In Paris the media didn’t have the social importance they had in New York. The French newspapers contained reviews of movies, plays and books, but where society was concerned, they were stuck in the Stone Age. French newspapers and magazines didn’t contain lifestyle pages or society gossip columns that told people what parties were being given by which hostess; who was wearing what on each occasion; who had been seen lunching where, with whom; who had just bought a new place and intended to gut and redecorate it; who had gone on vacation with what group of friends, or what charity balls were being planned by what group of women.
The French gave almost nothing to charity; their private parties were closed to the press, ladies lunched together at home, and everyone knew where the few women who could still afford the couture dressed. People wisely played down their wealth for fear of the tax inspectors.
Ah, but New York! An event hadn’t really taken place unless it was reported in the press; newspapers and magazines were rich in outlets for such news, and Cora de Lioncourt made a study of the media that covered the to-ings and fro-ings of the rich as thoroughly as an anthropologist. Her greatest stroke of luck, and she had always known she would have one piece of luck or another, had been a friendship she had developed with Harriet Toppingham, the powerful and feared editor of Fashion and Interiors.
The two women had met briefly several times in Paris, when the fashion editor came for the collections—they had many mutual friends—but only in New York did the acquaintanceship become an important friendship for both of them. Harriet was as totally in thrall to collector’s mania as Cora, and equally knowledgeable. They developed a genuine affection and true respect for each other as they lunched together on Saturdays and then went off to the auction at Parke Bernet, or drove out for a day to investigate country dealers; not even a suburban garage sale could fail to inspire the thrill of the hunt for women who knew that you could never guess where a great or merely desirably amusing object might turn up.
Beyond collecting, they discovered that they shared a natural affinity that went right to their hearts. Each of them had grown up unattractive and ambitious, and each of them had made a successful life by imposing her intelligence and taste on the unpromising material she had been given. Each of them was cynical; each of them mistrusted men and hated all the pretty women of the world who floated so easily through life on a cloud of admiration. Each was bitter, each was lonely, each was unstoppable. Each needed the other.
Harriet Toppingham and Cora de Lioncourt collected different kinds of objects and used them in different ways in their complicated, beloved interiors, so the element of competition, which might have been a problem, was absent. As soon as Cora’s apartment was ready to be photographed, Harriet devoted an eight-page color spread to it in one of the monthly issues of Fashion and Interiors.
On the day that issue appeared, Cora was not merely made, she was consecrated. No one in New York who mattered to her remained ignorant of the arrival in their city of the fascinating Comtesse Robert de Lioncourt, the custodian of a world of treasures, the well-born charmer from Charleston as well as a Chatfield of Cincinnati, who had conquered Paris and had now returned to her native land and created a setting of refinement and character, with a flavor so distinctly special, so wittily her own, that no decorator in town could have imagined it. The Sunday New York Times Magazine photographed her apartment for their decorating pages, as did New York magazine and Town and Country, all during Cora’s second year in the city.
New Yorkers, who were becoming a bit tired of admiring each other’s predictable art and sculpture, vied for invitations to Cora’s small dinners, where they felt as if they had been transported to another country, a country that existed outside of time and space, created by Cora’s brilliantly innovative evocation of her Paris apartment. She became celebrated and courted throughout the inner circle of the small world from which she intended to make her fortune.
Yes, dear Harriet had been the key, but she had underrated herself, Cora thought. She hadn’t realized how the profession she had invented for herself was suited to her abilities. She got up from her desk, changed into a bathrobe, and lay down on the deep couch, covered with tapestry pillows, a couch that she thought of as her office, for there Cora had established her command center with the only tools she needed for her work: three books of phone numbers, a yellow pad, pencils and a telephone.
Her first clients had been antiques dealers, for they were the breed of tradesman with whom she could deal in the most surefooted way. Cora answered the entreaties of her new friends to “take them antique hunting” by leading them to the expensive dealers with whom she had made her arrangements, receiving a large kickback on the high prices they charged. On the other hand, she thought with pride, she never allowed anyone to buy something that wasn’t worth owning. If they showed a foolish yen for an unworthy piece, she pointed out, gently but firmly, why it was wrong for them.
Next she had launched a talented young Charleston decorator, new to New York and a distant relative, who had sought her help in finding him his first big client. Cora fished about carefully, finally bringing him a recently divorced friend who was looking for someone unknown and original to decorate her new penthouse. On this transaction, and the dozens of similar deals she had made with six other carefully chosen decorators, Cora took a solid ten percent of the total the client spent. The decorators who worked with her considered the percentage reasonable since the countess never brought them clients who weren’t convinced of the necessity of using fine antiques, a belief that invariably caused the clients, sooner or later, to throw away their budgets, eyes big with delight at the thought of the grandeur of the finished project.
Cora de Lioncourt entertained so well that it was inevitable for her to branch out into the field of parties. Women were always asking her for her secrets and she was generous with them, knowing that by the time they copied her she’d have found new sources to use. The florists whose shops she made fashionable, the caterers she discovered, the musicians she suggested, all paid her yearly fees with gratitude, for where Cora led, others followed.
