Queen Bess

by Preston, Jennifer

  But Arnold surprised her with his encouragement and support and promises to tutor her in government, politics, and law. In fact it seemed as if her appointment had rekindled their relationship, which had suffered tremendously since their dispute over having a child. “He said, ‘You don’t need the security of the earning power,’” Bess remembered years later.

  The next day Bess called Lindsay and told him she would accept the job. “I thought it would be a fantastic chance to put myself on the line and see if I could deliver,” she said later.

  On February 3, 1969, Lindsay publicly announced her appointment, describing her as a “charming and committed citizen of New York.” Bess needed no introduction to New Yorkers. Almost everyone knew the homegrown beauty queen.

  When reporters questioned her qualifications for the job, Bess turned to her childhood in the Bronx. Growing up during the Depression, the daughter of working-class Jewish immigrants, she explained, made it “simple to identify with people who create a quality of life for themselves with pennies, nickels and dimes.”

  Her appointment came at the height of the consumer movement that was sweeping the country. Prices were rising with inflation, and the public was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of goods and services. With the dollar worth only 77¢ of what it was in 1959, the public was no longer willing to pay for shoddy merchandise.

  Fueled by the populism of the 1960s, the movement had become increasingly aggressive and militant. As individuals became aware of the power of the purse, politicians and businesspeople recognized they could no longer ignore consumers’ demands. In 1968 Councilman Ed Sadowsky led the fight to combine New York City’s Department of Markets with the Department of Licenses to create the Department of Consumer Affairs.

  It was the only municipal agency in the country with the power to issue regulations and impose fines on fraudulent merchants. With a $3 million budget the agency was responsible for licensing more than a hundred types of businesses, ranging from sidewalk cafés to locksmiths. The inspectional force examined thousands of scales every year, checked the flow of gasoline pumps, and enforced city regulations governing price posting and the sale of products.

  Sadowsky was distressed when he first learned that Lindsay was appointing a former beauty queen-turned-television personality to head the new agency. “I made some noise about it: ‘Hey, this is too important to leave to a beauty queen,’” he said. “And hell hath no fury like Bess Myerson scorned. She descended upon me with her then-lawyer, Howard Squadron. They took me out to lunch. It was intended to win me over and explain that despite the fact that she was a beauty queen, she was a woman who had considerable skills and could do this job just fine. It was a pleasant enough experience for me to withdraw any objection. Thereafter, she did get to work at getting a very good comprehensive consumer protection law passed.”

  Bess was very much aware that some people at City Hall and in the press corps did not think she was qualified for the job. “Whipped cream” and “window dressing” and “What does an ex-beauty queen know about consumer affairs?” were among the comments that filtered down to her in the weeks after her appointment. To her dismay, almost all of the newspaper stories about her appointment began with the phrase “Bess Myerson, Miss America 1945.” Accompanying the stories in a couple of newspapers were photographs of her in a bathing suit when she was crowned. Even the august New York Times reported that Bess, during a visit to a city council meeting, “was paid all the honors appropriate to a Miss America.”

  Bess had expected to encounter some difficulty in shattering her beauty queen image. “See, the Miss America title became part of my name. My name was Bess Myerson, former Miss America.… And I thought, well, here we go again. We’re just going to have to dispel that, and we’re going to have to drop ‘former Miss America.’ It had to become Bess Myerson, Commissioner of Consumer Affairs.”

  Soon after her appointment was announced, Bess learned that she would immediately have to establish herself as one tough customer with the mayor’s senior staff. Although Lindsay told Bess that she could hire whomever she wanted without regard to the job candidate’s political party, a top mayoral aide tried to break that promise within weeks of her appointment. The mayoral aide wanted Bess to demand that Simon Lazarus, whom she had just hired as her counsel, change his registration from Democrat to Republican. She refused. “She was very tough,” Lazarus recalled. “He collapsed immediately. It was very clear that she was being tested.”

  In most cases, though, Bess used her charm before displaying the tough, aggressive side of her personality. Sid Davidoff, then a special assistant to the mayor, remembered the first day Bess turned the charm on him. He suspected that she knew he had opposed her hiring, and he expected her to be somewhat hostile to him during their first meeting. Instead Bess caught him off balance by oozing all over him: “‘Oh, you’re Sid Davidoff. Oh, I just didn’t expect anyone so young. I will just adore working with you.’

  “What are you going to do when a former Miss America is standing there telling you that?” Davidoff said. “I was twenty-seven years old. She got me with two blows before I had a chance to respond. She had her agenda. She did not use a club, but she was not afraid to use a club.”

  In the weeks between her appointment on February 3, 1969, and her swearing-in ceremony a month later, Bess immersed herself in consumer protection issues. Victor Marrero, a special assistant to the mayor, put together a three-ring binder that contained detailed explanations about consumer regulations, the organization of the department, and what issues the mayor would like to see pursued. “She mastered it very quickly,” Marrero said. “At no point did we have any doubt about her intelligence and her ability to master the intricacies of the job and the content.”

