Their conference must have been tense. Ash would later contend that his son-in-law was contrite, desperate for forgiveness, eager to reconcile with Joan. But John later would claim that he had been verbally bludgeoned into signing a most curious letter.
“The letter was one hundred per cent John Hill’s idea,” Ash would later say. “All I did was copy down his own words as he dictated them.”
But the letter was certainly written in the old man’s personal hand, on his distinctive stationery that bore his signature as its letterhead, and it contained language more suggestive of an avenging Victorian father than a contritious husband:
Mrs. Joan Hill:
I ask that you become reconciled with me and forgive my transgressions.
I want to come back home and be a good husband to you and a good father to Robert.
In the event of any additional separation between us, no matter what the cause or reason, I will deed you all of my interest in our home at 1561 Kirby Drive.
I will make all payments on same until it is completely paid for; I will pay all taxes and insurance on same until it is completely clear of all encumbrances; I will pay all upkeep on the same during this time also.
I will further give you $1,000 per month for your household and personal expenses. I will take a life insurance policy in sufficient amount to pay off all of the indebtedness on the house at 1561 Kirby Drive in case of my death.
I will place $7,000 to your account at once.
It is distinctly understood that it is not my idea or intention to influence any judicial action now pending or that might be instituted against you or by you.
John Robert Hill, M.D.
9 Dec 1968
Ash took the document, dismissed John Hill, and telephoned his daughter. “He’s coming home,” said Ash, “if you still want him.”
Several things must have been on John’s mind when he signed the letter, a document of potential financial destruction, a promise to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. Perhaps he thought it best to humor Ash Robinson and sign the paper, feeling that it was worthless and not binding in a lawsuit. Or he could have realized that if he did not return to Joan he would never see the completion of the music room, for Ash would demand of his daughter that she ban John Hill from the hearth. Or perhaps he had wearied of his liaison with Ann Kurth, for she was placing extraordinary demands of her own.
Hardly had John begun appearing with Ann in public than he received several anonymous telephone calls suggesting that he had selected an expensive adornment. The office manager, Frances Johnston, would later state that the arrival of Ann Kurth in her employer’s life “changed things drastically; in fact, his practice went to hell.”
On one occasion, after they began living together, Ann appeared at Mrs. Johnston’s desk and asked to see John Hill’s income tax records. “You ask him for those yourself,” said Mrs. Johnston, who, unbekownst to Ann, was a close friend of Joan’s and loyal to her. Much of Joan’s inside information about her husband’s activities came from Mrs. Johnston.
Turmoil settled over Dr. Hill’s office when Ann began paying regular visits and asking questions about intimate financial details. When she demanded that Mrs. Johnston give her daily copies of the surgeon’s operating schedule, and his list of accounts due plus anticipated revenue from surgery, the office manager refused—hotly. Then Mrs. Johnston went to Dr. Hill and said, “Is she running this office or am I?” And in a telephone conversation with Joan, Mrs. Johnston reported, “He’s started disappearing on us for hours at a time. Nobody knows where he is. He won’t even answer his beeper. I’m worried about him, the patients, and his professional reputation.”
When he twice failed to show up at a major hospital for scheduled surgery, a head nurse reamed him out. Operating room time is at a premium, she said, and if he could not keep his schedule straight, then she could not give him precious space.
One close friend, a nurse herself and also the wife of a radiologist, went to the Hill office with a badly cut foot—she had dropped a martini glass and stepped on it—and she endured a painful four-hour wait while his staff telephoned around the city trying to find him.
“Old John,” drawled a veteran cardiologist, “has a tiger by the tail, and he can’t let go. That woman’s turnin’ him every way but loose.”
After he signed the Ash Robinson letter of repentance, John drove the few blocks up Kirby to the great house where Joan, already alerted by her father, was waiting. There was one last obstacle to a full reconciliation, he said: the matter of his clothes and personal belongings. They were at Ann Kurth’s home and he was afraid to go and pick them up.
