Queen Bess
Page 12
Then she announced the contents and prices of each of the three bottles and called for a show of hands from the fifty people seated in the audience to indicate which they thought was the best value. After most people chose the largest bottle, Bess paused dramatically and then revealed that the midsized bottle was the best bargain. Similar demonstrations followed.
Among the speakers who came to testify in favor of the proposed regulation that morning was Ed Koch, the brash, newly elected congressman from Greenwich Village who would later become mayor of New York. Koch and Myerson had met through her top aide, Henry Stern. Koch and Myerson soon came to admire each other’s political style.
At the hearing Koch urged Bess to move ahead with unit pricing and let “New York City lead the way in consumer protection and give us in Congress an example for the nation.…” He continued, “I would like, also, to commend Commissioner Bess Myerson Grant for her initiative and her enthusiasm. She is devoting herself without reservation and without fear to the consumer interest.”
It was Bess Myerson’s devotion “without reservation and without fear” that troubled some prominent businesspeople and industry groups. Unit pricing was the first of her initiatives to come under attack. Food merchants’ associations threatened to bring a lawsuit should the regulation take effect. And Irving Stern, a member of the Mayor’s Advisory Council on Consumer Affairs, publicly criticized Bess for failing to do her homework. Stern, who was also a vice president of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union, scolded her for not learning how much it would cost storekeepers to comply with the regulation and what impact the compliance would have on shopping bills. The industry estimated the proposal would cost $50 million to implement.
Instead of waiting for the city council to pass legislation requiring unit pricing, Bess decided to go ahead and issue a regulation that imposed it citywide. The supermarket and food industry responded with a lawsuit that prevented the city from enforcing it. But Bess had raised public consciousness about the issue, so there was enough political pressure on the council to get unit pricing legislation approved. Unit pricing soon became New York City law and a model for cities and states around the country.
The city council was reluctant to move forward on other pieces of consumer legislation in 1969, but Bess’s popularity had made her a formidable adversary; it was almost impossible for the council to ignore her requests.
Working with Philip Schrag, Bess achieved her biggest victory with the city council during her first year in office. The Consumer Protection Act of 1969 was the most important legislation created during her tenure. Without the law the department could only impose a fine against swindlers. Moreover, the city could neither recover money for consumers nor stop the swindlers from continuing their unlawful methods. The legislation would outlaw all “deceptive” and “unconscionable” transactions and enable the city to seek civil penalties, criminal fines, and mass restitution on behalf of all victims of fraud in the city.
After intensive lobbying efforts, the bill was approved and signed into law on December 30, 1969. A single sentence—“No person shall engage in any deceptive or unconscionable trade practice in the sale, lease, rental or loan or in the offering for sale, lease, rental or loan of any consumer goods or services or in the collection of debts”—made it the toughest consumer legislation in the land.
Bess worked long, hard hours that first year in office, remembered her driver, Joseph Baum: “The hours were ridiculous. It never stopped. It went into the night.”
She gave away her season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. All she wanted to do when she returned home late in the evening was to play her baby grand piano or curl up with a book from their “Kennedy library,” which she contended held “every book ever written about the Kennedy family.”
She was so wrapped up in her job that she did not have the time to worry about her deteriorating relationship with Arnold. Even so, she could not completely block out Arnold’s constant complaints that she was never available to accompany him to parties and events. She said he would lash out at her by questioning her decisions at work and criticizing her public statements. She did, however, occasionally try to accede to her husband’s wishes that she be by his side at public events. Joseph Baum remembered the night Arnold Grant wanted Bess to join him at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for a dinner—the same night as the department’s annual retirement dinner in Queens. Bess told Baum she thought it was important that she, as the new commissioner, make an appearance at her department’s event. On her way home from the office she asked him for advice, and he told her not to worry about the retirement dinner. He suggested that she send a telegram.
After they swung by Arnold’s office and picked him up, Bess decided to mention the Queens retirement dinner to him and explain why she felt she should go. When they pulled up at 25 Sutton Place, Arnold told Baum to wait outside. “We’re going to talk this thing over,” Baum said Grant told him.
Baum waited outside Sutton Place for almost an hour. Then Bess emerged wearing an evening dress. Arnold was in a tuxedo. They got into the car, and Arnold directed Baum to take them to the Waldorf. “And then he said to me in the car, ‘Look, Joe, you come back to the Waldorf at nine o’clock. Pick up the commissioner and take her to this retirement dinner, but I want her back at ten o’clock.’”
Baum picked up Bess at nine. He raced her over the 59th Street Bridge to the retirement dinner in Queens. “Then I got her out of there, and I raced her back to the Waldorf, and just before we got there, she said, ‘Joe, you have to see what I walked out of. Come up to the ballroom.’
