Promptly at noon Vann stood at her upstairs window, feeling like a spy, and noted two cars drive up beside the Hill home. John emerged from the first car and walked briskly into his house. But who was the driver of the second, an anonymous blue Ford? Vann strained to see, but there was nothing but an inconclusive silhouette. Ten minutes later John hurried out of his house, looking dour, motioned to the second car, and both sped off.
Hurriedly Vann called her neighbor. Joan was in tears. The meeting with John had hardly begun before it blew up in acrimony. “Well, I think I saw a woman in a car parked behind his,” said Vann. “They just drove off together. Maybe we can follow them and find out who she is.”
With the excitement of a high-speed chase, the two women hurried across the sleepy lanes of River Oaks, searching for John Hill’s Cadillac with a blue Ford in tail. They drove all the way to the medical building where John had offices, but the two cars were not to be seen. Dejected, Joan asked to be taken home. While stopped at a red light a few blocks from the house, Vann glanced idly at the parking lot of the Avalon drugstore, a famous Houston pharmacy with a clientele chiefly composed of wealthy River Oaks residents. “My lord,” she murmured. “I think that’s the car I saw.” She pointed toward a blue Ford parked among others. Two people—a man and a woman—sat in the front seat. “Turn in!” ordered Joan.
Uneasy now at what loomed as an awkward confrontation, Vann did as her friend directed, finding a parking place twenty feet away. Joan Hill slowly turned her head and looked directly at her husband, caught red-handed in the company of a dark-haired woman. It was characteristic of John Hill that, whenever he was nervous, he began to sweat profusely. Operating room nurses knew to mop his brow when a procedure turned tense. At every critical moment in his life, his face was drenched. When he finally felt his wife’s glare and turned to acknowledge her, he was wet with perspiration and his shirt soaked to his back.
For a moment the surgeon only looked at his wife, then he nodded, opened the door, and approached. Tactfully, Vann made an excuse and strode to the drugstore, wishing she could have been a mosquito in the back seat. As she walked away, the last thing she heard Joan demand of her husband was, “Is this the woman you’ve been having an affair with?”
From the doorway of the pharmacy Vann watched the animated conversation, the drops of air conditioned chill frosting the interior of the car. She could not see the faces. Then John burst out, slammed the door, returned to the Ford, and left with the woman.
Vann hurried back to her car. “What did he say?” she asked, breathlessly.
Joan seemed stunned, almost in shock. “Her name is Ann Kurth,” she said softly. “John said he was in trouble. He said he was having an affair with this woman’s husband, and that he was being blackmailed.”
“Her husband?” exclaimed Vann. “Are you sure you heard it right?”
Joan nodded. “He repeated it twice. What in hell do I do now?”
Anonymous notes began arriving in the mail for Joan. They informed her that John was living openly with Ann Kurth at her home and that they were being seen at restaurants and concerts together. One note suggested that Ann Kurth was but one of many women John Hill was tending.
After a few days of frenetic investigation among her friends of Ann Kurth, Joan was able to report to Vann: John had lied about having an affair with that woman’s husband. “In the first place, she doesn’t even have a husband any more,” said Joan wryly. “And secondly, he’s sleeping at her house every night.”
The farce was on. First Joan engaged an off-duty policeman to snoop on her husband. Within a week his reports verified that John Hill was living at Ann Kurth’s home. Filled with jealousy and curiosity, Joan took to cruising around her rival’s neighborhood, shopping in Ann’s supermarket, even emerging from a dressing room at a department store where Ann happened to be trying on a dress. Joan pretended she did not know the other woman, but the current between the two was a high-tension wire.
Ann Kurth stood at her window one afternoon and watched Joan drift by in her blue and white Cadillac. A few minutes later, in separate investigation, came Ash at the wheel of his black Lincoln, casting a quick glance at the Kurth home. “My God, it sure is getting classy around this neighborhood,” said Ann to John that night. “You wouldn’t believe the Cadillacs and Lincolns driving past my house all day.” She found the escapade amusing, but unsettling. The phone had started ringing in the middle of the night, with no one in response when she answered it. John put a tape recorder on Ann’s phone. Joan put a tape recorder on her phone, but installed it improperly and cursed when it failed to work. Ash put a tape recorder on his phone.
