Innocent Spouse (20 page)

“Because they are young,” he said. “They don’t know better. They are macho.” They may not have known better but they very well knew what they were doing.

“What can I do?” I asked.

“There is nothing. I have talked to them. It won’t happen again. But I am very sorry. This was very bad.”

“Arnoldo, tell them the next time I will call the police.”

When I repeated to Doug what Arnoldo had told me, he said quite casually, “Yes, I’d heard that.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I figured I could work it out and I didn’t want to bother you.”

I asked Doug what I asked Arnoldo. “Why do you think they did it?”

“You’ve been cutting back on their overtime. They’re angry.”

“Great. Get the business shut down by the health department. That will help overtime a lot.”

I got up and left the restaurant. I had to get out of there. I walked home, let the babysitter go, and took Spencer and the dog out for an extended hike. Their company was the antidote to every disappointment, frustration, failure, and tinge of anger. I could never overdose on Spencer.

N
ATHANS’ LEASE WAS
still up in the air. Jake Stein’s negotiations with the landlords’ lawyer, Dimitri Mallios, dragged along, but it looked certain the lease would expire before we settled with the IRS. This is where it got complicated. While I was anxious to have a signed lease, Sheldon and Miriam didn’t mind if it ran out. Their view was that if Nathans had no lease then Nathans would have no value and there would be nothing there for the IRS to come after. A restaurant with no lease is worthless. This was an important negotiating point for them, a point I would never have grasped without my lawyers. It could be achieved simply by the Halkias family giving me a month-to-month extension, which would keep Nathans in business but technically was not a new lease. The lawyers and I could live with that. We’d go month-to-month for the time being, which dropped the restaurant to its lowest possible value. Then, once the IRS issue was resolved, we would sign a new lease that restored the full value. I still had the dream of selling Nathans. For that to happen, I would need a new lease eventually. My plan was to settle with the government, get the lease, sell Nathans, and use the money to pay the IRS. Or, if fate went my way, I could use it to build a future for Spencer and me. I checked with Jake late one afternoon about his talks with the landlords’ lawyer. I was at Howard’s desk in Nathans’ gray and cluttered basement. Doug sat at his and Connie was at a third. “How’s it going?” I asked.

“I just sent a letter over to Dimitri,” Jake said.

“I hope this means we’re close,” I said. “I’ll feel so much better going forward with the IRS when I know the landlords will work with us. At least I know I’ll have a way to pay them if it comes to that.”

“Getting there,” he said, and then he paused. “You know, I think I
ought to tell you something Dimitri told me. The word on the street is that Doug is negotiating behind your back to get the lease for himself.”

I was surprised but not shocked. I knew I was vulnerable, that my lease was in some ways up for grabs once it expired. But the thought of a threat coming possibly from the inside was upsetting. And there was Doug, sitting not more than fifteen feet away, going over some papers with Connie. So much for asking him to mind the landlords.

“If anybody would know, it’s him,” I said, being necessarily discreet but referring to Dimitri. “What does this mean for me? Is this an impediment?”

“Nah,” he said, “I think it will be okay. But if it’s true, it tells you something about your manager.”

“Jake, what should I do?” I asked.

“Do nothing right now,” he said. “Wait until you get your lease.”

“Will I get it?”

“Yes,” Jake said. “I believe so.”

Jake’s news about Doug upended my composure. I hung up the phone, queasy in the stomach. I could hardly breathe. Doug was at his desk, yakking to Connie. I winced in order to stop myself from crying. If true, was this his version of loyalty? Was this another warped way of giving me support? Like when I first inherited the place, and he blithely told me the business was $250,000 behind in accounts, as if his management played no role in accruing the debt. His attitude was “This is your problem, not mine.” How could Howard have coexisted with such a person? Leaving me with him was almost as bad as leaving me with the IRS. I sat at the desk, fighting back the tears.

Both Connie and Doug looked up, concerned, and Doug asked, “Is there anything we can do?”

“No.”

The phone rang. It was Spencer. “Mommy, when are you coming home?”

“Soon,” I said.

“But how soon?”

“Real soon, honey.”

“Mommy, are you crying?” Spencer asked.

“Yes, a little.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you when I get home.”

“Why don’t you go to the phone upstairs?” he suggested.

“Okay,” I ran upstairs and picked up the bar phone. “Honey, I got some bad news but I’ll be okay and I’ll be home soon.”

“Mommy, is the bad news that we’re not going to get Teddy’s house?”

“No, angel, we’re going to get the house.”

