“They haven’t been squeezed by me,” she answered, a broad smile crossing her face.
“And that’s a pleasure,” Koch chimed in.
Bess later explained to a reporter that she wanted to raise more money for the arts from small businesses. “Community leaders and shopkeepers will come out to see Bess Myerson,” she said, adding with a laugh, “if only to see what I look like now.”
On the press release distributed to reporters that day the last sentence said Bess’s appointment was subject to the usual “city clearances.” But the background check conducted by the city’s Department of Investigation did not turn up Bess’s 1969 shoplifting arrest in London or the results of the New York City Police Department’s November 1980 investigation into charges of harassment.
Koch, who had been briefed about the harassment campaign in 1980, said later that he had not considered the police department’s findings when he asked her to join his administration in 1983. “Between the time I knew of it and [the time] I appointed her, I had seen her many times and didn’t see anything unusual or bizarre in her behavior. I assumed it was an affair of the heart and not a consideration for me.”
The week before Mayor Koch announced her appointment, Bess had been in Aspen, Colorado, with Andy and his children. She stayed with friends while Andy and the children stayed in a rented condominium nearby. She had flown back to New York alone when Andy first got word from his attorney that Nancy had obtained a court order evicting him from their Fifth Avenue apartment. He was furious, not only about being thrown out of his own home but also about being accused of having beaten his wife a second time.
In attempting to convince the court that she should have exclusive occupancy of the Fifth Avenue apartment during the divorce proceedings, Nancy reported that Andy had attacked her again, a charge that her husband denied adamantly. She said the second beating had occurred just before he left for Aspen during an argument over her decision to return a $10 toothbrush he had purchased at a local drugstore. She said he first threw a scotch and water in her face, then grabbed her by the shoulders and banged her head against a wall. Her attorneys argued the attack was a violation of the order of protection issued by family court judge Bruce Kaplan two months earlier and that he should be barred from ever entering the apartment again.
On February 16 the motion came before state supreme court justice Hortense W. Gabel, who had been assigned jurisdiction over the Capasso v. Capasso divorce case. She ruled in favor of Nancy and ordered Andy to vacate the apartment immediately. “Serious allegations have been made by the defendant [Nancy] that the plaintiff [Andy] has engaged in various acts of violence against her,” her decision said. Gabel did, however, grant Andy exclusive use of the couple’s waterfront estate in Westhampton Beach.
Four days later Andy returned from Aspen with the children. On his way home from the airport he stopped by his office and called Nancy to ask about the judge’s order granting her exclusive occupancy. He said she told him on the telephone: “That’s right. I told you I was going to have you thrown out of here.”
When Andy asked to pick up some clothes and personal things that night, he said she objected but changed her mind and told him it would be okay.
Nancy denied ever giving him permission to come into the apartment and said she asked him to leave the children downstairs with the doorman and come back the next day with his attorney. So she was shocked when he stepped off the elevator into their grand marble foyer that night. “He was angry, and he went into the closets and pulled out all of our luggage and started filling them with everything possible, including my Frank Sinatra records from college,” she said. “I was terrified. I called the police and locked myself in the bathroom. When the police got to the building, they called up on the intercom, and he answered it. ‘There’s a mistake,’ he told them. ‘Nobody called the police.’”
Based on Andy’s statements, the police left. Nancy remained in the bathroom. As Andy continued to pack some things, Nancy could hear him shout repeatedly that she would pay for the rest of her life. His last words were “You will get nothing,” which he shouted before disappearing behind the elevator’s closing doors.
Waiting outside the apartment on Fifth Avenue was his chauffeur, Tony Bailey, who put the suitcases and bags in the trunk. “He was fuming,” Bailey remembered. They drove first to a drugstore, where Andy picked up a few things, and then to four or five luxury hotels before Andy found a vacancy at the Westbury Hotel on East 68th Street, just three blocks from Bess’s apartment.