One morning Joan summoned Vann from across the street and announced a plan: “Everything John Hill has—his whole god damn life—he carries around in the trunk of his car. I want to get into that trunk and read his letters.” Protesting all the way, Vann nonetheless let herself be persuaded to stand lookout for her friend during the caper.
Her instructions from Joan were to stand beside the stairway door that allowed people to enter the basement garage of the medical building where John had his offices. Every time the door opened Vann was to signal, and, on the slender chance that John himself emerged, she should divert him. “How do I explain what I’m doing in his office garage?” asked Vann plaintively.
Joan ran quickly to her husband’s conspicuous Cadillac and opened the trunk with her set of keys. It was full of papers, sheet music, letters, and photographs. She began scooping them up, reading them, stashing an occasional document in her purse. At her post, Vann was jumpy. She kept forgetting the signal. Was she to whistle twice or clap her hands if trouble loomed? The door opened several times with people coming for their automobiles, and each time, rather than signal, Vann skipped nervously over to Joan where she hissed at her, “That’s enough. Let’s get out of here!” But Joan would not shut the trunk, not until she had examined the hundreds of papers.
Finally, her nerves stretched, Vann went to the scene of the small crime and physically pulled her friend away.
Triumphant in her successful burglary, Joan poked over the papers for days, attempting to make sense out of her husband’s life. When she discovered a bill from Sakowitz, an expensive department store, for lizard shoes and matching handbag, Joan cried, “The son of a bitch never bought me anything!” She also discovered several checks for a hundred dollars each made out to cash, seven bills for surgery on women marked “Gratis,” and a list of nine women with check marks after their names like movie ratings. Beside Ann Kurth were four checks. Somehow her deduction led her to believe that John Hill was having simultaneous affairs with either twelve or thirteen women. How would it be, she said to Vann, if she filed an alienation of affections suit against “Kurth et al.”? It would be all over the newspapers, warned Vann. That’s how it would be.
As the weeks passed and the year spun into late September, Joan turned occasionally serene; she spoke softly and greeted her friends philosophically. During these periods she professed that John was merely “having a fling.” “He’s just a country boy from Edcouch,” she muttered, more to herself than to her friends, “and he was always kept tied down by his mother and the Church of Christ, and for the first time in his life he’s cut loose. I’ll give him a little rope.”
Then a private detective whom Ash engaged delivered word that John had leased a bachelor apartment in the city’s Post Oak area, a community favored by “swinging singles.” This darkened Joan’s attitude, for it indicated that the estrangement was growing more permanent. Quickly she drove to the apartment and parked outside, watching lithe young people come and go in their sports cars. At thirty-seven, she suddenly felt old and unwanted.
When Joan returned to the big house she found her husband’s car parked in the driveway. Joyfully she ran inside, only to find John packing a suitcase with sheet music. He looked embarrassed, glancing at his wife and then mutely returning businesslike to his chore. Angered by his silence, Joan tri
ed first to shame him, cataloging the moneys her father had spent to help finance his surgical training, the loans for cars and houses, the sums spent on Boot. “Send me a bill,” he said, “I’ll pay it back.”
Joan checked her anger and humbled herself. She pleaded with John to return. What was the core of his discontent? Her horses? She would give them up. She would sell the farm. She would do anything he asked. They had a son; they had eleven years together. These were too precious to throw away on a dalliance like Ann Kurth.
The situation was more complex, answered John. He was unable to disentangle himself. Ann Kurth would not let him go, even if he wanted to leave her.
Joan stood at an upstairs window and watched her husband drive away. The one thing she had not done was talk to Ann Kurth herself. This is what civilized people do, she reasoned. They talk things out. Hurriedly she summoned Vann from across the street and revealed her last-ditch plan. How should she act? What should she say? What tone of voice should she use?
