The Bess Myerson trial begins - 28 October 1988

This fall has been bright but extraordinarily cool, the days in the 50s instead of the 70s and when we piled logs on the fire just before the seven o’clock news and attended to the glasses of two visiting friends we turned north, as it happened, to the telly, as other religions at stated times turn towards the east.

There’s not much need these nights, or for the next ten nights or so, to pay much attention to the lead items. They’re always about how the two presidential candidates are doing and it’s generally and sadly agreed that Mr Dukakis is being inept and defensive, while Mr Bush is being savage and mean-spirited in a way we should never have expected two months ago from such an affable man.

The other night an early item showed thrashing palm trees and we heard a screaming wind. It was about the typhoon in the Philippines. Quite quickly and casually the anchorman announced voice over that 500 people in a ferry boat had been swamped and only 15 of them had been saved. While we were reeling at the thought of 485 people dead the news switched to a trial somewhere in Texas and that was that.

“Wait!” said an old friend present, “We’ll have at least two minutes on the stranded whales.” Sure enough, in the body of the half-hour we rejoiced in one channel having been cut through and we saw those two heads, surely by now the most famous mammals on earth, bobbing up mechanically like the studio-manufactured villain of Jaws.

When it was all over, with the fifth instalment that week of a continuous horrendous story of the plight and the appalling cost to the taxpayer of babies born to cocaine-addicted mothers, when it was all over, ????? WORDS MISSING???? at the editorial decision of the network which had give 20 seconds to the doom of 485 humans and three minutes to the Alaskan whales.

I’m not scolding the network for this division of time and of course we can’t do anything about the nearly 500 people drowned in the Philippines but the fascination of the whole world with the whales is something that can’t be explained.

It reminded me vividly of a murder case that absorbed London and Britain in 1935. I don’t have to strain for total recall in this case because it’s been adapted as a television drama and we’re seeing it now. It’s the Rattenbury Case, a very simple, brutal crime soon decided and correctly, not one of those baffling forever-unsolved mysteries like the behaviour of Lizzie Borden in Falls River, Massachusetts or the classic puzzle of the guilt, if any, of Mr Wallace the Liverpool chess player.

Mrs Rattenbury, 38, was the wife of an ageing architect. She’d advertised for a chauffeur-handyman. A slip of a boy, 18, applied and was hired. In no time he became her lover, to the indifference of the old husband who one day was found with his head smashed in by a mallet.

Mrs Rattenbury, drunk through most of the evening and the night, confessed but she was covering up for the boy who was subsequently condemned to death and later reprieved. Within a week of the original verdict Mrs Rattenbury stabbed herself to death.

My favourite diarist – whom I put up there along with, if not above, Pepys, Evelyn, Granville, Nicolson – the late dramatic critic James Agate, one of the papers he wrote for (he had to write for several under pen-names as well as his own, for he was a man of expensive tastes) he was asked to go and cover the trial and for the last three days of it he could think of nothing else.

As something of a maniacal lover of French literature he saw the sad trio as characters out of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola very persuasively, listen, “In the box Mrs Rattenbury looked and talked exactly as I have always imagined Emma Bovary looked and talked.” Pure Flaubert.

Then there was the part of her evidence in which she described how trying to bring her husband round she first accidentally trod on his false teeth and then tried to put them back in his mouth so that he could speak to her. This was pure Zola.

The sordidness of the whole thing was relieved by one thing and one thing only. This was when counsel asked Mrs Rattenbury what her first thought had been when her lover got into bed that night and told her what he’d done. She replied “My first thought was to protect him." This is the kind of thing Balzac would have called “sublime” and it’s odd that not a single paper reported it.

So what is the connection between this sorry scene, the stranded whales and the Philippine typhoon, what, as Shakespeare said, is the concernancy? During the last day of the trial appalling news came in of an earthquake at Quetta, a city in what is now west Pakistan. Between 20 and 40,000 people lost their lives and that evening, 31 May 1935, Agate wrote in his diary, “What a rum thing is the mind? This trial has moved me immensely, probably because I saw part of it, while the dreadful affair at Quetta makes no impression. The twenty thousand said to have perished in that earthquake might be flies. I see no remedy for this. One can’t order one’s feelings and to pretend different is hypocrisy.”