“Afraid?” said Joan. “Why?”
“The lady has a temper,” said John.
Then Joan would engage a protective posse to escort her husband into enemy territory. She telephoned Clyde Wilson, a colorful private detective and friend of the family. Gruff, blustering, a cigar stump ever growing in his mouth, Wilson was a character from the John Ford stock company. Indeed the only films he ever watched were John Wayne movies. He once was engaged to protect a string of laundries which had been plagued by burglars. Wilson’s novel and very Texan solution was to hire an unspecified number of off-duty Houston policemen. They were to lay in wait at the laundries with instructions to shoot unlawful intruders. Coincidentally, he passed word through the Houston underground that, should anyone attempt to rob one of the laundries, that person would be playing a form of Russian roulette. There might, or there might not, be a hired hand with a drawn and loaded gun waiting behind the washtubs. The wave of burglaries slowed dramatically.
Wilson agreed to accompany John Hill to Ann Kurth’s home. But once there, the doctor insisted on waiting in the car while the detective rang the doorbell. Unaware of what had taken place between her lover and his father-in-law, Ann greeted Clyde Wilson politely. But when she saw John sitting in the car outside—and when Wilson explained his mission—her demeanor became frosty. She was confused. What the hell was going on? She would not let Wilson have anything unless John Hill himself came into the house and explained matters.
Reluctantly, Hill got out of the car and entered the house where the night before he had held Ann Kurth in his arms. Now he was mute and sullen. The two men gathered up suits, shirts, ties, underwear. Wilson found two guns—a .45 and a .38—under the mattress where Ann and John slept. He took these as well. Beside the bed was a tape recorder with a voice-activating device to record all calls. John collected this and a few cassettes containing calls from Ash and Joan.
The two men left hurriedly as Ann sat on a sofa, both bewildered and furious, her eyes glowing like freshly ignited charcoal on a barbecue grill.
That night, with two other couples, John and Joan Hill held a reconciliation party at Patti’s, a new and popular downtown supper club. Owned by a rich divorcee and frustrated café singer named Patti Gordon who, in classic Houston tradition, built her own place in order to find an outlet for her talents, the restaurant had the atmosphere of a living room, where guests sat on sofas and overstuffed chairs, with dim lighting and attentive black waiters drifting about. During the estrangement Joan had gone to Patti’s often, sometimes alone.
Although they were but casual friends, she often confided to Patti intimate details of her broken marriage. “It’s that god damned music room,” she said. “He doesn’t care about me or our son or anybody else. Only that god damned music room. I wish we had never started building it.”
With Christmas lights twinkling softly and seasonal greenery all about, John Hill and his wife lifted champagne glasses and toasted one another. Joan was radiant and tender, happy to have her husband back and determined to make the rapprochement permanent.
But Patti Gordon, watching the toast from the bar, noticed a lack of warmth in John Hill’s manner. “I don’t think he’s gotten used to the reconciliation,” said Patti to the bartender.
“That’s a reconciliation?” said the bartender, his eyebrows arching.
“It looks more like a last supper. Look at the way he’s watching her. He hasn’t smiled all evening.”
Late that night the telephone rang beside Ann Kurth’s bed, a private telephone put in by John Hill. He was the only one who knew the number. Ann let it ring several times, staring at the object with anger, before she answered.
“Hi, baby.” It was John.
Ann exploded. “I have no idea what you think you’re doing,” she shouted, “but you have really screwed up my life royally. I think you’ve flipped out. Are you the same man who told me you loved me the past three months? For God’s sake, John, what is going on?”
John spoke as if nothing had happened. “I’m sorry about the way I handled that,” he said. “There was no other way.”
“Well, I’m in shock, I can tell you that.”
“Let’s have lunch tomorrow. I’ll explain everything.”
Two days before Christmas, 1968, John Hill withdrew his divorce action against Joan Robinson Hill. In celebration, she planned a festive holiday dinner and a party to which their friends would come and see the couple together again. “I think it’s going to work out,” Joan told Vann Maxwell. “I’m keeping my fingers crossed.” She called a baker and ordered a cake in the shape of a grand piano.
