The Lady Vanishes: An “Edge of Night” Real Life Mystery

Marlena says: The soap mystery “The Edge of Night” was seen on CBS from its inception in 1956 until 1975, when it moved to ABC, remaining there until 1984. One of its writers was Grace Garment, who turned out scripts for a relatively brief tenure, from 1975 to 1977. But the story of her life, disappearance and death are remembered as poignant as any ever devised for the show. Our historian Mike Poirier has all the details, with an introduction by Sharon Gabet, who starred as Raven Whitney on “Edge” from 1977-1984.

By Sharon Gabet

Why is anyone surprised when life imitates soap opera? Especially when that soap is long-running murder mystery thriller “The Edge of Night.”

The story of Grace Garment was passed down on darkened “Edge” sets by actors, crew members and producers. She was the mystery writer who disappeared without a trace — a fate that usually plagued only bad actors.

I began my professional acting career in 1977 when I was cast as Raven Alexander and regretfully just missed memorizing one of Grace’s fabulous scripts. I did have the good fortune to work with the loyal and kind Nick Nicholson who was like a father to me, and to experience playing out a number of the great Henry Slesar’s intricate murder mysteries.

By the end of my seven years on the show, Raven had married five times, twice to the same man. Well, not exactly to the same man. The first one was a pretender who had plastic surgery to change his face to look like the rich Schuyler Whitney. Raven married him for his money, found out he was an impostor when he tried to kill her, but fell in love with him anyway because he was so deliciously devious. He promptly fell in love with her for the same reason. He murdered a bunch of people, was murdered himself, and then Raven fell in love with and married the REAL Schuyler, too. And so it goes.

Mike Poirier has beautifully pieced together the outrageous story of a real life, grand character involved in intrigue, mystery and… well, you will have to stay tuned for the next episode to find out what happened.

By Michael Poirier

A train ticket, a fur coat, a half-written television script, a mental hospital, and a lawyer for Richard Nixon during the Watergate era. All pieces of a puzzle and clues to what became of Grace Garment, an associate writer for the popular soap opera, “The Edge of Night,” who disappeared one cold December afternoon in 1976, last seen at Pennsylvania Station in New York City. Her body was found twelve days later in a Boston hotel room. Her remains were kept in the city morgue for seven more weeks until she was identified by her husband, former Nixon aide Leonard Garment. Her death was ruled a suicide. She was 49 years old..

Grace Garment was born on April 3,1927 to Irving and Helen Albert of Queens, New York. The couple were both lawyers and very devout followers of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. They were later described as vacant and unable to provide the emotional support their daughter needed. Upon finishing high school, Grace went on to Northwestern University where she studied speech. She soon dropped out and became a U.S.O. troupe singer during World War Two. From there, she worked for Benton & Bowles advertising agency and, on the side, gave elocution lessons. Her boss made her a production assistant on the soap opera “Love of Life.” She and her friend Gloria Hellman also worked together on “Search For Tomorrow.” She developed a desire to write for soaps, but found it difficult to get into the Writer’s Guild. She earned extra money singing at the Club Samoa.

Her career may have kept her busy, but she found time for love. She married lawyer and jazz musician Leonard Garment. They had met through friends on Fire Island. She was raised a Christian Scientist, but the couple had a traditional Jewish wedding, observing the faith of the groom. In fact, Leonard played the saxophone with the band during parts of the reception. The couple had a six-week honeymoon in the Caribbean.

Grace tried freelance writing with some success. She wrote some scripts for “Kraft Theater” as well as for a show starring Jack Lemmon. Her first rejection, by Wally Cox’s show, led to her first bout of depression in her marriage. She began seeking psychiatric treatment, which would continue on and off during their marriage. During this period, the couple had two children, Paul and Sara.

The couple’s lives moved toward politics when former Vice President Richard Nixon joined the same law firm as Leonard. Decades later, in his book “Crazy Rhythm: From Brooklyn and Jazz to Nixon’s White House,” Leonard Garment posed this question: “How did a liberal Jewish jazz musician from Brooklyn become one of President Richard Nixon’s most trusted advisers and one of Washington’s most influential lawyers?” The couple fielded late night calls from the Presidential candidate in 1968. Apparently the trick to keeping Nixon calm, according to Garment, was Seconal, some liquor, and a reassuring chat with his old friend Garment. For the next few years, Grace would take similar late night calls from Nixon’s Attorney General’s wife, the infamous Martha Mitchell, “The Mouth from the South.”

