On weekend afternoons Andy would often tell his wife he was going to play tennis with a friend and then drive over to see Bess at her friend’s house. He usually parked his Mercedes in the garage just in case his wife or a friend drove past the house and wondered what he was doing there. Andy and Bess usually sat around the pool, soaking up the sun. The hostess remembered thinking at the time that there seemed to be an intense physical attraction between them. One weekday afternoon, the hostess said, she looked out the window to see Bess and Andy swimming together nude.
By that summer of 1982 Andy no longer bothered apologizing to Nancy for his absences. “He would just do whatever he wanted,” Nancy said. “He offered no explanations. The whole thing was a nightmare.”
Finally, as autumn approached, Nancy was enlightened. A good friend who worked with her at Sotheby’s International Realty had heard about the long-running affair during a party that weekend in the Hamptons. On Monday morning the friend approached Nancy and told her, “Someone says that something is happening there.…”
“What? Who is she?” Nancy demanded.
“Bess Myerson,” Nancy recalled her friend said.
“I was stunned for a minute and then relieved that I wasn’t crazy,” Nancy said.
Another friend then acknowledged that she had heard that Andy had bought Bess a midnight-blue Mercedes 380 SL. Determined to find out whether the rumor was true, Nancy took a couple of hours off from her job that afternoon and went over to the Mercedes dealership where Andy usually bought and leased his cars. Pretending to be her husband’s secretary, she told the dealership that she needed a copy of the bill of sale for a midnight-blue Mercedes 380 SL purchased earlier that summer. “Tears were running down my face,” Nancy recalled. “I went through this whole spiel about how I was his secretary and how I was going to get fired because I lost that bill of sale.”
The dealership finally handed her the bill of sale. It said that on July 22, 1982, Nanco had paid $41,000 for the car, with a company check, and that Bess Myerson had picked it up.
Nancy was in a state of shock. The rumor was now confirmed. She returned home and waited up until the early morning hours for Andy to walk into the apartment so she could confront him with the bill of sale. Angrily denying her accusations, he insisted that he and Bess “were just friends.”
Unconvinced, Nancy retained the well-known and flamboyant New York divorce lawyer Raoul Lionel Felder for advice in the event that she decided to proceed with a divorce. She also began checking out all of her husband’s excuses for his late nights. One of the people she called was their former neighbor in Old Westbury, “Matty the Horse” Ianniello.
“Andy goes every evening to see you?” she asked.
“Nobody sees Matty every night,” Nancy said he replied.
“Did you know about Bess?”
“I can’t explain what Andy is doing with that old bag,” Nancy said Ianniello told her.
Not long afterward, Nancy learned that Andy’s relationship with Bess was not the first extramarital affair he had had during their marriage. Maybe Bess was just a fling, she thought. Then she listened to a cassette tape that a maid who worked at the Capassos’ Westhampton Beach estate had turned over to her. Andy had apparently installed recording devices on the telephones in Westhampton Beach, Nancy believed, to find out how much she knew and if she were consulting a divorce lawyer. Inadvertently he had taped himself one Friday night when he left a touching message for Bess on her answering machine in New York:
“Hi, baby. How are you? It’s ten after seven. I’m sorry, I didn’t have any opportunity to call you sooner. I just tried the office and there was no one there and, uh, I’m home, here in Westhampton, and I expect to be here. I will be here tonight and, uh, I’ll try you a little later. I love you. I miss you. And I’ll try you until I get you. I’m sorry I couldn’t call you before, baby, but I just didn’t have the opportunity. Think of me. I miss you. Hope everything is okay with you. I’ve been thinking about you, your situation, the problem, and everything that goes with it, and I’m concerned about it, baby. I hope everything is okay for you, for me, and for us, and I’ll speak to you later, dear.”
He made kissing noises into the phone before hanging up.
