Shortly after the marriage, Sylvia de Cuevas, the then wife of John de Cuevas, took the marquesa’s two granddaughters to visit her in Palm Beach. She says she was stopped at the front door by an armed guard, who would not let them enter until permission was granted by Raymundo. Soon other changes began to take place. Old servants who had been with the marquesa for years, including her favorite, Marcel, were fired by de Larrain. Bessie de Cuevas claims in her affidavit that he accused them of stealing and other misdeeds. Long-term relationships with lawyers and accountants were severed. Copies of correspondence to the marquesa from Richard Weldon, her lawyer for many years, and Albert Remmert, her secretary and financial adviser for many years, reflect that her directives to them were so unlike her usual method of communication that they questioned the authority of the letters. Shortly thereafter both men were replaced. Another longtime secretary, Lillian Grappone, told Bessie de Cuevas that her mother had complained of the fact that there were constantly new faces around her. During this period the many houses of the marquesa were sold or given to charity, among them her two houses on East Sixty-eighth Street in New York, which had always been her favorite as well as her principal residence. Bessie de Cuevas claims in her affidavit that her mother sometimes could not recall signing anything to effect the transfer of these houses. At other times she would talk as if she could get them back. On one occasion she acknowledged having signed away the houses but said she had been talked into it at a time when she was not feeling well. Her father’s villa in Fiesole, where she had grown up, was given to Georgetown University. The house in Cannes was given to Bessie and John de Cuevas. Her official residence was moved from New York to Florida, but she was moved out of her house of many years on El Bravo Way in Palm Beach to a condominium on South Ocean Boulevard. Several people who visited her at the condominium said that she seemed confused as to why she should be living there instead of in her own house. Other friends explain the move as a practical one: The house on El Bravo Way was an old Spanish-style one on several floors and many levels, badly in need of repair, and for an invalid in a wheelchair life was simpler in the one-floor apartment.
During this period the financial affairs of the marquesa were handled more and more by Wilson C. Lucom, the host at the wedding. Bessie de Cuevas states in her affidavit, “I think my mother’s belief that Lucom would safeguard her interests against de Larrain only highlights her lack of appreciation for the reality of her circumstances.” Bessie de Cuevas tells of an occasion when she visited her mother at the Palm Beach condominium and Lucom “taunted” her by boasting that he and de Larrain were drinking “Rockefeller champagne.” “My mother’s total dependence on de Larrain is reflected in an explanation she gave for why she did not accompany de Larrain to Paris on a trip he made concerning her holdings there. De Larrain told her no American carrier flew to Paris any longer, and since my mother did not care for Air France, it was best for her not to go. Plainly, my mother had lost any independent touch with the real world.”
Access to her mother became more and more difficult for Bessie de Cuevas. When she called, she was told her mother could not come to the telephone. Some friends who visited the marquesa say that she would complain that she never heard from her daughter. Others say that messages left by Bessie were never given to her. In 1982 Raymundo de Larrain took his wife out of the country, and they began what lawyers representing the de Cuevases’ interests call an “itinerant existence.” She never returned. They went first to Switzerland, then to Chile, where he was from and where they had built a house, and finally to Madrid, where de Larrain was made the cultural attaché at the Chilean embassy. There Margaret died in a hotel room in 1985. Bessie de Cuevas saw her mother for the last time a few weeks before she died. Neither Bessie nor her brother has any idea where she is buried.
Certainly there was trouble between the Rockefeller family and the newlywed de Larrains from the time of the marriage. After the change of residence from New York to Florida, David Rockefeller urged his cousin to donate her two town houses at 52 and 54 East Sixty-eighth Street to an institution supported by the Rockefeller family called the Center for Inter-American Relations. The appraisal of the two houses was arranged by David Rockefeller, and the appraiser had been in the employ of the Rockefellers for years. He evaluated the two houses at $725,000. Subsequently Margaret de Larrain was distressed to hear that these properties, which she had donated to the Center for Inter-American Relations, were later sold to another favorite Rockefeller forum, the Council on Foreign Relations, for more than twice the amount of money they had been appraised at.
Raymundo de Larrain, in his affidavit for the probate proceedings, says that his wife’s male Rockefeller cousins discriminated against the females of the family. “Not only did her cousin-trustee [John D. Rockefeller III] want to dominate her life and tell her how to spend her trust income, but wanted also to dictate and approve how she spent her non-trust personal principal and income. My wife strongly resented their intrusion in her personal life.… Her position was that her money was hers outright, not part of her trust, and that she and she alone was to decide how she spent it or what gifts she—not they—would make.” Later in the affidavit, de Larrain says that his wife’s trustees “wanted her to give virtually all her personal wealth away to her children long before she even thought of dying. Then they would control her through their control of her trust income.”
