An Inconvenient Woman

by Dominick Dunne

  Jules returned to his chair beneath van Gogh’s White Roses and moved some newspapers aside. Kippie entered the room and closed the door behind him, but he did not sit down.

  “I have called the rehab in Lyons,” said Jules. “I talked to Father LaFlamme. They’ll take you back. I think it’s where you should be.”

  Kippie nodded.

  “Miss Maple has booked your flight.”

  Kippie nodded again. “Much obliged,” he said.

  “Just get one thing straight. I did this for your mother. I didn’t do it for you,” said Jules.

  “Much obliged, anyway,” said Kippie.

  Flo’s Tape #9

  “They had me down on the books as a consultant, although God only knows what I was a consultant for. I’ll say this for Jules Mendelson, he was a very generous man. Each month my check came addressed to F. Houlihan. Houlihan’s my real name, although I haven’t used it for years. March is only a made-up name, in case I became an actress or a model, none of which ever worked out, incidentally. Sometimes, if Jules ever had to write me about anything, he always started out the letter, ‘Dear Red.’ That was supposed to fool the secretary into thinking F. Houlihan was a guy instead of a girlfriend, and Miss Maple went along with the act. Only you couldn’t fool Miss Maple. She always knew who I was. One day she called me up on the telephone and told me, in a very nice way, that she thought I was spending too much money. Of course, Jules never knew she called me. If only she’d said to me, ‘Put some of that money in the bank and save it for a rainy day.’ But even if she had, knowing me, I probably wouldn’t have listened. You see, the big mistake I made was that I thought the merry-go-round was never going to stop.”

  10

  Had Flo March known how unserious the conflagration was going to be, she would have reacted with less alarm than she did when someone, a woman, running, had screamed the word “Fire!” in an altogether hysterical voice in the corridor outside her suite in the Meurice Hotel in Paris at two o’clock in the morning. Later, she told the person most affected by her action that her mother had died in a fire in a welfare hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Had she reacted with less alarm, Flo’s picture would not have appeared on the front page of Figaro and two other Paris newspapers, as well as the International Herald Tribune, with her lovely red hair in total disarray, wrapped in a blanket over her silver fox coat, and carrying a small Louis Vuitton case—its newness evident even in the photograph—that could only have contained jewels. Even that might have passed unnoticed, for Flo March was relatively unknown, as most mistresses are, but her benefactor and lover, dressed but tieless, was in the background of the same picture, another fleer from a four-alarm fire that turned out to be no more than a burned mattress caused by the dropped cigarette of an inebriated television star in an adjoining suite. And Flo March’s benefactor and lover was extremely well known. He was so well known that it was known he was staying at the Ritz Hotel in the Place Vendôme several blocks from the Meurice and could only have been having a midnight rendezvous at that hotel, as Cyril Rathbone, the gossip columnist for the Los Angeles magazine called Mulholland, who happened to be in Paris at the same time, noted on the clippings that he sent back to his old friend Hector Paradiso in Los Angeles.

  “Poor Pauline!” Cyril wrote in his spidery handwriting, on the border of the newspaper. Cyril Rathbone had never liked Pauline Mendelson, because she refused to allow him to cover her parties for his column, and no amount of persuasion, even on the part of her great friend Hector Paradiso, could make her change her mind. “Darling,” Pauline had said to Hector at the time, “don’t persist. We cannot have news-people like Mr. Rathbone in our home. Jules hates that sort of social publicity. And besides, Mr. Rathbone seems to write a great deal about us without coming to our house.” So, in Cyril Rathbone’s code of behavior, the very grand Mrs. Mendelson was fair game.

  On several occasions, as recently as at the Mendelsons’ party on the night he died, Hector had tried to impart this information to Pauline, in order to save her from embarrassment should the photograph become public. Each time he approached his unpleasant task with reluctance, and each time he felt an inner gratitude that he had not been able to carry out his mission, because he knew how deeply hurt she would have been.

