The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  The only fly in the ointment was the kids. Bibbs still didn’t care for Jeanette’s little girl, Joy, who was moody and excitable and talked a blue streak. And Jeanette was none too fond of Bibbs’s sons. He understood her antipathy. The boys were spoiled. He had lavished money on them when they were growing up, had spent over a million and a half dollars on them. He’d bought them boats and cars—he’d given Jimmy his own almost brand-new white Corvette convertible when the boy was only sixteen. But Jimmy, who was argumentative and strong-willed, was Jeanette’s pet peeve—she was always saying she couldn’t stomach him. And Van, well, he’d always been a little odd. He was a handsome boy, with curly blond hair and blue eyes, but he was slow, sweet but slow, and there was something of the rebel about him. He wasn’t interested in school. He wasn’t interested in business. Or even in money. All he cared about was boats and cars. Taking them apart. Fixing them. Riding them fast. Too fast. Plus he hated to shower, hated to put on clean clothes. He was always so grimy that the other kids in the neighborhood had nicknamed him “the ditchdigger.”

  It didn’t surprise Bibbs that Jeanette started complaining regularly about his sons.

  “You must be the new Mrs. Wolosoff’s daughter,” Dick Simons said to Joy one cool spring evening in 1960. He’d come over to play gin rummy with Jimmy and his friends. She was standing at the door, holding it open for him. And although he’d heard from his father, who had met Joy at a lavish bar mitzvah, that she was a stunning girl and no ordinary thirteen-year-old, Dick Simons, who was eighteen, was astonished at her beauty. She had pitch-black hair and wide dark eyes and a smile that was so dazzling it made him think of fireworks. She wasn’t dressed up. She was barefoot and had on a pair of cutoff blue-jean shorts, a tight little T-shirt that showed the outlines of her already full breasts, and a little black bandanna that was folded around the top of her hair. “You look like Pocahontas,” he told her. And that made her brilliant smile even wider.

  Throughout the game, she lounged near the cardplayers, serving them beer and crackers, and flashing smiles at Dick. And when the game was over and he was once again standing at the front door, this time wishing her good night, she said, before he realized he wanted to say the same thing, “Are we ever going to see each other again?”

  He told her, “Sure.”

  “Then, why don’t we start right now?” she asked. “Why don’t we go for something to eat?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Dick said, and he drove her in his car to Squire’s, the local deli, and they talked for a long while, and she wanted to go on talking, and they sat in a booth and kept on talking, and at last he said, “Shouldn’t I take you home?” and he drove her back, and when they got there, it was two in the morning, and he wanted to kiss her, but he was afraid, because she was only thirteen, even though there’d been nothing thirteen about her.

  Not long after Dick met Joy, Jeanette began asking Bibbs to adopt Bruce and Joy. She asked him repeatedly, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it. Okay, yes, maybe the little boy. But the girl? Her father wasn’t dead. He was living God knows where, doing God knows what. But whoever and whatever he was, he was Joy’s father. Bibbs told Jeanette no about the girl, but said he’d think about adopting Bruce.

  By summer, Dick was at the Wolosoff house constantly, and he and Joy had become boyfriend and girlfriend. They’d listen to music together, or she’d come to the baseball field and watch him play ball with his buddies. At night, after the games, he’d take her to dinner. And on weekends, they’d go out on his boat.

  Her mother seemed amused by their relationship. Dick had felt peculiar in Jeanette’s company the first time he met her. He’d been used to Sylvia’s being the woman of the house, and now there was this new woman, Jeanette, sitting on Sylvia’s couch and offering him a cold drink from Sylvia’s refrigerator. But Jeanette had apparently understood his awkwardness, and she’d tried to make him more comfortable. She seemed to know about his father, a successful retailer who imported, manufactured, and sold furniture, and about his mother, who was so close to the Shuberts, of theatrical fame, that many people who knew his family thought she was a Shubert, and she chattered away, asking him about the sports he played and telling Joy she was lucky to have an athletic boyfriend and saying that someday she’d like to see him play ball too.

