by Emma Morgan
*****
The Mail On Sunday, Sunday 17th October 2010
Having duped the tabloids, Stacey Blyth was sensationally outed as a fraud last week. Now, for the first time, the real heir to the Dulac oil billions, Cady Stone, talks about the night she met her mother, and grandmother, and how she feels about Blyth’s betrayal...
‘As Duluc would have it...’: the identity theft that revealed a billion-dollar baby
The similarity is striking. As three generations of the Dulac family sit before me, it is clear their connection goes as deep as their genes. But until recently, golden-era screen goddess (and self-confessed gossip-mag addict) Louise only knew her granddaughter by reputation, unaware that she and Cady Stone were related. It was a secret Estella, her only child by her late billionaire oil-heir lover, had kept for three-and-a-half decades, not knowing herself what had become of the baby she had given up for adoption in 1976.
So how were the family reunited, after all this time?
“I am a hoarder,” explains Cady, the much-photographed willowy blonde whose boho dress-sense belies an admirably steely quality. “I have always known I was adopted, my parents were always very open about it and I respect them for that but, as a result, I keep everything. As if I am hoarding memories, in lieu of a family tree. Everything I have ever loved – a book, a record or CD, a movie, a dress or shoes or accessory... even magazines where I have particularly loved pictures – I have kept.”
Her north London townhouse is like a storage facility, she explains, full of boxes of trinkets and clippings, mementos rather than heirlooms.
“It is surprising what you forget about your own life,” she continues, “let alone learn about someone else’s. Every so often, I would take out a box or crate at random and go through the contents, and events would flood back. And it gave me a sense of continuity with my own life, if not with my biological parents’.”
At this, slender if weather-beaten beauty Estella looks a little uncomfortable, guilty even, which Cady spots, shaking her head. “I don’t blame Stella” – as she is called by both her mother and daughter, who says she prefers not to refer to her as ‘Mum’ or ‘Mother’ yet – “I totally understand what she did and I don’t judge her for it. She did the only thing she could do at the time, that was her karma.”
(Her grandmother frowns comically at the spirituality slang.)
“One day, I opened a box full of my parents’ pictures and in amongst it was that snap that turned up in the papers recently, taken at the Mamounia in Marrakech. They were in masks – the same masks that were hanging on the wall downstairs, so I knew it was them, but the other woman most intrigued me. I felt like I knew her, but didn’t know who she was. I half remembered an anecdote my father once told about meeting a girl dressed like Marlene Dietrich at a party, but by now there was no-one I could ask...”
She doesn’t suggest the link, but Cady’s hoarding seems to have become chronic when her adored and adoring adoptive parents were killed in a car accident during her late teens; she inherited the house and set about making it a shrine to their lives. Amongst their files, she found the papers that would prove vital to uncovering her identity.
“My father was in the diplomatic corps and was very efficient, so their papers were all in order already, really. The executor took what was needed to settle the estate, such as it was, and I was left with the rest. All of which I read, to know them better.”
I suggest she coped with the loss well, considering she was left all alone.
“Maybe...” she half agrees. “As much as my parents cared for me, I always had the sense it was a temporary arrangement, somehow. They travelled and were posted abroad a lot and I went away to school so sometimes we were in the house at the same time and sometimes not. We passed in the night, mainly. So when they died, it was just like they had been sent away again and I sorted their papers to send on after them.”
Amongst the papers, three documents were found which puzzled Cady and the executor alike. Adoption papers, with a strange name on them – “they never called me Suki, or Amy” – a will and a death certificate.
“That was the oddest part,” she says, avoiding eye contact with Estella. “There was no copy of my birth certificate, the names on the adoption papers didn’t tally – we thought maybe I had a sister or something but the dates matched me – and then the death certificate for some woman I had never heard of, who named me in her will.”
Intrigued, Cady hired a private detective to investigate the dead woman – only to learn that not only was her death certificate phony but she never actually existed.
“It was well done for the time, certainly, but it was a fake. They had copied the details for another woman who had died around the same time and just changed the name, but the serial number meant the original file could be found and compared.”
