Queen Bess

by Preston, Jennifer

  By late summer, though, Gordon had started seeing Charlotte Ames again, behind Bess’s back. He also dated other women. Apparently Bess “was a little bit too crazy for him.” After having dinner together a few times, Gordon and Charlotte traveled to the Maine coast for a long weekend.

  It didn’t take Bess long to suspect that Gordon might be seeing someone else. By the end of the summer she was questioning him intensely about his schedule. According to a source close to Gordon, she took to taping their telephone conversations so that she could study his voice inflections for any hint of deceit. Bess would then play back tapes for Gordon and suggest that his tone of voice revealed betrayal. “He appeared to be really enamored with Bess,” Marilyn Funt, one of Bess’s closest friends, said later. “When she found out about the other women, she was shocked.”

  After Bess learned he was again seeing Charlotte, she angrily confronted him. “If I were twenty years younger, this never would have happened. I could have kept you,” she was said to have told him. Bess was unaccustomed to having a man leave her, for as she once explained, “Men go after me, and I choose among them.”

  For all her anger, however, Bess was not ready to walk out on the relationship. And Gordon could not bring himself to tell Bess that he no longer loved her. He agreed to continue seeing her, and over the next year they met occasionally for a drink or dinner. Still in the middle of his divorce, Gordon was dating lots of women and not ready to settle down with any one woman at that time. Perhaps Bess thought she could still win his heart. Her chances, however, were slim as long as Charlotte Ames remained in the picture. Gordon always seemed to return to his earlier love.

  A few weeks after Bess first challenged Gordon about his relationship with Charlotte, he ran into her unexpectedly—in his own apartment. As Charlotte remembers it, he had been having brunch downstairs in the Carlyle’s dining room with Charlotte and her daughter when he discovered a hole in his sock and returned to his apartment for a new pair. Walking into his bedroom, he discovered Bess, in jeans and an old sweater, standing on a stool and rummaging through boxes on the top shelf of his closet.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded. “How did you get in here?”

  Bess told him that a chambermaid had let her in. Then she hurried past him and out the door without an explanation or apology. That very night Gordon and Charlotte were watching the eleven o’clock news when Bess appeared on the screen at a political fund-raiser, looking stunning in a chiffon Stavropolos gown. “I couldn’t believe this was the same person that Gordon had described standing on a stool, going through his bedroom closet,” Charlotte later recalled.

  Within a few days Gordon and Charlotte began to be plagued by a mysterious caller who would telephone them repeatedly and then hang up when they answered. Sometimes the caller would pause long enough to breathe into the phone. Other times Charlotte would hear music on the other end. The identity of the caller was a mystery. “I would get about thirty calls a day. It went on for months. It drove me crazy,” Charlotte said.

  Gordon also began receiving strange messages on his answering machine. The first was left while Gordon and Charlotte attended a party and then went to dinner at a midtown Manhattan restaurant. When Gordon played back the tape that night, he heard a deep male voice describe precisely where he and Charlotte had gone that evening. “We knew we were being followed because we didn’t decide until we were walking up Fifth Avenue to go to a party on upper Fifth Avenue,” Charlotte remembered. “And then while we were at the party, we decided where to go for dinner. Then, after we got home, there was this tape recording saying where we had been.”

  The anonymous telephone calls persisted. A few weeks after getting the message on his answering machine Gordon returned home to find a piece of paper slipped under his apartment door listing the names of restaurants he had been to with Charlotte in the preceding few days.

  Several weeks later, on October 14, 1978, Gordon and Charlotte boarded an Eastern shuttle for Washington, D.C., to visit her mother for the day. They met her in the lobby of the Madison Hotel and then went to Sans Souci for dinner. When they returned to New York the following day, another taped message was waiting for them at Gordon’s Carlyle apartment.

