by Linda Wolfe
Sol got angry. “I’ve been supervisor,” he snapped. “I’m not going to be deputy anything.” And subsequently, refusing to take no for an answer, he went to the executive committee of a different Long Island town, the nearby town of Hempstead, and got their endorsement.
Holman’s supporters were furious. Sol went behind our backs, they muttered. Worse, he treated his old friend like dirt, like a bug he could crunch under his feet.
Rockefeller wasn’t aware of the mounting anger in Nassau against Sol. Early in December, he announced that he was recommending him for the judgeship. But as he had made it his practice to appoint only those judges whose bar associations approved them, it was necessary for Sol to do one more thing, to appear before the Nassau County Bar Association’s judiciary committee and gain their approval.
A routine matter. Shortly before Christmas, Sol spoke to the committee. He told them he’d represented six major corporations, that his job as supervisor of the town of North Hempstead had been quasi-judicial, and that he’d argued cases before several courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States. When he was done, he left, and the committee took a vote.
It went against him. With three of its seventeen members absent, the bipartisan group voted ten to four not to approve him. He wasn’t qualified to be a judge, they said. Not that there was anything wrong with his character, learning, or background. No, the problem was he had too little trial experience.
The bar association’s rejection of him was a blow for Sol, another blow. Two in a row, not even two months apart. But he didn’t fold up. He went before the judiciary committee again, and this time he talked to them for an hour and a half. When he was done, they held a five-hour closed-door session and then took a second vote. But once again, the vote went against him.
Up in Albany, Rockefeller was enraged. “You guys have embarrassed the hell out of me!” he screamed at Speno, who had just stepped down as county chairman and been replaced by a new chairman, Joseph Margiotta.
Perhaps it was Rockefeller’s fury, or perhaps, as one supporter of David Holman insisted, it was because Holman begged the bar association to stop tearing itself asunder, but in the end, the question of Sol’s endorsement was sent to the bar association’s board of directors. Both Rockefeller and Sol had many friends on the board, and the directors voted to overrule their judiciary committee and declare Sol qualified. He had been bloodied in the battle, but at last, he had won. In mid-January 1968, he became a judge.
“Is it all right with you if I marry Joy?” Dick Simons, who was working as a furniture salesman in a company owned by a colleague of his father’s, asked Bibbs one night that year. Joy had insisted he do things the old-fashioned way and ask Bibbs for her hand. But Bibbs was diffident. “I’m not Joy’s father,” he told Dick brusquely, and not mentioning that Joy’s real father was still around somewhere, he went on, “I’m just a stepfather.”
Still, Bibbs lent his energies, and his money, toward ensuring that the marriage got successfully underway. He gave Jeanette seven thousand dollars so that she could buy Dick a gold Piaget watch as an engagement present. He paid for Joy’s engagement ring too—a hundred-and-ten-thousand-dollar diamond ring from David Webb that Jeanette had decided was just the right thing, but that Dick had said was way beyond his means.
Bibbs also gave the happy couple a place to live once they were wed. Joy wanted to live in Manhattan, and Bibbs, who had been one of the developers of the stylish Brevort apartment building just off Washington Square Park, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, presented her and Dick with a large co-op apartment there.
He also threw the engagement party, which was held on his back lawns that rolled down to the edge of the silvery Sound. He and Jeanette invited hundreds of guests, among them some of the most prominent real-estate developers in the New York area. Sam Lefrak, who had built Lefrak City, was there. So was Sol Atlas, the developer of the Manhasset Miracle Mile.
Jeanette had seen to it that Dick, a casual dresser, dressed properly for the affair. She’d gone out and bought him a double-breasted blue blazer, red-and-white houndstooth checked trousers, and a pair of white Gucci shoes. “No one had the right to be that tall, that handsome, that charming,” one of the party guests thought when she saw him.
Sol Wachtler was at the party. And although, on the previous occasions when he’d met Joy, he’d taken no notice of her, today there was no overlooking her. Years later, he would date his first encounter with her to this festive evening.
She was wearing a long white summery dress with a cluster of pink carnations pinned onto the bodice. Her dark eyes were sparkling, her smile was radiant, and she had the ecstatic air of a princess about to ascend a throne.
