The two women laughed together, their laughter like a naughty but delightfully sung duet. Though they were not physically similar-Mrs. Matthau being blonder than Harlow and as lushly white as a gardenia, while the other had brandy eyes and a dark dimpled brilliance markedly present when her negroid lips flashed smiles-one sensed they were two of a kind: charmingly incompetent adventuresses.
Mrs. Matthau said: "Remember the Salinger thing?"
"Salinger?"
"A Perfect Day for Banana Fish. That Salinger."
"Franny and Zooey.»
"Umn huh. You don't remember about him?"
Mrs. Cooper pondered, pouted; no, she didn't.
"It was while we were still at Brearley," said Mrs. Matthau. "Before Oona met Orson. She had a mysterious beau, this Jewish boy with a Park Avenue mother, Jerry Salinger. He wanted to be a writer, and he wrote Oona letters ten pages long while he was overseas in the army. Sort of love-letter essays, very tender, tenderer than God. Which is a bit too tender. Oona used to read them to me, and when she asked what I thought, I said it seemed to me he must be a boy who cries very easily; but what she wanted to know was whether I thought he was brilliant and talented or really just silly, and I said both, he's both, and years later when I read Catcber in the Rye and realized the author was Oona's Jerry, I was still inclined to that opinion."
"I never heard a strange story about Salinger," Mrs. Cooper confided.
"I've never heard anything about him that wasn't strange. He's certainly not your normal everyday Jewish boy from Park Avenue."
"Well, it isn't really about him, but about a friend of his who went to visit him in New Hampshire. He does live there, doesn't he? On some very remote farm? Well, it was February and terribly cold. One morning Salinger's friend was missing. He wasn't in his bedroom or anywhere around the house. They found him finally, deep in a snowy woods. He was lying in the snow wrapped in a blanket and holding an empty whiskey bottle. He'd killed himself by drinking the whiskey until he'd fallen asleep and frozen to death."
After a while Mrs. Matthau said: "That is a strange story. It must have been lovely, though-all warm with whiskey, drifting off into the cold starry air. Why did he do it?"
"All I know is what I told you," Mrs. Cooper said.
An exiting customer, a florid-at-theedges swarthy balding Charlie sort of fellow, stopped at their table. He fixed on Mrs. Cooper a gaze that was intrigued, amused and… a trifle grim. He said: "Hello, Gloria"; and she smiled: "Hello, darling"; but her eyelids twitched as she attempted to identify him; and then he said: "Hello, Carol. How are ya, doll?" and she knew who he was all right: "Hello, darling. Still living in Spain?" He nodded; his glance returned to Mrs. Cooper: "Gloria, you're as beautiful as ever. More beautiful. See ya…" He waved and walked away.
Mrs. Cooper stared after him, scowling.
Eventually Mrs. Matthau said: "You didn't recognize him, did you?"
"N-n-no."
"Life. Life. Really, it's too sad. There was nothing familiar about him at all?"
"Long ago. Something. A dream."
"It wasn't a dream."
"Carol. Stop that. Who is he?"
"Once upon a time you thought very highly of him. You cooked his meals and washed his socks" — Mrs. Cooper's eyes enlarged, shifted-"and when he was in the army you followed him from camp to camp, living in dreary furnished rooms—"
"No!"
"Yes!"
"No."
"Yes, Gloria. Your first husband."
"That… man… was… Pat di Cicco?"
"Oh, darling. Let's not brood. After all, you haven't seen him in almost twenty years. You were only a child. Isn't that," said Mrs. Matthau, offering a diversion, "Jackie Kennedy?"
And I heard Lady Ina on the subject, too: "I'm almost blind with these specs, but just coming in there, isn't that Mrs. Kennedy? And her sister?"
It was; I knew the sister because she had gone to school with Kate McCloud, and when Kate and I were on Abner Dustin's yacht at the Feria in Seville she had lunched with us, then afterward we'd gone water-skiing together, and I've often thought of it, how perfect she was, a gleaming gold-brown girl in a white bathing suit, her white skis hissing smoothly, her brown-gold hair whipping as she swooped and skidded between the waves. So it was pleasant when she stopped to greet Lady Ina ("Did you know I was on the plane with you from London? But you were sleeping so nicely I didn't dare speak") and seeing me, remembered me: "Why, hello there, Jonesy," she said, her rough whispery warm voice very slightly vibrating her, "how's your sunburn? Remember, I warned you, but you wouldn't listen." Her laughter trailed off as she folded herself onto a banquette beside her sister, their heads inclining toward each other in whispering Bouvier conspiracy. It was puzzling how much they resembled one another without sharing any common feature beyond identical voices and wide-apart eyes and certain gestures, particularly a habit of staring deeply into an interlocutor's eyes while ceaselessly nodding the head with a mesmerizingly solemn sympathy.
