At the Department of Cultural Affairs that morning copies of the New York Post article had made their way onto virtually everyone’s desk.
Bess called a senior staff meeting to discuss how she should respond. Sukhreet was not invited. She was busy following Bess’s orders to make a list of everything she had done since she arrived at the agency and to put together a package of letters of recommendation and references so that Bess could have them on file.
According to Richard Bruno, who attended the meeting, Bess wanted to send a letter to Mayor Koch that would cast the most favorable light on Sukhreet Gabel’s hiring. The task of writing the letter fell to Bruno. Bess dictated the key points she wanted him to make. The letter was sent to City Hall in the hands of her city driver the following day. Bess also had her driver drop off a copy at Judge Gabel’s home.
Dated October 19, 1983, the letter read:
Dear Ed:
Because of yesterday’s incomplete and misleading article in the New York Post about my hiring of Sukhreet Gabel, I felt that I should provide you with a succinct and thorough outline of the facts and sequence of events.
Through July and the beginning of August, Richard Bruno, whom I had recently appointed Assistant Commissioner in charge of public affairs and development, began to organize this new unit, reassigning people already on staff and interviewing them for one actual and several possible openings. Among the two dozen people that he interviewed was Sukhreet Gabel. She had originally applied to the Office of Economic Development, to staff the international business development desk. At that time, no position was available at OED, and she was advised to investigate possibilities at other city agencies. She sent her résumé to the Department of Cultural Affairs, and an interview was arranged.
Both Assistant Commissioner Bruno and Deputy Commissioner Randy Bourscheidt recommended her to me as a bright, enthusiastic, articulate and a potentially valuable employee. Several projects that suited her skills emerged almost at once.…
I made this decision in the context of having known her mother, Judge Hortense Gabel, for many years, as a judge of the highest integrity whose reputation is impeccable, and in light of the fact that the matrimonial actions involving Mr. and Mrs. Capasso had been in the courts since February. Most of what was to be decided had already been decided in the first six months, a major part of it in favor of Mrs. Capasso. Thus it seemed to me that not only was there in fact nothing improper in this action, but any basis for inferring or attributing the appearance of impropriety was absent. In fact, I have just learned that lawyers for both sides requested Tuesday morning (the day the article appeared) that Judge Gabel continue with one piece of unfinished business which was before her on that day.
During the past six weeks, Sukhreet has worked diligently, expanding the ticket distribution program so that it encompasses an ongoing collaboration with the Department for the Aging, meeting with foreign visitors, and doing important research and writing for both my Deputy and Assistant Commissioner. Her performance has been excellent. She represents the Department and the city well. I do not regret my decision. A person who is that highly qualified should not be discriminated against because her mother is a public figure. I regret only any embarrassment or concern that the Post’s interpretation of the situation may have caused you or the Department.
As always, I look to you for wisdom and advice.
Sincerely,
Bess
Bess’s old friend, the mayor, had no reason not to believe her detailed account, and after reviewing it with his chief of staff, Diane Coffey, he sent Bess a note on October 21, 1983, expressing confidence in her decision to hire Sukhreet:
I have your note of October 19 commenting on the hiring of Sukhreet Gabel. While your note wasn’t necessary, I do appreciate your having thought to write it. Based on the recommendations made to you, her talent and your own appraisal, you did exactly the right thing in filling an open job with an able person.
Soon after Bess sent her October 19 letter to Koch, Sukhreet said, Bess told her to go and thank Richard Bruno for “getting her off the hook.”
Although her title was special assistant to the commissioner, Sukhreet found herself virtually isolated from Bess after the New York Post article appeared. The invitations to accompany Bess to evening performances or to meetings outside the office, which had slowed down when Sukhreet began telling department employees who her mother was, became even rarer. And now Sukhreet spent most of her time working under other supervisors.
As part of being pushed aside, Sukhreet said, she was given such assignments as coming up with a cleaning contract for the building.