Despite the chaos of their Washington, D.C. years, when Leonard went from being just an advisor to serving as replacement for John Dean as White House Counsel, Grace went back to school to get her undergraduate degree at George Mason University. A lucky break through friend Bryce Harlow at Proctor & Gamble landed her an audition with “The Edge of Night” head scribe Henry Slesar. She passed with flying colors and this new job, according to her husband, seemed to be the cure for her depression. She started around September 1975.

Soon their home was filled with the sound of happy typing coming from the study or the scratching of the pen as she wrote notes on ideas for dialogue. Even her two children received missives on the backs of script pages tucked into their bags. One to her daughter Sara said: “It surprised me to hear Dad tell you to meditate (I never see him meditate) but perhaps it’s not a bad idea. After all, Geraldine had been meditating quite a lot, and now she can get up out of her wheelchair. (But she fell over.) Today the show, which was written by yours truly, was quite good. It was about Nicole, after she ran into the woods and had the concussion. She was in the hospital in this episode with a bandage on her head, her hair all neatly groomed above it, as if she’d just come from the beauty parlor … Oh Lord, where will it all end.”

Interviewed along with some of the cast, Grace joked that she “had to write a governor into the script the other day, and had been thinking of playing over the Watergate tapes to find someone. The Proctor & Gamble representative did not laugh.”

Grace would tell friends she was too busy to get together because she had numerous deadlines. To keep up with the pace of her work, her husband said, she was taking Dexedrine and Dexemil. In order to get some sleep, she took barbiturates. Her boss, Henry Slesar, was so impressed with her scripts, he assigned her to do an extra one a week. “She had such a good grasp of the situation,” he said later. “The scripts always had the right flavor.”

The stress became too much and her drug use reached its peak. She carried a pharmacist’s prescription pad to try to use when pharmacists declined requests for more pills. Shortly after, in September 1976, Grace entered the Payne-Whitney Clinic to detox and to get help for her ongoing depression.

Cast and crew from “The Edge of Night” sent gifts and encouraging notes. Dixie Carter was among those who called her directly to wish her well. Leonard believed she wasn’t that close to her coworkers, and didn’t even know the actor’s real names. The overflowing support proved he was wrong. Her boss Henry Slesar, ever the gentleman, promised to hold her job for her.

The family was horrified by the poor treatment they believed she received at Payne-Whitney. They said she had become a zombie with the new drug regimen, and, her husband claimed, the staff paid so little attention to her, another patient was able to consistently steal her food.

A few outings got her away from the facility and finally she came home shortly before Thanksgiving. The routine of being mom and wife began again, and she went through the motions of going back to shopping for the holiday dinner, housework and cooking. But there was no sign of happiness in her demeanor.

Following dinner, the couple dressed for a long walk down to the water. There she confessed to Leonard that her doctors wanted to institutionalize her and keep her away from her family. She was adamant that wouldn’t be an option. She preferred outpatient treatment with a local therapist. Her goal was to go back to writing, but she wasn’t sure when. The couple went to see various friends, had dinner at restaurants, took in a movie and spent time with the children. But soon Grace was slipping backward, just staring at the ceiling for long periods.

Her husband made a family appointment with the therapist for 4 p.m. on Dec. 3, 1976. Grace drove her son and husband to the subway. Leonard caught a glimpse of his wife’s face and said her mouth was set in a grimace. However, due to the cold, he didn’t think much of it. Grace returned to the house, saw her daughter off to school, and did her chores.

Just before the appointed time, Leonard, Paul, and Sara assembled at the doctor’s office, but Grace didn’t show up. The worried husband called neighbors to check on her, but there was no sign of her. In fact, she had left car keys and credit cards at home. There was no note. Phone calls to other friends were made to aid in the search. Senator-elect Daniel Patrick Moynihan came to the house and contacted the heads of the police and the F.B.I. to help. Sgt. Max Sanders of the Police Department’s Missing Persons Squad said in an interview, “We follow any leads we get, knowing that only one of the leads will be the good one. A 13-state alarm has produced no leads, and police continue to check hospitals, morgues and what-not for unknowns or for persons using any of her names.”

