Final Statement: Minutes before he killed himself, Myerson scrawled a will leaving everything to his sisters.   (Photo: Courtesy of Jean Myerson)

Allen and Carol met in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1981, when both were 25 and cub reporters at the Lexington Herald. Carol was a “sweet, pleasant local girl,” born and raised in Maysville, Kentucky. “And Allen was this fast-talking kid who’d gone to Harvard,” remembers Philip Terzian, an editor there. “Very ambitious and aggressive, among all these easygoing Kentuckians. We used to laugh about what the Myerson household must think of Carol, because they came from such disparate worlds.”

What the Myersons thought wasn’t pleasant. Carol says part of the reason she and Allen waited six years to marry was because his Orthodox parents were so opposed to the idea. That, and his ambivalence even then about having children. Jean admits that her parents were distraught over the possibility of a “mixed-race marriage,” as she calls it. “But Allen was smitten.” His mother would be the one to make peace: “My husband said, ‘I’m not going to that wedding.’ And I said, ‘Yes, you are. This is our son.’ ”

Through the course of their marriage, the couple moved continually as Allen worked his way toward the New York Times. He’d worshiped the newspaper since childhood, his mother remembers, adding that even as a boy he’d insisted on having his own subscription.

Allen grew up as a somewhat sickly child, terribly asthmatic but so determined to be like the other kids that he threw himself into sports, eventually running both the Boston and New York marathons. He wanted desperately, friends say, to impress his father, Sam, a civil engineer who was in and out of jobs and, by most accounts, was a difficult man. Some think he, too, secretly battled depression. In Carol’s court papers, she describes Allen’s family as “abusive and dysfunctional”—a characterization that incensed Natalie and the sisters. “His biggest fear was becoming like his father,” Carol says, “repeating his father’s life and their marriage. And this played out in all his mixed feelings, about buying a house, about having children.”

“Now you can see what a cruel bitch she is,” Jean retorts. “If we were all so mental, why was she so hell-bent on using his sperm?”

For many years, they put off having children because Allen “was never ready,” Carol says. But around the time they turned 40, Allen acquiesced to her desire to seek fertility treatments. At the time, they were living in Dallas, where Allen had landed the job of bureau chief for the Times—after paying his dues for four years on the Times copy desk back in New York. By all accounts, his years in Dallas, from 1994 to ’99, were his happiest. He loved his job, which allowed him to travel the state and write stories about quirky Texas characters who fascinated the kid from New Rochelle, without having to deal with the politics and daily grind of the newsroom. He had a tight group of close friends, and he and Carol became known for the shindigs they threw at their comfortable Dallas home—Kentucky Derby parties, catered barbecues, and the like.

But the party was over in 1999, when Raines’s predecessor, Joe Lelyveld, brought Allen back to New York and a desk job. Officially, being named “assistant Sunday business editor” was a promotion, and Allen, the consummate company man, did not let on to friends how crushed he was. He wanted to write more, not less; being chained to the business desk on the weekends wasn’t part of the big life plan. “He hoped his next step would be to become an international correspondent,” says Carol. “That was his dream.”

Around the time of the move back to New York, says Carol, their marriage began to hit the rocks. She blamed this on several things besides his new job description. With her income uncertain, they moved into a $1,000-a-month rental apartment in Montclair—too small to entertain the way they used to and an enormous step down in their standard of living. But more stressful was the fertility project. The endless, expensive rounds of unsuccessful procedures are, of course, a known marriage killer, exacerbated by the constant hormone treatments—and Allen’s continued waffling.

By January 2002, they were in regular marital-therapy sessions—in addition to several shrinks Allen saw. But they decided to pursue adoption. Allen, in what had become a recurring pattern, wavered between gung-ho participation (hiring an adoption lawyer, researching the laws in various countries) and resistance. Carol grew increasingly frustrated, says one of the couple’s friends, Cynthia Coulson. “She desperately wanted a child, and she only had so much time left,” says Coulson, who had explored the adoption route herself. “But then Allen decided he did not want to proceed with adoption.” By March 2002, five months before his death, they were back on the fertility track again. Both felt a sense of desperation—but for very different reasons.

The last months of Allen’s life were, like Allen himself, fraught with ambivalence. By late spring, he started telling his mother that he didn’t want to go through with the purchase of the big, expensive house. “Then don’t do it, Allen,” she told him. Later, he told her he didn’t want to donate his sperm on July 5. “Then why did you?” asked an exasperated Natalie. “Because she told me ‘I owed her,’ ” her son replied. “He told me the reason he needed the divorce,” says Jean, “was that he couldn’t stand the criticism anymore. That she blamed him for everything, including not being able to get pregnant.”