Within two weeks Bess and Andy no longer had to worry about being discreet about their relationship. On March 7 their long-held secret affair had made its way onto the front page of the New York Post. Next to Bess’s picture ran the headline “Irate Wife Evicts Escort of Bess Myerson.” On the paper’s widely read gossip page, “Page Six,” the article began: “Newly named Cultural Affairs Commissioner Bess Myerson, whose frequent escort around town has been her former campaign advisor Andy Capasso, has lost one social friend, Andy’s wife, Nancy.…”
Nancy took the opportunity to deliver a few potshots at Andy and Bess, telling the Post that she had never known her husband liked older women, “although he always liked my mother.”
About Bess she said: “She’s been around more years than a normal mortal. It’s disgusting. If it was a 28-year-old blond I wouldn’t be so insulted.”
Bess would later tell writer Patricia Morrisroe that the article, which Bess believed was planted by Nancy, drew her even closer to Andy. “It made me more supportive of him, because I’m supportive of friends,” she explained. “She just threw us to the wolves. But I’m used to that. Women take their vengeance out on me because they think I have it all.”
Before beginning her new job at the Department of Cultural Affairs on April 26, Bess finished up her work at WCBS-TV and flew with Andy to Caneel Bay, on St. John in the Caribbean, to celebrate her city appointment and to help him celebrate a $53.6 million contract that he had just won to build a sludge-processing complex at the Owls Head sewage treatment plant in Brooklyn. Although he had never done such work before, he had won the contract after submitting the lowest bid. Years later the city contract would become the focus of numerous inquiries as investigators attempted to determine what role his friendships with former Democratic political bosses Stanley Friedman and Donald Manes had played in the selection process.
Despite his tremendous business success that spring, Andy had become preoccupied, almost obsessed, by his divorce. He was enraged that Nancy had evicted him from the apartment. Drinking heavily and losing nights of sleep, he sometimes took out his frustration and anger on his employees, accusing some of them of betrayal and giving information to Nancy. He was always looking over his shoulder, because he suspected that Nancy had hired a private investigator to follow him. He worried too that she was tapping his telephones, and he had the office phones repeatedly swept for bugs. “The divorce was getting the best of him,” Andy’s former secretary said.
Andy spent weekdays at a suite in the Westbury Hotel and weekends with Bess at his Westhampton Beach home. During their first weekend alone at the house, Bess brought out a suitcase full of clothes and other belongings and hung her clothes in a guest bedroom. By the following weekend she had moved all of her things into the master bedroom.
In March they began interviewing live-in servants to care for the waterfront estate. They decided on Shirley and Ray Harrod, a British couple who had worked in various homes for more than twenty years in the United States. The couple was paid $2,300 per month. Bess gave the Harrods specific instructions about what to do should Nancy Capasso or her children from her previous marriage ever appear at the door.
“She said Mr. Capasso was going through a very messy divorce, and the security had to be very strict, for they didn’t want any of Mrs. Capasso’s children to come into the house or Mrs. Capasso,” Shirley Harrod later said.
At the five-bedroom home in Westhampton Beach on Quantuc
k Bay, Shirley Harrod recalled, Bess quickly established her position as the lady of the house. She rearranged the furniture, brought out some of her own china, and instructed Harrod to get rid of all of Nancy’s potted plants, telling her that she didn’t like “living in a jungle.” She also asked her not to answer the phone with “Capasso residence.” “Hello” would do.
After Bess began working at the Department of Cultural Affairs in late April, Andy’s driver often picked her up outside of her office at 2 Columbus Circle on Thursday or Friday afternoon to take her to the 23rd Street heliport, where she would meet Andy and board a seaplane for the twenty-minute trip to Westhampton Beach. They would be delivered almost to the back door, landing in the bay behind his house.
That spring and summer of 1983 Andy and Bess frequently entertained. Bess’s longtime friend Herb Rickman, a special assistant to the mayor, stayed with them several weekends that summer, sometimes taking the seaplane with them on Friday afternoon. Federal investigators would later contend that Bess and Andy were using Rickman to draw them closer to the mayor because Andy might have been worried that his connections with organized crime were too close. He wanted desperately to move in the right circles, the investigators argued, so that he could cloak himself with respectability.
