Queen Bess Page 9

  Turning to the reporters, Allan asked, “If I love her the way I do; could I assault her?”

  “Do you love Bess?” a reporter asked.

  “I always have, and I always will,” Allan replied.

  Bess looked nervous and upset later that day when she appeared at the station house and swore out a complaint against her husband. There was no visible evidence of the assault. When questioned by reporters, she dismissed Allan’s comments about his love for her. “That’s his statement,” she said. “Only I know what I have been through. My daughter is my only concern. Her welfare and state of mind are paramount. Now let justice take its course.”

  On Monday Allan was scheduled to appear in Manhattan Criminal Court to face the assault charge. Bess showed up in a beige suit to testify against her husband, wearing her wedding band on a chain dangling from her neck. As they stood waiting outside the courtroom with their lawyers, they did not speak.

  In her sworn testimony Bess again stated that Allan had ripped off her pajamas, put his hands around her neck, and shoved her against a desk. She said that in the past he had threatened “to get” her and their daughter. She also testified that he had pushed her around on “numerous other occasions, one necessitating hospitalization.”

  “This is a case with a history of violence,” argued her attorney, Benjamin Robinson, “and we ask that the defendant refrain from threatening and intimidating the deponent.”

  Allan’s lawyer, Rudell, denied the charges. “There has been no breach of peace by my client.” Referring to the separation action, he said, “The complainant’s charge is motivated by other causes.” He asked the judge to transfer the case from the criminal courts to the family court, where he argued the case belonged. The judge agreed and asked Allan, “as a favor to the court,” to take a hotel room and stay away from the East 88th Street apartment until the case was resolved.

  After the court session Bess told reporters that she no longer loved her husband. “I don’t really know when I stopped. I’ve had enough of his cruelty over the years, and I cannot stand it anymore. I tried to be a good wife and hide all of this, but I feel relieved I have gone this far.” After she left the courthouse, she headed for her television show.

  Allan refused to say anything negative about Bess to reporters. “She’s still a wonderful girl,” he said.

  This time Bess went ahead with a divorce and another lawsuit, charging Allan with misappropriating $100,000 of assets she contended belonged to her. There was no hope for a reconciliation now. Divorce proceedings were under way.

  In December 1957 she sought a court order barring him from transferring stock that had been put in his name only. She contended that she had earned considerably more money than her husband had for several years and that the stocks were bought with her earnings. “I fear that he will attempt to sell these properties to avoid having to turn them over to me,” she told the New York Daily News.

  Allan responded with a lawsuit seeking custody of Barra. A month later, on January 17, 1958, Bess dropped her lawsuit for the $100,000. They reached an out-of-court settlement on property and child custody issues and finally were divorced. Bess won custody, but Allan retained visitation rights. “It took a long time finishing because he was suing for custody of my daughter, and you can’t do that,” Bess said years later. “He just wanted the money.” She said she gave him money so she could end the bitter battle over Barra, get the divorce, and go on with her life.

  Allan moved out of their apartment on East 88th Street and into an elegant, expensive residential hotel in midtown Manhattan. He was devastated by the divorce. His drinking increased. Over the next few months he became increasingly despondent. “He couldn’t take what had happened to him. ‘What, you can’t hold on to Miss America?’” said a longtime friend of Allan Wayne’s who had grown up with him on West End Avenue. “He was insane about her, and that’s why he couldn’t take it when she left. She was going forward. He wasn’t. She is no good, no good. She was a cruel person to him. He gave her her start.… He was a very nice fellow, and he made the mistake of wanting this girl, and along the road she no longer needed him. I guess he was a stepping-stone.”

  Another woman, who dated Allan for two years after the breakup of his marriage, said she could never believe the charges that he had assaulted Bess. “He had too much respect for women,” she said. “He was very bright. At the time I met him he had a very responsible position at M. Schrank, and he was just a loving person. He was just a very, very loving person. But I know there was another side to him. He drank a lot. That was a problem. I presumed it had started after they had separated and divorced.”

  At one point in their relationship she tried to persuade Allan to join Alcoholics Anonymous, but he wouldn’t go. “He would just say he was busy,” she said. “And by that time I had stopped seeing him. I felt then he was just beyond help.”

  By the summer of 1962, four years after his divorce from Bess, Allan’s drinking was out of control and he was overwhelmed with despair. That spring his alcoholism had cost him his job at M. Schrank, a lingerie and underwear company. He ran out of money and lost his apartment. He had nowhere to go, but he felt too much shame to return to his mother’s apartment on West End Avenue. His brother, Leonard, who lived with their mother, begged him to stop drinking and return home. But Allan did not want his mother to know what he had made of his life.

  A woman he had worked with at M. Schrank offered Allan the use of her apartment on the East Side. She traveled frequently for the company and spent days at a time on the road.

  Just after eleven o’clock on the morning of August 12, 1962, she returned home from a business trip. She had last talked to Allan on the telephone four days before.

  When she opened the door, the stench must have been unbearable. Allan was lying fully dressed on a couch in the bedroom. His body was badly decomposed. The medical examiner’s office concluded he had been dead for several days.

  “Allan was a very sweet, mixed-up man,” said the woman who had dated him in the years after his marriage with Bess ended. “He was very sick. In a way he took his own life, but I don’t think he meant to.”

  The city’s medical examiner conducted an autopsy and found no sign of fresh, traumatic injury. There was no evidence that he had committed suicide. Bess would later say that he died of a cerebral hemorrhage, but the report says the cause of death was “unresolved, indeterminable.” The doctors told the Wayne family they suspected Allan had become sick while drinking and possibly choked to death on his own vomit. The coffin was closed at his funeral.

  The funeral drew more than a hundred people to Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Bess was not among the mourners at the West End Funeral Chapel, formerly located on West 91st Street. Neither was her daughter, Barra. Allan’s mother, Cathryn, and brother, Leonard, were deeply hurt that Bess did not make arrangements for Barra to be there, according to other friends and relatives who attended. “They felt that Bess had deliberately kept her away,” said a longtime friend of the late Cathryn Wayne. “But she never said a bad word about Bess. It was very, very sad. Allan died of a broken heart.”

  11

  “I’ve Got a Secret”

  After her highly publicized divorce Bess received a few kind letters from television viewers offering support and encouragement. Most of the letters that arrived on the set of “The Big Payoff,” however, harshly criticized her for leaving her husband. Some people were cruel.

  Bess was deeply hurt and overwhelmed by the emotional expense of having to undergo such a public divorce. “An Emma Schultz can go through it with dignity, but a celebrity cannot. The public can be cruel,” she said bitterly four years later.

  Besieged by financial insecurity now that she was a single mother at age thirty-four, Bess took on as many television and modeling appearances as she could fit into her schedule. She was growing bored with “The Big Payoff” after seven years of modeling the mink coat five days a week. She couldn’t think, though, a
bout giving up the steady paycheck. “It’s hard to just pick up and go,” she explained to a television columnist a year after her divorce from Allan. “I have to think of my obligations—my child, Barra, for example.”

  Instead of taking a vacation the first summer following the breakup of her marriage, she appeared in the summer stock version of Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy at the Gateway Playhouse in Somers Point, New Jersey. She portrayed a schoolmaster’s wife who defends a sensitive student. While the reviews were favorable, she dismissed questions about becoming a serious actress. She said she was not ready to accept a dramatic role. Perhaps she was unwilling to risk failure at that point, when failure could have jeopardized her financial security and her ability to support her child.

  By the late 1950s her picture-tube-perfect face could be seen all over the television dial. She made guest appearances on “The Name’s the Same,” filled in occasionally on NBC’s “Today” show, and appeared regularly on the popular weekly prime-time show “I’ve Got a Secret” with host Garry Moore. In 1958 she replaced Jayne Meadows on the panel, where she would remain with Henry Morgan, Bill Cullen, and Betsy Palmer for the next nine years.

  “I’ve Got a Secret” was a spinoff of Mark Goodson and Bill Todman’s “What’s My Line?” and was probably the most successful panel show in the history of television, making the top ten prime-time shows during most of the time Bess was there.

  The show’s format was simple. It was part quiz, part entertainment. Four panelists would try to guess a contestant’s secret after it had been flashed on the screen for the television audience. Three contestants and a celebrity guest got a chance to stump the panel during each show. Then the contestants would demonstrate their secret on live television.

  Thousands of people from all over the country wrote to the show’s producers, hoping to interest them in their secrets. Some of the secrets were pretty strange. There was the young boy who could tap-dance on his hands and the dog who could churn butter. “It became almost like a superior vaudeville show,” recalled Henry Morgan.

  The panel guessed only about one-third of all of the secrets over the years. “They got some on intuition, very few on logical questioning,” recalled Chester Feldman, who produced the show for years. “For the most part it didn’t matter whether they guessed it or not. Unlike ‘What’s My Line?’ where they could question for five or six minutes, the panelists on ‘Secret’ had a total of two minutes for questioning because we had to leave time for the demonstrations. The game playing was less important than the payoff.”

  Feldman remembers Bess joining the panel after Jayne Meadows moved to California: “She was just someone who was around who was intelligent and beautiful. Being a panelist is made to look easy, but believe me, a hell of a lot of auditions were held before we found someone who could think on her feet and ask questions logically.

  “You never knew what your next question was going to be. So they had to really think on their feet. Panelists were really selling themselves. It was one of the hardest things to do, to be interesting as yourself. They have no role or script to hide behind, so they were just out there with their bare face.”

  “Nobody played a role,” added Henry Morgan, who was a panelist on the show from 1952 until it went off the air in 1967. “They played what they thought was themselves. So they came out as themselves.”

  Bess knew she couldn’t be the funniest panelist, so she played it straight, serving as the serious panel member who asked careful, thoughtful questions. At times, though, it appeared as if she were trying so hard to ask a serious question that she didn’t realize it was all for fun and entertainment.

  Morgan remembers with a laugh that she often repeated what had just been said. “She’d stall around—‘Let’s see, I understand that you have lived for twelve years in Podunket. It’s already been established.’ She would do it every goddamn time.”

  “Bess was like the schoolmarm on the show,” Feldman said. “The others would go for the laughs. Betsy was a little kooky. Bill was very witty and bright, and Henry was the bad boy. They would take pride in their ability to come up with questions, but they didn’t take it that seriously. Bess played it very straight, and that’s what distinguished her from the others. It was good for balance.”

  Backstage Bess struck the people who worked on the set as moody. Sometimes she would be warm and friendly, but most often they found her aloof. When Henry Morgan first met Bess, she had just been divorced from Allan Wayne. “She was a pretty unhappy girl when I met her,” said Morgan. “Things weren’t all that great.… She was working to live, to eat.”

  Bess was lucky to have won a regular spot on “I’ve Got a Secret” in 1958. A year later CBS canceled “The Big Payoff,” her bread and butter.

  CBS swept all of the big-money giveaway and quiz shows off the air in the fall of 1959, in the wake of a congressional investigation that revealed some television quiz shows had been rigged to create more drama. In testimony before a congressional committee, contestants admitted they had been coached in advance, told when to lose, and, in some cases, supplied with the answers. While there had been complaints of skulduggery on “The Big Payoff” since 1952, the congressional committee did not turn up any evidence of wrongdoing.

  Bess might have been secretly thankful that her eight years on “The Big Payoff” were over. “By the end it all boiled down to finding a new dress to wear every day,” she said at the time.

  Worried about not having enough money to support herself and Barra, she set out to capitalize on her celebrity and create as many opportunities as she could. Only three years before, she had told her agent, George Spota, to turn down offers to do commercials. Now she considered almost any lucrative offer, including television commercials. At that time a glamorous “pitchgirl” could earn between $75,000 and $100,000 a year. Bess became the “commercial hostess” for “The Jackie Gleason Show” and later sold Ajax in commercial after commercial.

  In the late 1950s and early 1960s Bess worked hard, even producing a record album with MGM called Fashions in Music, which featured her piano versions of thirteen popular songs, including “Makin’ Whoopee” and “Ain’t She Sweet?” She appeared every September as an anchor at Convention Hall in Atlantic City, guiding millions of television viewers through the Miss America pageant. And she joined the parade circuit, providing the commentary with Arthur Godfrey for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City and with Ronald Reagan and later Michael Douglas at the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena.

  “She was kind of hot,” said television director Lloyd Gross, who worked with Bess on the set of “I’ve Got a Secret” and behind the scenes at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. “She was somebody you could count on to do a solid performance in that type of thing. Not that she was a great actress, but as a hostess she was a fairly substantial person to put on a panel. You didn’t have to worry about what was going to come out of her mouth. If something went wrong, you knew she wouldn’t fall apart. People found her very professional.”

  That is because Bess did her homework. When the floats paraded past her glass booth, she knew everything there was to know about each and every one of them. “People in New York might say, ‘What difference does it make?’ But it makes a lot of difference to the people in California,” she told a reporter years later. “They worked hard on those floats. I knew them so well, even if the TelePrompTer broke down I would remember. You can’t rely on TelePrompTers.”

  Bess was earning almost $100,000 a year as a regular member of the popular panel show, but she still felt poor. And while her work and her projects and a trip to Israel were keeping her busy, she felt very lonely. She told a friend that she wanted very much to marry again. Only this time her prince had to be successful and wealthy.

  12

  A Pygmalion on Sutton Place

  Arnold Grant sat on the dais at the annual dinner of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in New York in the fall of 1961, plotting h
ow he would capture the attention of the stunning mistress of ceremonies. He had never seen Bess Myerson before that night, and he was struck by her beauty and her presence. A passionate speaker and dominating figure onstage, Bess held the attention of virtually everyone in the hotel ballroom as she made a brief speech and then introduced the ADL’s honored guests and prominent members.

  When she announced his name and spoke effusively about his efforts to raise money for Israel as chairman of the Joint Defense Appeal of the American Jewish Committee and Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, he knew exactly what to do. Grant rose from his chair, smiled, and told the audience that he would forgive such extravagant praise “only if the lovely mistress of ceremonies will have dinner with me after the dinner.”

  Many women might have been taken aback by such bravado, but Bess was intrigued by this man, who she knew was one of the richest and most powerful men in Hollywood and New York and who had been one of the most sought-after bachelors on both coasts since his divorce two years before. Flattered by such a gallant gesture, Bess turned and graciously accepted his invitation.

  As Bess’s longtime friend Lilly Bruck later recalled, “Arnold Grant represented security. He had everything she wanted.”

  A tall, trim man in his fifties, Grant was a well-connected lawyer who counted Eleanor Roosevelt, President John F. Kennedy, and Senator Hubert Humphrey among his friends. Polished and self-assured—some would say arrogant—Grant divided his time between the entertainment capitals of the East and West Coasts. He wore expensive suits, vacationed on the French Riviera and at the oceanfront resorts of Mexico, and did not hesitate to indulge his expensive tastes in art. As a multimillionaire who earned an estimated $300,000 a year—this in the sixties—Grant had no trouble affording the jet-setting lifestyle he led.