by Unknown
They were not rich by any means, and they were moving into their retirement years.
One afternoon, as we ate lunch in a diner in Seabright, my father launched into a gloomy tale about how things were so bad he could no longer afford to keep our family dog, a black Labrador named Notso. They were looking for a home for him, he said. The conversation was so depressing, I started to cry—which always made Tony anxious. Tony respected my father—addressing him as “Mr.
B.,” never by Randy—but at this moment, he put the niceties aside and took charge.
“Mr. B., pull yourself together,” he said. “You don’t need to get rid of Notso. You need a plan, and you need to stick to it.”
He was only twenty-six, but he was acting like a parent. He grilled my mom and dad about their assets and expenses, and proved to them that they were more than capable of taking care of a dog, not to mention many other things they claimed they could not afford. I had seen this fierce side of Tony before
—namely, on the night of November 22, 1963—and it often frightened me; it was a big reason I opted for silence rather than confrontation around him. But on that day, I saw how the part of him that so cowed me could also be such a comfort.
Tony was in his element at Harvard Business School, and because he was happy, I was happy. We had taken out a loan to cover his tuition, but it was up to me to cover our living expenses. Through my New York Republican contacts, I had landed a job as a secretary in the office of the Massachusetts attorney general, a courtly, bespectacled public servant named Elliot Richardson (who in October 1973 would famously resign as Richard Nixon’s attorney general rather than carry out the order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox). It was serious work but with none of the Camelot glamour or sense of fun—and certainly none of the extracurricular hijinks. I never told anyone in the office that I had been a White House intern for two summers, and I purposely kept it off my résumé.
We rented a small apartment in a big clapboard house on Gerry Street, a stone’s throw from the Charles River and a quick walk to the Harvard campus.
It was a time of great political upheaval at Harvard—and across the country—but Tony and I remained so focused on our plan—Tony on his studies, me on making sure we could pay our bills—that the “revolution” barely touched us. We were so conservative and square. A few blocks away, students with long hair and dressed in Army surplus were protesting the Vietnam War, while Tony wore his white button-down shirts and crew-neck sweaters and blue blazers to school and I put on my prim blouses and skirts to work for a Republican who was the state’s chief law enforcement officer. Instead of smoking marijuana, we smoked cigarettes. Instead of manning the barricades, we holed up in our apartment. I would come home late from work and put together a casserole or Tony’s favorite meal of a burger with a wedge of iceberg lettuce and Russian dressing. We couldn’t afford to go out to dinner, and we didn’t socialize much.
Tony would study at his desk, and I would curl up on a sofa with a book.
Michael Ansara, a well-known political activist and one of the founders of Harvard’s SDS chapter, lived in one of the adjacent apartments, but I don’t recall saying a word to him in the two years that we lived there.
It wasn’t exactly a wild time for us, but there was a renewed sense of romance in our relationship, as Tony and I were in sync as a couple. We were unified in our commitment to our life plan. Tony would get his MBA and we would return to New York, where he would take a coveted job in finance. We were so in sync, in fact, that with one small exception (which I’ll get to shortly), I never thought about President Kennedy. This was all the more extraordinary when you consider that we were living in Harvard, where the most famous alumnus at the time was surely JFK. John F. Kennedy Park, the Kennedy School of Government, and J. F. Kennedy Street could all be found less than one thousand yards from our apartment door. If I had wanted to avoid memories of JFK, the Boston area was most assuredly not the place to do it; it was practically a Kennedy theme park.
Three years had passed since the death of little Christopher. Even though Tony was still a student and I was making a modest secretary’s salary, we were determined to have a baby, which we finally did on September 22, 1968, a few weeks after Tony began his second year at school. Our daughter Lisa was healthy and perfect, and I loved everything about taking care of her, even diaper duty and midnight feedings. On Lisa’s first outing, I pushed her blue pram over to Brattle Street and cajoled the owner of our drugstore to come out to the street “to see what I had gotten.” Those were the words I used, as if Lisa was the most precious gift I had ever received. Suddenly, my life was centered on her, and I didn’t mind for a second.
