Too Much Money

by Dominick Dunne

  “But where will cousin Minnie go to live? In one of those assisted-living places where you take your own furniture?” asked Maisie.

  “Not at all. Believe it or not, I’ve grown rather fond of my little apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street. I’m having it all done over. I’ve gotten rid of those red damask draperies from the Fifth Avenue apartment that looked all wrong from the beginning and hired a charming young man named Markham Roberts, he’s the latest hottest thing, to brighten it up, and it’s really quite cozy. There’s an apartment in my building that’s coming on the market, and Minnie’s going to move there. Do you remember my old cook, Gert, whom Ruby Renthal stole from me? Gert has an Irish niece named Lil after me, and we’re going to change her name to Bridey—we can’t have two Lils on the same premises—and she’s going to move into the little maid’s room there and take care of Minnie. Now I must run. I have an appointment with old Marjorie Watson at River House about letting me sell her place.” Lil looked in both directions and then mouthed but did not speak the word Alzheimer’s.

  CHAPTER 33

  THE TALK AROUND TOWN AT LUNCH AT SWIFTY’S and Michael’s and ‘21’ was about Elias and Ruby Renthal’s coming-out party at the Four Seasons that everyone of importance in New York was receiving invitations to. There had been talk that Stokes Bishop would host the party, but Simon Cabot and Baroness de Liagra had prevailed and the party was being hosted by Elias and Ruby, as their own return to New York after his seven years in prison. The name Ruby Renthal was in the air.

  Simon Cabot, the international public relations figure best known for making the unpopular Camilla Parker-Bowles, mistress of His Royal Highness Prince Charles, acceptable to the British public following the tragic death of Princess Diana, issued the following release to Kit Jones, Toby Tilden, Christine Saunders, and others of equal stature in the New York media:

  Ruby Renthal, the beautiful, gallant, and loyal wife of billionaire financier Elias Renthal, will be on the cover of the October issue of Park Avenue magazine, dressed by Oscar de la Renta and photographed by Annie Leibovitz in front of the Renthals’ gardenia-filled indoor swimming pool at their magnificent New York mansion, with aquatic ladies swimming and kicking in unison, in the manner of Esther Williams and Busby Berkeley in the great days of MGM.

  There was, of course, no mention of the vast artistic contribution of Baroness de Liagra in choreographing the Aquacade especially for Ruby.

  Ruby Renthal, Ruby Renthal, Ruby Renthal. Everyone in New York was beginning to talk about Ruby Renthal.

  EAST FIFTY-SECOND Street between Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue was jam-packed with chauffeur-driven limousines dropping off the three hundred guests at the awninged entrance of the Four Seasons, the city’s most prestigious restaurant for the rich, famous, and powerful. Horns honked. Police whistles blew. On the sidewalk, smartly uniformed doormen opened the doors of the limousines and another opened the door of the restaurant, saying to the regulars, “Good evening, Dr. Kissinger;” “Good evening, Mayor Bloomberg;” “Good evening, Mrs. Rockefeller;” “Good evening, Ms. Vanderbilt.” Paparazzi, flashing their cameras, pushed through the hundreds of spectators, who cheered and screamed for their favorites as they emerged from their limousines. It was controlled pandemonium. “Oh, my god, there’s Faye Converse, the old-time movie star,” cried out Lillian Hoolihan, Gert Hoolihan’s niece, who had changed her name to Bridey when she went to work for Minnie Willoughby. “She’s still beautiful at seventy-six,” said Bridey. She wrote down Faye Converse’s name below Mick Jagger’s on the list of the famous people she’d seen that she was planning to read to the other maids at bingo night at the Sodality of Mary. Gert and Tammi Jo, who had been hired to be Elias Renthal’s private nurse, had high positions in the Renthal household and had been allowed by Ruby to enter the restaurant and watch the arriving guests from the bottom of the stairway leading up to the party room.

