The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Barbados on her mind, Joy wanted to go down to the tropics and check out the island. She’d look over the ambassadorial residence and see if there was a good school for Jessica. She told Sol, who didn’t think she should go. Not before she was confirmed. But she flew down, anyway. And she must have come home dissatisfied with what she’d seen, for sometime after her visit, Jeffrey, too, went down to check things out.

  He definitely didn’t like what he saw. The ambassador’s mansion is too small for our family’s needs, he thought. And besides, it needs refurbishing.

  After seeing it, he arranged with the State Department’s help to rent a second residence, a charming little house adjoining the ambassador’s mansion. That way, he figured, he and Joy would be able to house Jessica’s nanny separately, and they’d have enough space for his children from his first marriage when they came down to visit. He also indicated to the State Department that he’d fix up the mansion, make it more presentable, and pay for the redecoration out of his own pocket.

  Joy was still working on the biographical papers she’d need to submit to her sponsors before her nomination could become official. One Monday morning, she traveled to Albany to work on the papers with Sol. He took her to his chambers once again, but this time during working hours, and, explaining to his staff that she was a relative and that she would be sitting at his desk and doing some work while he was at conference, asked the staff to take good care of her.

  She looks dangerous, one of the staff members thought. She’s so decked out, it’s like she’s in battle dress for the war of the sexes.

  It didn’t occur to him that Sol was having an affair with her. Sol, he believed, was the soul of rectitude when it came to marriage. He always said affairs weren’t worth it, always joked that the screwing you got wasn’t worth the screwing you’d get. Still, there was something troubling about the woman. Her clothes and jewelry fairly reek of money, the staff member thought. Her face and hair and outfit look as if they’d set her back by a fortune. And she was terribly ingratiating with Sol. Fawned all over him.

  The staff member was relieved when, at lunchtime, Sol came back to his chambers and he and the woman left.

  But then, after lunch, there she was again. In fact, she was there all week. Every morning, she’d arrive with Sol at ten A.M., sit in his chambers while he went to conference, go out to lunch with him, then sit at his desk while he went on the bench. Then, they’d leave together at day’s end.

  Was Joy in love with him? Sol thought so. “She gave the impression of total commitment,” he remembered. “And total reliance. She didn’t write a letter, she didn’t go out, she didn’t do anything without calling me first and checking to see if it was all right. She used to call me seven, eight times a day. Drove my law clerks crazy—because no one else was allowed to do that. Some days I would take no calls except from Joy or my family. I used to say to her, ‘Joy, the one thing that’s going to break us up is going to be the telephone.’ She’d say, ‘Well, I can’t help it. I don’t get to see you as much as I want, so I have to speak to you on the phone.’” It sounded like love to him.

  But was he in love with her? After the day he’d finally answered her familiar question, “How much do you love me, on a scale of one to ten,” by saying, “Ten,” she’d changed the question, next asking him, “But are you in love with me? How much are you in love with me—on a scale of one to ten?” The game embarrassed him, made him feel like a silly teenager. But the question began to haunt him. Was he in love with her? Certainly, they were doing the things that people in love did—not just the sexual things, but the romantic ones, the revelatory ones, the things that had to do with nostalgia and loss and history. She’d gotten him to drive her to Lake Hiawatha in New Jersey, where she’d used to visit her grandmother, Jeanette’s mother, when she was a little girl. They’d laughed in amazement to discover there was no longer a lake at Lake Hiawatha. He’d taken her out to Brooklyn, to the neighborhood in which his grandparents had lived and in which he’d spent his summers when he was a teenager, traveling up from the South to visit aunts and uncles and cousins. He’d shown her the crowded streets on which he used to play and told her how at night, he and the cousins had slept on cots scattered helter-skelter throughout the apartment, and he’d taken her out for cold cuts at a local delicatessen whose spicy smells and pungent tastes he had never forgotten. Had he ever taken Joan to his old neighborhood? Had she ever asked to see it? He didn’t think so.