Then, she said, Bess asked if she had any business cards with her title as special assistant to the commissioner. When Sukhreet showed her a box of four hundred cards, she said, Bess took them from her and dumped them into the trash as she watched.
“Do you have any others on you? How many have you handed out?” Bess demanded.
“Only a few,” Sukhreet replied.
Sometime later, Sukhreet said, while she was attending a function for foreign diplomats, Bess noticed her collecting business cards. “She walked up to me, and she said, ‘You weren’t giving out any business cards, were you?’
“And I said, ‘No. These are simply ones that I have received.’
“‘What have you got there? I want to see what’s in your pocket,’” Bess said as she reached into the pockets of Sukhreet’s blazer to see if she was telling the truth.
The clearest message, Sukhreet says, was the assignment of her desk under a reorganization. She had expected to be moved to a desk right outside of Bess’s office, but instead she was given a desk on the same floor next to the lavatory in what she called “Siberia.” “While I normally don’t care very much about the size of my desk or whether or not I have a window, I felt that there was a message in being put next to the lavatory. I was very upset.”
As soon as she found out where her desk had been placed, she went into the ladies’ room, turned on the water, and began to sob. A few minutes later she heard a knock on the door and a voice saying, “Who’s in there?”
It was Bess.
“It’s me, Bess, Sukhreet.”
“Open up,” Bess ordered.
Bess walked past Sukhreet, who was standing at the sink, and used the facilities behind another door. When she emerged, she must have noticed Sukhreet’s red eyes and swollen face.
“Well,” she said, putting her hand on Sukhreet’s shoulder, “you’ve just got to learn to roll with the punches, kid.” Then she walked out the door.
Another time that fall, Sukhreet said, Bess suggested she visit a psychiatrist at a clinic that offered prospective patients an evaluation for $50. Sukhreet said she agreed to go and visited a doctor there for two months before deciding it wasn’t doing her any good.
Sukhreet complained to her mother about the harsh treatment she was getting, and her mother called Bess and asked why Sukhreet could not have a desk outside of her office. Sukhreet said her mother told her that Bess intended to give her more interesting assignments, such as drafting legislation to be presented to the city council, but that assignment never came to pass.
Although Sukhreet’s relationship with Bess had cooled noticeably since the New York Post article, she decided to host a small dinner party for Bess in her studio apartment that December, following the diplomatic custom of entertaining your boss. Among the people she invited were Bess, Herb Rickman, her parents, and Bob Vanni, the counsel for the department. Sukhreet said she was seated only a few feet away from Bess in the one-room apartment when she overheard Bess talking about her to Bob Vanni. “I can’t understand Sukhreet. She makes me crazy. I just don’t know what I’m going to do about her,” she heard Bess say.
Sukhreet was astonished. Didn’t Bess know she could hear what she was saying? And how could she say such things at a party Sukhreet was giving in Bess’s honor? Struggling to fight back her tears, Sukhreet went into the kitchen
and started washing the dishes.
It was then that Sukhreet realized she had to start looking for another job, and the following week she began making inquiries at other city agencies. Judge Gabel started calling on her friends again as well. She contacted the director of the state’s women’s division on Sukhreet’s behalf and wrote a letter to a prominent attorney, saying that she believed “Sukhreet’s international and language skills are excellent and that she has excellent administrative and negotiating abilities.” But no interesting job offers came her way.
Meanwhile, her job performance at the Department of Cultural Affairs declined in the eyes of her superiors. In early 1984 Deputy Commissioner Randy Bourscheidt complained in writing to Richard Bruno about Sukhreet’s job performance. Bourscheidt’s note, labeled “For your eyes only,” included a copy of a memo written by Sukhreet. Bourscheidt evidently thought Sukhreet’s memo was so bad that it required no other explanation from him than “This is the quality of work I get from Sukhreet.”
