We held hands and walked deeper into the woods, away from the snake. I held him over a stream so he could drink from the clear mountain water. This he declared “cool.” Later, at a roadside country store, he wore down my resistance and I bought him a plastic Davy Crockett rifle. He cradled it in his lap. “I’m a real mountain man,” he beamed. On the highway, headed home, Spencer stared out the window for quite a while then turned to me and asked, “Mommy, if you marry again will you tell me if it’s an alien?” I promised him that I would.
Chapter 17
THE PACE OF my life was quickening. While June and July were packed with enough New York high life, professional success, and personal excitement plus an escape to the Vineyard to make me believe my problems had gone away, August reminded me they had stayed put, waiting for me. I may have been changing but my problems remained the same. Sometimes they overwhelmed me, but apparently it didn’t show.
“You don’t look the same,” a French friend told me soon after we returned from the Vineyard. “You always used to look like a woman carrying a burden, head down, very serious. Now you look like a woman who’s walking on the Champs-Elysées with your head up and smiling.” Odd that before Howard died, when I didn’t have a burden I looked like I did, and now, with nothing but burdens, I looked stress free.
My psychiatrist noticed it, too. “Something in you that was dormant is waking up,” he said.
“Not a moment too soon,” I replied. I knew I was changing. I stood up straighter and my step was more purposeful. I could see it, feel it. But I couldn’t explain it. My troubles in the real world were as daunting as ever. I guess Nietzsche was right: That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
The staff at Nathans needed a lot of attention. The night manager, Bob Walker, asked for a raise. I used his request as leverage. “I don’t mind giving you something but in return I’d like you to knock off the sauce when you’re on duty.” He didn’t look happy. “Look, Bob, you’re the responsible grown-up here at night. I worry about your driving home. You’re a father. I really want you to do this for me but if that doesn’t work, do it for your family.”
He nodded. As I walked away, he said, “Doug thinks all the managers should get raises.”
I stopped, turned, considered what he’d said, turned again, and then continued to the office. His words got me rattled. Where was the money supposed to come from? They were the most highly paid managers in the city, their pay scale out of line with what the business made. Doug Moran knew I had the government breathing down my neck. I still couldn’t figure out what he did for his hundred-thousand-dollar salary—and now he wanted more?
AT LARRY KING LIVE, Wendy called me into her office. “Here, Carol, I’ll give you an easy one.” She asked me to book George Stephanopoulos, who’d left the Clinton administration the year before. He was reportedly writing a book about his years on the campaign trail and in the White House. I was grateful for the bone she’d tossed me but I wished she’d told me that everyone else at CNN, including the network’s White House correspondent, had pursued him without success. His publisher would be nuts to let him do any interviews before the book was even written. “These are the summer doldrums,” Wendy said. “We need bookings.” Stephanopoulos did not return my calls.
I would swing in and out of moods about the show. I loved the work, but what I used to think rocked the world now could feel shallow and pointless. I liked to take on world issues, but I couldn’t get stressed anymore over whether Michael Jackson or Mick Jagger would do an interview. But I needed to be productive because I really needed the job. Stephanopoulos would have been a nice little coup. I tried, I failed.
At Morgan, Lewis, and Bockius, Sheldon and Miriam worked hard to find ways to bring down the tax debt. Miriam asked me to sift through five years of Howard’s credit card charges, particularly restaurant charges, and to mark those that were business related. What qualified as a business dinner, I wondered? I recognized so many of the charges. Did champagne and steamed lobsters at a romantic window table at the Black Pearl in Newport, Rhode Island, count as a business dinner? It was October 1993, a sailing trip in New England, our first time away from Spencer, and I was anxious about leaving him. Howard pocketed the dinner menu as he always did when we ate out. In the restaurant world, did that make it a business dinner? Another restaurant owner told me, “You write off all your meals. Why else be in the business?”
“Why does Deborah Martin’s report cover only five years?” I asked Miriam at one of our meetings.
“Because that’s when they decided to stop looking. Deborah had enough. She had a good case. She could have gone further back and would probably have found more, but she said she had enough and stopped.”
I WAS CUTTING my emotional ties to our possessions. I looked at the furniture in terms of what could go and what should stay. It came down to this: We’ve got to have beds, chairs, tables, a sofa. Almost anything else can be sold. I needed cash, desperately. Spencer and I operated on a third of the income we had had when Howard was alive. We weren’t poor, but our household expenses cost more than what I had. It cost a lot to keep the Bay house and the apartment in good working order so they could be sold. I had to be smart—and legal—and try to find money somewhere to keep everything going.
Howard’s estate was fat with money that I couldn’t use. Dividend checks from his stock portfolio regularly arrived in the mail. They were in Howard’s name and, with Uncle Sam watching, I had to put them in the estate bank account. The money from the sale of anything that was in Howard’s name went into the estate account as well. The income from the Joynt family trust stopped the day he died. The way the trust was set up, when Howard died the remainder went to Martha and her son and to Howard’s two sons from his last marriage. Since the trust documents and Mr. Joynt’s will were written before Spencer was born, he was not mentioned. There was a lot of money around us, but none of it was mine or my son’s.
