The way the studios forged starlets from plain Janes, Adams says she was forged for a life in New York society. Her family had no money, but her mother, Jessica Sugar Heller, got Cindy a nose job (illegally) when she was 15, plus a procedure to push back her hairline. She sent her to etiquette classes and banished any trace of a class-betraying New York lilt with broadcast-English lessons. Adams says her mother “improved” her, and when I asked if it fucked her up at all, she responded like I was from outer space. “My mother was wonderful to me,” she said. “She. Created. Me.”
The project was a success, and by 17, Cindy was a local pageant queen going steady with Joey Adams, a vaudeville comic who seemed to have the keys to the city. “I went from one to the other: a mother who took care of me no matter how ill I was, how unpretty I was. And then I married a man exactly the same age as my mother who took care of me.”
Adams likes to say that her husband was “a No. 2 with a No. 1 lifestyle.” Joey’s connectedness — in show business, in media, in politics — primed Cindy to become something beyond an access journalist and more like a spokeswoman for the stars.
When Joey went to Asia on tour with a variety show, Cindy made friends with other powerful couples: the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife Farah, and Indonesian president Sukarno and his wife Dewi. In 1965, she published her first book, Sukarno: An Autobiography, As Told to Cindy Adams. She got her break in the news business in 1979, when she was summoned to visit the Shah on his deathbed and the invitation conflicted with her dinner plans with then–Post editor-in-chief Roger Wood. Adams skipped the dinner, met the Shah, and wrote up what she saw for Wood, who slapped the exclusive on the cover. Adams officially became a Post columnist in 1981, just in time for the tabloid rise of her close friend Donald Trump (whom she met through her other close friend Roy Cohn).
Adams is a registered Republican with what she calls her own “values,” but her decisions over the decades have been largely in service to one cause: the advancement of Cindy Adams. In Gossip, Carchman details how Adams maneuvered through the paper, making herself useful to her bosses; in one scene, Adams recounts working with Governor Mario Cuomo to get Rupert Murdoch the legal rights to run the Post and his television network, Fox News, at the same time. What was good for the Post was good for Adams, and she remains proud of her ability to use her pen to secure these intertwined fates.
“What struck me was how politically savvy she was in terms of how to handle people like Col Allan,” one tabloid vet told me, referring to the onetime Post editor-in-chief and Murdoch confidant. “Cindy noticed that Col was this alien from Australia who didn’t know what was going on and felt lonely and isolated, and she took him under her wing, squired him around Manhattan, made sure he was invited to things, and thus secured her role there.”
The less generous view was that Adams was a “political opportunist,” in the words of one media executive, who said her coziness with Murdoch meant that her column was essentially corrupt, since readers could never know when she was carrying out her boss’s bidding. “Cindy was a good girl,” the executive said, “She did what Daddy wanted.”
