Audition (16 page)

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 have 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.

He called again, and then again, but I ducked him as much as possible and saw him very infrequently. When I did see him, I must admit I found him interesting. He seemed to know everything about everything and everyone who was somebody. He was also very funny in a sardonic way. I was never physically attracted to him, nor, evidently, was he to me—outside of a quick kiss on the cheek, he never asked for more. So now and then, when he called, I said yes and we went out. Nothing close to serious. Besides, I had a new beau who, in his way, was every bit as unlikely as Roy: “Philippe of the Waldorf.”

Claude Philippe had for years been the very well-known head of the catering and banquet department at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, hence the unofficial title. He was in charge of everything from weddings to all special events. I had met him some years before when my father and I went to the Waldorf to check out the hotel as a possible setting for my wedding to Bob Katz. Philippe himself met with us because the bride-to-be, me, was the daughter of Lou Walters of Latin Quarter fame, but for all Philippe’s personal attention, my father had chosen the Plaza because he thought it was classier.

I remet Philippe at Tex McCrary, Inc. He had become a client of the agency after his falling-out with the Waldorf, caused by a highly public indictment in 1958 for income tax evasion. He had been loudly proclaiming his innocence ever since and still had a great reputation as a rather flamboyant manager and a connoisseur of food and wine, so I guess his indictment didn’t bother me too much—or many others, for that matter.

Despite the charges against him, Philippe had been snapped up to head the food, drink, and catering business at two other hotels, the Summit and the Americana, and both hotels became clients of Tex McCrary, Inc. I was assigned to get publicity for their star attraction.

Claude Philippe and I had a delightful lunch. He had been born in Paris, was enormously charming and very witty. He knew all about wine, food, restaurants and was the epitome of sophistication. He started to call. I was thrilled. And so began two of the most romantic years of my life. That he was married to an actress in Paris did not bother me. They were separated. She lived in France. He rarely saw her, he said. There was talk of divorce. I wasn’t thinking of marrying again, so his being married somehow didn’t bother me. Neither was I bothered by the eighteen-year difference in our ages. Philippe was elegant, worldly, exciting, and a master of the intimate gesture—bouquets of yellow roses, love notes in French, a sprig of fresh lavender for my lapel. I was mad for him.

I never told my parents I was seeing Philippe. The reaction of Shirley, who kept referring to him as “the headwaiter,” was bad enough. But I didn’t care. Philippe and I were both so busy we didn’t see each other much during the week. The weekends, however, belonged to us, and they were magical.