When Band-Aid heir J. Seward Johnson Sr. died in 1983 at the age of 87, he left behind more than $400 million—and a will that would ignite, Margolick writes, "the largest, costliest, ugliest, most spectacular, and most conspicuous [inheritance battle] in American history." On one side stood the principal heir, Johnson's third wife of 12 years, Barbara "Basia" Piasecka, an imperious Polish former chambermaid 42 years his junior. On the other were marshaled Johnson's six spendthrift adult children from his first two marriages. (Each child had previously received a trust that untouched would have been worth $110 million at the time of Seward's death.)
But according to Margolick, national legal affairs correspondent for The New York Times, the key players were hired guns from several of New York City's most prestigious—and in his view overrated—law firms, plus one wildcard judge whose "hand was always on the scale. Herblatantly anti-Basia rulings so handcuffed the widow's already bumbling team that Basia was pressured into a settlement that ended up costing her some $150 million to avert an even more catastrophic jury verdict.
Displaying the same panache as in his Times column, "At the Bar," Margolick for the most part guides readers through the legal thickets with compelling intelligence and incisive writing, sprinkling humorous bread crumbs liberally en route. Though the epic struggle and resulting travesty of justice are his focus, the author never loses sight of the people involved, whom he came to know over six years of dogged reporting. Bizarre, pretentious, greedy and, occasionally, charming, they make for juicy reading—even if you wouldn't want to trust them near the silverware. (Morrow, $23)
by Michael Mewshaw
In his gossipy, partly cautionary quasi-expose of women's pro tennis, Mewshaw hits all the hot buttons: pushy parents, sex with coaches, drugs, money, mindlessness. But much is attributed to "informed sources," and no one names names.
Aside from stress and loneliness, the most striking feature of these young lives is the lack of intellectual stimulation. Most young female tennis pros don't even finish high school. They know only tennis. But if Mew-shaw's subjects are not exactly brain surgeons, his view of them still seems somewhat mean-spirited. He ridicules Monica Seles for being a "motor-mouth" and writes that asking her about her fitness program was tantamount to "lifting the floodgates on the Aswan Dam." Her long answer is nonetheless striking: It shows how unaware she is of her own self-absorption and how much conflict she feels about body image—to be muscular and hard or traditionally feminine.
If much of the book sounds familiar, it's because Mewshaw quotes liberally from press conferences and from other writers. But with images like Jennifer Capriati's father getting her to do sit-ups in her crib, Ladies hits the occasional winner. (Crown, $22)
by Jack Sands and Peter Gammons
The premise of sports lawyer Sands and veteran baseball scribe Gammons is that baseball is dying, eclipsed by the NFL and the NBA. They maintain that smaller market franchises are in financial distress because the bigger franchises won't share their bloated local TV money; the pool of American blacks playing pro baseball is smaller today on a percentage basis than it was 20 years ago; selfish owners have colluded to bust the players' union; and many players don't seem even to like the game that keeps them in five-car garages.
There is hope for the game, say the authors in their fair, factual yet provocative study. Among many other things, they recommend uniform rules for both major leagues, revenue sharing and competition against foreign teams. If baseball doesn't get the message, this book will be among the first to have prophesied its demise. (Macmillan, $24)
by Oscar Hijuelos
With The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, his Pulitzer-prizewinning second novel brimming with macho lust, Hijuelos in 1989 became the king of Cuban-American letters. In his third novel, Hijuelos, the Manhattan-born author, 41, tells a very different story about 14 daughters of a Cuban mother and an Irish father and their lone brother, Emilio—the baby of this intoxicatingly feminine brood—who becomes a movie star.
Set in small-town Pennsylvania beginning at the turn of the century and shilling in time, the book employs Garcia Marquez-like magical realism to chronicle the lives of the robust, close-knit Montez O'Brien family, in particular the last and first born: Emilio and his eldest sister, Margarita. Made up of moments that accrete in the course of nearly 500 pages, the saga reads like a painstakingly arranged family album shown to the reader picture by picture by an articulate, amused and passionate, if somewhat sex-addled, relation.
In a passage typical of the book's narrative voluptuousness, Hijuelos describes Emilio's young life among his (mostly) beautiful, bustling sisters: "From the time he was little, his sisters' love for him...whipped and breathed through every piece of linen and cloth; it had radiated...in the scent of their dresses, slips, and underdrawers which, hanging off laundry lines in the yard, were like the flags of a beautiful. luxurious nation."
What emerges powerfully here, but was lost in the music and inspired mayhem of Mambo Kings, is the notion that happiness comes to us only in brief, unexpected moments. These leave us, the author seems to feel, with internalized photos that even decades later we can look at, if we dare. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $22)
by Cathleen Schine
In the tradition of the lighthearted literary romp a la Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot arrives Rameau's Niece, a novel echoing the witty, erotic tone of Denis Diderot's 18th-century tale Rameau's Nephew.
Schine's protagonist, Margaret Nathan, is a young writer who has become a celebrity for publishing a biography of a little-known 18th-century French anatomist named Madame de Montigny, who wrote a bawdy lexicon of the human body that apparently influenced modern feminist theory. Margaret's success only serves to highlight her codependent marriage to Edward, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. By taking on the translation of an anonymous French manuscript that goes by the name Rameau's Niece—a sexually libertine work—Margaret expects to sublimate her feelings of personal inadequacy.
But the more she mines the ardor of her translation characters, the more her own life begins to feel gutless by comparison. The result is a hilarious, neurotic jaunt around the island of Manhattan, where, in search of renewed passion, Margaret futilely chases one sexual fantasy after another. Tracking her heroine's follies in this, her third novel. Schine demonstrates an astute ability to sum up modern relationships. "Couples were miraculous, odd, ill-formed things that grew without reason and without grace, like double ears of corn," she writes in high style distinguished by a deft comedic touch. (Ticknor & Fields, $19.95)
>MEN: SURE-FIRE WAYS TO RUIN A ROMANCE!
AT AN EDITORIAL MEETING LAST YEAR, the mostly female staff of Hyperion Books were struggling to comprehend the success of Naura Hayden's How to Satisfy a Woman Every Time...& Have Her Beg for More, when someone hit on the devilish idea of doing a spoof called How to Aggravate a Woman Every Time...And Send Her Screaming Out the Door! With Hyperion's Jenny Gauthier and Mary Ann Naples editing and more than 30 male and female staffers contributing, the soft-cover original has just been published (at $6.95) under the pseudonym Y.I. Hatem. Some fail-safe stratagems:
•Ask her how her day was, then interrupt and tell her how your day was.
•Tell the waiter you're both ready to order when she's not.
•Forget or at least confuse the names of her family members and friends.
•Record your relationship for posterity: Take her picture when she least expects it, like first thing in the morning or as she steps out of the shower.
•Act insulted when she swoons over Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, then whistle loudly and wave at Michelle Pfeiffer during Batman Returns.
•Argue with her about something trivial right before the dinner she's hosting, and sulk throughout the evening.
•Look at her blankly when she tells you she loves you.
•Tell her you're not impressed by gorgeous, slender glamor girls—you'd rather come home to her.
•Tell her you want to get married...you just don't know when.
- Contributors:
- Pam Lambert,
- Carol Peace,
- Tim Whitaker,
- Lisa Shea,
- Joseph Olshan.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
