In the tradition of star-crossed lovers, they defied their foes, eloped to Virginia and then vanished on a secret honeymoon.
But they weren`t just any star-crossed lovers. The controversial nature of their union has made international newspaper headlines for the last year and sparked a bitter annulment proceeding that was still being battled out in court here last week.
The groom, Sir Rudolf Bing, turned 85 on his wedding day, Jan. 9, 1987, and was suffering from the mental deterioration of Alzheimer`s disease, according to his doctors. Moreover, at the behest of his lawyers, the celebrated former impresario and demon of divas at the Metropolitan Opera shortly would be declared incompetent, assigned a guardian and have his estate given over to a conservator by a New York court.
The bride, Carroll Douglass, was a frayed-looking 47-year-old whose own history of mental fragility included an attempt to arrange for the ”purchase of a helicopter for $40,000 and for flying lessons in order to become the pilot of the Pope,” for whom she had ”acquired a romantic and unreasonable fixation,” according to earlier court documents in Washington. As a result, her own estate had been under court-ordered care until last year.
Flagrantly ignoring court orders that barred Bing from leaving New York, their honeymoon degenerated into a sadly bizarre nine-month game of hide-and- seek chronicled in newspapers around the world. Flitting from Florida to Anguilla to England and Scotland, with cash running low, the newlyweds were reduced to boardinghouses and even charity before they were returned to New York from London last November.
Opera fans and acquaintances of the illustrious former general manager of the Met were shocked at the tawdriness of the tale.
But the couple`s return to New York was not to be the final act in what has come to resemble a painfully grotesque Romeo and Juliet tragedy with the proportions of a Wagnerian opera.
Last week witnesses in court hearings testified to the pathetic, tragic and often volatile circumstances of the Bings` life since their return to the apartment in the Essex House hotel, where Bing has lived for 39 years.
The hearings, part of an ongoing annulment proceeding brought by Sir Rudolf`s guardian, were held to determine whether Lady Carroll Bing is endangering the welfare of Sir Rudolf and should be evicted from the apartment. The annulment proceeding was begun last summer on the basis that, at the time of his marriage, Sir Rudolf was not mentally competent to contract a marriage, said Paul Goldhamer, Sir Rudolf`s attorney in the annulment case. In Manhattan Supreme Court, Justice Carmen Ciparick heard sometimes-heated testimony from doctors, nurses, hotel employees and waiters that Lady Bing, jealous of her husband`s female nurses, constantly prevented them from attending to his care to the point that the incontinent Sir Rudolf had not been bathed or had his clothes changed more than twice since January; that she had struck him, his nurses and hotel personnel; that she kept him out walking the streets for as long as 12 hours at a time until he was heard begging to go home; and that her erratic behavior was disruptive to his mental, physical and emotional well-being.
During two of the three days of hearings, the Bings were present. Sir Rudolf, a tall, thin, elegant man, sat quietly, smoking Marlboro Lights at the indulgence of the court, while witnesses discussed his lack of bladder and bowel control and occasions on which he had put his hand under his wife`s dress in the lobby of the Essex House and exposed himself to a child.
Occasionally, he would lean over to his attorney to politely inquire where he was, at one point amiably noting, ”I haven`t the foggiest notion of what is going on here.” Although his short-term memory is virtually nonexistent, aside from the effects of his Alzheimer`s disease, Sir Rudolf suffers from no other major ailment, according to testimony by his
psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Howland.
Lady Bing, a slightly pudgy, dispirited-looking blond,came to court both days wearing the same multicolored sweater-dress, tattered black pumps and fur-trimmed black coat with a gaping hole in the back that she has been wearing for the last three months. In her hands, grasped before her like a nun with a prayer book, she held the dog-eared copy of her husband`s first book,
”5,000 Nights at the Opera,” which she has been carrying everywhere with her lately. Approached for interviews several times in recent weeks, she consistently responded with a blank stare, saying, ”Perhaps tomorrow would be a better day.”
Frequently she was roused out of her vacant demeanor to disrupt the court by outbursts directed at the witnesses or leaving her chair to grab her husband, saying simply, ”Let`s go.” Her behavior drove her husband`s attorney to call her a ”madwoman” and unsuccessfully urge the judge to dispense with further hearings and evict Carroll Bing immediately.