There were several areas Cora chose not to venture into. Hair salons were too unpredictable, and she didn’t intend to risk losing a friend over a bad haircut; she trusted no jewelers or furriers except the great ones, whose reputation stood behind everything they sold, and such businesses had no need for her. She never felt the slightest desire to steer women into buying clothes from any particular store where expensive errors were bound to be made.
After three years of solid success making money from antiques dealers, decorators, restaurants and all the trades that were used in entertaining, Cora de Lioncourt found herself ready to undertake the launching of people. Here all her taste and discrimination and cleverness were essential to the delicate task.
People who required launching, new people who had recently arrived in New York or natives who had finally made big money, of whom there seemed to be more and more every day, were so often simply not launchable, lacking the material she required. She would only accept clients who had the real possibility of swimming on their own once she’d given them a send-off. She could guarantee nothing, as with the restaurants, and she made sure that she got paid up front. Ah, but when the right client came along, Cora thought, smiling to herself, when the right couple from the hinterlands telephoned, or the right newly single woman with huge alimony presented herself, then there was an opportunity in gold indeed! There was almost nothing such people wouldn’t pay for a toehold in New York society, and when Cora de Lioncourt invited them to a few of her famous little dinners, when she introduced them gradually into her wide circle, when she helped them to entertain on their own, in the apartments that had been decorated by people she suggested, they could hardly complain if they didn’t click.
It all made one big, grand circle, a dance in which every move led some solid sum to drop into her lap, and from there into her rapidly increasing portfolio of stocks and bonds.
And in the dance Cora had established, new leaders were always needed, stars like Billy Ikehorn who would add a glittering layer of the highest luster to the world Cora had created around herself.
A close association with Billy Ikehorn, even if she spent nothing, never bought so much as a teaspoon, would be worthwhile to Cora, but she was convinced that with the right encouragement Billy Ikehorn was on the verge of spending more money than any other woman to whom she had so generously unveiled her sources. The Scruples advertising idea would have brought her no commission at all except Billy’s gratitude. Occasionally, for special people, she gave away such tips, which she thought of, reveling in the delicious lowness of it, as “loss leaders.”
The fall party for Scruples would merely be a beginning. Clearly, Billy had to have an establishment in New York. It was incomprehensible to Cora that Billy kept nothing but a four-room pied-à-terre in the Carlyle, that she had only one home base in California. It was almost a scandal, Cora thought, for such a rich woman to live so meagerly, so stingily, in such a small and unpretentious fashion. She owed it to the tradesmen of New York, if to no one else, to spread some of that money around.
Her plans for Billy were going to be no less than a public service, Cora de Lioncourt promised herself, even though she would never be able to take public credit.
When Spider was out of town on business, Valentine found it doubly difficult to sleep. She’d always been prey to insomnia, but it was almost bearable when she could prowl around their apartment, knowing that Spider was sleeping. Now, when she found herself alone and awake in the middle of the night, she was more restless than ever. Thank God, Spider would be home from New York tomorrow, she thought as she went to watch television in the living room at two in the morning, for insomnia was far worse when she was lying in bed than when she was up and doing something. She could have gone to New York with Spider, as he had begged her to, but Valentine had decided to take advantage of the days in which the store was closed for redecoration to look for a house.
No man could be expected to have the patience to inspect house after house with a real-estate saleswoman, but Valentine had plunged into the process this past spring, knowing that somewhere the perfect house lay waiting for them. Today she thought she had … perhaps … found it, and her sleeplessness was compounded by her excitement at the idea of taking Spider back there tomorrow to get his opinion.
She turned the television off in disgust. No, nothing so bad could be endured. There was only one remedy, to which she had recourse frequently before her marriage and even now when her husband was out of town. She must work until she fell asleep from sheer fatigue, and to do that she had to go to Scruples, to her design studio. The house she’d seen today had room for a studio, as this apartment did not, Valentine thought as she dressed hastily, room for a garden, room for a library, room for children, room … so much lovely space … it would be a different sort of life, although no life could be better than hers was now.
Quickly she drove the short distance to Scruples and let herself in. Because of her nighttime visits she had a key to the service entrance and knew all the security codes. The store smelled of fresh paint, new lumber and sawdust, Valentine noticed as she made her way to her studio, and Scruples looked huge and strange with all the inventory temporarily removed and put into storage. It had been emptied and made totally available to the crews of painters and carpenters, dozens of them still working overtime to get the job done quickly, but her studio was forbidden territory. She had allowed no repainting there, thank you very much, for she was up to her eyebrows in work on the Legend costumes, and could not be disturbed for anything, she had told the painting contractor indignantly.
