Cindy Adams with Jazzy Junior (nearest her) and Juicy
Cindy Adams Present Tense
By Jerry Tallmer
Today a fifth of America’s electorate are single women …
Oprah’s alone; Uma’s alone; Whoopi’s alone; Roseanne’s alone; Barbara’s alone; Angelina’s alone; Latifah’s alone; Arianna’s alone; Fergie’s alone; Katie’s alone; Diana Ross – alone; Kim Cattrall – alone; Halle Berry – alone; Cher’s alone with her Botox; Liza’s alone with her lawyers; Mariah’s alone with her scrapbooks; Monica’s alone with her stained dress; Nicole’s alone with her Oscar; Renée’s alone with her Oscar; Martha Stewart’s alone with her spatula; Meg Ryan’s alone with somebody; Tara Reid’s alone during those moments she’s not alone; Jane Fonda’s alone – again; Pamela Anderson’s temporarily alone; Charlize Theron’s alone with somebody else; Cameron Diaz is legally alone but probably not for long; most of Anna Nicole Smith is alone; Kobe Bryant’s wife should be alone; Joan Rivers is alone; Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky is still alone; in her last three lives Shirley MacLaine’s been alone …
– Cindy Adams,
Living a Dog’s Life,
pp. 169-170
Cindy Adams is not alone. She has Jazzy Junior and Juicy. She used to have her husband, comedian Joey Adams – had him for 40 years, till death did them part. Used to have her mother, Jessica Sugar (“like you put in coffee”) – had her for as many years as Cindy had been here on earth, a numeral that Cindy doesn’t elaborate on. After they were gone, her husband and her mother, the gap of loneliness was filled for six-day-a-week New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams by Jazzy, a tiny Yorkshire terrier brought to her by Michael Viner, producer ex-husband of actress Deborah Raffin, but then Jazzy died too – as told in a wrenching chapter of Cindy’s new book, Living a Dog’s Life (St. Martin’s Press) – and now that gap has been filled by Jazzy Junior (male) and Juicy (female), frenetic fluffballs who together weigh – as Cindy would put it — “about half as much as my eyelashes.”
In the writing room of her Park Avenue penthouse – a chamber completely papered, all four walls and ceiling, with front pages of Cindy Adams’s scoops over the years in the Post – the obtainer of those scoops was bawling out Jazzy Junior. “I’m talking to you and you’re yawning!” Then, to the visiting press: “Look! He’s looking at the computer.” Then, anent Juicy: “That’s three and a half pounds of pure selfishness.” Then to Jazzy Junior and Juicy: “There’s the terrace! Go! Go! Go!” Then, dryly, to NYC Plus photographer Brett Vermilyea: “ ‘Retouch’ is my middle name.” Then, as the door was closing behind Vermilyea: “If he doesn’t do right by me, I’ll kill him.“
Down to business, Madam Adams. Or Cindy Heller, as you once were. How did everything begin?
“Oh, it’s a long, involved story. Because of my mother, Jessie, and my husband, Joey, that’s why my dogs all have ‘J’ names. My mother divorced my first father when I was 1. She became a single parent, which is why I’m enormously devoted to her [present tense, Cindy’s own]. She worked as an executive secretary in the [city’s] water department. Then she married a very nice man, an insurance man named Harry Heller. I grew up on Washington Heights. There wasn’t a great deal of money. Then we moved to Jamaica Estates, and came back to New York when I was 15.
“I was bounced out of Andrew Jackson high School. Had a 99.9 average, but I couldn’t sew. The principal said: ‘If she doesn’t sew, she doesn’t graduate.’ My mother, who had the same mouth as me, said to the principal: ‘If she doesn’t graduate, she doesn’t stay in this school.’ And I didn’t.”
At 15, Cindy Heller began to find work in Manhattan as a photographer’s model.
“I wasn’t tall enough for runway. I was just used for face and head. They gave me a bunch of crazy titles that nobody ever lets me forget. Miss Upswept Hairdo. Miss Bagel of the Brooklyn Better Bagel Bakers’ Association.”
Do you like bagels, Cindy?
“Yeah, sure, don’t you?”
I can take them or leave them.
“That’s heresy. Even my driver, Reggie Ram Kissoon, who is here 27 years from Guyana, he likes bagels.”
She met Joey Adams, she says, on a radio show.
“At 16 I was a little bit of a person because of those titles.”
You mean you were a celeb?
“In a little way. So he and I were on the same radio show, and – ”
When was this, Cindy?
She shrugs. “Forget it. A lifetime.” Who needs to know anything more than that she and Joey were married 40 years, and that he died December 2, 1999. “He and my mother were both in their 80s, and she died three months later. Jazzy [Senior] came to me [from Michael Viner] seven days after I lost Joey. And two years later I lost him, Jazzy, the only friend I had.”
Anybody who knows Cindy Adams knows that for at least a decade toward the end of her husband’s life, she sheltered Joey, she nursed him, she protected him like a baby. No matter what the function, the gala, the hoopla, the event – Tony Awards, celeb party, theater opening, anything – Cindy made sure that Joey was (a) seated, (b) fed, (c) kept company through the whole next hour or two when she had to be hard at work, on her feet, notebook in hand, snatching a few words on the wing from this famous one and that famous one as grist for the next day’s column.
