$11-Million Bequest to College Celebrates Hepburn-Tracy-Style Affair

From the moment they met in 1960, Harvey Wexler and Joan Coward knew they were meant for each other.

She loved his knowledge of finance and politics, his dry wit and his unassuming friendliness, which made everyone around him comfortable.

He loved her intelligent opinions on airline industry economics and her simple elegance that turned heads.

For three decades, they were rarely apart. But although they lived in the same northwest Washington apartment building, they never married. They went to social events together but never showed affection in public. Until she died in 1990, no one except family members knew about their devotion to each other.

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For Coward, it was a decidedly Katharine Hepburn-like life, and that’s how she liked it, because Hepburn was Coward’s idol. She drew parallels between herself and the star: Both were strong, independent career women who didn’t care for marriage. Both graduated from Bryn Mawr College, a Seven Sisters school near Philadelphia. And Coward saw her relationship with Wexler as similar to Hepburn’s 26-year discreet love affair with Spencer Tracy.

In death, Wexler finally revealed the depth of their love with the kind of dramatic gesture worthy of a Tracy-Hepburn movie.

He left $11 million to Coward’s alma mater, according to his will, which was settled in June. It is the largest gift the school has ever received, and it will fund four chaired professorships, including one in Coward’s name.

“It was like a great love affair,” said Nancy Urban, of Swarthmore, Pa., Coward’s sister. “They did everything together. Each one was completely, totally devoted to the other. They were as intensely in love as anyone could be.”

On their first date, Wexler was immediately impressed by Coward’s intelligence. She told him that at Bryn Mawr she had been taught how to think, rather than what to think.

“I even tested her on one matter, and she knew more than I,” he wrote in a letter years later to Coward’s sister.

Several years after the first date, she moved into his apartment building here. They had their own one-bedroom apartments on different floors.

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Talk of marriage came up, but they agreed that they were just as well off not being husband and wife.

“They knew that each needed some space,” said Mac Johnson, a close friend of Wexler’s who was related to Coward by marriage. “I think she said, ‘I like to have breakfast alone, but we always have dinner together.’ ”

Wexler and Coward thought their colleagues would consider their relationship a conflict of interest. Like the Tracy and Hepburn characters in “Adam’s Rib,” they worked on opposite sides of the same profession.

He worked for Continental Airlines, eventually becoming senior vice president; she was an economic analyst for the Civil Aeronautics Board, which regulated airline fares and routes.

Both were so reserved and private that even among family, they did not show each other affection, relatives said. So throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when Coward would accompany Wexler to airline-industry social events, no one speculated that the two were anything more than friends.

“I had always assumed that when Harvey would bring Joan to these occasions, that it was just because they were occasions when a man was expected to bring a woman,” said lawyer John Burzio, who met Wexler when Burzio was a senator’s aide on the Senate Aviation Committee. “I never suspected any close relationship.”

Indeed, Coward and Wexler seemed like contrasts, at least outwardly.

She was slim and beautiful, from a well-off Episcopalian family on Philadelphia’s Main Line. A 1946 graduate of Bryn Mawr, she held degrees in economics and politics. She had fine taste, family members said, and always dressed formally, in suits and dresses. Her sister-in-law said she doubted that Coward owned any slacks.

He was a plain, forgettable-looking fellow who grew up in a Jewish family on Long Island. He lived modestly, preferring ordinary suits, and he’d rather take Metro than a taxi or his car.

At age 5, he was introduced to economics during the Great Depression, when he saw a mob of people demanding their deposits at his father’s bank, he wrote. His father defied the government decree ordering banks to close, gave people their money and won his customers’ confidence, Wexler said in a letter to Urban and her husband after Coward died.

Wexler graduated from New York University in less than two years and received a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard University. His father refused to pay for his education, so at Harvard Wexler made money for school by betting his classmates at 20-to-1 odds that Harry S. Truman would win the 1948 election, Wexler recounted in a letter to Urban.

Both Wexler and Coward were intellectuals and overachievers. She worked in New York for Eastern Airlines after college, then came to Washington to work for the Civil Aeronautics Board. At the time of her retirement, in 1978, she was the highest-ranking woman at the agency.

Wexler worked for the Air Transport Assn. before joining Continental Airlines. Many colleagues regarded him as one of Washington’s experts on the economics of the airline industry.

He was once asked to become the president of Continental Airlines, Johnson said, but Wexler didn’t consider the offer, because Coward told him she didn’t want to move.

When Coward died of cancer in 1990 at 67, Wexler was devastated and wrote in a letter to her sister that he had lost someone who was “far more precious than my own life.”

He told his friends about their relationship shortly after her death, just as Hepburn has been more open about her affair with Tracy years after his death and that of his wife.

Wexler picked up his life and eventually became involved in a long-distance relationship with a woman in New York, one friend said.

But Coward still held a special place in his heart. He kept in touch with Bryn Mawr officials and decided to honor the love of his life upon his death.

“I owe a great deal to Bryn Mawr,” he wrote to Urban. When he died in October of cancer at 67, he left his entire fortune--except for $50,000 that went to friends and colleagues--to the school.

Friends knew that Wexler, a member of the International Club and the Georgetown Club and a shrewd economist, had money, but they were surprised by the size of the donation.

“It was clear that he adored the lady,” said Jim Landry, a friend of Wexler’s and former president of the Air Transport Assn. He remembers Wexler’s telling him after Coward died, “It was true that I never married, but I had as close a relationship with a lady as any marriage ever was.”

In the last months of her life, Wexler, without telling Coward, wrote to Hepburn, telling her of Coward’s respect for her and asking her to write back.

Hepburn responded a couple of weeks later with a signed playbill and a personal note saying that she was flattered that a fellow Bryn Mawr graduate admired her.

But by the time Hepburn’s note arrived, Coward had slipped into a coma. Wexler sat at Coward’s bedside and read her the letter.