Many of the guests toasted her, wishing her a long and happy marriage. Dick Simons recalled that Sol, glass in hand, toasted her too and that Jeanette thought his gaze too admiring. She nudged her future son-in-law. “Keep an eye on Sol Wachtler,” she teased. “He’s got eyes for Joy.”
“Oh, come on,” Dick objected. “You can’t be serious.”
“But I am,” she insisted. “I’ve seen eyes like that before.”
Dick shook his head. Jeanette was always trying to stir things up, trying to create little dramas.
But she didn’t let up. “Those aren’t just the eyes of a friend.”
During the time Joy and Dick were engaged, Bibbs made several trips to Florida to check on the land he’d purchased from Sol’s father. He’d had it dredged, and now it needed a sea wall, and it needed roads. But once those things were put in, whoever developed the site could build three hundred, maybe even four hundred houses on the land, and sell them for a fortune.
Theoretically, he no longer owned all the land. He had transferred the best piece, a hundred acres of prime waterfront property, to an irrevocable trust he had set up for Jimmy and Van. He’d charged the trust $575,000 and explained to the boys that in exchange for the money, they would own the land. But he hadn’t given them legal title to it, hadn’t presented them with a deed or contract. And they hadn’t asked for it. Van had no head for business, and Jimmy, to whom Bibbs had frequently said that the things one gets from a father can just as easily be taken back, had learned not to question his father’s decisions. So when he’d told Jimmy that the trust should buy the St. Petersburg waterfront lots, Jimmy had just said, “Dad, if that’s what you think we ought to do, I leave it to you, and you go ahead and do it.”
In January 1969, Joy and Dick were married. The marriage started off inauspiciously. Just before the wedding, the young couple had a fight—Dick had arrived late for the prewedding rehearsal. And after the ceremony, they had another. It started while they were driving to Kennedy Airport, where they were planning to spend the night in an airport hotel in order to board a flight for France early the next morning. Halfway to the airport, Dick realized he’d left their tickets and passports behind. Joy became upset, and even though Dick’s brother promptly retrieved the documents and brought them out to the hotel, the new couple, their tempers strained, didn’t make love that first night of their marriage.
Nor did they make love the next night, although by then they were staying in romantic quarters in Paris’s elegant Plaza Athénée hotel. They began to quarrel because right after they arrived in France, Joy called an old Great Neck friend who was living in Paris and invited him to dinner. Then, after dinner, she suggested to her friend that since it was late and he lived far away, he spend the night in their suite. Dick had a tantrum, stormed out of their hotel room, and spent the night walking the streets of Paris.
When he returned to the hotel in the morning, the friend was gone. But Dick was still angry. When Joy said she wanted to go shopping, he refused to accompany her.
By the time they reached Rome, their next stop, they were reconciled. Now, when Joy said she wanted to go shopping, which it seemed to Dick she said all the time, he went with her. But as they made their rounds, stopping at Gucci and Pucci and Bulgari, he worried th
at the rest of his life with her might turn out to be nothing more than a shopping spree.
Things were better when they got to the south of France, which was their next honeymoon stop. But something puzzling occurred there. Joy had told Dick that she’d made arrangements for them to visit her grandmother, who lived in the area, and explained that she’d never met her before. On a windy afternoon, they set out on the visit, maneuvering the hilly roads in a rented car and stopping at last at the home of Mme. Germont, Jeanette’s mother-in-law by her previous marriage. That Mme. Germont wasn’t actually Joy’s grandmother, Dick didn’t know at the time. He’d always assumed that Joy was a Germont and she’d never told him differently. But today, he was perplexed. The woman Joy had called her grandmother seemed singularly uninterested in either him or Joy. She spent hardly any time with them. And although she spoke some English, she barely talked to them.
“What’s with her?” Dick said to Joy when, after the tedious visit, they were on the road again. It had occurred to him that perhaps Mme. Germont was angry with her former daughter-in-law, Jeanette. But even if that was the case, was the way she had behaved any way to treat a granddaughter she’d never met before? Dick said this to Joy and observed, “She didn’t seem much like your grandmother at all.”