For 25 years Joey and Cindy Adams lived in a fine but smallish apartment on the corner of 86th Street and Fifth Avenue – “next door to Jackie O” — looking out on Central Park. Every summer they would travel – this country, that country, this continent, that continent – and in the fall would return to that apartment and her daily dispensation to Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.
How’d you get along with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis?
“She was not one to be close to us scrubby types of the press. But she knew me and who I was, and we nodded and said ‘Hi’ as we went by. I bought this place” – the penthouse – “in 1997, with my own money. It had been [millionaire tobacco heiress] Doris Duke’s, but I didn’t know that. I found out when I did a front-page story about Doris Duke bailing Imelda Marcos out of jail.” Imelda Marcos was one of Cindy’s favorite felons. Leona Helmsley is another. “As Joey said when I gave him
his 80th-birthday party: ‘If you’re indicted, you’re invited.’
“The reason we moved was because the Fifth Avenue apartment, which I loved, was becoming a nursing home. Joey was very fragile. I needed a configuration [in living quarters] to hide that part of his life. This place has a front and a back, where we could do that” – herself and her housekeeper of some 10 years, Nazalene Persaud.
Another part of the balancing act had to do with Cindy Adams, columnist, TV presence, wisecracking celeb reporter of celeb goings-on around town, friend of cop and cab driver – there was a time when you could not get into a taxi in New York without hearing Cindy telling you to buckle up your seat belt — rising to the top even as her husband was in decline.
“Uhmmmm,” she says when asked about life after – oh well, after 50. Thinks. “I suddenly in the last few years — the last decades — found I was something. Before that, I was just Mrs. Adams, Joey’s wife. But in the golden years” – her voice puts satirical quotation marks around the last two words – “if that’s what they are, I came into my own. I bought this apartment. I bought my own car. I travel the world. I’m a columnist. I had a best-seller two or three years ago” – The Gift of Jazzy – “and this book now. And it all happened in this part of my life.” Thinks, laughs. ‘There’s a lot more to 50 than it used to be.”
How are things at the Post for you these days?
“On the paper I’m the No. 1 read. They just gave me a new contract. They wouldn’t care if I was 300 years old if I kept writing the same smart-ass column.”
Who edits you there these days? (asks someone who once did just that for maybe five years).
“They all edit it [her column]. They call and say: ‘You need a comma here,’ and I say: ‘Put one!’ Just now there’s a new copy editor, a very nice girl. I’m in Amsterdam, Holland, a few months ago, and we’re on the phone, I’m about to take off for New York, and she says: ‘Just to save time, can you tell me what photo will we need for the next column?’ and I say: ‘Rembrandt.’
“I get off the plane at JFK and there’s a message waiting for me; ‘The paper does not have a current photo of Rembrandt.’ I call the girl up and say: ‘What did you do – skip the 5th grade?’ ”
The column runs every day except Saturdays. “If it’s really a hot front-page thing” – as plastered on the walls all around where we’re talking – “they’ll hold [her deadline] up till 8 p.m. If it’s the normal thing, I file anytime up to 5 p.m.”
Yes, she still does everything with pen and notebook – “or on napkin, toilet paper, theater programs, powder puff that’s fallen to the ground, whatever. It works. I just jot down key words. Tape recorder doesn’t work with me. You have to go over too much. It’s a time-robber.”
The computer – the one that Jazzy Junior was staring at – is fitted with a special Cindy Button.
“With me, it’s either a quill pen or else. They had a series of techies come up here, fiddling around, until they came up with this tailor-made button. One push, and the stuff goes straight to the paper. Even I can do it.”
The new book gives hints and bits and pieces of post-Joey timeouts with a baron or two, a CEO or two, a Cuban or two, all that. Cindy shakes her head. “That’s all en passant. They only pass through. The only male I want to be in bed with is Jazzy [Junior]. He warms my toes, cuddles me, doesn’t care if I’m fat or get a zit on my face. [In sardonic voice]: I should be told we’re going to have dinner at a certain hour? Go ahead and have it.”
But, as her book makes pretty clear, Jazzy Junior and Juicy are damned expensive to maintain, at least in the Adams style. “I just paid a bill for when they had their teeth cleaned. These teeth are the size of a sequin, you understand. The bill for both of them was just short of $900. Do you not think this is sick? Joey in his declining years didn’t cost as much. These dogs dominate everything. I allow them everything. They have their own car and driver. They’ve taken over nine-tenths of this apartment. It’s too big for me now, but I can’t sell it because I have to have that terrace for them. Am I mentally deficient? Probably yes. But nothing in that book is overstated.”
When she gets really exhausted she goes to the movies – “my great passion” – or sits and reads old issues of dead-and-gone magazines like Liberty or the Saturday Evening Post. Just now she’s been reading about Herbert Hoover.
“But I don’t look back. I think the insurance policy is talent, and energy, and love for what you’re doing. If I were a pipe-fitter I don’t know if I’d enjoy going to work every day, but I’m not a pipe-fitter. I don’t look over my shoulder. I just try to turn out something interesting and colorful, something I myself would like to read. If you keep looking back, you’ll run into a tree.”
And Cindy Adams will be there to write an inside-story scoop about it.
