by Linda Wolfe
Dick was reluctant to take on the new project. His work in St. Petersburg was going well, but it wasn’t finished. He had a hundred people working for him, and he was in the middle of construction on several houses, and besides, he liked St. Petersburg. But he agreed to drive down to Palm Beach and meet Bibbs, Jeanette, and Joy there on the weekend.
When he did, Bibbs told him he’d already arranged financing through the Chase Manhattan Bank for the Palm Beach apartments. “We can build a hundred and twenty-nine units,” he said, “and we’ll be partners in it.”
Jeanette, taking Dick aside, urged him to agree. “This will save your marriage,” she said. “Joy will have her shopping and her social life, and we’ll all be together.”
Shortly afterward, Bibbs and Jeanette began living in their new condo, and Dick and Joy rented an apartment in the nearby Sun and Surf, one of the most fashionable apartment buildings in Palm Beach.
Sol Wachtler had been out of the public eye for several years. “You get on the state supreme court and nobody ever hears from you again,” Joe Carlino had told him, back in sixty-eight. “You get on the state supreme court and you might as well be dead.”
Sol hadn’t agreed with Carlino back then. But now, after more than three years on the court, he had come to see what his old friend had meant. He was out of things. Sidelined.
His life was pleasant enough. At home, the children were growing up, and he had assumed a new role with them, not just that of entertainer and caretaker, but of adviser, counselor, and rescuer. The kids had always come to him, not Joan, when they got into scrapes. She’d been the disciplinarian. He, on the other hand, had always been indulgent. Now the kids worshiped him, and he was reaping the rewards, the admiration and adoration, for having played the softy in the familial version of good cop-bad cop.
At the courthouse, too, he was enjoying himself. A New York State Supreme Court judge wields a lot of power, is a man before whom lawyers stutter and defendants quake. Courtrooms are like little fiefdoms, and judges are like barons, expecting—and generally receiving—deference. But Sol knew that his power was not comparable to that wielded by judges in the state’s higher courts, the four appellate divisions and the mighty court of appeals. He was ready for a change when Joe Margiotta, Ed Speno’s successor as Republican county chairman, proposed to him that he run for a seat on the court of appeals.
Margiotta was a pudgy man who wore rings on his fingers like a Borgia pope and reveled in receiving the news and tribute from his minions over a gold-plated telephone with which they’d presented him. In an era when party bosses were almost becoming as extinct as dinosaurs, he flourished. And in a time when county political organizations were weak and divided, he ran one that was superbly disciplined and amazingly well financed. Under Margiotta, the Nassau Republicans were raising a phenomenal two million dollars a year. There was controversy about the way this money was gathered. Margiotta, it was said, tithed the salaries of party workers and took kickbacks from people doing business with the county.
But Sol got on with Margiotta. There was something about power that was seductive to him, and Margiotta had plenty of power. When he told Sol that he would be helping the party out if he ran for the court of appeals and that, because of this, the party would show its appreciation by giving him extensive and unusual support, Sol said yes.
The party needed help in the election because it had been double-crossed by the Democrats. Generally, court of appeals seats weren’t contested. The two parties mutually put up the required number of candidates, thus guaranteeing that whoever was nominated would be elected. But this year—it was early 1972—although there’d been an understanding between the leaders of the two parties that two Democrats and one Republican would be nominated for the three available seats on the court, at the last moment, and after everything had been arranged, the Democratic state chairman had refused to go along with the plan. He’d insisted the Democrats put up all three candidates. The Republicans had balked and said that, in that case, they, too, would nominate three candidates. Three strong candidates. Sol, who had put up such a good fight against Nickerson, had come immediately to mind.
When he said he’d run, Margiotta told him that the party would give him four hundred thousand dollars to spend on television ads. Such a costly media campaign was unheard of in a judicial race. Sol would be making history.
