The gem of the collection was the famous “Sèvres Commode,” made by Riesener. This exquisite chest of drawers was inlaid with individual Sèvres porcelain plaques, each one a different flower. The story of how I found the chest was famous: I’d spotted it in a thrift shop on the Lower East Side of New York, of all places—quite near, coincidentally, the now defunct antiques store where Gerald van der Kemp had found the Queen’s bedspread in the early 1950s. The plaques had been painted over and the maître’s signature was obscured by dirt. Still, I recognized it for the treasure it was and bought it. I had it restored to a glory no one dreamed possible. Later on, Ethan helped me authenticate the piece, a record of which was found in the Queen’s household inventory for Le Petit Trianon.
As we strolled past the gallery’s majestic interiors, I recalled the genesis of various purchases. The privilege of collecting often sent me on a great treasure hunt with all the mystery, intrigue, frustration, and (with luck) satisfaction attendant on such an adventure. Each example of furniture, each painting, each piece of porcelain was a witness to history with its own little story. Those objects had survived revolutions, world wars, ignorance, and, in my case, an insane adventures. Thank God, at least these things are in the museum where Monique can’t get her hands on them, I thought. Let’s hear it for the inanimate object.
“Just remember who’s responsible for all this, Jo,” Ethan said as we stopped to survey the Queen’s private library. “No one’s going to forget what you’ve done for this institution—hell—for this city.”
But—a New York but—I’d lived in New York long enough to know the silken ropes. Out of money, out of mind.
“Then why do I feel like Marie Antoinette without the guillotine?” I said with a grim chuckle.
I soon discovered that it was one thing to be best friends with someone and quite another to live with them. June, an eleemosynary workhorse, dedicated to committee meetings and organizing benefits for her pet causes, was far more controlling at home than I’d ever imagined. Her attention to detail was precisely why she was good at getting things done.
Living with her, however, was a nightmare. At first June accommodated me in every way she could, treating me as an honored guest. But as the days wore on and I settled in, the amenities she first offered were gradually taken away, mainly because although June and Charlie presented a very grand façade to the outside world, they lived on a veritable shoestring in private. June thought nothing of spending thousands of dollars on clothes, but when it came time to pay for help, she was a skinflint.
Colleen, the Irish maid who had helped me with my bags, was the only servant the Kahns employed on a full-time basis, except for the cook. When they had a party, which was quite often, they hired a small battalion of waiters and waitresses who were familiar faces to all of us who frequented the Kahn’s house. I, like everyone in New York, just assumed this little army worked for them. They didn’t. Colleen cleaned the entire apartment herself and she did the laundry. Having even a single guest to stay for any extended period of time, therefore, basically increased the poor woman’s workload by one third.
June dropped a polite hint that it might be “a tad easier for the staff”—as she referred to the hapless maid—if I joined her and Charlie at 6:45 sharp at the small round table in front of the window in the dining room where the Kahns ritually had their breakfast every morning.
I began to dread the sight of June wearing that fuzzy pink bathrobe, her face glistening with cold cream, her hair in pincurls, fretting about “the zillion things” she had to do that day. I was frankly amazed she let Charlie see her like that—June, who was usually so meticulous about her appearance in public—“band-box” pretty, as my mother used to say. Then again, Charlie was oblivious to human contact at that or, now that I think of it, pretty much any hour. Always nattily dressed in his navy cashmere slippers and matching cashmere bathrobe over striped pajamas buttoned up to the neck, the rail-thin man sat in resolute silence at the breakfast table, sipping his coffee at rhythmic intervals, studying the obituaries of The New York Times, which he referred to as “mini novels.”
“Death invigorates him,” June once whispered to me.
Other things began to drive me crazy as well: the way June fussed over every little thing, making sure every object in the house was angled correctly, dust-free, polished bright. Her fetish about punctuality seemed to grow exponentially with each passing day. Though a stickler for detail myself, I nonetheless felt that June carried control into the realm of obsession. She even had the nerve to go into my room to tidy it up when I wasn’t there, further emphasizing the fact that we were no longer on an equal footing.
On the morning I announced I was leaving, June feigned sadness, but the relief in her voice was palpable.
“Naturally, I can’t stop you. But where will you go?” she said with mock concern.
“To Betty’s,” I said. “It’s time you and Charlie had a break.”
I packed my bags—so many bags—tipped Colleen several hundred dollars to try to make up in part of the salary I knew June wasn’t paying her, and went off to stay with the Watermans.
Betty said, referring to the Kahns: “I don’t know how you stood it so long with those two. They’re both so goddamn anal. We spent a week with them in Lyford Cay one year and I was ready to throw myself to the sharks.”
Gil and Betty Waterman lived in an elegant limestone townhouse on a pretty tree-lined block on East Seventy-third Street. Their house was right across the street from another elegant limestone townhouse where Gil had his art gallery. A small brass plaque to the right of the door read simply: 32. Gil saw clients only through referrals. He wasn’t interested in street trade.
Their house was crammed with great art from Rembrandt to Rothko that everyone knew was for sale at the right price. My favorite was the Matisse collage sweeping over one entire wall of the dining room like wallpaper.