On Christmas morning John Hill spent an hour with his wife and son, then excused himself to “make rounds” at the hospital. Instead, he secretly drove out the Katy Highway west of town to a motel where for a week he had been enjoying a separate holiday with Ann Kurth. Over and over he reassured her that his marriage to Joan was still in jeopardy; working it out would simply take more time and thought.
One prank of John’s seemed amusing at the time to Ann. When they first drove into the driveway of the motel, John mentioned that he would have to sign the registration book under an assumed name. But the personalized license plates on his Cadillac bore his initials, “JRH.” To match them, John invented a curious signature for the desk clerk. He signed boldly, “Mr. and Mrs. J. R. Hyde.”
“Dr. Hill and Mr. Hyde,” laughed his mistress. “That’s really too much.”
ELEVEN
Joan embarked on a self-improvement program to keep her husband from straying again. Desperately she tried to give up smoking, it being one of John’s principal complaints against her. Three visits with a hypnotist did her no good. She purchased pacifiers, medication that promised to curtail her craving—nothing worked. Disgusted at her dependence, she took to throwing her package of cigarettes angrily into the kitchen sink and running water on them. There they would sit, waterlogged and crumbly, until an hour had passed and Joan had to put them into the oven to dry and make them smokable again. She compromised by trying to quit daily at least an hour before John normally came home from work, brushing her teeth, gargling with mouthwash, spraying with mint, chewing breath fresheners. Vann Maxwell watched her sit nervously one late afternoon, listening for the sound of John’s car, thinking she heard it, running upstairs to the bathroom for a last-minute gargle, then realizing it was not his car, lighting up a cigarette to help her renewed wait, and repeating the process over and over again. Religiously she counted her calories to keep her weight near a hundred and ten. At a post-Christmas party, the hostess exclaimed over Joan’s svelte figure and asked what kind of diet she was on. “Nerves, honey,” said Joan truthfully.
At the same party was a young woman named Ann Moore, who was the wife of John Hill’s junior partner. John had eyed the up-and-coming Dr. Jim Moore in the medical training program and had hired him, just as Nathan Roth had done half a decade earlier. Ann Moore labored successfully to make herself one of the principal scenic attractions of Houston. Compared to her, Ann Kurth was dowdy. Mrs. Moore accomplished complex hairdos, theatrically long false eyelashes, mini-skirts, and enough jewels on her fingers, wrists, throat, and ear lobes to make conversation difficult under bright lights, which she avoided. All of which she set on display in a red Cadillac convertible. Next to her husband’s partner’s wife, said Joan, “I feel like Grandma Moses’ grandma.”
Nonetheless, Joan asked her to lunch and midway through an empty remark about a charity project suddenly blurted, “Help me fix myself up, Ann. Give me some beauty tips.” Ann nodded, beginning tactfully. It happened that she had spoken with John Hill during his estrangement from Joan, and he had remarked that Joan’s “lack of femininity” turned him away from her. “There’s not one feminine thing about my wife,” he complained.
“So why not change your image?” suggested Ann Moore to her despairing girl friend. “Start by raising those hemlines from below your knee. And that pony tail suited you when you were sixteen, but now women are wearing their hair long and straight.” Joan considered the suggestions. “All right, I’ll raise my hems,” she said, “but I’ve lived with this pony tail for thirty-eight years and I’ve had good luck with it.” Then she studied Ann Moore’s carefully made-up face. Finally, hesitantly, she asked, “How the hell do you put on those god damn false eyelashes?” Smiling, teacher began instructions.
John stretched himself very thin in the opening weeks of 1969, trying to keep his wife happy and free of suspicion—and sustaining a demanding mistress as well. Ann Kurth rode her tormented lover hard, demanding a decision. “Is it me or her?” she pressed. “Make up your mind, Doctor, because I haven’t got the time to wait.” She was not willing to erect convent walls around herself and wait for a very much married surgeon to pay house calls. “I’m going to go ahead and live my life,” she would remember telling John, “and you lead yours—whichever one you find yourself in at the moment. And whenever you get yourself straightened out, then we’ll talk.”
