Tycoon

by Harold Robbins

  Harrison Wolcott flushed with indignation. “I think you had better amend your vocabulary, Kimberly. If Jack is a kike, so is John, and so is Joan.”

  Kimberly instructed her lawyers to draw up a separation agreement. They resisted, saying they could get her better terms, but she was adamant that they draft the agreement as she’d said, incorporating the terms her father had negotiated with Jack.

  Kimberly was to receive two radio stations: WCHS, Boston, and WHFD, Hartford. Jack would buy her stock in Lear Network, Incorporated, for $200,000. She would receive the house on Louisburg Square. Jack would pay child support of $500 a month for each child until that child reached the age of twenty-one. He would pay tuition and expenses for each child’s college education.

  At the suggestion of Jack’s lawyer, Kimberly flew to Nevada, where the divorce was filed and granted. It became final on Friday, September 14. The separation agreement was incorporated in the decree.

  Four

  JACK CALLED ON DODGE HALLOWELL IN HIS OFFICE AT BOSton Common Trust.

  Though conspicuously tense and pallid, Dodge affected a hearty welcome and invited Jack to have a seat. His office, while not as large as Harrison Wolcott’s, was handsome and ornamented with antique models of whaling ships. A collection of scrimshaw was displayed on a shelf behind his desk.

  “Well, Jack, I . . . I don’t know what to say.”

  “That’s okay. I do.”

  “I hope you appreciate the circumstances.”

  “I do. What I can’t appreciate is how damned stupid you two could be. My God, man! Even after she demanded I leave the house, and I did, you two were making whoopee in that little apartment you rented across the river.”

  “Your detective followed us even there?” Dodge asked, alarmed.

  “I’m no gentleman, Dodge. Didn’t Kimberly tell you?”

  Dodge’s face darkened. “She showed me the pictures.”

  “You going to marry her now?”

  Dodge swallowed visibly. “We’ve talked about it.”

  “Okay. That will make what I’m about to propose a good deal more palatable. Under the terms of the divorce, she’s to get $200,000 for her stock in my broadcasting company—”

  “We’ll lend you that,” Dodge interrupted quickly. “Boston Common Trust will lend you $200,000 at a low rate of interest. A very low rate of interest.”

  Jack smiled. “I had a different idea in mind. Since you two are going to get married, a transfer of funds from you to her would zero out in terms of your joint assets. You give me $200,000, I give it to her, you marry her, and your money is back in your joint account. I’m sure you’ve got that much cash, but if not, you can borrow it from Boston Common Trust at a very low rate of interest.”

  “That would be most irregular,” Dodge said somberly.

  “Think of the other advantage to yourself,” said Jack. “A reputation for probity is a valuable asset in the banking business.”

  Dodge Hallowell stood. “There is an ugly name for this,” he said stiffly. “But I accept. I’ll write the check now.”

  “Thank you, Dodge,” said Jack. “You’re a gentleman—and a practical man of affairs.”

  Five

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOONS, TWICE A MONTH, JACK COULD GO to the house on Louisburg Square to pick up the children.

  “Where’s your mother?” he asked the children one Saturday.

  “She’s upstairs.”

  “What would you like to do this afternoon?”

  “We’d like to see a movie: Anchors Aweigh” said John. “But there isn’t enough time. We wouldn’t be back in time.”

  “Your mother won’t mind if we’re a little late.”

  Joan shook her head. “Yes, she will.”

  Another Saturday afternoon John told Jack that Kimberly was very angry. “She said you are never to take us up in an airplane again!”

  “But you had such a good time. If we do it again, we won’t tell her. Okay?”

  “Something else, Daddy,” Joan said hesitantly. “Last Sunday Mother took us to the Congregational church.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “But, Daddy, she had us baptized!”

  Jack frowned hard but subdued the frown as fast as he could. “Don’t worry about it, kids,” he said gently. “It didn’t hurt anything.”

  “It hurt your feelings, I bet.”

  “Maybe. But you didn’t do it. She did. Don’t feel bad about it.”

  Joan grimaced. “It was icky.”

