Rob did well at Rochester. He pledged Psi Upsilon, which had been Horatio Alger’s fraternity. Even there, his competitiveness set him apart. He never did anything casually. If scores were being kept, Rob’s had to be highest. His favorite song was Neil Young’s “Old Man.” Old man, look at my life, / I’m a lot like you were…
He graduated in 1986, having decided on a career in finance, not engineering. Finance meant Wall Street, which meant New York. For anyone who grew up on the Jersey side, New York was Xanadu. It was the land of hopes and dreams, the fast track, the big league, the epicenter. It was where you went to find out who you were and to discover what you might become. Rob looked across the river with longing. It was the late 1980s and Wall Street was overflowing with young men making millions before the ink on their grad school diplomas was dry. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, Rob thought he could actually smell the money.
He was the kid with his face pressed against the glass of the candy store window. But Rob didn’t just want to buy candy. He was Bill’s son. He wanted to own the store. In 1987, after a tense year spent working for his father at Synfax, he enrolled in New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. Two weeks before classes started, he and a Psi U brother named Mike Paradise flew to the Club Med Turkoise in the Caribbean Turks and Caicos islands.
Turkoise was not for the prim and proper. Club Med’s brochures explained that it had been designed for “travelers in their twenties and thirties who enjoy making friends on vacation and value communal fun.” The message seemed to be: clothing optional, drugs permitted, sex guaranteed. Rob was twenty-three, handsome, and single. What could be better than that?
2. GIRL OF THE GOLDEN WEST
ON A WARM AND SUNNY SATURDAY IN THE SPRING OF 1966, a young couple from the nearby suburban town of Wyoming, Ohio, drove into downtown Cincinnati to have lunch, stroll a bit, and do some shopping.
Cigarettes had begun to carry warning labels, John Lennon had said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, and the United States had started bombing North Vietnam with B-52s. The Sound of Music had just won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Bonanza was the most popular program on television. In Cincinnati, despite another dazzling display from Oscar Robertson, the Royals had been eliminated in the first round of the NBA playoffs. In baseball, with young Pete Rose nearing his prime, the Cincinnati Reds were hoping for another first division finish.
Ira Keeshin and his wife, the former Jean Stark, were not much older than Pete Rose. They had met as students at Grinnell College in Iowa in 1960, when Ira was a sophomore and Jean a freshman. Jean got pregnant. They got married. They transferred to Michigan State, from which Ira graduated with a degree from the School of Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Management.
Jean Stark came from one of Cincinnati’s wealthiest families. Her mother was a Lazarus, as in Lazarus department stores, which dominated the retail market in the Midwest. Lazarus stores had been around for more than a hundred years. They were the first department stores in the country to install escalators. Later, they were first to become air-conditioned. In 1939, Jean’s grandfather, Fred Lazarus, Jr., persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to fix the date of Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November rather than the last, in order to assure a longer Christmas shopping season. Eventually, Lazarus would merge with the Federated chain, which would drop the Lazarus name in favor of Macy’s, but in the mid-1960s it was hard to find a department store in Ohio that the Lazarus family did not own.
Ira and Jean moved to Cincinnati in 1966 so Ira could join the family business. They made an attractive couple. The Lazarus family had high hopes for them. Ira was revitalizing the department store restaurants and Jean, despite what the family considered some worrisome liberal tendencies, was about to become the first Jewish member of the Junior League of Cincinnati. They had two young daughters, Laura and Nancy, and they saw no clouds on their horizon.
On this particular Saturday, Ira and Jean were shopping at Closson’s, a Cincinnati institution almost as integral to city life as were the Lazarus stores. For almost a hundred years, Closson’s had housed the city’s finest art gallery. Among Cincinnati’s moneyed classes, there was a feeling that if it didn’t come from Closson’s, it wasn’t art. Ira and Jean were looking for a Mother’s Day present for Ira’s mother. They were drawn to a grouping of lead statuettes created by a local artist named Lattimer. One, in particular, caught their eyes.
