Queen Bess Read online

  Arnold, meanwhile, was taking steps of his own to escalate the battle. He cut off her $3,000-a-month household and personal allowance and wrote letters to the upscale Manhattan department stores she frequented notifying them that he would no longer be responsible for her bills. He also began putting some of her personal possessions—trivial things like her records, hair dryer, and books—into locked closets for which only he had the keys.

  In early June Bess’s lawyer notified Arnold that she had retained counsel, which drew a retort from Arnold’s lawyers that simply reiterated his demand to Bess months before: that she move out and live up to the terms of the prenuptial agreement she had signed willingly at the time of their remarriage in May 1968.

  Her lawyer then came back to Arnold with a proposal that Bess would leave their Sutton Place apartment and agree to a divorce forthwith if he would pay her $250,000 up front and agree to provide her with another $17,500 annually.

  On June 19 Arnold struck back by changing all the locks at Sutton Place and having the telephone lines disconnected. He refused to provide Bess with a set of keys to the apartment, telling her that she was now a guest in his house and would be let in and out by the servants—just as any other guest coming to call.

  Bess held firm, however, and still refused to move out of the apartment. On July 13 a now enraged Arnold went to court seeking a formal separation. On the same day he changed the locks on the apartment a second time and then sent his servants away on vacation. He made a reservation for Bess at the Hampshire House hotel on Central Park South and sent a suitcase containing some of her clothes to her attorney’s office.

  Bess was at a meeting in City Hall while all this was happening and learned of Arnold’s latest move when a messenger interrupted the session with a court summons and a letter from Arnold explaining once again why he wanted a formal separation.

  Dear Bess:

  Months ago I told you that I intended to terminate our occupancy of the apartment at 25 Sutton Place. Constantly eating alone, isolated in one room without companionship, conversation or company of any sort has become unbearable, intolerable and senseless. You then stated that you would look for your own home and move shortly. You have not done so.

  I have therefore closed the apartment, terminated the help and moved into a hotel. At the same time, I have reserved accommodations for you at the Hampshire House. A bag has been packed for a few days, and sent to your lawyers. If there are any other of your clothes or possessions which you desire, have your attorneys advise my attorneys thereof and it will be properly arranged. Any possession of yours that you do not now desire will be sent to storage in your name and a detailed list thereof sent to your attorneys. I have made these arrangements for us to move into separate premises since by statements and actions you have, as you intended, succeeded in bringing our marriage to an end for all practical purposes.

  Arnold

  Bess was furious. As it turned out, her current husband had done to her exactly what she had done to Allan Wayne during their divorce fight: changed the locks on their apartment and sent the separation papers to the office.

  That night, at Bess’s instructions, her city driver called a locksmith to the Sutton Place apartment, where the new locks were opened, allowing Bess to get back into the apartment. Her driver then broke the locks Arnold had placed on closets so she could get her belongings.

  The following morning Bess sent word to Arnold, who was living in a hotel, that she intended to remain in the apartment but that she was not treating the apartment as hers exclusively and that he could return or visit the apartment at any time. The siege of Sutton Place continued.

  Arnold was by now nearly beside himself with rage. He confronted Bess at their apartment a few days later and angrily demanded that she vacate the apartment within twenty-four hours because he intended to sell it immediately. He told her that he would keep her in court until she spent her last dime and that he was perfectly willing to spend all of his time presiding over her demise. Despite Arnold’s threats, however, Bess stayed put at the Sutton Place apartment and showed no inclination to move out.

  On July 31 Arnold offered a hint of the until-now secret weapon he hoped to use to force Bess out of the apartment and out of his life. Court papers that he filed seeking Bess’s ouster from the apartment contained a brief mention of her diaries. Though newspapers reported the filing, they gave few details. Arnold’s reference to her diaries caused Bess great concern—concern that she soon would learn was entirely warranted.

