by Linda Wolfe
“I said, ‘Joy, Bush is going to win, and this is great, because now D’Amato is taking all the regular Republicans and putting them on Dole. So you’ll stand out even more as a Bush supporter.’”
She did stand out. “Who is she?” “How come the limo?” Bush campaign staffers wondered when she first started coming down to campaign headquarters at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel. They soon got to know her, for after her first few visits, she turned up almost daily, sometimes doing the most mundane chores such as stuffing envelopes and manning the phone lines. Some of her coworkers found her delightful, a competent and generous woman—she’d send her chauffeur out to buy sandwiches for everyone at her favorite delicatessens. “She was one of the few volunteers you could depend on day in and day out,” Russ Schriefer, the state campaign’s executive director, would one day say. But others were less kind. “She’s a snake,” one woman who worked with her decided. Another woman, whose husband was one of Bush’s financial advisers, concluded, “She’s pushy, and everything she does, she does with an eye toward an appointment.” This woman and her husband were working exceedingly hard for the Vice President, with no personal reward in mind, and it irked her that Joy seemed transparently interested in self-advancement.
Still, whatever others thought of her, Joy worked hard, particularly at raising money. She brought in money for Bush from all sorts of sources, from her wealthy friends, from the designers whose clothes she bought, even from a repairman who came to her home to fix her stereo set. “She sucked him up for one thousand dollars,” Julie Wadler, the New York campaign’s finance director, recalled.
“Today I met someone named Brown,” Joy would tell Sol when next she spoke to him. “Today I met someone named Firestone.” Sol would check into the backgrounds of the people she’d met, tell her who they were, and, if he deemed them important or thought they might be of future political help to her, compose notes to them for her to sign. “It was a pleasure to meet you at lunch the other day…” “I loved talking with you. It’s always a delight to talk to someone who’s so well informed.” She’d put the notes on her own stationery and send them off.
Sol liked writing notes for her. It wasn’t so different from what he used to do, when his kids were little and he’d helped them do their school assignments. So sometimes he didn’t create just simple glad-to-have-met-you communications, but more substantial letters, comments on speeches given by politicians and statesmen Joy told him she’d encountered, reactions to reports about them that had appeared in the press. “I read your interesting and inspiring closing statement,” went a letter Sol wrote for her to send to an acquaintance whose address before a conference on global survival had been reported in a newspaper. “All those present will certainly remember you as well as the leadership you brought.” “You done good,” went a letter he directed her to send to a friend who had taken a controversial political stance in Congress. “Back where I came from, that was the highest praise of all.”
No one to whom she sent his letters guessed that the seasoned New York pol was dictating her correspondence, and Sol threw himself into the task with gusto. “We’re sowing seeds,” he explained to Joy. “You’re casting your bread on the water. This is how you’re going to get recognition. This is how you let them know you have some intelligence.”
She was getting recognition. And meeting more and more interesting people. At a Bush fund-raising luncheon attended by both the Vice President and his wife, Barbara, she met Tania Melich, an influential Republican strategist and consultant. Melich was the organizer of the New York State Republican Family Committee, a committee of Republican women for choice, and Joy agreed to join the group and have her name listed on its stationery. She also met Lawrence E. Bathgate II, a gregarious multimillionaire lawyer and land investor who would soon be named finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. “This is all so exciting,” she confided to Bathgate. “I want to become more involved.”
Bathgate found her charming. “That’s easy enough to do,” he told her. “You just have to give us your time, money, resources.”
Joy’s smile, he remembered, was incandescent.
“How much do you love me?” Joy asked Sol one day. “How much—on a scale of one to ten.”
He said, “Three.”
She didn’t like that very much, and the next time they were together, she asked him again, “How much do you love me? On a scale of one to ten?”
He said, “Four.”
Joy had a psychotherapist. Her name was Eleanor Sloan, and she lived in Philadelphia, practicing there and, whenever she came up to New York to visit her daughter, in Manhattan as well. Sloan was a short, heavyset woman in her late fifties. There was nothing chic or sophisticated about her. She wore ordinary clothes, sensible shoes, had about her none of the trappings of affluence that Joy so admired. But Joy swore by Eleanor, liked her so much that she’d been going to her for years, and had even sent friends and family to her for treatment.