A local car service told Leonard that a driver picked up his wife and took her to Penn Station. She was wearing a brown mink coat and a pink turtleneck. He dropped her off around 1:30 p.m. and she disappeared into the crowd.

The newspapers interviewed not only Leonard, but also Henry Slesar and producer Erwin “Nick” Nicholson. Slesar declared, “She was tremendously conscientious … Her scripts were always on time. She was very thorough on everything she did. She was a perfectionist.” Such a perfectionist that she had insisted on delivering her scripts by hand to Slesar instead of using the mail. The papers noted that a half-written script was still sitting in her typewriter, despite being on sabbatical from the show. Nick Nicholson got the cast together and taped a personal appeal to Grace, hoping she was tuning into the show. Nicholson himself asked three times on the air that “a very special friend get in touch because she is needed.”

“Her husband described her state of mind to the New York Post: “She had become exhausted and felt the quality of her work was trailing off.” She was, he said, “very quiet, very serious, very sensible, with a gentle sense of humor” and “a first-rate mind.” Foul play wasn’t suspected, nor was any connection to Watergate., Leonard, was not only Nixon’s former counsel, but also one of the people who urged President Ford to pardon Nixon.

The family put together a number of scenarios including that she had run away and changed her name to start life somewhere new. Perhaps her troubles brought on amnesia, they surmised.  In fact, she contributed scripts to stories involving a political wife reappearing with amnesia after being presumed dead, and a mother with a split personality. Sgt Sanders said if she would just let them know she was okay, they’d be fine with her being away from the family until she was ready to come home. However, Leonard privately felt that she could be dead.

A breakthrough in the case came from the clever Dr. George Curtis, the medical examiner in Boston. A “Jane Doe” was found in the local Hotel Essex on December 7. She had registered under the name “Hilda Miller” but this Hilda didn’t exist. Her effects included a fur coat and glasses, but no identification. The prescription from the glasses yielded no results. Weeks later, Curtis was still going over the case when he realized the fur from Bonwit Teller likely had her name under the label. He was right. Somehow, at the same time, the Boston police got a second appeal from the New York police. The authorities contacted Leonard and he and his brother made the trip to the Boston morgue. It was, indeed, Grace. He noticed her face still had the grim countenance he had last seen on her the morning of Dec. 3.

The pieces of the puzzle finally came together. When Grace arrived at the station, she stopped to buy pink vodka, razors, and a copy of The New Yorker. Once the train stopped in Boston, she walked across the street to the Hotel Essex, booked room 1004 at 7:53 p.m. Once there, she put a “do not disturb” sign outside the room and proceeded to read her magazine while taking sleeping pills and codeine mixed with the vodka to lessen the pain. She ran the warm water in the tub and she put her plan into motion. The maid tried for the next few days to get into the room, and finally notified management on December 7. The police arrived shortly.

The family arranged for burial in the historic Greenwood Cemetery. Former President Richard Nixon sent a letter of condolence. The show went on for “The Edge of Night.” Slesar hired others to help bring his scripts to life. The show’s real life mystery had come to a sad end.

A final note: If you are reading this and need someone to talk to, dial 988. Help is available 24 hours a day.

A special thank you to Sharon Gabet for writing the intro. Not only did she enthrall viewers with her portrayal of Raven for many years, she has been instrumental in preserving the history of “The Edge of Night.” Thank you to Connie Passalacqua, Ed Hayman, and Mark Faulkner.

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Article sources:

The Record, 4/15/76

The Daily News, 12/22/76

The Standard Star, 1/9/77

The Courier-Post, 1/12/77

The Daily Sentinel, 1/12/77

The Boston Globe, 1/27/77

Palm Beach Post, 1/27/77

The Reporter Dispatch, 1/27/77

The Journal News, 1/29/77

Crazy Rhythm, by Leonard Garment, Grand Central Publishing, 2001