Authors: Dominick Dunne
“This is only just beginning. I’ll shut down his shitty little book! I’ll give him infamous lady!”
L
IL
A
LTEMUS HAD SUCH A DIFFICULT TIME DECIDING
whom to invite to her first lunch party in her new apartment, as her dining room, which had originally been a spare bedroom, only seated eight comfortably, or uncomfortably, as Lil had taken to saying after her first dinner party the previous week. In her old dining room on Fifth Avenue, she could easily seat twenty-four without giving it a second thought, not even having to bring in an extra chair or two from the massive front hall. Lil wanted everything to be particularly nice, as her guest of honor was Adele Harcourt, “that old darling,” as Lil said about her when she invited the other five guests, with the ever-present Addison Kent, whom Adele asked if she could bring, making up the eight. “Addison’s such fun, and he takes me to see all the movies,” said Adele, who was going out less and less. When Adele arrived, beautifully dressed as always, in her black suit, white gloves, and straw hat and veil, she seemed tired as she leaned on Addison’s arm. Addison had changed into a well-cut tweed jacket, with a pocket handkerchief and matching tie that Lil recognized as having belonged to Winkie Williams. He made no mention of the cremation he had attended earlier in the day, but it was apparent from Lil’s expression that she had been informed of Winkie’s passing.
“I miss Winkie so. Oh, Addison, I can’t believe he’s gone!” Lil said, grabbing his hand, swept up in her grief for her friend and forgetting for a moment the disdain she normally felt for Addison Kent. Her eyes began to well up with tears. She turned to Adele. “I got a letter from him just this morning. And look at this exquisite orchid he sent with it!”
Addison squeezed her fingers and said, “I know, I know. He didn’t want a fuss made over him.”
Lil continued talking.
“That’s just like Winkie, not to want a fuss. When I gave those large dinners at the old apartment I always asked Winkie to do the seating. He was a genius at placement.”
Lil turned to Adele and mouthed the word
suicide
, and Adele nodded, wide-eyed.
Adele, always kind, in an attempt to get her dear friend’s mind off of her shocking loss, looked around at Lil’s new apartment and raved about it. “It’s sweet, Lil, so sweet, and I recognize those red damask curtains from the Fifth Avenue apartment,” she said.
“Rosalie Paget said they overpowered the room. I think Rosalie was right, don’t you?” asked Lil, “In his letter Winkie said I should get new ones, that tangerine is the color of the season.”
“Perhaps if you took the valances down,” said Adele.
“The rooms are small, Adele, and the ceilings are low, and the furniture all looks much too large. I suppose I’ll get used to it. There are so many things to get used to these days. Thank God for Gert. I don’t know what I would do without Gert. You must let me know if the Canaletto of Westminster Bridge overpowers the dining room, which is tiny, tiny, tiny.”
“It looks lovely, darling,” said Adele. “It’s supposed to overpower a room. That’s the point of owning a Canaletto.”
“You are dear, Adele. My grandfather bought it from Lord Duveen when he was building the big house on Park Avenue and
Sixty-fifth Street,” said Lil. “I’m so glad I grabbed it right out of my father’s dining room after he died, or my stepmother, the dreaded Dodo, would have nicked it for herself.”
“I have to sit down,” said Adele. “Addison, will you help me over to that chair?”
“Let’s go right in to lunch,” said Lil. “The soufflé’s ready. Adele, you’re sitting next to me, with Addison on the other side. And you here, Ormolu. And Kay Kay’s there. And Jamesey Crocus between. I asked Prince Simeon of Slovakia, but he had to back out at the last minute.”
“Simmy flew to Monte Carlo for the sale of the Krupp diamond,” said Addison, who loved to impart new information, as a way of securing his position. “Faye Converse, the movie star, is selling it in great secrecy. She wants fifty million, and there’s a Saudi prince who’s interested.”
“Faye Converse was always my favorite actress,” said Adele.
“My friend Gus Bailey, you met him at my house at Easter, produced one of Faye Converse’s movies when he was in the movie business, but I never can remember the name of it. Let’s sit down.”
“I so enjoyed having Winkie Williams on occasions like this. I just can’t believe he’s gone,” said Lil in Adele’s ear, to deflect attention from Addison, who was telling a story about Faye Converse as if he knew her, which he didn’t. “I think we should drink a toast to Winkie. I heard from Brucie when he brought over the centerpiece this morning that Addison went to the cremation. Tell us about it, Addison.”
