Authors: Carol Ross Joynt
I knew that sky and I knew those waters. I’d lived in the Caribbean for a while before I met Howard, and after we married we returned together many times. This was our first trip with our son. To our delight he took to the surf and sand and steel drums like an island native. He responded to the motion of the boat, the pitch and roll and heel, like a seasoned deckhand. I sighed and squeezed Howard’s hand. We shared so much happiness—our love for each other, our son, that night, that place, and those lovely, soothing sounds. My head found its familiar spot on his shoulder.
Howard was the embodiment of the irresistible rogue. He wore money well—with the distinguished good looks, grace, and style of a rakish prince, underscored by just enough pirate to seem slightly dangerous. That was what had initially attracted me, but I loved him for so much more. I was drawn to his dash, of course, but there was intelligence shielded behind that glossy veneer. He had a remarkable BS detector, which was useful in the bar business and impressive to me. Over the years I watched as he unerringly called out various posers
and charlatans. He had a keen business sense and the math skills of an accountant. Some would say he was too smart to own a bar, but maybe that was the point.
Away from work, Howard knew and loved history and art and had a well-read appreciation for design. He could stand in an art gallery and zero in on the one true gem. A frustrated landscape architect—what he would have studied in college had his father not rejected the pursuit as “sissy”—he loved to research, plant, and tend gardens. He could recite virtually every variety of daffodil, his favorite flower. He was also a handyman who could get down on his hands and knees to fix the kitchen sink. He was sincerely thoughtful toward others, though he was not a schmoozer. He had a sense of duty—to his parents, his sister, and to my family—which awed me because my family was not that way. When I had a bad day he made it his project to lift my spirits. He made me feel safe and secure and adored. I was serenely happy to be his wife. I believed that without him I could not exist.
On the other hand, he was catnip to women and he knew it; he had lived a life of so much privilege that the rules of law were a gray area; he too often confused material luxury with love, and his personal motto was “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.”
Still, he was my knight in shining armor.
“I am the happiest I have ever been in my whole life,” I said to him. Right there, right then, I had everything I wanted in the world.
H
OWARD AND
I had met two decades earlier at an after-hours party at Clyde’s, a Georgetown bar a block away from Nathans, its chief competitor. Nathans and Clyde’s were founded a few years apart in the 1960s. Both were legends in the Washington, D.C. bar business—just like their owners. Stuart Davidson, who owned Clyde’s, and Howard, who owned Nathans, were gentlemen saloon owners, which meant they didn’t need the work or the money. Howard’s father was a successful patent lawyer who had secured rights for windfall American staples such as the parking meter and stainless steel, and his wife was a rare-books expert and had a famed collection of eighteenth-century American furniture and art. A Washington native, Howard preferred
New York, especially the bars on the Upper East Side along Second and Third avenues. He’d been a denizen of that scene after a year or so of college. When Howard returned to Washington, his father wanted him to find a job.
“You seem to like to spend a lot of time in bars,” his father had said to Howard, “so you might as well own one.” With that, Mr. Joynt paid off two partners and bought Nathans for Howard, who made it a rumpus room for trust-fund prepster types, celebrities, the social, the powerful, and anybody else who wanted to join the party. He styled Nathans as a homage to his two favorite New York haunts, P. J. Clarke’s and the 21 Club. The logo was a jockey on a racehorse. The cover of the matchboxes showed a bottle of Dom Pérignon beside a rubrum lily.
The restaurant business provided the perfect stage for Howard’s larger-than-life character: tall, lean, with a natural virility, his hair slicked back and curling at the collar, his brown eyes and serious eyebrows, the strong and purposeful chin, the tailored suits, the perfectly knotted Hermès ties, the polished Gucci slip-ons. Any room picked up when he walked in. A few glasses of vintage wine or cognac only heightened his effect. He could be a lover and friend to women, but men, too, heartily enjoyed his company. He had the gift for making any conversation about the other person, not himself. He could charm anybody, and usually did.
