Read Too Much Money Online

Authors: Dominick Dunne

Too Much Money

ALSO BY DOMINICK DUNNE

FICTION
Another City, Not My Own
A Season in Purgatory
An Inconvenient Woman
People Like Us
The Two Mrs. Grenvilles
The Winners

NONFICTION
Justice
The Way We Lived Then
The Mansions of Limbo
Fatal Charms

P
ROLOGUE

A
FEW YEARS AGO THERE WAS A RUMOR
that I had been murdered at my house in Prud’homme, Connecticut, by a cross-country serial killer of rich older men. Of course, it wasn’t true, although it was a rumor that lingered for a while: Gus Bailey was dead. There was indeed a serial killer at the time, who was very much in the news. He had just killed a couturier in Miami who was so famous that Princess Diana and Elton John and his future husband attended the funeral in Milan. I confess now to having been the person who started the rumor. I couldn’t figure out how to finish a novel I was writing at the time, and I wanted desperately to leave the next day for the Cannes Film Festival with Stokes Bishop, my editor at
Park Avenue
magazine, who assured me in advance that I was to be seated between the French film star Catherine Deneuve and Princess Olga of Greece at the magazine’s party at the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes. I didn’t want to miss that so I just grabbed the headline news of the murder in Miami and added Gus Bailey to the killer’s list, thus ending the novel, and I flew to France. Do I regret having done that? Yes.

My name is Augustus Bailey, but I am called Gus Bailey by everyone who knows me. It happens that I am often recognized
by strangers on the street, or in public places, and even those people call me Gus. I only use Augustus Bailey on my passport, my driver’s license, the covers of the books I write, my monthly diaries for
Park Avenue
magazine, and the weekly introductions on my cable television series,
Augustus Bailey Presents
, which I host. I thought it best to tell you a bit about myself before I get into the story that I am about to tell. It should be pointed out that it is a regular feature of my life that people whisper things in my ear, very private things, about themselves, or about others. I have always understood the art of listening.

The characters in all my novels are based on real people, or combinations of real people, and they are often recognizable to the readers. Many of the ones who recognized themselves in the books became livid with me. If you could have heard the way Marty Lesky, the Hollywood mogul, who has since died, yelled at me over the telephone. There was a time when I would have been paralyzed with fear at such a call from Marty Lesky, but that time has passed. It made him more furious that I was not writhing with apologies, but the dynamic between us had changed over the years and I no longer feared him, as I used to fear male authority figures, going all the way back to the terror my father inspired in me as a child, but that’s another story. I’ve lost several friends over my books. One I missed. One I didn’t.

Losing the occasional friend along the way goes with the writer’s territory, especially if the writer travels in the same rarefied circles he writes about, as I do. In time, some people come back. Pauline Mendelson did. She was a very good sport about the whole thing. Mona Berg did, sort of. Cecilia Lesky did. Maisie Verdurin adored being a character in one of my books and bought fifty copies to give as Christmas presents. Others didn’t, of course. Justine Altemus, my great friend Lil Altemus’s daughter, never spoke to me again. Only recently, Justine and I were seated side by side at a dinner dance at the Colony Club, celebrating Sandy Winslow’s ninetieth birthday, and we
never so much as looked in each other’s direction for the hour and a half we were table companions.

Not too long ago I had intended to give myself a party on the occasion of my upcoming birthday, a milestone birthday, which I must confess I never thought I would reach, especially in the last two years of stress and high anxiety. This was all caused by a monstrously unpleasant experience involving some monstrously unpleasant people, who had no place in my life and took up far too much time in it, particularly when the years left to me are dwindling down to a precious few, as Walter Huston used to sing.

But it is a fact that the fault was mine. I fell hook, line, and sinker for a fake story from an unreliable source. I thought I had the scoop of my career, and I made the fatal mistake of repeating it on a radio show of no importance, and the consequences were dire. If you must know, I accused a congressman, former congressman Kyle Cramden, of knowing more than he was admitting about the case of the famous missing intern, Diandra Lomax. I made a mess, I tell you.

I tried to distract myself from my troubles by focusing on party planning. When my birthday party guest list grew to over three hundred, and I was only at the P’s, I realized I would have to rethink things. I know entirely too many people. Although I have several very serious enemies in important positions, I hope not to appear immodest when I say that I am a popular fellow, who gets asked to the best parties in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Paris, and goes to most of them.

I decided to limit my party to eighty-five people, which is the age that I will soon be. It was so difficult to hone my friends to eighty-five. It doesn’t even scratch the surface. Eighty-five, in fact, really means forty-something, with wives, husbands, lovers, and partners making up the other forty or so. There would be hurt feelings, to be sure. That’s why I don’t like to give parties. I go about a great deal in social life, but I never reciprocate.
The spacious terrace of my penthouse in the Turtle Bay section of New York City, where I have lived for twenty-five years, has a view of the East River, and could easily hold a hundred people or more without much of a squeeze, but I have never once entertained there.

I felt, however, as if I deserved a party. But it was not to be, as you will find. Things happen. Everything changes.