My secret, of course, stayed deeply buried.
And yet on a crisp spring day in 1969 when I took an afternoon walk with the baby in the carriage, I passed a hair salon on Massachusetts Avenue advertising Frances Fox hair products in the window. It had been six years since I’d given the President his regular hair treatments, but suddenly I was overcome with emotion. I looked both ways down the street to make sure no one was watching me (ridiculous, I know) and, carrying Lisa in my arms, walked into the store to see which products they sold. I wasn’t planning to buy anything. I just wanted to luxuriate in the warm memory of President Kennedy, if only for a few minutes. I picked up the bottles and turned them over in my hands. I carefully set them back on the counter and walked out. I felt so guilty about what I’d done, I tucked the incident away, deep in my mind. I wasn’t going to mention it.
Lisa, barely six months old, wasn’t talking either.
Tony got his MBA in June 1969 and, as we had hoped, was recruited by Goldman Sachs for a well-paying job in New York. At first, we rented a carriage house in Greenwich, Connecticut, thinking that a leafy suburb was a better place to raise our new family. But after nine months of commuting, Tony was ready to return to the city. I was, too. I missed the energy of city street life. One of Tony’s colleagues suggested Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood on the other side of the East River, directly across from Wall Street. The only thing I knew about the borough of Brooklyn was that my father had been born there. To our amazement it took us only one weekend, armed with the local paper, to find an exquisite floor-through garden apartment on tree-lined Hicks Street. Tony was delighted with his one-stop subway ride to his office, and I fell in love with the community. It was the city but “not too much” city. I had a beautiful baby in my arms and a great provider of a husband by my side. Life was good.
*This wasn’t so easy to do in late 1964. Seven days after JFK’s death, President Johnson had established the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination. The Commission issued its 888-page report in September 1964, creating instant controversy (which persists to this day) and immediately thrusting JFK’s name and image everywhere again.
Chapter Thirteen
Between November 1963, when I told Tony about JFK, and May 2003, when the Daily News exposed my secret, there were only a few other people with whom I shared the story of my affair. I had spent my young adult life trying to be a perfect wife and mother. Of course, that didn’t mean I was happy. But I hid my unhappiness behind a placid façade, a skill at which I excelled. To family and friends I appeared dutiful, capable, energetic, and content, but as hard as I tried to keep it up, cracks in the façade inevitably appeared.
In the summer of 1973, I told my secret to my cousin Joan Ellis. I had just turned thirty. My second daughter, Jenny, had been born three years after her sister and was just learning to walk and talk. Along with Lisa, she was bathed in the constant attention of her doting parents. Tony’s career had blossomed at Goldman Sachs to the point where, just before Jenny’s birth, we had been able to afford a three-bedroom apartment in one of Brooklyn Heights well-established coop buildings, along with a summer rental in Rumson, New Jersey.
The summer house was beautifully furnished, on top of a hill at the end of a long stone driveway, an hour from the city. The only
thing it lacked was a television, which was a problem in the summer of 1973 when the entire nation was transfixed by the Watergate scandal. Nearly every day the networks would pre-empt their usual programming to show the Senate hearings chaired by North Carolina senator Sam Ervin. I was as mesmerized as everyone else by this unprecedented episode of political high drama. Most days, while Tony was at work, I would pile the girls and our babysitter in the car and drive the few miles to my cousin Joan’s house, where her television was sure to be tuned to the hearings.
Joan was twelve years older than I. Years before moving back to New Jersey to start their own electronics company and raise their three children, Joan and her husband had worked in Washington, D.C. In addition to being the smartest woman I knew, Joan was also the most private. She didn’t gossip. She kept to herself and made a point of steering clear of the suburban social scene. If there was one person in my life who could appreciate the power of a secret, it was my cousin Joan.