Palm Beach, where the Wolosoffs and the Simonses were trying to put down roots, was still, just as it had been for more than fifty years, the favorite winter playground of the very rich. The twelve-mile sandspit was chockablock with third-generation millionaires married to women thirty years younger and twelve to sixteen inches taller than themselves, as well as with Social Register hostesses who employed their own personal publicity agents, and with business tycoons, world-renowned entertainers, international diplomats, polo players, philanthropists, princesses. Consuelo Vanderbilt had a home there. So did Marjorie Merriweather Post Close Hutton Davies. And the Pulitzers. And the Kimberlys. And the Kennedys. In glamorous mansions, some of which had over a hundred rooms, the celebrated rich entertained one another, as well as the titled and royal from Europe and the Mideast, among them the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Prince Alfonso de Bourbon-Asturias of Spain, and King Hussein of Jordan.
The United States had had a recession in 1971, and the recession had struck Palm Beach. But it had primarily affected people like the stock and bond salesmen who peddled to the celebrated rich and the architects and developers who built modest homes for those who yearned to live in proximity to their glamour. It had hardly touched the celebrated rich themselves. At worst, they were finding themselves forced to live, as one writer put it, “on the interest rather than the interest on the interest.” Unaffected, they continued to give their champagne and caviar cocktail parties, their stone crab and lobster Newburg dinners, their charity balls.
The heady lives of the socialites did not often intersect with those of Palm Beach’s less affluent, albeit very well-to-do, newcomers, who, like the Wolosoffs and the Simonses, occupied the banks of glistening new condominiums that had sprung up on the island in recent years. But in the breasts of many of these occupants—Joy and Jeanette among them—soared the perpetual hope that, in time, paths would cross, invitations would be proffered, friendships would be formed.
The Palm Beach aristocracy mocked the aspirations of the newcomers. In March of 1971, just before the Wolosoffs and Simonses arrived, Palm Beach art gallery owner George E. Vigouroux told The New York Times the sad story of a woman who had a husband worth a hundred million dollars, a collection of very elaborate jewelry, and a white Rolls-Royce in which she made a grand entrance into Palm Beach, only to find herself shunned by the social crowd for a good several years until she “found out finally what was expected of her.”
Nevertheless, Jeanette followed the path of her unhappy predecessor. As soon as she arrived in Palm Beach, she bought a white Rolls-Royce, and she began sporting the expensive jewelry that over the years she had gotten Bibbs to purchase for her at Cartier and David Webb. But although she was properly becoached and begemmed, and properly outfitted in Pucci prints and Gucci shoes, it was difficult for her—and for Joy—to make the right connections, to be invited to the right parties. Joy, whose moods were mercurial and whose temper was turbulent, took Palm Beach’s social snubs badly. Once, anticipating being invited to a particularly desirable ball, she purchased an extremely stylish and expensive gown. When the invitation to the ball never came, in a fit of rage, she tore up the gown.
But gradually, after Joy met and became friendly with several young women who were at the very nexus of Palm Beach’s party-primed life, their social standing improved. Her new friends included Jacquie Kimberly, whose husband, Jim Kimberly, forty-three years older than she, was one of the heirs to the Kimberly-Clark tissue fortune, and Roxanne Dixon, who would soon be married to Herbert “Peter” Pulitzer, Jr., one of the heirs to the Pulitzer newspaper fortune. Jacquie and Roxanne would even
tually be at the center of one of Palm Beach’s most scandalous divorce trials, during which Roxanne would accuse her husband of, among other things, turning her on to cocaine and requiring her to make love in his presence to her best girlfriend, Jacquie. When the trial was over, both Roxanne and Jacquie would no longer enjoy the place in Palm Beach’s highest social circles that they had held in the early 1970s.
But at the time Joy became friendly with them, the scandal was still in the future, and with the support of her new friends, she—and through her, Jeanette—was at last able to crack Palm Beach’s social scene. Getting to know the notorious, like Gregg Dodge—who had been accused in divorce papers of brutally beating her alcoholic husband, automobile heir Horace Dodge, Jr.—and the exquisite, like Susie Hutton—who had given up a career in modeling to marry brokerage heir Willie Hutton—swimming and watching their husbands play golf at the Breakers Country Club, dancing at the Kimberly estate and at Pulitzer’s mansion, and even dining with King Hussein—not just once but several times—Joy and Jeanette began at last to live the life they had always read about in gossip columns.