“So I did. You know what it was? It was the Friars, and they were honoring Barbra Streisand. I stood against the wall because there were no seats at any of the tables. I stayed just a short time. It just didn’t look right, my standing there. When I saw her the next day, she said to me, ‘Do you know what you did?’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘You walked out on Streisand. She sang, “People.”’”
When Bess learned a few weeks later that Streisand was to perform at a fund-raiser for Lindsay, she arranged for Baum to have a front-row seat. Baum said it wasn’t the only kindness Bess showed him and his family. Years later, after she left the Department of Consumer Affairs, she called Baum when she heard Pope John Paul I was to visit New York. “She knew that my wife was Polish Catholic. She said to me, ‘Joe, Olga has to see the pope.’ She arranged it, and we went to the Mass at Yankee Stadium. It was very nice. These are the things she would do. She was that way.”
“She did an enormous amount of good for people along the way,” said Henry Stern, who was her closest aide and who has remained a close and loyal friend over the years. “All kinds of minor kindnesses and interventions in people’s personal lives that nobody else does. This was a person who went out of her way to perform an extraordinary number of kindnesses for people from different walks of life.”
Not everyone who worked with her at the Department of Consumer Affairs would agree. Some staff members saw her efforts to be nice as calculating and manipulative. Others remember her as demanding, imperious, and arrogant, with little regard for other people’s schedules and feelings. They say she was chronically late for appointments and could often be heard screaming at typists and clerks.
One former deputy commissioner remembers the time he tried to explain to Bess that she could not go ahead and order thousands of buttons with the agency’s new logo—“Wise Up!”—without getting the expenditure approved through the proper budgetary channels. He said he was shocked at her reaction: “She called up Mayor Lindsay, right in front of me, and said, ‘Who do I have to lay to get these buttons paid for?’
“This is my great commissioner,” said the former aide in disgust. “Anyway, Mayor Lindsay got the money for her.”
Within months after she had arrived, her popularity with the public and the press enabled her to get almost anything that she wanted from City Hall. “She was clearly independent. There were no
reins on her,” recalled Sid Davidoff, who helped manage Lindsay’s 1969 reelection campaign. “She didn’t always carry the political message we would have liked. But when the chips were down, when John needed her, she was there.”
In the fall of 1969 Bess had decided to campaign on Lindsay’s behalf. Together out on the hustings, they were a campaign manager’s dream, Davidoff said. “No negatives at all. He had that star quality, and Bess Myerson shared the spotlight. She was just spectacular out there. She was the fighter for the little guy, the little person buying in that supermarket. A former Miss America. Everyone wanted to see her and touch her. It was an exciting thing to see.”
A few days after the November general election Bess flew alone to London, England, to visit her daughter, Barra, who had left Bryn Mawr to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Arnold was funding her training over Bess’s objections to Barra’s decision to pursue an acting career.
In London, away from Arnold, Bess told a close friend that she was hoping to be able to reach a decision about her marriage. Her husband’s earlier involvement in her job as commissioner had seemed to alleviate some of their personal problems, but the tension at Sutton Place had increased in the seven months since her appointment. Her feeling a year ago that remarrying Arnold had been a terrible mistake was now a strong conviction. Maybe, when she returned from London, Bess would summon her courage to ask him for a divorce and leave the financial security that he represented behind.
14
For Love and Money
On the afternoon of November 12, 1969, Bess went shopping alone along London’s fashionable New Bond Street. She was in town to visit her daughter, and she looked smart in her trench coat over black pants and a black sweater as she ducked in and out of the trendy shops. In one of the boutiques she lingered at a display counter, admiring a sweater. Apparently thinking that no one was watching her, she slipped the sweater into a shopping bag and walked past the cash register and out the door.
One of the store clerks, though, had been eyeing her and followed her out to the sidewalk, where he confronted her and demanded that she surrender the shopping bag. Bess implored him to let her pay for the sweater and go, but the clerk insisted that she remain inside the store while he contacted London’s Metropolitan Police Department. Minutes later Constable Moya Woodheath arrived to make the arrest.
Bess begged Woodheath to let her pay for the sweater and pulled out cash from her wallet to show that she had more than enough money to cover the cost. But Woodheath ignored Bess’s pleas and placed her under arrest for “theft from a shop.” She then escorted Bess out of the store and onto the sidewalk to wait for a police van to take them to the West End Central Division station house.
As they were standing outside, Woodheath recalled, Bess suddenly bolted away and began running down the street. She covered almost two blocks before Woodheath was able to catch up and force her back to the store where the police van was to pull up.
Luckily for Bess, the police were unaware that their shoplifting suspect was a former Miss America and a high-ranking official of the city of New York. And Bess wasn’t about to let them in on those facts. Knowing that her arrest would be a huge embarrassment that could cost her her job as consumer affairs commissioner, Bess kept her public position to herself when questioned by London’s metropolitan police.