  At the end of April 1989, Sol and Joy attended a gala ceremony in Manhattan commemorating the first inauguration of George Washington. It was held under a sky raining balloons and confetti at Federal Hall on Wall Street, right where Washington himself had once stood, and every dignitary imaginable had flown into town for the occasion. The governor had come. And New York’s two senators. And the secretary of the army. And even the President. Joy, who had by then developed a solid friendship with Barbara Bush, had ridden out to the airport to meet the President’s plane and be part of his escort into the city. But Sol felt it was his show. He was one of the chairmen of the event.

  The two thousand VIPs who were to take part in the ceremony—not just politicians but Hollywood stars, world-renowned writers, and the descendants of former presidents—had all been given reserved seats. But as a principal in the event, Sol had one of the best, and he’d arranged to have Joy sit alongside him, right in the middle of the dais. He was feeling splendid that day, proud and happy and complete, as if life had granted him everything he’d ever wanted. Joy seemed exceedingly happy too. When she saw Steve Ross, the chairman of Warner Communications, sitting way off in a corner, she whispered to Sol, “I’ve got a better seat than he does!” Then she went over to Ross to say hello. Sol saw her standing beside him and saw her take the silk of his tie between her fingers and begin fondling it. But it didn’t make him jealous. It just made him think how remarkable Joy was with men. How sensual she was. How sexual.

  He wasn’t jealous, because she was his. The day was, for him, the pinnacle of their love.

  CHAPTER 8

  “I LOVE GEORGE BUSH,” JOY CONFIDED TO A WOMAN WHOSE CHILD went to Nightingale with Jessica, not long after the George Washington inaugural commemoration. “I love him. He’s given me my life.”

  She had become a frequent guest at the White House ever since he’d been elected. But as the summer of 1989 approached, she began to grow uneasy. Her sponsors for the ambassadorship had begun hinting to her that her résumé, with its lack of a job history or even a college degree, might be a problem. The press had begun attacking her—she was, wrote The Washington Post, a “major exhibit” in the Bush team’s tendency to name as ambassadors “political appointees with few or no qualifications outside of support for Bush or wealth given freely to the GOP.” “I’m caught in a web in Washington,” she complained to Andrew Stein, then president of New York’s City Council, who advised her to get in touch with Phil Friedman, a political consultant who had helped him out in the past.

  Phil Friedman didn’t work on Joy’s ambassadorship, but he became one of her closest friends. He gave her advice, listened to her worries, comforted and consoled her. He’d heard that George Bush was entranced by her, and he could see why. She’s fun, he thought. She makes everything around her fun.

  Phil also thought there’d never been anyone in the world quite like her.

  She always entertained him in her bedroom, never anywhere else in the apartment, and she’d wander around the room wearing every variety of dishabille imaginable. She preferred not having to get dressed, even though she had a veritable store-load of dresses—there was a wall of walk-in closets in her bedroom that was so big it was like a concourse.

  Her favorite item of apparel was jewelry. Once, he went down to Washington with her and stayed in the same hotel, where Joy, who was going to dinner at the White House, had stored her jewelry in a safe-deposit box. She asked Phil to come and have a look at it, and he’d never seen anyone carry on about anything the
way she did about the jewelry. “Look at this! Look at that!” she kept saying, flashing one gem after another at him. And her eyes were as bright as the stones.

  Often, when Phil visited her at home, she’d invite him to linger in the bedroom and watch TV with her. Her favorite activity was watching old movies. She could watch for hours. But he found the pastime boring and would excuse himself and go home. Even so, she’d want him to watch “with” her. So she’d call him up, and he’d turn on his own set, and they’d talk on the phone a bit, and then watch their screens, and then talk on the phone some more, and then watch some more. Sometimes ten or fifteen minutes would go by without either of them saying anything into the phone, and then one of them would say, “That was great! Did you see that? Did you hear that line?”

