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What would you do if, just weeks after your spouse's sudden death, you found out he was keeping secrets? Big secrets. Secrets that could cost you millions of dollars—and brand you as a criminal. Innocent Spouse is an eye-opening memoir that asks a provocative and disturbing question: Is it possible to really know and trust someone, even your spouse? Carol Ross Joynt was a successful television producer in Washington, D.C. Her husband, Howard, owned Nathans, a legendary restaurant in Georgetown. From an outsider’s perspective, Carol and Howard lived a fairy-tale life—spending weekends at their Chesapeake Bay estate, rubbing shoulders with New York’s and Washington’s elite, and raising their beloved son, Spencer. But everything changed with Howard’s sudden death when Spencer was only five years old.
Like any widow, Carol was devastated because she lost the love of her life and her son’s father. But soon Carol had much more to cope with than her grief and new life as a single parent. As she was forced to take over her family’s legal and financial responsibilities, as well as run Howard’s restaurant on her own, Carol discovered that her husband had secrets, and one of them, an almost $3 million debt to the IRS, threatened to derail her entire life. And even though Carol didn’t know anything about the tax fraud—finances had always been Howard's department—no one cared. As his surviving spouse, legally, Carol was responsible.
As Carol picks up the pieces of her fractured life and copes with her sadness and anger, she learns to become something she’d never been before: self-sufficient. Poignant, eye-opening, and at times heartbreaking, Innocent Spouse is ultimately an inspiring story of strength and newfound independence in the face of loss and betrayal.
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"One can easily imagine the ladies of “The View” grilling Washington journalist Carol Ross Joynt about the financial and emotional soap opera chronicled in Innocent Spouse, her memoir of love, death, betrayal, survival, re-invention and major name-dropping."--The Washington Post
"INNOCENT SPOUSE does a great job of highlighting a huge tax problem and is entertaining to boot. A page-turning read about unexpected reversals of fortune."--Forbes
"There are many memoirs by women who don't know their husbands until they die...but none has the brutal irony of "Innocent Spouse...What makes this memoir exceptional is Carol Joynt's unending honesty. She doesn't spare herself --- on many pages, she really does come off like an idiot...But she perseveres. She learns. She gets it right."--Jesse Kornbluth, HeadButler.com
"A page-turning, name-dropping memoir..."-InStyle
"When a husband dies suddenly he often leaves his widow holding the bag. The choice is to crumble or carry on. Carol Joynt not only carried on but she came through victorious."--Joan Rivers
"Carol Ross Joynt is more than an Innocent Spouse; her indomitable spirit prizes through in this compelling memoir of growth and accomplishment. In the flood of widow memoirs, hers will stand out as a story of overcoming financial ruin, professional and personal deceptions, as well as losing the man she believed was the love of her life."–Sally Ryder Brady, author of A Box of Darkness
"For those who read The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve and wondered how a loving husband could possibly keep a secret life hidden from his family, wonder no more: Carol Joynt reveals in sad and searing detail how it can happen and the price she, as a wife, had to pay to save herself and her young son."--bestselling author Kitty Kelley
"A searing personal journey where the pages fall away from one’s hand like meat from a bone. Ms. Joynt takes on her life with both a hatchet and a scalpel and is unafraid to turn an unerring spotlight on herself, examining the flaws and mistakes from every angle. Yet what emerges from this fascinating story is a courageous woman who is a survivor and above all else a mother who would do anything for her child."--bestselling author David Baldacci
"Think you know your husband? Read this book. Carol Joynt takes us on a harrowing roller-coaster ride through a system that viewed her as guilty until she proved her innocence. A riveting, inspirational account of one woman's dreamy life turned nightmare and her ultimate triumph. I couldn't put it down."--bestselling author Jane Stanton Hitchcock
"An utterly compelling story of spousal deception, postmortem forgiveness, how NOT to run the hottest restaurant in DC, and the enduring power of love. You will read this memoir in one night, pages flying and heart racing."-- Leslie Morgan Steiner, author of Mommy Wars and the New York Times bestseller Crazy Love
"An honest telling of a woman betrayed by her husband whom she had loved and her determination to protect herself and her son."--Publishers Weekly
"Excellent recounting of the author’s lost decade, during which she rebuilt her life, became self-sufficient and found peace following her husband’s deceit."--Kirkus
About the Author
CAROL ROSS JOYNT started her three-decade career in journalism with the wire services and Time magazine before becoming a writer for Walter Cronkite on CBS Evening News. She went on to work as a producer and writer for NBC News, The CBS News Nightwatch, USA Today: The Television Show, This Week with David Brinkley, Nightline, Larry King Live, and Hardball with Chris Matthews. Upon her husband’s death, Joynt inherited his landmark Georgetown restaurant, Nathans, where she created an interview program, The Q&A Café. Today, in addition to hosting the show, Carol writes a weekly column about Washington for NewYorkSocialDiary.com.