  No man was more content with his marriage than Jules Mendelson. From the moment he first saw Pauline McAdoo Petworth twenty-three years earlier, at Laurance Van Degan’s birthday dance at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach, he had known that it was she for whom he had been waiting. She was dancing that night with Johnny Petworth, whom she was also divorcing, and she epitomized everything to Jules that was proper and swell. Jules was not thought to be a great catch in those days. He was at the time ungainly and vaguely untidy, a large rumpled-looking sort of man who gave no thought to his appearance. And, moreover, word of his immense wealth and financial genius had not penetrated the world in which Pauline, as young as she was, was already a fixture.

  Palm Beach people found him dull and difficult to seat. “Darling, do you mind terribly that I’ve put you next to Jules Mendelson?” hostesses said to their best friends. It was in that way that Pauline was seated next to Jules on the following night at the home of Rose Cliveden and immediately saw the possibilities of him. Once Mr. Forbes began publishing his annual list of the four hundred richest people in America, and Jules Mendelson was listed so near to the top, the very people who had found him dull in the beginning became the first to find him fascinating. “Lucky me, Jules, sitting next to you,” the same ladies now said, but by then Pauline had been Mrs. Jules Mendelson for many years. No one who knew him then ever suspected that he would allow himself to be done over, as Pauline had done him over, in much the same way she had done over the old von Stern mansion in Beverly Hills that Jules had bought and Pauline had turned into a showplace. She totally redid his appearance. She instructed Willi, his barber, to raise the part in his hair and shorten the length of his sideburns. She picked out his ties and cuff links and studs. She took him to the tailor in London who had made her father’s suits for years, as well as to her father’s shirtmaker and shoemaker, and made his decisions for him until he understood the look of her kind of people. Everyone remarked on his greatly improved appearance, as well as his ability to carry on a conversation at a dinner party.

  “Do you have a mistress, Jules?” Pauline had asked him once, more than a year before Cyril Rathbone had seen the picture of Flo March, with Jules in the background, in the Paris press. She waited until Dudley had set up the drinks tray and left the room before asking her surprising question, a question that surprised even her when she asked it. Although she was not an overly passionate woman, Pauline was feeling worshiped but untouched, and a certain feminine instinct brought forth the question more than any knowledge of such a fact. The conversation took place in the sunset room, where the Mendelsons met each twilight to have a glass of wine together and talk over the business of the day before they dressed for dinner.

  “What does that mean?” asked Jules, astonished, turning away from the red and orange sunset to give her his full attention.

  “Just asking,” said Pauline, holding up her hands in a defensive gesture.

  “But what does such a question mean?” Jules asked again.

  “You keep repeating yourself, Jules. ‘What does that mean? What does such a question mean?’ Surely you can think up a better answer than that, you, a man used to handling hundreds of millions of dollars.” For Pauline, usually so serene, she had become slightly shrill.

  “Why are you being like this, Pauline?” he asked, with the attitude of a man who had nothing to hide.

  “More questions. You answer me with questions. That might work in your business life, Jules—intimidation, putting people on the defensive—but it doesn’t work with me. I’m probably one of the few people you’ve ever met who isn’t afraid of you.”

  Jules smiled. “I know that, Pauline,” he said. “I’ve always known that, from the time I saw y
ou throw the prenuptial agreement at Marcus Stromm and splash black ink all over his shirt. That’s one of the many things I love about you.”

  “You have a peculiar way of showing your love,” she said.

  “I can only answer you with a question again. What does that mean?”

  “I am considered to be a beautiful woman. At least people tell me that I am beautiful, and magazines and newspapers write me up as a beautiful woman. I say this with no braggadocio. It is something I have been told about myself since I was a child. It is something I work on. It is the reason I swim forty laps in the pool every day, rain or shine. It is the reason I spend part of each day with Pooky for my hair and Blanchette for my nails. It is the reason I go to Paris twice a year for my clothes.”

  “I know all that,” said Jules.

