Audition (19 page)

I loved doing my little segment on the air. But it never occurred to me that I would ever have a regular on-air role myself. Glamour, not humor, and certainly nothing intellectual, was the requirement if a woman wanted to be in front of the camera. All I wanted was to do whatever I was asked to do so I wouldn’t be replaced by some other female writer. I just wanted to keep my job.

For the next twenty years, thirty years, maybe even forty, I would feel the same way. No matter how high my profile became, how many awards I received, or how much money I made, my fear was that it all could be taken away from me. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to link that insecurity to my father’s roller-coaster career or to my mother’s constant anxiety or to my sister’s needs. I have, as I’ve said, always felt I was auditioning, either for a new job or to make sure that I could hold on to the one I had.

And that’s not all bad. Though I’ve lived in varying degrees of anxiety throughout the course of my career, I’ve never really changed my attitude. I’ve worked as hard or harder than anyone else, accepted most every assignment, done my homework, kept complaints to myself, finished the job, and moved on. That is not a bad formula for success.

To my relief, my family was stable during that first whirlwind year at
Today.
My parents and Jackie were settled in Las Vegas, where my father continued to produce his lavish shows and assemble the most gorgeous line of showgirls and dancers. Unlike in Miami or New York, in Vegas these beauties could leave their breasts exposed. The costumes, as usual, were exquisite. So were the breasts. The owners of the Tropicana, which, up until then, had mostly big-name stars as their headliners, were delighted with my father’s work, particularly with his version of Paris’s Folies-Bergère. They gave him a contract, and more and more of the other hotels began to follow his formula, using big production numbers as the main attraction.

My parents bought a small house in Vegas. My father even planted a rose garden. It wasn’t Broadway, but it wasn’t a low floor in a hospital, either.

Professionally he was having a second wind. He was flying to New York, Miami, and Europe looking for acts and inspiration. The Tropicana’s owner rode hard on my father’s extravagant impulses and they were paying him a nice salary. I myself was making pretty good money then, some five hundred a week, and I continued to repay Lou Chesler. I never told my father about the loan; I thought it would humiliate him. Mr. Chesler often offered to forgive it but I didn’t want him to. He was there when I needed him, and this was my way of showing my gratitude.

I was also relieved that Jackie seemed happy. As usual she’d made friends with some of the chorus girls and soon found a brand-new friend in one of my father’s headliners: Carol Channing, the irrepressible Broadway star of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and, later,
Hello, Dolly!
Carol’s father, George Channing, had been a serious follower of the Christian Science movement, and she had grown up with many “Jackies” around her family’s house. She seemed to truly enjoy my sister’s company. Carol invited Jackie to her every show, telephoned her regularly, visited her when she could, and their friendship lasted until the day Jackie died. I will always love Carol Channing.

During this period I spent a good deal of my vacation time with my family in Vegas, but I was always happy to get back to New York. I was in my early thirties, I had a great job, I was single—and, finally, I had a personal life.

From time to time I would still see Roy Cohn. I knew all his faults, but I could never forget what he had done for my father. We never, ever, discussed politics. Though he claimed to be a Democrat, his views were so conservative that, had we discussed them, I probably would never have been able to see him again. Instead I just concentrated on the fact that Roy was very smart and could be very good company.

In spite of his despicable role in the McCarthy hearings, he seemed to have a million friends in all walks of life. For all his tough reputation and his questionable favor swapping, Roy had a whole side of life that was legitimate and attractive. He was a close friend of my old friend Bill Safire, and of William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the conservative political magazine
National Review.
Another very good friend was Si Newhouse, the head of Condé Nast publishing, and also Si’s parents, Mitzi and Sam, to whom Roy was very loyal. On the political side he was a friend of President Ronald Reagan, of the Catholic cardinals, and of the New York political boss Carmine De Sapio. Roy was like a godfather. You do a favor for me, I do a favor for you. He was also one of the toughest divorce lawyers in New York.