Valentine turned on the bright overhead lights of the studio and looked around in relief. Here she could spend the night profitably and even sleep for a few hours on the battered old chaise longue she kept in a corner, half buried under her collection of fashion magazines and old copies of Women’s Wear Daily. It was an old, friendly, familiar habit, leafing through back issues of WWD, looking for pictures of old friends, seeing what had happened months ago in the frenzied world of Seventh Avenue that she was happy to be part of no longer. Valentine often took a break in her daily routine, curled up there for half an hour and browsed through the papers, but she hadn’t had time to do so recently, because of the press of work.
She was simply going to have to demand a larger studio, Valentine realized as she looked around, if Billy ever again asked her to design costumes for a film, as she had with Legend. The studio had never been so impossibly crowded before, but in order to create the costumes for Melanie Adams on the schedule she had agreed to, Valentine had been forced to have a dozen dressmaker’s dummies made exactly to Melanie’s measure.
The actress had neither the time nor the patience to stand still for lengthy fittings for the sixty-odd costumes Valentine was designing. Each of the dummies was presently clad in a gauzelike material, a kind of heavy, flexible tulle, that Valentine was using instead of the traditional dressmaker’s muslin, which was too stiff to use as a toile, the working design for these 1920s and 1930s costumes she was creating, costumes that must drape softly and becomingly.
In addition to the crowd of dummies, the small studio was littered with old photographs from films in which Garbo and Dietrich had starred in their early days; piles of yellowed old newspapers that showed the two actresses as they embarked or disembarked from Atlantic crossings or posed for publicity stills, as well as books of film history that had been brought by the studio for Valentine to study. Her usually orderly studio had never been in such a mess before, Valentine thought, dismayed, but it wouldn’t remain that way for long. There was just enough room for her to move around the dummies, cutting, pinning, draping and redraping the resilient soft gauze; the silent, white, headless figures were more agreeable company to her than any middle-of-the-night television movie.
Valentine worked industriously for several hours. The worst of the labor on Legend was almost finished, Wells Cope had approved all her sketches, and only another half dozen costumes were left to be worked on next week and then translated from gauze into actual cloth. Melanie Adams would have to bring her precious self here in person for the last costume fittings, but that particular problem was one she would leave to Mr. Cope to cope with, Valentine thought sleepily, for she was pleased with her work and ready to stop. Exhausted, she stretched out on the old chaise and lit a Gauloise Bleu, so redolent of Paris, from the package she always kept there. As Valentine lay back and puffed, she felt delightfully relaxed … yes, definitely, she must have a studio in their new house, she thought just before she plunged into a deep sleep.
The burning cigarette dropped from her hand and landed on a pile of brittle photographs, which caught fire instantly. The photographs ignited one of the old newspapers, and within seconds the entire studio was ablaze, the gauze on the dressmaker’s dummies going up in flares of flame, the paper that filled the room feeding the roaring fire that quickly consumed Valentine’s studio. The fire raced through the newly painted offices down the newly painted central staircase and attacked the piles of lumber left everywhere by the carpenters. It was fueled by the cans of paint that were standing about in every corner, some of them carelessly closed by the painters who were to return the next morning. Hungrily the roaring blaze destroyed floors and walls and newly varnished display cases, rushed to attack the paneling in the Edwardian Winter Garden, and leapt through the freshly papered walls of the dressing rooms that stood with their doors propped open for the workmen’s convenience.
In just a few fierce, catastrophic minutes, well before the Beverly Hills Fire Department arrived, Scruples was gutted, its interior burned to the ground within its setting of formal gardens that kept the store separate from Rodeo Drive. Valentine was dead, quickly asphyxiated long before she could have known what was happening.
9
Almost a year after the fire, in the spring of 1981, Josh Hillman, for all his
lawyerly attention to detail, felt that no matter how carefully he looked for a still-unfinished piece of business, the Scruples file could be closed. Too agitated to sit down, he paced about his own office in the imposing Century City offices of Strassberger, Lipkin and Hillman, unable to feel the usual relief of a man who knows that a difficult job of work is behind him.
Billy had never laid eyes on the site of the Beverly Hills Scruples again, he thought, remembering how she had come to him straight from the airport and given her orders in a state of grief that he would not have believed possible during their years of a close business relationship.
“Bulldoze the outside walls to the ground,” she had said, in a parched, ragged, all-but-unrecognizable voice, “bulldoze the gardens, clean it up and sell the land immediately.”
He’d nodded assent and made a note, but then she continued to pour out instructions that simply didn’t make any sense to him.
“Sell the Chicago store, sell the New York store, the Munich store, the Honolulu store, the Hong Kong store; stop construction on all the other stores that are underway, sell all the parcels of land that I bought for future construction, get rid of them as quickly as possible, Josh.”
“Billy, I understand how you feel about the Beverly Hills store,” he’d told her gently, “but selling Chicago and New York? That’s going too far, Billy, much too far. As your lawyer I have to advise you that it’s the worst possible business decision you could make. Both of those stores are doing amazing business and their locations can never again be duplicated. Nobody in his right mind would sell them in today’s boom market. I know how deeply upset you feel, but, believe me, this is not the time to make any long-range plans. We’ll talk about it in a few weeks if you still—”
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