Queen Bess Read online

  In the Myersons’ small apartment Bella was the dominant personality, a matriarch who ruled her home with an iron hand and barked out commands to her three daughters with the force of a Marine drill sergeant:

  “Eat!”

  “Practice!”

  “Homework!”

  If the girls dared talk while eating supper, Bella would roar, “Finish!” She thought dinner conversation was a waste of time.

  A stern and demanding taskmaster, Bella liked to argue, rarely paid her harried daughters a compliment, and almost never hugged or kissed them. When Bess and her sisters returned home from school, excited by the high marks they routinely got on their tests and report cards, Bella would demand, “Ninety-eight? What’s ninety-eight? What happened to the other two points?”

  The years at Sholem Aleichem were lonely ones for Bess, dominated by the impossible task of pleasing her irascible mother. “I was not allowed to have friends,” Bess once said. “That made me feel different. I was envious of girls who could meet friends after school. I envied friends who could go to the movies together.” In her mother’s opinion having friends was an unproductive use of time that would be better spent studying or practicing the musical instruments her mother insisted her daughters master.

  Bess found grade school difficult, too, because she was tall beyond her years, a thin, awkward, self-conscious child. “You know,” she once told an interviewer, “when I was growing up, I realized that people just hugged little girls. And the big girls were asked to be the monitor and to fetch that and that. I was always wanting to be that little girl who would be taken care of and embraced. So I had to learn somewhere in life to put my arms around myself. To give myself comfort. To learn how to be supportive of myself, to approve of myself, to give myself love.”

  Her classmates taunted her about her height, which had soared to 5' 10" by her twelfth birthday. “Hey, Stretch, how’s the air up there?” they would yell to Bess. Her height figured in one of her worst memories as a child: being cast in the school play in the role of Olive Oyl, the tall, homely cartoon character. Bess begged her teacher to cast someone else, but her teacher told her she was perfect for the role. She was forced to pull her hair tightly behind her head, put on an ugly black dress, and complete the costume by wearing her father’s shoes. She was mortified, but her mother waved off her complaints, telling Bess: “I would have been taller, but we couldn’t afford it.”

  The constant drumbeat of the Myerson household was “Go to school. Get As. And learn how to support yourself.”

  “Do something!” Bella would command her daughters on those rare occasions when she caught them unoccupied around the apartment.

  “She taught me discipline. My mother was the constant who ruled my life,” Bess later told a reporter. “I ingested my mother’s attitude even when I wasn’t with her. And her attitude was always ‘You better do good.’”

  There was an irony to Bella’s nagging and her obsession that her three daughters succeed, however. Though she had lived in the U.S. since the age of ten, she was unable to read English and spoke it poorly. Some of her teeth were missing, and she paid little attention to the rest of her appearance. Despite all the time she spent cleaning and cooking—her daughters later concluded that this was her way of showing them affection—the Myerson apartment always seemed to be cluttered. And her cooking was terrible.

  Bella and Louis, meanwhile, argued constantly. “My mother and father lived in conflict all of their married life,” Bess once explained. “They were always fighting, always arguing, but there was a pact, you know. You could say rocks in his head fit the holes in hers. My mother argued incessantly. And my father surrendered.”

  Bess’s father was in many ways her mother’s antithesis. Soft-spoken and patient, he was the one Bess turned to for the affection she never seemed to get from her mother. He was also the one who instilled in her tremendous pride about her Jewish heritage. “Never forget who you are,” he would tell little Bessie.

  On the weekends Bess liked to tag along on her father’s housepainting jobs. “His work was so good and they loved him, so he would say, ‘Wait till you meet my daughter,’” remembered Bess. “He would drag me around to his clients who had pianos. I would give little concerts while he was moving buckets of paint.”

  Louis was painstaking in his work—a “craftsman,” as one of his clients, Pearl Pochoda, later described him. Her husband, Sam, remembered that if Louis “would make a mistake and smudge one of the doorknobs, he would go out and buy one out of his own pocket. He did not rush his work. I don’t think he got paid enough for the amount of time he put in.”

  Clients would write to him commending his work, though Bella would complain invariably that he was getting letters while other painters were earning more. During the 1930s, however, Louis was fortunate to find any work at all.

  One of the stark realities of Bess’s growing-up years and something she would remember with clarity years later was the Great Depression. By the time she was nine, in 1933, the Depression was at its very depth, with sixteen million people out of work—fully one-third of the nation’s workforce. In New York its grim effects were everywhere: a shantytown of makeshift shelters arose in Central Park to billet the homeless, the unemployed sold apples from street corners, and long lines of the poor and dispossessed waited for meals outside the city’s many soup kitchens.

  The working-class families living in the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses in the Bronx were not immune to the economy’s ravages. When the Depression loomed in 1929, just two years after Louis and Bella had put down $1,000 for their apartment, the cooperative went bankrupt as more and more of its residents fell on hard times. The buildings were bought out by a private investor, and the Myersons and their neighbors suddenly found themselves tenants in the buildings they had once owned.

  Some neighbors were cast out on the street soon afterward as the economy worsened and families became hard-pressed to pay their rent. Bess and her friends would sometimes return home on the bus from school to find a family evicted by the landlord, their furniture piled up around them on the street.