According to Woodheath’s police report, Bess gave the police her married name, Bess M. Grant, and said she had been married to an Arnold Grant since 1946. She claimed that she was “unemployed” until February 1968, when she took a job as a “research worker with a home economics firm, Consumer Affairs, in New York.”
She went on to explain that she earned approximately $400 each week and that her husband provided her with an additional $800, perhaps in hope that the police, knowing of her substantial income, would conclude her shoplifting arrest was really just a terrible mistake. After all, why would a woman of her means try to steal a sweater? She was unable to convince them, however, and after about three hours in custody she was released and ordered to appear the next morning before Sir Aubrey Fletcher in Marlborough Magistrate Court for a hearing. According to records, however, she never showed up.
Bess did not tell anyone of the arrest until years later. Looking back on her life, her longtime friends say they believe the shoplifting incident was the beginning of a pattern of erratic behavior that she was able to hide from the public for almost two more decades. She waited eighteen years before finally pleading guilty and paying the fine. Yet even when her secret was revealed to the public at that time, no one could believe that Bess Myerson was capable of shoplifting—until she did it again.
The Sutton Place apartment became a marital battlefield after Bess returned that November. Unable to bring herself to ask Arnold for a divorce, she focused all of her attention on her job and spent as little time as possible at home with her husband.
Exacerbating their marital difficulties that fall, Bess told Arnold that she no longer needed his advice on how to run her agency. She later said he was annoyed that she had stopped taking home the notes of her daily activities that she had been showing him.
But the fact was that she didn’t need him to tell her what to do. After seven months on the job, she now had confidence in herself and her bright young staff of lawyers educated at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. She was also no longer interested in listening to Arnold’s long lectures on how to handle her job, and she told friends that she was weary of listening to Arnold demean her.
After all, Bess was a big hit with the press and the public and seemed to be making great progress in a very short period of time. The mayor was more than pleased. To Bess, Arnold’s harangues were a sign that he was once again attempting to dominate her and control her life, just as he had done in their first marriage.
By January 1970 they had virtually ceased talking to each other. Arnold had come to regard their marriage as a nightmare. Bess was given to coming home extremely late and sometimes not at all. She would depart for entire weekends without telling him where she was going; nor would she tell him where she had been when she returned.
It wasn’t long before Bess took to sleeping in the guest room. Disgusted with his wife, Arnold began taking his meals in the library to avoid her. Most of the spacious apartment that he had spent so much time and money renovating during their first marriage went unused during this war of nerves.
It was sometime in March 1970—about the time Bess entered the hospital for cosmetic surgery to remove the wrinkles around her eyes—that Arnold discovered her diary in their bedroom. Bess had been a diligent recorder of her own life for a long time, having written down her thoughts and observations about her life and the people in her life in sometimes brutally frank fashion since 1945. What Arnold read in her diary had a devastating effect on him and convinced him that Bess had been an unfaithful and conniving wife who was interested in only one thing—his money.
Leafing through the pages of Bess’s diary, Arnold concluded that she had had affairs with two and possibly three men since they had remarried in 1968. Tucked inside the pages of the diary he found a passionate love letter to Bess from one of these men, which said in part: “I have little or no illusions about you, Bess, for I know you more than in the biblical sense. There is nothing delusionary in my love for you.”
In the diary Arnold also came across a passage that suggested he might have been right about Bess’s wanting another child so that she could obtain a bigger chunk of his fortune in the event of a divorce. He concluded, moreover, that Bess would rather have had him dead than alive, for Bess had written several weeks after her 1968 surgery that “if A [Arnold] would die, I would have the safety + security of a house, a place to exist.… I would then reach out to new experiences and have people around me.”
Another entry made a few days later referred to him as “more like a thing. I must manipulate. I must make him conscious of me every moment, become completely dependent on him.”
When Bess left the hospital following her cosmetic surgery, she arrived home with a friend to find Arnold furious. Demanding a divorce, he ordered her to leave the apartment immediately, taking just her clothes. He did not mention that he had read her diaries. He just insisted that she go now. To make his point Arnold reminded her of the prenuptial agreement she had signed, in which she had promised to leave the Sutton Place apartment if either of them concluded that the marriage was over.
Arnold’s demand that she leave their home forced Bess to confront contradictory impulses. On the one hand, despite all of the tension and acrimony that now consumed their marriage, Bess still worried about making it on her own financially and living alone. On the other hand, Bess knew that if she capitulated and moved out, she would probably forfeit any chance to win the apartment in a divorce battle. At first she considered leaving and even looked around Manhattan for an apartment. After a time, however, Bess concluded that she was once again allowing Arnold to dominate her and dictate what she should do. She decided to stay.
In May Bess contacted a lawyer to help her stand up for herself against her husband’s unilateral demands that she move out. This marked the beginning of a period in which they communicated with each other through their lawyers, even though they continued to live in the same apartment. It was marital cold war.