Innocent Spouse (7 page)

H
IS FULL NAME
was John Howard Joynt III. He was many things I was not: a child of money and privilege, casual about work but serious about living well. If there was anything we had in common it was that we were both shy. It wasn’t obvious. After all, his game was the restaurant business and I worked in broadcasting, neither of them known as a refuge for the timid. But for both of us work provided protection. Howard’s poise and the alcohol-infused bonhomie of his bar masked his shyness. Hard-charging television journalism masked mine. I was a different person at work. I don’t think anyone would have described that person as shy. When we first met I was dazzled by Howard’s star quality but fell in love with the sensitive man I saw within. I know, that’s what every woman says. That doesn’t make it a lie. Despite everything I learned about Howard after his death and my fury at what he had done to us and the frightening mess he had left me to clean up, when Howard and I were in each other’s company I was most myself and he had seemed most himself. I felt we were transparent to each other. There were the little fibs that happen in any relationship, but never lies. I didn’t lie to him and I didn’t believe he lied to me, though after the lawyers, I knew there was one huge and hugely important exception: where the money came from to support the way we lived. The answer was simple and disturbing: Much of it wasn’t ours.

I thought I had good instincts, but my radar didn’t extend far beyond the heart. I knew Howard loved me—but transparent? No. I may have been transparent to him, but clearly there was a part of Howard, the larcenous part, that he kept opaque. Looking back now I realize that his deception was in plain sight. He had a good BS detector for a reason. My eyes were dazzled by Howard’s brightness, blinding me to the whole man.

The day my beautiful Romanian mother met Howard, he drove up in a white Jaguar XKE convertible like a character out of
The Great Gatsby
, wearing white pleated flannels and a blue and white striped shirt, with a tennis sweater tied casually around his shoulders, a Kent hanging out of the corner of his mouth, and a chilled bottle of Dom Pérignon in his hand. Howard was a master of the grand gesture, and my mother ate it up. She had an instant crush.

“Let’s have some champagne, Olga,” Howard said, the bottle still in his hand—he cocked his head in my direction—“and ignore her.”

My parents lived in Warrenton, Virginia, a small country town an hour outside Washington where my father, Richard Ross, after time in the military and a stint as a dean at George Washington University, ran the Airlie Foundation, a think tank used by the federal government, Washington-based corporations, and academia. The job came with a lovely yellow stucco four-bedroom house, a pool, a pond, gardens, and bucolic views. From almost the moment we met, Howard and I would spend weekends there with my family. It wasn’t unusual for me to go to bed, only to wake in the wee hours to find Howard and my mother still at the kitchen table, drinking, smoking, debating politics, discussing history, and gossiping about movie stars. My mother had moved to Hollywood as a girl; her role models were movie stars.

Before the move to rural Virginia, the Ross family’s usually happy suburban home life had become increasingly emotionally chaotic. My parents fought a lot over money—the lack of it—and over my older sister, who had had too many run-ins with the law because of drugs and other misbehavior. The chaos was the main reason I moved out at age eighteen. But with the job at Airlie, which was a virtual fresh start, my parents and younger brothers regained a sense of calm, and the spirit of fun and affection prevailed. When I was growing up, my father, a native of Minnesota, was a Barry Goldwater Republican, an Episcopalian, and traditional to the core; my mother, the immigrant, was a Eugene McCarthy Democrat, raised a strict Catholic but with the soul of a gypsy. She had few boundaries and didn’t care about possessions except, perhaps, animals. I think she was happiest when Dad had new assignments and we camped in hotels or some kind of temporary housing. She taught us how to travel with very little baggage.

She was wedded to the notion of ghosts and we routinely had to visit houses thought to be haunted. We were raised on goulash and chicken paprikash. Her philosophy of raising my sister, brothers, and me was “Water you and you will grow.”

