The author who would tell circus family secrets

Jan Pottker says the owner of Ringling Bros. used spy novel tactics to keep her work from being published.

"As Americans watched Ann Landers and Dear Abby join the pantheon of syndicated celebrities, a twinhood rivalry was festering that made Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots' bid for the royal throne sound like sisterly cooing."

- From Dear Ann, Dear Abby: The Unauthorized Biography of Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren

by Jan Pottker and Bob Speziale, 1987

Jan Pottker had a knack for uncovering family intrigue. A mother and author with a doctoral degree in sociology and education, she was cultivating a career writing about celebrities and other well-known American families.

She had written an entire book about Abigail Van Buren and her twin sister, Ann Landers, without interviewing either. She had uncovered secrets on the private Mars candy family for the book Crisis in Candyland. She had compiled profiles of 50 heirs to well-known companies for another book.

But for all her energy and success in telling tales out of school about the rich and famous, one family stymied her.

Twice, she had tried to sell book proposals on the people behind the venerable Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Twice, she had failed.

The private detective showed up at Pottker's home in Potomac, Md., on a November morning in 1998. He said he represented a former vice president of Ringling Bros. who wanted to talk to her.

Pottker was curious. But she had grown frustrated with her Ringling Bros. failures and at first told him she wasn't interested.

Yet, hours later, she was standing in an outdoor mall in Chevy Chase, Md., shopping for cosmetics and waiting nervously for the phone call she had been told to expect.

It came about 5 p.m. A male voice told her to look toward the parking lot. It was getting dark, but she recognized the tall man with the curly, graying hair.

He was Chuck Smith, who had worked for Ringling Bros. for nearly 30 years, rising to chief financial officer before he was fired the year before.

Over coffee at a nearby restaurant, Smith told her that Kenneth Feld, the powerful head of Ringling Bros., had been behind an eight-year scheme to keep her from writing about Ringling Bros. and ruin her career.

The details sounded straight out of a spy novel. Photographic surveillance. Tapped phones. A business partner who wasn't what he seemed. A former CIA agent delivering reports on her everyday life, from discussions about writing a book on Estee Lauder to a trip to New York City to have a top stylist highlight her hair.

All of it because she had written an article in a little-known Washington, D.C., business magazine in 1990 that explored the Feld family's secrets.

If she didn't believe him, Smith told her, go look at a court file in an Alexandria, Va., federal courthouse.

Pottker had long wanted to write about the Felds and the circus because of their fascinating history. But she didn't fully realize how much Feld and his massive entertainment company, which brought in $776-million in 2001, cared about its image.

On this Veterans Day in 1998, she listened as Smith described the workings of a big business that played for big stakes. Her career struggles of the past eight years suddenly clicked into place.

"It was as if my life changed at that very moment," Pottker said. "And then I started to feel like I wasn't in my body anymore. It was almost as if it was happening to someone else and I was watching the conversation."

She walked outside to her car, got in and screamed.

Less than two weeks later, on the day before Thanksgiving, Pottker and her husband, Andrew S. Fishel, walked into that Alexandria courthouse.

They had met as students at American University nearly 30 years before. They had two daughters and lived in a rural neighborhood with homes set far back from the road with long, winding driveways.

She had worked part time at the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights and had published six books, but her writing career had faltered in recent years. He had risen to managing director of the Federal Communications Commission.

What they found stunned them.

In a lawsuit Smith had filed against Feld over severance pay and stock options, there was a sworn statement dated six months earlier from Clair E. George, a CIA operative since 1955 and a former deputy director for covert operations from 1984 to 1987.

George, who had been convicted in 1992 of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair and later pardoned, said that in 1990, Feld's companies began paying him to monitor Pottker's actions and report back.

He said he made arrangements to have a publishing house pay Pottker to write a book on the Mars candy family. The purpose, he wrote, was to divert her from writing about the Feld family.

Then there were the memos, maybe 20 of them.

As she looked at the records, Pottker figured out Ringling Bros. had a source close to her, and she had a pretty good idea of who it was. Her business partner, Robert Eringer, apparently had been telling George, and ultimately Feld, everything she told him.