Carol Ross Joynt is an Emmy Award-winning network television producer, Washington writer, interviewer, blogger, photographer. She was born in Denver, grew up in Europe, Ohio, and on the East Coast, and lives in Georgetown, DC.
Carol skipped college and jumped right into national news, joining the staff of the Washington bureau of United Press International in January 1969, the same week Richard Nixon was inaugurated President for the first time. She started as a "dictationist," taking in breaking stories from Helen Thomas and Merriman Smith, but soon was reporting on the antiwar movement. Carol also covered political stories and the Apollo space program. In 1972, she was hired by TIME Magazine and moved to New York to write about politics and assorted features. She traveled on the McGovern campaign bus, reported from the presidential conventions in Miami, and covered the premiere of "The Godfather," among other assignments; TIME offered that kind of diversity of stories.
Later in 1972, Walter Cronkite asked Carol to be one of his three writers on The CBS Evening News; she accepted without hesitation. She wrote script for the Evening News and special broadcasts for four years as Cronkite informed viewers about the death of LBJ, the Watergate scandal, the resignation of Richard Nixon, the kidnap of Patricia Hearst, and the end of the Vietnam war. Each year, Carol and her colleagues were awarded the Writer's Guild Award for best news script, and The CBS Evening News was commended on many fronts for its outstanding coverage of Watergate and Vietnam, including Emmys, the DuPont and Peabody awards, among other accolades.
After a year-off to crew on "Spartan," a 72-foot Herreshoff racing boat based in the West Indies, and to live in the south of France, Carol returned to Washington and network news and a succession of positions, which included producer roles at NBC News, CBS News Nightwatch, USA Today the TV Show, This Week with David Brinkley, Nightline, Larry King Live, John Hockenberry, and Hardball with Chris Matthews. For these broadcasts she focused on subjects ranging from national and global politics and the world's leaders to the latest successes or scandals involving the talented, the royal or the merely celebrated. At Nightwatch, Carol and host Charlie Rose won the 1987 National News Emmy Award for "Best Interview" for an hour CBS News broadcast interview with Charles Manson at San Quentin Prison.
Carol also directed documentary films and oversaw several film projects for clients such as the National Gallery of Art. She worked closely with museum Director J. Carter Brown as she directed a video retrospective of the NGA's 50th Anniversary, and a film tribute to the Kress family and their contribution to the Gallery's collections. In 1994 she directed a film for the American Academy in Rome, celebrating its 100th anniversary.
In 1997, when she was a producer for Larry King Live, her husband of twenty years, J. Howard Joynt III, died suddenly from pneumonia. Carol inherited Howard's landmark Georgetown restaurant, Nathans, where she created The Q&A Cafe, the only known "talk show in a saloon."
The Q&A Cafe launched in October 2001 as a response to the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Carol felt the community craved information and she sought to help fill that void by hosting weekly interviews with experts on subjects related to terrorism, the Middle East and South Asia. Over time, and with its growing popularity, The Q&A Cafe focused on other subjects as well - politics, medicine, science, the military, diplomacy, literature, the arts, sports, fashion, music and entertainment - and began broadcasting on youtube. Carol provides the show free of charge to local DC Cable. It airs Fridays at 8 p.m.
Carol closed Nathans on July 12, 2009, after the economy crashed and the building's landlords put the property up for sale. The Q&A Cafe moved to a new location, The Georgetown Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
In addition to booking and producing the show, Carol also writes and takes the photographs for a daily blog, "Swimming in Quicksand," on her website, caroljoynt.com, and a regular diary about Washington for the New York Social Diary at NYsocialdiary.com. But her priorities are making a home for her son, Spencer, who is a college freshman, their Bichon Frise, Leo, and Ozzy, the Conure parrot; writing, community affairs and, especially, survival.
