The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  He liked her too. He’d heard some bad things about her. That she was tough. That she was aggressive. But as far as he was concerned, what she was was strong. Strong women don’t have it easy, he thought. People call them names. They call them bitches. Not him. He liked strong women.

  But unfortunately for the agent, Joy wasn’t interested in him.

  She knew what she wanted. Someone handsome, powerful, rich. Someone who could replace both Sol and Jeffrey in her life. And someone who would be not just a man she could be seen with, but someone she could marry.

  To find him, she enlisted the aid of many people she knew. One of the acquaintances she asked was no help at all. He was William Koeppel, the Republican party leader who had scoffed at her Harmonie Club speech. He still didn’t like Joy, though he’d seen her around more and more often in recent years. He’d even begun hearing around town the unsettling rumor that she was the girlfriend of his idol, George Bush. She must have started the rumor herself, Koeppel thought. To add to her luster. Because she always wanted center stage. Like that time when he’d been to a dinner party at Dan Quayle’s house with her, and just when he and the Vice President had been deep in conversation, Joy had come over and edged him out of the way. “Pushed me out of the way,” he remembered. “No, shoved me out of the way.” So when she questioned him about a widower who was a member of the same exclusive Florida country club to which he belonged, asking, “Is he as rich as they say?” he snapped, “I’m not his accountant.” And when she persisted, asking if he could introduce her to him, he barked, “I’m not his social secretary.”

  But some people were genuinely helpful to Joy in her quest. Larry Bathgate was one of them.

  She ran into him at a luncheon for Barbara Bush at the Plaza Hotel, and leading him to a quiet corner of the room, she said, “You’ve got to find me a man.”

  Bathgate immediately thought of his old friend David Samson. But because he loved to horse around—he had a comic style that was four-fifths Jackie Mason, one-fifth Woody Allen—he asked Joy just what she was looking for in a guy. “Tell me what you want,” he said. “You want short? Tall? Thin? Fat? A basketball player? What?”

  “I want a guy who’s between forty-five and sixty,” Joy said.

  “You want Jewish?”

  “He doesn’t have to be Jewish, but Jewish would be nice. And he’s got to be presentable.”

  “I got the guy,” Bathgate said. “Fifty-two. One of only two named partners at a law firm with eighty partners. Six feet two inches. A hundred and eighty pounds. And blond, with blue eyes.”

  Joy’s eyes lit up. “There is such a guy?” she asked.

  When Bathgate nodded yes, she took out her card and said, “Great. Give him my card.”

  Right after lunch, Bathgate called David Samson. “I’ve got a woman for you,” he said. “She’s terrific. A ten.”

  Samson was pleased, but he announced that he had a dilemma, because he’d just been told about another terrific woman. “Another ten,” he allowed. She’d just broken up with her husband, a proctologist. “Which one should I call first?” he wanted to know.

  “Where does the proctologist’s wife live?”

  “Ninety-second and East End.”

  Joy lived at 83rd and Park, just two blocks from Samson. “Start with the one closest to you,” Bathgate advised. “You can take her out in the neighborhood and walk her home. The other one, you gotta take a cab to get her home. And whaddya do? See her up? Have the cab wait? It’s your first night. Who needs all that pressure?”

  Samson said, “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll call Joy first.”

  But he didn’t call right away. He was busy with other things, and he put her number aside.

  After her conversation with Bathgate, Joy may have begun sending out signals to Sol that she was no longer willing to tolerate his waffling. Or perhaps Sol himself was sick of his indecision, and sick of himself. He told Lauren, who by now knew for certain about his affair, that he was thinking of “breaking up” with Joy. “I can’t leave your mother,” he said. “We have forty years of history together. And you. And the other kids. And now, the grandchildren.”

  Lauren wanted to help him. But she didn’t see how she could. It was a terrible burden to have to counsel a father in a matter of the heart. “You have to make your own decision,” she said.