  “Oh, yes, I know you do. I also know that you like to have me by your side when you enter those endless dinners you have to attend. I know you like and even need the way I am able to entertain and attract interesting people to your parties when you want to impress men you have business dealings with.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “It’s not enough for me anymore, Jules. I might as well be married to Hector for all the love you show me.”

  “I do love you.”

  “You do understand that I am talking about love in the lovemaking sense of the word love. I am more than a mannequin. I am more than a hostess.”

  Of course, he understood. He worshiped his wife. He could not imagine life without her. His marriage was a contract as binding as any business contract he had ever signed. Forestalling further suspicion, he became attentive again to the obligations of his marriage, at least for a while, but a complication had set in, a sexual complication, that he had never imagined could happen to him.

  • • •

  Her name had been Houlihan, Fleurette Houlihan, and she could not bear the sound of it. “You don’t think I look Irish enough, without having a name like Fleurette Houlihan?” she often asked, shaking her red hair at the same time. When she thought she might become an actress, and worked as a waitress at the Viceroy Coffee Shop on Sunset Strip, she renamed herself Rhonda March, after Rhonda Fleming, a red-haired film star her mother had admired. The Viceroy was said to serve the best coffee in West Hollywood, and that was where she had met Jules Mendelson, who was a coffee drinker, ten cups a day. He had walked into the Viceroy Coffee Shop on a day when the coffee machine in his office was not working. She was wearing a nameplate with RHONDA on it.

  Jules Mendelson was not the type of man who spoke to waitresses in coffee shops, but that day, for a reason he did not understand, he had said to the red-haired girl wearing the name tag with RHONDA on it, “I suppose they call you Red.”

  “No, they don’t,” she answered quite emphatically. She was a pretty girl who was used to dealing with lascivious older men. “I don’t like being called Red, as a matter of fact.”

  “What do they call you?” he asked.

  There was in his tone a genuine interest in her answer, and she felt she had mistaken him for lascivious. “Do you mean what is my name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Rhonda,” she said, tapping a red fingernail against her nameplate.

  When he looked up from his London Financial Times and watched her wipe off the table with a turquoise-colored sponge, he said to her, “You don’t look like a Rhonda.”

  “I was thinking of changing it to Rondelle,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” he said, “not Rondelle.”

  “You want coffee?” she asked. “We got the best coffee in West Hollywood here.”

  “Yes.”

  When she put the cup down in front of him, he asked, “What was your name before you changed it?”

  “You don’t want to hear,” she said.

  “Yes, I do,” he said.

  “Fleurette Houlihan,” she said, almost whispering. “It makes me cringe. Imagine that up on the screen.”

  He laughed.

  “I kind of like the Fleurette part,” said Jules.

  “You don’t!”

  “Kind of.”

  “You’re nuts.” She liked talking about herself, though.

  “How about Flossie?”

  “Sounds cheaper than Fleurette.”

  “Flo?”

  “Hmmm.” She gave it some thought.

  “I once knew a Flo,” said Jules. He hadn’t meant to get so deeply mired in such a conversation. “She was a very pretty girl too.”

  So she became Flo.

  Flo March was then twenty-four years old, perhaps not the smartest girl in town but one of the nicest and, certainly, one of the prettiest, if red hair, blue eyes, and creamy-colored skin were an appealing combination for her beholder. She sometimes dated minor agents she poured coffee for in the morning, but they never took her to screenings or to dinners in restaurants, which were the sorts of things she yearned to do. They took her to dinner in other coffee shops and were after one thing and one thing only, and she usually gave it to them, because it was easier to say yes than to say no and have to deal with all that hassle. Hector Paradiso, who lived in the Hollywood Hills above the Viceroy, had breakfast there every morning, and often told Flo stories of where he had been the night before: at Faye Converse’s party, or Rose Cliveden’s, or, best of all, Pauline Mendelson’s. Flo loved hearing about parties, especially Pauline Mendelson’s parties. She read every word about Pauline Mendelson in the society columns and in the fashion magazines that Hector sometimes brought by for her after he had finished with them. Flo, no fool, knew all about the other part of Hector’s life too, the part no one ever talked about. All the hustlers from the Strip came into the Viceroy too, and they told her about their adventures with the rich guys who stopped their Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls-Royces, made their deals, and took them to their houses.

