she had bought the night before. She walked over to a display of Duracell batteries and took the clock out of the bag. She opened the box that the clock was packaged in and shoved a package of size AA batteries inside.
Finished with her shopping, she pushed the cart over to the house-wares department, lifted her handbag and her Hill’s shopping bag from the cart’s seat, and headed for the front of the store, past the cash registers, and out the door.
Nancy Hill was right behind her. She caught up with her in the parking lot.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” she said. “I’m with Hill’s security, and you have items in your purse and your bag that you didn’t pay for.”
“I’m going to my car to lock it,” Bess told her.
Hill noticed that she didn’t have the car keys in her hand.
Bess identified herself, but Bess’s celebrity didn’t seem to register at all with Hill, who had no idea that the sixty-three-year-old woman wearing white Calvin Klein jeans, a white blouse, and a plastic hairband was the famous former Miss America who was now under federal indictment for bribing a judge.
She asked Bess to turn over the shoes, the earrings, the nail polish, and the batteries. Bess reached into the shopping bag and pulled out the white sandals. “I then asked her for the rest of the items, and she kind of stuttered and gave me the nail polish,” Hill said later. “Then I said, ‘Please come back in the store with me where we can talk in private.’”
Bess followed Hill to a conference room at the back of the store, and Hill read Bess her Miranda rights. She also asked Bess to turn over the pierced earrings and batteries that were in the bag. Bess insisted that she had purchased the earrings and the batteries the previous day; however, she was able to produce a sales slip for only the clock.
Queen Bess Page 38