Joy changed the subject.
In New York, when the honeymoon was over, Joy and Dick settled down to married life. Jeanette had decorated and furnished their co-op, buying imported furniture and choosing a pale pink-and-white color scheme for all the rooms. Dick went back to work selling furniture, this time at his father’s big shop in Queens. Joy bought herself a dog, not just any dog, but a pricey Lhasa apso, and spent her time strolling with her new pet in Washington Square Park or lunching and shopping with her mother.
Jeanette and Dick were still good friends, and one day when she was visiting and Joy was in another room, Jeanette told Dick there was something she wanted to tell him. “Joy’s not a Germont,” she said. “Her father was a man named Ben Fererh.”
Dick was stunned.
“I married Fererh when I lived at Saranac Lake,” Jeanette went on. “I was miserable. We broke up.”
“What happened to him?” Dick asked.
“He lives near Miami. Miami Beach. I used to send him a hundred dollars here, fifty dollars there. He still calls sometimes.”
When she had finished her tale, Jeanette asked Joy to come into the room and said to her that she’d told Dick what he needed to know.
Dick felt sorry for Joy after that. And when he and she fought, which they kept on doing more and more often, he would tell himself that it was no wonder Joy was so quarrelsome and acted at times as if she hated him. The poor kid, he would tell himself, she had one father who walked out on her and another who died on her and a third who refused to adopt her—though now he felt he could understand why Bibbs hadn’t adopted her. She had a father. Still, no matter how you looked at it, each of her fathers had let her down. There’d never been a single one who’d really cared about her and looked after her and made her feel safe and protected. It was enough, Dick thought, to make a woman hate not just a husband but all men.
Some months later, the phone rang and Dick picked it up to hear an operator’s voice. A Mr. Ben Fererh was calling collect, the operator said. For a Mrs. Joy Simons.
Dick put Joy on the phone, and she and her father talked to each other for the first time in Joy’s adult life. Fererh told Joy that Jeanette had asked him to call. Joy told him that she’d just gotten married, that she adored her husband, and that they’d just had a great trip to Europe, where they’d seen and done the most marvelous things. And that was it. As far as Dick knew, she never spoke to her father again.
CHAPTER 4
THE FIRST DAY SOL TOOK THE BENCH, STRIDING TO HIS HIGH-BACKED chair in an airy courtroom of the Nassau County Supreme Court in Mineola, a court stenographer eyed him suspiciously. The man was aware of the criticisms that had been leveled against Sol by the local bar association, and he expected a judge who would be at best confused, but more probably ignorant and incompetent. Nevertheless, within hours, as he sat there taking notes, the stenographer came to the conclusion that this new young judge had an unusually clear way of crystallizing issues and sizing up cases. He liked him, liked him a lot.
So did many of the people who met Sol in his new capacity, and he quickly became a highly respected trial judge. He handled civil cases—negligence and matrimonial disputes, contract and business controversies, and land use and zoning arguments (he had great familiarity with both these latter matters as a result of his years as town supervisor). Plaintiffs and defendants were impressed by his fairness, lawyers by the felicitous way in which he moved them and their cases along, appellate division judges with the intelligence and clarity of his decisions, and court personnel with his friendliness. Right away, or so it seemed, he knew the names of all the court officers and court stenographers in the Mineola courthouse. “It was the politician’s ability,” the court stenographer who had worked with him on his very first day often thought. “But still, you never failed to be impressed.”
About eight months after she and Dick got married, Joy became pregnant. Jeanette was overjoyed and asked Bibbs to set up Dick, the father of her future grandchild, in business. She didn’t like Dick’s being in the retail trade, she said. There were too many late hours; there would be too many parties and dinners Joy would have to attend alone. And besides, she urged Bibbs, if he put his mind to it, surely he’d come up with an occupation for Dick that would enable him to make a great deal more money than he was making now.
Bibbs came up with the idea. He proposed to Dick that he and his father develop the St. Petersburg land that he’d bought from Sol’s father and promised to his sons, Jimmy and Van. He was more generous with Dick than he’d been with Sol, to whom he’d also once proposed developing the land. He didn’t demand any money up front, but said magnanimously, “You won’t have to pay me for the lots until you’ve sold the houses.”
