I was fortunate to have had my parents much of my adult life. Olga died from lung cancer when I was thirty-seven, exactly ten years before Howard’s death. Hers was a quick and terrible decline, as so many cancer deaths are, especially with the adverse effects of radiation and other treatments. The family was at her bedside in the last days, and she died peacefully at home.
HOWARD APPEARED TO have had stability, money, and comfort from the start. He was born March 21, 1939, and came home to a historic house in Alexandria, Virginia, where he lived until he moved out as an adult. It was the Benjamin Dulany House, one of the finest in Old Town. The record shows that George Washington dined there. (He ate out a lot in that part of Virginia.) Howard’s parents, Howard and May, bought the house in 1932 and lived there until Mr. Joynt died in July 1989. May Joynt died less than a decade later, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s. But through much of Howard’s life he had the apparent security of one home, with successful and cultured parents.
Life in the elegant Joynt household was lived as close to the 1750s model as one could reasonably get. Modern amenities, such as televisions, were tucked away out of sight. The silver was made by Paul Revere, William Hollingshead, and Jacob Hurd. The furniture was Chippendale, Queen Anne, and Federal from Philadelphia and Massachusetts. The paintings that hung on the drawing room and library walls were by Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley, the prints by Audubon. The porcelain was Chinese export, Sèvres, or Delft, and the rugs were Aubusson. The floors, moldings, windows, and doors were original to the house. The boxwood garden was designed by a famed expert in eighteenth-century landscaping. Mr. Joynt made one concession to the early twentieth century. He ate his morning cereal from Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s breakfast bowl. It was all very lovely but, frankly, like living in a museum. For Howard, it was stifling.
I went from public high school straight to work. Howard went from school to freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. I eventually learned that he embellished the stories of his past. Howard was a bit of what the French call a mythomane. He told wonderful tales about himself and others whose faithfulness to the facts could fairly be described as problematic.
Odd that I point this out, given what happened, but I was more into facts. I really liked digging up details about things that had happened, and I was rigid about telling the truth. There’d been a lot of lying in my household growing up—about my parents’ debts, their drinking, their fights, and my sister. No doubt my veracity was at the root of my fondness for journalism. After high school I went from hometown newspaper to the Washington bureau of United Press International, where I started with an entry-level job that led to reporting on the antiwar movement. That got me front-page bylines all over the world as the protests rose in volume and intensity. It was a heady experience. I loved my work—and it seemed like only an incidental bonus that they were paying me to do it.
From UPI to Time magazine in New York, and then at twenty-two I landed the big prize—writing the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Walter hired me personally. Naturally the gaggle at the water coolers speculated about whether there was something more to my being hired—like that I’d slept with him. Why else would he bring on board a twenty-two-year-old woman whose only real qualification was that she had what they called a nose for news?
Walter was the one who told me about the rumors. I’d been writing for him for almost a year when he leaned over his table at Copenhagen, where he’d invited me to lunch, and said in that inimitable voice, “You know, there are rumors around the office that we’re having an affair.”
I was mortified, shocked, embarrassed. Walter was the same age as my father! I didn’t know what to say. I was stammering out some response, when he laughed and said, “Do me a favor, will you? Please don’t deny it.”
Actually, Walter and his wife, Betsy, became my friends. Over the years they became friends to Howard, too. We would meet for a meal or to go sailing. After Howard died, Walter kept in close touch and faithfully phoned every Christmas morning—wherever he was, wherever we were—to make sure Spencer and I were doing okay. We would see him if we were in New York, and a year before he died we visited him on Martha’s Vineyard. He took us sailing and, in a moment I’ll never forget, showed sixteen-year-old Spencer how to handle the helm.
MY TIME ON the CBS Evening News spanned an era that included the death of President Johnson, Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the fall of Saigon. When Walter offered me the job he told me there were many candidates, all of them older, more experienced, and male. But he wanted someone with wireservice experience. “Also,” he added, “there’s pressure on me to hire a woman. You qualify on both counts.”
The two other writers, the editor, and I sat beside Walter just off camera every weeknight. Together we did the news and all other specials he anchored. I was sitting beside Walter in our Washington bureau at the moment Nixon announced his resignation. I ripped the “flash” off the AP wire and ran it to him. For me, the job was always that exciting.
I rented a small house in New York’s West Village. I was loose in the big city, young, unencumbered, and well-paid, but my work always came first and I approached it with dedication and passion. The matter of college came up from time to time, and it was something I was always going to do at some point, but campuses were erupting with protests and turmoil, none of my employers demanded a college degree, and my jobs felt like an education. At the CBS Evening News I was proud of what we did, how we did it, and why. My parents were proud, too, especially because each time the show went to commercial there was a “bumper,” or wide shot, that showed me sitting beside Walter. My brother David said, “They bought a big new TV just to watch you on the Evening News.”