Still, it seemed to Dick that Joy wasn’t altogether happy, for her exciting new social life required costumes and jewelry that were costly, and he and she were, as always, having fierce battles about money. She complained to him that he was denying her things he could easily afford. He complained to her that she was insatiable when it came to material objects. And when he told her that they couldn’t afford them, she’d say the hell with him, she’d get the money from her mother, for Jeanette was always willing to slip Joy an extra thousand or two, or even five or six. Once, she even sent Joy an envelope with ten thousand dollars in cash in it, a gift to enable her to take a Caribbean cruise with Dick on the QE II.
Jeanette’s generosity irked Dick. He felt her largesse was ruining his marriage, and one day when he and Joy were having a particularly fierce fight over something she wanted to buy, he told her, “You’re not going to get it from me. And if your mother buys it for you, you might as well kiss goodbye to our marriage.” The next day, Bibbs called Dick and invited him to have lunch at the local delicatessen with him and Jeanette.
While they were eating their corned beef sandwiches, he tried to talk Dick into letting Joy have her way. “It’s only money,” he said. “With women, you gotta give ’em what they want. That’s the only way to keep peace in the house.”
“But I don’t have that kind of money,” Dick said, and he stopped eating. “Joy goes through money as if it were water.”
“I’ll give you the money,” Bibbs said.
Just then, Dick felt Jeanette’s hand on his leg. She was slipping him something. An envelope. “Here,” she said, as his hand closed on it. “Just buy Joy whatever she wants. Be happy. Relax.”
Dick put the envelope on the table and opened it. Inside was twenty thousand dollars. The bills were crisp. “These just come out of your safe?” he asked Bibbs.
“What do you care?” his father-in-law said. “Just take it. For Joy’s sake.”
Shaking his head, Dick looked in dismay at his mother-in-law. “You take the money back,” he said, “or I’m going to embarrass you and me both by getting up and throwing it right on the table and walking out.”
“Well.” Jeanette reluctantly took the envelope. “You’re making a mistake.”
“You’re being a fool,” Bibbs said.
“No, this is crazy.” Dick went on eating. “When Joy spends the way she does, and you guys pay for it all, it makes me feel like I’m not the man of my house.” But he couldn’t eat anymore. His heart was burning. “Like I’m a nothing, like I’m, I don’t know, just a chauffeur who sleeps with Joy.”
For a while after that, Bibbs and Jeanette made no more offers of cash to Dick. But the fights between him and Joy continued. He was despondent. She was edgy. And although she was seeing a psychiatrist and receiving tranquilizers, sometimes Dick made her so mad she threw things, not caring what she threw. Once, she pitched a Lalique ashtray across the room. Once, a Steuben-glass vase.
There was something else that was unusual about Joy when she got angry. She didn’t brood on her injuries. She took action. Her father-in-law, Alexander Simons, noticed this one day. He’d been to Italy on a business trip, and he’d promised Joy that while he was there, he would buy her a certain Gucci bag in Milan. But in Italy, he forgot to buy the bag and when he returned and went to visit Joy, he arrived empty-handed. She was furious. He apologized, but she wouldn’t accept his apology and, giving him a belligerent look, reached for the telephone, dialed Gucci in Milan, and ordered the bag.
In Great Neck, Sol had begun to worry that his TV commercials were too low-key. It was 1972, a presidential election year—Nixon was running on the Republican ticket—and Sol had been advised by his handlers that, with a presidential race at the top of the ticket, a whole slew of other races beneath it, and the court of appeals race all the way down on the bottom, he needed to do something to focus attention on himself. He was advertising, but his ads weren’t having enough impact.
