Fairy Tale Interrupted (20 page)

His carelessness wasn’t mean-spirited or intentional, but his substance abuse was taking over his life. So I should have
known it was a mistake to put Frank in charge of the main dish at a birthday dinner I threw for myself. It was 1997, and Matt Berman had offered to host a dinner party for me at his new apartment, a gorgeous loft in SoHo that he had decorated to perfection (you found yourself wanting everything in that apartment, whether it was a fifty-dollar lamp or a thousand-dollar photograph).

I planned a glamorous dinner party and decided to cook for ten of my best friends against the backdrop of the lights of Manhattan filtering through the apartment’s huge windows. Frank, who wanted to help and do something nice for me, had insisted on buying the leg of lamb for the main course. He was supposed to arrive at Matt’s at 5:00 p.m. so I’d have enough time to cook the meat, but he didn’t show up until 6:30 p.m., when the first guests began trickling in for cocktail hour. I was livid but decided not to say anything, so as not to make a scene in front of the other guests.

“Here you go, Ro,” he said, thrusting a big bag into my arms. “Happy birthday!”

He looked a little off, but I just took the package into the kitchen and began to unwrap it—only to discover it was not lamb but a supermarket-prepared pork roast that would feed about four people. I wanted to cry. I walked right up to Frank, who was pouring wine into a water glass, and got in his face.

“It’s not funny anymore, Frank,” I said. “It’s my birthday, I asked you to do one thing, and you can’t get it right, after everything I’ve done for you?”

Frank looked at me as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “I never asked you to do any of that for me,” he said matter-of-factly.

I was crushed; I felt as if Frank was telling me to go fuck myself for caring about him. We had been each other’s favorite person for so long. But maybe that wasn’t such a good thing. Frank was living his life as a gay guy with me as his best friend. I was living mine like a straight girl with a boyfriend who happened to be gay. I was so consumed with taking care of him that I didn’t pay enough attention to other guys. Who could blame me? Frank and I were completely compatible, everyone loved him, and he was always up for anything. It was easier to be around Frank than most guys. Until now.

I had often put Frank’s needs before mine with the understanding that we cared about each other. But the sleepless nights of worry, the incessant eye to detail, the obsession with loyalty—all of that was apparently
my
problem.

Hachette had begun putting intense pressure on the staff to improve
George
’s numbers. Their threat to pull the plug if we didn’t increase revenue became more real every day. As a result, I didn’t have much time to focus on Frank and his problems. I saved all my worrying for the magazine, and so did John.

In November 1997, John rented the Beaverkill Valley Inn in the Catskills for an editorial retreat with the entire staff. The aim was to get everyone invested in the success of the magazine. After all, what’s better for boosting morale than a rustic lodge in upstate New York during one of the dreariest months of the year?

We got the full camp experience, with meals served family-style around a big table (preceded by the requisite jockeying to sit next to everyone’s favorite camp counselor and editor in chief). We went on hikes, which entailed pasty-faced city slickers in unsuitable footwear stumbling over rocks and roots, and of
course we played soccer, with John trying not to embarrass his winded editors.

In between the nature walks and canteen meals, John held meeting after meeting to get everyone up to speed on what he hoped would be an aggressive and profitable new year. On the last day of the retreat, we gathered in one of the lodge’s conference rooms to talk about newsstand competition. Sitting around tables set up in a U-shaped arrangement, we listened to the rain beat down on the paned-glass ceiling as John laid out his strategy to beat magazines such as
Men’s Journal
and
Esquire,
amid cheerful rejoinders from the editors.

Finally, I couldn’t help but point out the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room.

“We have half the staff of those other magazines,” I said. “It’s never going to happen unless Hachette steps up and gives us what we need to be competitive.”

John glowered at me, gripping his pen a little too tightly.

“That’s enough,” he said in an unusually harsh tone.

“But—”

“I said that’s
enough
! We don’t need to hear that anymore.”

