Innocent Spouse

by Carol Ross Joynt

  I was surprised but not shocked. I knew I was vulnerable, that my lease was in some ways up for grabs once it expired. But the thought of a threat coming possibly from the inside was upsetting. And there was Doug, sitting not more than fifteen feet away, going over some papers with Connie. So much for asking him to mind the landlords.

  “If anybody would know, it’s him,” I said, being necessarily discreet but referring to Dimitri. “What does this mean for me? Is this an impediment?”

  “Nah,” he said, “I think it will be okay. But if it’s true, it tells you something about your manager.”

  “Jake, what should I do?” I asked.

  “Do nothing right now,” he said. “Wait until you get your lease.”

  “Will I get it?”

  “Yes,” Jake said. “I believe so.”

  Jake’s news about Doug upended my composure. I hung up the phone, queasy in the stomach. I could hardly breathe. Doug was at his desk, yakking to Connie. I winced in order to stop myself from crying. If true, was this his version of loyalty? Was this another warped way of giving me support? Like when I first inherited the place, and he blithely told me the business was $250,000 behind in accounts, as if his management played no role in accruing the debt. His attitude was “This is your problem, not mine.” How could Howard have coexisted with such a person? Leaving me with him was almost as bad as leaving me with the IRS. I sat at the desk, fighting back the tears.

  Both Connie and Doug looked up, concerned, and Doug asked, “Is there anything we can do?”

  “No.”

  The phone rang. It was Spencer. “Mommy, when are you coming home?”

  “Soon,” I said.

  “But how soon?”

  “Real soon, honey.”

  “Mommy, are you crying?” Spencer asked.

  “Yes, a little.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get home.”

  “Why don’t you go to the phone upstairs?” he suggested.

  “Okay,” I ran upstairs and picked up the bar phone. “Honey, I got some bad news but I’ll be okay and I’ll be home soon.”

  “Mommy, is the bad news that we’re not going to get Teddy’s house?”

  “No, angel, we’re going to get the house.”

  “Is it that I’m not going to get to go to my new school anymore?”

  “No, honey. You’ll go to your school as long as you want.”

  “Then what is it, Mommy?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get home. Now, sweetie, finish your dinner and I’ll see you shortly. I love you.” I called Connie on the intercom. I could trust her with this, largely because she shared my skepticism about Doug.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m okay. Can you come up for a minute?”

  We met in the empty dining room. I told her about Jake’s call. She was momentarily speechless. “I’m going home,” I said. “If I go back downstairs I’ll lose it.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” she said. “But, honestly, I can’t imagine the landlords giving the lease to him, and he couldn’t have the business anyway. Nathans is yours. He’d have to buy it. What’s the chance of that happening?” Connie, of course, was right. I did own Nathans for better or worse. I loved the fettuccine but I wished the cement blocks weren’t on my feet. Still, as Anthony Lanier warned me, it was the hottest property in town, my lease was potentially up in the air, and the sharks could be anywhere. Why wouldn’t Doug have fantasies of putting together a deal and pulling an end run on me?

  At home, after Spencer was asleep, I called Jake to talk to him more candidly than was possible in the office. I asked him to try to find out what was going on between Doug and the landlords. Were these “talks” serious?

  “Will do,” he said.

  I sat in the kitchen alone and picked at my dinner while I considered this latest scary development. Was Doug acting alone among the staff of fifty-five—or was it a mutiny? Whatever it was, I had to be ready to handle it fast and smart. And how would I do that?

  I cleaned up the kitchen, walked the dog, and returned to sit at my desk for an hour, paying what bills I had the money to pay and filing the letters from collection agencies into their already overflowing box. Just when I was taking my somber spirits to bed with me, Paolo phoned. At the sound of his voice, Nathans, the IRS, the landlords, Doug, the unpaid bills—all that was lifted from my shoulders. His charm and affection were a magic wand that transformed me from a middle-aged widow who’d inherited a bar she never wanted, along with far more debts than money to pay them, into a princess pursued by the handsome Prince Paolo. I was back in my teenage crush. It felt like such a good, safe place to be.