Her memo concerned comments Bourscheidt might make when introducing author John Updike at a February 1984 dinner in Updike’s honor:
To: Randy
From: Sukhreet
Date: 24 February 84
Subject: John Updike Dinner
I have spoken to Mrs. Zwicker, Zwick and others. All they want you to do is to stand up and say “Welcome to the city of New York” and sit back down, in two or three minutes.
You might want to say:
“New York, as the great metropolitan center of culture for the region, for the country, and for the world is a large factor in any writer’s experience. I would, however, like to digress and spend just a moment discussing the economic and social impact of John Updike’s work on the city of New York. We, New Yorkers, spend a good deal of money and expend a lot of emotion on writers. Mr. Updike’s work has provided the grist for the mills of countless animated cocktail and dinner conversations and those are, of course, a major New York industry. John Updike’s work has been the subject of scholarly treatises and has provided employment for many of our resident professors and concomitantly keeps our students off the streets and home instead with a good book. New York newspapers are filled with reviews and bestseller list notations. John Updike, of course, is a main stay. Perhaps Mr. Updike’s most important economic contribution to the city of New York is to its very large publishing industry. Thank you, John Updike for helping the city of New York to stay financially and emotionally afloat and welcome.”
The quality of her work became the talk of the senior staff. Richard Bruno decided to bring it to Bess’s attention after he claimed Sukhreet failed to complete an assignment properly for him. He had asked her to obtain some biographical material on some well-known people for a project he was working on. When she told him she was unable to find material on some of the people, he noted that he found the information himself in Who’s Who. In a nasty letter to Sukhreet, Bruno wrote, “I feel that you performed a barely adequate job on what for you should have been a routine assignment.”
In a meeting with Bess, Bruno told her that there was “universal dissatisfaction” in the agency with Sukhreet’s performance. He said Bess told him she was surprised to hear that, but if he felt that way, he should put it in writing.
On May 8, 1984, Bruno sent Bess a memo outlining Sukhreet’s failings. “Too many days just show too little activity, or at least the work is not sufficiently documented,” he wrote. “Although she is not without talents and abilities, after some ten months, it is my opinion that her particular skills do not match with any current needs here at DCA. I feel that given other critical personnel needs, keeping Sukhreet on staff is a luxury that we can no longer afford.”
After Bess received the memo, she called Sukhreet into her office and told her the senior staff wanted to have her fired. “She said that I shouldn’t worry, that she was going to protect me,” Sukhreet said later.
Sukhreet was now just biding her time, preparing to leave the Department of Cultural Affairs as soon as she could get another job somewhere else. Her mother continued to look for her as well and, in early June 1984, finally interested one of her friends, Marcella Maxwell, in hiring Sukhreet.
Maxwell, formerly the dean of Medgar Evers Community College in Brooklyn, considered Horty Gabel a mentor and a friend. She had called the judge for her advice when she sought Koch’s appointment to become the city’s commissioner of human rights. Judge Gabel had sent a letter of recommendation on her behalf. On May 19, 1984, Maxwell was appointed to the post.
A few days later Maxwell and her husband were having dinner with Judge Gabel and her husband at the Gabels’ apartment when the judge suggested that her daughter, Sukhreet, might be an asset to the commission. She explained that Sukhreet was having some personality problems with Bess and that she was looking for another job. The judge thought Sukhreet might make a terrific executive assistant because of her background in sociology and race relations at the University of Chicago and her knowledge of languages.
Maxwell was intrigued, and she told the judge that she would call Bess and ask permission to hire Sukhreet away from cultural affairs. “And Judge Gabel said, ‘I have her telephone number. Why don’t you make a call?’”
Maxwell dialed Bess’s home telephone number from the judge’s apartment and got Bess on the phone. “Bess, you know I am going to be heading the human rights commission, and I am going to be building a staff, and I would like for you to consider letting Sukhreet come and work with me because of her background. I’d like her to serve as my executive assistant,” Maxwell explained.
“You need a black executive assistant,” she said Bess replied.
“Is there anything wrong with her work or any reason you wouldn’t want to let her go?” Maxwell asked. “And the only thing she said was that she was ‘a little pretentious.’”
