“There is no way you are interviewing Monica Lewinsky,” I yelled.
“You don’t get it, Rose,” he said, turning his back to me.
“I get it. I get that you’re going to find someone else on the staff to do it.”
“I’m the only one who can land this.”
It would have been great for the magazine, but terrible for John. We had a hard enough time getting people to take him seriously. As far as I was concerned, interviewing Monica Lewinsky was low-hanging fruit for John Kennedy. “You don’t need to sell magazines that badly, and she’s not a political figure,” I said.
“Yes, she is. She’s in the middle of the biggest political scandal in recent history.”
“I respectfully disagree with you on this one. And this isn’t something you’ll be comfortable with once it’s done. You’ll regret it.”
“Every reputable magazine is trying to get this.”
“Okay, let me spell it out for you. If you get the interview, everyone will say it’s just because of who you are. And then they’ll rehash the rumors about your father in the White House.” And I knew I would be the one cleaning up the mess, propping him up through his regret while I fended off a million calls from the press. I ended up winning the fight. For George’s Sex in High Places issue, John settled on a tamer historical perspective by interviewing Gary Hart—an actual political figure whose career in the Senate ended in the eighties after his extramarital affair was exposed.
The day after our argument, I came into work to find on my desk a big cardboard box. On its side was a drawing of a girl with a speech bubble containing the word “No!”
“I don’t think I need you anymore,” John said, pointing at my replacement. “I have her.”
I was gaining more confidence at George, and not just in saying no to John. I started to have an editorial influence, helping to brainstorm cover ideas or suggesting interview subjects for John. I even interviewed the Democratic strategist James Carville for the magazine’s back-page “If I Were President” feature. Among the editors, I now had allies and friends. In addition to Matt Berman and Biz, the executive editor, others learned I had more to contribute than just my gatekeeper duties (even the editor who had mocked me about PBS was in my corner). I began to feel as if I belonged, and I realized over drinks, during late closes, and even at parties that they didn’t see me as the dumb girl from the Bronx that I thought they had. While I continued to butt heads with some editors who didn’t consider me to be anything more than in their way, most of them came to understand that my saying no to John and looking out for him was an asset rather than a hindrance. At the end of the day, my concern was always for John over the magazine.
And the same was true for Carolyn. After they were married, I had to start saying no for her, too. Once their relationship became official, she had more responsibilities, as she knew she would. She had to consider both John’s social obligations and his responsibilities to the magazine. For example, when attending a public event, she wouldn’t wear any designer that advertised in George for fear of angering other designers who might pull their ad pages. Because designers came out of the woodwork wanting to dress her, I had to turn down quite a few offers.
Getting Carolyn to wear a designer’s dress or carry their handbag was a surefire way to sell clothes and, as some of the sales reps at George soon realized, also a great way to sell ads. The sales reps started pushing for Carolyn to join John for dinners with designers, asking that she wear certain clothes. That’s when I began taking a more aggressive approach in turning people down.
One ad sales rep cornered me while I was in the ladies’ room and told me that an important client wanted John and Carolyn to come to his apartment and have breakfast with him, his wife, and his kids.
“A monkey could sell those ad pages by getting John Kennedy and his wife to come for breakfast,” I said, thinking, And if we had a monkey, then we wouldn’t need you. Basing sales on John’s meeting with clients was a supremely flawed concept. After you sell the first set of ads based on meeting John, how do you top that?
“What do we do to get him to buy pages next year?” I asked. “Let him sleep with Carolyn?”
The sales rep, who stormed out of the bathroom, made the mistake of approaching John about the breakfast. His response was a firm, terse no. Whenever anyone went to John in an attempt to get a different answer from the one I had offered, they were usually disappointed. At that point, John and I were on the same page about almost everything. He appreciated the role I took in protecting Carolyn in addition to him, because he wasn’t always in a position to do that. And I was now fully confident in my ability to determine what was a yes and what was a no.
While protecting John and Carolyn was getting easier, protecting Frank, something I had done throughout our relationship, had just become more difficult. No matter what he asked for or what time of night he needed me to meet him, I was always there. When Frank didn’t write a final paper for a class, I wrote it for him. Before I found him a job, I paid his bills for six months because he had no money. And when he tested positive for HIV, I was the only one he told.
When Frank mentioned that he was getting tested, I didn’t think much of it. He had assured me he was always safe (plus, I didn’t believe that anything harmful could ever befall Frank). It took two weeks to get the results, so when he called me at work with the news, it seemed out of the blue. And totally terrifying. We spent several months in denial, until we told my sister Amy, a nurse practitioner, who got Frank in to see a top AIDS specialist. The doctor, who saw Frank for free because of her relationship with my sister, prescribed a drug cocktail.
The regimen of drugs to manage HIV was grueling. He had to take roughly ten pills a day, some with food, some on an empty stomach, and some in the middle of the night. Routine wasn’t Frank’s forte, and the drug schedule was something he needed to stick to religiously to stay alive. I was so scared he would miss a dose that I called him at 3:00 a.m. every day to make sure he took his pill.
