by Linda Wolfe
In 1981, Mario Cuomo, the lieutenant governor of New York, began to consider challenging his boss, Governor Hugh Carey, and undertaking his own run for governor in the next year’s election. Cuomo had made good friends in Albany, one of whom was Sol Wachtler. The two of them, along with a few other friends, frequently played poker together, and they dined together several times a week. One night early in 1981, they went to a friend’s birthday party. The party lasted long into the night, and there were hours of jokes and discussions. Cuomo came away from the party convinced that Sol was eager to run for governor on the Republican ticket. Would the two of them be up against each other? Cuomo didn’t know, but one thing he did know was that Sol would make a good candidate.
There were plenty of others—plenty of Republicans—who shared that view. Since the last gubernatorial election, Sol had been adding to the luster of his name by writing major decisions in matters that weren’t arcane but affected the lives of many ordinary citizens in the state, and while some judicial experts viewed his decisions as being far too pragmatic and too much influenced by considerations of public opinion, the public naturally applauded them.
In one case, he had written a majority opinion that held that employees who were forced to quit their jobs because of racial intolerance were entitled to back pay. In another, he had written a dissent about a two-year-old boy who had been removed from his foster parents’ care and put up for adoption, even though the foster parents wanted to adopt him. The child had to be taken away, the majority of the court had ruled, because that was the arrangement the foster parents had agreed to when they got the boy. Sol, disagreeing, said that in the pursuit of orderliness, the court had overlooked the interests of the most important person in the case, the child—a decision that garnered so much favorable publicity that although the Department of Social Services in Nassau won the case, they reversed their position and let the boy remain with his foster parents.
In another important case, Sol had disagreed with the majority of the court when it ruled that medical life support for a severely retarded man, whose mother had petitioned his doctors to let him die, could be discontinued. Sol was generally in favor of letting seriously ill people decide if they wanted to go on living, but in this case, where the wishes of the patient couldn’t be determined, he refused to go along with the court, telling his staff that the case reminded him of World War II and the Nazis.
His staff disagreed with him. But Sol held fast—and again, a large segment of the public approved his decision.
Sol had also once again been courting political attention by making speeches wherever he was asked to talk. “We know where crime is born, where it grows and where it thrives,” he had told an audience of lawyers and legislators in December. “It grows in slums amid squalor and poverty. It grows in ignorance and it thrives on hopelessness.” And, “The greatest responsibility for our national welfare does not rest with statutes carved in stone,” he had told an audience of judges, “but with the principles, conscience, and morality of the individuals who constitute this generation and with the judges who have been charged by them with the responsibility of administering the law, free from the passions of the moment and free from the passions of the crowd.”
Some people didn’t like his speeches or even his demeanor at legal and judicial conferences. He had a reverent, even a pious, attitude toward the dignity of his profession, they argued. He was pretentious, and false.
But if he had critics, he had far more admirers. And many of those who admired him believed that he would be an exceedingly effective campaigner—especially if the Republicans had to run someone against the Democrats’ master orator, Mario Cuomo.
Sol, however, didn’t know if he wanted to run. All he knew was that he was restless. He’d been on the court of appeals nearly ten years now, and a certain sameness, a dreadful flatness, had crept into his life. Perhaps part of the burnout he felt was the result not just of doing the same kind of work over and over again but of something deeper, more personal. Perhaps part of his feeling of dullness had to do with the desiccation that was his sexual life. He and Joan had stopped making love. They had stopped altogether.
He didn’t go seeking other women in order to relieve his sexual frustration. He was too afraid of scandal for that—although he may have been intrigued by a woman who, he would one day say, “made a play for me.” She may have been a waitress. While Jeanette was still alive, her sister-in-law Elsie—Joan Wachtler’s mother—told her that her son-in-law was having a dalliance with an Albany waitress named Dorothy, and Jeanette passed the gossip along to Joy.