Maxwell asked Bess to think about it, and then she rejoined the Gabels. Judge Gabel naturally wanted to know what Bess had said, but Maxwell was too embarrassed to repeat Bess’s comment that Sukhreet was pretentious. She told Judge Gabel only that Bess was reluctant to let Sukhreet go.
Within a few weeks Maxwell interviewed Sukhreet for the position, and after reading a letter Sukhreet wrote detailing her academic studies and interest in race relations, she decided she would hire her for a $40,000-a-year position as deputy executive director.
Determined not to let Bess block her way, Sukhreet submitted her resignation on Friday, June 15, 1984. She said Bess was furious. “She no longer had control over me,” Sukhreet said. The following Monday she started work in her new job as deputy executive director for the city’s Commission on Human Rights.
It immediately became apparent, however, that Sukhreet would not fit into the organization well. “Sukhreet came in with a lot of very strange notions about how a professional person acts, dresses, and behaves,” said one senior-level staff member. “She came sashaying into the dingy, dirty offices, wearing flowing white outfits and little hats. She looked like she was going to a tea party.”
Sukhreet did not seem to be able to function in her new role. “She saw the world in a way that no one else did,” said the senior-level staff member. “She could not follow through on substantive material. She made up stories about why she couldn’t get things done. She would take two- and three-hour lunches, telling us she was ‘networking.’ I could not think of allowing her to address a group.”
“I would say, ‘I need this,’” said the senior staff member, “and she would put on a smile, make excuses, and attempt to be cute. She was a darling child who never grew up.”
One of Sukhreet’s first assignments was to help organize Marcella Maxwell’s July 14 swearing-in ceremony at City Hall. As the event drew near, Maxwell and her staff discovered that Sukhreet had failed to accomplish virtually all of her assigned tasks. When they asked to see a sample of the invitation, Sukhreet told them she had not yet designed it. Then, just before the ceremony, she finished writing the speec
h for Maxwell to deliver at the event. By the end of July Maxwell concluded she had to fire Sukhreet.
Before telling Sukhreet, Maxwell thought it would be best to explain to her old friend, Judge Gabel, why she felt she had to fire her daughter. She suggested they meet for lunch at a Greek restaurant across the street from the courthouse.
Over lunch Maxwell explained that Sukhreet was “unable to function within the framework of the new direction the agency is taking, and I am going to have to let her go.”
“She will kill herself,” Judge Gabel said.
“What are you talking about?” Maxwell asked.
“She’s in deep therapy,” Judge Gabel replied.
“I was very upset,” remembered Maxwell. She agreed to permit Sukhreet to resign from the agency “in order not to destroy her.”
Two or three days later Maxwell received a phone call from Bess Myerson, whom she barely knew, inviting her to come to the Department of Cultural Affairs for lunch. They agreed to meet on August 7.
Over lunch that day Bess talked about herself and her accomplishments as cultural affairs commissioner and offered Maxwell tips on how to persuade the city’s Office of Management and Budget to increase her agency’s budget. In the middle of describing her own “excellent presentation” to the city’s budget director, Bess blurted out without explanation: “You have to fire Sukhreet Gabel.”
Maxwell was shocked. She did not ask Bess to elaborate. She had not mentioned to anyone except Judge Gabel that she was unhappy with Sukhreet’s work and that she was thinking of letting Sukhreet go. She was surprised that Bess would tell her to fire Sukhreet when Bess had never indicated during their earlier telephone conversation that there had been anything wrong with Sukhreet’s work at the Department of Cultural Affairs.
Three days later, on August 10, Maxwell asked Sukhreet to resign from the agency. Sukhreet was deeply disappointed that her new job had not worked out.
Having no idea that Bess had suggested to Marcella Maxwell that she should be fired, Sukhreet accepted an invitation from Bess to attend a party that weekend. She now thinks that Bess was kind to her so that she could extend control over her.
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