It was eight inches high, weighed eight pounds, and portrayed two young girls sitting face to face, as if in a garden. Rising from a two-inch base of solid lead, the figurines suggested both the closeness of sisters and the innocence of childhood.
To Ira and Jean, the two girls on the statuette represented their own two daughters, Laura and Nancy. They bought the statuette and gave it to Ira’s mother for Mother’s Day. It became the object she cherished most for the rest of her life.
Like a lot of marriages begun with an unplanned pregnancy, Ira and Jean’s eventually ran aground. They divorced in 1977. Laura was fourteen and Nancy was twelve, and the divorce sent the two girls tumbling out of the world of privilege and stability, the only one they’d ever known.
By then, Ira owned the Wheel Café, which was even more of a downtown Cincinnati landmark than Closson’s. The Wheel Café had anchored Fountain Square for longer than anybody could remember. Generations of politicians had clustered around its varnished tables to share their dreams and plot their schemes. Although Ira was proud to own this piece of Cincinnati history, after the divorce he worried that Jean’s family might cast a pall on its future. He sold the restaurant and went to Minneapolis to become concessions manager at the new Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.
Jean felt liberated by the divorce. Despite her Junior League membership, she had the heart of a hippie. Her family’s wealth oppressed her. She found Cincinnati society suffocating. She yearned for space in which she could develop her artistic sensibility and her inner self. She moved to California with Laura and Nancy, eventually settling in the small town of Piedmont, in the hills just beyond Berkeley. She left behind all the Lazarus family money and support.
Jean’s first problem as a single mother was finding work. It was not one she ever fully resolved. She had not graduated from college, nor had she ever developed marketable skills. Women in the Lazarus family had not been encouraged to do either. Aware that she could not support herself and her daughters as an artist manqué, she tried repeatedly to plug herself into the workforce. She either quit or was fired from countless office jobs. She had a brittle nature not well suited to the give and take of an office environment. She quarreled easily and often. She was intelligent and articulate, but neither equanimity nor resilience was among her strengths.
She developed an anxiety disorder. She slumped into debilitating periods of depression. She came to recognize that she was not a very good mother. Her own mother had been so disabled by alcohol and had collapsed in so many public places that the family had put the word out that she was epileptic. Jean herself had never experienced mothering, and found that she had little aptitude for it.
Despite her best efforts, she didn’t cope well with Laura and Nancy’s teenage years. In search of stability herself, she wasn’t able to provide it for her daughters, and her attempts to bond with them never got beyond smoking pot in the kitchen. The girls started building their own lives. Laura married young and moved away. Nancy had a hard time at Piedmont High. She acted out. She snorted coke. She slept around. She was effusive one minute, angry the next. She found it difficult to channel her energies. She was bossy and loud, lewd and crude. She was either the leader of a group or she quit it. It was her way or the highway.
What Nancy had going for her were her looks. She was a knockout. She stood a full-breasted five foot four, dyed her hair blond, and made ample portions of her firm and shapely legs available for viewing. Her manner fluctuated between brash and insouciant. She was quick, sharp, and funny. She did no
t shy from attention and she paid attention to the impression she made. She had a provocatively dirty mouth and talked as if there was nothing she was afraid to try.
She had artistic talent but little discipline. She was no more likely to last through four years of college than she was to fly to the moon. She made a pass at junior college, followed by a halfhearted attempt to enroll in a Los Angeles art school. She and her mother reached the conclusion that they’d both be better off if Nancy left home. She moved to Minneapolis to live with her father. He’d remarried and had a five-year-old son. His new wife welcomed Nancy with genuine warmth.
Ira encouraged her to try college again. Without enthusiasm, she enrolled at the University of Minnesota, where winter arrived on the heels of Labor Day. Students wrapped in parkas and scarves walked through tunnels to get to class because it was too cold aboveground. Bob Dylan had lasted only a semester at the University of Minnesota, and Nancy did not outdo him. She disliked her classes, her classmates, the darkness, the cold, and the snow. Midway through her second semester, she put together a portfolio of her artwork and sent it to the Parsons School of Design in New York. To her surprise and delight, she was accepted.
