Double Life:
The Shattering Affair Between Chief Judge Sol Wachtler and Socialite Joy Silverman
By Linda Wolfe
Pocket Books, 286 pages, $22
`To know all is to forgive all,” the French like to say, though it’s hard to make a case for crazed New York judge Sol Wachtler and his harassee, Joy Silverman. These two, as this insightful book notes, seem to be guilty of every one of the seven deadly sins, with the possible exception of gluttony.
What we have here is a readable commingling of pride, covetousness, lust, envy, anger and, in Joy’s dossier, sloth. Once, when her lover, Sol, suggested she put some depth in her life by going back to school, she vetoed the idea. “I hate to read,” she said. Earlier, when her first husband suggested moving to St. Petersburg, Fla., to develop some land owned by her stepfather, Joy threw a fit. “Where can you shop here?” she cried, after surveying the place, though her friends pointed out that it was not really that far from Palm Beach.
As readers of tabloids will recall, Wachtler, 62, was Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals of the State of New York when he was surrounded by FBI agents in late 1992, handcuffed and charged with extortion. Using nasty letters, obscene greeting cards, voice disguisers, strange makeup and the adopted persona of a seedy Texas private detective, he had been harassing Joy Silverman, 45, his wife’s uncle’s stepdaughter-and his former mistress.
“Oh, my God,” he said several times, as FBI agents drove him back to New York. Then, “Oh, my God, I could have been governor.”
One of the tragedies of this case is that Shakespeare is no longer around to craft its progressions into a powerful cautionary tale. But writer Linda Wolfe does a good job in capturing key scenes in the lives of the principal players, whom she describes as “a voluptuous Park Avenue socialite” and “an esteemed public servant.”
The cast includes Barbara Bush, for whom Joy once threw a dinner for 48 people in a tent behind her home, raising $135,000. Bush’s husband, George, more than once cast a thoughtful eye on the Silverman physique, Wolfe reports, and was helpful in steering Joy directly to FBI Director William Sessions when the dumped Wachtler got out of hand.
Power, and access, appear to have been important to both Joy and Sol. One job she liked, for the mayor of New York, was to use her third husband’s limousine and driver to pick up dignitaries at the airport. The judge, meantime, had worked his way steadily upward in Republican politics, shaking hands at commuter stations, speaking at women’s clubs, etc.
Their greatest day together, Wolfe suggests, came in the spring of 1989, at a gala ceremony in Manhattan commemorating the first inauguration of George Washington. Joy rode in from the airport with President Bush. Sol, one of the chairmen of the event, got great seats, on the dais. When Joy saw Steve Ross, the chairman of Warner Communications, “sitting way off in a corner, she whispered to Sol, `I’ve got a better seat than he does.’ “
Sol was “feeling splendid that day, proud and happy and complete,” Wolfe reports, even when he noticed Joy walk over to Ross, “take the silk of his tie between her fingers and begin fondling it. It just made him think how remarkable Joy was with men. How sensual she was. He wasn’t jealous, because she was his. The day was, for him, the pinnacle of their love.”
Going back in time, Wolfe reports that Wachtler had a tendency to play mean-spirited tricks. Getting off an elevator in the courthouse in Albany, he pushed down buttons, propelling colleagues he disliked to the basement. Joy, in turn, was moody, excitable and talked a blue streak. As distant relatives they had seen one another over the years. They first locked eyes at a party celebrating Joy’s engagement to her first husband, a furniture heir.
“Those aren’t the eyes of a friend,” remarked Joy’s mother, noting the judge’s close attention to her daughter.
Joy’s first marriage lasted three years. Her second husband was a real-estate developer later involved in a major savings and loan scandal. Minutes after marrying him, at 3 a.m. in a Las Vegas wedding chapel, Joy phoned her first husband to tell him exactly what she had in mind for the next few hours. The newlyweds parted after two months.
Married to her third husband, a cable-TV entrepreneur with “great prospects but cash poor,” Joy turned to Sol for help in untangling estate matters after her mother and stepfather died. Her share was under control of her stepfather’s last wife, whom she disliked. “Does Sol fool around?” Joy asked friends. Not likely, she was told. Although his marriage had deadened, and he no longer slept with his wife, he was known as a workaholic, never succumbing to the legislator-on-the-loose temptations of Albany at night.
When Joy called and asked to see him, Wolfe reports, “he thought what she had in mind was observing how the court operated.” He suggested that she bring her children because “kids were always fascinated by the workings of the court of appeals.” Joy arrived alone, but brought considerable skills, notably in the bedroom. Sol, in turn, counseled her in financial matters and politics, teaching her to become such a skilled fundraiser that she was later mentioned for an ambassadorship, possibly Barbados. But later, Sol had second thoughts about leaving his wife of 35 years, as Joy suggested.
Trying to break off his affair, he told Joy he had a brain tumor-yeah, that was it, a brain tumor. Joy promptly dispatched him to her astrologist, who confirmed the diagnosis. Sol urged Joy not to saddle herself with a “sick and possibly doomed man.” Joy said she was not the kind of woman to abandon her man when he was ailing. Sol said a hospital had informed his wife of his condition, and she had agreed to see him through his final days.
Worn down by strain, Sol turned to various doctors for help. He started taking antidepressants, sleeping pills and an amphetamine-like drug called Tenuate. He became jumpy, distant and restless. At dinner parties, he kept talking and talking. Joy found someone else. She refused to see Sol. “I would never see two men at the same time,” she explained, adding that her new beau, a lawyer, was younger, handsomer and earned five times more money.
The drugs, Wolfe suggests, did not cause Wachtler’s bizarre behavior. But they “disinhibited” him, letting loose “the dogs of wounded pride.” Adopting the guise of a sleazy private eye from Houston, Sol demanded $20,000 in cash from Joy, in exchange for alleged tapes of Joy and her new lover. He never got to pick up the money. He was arrested by the FBI on Long Island. At the time, he was driving to pick up bagels for his wife.
He entered prison in October 1993, to serve a term of 15 months. He was fined $31,000, to repay Joy for hiring guards and tutors for her daughter during his period of harassment. Given psychiatric attention and treated with Prozac, he was pronounced well enough to join the general prison population. Before he was put in a work-release program, he was assigned to teach creative writing.