  Upstairs in the restaurant, it was Brucie’s finest hour. Ruby had taken a liking to Brucie during the several years she had lived at the Rhinelander Hotel when Elias was doing time in the facility in Las Vegas and, in return, Brucie had become her most ardent admirer. His pal Jonsie, from the wine shop, said that Brucie worshiped Ruby. So it was no surprise that Ruby had insisted to Elias that Brucie do the flowers and decorations for the party at the Four Seasons. It was the biggest job of his career, and he rose to the occasion. The centerpieces, the fifteen-inch red candles, and the goody bags bearing gifts for the departing guests at the end of the party all fell under Brucie’s supervision. He had created a new scented candle named for Ruby Renthal as one of the gifts.

  AN EMERGENCY call from Johannesburg about her drug-addicted half brother, Rocco, who had this time urinated on the dance floor of the Tits and Ass Club while smoking a joint and had landed in jail for the second time in a month, had delayed Perla Zacharias considerably, much to the dismay of Bernardo, who was waiting to do her hair and makeup before he went to do the same for Ormolu Webb. Addison Kent was frantic, and in order to save time, Perla suggested that he wait outside the Four Seasons and be there when she finally arrived, as she did not wish to walk up the stairs to the party unescorted any more than Addison wanted to walk up the stairs alone, as he had not been invited directly, merely as an escort for Mrs. Zacharias. Addison had the taxi drop him at the corner of Fifty-second Street and Park Avenue and walked the half block east to the entrance of the Four Seasons through the nearly impenetrable crowd of fans and paparrazi. “Excuse me. Excuse me,” he kept saying in the tone of voice he had learned to use when speaking to what he considered to be lesser people. “Coming through, please. I’m a guest at the party. Coming through, please,” he said several times, inadvertently bumping into Bridey Hoolihan and knocking her Instamatic camera out of her hand just as she was about to snap Caroline Kennedy, her favorite Irish American, emerging from her car. “Fuck you, asshole,” screamed Bridey at Addison as she leaned down to pick up the smashed camera from the sidewalk. In her brief time living in New York, Bridey had learned a new language that was quite different from how she’d spoken at Our Lady of Sorrows in Roscommon, Ireland. Addison, unabashed, ignored her and pushed on, finally breaking through the crowd to the entrance of the Four Seasons. “Has Mrs. Konstantin Zacharias arrived yet?” he said to the doorman in the same uppity voice. The doorman took an instant dislike to Addison. “Don’t know the lady, and you can’t wait here,” he said.

  “No, no, you don’t understand. Mrs. Zacharias is a very important international woman and a close personal friend of Elias Renthal and she specifically told me to meet her at the door.”

  “Then move over there out of the way. You’re holding things up here,” said the doorman, waving him away, totally unimpressed with Addison’s self-importance. “Good evening, Mrs. Schlossberg,” the doorman said to Caroline Kennedy as he bowed his head in respect and opened the door. The doormen knew the riff from the raff.

  Addison, stung deeply at being spoken to in such a manner by a doorman, retreated into a corner of the entrance, so rattled that he needed a smoke. Unconsciously, he patted his jacket down until he found his gold cigarette case. At the very same moment, Lil Altemus was exiting the limousine of her stepmother, Dodo Van Degan, with Dodo and Dodo’s lover, a very excited Xavior Branigan, who had never been to such a party before. As Lil climbed the steps, her eye caught the gold cigarette case that Winkie Williams had promised to leave to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum. She stormed forward and grabbed the cigarette case out of Addison Kent’s hand as Bill Cunningham, the star society photographer from the New York Times, who knew an aristocrat when he saw one, took Lil’s picture over and over.

  “I’ll take that, thank you very much,” she said in her most patrician outraged voice. “That poor maid, Immaculata or whatever her name was. I accused her of stealing Winkie’s cigarette case and told all my friends not to hire her, and all the time it was you! I knew you were a phony from the first time you walked into my house with
Adele Harcourt at my Farewell to Fifth Avenue lunch party. What about this emerald ring?” she said, holding up the ring on her finger to Addison’s face and shaking her finger. “Did you steal this too?”

  “No, no, honest to God,” cried Addison, close to tears.

  “I can only imagine what your great friend Perla Zacharias will do to you when she hears about this, which she will! You shouldn’t be allowed into this party. I’m going to have a word with Elias Renthal about you!”

  “Come along, Lil,” said Dodo. “You’re holding up the line, and the photographers are taking pictures of you. Xavior, take Lil’s arm. We’re going in.”

