Fairy Tale Interrupted (15 page)

John smiled and stepped aside to make room for me to sit at my desk, which was piled high with gifts from Carolyn. There were big boxes, little boxes, Barneys garment bags, and Miu Miu shopping bags. My mouth dropped open. This had to be some kind of joke. Or she’d lost her mind.

“You’re such a brat, Rosie,” he said. “You should be embarrassed by all those gifts.”

John was kidding, but I
was
embarrassed and quickly stashed them away so I could open them later. John then handed me one more gift: a card.

“Merry Christmas, Rosie,” he said.

“Merry Christmas,” I said, taking the envelope and pulling out the card, which had a pig on it.

Inside the envelope was something else: a check. I had to look twice to make sure I was reading the number right. It was for five thousand dollars. I had never in my life seen so much money at one time.

I threw my arms around him. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You deserve it.” John hugged me, and although I didn’t believe him, I felt proud that I’d earned it by his estimation. John didn’t throw money around—he had a respectful relationship to it—so I must have done something right.

At my parents’ house a day later, I couldn’t wait to share my good fortune. Christmas was one of the only harmonious times in our house. In fact, our home during the holidays was the best place to be—safe and comfortable and full of the scent of an amazing feast cooking in the kitchen.

Christmas preparations started a month in advance, with my mom planning the menu for the twenty or so family members who often showed up for dinner (the only “outsider” ever invited for Christmas Eve dinner was Frank). After my mother had settled on her long list of dishes, she scoured the Italian grocery stores on Morris Park Avenue, smelling each fish suspiciously, tasting each hunk of cheese, squeezing tomatoes, haranguing owners for the freshest ingredients, and then revamping her menu to reflect the best she could buy.

The traditional Italian Christmas Eve meal of seven fish courses was challenging to prepare—even for someone as tough as my mom. Beginning a week beforehand, my mom made every single dish from scratch, with exacting standards that
could drive a sous-chef/daughter crazy. But Christmas wasn’t Christmas in the Terenzio household unless we went to mass at 6:00 p.m., followed by a late feast of shrimp and calamari in tomato sauce, baked clams, spaghetti with clam sauce, smelt pie, and so on.

I walked through the door the morning of Christmas Eve and immediately took in the aroma: the entire house smelled of fish. In the kitchen, my mom was hunched over the sink, shucking clams with a special knife. Newspapers covered the floor to soak up the fish juice that splattered during the intense preparations. The briny fragrance of a bowl filled with tiny silver fish—that my mother had spent hours cleaning—mixed with the tang of raw garlic on a cutting board and with the perfume of rich tomato sauce bubbling in a big pot on the stove.

After my mom leaned away from the sink to give me a kiss, I washed my hands and set to work. She shucked the clams and cut up the meat, and I combined the chopped-up clams with oregano, parsley, olive oil, and bread crumbs and stuffed the mixture into the cleaned shells.

“Not too many bread crumbs,” my mom said to me more than once. “You want to taste the clams. Not too much.”

With the clams in the oven, I slipped out of the kitchen. My dad was watching TV in his chair, and my heart squeezed at the big smile that spread across his face when I walked into the room. Life had never been easy for my parents, but the last couple of years were especially difficult. Having no money is hard. Having no money and getting old is harder.

I sat down in the love seat next to his chair, called my mom in from the kitchen, and handed him an envelope. “I want to give you guys my Christmas gift a little early,” I said.

My dad looked up at me questioningly, and then took out the two-thousand-dollar check in his name. He said in Italian to my mother, “You can’t believe what’s in here.

“We can’t accept this,” he said, looking away and pushing the envelope into my chest. “This is your money.”

“RoseMarie! This is crazy,” my mom said. “You can’t give us this kind of Christmas gift.”

“You have to take this,” I said. “After all the times you’ve struggled, I want you to have it for whatever you want to do.”

Teary-eyed, my dad walked out of the room, returning after he’d taken a few moments to compose himself.

My mother looked at me and said, “RoseMarie, you don’t pay your parents back.”

“I’m not paying you back. I’m giving you a gift because I can afford it,” I said. “Take it now, because it might not be here next year.”

Working for John was the ride of a lifetime, never mind the fringe benefits—the invitations, the presents, the money. By his side, I sometimes got front-row seats to moments I only dreamed of witnessing. For me, the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in the spring of 1999, the annual event at which politicians, journalists, and celebrities gathered for the rare chance to hear the president poke fun at himself and be teased by others, was just such a moment.

By that time, I had grown in my role as an assistant from one who answered phones and opened mail into something of a chief of staff, responding for John and strategizing his PR. Perhaps that’s why I was emboldened enough to ask for a ticket
to the dinner. I didn’t like to ask John for favors, and this was a big one—both of which made me incredibly nervous about approaching him.
George
had purchased only a few tables, and the priority was to have political figures and celebrities sit at them, which meant very few seats were left for even the editors. It was a coveted invitation. Would it be unfair to the editors who couldn’t go if I, an assistant, got to attend?

I didn’t want to overstep, but I had discussed it with Carolyn and she felt that I had earned it. “You
have
to go,” she said. Because of her anxiety over the scrutiny she would face at the dinner and the fact that she would feel more comfortable if I was there, I worked up the courage to make the outrageous request.

“John, is there any way I can go to the correspondents’ dinner this year? I’ll pay for my own hotel and my own ticket there.”

“You can go, Rosie. And you don’t have to pay for your ticket. If we can’t find you a room, you can sleep on a mat outside our door.”

I immediately called Michele with the amazing news.

“What’s that?” she said. “Are you having dinner at the White House?”