Parsons, with its campus in Greenwich Village, is one of the top design schools in the world. Nancy arrived in the fall of 1984, when she was twenty. She brought with her an inquiring mind, an adventurous soul, swelling ambition, and a body that was nothing short of luscious. What more did a newcomer need?
Bored by routine, she quit Parsons after a year. It had served its purpose—introducing her to New York City. She got a job at Caliente Cab Company, a trendy Tex-Mex restaurant on Waverly Place. Her first job was as a “border guard,” a hostess who escorted customers from the Mex side to the Tex side and vice versa.
It was a business where quitting time was after midnight in a city where a lot of people considered that late afternoon. Though the work pace was hectic, it couldn’t compare to the cocaine-fueled after-hours social life.
Nancy had the looks, the energy, and the attitude to flourish, and she did. When she called home, her mother detected a hard new edge in her voice, which Nancy said was the sound of street smarts. She was flamboyant. She dyed her hair red, then blond, then red again, then back to blond. She partied fervidly. She attracted attention and reveled in it. New York didn’t faze her. She felt it was the stage she’d been born to perform on.
Many of her dates were out-of-work actors. One had appeared briefly in Full Metal Jacket. Another had an intermittent role in a soap opera. They struck her as glamorous, but at least one of them actually struck her. It may have been two. Nancy seemed to enjoy telling friends that she could provoke men to the point of violence.
She had not yet mastered her own short temper. Often, it showed itself at work. Like her mother, she was frequently hired and fired. She’d win a quick promotion with her charm, then provoke a spat and get sent packing. From Caliente Cab Company she went to El Rio Grande on Thirty-eighth Street, from there to brief stints at three or four other places, and finally to Docks on the Upper West Side (where, to her delight, she once catered a birthday party for Imelda Marcos).
Wherever she was, Nancy came alive at closing time. She moved with what in earlier times might have been called a fast crowd: men with more plans than money, but always enough for cocaine; women who were smart, sexy, and unattached. In New York in the mid-1980s, she was living Sex and the City before it was born.
Although she tended to pick up and drop companions as often as she changed jobs, Nancy maintained her friendship with her ex–Parsons classmate Alison Gertz. Alison was the genuine article—a Park Avenue socialite and an heiress. She came from a department store fortune, too—and her relevant parent had not been disinherited. Gertz (later Stern’s) had been the Lazarus of Queens and Long Island. Eventually, like Lazarus, the Gertz/Stern’s chain was absorbed by Federated, leaving Ali’s father even wealthier than Nancy’s mother might have been.
In late summer of 1987, Nancy decided to take a vacation. She’d seen a Club Med brochure. The spot that caught her eye was the Turkoise in the Turks and Caicos. She persuaded Ali—not that Ali needed much persuading—that the two of them should fly down for a week of uninhibited fun. They arrived on a separate flight but on the same day as Rob and Mike Paradise.
3. YOUNG LOVE
THEY MET ON THE NUDE BEACH. ROB SAID, “I BET YOU’D look great with your clothes on.” It was lust at first sight.
To Rob, Nancy personified everything hip and stylish and daring and free. She was New York, in all its sophistication, glamour, and allure. She was sparkly and saucy and had the street-smart veneer she’d been striving for. She was also gorgeous enough to make his pressed-against-the-glass-storefront, Jersey-guy eyes fall out. Plus, she was Jewish.
To Nancy, Rob personified everything she wanted in a husband. He was good-looking and hard bodied, clever and ambitious, well educated and smart. And, she soon intuited, from a family that was—at least by New Jersey standards—filthy rich. Plus, he was Jewish.
Neither of them ever looked back.
But neither did they charge ahead recklessly. Nancy may have been impetuous, but Rob was as methodical as a Swiss watchmaker. His heart had leapt impulsively, but his mind soon assumed full control. There was passion and romance and there were dreams of the splendor yet to come, but he laid out their future systematically.