He smoked cigarettes, Kents, with the panache of an uptown gangster in a ’40s-era film noir. He could talk like one, too. With his deep gravel and sandpaper voice, he was fresh off the pages of Damon Runyon. If the engine on his vintage twelve-cylinder Jaguar XKE didn’t turn over, it was “deader than Kelso’s nuts.” When he wanted something fast, it had to happen “in a New York minute.” He comfortably talked the talk with Madison Avenue antiques dealers and always impressed them with his seasoned eye for what was good; handled appointments with his tailor as a necessity not an indulgence; and fit in as well with the bookies at the bar (after all, he got Nathans in part due to a bookie’s gambling debt) as he did with the café society types with whom he sometimes jetted about. He cussed a blue streak, but not in front of women or children. It was second nature for him to offer a woman a seat, pull out her chair, open her door, or send her flowers
and thoughtful gifts. He combined a salty swagger with refined good manners at a time when manners like his were becoming as rare as his parents’ antiques.
Howard liked the good life and he introduced me to it. I’d never before experienced anyone quite like him—he swept me off my feet. He was a character from the movies: the legendary New York restaurateur Toots Shor as played by a combination of Cary Grant and Jack Nicholson. At the party where we met, the jaunty way he arrived—in his tuxedo, tie hanging loose—turned my head. No way was this man a lawyer or government worker or lobbyist. He had a devilish gleam in his eye as he scanned the room. He set his bemused smile on me and walked over. “Where’s the champagne?” he asked. I gestured behind me. “Can I get you a glass?” he offered. I nodded.
Howard had come to Clyde’s from a formal dinner party at the home of a rich young socialite. I had arrived straight from eight hours under the fluorescent lights at the NBC News Washington Bureau, where I worked the late shift as the night assignment editor. It was 1977, and in the spirit of the times I was dressed in the androgynous style of Mick Jagger—chic Soho thrift-shop trousers and a bomber jacket, my dark brown hair in a chin-length bob. I’d been in Washington only a few months. I’d spent four years in New York as Walter Cronkite’s writer at CBS News, covering Watergate, the Nixon resignation, and the end of the Vietnam War. I loved it, but after those nonstop New York years, when I turned twenty-five I checked out for a year to pursue another passion: crewing on sailboats in the West Indies and France. I was freshly back and ambitious to succeed in my news career. I was proud of what I’d accomplished with my life. I wasn’t sheltered or unsophisticated about the world, or at least I didn’t think so. I’d been on my own since high school. I thought I was fairly savvy. But Howard, at thirty-eight, was savvier.
At his invitation we left the party together. He helped me into his shiny black Jaguar sedan and we sped off into the balmy spring night. On the car stereo the Eagles sang “Life in the Fast Lane.” I fastened my seat belt.
“You’re a strange one,” he said. “Why haven’t I met you before?”
“I just moved back here. I work the late shift and don’t get out much.”
In 1977 I owned nothing but an assortment of eccentric but trendy clothing, a suitcase, a black-and-white TV, and a one-LP record player. I camped in a studio apartment. Literally. My home décor was L.L.Bean, my “end tables” cardboard boxes. I slept in a sleeping bag on a cot. The refrigerator held a few bottles of Korbel sparkling wine and that was it. I was a vegetarian and swam for a half hour every day, but would party till dawn if the party was good enough. My network TV salary was good. I easily paid rent, bought stuff, took trips, went out with friends. I had one credit card, a checking account, and no savings. I had no one to support but me. I had no responsibilities, no strings. Howard played in a different league.
From the party in Georgetown we headed to another restaurant he owned, Nathans II. It was downtown and, with dinner service over, closed for the night. He unlocked the door and turned on a light switch that brought the spacious, elegant room to life. He walked me over to the black lacquered bar, opened a bottle of Dom Pérignon, and poured two glasses. He stood behind the bar, hitched his foot up on the beer cooler, and cocked his glass toward me.
“To the strange one,” he said.
Strange? Maybe. I didn’t see myself that way, but I knew I didn’t fit the mold for Washington, which tilted strongly toward buttoned-up and conservative. Professionally, in an important job at a network news bureau, I played by the rules of the town’s mainstream. But after life in New York, and time in the Caribbean and Europe, I was easily seduced by what was outside the box. Howard Joynt was outside the box. With his elegant suits and distinguished good looks he may have looked like he was on the conventional Washington team, but I sensed his subversive soul from the start.
From his smart tuxedo jacket Howard pulled out the fattest joint I’d ever seen, lit it, and offered me a hit. Weed wasn’t my particular habit but I wasn’t averse to it. Most of what I smoked was my brother’s homegrown, which was the 3.2 beer of marijuana. Howard’s grass, on the other hand, was fully loaded. “It’s Thai stick,” he said. “You sure you can handle it?”
