The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Whatever really happened, in an effort to break them up, Jeanette went to Bibbs with her story about Van’s attack on Joy, and a short time later, Van was sent away from home. He was placed in a private school in Westchester County and he returned to Great Neck only once every other week, when Bibbs and Jeanette would drive up and get him.

  Jimmy wasn’t welcome at the estate, either. “I can’t stomach either of your sons, Bibbie,” Jeanette told Bibbs. “They’re ruining my life.” And at last, she prevailed upon Bibbs to make up to her for all she was suffering by adopting her son.

  By the time the grass on Bibbs’s lawns had turned a brilliant summery green, Bruce Germont had become, officially, Bruce Wolosoff. When the lawns began to fade, and the leaves on the shade trees began to turn gold and red, Joy entered the University of Maryland as a freshman who would be studying the liberal arts. And in November, when the leaves had fallen from the trees, Sol was elected town supervisor, receiving a plurality of twenty-three thousand votes, the highest plurality ever achieved by any candidate who had run for the office.

  CHAPTER 3

  “WHY DIDN’T BIBBS ADOPT YOU?” DICK SIMONS ASKED JOY AFTER Bruce had become Bibbs’s third son.

  “Because he hates me,” she told him.

  Dick figured it must be true and tried to comfort her when she told him how angry and envious she was. He didn’t know that Joy, who went by the name of Joy Germont, had a different father from Bruce, nor that her father was still alive somewhere. Joy never mentioned it, and neither, until many years later, did Jeanette.

  Dick was still seeing Joy now that she was at the University of Maryland, but only from time to time. Mostly it was when she came home for school vacations. At Maryland, she dated other men.

  Dick was jealous. But he tried not to think about the other men in her life and to maintain as much of a connection with Joy as she would permit him. He called her frequently and, several times, drove down to Maryland to see her.

  Jeanette also visited Joy in Maryland, and one weekend, she suggested that she and Dick drive down together. But she didn’t want to make the whole trip in a single day. “We’ll stop somewhere,” she suggested. “Have dinner, sleep over in a motel.”

  A motel? Dick wondered about that.

  They set out in Dick’s new burgundy Jaguar, with its black top and smooth black leather interior, and when they found a motel, Jeanette said, “We might as well share a room.”

  What did she have in mind? Dick, who had been to see The Graduate with her, kept on wondering. He tried to put the question out of his head. We’re buddies, he told himself. And, hey, she’s Joy’s mother, for Christ’s sake.

  That night, they shared the room. Dick undressed in a hurry while Jeanette was out of the room in the bathroom. He tried to pretend everything was normal. Maybe it was. At least for Jeanette. Anyway, they had two beds. He got into his.

  Jeanette, in her casual way, wandered about for a while in her nightgown. Was she being provocative? Or was she just oblivious to his presence? Unwilling to put the matter to the test with a woman so much older than himself, and his girlfriend’s mother to boot, Dick shut his eyes.

  Nothing happened between them. And in the morning, they had breakfast and continued on to Maryland.

  Much later, thinking about that night, Dick concluded that Jeanette couldn’t stop herself from being seductive. Seduction was second nature to her.

  Sol had been a progressive town supervisor. He’d built public housing, sponsored parks and recreational facilities, and paved the dirt roads that were still common in areas of North Hempstead where the black people who were the servants to the rich lived.

  His public-spirited efforts had brought him acclaim, and early in 1967, he was asked by the leadership of the Republican party in Nassau if he would be willing to run for Nassau county executive, the premier job in the county. Nassau, with close to a million residents, was more heavily populated than many American cities, and its county executive administered what was then a princely budget of two hundred and fifteen million dollars. He determined ten million dollars in personal service contracts that were awarded without competitive bidding. He was the boss of fourteen thousand county employees, and he controlled nearly six thousand patronage jobs. It was an important and powerful job. Moreover, if Sol won, he would be his party’s fair-haired boy, in line for even higher, statewide office.