  In addition to Kimberly’s venom, Jack had to deal with Connie’s decision about their baby, which was due in November. When Dan Horan returned home from England in July, Connie spoke to Jack on the telephone.

  “Dan will raise the child as if he were its father.”

  “Express my most heartfelt thanks to Dan, Connie. He’s a generous, big-spirited man.”

  “The child is never to know that Dan is not the real father. That means you can’t see it or have any contact with it. No cards or presents. Nothing. Dan and I will bring the child up as we see fit. You know what I mean. You must not interfere.”

  Jack’s eyes were closed, and there were tears on his cheeks. “I understand,” he said quietly. “I’ll go along with your wishes.”

  “And one more thing, Jack,” Connie added before she hung up. “I will never see you again. Not even in public.”

  Late in November, Harrison Wolcott called Jack. “Connie gave birth yesterday to a baby girl. They are naming her Kathleen.”

  Six

  DECEMBER 1945

  “WE SHOULD MARRY AT WELDON ABBEY,” ANNE TOLD JACK. “Arthur is emphatic about it. Rose says she will hear of nothing else.” Arthur was of course the Tenth Earl, the younger brother of Anne’s late husband, and his wife, Rose, was Anne’s successor as Countess of Weldon. “He insists that nothing else would be appropriate.”

  “Let’s do what’s appropriate,” said Jack.

  They arrived at Weldon Abbey two days before the ceremony. The Abbey was not one of the grandest English houses, but it was old and distinguished, built chiefly in the seventeenth century on land that had belonged to a monastery closed by Henry VIII. The Fourth Earl had been a connoisseur of art and had bought paintings all over Europe. A minor but distinctive Rembrandt hung in the hallway that the Fourth Earl had made his gallery. The collection also included a portrait by Sir Anthony Van Dyck of a subject no one had been able to identify, a domestic scene by Vermeer, a plump teenage nude by Boucher, and a portrait of the Fourth Earl’s wife by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

  Though Jack and Anne had said they wanted a small wedding and had suggested a short invitation list, the Earl and the Countess had a different idea. They invited an assortment of peers and knights, most of whom Jack could not confidently identify. Anthony Eden came, as did Duff Cooper and Lady Diana. Vita Sackville-West, who was a distant relative of Anne, attended the wedding with her husband, Harold Nicolson. Max Beaverbrook and Randolph Churchill came, as did Kay Summersby.

  Jack had suggested only a few names—Curt and Betsy Frederick, who were still in London; Mickey Sullivan and Cap Durenberger; and Mr. and Mrs. Herb Morrill. He would have liked to invite Harrison Wolcott but decided that would be inappropriate.

  He put no California names on the invitation list.

  On the day before the wedding, Anne took Jack on a tour of the estate.

  “I had expected to spend most of the rest of my life here. God damn the goddamned Krauts!” She grabbed Jack’s hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry. If . . .”

  He kissed her gently.

  They walked along the gallery, and she identified each of the paintings. When they reached the Boucher, the teenage nude, she asked Jack what he thought of it.

  “Erotic . . .” he murmured with a little smile.

  “You’re going to see a lot of this painting. It’s our wedding present from Arthur and Rose.”

  Tradition had it that Jack was not to see his bride before the ceremony on the day of the
wedding. The Tenth Earl took him for a drive. As they drove in the rain, the earl gave him an extended lecture on the history of his family and Anne’s.

  “Her lineage, you see, is in most respects more distinguished than mine. It’s a century older, at least. Historical records show that an ancestor of hers was beheaded on Tower Green by warrant of King Henry the Eighth.” The Earl smiled broadly, showing his teeth. “We Flemings, Earls of Weldon, can claim no such honor.”

  “I know nothing of my ancestry beyond my grandfather, who was a professor in Berlin and fled Prussia to avoid military service.”

  “Anne’s a fine gel, Jack. She’ll make you the best of wives.”

  “I am honored that she’s accepted me.”

  “I should be amiss if I did not tell you certain facts,” said the earl. “This match astounds a great many people, and they explain it variously. Some say the earldom is bankrupt and faces the loss of Weldon Abbey and that therefore I arranged the marriage and demanded a great deal of money from you. That is, of course, not true. I shouldn’t think of asking you for money.”