  Not long afterward, he made one. Or thought he’d made one. It was the same one he’d been making time after time. He would tell Joy he wanted to cool their relationship. But he wanted to tell it to her in person. He called her, and made a date to meet her at Eleanor Sloan’s.

  In Philadelphia, he had a therapy session with Sloan, and then checked into a hotel with Joy. He was feeling resigned. It was clear to him that, for all Eleanor’s therapy, he was no closer than he’d ever been to leaving Joan or giving Joy what she wanted—an open relationship. He told her so, and she wasn’t surprised. “I had the feeling you were going to dump me,” she said.

  For a moment he had the idea that Joy hated him. That she loathed him for not having left Joan. But that was the way it was. He couldn’t. Or at least, he hadn’t. So he tried to make an end to it and even tried to anticipate what would surely come next. “Maybe you ought to start seeing other men,” he said.

  Joy didn’t let on that she’d already been putting out feelers for other men. “I will never,” Sol remembered her saying, “love anyone the way I love you.”

  David Samson had not forgotten about Joy, and one Tuesday afternoon in July, presumably a few days after Joy’s night in Philadelphia with Sol, he telephoned her. Apologizing for calling at the last minute, he said, “You’re probably already busy, but if you’re not, can you go to dinner tonight?”

  Joy, despite being asked at the last moment, said yes with alacrity.

  At eight o’clock, her doorman announced Samson, and she opened the door to her apartment. But as she opened the door, her little dog, Coco, scampered out and began barking fiercely. She tried to restrain him, and she was bending down to scoop the dog into her arms when she saw a pair of men’s shoes in front of her. And above them, trousers. And then, she looked up, and saw David for the first time. “She looked up and there he was,” Larry Bathgate would say later. “A fuckin’ Jewish Adonis.”

  Bathgate, who was privy to the details of their first date, was impressed by how quickly they took to each other. “David took her to Nicola’s, bought her a bottle of wine, and four hours later, they were in love.”

  David had rented a vacation house in Bridgehampton, not far from Joy’s place in Southampton, and over the rest of the summer Joy saw him regularly. She also continued to see Barbara and George Bush, once spending the weekend as their guest at Camp David.

  In the fall, she invited her new boyfriend to accompany her to one of the Bushes’ White House dinners. David more than lived up to her dreams of the ideal escort. When she introduced him to the President, he said he was here just to squire her around, and Bush eyed her appraisingly and joked, “Tough duty!” Then David said, “You don’t know the half of it!” which made the President guffaw. David was perfect. A man she could take anywhere. And a man who was available for marriage. Or who would be, once he got his divorce.

  She didn’t tell Sol, whom she still spoke to frequently on the telephone, that she had a new boyfriend. She just told him she was seeing other people, implying that there was no one for whom she had any special feelings. But after a while, she felt she had to tell him.

  They met for dinner; as always, he’d been worried about being seen with her, and he’d chosen an obscure restaurant in Queens where no one they knew was likely to dine. She told him she’d met a man with whom she’d become seriously involved. She couldn’t help being a little taunting. Sol had put her through hell. So she confessed that her new man was younger and richer than he was. And when Sol complained at her disloyalty—he must have thought that even though he’d suggested she go out with others, nothing would come of it and she’d stay faith
ful to him forever—she reminded him that it was his idea. “You said I should find another man to date,” she told him.

  He kept asking her who the man was. But she refused to identify him.

  Afterward, Sol was bitter. One day she can’t turn around without me, he thought, and the next she’s gone on to someone else. It stopped on a dime. It’s good-bye, Charlie.

  Calling Joy, he badgered her to tell him who her boyfriend was and whether she was sleeping with him, but she wouldn’t answer either question.

  Soon, he started crying whenever he thought about her. And sometimes he cried even when he wasn’t thinking about her. And the more he cried, the more his loss seemed immeasurable.