Cady felt she was back where she started until her hired gun pointed out two things – one, that you would only fake a death certificate if you wanted to fake a death and, two, that a detail had been left on the paper that indicated the dead woman had given birth.
“This was the most amazing thing, and it seems like nothing. Every woman who gives birth naturally – as in, not via a C-section – gets these marks left on her pelvis. So you could dig up a mother in a hundred, two hundred years, and you could tell from her bones that she has given birth – it is incredible, like the most indelible tattoo. It is literally written on the body in a way that cannot be faked. And for some reason, the certificate they had chosen to copy carried this detail.”
Could that not have been a coincidence?
“There are no coincidences, that’s what I believe,” Cady insists, her grandmother raising an eyebrow, obviously no fan of modern self-help doctrines. “I think whether it was deliberate or not, the subconscious of the man who copied the document left in this detail, so I – or whoever one day found the papers – would know.”
Know what – what did it tell her?
“It told me my mother was not dead. That it had been made to look that way, for whatever reason, but that she was not dead. And that was the happiest day of my life.” She beams as she speaks, and Estella slowly joins in. “Of course, with the name being fake, I couldn’t get any further with it at that point, but just knowing the possibility existed that she was alive was enough. I had buried my parents but resurrected my mother.”
At this point, Estella takes up the story.
“I know how all this must look and, please believe me, I hated myself for it every single day of my life until meeting Su... Cady in person, and having her forgiveness. I really did. I mean, I could have kept her, I suppose, but I was in such a strange place, I didn’t know how to take care of myself, let alone how to raise a baby.”
Heroin has been mentioned many times in connection to Estella, since her sojourn in Marrakech was revealed, but she denies all allegations of drug-taking.
“That was just part of the cover story,” she explains. “We wanted to make the death look authentic, so we decided I would ‘overdose’, and the stuff about drug use on the death certificate meant the adoption process was sped up, so it worked out for everyone.”
‘Everyone’ and ‘We’ being people who could arrange fake certificates?
“My father,” says Cady, “my adoptive father, that is. As I said, he was a diplomat, he could pull strings and fill out forms and whip up replacement passports and so on, and so he dealt with the paperwork. And quite well, really. I mean, it went unnoticed for 20 years, and even then it was a dead end – no pun intended.”
Estella nods and continues her story. “I met them at the Mamounia, at the party in the picture. They were the first people I had really talked to since sort of exiling myself out in Morocco, and we really hit it off, but I could see the woman had a terrible sadness about her, like she was grieving. When she went to the restroom at one point, I asked her husband, ‘Is she OK?’ and he came out with all this stuff about a stillborn baby, like he
hadn’t told anyone yet, and it just gushed out of him. It was written all over their faces.”
So you found out you were pregnant and immediately offered them your baby?
Estella shakes her head. “Absolutely not, no. No, it was nothing like that. I really wanted to keep her, but I just... couldn’t.” She inhales deeply. “I led a sheltered life. Very sheltered. Mother was just trying to keep me protected but... it went too far. We lived in this huge house with acres of grounds and I knew nothing of the world. Nothing. I was home-schooled, and very well, but I was utterly ignorant of reality.”
Louise does not miss her cue. “Stella had the very best of everything. Clothes, food, education, everything! She wanted for nothing.”
“I wanted some freedom,” insists Estella. “I wanted to be allowed out, on my own.”
“And I let you, did I not? I let you go to college – and look what happened!”
What happened was Stella was kidnapped, like Patty Hearst and John Paul Getty III before her – right?
“It wasn’t exactly what it looked like,” Estella admits, sheepishly. “The thing was, well, Mother hadn’t worked in such a long time and she came up with this...”
“Ruse!” cackles Louise. “A wonderful ruse – but best-laid plans and all that.”
The kidnapping was a con?
“We were very, very rich,” says Louise with gusto, as if beginning a soliloquy. “Or rather, I was. Her father drank himself to death when Stella was, I don’t know, ten? And his mother followed a couple of years later. So I got the lot. Which was wonderful in many ways, as the mansion was ever so run-down, you see, and they had been too tight to get it fixed up. They thought Getty’s idea of a payphone for guests was a wonderful idea – only putting in the payphone in the first place was too pricey!”