In 1972, CBS paid me $38,000, double what I earned at Time, and, my father pointed out again and again, just about what he earned running a foundation. I put my paychecks in the bank, paid my rent and utilities, and felt financially secure. I knew where my money came from, how much money I had, and where it was going. I managed my money well, in the sense that I lived within my means, but I was not sophisticated about money. I would have been happy to let someone else take over all that. For a few years my father had done my taxes, but now that I was twenty-two and earning real money at CBS, I hired my own accountant. It seemed the grown-up thing to do.
Watergate was over and the Vietnam War had come to an inglorious end, when I decided to check out of the CBS Evening News. It felt like the right time to use my savings and take a break. A random invite lead me to the West Indies, where I got a job crewing on Spartan, a seventy-three-foot wooden Herreshoff yawl that was built in 1918. My sole qualification was that I’d fallen in love with the captain, a tan, ripped, and sun-bleached California surfer dude named Lewis Starkey. With him as my teacher I became a sailor quickly. After seven months in the Caribbean and falling out of love with Lewis, I spent four months enjoying the south of France.
That was enough. I loved the vagabond life, but I missed my work. On the day before the 1976 bicentennial, almost a year after leaving the Cronkite show, I flew home to New York, breezed into CBS News, and got hired on the spot as a writer for the upcoming Republican National Convention in Kansas City. After that I relocated to Washington, and was over the moon when an old friend, the new chief of the NBC News bureau there, hired me to run the night assignment desk, essentially a flight controller’s job. It was exactly what I wanted, an ideal perch back in network news. I didn’t intend to stay in Washington; I wanted the world. Then I met Howard.
Chapter 7
AFTER MEETING WITH Howard’s lawyers, panic hit. Twenty-four hours earlier I had thought Howard’s death was the worst that could happen to us, and now I was a federal tax fraud defendant who owed the government almost $3 million I did not have. The lawyers—now my lawyers—didn’t believe I was an innocent spouse. They believed I was guilty.
The first stage of grief is shock, whether the loss i
s a person or everything you believed was solid in your life. I went into shock. I went off the deep end. With Spencer tucked in, I attacked Howard’s large mahogany partners desk. There were four drawers on either side and one drawer in the middle. One was mine, the others were his. I never went into them. Barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt, I crouched on my knees and pulled out every drawer. My goal was to dig through everything. He was so amazingly organized. One drawer held only canceled checks going back years, but I didn’t know what to make of them. I slit open envelopes, pored over documents, fingered through manila folders—all without a clue as to what I was looking for.
I did find one seemingly relevant file that held a page from a yellow legal pad. In Howard’s precise prep school scrawl was a list of things we owned. Beside each item he’d jotted an amount of money, a value. At the bottom of the column was a total. It looked like he was calculating how much money he could come up with if we sold everything. And he listed every last thing: our Chesapeake Bay home, the two modest apartments in Georgetown, cars, art, antiques, boats, stuff. The total was $1.2 million. Distraught, I tossed the list across the room. “This is hopeless,” I said out loud. “Not even close.”
But who was I kidding? Whatever Howard had done wasn’t going to be found in a lockbox with a secret code attached explaining everything for me. I sat in the middle of the floor, haggard, hands covered in grime, with all this crap around me, absolutely paranoid about what the IRS could rain down on me. The later the hour, the darker the fears. Would jackbooted IRS muscle kick down the door to drag me away in handcuffs, my sobbing child clinging to my ankles? I knew it had happened because at CBS News we reported on that very thing—IRS agents, minus the jackboots, coming in the night, carting people off to the slammer. That story made a lasting impression. It didn’t matter at that moment that perhaps my case didn’t qualify for prison (yet); I was in a panic.
It lasted through the night. The clock hands moved from midnight to two, then three. The dog looked at me, head cocked, wondering if we would ever go to bed. I took paintings off the walls and carted them to the basement storage bin. I took my few pieces of real jewelry and hid them in socks. Socks! It didn’t occur to me that this was a waste of time. Either the IRS wouldn’t care or they’d look first in the storage bin and sock drawer.
I didn’t understand what had happened to me, I didn’t understand how it had happened, and I certainly couldn’t ask Howard why it had happened. I had an emotional twofer—hopeless and helpless. The level of despair outweighed the fear I had felt at the hospital, where at least the doctors and nurses answered my questions and were on my side. Who was I going to call? Who could I tell? Why would I want to reveal this awful turn of events? And it’s three in the morning. Not a good time to call anyone. The normal emotion might be anger. But no, I wasn’t there yet. I was still in the stages of shock and denial.
At Nathans, once the floodgates were open, bad news began to cascade. A man arrived in the basement office who said he was the bookkeeper and there to take care of the quarterly tax payments for unemployment and other city and federal obligations. I welcomed him to do whatever it was he was there to do. When he was done, he asked to talk to me. Privately.
Upstairs in the bar, for the better part of an hour, we talked about what people had started to call my “situation.” The bar business, I discovered, is as gossipy as the news business, and word had begun to spread about Howard’s fraud and the mess he had left behind. None of the gossips knew details, but that didn’t stop the grapevine from growing and expanding like kudzu. The bookkeeper had factual knowledge of the business, though, and talked about the different ways Howard wrote checks out of Nathans and what he wrote off or didn’t. He added that essentially Howard had run the business “in his head.”