  But Sol wasn’t sure he wanted to run. The man he would be up against was the incumbent, Democrat Eugene Nickerson, one of the most popular Long Island politicians ever to hold office.

  Suppose he lost? He didn’t want to be a loser, and there were those who said that Nickerson was unbeatable.

  Uncertain what to do, Sol discussed his dilemma with State Senator and Republican County Leader Edward Speno. Take the gamble, Speno advised him and promised that if he lost, the party would be grateful and he could have any job that was available. Sol decided to say yes.

  In February, he was endorsed for Nassau executive by the Nassau Republican Executive Committee, after which Speno held a press conference and called Sol “one of the most dynamic, young, articulate figures in the Republican party in the state and throughout the nation.” In March, at a raucous convention in a hotel ballroom in Garden City, he was officially nominated.

  He stood on the platform and saw surrounding him nearly two thousand committeemen, flourishing banners and balloons and shouting his name. He had been participating in political conventions, some mock, some real, ever since his college days and had come to love the push and surge and glitter of those extravaganzas. But now, the screams and chants were for him. When his name was put forward and the crowd began to stamp and cheer, a vision of his future, of political conventions that would blazon his name for ever higher and higher office, seemed to sweep over him, and he looked down upon the crowd with an expression of undisguised euphoria.

  The party leaders who had been instrumental in selecting him to run were euphoric in their own way. Politics was being played differently that year. For virtually the first time in history, local candidates were addressing voters not just through public appearances and print and radio advertising, but through the volatile medium of television. Sol seemed to his party’s leaders ideal for television—so good-looking, so youthful and energetic, and so sincere in manner. Shortly after he was nominated, they announced they would spend the then startlingly high sum of five hundred thousand dollars to try to elect Wachtler and that the bulk of the expenditures would go for putting him on television.

  Sol was taken in hand by an army of political public-relations experts. He was advised by one, Don Kellerman, who was in charge of marketing him, to be less meticulous in his appearance. “Be more informal,” Kellerman told him. “Don’t come on as such a gentleman.” And following Kellerman’s advice, Sol stopped wearing cufflinks and took to dressing without a tie or with a tie that was amusingly askew.

  Joan, too, was subjected to Kellerman’s scrutiny. This was no doubt harder for her than it was for Sol. She was a more private person, reserved where he was outgoing, deliberate where he was breezy, and she hated the glare of publicity. Still, she went along with the public-relations man, cooperatively allowing him to help her select clothes to wear at public appearances. But when he jokingly suggested she try to gear her outfits to making her look as if she was thirty years old, the median age of Nassau’s voters, she couldn’t help saying, in a somewhat brittle voice, that she’d seen that age already and wasn’t going to be seeing it again.

  What was Joan’s image? Kellerman limned it. “Joan’s image,” he said, “is that of partner.”

  And indeed, she felt like a partner. She had been restless the last few years, as the children had begun to grow older, had been dissatisfied with just keeping house. Sol’s campaign gave her a chance to engage in political work, and while she didn’t like being in the spotlight, she thoroughly enjoyed working behind the scenes. She organized public appearances for Sol; she planned his calenda
r; she ran the campaign office. “I loved the political life,” she would one day recall. “I wasn’t just the candidate’s wife. I had a job.”

  Sol didn’t spend all his time campaigning. He still did some legal work, and one morning he drove with Bibbs to Mineola, where the Nassau courthouse was located. Bibbs’s stepdaughter Joy, now a young woman of twenty, was in the car too. Sol had met her years before, when she was around thirteen and had first become a member of Bibbs’s household. But she’d made no impression on him. Nor did she this day. But she was impressed with him. She listened to him discuss his campaign with Bibbs and, although she wasn’t much interested in politics, found what Sol was saying fascinating.

  “He’s very bright,” she told Dick after she rode with Sol in the car. “And handsome.”

  By early September, Sol’s campaign was in full swing. He was greeting potential voters not just at commuter stations, but even on the rails themselves, riding the trains into the city, then back out to the suburbs, then into the city again, then back out to the suburbs again.