But according to Sol and those who knew him best, he was celibate, a man who had never put sex at the top of his list of priorities and wasn’t about to do so now. Instead, he kept himself distracted by devising pranks, antic little jokes that amused him and brought a smile to the lips of the people to whom he confided them.
Some of his pranks were harmless little things, like his habit of coming to court wearing toe socks and no shoes under his judicial robes, or his jest of naming the cabin cruiser he kept back home on Long Island Sound the Felony I, and its successor the Felony II. But some of his pranks were not small but elaborate, and not entirely harmless. Like the one he had devised to embarrass Fuchsberg, the judge he had for years detested. Sol and a group of other judges, including Fuchsberg, had been planning to go to dinner, as they often did, at the Century Club in Albany, a club that did not admit women. At the last minute, Fuchsberg had sent word that he wouldn’t be coming. Sol and his fellow judges rendezvoused there anyway, only to discover that a group of Manhattan reporters and photographers were present, recording the names of legislators and judges who were dining in the segregated club.
Sol was convinced that Fuchsberg had gotten wind of the presence of the journalists and that that was why he had canceled—and he was annoyed that Fuchsberg hadn’t alerted the rest of them. So, then and there, Sol devised a bit of vengeance. He asked one of the waiters to page Fuchsberg. Then he directed an upstate judge whose face was not likely to be familiar to the downstate press to answer the page, passing himself off as Fuchsberg. The prank worked. The reporters heard Fuchsberg being paged. Then after a while, they saw a dignified man get up and answer the page. They reported—just as Sol had imagined they would—that Fuchsberg, too, had eaten that night at the segregated club.
Games like these—a member of his staff called them “Sol’s little scams”—had kept him entertained in the past few years. But essentially, he was bored and ready to move on, except that he wasn’t sure he wanted the strain and stress of being a candidate. Having to beg for money. Having fingers pointed in his face. In addition, Joan didn’t want him to run. She didn’t want to take time off from her social work job to go campaigning. She had her own life now.
Still, despite all the negatives, he let the courtship by his party proceed. After all, this time around, Margiotta thought he might be able to make it. He’d tried to get Sol to run and promised him his full support. But Margiotta’s support didn’t have quite the cachet it had had before. The old Nassau power broker had been indicted for mail fraud and extortion. According to prosecutors in the federal district court in Westbury, Long Island, he’d dispensed half-a-million-dollars’ worth of Nassau County insurance commissions to politicians who did little or no work for the money.
In March 1981, Margiotta was put on trial. Sol went to court to testify in his behalf, an event that troubled some of Sol’s friends, one of whom wondered, “Why does my high-minded friend Sol have such a tolerance, even an appetite, for the Margiottas of this world?”
On the stand, Sol was forced to admit that Margiotta had played a prominent role in getting him his seat on the court of appeals. And when the prosecutor then suggested that the corrupt politician would play a leading role in Sol’s life if he sought the Republican nomination for governor next year, Sol must have thought he was in deep trouble, for he said he had no intention of running.
But he
did. He still did. And it wasn’t until September that he finally announced, firmly and definitively, that he had decided not to seek the nomination but to remain on the court of appeals.
By that time, Mario Cuomo had become fairly certain that he was going to run. He had started conducting polls and raising funds. And, according to a widely circulated rumor, he had promised Sol he would name him chief judge when the present chief stepped down in two years. Whether true or false, the gossip in Albany held that this was Cuomo’s way of keeping Sol, whose liberal views were so similar to his own, out of the race.
Bibbs had been broken up about Jeanette’s death, but, in the way of wealthy widowers, he soon enough found solace in the arms of a new attractive woman. Her name was Honey. Tall, dark-haired, and dimpled, she’d been a friend of Jeanette’s. The couple’s was truly a storybook romance, for Bibbs, despite the lawsuits he’d lost and the money he’d lavished on Jeanette, was still a very rich man, and Honey a woman of modest means. She had almost no money, and even less jewelry. Indeed, Jeanette, who had been a generous friend, had been in the habit of letting Honey borrow her baubles to wear to special events. Honey took comfort in Bibbs’s strength and generosity. Bibbs took comfort in Honey’s familiarity and her pleasant nature. And two years after Jeanette’s death, he married her.