I EXPLAINED MY IRS problems over dinner with Roger Cossack, host of a legal affairs program on CNN. I told him that even though my lawyers were “building a wall around me,” letters from the IRS arrived in the mail every week. “They threaten to put liens on my bank accounts, to seize whatever property I own, to take my car and anything else they can get their hands on. They are really scary letters,” I said.
“What do you do with them?” Roger asked.
“I open them, read them, and fax them to Miriam Fisher. Maybe I should skip the reading part and go direct to the fax. Might be better for my mental health.
“Once I actually called the IRS 800 number to tell them I had legal representation,” I said. “That didn’t impress the woman at the other end of the line. She started asking me when I was going to send a check for the full amount. You know, a few million dollars.”
“You’re on their radar,” Roger said. “Most of us live our lives and never show up on it. We just hope to stay that way. You used to be off their radar. When this is over, you’ll be off it again, but that may take a while. Don’t be surprised if they audit you for a few years.”
“But what about the people who can’t afford a lawyer?” I asked. “I think about them every time I get one of these letters. They make me feel like a deadbeat, a criminal. Never a hint that I might be innocent.”
Not that the IRS needed any guidance from me, but I was struck by how cold it is out in the cold. “If I didn’t have lawyers explaining everything to me, calming my paranoia, I’d probably be locked in my house with the furniture piled against the door. I hope when the hearings on the Hill are done the IRS tones down its language. They need to hire Miss Manners.”
“You forget that a lot of these people they pursue did commit fraud, did break the law.” Roger was again the lawyer, but I knew he was right. “Those letters are crafted for the guilty, not the innocent.”
Roger was a widower and his son was grown and out on his own. I told him about Spencer and how much it weighed on me each time I went to New York for t
he show. “It’s tough because the trips are good for me but I worry I’m some kind of awful mother, leaving Spencer with the babysitter.”
“Go,” he said. “Give yourself the time away. Enjoy yourself. Spencer will be fine. If it makes you feel better, call him every hour on the hour and drive him nuts. But he’ll be fine.”
———
I GOT TO know another widow who had had her own experience with the IRS. It didn’t turn out very well. Leona Helmsley served time in prison for tax fraud. Her case was in every public way the opposite of sympathetic. In her trial she was quoted as saying, among many other incendiary gems, that she didn’t pay taxes because “only the little people pay taxes.” In my pursuit of an interview for Larry King, I invited her to dinner. We went to the ultra-upscale French restaurant Daniel, which at the time was on East Seventy-Sixth Street. It was at the top of the heap among New York restaurants. I’d heard that it was a favorite of Mrs. Helmsley, who liked everything haute, including the cuisine and the wine. Mrs. Helmsley didn’t eat in downscale restaurants. I supposed they were for the “little people.”
A well-polished long black limousine pulled up on Seventy-Sixth Street outside Daniel precisely on time and out stepped the “Queen of Mean.” She looked great, much brighter than she had been at an earlier lunch with Larry, his fiancée, Shawn Southwick, and me at the Park Lane, one of her hotels. Her short dark hair appeared soft and not the least like a helmet. She wore an attractive black linen dress that hit just above the knee. Around her neck was a double strand of pearls so amazing that later, during the meal, I asked if I could touch them. “Sure,” she said, as if people asked her that all the time. The pearls were the size and weight of marbles. More haute than that you could not get.
As we walked to the table a number of people reached out to greet her. She was gracious. I did not sense any of the bitterness that had showed at our lunch.
“That man who just kissed me on both cheeks,” she said as we took our seats, “he tried to outsmart me in a deal.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I outsmarted him,” she said, placing the napkin on her lap.
Daniel Boulud, the superstar chef, came to the table to say hello and to ask, “Can I cook for you?” We were not about to say no.
Mrs. Helmsley flirted with him. “You ought to come work for me,” she said. “I’ve got a good restaurant over at the Park Lane. We could be a good team.”
I wondered what this famous chef thought about her offer. He seemed to be appropriately flattered. When he walked away, she leaned into me and said, “He’s good, you know. Very good.”
We talked about her life, my life, her IRS story, my IRS story, her husband’s death, my husband’s death, her business, my business, and prison. “You know, they liked me there,” she said, referring to her fellow inmates. “But I wanted out. Every day I wanted out.”
I wondered what it would have been like for Howard if he’d been indicted, convicted, and sentenced to prison. I think the humiliation would have done him in. But Mrs. Helmsley seemed to be made of tougher stuff. I told her a few details of my case, including that the IRS said I owed them almost three million.
“Sell what you’ve got to sell,” she said, waving her hand in a grand dismissive gesture. “Give ’em the money. Get on with your life.”
I looked at her. “That’s easy for you to say, Mrs. Helmsley. You’re a billionaire.” To my relief, she laughed. But it was true. “What properties do you own in New York, Mrs. Helmsley?” I asked. “How big is your real estate empire?”
She ticked off a list of impressive addresses. She was in the midst of selling a lot of them. “But I’m not selling the Empire State Building. I’m going to keep that.”