Sloan wasn’t a psychiatrist or a psychologist. But in order to practice psychotherapy in Pennsylvania or New York, training in such fields isn’t necessary. Nor is a license.
Sloan wasn’t the sort of therapist who sits back and listens to a patient and only on occasion offers an interpretation or a suggestion. She was a talker, a bright, directive woman, with strong opinions about what would be best for her clients. It was easy to grow dependent on such a woman—she was like a dear best friend. Or a mother. Joy leaned on her, relied on her for guidance, didn’t just visit her for treatment but telephoned her whenever she had a perplexing decision to make or an attack of anxiety to fend off. Sometimes she called her four or five times a day. Just the way she used to call Jeanette.
Sol ought to see her too, Joy told him not long after they’d begun their affair. Maybe Sloan would be able to help him, because clearly he needed help. He’d stayed married to Joan—whom Joy didn’t think he loved—for thirty-five years.
At Joy’s behest, Sol went to see Sloan. “I’d never been to a therapist before,” he remembered. “Never thought I was in need of one. But Sloan was going to instruct me in how to leave my wife. How best to do it. She said, ‘It will take you two years to leave your wife. That’s how long the process takes.’”
The idea of leaving Joan made Sol uneasy, but he liked going down to Philly to see Sloan in her West Evergreen Avenue office. Afraid of scandal, afraid of Joan’s learning of his disloyalty, he had told no one, not a single friend, that he was having an affair. The need for secrecy oppressed him, made him feel inauthentic, feel like an impersonator, and it was a relief to be with someone who knew his secret.
Besides, Eleanor, as he soon began calling her, had another beneficence to offer him. “She let Joy and me sleep together in her house,” he recalled. “It was a perfect cover for us, because Joy used to say to Jeffrey, ‘I’m going down to Eleanor’s for the weekend,’ and if Jeffrey called, Eleanor would answer the phone and say, ‘Joy’s out.’”
But they didn’t always sleep together in Eleanor’s house. Sometimes they’d stay in a nearby hotel, in Germantown. “Eleanor would make a reservation for me under my assumed name. Which was Sloan. I was Al Sloan.”
By this time, Sol and Joy had grown closer, exchanged all sorts of confidences. She had told him the sexual predilections of all her husbands—he hoped she’d never talk about his. She told him, too, about her relationship with her stepbrother Van, which made him surprisingly jealous, even though it had happened so many years ago, when she was just a girl—he thought maybe it was because they’d spent the night together on his boat, when it was tied up at Bibbs’s dock.
He told her stories about his boyhood and about his father, who’d loved him and wanted to keep him from the taint of business, but who hadn’t really been an affectionate man. She told him about her mother and how much she’d loved her, but that she’d hated the way Jeanette had gone from relationship to relationship before settling down. She didn’t approve of that part
of her mother’s life at all, she said, and she didn’t want to be like her in that respect.
He was touched by her anxieties. One day, when she asked him again, as she was always asking him, “How much do you love me, on a scale of one to ten,” he said, “Ten.”
When he wasn’t with her that spring of 1987, he thought about her all the time, and threw himself into guarding her financial interests. Bibbs had specified in his will that the Kings Point house, where Joy had grown up and Honey had eventually become chatelaine, should be sold and the profits used to bolster his estate. Sol began trying to sell the house. But it had sat empty and unoccupied for several years—Honey was living in Palm Beach—and it had lost the gloss it once had. It needed cleaning, painting, attention. On weekends Sol would go over to the house to see what work needed to be done, and sometimes he hired workmen, but sometimes he did the work himself. He vacuumed the house, and one day he got out tools, crawled outside, and repaired a bit of roof that was caving in. Joan thought he was going to a great deal of unnecessary trouble to spruce up her uncle’s mansion. But houses weren’t moving, he told her, so he had to make it as inviting as possible to potential buyers.
