All The World's a Stage

By Richard Lacayo

This year's Broadway season has got off to a sluggish start. That may help explain why the best theater in New York City last week was not along the Great White Way but on Centre Street, the stretch of lower Manhattan where the city, state and federal courthouses are clustered. Three legal proceedings under way there have drawn SRO crowds. One stars the 1945 Miss America, Bess Myerson, though she has been upstaged by the gabby daughter of a local judge, testifying for the prosecution. The second, unfolding as a sordid tragedy, centers on Joel Steinberg, a disbarred attorney accused of beating to death six-year-old Lisa, a child he had raised but never formally adopted. And, in a brief personal appearance, former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos swept into court swathed in silk.

In the courtrooms the spectators' galleries are filled every day with pensioners, law students and secretaries who put office life on hold to hear accounts of greed and cruelty or to see the rich and famous sent plunging down the slots of institutional justice. They flaunt their detailed knowledge of the cases and refer to the central figures by their first names. They have come to hear riveting testimony or to see "star lawyering." They have flocked to peer at Myerson. ("She's marvelous-looking!" exclaims Sam Margolis, 71, a retired school principal.) Others come because the courthouse scene has become a part of the New York itinerary. "We've already seen the Statue of Liberty, the Broadway plays and Radio City Music Hall," explains Audrey Fitzgerald, 58, a spectator at the Steinberg trial. "We love the judge," adds her friend Carole Sanders, 48. "He keeps it moving."

Last week began with the arraignment of Imelda Marcos, who left her Hawaiian retreat to plead not guilty to charges that she and her husband, the deposed Philippine President, embezzled $103 million from their nation's treasury. Mrs. Marcos could give Bette Midler tips on making an entrance. She swept into U.S. district court in nothing less bewitching than a floor-length turquoise gown, a silk-and-chiffon terno that is traditional Philippine wear. As she hoisted her presence up the courthouse steps, packs of demonstrators reared up to denounce her as the bloodsucker of the Philippine people. One woman bared false vampire fangs.

At the same courthouse last week, Judge John Keenan continued hearing testimony in the trial of Bess Myerson, 64, her lover Carl Capasso, 43, and former State Judge Hortense Gabel, who once presided over Capasso's divorce case. Myerson, formerly New York City cultural-affairs commissioner, is accused of putting Gabel's daughter Sukhreet on the public payroll in order to get Gabel to lower Capasso's alimony payments. Many New Yorkers seem less offended by Myerson's alleged misdeeds than by the behavior of Sukhreet, 39, who cheerfully testified for eight days against her 75-year-old mother. "This is what she wanted her whole life, to be an actress. She doesn't care who she's hurting," says Warren Shalit, 58, a retired warehouse manager and connoisseur of trials.

Some spectators divide their time between the Myerson and Steinberg courtrooms, hurrying from the ornate federal chambers to the scuffed and grimy criminal courtrooms two blocks away. "The Myerson trial is political comedy," says Robert Comeau, 71, a retired maintenance man. "This is a serious drama." Much of the fascination is with Steinberg, who seems to strike many observers in the public galleries as the personification of evil. He watches the proceedings intently, taking notes and exchanging points with his lawyers. Asks Creighton Pickering, 20, a photography student: "What ever possessed him?" Others come with thoughts of Lisa in mind. "I have an adopted son," says Spencer Compton, 37, a law student. "It makes me feel frustrated that the system has holes in it that would allow this to occur."

The chief witness against Steinberg, 47, is his companion of more than a dozen years, Hedda Nussbaum, 46, a onetime children's book editor whom Steinberg is alleged to have brutally battered. Last week the courtroom was riveted by a prosecutor's videotape made of Nussbaum after the pair were arrested last year. It showed a woman with the blank gaze of a zombie, covered with scars and bruises, her right leg bearing green ulcerations, and with several bones and joints misshapen from injuries that were never properly treated. Sitting up front every day, just behind Joel Steinberg, is Michelle Launders, 27, Lisa's natural mother. She was 19, pregnant and single in 1980 when, she says, she paid Steinberg $500 to arrange for her child to be adopted. Unbeknown to her, Steinberg kept the girl himself. Last week marked the first anniversary of her daughter's death. Staying away from the trial was impossible, says Launders: "This is something I had to do."

At the Myerson trial, some regulars gather at the end of each day in front of the courthouse, hoping to glimpse Myerson on the way out. But like many a star, she usually eludes her public by slipping through a back door. Frieda Nuss, 58, a bookkeeper from Brooklyn, sighs at the thought that Myerson might be guilty: "She could have enjoyed her twilight years." At least everyone else is enjoying them. And in January the real estate moguls Leona and Harry Helmsley -- the billionaires New Yorkers love to hate -- are scheduled to come to trial for income-tax evasion. Will Broadway have anything to compare?

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York