Books: The Bess Mess

WHEN SHE WAS BAD

by Shana Alexander

Random House; 305 pages; $19.95

The unhappiness of people who have every reason to be happy is always fascinating, and the story of former Miss America Bess Myerson is riveting. Quiz-show star, New York City's Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, walker of Mayor Ed Koch, candidate for U.S. Senate, she fell from grace with a thud. Although the ending of the Bess Mess is known -- she was acquitted of bribery charges stemming from her affair with a married man -- it is a tribute to Shana Alexander's storytelling that the reader believes at points along the way that Myerson and those around her could be spared the sorrow that ultimately engulfs them all.

Alexander, author of a 1983 book on Jean Harris and the murder of diet doctor Herman Tarnower, carefully details the lives of the players: Myerson's lover Andy Capasso and his estranged wife Nancy; Judge Hortense Gabel, who presided over the Capasso divorce; and Sukhreet, the judge's troubled daughter. Bess is a towering "glamazon" who dazzled almost everyone she met; Hortense Gabel is a stocky housing lawyer with Coke-bottle glasses and sensible shoes. Yet Alexander pairs them as spiritual twins. Both had climbed out of the Bronx through brains, hard work and chutzpah. And both hated looking back.

Alexander portrays Myerson as a woman who loved too much and too desperately through two failed marriages and numerous affairs. That picture is so convincing that Myerson's willingness to hire Judge Gabel's nearly unemployable daughter as a way to induce Gabel to lower Capasso's alimony payments makes an odd kind of sense. Capasso, a sewer contractor from Queens, had nothing to offer Bess but limousines, furs and financial security. But for someone as insecure as Myerson, he was an emotional 911.

Alexander adds many new details to the saga, revealing, for example, that Sukhreet's job at a massage parlor included an extra $15 for going topless. But her gift is to make sense of what is already known: how a daughter came to turn on her devoted mother, why a venerable judge would jeopardize her reputation for a $19,000-a-year job for her child, and how the most famous Miss America of them all turned out to be anything but our ideal. M.C.