"Pottker and I discussed other authors and how tragic it is when they become obsessed by their stories and cannot move on," said the 11th memo, which Eringer later testified he wrote. "We agreed that there are many good stories in the world and that if one doesn't work, the author should let it go and tackle other stories."

Another one said: "Pottker has re-focused her time and energy into projects I have given her. Her enthusiasm for exposing Ringling Bros. has been redirected to exposing others. Instead of spending the past two weeks stirring up trouble, ... she has been busy researching and writing these new projects."

It all made sense now.

Pottker's path to this courthouse started a decade before when she began writing a book about heirs to popular American businesses.

Kenneth Feld, who had inherited the vast Ringling Bros. empire from his father, Irvin, was one of them.

Irvin Feld had started out as a snake oil salesman at circus sideshows in the 1920s and ended up buying Ringling Bros. from John Ringling North for $8-million in 1967. When he died in 1984, he gave his son the company.

Pottker wrote Kenneth Feld asking for an interview, and he agreed. So one day in August 1988, she walked into Ringling Bros. headquarters, then in the District of Columbia; past 3-foot elephants with sapphire- and ruby-colored stones and Gargantua, the world's largest gorilla, stuffed behind glass; and into Feld's office.

Feld surprised her with his openness that day. He told her how details make the circus and how he finds all the new talent, auditions each act and negotiates contracts.

But he also talked about the suicide of his mother when he was very young: how it affected him and how he had had a dispute with his sister, who felt she had been disinherited from her father's will, according to Pottker's article.

"I don't want any free time," Feld said about his commitment to his business.

Pottker researched the Feld family further, interviewing current and former employees; Feld's sister, Karen; and others for the next year. She began to think she had the makings of not just a chapter, but an entire book.

Pottker's story about Feld first appeared in August 1990 in Regardie's magazine. In it, Pottker quoted a People magazine article that described Irvin Feld as a man with the "heart of a closet flamboyant" who had a purple bedroom and a Washingtonian magazine article that referenced his sexual orientation.

"For one thing, an ill-kept secret dogs the family to this day: (Irvin) Feld was a homosexual," Pottker wrote without attributing the information. "Today, the common wisdom is that his attraction to men and his desire to book bigger and better acts were a dual obsession that kept him out of town and happily away from (his wife), Adele."

The article went on to say that Adele Feld blamed herself for the problems in her marriage.

"The conventional wisdom of the 1950s said that a homosexual man could be reoriented toward women if a woman were attractive enough," Pottker's article said. "Adele believed that her inability to keep Irvin at home meant that she was a failure, both as a woman and as a wife."

Adele Feld killed herself by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1958 at age 31.

The article outraged Kenneth Feld, Smith, the circus' former chief financial officer, said in a deposition. He believed Pottker had destroyed the legend of his father, Smith told Pottker, and he wanted to stop her and ruin her, according to a lawsuit Pottker has filed against Feld and his companies.

Smith told Pottker that Feld always used epithets when referring to her and kept 20 copies of the article in his office and one in his private bathroom, her lawsuit said.

Feld declined to be interviewed for this story. Julie Alexa Strauss, vice president and corporate counsel for Feld Entertainment, wrote in a letter that many "defamatory" and "baseless" statements have been made in the Pottker case and that there are protective orders issued by the court restricting what can be said about the case. Therefore, "we are not able to discuss all of the information your readers would need to have a full and accurate understanding of the facts," she wrote.

But Feld's views on Pottker's article can be found in a draft of an unpublished book about the Feld family that he had Eringer and George work on, according to court records.

"To say that Irvin was a homosexual, what did that prove?" Feld wrote. "That charge is an absolute lie, and Irvin is not here to defend himself. I can't buy the statements about his alleged sexual preference contributing to my mother's death. Everybody has problems in this marriages (sic) - people have good ones and others have bad ones. My mother's condition predated her marriage to my father."

Pottker thinks her Regardie's article was the first to explicitly call Irvin Feld a homosexual, although other publications had alluded to it.

She said in a recent interview that her sources for the information are confidential. Feld thought his sister, Karen, had disseminated the information.

Pottker pointed out that Feld never called to complain about the story.