Pending resumption of these hearings on May 23, Ciparick issued a temporary restraining order last week under which Lady Bing must leave the apartment during six designated hours each day so nurses may care for her husband and he can rest, that male nurses replace the female nurses in the apartment (because of Carroll Bing`s jealousy) and that either a nurse or a bodyguard be present in the Bings` apartment throughout the night.
”I am not convinced that you are such a danger to your husband that you must be excluded altogether,” Ciparick told Lady Bing, but he sternly warned her that she must obey the court`s order. Goldhamer told the judge that he feared her order was futile, because Lady Bing had ignored all previous court orders.
Last Thursday, Lady Bing was arrested for refusing to leave the apartment during court-ordered hours and was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court but later released.
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No one may ever know exactly how the paths of the elegant but increasingly addled octogenerian and the dowdy but peculiarly imperious and mercurial blond crossed. At various times, Carroll Bing has said that they met in May, 1986, in the lobby of the Essex House or at a matinee performance of Wagner`s ”Parsifal.” The only thing that is sure is that they were two lonely people when they met, both with a shaky grip on reality and on a steady drift away from the mainstream of life.
John and Diane Douglass, Carroll`s brother and sister, consistently have supported their sister`s marriage, claiming the Bings would be fine if just left alone. They acknowledge that Carroll can be unstable, but they insist that she could function adequately if not for the ”pressure-cooker situation” she has been placed in, citing the 24-hour nurses and the detectives/bodyguards hired by Sir Rudolf`s lawyers to accompany him constantly to ensure that he is not taken out of the city.
”Definitely, they`re very much in love with each other, devoted to each other. She`s perfectly capable of taking care of him,” said John Douglass, Carroll`s brother, a professor at American University`s School of
Communications in Washington.
His older sister, Diane, a businesswoman in Washington, agrees. ”They`re happy, which is what a lot of people don`t understand. They`re in seventh heaven together. She can`t understand why people keep bothering them.”
But many others have quite a different view . ”It`s a shocker,” said fabled baritone Robert Merrill, who says he can`t bring himself to read the newspaper stories any longer. ”I just can`t take it. It`s disgraceful. It`s shameful.
”Lacking today are real impresarios. He was a real impresario,” said Merrill, who appeared in Verdi`s ”Don Carlo,” the production that launched Bing`s debut season at the Metropolitan Opera in 1950.
A naturalized British citizen, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1971, Bing was born in Vienna in 1902. After a career in Europe that included founding the Edinburgh International Festival and managing Glyndebourne, both British summer opera festivals, he went to New York as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in 1949 and reigned there for 23 years.
Considered one of the most powerful men in New York for many years, Bing oversaw the move of the Met from its former midtown location to its current home at Lincoln Center in 1966.
Sometimes called ”the autocrat of the Met,” Bing was known for his elegantly arrogant manner and sharply witty tongue, with which he lashed many, including such divas as Maria Callas, whom he fired, and Beverly Sills, whom he refused to hire.
Until her death in 1983, Sir Rudolf was married for 54 years to former Russian ballerina Nina Schelemskaya-Schelesnaya. The Bings were childless, and Sir Rudolf has no surviving family other than a niece and nephew in Europe, with whom he has had limited contact.
His apartment at the Essex House, the same one he checked into on the day he and his first wife arrived in America 39 years ago, seems frozen in time. In contrast to the recently refurbished hotel, the walls of the one-bedroom apartment (which reportedly rents for $2,000 a month) are chipped and peeling, according to a recent visitor. Two shabby green silk wing chairs flank a shawl-covered round table in the living room, in one corner of which is the single bed where he used to sleep during his first wife`s illness and which he now shares with Carroll Bing, according to his nurses.
Stacks of music-oriented books totter atop the mahogany cabinet of a 1950s-vintage TV, and on one wall is a small drawing dedicated to ”Nina and Rudi” by Marc Chagall, a longtime friend and neighbor at the Essex House.
”The thing that kills me is that he lived a life of total dignity. I don`t care who he`s in love with, that`s his business, but he should die the way he lived,” said Richard Boehm, a longtime friend and seemingly one of the few who have kept in touch with Bing in the last 10 years.
Boehm, a New York literary agent, met Bing in fall, 1972, when he acted as publicist for ”5,000 Nights at the Opera,” the impresario`s first book of memoirs. During the promotional tour, the two struck up a friendship that deepened after Nina Bing suffered a debilitating stroke in early 1978.