On February 14, 1969, Valentine’s Day, John went to Ann’s home for dinner, bearing an enormous box of candy and smaller gifts for each of her three sons. He had bought his own wife nothing. After slices of heart-shaped cake, John was happy and expansive. “This is the way I’ve always wanted it to be,” he told Ann. “I just love my new little family.”
The Bösendorfer piano was delivered and installed in the music room. When John encountered it the first time, his attitude was reverential, like a pilgrim approaching the Vatican. He touched it tremblingly, with wonder. The instrument, a magnificent ten feet long, was made from wood so fine and rubbed so lovingly that it gleamed with dignity. “André Previn once encountered a Bösendorfer in Chicago,” said piano salesman Bill Knight, “and he locked himself in the room and he played it for four hours.”
Joan already owned a Yamaha grand, and the two pianos were now arranged next to one another, for duets. The two men, surgeon and salesman, sat down and played for an hour. “It was some strange sonata,” said Bill Knight later. “It sounded like marbles rolling down a staircase, but John knew it well, and he seemed to take pride in playing it better than I.”
The music room was nearly completed, and it was, in a word, unbelievable. To enter was to gasp! The size of a hotel ballroom with a double-height ceiling, the opulent color scheme was royal gold and white. On the walls were panels of satin brocade; above, in dominance, chandeliers dangled drops of Baccarat crystal. The fireplace was ornately carved marble from a Louisiana plantation house, and on it were gilded candelabra and an antique clock. The floors were highly polished parquet, bare at one end, where the pianos were placed, and at the other, covered with a thick Chinese carpet, where people could sit on French provincial settees and hear the music. Behind every gold panel, all of which opened by secret silent touch, were intricately arranged shelves—space for two thousand record albums, hundreds of music books, John’s collection of musical instruments. The walls contained four miles of wiring and 108 speakers. The sound system cost more than $20,000—one of the most expensive privately owned installations in America. A movie screen slid down from the ceiling at the push of a button, and in one of the hidden panels was John’s collection of film comedies. He owned several starring W. C. Fields.
When Bill Knight left, John walked around his room, thrilling at what he had
wrought from a junk room above a garage. Now it could easily be taken as part of a castle. A king could dine here. A court ballet could be performed here. The great voices could sing here, embraced by the most perfect acoustics man was capable of creating. And John would accompany them on the world’s most expensive piano. It would surely happen, he vowed. The room would become famous in the world of people whose souls were stirred by great music. That it had already cost more than $100,000—more than the cost of the entire original house—was irrelevant.
At that moment, Joan walked abruptly in with two women house guests and knelt sarcastically before the fireplace. She crossed herself, as if before an altar. “This is God’s room,” she said derisively to her friends. John did not find the remark amusing.
It was the second week of March 1969. A series of events were about to convulse the household.
Chatsworth Farm had never approached what Joan intended. No world champion horses were foaled there, nothing much had been accomplished save giving a bunch of little rich girls riding lessons and boarding their ponies. There was no lack of youngsters, Joan Robinson Hill remaining a powerful lure for socially ambitious mothers.
Part of the trouble lay with Ash. One good trainer worked there for a few years, but he found it difficult to get along with the old man. Every time money was needed to purchase a new piece of equipment, it meant prying the funds out of Ash. “It’s too much hassle,” said the trainer in explanation to Joan, on one of the numerous times he quit, only to be persuaded back by the mistress of Chatsworth. Finally, in 1967, he left for good, angry at a list of broken promises from Ash. And the stables had been without a trainer or manager since his departure. Joan filled in as best she could, hurrying out to the farm at least two or three times a week, but when the Ann Kurth episode commanded her attention, she had little time for horseflesh.
Blood and Money Page 12