Vann disliked the idea. Surely the Kurth telephone was tapped, John being so adept at electronic equipment. Joan might say something rash and regret it later. “So let her tape me,” said Joan. “You listen in on the extension for protection.”
With Vann as reluctant eavesdropper, Joan dialed the woman who had taken away her husband. Later, Vann would recall the conversation:
“Mrs. Kurth?”
“Yes.”
“This is Joan Robinson Hill.”
At the other end, a moment of silence, then a warm response. “Oh, yes. My children are making noise and I’m going to change telephones. Just a minute.”
From her listening post, Vann put her hand over the receiver and called out to Joan, “Watch out! She’s moving to a phone with a bug on it. Be careful!”
Ann Kurth resumed the conversation in a tone of voice both polite and positive. She spoke with self-assurance, as if she were experienced in this sort of awkward encounter.
Immediately Joan blurted out that she was aware of the entire situation, and that her husband wanted to come home. But, she quoted him as saying, Ann Kurth would not allow it.
“On the contrary,” said Ann sweetly, “I have encouraged John to go home, to talk it out with you, to see his son, to make some sort of decision. I don’t like this hidden, secretive business, either. I know what tremendous amount of respect John has for you.”
At this, Vann winced. She felt that John had no respect for his wife at all. That he, in fact, disliked her intensely.
Joan made a few mumbling remarks and hung up in confusion.
Vann felt the conversation was harmful, that Joan had been bested. “You’re no match for this woman,” she said. “She’s cleverer than you.”
And one more thing, cautioned Vann. “This is a dangerous game you’re playing. All this snoop business. People have gotten hurt for a lot less.”
Joan nodded, but she seemed not to hear the warning. “I love the son of a bitch,” she said. “That’s what hurts. I’d crawl on my hands and knees across Houston to get him back.”
TEN
John Hill displayed none of the numbing grief that seized his wife during their chaotic autumn of 1968. Rather he seemed proud of the new woman on his arm, as if she were a suitable ornament for a man of his position. Speculation could suggest other reasons for his sudden plunge into the waters of adultery. His life was, by all accounts, an emotionally barren one, shaped by the severe religious ethic imposed by his mother. He was not comfortable in sexual relations with women. Indeed, he had told Joan that he was still a virgin at twenty-six, when they married. And he once remarked to her, in a confession that she repeated to a close friend, that he was unable to really enjoy sex unless it was “illegal or immoral.” Joan had responded, “But that’s not natural, John.” He agreed, but insisted that such was his make-up. “Then you try to work it out,” Joan told him, “and I’ll stand by you.”
And he was approaching forty, the time when a man can feel that his romantic capacities are diminishing. Paramount among his reasons must have been the feeling that for eleven years he had been a possession of both his wife and her father. John had grown to loathe Ash Robinson. He hated his wealth, his power, his control over Joan. In response to all his frustrations, the surgeon broke out, with a highly desirable woman who would make most any man’s head turn.
Perhaps because he was so inexperienced in infidelity, he behaved with a spectacular lack of caution during the period of estrangement. Before a man gets divorced, he normally keeps any new woman in his life secret, for fear of harsh alimony and property division. But John descended on public Houston with what could only be termed abandon. At a popular French restaurant, he made a point of calling out to Maxine Mesinger, gossip columnist for the Houston Chronicle, and introducing “my new friend, Ann Kurth.” The columnist had heard of his separation from Joan, it having been a prominent topic of gossip in café society for weeks. But she was startled to see the doctor openly dining with Joan’s replacement. “That fellow doesn’t have any sense,” she thought to herself.
The Heartbeats played for a charity gala called the Spanish Ball on October 12, 1968, and John arrived with Ann in an arresting black gown. He introduced her around as “my fiancée.” The wives of his fellow band members, mostly doctors, clucked like duennas behind fans. Adultery is not unknown among members of the medical fraternity, but an unwritten rule seemed applicable here: do not bring your plaything to a charity ball.