Lady Ina observed: "You can see those girls have swung a few big deals in their time. I know many people can't abide either of them, usually women, and I can understand that, because they don't like women and almost never have anything good to say about any woman. But they're perfect with men, a pair of Western geisha girls; they know how to keep a man's secrets and how to make him feel important. If I were a man, I'd fall for Lee myself. She's marvelously made, like a Tanagra figurine; she's feminine without being effeminate; and she's one of the few people I've known who can be both candid and cozy-ordinarily one cancels the other. Jackie-no, not on the same planet. Very photogenic, of course; but the effect is a little… unrefined, exaggerated."
I thought of an evening when I'd gone with Kate McCloud and a gang to a drag-queen contest held in a Harlem ballroom: hundreds of young queens sashaying in hand-sewn gowns to the funky honking of saxophones: Brooklyn supermarket clerks, Wall Street runners, black dishwashers, and Puerto Rican waiters adrift in silk and fantasy, chorus boys and bank cashiers and Irish elevator boys got up as Marilyn Monroe, as Audrey Hepburn, as Jackie Kennedy. Indeed, Mrs. Kennedy was the most popular inspiration; a dozen boys, the winner among them, wore her high-rise hairdo, winged eyebrows, sulky, palely painted mouth. And, in life, that is how she struck me-not as a bona fide woman, but as an artful female impersonator impersonating Mrs. Kennedy.
I explained what I was thinking to Ina, and she said: "That's what I meant by… exaggerated." Then: "Did you ever know Rosita Winston? Nice woman. Half Cherokee, I believe. She had a stroke some years ago, and now she can't speak. Or, rather, she can say just one word. That very often happens after a stroke, one's left with one word out of all the words one has known. Rosita's word is 'beautiful.' Very appropriate, since Rosita has always loved beautiful things. What reminded me of it was old Joe Kennedy. He, too, has been left with one word. And his word is: 'Goddammit!"' Ina motioned the waiter to pour champagne. "Have I ever told you about the time he assaulted me? When I was eighteen and a guest in his house, a friend of his daughter Kek…"
Again, my eye coasted the length of the room, catching, en passa, nt, a bluebearded Seventh Avenue brassiere hustler trying to con a closet-queen editor from The New York Times; and Diana Vreeland, the pomaded, peacock-iridescent editor of Vogue, sharing a table with an elderly man who suggested a precious object of discreet extravagance, perhaps a fine grey pearl—Mainbocher; and Mrs. William S. Paley lunching with her sister, Mrs. John Hay Whitney. Seated near them was a pair unknown to me: a woman forty, forty-five, no beauty but very handsomely set up inside a brown Balenciaga suit with a brooch composed of cinnamon-colored diamonds fixed to the lapel. Her companion was much younger, twenty, twenty-two, a hearty sun-browned statue who looked as if he might have spent the summer sailing alone across the Atlantic. Her son? But no, because… he lit a cigarette and passed it to her and their fingers touched significantly; then they were holding hands.
"… the old bugger slipped into my bedroom. It was a
bout six o'clock in the morning, the ideal hour if you want to catch someone really slugged out, really by complete surprise, and when I woke up he was already between the sheets with one hand over my mouth and the other all over the place. The sheer ballsy gall of it-right there in his own house with the whole family sleeping all around us. But all those Kennedy men are the same; they're like dogs, they have to pee on every fire hydrant. Still, you had to give the old guy credit, and when he saw I wasn't going to scream he was so grateful…"
But they were not conversing, the older woman and the young seafarer; they held hands, and then he smiled and presently she smiled, too.
"Afterward—can you imagine? — he pretended nothing had happened, there was never a wink or a nod, just the good old daddy of my schoolgirl chum. It was uncanny and rather cruel; after all, he'd had me and I'd even pretended to enjoy it: there should have been some sentimental acknowledgment, a bauble, a cigarette box…" She sensed my other interest, and her eyes strayed to the improbable lovers. She said: "Do you know that story?"
"No," I said. "But I can see there has to be one."
"Though it's not what you think. Uncle Willie could have made something divine out of it. So could Henry James-better than Uncle Willie, because Uncle Willie would have cheated, and for the sake of a movie sale, would have made Delphine and Bobby lovers."