CHAPTER 6
BIBBS MADE A NEW WILL SHORTLY AFTER HE MARRIED HONEY. HE left $100,000 in trust for Van, for whom he had already established several large trusts, and nothing to his son James or to James’s daughters. He left Bruce an outright gift of $103,000, and $2,012,000 in trust. He left Joy an outright gift of $100,000, and $2,800,000 in trust. But Honey was the big winner. Bibbs bequeathed to her his seaside apartment in Palm Beach, two of his automobiles, a $3,500,000 trust, and an outright gift of over $4,000,000. He also made her coexecutor of his estate, along with Sol.
Joy didn’t know the terms of Bibbs’s will. But she was aware of the attachment that had sprung up between him and his new wife and worried that, as a result, he might decide not to leave any money to her. “Did he love my mother? Did he really love my mother?” she kept asking a secretary who worked in Bibbs’s office. But Bibbs had loved her mother, and he still cared for his stepdaughter, and when, one day, she asked him to lend Jeffrey a large sum of money so that he could buy some stocks, he agreed to do so.
The stocks were those of a small building-materials company called Ply-Gem. Jeffrey had already invested in the company, but he wanted to take it over. Bibbs lent him the amount he needed to do so, and in 1982, Jeffrey became Ply-Gem’s controlling shareholder.
Not long afterward, through a series of clever acquisitions and the development of new products, Jeffrey built Ply-Gem into a major do-it-yourself home-improvement company, and Joy found herself married, at last, to a very rich man.
Van Wolosoff, who had about him some of the saintly qualities of Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin, wasn’t interested in riches. In 1983 one of the trusts Bibbs had established for him was due to come to its end and deliver to him a sum of more than four million dollars. Bibbs thought his younger son, who was already in his forties, wouldn’t be able to handle that amount of wealth and asked Sol, who was still serving as his adviser, to speak to Van about letting the trust be renewed. Sol, inviting Van to his chambers, did as Bibbs suggested. “What would you do with this money if you came into it?” he asked.
Van pointed to a court officer who was assigned to guard Sol, and said, “I’d give it to him.”
Sol wasn’t sure Van had altogether understood his question. “You’d give him four million dollars?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes,” Van said. “I just want enough money to live on, a couple of hundred dollars a month. That’s all I want.”
The rest of Bibbs’s children were not eager to live as frugally as Van, and after he’d been married to Honey for a while, Bibbs got increasingly annoyed with the way they were draining his estate. Especially Joy—according to Sol. He remembered Bibbs saying to him in 1984, in a phrase inadvertently echoing what Dick Simons had complained of years earlier, “If you give her a million dollars today, she’ll be broke tomorrow.” One day that year, Bibbs decided to make yet another new will, this one reducing Joy’s share of his estate considerably, and he asked Shea and Gould, the law firm that handled his estate, to draw it up.
The new will was drafted but never signed. On a hot summer’s day, not long after he’d given instructions about the document, Bibbs decided to cool off by taking a swim in his shimmering pool. He put on his bathing trunks and headed through the kitchen for the pool. Suddenly he felt something grip his chest. He couldn’t stand, let alone walk. A moment later, he collapsed on the kitchen floor. And shortly afterward, a doctor pronounced him dead, the victim of a massive heart attack.
Sol went to Bibbs’s funeral, a big one that was held at the Nassau North Chapel in Great Neck. He paid his respects to the grieving widow and said a few comforting words to each of the children. One of them he hardly remembered. It was the girl. Jeanette’s daughter, Joy. He hadn’t seen her for, to his best recollection, nearly twenty years. She had changed. Grown chic in her middle thirties. Sophisticated.