On Memorial Day weekend Bess and Andy invited Mayor Koch, along with his good friends Bobbie and David Margolis, who own a home nearby, to Westhampton Beach for a barbecue.
Although most of Andy and Bess’s friends knew they were an item, Bess apparently did not want everyone to know she was sleeping there. One afternoon, Shirley Harrod said, as a group of guests was arriving at the house, Bess “walked out the kitchen door and came in the front door as if she had just arrived.”
A frequent topic of conversation among Bess, Andy, and their close friends that summer was Andy’s divorce. Both Bess and Andy constantly railed against his estranged wife. Andy once explained to a houseguest that Nancy put him down all the time and had loved only his money. “The official version was that their marriage had been troubled long before Bess arrived on the scene,” the guest recalled. “He said that she had been fooling around with a tennis pro. And he said she was embarrassed by him and never liked to entertain his friends.”
Even so, Andy felt ambivalent about ending his marriage. “I’m an Italian man,” the houseguest remembered Andy saying. “I get married until death. There is no divorce in my family.”
But Andy felt that Nancy had left him no choice when she threw him out of his Fifth Avenue apartment and splashed their marital troubles on the front page of the New York Post. And for that Nancy would have to pay. “I’m not giving her a dime,” chauffeur Tony Bailey later recalled he said.
In March Andy fulfilled his promise by refusing to pay the $5,914.07 monthly maintenance charges on the Fifth Avenue apartment and virtually all of the household bills. While he promised to continue paying all of the children’s expenses, he insisted that Nancy pick up the rest of the expenses herself using her income from Sotheby’s International Realty and the interest she was earning from thousands of dollars he claimed she had stashed away in certificates of deposit during their marriage.
Claiming that under state law he was obligated to pick up the tab, Nancy struck back in court. Her lawyers requested that Judge Gabel award Nancy temporary alimony and child support payments. Since it takes almost two years for many divorces to go to trial in New York, state law requires that a spouse, most often the wife, receive temporary alimony and temporary child support until the divorce has been granted and the division of marital properties and assets has been made. Temporary alimony and child support payments are intended to meet the spouse’s reasonable needs and essentially maintain the lifestyle the spouse had known before the marriage broke up. A number of different factors are considered when a judge determines how much temporary alimony to award a wife, such as whether the wife earns a sufficient income to support herself.
Temporary alimony can also be a major factor in determining strategy in a bitter divorce. For example, if a spouse receives a substantial temporary alimony award, there is less incentive to settle the divorce quickly or bring on a speedy divorce trial, because the permanent alimony award could be lower. On the other hand, if a wife receives a small temporary alimony award, the husband might try to drag his heels in bringing the divorce to trial out of concern that he might end up having to pay more.
In order to maintain the lavish lifestyle Nancy enjoyed before Andy filed for divorce, she claimed in an affidavit on April 29, 1983, that she needed $6,060.13 a week in temporary alimony and $1,933.17 a week in child support. Her attorney, Raoul Lionel Felder, had a reputation for overstating his request in order to get as much money as possible for his client.
In addition, Nancy asked the court to compel Andy to pay the $5,914.07 monthly maintenance on the Fifth Avenue apartment, the $1,669 monthly mortgage and maintenance fee on their Palm Beach condominium, and $9,665.18 in household bills that included virtually everything from her $308-a-month dry-cleaning bill to the cost of getting the vacuum repaired.
“He has cut me off without a cent,” she stated in the affidavit. “He has done this to get even with me because of my application to this court for exclusive occupancy of our Fifth Avenue apartment and to force me to settle this case on his terms.… He knows that there is no way in the slightest that I can afford to maintain, even remotely, the lifestyle to which he has accustomed us over the years. He has acted out of pure vengeance.”