Sitting in the Ginger Man restaurant, a favorite of opera fans and artists across the street from Lincoln Center, Boehm recalled, ”That was the turning point. That was when he started going downhill. He used to say, `Dick, I think I`m going senile.` It was bugging him because he had always prided himself on his memory, and now he was asking what day it was.”
With his wife`s ability to communicate impaired, Bing often found himself ”desperate” in his loneliness, according to his second book of memoirs,
”A Knight at the Opera,” published in 1981. He and Boehm began meeting four or five times a week at the Fontana di Trevi restaurant on West 57th Street, where Bing had been a regular for more than 30 years. It was a habit that the two friends continued after Nina Bing`s death in December, 1983.
Roberto Mei, whose family has owned the restaurant for 35 years, remembers that period well. ”He was a very lonely man after his wife died. After all those years at the Met and all the people he knew , he always ate by himself. Richard (Boehm) was his only companion,” said Mei.
”It is amazing. And it`s not that he was unfriendly,” Mei added, noting that several times when the restaurant was full, Bing would share his table with single diners.
From 1984 to 1986 Bing`s mental state deteriorated markedly, Mei said, to the point that ”every time I`d circle his table, he`d stop me and ask, `What day is it?` `Have I eaten yet?` `Have I ordered yet?` `Have I paid the check yet?` ”
By this time, few except Boehm were willing to share a table with Bing any longer.
That changed in the spring of 1986, when Sir Rudolf Bing met Carroll Douglass. No one knows how it happened, but some agree with Richard Boehm, who said, ”I really don`t believe it was by chance.”
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Carroll Lee Douglass had a history of being attracted to older men and episodes of eccentric behavior before she ever met Bing.
The middle of three children of insurance broker James Douglass and his wife, Dorothy, Carroll was born in 1939 and reared as a Christian Scientist in Potomac, Md. Her mother died in 1952, and her father, James, remarried in 1954. He died in 1982.
After a private-school education in Washington and at the Christian Science-oriented Principia School in St. Louis, Carroll studied drama in England and received a bachelor of arts degree from New York University`s School of Arts and Sciences in 1962.
”She was a lovely, happy, natural young girl, very energetic and sports- minded, always winning blue ribbons,” recalled her aunt, Mary Edwards.
”She was very artistic, interested in drama and poetry. We weren`t all that close,” said her brother, John, who did not recall any unusual behavior by Carroll while she was growing up.
Carroll Douglass was 22 when she married Jack Glenn, a 65-year-old documentary filmmaker, in 1961. Her wedding announcement picture shows a pretty, if somber-looking, young woman. In those days, she apparently aspired to be an actress and, in fact, starred in a never-released film of ”The House of Seven Gables,” made by her late husband.
The Glenns lived in New York, where Carroll brought her maternal grandfather, Col. Lawrence Worrall, to live with them for several years before his death in about 1971, according to her relatives. Carroll always liked caring for older people, said her brother.
In 1973, the same year she was divorced from Glenn, Carroll married William Rickenbacker, who was the son of the World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker, and who was 12 years her senior. An investment counselor and contributor to the National Review magazine, Rickenbacker met Carroll through his work and knew her for two years before they married, he said in a telephone interview last week from his home in Francestown, N.H. In those days, ”she was pretty and vivacious,” recalled Rickenbacker, who also described her as romantic and kind.
”All of her problems, that I could see, came from childish delusions of grandeur, such as hopes for a major career in films. She was always hoping to go from zero to 100 without any intermediate steps,” Rickenbacker said.
When Rickenbacker divorced her in 1978, the bitterness of the proceeding brought on Carroll`s confused and irrational behavior, according to her brother and sister.
Although she seemed to have stabilized by the time of their marriage, Rickenbacker said, once they began their life together in Greenwich, Conn., he began to catch her moving her lips silently and gesturing to herself, as if in conversation, and beginning a pattern of what he called ”pathological”
lying. A spate of ”obsessive behavior began again, with aviation, around 1974-75,” he said.
”She was fascinated by helicopters and wanted to get a license and become a traffic reporter in Washington,” he said. Eventually, Carroll earned pilot licenses for both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, according to Rickenbacker.
She decided in the early 1970s to join the Army, with the intention of becoming a military helicopter pilot. Carroll`s brother and sister said that they didn`t find her decision unusual and admitted that they did nothing to stop her.
