Innocent Spouse (3 page)

Howard wasn’t happy, either, and he succumbed easily to disturbingly dark moods. Nathans II failed and closed, leaving only the original in Georgetown. Too much weed, too much alcohol, too little to
do, and he would transform from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. For every lark that was a “high”—good living, good times, good travel—there would be the inevitable “down.” Benders happened. Rage happened, too. He’d have sudden meltdowns. He became abusive and cruel. On occasion, out of the blue, he hit me. More often he was plain out of control. He locked me out of the house. He pushed me out of the car one night in a rainstorm, miles from home, without money or identification. A stranger who saw me crying at a pay telephone drove me home, forty minutes away. My problem was I never saw the meltdowns coming. He could go to dinner five times, have wine, and remain charming, loving, and completely normal. And then there would be that sixth time, where mid-dinner or mid-party he’d suddenly turn an invisible corner, cross an unseen line, and change: not able to stop drinking, aggressive, and crazy, as if invaded by an alien—an alien who hated himself and anyone in proximity, chiefly me.

Howard would recover from the episodes and return to his other wonderful self, not remembering any of the gory details, while I’d remember all of them. He’d make up for it with affectionate words of contrition and gifts. A handful of Anna Weatherley dresses would arrive, boxes of beautiful silk chiffon as delicate as cotton candy, a ring from Tiffany, a necklace from Cartier, and I, reluctant to say “No, thank you” and happy to have the storm over, would accept the gifts and his apology. I would invent one story or another to explain away a black eye. My seemingly confident exterior fooled so many. I told no one what was really happening, not even my closest friends. Who would believe me? I could hear them: “Not Howard! That’s not possible.” Besides, where would I go? I had no one but him, or so I thought, and I’d brought this on myself. I was becoming the classic abused wife.

Howard was my entire world, and when his mood was dark, my world was dark. I was stranded in bizarre splendor in a grand house at the end of a long dirt road surrounded by fields and foxhunters. It was a million miles from the world I had left. Eventually I fell apart, what they used to call a “nervous breakdown.” I had disappeared as a person. I was invisible. I was Mrs. John Howard Joynt III, but Carol Ross had left the planet. My self-esteem was zero. At one point I curled up in a closet—not a walk-in—wanting everything just to go away. The outside
world appeared not to notice—I was always good at maintaining a façade—but I did. I knew it. I was living it. I was hating it.

I confided to my physician one day in a routine exam and he sent me to a psychiatrist. Through weekly therapy, I gradually worked my way back to solid ground. Howard followed me into therapy with the same doctor. We saw him at different times on different days. It may seem strange that we shared the same shrink, but it worked. Chronic depression was fueling his manic ups and downs. The doctor put him on Prozac and, just like that, he was transformed. The dark side of Howard retreated, and the bright, happy, charming side—the side I had fallen in love with—became the constant. It was an astonishing turn and convinced me ours was a marriage worth saving.

“We’ve got to get back to the world,” I told Howard in the den of our house in Upperville. We’d lived there for seven years in what was more a hideout than a home. “I have to go back to work. You have to go back to work, too.” He agreed. He’d neglected Nathans, leaving it in the hands of managers and bartenders. No one was minding the store. He hired Pinkerton detectives, whose investigation revealed that the staff was stuffing dollars in their pockets—tens of thousands of dollars—selling cocaine across the bar, and walking out the back door with whatever they wanted. It was time for both of us to go back to work.

My career was built on curiosity, instinct, and asking questions, and yet I never once questioned our life of quiet luxury. I’d grown up in an emotionally chaotic household where I’d rarely felt like I was on firm footing. I loved my parents dearly but I had moved out of their home the moment I could, at age eighteen, and embarked on a good career. But when I met Howard, and even though I had living parents, brothers, and a sister, I felt somehow like an orphan. Howard adopted me, took me in, and put a secure roof over my head, and in spite of the fighting made me feel safe, protected, secure, and loved. I traded in my self-respect to preserve that fragile deception. Not his. My own. If my house was a house of cards, I didn’t want to know about it.

The second decade of our marriage was better, and it kept getting better with each passing year. I had begun to assert myself. I became again the master of my own life. We packed up and moved to the Chesapeake Bay while keeping a small apartment in Georgetown. We
were water people. We liked to sail. Howard jumped back into the day-to-day management of Nathans, and I returned to television as a producer for the CBS News overnight broadcast,
Nightwatch
, hosted by Charlie Rose. I loved being back at work, sharing my days with people like me who were involved in the world, excited by it.