In 1999, Pottker filed a $120-million-plus lawsuit against Feld, a number of his entertainment businesses, George, Eringer and others, alleging invasion of privacy, interference with business relationships, infliction of emotional distress, fraud, conspiracy and breach of contract, among other things. The case, which later would attract celebrity lawyer Johnnie Cochran to Pottker's team, is scheduled for trial in September in Washington.

In May, Pottker entered a conference room at the offices of Feld's attorneys. She walked past a table with coffee, cookies, muffins, bagels and napkins with the firm's initials on it. She took her seat at the end of a long hardwood table, next to a court reporter and across from a videographer. Ten lawyers and a paralegal sat across from her.

Her attorney, Roger Simmons, and another lawyer from his firm sat by her side. It had taken her six months to find him. Half a dozen lawyers had turned her down. Who would want to take on Feld, then worth $775-million and No. 328 on Forbes magazine's "400 Richest in America" list?

The 15-day deposition she gave has been sealed. But some of the details of the "private war" Pottker alleges Feld waged on her can be found in court files.

Central to the deception, Pottker said, was the man she thought was her business partner.

Eringer said he had been involved in the literary world for years, as a book publisher, agent, journalist, author and consultant. The son of a Walt Disney illustrator, he had grown up in London and Beverly Hills, Calif., and gone to four colleges without receiving a degree, he testified. He told Pottker that his mother had made most of his family's money with a well-received cheesecake recipe in London.

Eringer now lives in London and runs the Bedlam Bar and Restaurant, which he boasts has a piece of Vincent Van Gogh's severed ear framed on the wall.

Pottker claims in her lawsuit that Eringer, George and Feld conspired to ruin her career by having Eringer cultivate a relationship with Pottker and her agent to steer her away from stories on Feld to other less productive projects.

Robert Eringer tells the story differently in his deposition. In 1990, after Pottker's article on the Feld family was published, Eringer said, he happened to contact Pottker's agent about starting a publishing house and learned that Pottker had produced a book proposal on the circus, titled Highwire.

It was to be an unauthorized biography of the Feld family that would explore the life of Irvin Feld, a vivacious man who had opened a drugstore with a soda fountain in a mostly black neighborhood of Washington and had promoted rock 'n' roll acts such as Chuck Berry, Chubby Checker and Fats Domino.

It would say that he was homosexual and that his wife had killed herself over it, just like Pottker's article.

Eringer's friend Clair George, the former CIA agent, had been working for Feld promoting the Disney on Ice show outside the United States. Eringer told George, who passed the information on to Feld.

According to George's and Smith's depositions, this triggered the plan to monitor Pottker, derail her from writing about Feld and steer her to other projects. Feld initiated the plan and received regular memos on it, both testified.

In 1993, Eringer approached Pottker at the Potomac public library after she had given a lecture on her most recent book, Born to Power: Heirs to America's Leading Businesses. Before long, they were meeting regularly to discuss her career and consider other projects. They formed a business partnership.

Eringer said in his deposition that he was paid $1,500 a week by George to contact Pottker and come up with a competing authorized biography on the Feld family that would be released simultaneously with any book Pottker published about Feld. Eringer said he understood the money came from Ringling Bros.

Eringer steered Pottker's agent to send Highwire to various publishers, but the book was never picked up. Pottker alleges that Eringer purposely sabotaged the book by sending her agent to publishing contacts he knew and then getting them to reject the project.

Pottker further says Eringer suggested she undertake a complicated book about the Mars candy family. Unbeknownst to her at the time, her $25,000 advance was provided by one or more of Feld's companies, George and Smith testified.

Meanwhile, another proposal on the working conditions of circus children went nowhere under Eringer's supervision, Pottker says.

"I just kept thinking bad luck, bad luck, bad luck, a lot of bad luck," Pottker said.

The final blow to the business relationship came with a dispute over a joint project Pottker and Eringer pursued in 1995: Celebrity Washington: Who They Are, Where They Live and Why They're Famous, a guidebook to local celebrities.

"He wanted to put it in verse, poetry," Pottker said. "It's a guidebook!"