As close as we were, Frank and I found ourselves at odds because of our jobs, a particularly painful experience. Frank’s boss, Brad Johns, Carolyn’s colorist, often talked about her to the media. After the wedding, he was in the paper every other day, giving tons of elaborate details about her hair and how he’d colored it before the wedding ceremony. Carolyn and John were pissed that Brad wouldn’t shut his mouth and threatened to take legal action in a cease-and-desist letter.
John, who tried to avoid lawsuits, asked me to appeal to Frank, who might be able to stop Brad’s loquaciousness. John thought a simple threat would put an end to the nonsense. But to me there was nothing simple about that call. I felt sick to my stomach dialing Frank’s number. In the million times I had called him, we’d never been on opposite sides.
Once I’d relayed John and Carolyn’s complaint, he said, “There’s nothing I can do. I have to do what he tells me to.”
Following a quiet moment of tension, I fell into my old habit of getting angry when uncomfortable. “You’re making my job and my life miserable. Your loyalty is supposed to be to me,” I said.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said, on the verge of tears.
“Then I have to send him a cease-and-desist letter.”
“Okay, I’ll make sure Brad gets it,” he said.
I felt as if I had failed John by not immediately solving the problem, and failed Frank by not being able to protect him.
As promised, I sent the letter, and sure enough, the items stopped appearing in the papers. For John and Carolyn the issue was resolved. But for Frank, his problems had just begun. Not long after he got the letter, he was fired. Frank was heartbroken; for the first time, he’d felt as if he was starting a career. Working for the salon changed him. He had begun getting up early in the morning and going to the gym before work.
As soon as he was let go, Frank went back to his old habits—drinking heavily, staying out until all hours of the night, experimen
ting with God knows who or what. I wasn’t going to let his getting fired by a hair salon derail him, so I set about finding him another job. Negi Vafa, George’s creative services director, a chic Iranian woman, hired Frank to assist her with RSVPs and to man the door at events.
Even John pitched in to the effort to keep Frank gainfully employed by paying him to drive his Buckeye Powered Parachute—a contraption that looked like a flying lawn mower—to the Midwest to be fixed. John, traveling for the magazine, met Frank in Chicago to give the renewed Buckeye a test drive; that way, if any problems occurred, Frank could drive it back to the shop for further repairs. When they checked in to a Holiday Inn, the receptionist looked at JFK Jr., standing next to an equally, if not more, handsome man, and asked nervously, “Who’s the nonsmoking queen?”
Frank waved his hand theatrically and said, “That would be me.”
John loved that story—he got a ton of mileage out of recounting their buddy-comedy road trip. Of course, Frank charmed everyone: grouchy middle-aged diner waitresses, bitchy queens, even movie stars. I once brought him as my date to a dinner at the apartment of John’s sister, Caroline. She hosted an evening for friends and family to celebrate John and Carolyn’s marriage. Julia Roberts, who was dating John’s trainer, sat at our table, and of course Frank had her wrapped around his finger before the salad plates were cleared. When he got up to go to the bathroom, Julia leaned toward me and whispered, “I hope you’re going to marry him. He’s a great guy and he’s so gorgeous.”
“I know, Julia,” I replied, “but he’s gay.”
“Are you sure?” she said, looking disappointed.
I could take Frank anywhere, and he would not only hold his own but become part of the scene. He was even in a newspaper’s coverage of the dinner. The paparazzi snapped Frank helping Carolyn carry her gifts as they exited Caroline’s building, and the photo appeared in the paper the next day. Not Julia Roberts. Not Caroline Kennedy. Frank Giordano.
Frank definitely was the life of the party, which wasn’t always a good thing—especially for him. He’d often repeat his signature line, “I know, I know, I have to get off the party carousel,” but still found a reason to go out almost every night of the week. And everyone knew he was the one with access to the “party favors.”
From my point of view, Frank’s problems with alcohol and drugs—as with his inability to secure long-term employment—were just a by-product of Frank being Frank. I never considered that he was an addict; instead I naively believed he just needed to grow up. The hardest drug I ever did was pot, so I decided the alarm I felt in regard to Frank’s excessive drug use was simply an overreaction. I assumed that Frank’s HIV diagnosis would be a wake-up call, but Frank just kept partying. To protect myself from the truth, I turned his drug use into another item on the list of Frank’s selfish acts. There was always drama where Frank was concerned. He refused to grow up and I was getting sick of taking care of him. After all the lost jobs, car accidents, and failed relationships he’d been through, I was tired of worrying.
His carelessness wasn’t mean-spirited or intentional, but his substance abuse was taking over his life. So I should have known it was a mistake to put Frank in charge of the main dish at a birthday dinner I threw for myself. It was 1997, and Matt Berman had offered to host a dinner party for me at his new apartment, a gorgeous loft in SoHo that he had decorated to perfection (you found yourself wanting everything in that apartment, whether it was a fifty-dollar lamp or a thousand-dollar photograph).