  One day, Joy told him that she thought her husband was having an affair. “Catting around” was how she put it. She expressed strong indignation at the proclivity of husbands to cheat on their wives and sounded so miserable about her own husband’s having done so that Phil was deeply touched by her predicament.

  By the fall of 1989, Joy’s chances of winning the ambassadorship were looking slimmer and slimmer. She’d become something of a cause célèbre in Washington, where the press had used her lack of a foreign service background, or even a college degree, to beat up on George Bush. They’d criticized her, too, for having complained that the ambassadorial residence on Barbados was inadequate and for having gone out and rented a second residence there. (She defended herself by saying it hadn’t been she, but her husband, who’d done these things.) In a last-ditch effort to obtain the position, Joy visited many of the Democratic senators who would have to vote on her nomination.

  Most of the time, the visits went well. But sometimes they went poorly, and afterward Joy would get depressed or hysterical. She’d call Sol in New York and say, “I’m lying here in a pool of blood.”

  He knew the expression was just a metaphor. He knew that Joy liked to imbue her life with high drama and keen tragedy. Still, when she spoke like that, he’d tell Joan he had an appointment with this senator or that, then rush to the shuttle and fly down to Washington to be with Joy.

  “I helped her in other ways too,” he recalled. “I made calls and wrote letters—one, to an organization of former diplomats. They’d just evaluated Joy’s application, and they concluded she wasn’t qualified to be an ambassador. After I wrote them, they promised they’d reevaluate her credentials.”

  He also continued to prepare her for the Senate hearings she would soon have to undergo. “I wrote a statement for her to give to the Senate that would explain why she didn’t have a career. The explanation we presented was that because she’d had no proper family—she’d told me her father left her mother when she was three years old—she’d made up her mind that she was not going to do that to her children, and that she was going to stay by them, in steadfast fashion, and if the senators wanted to punish her for that, so be it.”

  He was still very excited by the idea of his relationship with Joy. He’d even told her that once she was named ambassador, he would start divorce proceedings, and that when her diplomatic assignment came to an end, he would marry her.

  But did he really want to marry her? There were times when he wasn’t sure. In part, it was because of Joan. In part, it was because he still harbored in his mind the idea that one of these days he would run for governor, and he feared that being a divorced candidate would hamper him. But in part, it also had to do with his feelings about Joy herself. He loved her, he thought. But he didn’t always like her. “She had a terrible mouth on her,” he would one day recall. “Once, I said I’d meet her at the Algonquin, and I was maybe five minutes late, and she started calling me on my car phone and screaming so loudly that I was afraid my driver would hear her. ‘How dare you keep me waiting?’ she screamed. ‘Joy, please,’ I said. ‘It’ll only be five more minutes, for God’s sake. The FDR Drive is all tied up.’ ‘Get off the fucking drive!’ she shouted. Jesus, she was terrible.”

  But on the other hand, he found her fun. He enjoyed “the laughter. And the adoration. She would say things like, ‘There’s no one, there is no one, who speaks like you. You’re so brilliant. You’re so bright.’” He relished that.

  But marry her? Leave Joan after all these years? He just wasn’t sure.

  Sometimes he felt he was lying to both of the women in his life, lying to Joan and Joy. And when he felt that, he experienced a wave of guilt and self-loathing.

  In November, Joy’s nomination was blocked. Senator Paul Sarbanes argued before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Joy had no credentials for the post she was seeking. “There is no there, there,” he said of her résumé. And in the end, Joy had to withdraw her application.

  She was crushed, and to some extent, she blamed Sol for her defeat. “Whenever you take his advice,” she complained to a friend, “it doesn’t work.” But despite the fact that she was beginning to notice that Sol had feet of clay, she clung to him, for shortly after she withdrew her application, she decided to end her third marriage. She told people she’d gotten proof positive that Jeffrey had been having an affair, and said she didn’t want to live with a man who was two-timing her.