  Four days later the attorneys representing Bess and Arnold met in yet another attempt to hammer out a settlement. It was at this meeting that Arnold indicated he was in possession of pages from Bess’s diaries that could cause her great embarrassment if they were ever made public in a divorce trial. “He blackmailed her with the diaries. He threatened to destroy her,” said a friend of Bess’s.

  Faced with this new information, Bess said she would move out of the Sutton Place apartment and sign a formal separation agreement in return for a modest financial settlement. Arnold’s lawyers insisted that she leave the apartment first. While she was packing, they said, they would put the finishing touches on a separation agreement and work out the details of a financial settlement with Arnold.

  On August 6 Bess left the Sutton Place apartment. With nowhere else to go, she sought refuge with Lilly Bruck, her close friend and volunteer coordinator at the Department of Consumer Affairs, who had a large home in nearby Scarsdale. Bess’s driver, Joseph Baum, helped her haul boxes of possessions up to Scarsdale, where she planned to remain for the rest of the summer while looking for an apartment in Manhattan.

  As in the case of so many bad marriages that crumble into bitterness and recrimination, the Grants’ impending divorce had reached the stage where they began battling over the most inconsequential possessions. Arnold followed Bess to Scarsdale the next day and insisted on inspecting the boxes of belongings that Bess had removed from Sutton Place and was storing in Lilly Bruck’s attic. Arnold spent three hours rummaging through the boxes in stifling, ninety-degree-plus heat. Occasionally he would come down the stairs and warn Bruck that she was an accomplice to a crime by allowing Bess to store items of his that his wife had pilfered from his apartment. While he claimed that most of the items in the boxes belonged to him, he left that Saturday afternoon with only a Japanese screen.

  At this point Arnold was worth at least $7 million. Bess was worth roughly $1 million. And they were fighting over household items like a Pyrex double boiler, a potato baker, a marble cheese tray, and a fondue set that were stored in Bruck’s attic. Arnold was claiming, moreover, that Bess had taken twelve crystal corn-on-the-cob dishes from Sutton Place and replaced them with six cheap ones.

  Having agreed to move out of the apartment, Bess was expecting Arnold to present her with the separation agreement and the terms of a financial settlement forthwith. But Arnold, pointing to the boxes in Bruck’s attic, refused to proceed on any settlement until Bess prepared a detailed accounting of all the property she had removed from their Sutton Place apartment. Bess supplied him with the accounting two weeks later, around August 17.

  Arnold still did not come up with the separation agreement. Instead, on August 24 Arnold, who was again living at the Sutton Place apartment now that Bess was gone, went to court seeking exclusive occupancy of the apartment. With the detailed accounting of all of the property Bess had removed in hand, he also asked the court to order Bess to return to him everything she had taken from the house. “She has taken many, many items from their home,” Arnold’s attorney, Morris Abrams, told the New York Post at the time.

  A hearing on Arnold’s request for exclusive occupancy was scheduled for September 8 in Manhattan Supreme Court. On that day lawyers representing both Arnold and Bess asked for a postponement. They said they were trying to work out a solution.

  Just before the hearing Bess’s daughter, Barra, who was then twenty-two, had attempted to intercede on her mother’s be
half while in New York on vacation from London. Barra called Arnold, and he told her that he would agree to a settlement provided that Bess return the items in Bruck’s attic.

  On September 10 Bess returned some, but not all, of the boxes. This wasn’t enough to satisfy Arnold, however, who began complaining that Bess had also removed some of his furniture from Sutton Place. Bess tried to schedule meetings with his lawyers in the hope of getting a settlement, but nothing was forthcoming.

  By late October it became apparent to Bess that Arnold wasn’t interested in offering her a settlement at all. He had achieved his goals: she was out of the apartment and had returned to him most of the household items from Bruck’s attic that he had wanted. And so there was no incentive for him to offer her a dime.

  On October 26 he filed a suit for divorce in Manhattan Supreme Court. He was moving toward a full-scale—and very public—divorce trial. Unless she agreed to walk away without a dime, he intended to expose her diaries. He told a friend that he wanted people to know what Bess Myerson was really like.

