Edited by: TJVNews.com
As CNN head honcho Jeff Zucker made headlines recently when he resigned from his coveted position at the cable network, it has come to light that the reason for his abrupt departure wasn’t so much that he was having an intimate relationship with a colleague (Allison Gollust, the network’s executive vice president) and not being upfront about it, but that the two lived in the same Manhattan apartment building when the affair began.
While Zucker’s relationship with Gollust was an open secret for a while amongst CNN staff and other power players in the media world. An article in Curbed.com reported that Katie Couric wrote in her memoir, “Everyone who heard about their cozy arrangement thought it was super strange.”
Curbed reported that “Zucker and Gollust had lived with their (now ex-) spouses and their children in the same apartment building at 32 East 64th Street. They even had units directly atop one another, a setup that was considered unorthodox by everyone except, it seems, Zucker and Gollust.”
As it appears, this is not the first time that a wealthy husband or wife, for that matter, have put up their lovers quite close to where they live, work or even play. One would imagine that convenience plays a major factor in these decisions as they carry out their extra-marital relationships.
What makes the Zucker/Gollust relationship different is that it is very seldom that two people having an adulterous relationship will end up living in the same building.
Donna Olshan, the president of Olshan Realty told Curbed.com: “The point of having a mistress is not to get caught. You don’t put them in the same building, preferably not even in the same Zip Code. That’s just nuts.”
Back in 2009 Gollust and her husband had purchased an apartment one flight above that of Jeff Zucker and his wife Caryn. That was before the relationship between Zucker and Gollust commenced. When they did begin more than a platonic relationship, it was considered quite a convenient arrangement.
Speaking to the New York Post, one unnamed source said: “They didn’t even have to leave their building. It was a perfect cover,” as was reported by Curbed.com.
Another source said that, “Zucker would disappear for hours on end, but Caryn initially had no idea that the woman she was being polite to in the elevator was sleeping with her husband. Everyone in the building knew about it — even the doormen tried to ensure Caryn wasn’t in the elevator at the same time as Allison,” as was reported by Curbed.com.
History reveals that these types of surreptitious relationships and locations where mistresses were kept was not uncommon.
Curbed reported that Florenz Ziegfeld, the Broadway impresario behind the Ziegfeld Follies, shared a ninth-floor suite of the Ansonia with his wife Anna Held, the greatest of all Ziegfeld stars, and kept a 10th floor apartment for his mistress, (another Follies showgirl) named Lillian Lorraine.
In the 1920s, New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker purchased a house in Greenwich Village at 12 Gay Street for his mistress Betty Compton (another Ziegfeld girl), as was reported by Curbed.com.
Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst was quite generous with his mistress, Marion Davies. Curbed.com reported that the mogul bought Davies “a 25-room mansion on Riverside Drive with a fountain in the sitting room; he also built two hotels partly for her (the Warwick New York and the Ritz Tower) and gave her the run of his massive penthouse at 91 Central Park West. The building was a rental until the 1960s, so Davies’s name wouldn’t have been on the deed, but, according to the Times, her initials were still carved into the woodwork when the apartment sold a few years back.”
Curbed also reported that silent film heartthrob, Rudolph Valentino also had a secret entrance for his mistress at the Hotel des Artistes on the Upper West Side. The report indicated that “he married Natacha Rambova, a costume designer, before his divorce from his first wife was finalized, a scandal that resulted in a bigamy trial. To smuggle Rambova into his apartment, Valentino cut a 15-inch-wide slit through to the apartment next door, allowing “Rambova, reportedly staying down the block with her aunt, to come and go undetected,” according to the Times.”