A few days later John received a telephone call from Dr. Grady Hallman, the heart surgeon who was leader of the orchestra and who had been his friend since they mutually attended a high school band convocation in 1948. Awkwardly, Hallman said that John was being dropped from the Heartbeats.
Stunned, John asked for the reason. Hallman murmured something about his own wife Martha, a deeply religious woman and maternal force behind the group, having asked for the expulsion. And she had the support of other wives. At least until this mess is straightened up, counseled Hallman.
“There is a little hypocrisy going on here,” argued John Hill. But he was then and there booted out of the band.
In his absence from the house on Kirby Drive, work nonetheless continued on the music room. Costs had escalated wildly. The original $10,000 estimate was spent in partial payment for contracting costs alone. By October 1968, John had written checks totaling more than $75,000. It must have been in his head that, no matter how the marriage to Joan turned out, he would somehow retain ownership of the house. Sometimes, in bed, late at night, he spent hours telling Ann Kurth how he would someday preside over elegant evenings of great music. He nursed the plan of inviting Joan Sutherland to sing in his home and sell tickets at $1,000 each to raise money for musical charities.
One of John’s dreams was to own the most expensive piano built in the world, a Bösendorfer. Handmade in Austria, only a hundred of the instruments are built each year. With no contenders, it is the snobbiest piano in existence. Bill Knight, a salesman for a Houston piano company and a well-known musician himself, telephoned John Hill in late 1968 and revealed that his firm had obtained the Bösendorfer franchise in Houston. Immediately John went to the showroom and ordered an Imperial Grand, a massive instrument ten feet long and listed in the catalogue at $15,000. An order was sent to the factory in Austria, delivery promised a few months hence.
In mid-November, Joan answered her front doorbell and was handed a divorce citation. Leaning against the foyer wall, she hastily scanned the paper, then clutched it to her body and progressed upstairs. Midway to her bedroom, she almost fainted. “I had to sit down and get ahold of myself,” she told Vann Maxwell.
The allegations were hard and cold, particularly Paragraph IV:
“… that during all of the time John Hill was living with the defendant (Joan Olive Hill), Plaintiff conducted himself with propriety and treated his wife with kindness and forbearance and has been guilty of no act bringing about or causing the hereinafter described acts, omissions,
and commissions on the Defendant’s part. But the Defendant, disregarding the solemnity of her marriage vows and obligations to treat Plaintiff with kindness and attention, prior to their separation, commenced a course of unkind, harsh and tyrannical conduct toward him which has continued until the time of their separation and beyond. That Defendant’s conduct toward Plaintiff has been of such a nature as to, under the circumstances, render their further living together insupportable …”
Joan showed the document to her girl friends. “Can you believe it?” she said testily. “Who exactly commenced this course of ‘unkind, harsh and tyrannical conduct’ toward whom?”
Before the day was out Joan had telephoned many of her friends to read the humiliating paper. And each, Vann especially, encouraged her not to contest the divorce, nor to counter-file if her pride dictated. “I think you two are better off without one another,” she counseled.
But Joan would not have it. She was thirty-seven years old, this would be her third divorce. Her ego and the terrible condition of rejection were involved here, but the overriding factor seemed to be that she still loved her philandering husband. She decided to play a game of stalling, promptly consulting her attorneys and sending John a registered letter stating that she would not consent to the divorce. This, she felt, would tie matters in legal snarls for years.
Ash Robinson had a more direct plan.
On December 9, a few days after his daughter was sued for divorce, he telephoned John Hill at the bachelor apartment, which Ash would later refer to continually as his “love nest.”
John listened intently, his face darkening. When he hung up, he told Ann Kurth that something was wrong. He could not make full sense of what the old man was saying, but the implication was that if he ever wanted to see his son Boot again he must hurry to Ash’s house.
“Has the kid fallen down the stairs or something?” asked Ann. But John was gone, out the door, tires squealing as he hurried to the house where he had married Joan.
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