Who wouldn’t be? In the first years of my career, at United Press International, I had stood mere yards from President Johnson soon after he announced he would not seek reelection. Helen Thomas included me on a visit to President Nixon’s “hideaway” office in the Old Executive Office Building where he sat at his desk and talked about the bombing of Cambodia. In my next job, with
Time
magazine, I asked Elvis Presley what he was doing after his show. “I don’t know, baby,” he said. “If ya tell me where you’ll be, I’ll tell ya what I’ll be doin’.” Also at
Time
, I went to my first presidential conventions and on the road with Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden at the height of their antiwar activism. In various jobs I met all the presidents of my time: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and both of the presidents Bush. With Larry King, I met Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Diana, and John F. Kennedy, Jr., who did a live interview while I kept company with Carolyn Bessette.

The New York socialite C. Z. Guest, one of Truman Capote’s favored “swans,” agreed to do an interview with Larry about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor for the auction of their possessions. Sotheby’s invited me to bring C.Z. to their warehouse to go over the items. She met me looking like a glass of lemonade, all sparkling and fresh and blond. Not for nothing was she on the best-dressed list year after year. The warehouse held vast rooms of furniture, racks of clothing, boxes filled with bed linens. While the staff was coding and tagging, C.Z. and I wandered unattended, fingering suits, jackets, dresses, the Windsors’ stuffed Pug dolls, their silver. There was the duke’s “abdication desk,” and his much-photographed greatcoat. C.Z. pulled it on, smiled, and twirled. It looked made for her.

This was fun, some of it was fascinating, and all of it sure beat living the idle life. The one interview I didn’t want to touch was Charles Manson, the truly sick mastermind behind the grisly 1969 murders of Sharon Tate, the actress and Roman Polanski’s wife, along with four others in Polanski’s Los Angeles home. John Huddy, executive producer
at CBS News
Nightwatch
, pushed me into it. I balked, but he called me his “star” producer and told me this was a professional step I needed to take, so I made a call to the warden of San Quentin. He said Manson was permitted to do one interview per quarter. “It’s up to him. You have to write him directly.” He gave me a prison address.

For the next year, Manson and I exchanged letters. Mine were typed and antiseptic. I was careful not to fall into the usual fawning that went with pursuing a big “get.” Manson’s letters to me, on the other hand, were wild and required several readings to decipher. They went on for pages and pages, written with a pencil in longhand on yellow legal paper. One day the warden phoned. “Manson has agreed to an interview.”

In February 1987, Charlie Rose and I—and Howard—flew to San Francisco. I gave Charlie the “prep packet” of all my notes from interviews with prosecutors, forensic psychiatrists, and others. I’d also asked him to read Vincent Bugliosi’s
Helter Skelter
. When we arrived at San Quentin no two people were more read up on Charles Manson. There was no way not to be anxious as we went through three gates and listened to a recitation of the prison’s “no hostage” policy (“We will not negotiate your safety for the freedom of an inmate.…”). Gulp. I had purposely dressed down. White shirt, gray pants, no jewelry, no makeup. Charlie Rose wore a suit. The two of us and the two-man crew were taken to the large parole hearing room, with a big wooden conference table and windows with a stunning view of San Francisco Bay.

Guards led Manson in, shackled at the wrists and ankles. He was slight, weighed down by the chains that wrapped around his waist. His skin had the pallor of milk—skin that never sees sunlight. He was kept in solitary; he wouldn’t have lasted long in the general population. I asked the guards to remove the shackles, thinking that might make him more comfortable and easier to interview. We introduced ourselves. I didn’t know whether to shake his hand, and then I did. “We’ll start in a few minutes,” I said, “if you’d like some time to relax.” He walked over to the window and stood stock still, staring out at the world he had left forever, the sparkling blue bay drenched in sunlight and dotted with sailboats.

Once the interview began, we stopped only for Skip Brown, the
cameraman, to make quick tape changes. Manson began calmly, but as time was running out he got more animated and explosive, eventually becoming barely coherent. And then it was over. He was shackled again and the guards led him away, his chains clanking. The program aired within days of the interview. Later that year Charlie Rose and I stepped up to the stage at New York’s Waldorf Astoria to accept Emmy Awards for best network interview. Not even a year spent pursuing Elizabeth Taylor could top that.