  Jules had returned to the Viceroy Coffee Shop every day since the first day, always carrying a financial newspaper, and sat at the same table, though the management frowned on a single person tying up a booth for four customers and only ordering coffee. But there was something about Jules—although the manager, whose name was Curly, had no idea who Jules was—that kept him from asking Jules to sit at the counter instead of the booth, especially after Rhonda, who now wanted to be called Flo, told the manager that the big man always left a ten-dollar tip, even though he only had coffee.

  “I don’t want you to think for a single instant that this is what I intend to do for the rest of my life,” said Flo, a few days later, pouring Jules a second cup of coffee with one hand and wiping off the Formica top of the table with her turquoise-colored sponge with the other. “This,” continued Flo, referring to her job as a waitress in a coffee shop, “is only a means to an end.”

  “And the end, of course, is stardom,” said Jules, watching her over the top of the Wall Street Journal.

  “I’d settle for less than stardom,” said Flo, quite seriously.

  “What would you settle for?”

  “I’d like to be the second lead in a TV series, best friend of the star, where the whole show wouldn’t rest on my shoulders, and when it gets canceled after thirteen weeks, I wouldn’t be blamed and would just go on to another series, again as a secondary lead. Or even just a running part would do.”

  Jules laughed.

  Flo blushed. “What are you laughin’ at? I’m serious,” she said, defensively.

  “It is a laugh of enchantment, not derision,” he said.

  “A laugh of enchantment, not derision,” she repeated slowly, as if she were memorizing it so that she could repeat it in conversation. “Hey, that’s really nice,” she said.

  “Are you doing anything about it?” asked Jules.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Studying, getting an agent, going on calls, or whatever it is actresses do to get ahead. You’re not waiting to be discovered at the coffee counter, are you?”

  “You have to have pictures,” said Flo. “Or the
y don’t want to see you.”

  “Then get pictures,” said Jules, simply.

  “ ‘Get pictures,’ he says.” She rolled her eyes, as if Jules Mendelson had said something stupid. “Do you have any idea what pictures cost?”

  “You seem to be defeated without even starting,” he said. “Let me tell you something. If you can visualize what you want to be, you’ll make it, believe me.”

  She looked at him earnestly. It was not the sort of flirtatious conversation she was used to with her customers. “The thing is, I have this great desire to become famous, but I don’t know whether I’m good enough at anything to become famous.”

  “You look very well today,” Jules had said another day, noting the fresh pink uniform that she was wearing.

  “My mother used to say that Maureen O’Hara was the first redhead in movies who had the courage to wear pink on the screen,” said Flo.

  Jules, bewildered, nodded. He didn’t understand most of what Flo said, but he had grown to like listening to her talk. She had opinions on everything. His secretary, Miss Maple, whom he had had for years, couldn’t understand why Jules left his office every morning around ten o’clock to go and have coffee at the Viceroy Coffee Shop, when Beth, her assistant, made perfectly good coffee right there in the office; but Jules said he liked to get the fresh air and to be able to read the Wall Street Journal and the London Financial Times in peace. Miss Maple didn’t ask any more questions.

  Flo looked out the window of the coffee shop. There, parked by the curb on Sunset Boulevard, was a dark blue Bentley.

  “That your car out there?” she asked.

  Jules looked out the window at the car, as if it were not his, and then looked back at her.

  “Why would you think that was my car?” he asked.

  Flo shrugged. “You kinda match each other,” she said. Jules did not reply.

  “And nobody else in this joint looks like they could afford a car like that. Do you have that on a lease, or do you own it?”