  “Well, the tables have turned,” said Xavior, who had once tricked with Addison Kent in a men’s room at the Grant P. Trumbull Funeral Home and then been snubbed by him. He took Lil’s arm, as if he were a family member, and rendered a look to Addison that clearly said, “You’re toast, Miss Kent.”

  “I never liked him, never, from the first day I met him,” continued Lil as she entered the restaurant.

  Addison, devastated, began to cry at his public shame.

  “Out! Move, fella! Officer,” said the doorman.

  “No, no, I’m going. Will you please tell Mrs. Zacharias,” he said in a pleading voice.

  “I’m not telling Mrs. Zacco nothing! Officer! Officer!”

  Addison, frightened now, backed off into the crowd. He ran wildly to the corner of Lexington Avenue, sobbing all the way. He didn’t know where to run. He had recognized Bill Cunningham from the Times. He knew there would be pictures. For the first time in his life, he thought of his mother, who, after the failure of her cheese soufflé at Tootie Scott-Miller’s lunch party, had jumped to her death out the window of the Tavistock mansion, which was now the home of Elias and Ruby Renthal, whose party he had not been allowed to enter.

  NO ONE ever said about Perla Zacharias that she was not a very clever, perhaps even brilliant, woman. No one knew Perla better than Perla knew herself. In the privacy of her room, she talked to herself in the mirror and was totally, brutally honest with herself. In her social quest, she still had high ambitions, despite several setbacks that had been written about in Park Avenue magazine in articles by Augustus Bailey, whom she loathed. Nonetheless, her desire to assume the philanthropic mantle of Adele Harcourt had never abated. Adele had been dead for more than a year now, and no one had stepped forward to take her place. Perla knew that no one must ever realize the extent of her vile vicious temper, or she would never attain the high position in New York that she felt she was ready to assume. Her half brother, Rocco, for whom she felt dislike and who she often wished had never been born, was one who knew the cruelty of her temper, but he had long since tuned out his sister, who kept him back in Johannesburg, never to visit or ever see her grand houses in New York, London, and Paris. Rocco could do imitations of her rage that kept the servants in hysterics, and he delighted in embarrassing her memory in Johannesburg, by doing things like urinating on the dance floor of the Tits and Ass Club, the lowest dive in Johannesburg, while smoking a joint. The rage she felt at her brother, and at others such as Gus Bailey, often lingered for long periods. Some had witnessed her anger, but they were her servants, her guards, people too insignificant for her to concern herself with.

  As late as she was for Elias and Ruby Renthal’s party, she did not wish there to be any leftover anger fermenting within her, so she asked her chief of staff, Willard, dressed as always in gray flannel, to ask her driver, Mohab, in livery copied from the livery of the staff of the Prince of Wales at Clarence House, with whom she dined on charity nights, to drive slowly around the park before pulling up in front of the Four Seasons. Arriving, she rolled down the darkened window of her Rolls-Royce. “I am scheduled to meet Mr. Addison Kent here outside the Four Seasons. Will you tell him that Mrs. Zacharias has arrived.”

  “Mr. Addison Kent couldn’t wait any longer, Mrs. Zacharias,” said the doorman.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Perla,

  “He wasn’t having a very good time waiting, so he took off,” said the doorman.

  “Took off? What do you mean he took off?”

  “Took off. He ran down the street,” replied the doorman.

  “You’d better have a word with that one,” said Perla to Willard.

  “What are the orders, Mrs. Zacharias?” asked Willard. “I know you don’t want to walk into the party without an escort.”

  “How would you like to walk me in, Willard? Just take me to the top of the stairs. I don’t want you to go through the line with me. I don’t want to have to introduce you to anybody. Just get me to the top of the stairs and then you can leave.”

  “What are you going to do if you bump into Gus Bailey?”

  IN THE splendid bedroom of the house on East Seventy-eighth Street, Elias and Ruby Renthal emerged from their separate dressing rooms to look at each other in their party finery. But Elias stalled the proceedings with an urgent need to use the facilities.

  “Elias, we can’t be late. This party is about us, and you’re holding us up,” called out Ruby.