At last, toward the end of 1987, just after the stock market crashed on Black Monday, but before the bottom fell out of local real estate, he managed to sell the house, getting close to five million dollars for it.
One evening around this time, Joan, who was on the board of Long Island University, went to a fund-raising dinner for the school. To her surprise, her stepcousin Joy was there, and the two of them had been placed right next to each other at one of the banquet tables.
Joan made small talk with Joy, whom she hardly knew and hadn’t seen since Bibbs’s death.
Joy chattered back and then began gossiping about a woman on the other side of the table, an acquaintance of hers. Most of her comments were derogatory. Had Joan noticed the way the woman walked, she wanted to know. Had she noticed that her arms looked just like lamb chops?
Joan found her remarks offensive. She disapproved of mocking people, but especially of mocking them for physical characteristics, which she considered matters that were generally beyond a person’s control. When Joy went on making fun of the woman across the way, she couldn’t help thinking, Oh, boy, this Joy is really some piece of work!
Annoyed, Joan turned to the person on her other side, distancing herself from Joy, and as soon as she finished eating, she left the table.
By the spring of 1988, the affair between Sol and Joy was in full bloom, and he was feeling like a new, a young, man. He had for years looked like a young man, having banished his wrinkles with facial surgery. But now there was a new youthfulness in his very step and his high, optimistic spirit. He was also funnier than he had ever been. One night in March, he addressed a group of businessmen in Albany and made them laugh so hard that they begged for time to catch their breath between jokes. “We received a letter not too long ago,” he began, “from a disappointed litigant who said, ‘You judges are stiff-necked, arrogant fools who have no knowledge of the people, and even less knowledge of the law.’”
He paused after that for just the right brief second of time. Then he said, “Well, I say, ‘Picky, picky, picky.’”
The audience guffawed, and he went on to tell jokes about his friends and colleagues. He was so funny and so mischievous that when Governor Cuomo, who had also been invited to address the businessmen, got up to speak, he dubbed his chief judge “Mr. Laughs.”
Joy, too, was in high spirits. For one thing, her political career had taken off. She had become a chairperson of the New York Jewish effort for Bush and helped coordinate a gala Bush fund-raiser at the Plaza Hotel, attended by the Vice President and his wife. Then, in the summer of 1988, she got to play hostess herself to Barbara Bush, throwing a fund-raising dinner for her at Joy’s house in Southampton. She invited only forty-eight guests, set up elaborately appointed dining tables beneath a big white tent in the garden, ordered food from the finest caterers, and saw to it that Mrs. Bush changed tables after each course. Joy’s guests were enchanted by the balmy setting, the exceptional food, and the opportunity to talk intimately with the Vice President’s wife. By the end of the evening, Joy had not only made a friend of Barbara, but raised $135,000.
Her efforts did not go unnoticed. A few weeks after her fund-raiser, she flew down to New Orleans to attend some of the preconvention festivities that signaled the start of the Republican convention. One evening she attended a party thrown by the former ambassador to Austria at a hotel in the French Quarter. The party was a festive one—crowds of conventioneers were drinking ebulliently and eating their way through vast platters of creole shrimp, blackened redfish, and spicy alligator—but her party, Joy soon discovered, was the one people were still talking about, at least the chosen few who had attended both.
“It was intimate, that was the wonderful part of it,” Eric Javits, son of the late senator from New York, Jacob Javits, told her.
“It was the single most successful party for any candidate’s wife anywhere. Ever,” said Bruce Gelb, Bush’s finance co-chairman in New York.
Joy was on her way, was becoming a highly visible member of the Republican political community. One night, back in New York, she attended a Bush fund-raiser at the Harmonie Club, a private club frequented chiefly by Jewish businessmen, and she even made a speech. Standing up and speaking in a quavering voice, she said people were always asking her how she had managed to raise all the money she’d collected for Bush but the fact that she’d done it was as amazing to her as it was to them, because she’d never done this kind of thing before. She said she was just a housewife, but her belief in George Bush was so strong that it carried her through the discomforts of having to ask people for money.