  But I wasn’t a teenager. I knew that. For a magical moment I was just reveling in the rush of romantic fantasy. That’s what Paolo gave me, and it meant a lot.

  Chapter 22

  SUMMER WAS OVER. We invited friends to stay with us at the Bay house over Labor Day weekend. It would probably be our last good weekend there because going forward a real estate agent would be showing it to prospective buyers. Our guests were Yolande Betbeze Fox, a Georgetown grand dame as well as the 1951 Miss America, and her partner, Cherif Guellal, once Algeria’s dashing ambassador to Washington, along with Yolande’s granddaughter, Paris, who’d been to nursery school with Spencer. We planned a lazy weekend enjoying the quiet of the countryside, good conversation, grilling by the pool, briny breezes off the Bay, and a drink or two before going back to Washington, where life would heat up as the weather cooled down.

  Spencer was scheduled to begin kindergarten on Tuesday and needed some distraction. He got it. He and Paris got along famously until they started pulling each other’s hair. We would calm them down, and a little later the fracas would resume until we calmed them down again. As I said, it was a distraction.

  After dinner Saturday evening, Yolande and I were relaxing in front of the television when news broke that the car carrying Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed had crashed in a tunnel in Paris. Early reports from the scene were sketchy but said that Diana was injured but alive. Britt Kahn, who had quit the staff at Larry King Live to work for ABC News, called me shortly after nine p.m. to tell me that Diana was, in fact, dead. It hadn’t been made public. Britt was at work in New York and plugged in. She called me not to leak news but because we had a Diana bond. She was a fan of the princess. At a Washington dinner where Wendy, Larry King, and I first met Diana, I had pulled Britt across the room to present her to the princess. Britt didn’t forget that, and she was grateful. “I can’t believe she’s dead,” she said. “But we’ve got people over there at the hospital who have it confirmed.”

  I paged Wendy. She returned my page right away and without revealing my source I told her Diana was dead. Was I sure? Yes. Just to confirm, she asked me to call Mohamed al-Fayed’s spokesman, Michael Cole, who worked for al-Fayed in London. Cole and I had a solid professional relationship. He answered on the first ring and could confirm only that Dodi al-Fayed was dead. I talked to Wendy again. She knew I always had the best sources and trusted my information. We tried to call everyone else on the staff but it was Saturday night on Labor Day weekend. Most were out.

  Toward the end of one of our conversations I mentioned that Britt Kahn had given me the initial tip. She took a moment, then with a chill in her voice that would have frozen water, she began to rail. “How could you do that? She’s a traitor! I can’t believe you did that! Why did you talk to her?”

  “We’re friends,” I said. “She has a Diana thing. She called me. All we did was talk about what happened. She had confirmation of Diana’s death. That was invaluable.”

  “Did you tell her what we’re doing?” she asked.

  “We aren’t doing anything yet, Wendy. We don’t have a show until Monday. All I did was hang up and page you. So, no, I didn’t tell her what we’re doing.”

  “Carol, I can’t believe you would do such a thing. Nobody at our show should talk
to anyone from another show. Ever.”

  “Okay.” She went on to talk about other things, but before we hung up she came back to how “bad” I’d been to talk to Britt. What was all that about? I wondered. I’d never before been lectured for being first to call in with hot news, and Wendy usually liked it if I had bits of gossip from other talk shows. She liked to know what was up.

  The next call was worse. Wendy and senior producer Becky wanted me to get on the next flight to London and stay for the week. “This is your beat, your baby, you’ve got the contacts.”

  I couldn’t disagree. London was where I should be. I had outstanding contacts in “Diana world” and was good on my feet when news was breaking. It would have been challenging and exciting. However, I couldn’t go. “Spencer’s starting at a new school on Tuesday. I’ve got to be here.” All of us knew I should be headed to the airport, passport in hand, but it was hard to argue with the widow whose boy was starting kindergarten at a new school. “I can reach everybody by phone from here,” I said. They knew that, but it wasn’t what they wanted to hear. In a dismal tone that foreshadowed my future with the show, they said they’d send two other producers. I’d been in major-league journalism long enough to know that this was a moment when stepping up was everything, and I could no longer step up.

