Fairy Tale Interrupted (19 page)

After the requests became twice-a-week affairs, or more, I went into John’s office for a reality check.

“You know, it’s really interesting that
Elle
has thirteen pages of Liz Claiborne ads and we have two. How many times has
Elle
’s editor in chief gone to dinner with their people?”

“All right, Rosie. Let’s just calm down.”

“You’ve got to start saying no to this bullshit.”

He tried going up to Pecker’s office, but Pecker talked him out of his objections. I didn’t blame John for being cowed by Pecker.
George
’s contract with Hachette was up at the end of the following year, and the magazine still hadn’t turned a profit. That was not unusual for a magazine but it was unacceptable for one with John as editor in chief, so Pecker had the upper hand.

John worked so hard, putting everything he had into that magazine, and Hachette was not backing
George
with the sorely needed marketing and advertising muscle. John had to be a diplomat, but I didn’t. It was my job to manage John’s time, and many of Pecker’s dinner requests weren’t a good use
of it. (Though Pecker didn’t quite see my role the same way.) So I started refusing them.

“No, he’s not meeting with Seagram’s again.”

“No, he’s not going to dinner with the Mercedes-Benz people for a third time.”

The subtext being:
No, he’s not Pecker’s puppet.

Soon after I had wrestled John’s schedule from Pecker’s grip, he called John to complain. “I signed a contract to work with John Kennedy,” he said, seething. “Not RoseMarie Terenzio.”

Many people shared that sentiment—including some on the
George
staff—because I didn’t think twice about stepping in when I saw him compromising himself for the magazine, which he came very close to doing during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

I sensed something was up when John came out of an editorial planning meeting on the magazine’s coverage of President Clinton’s extramarital affair with the White House intern. He brushed me off when I asked what had been discussed. John and Carolyn both tried to avoid me when they knew I was skeptical of something, which made me feel like a hall monitor.

Later, John asked me to type up a letter from his notes. As soon as I made sense of what I was writing, I stopped and stormed into his office. The letter personally requested an interview with Monica Lewinsky. I understood that controversy sold magazines, and I certainly didn’t think John needed to be cautious journalistically. I had no problem when he wanted to push the envelope with the Marilyn Monroe cover (or even
with the idea of dressing Madonna as his mom), but this was going too far.

“There is no way you are interviewing Monica Lewinsky,” I yelled.

“You don’t get it, Rose,” he said, turning his back to me.

“I get it. I get that you’re going to find someone else on the staff to do it.”

“I’m the only one who can land this.”

It would have been great for the magazine, but terrible for John. We had a hard enough time getting people to take him seriously. As far as I was concerned, interviewing Monica Lewinsky was low-hanging fruit for John Kennedy. “You don’t need to sell magazines that badly, and she’s not a political figure,” I said.

“Yes, she is. She’s in the middle of the biggest political scandal in recent history.”

“I respectfully disagree with you on this one. And this isn’t something you’ll be comfortable with once it’s done. You’ll regret it.”

“Every reputable magazine is trying to get this.”

“Okay, let me spell it out for you. If you get the interview, everyone will say it’s just because of who you are. And then they’ll rehash the rumors about your father in the White House.” And I knew I would be the one cleaning up the mess, propping him up through his regret while I fended off a million calls from the press. I ended up winning the fight. For
George
’s Sex in High Places issue, John settled on a tamer historical perspective by interviewing Gary Hart—an actual political figure whose career in the Senate ended in the eighties after his extramarital affair was exposed.

The day after our argument, I came into work to find on my desk a big cardboard box. On its side was a drawing of a girl with a speech bubble containing the word “No!”

“I don’t think I need you anymore,” John said, pointing at my replacement. “I have her.”