It was a good deal, but Dick was worried that Joy wouldn’t like the plan. “We’d have to live there while we’re building,” he told Jeanette. “And Joy’s so into Manhattan. Maybe she won’t like it in Florida.”
Jeanette thought Joy could be brought around. “She’ll like your making good money,” she said. “And once you’ve made your fortune, you and Joy can do what you want to do, live wherever you want to live.”
In due course, she and Bibbs and Joy and Dick, accompanied by Dick’s father, made a trip to St. Petersburg to check out the area. Dick loved the weather and the dream it evoked of endless summer and perpetual golf games. Joy was unenthusiastic. “Where can you shop here?” she said, and turned up her nose disdainfully. But Jeanette told her it wasn’t all that far from Palm Beach, and maybe someday she could live there. Joy seemed reassured. So in short order, Dick agreed to Bibbs’s deal. (Sol, when he heard about it, was upset. It rankled that Bibbs had wanted fifty thousand dollars from him for something he’d given Dick Simons for nothing.)
Plunging into becoming a real-estate developer, Dick took an apartment for himself and Joy in St. Petersburg. But although Joy lived there with him for a while, she soon decided she wanted to be with her mother during the remainder of her pregnancy and went back up to New York.
In May 1970, the child, Evan Marc Simons, was born at New York Hospital. Dick flew up for the baby’s birth, and then he and Joy, with Evan in tow, returned to St. Petersburg. For a few months they were happy, buying a boat and exploring the local bays and channels, but soon their marriage began to show further signs of strain. They quarreled about money. No matter how many clothes and pieces of jewelry she bought, Joy always wanted more, Dick felt. They quarreled about sex. Joy, it seemed to Dick, wanted sex “by the numbers,” something automatic and abrupt and unspontaneous. But most of all, they quarreled about where they were living. Joy hated St. Petersburg more and more and said she was languishing there, while back home her mother and Bibbs were h
aving the time of their lives, dressing up and going out to fabulous dinners and parties, where sometimes they even rubbed shoulders with people who got written about in the society columns.
She missed not only the opportunity to meet such people but even the habit of reading about them in New York’s gossip columns, and every morning she would call Jeanette and ask her to report the latest dish about New York socialites and celebrities. Jeanette would fill her in and then, because just summarizing the gossip wasn’t enough, would read her entire entries from columnists like Suzy and Leonard Lyons and Eugenia Sheppard.
Later in the morning, Joy would call Jeanette again, or Jeanette would call Joy, and they’d talk about the baby. Or clothes. Or their horoscopes. Jeanette was a big believer in astrology. They were on the phone with each other for hours on end. They even called each other to discuss what had happened in their favorite soap operas, which both women watched religiously day in and day out. Bibbs complained to Dick that his phone bills had gone up hundreds of dollars a month since Joy had had her baby and moved back to Florida, and that maybe he’d better buy a place to live down there as soon as possible.
Jimmy Wolosoff had also gotten married and had a child, a little girl. Bibbs liked being a grandfather and began spending time with his son’s family.
Not Jeanette. She refused to have anything to do with them. She didn’t trust Jimmy’s wife, she told Bibbs. And he was a fool if he did. Sure, Jimmy’s wife acted sweet and devoted. But she was only interested in his money. Her and Jimmy too. And if Bibbs was fool enough not to see that and went on spending so much time with them, she’d leave him one of these days, walk right out.
“My parents just bought a condominium in Palm Beach!” Joy told Dick one day in 1971. She was speaking to him long distance, for she had once again gone up north to stay with Jeanette and Bibbs. She couldn’t bear the dullness of St. Petersburg a second longer, she’d told Dick, and taken the baby and gone home. They’d fought about it, of course, but now she was making peace. “The condo’s right on the ocean,” she trilled. “And there’s something even better. Bibbs has bought land right across from the condo. He wants you to develop it, to put up apartments. Oh, Dick, we’re going to move to Palm Beach!”