On our rare dates Roy would take me to dinner and then on to the Stork Club, where we would be seated at the best table. Sherman Billingsley, the owner, would sit down with him. So would the leading columnists of the time: Walter Winchell, Leonard Lyons, and Jack O’Brian, who was the most important and toughest television critic of the time. (Today, Kate O’Brian, Jack’s youngest daughter, is a vice president at ABC News. I’ve known her since she was a baby.) If all these people seemed to accept him, I guess I thought I could, too. I’m not trying to justify my friendship; I’m trying to make it more understandable. Partly, I suppose, to myself.

I really didn’t know that Roy was homosexual, though I had heard the rumors about his sexual orientation during the Army-McCarthy hearings. (There was no such word then as “gay.”) There wasn’t a lot of talk about homosexuality back then. There were obviously plenty of gay people, but their sexuality was never written about in the press or, for that matter, even in private. As I’ve mentioned, when I saw Roy, the extent of our physical contact was a peck on the cheek. Since he wasn’t a real beau, and I didn’t want him to be, that suited me fine. I never probed. When I look back, I am not sure that Roy admitted to himself that he was homosexual. Until his mother died.

I thought his mother was a dreadful woman. Her name was Dora Marcus Cohn, and she came from a prominent German Jewish family in New York. Roy called her “Mutti,” a leftover from his childhood, and the German diminutive of
“mutter”
for mother. She doted on Roy’s male buddies. But she sure didn’t dote on me. She had no idea if and when I saw her son, but she did know of my existence, and she quickly decided I was hardly what she wanted for her beloved son. I was the daughter of a nightclub owner. Roy was the son of a judge. I had no money or social background. Roy had plenty of both. He once brought us together for dinner, and Mutti could barely hide her disdain for me. I wish now that I had told her that I had no interest in her son, but I was raised to be polite and I kept my mouth shut.

My relationship with Mutti improved ever so slightly when I began appearing on the
Today
show. She then started treating me with a grudging respect. I still wasn’t what she wanted for her son, but people were beginning to talk nicely about me, so when we did occasionally meet at a birthday of Roy’s or a special occasion, she would then give me a cool hello.

Roy lived with Mutti in an apartment on Park Avenue until she died in 1969. On that day, to my surprise, because I hadn’t seen him in a while, Roy phoned me and asked me to come to the apartment to meet with the rabbi. I went. It was the first time I had ever been to his apartment. I could only imagine that it was important to Roy that the rabbi thought he had a girlfriend.

From time to time over the years, Roy asked me to marry him. I think he thought he
should
be married. Plus he liked children, and he obviously liked me, so why not marry? Of course I never seriously considered it. But I became Roy’s claim to heterosexuality. Whenever a reporter asked Roy why he never married, he always said he had wanted to marry me but was too busy and was married to his work.

For one fleeting instant, though, I did think about the possibility. It was when Roy bought a large town house. It had four floors, and Roy said my parents and Jackie could have their own apartment on the top floor. The idea of having my parents and sister safe and protected was such an incredible inducement that for one moment I thought maybe. But “maybe” never became “yes.” I just couldn’t.

I knew there was a lot wrong with Roy, and not just sexually. I had witnessed his terrible temper, having heard him scream at people, presumably subordinates, over the telephone. I was appalled. I was also haunted by the lives he had destroyed during the McCarthy era. To many people, among them my friends and colleagues, the memories were still raw. I understood that but could not explain my relationship with Roy to them.

I stopped seeing Roy almost totally during my second year at the
Today
show. By then I had met someone else I’ll tell you about later. Over the years Roy would occasionally call and say, “How are you? Want to have lunch?” We’d then go to one of the fashionable restaurants and catch up on his life. He was never very curious about my life, which was fine with me. His homosexuality became more and more obvious as time went on, but he never admitted it publicly or, for that matter, privately, to me. He was, however, becoming quite reckless, and I used to worry that I’d get a phone call in the middle of the night from the police telling me Roy had been murdered by some young “trick.”