  “If it should become necessary, it’s not outside the realm of possibility . . . within limits,” Jack said.

  “Oh, no! God forbid! There is nothing mercenary about this match. You love each other! Rose and I saw that when we first met you at York Terrace.”

  “I do love her. You can be sure of that.”

  “Some say you are a great seducer.”

  “Arthur,” Jack said, using the earl’s Christian name for the first time, “I will be as forthright with you as you have been with me: Anne and I have had no intimate relations.”

  “My God, man! You didn’t have to tell me that!”

  “Why not? It’s the truth. We are deeply in love, and for the first time in my life I have not asked a woman to prove her love.”

  The sun set early in England in December, and it was dark outside when Jack came down from his room and accepted a small whisky just before the wedding party assembled in the art gallery.

  Jack and Anne had agreed on a semiformal wedding. He appeared in a new dark-blue suit, and she wore a simple pink silk dress with an ankle-length gathered skirt and a hat of pink chiffon. Jack whispered to Curt, who stood beside him, that he had never seen anything so lovely. The stone-floored gallery was lighted by a hundred candles and decorated with banks of poinsettias flown in from America. Except for two elderly ladies who were seated in chairs, the guests stood to watch the ceremony.

  The wedding service was performed by the rector of the parish church who, the day before, had questioned Jack closely about his religious beliefs and secured a promise from him that any children of the marriage would be baptized and reared as Christians.

  After the ceremony, dinner was served in the dining room, on a table built in 1687 that was large enough to seat the entire wedding party and all the guests. Portraits of all the Earls of Weldon, including Basil, the Ninth Earl, looked down solemnly from gilt frames onto the candlelit scene. The meal was turtle soup, followed by venison from two stags killed on the estate a few days before, followed by a plum pudding as big as a washtub.

  At ten o’clock the Tenth Earl and his Countess led the bride and groom to their bridal chamber, which was lit by the flames in a huge fireplace. The great bedroom was still uncomfortably cold, but they soon discovered that heating pans had just been run over the sheets on the immense curtained bed where, as they were told, King Edward VII had once slept with his mistress, Mrs. Keppel. They made love without emerging from under the big down comforters—an extraordinarily intimate way to couple.

  Seven

  THEIR WEDDING NIGHT WAS ALL THAT EITHER ONE OF THEM had expected, and more. That they had deferred their ultimate intimacy to this night, and had so often thought of it and dreamed of it, gave it a piquancy it almost surely would have lacked otherwise. Jack made love to his bride as if she were a virgin: tenderly, with elaborate care for her, as though she were a delicate creature he could bruise by his ardor. She followed his lead and accepted him demurely, letting him imagine if he wanted to that he was deflowering a maiden. It became very plain, though, in a little while that she was a fervid lover, who wanted him as much as he wanted her.

  They stayed at Weldon Abbey through Christmas. Anne was going to America with Jack and had a wistful feeling that she might never see the old house again. She took Jack on a walk around the grounds, showing him the ruins of the monastery and of the abbey church, which the first earls had allowed to crumble. To Jack’s great surprise, a peacock strutted in the ruins of the church. He had not supposed this exotic species could survive the cold climate of England, but Anne told him this was by no means the only estate that kept a flock of peafowl.

  On December 27 Jack and Anne left Weldon Abbey and were driven to the airport in London, where they boarded a flight for Majorca. They would stay there ten days, their honeymoon.

  EIGHTEEN

  One

  1946

  ANNE HAD NEVER VISITED THE STATES, BUT SHE BELIEVED New York was where she wanted to live. Jack agreed. He emphatically did not want to live in Boston. They leased a brownstone on East Fifty-fifth Street, and he took office space in the Chrysler Building.

  Mickey Sullivan was with him when one of the lease agents asked Jack if he could provide credit references. “Certainly,” said Jack. “You can check with Mr. Harrison Wolcott, president of Kettering Arms, Incorporated.” Then he glanced at Mickey and showed a trace of a smile. “And Mr. Dodge Hallowell, president of Boston Common Trust.” Mickey turned away until he could choke down a laugh.