  The same male voice described in detail their movements in Washington the previous day. Whoever he was, he knew they had boarded the Eastern shuttle, had seen them meet an “unidentified woman” at the Madison Hotel, and knew they had gone to dinner at Sans Souci. Charlotte, already on edge because of the phone calls and the earlier taped message, now became terrified that a stranger had intimate knowledge of her life. She worried about her mother, who lived alone in Virginia, and about herself and her eight-year-old daughter living alone in New York City. Shouldn’t they go to the police? Gordon said no. He dismissed it as a lot of nonsense.

  What Charlotte did not know at the time was that Gordon was still seeing Bess occasionally and that Gordon suspected Bess was responsible for having them followed. Bess could always tell him where he had been, what he had been wearing, and whom he had been with. He knew that she was furious that he continued to see Charlotte Ames.

  Three weeks after Gordon and Charlotte returned from Washington, on November 5, 1978, they were attending a political fund-raiser at the El Morocco nightclub for their close friend New York City councilman Carter Burden, who was running for the U.S. Congress. With only a few days left before the election, Burden’s credibility had been dealt a hard blow. Bess, who had promised her political support months earlier, withdrew her endorsement of Burden that very afternoon. She accused him of using her endorsement in radio commercials and on door-to-door fliers without her permission. Bess aired her complaint in the newspapers, a move the Burden campaign feared would hurt his effort to unseat Republican congressman William Green.

  Those in the Burden campaign who knew about Bess’s failed relationship with Gordon believed that her action was triggered by the fact that Gordon was Burden’s close friend and chief fund-raiser. But Bess told reporters that it was “ludicrous” to suggest she would have withdrawn her endorsement because of her problems with Gordon. “I have never confused my personal life with my political integrity,” she told the New York Daily News. “Nobody delivers me. I deliver me.”

  Just before the November election, which Burden was to lose, the mystery caller stopped leaving taped messages on Gordon’s answering machine, though the hang-up calls continued. Meanwhile, Bess had started to date other men. Over the next year she was seen in the company of former New York State Supreme Court judge Jerry Becker; Edward Klein, then the editor of the New York Times Magazine; millionaire businessman Mort Hyman; investment banker and former commerce secretary Peter Peterson; and shoe manufacturer Jeffrey Endervelt.

  Bess also ended up on the gossip page of the New York Post when she was accused by a prominent divorce attorney of adultery with millionaire businessman Benjamin Lambert, who was separated from his wife at the time he was seeing Bess. “We have absolute evidence of adultery. We have absolute evidence that she was overnight at his house,” attorney Raoul Lionel Felder, who would later represent Nancy Capasso, told the New York Post in March 1979.

  Denying the allegations, Bess told the newspapers that she and Lambert were “just friends … [he was] one of my many friends.” As for the adultery charge, Bess said, “My God, of course it’s not true. Poor Ben. And that poor lady. I have no personal relationship with Mr. Lambert. I just think the lady is obviously very upset and very angry.” Bess recalled for the Post that the last time she saw Lambert “was at a meeting at his house about rehabilitating slum areas. We’re both interested in that. He’s a very pro-bono-minded gentleman.”

  Though Bess was seen about town with other men, she continued to see Gordon once in a while in 1979 and in the early months of 1980, unbeknownst to Charlotte. One morning before dawn in late 1979, Charlotte was awakened in her apartment by the ringing of a telephone. A woman was on the other end of the line.

  “Is Gordo
n there?” the woman asked.

  Charlotte was half asleep, yet she recognized Bess’s distinctive low voice.

  “Who is this?” Charlotte demanded.

  “Elizabeth Rubin,” the caller replied.

  “He’s sleeping. I don’t want to wake him.”

  “It’s urgent,” the caller insisted. “It’s about his children.”

  Charlotte leaned over and woke Gordon. “It’s Bess,” she said and handed him the phone.

  Gordon took the call in another room. When he returned to bed, he told Charlotte that it had, in fact, been Bess. She had said she was calling from a gurney in a Miami hospital, where she was about to undergo surgery for cancer. Bess told Gordon that she had gone to Miami for the surgery because she feared that word about her illness would leak out if she had gone to a New York hospital and that it would jeopardize her chances of winning the 1980 Democratic nomination for the United States Senate. She pleaded with Gordon to get on the next plane to Florida to be with her when she came out of surgery that afternoon.