  Meeting the public, he stayed calm, no matter who attacked him. But Joan, who was quick to anger, occasionally lost her temper. One day when they were standing at a commuter station, a man came up to Sol and said in a gruff voice, “Are you Wachtler?” When Sol acknowledged that he was, the man said, “Well, I hope you lose.” Joan, standing at Sol’s side, snapped, “Well, I hope you don’t make it into New York!”

  Sol was also visiting shopping centers, attending kaffeeklatsches, and addressing enthusiastic supporters at fund-raising barbecues, cocktail parties, luncheons, and dinners. He told reporters, “It’s a great embarrassment to have to ask friends for money,” but he proved exceedingly adept at it. At one luncheon alone, he raised what was then the munificent sum of a hundred thousand dollars.

  The liberal Jews of Great Neck were particularly attracted to him. They liked Nickerson, but Wachtler had a special appeal. “He was the Great White Jewish Hope out on the Island,” a woman whose parents worked in Sol’s campaign recalled. “He was on that beautiful bandwagon of Javits, Lindsay, and Rockefeller, but he was one of us. There was talk about him becoming president one day—the first Jewish president.”

  But as the campaign proceeded, trouble began brewing. Sol was using dirty tricks, the opposition charged. He was employing false images in his television commercials and campaign leaflets. One of his ads accused Nickerson of wasting public funds by having six photographers on the county payroll, and it showed a group of photographers busy doing nothing except snapping photos of the Democratic county executive. But the photographers in the ad were actors, posing as photographers. Moreover, as Nickerson was quick to point out, he hadn’t hired any photographers. His Republican predecessor had, and he’d been stuck with them. All six of them. Another Wachtler ad showed a large crowd of people milling about in front of a building that bore the signs “County Assessor’s Office” and “Grievance Day.” The copy beneath the picture said that taxpayers were groaning under Nickerson’s fiscal policies and that as a result, “every day is Grievance Day in Nassau County.” But no such crowd had ever gathered in front of the county assessor’s office. The photograph was, in actuality, a picture of an intermission crowd at a Broadway theater in Manhattan. Wachtler, Nickerson raged, was running “a slick, scurrilous campaign of distortion, appeals to fear, and outright misstatements.”

  The accusations didn’t prevent Rockefeller from campaigning for him. One autumn day, he crisscrossed Nassau County with Sol in a chartered bus, praising, promoting, and puffing him for a marathon twelve hours. And one autumn evening, he came to a party at Sol’s house.

  Alison Wachtler was only nine years old, but she would never forget it. She and her brother and sisters stayed upstairs while the party swirled and eddied below them. She saw men with big cigars, women in gorgeous dresses, and the expansive, exuberant governor. “We kids weren’t supposed to come down,” Alison recalled, “but we stayed awake and kept sneaking downstairs to get hors d’oeuvres.”

  Then, later in October, the Nassau County Democratic chairman accused one of Sol’s chief aides of paying one of Nickerson’s secretaries three thousand dollars to supply him with confidential information about Nickerson. Sol denied having any knowledge of the affair, and the aide resigned. But a cloud had begun to gather over the campaign.

  On Election Night, November 7, 1967, Sol and Joan went to the Garden City Hotel, where the campaign had started and where, on this night, three thousand Republicans were assembled. It still seemed to Sol that he had a good chance of winning, and indeed, as the election results started to pour in, he was often ahead of Nickerson. At 11:30 P.M., he was winning by three thousand votes. But at 11:50 P.M., with ninety-four percent of the vote in, the trend began to change and Nickerson pulled ahead.

  Ed Speno, who was receiving constant tallies, took Sol aside and whispered to him that the unofficial result was that Nickerson had won, though only by some thousand votes. For a moment, Sol became serious, downcast. But a second later, he composed himself. Smiling, and speaking in an upbeat tone, he said to Speno, alluding to the fact that at the beginning of the race neither of them had really thought they’d come anywhere close to knocking off Nickerson, “That’s a win, right?”

