Feature

Justice for Allen

Stone: Myerson's headstone makes no mention of "husband" or "father."

(Photo: Courtesy of Jean Myerson)

That e-mail would be turned into the legal filing dated August 22 that he dropped, unsigned, in the mail to his sister before killing himself. When she received it a couple of days after her brother’s death, she was “touched,” Jean says. “I said, ‘Gosh, these are all the things I said to him.’ ”

Carol first heard the contents of the document when this reporter read it to her over the phone. For several minutes, she was speechless. Then she said, “This is not the Allen I knew.” In fact, she said, late the same night he’d written the letter, he’d called Carol and raised the possibility of a reconciliation. But she was tired, and pregnant, and very bitter; she told him they would talk in a couple of days.

On Tuesday, Allen had what would be his last therapy appointment. “In our last session,” the therapist later wrote, “I was struck by Allen’s conversation about apartments he was considering, a party he’d been invited to, and his decision to inform his boss that he and Carol were separating. There was no trace of any suicidal thoughts or intent. He was hopeful about a happier future.”

This therapist also wrote in her notes that throughout their recent sessions, “Allen was also in conflict about romantic feelings for another woman.” While the rumor at the Times was that Carol was cheating on him—something she vehemently denies—several sources say Allen was infatuated with a woman he repeatedly referred to in his scribbled notes, though only by her initials. (The woman did not return repeated calls from New York.) She was a “nice Jewish girl,” say friends, whom Allen had met at his and Carol’s book club. “Allen and I occasionally invited her to dinner,” says Carol, “to try to fix her up with single men we knew.”

On Tuesday, August 20, Carol had her last conversation with her husband. Calling at midnight, he’d awakened her to find out where she’d parked the car they were now sharing from different addresses.

The next day—the day before he jumped—an old friend from Wilmington, Delaware, came to the Times to have coffee with him, so concerned and shocked was he after Allen told him and his wife that he and Carol were splitting up. The two couples were supposed to be spending that Labor Day weekend, just two weeks away, together at an inn in Cape May. And now there was a divorce and a baby. “He didn’t sound morose, but it just didn’t make any sense,” says the friend. “Why would someone about to have his baby want to divorce him? It was just so disturbing.”

Over coffee, Allen assured this friend that even though this was Carol’s idea, and he was sad that “she doesn’t like me anymore,” and that there was a baby and all, he was fine. He’d be fine. But Carol had changed the locks. “I said, ‘Allen, this doesn’t sound like Carol.’ ”

That night, Allen met Kevin Buckley and Karen Wirtshafter at a restaurant in Jersey. Now he said that he didn’t really want a divorce but that his lawyer had told him to file. They were baffled. But their conversation kept getting interrupted by Allen’s cell phone. They were closing some big story at the Times, and so Allen spent much of dinner excusing himself to talk to the business desk. When he finally sat down long enough to really talk, he seemed most concerned about getting his new “bachelor pad” in Manhattan.

Karen and Kevin thought the whole night was weird, but not alarming. “He seemed a little down but was also reasonably animated,” says Kevin. Twenty-four hours later, Carol, now a widow, moved for several days into the couple’s guest room. They didn’t want her to be alone in her grief.

In the end, Allen made his death as difficult as he had made his life. When he stood up from his desk after slamming down the phone and scribbling his suicide note, he walked, deliberately but calmly, to the elevator. There were several people inside. “Where’s the terrace?” he asked. They told him the eleventh floor. Oddly, he then got off on the fifth floor. The only thing on the fifth floor of the Times is the emergency medical clinic. But Allen just paused there; he didn’t ask for help. He got back on the elevator and took it to the top.

Though he jumped from the fifteenth floor, the highest one can go by elevator is to the fourteenth. And one doesn’t usually go there uninvited. Fourteen is the plush floor from which the Sulzbergers rule. From there, he’d almost certainly have taken a grim back stairwell, rarely used and not terribly easy to find, to the fifteenth floor. He found his way to a very old corridor behind a room filled with audiovisual equipment. The corridor is lined with ancient windows that could, with great difficulty, be forced open. That is what Allen did. From there, he had to crawl outside along a parapet to a ledge overlooking the bright action of Times Square, from which he leapt to his death.

Myerson v. Cropper remains an open case. Carol recently put an offer on the table that would give more than half of Allen’s probatable estate to his sisters and the rest to the twins. Meanwhile, Jean was still mulling it over. Earlier, she had been trying to get the police and Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau to investigate Carol for “aiding and abetting a suicide” and was livid that her calls were not returned. At one point she phoned to report that her private investigator had ascertained the names of the twins, then expressed her extreme dissatisfaction that New York won’t print them. But what about the children—Allen’s children? “My biggest wish,” Jean replied, “is that the paternity test comes back and they’re not Allen’s. That would be such a gift.”

Before the spring thaw, I go with Jean and Natalie to visit Allen. “I’ve been coming here since I was a little girl,” Natalie says as Jean navigates her mother’s old Mercury through Queens to the Mount Judah cemetery. By way of introduction, Natalie—a soft, sweet woman with tight white curls and wire-framed glasses—turns to me from the front seat and says, “She killed my son. Turn right.” She was talking to Jean. “I know that, Ma,” Jean snaps.

Jean has some business to attend to first in the cemetery office. She asks for the manager. “A woman has threatened to remove my brother’s headstone,” she tells him. “You wouldn’t ever allow that, would you?”

“Never!” he replies.

“Even in the middle of the night?”

“Never!”

She later admits that Carol had not in fact threatened to slip into Mount Judah in the dark of night and remove Allen’s headstone, but Jean Myerson isn’t taking any chances.

Natalie walks outside and picks up a stone to lay on Allen’s grave. Then she walks to the spot where her only son is buried. The dirt is still in a pile in front of the headstone that says everything but husband and father. “What a waste,” she says, sobbing. “What a sin.”