  He was about to suffer another, different kind of loss too. All year, he’d been lobbying Cuomo and the state legislature in an effort to get more money for the courts. But instead of granting him more money, the governor and the legislators had reduced his allotment, giving him not only millions of dollars less than he’d asked for but millions less than they’d given him the previous year. The cuts were so severe that, he felt certain, he would have to close down civil-trial courtrooms all over the state and lay off five hundred employees. He dreaded having to do that. Just thinking about having to tell people they’d be out of work brought tears to his eyes—but then, he was always weepy these days.

  He’d tried leaning on his old friendship with Cuomo to get him to give him more money. But Cuomo had stopped taking his telephone calls. And the last time he’d tried to reach him, Cuomo had directed his counsel, Elizabeth Moore, to deliver a message from him. The message was that he wasn’t going to give the courts “one cent more.” And, Moore had added, Cuomo had told her to tell Sol not to lobby him personally anymore.

  It was a slap in the face. Another slap in the face. But this one, he decided, he could do something about. He could sue the governor and the legislature, on the grounds that they had violated the state constitution by failing to finance the judiciary adequately. Courts in other states had filed such lawsuits, and a few had been successful. And at the least, Sol told a reporter from the New York Daily News on September 26, a lawsuit would “detail a decade of neglect where now in New York State we have come to accept excessive plea bargaining and lengthy delays.”

  That afternoon, he filed his lawsuit.

  He was still taking Tenuate, and perhaps the medication played a role in his drastic decision to sue. Certainly, when he subsequently went on television to explain why he had filed suit, he seemed manic, fevered, a man whose words raced from his mouth in a pressured profusion. And certainly some reporters covering what quickly got termed a “feud” between the governor and the chief judge noticed that Sol’s behavior was peculiar. “He could not stay seated at his desk and attend to his lunchtime turkey sandwich,” wrote one, Robin Pogrebin in The New York Observer, “since he was constantly jumping up to pace the red carpet, point for emphasis, and pound law books.” But most people, listening to his words and viewing his behavior, attributed his manifestation of manic symptoms to the stressful action he was taking—rather than the other way around.

  Joan was one of the many people who assumed that Sol’s hyperactivity was caused by the strains of the lawsuit against Cuomo. When he was home, which wasn’t often, because he was busy conducting his battle up in Albany, she paid little attention to him. For one thing, he was so supercharged, he was hard to be around. For another, she was particularly busy. Not only was she holding down her job at the Y, but she was doing campaign work again. Her youngest child, Philip, had decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and run for public office, and he was trying to win a seat on the North Hempstead Town Council, just the way Sol had done at the start of his political career. In a way, it was burdensome for Joan, whose job at the Y was increasingly demanding, to have to spend time campaigning. But in another way, it was pleasurable, a return to old times, a nostalgic activity that reminded her of the days when she and Sol had been young and whatever had come between them had not yet reared its head. So every morning she would rise at six, do her exercises and industriously swim laps, and then turn up at the Great Neck Republican party headquarters.

  Randa Pittel, a young attorney who was also working on the campaign, was struck by how unpretentious Joan was, given the fact that her husband was someone Pittel thought of as royalty among judges. She’d once argued a case before him and found him noble, regal, imposing. Joan was different. She came to the headquarters wearing pants and a sweater or T-shirt. She didn’t wear much makeup. And while she looked quite young, she made no bones about the fact that she was a grandmother. Indeed, she seemed enchanted by her grandchild, Philip Wachtler’s little girl, who sometimes came down to the headquarters with her parents. Joan would stop whatever she was doing to cuddle the baby.

  While Joan was working on their son’s campaign, Sol was brooding on his injuries. “Where are you?” he demanded of Joy at the start of the Columbus Day weekend. She’d called him on his car phone after he’d left several messages for her.

  “I’m in the Hamptons,” she replied to his question.

  “I’m on my way out there too. To see my daughter Marjorie.”

  He thought she would invite him to come over and see her. He still hadn’t comprehended that she was finished with him. But all she said was, “That’s nice.”

  “When will you be back in the city?” he asked her next.

