The Linda Wolfe Collection by Linda Wolfe

Author:Linda Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504049030
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

“I LOVE GEORGE BUSH,” JOY CONFIDED TO A WOMAN WHOSE CHILD went to Nightingale with Jessica, not long after the George Washington inaugural commemoration. “I love him. He’s given me my life.”

She had become a frequent guest at the White House ever since he’d been elected. But as the summer of 1989 approached, she began to grow uneasy. Her sponsors for the ambassadorship had begun hinting to her that her résumé, with its lack of a job history or even a college degree, might be a problem. The press had begun attacking her—she was, wrote The Washington Post, a “major exhibit” in the Bush team’s tendency to name as ambassadors “political appointees with few or no qualifications outside of support for Bush or wealth given freely to the GOP.” “I’m caught in a web in Washington,” she complained to Andrew Stein, then president of New York’s City Council, who advised her to get in touch with Phil Friedman, a political consultant who had helped him out in the past.

Phil Friedman didn’t work on Joy’s ambassadorship, but he became one of her closest friends. He gave her advice, listened to her worries, comforted and consoled her. He’d heard that George Bush was entranced by her, and he could see why. She’s fun, he thought. She makes everything around her fun.

Phil also thought there’d never been anyone in the world quite like her.

She always entertained him in her bedroom, never anywhere else in the apartment, and she’d wander around the room wearing every variety of dishabille imaginable. She preferred not having to get dressed, even though she had a veritable store-load of dresses—there was a wall of walk-in closets in her bedroom that was so big it was like a concourse.

Her favorite item of apparel was jewelry. Once, he went down to Washington with her and stayed in the same hotel, where Joy, who was going to dinner at the White House, had stored her jewelry in a safe-deposit box. She asked Phil to come and have a look at it, and he’d never seen anyone carry on about anything the way she did about the jewelry. “Look at this! Look at that!” she kept saying, flashing one gem after another at him. And her eyes were as bright as the stones.

Often, when Phil visited her at home, she’d invite him to linger in the bedroom and watch TV with her. Her favorite activity was watching old movies. She could watch for hours. But he found the pastime boring and would excuse himself and go home. Even so, she’d want him to watch “with” her. So she’d call him up, and he’d turn on his own set, and they’d talk on the phone a bit, and then watch their screens, and then talk on the phone some more, and then watch some more. Sometimes ten or fifteen minutes would go by without either of them saying anything into the phone, and then one of them would say, “That was great! Did

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