They would date each other exclusively for a year. Then he’d move to an apartment big enough for both of them. Then they’d get engaged. By then he would have his master’s in finance from NYU. Once it was clear that his future was assured, they would marry.
His first job was with a small, staid New York investment bank named Ladenburg Thalmann. This was not the glamour end of the spectrum. Ladenburg was a perfectly respectable establishment, with impeccable roots in German-Jewish society. But its heyday had come in the nineteenth century. By the second half of the twentieth it was no longer a first-rank player on Wall Street.
But Rob was now an investment banker and determined to live as much like one as his salary permitted. The first thing he did was move to a landmark building: La Rochelle, on Columbus Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street, where Mike Paradise and his wife were already living. Nancy moved in with him as soon as they were engaged.
Bill disapproved of Nancy from the start. He thought she was common because she didn’t have a college education. He referred to her as “that waitress.” Nonetheless, Rob and Nancy married in September 1989, only a few months after his mother died.
Nancy chose Ali Gertz to be her maid of honor. The year before, Ali had learned that she was dying of AIDS. The news reverberated throughout the Upper East Side. AIDS was for drug addicts and homosexuals; Park Avenue socialites did not get AIDS. Ali told friends that she must have been infected by a Studio 54 bartender with whom she’d gone to bed at the age of sixteen. The bartender, a bisexual, had later died of the disease.
Knowing she was dying, Ali made a choice. Instead of retreating to her Park Avenue apartment or her family’s summer home in the Hamptons, she stepped into the limelight, hoping that awareness of her fate would jar others into taking precautions. Barbara Walters interviewed her. People magazine put her on the cover. Esquire named her Woman of the Year. She was privileged, beautiful, and articulate. Her speaking out about AIDS triggered a quantum jump in awareness that no one who had unprotected sex was immune. She would continue to speak until the last of her strength deserted her. She died in 1992. ABC broadcast a movie about her called Something to Live For, which featured Molly Ringwald as Ali and Lee Grant as her resolute and loving mother.
Nancy’s choosing Ali to be her maid of honor seemed an act of love: letting a dying friend share in a commitment to life. A few ungenerous souls among the guests, however, viewed it as a grasp at Ali’s celebrity coattails. On the morning of the wedding, Nancy and Ali and Nancy’s second-closest friend, Bryna O’Shea, went to the Essex House on Central Park South to have their hair done and to p
ut on their gowns.
As they were dressing, Ali began to recite a list of the pills she had to remember to take. There were uppers for energy, downers to take the edge off the uppers, dozens of high-potency vitamins, and, most important, AZT. She had to take four hundred milligrams every four hours and she wanted to be sure she wouldn’t forget amid the excitement of the wedding reception. She started to explain that AZT was most effective in combating the HIV virus that was the precursor to full-blown AIDS, but that her doctor had said—
“Just shut up, Ali,” Nancy said. “This is my day. Nobody wants to hear about your fucking pills.”
The wedding took place at the East River Yacht Club, across the East River from Manhattan. Nancy wore a gown she had selected at Victoria Falls in Soho. The reception was held at the club’s restaurant, Water’s Edge, which offered an unrivaled view of the skyline.
The weather that day was glorious. A warm September sun shone from a clear blue sky. Guests crowded onto the restaurant’s outside deck. The Manhattan skyline dominated everyone’s field of vision. To Rob and Nancy, it represented limitless promise. A magnetic field seemed to emanate from it, drawing them into its mysteries, tempting them with its riches, thrilling them with its range of possibilities.
The bride and groom were radiant. They danced with élan. Their smiles were illuminated by joy. But Nancy later complained to friends that Ali Gertz ruined the day. All through the reception she talked to the other guests about AIDS. Whether she meant to or not, she stole the spotlight. She was beautiful, she was a celebrity, she would die young. Nancy felt that more attention was paid to her than to the bride. Nancy had no time for her after that.
Never Enough Page 2