“Ugh. The naiveté shtick,” William Koeppel, a national Republican party leader, remembered thinking as he listened to her. “‘I’m just this little housewife. I’m doing this for God and George Bush.’ If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”
Still, her manner impressed some people. Jonathan Bush, the Vice President’s brother and general chairman of the New York State Republican Party, was one. He invited Joy to accompany him on the campaign trail to upstate cities.
When the campaign was over and Bush had won, Joy, who by that time had not only raised a great deal of money but, with Jeffrey, given the campaign three hundred thousand dollars and lent one hundred thousand dollars for inaugural festivities, told Sol she’d like to go to work for the Republican National Committee. He remembers disapproving. “You have an opportunity now to get something very significant and very important, and you deserve it,” he said to her. “What you should do is try to get yourself an ambassadorship.”
“How could I get anything like an ambassadorship?” she asked.
“Very simple. You took French in high school, didn’t you? You ask to become ambassador to France.”
“You’re teasing. They’d never appoint me ambassador to France.”
“Of course not. But then you ask to be ambassador to Belgium. Or if Belgium’s out, then Luxembourg.”
“They won’t appoint me to Luxembourg, either,” Joy protested.
“That’s right,” Sol said. “But then you pull out a map of the Caribbean.”
She did as he instructed. She asked for Luxembourg. But more than three hundred big contributors to the Republican victory had also submitted requests for ambassadorships, and one of them, an old friend of the President, also wanted Luxembourg. Joy’s interest in becoming ambassador to the little European country was discouraged. But sure enough, just as Sol had anticipated, her friends in the administration began discussing the Caribbean with her. Would she like to represent the administration there? If so, there were two possible spots. Bermuda. And Barbados. But the United States didn’t have an embassy in Bermuda, just a consulate’s office.
So Joy said she’d like Barbados. And, afraid that being identified as pro-choice would harm her chance
s for appointment, she asked to have her name removed from the letterhead of the New York State Republican Family Committee, although she continued to support the group both financially and ideologically.
She was sponsored for the ambassadorship by two of the many prominent men she’d come to know during the campaign, Bruce Gelb and Jonathan Bush, and Sol promised her he’d help her with her application.
She was grateful and wanted to help him too. Why shouldn’t she use her political contacts in Washington to get him a better job than the one he had? Why shouldn’t she try to get him named attorney general? Or, better yet, appointed to the Supreme Court!
There weren’t any vacancies at the start of the Bush administration. But it was clear that shortly there would be. Joy began spreading the word whenever she met with top Republicans that Sol would be an ideal candidate for the highest court.
William Koeppel, who’d listened irritably to Joy when she’d said at the Harmonie Club that she was nothing but a housewife, overheard her promoting Sol. He didn’t know there was a sexual relationship between them. But he knew they were related to each other. Cousins, or something. Relatives of the Long Island builder Bibbs Wolosoff. “Joy’s being made into the family political contact person,” he thought when he heard her pitching Sol. “It’s a family plan to get him to the Supremes. Well, why not. The Rockefellers worked as a family. So did the Kennedys. So now it’s a Jewish family. It’s the Wolosoffs.”
Those were heady days. The two of them working to help each other attain a heart’s desire. For his part, Sol peppered Joy with suggestions about how to prevail at becoming an ambassador, helping her develop a résumé, writing out sample questions that might be asked of her at confirmation hearings, and even composing the answers she should make to the questions. “Question: Do you believe that the current situation in Haiti will have a direct effect on the politics of the Dominican Republic? Answer: My study of the region is ongoing. I have not yet focused on that subject. I will certainly do so immediately, and will submit my response to your question as soon as I am able. Question: Do you think ambassadorships should be sold? Answer: Absolutely not! Question: There are those who might charge that you bought yours. Answer: No one with any regard for our president or his judgment would make such a charge. While there are no specified credentials or criteria for ambassadorial designations, President Bush would not designate someone whom he did not consider eminently qualified and appropriate for appointment. Question: How could the President choose someone with no college degree? Answer: He chose Barbara as his wife. She has no college degree. A college degree is not an essential ingredient for good character and wisdom.”