  Despite the early evictions, the residents of Sholem Aleichem did not go sheepishly into tenancy. When forty families were issued eviction notices in 1932, a rent strike was organized by the cooperative—the first rent strike of the Depression in New York City. The residents threatened to move out en masse (they advertised in the New York Times: 212 families looking for apartment building, reasonable rent) and began constant picketing of the building. Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate for president, took up their cause and addressed the cooperative’s residents. After several unsuccessful appeals of the eviction proceedings in what organizers disparagingly called the city’s “capitalistic” municipal court, a truce with the landlord was reached in which rents were reduced by 5 percent and a portion of the total rent was placed in a special fund to subsidize the apartments of the cooperative’s unemployed. A victory dinner was held by the residents in celebration—a “proletarian dinner,” one of the strike organizers told the Bronx Home News at the time. “We will charge regular prices, but it will be herring and potatoes.”

  For all the hardship of the times, the Myersons survived—“independently poor,” as Bess later described it. Bella and Louis were hard workers. Her father brought home a steady income from his housepainting jobs, and Bella sometimes cleaned at the neighborhood restaurant. During the summers she also took a boardinghouse in the Catskill Mountains and rented out rooms. Her three little girls helped her make the beds and clean up after the guests.

  The Myersons were careful, too, not to spend their money foolishly. Louis took home scraps of leftover wallpaper from his job to decorate his daughters’ bedroom. He also picked up other odds and ends to build them doll carriages and other toys. Bella knew how to pinch pennies as well. She sold her old housedresses for $1 each to the black cleaning women who worked in neighboring apartments. Those who couldn’t pay the full dollar were pu
t on an installment plan. When the cleaning women were finishing up for the day, former neighbors remember, Bella would be waiting outside in the hallway to collect that week’s 25¢ payment.

  Some of Bess’s peers got allowances from their parents, but there were no allowances in the Myerson household. Bess’s father would tell her, “Baby, I would give it to you, but I’ll tell you what, I put my money in the bank, you see. And then all those people come along like the Rockefellers and Morgans, and they put all their money on top of mine. I have to wait until they spend all their money to get to mine.”

  Despite the hardships, Bella’s goal was to save enough money to buy a piano and pay for music lessons for her daughters. To Bella music represented a chance at upward mobility. In the Russia of her childhood Jews were barred from attending universities, but they could leave their shtetls to study at the great music conservatories in Moscow. The always practical-minded Bella saw music as a way for her daughters to become educated and to support themselves, if need be, as music teachers.

  Bess was eight when a battered secondhand baby grand piano was hoisted up three stories and wheeled into her parents’ crowded living room, and soon Bess’s life revolved around music, like it or not. Every afternoon Bess would have to leave the neighboring children behind in the park and trudge home to the piano bench. Her mother would be waiting at the door, and whenever Bess objected to the daily practice sessions, Bella lectured Bess in Yiddish in her high-pitched voice: “You don’t appreciate it now, but you’ll thank me later. Now, practice!”

  So Bess would take her seat at the piano and play the scales while Bella listened from the kitchen. Bella knew nothing about music herself, but every twenty minutes or so she would startle Bess by shrieking, “Wrong!”

  At Bella’s constant urging Bess advanced quickly on the piano, and when Bess was eleven her mother decided she had outgrown her teacher at the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses and it was time for someone new. That’s when Dorthea Anderson LaFollette entered Bess’s life.

  In Dorthea LaFollette Bess discovered a role model and a surrogate mother. She seemed to be everything that Bess’s mother was not: refined, educated, and empathetic. “She was like Ingrid Bergman,” Bess remembers. “She was very tall, and she had a wonderful, milky complexion and bright eyes.”

  Mrs. LaFollette’s elegant apartment overlooking Central Park was a world away from the cramped apartment in the Bronx that Bess called home. Marble steps led into the apartment’s front hall, and a spiral staircase led up to a salon with parquet floors and a big fireplace. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling.

  Bess found her new teacher warm and a willing listener. When Bess complained about being teased about her height, Mrs. LaFollette told her, “It’s not the altitude, Bess; it’s the attitude.”

  She also was able to ease Bess’s embarrassment at having only one presentable dress to wear for her piano recitals—a red dress with a full skirt and gathered bodice. Her father had declined her pleas for a new dress, telling Bess that she would look beautiful even in a burlap sack. But Mrs. LaFollette was able to coax Bess into the dress with aplomb.

  “I don’t know what you’re planning to wear,” she told Bess before each recital, “but would you, as a favor to me, wear that red dirndl you wore once before? … It’s a lovely dress, and you look so lovely in it.”

  Tension hung in the air in the Myerson apartment in the days before a recital. Sylvia and Bess would fight for the piano bench, while Helen concentrated on the violin. The girls struggled to memorize their pieces because Mrs. LaFollette did not allow her students to bring their musical scores onstage. Bella granted them an occasional break by ordering them out the door for a brisk walk around the block. “Walk fast and don’t forget to breathe. It’s good for you,” she would yell as they scurried down the stairs.