I planned a glamorous dinner party and decided to cook for ten of my best friends against the backdrop of the lights of Manhattan filtering through the apartment’s huge windows. Frank, who wanted to help and do something nice for me, had insisted on buying the leg of lamb for the main course. He was supposed to arrive at Matt’s at 5:00 p.m. so I’d have enough time to cook the meat, but he didn’t show up until 6:30 p.m., when the first guests began trickling in for cocktail hour. I was livid but decided not to say anything, so as not to make a scene in front of the other guests.
“Here you go, Ro,” he said, thrusting a big bag into my arms. “Happy birthday!”
He looked a little off, but I just took the package into the kitchen and began to unwrap it—only to discover it was not lamb but a supermarket-prepared pork roast that would feed about four people. I wanted to cry. I walked right up to Frank, who was pouring wine into a water glass, and got in his face.
“It’s not funny anymore, Frank,” I said. “It’s my birthday, I asked you to do one thing, and you can’t get it right, after everything I’ve done for you?”
Frank looked at me as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “I never asked you to do any of that for me,” he said matter-of-factly.
I was crushed; I felt as if Frank was telling me to go fuck myself for caring about him. We had been each other’s favorite person for so long. But maybe that wasn’t such a good thing. Frank was living his life as a gay guy with me as his best friend. I was living mine like a straight girl with a boyfriend who happened to be gay. I was so consumed with taking care of him that I didn’t pay enough attention to other guys. Who could blame me? Frank and I were completely compatible, everyone loved him, and he was always up for anything. It was easier to be around Frank than most guys. Until now.
I had often put Frank’s needs before mine with the understanding that we cared about each other. But the sleepless nights of worry, the incessant eye to detail, the obsession with loyalty—all of that was apparently my problem.
CHAPTER
9
Hachette had begun putting intense pressure on the staff to improve George’s numbers. Their threat to pull the plug if we didn’t increase revenue became more real every day. As a result, I didn’t have much time to focus on Frank and his problems. I saved all my worrying for the magazine, and so did John.
In November 1997, John rented the Beaverkill Valley Inn in the Catskills for an editorial retreat with the entire staff. The aim was to get everyone invested in the success of the magazine. After all, what’s better for boosting morale than a rustic lodge in upstate New York during one of the dreariest months of the year?
We got the full camp experience, with meals served family-style around a big table (preceded by the requisite jockeying to sit next to everyone’s favorite camp counselor and editor in chief). We went on hikes, which entailed pasty-faced city slickers in unsuitable footwear stumbling over rocks and roots, and of course we played soccer, with John trying not to embarrass his winded editors.
In between the nature walks and canteen meals, John held meeting after meeting to get everyone up to speed on what he hoped would be an aggressive and profitable new year. On the last day of the retreat, we gathered in one of the lodge’s conference rooms to talk about newsstand competition. Sitting around tables set up in a U-shaped arrangement, we listened to the rain beat down on the paned-glass ceiling as John laid out his strategy to beat magazines such as Men’s Journal and Esquire, amid cheerful rejoinders from the editors.
Finally, I couldn’t help but point out the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room.
“We have half the staff of those other magazines,” I said. “It’s never going to happen unless Hachette steps up and gives us what we need to be competitive.”
John glowered at me, gripping his pen a little too tightly.
“That’s enough,” he said in an unusually harsh tone.
“But—”
“I said that’s enough! We don’t need to hear that anymore.”
His words were like a slap across my face. I turned beet red, humiliated in front of the editors, who quickly averted their gazes. I felt as if I were a teenager getting screamed at by my dad in front of my friends. After the initial sting of his rebuke wore off, a numbing rage took hold, and I shut out John and the rest of the room. Those people had become my colleagues and friends, and in one sentence he had made me feel like an idiot again.
When the meeting was over, everyone avo
ided me like the plague. They were visibly uncomfortable after witnessing John lash out at me—it had shocked them almost as much as it had embarrassed me. They weren’t used to it. But I was. When he had a lot going on at once and felt overwhelmed, John would snap at me—something he didn’t do with other people. I’d be filling out his expense reports and he’d irrationally bark, “Do you think that’s a good use of your time?” I could tick off a laundry list of things I’d done for him that day—set up a week’s worth of meetings, gather story ideas from all the editors, turn down invitations to events, follow up on a cover entreaty, draft a letter for his next interview request, drop off his prescription at the pharmacy, pick up a gift for a friend—and if he was in a bad mood, his response would be to look at me as if I were a moron and ask, “What about the brakes on my bike that need to be fixed?”
For all the benefits, interesting moments, and glamour that came with my proximity to and close relationship with John, there was also a downside that left me feeling utterly powerless. I was like family to him, and because he felt so comfortable with me, he also took me for granted and acted out his stress on me.
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