  Faced with a divorce action, Bess asked the court to prohibit the press and the public from attending her divorce proceedings, and then she asked that her husband be required to provide her with temporary alimony. Bess wanted $3,500 a month from her husband as well as exclusive occupancy of their Sutton Place apartment, pending the outcome of the divorce proceedings.

  Arnold told the court that Bess didn’t need temporary alimony, claiming that $400,000 in deferred income from her television career and stock holdings of about $600,000 made her a wealthy woman. He pointed out that she still had the $95,000 that he had given her during their first divorce settlement. He argued further that she earned approximately $50,000 a year from her salary as a city commissioner and from interest and dividends on her investments.

  The court agreed with Arnold. On February 22, 1971, Manhattan Supreme Court justice Margaret Mangan denied Bess’s requests for temporary alimony and exclusive possession of 25 Sutton Place. She also refused to grant Bess’s request to seal the record. In her ruling Judge Mangan wrote: “To qualify for financial relief, a wife must demonstrate she is unable to adequately support herself from her own funds during the pendency of the action. There appears to be no demonstrative necessity of temporary alimony, and moreover the trial is imminent.”

  The judge’s decision did not bode well for Bess’s hopes of winning alimony on a permanent basis, particularly since Bess had signed a prenuptial agreement waiving any right to alimony. With her prospects for postdivorce financial support from Arnold looking gloomy, and Arnold threatening to expose the intimate secrets she had confided in the pages of her diaries, Bess decided to give up any claims on his money or the Sutton Place apartment.

  On April 28, 1971, after a private meeting in the judge’s chambers, Manhattan Supreme Court justice Morris Spector awarded Arnold the divorce decree. The grounds for the action were not disclosed, and the proceedings were closed to the public. According to a statement released by Arnold’s lawyers that afternoon, Bess had withdrawn her defense to the divorce actions and her claims for “separation, alimony, counsel fees and a property settlement.”

  Bess nevertheless left the marriage far wealthier than she had entered it. She had been able to invest most of her earnings from her television days because Arnold paid most of the bills. Worth a little more than $100,000 when she first married Arnold in 1962, she had increased that figure nearly tenfold.

  The meeting in Judge Spector’s chambers was possibly the last time Bess and Arnold ever saw each other. Six years later, in 1977, he was hospitalized in Westchester County for Alzheimer’s disease. He died in the hospital three years later, on November 15, 1980.

  After his death, recalling her years with Arnold during an interview with New York magazine, Bess said: “If I had known he was sick, I would never have left him. That’s the type of person I am.”

  15

  “Bess Myerson for Mayor”

  On a Sunday afternoon in March 1971 Bess rode downtown in the front seat of her chauffeur-driven Chrysler sedan to a new neighborhood consumer complaint center at 147 Delancey Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She had scheduled a press conference to announce the center’s opening so that she could draw attention to her efforts to reach out to the city’s low-income neighborhoods. Area residents would now be able to walk in off the street and register their consumer complaints in person.

  Bess also wanted to use the forum to announce that her divorce from Arnold was about to be finalized. “The first thing I want to make clear is that from now on you may call me Bess Myerson,” she told reporters. “I am no longer Mrs. Grant, and that will become official very soon.”

  Bess would say no more about the divorce and quickly changed the subject to the newly opened neighborhood center, which she hoped would “change the feeling of hopelessness that people have about getting action from governmental agencies, by providing face-to-face action on their complaints.”

  With the divorce and Arnold’s threats soon to be put behind her, Bess found herself spending more of her evenings and weekends with the young people she worked with at the agency as well as her first deputy, Henry Stern, and some of his friends, including Congressman Edward I. Koch, then forty-three. Talking about that period, she said a few years later, “I moved from one space to another space. I found that I enjoyed talking and arguing about politics and government.”

  Spending evenings in Chinatown and Greenwich Village with her politically oriented new friends, Bess found that she did not miss Sutton Place or the glittering social life she had left behind. “I’ve had the Norell dresses and the opening nights, and none of it seems so important anymore,” she said.