“Is it that I’m not going to get to go to my new school anymore?”

“No, honey. You’ll go to your school as long as you want.”

“Then what is it, Mommy?”

“I’ll tell you when I get home. Now, sweetie, finish your dinner and I’ll see you shortly. I love you.” I called Connie on the intercom. I could trust her with this, largely because she shared my skepticism about Doug.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes, I’m okay. Can you come up for a minute?”

We met in the empty dining room. I told her about Jake’s call. She was momentarily speechless. “I’m going home,” I said. “If I go back downstairs I’ll lose it.”

“I’ll see what I can find out,” she said. “But, honestly, I can’t imagine the landlords giving the lease to him, and he couldn’t have the business anyway. Nathans is yours. He’d have to buy it. What’s the chance of that happening?” Connie, of course, was right. I did own Nathans for better or worse. I loved the fettuccine but I wished the cement blocks weren’t on my feet. Still, as Anthony Lanier warned me, it was the hottest property in town, my lease was potentially up in the air, and the sharks could be anywhere. Why wouldn’t Doug have fantasies of putting together a deal and pulling an end run on me?

At home, after Spencer was asleep, I called Jake to talk to him more candidly than was possible in the office. I asked him to try to find out what was going on between Doug and the landlords. Were these “talks” serious?

“Will do,” he said.

I sat in the kitchen alone and picked at my dinner while I considered this latest scary development. Was Doug acting alone among the staff of fifty-five—or was it a mutiny? Whatever it was, I had to be ready to handle it fast and smart. And how would I do that?

I cleaned up the kitchen, walked the dog, and returned to sit at my desk for an hour, paying what bills I had the money to pay and filing the letters from collection agencies into their already overflowing box. Just when I was taking my somber spirits to bed with me, Paolo phoned. At the sound of his voice, Nathans, the IRS, the landlords, Doug, the unpaid bills—all that was lifted from my shoulders. His charm and affection were a magic wand that transformed me from a middle-aged widow who’d inherited a bar she never wanted, along with far more debts than money to pay them, into a princess pursued by the handsome Prince Paolo. I was back in my teenage crush. It felt like such a good, safe place to be.

But I wasn’t a teenager. I knew that. For a magical moment I was just reveling in the rush of romantic fantasy. That’s what Paolo gave me, and it meant a lot.

S
UMMER WAS OVER
. We invited friends to stay with us at the Bay house over Labor Day weekend. It would probably be our last good weekend there because going forward a real estate agent would be showing it to prospective buyers. Our guests were Yolande Betbeze Fox, a Georgetown grand dame as well as the 1951 Miss America, and her partner, Cherif Guellal, once Algeria’s dashing ambassador to Washington, along with Yolande’s granddaughter, Paris, who’d been to nursery school with Spencer. We planned a lazy weekend enjoying the quiet of the countryside, good conversation, grilling by the pool, briny breezes off the Bay, and a drink or two before going back to Washington, where life would heat up as the weather cooled down.

Spencer was scheduled to begin kindergarten on Tuesday and needed some distraction. He got it. He and Paris got along famously until they started pulling each other’s hair. We would calm them down, and a little later the fracas would resume until we calmed them down again. As I said, it was a distraction.

After dinner Saturday evening, Yolande and I were relaxing in front of the television when news broke that the car carrying Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed had crashed in a tunnel in Paris. Early reports from the scene were sketchy but said that Diana was injured but alive. Britt Kahn, who had quit the staff at
Larry King Live
to work for ABC News, called me shortly after nine p.m. to tell me that Diana was, in fact, dead. It hadn’t been made public. Britt was at work in New York and plugged in. She called me not to leak news but because we had a Diana bond. She was a fan of the princess. At a Washington dinner where Wendy, Larry King, and I first met Diana, I had pulled Britt across the room to present her to the princess. Britt didn’t forget that, and she was
grateful. “I can’t believe she’s dead,” she said. “But we’ve got people over there at the hospital who have it confirmed.”

I paged Wendy. She returned my page right away and without revealing my source I told her Diana was dead. Was I sure? Yes. Just to confirm, she asked me to call Mohamed al-Fayed’s spokesman, Michael Cole, who worked for al-Fayed in London. Cole and I had a solid professional relationship. He answered on the first ring and could confirm only that Dodi al-Fayed was dead. I talked to Wendy again. She knew I always had the best sources and trusted my information. We tried to call everyone else on the staff but it was Saturday night on Labor Day weekend. Most were out.

