Empress Bianca

by Lady Colin Campbell

  As far as Bianca was concerned, her ambitions had now crystallized, and she knew precisely what she wanted to be. She wanted to be another Brooke Astor. If Brooke could become one of the leaders of Society, so could she. All she needed to do was find the way.

  Normally, Bianca walked the two blocks from her apartment to Stella’s whenever she was lunching there, especially on a day like today: crisp and beautiful, with the sun shining and the air crackling in anticipation of the autumn. Like most New York residents, she had developed the habit of using her feet for short distances. For her, it was an uplifting experience to dress to the nines and walk down Fifth Avenue, turning heads at the age of nearly sixty. She loved the impact she still created. That, she told herself with more accuracy than modesty, was star quality, and no one could take it away from her. The energy. The vibrancy. The luminosity. When she walked down the streets of New York, the reaction of strangers told her she had still not lost her touch.

  Today, however, she would have to forego the pleasure of turning heads, in case there were reporters camped outside her building. Philippe did not consider it appropriate that the newspapers should have the opportunity of capturing his wife ‘walking the streets’. It would, he said, ‘convey the wrong image’. So Bianca had to forego a pleasure she had never let anyone know she enjoyed. Not that she would let such a tiny little inconvenience mar what was, for her, one of the most perfect days of her life. Even if the notoriously reserved Mrs Onassis was not forthcoming, and she did not manage to make her into a friend, Bianca had quite enough in her own right to crow about. She had officially joined the billionaires’ club. Hereafter, thanks to the Wall Street Journal, the world would always know that she, Bianca Barnett Calman Piedraplata Antonescu Mahfud, was a member of the most exclusive and desirable club in the world.

  As Bianca exited from her building, she was bursting with well being. Although scrupulously kind to staff without exception, today she had an especially warm ‘thank you’ for the doorman, who held the door open for her to step out into an absence of flashbulbs. She had to admit she was disappointed that the press had not turned out in force to doorstep her, but she did not allow such a paltry disappointment to lift the gilt from her gingerbread and happily pressed two one hundred dollar bills into the palm of the doorman’s hand. Then she climbed into the back of the chauffeur-driven Lincoln Continental stretch limousine that would convey her rather more sedately than she hoped, to Mrs P Adolphus Minckus’s Fifth Avenue triplex.

  As she settled back into the seat and stared out of the window as Fifth Avenue swept by, Bianca had to admit that, since she already had so much, it seemed a real shame that she didn’t have the rest. Why lie to herself? She wanted to be famous. Really famous. To be a household name. To be fêted and courted and worshipped.

  But, since Philippe considered personal publicity dangerous, she would simply have to do without this final coup, at least until he was dead - or she could get him to change his mind.

  Chapter Twenty

  The first time Philippe noticed the trembling was during negotiations with Continental Express prior to the sale of Banco Imperiale. He had been absorbed in a sheet of figures at the desk of his main office in the Principality of Andorra. This was something he often did. Like many highly successful businessmen, he trusted no one and had always functioned under the premise that he should keep as much as possible of his plans and thoughts away from his secretary, Gisele, even though she had been chosen for her trustworthiness as much as for her efficiency. ‘You just don’t know,’ Philippe would say to himself. ‘Maybe one day she’ll want to jump ship and float off with a competitor. Maybe she’ll sell our plans to a competitor, thereby giving him the edge. You just don’t know.’ Philippe therefore always tried to keep a crucial piece of every puzzle to himself until such time as he had to divulge the information to Gisele.

  The telephone rang. It was Gisele. He reached for the telephone without looking up. He wanted to finish the line he was working on before his train of thought was severed by this latest interruption. He clamped the receiver to his ear. ‘One minute,’ he mumbled. Gisele knew this meant he was finishing off something, so she waited silently and patiently for his cue to continue.

  Philippe wrote the final figure, looked up, catching sight of his left index finger as his line of vision settled upon the view of the Pyrenees in the distance. That, he always said, was one of the beauties of having an office in the tax-free haven of Andorra.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘It’s Madame, sir,’ Gisele said.

  ‘Put her through.’

  As they were speaking, Philippe looked, transfixed, as his index finger danced around while he held his hand in the air. ‘It must be the stress,’ he murmured to himself. Thereafter, he noticed that the index finger of his left hand trembled intermittently but gave it no more thought than he had given that first glimpse. Negotiations with Continental Express were intense and fraught, and it was only to be expected that, in a man of his age, there would be the occasional visible manifestation of the pressure he was enduring.

  Once the deal was done and Continental Express bought Banco Imperiale, the pressure was eased off. The trembling continued, however, gradually spreading to the other fingers on his left hand.

  ‘It’s obviously the after-effects of the strain,’ Philippe thought, and was soon launching himself back into a new venture, this time shoring up Banco Imperiale Geneva, which had not been bought by Continental Express, with a view to making it attractive for takeover by another financial institution.