De Larrain said that his wife had been generous with her two children, but that they were not satisfied with her gifts of millions to them. “They wanted more and more.” After giving her children more than $7 million, she refused to transfer her personal wealth to them. Even after her gift of $7 million, he claimed, the trustees cut her trust income. “My wife was shocked and distressed at the unjust and cruel and illegal actions of the cousin-trustees in pressuring her to give millions to her children and then breaking their agreement not to cut her trust income. This further alienated her from her family. She felt cheated and a victim of a plan by the family and the Chase Manhattan Bank.”
On February 21, 1978, a year after her marriage, Margaret de Larrain, at age eighty-one, revoked all prior wills and codicils executed by her. “I have personally destroyed the original wills in my possession, namely, two original wills dated February 14, 1941, and an original will dated April 26, 1950, and an original will dated May 14, 1956, and an original will dated May 17, 1968, and an original will dated June 11, 1968.” Thereafter, Margaret de Larrain added two codicils to a new will of November 20, 1980. In the first, she stated that she had already transferred her fortune to her husband, and she made him the sole beneficiary and sole personal representative of her estate. In the second, she expressed her specific wish that her only two children and two grandchildren receive nothing. De Larrain ended his affidavit with this statement: “There is abundant testimony that my wife was entirely competent when she later added the two codicils which expressed that she wanted to give the property to me, her husband. She did this because her children neglected her and she had provided abundantly for them in her lifetime by giving them approximately $7 million in gifts.”
It might be added that Margaret’s will did not set a precedent in the stodgy Rockefeller family. Her mother’s sister, Edith Rockefeller McCormick, who divorced her husband, Henry Fowler McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune, and then engaged in a series of flamboyant affairs with male secretaries, which caused her father great embarrassment, in 1932 bequeathed half of her fortune to a Swiss secretary.
Pending the upcoming court case, Raymundo de Larrain has dropped out of public view. When he is in Paris, he lives at the Meurice Hotel, but even his closest friends there, including the Viscountess de Ribes, do not hear from him, and he has dropped completely out of the smart social life that he once pursued so vigorously. On encountering Hubert Faure, the first husband of Bessie de Cuevas, in the bar of the Meurice recently, he turned his back on him. In Madrid he stays sometimes at the Palace Hotel and sometime
s at less well-known ones. He has been seen dining alone in restaurants there. Sometimes he nods to former acquaintances, but he makes no attempt to renew friendships. He has also been seen in Rabat and Lausanne. In the past year he has made two substantial gifts to charity. He gave a check for $1 million to the Spanish Institute in New York, and, as a member of the board of the Spanish Institute said at a New York party, “The check didn’t bounce.” He also recently gave a check for $500,000 to Georgetown University to supplement the gift of his late wife’s father’s villa in Fiesole to Georgetown. “You have to figure that if Raymundo gave a million dollars to the Spanish Institute before the trial, he must have already squirreled away at least $10 million,” said a dubious Raymundo follower in Paris recently.
This is not a sad story. The deprived will not go hungry. If the courts are able to ascertain what happened to Margaret Strong de Cuevas de Larrain’s fortune in the years of her marriage and to decide on an equitable distribution of her wealth, already rich people will get richer. As a woman friend of Raymundo de Larrain said to me recently, “Raymundo will be bad in court, nervous and insecure. If there’s a jury, the jury won’t like him.” She thought a bit and then added, “It’s only going to end up wrong. If you don’t behave correctly, nothing turns out well. I mean, would you like to fight the Rockefellers, darling?”
