Betty remained a terrific draw and filled the club for the duration of her weeklong contract, but even at that, the impressive $70,000 the Café de Paris took in was still $10,000 less than my father needed to meet expenses. And it went downhill from there.
First, Betty turned down a two-week extension of her contract, an extension my father had been counting on.
Second, my father’s frantic search for a new headliner to replace her ended with a complete loser: the controversial rock-and-roll singer Jerry Lee Lewis, best known for tearing up pianos and marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin. The café was practically empty on Lewis’s opening night. Lewis himself didn’t show up for his second night. And the “goblet” containing the swimming mermaid cracked and shattered, drenching some of the patrons and sending the mermaid to the hospital.
My father was by now desperate. He had the nightclub’s high rent to pay and a huge payroll to meet. He tried to borrow more money from his family in New Jersey, but they turned him down. I remember my father’s brother finally telling him: “Look, Lou, we’ll loan you money for yourself, but we’re not giving you any more money for your nightclub.”
The staff at the Café de Paris was more sympathetic. The maître d’ lent him money. So did the maître d’s wife and the waiters and the busboys and the cigarette girls. And so did I. I had a new job by then, in public relations, and I emptied my savings account and gave my father all I had, $3,000.
It wasn’t nearly enough.
It Gets Worse
IN JUNE 1958 my father tried to kill himself.
It happened several weeks after I had moved in with Marilyn and her parents (two of the sweetest people I’ve ever met). Marilyn and I were having breakfast one morning when my mother telephoned from the Hotel Navarro. “I can’t wake your father up,” she said, her usual matter-of-fact voice sounding close to panic. “He just won’t wake up!”
I knew that the Café de Paris was in serious trouble, but the idea that my father would try to take his own life was not something I had ever imagined. Or had I? Was this the nightmare I had always dreaded? Everything over? Everything gone? I had no time to think. I grabbed a taxi and raced to the hotel to find my father, in bed, ashen and unresponsive. I tried to shake him. Nothing happened. I screamed, “Daddy, Daddy!” No response.
Somehow, despite my own panic, I called an ambulance. Paramedics arrived almost at once and took my father out of the hotel on a stretcher. I knew my sister shouldn’t come to the hospital; it would traumatize her. But she certainly couldn’t stay alone at the hotel. So my mother stayed with Jackie, and I went with my father in the ambulance. Please, dear God, I kept repeating to myself, don’t let him die.
I knew as we sped to the hospital that our lives would change drastically whether my father lived or died. But for the first time I had the most overwhelming feelings of love and compassion for him. I kept stroking his face and saying, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” All my resentment was gone. My poor, miserable father. So in debt. His beloved new nightclub a failure. His heart so heavy that he didn’t want to live. Yet he had never discussed his grief with my mother, and I had been too involved with my own problems to explore his.
The ambulance took my father to Mount Sinai Hospital, where the doctors and nurses saved his life. He had taken a heavy overdose of sleeping pills, the kind he had been taking in far lesser amounts almost every night for years. They pumped his stomach and did whatever else they needed to do to bring him back from the brink. Eventually he was wheeled into a private room and put into a bed.
His room was on the first floor of the hospital. I learned that this was where the hospital put people who had attempted suicide. I guess they were afraid the patient might try to jump out the window. But when my father was conscious, he just lay in the bed, weak, pale, and mostly silent. By this time my sister understood what had happened, and both she and my mother were there with me. My father was out of danger and slept most of the time. We never left his side. We hovered around him, but he didn’t say a word to us about his suicide attempt. Not then, not ever.
Did he do it to spare himself the humiliation of his failure? Was it because he was so deeply in debt and hoped the insurance policy he always talked about would support my mother and Jackie? If this was his thinking, was it possible that he didn’t know there would be no money from insurance? My father, it turned out, had borrowed heavily on the policy. There was nothing left for the family. Whatever his reasons, we never asked why. We were just happy he was alive.