Delphine Austin from Detroit; I'd read about her in the columns-an heiress married to a marbleized pillar of New York clubman society. Bobby, her companion, was Jewish, the son of hotel magnate S. L. L. Semenenko and first husband of a weird young movie cutie who had divorced him to marry his father (and whom the father had divorced when he caught her in flagrante with a German shepherd… dog. I'm not kidding).
According to Lady Ina, Delphine Austin and Bobby Semenenko had been inseparable the past year or so, lunching every day at Côte Basque and Lutèce and L'Aiglon, traveling in winter to Gstaad and Lyford Cay, skiing, swimming, spreading themselves with utmost vigor considering the bond was not June-and-January frivolities but really the basis for a double-bill, double-barreled, three-handkerchief variation on an old Bette Davis weeper like Dark Victory: they both were dying of leukemia.
"I mean, a worldly woman and a beautiful young man who travel together with death as their common lover and companion. Don't you think Henry James could have done something with that? Or Uncle Willie?"
"No. It's too corny for James, and not corny enough for Maugham."
"Well, you must admit, Mrs. Hopkins would make a fine tale."
"Who?" I said.
"Standing there," Ina Coolbirth said.
That Mrs. Hopkins. A redhead dressed in black; black hat with a veil trim, a black Mainbocher suit, black crocodile purse, crocodile shoes. M. Soulé had an ear cocked as she stood whispering to him; and suddenly everyone was whispering. Mrs. Kennedy and her sister had elicited not a murmur, nor had the entrances of Lauren Bacall and Katharine Cornell and Clare Boothe Luce. However, Mrs. Hopkins was une autre chose: a sensation to unsettle the suavest Côte Basque client. There was nothing surreptitious in the attention allotted her as she moved with head bowed toward a table where an escort already awaited her-a Catholic priest, one of those highbrow, malnutritional, Father D'Arcy clerics who always seems most at home when absent from the cloisters and while consorting with the very grand and very rich in a wine-and-roses stratosphere.
"Only," said Lady Ina, "Ann Hopkins would think of that. To advertise your search for spiritual 'advice' in the most public possible manner. Once a tramp, always a tramp."
"You don't think it was an accident?" I said.
"Come out of the trenches, boy. The war's over. Of course it wasn't an accident. She killed David with malice aforethought. She's a murderess. The police know that."
"Then how did she get away with it?"
"Because the family wanted her to. David's family. And, as it happened in Newport, old Mrs. Hopkins had the power to prevail. Have you ever met David's mother? Hilda Hopkins?"
"I saw her once last summer in Southampton. She was buying a pair of tennis shoes. I wondered what a woman her age, she must be eighty, wanted with tennis shoes. She looked like… some very old goddess."
"She is. That's why Ann Hopkins got away with cold-blooded murder. Her mother-in-law is a Rhode Island goddess. And a saint."
Ann Hopkins had lifted her veil and was now whispering to the priest, who, servilely entranced, was brushing a Gibson against his starved blue lips.
"But it could have been an accident. If one goes by the papers. As I remember, they'd just come home from a dinner party in Watch Hill and gone to bed in separate rooms. Weren't there supposed to have been a recent series of burglaries thereabouts? — and she kept a shotgun by her bed, and suddenly in the dark her bedroom door opened and she grabbed the shotgun and shot at what she thought was a prowler. Only it was her husband. David Hopkins. With a hole through his head."
"That's what she said. That's what her lawyer said. That's what the police said. And that's what the papers said… even the Times. But that isn't what happened." And Ina, inhaling like a skin diver, began: "Once upon a time a jazzy little carrot-top killer rolled into town from Wheeling or Logan-somewhere in West Virginia. She was eighteen, she'd been brought up in some country-slum way, and she had already been married and divorced; or she said she'd been married a month or two to a marine and divorced him when he disappeared (keep that in mind: it's an important clue). Her name was Ann Cutler, and she looked rather like a malicious Betty Grable. She worked as a call girl for a pimp who was a bell Captain at the Waldorf; and she saved her money and took voice lessons and dance lessons and ended up as the favorite lay of one of Frankie Costello's shysters, and he always took her to El Morocco. It was during the war—1943—and Elmer's was always full of gangsters and military brass. But one night an ordinary young marine showed up there; except that he wasn't ordinary: his father was one of the stuffiest men in the East—and richest. David had sweetness and great good looks, but he was just like old Mr. Hopkins really—an anal-oriented Episcopalian. Stingy. Sober. Not at all café society. But there he was at Elmer's, a soldier on leave, horny, and a bit stoned. One of Winchell's stooges was there, and he recognized the Hopkins boy; he bought David a drink, and said he could fix it up for him with any one of the girls he saw, just pick one, and David, poor sod, said the redhead with the button nose and big tits was okay by him. So the Winchell stooge sends her a note, and at dawn little David finds himself writhing inside the grip of an expert Cleopatra's clutch.