  YOLANDE AND CHERIF were glued to the TV while I was glued to the wall phone in the kitchen. Eventually they excused themselves to go to bed. For me, the calls and TV watching went on through the night. My primary assignment was to try to get Tom Cruise for Monday’s show. He’d already called CNN’s live coverage to complain about the paparazzi. After talking to Michael Cole several more times, I finally got to bed at about four in the morning. I was up again three hours later, fielding calls and making breakfast for everyone. One of my colleagues, Pam Stevens, another booker, called for my contacts and numbers. Generally such things are privileged but she said, “These are for everyone, Carol.”

  We had a staff conference call around eleven a.m. Wendy began with an admonition: “If I hear of any one of you talking to our competition at the other networks you better start looking for another job.” Hmmm. It was decided I would keep after Tom Cruise, plus pursue Madonna, Demi Moore, the PR man Michael Cole, Harper’s Bazaar editor and Diana pal Liz Tilberis, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, designer Zandra Rhodes, and Elizabeth Emanuel, who had designed Diana’s spectacular wedding dress.

  When I finally reached Pat Kingsley of PMK, who represented Tom Cruise, she was tired and weary of calls from bookers like me. “No,” she said. “No to Tom.” I left messages for Liz Rosenberg for Madonna and Susan Magrino for Tilberis. I talked to Paul Wilmot about Anna Wintour. But I actually booked Michael Cole. Score!

  “Okay, Carol, I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll rest up for you.” It would be two a.m. in London when we went live.

  “Thank you, Michael.” Cole agreed to be exclusive to our show. He was al-Fayed’s spokesman but also his stealth leaker. We’d had a few dinners together in New York where I worked through him to work through Mohamed al-Fayed to get to Raine Spencer, and through Raine to Princess Diana. Raine was Diana’s stepmother and was close to al-Fayed. The al-Fayed family, particularly Mohamed al-Fayed, was obsessed with the royals. Mohamed went so far as to put Raine on the board of Harrods, more a British institution than a simple department store he now owned. There were times when Wendy, Michael Cole, and I would go through elaborate choreography to get Larry on the phone with Mohamed in advance of Mohamed’s possibly being in the same room with Diana, to pass on a message. Unwittingly, perhaps, Mohamed served as a surrogate “booker.” When Diana was al-Fayed’s guest in the south of France that fateful June weekend in 1997 when she so publicly hooked up with Dodi, Michael called me regularly with practically by-the-minute updates about the goings-on out on the al-Fayed yacht. “Dodi and Diana are getting along beautifully,” he cooed. “They’re like lovebirds. They can’t keep their hands off each other!” Nothing for Larry King Live, but as far as gossip goes it was the inside skinny and pretty darn good.

  The day rolled on, and the phone never stopped. I made beds with the phone wedged between my shoulder and my ear. I served lunch on the phone. Went crabbing at the dock on the phone. I closed up the house on the phone. The others helped, of course, and whenever I had a break I filled them in on the latest about what had happened in that Paris tunnel.

  We got back to D.C. and there was another conference call with Wendy and Becky. “Why haven’t you called Tom Cruise at home?” Becky demanded.

  “Well, first off, I don’t have his number and no one will give it to me. Second, he’s not at home; he’s in London starting a film.”

  “What’s the film? Where’s he shooting? Where’s he staying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They were delighted that actor Steven Seagal was available. “He’s stayed at the Ritz,” Wendy said. “He’s been driven in that same car and he knows the driver. Paparazzi chased him in that same tunnel!”

  “This is huge!” Becky exclaimed. You have to understand that in the circus that is entertainment television, “huge” isn’t quite the same thing as it is in the real world. I was becoming increasingly cynical about the news that we in the business deemed critically important: the lingering tendrils of the O. J. Simpson saga, the macabre drama around the brutal murder of child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey, the crisis of Christian televangelist and LKL regular Tammy Faye Bakker, any celebrity scandal or actor with a terminal illness, and now the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed. We were turning their personal tragedies into a celebrity fest. The worst things in the world equaled monster ratings, and the ratings were everything.