“You go, girl,” I said. “You keep the Empire State Building.”
The wine made her cheerful. She cracked jokes, flirted with the handsome French waiters, and invited them to come work for her, too. She showed me a soft side that would win people over if she could only reveal it on television. I told her all the ways Larry made the hardest cases look good in live interviews. I suggested there would be a positive response from the public and media, especially if we put some focus on her large gifts to charities.
The soft side dropped away and she turned cold and serious. “It doesn’t matter. They’d kill me,” she said. “They’d kill me from the start. I could go on the show and Larry and I could have a good time together, but the next day the press would kill me. There’s no way around it.”
After dinner, at her car, I said, “Leona, come visit Washington. Come have dinner with me at Nathans. Come see the studio. See Larry. We’ll all get together and have some fun.”
“When I get my jet out of the shop, dear,” she said, disappearing into the back of her long black car.
The next day her representative Howard Rubenstein was on the phone. “She had a good time, Carol, but she’s not changing her mind about an interview. There’s no good reason for her to put herself out there.”
I would get the occasional note from her, but we never met again. There were no network interviews. She died in 2007, leaving an estimated $4 billion estate, $12 million of it in trust for her dog.
Chapter 18
WHEN I FOUND time to mourn, I mourned, fitting it in between all the moments when I had to be alert, in charge, responsible, and dedicated. Mourning is an emotional roller coaster. The lowest low always came after the highest high. Hairpin turns came suddenly, and then everything was upside down, the whole world on top of me, my feet in the air, speeding. Then, nothing. Full stop. A day or two or three later, the ride would begin again.
I was no longer surprised by how good I could feel one minute and how miserable the next. I understood that the mood swings were unpredictable. I learned to roll with them and move on. Spencer swung between being a happy-go-lucky, perfectly normal five-year-old boy and Damien, the Antichrist. I rolled with that, too. Only rarely now did Spencer ask me to kill him so he could be with his father “in heaven.” But he told me repeatedly that he didn’t feel like he fit in with his friends. That disturbed me, but his therapist assured me it was normal. He was a little boy trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again and set him back on the wall, intact and whole.
“I’m the only boy who doesn’t have a father,” he said, which was true in the technical sense of a living father in our particular circle of friends.
I told him, “It won’t always be like that. As life goes on you’ll meet other boys and girls who don’t have a father, and you will be a step ahead and able to help them.”
We didn’t talk about the loss of Howard as much as we talked about the life of Howard. I wanted Howard to be part of our daily dialogue, as a reminder to Spencer that he did have a father and that his father was an important part of his existence. Many times I told him about the day I told Howard I was pregnant. “I came into the den in the afternoon with the little plastic stick that shows if a mommy is going to have a baby, and it showed that I was going to have you. He was reading a book and I waved the little wand in front of him.”
“What did Daddy do?”
“Oh, he jumped for joy. We both did.”
“How did you know it was me?”
“I just did. You were exactly who we both wanted.”
Spencer could be incredibly loving and sweet. But he had his dark moods, too, and sometimes those moods were very dark. One day he said, looking very sad, “I don’t have a daddy.”
A therapist might have suggested I say, “Let’s talk about it,” or something in the therapeutic ballpark. But there was no therapist around at that moment. “Yes, you do,” I said. “You’ll always have a daddy. It’s just that your daddy is dead, in heaven, and watching out for you from there.”
In a fit of frustration he yelled, “I hate you. I wish you weren’t my mommy.” A little later he told me, “I loved Daddy. Not you. I still love Daddy. I love Daddy more than you. I wish you were the one who died.” I let it roll off me,
but there was a painful familiarity. Oddly, even though he was a five-year-old child, he sounded just like his father when his father was Mr. Hyde. Already he looked a lot like his father. That was fine, I thought; look like him, just don’t be like him.
I did my best to handle Spencer’s outbursts, but there was no guidebook. Typically I went with one part ignoring to one part reprimanding to one part “Let’s talk about these feelings you’re having.” Later I could always think of other responses that might have been better, but maybe not. We were both grieving. He was five years old and had lost his father. It was hard. I was forty-seven and had lost my husband and simultaneously acquired his status as defendant in a tax fraud case and his debt to the government. That was hard, too. If the IRS didn’t decide I was the innocent spouse, we might lose everything, including a place to sleep at night. I tried not to think about that. It was too terrifying.
I learned to be tolerant with myself as well as with Spencer. Children never realize how much they can hurt their parents until they’re parents themselves. Often parents don’t realize the depth and intensity of their children’s feelings. But I was the grown-up. I had to keep remembering that. Sometimes I wanted to blow back at him, but, instead, I went into the bathroom and cried. I tried to ignore the pop psychology that paints a challenging picture for solo mothers, but still I worried whether I had the mettle to raise a son alone. Could I forecast the damage Howard’s death would cost, head it off, and wrap him in enough love to protect him from the empty and lonely feelings? I would look at my darling little boy and wonder, Who will you grow up to be? I was not sure how much of his father I wanted in or out of the mix, or whether it was already genetically predetermined.
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