WWW- A FORMER chef to Walter Cronkite is cooking up a recipe for scandal – she’s shopping a tell-all book that will paint the legendary CBS news anchor as an egotistical taskmaster who, along with his family, “mentally tortured” her.
“It was a difficult job. It was abusive,” Terri Schwab, who worked nine summers at Cronkite’s Martha’s Vineyard getaway before quitting in August, told Page Six. “When I started that job I was so proud. Today, I wish I’d never taken it because it totally disillusioned me.
“He’s a very difficult man. It’s all about Walter. It always was, it always will be. It’s dinner for four at 6:30, then it turns into dinner for six, then dinner for eight. Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir, that’s the answer . . . There’s a difference between the most trusted man in America and being an honorable man. I don’t think he’s going to come out looking so great.”
Schwab also has some beefs with the 89-year-old news legend’s family and his current gal pal, Joanna Simon, the 65-year-old opera-singer sister of Carly Simon, whom Cronkite took up with after the death of his wife, Betsy, last year.
“I took a lot of c-p from everybody. S-t rolls down a hill and I’m at the bottom of that hill. It’s been nothing but ugly since Betsy died. It seems like when Betsy died, everything died with her,” Schwab said. Declining to elaborate on what skeletons she might reveal in her tome, she added, “I’ve been in that house for a long time and I’ve seen more than I’ve wanted to see.”
Schwab wants severance pay. She hasn’t gotten any although, “we’ve been in negotiations.” And having never signed a confidentiality agreement, she feels she has carte blanche to dish Cronkite’s dirty laundry.
Marlene Adler, Cronkite’s longtime chief of staff, told us Schwab was a merely a summer employee and not entitled to severance. “This has blindsided us,” Adler said. “I’m sorry she feels she has to do something so mean-spirited . . . I’ve never heard of a summer employee getting severence . . . She was paid handsomely . . . This comes out of left field.”