In a phone interview, Eringer denied Pottker's version of events in the lawsuit but declined to go into detail.

"I wouldn't know where to begin," he said.

Eringer said Pottker can allege anything in a lawsuit, even if it's untrue.

"I would say this was a muckraking type of reporter who went poking around in the very areas of Mr. Feld's - that she herself was using a very similar approach that she accuses the defendants of using," Eringer said. "On the one hand, she likes to deal it out, but she couldn't take it in return."

Pottker denied there's a parallel between what she says Feld did to her and how she digs up information on her subjects. She said she told Feld up front that she wanted to write a story about him and his family business.

"What they did to me was secretly surveil me, and weekly reports went to Kenneth Feld. And I believe I was videotaped, I believe my phones may have been tapped and my house broken into," said Pottker, now 55. "I interviewed this man once in 1988, and I feel as if he's been stalking me ever since."

Smith, Eringer and George all said in separate depositions that their mission was to monitor Pottker and to divert her to other projects. Still, none acknowledge tapping her phones or using any other form of electronic or photographic surveillance.

Feld, now 55, denied all of Pottker's allegations in his answer to her lawsuit. But in a status report filed with the court later, his attorneys acknowledged that one Feld company, I & K Trading Co. Limited Partnership, hired George to gather information about Pottker, a "gossip monger," and steer her toward other projects.

But there was no intent to damage Pottker's writing career, attorneys for Feld and his companies said in court documents.

"There was no attempt by Feld Defendants to sabotage Pottker's submission of her works to other publishers or to interfere with or "spy' on her personal life," the documents said.

Feld's attorneys said Smith told Pottker "fantastical tales" about Feld's and his company's actions in an effort to "advance his own then-pending litigation against the companies."

"We note that there have been numerous false and defamatory statements made in connection with the Pottker case that are totally baseless and have never been substantiated in any way," Strauss, Feld Entertainment's corporate counsel, wrote in a letter to the St. Petersburg Times.

Feld's deposition, like Pottker's, is sealed.

In the summer, Simmons, Pottker's attorney, asked a friend who knew Johnnie Cochran to pass along the details of Pottker's case. Simmons wanted a big gun to join him in going up against the 13 lawyers from four prestigious firms who represented Feld, his companies and the other defendants.

Best-known as a defense attorney in O.J. Simpson's murder trial, Cochran, like Simmons, took Pottker's case for a contingency fee: a share of any winnings. Cochran said he handles only about 20 cases a year.

"Here we are in the 21st century with someone very powerful thinking they could invade someone's privacy," Cochran said on why he took Pottker's case. "It's a classic David and Goliath, and I saw Jan and her family as David and the other side as being Goliath."

Feld takes on those who oppose him with the zeal of a bullfighter. In 2002, he ran a full-page ad in the New York Times and other newspapers, challenging groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to reveal how much of their money is spent on lawsuits, ads, publicity stunts and extreme political groups.

Feld explained his feelings about those who attack Ringling Bros. in an interview with Chief Executive magazine.

"These groups are trying to tear down an American institution," he said. "We're 132 years old; we're older than baseball. And before I let something happen to this great institution, I'm going to come out swinging."

Feld's court fight with Smith, who sued him for $12-million in severence and stock options, was settled. Smith got $6.5-million and agreed "not to disparage Mr. Feld," although he can answer questions truthfully in court proceedings, he said in his deposition.

During his meeting with Pottker in 1998, Smith told her that the role he had played in the efforts against her had bothered him for years.

He told her he placed George's affidavit outlining the scheme in his court case, hoping the media would pick it up, and he didn't care whether she wrote a book about Ringling Bros., according to her lawsuit.

In November 2001, Pottker published Janet and Jackie: The Story of a Mother and Her Daughter, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. And in March, her newest book, Sara and Eleanor: The Story of Sara Delano Roosevelt and Her Daughter- in-Law, Eleanor Roosevelt, is coming out.

But Pottker said she has no plans to write about Feld or Ringling Bros. ever again.

- Times researchers Kitty Bennett, Caryn Baird and Cathy Wos contributed to this report. Leonora LaPeter can be reached at 727 893-8640 or lapeter@sptimes.com

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