  Nothing hurried Elias. When he finally came out of the bathroom he pointed to the bathroom door. “Don’t anybody go in there until next Tuesday.”

  “No cheap talk today, darling.”

  “Honey, I never saw you as beautiful as you look right now,” said Elias.

  “Well, thank you, sweetheart. That really touches me. I had Bernardo. I had Frieda. I had about ten people working on me, all at the same time. How do you like the dress? Oscar was here up until about twenty minutes ago, sewing me into it. It’s called Ruby Renthal Red. I changed the seating a few times. Darling, there’s no way you can put Sylvia Luby next to the Duke of Chatsworth. You know we’re being taped for the Today show, don’t you? Matt Lauer’s going to do the interview. Oh, listen, by the way, Elias. I think we ought to have a drink, just the two of us. To open a split of champagne. Like this,” she said as she opened the small bottle and poured the champagne. “Listen, Elias, I want to tell you something, straight from your wife’s lips. Thank you, Elias. Thank you. I’m proud of us. We went through some rough spots, and we came through them. We did it. We’ve turned out the town. I love you, Elias.”

  Just then Ruby’s secretary, Jenny, entered the room. “The car’s ready in front and it will take you and Mr. Renthal to the service entrance of the Four Seasons. We have a room for you with a dressing table, Mrs. Renthal. Bernardo will be there for the evening, in case you need any help with makeup and hair.”

  “OH, HONEY, you look fantastic; you’re beyond,” said Brucie to Ruby when she entered the Pool Room with Elias to begin greeting their guests.

  “Oh, Brucie, look how beautifully you have transformed this room,” cried Ruby. “Look, Elias. I’ve never seen anything like it. Oh, listen, the music is starting. Come on, Elias, we have work to do. We should be standing at the top of the stairs.”

  GUS WAS perfectly content to watch the party rather than participate in it. He knew all the stories of all the people. The dancing had started. Yehudit Tavicoli, wearing new emeralds, was dancing with Joe Carey, who she let everyone know was the richest man in Brooklyn. “Hey, Gus,” called out Elias Renthal. “Come over here and have your picture taken with me.” Gus, startled, let himself be hugged by Elias as he waved to the photographers at the same time. “This is a first, Elias,” said Gus. “Did Ruby put you up to having our pictures taken?” Elias had something he wanted to say to Gus, before he lost the moment. “Why don’t you lay off on Perla? The story’s over. The killer is in jail.”

  “You’re right, she probably didn’t do it. I have no concrete evidence that says she did. But something odd happened there and I’m just so intrigued by all the unanswered questions. The trial seemed so rigged. They knew before it started that the male nurse was going to be found guilty and would be sentenced to ten years. Why did the police keep the firemen out? Why were the locks all being changed? Why weren’t the surveillance cameras wo
rking? Maybe it won’t add up to anything, but there’s so much I want to know.”

  “You could get yourself in trouble, Gus. Do you ever think about that?”

  “I do,” Gus replied.

  “Have you seen Ruby?” asked Elias.

  “From afar. She’s a beauty, Elias.”

  “She’d like to hear that.”

  “I intend to tell her.”

  “I don’t suppose you and I will ever be friends, Gus, but I’m happy that you hold Ruby in high esteem.”

  Elias eased back into the crowd. Gus stood at the top of the stairs just in front of the room where the dancing was taking place. The Pool Room looked wonderful. He always marveled at the elegant simplicity of Mies van der Rohe’s proportions and Philip Johnson’s design. This year the Four Seasons was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, and Gus had been a regular there for half that time. At first the chain-metal curtains on the windows had made him dizzy; now he found them soothing.

  How many times had he waved to Philip Johnson sitting at his corner table in the Grill Room? How many lunches, dinners, and parties had he attended here? He remembered the day when Anna Wintour had been confronted by a lady in black from PETA, who had tossed a dead raccoon at her table, knocking over her double espresso. Was it two years ago that he saw former president Bill Clinton and Vernon Jordan munching on cotton candy in the middle booth? And then there was the fire in the Brasserie kitchen that caused both the Grill Room and the Pool Room to be engulfed in smoke, forcing the power lunchers to flee into the street.