“I’m putting you upstairs with the family,” Betty told me.
I followed her up four flights of stairs to a top-floor bedroom across the hall from her daughter, Missy.
Missy Waterman was a twenty-five-year-old teenager with long hair, a long face, and a frisky gait. She reminded me of an Afghan hound. She was sunny at times, sullen at others, and wholly preoccupied with herself. My pleas to her to turn down the music or close her door when she was talking on the phone at three in the morning were met with profuse apologies then immediate recurrence. Nothing I ever said to her seemed to make an impact. She worked downtown as a video artist. She showed me some of her work: an hour-long tape of a woman sitting on a toilet reading the National Enquirer was one of her efforts. Missy was basically a sweet young woman, but just like the fruits of her chosen profession, a little of Missy went a long way.
Life with the Watermans was oddly much less of a strain than life with the Kahns, even though the Waterman household was louder and more chaotic. Gil Waterman, a young-looking fifty-four-year-old, was extremely fond of opera, which he played at full volume whenever he was home. I liked the opera, too, but I thought if I had to listen to Aïda dying at fifty decibels one more day in a row, I’d kill myself.
Betty was an amateur potter. She had a studio with a skylight on the top floor where she made plates that had “FUCK YOU” written on the underside of them so if people turned them over to see where they were from, they would get the message. She also drank quite a bit and was always exhorting me to join her. The sun often went over the yardarm for Betty as early as eleven in the morning, which was another drawback to living there because talking to her when she was in this condition was like playing tennis against a backboard. Rather than try, I drank too.
I knew I had to get cracking, though, and in fairly short order, I went out in search of my own apartment. Some of the real estate agents who took me around were women who, like myself, had fallen on hard financial times fairly late in life. It looked like a rather lucrative occupation if you had the temperament for it. I didn’t. T
he people who were good at it were savvy and tough in a way I wasn’t. They were interesting to talk to because they often got wind of what was really up in New York before anyone else did.
“When they ask you to come and appraise their apartment for quote unquote ‘insurance purposes,’ you can bet there’s trouble in the marriage,” one of them told me.
It was through a real estate agent that I learned Monique had put my old apartment on the market for eighteen million dollars.
“I hear she’s moving to Paris,” the woman told me.
I felt an intense sense of relief, not only because I had a vague dread of the Countess, but because I knew that the only reason she would be selling the apartment was because she had effectively been frozen out of the world she so coveted. People were loyal, after all. Money was not always the golden key.
I couldn’t find anything decent to rent or to buy, nothing I could afford, at any rate. But then, I had a bit of luck. A friend of Betty’s who owned a small apartment on Park Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street was moving to Bangkok for a year. The building’s stuffy board refused to let her sublet the apartment. She needed someone trustworthy to basically house-sit until she got back. I moved in.
The apartment was beige and bland. I rearranged the furniture and bought some pillows and throws to make it look less like a hotel room. It was heavenly to be alone; I now set about seriously planning the rest of my life.
Chapter 13
My former existence was fading faster than a dream. Reentry into Real Life, as I now thought of it, was a stark adjustment. I quickly realized how dependent I’d become on wealth and the freedom and distractions it afforded. My earning potential and, indeed, the very desire to make my own living had atrophied in the warm climate of wealth. Little did I know I’d been living in a spa. But I certainly knew it now that I was back out in the cold. No longer a lady of leisure, I desperately needed a job.
I knew a lot about eighteenth-century art and furniture, but I was primarily self-taught with comparatively little in the way of a formal education. Except college. Even though I’d consulted with some of the greatest scholars over the years, I, myself, had no academic credentials. That meant I couldn’t get a job as a teacher or a curator, which I would have enjoyed.
I tossed around a few ideas with friends: becoming a consultant to an auction house; setting up a small antiques shop; teaching people how to form museum-quality collections; writing a book on the great ébénistes. But the general consensus among those who knew me best was that I would make a great interior decorator.
I must say the thought had often occurred to me, even when I didn’t need the money. I loved hunting for art and furniture and marvelous fabrics. I loved auctions. My idea of a sublime day was to roam around the flea markets and antiques shops of any city I happened to be in.
“Who’s more qualified than you?” Betty said. “You’ve got the greatest taste in the world.”
And indeed, Henri St. Martin, the late, great French decorator, from whom I’d learned so much when we had worked together on my various abodes, had always told me: “Vous êtes douée”—I was “a natural.” I’d studied at the master’s knee and I had a flare for creating an elegant atmosphere. I knew a lot of marvelous, quirky fabric houses and antiques shops. It would be difficult to sell me a fake. And I had a resale number that I’d often used to save money, even in the days when money wasn’t a consideration. I saw no point in needless waste.
June got the ball rolling very generously, commissioning me to “spruce up her ratty old dining room,” as she put it. She and Betty gave me a big luncheon to launch my new career. They took over Pug’s, a fashionable bistro on Lexington Avenue in the seventies, and rallied the troops behind me.