  Speno nodded. “That’s a win for all of us, and it’s a beginning for you, fella.”

  Sol kept the positive words flowing. “We got a county clerk. We got a controller.”

  Speno played the game too. “I think all the other candidates won.” Then he hugged Sol. “You put up a tremendous fight. A great campaign.”

  His body locked in Speno’s embrace, Sol let no sign of disappointment show on his face. And a moment later, he was buoying up Speno. “Keep a smile on,” he said. And Speno promised he would.

  Joan was sitting nearby, a sad expression suffusing her pretty face. But Sol continued to betray no sign of authentic emotion. It was as if he had learned, in that moment of defeat, how to wear a mask.

  Joy, by this time, had dropped out of the University of Maryland and taken a job in Manhattan with the film company MGM. She was a receptionist. But she was hoping that, with a little luck, she might be able to become an actress. Someone might discover her.

  She’d also taken an apartment. It was on East 63rd Street, and she shared it with a roommate, a young woman named Karen, who was studying nursing. Dick Simons was once again her steady boyfriend. And one of his friends was her roommate’s boyfriend. It was a convenient arrangement. Each evening they could, the two young suburban men would drive into the city together, have dinner with their sweethearts, and spend the night.

  One evening, however, when Dick and his friend arrived, only Joy was in the apartment. “Come into the bedroom,” she said to Dick, drawing him away from his friend.

  He followed her, wondering what was going on.

  “Karen’s met another guy,” she said. “A doctor. She’s going to marry him.”

  Not long after that, Joy began talking about giving up her job and her apartment and marrying Dick.

  He should become a judge, Speno had told Sol after he lost the election against Nickerson. There was a seat on the New York State Supreme Court in Nassau that was going to be vacated in January by a judge who was retiring. It would be a perfect spot for Sol.

  “What do you think?” Sol asked his old buddy, Joe Carlino. Sol was down in Florida, trying to get over the disappointment of his defeat, and Carlino had called him up to see how he was doing.

  “Don’t do it,” Carlino advised. “You get on the state supreme court and you die. You’re never heard from again.” He suggested that, instead, Sol should go after a congressional seat. “Take on Wolf,” he said, naming a Democratic congressman. “You’ll knock ’em dead. And you’ll be alive.”

  But Sol didn’t want to listen to him. The more he thought about the judgeship, the more appealing it was. He wouldn’t have to run for the seat. He’d just have to be appointed by Rockefeller. The idea of not h
aving to start in on another electoral fight was bliss. He was worn out, exhausted from the Nickerson race.

  Back in New York, he told Speno he wanted the judgeship, and one day when Rockefeller summoned him to his office to ask what reward he wanted for having undertaken the grueling fight against Nickerson, he told the governor too.

  “You want to be a judge?” Rockefeller said, with disbelief in his voice.

  “Yes.”

  Rockefeller, who didn’t think much of the judicial profession, shook his head. “After three years, you’ll be bored or alcoholic,” he said. Then he sat back, sure of himself. “Think it over and tell me tomorrow what other job you would like.”

  But Sol had made up his mind.

  He went back to see Rockefeller the next day, repeated his request, and this time Rockefeller acquiesced and agreed to recommend him for the opening.

  After that, Sol thought things would go smoothly, but they didn’t. It wasn’t Rockefeller’s fault. The problem was politics—local politics. It was customary in Nassau for a potential judge to receive the endorsement of his party’s local executive committee, but the committee to which Sol belonged, the North Hempstead Executive Committee, had already endorsed someone else for the judgeship he wanted. They’d endorsed David Holman, who several years earlier had helped Sol become town supervisor of North Hempstead by getting Clint Martin to resign.

  Holman was a former district attorney, and he had many powerful friends in North Hempstead. “Maybe you should go after a different job,” one of them said querulously to Sol on the phone one day. “What about deputy commissioner of state taxes? There’s an opening for that slot, up in Albany.”