  “It’s absolutely untrue that I had an affair,” Jeffrey Silverman would say years later. “I know she told people I did, maybe to justify her affair with Sol.”

  In any event, Jeffrey moved out, taking rooms in a hotel, and she hired a prominent matrimonial lawyer—an old friend of Sol’s named Norman Sheresky. As she’d presented it several times to others, she said to Sheresky that her husband had cheated on her and didn’t mention her own adulterous affair.

  Once Jeffrey was out of the picture, Joy began to urge Sol to marry her, and she suggested that if he wasn’t yet ready for that step, at least they should change the old terms of their relationship and start going out together publicly. She didn’t want to be a backdoor woman any longer, she told him. She didn’t want to sneak around corners and pretend she was nothing to him but a distant relative.

  Joy dearly wanted respectability for a number of reasons. First, she had children, and she didn’t want them tainted by scandal. Then, there was her mother, whose voice she could still hear in her mind’s ear, saying that what counted with men was getting them to the altar. And finally, there was her career—for by now, she had one. She had a career in politics, and even though she wasn’t going to be an ambassador, her future looked bright. The President was her fan.

  On January 2, 1990, Bush wrote her a note apologizing for her having had a bad 1989 “because of the spot I put you in” and assuring her that she had been “magnificent, head-high, knowledgeable.” In February, he named her to the Kennedy Center board of trustees, a position that did not require Senate confirmation. And on March 16, he wrote her a letter telling her he was sure she would do her “usual great job” in her new position. The letter must have satisfied the yearning for attention and approbation that had haunted her ever since she’d been a fatherless girl growing up as a poor relation on Bibbs’s estate, for with eerie foreshadowing, Bush also said he was certain that “the nation and the world have yet to hear the last of Joy Silverman.”

  If Joy was sick of secrecy, Sol wasn’t. For one thing, there was Joan. For another, his children. For a third, his career. He was more in the public eye than ever, largely as the result of a dispute he was having with Cuomo. The dispute was over the state’s financial budget for the judiciary—Sol wanted an increase in the funds allotted to the courts and a ten percent raise for judges, and the governor wanted to pay for these changes by raising civil court filing fees. “The courts are not for raising revenue,” Sol had lashed out at Cuomo when he heard this. “They are for administering justice.” “I differ with the chief judge on fees,” Cuomo had said. “I differ with the chief judge on raises. You just can’t do it this year.”

  The scuttlebutt in Albany was that Sol had stirred up the clash with Cuomo because he wanted to
run against him for governor in the fall of 1990. But that was unlikely. It was clear that in that election, Cuomo was going to be invincible. If Sol had a motive other than true dismay at the governor’s plan, it was more likely that he was currying favor with Joy’s contacts in Washington. Cuomo was expected to run against Bush for president in 1992, and anyone who took him on would be making himself look good in the White House.

  In any event, and whatever his reasons, by the spring of 1990, Sol was at war with his old friend Cuomo. And the fighting threatened to get worse. “There are differences,” Sol told one reporter. “And there are going to be more differences.”

  Yet despite the attention that was increasingly being paid to him by the press, he at last acquiesced to Joy’s yearning to feel more like a sweetheart and less like a shameful secret. They would, he agreed, go out on dates with other people.

  There were several who already knew about their relationship. There was Joy’s friend Paola, of course. And the psychotherapist Eleanor Sloan. There was also Eleanor’s daughter, Heather, in whose New York apartment Eleanor occasionally practiced and in which Joy and Sol had occasionally spent the night together.

  Additionally, Joy had told her brother, Bruce, and Sol had told his brother, Morty. He had told him because Morty had gone into the jewelry business, just like their father, and Sol needed to buy jewelry. He needed to, Sol said, because Joy had made it clear that she expected gems from her admirers. Unabashedly, she’d presented him with catalogues from Van Cleef and Arpels and other stores. He hadn’t wanted to shop retail, so he’d gone to Morty to make his purchases.