I saw no signs of my popularity waning. I’d obviously kept my cachet. Even the amis mondains came out to honor me, which was amazing considering downturns in fortune as severe as my own usually sent them scattering fast. Over the years, I’d made a little study of the people who used celebrated or rich friends to enhance themselves. There was a whole group of them. Everyone knew who they were. They courted rising stars with a vengeance, but when the chips were down, their silence was audible.
At lunch, everyone went out of their way to tell me how much they admired me for “getting on with my life.” I thought if I heard that particular phrase one more time I was going to scream. I felt rather like the latest fashionable cause people had taken up—either because they genuinely liked me, or because they were sorry for me, or simply because they feared a similar misfortune might hit them one day and they were hedging their bets.
Monique’s name was not mentioned once—not within my hearing distance, at any rate. After having endured endless stories about Monique being snubbed wherever she went (I often heard three or four versions of the same tale, embellished by enthusiasm with each telling), I finally made it crystal clear she didn’t exist for me. I didn’t want to hear her name.
Afterward, Betty told me that no one had seen or spoken to “the Cuntess,” as Betty always referred to her, in months.
“She probably got fed up and went back to hell,” Betty said.
I was relieved not to have to think about her anymore.
Jo Slater, Inc. officially opened in June of 1997. The hectic pace of my new job invigorated me. I scurried around to auction previews, fabric houses, and little out-of-the-way antiques shops around town, hunting for bric-a-brac and bargains. If there was a jewel in the junk, I found it. My first job went smoothly. June was delighted with her new dining room. Word spread. Soon I had a few clients. I hired an assistant, Melissa, an eager young woman who had just graduated from design school. The two of us worked out of my apartment to save money. I tried to keep the place organized, but soon it was overflowing with swatches and sketches.
It was hard work but I was having fun. I was written up in Nous and House Décor. Business was good. I didn’t want to kid myself, however. I knew I was the flavor of the month and that there was a lot of competition out there. I figured that when the novelty of my situation wore off and people learned I was working out of a borrowed apartment, decorating in order to make ends meet, not merely as a ladylike hobby, my luster would dim a bit. That was to be expected. But I was determined to make a success of Jo Slater, Inc. I wanted people to come to me because of my talent, not because of my name. I invested my heart and soul in every single detail of every single job.
Then I got my big break. Trish Bromire called me up one afternoon and told me about some friends of theirs from Cincinnati called Neil and Agatha Dent. The Dents were one of those attractive, socially mobile couples who, having made a fortune, grow bored with whatever city they’re in and move to New York seeking to expand their horizons. I’d watched many such types come and go over the years. Some had stayed and become fixtures of the community; others had left, either because they were never accepted in the way they envisioned, or went broke, or got involved in a scandal, or simply grew sick and tired of the whole scene and decided home wasn’t so provincial after all.
Neil and Agatha were an uncommonly tall and handsome couple, both in their mid-fifties. Though they were a tad too earnest and careful to be really good fun, they were a pleasant pair, easy to be around. Neil was a venture capitalist who had made scads of money in the telecommunications field and sold out way before it went belly-up. He had a blunt Rotarian sense of humor. He liked bathroom jokes that were often quite funny.
Agatha was more refined though a bit overanxious to do everything “right.” It was clear to me from the start that she had gleaned the little she knew about New York social life primarily from the pages of Nous magazine, which she pronounced “Noose,” until Trish corrected her. And like most out-of-towners, she invariably got it wrong at first. (It’s always difficult to convince people who move to New York that many of the people they really want to know are ones they’ve never heard of.)
Agatha, far more than Neil, was desperate to know the “top people,”
as she called them. And she did know something about social climbing. Having jumped the first hurdle—namely, buying a great apartment in a very fashionable building on Park Avenue—she now had to choose the right decorator.
The Dents’ original choice had been Dieter Lucino, a scrappy, talented architect-designer from California, who had built his reputation creating sweepingly grand interiors for new money who wanted to look like old royalty. Agatha told Trish Bromire she wanted Lucino because she had read the profile on him in Nous. I knew the piece she was referring to:
Lucino gives estimates for estimates and drops clients faster than he drops names if they so much as question a bill. His motto is, “If you have to ask, you can’t afford me.” He prides himself on being a snob and won’t take on just any client, even if they are rich.
I knew this made him doubly attractive to those whose self-importance relied heavily on the exclusion of others. The article went on to say:
Social climbers hoping to make an immediate splash in New York hire Lucino to decorate their houses, figuring that if their own drawing power is not sufficient, Lucino’s is. How right they are. Everyone wants to see the master’s work and speculate on how much it all cost.
What the article didn’t mention was that Lucino’s services included the redesign of his clients’ lives as well as their houses. There were people who depended on him so much they insisted he select the Christmas and birthday presents they gave. One woman I knew consulted him on every single accessory that came into her house, including the shade of her toilet paper. Another insisted he go to the couture collections with her in Paris to pick out her clothes to complement the rooms he had decorated. I myself had used him on several occasions. I admired his work. He was an aggressive little genius—the Napoleon of decorators.
Social Crimes Page 12