February 1987
THE WINDSOR EPILOGUE
On April 2, 1987, in Geneva, A. Alfred Taubman, the Michigan mall millionaire who has become the grand seigneur of the auction world, put on an auction which, for sheer showmanship, rivaled the finest hours of the late P. T. Barnum, the grand seigneur of the circus world, who immodestly called his circus the greatest show on earth. Mr. Taubman, no shrinking violet himself, pitched his tent, or rather his red-and-white-striped marquee, on the banks of Lake Geneva and papered the house with some of the grandest names in the Almanach de Gotha—nonbidders, to be sure, but the swellest dress extras in auction history. Sprinkled among the princesses, the countesses, the baronesses, and an infanta were the buyers who meant business: dealers from New York and London, Japanese businessmen, a Hollywood divorce lawyer, representatives of the Sultan of Brunei and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, not to mention a battery of bidders who, because they did not wish to travel or like to be looked at, were connected by phone to Sotheby’s in New York and Geneva. Under the red-and-white-striped marquee, after six months of an unparalleled publicity blitz, the gavel was finally raised on the opening lot of the sale of the jewels and love tokens of the late Duchess of Windsor, the American woman from Baltimore for whom a king gave up his throne. What followed was a jewel auction against which all jewel auctions to come will be compared.
In the month preceding the sale, the jewels, which I heard an English woman in Geneva describe as “frighteningly chic,” traveled from Paris, where they had been under the protectorship of Maître Suzanne Blum, the Duchess’s lawyer and a key figure in the story, to Palm Beach and New York—all with great fanfare and hype generated by Sotheby’s, the 243-year-old London-based auction house which took over New York’s Parke-Bernet Galleries in 1964, in order to woo the rich Americans who were expected to be the chief buyers in Geneva. In both cities, Alfred Taubman, the owner and chairman of Sotheby’s since 1983, hosted smart parties so that all the right people, like Mrs. Astor and Malcolm Forbes and the other heavy hitters, might have a leisurely view of the treasure trove that a besotted monarch had showered on his twice-divorced ladylove. Mr. Taubman, a hale and hearty sixty-two, whose assets are estimated in the Forbes-magazine list of the four hundred richest people in America at $800 million, and his beautiful younger wife, Judy, a former Miss Israel who once worked behind the counter at Christie’s, the rival auction house, handing out catalogs, are high-profile figures on the New York and Palm Beach Social circuits. “Selling art is a lot like selling root beer,” he once said.
Duchess fever swept New York. “The romance of the twentieth century,” we heard over and over. In actual fact, it was not a romance that can bear very close scrutiny: the love story of a masculine woman of middle age, who was probably never once called beautiful in her life, and a Peter Pan king, who resisted responsibility and composed embarrassing love letters. “A boy loves a girl more and more and is holding her so tight these trying days of waiting,” he wrote to her when he was forty-two. Be that as it may, royal romance was in the air. By day the hoi polloi, willing to wait in line for three or four hours just to pass by the jewel-filled vitrines, turned out in such record numbers that the New York Times reported the event on its front page. Public interest was so great that Sotheby’s desisted from running advertisements in the newspapers and cut back plans to show the jewels on local television shows because the security force at the auction house could not handle any more people than were already jamming its halls.
Although the British press reported even more avidly than ours every detail of the presale hype, the traveling jewel show bypassed England. From a public-relations point of view, Sotheby’s felt it best not to open old wounds or to stir up adverse criticism when such big bucks were at stake. Fifty years after Edward VIII gave up his throne for the woman he loved, his duchess, even in death, remains a controversial figure in that country, still disliked and still unforgiven by a generation that blames her for taking away from them a beloved king. A close friend of Princess Margaret, brimming with insider information straight from the palace, informed me, “The royal family hated her. Simply hated her.”
Her American admirers felt very differently, of course. As one of them said to me in Geneva, “The English didn’t get her. The English still don’t get her. They should erect a statue to Wallis Windsor in every town in the realm for taking away their king.”
• • •
The Duchess’s sale lasted two days. The Hôtel Beau-Rivage, where Sotheby’s is, was where the action was, but the Hôtel Richemond, directly next door, was unmistakably smarter. That was where the Taubmans stayed. The sale of the Duchess’s jewelry was also the occasion of a Sotheby’s board-of-directors meeting, and the Sotheby’s board of directors, as assembled by Alfred Taubman, is the swellest board of directors in big business today, boasting such illustrious names as Her Royal Highness the Infanta Pilar de Borbón, Duchess of Badajoz, who happens to be the sister of the King of Spain, for starters, as well as the Right Honourable the Earl of Gowrie, the Earl of Westmorland, and Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kaszon, who has the largest private art collection in the world after the Queen of England’s, and such Americans as Henry Ford II, Mrs. Gordon Getty, and Mrs. Milton Petrie.