  Eight months after the sale of the New York bank, the unexpected happened when Continental Express sued Philippe in New York City for breach of contract and for misrepresentation. The gist of their case was simple, even though the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times in London made it sound complex. They were claiming that he had padded the accounts to achieve a spectacular sale price and that he had, moreover, taken clients with him whom they had bought with the bank, having received ironclad guarantees that they would remain with Banco Imperiale NY. This lawsuit would have been devastating to Philippe’s reputation had he not fought it with the vigour that he did. He hired the toughest lawyers he could find: Gassman, Ginzberg, Strelnick and Houghton. They were renowned financial specialists, with a gift for ‘turning water into wine – an old Jewish trick not limited to the boy from Bethlehem’, as Philippe put it. He also hired John Lowenstein, the famous public relations consultant whose services his wife had been dying to avail herself of for years.

  To Bianca, with her frustrated aspirations for public recognition, the employment of John Lowenstein was almost too bitter a pill to swallow. She had been obliged to stand by throughout the years she had been living in New York, as Lowenstein pushed her friends Ruth Fargo Huron and Stella Minckus through the social columns to the forefront of the public domain, making them celebrities, while she had remained a socialite known only within the narrow confines of a select social circle.

  ‘Let John use me,’ Bianca suggested to Philippe, hoping to achieve her aims on the back of Philippe’s need. ‘We could form a pincer approach, so to speak, to defeat your enemies. Me in the social columns: you on the financial pages. Take a leaf out of Dolphie’s book. Look at how he has used Stella to enhance his stature and Belmont’s. You don’t seriously believe Dolphie would have John Lowenstein on a retainer, at the prices he charges, to promote Stella, if his business interests weren’t also benefiting, do you?’

  ‘It won’t work,’ Philippe said, too quickly, to have truly considered all the sides of the question. ‘You’re too precious for me to run the risk of hurting you. And, believe me, Bianca, adverse publicity will hurt, even if it’s only your vanity.’

  ‘Let me worry about my vanity and you worry about Continental Express while John Lowenstein uses all the ammunition we can put at his disposal,’ she said sweetly.

  ‘No,’ Philippe said stubbornly, his bottom lip protruding the way it did
whenever he had made up his mind and pressure was being applied upon him to change it. ‘I can’t run the risk of dragging you into this.’

  ‘I’m not some little china doll to be kept safely on the shelf, you know,’ she said. As Bianca uttered these words she realized, for the first time in all the years they had been together, that when she could have been acquiring fame, his claims of publicity being bad for business and potentially damaging to their professional and social positions had been nothing but an elaborate charade. He didn’t want the world viewing her as special, because he was afraid that if it did, she would become too independent. And then he might lose her.

  ‘No, you’re not a china doll,’ Philippe replied, as if in confirmation of her observation. ‘But you’re even more precious than the most precious china doll to me, and I must protect you against anything bad happening.’

  ‘Well, I wish you wouldn’t,’ Bianca snapped.

  Philippe looked stricken. His left hand started to tremble even more than it had before. He opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, and before she was even aware of what she would say, Bianca had jumped into the breach. ‘I’m getting sick of being mollycoddled by you in this way,’ she said. ‘It’s demeaning. And I wish you’d get that damned hand of yours looked at. That bloody tremor is getting worse than ever. You’re starting to look like a shaky little old man, and that, I have to tell you, gives your opponents the scent of blood far more than anything else you can think of.’

  Goaded by Bianca, Philippe made an appointment to see his doctor in New York. The diagnosis was Multiple Sclerosis. At first, Bianca did not fully appreciate the severity of Philippe’s condition. Nor, in fairness, did he. Neither of them was the type to face bad news head-on. Each of them thought that by dodging the issue, it would go away. But it did not, and within a year the trembling was worse than ever, despite medication.

  It was at this juncture that Bianca took things into her own hands. Acting upon the philosophy that there is no point in having influential and well-connected friends if you do not use them, she telephoned Stella and Ruth and discovered that the man they regarded as the world’s Multiple Sclerosis expert worked a few blocks away on 77th Street near Fifth Avenue.

  ‘Make an appointment with Dr Eli Wiseman as soon as possible,’ she instructed Mary van Gayrib, without even bothering to tell her husband what she was doing until Mary had confirmed a date and time.

  Far from resenting the steps Bianca had taken, Philippe was delighted and made no secret of it. In fact, he even boasted, as he recounted the tale to Gisele: ‘I’m the luckiest man alive to have a wife like Madame. She’s more capable than ten Roman legions and does not shy away from taking charge when the occasion demands it.’

  Dr Wiseman’s suggestions were basic enough. Philippe was to avoid stress, and he was to take his medication regularly, rather than when he felt the need for it. ‘You will never derive the cumulative benefits of the medication if you imbibe it intermittently,’ the doctor explained. ‘It is designed to be administered on a regular basis. Without that regularity it cannot do its work, and the symptoms of the disease will not be kept at bay but will continue to encroach with the steadiness and rapidity they have displayed since your initial diagnosis. MS is no respecter of persons, Mr Mahfud. All the money and success in the world won’t help you if you don’t start to show the condition the respect it deserves.’

