Nelson Rockefeller, Megan Marshack and me

But it would take these girls several decades to grow up and experience something like this their namesake was already behind him: a doomed affair with a married man. Meaghanna z The Thorn Birds fell in love with a Catholic priest married to the church. Megan Marshack, as published gossip had it, was living in the present with her boss, former vice president and four-term governor of New York Nelson Rockefeller, who was married to another woman. The circumstances of his death around midnight on a Friday in January 1979 immediately became the subject of salacious speculation: Why Megan, and not his chauffeur as initially reported, with him in his Manhattan office when he suffered a fatal heart attack? She didn’t answer that question and no one was able to find out.

Besides sharing a last name, Megan Marshack and I had eerily similar biographies. I was also born and raised in California; I lived on the East Coast as an aspiring journalist; I once worked as a researcher, or “staff assistant,” as Marshack was initially identified, for a much older famous man. Was it any wonder that many of the mostly male editors I interviewed for full-time work in the late 1970s and early 1980s simply couldn’t believe that I wasn’t the Megan Marshack? Wouldn’t Megan Marshack want to change her name after the whole scandal?

But she didn’t. I admired her for that, even though I sometimes cursed her for getting in the way of my career. I didn’t get the job, I just smirked across my future boss’s desk and invited him to lunch. Could they see inside me? Did they somehow know that I was also hiding secrets like Megan Marshack? Only mine weren’t as romantic as the ones in question the posthumous Marshack wrote before her death, which seemed to suggest her feelings for Rockefeller: “I won’t forget, I can’t regret,” she concluded, quoting the song “What I Did for Love” from “A Chorus Line.”

From today’s perspective, my predatory lovers could fill a #MeToo court record: a recently divorced college professor who lured me into bed one night toward the end of the semester after I spent the evening babysitting his son; a music teacher, a famous performing artist, who was looking for the clasp on my bra while I was sitting at the keyboard; and yes, a famous man at the time, my employer, with whom I had a month-long affair, doubtfully consensual. He punched me in the arm and then stomped on my leg when I tried to break off the relationship, ultimately more scared of him than where I was going to get the next dollar.

Is this what made me decide to pursue a freelance career, writing books on my own in a home office, rather than looking for a full-time job? At least initially, Megan Marshack proved more thick-skinned than I was, facing much of her share of grim curiosity. I was relieved to learn, reading her obituary, that after Rockefeller’s death she remained in Manhattan, working for CBS News, covering the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics and other international and domestic stories as a reporter, and then as a “tough news producer” for local news late at night. But in 1998, when the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke, she retreated to California to write for the Placerville Mountain Democratic Party. Did the press come back to haunt her when another young woman’s name dominated the headlines in a shocking combination of sex and politics?

I had known Placerville since childhood – it was called old Hangtown because it was the site of a triple execution in 1849 at the height of the gold rush. This is where my family stopped to stock up on supplies on their way to a summer vacation in the Sierra Mountains – a good place to settle down, I can imagine, if someone wants to write for a small town newspaper that isn’t going to fold and live among people who didn’t care about your East Coast past. Mountain the air was clean and forest fires were not yet a serious threat. She married a friend and they lived together for twenty years until her husband died last year in a car accident. Marshack’s death in a nursing home from liver and kidney failure suggests she had fallen on hard times.

“The deepest feeling always manifests itself in silence; not in silence, but in restraint,” wrote the poet Marianne Moore. Marshack’s lifelong silence about her relationship with Rockefeller, even if it was probably sealed by an NDA and a check made out to the robber baron’s inheritance, suggested an old-fashioned romance set in a Manhattan townhouse, conducted in furs and with the House. Pérignon and continued over the years with “the most caring and considerate boss I have ever met”: this being with an irrevocable past, a liberal republican.

How civilized and even enviable! Nothing like the sexual harassment I experienced at the age of 18 and 20, the price of entry into the workplace for too many young women at the time. There’s nothing like the Oval Office tryst that derailed Monica Lewinsky, as she recently wrote; or the association of porn stars with the only former president to be found guilty of rape in a court of law.

I have never publicly identified perpetrators of crimes in the past, not wanting to return to the vulnerability I felt 50 years ago. Wouldn’t it be nice to think that Megan Marshack’s silence hides something more noble: love?

Megan Marshall is the author of three biographies, including “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.” Her collection of essays, “After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart,” will be published in February.