I’ve noticed that concurrent with the growth of my public popularity, there is a small but powerful group of people who are beginning, or have already begun, to despise me. Elias Renthal, still in federal prison in Las Vegas as this story begins, is one of my despisers. Countess Stamirsky, Zita Stamirsky to her very few friends, is another who despises me after I refused to not write about her son’s suicide from a heroin overdose while he was wearing women’s clothes at the family castle in Antwerp.

And, of course, there is Perla Zacharias, allegedly the third richest woman in the world, who had me followed by investigators trained by the Mossad in Israel who collected information that she later threatened to use against me. That’s the kind of person Perla Zacharias is.

I have written about all these powerful people in
Park Avenue
, or in a novel, and earned their eternal enmity.
Their time would come
, I always thought. Elias Renthal knew what he was screaming about when he said, “They’re going to get you,” his face all red and ugly, as he pointed his finger in my face, only moments before he collapsed on the floor of the men’s room of the Butterfield Club.

C
HAPTER
1

I
T WAS
E
ASTER
S
UNDAY
. L
IL
A
LTEMUS, THE OLD
guard New York society figure, was having her annual Easter luncheon party at her vast Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park. In times to come, during her financial difficulties, Lil spoke of her Easter lunch as her Farewell to Fifth Avenue party. All her Van Degan relatives, several of whom she didn’t like, and some of her closest friends, like Matilda Clarke and Rosalie Paget and Kay Kay Somerset, whom she’d known all her life, were present. “We all went to Farmington, and we all came out the same year at the Junior Assembly, and we were all bridesmaids in each other’s first weddings,” Lil said about them every year in her toast.

The star guest at the Easter luncheon was “that perfect darling,” as Lil always called Adele Harcourt, who was almost a hundred and five and was still going about in social life. “Adele was such a close friend of Mummy’s,” said Lil, who was herself seventy-five, whenever she spoke about the revered Adele Harcourt. “We think of her as practically family.” Adele was celebrated for having given two hundred million dollars to the city of New York. She made appearances in slums to watch the improvements her donations made possible. She always wore
pearls and furs on these excursions to building sites. “That’s how they want me to dress,” she said to Lil on occasion. She was used to being cheered by the crowd and enjoyed her celebrity enormously.

There was also a small group of what Lil called her strays. Gus Bailey, a writer for
Park Avenue
magazine, used to argue that he was more than a stray. They had a curious friendship.

Lil and Gus had met years earlier at the Kurt von Rautbord attempted-murder trial in Newport, Rhode Island, which Gus had covered for
Park Avenue
magazine. Lil, as the best friend of the comatose heiress, Antonia von Rautbord, ever since they were roommates at Farmington, was a witness for the prosecution. Gus was impressed at how unafraid Lil was on the stand when she was cross-examined by a ruthless defense attorney of national reputation.

During a break, he introduced himself to her in the hallway outside the courtroom in Newport, after she had strongly disputed the allegations made by Kurt von Rautbord’s lawyer about Antonia’s alcoholism.

“You were gutsy up there on the stand,” said Gus. “Some people get so terrified, they cry.”

“Wasn’t he awful, that lawyer? So rude. Just who does he think he is, please? I certainly wasn’t going to allow Kurt von Rautbord to say all those dreadful and deceitful things about poor sweet Antonia after he lived off her money all those years,” answered Lil. “Antonia even paid his club dues at the Butterfield, forgodssake.”

It was Lil who introduced Gus to Marina and Fritz, Antonia’s grown children from her first marriage to a Hungarian prince, with whom he became friends. It was also Lil who arranged for Gus to spend the night in the Newport mansion where the attempted murder had taken place.

Gus often said that if Lil Altemus hadn’t been born so rich and married so rich, she could have been a very good detective.
Lil was always thrilled when Gus said that about her in front of others. She sometimes bragged that he discussed all the murder cases he covered around the world with her. In fact, there were those who said that Lil Altemus was Gus Bailey’s source for one of his most successful books, about the shooting of banking heir Billy Grenville at the hands of his wife, Ann.

On this Easter Sunday, however, Lil’s thoughts were concerned with her lunch party.

“We’re twenty-four in all. I’ve put you next to Adele Harcourt, Gus,” said Lil, walking around her beautifully set table, checking place cards with the expertise of a great hostess. Gus had used Lil as a character in one of his society novels,
Our Own Kind
, and, unlike others in New York society, she had not taken offense, nor had she stopped speaking to him, as so many had. However, she did have one quibble with her character, as Gus wrote her. She insisted every time it came up that she was very definitely
not
the one who had said, “Better dead than Mrs. Fayed” the day after Princess Diana was killed in the automobile accident with her lover, the very rich Dodi Fayed, in the Alma Tunnel in Paris, as Gus had quoted her as saying. She had, of course, said it.

“Adele
adores
meeting writers. Now, you must remember to speak up when you talk to her. She doesn’t hear well, and she hates wearing the hearing aid. She’s inclined to repeat herself a bit, but she’s divine, simply divine. You know, she was my mother’s best friend. They even worked at
Vogue
together back in the thirties. She’s going to be a hundred and five on her next birthday, bless her heart, and she still goes out nearly every night of the week, all dressed up and covered with jewels.”

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