Addison, usually loquacious, chose not to offer his information on the cremation. He didn’t want Lil and Adele and the other ladies and Jamesey Crocus to know that he and Francis Xavior Branigan, with whom he had had a quickie in the men’s room of the Grant P. Trumbull funeral home, had sung “The Extra Man” by Cole Porter as Winkie’s body turned to ashes. “It was brief, just the way Winkie wanted it,” said Addison.
“I heard that Ruby Renthal wants to buy Winkie’s ormolu chest before the Boothby auction,” said Kay Kay Somerset. “I haven’t seen Ruby in years, ever since Elias went to prison.”
“Ruby sees almost no one,” said Addison, who had never met her.
“Almost no one sees Ruby would be a better description of the situation,” said Kay Kay Somerset.
“I have a letter from Winkie asking that the ormolu chest be auctioned off and the proceeds be given to me. But just imagine Mrs. Renthal of all people, coming to my rescue with her checkbook. Little does she know I was the one who blackballed her from getting an apartment at my old building on Fifth Avenue.”
Addison, who had more news to impart, spoke up. “It looks like someone bought the Tavistock mansion on East Seventy-eighth Street and is having it done up inside to a fare-thee-well. Even an indoor swimming pool, I heard,” he said.
“Didn’t somebody’s cook jump out the window in that house?” asked Ormolu Webb.
“It was Tootie Scott-Miller’s cook,” said Lil. “Tootie criticized the soufflé, rather harshly, apparently—you remember how Tootie could get at times—and the cook was so hurt she jumped from the cook’s room on the sixth floor. Right in the middle of a lunch party. Plop, right outside the dining room window.”
“I was there for lunch that day,” said Adele Harcourt. “So was Winkie Williams. It was years ago. She still had her apron on, the poor thing. Plop she went. If you ask me, I think it’s a bad-luck house.”
N
ONE OF
them knew that the cook they were talking about who had jumped out the window of the Tavistock mansion during Tootie Scott-Miller’s lunch party twenty-seven years earlier was Addison Kent’s mother. Addison, who was once called
Artie, could listen to such a story about his mother and not react. He had been not quite a year old when his mother, who was still suffering from postpartum depression, jumped out the sixth-floor window after being rebuked by Tootie Scott-Miller for a disappointing soufflé. An aunt, his mother’s unmarried sister, who was the cook for Miss Winifred Staunton, the richest lady in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, took him in and raised him in the servants’ quarters of the vast Tudor mansion where she worked. As the years passed, the rich lady, now confined to a wheelchair and lonely, began to take an interest in the handsome boy. It was she who thought Addison would be a more suitable first name than Artie. She liked to have him dine with her. By the time he was ten, Addison knew how to remove the doily and finger bowl from the dessert plate and place them ahead to the left before serving himself the ice cream in a silver bowl held by his aunt Agnes, the cook. By the time he was twelve, he could look at a diamond and tell how many carats it was. Miss Staunton, who adored him and might have left him everything, gave him a jeweler’s loupe as a stocking present that Christmas. He often said, when asked about his history, “I was brought up by a Miss Winifred Staunton in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. We had a summerhouse in Harbor Springs.”
What was virtually unknown in Addison Kent’s history was that Miss Winifred Staunton, the richest woman in Grosse Pointe, ultimately felt betrayed by Addison Kent, whom she had championed, whom she had intended to send to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, until a sapphire ring, the disappearance of which had caused great consternation in the household, was discovered in a rolled-up pair of socks in his bureau drawer. There were no scenes, no police, no punishment. He was simply sent on his way to whatever life held for him. His mortified aunt Agnes offered to resign her post, but Miss Staunton did not accept her resignation. They never mentioned
Addison Kent’s name again, until they read about him in the papers years later, where he was pictured in the society pages on the arm of Adele Harcourt.
Miss Staunton, who was very old by then, looked at Agnes, who was still her cook, and Agnes, holding a silver tray with Miss Staunton’s morning hot water and lemon juice, looked back at Miss Staunton. “It’s quite Dickensian in its own way,” Miss Staunton said to Agnes as they peered down at the photograph. “Quite what, ma’am?” Agnes inquired. Miss Staunton then folded the paper, said it didn’t matter anyhow, and put it aside.