This is the first time I have ever revealed that my father tried to kill himself. It was a deeply personal matter, and I felt we had to protect his reputation. Not even his brothers or sisters were told what had happened. I knew the newspaper columnists would learn from the staff at the Café de Paris that my father was in the hospital. I had to reach them before that happened, so I called the most influential of them all, Walter Winchell, who, in addition to his column, had one of the most listened-to radio programs. If he didn’t like you, he could be a ferocious enemy, but from my father’s earliest days in New York, he had been kind. We even occasionally had dinner with him. I told Winchell that my father was suffering from exhaustion and had suffered a mild heart attack. I was giving him the story first, I said, an “exclusive.” Whether he believed me or not, that is what he reported, and that’s what was picked up in all the news stories and columns that followed. Looking back as I write this, I wonder how I had the wits to prevent the real story from coming out. But I did. My father’s honor and privacy were preserved.
My father stayed in the hospital for about a week.
While he was hospitalized his friends in the business and the staff at the Café de Paris made superhuman efforts to keep the club going. In an extraordinary gesture of support, some of the biggest stars of the moment offered to appear at union scale wages—$125 a week. Singer Dorothy Lamour, who had skyrocketed to fame in the Road movies with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, performed for four days. Others played for one night, famous comedians like Henny Youngman and Joey Adams. Joey’s widow, Cindy Adams, is today a well-known columnist. She and I are good friends, and if people sometimes wonder why we’re so close, they should know how long my relationship with Cindy and her late husband goes back.
My father also got support from other columnists who always liked his soft-spoken manner. “Seems like everyone is pulling for the game little fellow lying on his back at Mount Sinai Hospital, suffering from exhaustion and a heart attack,” wrote Lee Mortimer, in the Daily News. Lee had a reputation for being a real SOB, but not where my father was concerned. My father, such a gentle man in such a rough business, was liked and respected by all the Broadway columnists.
For all the goodwill, however, the club could not regain any momentum, and barely a month after the Café de Paris opened, it closed. The vultures descended. Creditors appeared out of the woodwork, some demanding to be paid back the money they’d loaned my father, others demanding to be paid for outstanding bills. Everything at the club was up for grabs: the tables, the chairs, the fancy decor. I went down to the disaster scene and asked for only one memento—my father’s old typewriter.
The days of the penthouses were over. My parents could no longer afford the Navarro Hotel, and I realized I could no longer impose on my friend Marilyn. Living with my parents and Jackie was also out of the question. Not only did circumstances preclude it, I was a grown-up divorced woman. I couldn’t and wouldn’t retreat into my past. So I had to look for my own apartment, the first I would ever live in alone, and it had to be cheap.
When my father was released from the hospital, the solution to several of my parents’ problems was for them to move back to Florida, where my father could regain his strength and convalesce. They owned a very nice house on North Bay Road, one of the best locations in Miami Beach. My mother hoped the sunny weather would begin to lift his deep depression. There was no thought of his seeking professional help. My parents were of the generation that would never hav
e considered a psychiatrist. Instead there was gin rummy.
To my mother’s everlasting credit, she, the determined noncard-player, played gin with my father every day. It helped him keep his mind sharp, and she even became pretty good at it. While she had not always been supportive of her husband in the past, she was a mountain of strength during his emotional breakdown. Slowly he improved and the black fog began to dissipate, but he was still in no shape to deal with the reality he was facing in New York. Which was rapidly getting worse.
“What’s wrong?” I asked my mother, hearing the fear in her voice when she called me one morning from Florida. “Taxes,” she managed to say. “Your father owes taxes in New York and he can’t pay them.” And so the next horror began. In his need for money to keep the Café de Paris open, my father had failed to report or pay various business taxes, including the payroll taxes which he had put back into his floundering business. The IRS was coming after him.
The government put a lien on the Florida house. My parents had to sell everything—their car, the house, and the entire contents of the house. The tax agents even took the chandelier off the dining room ceiling.