  Later on, Jeanette got even more complimentary. She said he was a good influence on Joy, and she showered him with praise about his looks and his easy charming manners. “You’re not like Jimmy and Van,” she’d tell him. “They’re impossible, the two of them.” And she’d joke with him and touch his arm, acting for all the world as if he were her boyfriend too. And sometimes when she had to get ready to meet Bibbs for an evening out, she’d invite both him and Joy to come into the bedroom and talk to her while she got dressed, changing her clothes right in front of them. In front of him.

  Joy didn’t seem to mind. She was in love with her mother, Dick thought. So there was nothing her mother could do wrong. The trouble was, he was a little in love with her mother too. He’d never met a woman who was so flattering, so interested in everything he said. Joy was wonderful. They’d taken to petting heavily every night, and he loved that. But there was something about Joy that made him think she wasn’t herself, that most of the time she was putting on an act, trying to be just like her mother.

  In 1962, when Joy was fifteen, the Wachtlers bought a two-story colonial-style house in Kings Point, very close to Bibbs’s mansion. The house cost them about eighty thousand dollars and had an acre of land and a little goldfish pond, as well as a big kitchen, a screened porch, and lots of bedrooms. They needed the bedrooms. They had four children by now, three girls—Lauren, Marjorie, and Alison—and a son they’d named Philip, after Sol’s father, who had died a couple of years earlier, without ever getting the house Bibbs had promised to build him.

  Sol was working hard, and his law practice was flourishing. He’d switched to a new firm, Hoffman and Altamari, in Mineola, the county capital. But whenever he was at home, he devoted a lot of time to the children. He helped them with their homework, did magic tricks at their birthday parties, and with his own hands crafted special toys for them, toys their friends didn’t have. Once, when Lauren was going through a shy period at a new school, he made her a big wooden boat and set it in the schoolyard, where all the other kids ran over to see it, asking Lauren if they could please, please sit in it and in short order making her feel like the most popular girl in the school. And always, every weekend, he took the four children to Kiddie City, an amusement park in Long Island City.

  On the way home, when they were tired and cranky, he told them stories. There was one with a hero whose adventures he kept going for months. The hero was a little boy named George Raft. He didn’t tell the children that George Raft was the name of an actor who played bad guys in the movies. All he told them was that this George Raft was a really bad little boy, who was always doing something nasty. He made the stories so suspenseful that invariably the kids didn’t want to get out of the car when he pulled into the circular driveway in front of the house. “Oh, Dad, go on! Tell us the end,” they’d cry. But he always said, “No. To be continued,” and promised that next weekend he’d pick up George Raft just where he’d left him off.

  He was living with a certain amount of suspense, himself. A vacancy had come up on the North Hempstead Town Council, and he wanted to have a go at the job. If he did, it would be his first stab at running for electoral office. But Norman Penney, the Republican leader of North Hempstead, didn’t think it was a good idea. North Hempstead was a political grouping that drew together a handful of actual towns, and its population was very conservative. Sol wasn’t. He’d allied himself with the liberal wing of the party, had supported Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller. He was also Jewish, and North Hempstead, despite some pockets where there were heavy concentrations of Jews, was largely Italian. Penney said there’d never been a Jewish candidate elected for any office in North Hempstead, and that it wasn
’t likely there ever would be one.

  Still, the party agreed to let him fight for the nomination in a primary. It would be the first primary the Nassau Republicans had held in their two-hundred-year history on Long Island, and Sol, convinced that they were holding the contest simply because he was the first Jew who had ever wanted to run for office in the area, was bitter about it. Nevertheless, he campaigned. And to the surprise of many of the local leaders, he won the primary.

  Joe Carlino took it upon himself to reassure Penney. Going to see him, he sang Sol’s praises. He told him Sol was a very active guy who’d campaign tirelessly. He told him he was a guy that people would like the looks of. He told him Sol loved the political life. And he said, “Sol won’t have any money problems—his family has substantial funds.”

  Penney was still reluctant. “That’s a big order,” he said. “To put up a Jewish guy over here.”

  “No,” Carlino told him. “It’s the best thing you can do.”

  After that, Sol threw himself into trying to win the seat on the town council. He turned up at school auditoriums, fraternal organizations, women’s clubs. He shook thousands of hands at commuter stations. And he attended scores of campaign parties.