She hoots at the memory.
“Anyway, once we started the renovations – and a lot needed doing, believe me, once they started stripping paper whole walls fell down, it was that sort of ruin – word got around as to how much money I had. And the estimates were way off, as they always are, but I was put at the top of some chart. And when that happens, you do start to worry terribly about thefts and kidnappings and things, so, yes, I did get a little overprotective. But I couldn’t bear the alternative, you see. I do love Stella. So very much.”
Going by Estella’s reaction, this appears to be news to her daughter-turned-carer.
“Then I had some health problems, so I stopped socialising, and I suppose we became rather reclusive. We didn’t really see anyone apart from workmen and staff for almost a decade. Which is a very long time.” Louise’s smile disappears. “It is silly, really, because no-one knew what Stella looked like, and we could have smuggled her out to go to school, but I just did not want to take the chance of losing her. So we stayed in.”
“Which was fine, I guess,” says Estella, generously, “but I really wanted to go to college. I didn’t want to spend my twenties in the house, so I insisted I be allowed to go, under a fake name if needs be. So arrangements were made I would start in September.”
“Leaving me all alone!” cries Louise. “Which would not do. So I decided on a comeback. Lots of the old dames did it – Bette Davies took out that ad, if you remember. Well, I wasn’t going to do anything so coarse as to beg for work, I just wanted to get my name known again and I knew demand would follow. So we came up with a plan. The Getty boy had been taken a couple of years earlier, and the Hearst girl was still at large at the time, so we thought, ‘What could be better that a quick kidnapping?’”
“It wasn’t as dramatic as it all sounds,” says a shamefaced Estella. “The plan was I would ‘go missing’ one afternoon, would be seen leaving my digs in a van going at high speed, then Mother would make an appeal and we would pretend money had changed hands and I would be left on the outskirts of Malibu somewhere, scruffy and bedraggled. Mother would be famous again and I would be used goods for any future attempts.”
But that isn’t what happened, is it?
Estella shakes her head.
“There were some... complications.”
Such as?
“Mother wanted some work done at the last minute – not surgical, just a cosmetic dental procedure – but she was still groggy from the anaesthetic when the reporters called and so forgot the script and said some gibberish about it all seeming ‘gauche’...”
“...And then they bloody well arrested Patty Hearst!” roars Louise. “Poor Stella! She is staying some old stable block beyond the beach where she could safely hide out for a few days, only all anyone can talk about is ‘Hearst, Hearst, Hearst’!”
“So I made some amendments,” says Estella. “I had a radio, so I knew what was going on, and that my story was dead in the water, so I hitched a ride to the airport. I had taken plenty of clothes with me, and money from my trust I had been stashing away since I turned 18, just in case I need a contingency plan, so I caught a plane to Europe instead.”
And you went along with this change of plans, did you, Louise?
“I did not! I was furious. Once the ether or whatever it was had worn off, I realised it had all gone wrong, and when I sent a driver to the stables they came back without Stella. Next thing I know, I get a call from the Ritz in Paris, of all places, and we have a blazing row about everything and don’t see each other for I don’t know how long.”
“It’s true,” says Estella. “We said lots of awful things to one another, things I don’t think we even meant, but it felt like there was no going back for me, at that moment. So I went out and got drunk – and got pregnant.”
At the mention of her father, Cady perks up.
“He was the son of some industrialist, the father. He and his sister, I think maybe they were twins, were doing a kind of Grand Tour, and I tagged along, to Morocco. But she got all jealous when I got together with her brother, and they ended up leaving Marrakech without telling me. So I was stranded. And then I found out I was expecting.”
Did you not want to track them down, to tell them about the baby?
“Of course,” says Estella, “but I didn’t know his name. He said it was Randy, ‘as in Randolf’, but I knew he was lying because he would never show me his passport. Then I refused to show him mine, so he didn’t know who I was either.”
Meeting the grieving couple must have been a godsend, then?