The hearing that third week in July had been extraordinary. Alexander Butterfield had just revealed the existence of sophisticated audio taping equipment in the Oval Office, meaning that every conversation involving President Nixon had been recorded. I remember Joan and I took a break from the hearings while the babysitter put my daughters down for a nap. In need of fresh air, we decided to head over to nearby Sandy Hook State Park. We were walking along a deserted section of beach, musing about how damaging these tapes might be to President Nixon and how long he could keep their contents secret.
“Secrets,” Joan said. “They always catch up with you.” Maybe that was the trigger. Maybe it was the fact that during that summer
—living in this beautiful house, with my adorable daughters and successful husband—I was as content and fulfilled as I had ever been. Maybe I felt secure enough in my marriage that breaking my promise to Tony, just this once, didn’t seem like such a big deal. Maybe it was the simple fact that we were discussing Washington and the presidency. Maybe it was the fact that I trusted Joan completely and could tell her anything. I had always admired her.
“I know,” I said. “I’ve been keeping a secret myself.” And then I told her.
The most amazing thing is that the sky didn’t fall. I wasn’t struck by lightning. I didn’t feel any more ashamed or guilty or sluttish. I actually felt better.
Joan was terrific, as I had hoped she would be. She had gone to Vassar with Jackie Kennedy, and was an ardent admirer of all things Camelot. But she didn’t press me with prurient questions. She didn’t profess shock or amazement. She just took it all in and said, “Well, that’s going to make an interesting story for your grandkids someday.” Her positive response cemented our kinship to this day.
As Joan and I drove back to her house to pick up my girls, I was glad I had told her but unsure if I would ever have the nerve to tell anyone else. The one thing I was sure about was that I wouldn’t tell Tony that I had broken my promise.
It would be ten years before I shared my secret again. A new crack in my façade had been forming slowly, almost imperceptibly, during that first full decade of motherhood and marriage.
In 1976, Tony and I had bought a three-story fixer-upper of a house at 19A Garden Place, one of the most desirable streets in Brooklyn Heights. It required extensive renovation, which I knew could either bring Tony and me closer together or push us further apart. I had taken courses at the New York School of Interior Design and been certified, so I took charge of all the details while the four of us lived for a year among plaster dust and workmen and exposed plumbing and missing appliances. The strain did not bring my husband closer to me. When things went awry, he would jump in the car, drive to New Jersey, and spend the night at the small house that we rented for weekends and summers.
The renovation in 1977, as silly as it sounds, was the emotional dividing line in my marriage. We’d had thirteen good years, and now we were about to have thirteen bad ones. It’s not often that one can isolate a single moment when the love goes out of a marriage. But I can.
That summer, we had been invited by friends to their farmhouse in Tenants Harbor, Maine, as an escape valve from the renovation. Our hosts plied us with lobster dinners and cold drinks and endless board games. I remember being struck by the contrast in our hosts’ affectionate, playful relationship with each other and the blank, practically lifeless relationship I had with Tony. The giveaway was our last morning in Maine, when I woke up and Tony abruptly turned away in bed, as if to announce that he’d rather be with anyone but me.
That’s when I finally admitted to myself that I wanted to be anywhere but with him.
From that moment I saw Tony only through a negative lens—and he did the same with me. I began keeping this horrible, mental running list of his shortcomings—how we didn’t make love anymore, how he refused to accompany the kids and me on visits to my mother in Florida, how we didn’t have any activities in common, how we never talked, how he didn’t help around the house. This kind of resentment is never good, but I did something even worse with it: I turned it on myself. I wanted to know what I had done wrong—and how to fix myself. While the girls were at school and Tony was at work, I would surround myself at the kitchen table with the classic self-help books of the time, such as Gail Sheehy’s Passages and M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, and less famous but even more trenchant books such as Harriet Lerner’s The Dance of Anger. I would scribble in the margins and highlight passages that spoke to my situation. When I retrieved my copies to write this book, I saw that all my notes centered on the same issue—that “mutual loving confrontation” is the key to a meaningful relationship, that without it the relationship is shallow and doomed. Everything I read reminded me that I had been too passive in my marriage, too walled off, but I had neither the self-confidence nor the skill to assert myself.