My parents met on a Friday in Los Angeles, when my father, an Army Air Force pilot who dropped paratroopers over Normandy on D-day, had exactly one week’s leave in the United States. They married at the end of that week. In the early years of their marriage, and while my brothers, sister, and I were little, my dad continued his air force career, ending up a full-bird colonel. We lived part of the time in the United States and part of the time in Europe, chiefly Wiesbaden, Germany, where he worked on the postwar cleanup. Our assigned housing in a nineteenth-century hotel had been Hermann Göring’s personal quarters when he was in Wiesbaden. The rooms went on forever, with high ceilings, gilded moldings, and beautiful crystal chandeliers. I loved to twirl on the parquet floors in the ballroom. Still, Mother made our spaghetti dinners on a hot plate. Hotels felt like home. We would bounce on the beds, go to the lounge and get fruit drinks with paper parasols, and generally charm or terrorize the staff. We traveled to Berlin a lot, which was among the more exciting aspects of living abroad. It was before the Wall went up, and my father would take us by car to tour reconstructed sections of East Berlin. It seemed like a movie set—a row of restored buildings and behind them acres of rubble.

Back in the States we moved a lot—Ohio, Maryland, Virginia—and that was before I turned fourteen. Furniture came and went, nothing stayed the same. We were always in debt, about to fly off the rails. Money management was not a particularly important part of my parents’ style. It was the postwar boom. Let the good times roll. Borrowing money was just what you did. I was too young to know what debt was, but I knew it followed us wherever we went. The money ups and downs, the travel, and the fluid living arrangements combined to make me, as a teenager, an expert at arriving in new neighborhoods and schools and quickly finding friends. Even when we moved to a home of our own near Mount Vernon and stayed for all four years of my high school, I didn’t entirely buy into the seeming stability. It always felt elusive. There was a lesson here, but I didn’t learn it.

I was fortunate to have had my parents much of my adult life. Olga died from lung cancer when I was thirty-seven, exactly ten years before Howard’s death. Hers was a quick and terrible decline, as so many cancer deaths are, especially with the adverse effects of radiation and other treatments. The family was at her bedside in the last days, and she died peacefully at home.

H
OWARD APPEARED TO
have had stability, money, and comfort from the start. He was born March 21, 1939, and came home to a historic house in Alexandria, Virginia, where he lived until he moved out as an adult. It was the Benjamin Dulany House, one of the finest in Old Town. The record shows that George Washington dined there. (He ate out a lot in that part of Virginia.) Howard’s parents, Howard and May, bought the house in 1932 and lived there until Mr. Joynt died in July 1989. May Joynt died less than a decade later, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s. But through much of Howard’s life he had the apparent security of one home, with successful and cultured parents.

Life in the elegant Joynt household was lived as close to the 1750s model as one could reasonably get. Modern amenities, such as televisions, were tucked away out of sight. The silver was made by Paul Revere, William Hollingshead, and Jacob Hurd. The furniture was Chippendale, Queen Anne, and Federal from Philadelphia and Massachusetts. The paintings that hung on the drawing room and library walls were by Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley, the prints by Audubon. The porcelain was Chinese export, Sèvres, or Delft, and the rugs were Aubusson. The floors, moldings, windows, and doors were original to the house. The boxwood garden was designed by a famed expert in eighteenth-century landscaping. Mr. Joynt made one concession to the early twentieth century. He ate his morning cereal from Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s breakfast bowl. It was all very lovely but, frankly, like living in a museum. For Howard, it was stifling.

I went from public high school straight to work. Howard went from school to freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. I eventually learned that he embellished the stories of his past. Howard was
a bit of what the French call a
mythomane
. He told wonderful tales about himself and others whose faithfulness to the facts could fairly be described as problematic.

Odd that I point this out, given what happened, but I was more into facts. I really
liked
digging up details about things that had happened, and I was rigid about telling the truth. There’d been a lot of lying in my household growing up—about my parents’ debts, their drinking, their fights, and my sister. No doubt my veracity was at the root of my fondness for journalism. After high school I went from hometown newspaper to the Washington bureau of United Press International, where I started with an entry-level job that led to reporting on the antiwar movement. That got me front-page bylines all over the world as the protests rose in volume and intensity. It was a heady experience. I loved my work—and it seemed like only an incidental bonus that they were paying me to do it.