Nancy was devastated. She told Felder to go ahead and tell her husband that she wanted to start negotiations for a divorce. On October 20, 1982, Felder wrote Andy a letter saying that he was representing Nancy. Andy hired his own lawyer, Sam Fredman, and letters flew back and forth between the attorneys. Millions of dollars were at stake: the Fifth Avenue apartment, the Westhampton Beach waterfront estate, the Palm Beach condominiums, and his company, Nanco Contracting Corp., which Nancy would later claim in court she helped build.
As the lawyers attempted to work out a settlement, Nancy and Andy continued to live together in the apartment with their two children and Nancy’s twenty-two-year-old daughter, Helené. They argued constantly. Andy later said Nancy told him during this time to be careful about what he ate because she had put cyanide in his food. Another time, he said, Nancy told him: “You just worry about making money, I’ll spend it. I know what to do about it. There isn’t a diamond big enough to pay me for the way I have suffered in my life with you.”
Nancy confided in her old friend, Judith Yeager, about her marital troubles and asked her to come to the Manhattan apartment one night for dinner. Yeager arrived at about 7:00 P.M. on Friday, November 5, 1982. She didn’t expect Andy to be there, so she was surprised to find him in the kitchen, making spaghetti and chicken for them. Shortly after she arrived, Yeager joined him in the kitchen. She remembered that Andy had tried to talk to her ex-husband during her divorce years earlier. “Andy really tried to help me,” she said. “And I felt I wanted to do the same thing in this situation. Having known them as young people, newlyweds, I could not believe that they were still not in love with each other.”
In the kitchen, Yeager said, Andy was drinking wine steadily and rebuffing any attempt she made to discuss the situation. “I couldn’t get to first base with him. If I would ask him a question, he would either be nonresponsive or he would tell me, ‘None of it is true.’ He kept saying over and over again to me, ‘My wife is telling the world stories about a very dear friend of mine. She is slandering us. Bess is just a very good friend of mine, and Nancy is lying to everybody about us.’
“Whatever I said to him, he would say, ‘It isn’t true.’ Then I asked him, ‘How come, Andy, you are out all night?’ He wouldn’t respond to that. He would just again go through the rehearsed remarks: ‘Bess is my dearest friend, and it is not right that Nancy is lying about it.’
“I could not get anywhere with him. He wasn’t talking to me heart to heart. I was wasting my breath.”
Dinner was surreal. There they were, Nancy and Andy, in the midst of divorce negotiations, having dinner with their children and an old friend in whose living room they had been married. Over dinner, Yeager said, no one talked about the marital problems. In fact, she remembered that Andy had tried to be charming.
Then, at about 9:00 P.M., after the dishes were cleared away from the table, Andy went upstairs. Nancy assumed that he was going to “freshen up” for his evening “appointment” with Bess.
She followed him upstairs with the children to get them ready for bed. A few minutes later, Judy Yeager and Helené heard Nancy scream.
Andy later said that as he was washing up in the upstairs bathroom, his eight-year-old daughter came in and asked, “Where are you going? Out with your girlfriend?”
“Where did you hear that?” Andy asked.
“Mommy,” Andy later said the child replied.
Andy was enraged. He tore out of the room, past his daughter, shouting obscenities at his wife. “He must have thought that I put her up to that,” Nancy said later. “I didn’t even know what was happening. I had come upstairs to check on the kids, to see if they had taken their showers and had gotten ready for bed, and there he was, hurtling at me out of nowhere. He was scream
ing I don’t know what, and then he flung me over a glass table, and I ended up on my back like a turtle. Then he started stomping on me.”
Still wearing his heavy black dress shoes, he kicked her repeatedly, leaving at least six large bruises on her thighs, buttocks, and back. Her screams alerted Judy and Helené, who bounded up the marble staircase. The two younger children were crying in their bedrooms. Helené started screaming at Andy as she tried to pull him off her mother. Yeager yelled that she was calling the police, but Nancy screamed, “No. Get the doorman.”