  Some of the parties were thrown by Bibbs and Jeanette. “I wanna see Sol go all the way,” Bibbs told Dick Simons one day. Dick thought Bibbs’s enthusiasm had something to do with the fact that he needed some land rezoned, and the town council decided zoning matters. But he didn’t ask Bibbs about it. With Bibbs, he had learned, the best policy was never to question why he was for or against anything.

  Joan and her children didn’t come to the parties at Bibbs’s house. Joan and Jeanette had never hit it off, perhaps because Joan had been fond of her aunt Sylvia, and Jeanette seemed like an interloper to her. Moreover, Joan didn’t want her children associating with Jeanette’s children. The boy, Bruce, was rumored to be part of a fast crowd. And the girl, Joan would one day say, “had this reputation.” Joan didn’t want the members of her family to come under her influence.

  That fall—it was 1963—Sol won his seat on the town council. But he did more than just get elected. He won the seat by the biggest victory margin either before or since the election. “He’s a great campaigner,” Penney acknowledged to Carlino.

  “He’s gonna be one of the stars of the party,” Carlino prophesied.

  Van Wolosoff had a crush on his stepsister, Jeanette noticed that year. And Joy seemed to like him too. Or did she just feel sorry for him? Jeanette wasn’t certain, but one thing she was sure of: she had to discourage their friendship. Van wasn’t just slovenly and eccentric. He had no sense of propriety. Or of money. If you gave him money, he was apt to give it away to any friend or beggar who asked.

  Jeanette was always having to scold him. He’d come into the house after one of his marathon sessions under the hood of a car, and he’d be barefoot and shirtless and covered in grease. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’d march over to the refrigerator and start looking for something to eat, handling the food with his filthy hands. She’d shout at him, “Get out of here! Go and get washed!” But he never seemed to learn from her scoldings or show any improvement. He was, Jeanette began to feel, a total fool.

  Ordinarily, she’d have expected Joy to agree with her. They agreed about so many things. But Joy had a soft spot for Van. She was sixteen now, and like so many sixteen-year-old girls, she had a passion for misfits and rebels. It made Jeanette uneasy, so uneasy that she wasn’t sure she wanted Joy growing up under the same roof as Van.

  She hadn’t liked having Joy grow up under the same roof as Jimmy, either. But at least Jimmy was grown now and living away from home. Jeanette wished Van was out of the way too, and after a while she began badgering Bibbs about sending him to a private school, someplace where he could learn to be more like other boys. But Bibbs said no, and Jeanette decided that, under the circumstances, she’d best send Joy away.

  The school she picked for Joy was an exclusive and expensive finishing school in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. It was called the Howard School for Girls, and it taught young women manners, deportment, French, and the social graces. Joy was miserable when she first arrived, but she soon adjusted, becoming a cheerleader and an active member of the drama club. But although she tried her best, her grades were terrible. “I hate to study,” she told her old boyfriend Dick on one of her visits home. “I hate to read.”

  There was something else she hated. It was the way her stepfather looked at her. There was something sexual about it. He wanted her, she began to think. And one day, sure enough, he grabbed her and tried to kiss her. He forced his tongue between her lips and began to fondle her breast. She pulled away and screamed at him and told him if he ever came near her again in that way, she’d tell her mother.

  Dick didn’t know that Bibbs had made a pass at Joy. Had he known, he most likely would have been furious, because he and Joy had become lovers. They had sex whenever they could, sometimes in the house when Jeanette and Bibbs were out, sometimes, when they were home and asleep, in Dick’s green Corvette.

  To their chagrin, one night Jeanette caught them. It was four in the morning, and they were in the car, their bodies half-naked, their limbs groping for comfort in the tight space, when suddenly she appeared out of nowhere, dressed in her nightgown, and began banging on the window. Joy adjusted her clothes and ran from the car. Dick, flustered and embarrassed, blurted out how sorry he was. But to his surprise, Jeanette didn’t act angry or even astonished. “You should be sorry,” was all she said. And then, “I’ll talk to you in the morning.” But when she saw Dick the next day, she said nothing further.

