Misogyny in media -- why you've never hated Frank Turco

You remember in 1989 when the sentencing came down in the Leona Helmsley tax fraud case. Shocked at the wrongdoing, greed and arrogance in the running of her hotel empire, you cheered when you heard prison time was given. And to this day you hate… Frank Turco and Joseph Licari.

They were the two other executives of Helmsley Hotels and related companies who -- before Helmsley’s own trial – were sentenced to federal prison for tax and mail fraud and conspiracy, but in fact, you don’t resent them because you’ve never heard the names Frank Turco or Joseph Licari.

Leona Helmsley’s level of exposure to the public consciousness couldn’t be more different: Newsweek magazine’s cover said of the billionaire hotel executive: “Rhymes With Rich.”

Even though she was one of three people sent to prison in the matter, her image alone from that episode is fused into the American consciousness and permanent lore as the embodiment of selfishness.

And Turco, Licari and Harry Helmsley (Leona’s husband and the hotel corporation founder) never had to pass by newsstands all day where they’d see themselves described as, say, rhyming with “plastered.”

Harry Helmsley was indicted along with his wife, but he was found incompetent to stand trial due to cognitive decline.

And remember how everyone demonized Leona Helmsley’s alleged statement, denied by her but recounted under oath by a one-time personal maid: “We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes."

Blame Ronald Reagan, Milton Freedman, the Ways and Means Committee and a whole capital full of corporate lobbyists for that – not the messenger who spoke those highly accurate words.

No question, Leona Helmsley was an unabashedly greedy person in business and arrogant at home. It was said in testimony that she once fired an employee because he entered her bedroom to repair a phone chime, and that Helmsley, just after her own son’s death at age 40, sued his widow to make her pay to transport his coffin from Florida to New York.

And spending $3 million for her own birthday party in Morocco right when millions were in danger of starvation from a drought on that continent? Nope, that was Malcolm Forbes who did that in the ‘80s.

Yet Forbes’ image avoids any universal demonization over that self-centered excess, despite his admitting at a press conference that regarding the $3 million he spent, “some of it is a business expense.” If Helmsley had thrown so costly a party and comfortably acknowledged deducting part of it, everyone would know and would scowl over it.  

And if she had said that not paying taxes in times of huge deficits “makes me smart,” average Americans would have rolled their eyes in disgust, but Donald Trump said that at a 2016 debate when accused of not paying taxes, and he was shortly elected president.

And while corporate media such as Newsweek, TV networks and the New York Times waved a baton to coordinate all our outrage at Helmsley’s “Only the Little People Pay Taxes” declaration, the fact that her statement reflected reality  was barely dealt with by any of them.

The intense focus on Leona Helmsley’s awful personal traits revealed in her trial was an old tactic – give the mass public a villain so they think about that individual instead of the policies which enabled their evil deeds. Prompting the people to flail at a persona is a safety valve to relieve the pressure to actually change an unjust system.

And when three of the four people indicted the Helmsley Hotels case were men, but only the woman has her name used as a synonym for heartlessness and greed, the usefulness of sexism to the power structure in maintaining that safety valve is clear.

Massive tax cuts for corporations and the rich sailed through under Reagan and George W. Bush, with lots of Democrats voting for them and media never analyzing how little people’s sales, occupational and income taxes and road and bridge tolls go up because of lowering corporate rates. Oh, but how awful the “Queen of Mean” Leona is.

Recalling the public sector of that same decade, it is Nancy Reagan who is initially condemned for a lack of compassion for people who were stricken with AIDS, and she is the one scoffed at for believing in astrology.

But she didn’t implement the deliberately slow response to the AIDS crisis – her elected husband did. And President Ronald Reagan, not just Nancy, heeded the stars and planets in making many decisions about precise timing of events and ceremonies, but also possibly about the most important policy matter of all.

The first revelations of astrology’s influence in the Reagan administration were by an aggrieved former chief of staff Donald Regan after he was forced to resign because of Iran-Contra. And contrary to the general perception, Regan did not accuse Nancy Reagan specifically of using astrology; it was not the Donald Regan-Nancy Reagan feud of the historical memory.

Don Regan’s 1988 book For the Record said: “Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.”

Notice he said, “the Reagans,” not the First Lady. The real story is a U.S. President’s reliance on astrology, yet when people bring up that issue, it’s almost always hinging on Nancy Reagan.

Journalist Allen McDuffee on Timeline dot com quotes San Francisco astrologer Joan Quigley in her memoirs as saying: “I was responsible for timing all press conferences, most speeches, the State of the Union addresses, the takeoffs and landings of Air Force One. I picked the time of Ronald Reagan’s debate with Carter and the two debates with Walter Mondale; all extended trips abroad as well as the shorter trips and one-day excursions.”

McDuffee said Quigley even boasted of having a role in persuading the staunchly anti-Soviet Ronald Reagan to change his stance and negotiate with USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev over arms reductions.

Quigley’s statements, like Donald Regan’s, never focus on Nancy Reagan. Yet today’s right wing spin artists need a sanitized image of Ronald Reagan to line up their constituencies in political battles. So, just as with shifting the blame for a regressive tax code to a Leona Helmsley who did not create it, on the matter of presidential astrology a woman will do nicely as the repository of public scorn.

The left can fall for this. I’ve sometimes heard LGBT activists condemn Nancy’s leadership in stymying the national effort in the ‘80s to stop AIDS.

I imagine I as well have focused disproportionately on Nancy Reagan, instead of the Reagan Administration in discussing that issue. The tendency to go along unconsciously with the false genderizing of an outrage is a subtle but powerful effect of that patriarchy machine we need to – rhymes with rich – off. 

                                Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA.