Dear Miss America,
The story in the New York Times was just what you deserved. You are an empty clown and you should retire from life before you mess up everyone else by embarrassing yourself and New York by representing us. You are being asked now to return to Charlotte Ames, all the notes and gifts in your possession that you ever received from Gordon. She has a right to them and you don’t. If you contact Gordon instead of Charlotte, you will be doing the wrong thing. Believe us. Charlotte knows about this request and she is expecting them. Gordon has told her about the gifts he has given you. You are to return them as soon as possible. You are to drop them off at her house.… A marriage is pending. Mrs. Marcus is going to give Gordon the divorce he has been waiting for. She knows that Charlotte took him away from her. She is afraid not to follow Gordon’s demand because he will cut her off. He will cut her off anyway because that is what he plans. He will have as little to do with their children because he wants to give Charlotte’s daughter all of his attention and really take her own father’s place.
You will try to see him again. It is when you try to see him again she will know about it. If he tries to stick his Jewish nose in your cunt make sure it is wiped off. He will probably be coming from another woman. He will always be coming from another woman. How does he rate you on blow jobs? He has some expert blowers and you rate pretty low. He has talked about you making love and your body. What laughs he provides you better know it. He is moving ahead with the counter campaign. It may not appear in the newspapers, but you should know that he is helping Holtzman’s campaign through a good friend of his and hers. That is the latest tactic. You had better believe what we are telling you. We are in touch with a very good friend of Charlotte’s they tell us all. Watch for the announcement of their marriage in the newspaper. Keep away. He may keep calling you as he is calling the others. We know of two others he is seeing in addition to Charlotte. Remember there are twenty-four hours in a day and he lives it to a hilt. He is a phony and a liar. Whatever he tells you is a lie. He will deny what he is doing. We do not believe him. Return all notes. That is very important. Return all gifts. That is very urgent. Keep away from him. That is a must or you will suffer. God gives us roles to play. Watch and do not wonder how and why. More follows.
Another letter warned Bess:
One day soon you will know why you should not be doing what you are doing. There is no way you will win this election. Not even if you try to buy it with your money. There is a real movement going on being led by Charlotte Ames to stop you. She and J. Gordon Marcus will do everything in their power to see that you don’t. That fuck-face son of a bitch thinks he is God’s gift to women is bad mouthing you anytime he can. Charlotte Ames has gathered together her troops and he is going to give her the money to start the campaign. In the end you will know who is responsible. You will be smeared in the press. There is no way you can stop this. There is no way she will be stopped. There is no way he will be stopped.
That will be your end for moving in on her. If J does not see you it will be because he feels guilty about what they are doing and he doesn’t want you to suspect them. You will not be able to stop this not even if you agree never to speak or stop. He is hers forever. Keep out.
Armed with the letters, Charlotte contacted a friend who was a lawyer and asked for advice. He recommended that she hire a private investigator to look into the matter immediately.
Meanwhile, Gordon was spending most of his time with a young woman who worked as a producer at a local television station. They had been dating since Charlotte had ended her relationship with Gordon that summer. In October the producer began getting hang-up telephone calls at her apartment. Then, on Friday, October 31, a woman identifying herself as “Andrea” called her office and asked to speak with her. The producer’s secretary told the caller that she was in Boston and was not expected back until that night.
The same day, an anonymous message was left for Gordon at the Carlyle informing him that the producer’s flight from Boston would be an hour late. But Gordon was not picking her up from the airport that night. He was on his way to Boston to join her there for the weekend.
When Gordon returned home to the Carlyle on Monday, a Bergdorf Goodman shopping bag was hanging on his outside doorknob. Under layers of tissue paper was what police later determined to be human excrement. Gordon immediately suspected Bess had sent him the package out of anger that he was seeing the producer. He had had enough.
He first talked with Charlotte, who he knew had hired a private investigator. When Gordon called the investigator and told him about the package left outside his door, the investigator said it was a matter for the police.
On Tuesday, November 4, the day after he returned from Boston, Gordon called Bess and told her that he was going to the police. Bess told him there was no need to contact the police because they were already investigating the letters she had received during the campaign that said he had tried to undermine her campaign and ruin her.
In fact Bess had not gone to the police at that point. The next day she called New York police commissioner Robert McGuire directly at One Police Plaza and told him that she was receiving annoying telephone calls and bizarre letters from a former lover, J. Gordon Marcus. She asked him to have a detective look into it.
McGuire turned the case over to the department’s Intelligence Division, and Detective Gloria O’Meara was assigned the case. Over the next few days O’Meara interviewed Bess, Charlotte, the television producer, and Gordon, who had not yet contacted the police. From interviewing Gordon, O’Meara learned that at least seven other women had received anonymous letters similar to those sent to Charlotte during the last nine months. All but one of the women had one thing in common; with the exception of Charlotte’s mother, all had dated Gordon within the last two years.
Charlotte recounted for O’Meara the history of the harassment dating back to the hang-up phone calls that had begun in late 1978 and the strange taped messages from the man who had been able to recount her movements and Gordon’s. Charlotte also turned over the twenty-six anonymous letters she had received between March and September 23, 1980.