Toward the end of one of our conversations I mentioned that Britt Kahn had given me the initial tip. She took a moment, then with a chill in her voice that would have frozen water, she began to rail. “How could you do that? She’s a traitor! I can’t believe you did that! Why did you talk to her?”

“We’re friends,” I said. “She has a Diana thing. She called me. All we did was talk about what happened. She had confirmation of Diana’s death. That was invaluable.”

“Did you tell her what we’re doing?” she asked.

“We aren’t doing anything yet, Wendy. We don’t have a show until Monday. All I did was hang up and page you. So, no, I didn’t tell her what we’re doing.”

“Carol, I can’t believe you would do such a thing. Nobody at our show should talk to anyone from another show.
Ever.
”

“Okay.” She went on to talk about other things, but before we hung up she came back to how “bad” I’d been to talk to Britt. What was all that about? I wondered. I’d never before been lectured for being first to call in with hot news, and Wendy usually liked it if I had bits of gossip from other talk shows. She liked to know what was up.

The next call was worse. Wendy and senior producer Becky wanted me to get on the next flight to London and stay for the week. “This is your beat, your baby, you’ve got the contacts.”

I couldn’t disagree. London was where I should be. I had outstanding contacts in “Diana world” and was good on my feet when news was breaking. It would have been challenging and exciting. However, I couldn’t go. “Spencer’s starting at a new school on Tuesday. I’ve got to
be here.” All of us knew I should be headed to the airport, passport in hand, but it was hard to argue with the widow whose boy was starting kindergarten at a new school. “I can reach everybody by phone from here,” I said. They knew that, but it wasn’t what they wanted to hear. In a dismal tone that foreshadowed my future with the show, they said they’d send two other producers. I’d been in major-league journalism long enough to know that this was a moment when stepping up was everything, and I could no longer step up.

Y
OLANDE AND
C
HERIF
were glued to the TV while I was glued to the wall phone in the kitchen. Eventually they excused themselves to go to bed. For me, the calls and TV watching went on through the night. My primary assignment was to try to get Tom Cruise for Monday’s show. He’d already called CNN’s live coverage to complain about the paparazzi. After talking to Michael Cole several more times, I finally got to bed at about four in the morning. I was up again three hours later, fielding calls and making breakfast for everyone. One of my colleagues, Pam Stevens, another booker, called for my contacts and numbers. Generally such things are privileged but she said, “These are for everyone, Carol.”

We had a staff conference call around eleven a.m. Wendy began with an admonition: “If I hear of any one of you talking to our competition at the other networks you better start looking for another job.” Hmmm. It was decided I would keep after Tom Cruise, plus pursue Madonna, Demi Moore, the PR man Michael Cole,
Harper’s Bazaar
editor and Diana pal Liz Tilberis,
Vogue
editor Anna Wintour, designer Zandra Rhodes, and Elizabeth Emanuel, who had designed Diana’s spectacular wedding dress.

When I finally reached Pat Kingsley of PMK, who represented Tom Cruise, she was tired and weary of calls from bookers like me. “No,” she said. “No to Tom.” I left messages for Liz Rosenberg for Madonna and Susan Magrino for Tilberis. I talked to Paul Wilmot about Anna Wintour. But I actually booked Michael Cole. Score!

“Okay, Carol, I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll rest up for you.” It would be two a.m. in London when we went live.

“Thank you, Michael.” Cole agreed to be exclusive to our show.
He was al-Fayed’s spokesman but also his stealth leaker. We’d had a few dinners together in New York where I worked through him to work through Mohamed al-Fayed to get to Raine Spencer, and through Raine to Princess Diana. Raine was Diana’s stepmother and was close to al-Fayed. The al-Fayed family, particularly Mohamed al-Fayed, was obsessed with the royals. Mohamed went so far as to put Raine on the board of Harrods, more a British institution than a simple department store he now owned. There were times when Wendy, Michael Cole, and I would go through elaborate choreography to get Larry on the phone with Mohamed in advance of Mohamed’s possibly being in the same room with Diana, to pass on a message. Unwittingly, perhaps, Mohamed served as a surrogate “booker.” When Diana was al-Fayed’s guest in the south of France that fateful June weekend in 1997 when she so publicly hooked up with Dodi, Michael called me regularly with practically by-the-minute updates about the goings-on out on the al-Fayed yacht. “Dodi and Diana are getting along
beautifully,
” he cooed. “They’re like lovebirds. They can’t keep their hands off each other!” Nothing for
Larry King Live
, but as far as gossip goes it was the inside skinny and pretty darn good.