  Jack did not have to seek sponsorship for a club. As a graduate of Harvard, he was welcome at the Harvard Club.

  Curt’s broadcasts would now originate from a studio in the Chrysler Building and go out by telephone line to the LNI stations. Curt and Betsy also moved to New York.

  TWO

  IN APRIL, ANNE FLEW TO LONDON AND FROM THERE TRAVeled to Berlin. Beautiful homes had been blasted to pieces in both cities, but many distinguished pieces of furniture, antique silver, and even china had survived and were for sale. She spent much of her own money and some of Jack’s, not guessing that money was scarce for him. She shipped thirty crates of treasures to New York. Few of them arrived before autumn, but when they did and were unpacked, the Lear house on Fifty-fifth Street became a showplace of the city.

  The furniture Anne had shipped to New York was of fine eighteenth-century workmanship, but none of it was delicate; the antiques were not museum pieces; they were meant to be used.

  “Most of these pieces are from Berlin,” she explained to Jack as they worked together, unpacking her purchases and arranging them in their rooms. “I bought them at distress prices. If your house gets knocked about, you salvage what you can and sell it to buy food.”

  “I guess you have to feel sorry for the people who owned some of these things,” Jack suggested.

  “I don’t feel sorry for them at all. They made war and lost. Basil and Cecily were just two of the many millions of fine, innocent people they killed. If their treasures are picked up by the victors, that’s just too bad. I’m sorry I had to pay anything at all for these pieces. I’d have stolen them if I could.”

  The house could not all be furnished with eighteenth-century antiques. The library was not. The master bedroom was not.

  Also, while Anne was in Europe, Jack had contracted with a firm of plumbers to replace all the fixtures in the four bathrooms with more modern fixtures. He could not find a marble shower stall with a needle shower and a bidet, but he did have installed a tiled stall big enough for two people to shower together.

  Before she left for Europe, Anne had told him to go ahead and hire a maid; she would be satisfied with his choice. He hired a thirty-year-old Negro woman named Priscilla Willoughby, who had worked for Tallulah Bankhead until the actress’s idiosyncrasies became too much for her. She came with good references, including one from the redoubtable Tallulah herself.

  Thre
e

  BY DECEMBER THE LEARS CONSIDERED THEMSELVES SUFFIciently well established in their new home to throw a party.

  They invited guests to a dinner party, to be held on Friday evening, December 13. It was to be a small party, nothing grand—a dress rehearsal for something bigger they would do later.

  The invitation list was limited to old friends and associates: Herb Morrill and his wife, Esther; Mickey Sullivan and his wife, Catherine; Curt and Betsy Frederick; and Cap Durenberger and his girlfriend. Anne suggested this would be a good opportunity for her to meet Jack’s family. When he demurred, she insisted. The invitations went out, and on the Tuesday before the Friday-night party, a wire from Los Angeles advised that Erich Lear and a friend, plus Robert and his wife, would be pleased and honored to attend Jack’s housewarming.

  The Lears arrived and checked into the Waldorf only hours before the dinner party, so Jack had no opportunity to introduce them to his new wife before the other guests arrived.

  “All I can tell you, darling, is that I warned you. I hope you can still love me after you see what I come from.”

  The guests were due in less than half an hour. Anne kissed Jack as she straightened his tie.

  He was wearing a single-breasted tuxedo that had arrived unordered and unexpected from his Savile Row tailor, as had a tweed jacket and two pairs of slacks. Curt had explained to Jack that the tailor regarded it as his obligation to see to it that his gentleman was properly outfitted for all occasions. Indeed, he had helped Jack to write a letter to the tailor, explaining that he would not be riding, hunting, or fishing and would not require clothes for those activities, nor would he be coming to England for the races at Ascot or doing any upland shooting in Scotland. Curt had explained also that there would be no point in asking for a bill; the tailor would submit an annual statement, as he had done during Jack’s years in London. Curt also advised him to visit the tailor each time he was in London so the man could check his measurements.