  Gordon was shocked at the news, and he left Charlotte’s apartment to continue the telephone conversation in the privacy of his own home. He considered going to Florida that morning, but after talking to a close friend of Bess’s, he believed it would give Bess false hope that he was interested in reviving their relationship. As it turned out, Bess was not in the hospital for cancer surgery. She has since told friends that she went to Miami for cosmetic surgery to remove scars left from her 1974 hysterectomy.

  The hang-up phone calls to Gordon and Charlotte—mostly to Charlotte—continued sporadically through the spring, summer, and fall of 1979. Charlotte finally became completely fed up with the harassment and contacted the telephone company for help early that fall. The company agreed to attempt to trace the phone calls, and after several weeks of trying to pinpoint the origin of the calls, a pattern emerged.

  According to Charlotte, the phone company told her that the majority of the calls were coming from three pay telephones in Manhattan. One of the telephone booths was on the corner of East 71st Street and Madison Avenue, and the other two were on East End Avenue. Charlotte asked Gordon if he knew anyone who might live or work near those phone booths. Bess, he replied.

  Bess lived on East 71st Street, just a block from Madison Avenue. Her ghostwriter, whom she would meet with frequently to discuss her book on consumerism and her articles for Redbook, lived on East End Avenue, across the street from one of the phone booths. The other booth, at the corner of East End Avenue and East 88th Street, was across the street from Gracie Mansion, the home of Mayor Ed Koch, whom she had been seeing more of that fall as she considered entering the U.S. Senate race the next year.

  Armed with this information, Gordon confronted Bess and asked whether she was the one making the calls. Bess adamantly denied it.

  Soon afterward Charlotte and Gordon stopped getting calls. Then, a few months later, in the spring of 1980, after Gordon had finally stopped seeing Bess, anonymous letters began to arrive. The first one was addressed to Gordon at the Carlyle. “Dear Nothing,” the letter began. “You should be hearing from some of the girls you laid and screwed. You will be sorry for what you have done to one of them. You will be punished in ways you don’t know.”

  The letter ended with this promise: “More follows.”

  *J. Gordon Marcus is a pseudonym.

  *Charlotte Ames is a pseudonym.

  19

  “Too Tall, Too Beautiful, Too Rich”

  In the months after her relationship with J. Gordon Marcus cooled in August 1978, Bess began sounding out friends and political cohorts about her idea of seeking the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate in 1980. After nearly a decade of campaigning on behalf of others, Bess was finally ready to become a political candidate herself.

  Her doctor had given her a clean bill of health that November. She had passed the magic five-year mark for patients with ovarian cancer with no sign that the disease would recur. She also had saved about $4 million from her salary and investments, though she sometimes confounded her friends by living as if she were on the brink of bankruptcy. There was no one man in her life. What’s more, Bess was bored with her high-paying jobs as a consumer consultant for big business and eager to do something different, try something new.

  In February 1979 Bess invited some of her closest friends to her apartment for a tuna lunch to discuss her political ambitions. A friend remembers that Bess said, “I don’t have anything more to do in life. I have to do something now. It’s my time.”

  Bess’s sights were set on a formidable goal—unseating Senator Jacob Javits, the popular liberal Republican who after twenty-four years in the U.S. Senate was planning to run for his fifth term. The idea of Bess as a candidate was attractive to some Democratic strategists, who theorized that she could win back some of the Jewish Democratic voters who had supported Javits in the past.

  Before worrying about Javits, however, Bess would have to win the Democratic primary in September 1980, and that would be no easy task. Her principal challenger was expected to be Elizabeth Holtzman, the no-nonsense Brooklyn congresswoman and graduate of Harvard Law School whose aggressive questioning during the impeachment hearings of former president Richard Nixon had attracted national attention. Others considering running in the primary included Bess’s former boss, John Lindsay, who was attempting a political comeback, and John Santucci, the Queens district attorney.