From UPI to
Time
magazine in New York, and then at twenty-two I landed the big prize—writing the
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
. Walter hired me personally. Naturally the gaggle at the water coolers speculated about whether there was something more to my being hired—like that I’d slept with him. Why else would he bring on board a twenty-two-year-old woman whose only real qualification was that she had what they called a nose for news?

Walter was the one who told me about the rumors. I’d been writing for him for almost a year when he leaned over his table at Copenhagen, where he’d invited me to lunch, and said in that inimitable voice, “You know, there are rumors around the office that we’re having an affair.”

I was mortified, shocked, embarrassed. Walter was the same age as my father! I didn’t know what to say. I was stammering out some response, when he laughed and said, “Do me a favor, will you? Please don’t deny it.”

Actually, Walter and his wife, Betsy, became my friends. Over the years they became friends to Howard, too. We would meet for a meal or to go sailing. After Howard died, Walter kept in close touch and faithfully phoned every Christmas morning—wherever he was, wherever we were—to make sure Spencer and I were doing okay. We would see him if we were in New York, and a year before he died we visited
him on Martha’s Vineyard. He took us sailing and, in a moment I’ll never forget, showed sixteen-year-old Spencer how to handle the helm.

M
Y TIME ON
the
CBS Evening News
spanned an era that included the death of President Johnson, Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the fall of Saigon. When Walter offered me the job he told me there were many candidates, all of them older, more experienced, and male. But he wanted someone with wireservice experience. “Also,” he added, “there’s pressure on me to hire a woman. You qualify on both counts.”

The two other writers, the editor, and I sat beside Walter just off camera every weeknight. Together we did the news and all other specials he anchored. I was sitting beside Walter in our Washington bureau at the moment Nixon announced his resignation. I ripped the “flash” off the AP wire and ran it to him. For me, the job was always that exciting.

I rented a small house in New York’s West Village. I was loose in the big city, young, unencumbered, and well-paid, but my work always came first and I approached it with dedication and passion. The matter of college came up from time to time, and it was something I was always going to do at some point, but campuses were erupting with protests and turmoil, none of my employers demanded a college degree, and my jobs felt like an education. At the
CBS Evening News
I was proud of what we did, how we did it, and why. My parents were proud, too, especially because each time the show went to commercial there was a “bumper,” or wide shot, that showed me sitting beside Walter. My brother David said, “They bought a big new TV just to watch you on the
Evening News.
”

In 1972, CBS paid me $38,000, double what I earned at
Time
, and, my father pointed out again and again, just about what he earned running a foundation. I put my paychecks in the bank, paid my rent and utilities, and felt financially secure. I knew where my money came from, how much money I had, and where it was going. I managed my money well, in the sense that I lived within my means, but I was not sophisticated about money. I would have been happy to let someone
else take over all that. For a few years my father had done my taxes, but now that I was twenty-two and earning real money at CBS, I hired my own accountant. It seemed the grown-up thing to do.

Watergate was over and the Vietnam War had come to an inglorious end, when I decided to check out of the
CBS Evening News
. It felt like the right time to use my savings and take a break. A random invite lead me to the West Indies, where I got a job crewing on
Spartan
, a seventy-three-foot wooden Herreshoff yawl that was built in 1918. My sole qualification was that I’d fallen in love with the captain, a tan, ripped, and sun-bleached California surfer dude named Lewis Starkey. With him as my teacher I became a sailor quickly. After seven months in the Caribbean and falling out of love with Lewis, I spent four months enjoying the south of France.

That was enough. I loved the vagabond life, but I missed my work. On the day before the 1976 bicentennial, almost a year after leaving the Cronkite show, I flew home to New York, breezed into CBS News, and got hired on the spot as a writer for the upcoming Republican National Convention in Kansas City. After that I relocated to Washington, and was over the moon when an old friend, the new chief of the NBC News bureau there, hired me to run the night assignment desk, essentially a flight controller’s job. It was exactly what I wanted, an ideal perch back in network news. I didn’t intend to stay in Washington; I wanted the world. Then I met Howard.