In all the times my mother had worried about reversals in her husband’s finances, I don’t think she ever thought things would be so dire that they would lose the only home they owned. But despite all her past complaints, she was a very strong woman. When things were the worst, she was the strongest. So she packed up the few things she was allowed to keep and began to look for a small apartment in Miami Beach that they could rent. It was important that the apartment be in walking distance of a supermarket, as neither my mother nor father could drive at that time. During all this my mother did not blame my father. It was too late for that, and she was concerned about his fragile emotional condition. My sister understood everything but knew there was nothing she could do but try to help my mother pack. Poor Jackie. She was exposed to all the vicissitudes of her parents’ life with no personal life of her own into which to escape. As for me, I talked twice a day to my mother, assuring her that things would get better, even though I had trouble assuring myself. What a dark period for us all.
As all this was going on I became obsessed with finding the money to pay off as many of my father’s debts as I could. I had from early childhood felt responsible for my parents. Hadn’t my mother always told me of her problems with my father? I grew up sharing her concerns about his financial state. What was happening may have seemed like a nightmare, but I had dreamed it all before. I didn’t know where I was going to find this money. We were not really in touch with my father’s family, and remember, they had already refused to loan him money for the Café de Paris.
Into my life at that time came a saint, or at least I thought he was. His name was Lou Chesler, a Canadian with a rather dubious reputation as the czar of gambling casinos in the Bahamas. He had been a habitué of the Latin Quarter (both the Florida and New York clubs) and was fond of my father. I had met him several times, but we barely knew each other. When he learned that my father was ill, he telephoned me to ask about him. I didn’t mention the suicide attempt, but I did tell him that Dad was in bad shape. However, I said quietly, I was sure we would be all right.
Wise man that he was, Mr. Chesler wasn’t so sure. He gently asked me if my father had debts. Did he need money? I said he did and that I was trying to pay them off. I certainly was not thinking of asking him to pay them off. And then came the amazing offer: With no more questions asked he lent me $20,000, a very substantial amount of money at that time, or any time for that matter. “You don’t need to pay me back,” he said. I was grateful beyond words and I certainly didn’t refuse the loan—my pride was not stronger than my need. But I wasn’t a charity case. I wanted to repay it. And I did, little bit by little bit over the years, until I paid back the whole thing.
It still seems incredible that this man, almost a total stranger to me, came to my family’s rescue. Perhaps my father had treated him with the respect others had not. Or perhaps he was touched by the sense of responsibility I, as a young woman in her twenties, had for my father. Whatever the reason, like something from a corny movie plot, he gave me the money. I never forgot Lou Chesler, and it gives me pleasure to write about him today.
My parents left the big house on North Bay Road and moved into the small, inexpensive rental my mother found in Miami Beach. It was off-season, which was a very good thing, because I had now become the sole support of my mother, father, and sister. Everything I had always dreaded might happen had happened. There was no time to cry and I was too busy to feel sorry for myself.
So here is the big question: If my parents had not descended into financial ruin, would I have had the success I have had? Would I, after my divorce, have moved back in with Mom and Dad, perhaps taken a vacation, hung around until I could get another job in television? Was all this, in a strange way, my destiny? (By the way, my daughter always says that one of the first things I taught her was that she must always be able to support herself.) I guess it’s really impossible to know the answer about the whole destiny business. But my feeling is that the answer is yes. Very definitely yes.
I couldn’t find a job in television, which was what I really wanted. I didn’t have the luxury of holding out for a job I loved, so I took the closest thing. I went to work in the so-called radio and television department of a public relations firm called Tex McCrary, Inc. Remember the Tex and Jinx radio and television shows from my days in the publicity department at WNBT? Well, Tex was now a partner in the growing PR firm. I heard that there was an opening, and Tex was receptive to my joining the company.
Tex had formerly been a very good newspaper editor, and although I never liked public relations, I learned a great deal from him. He taught me how to put together a story. “Get them with the first line,” he would say. “Put your facts in the second line.” He was a good teacher to me, and to many others. Another of his “pupils” at the time was a young man named William Safire, a junior partner in the firm in charge of the radio and television department. To be accurate, Bill was in charge of me. Because, except for his secretary, Bill and I were the entire staff of the radio and television department.