Well there’s a trial going on in New York city which I must say is absorbing New Yorkers certainly to the exclusion of anything more than a passing interest in the election. From the beginning, this trial engaged the national interest if only because one of the defendants is a former Miss America and probably the most famous and admired of the breed, since she blossomed out not into a movie star or a jet-set doll, but a serious and very competent public servant, Bess Myerson.

She became in the early 1970s the head of this city’s department of consumer affairs and as such became the terror of sloppy restaurants, gouging wholesalers and all supermarkets that sold packaged food which contained less in weight or nutrients or whatever than was printed on the outside.

She was beautiful and she was an effective crusader and did much to secure the election of Ed Koch as Mayor of New York city. From there she went onwards and upwards and was the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs when she was arrested. It came out that Miss Myerson had a lover and both of them were charged, along with an old woman judge, for conspiring to give the judge’s daughter a job with Miss Myerson’s department in exchange for favourable treatment to the lover in his divorce settlement.

The fact, or rather the allegation, is that once judge’s daughter, a bright woman in her late 30s who seems to have had trouble getting work, once the judge’s daughter went to work for Miss Myerson her mother, as a presiding judge, reduced the lover’s required alimony payments.

In the early days of the trial the general interest was focused, perhaps a little morbidly, on the revelation that Miss Myerson was so devoted to her man that she would take the great risk of, in this indirect way, soliciting help from a judge. It was a heedless, scary thing to do and from all the early testimony it was pathetically plain that Miss Myerson was a mature woman far gone in infatuation.

As the trial has proceeded, however, the interest has settled more and more on the daughter, Justice Gabel’s daughter. She’s a bulky redhead with a brisk gait and an unflappably cheerful air. She comes high-stepping into court looking more like an acquitted defendant than a witness facing her aged, nearly blind mother in the well of the court.

Miss Gabel is, of all unlikely people, the prime witness for the prosecution and by no means reluctant. The other day she took the stand and admitted, almost declared, that she had once secretly taped a conversation with her mother in a criminal investigation.

Then she described how one day in 1987 with federal prosecutors and agents by her side in her apartment she had taped a conversation with her mother about the Myerson case. The defence lawyer asked her if she’d ever heard of a daughter in the presence of prosecutors taping the conversation of her mother who was the subject of a criminal prosecution. “No,” she said, “I haven’t heard of it.” Out of the mouth of this daughter the old judge is being mercilessly condemned.

Now so far if you were reading about this in a murder mystery, whether a bit of pulp fiction or a slice of Dorothy Sayers, there’d be nothing extraordinary in the plot or the way it was being played out. I can almost recite now the accompanying commentary of the author on the broken figure of the blind mother, her seething bitterness, the barely-suppressed hatred of the testifying daughter, but here in life, in this court, that is not the way it is at all.

Miss Gabel comes in in the morning, hugs and kisses her smiling mother, takes to the stand, delivers her forthright and damning testimony and then goes out to lunch with her mother and her 81-year-old father. Miss Gabel has acknowledged a history of mental illness and frequent depressions though in court, in the limelight perhaps, she has sounded and looked and acted closer to elation.

She has been damaged herself by her acknowledgement that her memory of events is shaky, so that on Wednesday the defence lawyer said, “If you were to come back a month from now we have no guarantee that your memory wouldn’t be different.” “That’s correct,” she said, “You have no such guarantee.”

After a long session she said to a reporter that giving testimony on the stand was like being buoyed up on a cloud. Throughout the proceedings the parents look on, almost tenderly. She has been asked in various ways if she’s hiding secret anger at her mother. “No, indeed, I adore them,” she says “for what they are and who they are.” She has refused to take the 35 dollars a day due her as government witness. “Judas money” she calls it.

At the end of the long day last Tuesday, Justice Gabel hugged her daughter and said, “See you tomorrow, honey.” What a rum thing is motherhood.

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