  After that, Dick concluded she didn’t hold it against him that he’d been making love to Joy. In fact, what he’d done seemed to make Jeanette treat him in a different, closer way, as if he were family. She took him along with her when she rode up to Massachusetts in the chauffeured limousine to visit Joy. And she called him frequently, inviting him to spend the day with her. “Come on,” she’d say. “Let’s take the car and go into the city. John will drive us, and we’ll go shopping and have some lunch.”

  Dick looked forward to her phone calls. And when they got in the car, they’d laugh and talk, and it was sort of as if they were dating. Dick wasn’t sure why she acted so cozy with him—whether it was because she wanted him to marry her daughter, or because she liked him for himself, really liked him, even though he was twenty-two and she was in her forties, or because it was just her nature to be flirtatious, because she couldn’t be around a man, any man, without trying to make him feel he was everything in the world to her.

  Whatever her reason, Dick enjoyed their expeditions. They’d go to Bonwit’s or to the Park Avenue shop of David Webb, one of the finest jewelers in the country. At Bonwit’s, Jeanette would try on clothes, and he’d tell her, “You look really gorgeous.” And at David Webb’s, she’d look through the showcases and ask the clerk to take out whatever caught her fancy. “Let’s have a good close look at that one,” she’d say. And she’d study it, turning it this way and that.

  “Like it?” She’d hold it up to her throat or her ears. “How about this one?” she’d ask. “Or this one.”

  “Pretty terrific,” he’d say. And when he liked something, she’d say, “Bibbie is going to buy me this, Dick. You’ll see, Dick.”

  And Bibbs always did.

  He did almost everything Jeanette asked him to do. But he wouldn’t adopt her children.

  Early in 1965, while Joy was still away at the Howard School for Girls, Sol Wachtler began entertaining hopes of running for town supervisor of North Hempstead.

  As a member of the town council, he had made many powerful friends among the party leadership, and they had not only accepted his being Jewish but even come to see it as an advantage—or at least an advantage just now, when the Democrats, fresh from Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in the recent national elections, were riding high. Most of the communities that made up the to
wnship of North Hempstead could be counted on to vote Republican, but there were by now two areas in the township, Great Neck and Roslyn, that were predominantly Jewish, and Jewish voters tended to vote Democratic. Sol had convinced the Republican leadership that a liberal Jewish Republican like himself might prompt many Jewish Democrats in the crucial towns of Great Neck and Roslyn to vote Republican in the upcoming town supervisor’s race.

  There was only one problem. Sol wasn’t the incumbent, and as everyone knew, his being the incumbent would give him the best shot at winning.

  In the spring, the man who was the incumbent, a Catholic named Clint Martin, was called into a meeting by one of the Republican leaders, a lawyer named David Holman. “You’ve got to step down, Clint,” Holman told him.

  “What the hell for?” Martin said.

  “Because we’ve got to do something about Roslyn and Great Neck,” Holman told him.

  Martin dug in his heels. “I’m the supervisor and the leader, and I’m not stepping down. Nohow.”

  “We’ve got another job lined up for you,” Holman said. “Commissioner of elections.”

  Martin went white. “Commissioner of elections!” It wasn’t even a plum. It was a job that paid some three thousand dollars less than the town supervisor’s job.

  He continued to argue. But his protests got him nowhere. Without the support of the party, he was dead meat. And it was clear to Martin that Sol, with his suave social and political skills, not to mention his wife’s and his uncle Wolosoff’s money, had won the support of the party.

  When the meeting with Holman was over, Martin resigned, and Sol was appointed to replace him.

  In Kings Point that summer, something happened between Joy and her stepbrother Van.

  There would always be two versions of just what actually occurred. There was the one Jeanette told Bibbs—that Van had attacked her daughter. He came into her room by stealth, she said, and forced himself on her. There was also the story that Dick Simons said Joy later told him—that she had for years harbored feelings of love toward Van, and that one night she told him so. When she did, Van said he’d always loved her too. After that confession, they’d become inseparable—much to Jeanette’s dismay. They’d even spent a night together on a little cabin cruiser that belonged to Sol Wachtler, who kept his boat tied up at Bibbs’s dock.