Her memoir, "Innocent Spouse," to be published by Crown in May, is her account of the turn of events in her life after her husband's sudden death. It is about love and loss and a hundred avalanches as she deals with what he left behind. "Innocent Spouse" will resonate with any woman who has ever been married and asks the question, "do you really know the person you married?"
Here is a recent interview about the book on nbc.com: http://www.nbcwashington.com/blogs/niteside/Author_Carol_Joynt_Discusses_New_Book___Innocent_Spouse__All__National_-112501484.html
When Carol Ross was 22, Walter Cronkite hired her to write the evening news. He had a crew of writers, but she was his personal writer, the one who sat next to him, just out of camera range. No fool he --- Carol Ross was not just young and talented, she was extremely attractive. Gossip followed, none of it true.
When I met her, she was 24. I had an instant crush, which resulted in a dinner or two. There were many guys meeting her after the broadcast that year, and I don't think she noticed any of us --- she was consumed by her job, and then she was consumed with leaving it to crew on a boat in the Caribbean.
Our next dinner was thirty-five years later. She had another name now, having married John Howard Joynt III. And a very different situation: Howard Joynt, the popular owner of a popular bar in Georgetown, had died. He left behind a five-year-old son and a very puzzled widow, for right after his death, the IRS showed up to demand $3 million in back taxes, penalties and interest.
Carol Joynt didn't have $3 million. And then there was the problem that couldn't be assessed so neatly --- she really hadn't known her husband. At all. He was tall and affable, quick to open the champagne, and he had cast himself as her protector, and she bought it all.
Oh, there were signs. Early in the marriage, he hit her. Pushed her out of the car at night, in a rainstorm, far from home. Drank himself into a hate-spewing jerk.
But then Howard would be his adorable self again. And Carol would go back to sleep.
There are many memoirs by women who don't know their husbands until they die, but none has the brutal irony of "Innocent Spouse."
The irony? She had to convince the IRS that she was an "innocent spouse...." Let me translate that legal term of art into common English: The journalist who worked for Cronkite and Charlie Rose and Larry King --- the professional with an inborn knack for ferreting out The Facts --- had to convince professional skeptics that, in her personal life, she was spectacularly incurious. In a word: an idiot who she signed tax returns she never read and was clueless about her husband's cavalier business practices.
It's to Carol Joynt's great credit that she writes as a professional. She knows what the peg of the story is --- how did a smart woman become so dumb --- and she confronts it head-on:
"I wasn't proud of what [the IRS] report said about me, but not because the facts were wrong. They were right. It made clear that in my marriage, I had given over control of my life to another person. Sheltered would be the polite word. Idiotic seemed more like it, even stupid: 'Throughout her adult life, Carol steadfastly avoided getting involved in financial matters because she knew they were complex and she did not understand them.' When the report didn't make me feel like a fool, it made me feel like a concubine: 'Carol was enticed and overwhelmed by Howard's . . . obvious comfort in a good life she had never before experienced. . . . She fell in love with Howard believing he would be able to take care of her and would never let anything happen to her. That was her Faustian pact.' There it was, the truth I was unable to speak. I'd sold myself for what I thought would be a better life..."
In these pages, you see her reach out to powerful friends, and you see them come through. You follow her efforts to run her husband's business long enough to resolve its tax problems. She works overtime to be a good mother to her son. She starts an interview show at the restaurant that is honest, satisfying work and becomes the invaluable Washington correspondent for NewYorkSocialDiary.com.
This is not exceptional material. Sadly, it's all too common --- this is an old, old story. Happens every day. And will continue to happen as long as men feel the need to dominate and women can't summon the guts to confront.
What makes this memoir exceptional is Carol Joynt's unending honesty. She doesn't spare herself --- on many pages, she really does come off like an idiot. And you really do want to scream: How can you be so dumb? But she perseveres. She learns. She gets it right. Her son's okay. She's still walking.