I was gaining more confidence at
George,
and not just in saying no to John. I started to have an editorial influence, helping to brainstorm cover ideas or suggesting interview subjects for John. I even interviewed the Democratic strategist James Carville for the magazine’s back-page “If I Were President” feature. Among the editors, I now had allies and friends. In addition to Matt Berman and Biz, the executive editor, others learned I had more to contribute than just my gatekeeper duties (even the editor who had mocked me about PBS was in my corner). I began to feel as if I belonged, and I realized over drinks, during late closes, and even at parties that they didn’t see me as the dumb girl from the Bronx that I thought they had. While I continued to butt heads with some editors who didn’t consider me to be anything more than in their way, most of them came to understand that my saying no to John and looking out for him was an asset rather than a hindrance. At the end of the day, my concern was always for John over the magazine.

And the same was true for Carolyn. After they were married, I had to start saying no for her, too. Once their relationship became official, she had more responsibilities, as she knew she would. She had to consider both John’s social obligations and his responsibilities to the magazine. For example, when attending a public event, she wouldn’t wear any designer that advertised in
George
for fear of angering other designers who
might pull their ad pages. Because designers came out of the woodwork wanting to dress her, I had to turn down quite a few offers.

Getting Carolyn to wear a designer’s dress or carry their handbag was a surefire way to sell clothes and, as some of the sales reps at
George
soon realized, also a great way to sell ads. The sales reps started pushing for Carolyn to join John for dinners with designers, asking that she wear certain clothes. That’s when I began taking a more aggressive approach in turning people down.

One ad sales rep cornered me while I was in the ladies’ room and told me that an important client wanted John and Carolyn to come to his apartment and have breakfast with him, his wife, and his kids.

“A monkey could sell those ad pages by getting John Kennedy and his wife to come for breakfast,” I said, thinking,
And if we had a monkey, then we wouldn’t need you.
Basing sales on John’s meeting with clients was a supremely flawed concept. After you sell the first set of ads based on meeting John, how do you top that?

“What do we do to get him to buy pages next year?” I asked. “Let him sleep with Carolyn?”

The sales rep, who stormed out of the bathroom, made the mistake of approaching John about the breakfast. His response was a firm, terse no. Whenever anyone went to John in an attempt to get a different answer from the one I had offered, they were usually disappointed. At that point, John and I were on the same page about almost everything. He appreciated the role I took in protecting Carolyn in addition to him, because he wasn’t always in a position to do that. And I was now fully
confident in my ability to determine what was a yes and what was a no.

While protecting John and Carolyn was getting easier, protecting Frank, something I had done throughout our relationship, had just become more difficult. No matter what he asked for or what time of night he needed me to meet him, I was always there. When Frank didn’t write a final paper for a class, I wrote it for him. Before I found him a job, I paid his bills for six months because he had no money. And when he tested positive for HIV, I was the only one he told.

When Frank mentioned that he was getting tested, I didn’t think much of it. He had assured me he was always safe (plus, I didn’t believe that anything harmful could ever befall Frank). It took two weeks to get the results, so when he called me at work with the news, it seemed out of the blue. And totally terrifying. We spent several months in denial, until we told my sister Amy, a nurse practitioner, who got Frank in to see a top AIDS specialist. The doctor, who saw Frank for free because of her relationship with my sister, prescribed a drug cocktail.

The regimen of drugs to manage HIV was grueling. He had to take roughly ten pills a day, some with food, some on an empty stomach, and some in the middle of the night. Routine wasn’t Frank’s forte, and the drug schedule was something he needed to stick to religiously to stay alive. I was so scared he would miss a dose that I called him at 3:00 a.m. every day to make sure he took his pill.

As close as we were, Frank and I found ourselves at odds because of our jobs, a particularly painful experience. Frank’s
boss, Brad Johns, Carolyn’s colorist, often talked about her to the media. After the wedding, he was in the paper every other day, giving tons of elaborate details about her hair and how he’d colored it before the wedding ceremony. Carolyn and John were pissed that Brad wouldn’t shut his mouth and threatened to take legal action in a cease-and-desist letter.