  Arnold, too, fulfilled his promise to help coach Bess. He suggested they leave New York for Palm Springs, where they could spend a few days free of distractions, studying consumer law and the ways of government. She packed her three-ring binder in a suitcase, along with other reports and papers from the department and a few books, including David Caplovitz’s The Poor Pay More, which detailed abuses in the urban marketplace. Inside her purse was her horoscope, which she had cut out of the paper a few days before: “Come through with what you have promised where your vocation is concerned, and do nothing that jeopardizes your reputation.”

  After a few days, however, she concluded that Arnold was more interested in dominating and controlling her than in helping her become acquainted with consumer law. As they sat by the pool, baking in the hot desert sun with their books and papers, she later complained, he relentlessly drilled her on points of law, consumer issues, and the structure of city government. He gave Bess long lectures and insisted that she take notes so he could later test her recall. She said he also demanded that she keep notes and records of all her daily activities once she took over the agency so that he could review them when she got home.

  By the time of her swearing-in ceremony at City Hall on March 4, 1969, Bess was prepared to deliver an acceptance speech that would erase any doubts about her convictions and ability to defend consumers. Her family and friends squeezed into the Blue Room at City Hall, which was already packed with Lindsay administration officials, reporters, photographers, and television crews. With John Lindsay at her side she opened her speech: “As a native New Yorker, I declare with pride and conviction that this is the greatest city in the United States. It can also be the most difficult.

  “Right, Mayor Lindsay?” She turned to him and smiled. “In my innocence and in this difficult city, I accept the responsibility and the exciting challenge to protect and defend the consumers of the city of New York. I do so with a sense of dedication and the determination to succeed.…”

  She promised to move quickly on consumers’ complaints, seek new laws that would give consumers additional protection in the marketplace, and “identify the culprits and their illegal methods to all the people in the city.”

  Her
lengthy remarks, interrupted by several bursts of applause, won over some skeptical members of the City Hall press corps. The New York Daily News City Hall bureau chief, Edward O’Neill, described her in the next day’s paper as the city’s “new—and tough—commissioner of consumer affairs.”

  Following a small reception held in her honor, Bess left City Hall to begin her first day on the job in the agency’s dingy offices, ten blocks north of City Hall, at 80 Lafayette Street. She sat down with her counsel, Simon Lazarus, and together they went through her mail. Among the piles of letters and invitations was a request from the Better Business Bureau that she speak at an upcoming luncheon. To establish a reputation as a tough defender of consumers, Lazarus suggested that Bess accept the invitation and deliver a speech attacking the Better Business Bureau for “misleading consumers into a false sense of security that prompts them not to demand strong government protection.” By immediately creating an adversarial relationship with the business community, he contended, Bess would ensure that no one would be able to question her commitment to consumers. Bess agreed, and the speech was drafted that week. “Her willingness to do it, I thought, was remarkable,” Lazarus said later.

  Nine days after Bess took office she accompanied Lindsay to the Better Business Bureau’s luncheon at the elegant Plaza Hotel on the southern edge of Central Park. Almost two hundred men filled the room. After the luncheon Lindsay made a few brief remarks, saying that “improving the consumer’s plight is essentially a matter of communications.”

  Then Bess strode up to the podium in a flowing white dress. A hush fell over the room as she opened her speech with a few pleasant remarks and then suddenly changed the tone of her voice. Always the passionate speaker, Bess exhorted her hosts to protect the “fed-up” consumer and to publicize the names of stores that generated “an unusually high proportion of valid complaints.” As she had planned earlier with Lazarus, Bess criticized the bureau for not supporting new consumer protection laws and asked it to work with her to “attack those areas where criminals monopolize and rig the market.”

  “The audience was stunned,” Lazarus said. “Lindsay was sitting next to her. He did not expect it. He was so embarrassed. He was really upset. The reporters were amazed. It made her a fascinating public figure. I’ve worked for politicians who were better on substance than Bess, and I have also worked for politicians who are not as good. There were few who understood and had the guts to do what it took to create a public persona that was respected for leadership, courage, toughness, and so forth. That speech to the Better Business Bureau took a lot of courage. She was taking on significant people.”

  In a single speech Bess had dismissed any speculation that she would be a pushover or a figurehead. A few weeks later she reinforced her position in another speech to a group of industry executives: “You will find that I am tough enough and that my staff is tough enough and that the consumer is going to be even tougher than we are.” She warned that the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs would be “acting as the people’s lobby.”

  Within months Bess became an urban folk hero. The public loved to hear her rail against shoddy merchandise and unscrupulous merchants. Storekeepers were terrified that she would show up unannounced at their stores. They knew that television cameras and reporters would be following right behind her. “She turned out to have this incredible charismatic power,” Lazarus said. “You would get out of the car with her, and mobs were just drawn to her like a magnet. People were fascinated with her.”

  “Her work was brilliant,” said another close aide, Henry J. Stern, who was then a thirty-four-year-old Harvard Law School graduate and assistant city administrator sent over by City Hall to help Bess reorganize the agency and run the department. “She transformed a sleepy agency into a national model of consumer effectiveness. It led to the establishment of dozens of others. She was extraordinary.”