Bill, who became a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the New York Times, had grilled me during my job interview about what was going on in the New York scene and who was what to whom. The job entailed getting positive stories about the products of the firm’s clients into newspapers, radio, and television, so knowing the players in the media was essential. And of course I did, because of my father and the work I had done at WNBT, WPIX, and CBS.
When I got the job, I also got my own apartment, in a Manhattan building owned by friends of my parents. It was a rear apartment overlooking the backs of several other buildings, at Seventy-ninth Street and then-unfashionable Second Avenue. It was rather like the apartment I lived in when I was married to Bob Katz—one bedroom, a living room, and a tiny kitchen. Most important, it had a frozen rent. That is, a very low rent that would not be raised every year. It was a godsend.
Cousin Shirley helped me fix up the dark little apartment. We bought a thirty-nine-dollar yellow rug for the floor, which helped somewhat, but the few pieces of old furniture I’d gotten from my parents’ apartment didn’t look right. Shirley decided we should paint some of the pieces black and cover the rest with black contact paper, which we did, unaware that what seemed old-fashioned to us was indeed antique. But Shirley still wasn’t satisfied. She went out, came back with a pink dish, plunked green grapes on it, and said: “There. That spruces up the whole apartment.” I just adored Shirley.
My life settled into a routine. I took the bus to and from work every day. There was a supermarket across the street from my apartment, and most nights, I would go there, buy a package of sliced bologna and a big roll, head home to make some coffee, and have what I thought was a delicious dinner. I rarely cooked except for an occasional scrambled egg.
I had a very good friend from college,
Dorothy Sheckman, who had worked in Paris after graduation and had a wardrobe of magnificent couture clothes from fashion houses like Dior and Balenciaga. She gave me two divine outfits she had grown tired of wearing. From Dior, a pale blue-gray fitted wool dress, and from Balenciaga, a black satin cocktail gown, cut low in the back. How I wish I had both dresses today! I’ve probably never been as chic as I was back then. So, if I was alone, it was bologna sandwiches, and if I had a date, Parisian couture.
I wore one of those dresses when I turned thirty. But neither the dress nor I went out that night. I was supposed to go out with a dashing young socialite stockbroker I’d met by the name of Gianni Uzielli. I washed my hair, did my makeup, put on my lovely dress, and I waited. And I waited. And I—well, you get the picture. Gianni stood me up. I never found out whom he went out with that night since he never called again, but years later he married a lovely young woman, Anne Ford, granddaughter of Henry Ford.
Not an auspicious beginning to my fourth decade. But then, neither was my first date with guess who? None other than Roy M. Cohn. Roy had somehow tracked me down and kept calling to ask me out. I kept turning him down. My extremely negative opinion of Roy Cohn hadn’t changed, but finally, perhaps out of curiosity (after all those weeks of watching him on television, I wondered what he was really like) or, more probably, needing to take a break from the bologna sandwiches, I said yes.
Roy picked me up in his car. People then drove around New York more than they do now. We were going to the “21” Club, the most exclusive restaurant in New York at the time, which was a tonic in itself. But it wasn’t “21” that made our first date so memorable; it was how we got there.
The traffic on West Fifty-second Street (“21” is still there, just west of Fifth Avenue) was at a complete standstill. The traffic lights changed from red to green and to red again, but nothing moved. Except for Roy. “Come on,” he said suddenly. “We’re getting out.” And with that he simply got out of the car, slammed the door, and started walking toward the restaurant. I scrambled after him in disbelief. He had abandoned the car. Just like that. In the middle of the street. I remember thinking he had to be the most arrogant, inconsiderate man I’d ever met, but then again, I was an accomplice of sorts, even though I couldn’t drive. I was so startled, so caught up in the sheer chutzpah of his bolting from the car, I just got swept along. I have no recollection of how I got back to my apartment after dinner. He probably called some flunky to pick up his car, and took me home in a taxi. Anyway, that was my real introduction to Roy Cohn.
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