His words were like a slap across my face. I turned beet red, humiliated in front of the editors, who quickly averted their gazes. I felt as if I were a teenager getting screamed at by my dad in front of my friends. After the initial sting of his rebuke wore off, a numbing rage took hold, and I shut out John and the rest of the room. Those people had become my colleagues and friends, and in one sentence he had made me feel like an idiot again.

When the meeting was over, everyone avoided me like the plague. They were visibly uncomfortable after witnessing John
lash out at me—it had shocked them almost as much as it had embarrassed me. They weren’t used to it. But I was. When he had a lot going on at once and felt overwhelmed, John would snap at me—something he didn’t do with other people. I’d be filling out his expense reports and he’d irrationally bark, “Do you think that’s a good use of your time?” I could tick off a laundry list of things I’d done for him that day—set up a week’s worth of meetings, gather story ideas from all the editors, turn down invitations to events, follow up on a cover entreaty, draft a letter for his next interview request, drop off his prescription at the pharmacy, pick up a gift for a friend—and if he was in a bad mood, his response would be to look at me as if I were a moron and ask, “What about the brakes on my bike that need to be fixed?”

For all the benefits, interesting moments, and glamour that came with my proximity to and close relationship with John, there was also a downside that left me feeling utterly powerless. I was like family to him, and because he felt so comfortable with me, he also took me for granted and acted out his stress on me.

It was particularly awful when others witnessed it. The daughter of Nancy Haberman—a high-powered publicist at Rubenstein Associates, who handled press for the magazine—was an intern at
George,
answering my phone one afternoon, when she called out to John that someone was on the line for him. He yelled back in an extremely nasty tone, “What are you saying? I can’t even hear you!” I heard
him
as I returned to my desk, where I found Nancy’s daughter in total shock.

“John, that’s not me. It’s Maggie,” I said.

“Oops,” he said. “Sorry, Maggie.”

Maggie later called her mother and said, “I can’t believe how he talks to her sometimes.”

When John was in a bad mood, Matt and I joked about it to ease the tension. Matt instantly would read my expression and ask if it was a “because I said so” or “opposite” day. He came up with the two categories as a joke based on a very real truth. On “because I said so” days, John fired off orders and then got on my case, as if expecting incompetence. “Did you send out that package?” he might ask five minutes after making the initial request. I knew better than to try to defend myself. On “opposite” days, I couldn’t get anything right. Even if I did exactly what he told me to do, it was wrong. If I ordered Thai food for lunch after sussing out what he was in the mood for, he’d act completely shocked and unhappy with the choice. “Thai food? I had Thai food last night for dinner.” At the end of either kind of day, I’d wind up in the bathroom, wringing myself out.

The difference between me and John, though, was that I never lashed out at him in public—and not only because he was my boss. For me, it was just like the scene in
The Godfather
when Michael Corleone tells Fredo to never take sides against the family. John’s outburst at the staff retreat made me feel as if he didn’t have my back. If he’d blasted the shit out of me after the meeting, that would have been fine. But to admonish me in front of a roomful of people crossed the line.

Back in my room, still seething, I was shoving clothes into my bag when John knocked on the door. I let him in, turned my back, and continued packing.

“I just spoke to Carolyn,” he said. “She had no idea about the party tonight. Did you forget to tell her?”

I almost shredded the tank top in my hands. The magazine was holding a party that night to mark its second anniversary. Celebrities such as Sheryl Crow, Donald Trump, and Adam Duritz from Counting Crows had been invited to celebrate at the hot new restaurant Asia de Cuba. After the day I’d had, I would rather have put a stiletto through my hand than attend the event. Carolyn, who had known about it for weeks, was trying to get out of it by playing dumb, and I had no patience for it today.

“Boy, I’m getting it from all angles today. I can’t get a break.”

“Well, that’s what she said,” John replied.

“That’s bullshit,” I said, spinning around to face him. “Of course I told her. She just doesn’t want to go.”