“You know, I’m not entirely sure.”

Wherever the dinner was held (not at the White House, I quickly learned) didn’t really matter: from the dirty looks I got around the office from some staffers who were not going, I knew the evening would be every bit as incredible as I imagined.

After securing a ticket, the next thing I had to do was find an outfit worthy of wearing to see the president of the United States in person. Luckily, I had the best stylist in town—Carolyn,
who encouraged me to pull a Sharon Stone and pair a billowing black organza skirt we found at BCBG with a simple black tank top from the Gap. When I tried on the whole ensemble at their place in Tribeca, Carolyn cooed, “Oh, honey, it’s gorgeous . . . but wait.” She scampered to her bedroom and came out bearing a necklace of three weighty rows of Indian rose-cut diamonds. The sparkling piece, a Christmas gift from the jeweler Maurice Tempelsman, was stunningly intricate, with red and gold enamel flowers covering the back of each diamond. She held it up to me.

“Oh no, Carolyn. I can’t.”

“You have to,” she said, clasping the diamonds around my neck.

“No way. This necklace is terrifying. What if I lose it?”

“You’re not going to lose it. How could you lose it? It’s so big.”

She twisted my arm, and I borrowed the diamonds—Carolyn was a very persuasive fairy godmother.

Getting together an outfit that included serious jewels was definitely like a fairy tale. But I returned to reality while wrestling with the logistics of
George
’s tables for the event. Working out seating arrangements is never fun. But when you’re dealing with movie stars, incendiary publishers, and political insiders, it’s a fucking nightmare.

Originally,
George
was set to host the actor Sean Penn, the conservative political commentator Ann Coulter,
Hustler
publisher and Clinton supporter Larry Flynt, the millionaire Republican newspaper publisher and Clinton hater Richard Mellon Scaife, the historian Douglas Brinkley, the king of the gonzo journalists Hunter S. Thompson, the actress Claire Danes, and longtime Clinton adviser Harold Ickes.

Unfortunately, Scaife, who had spent a lot of money trying to bring Clinton down after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, canceled a week before the dinner because he didn’t want to sit at a table with Flynt, who had spent a lot of money trying to get women who had affairs with Republican leaders to come forward and expose their hypocrisy. Scaife’s wife called and told me, “Dear, he’s deaf as a post. He won’t be able to hear anything in that place.”

He wasn’t the only last-minute dropout. Only two days before the dinner, Thompson also bowed out. Jann Wenner—the publisher of
Rolling Stone,
which had employed him for many years and originally printed his famous piece
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
—got wind of the plan and, John surmised, gave the writer an ultimatum: either you’re at
Rolling Stone
’s table or you’re not at anyone’s table. As rebellious as Thompson could be, he wasn’t an idiot. Through his assistant, he begged off because of a supposed fight with his girlfriend.

To add insult to injury, Thompson had insisted the magazine book him a two-bedroom suite at the Four Seasons, where people had booked rooms four months out and where everyone attending the dinner was staying. The exorbitant room was completely nonrefundable, and I had the thankless task of relating the news to John. But there was a silver lining: my hotel upgrade to Thompson’s suite.

When I arrived in Washington, D.C., I took over the suite, which looked more like a gorgeous Upper East Side Manhattan apartment than a hotel room. There was no use in letting all that luxury go to waste. I wasn’t the only one who got an upgrade. The Four Seasons had put John and Carolyn in the Presidential Suite, which with its living room, formal dining room, and three
bedrooms made my accommodations look like the projects. I thought John was going to take my head off for allowing the upgrade.

“This is ridiculous,” John said, while Carolyn sat curled up on the couch giggling.

“I didn’t do it! They just saw your name,” I protested. “What do you want me to do?”

John claimed he was worried that the suite was going to cost the magazine a fortune, which the correspondents’ dinner already had, even though he knew it wouldn’t. He was just embarrassed by the lavish display of attention.

After I talked him down, I returned to my room to get ready. Nothing could ruin my night—no last-minute cancellations or lodging dilemmas. I was determined to enjoy myself. The Washington Hilton’s banquet hall, where the dinner took place, was filled with celebrities hobnobbing with journalists and political bigwigs. And the biggest celebrity of all was the president. Bill Clinton was in his element, warmly shaking hands with guests and leaning in for the occasional friendly comment. At first, I didn’t know whether to get on the receiving line. Who the hell was I? But I had a ticket like everyone else and didn’t know when I’d have another chance to meet the president.

When I finally stood face-to-face with him, I almost died. No matter your political affiliation, it’s an honor and a privilege to meet the sitting president of the United States. You are in the presence of someone who commands respect for taking the hardest job in the world. Electricity ran through me when President Clinton shook my hand.

Arriving at the table where I was sitting with a handful of
George
staffers, I couldn’t stop buzzing from my encounter with
the president and almost missed John. Almost. He was walking in late behind the color guard, which was playing “Hail to the Chief,” when we spotted each other from across the room. I didn’t dare wave, not wanting to draw attention to him. John didn’t have the same concern: he smiled and gave me the finger.

When he came over from his table, where he was hosting the celebrity guests, I gushed about meeting the president.

“I can’t believe I’m in the same room as the president!” I said. “And I just shook his hand!”

A top editor, who had accompanied John from the other table, rolled his eyes. “Oh God, Rose. Do you know how many times I’ve been in the same room with the president? It’s not that big a deal,” he said, giving John a quick glance for approval.

His comment temporarily burst my bubble, a quick and piercing reminder that I didn’t belong in that ballroom. But then, just as quickly, John turned it around.