I told him I had found a binder with daily numbers in it and comparisons to the year before. “It looks like a daily account of money earned or spent or both. To me, mostly a lot of numbers.”
“That’s your book,” he said. “I’m sure there are two sets of books. If you can find the other, try to figure out which one is real.”
Figure out which one is real? How was I going to do that? I knew the bookkeeper wanted to help, but the more he explained the more my mind began to slide into the fear zone. I wished I could dig deep into the crisis and hit the bottom, but there was no bottom. Digging deep meant only having to dig deeper.
“Well, I’m going to bill you, but Howard always gave me a periodic $5,000.” That snapped me back to attention. I’m sure my jaw dropped.
“Can I afford that?” I asked.
“I don’t know if you can,” he said, adding, “He also let me run a tab.” All I could do was mumble, “Let me talk to the manager and get back to you.”
I didn’t immediately find the Nathans “book” but I found Howard’s personal checkbook. In all our twenty years together I’d never looked in his checkbook. He had his, I had mine. He balanced both. He liked doing that. The book was big, brown, and covered in leather. I took a deep breath before lifting the cover. I flipped through the pages going back a year or so. Most of the entries were conventional, normal. But there were also entries for a few men I knew to be, well, characters around town. I didn’t know them personally, but Howard would mention them—with a salty anecdote and a groan—from time to time. One or the other was always down on his luck, in need of a loan. “But are you actually going to give him money?” I would ask, incredulous. “No fucking way,” he’d say. But now I noticed he’d written them checks. Not one, not two, but several. Five thousand here, three thousand there. I was certain they were loans rather than gifts. I wondered if they would offer to repay me, but they never did.
I welcomed the company of friends and took advantage of every opportunity to be with them. In the early months after Howard’s death they were my core support. They included Howard’s only sibling, his sister, Martha, a presidency scholar, who had the advantage of being available almost on the spot. Her husband, Vijay Kumar, lived full-time at their home in New Castle, Delaware. Martha, who was camped at the White House and taught one night a week, commuted home on weekends. My other girlfriends lived up or down the street or around the corner, but they had husbands and children to tend to and were not available on demand. I would see them for lunch or at children’s parties and the occasional weekend gathering of all the married folks. I didn’t feel it then, but I was already becoming the odd one out: the widow, the business owner, the defendant in a tax fraud case. Most of all the defendant.
I liked these men and women who were almost all a decade younger than me. Many of the women had come to the hospital and had helped out in the immediate aftermath of Howard’s death, bringing food and flowers to our apartment, inviting Spencer for extra playdates with their children. Their husbands were business owners, developers, lawyers. At one particular dinner party in the suburbs, I sought business advice from some of the men. They spoke the new language I was trying to learn, and I had to learn it fast.
“Well, Carol, now you know why they called Nathans ‘the Bank of Howard,’ ” said the fellow who owned the linen company that provided Nathans’ napkins, tablecloths, and kitchen uniforms. The men laughed. I didn’t. “Howard did it so smoothly, everybody figured he would get away with it forever.”
One of the businessmen told me, “Just remember, your lawyers work for you, you don’t work for them. If they aren’t serving you, fire ’em.” He was talking about firing the lawyers and I hadn’t even hired them. I was in so far over my head.
A chilling encounter with a complete stranger made me fully grasp my vulnerability and see that there was a bull’s-eye on my back. It was at a small neighborhood cocktail party for Anthony Williams, the expected next mayor of Washington. I was invited not as a journalist but as the owner of a prominent small business. Knowing only the hosts, I was a wallflower, but was rescued by an attractive man with European deportment and a distinct appealing accent. “Can we sit somewhere quiet?” he asked
, leading me to a sofa in a far corner.
It was Anthony Lanier, a native of Austria, and a Washington developer who even I knew was managing impressive makeovers of old buildings in Georgetown’s commercial area, buildings just like mine. The word was he had $800 million investor dollars to play with and that a large chunk came from George Soros, the Hungarian-American businessman and financier worth many millions, even billions.
Our conversation was all business. He knew more about my building and my landlords than I myself knew, and a fair amount about my predicament, and he made clear that he wanted my building because it was the jewel in the crown, “on the best corner of the most powerful city in the world.” I was intimidated but listened closely.
“Everybody wants your space,” he said. “They will come at you from every direction. No one thinks you can survive. You are not in a position to trust anyone—your staff, your landlords, your lawyers. The landlords are worried about you, they live entirely off that building, and they will go in another direction if they can, but they don’t move fast, which is in your favor.”
I sighed. “So, what are you going to do to me?” I asked.
“I could steamroll you, but I’m not going to,” he said. “Your husband left you in a mess. I want your building but I will try to work with you rather than against you.”
Anthony was a man of his word and became an invaluable ally. His insider information often scared me out of my wits but it made me stronger and braver as I struggled to get that bull’s-eye off my back.
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