Even though the police were now involved, the television producer continued to be harassed by hang-up telephone calls. About a week after O’Meara began her investigation the woman who had identified herself as “Andrea” called the producer’s office again. Pretending to be her own secretary, the producer tried to engage “Andrea” in conversation to find out more about her. But “Andrea” would say only that she was a friend and needed to speak to her directly. When the producer said that she was speaking with her directly, the caller promptly hung up.
That night the producer called Gordon and told him about the call. Gordon said he suspected “Andrea” might actually be Bess. To test his suspicions he took a tape of Bess’s voice over to her apartment. After listening to the tape, she concluded “Andrea” and Bess were the same person. Gordon called O’Meara with the information.
On Friday, November 14, Bess called Detective Gloria O’Meara twice about the case. She wanted to know what Gordon Marcus had told her about his love affairs. O’Meara told Bess that it was a confidential police matter and she could not discuss it. Bess countered by saying that it was her understanding from the police commissioner that she would be kept apprised of the results of the investigation. But O’Meara held firm and refused to discuss her investigation with Bess.
A few days later Gordon got a mysterious call from a man who identified himself as “Tony” and said that he was the television producer’s ex-lover. “Tony” warned Gordon to stay away from her. “Tony” said that “Andrea” was his secretary and that he was the one who had left the misleading message at the Carlyle about the producer’s flight from Boston being late. Gordon suggested a meeting, and he arranged to meet “Tony” that weekend at the Museum Cafe, a restaurant on Columbus Avenue. Gordon alerted O’Meara, who arranged for detectives to stake out the restaurant. But “Tony” never a
ppeared.
By November 19 the police had installed a special device on the producer’s telephone that allowed them to trace the anonymous calls she had been getting. Over the next three days there were three such calls. All were traced to Bess’s apartment.
At the end of November O’Meara submitted a confidential report of her findings and conclusions to her superiors, and the report was forwarded to the police commissioner. O’Meara’s report concluded that Bess was behind the harassment campaign and had filed the complaint as a diversionary tactic. According to Detective O’Meara’s report, Bess was responsible for about fifty anonymous letters and telephone calls to Charlotte, Gordon, and his other female friends. The report also concluded that Bess had written the threatening letters to herself. No conclusion was reached, however, about who may have left the excrement for Gordon outside his hotel apartment door.
Years later Bess refused to discuss her relationship with Gordon, saying only that he was “a juggler.” She also refused to talk about the police allegations against her. “I don’t even want to talk about it,” she said. “It is obscene because no one has really bothered to tell the truth.… I got too involved in his life, with his children and their problems. I tend to do that. And then there is a need for denial, accusations, and counterclaims. All the things they mention and accuse me of were not true.”
When Charlotte and Gordon asked the police about prosecuting the case, Charlotte, who married Gordon in 1983, said they were told there was not enough evidence. “I was told it was a misdemeanor and that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict anyone of any crime,” Charlotte said.
That November the police commissioner took O’Meara’s findings directly to Mayor Koch and briefed him on the investigation. McGuire recalled telling Koch that Bess might be “acting out” because of her devastating loss at the polls. McGuire also said later that a high-ranking official in the department told him he would warn Bess to stop the harassment. The matter went no further.
Koch acknowledges that McGuire told him about the telephone calls, but he does not recall McGuire’s mentioning the letters or the package left outside of J. Gordon Marcus’s hotel door. Koch said he did not ask to see a copy of O’Meara’s report and never asked the police for elaboration. As he later recalled, he dismissed the situation “as a matter involving jilted lovers” and said that he considered it an “aberration.”
Koch knew that Bess had been going through a difficult time since losing the Democratic primary. She had asked him to appoint her the city’s deputy mayor for economic development, even offering to do the job for one dollar a year, but he had refused her request even though he had told cheering crowds during the 1977 mayoral campaign that she would be a great choice for precisely that position. “I said no. I did not think she was qualified for that,” Koch later said.
The fall of 1980 was one of the worst times in Bess’s life. She had been rejected at the polls. She had been discarded by J. Gordon Marcus. She had spent almost $800,000 of her own money on a losing campaign. And her old friend, Ed Koch, had declined her post-campaign request to join his administration. If all that wasn’t bad enough, Bess’s ninety-year-old father, Louis, had died that fall, not long after she had lost the primary. She had always been much closer to him than to her mother, and his death caused her tremendous pain. “It was a very low time, a very low time,” she said later. “Then he passed away after the primary. It was a very hard time for me. I was really depressed.”
During this intensely painful period in Bess’s life Andy Capasso could not have been more kind and generous. What had started as a “telephone relationship” during her campaign had evolved into an affair in the fall of 1980. Bess desperately needed someone to help her get on with her life.
“When she lost that campaign, she felt deserted and abandoned by everyone,” said a close friend of Bess’s at the time. “Normally when you lose a campaign you have a fund-raiser to pay off your debt. Nobody ever got one together for her. When she lost, Jewish café society moved away from her. She kind of lost her cachet. Then he pursued her. He really pursued her.”