“I had been at the hotel for a couple of weeks by then, and had got to know the staff well. They were very kind and would check to see how I was, being all alone, but it wasn’t the same as having a real friend – I was paying them to be kind to me, after all. So yes, they were wonderful. And my being pregnant seemed to cheer them up, so we bonded and they were very helpful after I gave birth.”
“But they were probably being posted back to Britain soon, and the thought of being alone again was too much to bear, too much to cope with. They offered to let me come and live with them in England, and I was going to, but I felt if I was in a strange house in a strange land again, now with a baby to care for, I would be no better off than if I had never left California. I think I had a breakdown, maybe. And then one of them said they would look after the baby for me for as long as it took to sort myself out and I said, not meaning it – or maybe I did, I was so addled and upset – ‘You can have her.’ And somehow that became fact. And he could get all the papers sorted so quickly, he could cover up my disappearing with an ambulance and some paperwork done after hours, then they would have a replacement baby and I would have my freedom. No-one would know who I was and I could just travel around and see the world and go at my own pace and not have to worry about being kidnapped or over-protected or...
“Or being a mother?” asks Cady, pointedly.
“I was too young, mentally. Just because your body can cope with a baby doesn’t mean your mind can. And I couldn’t just stop seeing the world there and then. It would have been like being a battery chicken, like I was destined to a life spent indoors, just existing until I died.
I didn’t want that for me and I didn’t want that for Cady. What kind of life would she have had if her mother was just some immature idiot? She would have been worse off than I already was. But they could give her a life.”
“Of course, I knew nothing of this,” says Louise, her cloud-like silver hair giving her head a halo-like glow. “I had a granddaughter and no-one told me, until that party!”
“Which was how I had planned it,” admits Cady. “I had seen a documentary about my mother on the 20th anniversary of her disappearance, ‘The Forgotten Heiress’ or something. All it really said was that she had gone missing the day before Patty Hearst was captured and no-one knew what had become of her, but her face rang a bell. And finally I placed it. I had a dream, believe it or not, where I met Estella Dulac at a party, and everyone but us was wearing masks! And I didn’t connect it to that photo at the time but eventually my conscious mind made sense of it all and I knew who she was.”
Did you hire another detective?
“Not this time, no. I mean, I had the internet now, I could go online and research it all myself. So I pieced it all together and realised that the disappearance happened a few months before I was born and adopted, but I had nothing other than that. So I focused on Louise instead, on trying to find out if she was still alive and, if so, where she was.”
And at some point you told someone else about your investigations?
“I didn’t tell a soul. Not intentionally...”
What does that mean?
With a regretful sigh, Cady starts to bring the story full circle.
“As everyone now knows had a friend – a stray, really. Most people I socialise with are well-known and very busy, so the only chance I get to see them is at shows or premieres or launches or whatever, so that was my social life. And there was a girl I met there and she looked so lost and shabby my heart went out to her. She told me that she was adopted too, and that her parents were also dead; I have no idea if she was telling the truth, but I think I wanted to believe her and that we had a common bond. And I was lonely, I suppose, so I let her move in with me for a while, for company.
“After a while, she started to call me Lady Macbeth. We had just seen a new production of it and I suppose the female lead maybe looked a little like me, only much older, but it was something specific about her she was goading me about.”
Ambition? Ruthlessness?
Cady shakes her head.
“You must know some Shakespeare – you probably went to the opening nights, right?” she chides her grandmother. The elderly actress only pretends to be annoyed.
“I know one scene, dear child, one scene only.”
“Which one?”
“‘Out, damned spot!’ and all that... Did you kill someone?”
“No! The doctor and the ‘Gentlewoman’, do you remember that bit?”
“You will have to refresh my memory.”
Cady seems perfectly happy to have the floor to herself.
“Before Lady Macbeth enters, and incriminates herself and dies, the doctor and the Gentlewoman have a conversation about her sleep-walking and -talking.”
You sleepwalk?
“I sleep talk. I knew I did, I think, I have been told by exes but it never seemed to be a big deal, no-one said they minded. But apparently I sometimes say things I shouldn’t, when I have dropped off on the sofa after nights out. And my so-called ‘friend’ wrote them all down as fact and sold them to the highest bidder.”