  As Dr Wiseman had noticed during that first meeting, Philippe was in many ways the worst person to have fallen victim to a disease like MS. He thrived on stress and had never been the sort of person who could conquer discomfiture. This latter trait had been the secret of his success in business and had also accounted for the great gaps within his personality. Despite being one of the most successful businessmen on earth, Philippe had never stretched the limits of his personality, withdrawing instead into a world of his own creation where he could function comfortably without the need for painful personal growth. He was someone who had always found it easier to escape the demands of small talk, casual friendship and normal socializing by retreating into his office and coming up with schemes for making yet more money. The acquisition of wealth had long been more about entertaining himself than it had been about what money could or could not buy, for he had passed the stage where his money could be spent. Money had become nothing but a yardstick of accomplishment and the means by which he was able to have the world adjust to him, rather than vice versa. In so doing, he had been able to remain fundamentally a child. A ruthless child, admittedly, but also one who could be sweet and kind and loving and who, to those close to him, had a vulnerability that made his limitations excusable, even appealing at times.

  This self-indulgence might have been the source of much of his success, but it also became the cause of the rapid decline in his health. It wasn’t long before Philippe disregarded Dr Wiseman’s advice concerning the regular intake of his medication. ‘The damned tablets either make me nauseous or befuddled,’ he complained, ‘and I can’t afford to be either.’

  At first, Bianca tried to get him to follow the specialist’s regimen with wifely concern. ‘You know what Dr Wiseman told you. You’ve got to take your tablets regularly. Why not try them for a month and see if there isn’t an improvement?’

  Philippe, however, could last no more than two days before abandoning the discipline of regular medication. After enduring weeks of watching him ignore the doctor’s sensible advice, Bianca could stand no more. ‘I have to tell you I’m getting fed up with your childish attitude,’ she snapped. ‘Dr Wiseman says the reason why your limbs are stiffening and shaking is that you refuse to do anything to suppress the natural progression of the disease. If you persist in this folly, you’re going to end up unable to get out of a chair without help, and soon you’ll be unable to walk unaided. Do your really want to have to use a Zimmer frame or a wheelchair for the rest of your life?’

  ‘I’ll be OK,’ Philippe said. ‘All I need to do is win the case Continental Express have brought against me.’

  ‘If I were you,’ she said, ‘I’d settle it.’

  Philippe looked incredulous. Even though the MS had started to affect his facial expressions, Biancc could see the passion that illuminated his irises. ‘Having MS doesn’t mean I’ve become a loser,’ he insisted. ‘I’d sooner die than settle that action.’

  Fortunately Continental Express settled the lawsuit, having come to the realization, as Gassman, Ginzberg, Strelnick and Houghton buried them under a mountain of paperwork and John Lowenstein further immersed them under a welter of favourable newspaper coverage generated by a book he had arranged for a friendly journalist to write giving the Mahfud side of the argument, that the cost would ultimately wipe out all the financial benefits of any success they might achieve.

  Left to his own devices, Philippe would have continued to go into the office every day, return home every evening, have a quiet supper; go to bed early and get up the following morning. Then he would resume plotting and planning and scheming his way towards the creation of yet another vast fortune, in an effort to give his life definition and to take his mind off what was happening to his body. However, he could no longer be left to his own devices. He needed help to walk, and he could not write anymore. He therefore became more reliant upon his assistants.

  Gisele especially took the brunt of the responsibility, and gradually, as she had to do more and more for him, he found himself sharing his plans and dreams with her in a way that he never would have done in the past.

  During this period of decline, Philippe kept his spirits up the only way he knew how. He dedicated himself to a new moneymaking project. This one, he knew, would have to be the climax of his financial career, so he set about making it as glorious as possible. Readying Banco Imperiale Geneva for an even more impressive and lucrative takeover than anything that had gone before, he cultivated rich clients even more avidly than he had done in the past. Using his Mexican connections, and that country’s proximity to
neighbouring cocaine-rich Colombia, he pushed the already murky dealings of international banking further into the mire. Like many, if not most, successful bankers, he had never been overly concerned with the provenance of a fortune. As long as someone had a large enough amount to invest and thereby boost the desirability of Banco Imperiale Geneva for takeover, Philippe would court their business - no questions asked. This was true even when it was apparent that the money was tainted, that it was being laundered unlawfully or being diverted by officials of foreign states. It was only a matter of time before the word spread in the reputable and disreputable segments of the financial community alike that the man to turn to when you had nowhere else to go was Philippe Mahfud. To those members of the financial community who valued probity - or, at any rate, the appearance of it - he now became a figure to shun. But to those who admired results - to the Manuel Noriegas and the Pablo Escobars of this world, or to the bankers who wanted an ‘introductory fee’ for laundering drug and blood money while keeping their own hands clean - he provided the solution to their problems.

  From Philippe’s point of view, this could not have been a more ideal time to build up quickly the most successful investment bank in the world. Aside from the billions of dollars of drugs money to be laundered, the Soviet Union was in the process of collapsing. The staggering wealth of that vast country was falling into the hands of a tiny minority of state officials who exploited the breakdown of the old order and the creation of a market economy by siphoning off billions of dollars. They cut deals with their cronies and either sold off or acquired state property, state enterprises and state assets.