“Oh sure,” I said. “Of course.” I inhaled deeply. When it hit me I almost took a header off the barstool.
On that first evening we talked all night, and we continued to talk for
the next two weeks. When I got off work at eleven, he would be waiting in his Jaguar outside NBC’s front doors to whisk us off to what was then the chicest restaurant in town, the Jockey Club, which looked and felt like the 21 Club and was open late. I felt sophisticated, out among the grown-ups. At every other table were Washington movers and shakers I recognized from the news I’d covered that day or from the gossip columns. We talked through dinner. Then, after hours at his bar, alone or with a ragtag group of bookies and well-funded drunks, or in his car driving until dawn with no particular destination, we continued to talk. I was not involved with anyone at the time. He told me he was in the midst of a divorce from his second wife, with two young sons. I didn’t like that he wasn’t yet divorced, but he assured me that he would be soon. The coast was clear, or so I thought.
We were alone at Nathans II in the wee hours of the morning on one of these early occasions when he came up behind me, put his hands on my shoulders, and whispered in my ear, “I think I’m falling in love with you.” The words wrapped me in a soft, warm blanket. I fell back into his strong arms and savored the most profound feeling of belonging. For my heart he felt like home. Nothing else mattered.
Two weeks after we met, we made love for the first time. The next day he moved into the Madison Hotel, the most exclusive in Washington at the time. To celebrate his first night there, he took me to the hotel’s dining room, the Montpelier Room, where the waiters treated him—as did the waiters at the Jockey Club—as if he were James Bond. He ordered Dom Pérignon and a tin of Iranian Beluga Malossol caviar, which he spread on toast points, spritzed with lemon, and fed to me. He didn’t do this as a phony playing a role. It was as natural to him as breathing air. If that was our first date, and surely glamorous, our second date showed me more of the man I would come to love so dearly. He took me to Colonial Williamsburg—yes, a touristy museum town—to share with me his affection for all things eighteenth-century American, particularly the architecture and gardens. We walked leafy historic streets hand in hand, watched the Fifes and Drums perform at day’s end, and drank cider with our crab and ham.
A few days later I gave up my studio apartment, packed my things, discarded the camping gear, and moved in with Howard at the Madison Hotel. I was a kid in the candy store of love. He’d send flowers,
champagne, even caviar (with toast) to NBC. He’d call one, two, three times when I still had hours to go before my workday ended. “How many minutes until you get off work? I can’t wait for you to get here. I’ll send a car to pick you up. Just come in the room, don’t say a word, let me make love to you.” Sure enough, as I walked out the door at eleven, there would be a driver holding open the door to a black sedan. I was swept away by this unending cornucopia of affection.
At the hotel, Howard was always as good as his word. With very few exceptions, we shared the same bed every night for two decades.
After we had settled in, he told me that his divorce hadn’t actually begun until the week after we met. He brushed it away with a wave of his hand. “It was coming, regardless. Strange One, you aren’t to blame. You’re just the catalyst for what I already wanted to do.”
I didn’t like it, but I had no clear idea what to do about the situation. I could have walked out the door, but I didn’t. Howard had lied to me, but I knew from experience that people in the first flush of love say all kinds of things they’d like to be true but, in fact, are not. It was his marriage and his divorce and he’d been down that road before. None of my business. I was madly in love, and as everybody knows, love is blind—and sometimes a bit dumb. With little regard for judgment or common sense, I signed myself over to him. His divorce was granted within the year, and we eventually married. I quit my job at NBC News and our love nest became the manor house of a five-hundred-acre farm an hour from the city in Upperville, Virginia, the heart of the hunt country. I had visions of foxes and hounds and hunt breakfasts and witty repartee with the landed gentry. The reality was different. We spent most of our time together, whole days and weeks, which was fine, but it narrowed our landscape. Even wrapped head to toe in Ralph Lauren, I didn’t fit in with the horse-farm trust-fund crowd, nor did I want to. I was a middle-class girl with a work ethic. With a few exceptions, no one we knew did anything. I was interested in the world. They were interested in horses, land, and one another. Some were flat-out bigots. The countryside was beautiful, our home was a dream, but my brain was slowly dying.