As he got older he had his face lifted several times, and he made no effort to hide that fact. Once, when I saw him for lunch, the stitches were showing. It was a strange and contradictory example of both his vanity and lack of concern for what anyone thought about him. But Roy’s quirks didn’t seem to hinder him professionally. He still had some very important clients, not to mention all those divorce cases. He bought a yacht, which he kept at the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin in Manhattan. I never visited. He bought a house in Connecticut where he gave big parties to which I was invited but also never visited. He must have made a lot of money, but I heard over the years that he never paid his bills. I later learned that he charged everything to his business and constantly owed money to the restaurants and clubs he patronized.

And then he got AIDS. In retrospect it seems inevitable. All the parties on his yacht and in his various houses. All those boys, those endless, young, one-night stands. Did they rob him? Blackmail him? Is that where the money went?

Roy never admitted he had AIDS. But the rumors were there. I remember having lunch with him at a very chic restaurant, Le Cirque, and being horrified when he kept sneezing and wiping his nose with a linen napkin. It was so like the thoughtless, selfish Roy who had simply abandoned his car in the middle of the street the first night we’d gone out all the years before, but this might have had much more dangerous consequences. After we left the table I took the maître d’ aside and told him to throw out the napkin.

With everything, though, I remained loyal to Roy, just as all those years ago, he had been loyal to me. When, in 1986, he asked me to testify on his behalf before the New York Bar Association, which was moving to disbar him for unethical and unprofessional conduct, I did. I knew that Roy was dying, and I asked the committee to spare him so that he could die with some dignity. Roy’s close friends Bill Safire and William Buckley also testified, all of us supposedly in secret, although our testimony leaked to the papers. But the committee had had it with Roy’s arrogant and clearly unethical behavior, and they did, indeed, disbar him.

In 2003 Mike Nichols directed the brilliant HBO miniseries
Angels in America.
It was a devastating dramatized version of Roy, adapted from Tony Kushner’s equally brilliant 1990 play by the same name. In the TV version Al Pacino played Roy and captured all of his complexities and cruelties. I recognized parts of the portrayal and could not disagree with it. But I could also not dismiss my own memories of Roy.

Shortly after he was disbarred, Roy died. It was August 2, 1986. He was fifty-nine.

Passage to India

J
ACKIE
K
ENNEDY TOOK A TRIP
to India and Pakistan in March 1962. The White House billed it as a “semiofficial” trip, but officially the administration cleared forty-five reporters to cover the first lady. I was one of them.

I was a neophyte among much more senior newscasters from NBC, CBS, and ABC, all male of course, and veteran print journalists from almost every newspaper and magazine—the
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
, the wire services,
Time
, the since-defunct
Saturday Evening Post
—almost all of whom were also male. There were only seven women assigned to cover Jackie’s “goodwill tour,” which was actually quite a lot, there being so few women in journalism. Six of them were print journalists: Fran Lewine for the Associated Press, Marie Ridder for the Ridder newspaper chain, Anne Chamberlin for
Time
, Gwen Morgan for the
Chicago Tribune
, Molly Thayer for the
Washington Post
, and Joan Braden for the
Saturday Evening Post.
I was the only one from television.

How did I get to go? Because Shad Northshield and John Chancellor realized that the story would be perfect for the
Today
show audience. A woman’s story, reported by a woman. Why not send me? I could write and report. I couldn’t pack fast enough.

I didn’t know Jackie Kennedy at the time, but, like millions of other Americans, I was dazzled by her fabulous good looks, poise, and style. John F. Kennedy, the young, handsome president, and Jackie, his elegant wife, stood in sharp contrast to their elderly predecessors in the White House, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower. America was young and vibrant again and, as a result, full of promise and potential. It was an intoxicating time.

It was also an exhausting trip. Everything was carefully planned to move the press corps as quickly as possible from one photo op to the next. We all had to lug our baggage and whatever other equipment we had, including our typewriters, which, in those prelaptop days, weighed a ton. I should either have taken weight training—or been Joan Braden.