  At the agency Bess surrounded herself with a dedicated, bright young legal staff. Heads rolled within weeks after her arrival at the agency as she fired veteran city employees to make way for the graduates of the country’s best law schools. Working with Stern, Lazarus, and, later, Philip Schrag, a young lawyer who was the chairman of the Mayor’s Advisory Council on Consumer Affairs, she mapped out a strategy to impose some of the toughest consumer protection regulations in the nation and persuade the New York City Council to increase the agency’s enforcement powers. The department’s unofficial motto tacked on her door read: “The impossible we do today. The totally impossible we do tomorrow.”

  Bess realized that she could not fully understand the problems shoppers encountered in the supermarket when a French couple handled all of her grocery shopping and cooking. And so, on some mornings, on her way into the office, she would instruct her driver, Joseph Baum, to stop outside of supermarkets so that she could run inside and inspect the supermarket shelves and the dairy and meat cases. Then she would return to her office full of questions and concerns for Henry Stern, whom she appointed as her first deputy commissioner. “She would find the injustice, and we would find a way to deal with it,” explained Stern, who became the city’s parks commissioner during the Koch administration. “It was a synergistic combination of a real, commanding public figure with devoted lawyers with the technical ability. And people really liked each other’s company and worked late in the evenings. It was like the New Deal in the beginning. The first hundred days of 1933 were like what we did in 1969 with all of these consumer regulations.”

  Bess’s decision to hire bright young lawyers disturbed some veteran employees who thought the “youngsters,” as they called them, were cocky and did not have the experience ultimately to get things accomplished within a huge government bureaucracy. “They were mostly young kids fresh out of college, very well educated, and they looked upon the civil service people as peons,” remembered a former deputy commissioner who was at the department when Bess arrived. “But those were the people who made the department run. They were the heart and soul. They were too old to be insulted by a group of kids. I can’t tell you how many good people packed their bags and left.”

  Moe Greenspan, a retired chief inspector who worked with the agency for more than thirty years, also recalled a schism between the new employees and the old. “There was a tremendous amount of resentment because they came in with the attitude that civil servants were all a lazy bunch of do-nothings and that they knew everything and they were going to run the show. The morale was destroyed. The inspectors did their jobs as professionals, but there wasn’t that little extra.”

  Over the objections of veteran employees, Bess dramatically expanded the public relations staff soon after her arrival. “She kept taking my lines [jobs] for inspectors and hiring people for the public relations office,” said the former deputy commissioner who was at the agency when Bess arrived. “I went into her office and told her that I needed inspectors. She said, ‘I can run this job right from my office with the newspapers and television stations. I don’t need inspectors.’

  “I couldn’t take it,” he said. “I packed it in and left.”

  Others thought Bess was brilliant to use the media to educate the public about the agency’s work and consumer issues. “I think she gave the Department of Consumer Affairs a fantastic reputation,” acknowledged another former top official in the agency who was there when Bess arrived. “Something we couldn’t do. She put us on the map. She gave consumerism a big push.”

  Almost everything Bess did was noted and distributed to reporters. Press releases were cranked out almost daily. Bess had no trouble grabbing headlines or getting invitations to appear on talk shows. She was soon getting as many television and radio appearances as consumer affairs commissioner as she had while working as a full-time television personality. “Whenever she scheduled something, everyone would go,” remembered Rita Delfiner, who covered Bess as a consumer reporter for the New York Post. “You knew that if you covered it, you would get a story. She was really enthusiastic
about it. When consumers got mad at their butcher, they would say, ‘I’m going to tell Bess Myerson on you.’ Merchants were terrified that they would be reported, because she had such clout. That was the kind of mood. She was like everyone’s Molly Goldberg. She was like every consumer’s guardian angel.”

  Within six months of taking office Bess was entreating the state legislature to defeat a bill that would overturn a city law requiring meat to be packaged in transparent wrap. She traveled to Washington to urge Congress to create a federal department of consumer affairs. And she had publicly criticized a toy manufacturer for marketing a pink plastic baby rattle that contained sharp pieces of shrapnel.

  She had sent inspectors into 421 restaurants to investigate whether they were serving “shamburgers,” burgers that were not 100 percent beef. She had launched campaigns against phony veal cutlets, “paper” furniture, and supermarkets that used red lights to make bad meat look red and yellow cellophane to hide spoilage in chickens. She also attacked unlicensed auto mechanics, excessive hospitalization rates, and “fresh” fish that had actually been frozen.

  At Bess’s first public hearing, less than three months after she was sworn into office, she introduced a proposal to impose “unit pricing,” which gives shoppers the item’s price per pound, per ounce, or per foot. And she did it with such drama and entertainment that the newspapers compared the event to an “audience participation show.”

  Flanked by floodlights and twenty-eight boxes of detergent, cans of tuna, and bottles of soda, Bess proceeded to demonstrate the difficulty shoppers faced in choosing the best bargain from a dazzling array of packages and products. She placed three bottles of Mr. Clean on a table and then turned to the audience. “Most people believe that the larger the package, the more economical it is,” she said in her melodic voice, looking directly into the television news cameras. “But often this is not true. Often larger packages cost just as much on a per-ounce basis as the smaller ones. Sometimes they cost more.”