He saw her again several days later when he went to Bibbs’s house to pay a condolence call. He had his daughters Alison and Lauren with him, but he left them downstairs and went upstairs with Van, Bruce, and Joy to tell them about Bibbs’s will. They all sat down on the bed in Van’s room, and he told them the extent of the estate, what their shares of it were going to be, and that he and Honey would be the cotrustees.
Joy—Sol would one day recall—exploded at the news. “Why Honey?” she cried. “Why should Honey be cotrustee?”
He started to explain, but she interrupted, saying, “That’s ridiculous! That’s absurd!”
The terms of the will, he started to tell her.
“Why should I have to go to Honey for money!” she exclaimed. “Honey? You mean, I have to be responsible to Honey?”
He wondered how she would have reacted if the will he was telling her about had been the new one instead, the one cutting her out almost entirely. As it was, his cousin Joy was so upset and excited, she appeared to be hyperventilating. It was only after a while that she calmed down. But at last she did, and went downstairs and made small talk with his daughters about her astrologist.
In December 1984, Lawrence Cooke, the chief judge of the court of appeals, retired from the bench, and Mario Cuomo, now the governor of New York, appointed Sol to replace him. The job of chief judge was an exceedingly important one in New York, and entailed not only presiding over the court of appeals but administering the state’s huge court system, in which there were some three thousand judges and twelve thousand nonjudicial employees. Sol’s name had been on a list of seven worthy candidates who had been suggested by a judicial nominating commission, but the governor’s advisers had given serious consideration to only two of the people on the list—Sol and Milton Mollen, presiding judge of one of the state’s appellate divisions.
Both men had been checked out thoroughly, one senior adviser recalled, and nothing but good had been heard about either one, so the advisory team had been at a loss as to which of them would be the best choice. But the senior adviser began pushing for Sol. There was a downside to Mollen, he argued. Mollen was a friend of the corrupt Brooklyn political boss Meade Esposito. Sol was a friend of a corrupt political boss too—the now out-of-jail Margiotta. But Margiotta wasn’t as bad as Esposito, the adviser contended. And besides, choosing Sol would make Cuomo look good, because Sol was a Republican, and it would show that the governor was above petty partisan politics.
Cuomo may have been influenced by this view. Or he may have chosen Sol simply because, as he explained in a radio interview, “If you look at the law [governing the requirements for the job of chief judge], it speaks in terms of experience. Judicial aptitude. Character. I think that on every criterion Wachtler scored higher than everybody else.”
Whatever
Cuomo’s reasons, his choice was met with great enthusiasm, and on January 1, 1985, Sol Wachtler became New York State’s chief judge.
At the time Sol began heading up the court of appeals, Joy was leading a life that resembled that of the majority of American women in the 1950s, but not that of many women, at least those of her age and economic background, in the 1980s. Daytimes, she shopped, attended to her beauty needs, visited her astrologist and her psychic, lunched with friends, and mothered her children. Evan was fifteen now, Jessica seven. As often as she could, Joy would escort Jessica home from school, driving to her private academy, Nightingale-Bamford, in Jeffrey’s stretch limousine and scooping her into the vehicle the moment she was dismissed—rather, the mother of one of Jessica’s classmates thought, as if the little girl were a princess or a child film star.
Evenings, Joy went to dinner parties and to the theater with Jeffrey or entertained his friends and business colleagues at home. But Jeffrey was often out of town. When he was, she spent a lot of time in her bedroom, watching TV.
She wasn’t happy, and she complained about her life to certain friends. “There are a lot of things I want that I don’t have,” she said to one, a young lawyer named Kathy Greenberg, who worked at Shea and Gould, where she handled the details of Bibbs’s estate.
The two women were lunching at the expensive and exclusive Le Cirque, and amid all the restaurant’s posh and plenty, Joy’s negativism struck Kathy as unnecessarily self-pitying. “You have everything, Joy,” she told her.
“You mean everything money can buy?” Joy responded, gloomy.
“No, not just everything money can buy. You also have all the things money can’t buy. Children. A husband. Love.”