Andy Capasso was unlike any other man she had been involved with, but she was attracted to him. “He is a stand-up guy,” said another friend. “He is street-smart. I think that is one of the things that she liked about him. He’s real smart.”
Andy treated Bessie—as he called her—like a queen. He put his chauffeur at her disposal, allowed her to use company office space and staff to tend to the final details of closing down her Senate campaign, and called on his contractor friends to kick in some more money to help Bess erase her big campaign debt.
“After the election was over, everybody in my campaign ran to the other candidate,” Bess told writer Patricia Morrisroe. “When you lose, people don’t know what to say to you, they don’t call you. This man was the only person who picked up the phone.”
After having been rejected by J. Gordon Marcus for a younger woman, Bess must have been happy that she now had a much younger man—twenty-one years her junior—to tell her repeatedly that she was beautiful and sexy.
There was something else, too, that pulled Bess toward Andy. He reminded her of her father. She didn’t realize it until she accompanied Andy to one of his construction sites one afternoon. As she watched him crouch on his hands and knees and touch one of his sewer pipes and explain with pride how he did the best work in the city, she thought of her father. “I watched him, and my memory came back to my father, who used to take me on the job,” she said. “He would say, ‘Just feel that wall. It feels like glass. You don’t see a piece of the brush. You don’t see a bump.’ The way that he touched it. It is comparable to someone holding a palette and a paintbrush or somebody holding their own canvas or an instrument. That is the way Andy felt about his work.”
By December Bess had moved all of her files from her closed campaign headquarters over to the offices of Nanco, Andy’s company, in the Long Island City section of Queens. She spent several days a week there that fall as she worked to close down her campaign. At first she sat at a desk in the engineering department; later she took over the conference room next to his office. None of the other employees were allowed into that room while Bess and her belongings were there.
Andy and Bess would often talk during the day and work out together in the company gym. So that he could spend evenings with Bess, Andy would tell his wife he had to attend late-night meetings with union officials, engineers, or mobster Matthew “Matty the Horse” Ianniello.
At Christmas, however, Andy went to Palm Beach with his wife and family to spend a week in his condominium there. Bess remained in New York and continued working at his office.
On Tuesday, December 30, 1980, Bess was standing at the office’s copy machine when suddenly she felt very warm. She dropped a pile of papers she was carrying. “Sweat came pouring down my face like a waterfall,” Bess said a few months later. “I was scared stiff.” She was reaching for a chair to sit down when she collapsed.
“She was completely disoriented and perspiring,” recalled an office worker at Nanco. “We sat her down in the engineering department, and there was mass confusion.”
Andy was still in Palm Beach. As one of the engineers went through Bess’s wallet looking for the name and telephone number of her daughter or a doctor, Andy’s secretary dialed his number at his Florida condominium. He told her to call the Astoria Volunteer Ambulance squad immediately and tell them to rush Bess to Lenox Hill Hospital. He instructed her not to give Bess’s real name to the ambulance squad.
Nancy Capasso later remembered that her husband was very upset that day: “There were these frantic calls back and forth, but I didn’t know what it was all about. He was hiding it. You can imagine the tension he was under. So he was screaming all the time, but I didn’t know why. He was taking it all out on me, and I didn’t even know what was happening.”
Bess was taken to the emergency room and admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital’s intensive car
e unit at 8:00 P.M. She had suffered a stroke.
21
Andy and Nancy
In the days following Bess’s mild stroke, the press offered varying reasons for her hospitalization. On January 1, two days after Bess entered the hospital, the New York Post reported she was hospitalized following an attack of hypoglycemia. The following day, January 2, the New York Times, quoting a close friend, said that she had sustained a back injury when she fell from a ladder while redecorating her apartment. A hospital spokesman told the Times, “I’ve received a press release from her press agent saying she has a slipped disc. That’s our version then.”
Bess was fortunate in that the burst blood vessel damaged only a tiny bit of brain tissue. Although she had difficulty speaking immediately following the stroke, she did not lose any feeling in her arms and legs. She remained in the hospital for almost three weeks until she recovered completely.
As soon as Andy returned home from Palm Beach, he hurried over to Lenox Hill Hospital to see her. He visited almost every day. It was at the hospital where some of Bess’s friends met Andy for the first time. “She would call him Mr. Capasso,” said a former friend who was introduced to Andy in Bess’s hospital room. “I thought she had exercised bad judgment with men in the past, but I thought this guy was the pits.”
To some of Bess’s friends Andy spelled trouble. He was married, with two young children, and after her disastrous relationship with J. Gordon Marcus, they worried about Bess getting deeply involved with another unavailable man. One of her friends told Herb Rickman, special assistant to the mayor, who was close to Bess at the time, that she thought Andy was “sleazy” and urged Rickman to use whatever influence he had with Bess to get Andy away from her.
In Bess’s circles there seemed to be no room for a multimillionaire sewer contractor who lacked a college education. No matter how much money he had.
Carl Andy Capasso was born in New York City on September 10, 1945, two days after Bess was crowned Miss America in Atlantic City. His parents, Michael and Josephine Capasso, named their only son after his paternal grandfather, who had started a sewer and construction business in Brooklyn.
Queen Bess Page 20