And, in the end, she does the hardest thing --- she comes to terms with the father of her son, her lover, her protector, her fraud of a husband. As she writes:
"I try not to carry grudges or to remain angry. Like sea anchors, they stop forward motion. I needed to move on to survive. Howard was dead. What good was it to waste time and energy on anger toward a dead person? For the longest time I didn't sense anger, and only toward the bitter end did I come to terms with how it nested deep inside me. I resented that he left me a bankrupt business and no road map, a manager who worked against me, landlords who didn't want me and who were incapable of trusting a woman as a business owner, and this financial mess he'd got himself into that consumed me, my resources, my energy and the time and happiness I should have had to devote to raising our son. I was angry at myself, too, and shared the blame. When I finally at long last was able to close the business and regain my freedom, I cut loose that last sea anchor: my anger."
I wasn't wrong to like this woman. You won't be either.Read more ›
I enjoyed this for the Georgetown insider, tabloid style history it provided. But I finished this book and found myself wondering why I didn't feel more compassion for the author. This story is after all a story of tragedy - a husband is dead and a wife learns not only of a huge financial burden, but also of years of deceit. I think part the cause for my lack of compassion is the writing style I mention in the title of this review. It's written in the same somewhat clipped, monotone style of a Vanity Fair piece. Not a style that really grabs for the heart strings. For reference, the author also writes for the New York Social Diary website, and one can see some parallels in style. I also didn't care for the fact that in her description of various challenges, she spends a lot of time talking about how she was wronged, but doesn't seem to adequately acknowledge how lucky she was. More specifically, lucky to be surrounded by a cast of friends and acquaintances that provide her with an extraordinary amount of assistance. Clearly not everyone can line up a world-class trial lawyer to work case pro bono. Not all of us are able to have Bob Woodward intervene on our behalf. In summary, this book conveys a sense of narcissism that doesn't enhance the telling of the story.
Other reviewers have questioned whether the whole story is told in this book. I really couldn't say. I think of it as a story told by a one-time socialite, knocked a bit off her throne, who wants her story to the public in a way that reopens some of those old doors. So yes, it may come across as a bit of a whitewash.
All said, an interesting enough book from a Georgetown/DC tabloid gossip perspective, but I was expecting more.
I've never wanted to throw a book before. Until this one.
Something just didn't ring true with this memoir. From the beginning, five-year-olds aren't as deep and eloquent as her son was portrayed. I kept with it because she writes a good, engaging story. Then I realized that's exactly what this was - a cover story. I find it hard to believe she was as innocent as she claimed. She went overboard in repeatedly justifying the fact that she had no idea that tax fraud was going on.
It was hard to empathize with her struggles as she fretted about limited use of her summer home and which ill-gotten collectibles should be sold.
Watch as she innocently throws people under the bus, including her original lawyers, deceased husband, employees and landlords.
Ultimately, she applies her talents on a fictional story designed to re-write her own past.
Carol Joynt wants us to believe that her book about her life with her duplicitious husband should be a warning to all women. And, indeed it should. However, most women are not privy to well-placed friends, therapy, the best lawyers, and private schools for their children. This is a credible story, and I am sure she suffered, but somehow it is difficult to feel too sorry for her.
Carol and her husband, Howard, lived the life of luxury, several homes in and around DC, trips, expensive cars and boats, designer clothing and glorious vacations. Until one day, Howard died and the truth of how they had been living became too real. Howard had a much smaller trust fund than he said, it appeared they were living on the proceeds of Howard's bar, Nathans. Bills at the bar/restaurant were not being paid because all the money was going to their upkeep. As Carol dug deeper, she found she needed to find a very good lawyer because she owed the IRS a great deal of money. She was able to beat that with the assistance of a lawyer who worked for the IRS and wrote the 'Innocent Spouse' bill. But, still she had to support her son and send him to private school. Shd did receive some money to keep her going. She tried to save Nathans and worked hard to support herself and her son, But, alas, there was too much to do to rev up the establishment, and she had to declare bankruptcy. She supports herself with media jobs, writing for the New York Social Diary and interviews with celebrities.
This is an entertaining read at times, but could have used more editing. It is a cautionary tale for everyone, actually. We all should know what we are getting into in our relationships, and keep our eyes wide open at all times.
Recommended.... prisrob 10-07-11
[[ASIN:B004J4WMCC Innocent Spouse: A Memoir]Read more ›