Yeager ran downstairs and called the doorman. “By the time the doorman came up, things were pretty quiet,” she said. “I went upstairs again, and Andy was in his daughter’s room, muttering over and over to himself, ‘She tells my daughter that I am going to see my girlfriend. How does she do such a terrible thing? She tells my daughter that I am going to see my girlfriend.’
“He was absolutely out of control, and he was drunk, and he was unwilling to deal straight. He was taking the offensive, saying to Nancy, ‘You are imagining this, and because you are imagining this, you are hurting me.’ Not vice versa. ‘You dare to tell my child that I have to go because I have to go visit my girlfriend.’ The truth is that is where he was going.”
Shortly after the incident Andy left the house. Badly bruised and shaken by the beating, Nancy went into the bathroom to inspect her wounds. Then she went downstairs with her friend and the children. Yeager tried to calm Nancy down by reminiscing about their lives twenty years before in Jamaica Estates. Nancy pulled out a photo album, and they flipped through the pages, looking at photographs of their children going off to camp together. A few hours later Andy returned home. When he saw that Yeager was still there, he left again for the night.
Andy later said that he apologized to his wife for the incident and expressed to her that the beating had made him feel “seriously depressed, anxious, embarrassed, [and] upset.…” He was so troubled that he sought help from Bess’s therapist and good friend, Ted Rubin. When asked years later about Andy’s having beaten his wife, Bess said the same thing that some people had said about her and her first husband, Allan Wayne: “Mr. Capasso is the sweetest, gentlest of men. She obviously provoked him.”
The next day Nancy contacted her attorney and told him what had happened. He told her to take photographs of her bruises. Within two days they filed a petition on her behalf in family court, seeking an order of protection. A hearing was scheduled for December.
Andy was furious. Nancy said that he told her, “If I dared to take him to ‘nigger court,’ which is what he called family court, I would pay for it the rest of my life.”
Andy and Nancy continued to live together in the Fifth Avenue apartment, and their constant sniping at each other must have seemed unbearable. She accused him of stealing her jewelry, and he accused her of trying to poison their children against him.
On the day of the family court hearing Andy took the stand. Nancy’s lawyer asked him to remove one of his size twelve, triple E black leather dress shoes and hold it up so the judge could see how heavy a weapon it was. After hearing testimony and reviewing the photographs of six large contusions on Nancy’s body, Judge Bruce Kaplan issued a six-month protection order, restraining Andy from any further violence. “There is no dispute as to whether Mr. Capasso threw Mrs. Capasso over a coffee table and then kicked her a number of times,” Kaplan said. “Observing the documentary evidence, photographs, I can see at least six different extremely large bruised areas. This for the purposes of the Family Court Act establishes that Mr. Capasso did assault Mrs. Capasso on the evening of November 5, 1982.”
Kaplan concluded that while the daughter’s remark may have provoked Andy, “it most assuredly does not justify admission of a vicious beating, and I must characterize, based on the testimony and the photographic evidence, that what happened was a vicious beating.”
On December 20, 1982, Andy struck back. He filed for a divorce on the grounds of “cruel and inhuman treatment.” In his divorce papers he accused Nancy of calling him a “dumb guinea” in front of the children and charged her with telling him, “These kids have to know you are a piece of shit.” In asking the court for a divorce, Andy sought custody of their two children and sole and exclusive use of the Fifth Avenue apartment, Palm Beach condominiums, and Westhampton Beach estate.
Nancy was on her way out the door to meet a friend and see the hit Broadway musical Cats when a stranger handed her a summons and the divorce papers. Despite everything that had happened between them in the previous months, she was surprised that Andy had moved ahead to end their marriage. She had been thinking in terms of a separation.
Capasso v. Capasso was now in New York State Supreme Court.
Toward the end of the summer of 1982, just before Nancy discovered that Bess and Andy were having an affair, Bess confided in a close friend that she was thinking about dumping Andy. She had been with Andy for almost two years and, her friend said, was tired of being the “other woman.” What’s more, Andy was beginning to bore her. She no longer found his savvy street sense appealing. She told one friend that his “coarse manners” embarrassed her.