John, who tried to avoid lawsuits, asked me to appeal to Frank, who might be able to stop Brad’s loquaciousness. John thought a simple threat would put an end to the nonsense. But to me there was nothing simple about that call. I felt sick to my stomach dialing Frank’s number. In the million times I had called him, we’d never been on opposite sides.

Once I’d relayed John and Carolyn’s complaint, he said, “There’s nothing I can do. I have to do what he tells me to.”

Following a quiet moment of tension, I fell into my old habit of getting angry when uncomfortable. “You’re making my job and my life miserable. Your loyalty is supposed to be to me,” I said.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said, on the verge of tears.

“Then I have to send him a cease-and-desist letter.”

“Okay, I’ll make sure Brad gets it,” he said.

I felt as if I had failed John by not immediately solving the problem, and failed Frank by not being able to protect him.

As promised, I sent the letter, and sure enough, the items stopped appearing in the papers. For John and Carolyn the issue was resolved. But for Frank, his problems had just begun. Not long after he got the letter, he was fired. Frank was heartbroken; for the first time, he’d felt as if he was starting a career. Working for the salon changed him. He had begun getting up early in the morning and going to the gym before work.

As soon as he was let go, Frank went back to his old habits—drinking heavily, staying out until all hours of the night, experimenting with God knows who or what. I wasn’t going to let his getting fired by a hair salon derail him, so I set about finding him another job. Negi Vafa,
George
’s creative services director, a chic Iranian woman, hired Frank to assist her with RSVPs and to man the door at events.

Even John pitched in to the effort to keep Frank gainfully employed by paying him to drive his Buckeye Powered Parachute—a contraption that looked like a flying lawn mower—to the Midwest to be fixed. John, traveling for the magazine, met Frank in Chicago to give the renewed Buckeye a test drive; that way, if any problems occurred, Frank could drive it back to the shop for further repairs. When they checked in to a Holiday Inn, the receptionist looked at JFK Jr., standing next to an equally, if not more, handsome man, and asked nervously, “Who’s the nonsmoking queen?”

Frank waved his hand theatrically and said, “That would be me.”

John loved that story—he got a ton of mileage out of recounting their buddy-comedy road trip. Of course, Frank charmed everyone: grouchy middle-aged diner waitresses, bitchy queens, even movie stars. I once brought him as my date to a dinner at the apartment of John’s sister, Caroline. She hosted an evening for friends and family to celebrate John and Carolyn’s marriage. Julia Roberts, who was dating John’s trainer, sat at our table, and of course Frank had her wrapped around his finger before the salad plates were cleared. When he got up to go to the bathroom, Julia leaned toward me and whispered, “I hope you’re going to marry him. He’s a great guy and he’s so gorgeous.”

“I know, Julia,” I replied, “but he’s gay.”

“Are you sure?” she said, looking disappointed.

I could take Frank anywhere, and he would not only hold his own but become part of the scene. He was even in a newspaper’s coverage of the dinner. The paparazzi snapped Frank helping Carolyn carry her gifts as they exited Caroline’s building, and the photo appeared in the paper the next day. Not Julia Roberts. Not Caroline Kennedy. Frank Giordano.

Frank definitely was the life of the party, which wasn’t always a good thing—especially for him. He’d often repeat his signature line, “I know, I know, I have to get off the party carousel,” but still found a reason to go out almost every night of the week. And everyone knew he was the one with access to the “party favors.”

From my point of view, Frank’s problems with alcohol and drugs—as with his inability to secure long-term employment—were just a by-product of Frank being Frank. I never considered that he was an addict; instead I naively believed he just needed to grow up. The hardest drug I ever did was pot, so I decided the alarm I felt in regard to Frank’s excessive drug use was simply an overreaction. I assumed that Frank’s HIV diagnosis would be a wake-up call, but Frank just kept partying. To protect myself from the truth, I turned his drug use into another item on the list of Frank’s selfish acts. There was always drama where Frank was concerned. He refused to grow up and I was getting sick of taking care of him. After all the lost jobs, car accidents, and failed relationships he’d been through, I was tired of worrying.