  Through the spring, summer, and fall of 1979 Bess moved deliberately to lay the foundation for a 1980 Senate race. Like many would-be candidates, she was coy with the press, refusing to say explicitly that she was planning to run for Javits’s seat. Yet she was doing everything that a potential candidate should have been doing.

  As early as the spring of 1979 Bess began calling in the political chits she had accumulated from her years of campaigning for others. Within the first few months of the year Senator Moynihan promised to help and Governor Carey put her in touch with his major fund-raisers. Her biggest ally, of course, was her old friend, Mayor Ed Koch, who told listeners of WMCA-AM’s Barry Gray radio talk show that spring, “If she runs, she’ll wipe the floor with all the other people. She would walk away with the race.”

  That summer Bess spent hours on the telephone seeking contributions from wealthy or influential friends and acquaintances. By the end of 1979 she had more than $200,000 in the bank and her list of contributors looked like a “who’s who” of the rich and famous: movie producer and director John Avildsen, actress Greer Garson, television game show creator Mark Goodson, hotel owners Leona and Harry Helmsley, television producer Norman Lear, attorney Arthur Liman, chicken king Frank Perdue, financial columnist Sylvia Porter, and model Christina Ferrare, who was then married to maverick auto producer John DeLorean.

  Bess also began making the obligatory rounds of the city’s various Democratic clubs and ventured into upstate New York to make speeches and oil her rusty campaign skills. She sought support from prominent Democrats, but not all of them were in her camp. Her biggest rebuff came from Gloria Steinem, who complained that Bess had not staked out positions on many important issues. Steinem called this “unacceptable” and urged Bess to abandon her candidacy and support Holtzman.

  Steinem’s criticism underscored one of the problems of Bess’s early campaign. While she spoke knowledgeably and at length about consumer questions and the importance of supporting Israel, she appeared to know little about many of the major issues confronting the country. She made the mistake of telling reporters that she intended to learn the issues as her campaign progressed, a remark that drew a laugh from Andrew Stein, then Manhattan borough president, who suggested that Bess was “trying to beauty queen her way to the nomination.”

  Stein’s comment struck at the very heart of what Bess had been trying to overcome since the day she was crowned Miss America in 1945. Even her years as the city’s feared and celebrated consumer affairs commissioner had failed to transform her celeb
rity image as a beauty queen and television’s “Lady in Mink” into the persona she had long sought for herself: that of a serious and hardworking woman who had overcome the odds and made something of herself. The Miss America title seemed to be linked inextricably to her name. “I’ve always been Queen Bess,” she said at the time. “It’s a theme that runs through my life. It colors everything I do.”

  Her own private poll, taken in the fall of 1979, reflected her image problem with voters. “Everyone in New York state knew who Bess Myerson was and liked her, but hardly anyone was convinced that she had the experience to be a U.S. senator,” recalled Bess’s campaign manager, Dick Eaton, then a thirty-year-old lawyer and political veteran who had worked on U.S. senator Moynihan’s campaign.

  What she had to do to win in 1980 was shatter her beauty queen image and remind voters that she had been in government and in business. However, her one major public service credential—her impressive record as the city’s consumer affairs commissioner in the early 1970s—now had a serious downside. After leaving the Lindsay administration, Bess had gone through the revolving door of the business-government complex and had gone to work as a consumer consultant for Citibank and Bristol-Myers, two companies that came under criticism from consumer advocates for some of their policies.

  Out on the hustings in those early days of the campaign—in cities like Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, and Binghamton, where she was giving her stump speech a dry run before facing the aggressive New York City press corps—she got off to a weak start. Instead of talking about issues, she sought to “emotionally bind” herself with her audiences by telling them stories about her early life. She recounted her upbringing in a working-class Bronx family during the Depression, describing her parents as “boat people” from Europe. She told Jewish audiences stories about never being good enough to please her mother, and she talked about facing discrimination while Miss America.