Society girls in the employ of Sotheby’s, wearing black dresses and single strands of pearls, bristled with self-importance as they manned the telephones, dispensed press badges, sold catalogs, and gave terse replies to queries. The bars in both hotels were never not full, and the gossip was terrific, although not always reliable. “Absolutely not!” one indignant upper-class voice, overbrandied, rang out. “I don’t care what you’ve heard! The Duchess of Windsor was not a man!”
Always, following the death of a prominent person, individuals come forward claiming to have had a closer acquaintance with the deceased than the facts would bear out. One favorite preoccupation among the insiders was minimizing the degree of familiarity certain people claimed to have had with the late Duke and Duchess. “So-and-so,” they said, talking about a highly profiled man in New York, “was not nearly so close to the Duchess as he says he was. The Duke would never have had him around.” Or, “I visited the Duchess for years and I never once heard her mention So-and-so,” naming an international lady.
A thousand smartly dressed people piled into the tent to find their ticketed seats, all carrying the glossiest and most gossipy auction catalog ever printed. At fifty dollars a copy, it promptly sold out, and is now a collector’s item. Friends met. Men greeted men with kisses on both cheeks, and women did the same. On closed-circuit television sets around the tent a film was shown, but no one watch
ed, because they were all looking at one another. “The world was fascinated by them,” intoned a voice on the sound track, “and they were obsessed with each other.… The Prince of Wales’s father, George V, had Mrs. Simpson’s past investigated and decided she was not a suitable companion for his son.… Queen Mary called her an adventuress.” Year after year of newsreels of their glittering and empty life flashed by: weekends at Fort Belvedere when the Duke was still king, their somber wedding at the Château de Candé, the two of them arriving here, arriving there, fashion plates both, stepping out of limousines, waving from the decks of ocean liners, sweeping into parties, relentlessly up to the moment, in all the very jewels that were about to be sold, the Duchess leading, the Duke following, she gleaming, he scowling, or smiling sadly. Behind it all, a voice sang, “The party’s over. It’s all over, my friend.” But no one was listening either, because they were all talking to each other. The Princess of Naples, married to Victor Emmanuel, who would have been the king of Italy if history had gone another way, chatted up Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia, who works for Sotheby’s jewelry department, while his brother, Prince Serge of Yugoslavia, chatted up the Baroness Tita Thyssen-Bornemisza, ablaze in sapphires, who chatted up the Countess of Romanoes, who was wearing the diamond bracelet she had inherited from the Duchess of Windsor and who in turn chatted up the Infanta Beatriz of Spain, who chatted up Grace, Countess of Dudley, who chatted up Princess Firyal of Jordan, who chatted up Judy Taubman, while her husband, Alfred Taubman, the grand seigneur, radiating power and importance, carried a huge unlit cigar and smiled and waved and greeted.
Then the auction began.
From the first of the 306 lots, a gold-ruby-and-sapphire clip made by Carrier in Paris in 1946, the air in the tent was charged with excitement. A few moments later, lot 13, a diamond clip lorgnette by Van Cleef & Arpels, circa 1935, which was estimated to bring in $5,000, went to a private bidder for $117,000. The excitement began to build. Two lots later, when a pair of pavé diamond cuff links and three buttons and a stud, estimated to go for $10,000, went for $440,000 to a mysterious, deeply tanned man who was said to be bidding for the Egyptian who has taken over the Windsors’ house outside Paris, the first applause broke out in the tent. People realized they were present at an event, engaged in the heady adventure of watching rich people acting rich, participating in a rite available only to them, the spending of big money, without a moment’s hesitation or consideration. The sable-swathed Ann Getty, who wanted it known that she was there because of the board-of-directors meeting and not to bid, changed her seat from the fifth row to the first in order to be closer to the arena. By lot 91, a pair of yellow-diamond clips by Harry Winston, 1948, that went to the London jeweler Laurence Graff, one of the royal family’s jewelers, for over $2 million, financial abandon filled the air with an almost erotic intensity, and it never lessened during the remaining hours of the sale. Powdered bosoms heaved in fiscal excitement at big bucks being spent. Each time the bidding got into the million-dollar range, for one of the ten or so world-class stones in the collection, the tension resembled the frenzy at a cockfight. Sotheby’s employees manning the telephones waved their hands frantically to attract the auctioneer. People rose in their seats to get a better look at the mysterious Mr. Fabri, who bid and bid—money no object—on all the pieces directly linked to the love affair between Edward and Wallis. “The Duke would have hated all this,” said a friend of the Duke’s, shaking his head. “I’m surprised they’re not auctioning off his fly buttons.”
The Mansions of Limbo Page 27