“It is called ‘Somnambulism’. And it gave me away. It gave us away. I must have talked about Stella, only she kept all that stuff to herself. And I was oblivious, until I realised the only person who could have known about what was ending up in print, some of it very personal indeed, was her – at first I thought she must have been bugging me and that was how she found everything out. So we had a huge row and I threw her out and next thing I heard she had been rescued from the Thames. At the time I felt terribly guilty but now I think it was her Lady Macbeth moment – she was trying to wash off the stain of selling me out for months on end, messing up friendships, almost ruining my relationship with... well, I would rather not say any more on the subject. Other than that when I came to clean out the room I had let her stay in, it became apparent she had been going through the storage boxes in there and had found the certificates. There were in the wrong place, like she had found them, photocopied them and put them back anywhere.”
And you worried if she had overheard you sleep-talking, she knew as much as you?
“Exactly. I mean, what she would do with the information, I couldn’t know... In a way, though, I owe her some thanks, because she forced me to take action at last.”
So you arranged the party for Louise’s 95th birthday?
(The almost-centenarian tuts playfully at my indiscretion.)
“I did. I knew Louise lived in London, or did the last time anyone heard from her. Years earlier I bought some old interview tapes off an auction site that claimed to be her last interview, and she said she came back to England in the ’80s, after Chaplin died.”
“Did I?” Louise blushes. “I remember that journalist, she was very persuasive... I wonder if she drugged me to get me to say more? Probably not, I always did love an audience! But she never printed anything. She said no-one was interested in my story, that I was not famous or salacious enough. Do you think they would say that now?”
“So,” says Cady, “I had a hunch that if she lived in town still, and I arranged a party and made enough of a fuss about it, then maybe she would hear about it and show up. And I was right. But I never knew about Stella – that was the real surprise to me.”
No-one in attendance expected that reunion, least of all the delusional former friend who was either maintaining an elaborate pretence or had come to believe that she really had lived Cady’s life. Indeed, it was her tearful declaration to Louise that she was her unknown granddaughter that finally ended the mystery of Stella’s disappearance.
“I don’t know if I would have been bold enough to simply tell Louise who I was if she hadn’t tried it first,” says Cady. “But she needs help, and I hope she is getting it.”
(She is. In a final irony, she has been admitted to the rehab facility she only pretended to be a patient of in the fictional memoirs she flogged to an unwitting – and subsequently litigious – tabloid. Cady quietly admits to stints there herself at times of great stress, explaining that she booked in under the name ‘Stacey Blyth’ to avoid attention.)
So how does it feel, to be together after all these years?
The trio consider their responses.
“Good. Great, actually,” says Cady. “The first time the three of us were alone together, I felt an incredible sense of security. I feel very loved and protected.”
“Not overprotected?” asks Louise, winking at Estella. “No, I am only joking. It really does feel wonderful to know the family has another generation in it, and that I have time enough to get to know my gorgeous granddaughter.”
“It is the best gift imaginable,” grins Estella. “And Cady has been very kind but I know I have a lot of amends to make, a lot of missed birthdays and milestones and so on.”
“No gift could be better than this,” smiles Cady, indulgently.
“I totally agree,” says Stella, “but I do have one thing for you.”
She reaches for her purse, sliding from it an old piece of paper, brown around the folds, and passes it to Cady.
“Happy birthday.”
“But it’s not my... oh!” Cady appears instantly overcome.
It is not, as you might expect from one heiress to another, a cheque. Rather it is another document, not unlike the clues that led Cady to uncover her long-lost mother.
Her hands shaking, she holds the paper up towards the room.
Around the Queen’s crest of a lion and unicorn flanking a shield, in faded red type on now-beige paper, are the words ‘CERTIFICATE OF BIRTH’. Below it, the fields ‘Name and surname’, �
��Sex’ and ‘Date of birth’. It confirms that, on June 1st 1976, a baby girl was born named ‘Suki Louise Estella Dulac’.
“I just need you to know,” says Stella, choking on her words as her mother and daughter wipe their eyes, “that, Suki, Amy, whoever, you were always, always beloved.”
THE END
*****
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