  Wendy, Becky, the other producers, and I compiled a wish list of knowns and unknowns that ran about three feet long, small print, single-spaced. It had more names than the Washington social register but for Monday’s show we’d confirmed only Seagal and Michael Cole. We also had a few eyewitnesses, and we hoped to get French police officials and Scotland Yard. Then Becky said she wanted to speak with me privately. “Wendy only wants you to work on two people—Michael Cole and Anna Wintour. Nobody else! We’re streamlining.” Since I had Cole in the bag, it meant I was after only one person, Wintour, the longest of long shots.

  I didn’t see why Becky had to make this assignment privately or why Wendy didn’t tell me herself, but this was television. “Okay,” I said.

  My colleague and friend Dean Sicoli called me at home that evening to tell me that Wendy didn’t want the staff to talk to me. “She had Pam Stevens tell everyone ‘Don’t talk to Carol.’ ” Sometimes working in television was crazier than working at Nathans.

  When I got to the LKL office on Monday, the morning of our first show about the Paris crash, Wendy wasn’t there. She and Larry had flown to Los Angeles on previously scheduled business. I sent her an e-mail message. “I heard last night that you instructed Pam Stevens to tell the staff not to talk to me or work with me. Is this true?”

  Finally Wendy responded. “What you heard was hearsay. This isn’t my problem. You know the source. Settle it with her.” Later, on a staff conference call, Wendy said, “We all love Carol. She’s part of the team. We work with her and she works with us.” What can I say to that? Not much. A job in the television pressure cooker always keeps a person on her toes.

  But I still had a job, thank God, and all the phones were ringing nonstop. Every button on the receptionist’s console lit up with a new call or flashed with an old one on hold. Pam and another member of our booking team were having a vocal tug-of-war over a potential guest whose publicist was on hold. The receptionist, Dorsey Edwards, wanted to give one of them the call so she could handle the other ringing lines. The argument got louder. Finally Dorsey stood up and exploded.

  “All of you are so, so, so un-fucking-professional!” Her voice rose on every so. “So fucking rude! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Every one of you!” We’d had blowups in the office before, but this was the Mount St. Helens of er
uptions. “You should all be ashamed. I’ve never seen anything like it! You butt in on phone calls, you interrupt conversations, you make impossible demands, and you bark orders like General Patton. I’ve never worked anyplace so unprofessional, and I worked in the restaurant business, for God’s sake!” Dorsey sat down, put her head in her hands, and burst into tears. I was probably the only one in the room who got the picture.

  Dorsey’s outburst was the perfect aria for our seventy-two-hour office death-of-Diana media opera—and the opera had scarcely begun. It was only the end of the first act and everyone on the staff was coming apart. To top it off, and amazing as it now seems, Larry King and Shawn Southwick got married—suddenly—that same week in a Los Angeles hospital where Larry—just as suddenly—had been scheduled to undergo emergency coronary bypass surgery. He’d had heart disease for years. The ceremony took place at dawn; Wendy was a witness. They wanted to be married before Larry went under the knife. I’m not sure who wanted it more. At the last minute, the doctors decided Larry didn’t need the surgery—that an angioplasty would do—but the wedding went ahead anyway. After the ceremony, the happy couple flew to New York for Larry’s angioplasty. In the midst of the Diana frenzy, Wendy gave the full staff a report on Larry and Shawn’s wedding in a late-night conference call.

  And Tuesday morning I kept my promise to Spencer and went with him to his first day of kindergarten at his new school.

  ———

  I’D GONE TO public schools and believed in their value, but at that time in Washington the city’s public school system was something to be avoided if at all possible. Even city leaders conceded that fact. There were good schools within the system, but they were heavily subsidized by parents. The best required an application process similar to private schools. Most middle-class Washington families who wanted to send their children to public school moved to the Virginia or Maryland suburbs when their children reached school age. That wasn’t an option for us. During all the back-and-forth with the IRS and my lawyers, I’d kept my moderate savings account out of the picture. I used every dime of it to pay for Spencer’s school. Just in case our world went south, I paid the full tuition in advance for kindergarten through the third grade. I wanted Spencer’s education to be a certainty. Even if the IRS took everything else away, he’d still have that.