Andy and Bess worked together with his lawyers to prepare a response to Nancy’s request. Andy’s chauffeur remembers frequent trips to pick up divorce papers from Andy’s office and drop them off at Bess’s house. In Westhampton Andy and Bess spent hours at the dining room table, discussing strategy and making notes in the margins. They talked about the divorce incessantly, recalled the maid, Shirley Harrod: “They were so very upset about the whole thing. Mostly about the payments.” One afternoon, she said, Andy threw the papers on the table and said to Bess, “Isn’t there something you can do about this?”
Harrod said she did not hear Bess’s reply.
On May 17 Andy submitted his response to the courts on Nancy’s request for temporary alimony. In his affidavit Andy charged that Nancy had “wildly exaggerated” her need for temporary alimony and child support. He claimed that her request would cost him $515,488.44 a year, five times more than what he had spent on the family when they had all lived together in 1982. He claimed that Nancy had “artificially inflated her expenses to the financial frontiers of the imagination.”
He also stated in the affidavit that he would continue, however, to pay for all of his children’s expenses. “Frankly, I do not need my wife, her lawyer, or anyone else to remind me of my obligations towards my children. I have gladly and willingly paid all of their expenses, every single one … and I continue to pay for those expenses on a current basis because I love my children and care for them very much. My cultural heritage dictates that I have a sacred obligation to support my children and a court order is simply unnecessary because I would not dishonor myself by not doing so.”
By May 24 both sides in Capasso v. Capasso had submitted their arguments in motions before Judge Hortense W. Gabel. As the judge assigned to rule on divorce motions, she would determine how much, if any, temporary alimony and child support Nancy Capasso would receive.
Nancy took comfort in knowing that Judge Gabel was making the decisions in the case. It had been Judge Gabel who had granted exclusive occupancy of the Fifth Avenue apartment to her in February. And she had heard that Judge Gabel was a veteran public servant with a sterling reputation who was generous to women in divorce cases. Once, after learning that musical composer Alan Jay Lerner was $12,000 behind in his alimony payments, Judge Gabel had placed his property in receivership and named his ex-wife as the receiver.
What Nancy did not know that spring of 1983 is that Judge Gabel and Bess Myerson had been acquainted for fifteen years. And that on
Wednesday, May 25, the day after she had filed a motion requesting Judge Gabel to grant her temporary alimony, Bess Myerson and Judge Gabel were on their way to Gracie Mansion in Bess’s chauffeur-driven city car.
24
Mother and Daughter
Seventy years old in 1983 and nearly blind, Hortense Gabel—Horty to her friends—was considered “one of the grandes dames” of the courts and a legend in legal and government circles for her skirmishes with the city’s legendary city planner and power broker Robert Moses. As a small, frail-looking woman who peers out from thick glasses, her appearance gives little indication of the toughness and determination that helped her overcome her poor eyesight and break down gender barriers to reach the highest levels of city and state government.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, while Bess was modeling minks on television game shows, Hortense Gabel was regarded as one of the most powerful women in New York. As head of Mayor Robert F. Wagner’s campaign against “slumlords,” she was a highly visible public figure who captured the press’s attention in much the same way Bess did years later as Mayor Lindsay’s commissioner of consumer affairs. She battled landlords at every turn, staging well-publicized “raids” on their buildings, where she would decry the poor conditions, demand immediate improvements, and seek large fines against building owners. The New York Times called her the “lady against the slums.”
Hortense Wittstein Gabel was born in the Bronx on December 16, 1912, to a comfortable, middle-class Jewish family. Her father, Ruben Wittstein, was a politically active lawyer whose friends included the powerful Bronx state supreme court judge Al Cohn, father of the well-known New York attorney the late Roy Cohn. “Government was always a topic for table conversation,” she once said. “I was very lucky in my choice of parents.”
Her mother taught her to read and write at home because she was so nearsighted that the family doctor did not think she could learn much in a classroom. When she did finally enter the local public school at around age eight, she excelled and skipped several grades. She went on to Hunter College and then followed her father’s footsteps, entering Columbia University Law School in 1932. “It was a complete case of father identification,” she once said. She was one of five women in her class.
Queen Bess Page 24