  Although Bess still worried about her financial situation, she was beginning to lose her fear of being alone. She filled many of her empty nights with work, sometimes returning to the office in a sweater and jeans to read letters from people who believed they had been swindled. She traveled frequently to Albany and Washington, D.C., to testify for consumers and kept herself so busy in the months following her divorce that she couldn’t find time to furnish the spacious two-bedroom apartment on the ninth floor of a prestigious postwar building on East 71st Street, just off Fifth Avenue, which she had bought for $114,000 following her divorce.

  By 1971 the woman who had been arrested for shoplifting only two years before had added significantly to her list of accomplishments in consumer protection. Life magazine put her on the cover that July with the headline “A Consumer’s Best Friend, Bess Myerson on the prowl for stores that cheat us.” She had dramatically changed the way people shopped in supermarkets, following up her unit pricing legislation with “open dating,” signed into law by Mayor Lindsay on April 23. The open dating law, which was adopted by other cities, states, and counties around the country, required grocers and food companies to stamp a final date of sale on perishable foods, such as meat, poultry, fish, dairy products, eggs, fruit, vegetables, and baked goods.

  Six months after the Life cover story, while still commissioner, Bess returned to television to host a syndicated, five-day-a-week talk show on consumer issues. Called “What Every Woman Wants to Know,” it aired on Channel 7, WABC-TV, in New York. Soon after production began, however, it became apparent that Bess was unable to meet the demands of the heavy production schedule while working for the city of New York. One of the show’s producers described her as “a horror,” saying, “She had no regard for other people’s schedules and lives. Thousands and thousands of dollars were lost because she was always late.… Usually you would look forward to tape day, but we used to cringe and talk about ‘What is she going to do to us today?’” The program was canceled after only a few months on the air.

  Bess’s demeanor in the television studio underscored a side of her personality that was not seen by the public. To the television audience Bess was a bold, outspoken fighter for the little guy. At the office, however, her impetuous insistence that every problem be
solved at once often caused confusion and tension among her staff.

  One woman who worked closely with Bess at the Department of Consumer Affairs recalled that Bess was “very condescending with people. She would yell and put people down. She knew she could be an intimidating presence. If she came in contact with anyone who showed weakness, she would use that weakness to bolster herself.”

  At the same time, Bess could be charming and considerate with employees on whom she depended daily. She would ask about their families and offer to use her clout to help their relatives find jobs. She would recommend doctors and was willing to cut through red tape for her close associates and friends. When one of her staff members once complained to Bess that her husband had to wait for a bed in a New York hospital, Bess got on the phone to the hospital’s top administrator, and a bed was made available immediately.

  In return for such treatment Bess expected her employees to be faithful and tolerant, and her solicitousness did engender powerful loyalty among many. One former high-ranking official in her agency remembered some secretaries who “voluntarily became her slaves.” Bess’s friend and co-worker Lilly Bruck said that Bess had a “charm, a warmth that’s irresistible. She enveloped people in her warmth. When she dropped them, they fell hard.”

  Howard Tisch, a deputy commissioner under Bess, recalled, “She could turn on you very quickly. She wasn’t close to anybody except for Henry Stern. My feeling was always that she was somewhat a loner.”

  Stern was in charge of the agency’s day-to-day operation, but no one doubted that it was Bess who was really in charge. “Bess was the boss,” Tisch said. “Nobody ever challenged that. She is probably the strongest-willed person I have ever met. I had great admiration for her. She knew exactly what she wanted, and she knew how to get it, and you did not want to be in her way when she went to do it.”

  Bess’s conquering-hero image in the press began to worry some of Lindsay’s top aides, who thought she was becoming too independent and who found her increasingly difficult to deal with on some issues. One mayoral aide said, “She was a publicity saint, and she realized that she was popular with the press, and she became a little difficult to manage. She took on many things that were over her head, but the press never caught on. They never looked into the details. They never analyzed the merits. The press just loved her. She had that weapon over City Hall. You had to go slow in handling Bess because she had the press bamboozled.”