One day he met with Sheila Kelley, a political consultant and advertising specialist, to discuss a different direction for his commercials. “What about concentrating on crime?” he asked. “Crime’s on everyone’s mind.” It was true. Nixon had declared a “war on crime,” and a number of national magazines had taken up the chant, pointing out that crime rates were rising, jails becoming overcrowded, and judges growing demoralized. “We’ve got to address this,” Sol said to Kelley, and urged her to find a dramatic way of doing so.
The commercial she came up with was powerful. Sol, wearing his judicial robes, was filmed touring a corridor of cells at the Nassau County jail, slamming a cell door shut with a loud clang and earnestly pledging he’d “get the thieves and muggers and murderers into these cells.”
When the commercial was aired, there was a tremendous outcry from the Democrats. Sol was accused, just as he’d been accused in the Nickerson campaign when he’d employed doctored photographs in his ads, of misleading the public—this time by erroneously suggesting that court of appeals judges dealt directly with criminals. The Bar of the City of New York, a nonpartisan organization, also became enraged and issued a series of ethical guidelines to control future advertisements for judgeships—candidates shouldn’t pose in judicial robes, they recommended, and they shouldn’t run ads that appealed “directly or indirectly to the fear, passion, or prejudice of the electorate.”
Despite the criticism, Sol kept the commercial running. But as the criticism mounted, he began to have second thoughts, and at the end of October, just before the election, he dropped the offending ad.
His change of mind came too late for his critics to forgive him, and afterward a movement to change the way judges got onto the court of appeals began to flourish. Judges shouldn’t run for the top court, influential people said. They should be appointed. Chosen on the basis of their merit. Eventually, this view prevailed and the system was changed. But in the meantime, Sol had been successful in his efforts. In November 1972, he was elected to the court of appeals by a small margin.
In December, Margiotta tried to take all the credit. When a reporter mentioned to the powerful county leader that he’d heard that Sol might someday like to run for a state position such as attorney general, Margiotta said, as if to demonstrate that he and he alone pulled all of Sol’s strings, “Sol has to sit there in that judgeship for a while.”
If Sol was troubled by this, he kept it to himself. In politics, keeping things to oneself is essential, and Sol had mastered that art.
“We should never have left St. Pete,” Dick kept saying to Joy. “We should never have come to Palm Beach.” The tensions in their household were coming to a head, and when Dick’s brother, Steven, announced that in June 1973 he would be getting married, they exploded. The catalyst was Joy’s search for a dress to wear to the wedding, which promised to be very lavish—Steven was marrying a Houston petroleum heiress. Joy w
ent shopping, and one day returned from a foray to the fashionable Martha’s on Worth Avenue to inform Dick she’d found what she wanted. It was a great dress, but it would cost them five thousand dollars.
Dick did a double take. “Five thousand dollars!” he exclaimed. “For a dress to wear to a wedding!”
Joy looked at him archly. Then she said, “Well, Dick, I have to tell you something I haven’t told you. The dress has to be custom made. Because by the time I wear it, it’s going to be a maternity dress.”
Dick was astonished. He hadn’t known she was pregnant. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he asked.
“Because you’ve been in such a bad mood lately. My mother and I thought I should let it go until you were in a better mood.”
He was glad about the baby and told her so. But he was stubborn about the dress. “Cancel it,” he said. “It’s too much money to spend. Especially now that we’re going to have another child.”
The next day, Jeanette called and asked Dick to have lunch with her at Chessler’s, and during lunch, just like the time she’d tried to give him twenty thousand dollars, she pressed an envelope on him. Inside was five thousand dollars. “Joy’s going to have to be in a maternity dress by the time Steven gets married,” Jeanette said, “so you might as well let her have the dress she wants.”
Dick refused. “You’re making me feel like nobody, like a piece of shit,” he said. “You’re ruining my life with your money.”
Jeanette’s response was to tell him that he was ruining Joy’s life by being such a pinchpenny with her and that Joy was convinced he was having an affair. He said he wasn’t, but that he was at his wit’s end in the marriage. “Maybe Joy and I should have a trial separation,” he suggested. “Maybe I should go back to St. Petersburg for a few weeks and we should each try to think things through, figure out what we can do to make the marriage work.”