How ironic that every evening, just before Tony came home, I would scramble to put away my books about “meaningful confrontation” so he couldn’t see them, so he couldn’t tell me once again to get my act together, as if I was just being weak. Eventually, the low point of my day became the moment I heard his key in our front gate, signaling his return home.
What saved me, literally, was running. I had finally quit smoking in the late seventies and took up running as a way of getting back in shape and achieving some kind of happiness. I don’t know what took me so long to rekindle the love of running that I’d had as the only girl on the boys’ track team at Rumson Country Day, but the first time I ran on the Promenade along the East River near my house, I knew this was something I could be good at.
Running immediately became the routine that lent a tincture of inner peace to my life. I’d get up at five-thirty A.M. before Lisa and Jenny woke up, pull on my gray sweatpants, gulp down a cup of coffee, and head out for at least a four-mile run, sometimes more, down the Promenade, then onto the Brooklyn Bridge, to Manhattan and back, often catching sunrise over the East River, returning in time to get the girls off to school. The next morning I’d do it again.
This was a moment when the entire nation seemed to discover the joys of running. Jim Fixx’s 1977 book The Complete Book of Running was the number-one bestseller for more than a year. It wasn’t unusual to see runners of all shapes, ages, and sizes gathered in packs of ten or more, clad in their short shorts and Nikes, at a street corner as they headed out for a communal run before or after work. Pretty soon, I was one of those people. I joined the New York Road Runners Club, the biggest runners’ group in America, and committed myself to running a marathon. Where my identity a year earlier had been wife and mother, it was now mother and runner.
I ran my first New York City Marathon in 1979 in four hours, sixteen minutes. I was proud to finish, and immediately began training for another one, vowing to break four hours (which I did). Before long, I was volunteering at the NYRRC
and discovering a whole new circle of friends that had nothing to do with my sour domestic life in Brooklyn, and with whom I had so much in common. To
ny tolerated the hours I spent running and didn’t complain about them. My daughters heartily approved, and even seemed proud of me. After I finished a particularly long run on our weekends in New Jersey, the three of us would jump in the car and retrace my fifteen- or sixteen-mile route on the odometer.
The mileage check would always end with a visit to the local Dairy Queen (which may explain why the girls were so supportive of my running), where we would order large vanilla soft-serve cones with sprinkles.
In February 1981, I took a part-time job at the NYRRC, developing their research library. The pay barely exceeded the minimum wage, but I didn’t care.
My colleagues were all runners and, frankly, I hadn’t felt this kind of excitement and sense of purpose since I was in the White House. I was particularly drawn to a senior staffer named Bill Noel. He and I would train together, eat lunch together, and find a reason to visit each other’s desk several times a day. Our flirtatious relationship was fueled by our mutual love of running and the feeling of accomplishment and good health it gave us.
When Bill had the bright idea that we should run the London Marathon in May 1982, I immediately said yes. Five of us flew over, but only he and I had signed up to run. The other three were along as tourists and supporting players, which explains why Bill and I were assigned to share a hotel room the night before the race. We needed the sleep; the others could go out and hit the town. It was a sign of how innocent our relationship was—and how committed we were to our sport—that no one in our group thought the sleeping arrangements were inappropriate, including us. By that time, I had not been intimate with my husband for five years. In fact, we’d barely hugged. Alone in the hotel room that night, I realized how much I yearned for physical affection and connection. So I made a bold, spontaneous gesture that surprised both of us. I climbed into Bill’s bed instead of mine. It seemed like such a natural culmination of all the encouragement we’d shared during our months of training. I had turned thirty-nine two days before, and Bill was my third lover.