It is hard to comprehend the significance Bess Meyerson had for Jewish Americans when the 5’10” beauty was selected as Miss America in 1945. Her win occurred as the extent of the Holocaust was being revealed. Meanwhile, on the home anti-Semitism front, three pageant sponsors refused to allow her to represent them.
Meyerson was a proud representative of Jewish culture. Raised in the Bronx by her Russian immigrant parents, the family lived in a collective complex with artists, poets, and laborers (her father was a carpenter and handyman). Meyerson was a talented pianist. She used her pageant prize money to attend Juilliard and Columbia for a graduate music degree and performed in prominent venues like Carnegie Hall and with the New York Philharmonic.
For better or worse, Meyerson’s beauty and reputation made a music career less likely than her becoming a television personality, which she did, hosting game shows and the Miss America Pageant throughout the 1950s-60s. However, Meyerson was also actively involved in such social issues as violence, mental health, and consumer protection. In 1969 she left her media career to become New York City’s first Commissioner of Consumer Affairs under Mayor John Lindsay, a position from which she sponsored America’s first consumer protection laws.
Thus Meyerson launched into her political career, where she never achieved independent electoral status. Her main function throughout the 1970s was as Ed Koch’s consort. This was generally thought to be a non-sexual, companionable relationship (Koch never married, nor was he ever known to have an intimate relationship) that led to Koch’s election as New York City’s mayor in 1977. In 1980 Meyerson tried for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. She was defeated by Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who herself lost the general election to Republican Al D’Amato. (Keep in mind that the current Senators from New York are Chuck Schumer and Kirstin Gillibrand, who replaced Hillary Clinton.)
This ended Meyerson’s career as a prominent and admired public figure, presaging a rather sad personal decline, centered on an ill-advised personal relationship. First, it should be noted, Meyerson never formed a successful long-term intimate relationship (which made her for a time seem to be the perfect companion for Ed Koch). She was married twice. Both marriages ended in divorce; the first divorce included charges of domestic violence.
After Koch appointed Meyerson his Commissioner of Cultural Affairs in 1983, Meyerson became romantically involved with a married sewer contractor, Carl Capasso. This seemed to be an odd connection between a cultural and political figure with a man involved in the shadowy realm of New York City—well, sewers—and Capasso was eventually convicted of tax evasion. In the meantime, Meyerson became involved with Capasso’s divorce case through her friendship with the judge in the case, Hortense Gabel and her daughter, Sukhreet.
Meyerson was indicted by the U.S. Attorney, Rudy Giuliani, along with Gabel and Capasso, for conspiracy, obstruction, and bribery in an alleged plot whereby Meyerson gave Sukhreet a job in exchange for Gabel reducing Capasso’s child support payments. Meyerson was acquitted eventually, but her status as a public figure was forever destroyed and she lost her job in the Koch Administration. (In addition, in 1988, she was arrested on a shoplifting charge to which she pleaded guilty.) Meyerson died, age 90, in Santa Monica in 2014. Her death was not announced publicly by the L.A. coroner.
THE BASICSWhy was this incredibly gifted and successful figure susceptible to a relationship that destroyed her career and personal life? We are used to—accept—stories of prominent figures who are laid low by drugs and alcohol. But love? Why did Meyerson never form a normalized relationship with ordinary satisfactions and contentment (she did have a daughter from her first marriage)—or that at least avoided her losing her job and being tried in federal court?
As I define addiction (with Archie Brodsky) in Love and Addiction, addiction is the result of failing to find something essential in life and desperately seeking it in some danger source, place, or way. And nothing is so readily missed and desperately sought than love, making love the most common, and destructive, type of addiction.