"I'm sure it was David's first experience with anything less primitive than a belly rub with his prep-school roomie. He went bonkers, not that one can blame him; I know some very grown-up Mr. Cool Balls who've gone bonkers over Ann Hopkins. She was clever with David; she knew she'd hooked a biggie, even if he was only a kid, so she quit what she was doing and got a job in lingerie at Saks; she never pressed for anything, refused any gift fancier than a handbag, and all the while he was in the service she wrote him every day, little letters cozy and innocent as a baby's layette. In fact, she was knocked up; and it was his kid; but she didn't tell him a thing until he next came home on leave and found his girl four months pregnant. Now, here is where she showed that certain venomous é1an that separates truly dangerous serpents from mere chicken snakes: she told him she didn't want to marry him. Wouldn't marry him under any circumstances because she had no desire to lead a Hopkins life; she had neither the background nor innate ability to cope with it, and she was sure neither his family nor friends would ever accept her. She said all she would ever ask would be a modest amount of child support. David protested, but of course he was relieved, even though he would still have to go to his father with the story—David had no money of his own.
"It was then that Ann made her smartest move; she had been doing her homework, and she knew everything there was to know about David's parents; so she said: 'David, there's just one thing I'd like. I want to meet your family. I never had much family of my
own, and I'd like my child to have some occasional contact with his grandparents. They might like that, too.' C'est très joli, très diabolique, non? And it worked. Not that Mr. Hopkins was fooled. Right from the start he said the girl was a tramp, and she would never see a nickel of his; but Hilda Hopkins fell for it—she believed that gorgeous hair and those blue malarkey eyes, the whole poor-little-match-girl pitch Ann was tossing her. And as David was the oldest son, and she was in a hurry for a grandchild, she did exactly what Ann had gambled on: she persuaded David to marry her, and her husband to, if not condone it, at least not forbid it. And for some while it seemed as if Mrs. Hopkins had been very wise: each year she was rewarded with another grandchild until there were three, two girls and a boy; and Ann's social pickup was incredibly quick—she crashed right through, not bothering to observe any speed limits. She certainly grasped the essentials, I'll say that. She learned to ride and became the horsiest horse-hag in Newport.
She studied French and had a French butler and campaigned for the Best Dressed List by lunching with Eleanor Lambert and inviting her for weekends. She learned about furniture and fabrics from Sister Parish and Billy Baldwin; and little Henry Geldzahler was pleased to come to tea (Tea! Ann Cutler! My God!) and to talk to her about modern paintings.
"But the deciding element in her success, leaving aside the fact she'd married a great Newport name, was the duchess. Ann realized something that only the cleverest social climbers ever do. If you want to ride swiftly and safely from the depths to the surface, the surest way is to single out a shark and attach yourself to it like a pilot fish. This is as true in Keokuk, where one massages, say, the local Mrs. Ford Dealer, as it is in Detroit, where you may as well try for Mrs. Ford herself—or in Paris or Rome. But why should Ann Hopkins, being by marriage a Hopkins and the daughter-in-law of the Hilda Hopkins, need the duchess? Because she needed the blessing of someone with presumably high standards, someone with international impact whose acceptance of her would silence the laughing hyenas. And who better than the duchess? As for the duchess, she has high tolerance for the flattery of rich ladies-in-waiting, the kind who always pick up the check; I wonder if the duchess has ever picked up a check. Not that it matters. She gives good value. She's one of that unusual female breed who are able to have a genuine friendship with another woman. Certainly she was a marvelous friend to Ann Hopkins. Of course, she wasn't taken in by Ann—after all, the duchess is too much of a con artist not to twig another one; but the idea amused her of taking this cool-eyed cardplayer and lacquering her with a little real style, launching her on the circuit, and the young Mrs. Hopkins became quite notorious-though without the style. The father of the second Hopkins girl was Fon Portago, or so everyone says, and God knows she does look very espagnole; however that may be, Ann Hopkins was definitely racing her motor in the Grand Prix manner.
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