John, suddenly uncomfortable, tried to change the subject.

“Look, I’m sorry about today’s meeting. But when you say stuff like that, people assume it’s coming from me. I can’t go around being negative all the time about Hachette. It’s bad for morale and bad for business.”

Point taken. He’d just spent the whole weekend galvanizing the staff to do more with less, and I had to open my big mouth and rain on his parade. He was right to be annoyed. But I wasn’t going to let him accuse me of not informing Carolyn about the party.

“Do you really think I’d forget to tell Carolyn about tonight? That’s what sucks. After every little thing that I do for this place, you think I would forget that?”

He nodded and left me to finish packing, each of us understanding the other’s position and agreeing to drop it. I had the unenviable task of running interference between John and Carolyn when they didn’t feel like dealing with an issue. In
moments like that—John needing Carolyn to attend the kind of public event she had come to dread and neither wanting to confront the other—I became a convenient pawn in their conversations, part assistant and part girl passing notes in class. It was the part of the job that neither of us wanted to examine too closely.

I didn’t blame Carolyn for trying to skip the anniversary party (even if she did use me as the fall guy). The first year of marriage is hard for anyone; for her it was almost impossible. The meaner the stories in the press, the more Carolyn retreated into herself. The process was heartbreaking to witness and made me want to kill people who said, “Well, she knew what she was getting into when she married John.” Just because someone knows what she’s getting into doesn’t make her life any easier. And how could Carolyn possibly have known the extent of it beforehand? I sure had no idea what I was getting into when I took the job with John.

After more than three years of working for him, I worried all the time. Every day, before the alarm clock went off, I woke up, popped out of bed, threw on some sweatpants and a T-shirt, and rushed to the Korean deli on the corner with my stomach in knots. I didn’t wait to get back to my apartment to scan the papers for mentions of John, Carolyn, and
George
; I braced myself and looked through them on my walk home. After all those years, I still worried I would slip up and say the wrong thing. (Although that was the last thing I needed to be concerned about. As my friend Michele said, “The only way something you know could appear in the paper is if Page Six’s editor slept inside your head, because you don’t say anything to anybody.”)

I wasn’t just worried about a leak to the press. I was
concerned about everything—wondering how the latest issue had sold on newsstands and whether John and Carolyn should attend an event, making sure John’s editor’s letter was in on time and that every aspect of his life was in check. I couldn’t let my guard down and just relax. And I certainly couldn’t rely on John to put me at ease.

Unfortunately, John didn’t understand why the paparazzi made Carolyn so upset or why I was so neurotic. “It’s no big deal,” he said to Carolyn over the phone in response to her complaining about a particularly vicious incident. “Just don’t pay attention to it. I don’t.” I cringed. “There are worse things that could happen than a few photographers following you around,” he said, putting the nail in the coffin of my afternoon; I now would have to clean up the mess he created by minimizing her feelings.

I knew that John’s dismissive attitude was due to his frustration. He had no control over the situation and was angry that he couldn’t protect his wife from it. He should have told her as much—I know she really wanted to hear it—but instead he was flippant.

And I had to appease both sides. I couldn’t tell John off
or
dismiss Carolyn’s complaints. Instead, I acted as a mediator, which was instinctual, having spent most of my childhood trying to assuage my mom. That early training made me an expert at finding a rationale for someone else’s less-than-perfect behavior. I could always see the other side.

To John, I would say, “Give her a break”; to Carolyn, “He doesn’t get it.” Seventy percent of the time I was successful in resolving the situation, which is what happened with
George
’s anniversary party at Asia de Cuba. Carolyn actually didn’t
want to go because she was mad at John for not calling her from the retreat all weekend. I smoothed things over between them, but it left me completely and utterly depleted, as mediating always did.

Once I sorted out the drama and returned from the retreat, I barely had time to shower and change before going to the party. I raced around my apartment, quickly throwing on a dress I bought a week before, and dashed out to hail a cab.