Still, that April, he squired Carol to the Champagne vineyards of France and the opera in Berlin. In early June, they headed to Cambridge for Allen’s twenty-fifth Harvard reunion. The occasion was something that had consumed Allen for months. He headed three different reunion committees and, with Carol at his side, attended nearly every event of the long weekend, though she admits noticing he seemed less gregarious than usual. At one point during the festivities, a crisis occurred: One of the alums, classmates feared, was suicidal. Allen barely knew the woman, but he immediately took charge, tracking down her loved ones from his cell phone in the middle of a rainstorm in Harvard Yard, getting her to a hospital, and making sure there were adequate psychiatrists.

What few, including Carol, knew at the time was that Allen himself had had a breakdown at Harvard. It was at the end of his sophomore year, during which he tried to take too many classes while also playing trombone for the Hasty Pudding club and writing for the weekly Independent. Jean furiously rejects the suggestion that Allen had psychological problems, insisting that he had only needed some time off and came home for a year—where his father got him a job at a construction site in the city and he took a room at the 92nd Street Y.

But a retired Harvard professor who was the house master at Lowell House in the early seventies recalls a more complicated set of circumstances. “Basically, he had a nervous breakdown and wouldn’t move out of his dorm room, among other things,” says Zeph Stewart. “Eventually he had to be moved out.”

Stewart, who is 82, does not recall whether Allen was hospitalized in Cambridge, but he vividly remembers the episode because among other examples of Allen’s curious behavior was a series of nasty letters sent to Harvard administrators about Stewart, a professor of Greek and Latin. “He had been an extreme admirer of mine, and frankly I thought he was slightly unbalanced for thinking so well of me. But then he went from one extreme to another. He started writing these bizarre criticisms of me, saying that I was a fraud, that I wasn’t all that good a scholar. You could say it was slightly hostile,” Stewart says wryly. Years later, Allen befriended Stewart again. “Allen always stopped for lunch or tea when he was in Cambridge. It was as if that never happened, this ‘incident.’ I always liked him. But I was not astounded when I heard the news.”

After the reunion, Allen began to confide in Jean—telling her that he “hated his wife” and didn’t want anything to do with her, much less have children—but at the same time, he went through a new series of blood tests and psychological screening at a fertility clinic he himself had chosen. Carol was shocked to discover later that he’d been talking to Jean. Jean and Allen had had a falling-out, she says, when their father died in 1996, and “Jean wouldn’t speak to us for over a year.” (His therapist at the time described his family as “toxic.”) Jean downplays the estrangement, but in her eulogy for her brother, she spoke about how in his last months, they had gotten closer than ever: “With his newfound lease on life, he finally became the brother and friend I had always longed for.”

On July 22, Carol learned she was pregnant. Allen “sent me a big bouquet of flowers at work,” she says, and took her out to a romantic restaurant. Then he began divorce proceedings.

In court papers, Carol describes Allen's family as "abusive and dysfunctional." "Now you can see what a cruel bitch she is," Jean retorts. "If we were all so mental, why was she so hell-bent on using his sperm?"

In the last three weeks of his life, Allen’s behavior grew increasingly erratic. He told different things about his wife to different friends outside the newsroom. To some, she was his “best friend” and his “only love,” and he feared he was “ruining his life.” To others, she was a shrew who had changed the locks, pirated his mail, and “stolen his favorite suit and his last roll of toilet paper.” He said conflicting things about the pregnancy—he wanted a baby, he didn’t want a baby. He also began writing notes to himself at his desk that would later be discovered: “If I can just think of it as in vitro, she did it herself, if I can hold that thought, I’ll be all right.” “You are going to get hurt deep down inside.” “Just stand up for yourself.”

Had any one of his friends gotten the whole download rather than select bits and pieces, it would have been painfully clear that Allen was unraveling.

To Carol, high on hormones and furious at his decision to divorce her, nothing made sense. But she says she believed that whatever he was going through, he would eventually snap out of it and come to his senses; he always had before. “Yes, we had some serious problems,” she admits. “But I still believed we would move into the new house and raise our children, everything we strived for.”

Allen was so conflicted that in the week after he filed for divorce, he still made time every day to inject his wife with hormones.

“I think she was the light of his life, his beacon of hope, really,” says Toddi Gutner, Carol’s closest friend at Business Week. “But when they started having problems, he went back to his family for the same support he got growing up.” Gutner believes Allen had painted himself into a corner, torn between his love for his wife and what his family expected of him—which was to finally leave her.