From CBS News I went to the start-up of the television version of
USA Today
, where I was Washington bureau chief; the show failed but I learned a lot. Then it was on to producer roles at
This Week with David Brinkley
, and
Nightline
at ABC News. Working with Ted Koppel was the closest I’d come to an experience that matched the excellence of Walter Cronkite. These were great jobs and my career blossomed. But I was forty years old and eager to get pregnant, which is tough when you work for a show like
Nightline
, where the workday ended at midnight and began with an early morning conference call. A sensible interlude followed at the National Gallery of Art, where I was brought in by director J. Carter Brown to make documentary films. The hours were essentially nine to five.

Meanwhile, business was booming at Nathans. Howard and I focused on making our house on the Chesapeake into the home of our dreams. When I didn’t think life could get any sweeter, I became pregnant and it did. Spencer was born in November 1991, when I was forty-one and Howard was fifty-three. It was the right time. We were ready. After Spencer’s birth, our life together became a succession of quiet but very happy rewards. Like so many baby boomers, we replaced the all-nighters and nightclubbing and madcap adventure with the simple pleasures of home and hearth. Howard quit smoking. He grew a slight paunch. His hair turned silver. We woke up early and went to bed early. We were a family, and as we sailed through the Caribbean islands that December we seemed as solid and happy as we had ever been.

I
’
D LEFT THE
hospital for home late Friday night. Now it was the wee hours of Saturday morning. The phone on the bedside table jolted me from a sleep as deep as the sea. It took me a moment to realize where I was. My own bed. The clock said four a.m. No husband beside me. Oh, damn. That. This is real, not a nightmare. The sinking feeling returned. Half of my brain told me a predawn phone call is never good news. The other half instinctively guided my hand to the receiver.

“Carol, it’s Martha. I’m at the hospital. They say Howard’s condition is grave. They’re not sure he’ll make it through to dawn. Get here.”

In one urgent continuous motion I dressed, kissed Spencer, woke the live-in babysitter, and rushed into the elevator and to a waiting car. I didn’t dare try driving. Again my breath couldn’t get below my breastbone. My mouth was sand. I’d begun to exist in two worlds: one where I knew what I had to do and did it; another in which I was spiraling out of control. In the bitter cold of that early Saturday morning in January, Washington was still tucked in. The streets were empty, houses were dark, and I thought of the people inside, sleeping undisturbed in the safety of their beds, and I envied them.

The scene at the ICU was much more frightening than what I’d left six hours earlier. My husband was hooked up to an elaborate life-support system, surrounded by men and women in white coats whose demeanor was too urgent, too serious, and too focused to give me any reassurance. “We can’t get his oxygen absorption up,” an anxious nurse told me. There was nothing for me to do but stand on the sidelines and stare. I knew only that under that tangle of tubes and monitors and wires and IVs that make up the armamentarium of modern medicine beat the heart of the husband I loved, and he was dying.

When either Martha or I weren’t at his bedside, we sat quietly stunned in the small, dim waiting room, trying to keep our courage up. Every chat with a doctor was dire. Dawn became morning, which turned into midday and then afternoon. Good friends arrived from Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Wendy Walker, the executive producer of
Larry King Live
, came with her husband. My younger brother, Robert, arrived from rural Virginia. I phoned home to check on Spencer. “He’s fine,” the babysitter said, “playing with his Legos. Don’t worry, Carol. Things are under control here.” They may have been under control there, but my life was slipping off the rails.

Spencer and I had not been together since Friday afternoon. There was the quick hug and kiss before I rushed Howard to the hospital, and he was asleep when I was briefly home that night. Our time together over the past week had been fractured as well, which was unusual, because I had taken a business trip without the family. I hadn’t wanted to make the trip to New York, but I had made a personal New Year’s resolution to do more for
Larry King Live
on my own. Typically, when I had CNN business in New York, we all went, including Spencer, the babysitter, and the dog. We would check into the Carlyle hotel, where we always had the same rooms that felt as comfortable and familiar as home. I would work during the day, Howard and Spencer would enjoy the city, and in the evening Howard and I would try a favorite old restaurant or a hot new one.