“She was ready to get rid of him,” said the friend, who was close to Bess at the time. “She had had enough of his money. She didn’t need it anymore. She used him for what he was to be used for, and she was ready to move on. She didn’t like to stay with anybody too long anyway.
“But then the shit hit the fan about Nancy knowing. She felt that she could not abandon him at that point.”
How could she walk out on Andy after he had stood by her in the agonizing months following her failed campaign for the United States Senate? How could she break off her relationship with a man who had visited her every day at Lenox Hill Hospital? How could she leave him as he proceeded with a messy divorce?
She decided to stay.
As things would turn out, sticking by Andy Capasso during his bitter divorce might have been one of the biggest mistakes she had ever made.
If Bess had walked away that fall of 1982, and cut Andy Capasso out of her life, she might never have ended up five years later on the steps of the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Manhattan with her reputation besmirched and her life in tatters.
23
Cultural Affairs
After spending almost a year in television news, Bess wanted out. She had expected to have lots of time to probe consumer-related stories. Instead she found herself frequently called on to cover daily news stories on a variety of subjects, a situation that she thought did not provide her with enough time to do the consumer stories.
In February 1983 she sent word to her old friend, Mayor Koch, that she would like to come back to government and head the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. With a $46 million budget in 1983, the department had the second-largest arts budget in the country, smaller only than the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. Some money was distributed to neighborhood arts groups and used to fund a variety of public programs and services, but almost 90 percent of it went to support the city’s thirty major cultural institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History.
More than thirty people had been interviewed for the $62,000-a-year job since the former commissioner, Henry Geldzahler, had resigned in October. No one candidate with all of the qualifications that Koch was looking for had emerged—except for Beverly Sills and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and they had both turned him down. Koch wanted someone with “superstar status” to head the agency, someone who could bring visibility to the department and help raise millions of dollars from the private sector to help fund arts programs.
While Koch had ruled out Bess in the fall of 1980 for the job she had wanted then—deputy mayor for economic development—because he thought she didn’t have the experience for the post, he thought that she would make a superb commissioner of cultural affairs. Bess’s celebrity not only would bring visibility to the arts, but she had gove
rnment experience, political skills, and a demonstrated ability to raise money.
Heading a municipal agency for cultural affairs might not seem like an important post in many cities, but the arts in New York, as Bess once said, “is as important a commodity as wheat is in Kansas and steel in Pittsburgh.” On any given weekend at least two hundred music, dance, and theater performances are given, and more than 150 museums and public exhibition spaces are open. In 1983 a government report concluded the arts pumped an estimated $5.62 billion a year into the city’s economy.
On Monday, February 21, Bess and Mayor Koch met for lunch at a Columbus Avenue restaurant to talk about the job. Bess accepted but told him she did not want to begin work for about two months. She wanted to finish some of the stories she had been working on at WCBSTV, and she intended to take a vacation. She seemed enthusiastic about her return to government, even though it meant taking an enormous cut in pay. She later said she saw her life coming full circle as the city’s cultural czar. Once again she would be immersed in the arts, just as she had been as a young girl, studying the piano with Mrs. LaFollette and music at the High School of Music and Art.
Planning to depart on a trip to Jerusalem later that week, Mayor Koch wasted no time in announcing Bess’s decision to join his administration. Two days later, at an eleven o’clock City Hall press conference, they appeared together in the same room where Mayor John Lindsay had introduced Bess fourteen years earlier as his commissioner of consumer affairs.
“It took me five years to get her into government, and I’m delighted,” Koch said disingenuously, making no reference to the fact that he had rejected her request for a post two years earlier.
“It’s a great way to continue my love affair with the city,” Bess told reporters.
How did she intend to obtain more private funds from corporations when the federal government’s own budgetary “tight squeeze” might make it difficult for her agency to seek outside funding? a reporter asked.
Queen Bess Page 23