A
FTER THE
fig mousse, which was Adele Harcourt’s favorite dessert, they continued to sit in the little dining room for their demitasse.
“I think moving to the living room sort of breaks up the mood, don’t you?” asked Lil.
Adele started to get up from the table.
“Where are you going, Adele?” asked Lil, leaning in. “Oh, the fig mousse. I know it’s your favorite. That’s why Gert insisted on serving it, although she thinks it goes better with dinner than with lunch. Shall I ring for Gert? She’d be so thrilled.”
“No, I’ll go in the kitchen,” said Adele.
“You’ve always been the most thoughtful person, Adele. Mother used to say that about you. Addison, will you please help Adele into the kitchen?”
“It was delicious, divine, better than ever, Gert,” said Adele.
That night Addison headed off to a dinner party. “To say Gert was ecstatic at Adele’s praise would be the understatement of the year,” he told the other guests. He didn’t bother saying that it was during the moment that he let go of Adele’s arm so that he too could shake hands with the cook that everything happened.
As Adele turned to reenter the dining room for the champagne toast to the new apartment, she tripped on the linoleum floor that had become slippery from overuse over the years by prior old tenants of the apartment and broke her hip.
“Such screams as you’ve never heard,” continued Addison, who was the center of attention. “Adele was gallant, simply gallant. Lil, on the other hand, was crying and wringing her hands, saying she’d been meaning to have the linoleum changed ever since she moved into the apartment.”
W
HEN
L
IL
returned from the hospital, after having ridden in the ambulance with Adele and Addison, whom she didn’t like, Gert, who had brought her a cup of tea, said to her, “It was Mr. Kent. He let go of Mrs. Harcourt’s arm to shake hands with me, copying the way Mrs. Harcourt did, and that’s when she fell, when he let go of her.”
“I’ve been meaning to change that linoleum ever since I moved into this damn apartment, ever since that Guatemalan maid slipped, do you remember, Gert? The one who recently worked for poor Winkie.”
“Immaculata,” said Gert.
“What?”
“Immaculata. That was the Guatemalan maid’s name.”
“She couldn’t sue, thank God. Wasn’t she an illegal alien?”
“I don’t know, Missus.” said Gert.
“They all are these days.”
“Missus, I know this isn’t a very convenient time, but there’s something I have to talk to you about,” said Gert.
A nervous expression passed quickly across Lil’s face, as though she knew what Gert was going to ask and she dreaded the answer she knew she had to give. She was careful not to betray herself to her cook.
“And there’s something I have to talk to you about, Gert. About the trip to Ireland this year to see your niece. It’s just not going to work out for me. Ever since Dodo, that ghastly stepmother of mine, got all the money that was supposed to come to me, and since young Laurance is keeping me on such a tight financial leash, I think we’re going to have to put the trip off until next year. From now on, make it every other year rather than every year.”
I
T WASN’T UNTIL THE BOARDS WERE REMOVED FROM THE
windows of the old Tavistock mansion on East Seventy-eighth Street between Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue and the limestone was washed for the first time in sixty years that people in the neighborhood began to notice that there was magnificence in the French château that they had walked by every day for years but overlooked in its neglected state. The original owners, back in the 1920s, were the Clarence Pierpont Tavistocks, who brought so much of the exquisite paneling in the library and dining room from Kingswood Castle in Wiltshire, as arranged and brokered for them by Lord Duveen, then in the twilight years of his famous career of providing art and sculpture from the great houses of England, France, Italy, and Spain for the new great houses of New York, Boston, and Newport. The house itself had been designed by Odgen Codman, a Bostonian architect and decorator not much remembered these days other than as the collaborator with Edith Wharton, whose novels dealt with the occupants of such grand houses, on her book on the art of decorating. The Clarence Pierpont Tavistocks never lived in the beautiful mansion they had so lovingly built and decorated. On the night before they were to move in, they were killed while returning
from the opera in an automobile accident caused by their chauffeur, O’Connor, who ran a red light and crashed into a telephone pole on the corner of Park Avenue and East Seventy-eighth Street. O’Connor, who was drunk, served ten years.
On East Seventy-eighth Street, people were beginning to wonder
who
was spending the fortune that it must be taking to restore the house to its former grandeur. Even very rich people who never had to worry about money and could always have anything they wanted without thinking about cost couldn’t stop discussing how much money someone was spending on the extensive renovations.