  “Sunday night.”

  “I’ll be up in Albany on Sunday,” he said. “I’ll give you a call.”

  On Sunday night, he began telephoning her. He called her apartment in the city. Then he called her house in Southampton. He got no answer at either number, and he called them again and again. Then, after a while, he got upset.

  Was it jealousy that was plaguing him? Could this be the source of his discomfort? No, he was worried about her, he told himself. He was worried that something had happened to her. And to Jessica. Because Jessica wasn’t at either of the numbers, either.

  He began calling her friends, and at last he reached one of them. “She’s probably with David Samson,” her friend said.

  The name meant nothing to him. But when he finally got Joy on the phone the following night, he said angrily, “I know about David Samson. You’ve been sleeping with him, haven’t you? You’ve been spending weekends with him.” Then he wanted to know if she’d taken Jessica with her, and when she said yes, he got moralistic. “You and Jessica were sharing a house with David?” he admonished her. “How could you?”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he recalled her saying defensively. “But let me just tell you something. After David and I were finished, I always went back to the bed next to Jessica’s, and when she got up in the morning, I was always right there beside her.”

  “Yeah, but while you, before you were finished—” he said. And then, his old puritanical self surfacing, he scolded her. “Don’t you think that was—You know she’s fourteen years old, and you’ve known this guy for only two weeks, three weeks.”

  Joy didn’t tell him how long she’d known David. She just said, “Jessica is very mature. She understands these things.”

  Her casualness shocked him. When he and Joy had been seeing each other, they’d avoided making love when they were under the same roof as Jessica. What had been the point of all their care and self-denial, if now her mother was breaking all the rules? But the most important matter on his mind was being with Joy again. He told her he wanted to see her. And once again, she startled him.

  “I would never see two men at the same time,” she said.

  “What about when you were with Jeffrey, and you were having an affair with me?” he argued.

  “That was different,” she said. “I was married.”

  He didn’t understand her, didn’t comprehend the crucial difference between deceiving a newly beloved partner and a no-longer-loved husband. If she had cheated on Jeffrey with him, why couldn’t she cheat on David with him? But there was nothing he
could say to make her change her mind. She didn’t want to see him again.

  She made that even plainer the next time he called her. And she also boasted about her new lover. “David’s handsomer than you,” she said. “He looks like a younger edition of Lloyd Bridges. He has a wonderful athletic build—he’s a real athlete. And he’s richer than you. He earns five times as much money as you.”

  Not long after that conversation, Sol stopped eating, and whenever he went to bed, he tossed and turned for hours.

  PART 3

  “This Judge Is Either Crazy or Criminal”

  CHAPTER 9

  “SOMETHING IS TERRIBLY WRONG [WITH SOL],” JOAN WROTE IN her diary not long after Sol and Joy broke up. “He’s acting strangely. Very depressed, irritable, emotional.… [He went to] Florida [to visit his mother]—came back, told me it was the worst three days of his life—death, old people—he feels he’s dying.… Doesn’t understand what’s happening to him. Feels disassociated with himself. Feels a beautiful day is ugly. Hasn’t slept in weeks even with pills—lost fifteen pounds. Doesn’t eat at all—drug-related?”

  He had told her by then that he thought maybe they ought to separate. He loved her, he said, but he couldn’t live with her any longer—not until he got his head together. He’d even begun moving some of his clothes out of the house. But then he moved them back in. Joan hardly knew what to think.

  But it seemed to her that whatever else might be going on with him, he was depressed. After all, she’d been head of a mental-health clinic for years. She begged him to see a psychiatrist.

  Sol refused. He was afraid, he told her, that if he went to a psychiatrist, news that he had a mental problem might leak out. If it did, his career would be ruined. He’d have no more credibility as a judge, and he’d never be able to run for governor. He’d be stigmatized, like poor Tom Eagleton.

  He didn’t tell Joan that he was already seeing someone in the mental-health field—Eleanor Sloan.