  On the day of the recital Louis would have the old car ready for the trip from the Bronx to Mrs. LaFollette’s apartment on Central Park West. Bella always invited a few friends or neighbors along, and Bess would squeeze into the backseat and visualize her lap as a piano keyboard.

  Bess proved to be one of Mrs. LaFollette’s best students, and by the age of twelve she was performing with a small symphony orchestra. Bess loved music and dreamed of becoming a concert pianist or possibly even a conductor. “My mother wanted for me what she never had,” Bess said years later. “I remember her once saying to me: ‘You hate me now. You’ll love me later.’”

  3

  Beauty from the Bronx

  The long hours Bess spent on the piano bench in her parents’ living room paid off when she auditioned for and won acceptance into New York’s High School of Music and Art in 1937. Only 120 children from throughout the city had been chosen to attend the new school, which had been created the year before by New York’s music-loving mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, to offer artistically gifted children the opportunity to sharpen and develop their talents.

  For Bess, who turned thirteen that year, the school opened a new and vastly different world from the one she had come to know. At the High School of Music and Art Bess found herself side by side with the best and brightest young talent the city had to offer. The students’ enthusiasm was clear from the long commute many endured to attend. Some students from the far reaches of the city would travel for up to two hours by bus, subway—even ferry—to reach the school at 135th Street and Convent Avenue in Manhattan. Even so, the school posted one of the finest attendance records of any in the city.

  Bess herself spent almost an hour riding the bus and the Broadway Local subway train down from the Bronx to the school, an imposing Gothic building that sat on the top of a hill and became known, appropriately enough, as “the Castle on the Hill.” As her second instrument, Bess had been assigned the double bass because her teachers, seeing how tall she was, thought she would be able to handle the instrument. But after Bess explained the difficulty of her commute from the northwest Bronx, they allowed her to take up the flute instead.

  Classmates of Bess remember her as shy, serious-minded, and a bit aloof during their freshman year. It took Bess time to develop close friendships, and even when she did she rarely revealed much about herself. “She was mysterious,” said classmate Shirley Schwartz, who later had Bess as the maid of honor at her wedding. “She was very secretive about her life outside of high school.”

  Bess did not bring many friends home to her family’s one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx. Her afternoons were filled mostly with practice, rehearsals, and part-time jobs.

  By her junior year in high school Bess had grown from a tall, awkward, skinny girl into a beautiful, willowy young woman with amber-colored eyes, a wide smile, and thick, curly, dark brown hair that fell past her shoulders. She wore no makeup, only a touch of Vaseline on her lips. “In her middle high school years she began to blossom,” said her neighborhood friend, Ruth Singer. By her senior year Bess’s looks had impressed her classmates enough to vote her dual honors as “Prettiest Girl” and “Girl with the Most Charming Smile.”

  Bess paid little attention to comments about her looks. Beauty was something that her mother, Bella, had taught her not to value. “The one important thing about the way she treated me, and the way she treated my sisters, was that physical appearance had no meaning at all,” Bess once said. “It wasn’t anything one could rely on, depend on, or work towards.”

  What Bella Myerson did value was hard work, and during her high school years Bess did what she could, despite her hours of practicing and the long commute to school, to make money for her family. She did some baby-sitting and gave private piano lessons—an experience that provided a bit of a shock when she discovered that some parents allowed their children simply to give up on the piano rather than insisting, as her own mother had, that their children practice and master it.

  With some of the money she earned Bess bought clothes for herself, but she was careful about bringing them home. “If I ever bought anything like something to wear, I always took the price
tag and slashed it with a red pencil and wrote down a number that was exactly half of what it was on sale for. My mother thought it was terrible if we spent money and bought retail. She always thought we should buy everything on sale, because that’s the way you save money,” Bess recalled.

  “I think the girls who grew up in the wealthier part of the city didn’t have the work ethic that we did,” Bess continued. “Also, you had to bring money home. If I got twenty-five cents for a lesson or eventually fifty cents for a lesson, I put that money on the kitchen table for my mom. We made that contribution to the house, as well as buy all our own things.”

  There were not many boys tall enough for Bess, who was 5’11”, or for her close friend, Ruth, who was 5’8”, so they joined a group of Ruth’s friends who had formed a club for tall girls. Membership was limited strictly to girls who were 5’8” or taller. They went roller skating together at the old Columbus Circle rink, sometimes dressed alike in red sweaters and white skirts. Ruth remembers the time a sailor tried to pick Bess up at the roller rink. Bess thought he was too short for her. “She said her name was Bess O’Leary,” Ruth said with a laugh.

  As Bess progressed through high school, Ruth watched as she appeared to gain confidence in herself and become more outgoing. “When I brought her into the group, she became a hit with them, I think mostly because she was level-headed, pleasant, and warm. They picked her to be president right away,” Ruth recalled.

  Bella didn’t approve of the increasing interest Bess took in boys. “My mother sabotaged any attempt I made at dating because my mother thought that study and practicing were more important,” Bess said years later. “And as a matter of fact, I remember times when I would meet a young man, perhaps I was playing in a symphony orchestra at Columbia University, and I’d say, ‘Please call.’