“You shouldn’t be drinking anything at all,” she scolded Elias, then came into the dressing room and started in on me. “You know this manicure cost me thirty dollars. And these little buttons are a bitch. If you’d had Vera Wang make these dresses instead of Armani, she would have hidden a thin little zipper behind them, and they just would have looked like actual buttons.”
“I don’t care. They’re worth it.” I was standing in my dressing room looking at myself in the triple mirror. “I love these gowns.”
“Everybody ready?” Richard called from the bedroom.
“Ready,” I answered.
“Oh, my,” he said, turning me around. “You are lovely.”
All we could do was smile at each other like two idiots.
“Want to get on down there and do it?”
“Let’s.”
FORTY-ONE
Roundup Morning News
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1998
Lilly McLaughlin Bennett and
Richard Welland Jerome, Jr.,
Wed in Ranch Ceremony
by Pat Collier, Society Editor
If anybody thinks for one second the rich aren’t different from you and me … think again. Yesterday afternoon, in what will go down in history as one of the West’s most memorable and glittering weddings, Bennett heiress Lilly McLaughlin Bennett and Richard Welland Jerome, Jr., General Director of the Roundup Opera Company and scion to one of Manhattan’s most venerable banking dynasties, said their vows at the two-hundred-thousand acre Bennett family ranch, the Circle B, outside of Bennett’s Fort.
Everyone agreed the bride’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Elias Caulfield Bennett III … our beloved Katharine and Eli … pulled out all the stops for their only daughter, and we all know that when it gets down to pulling stops, they have more than most.
Katharine looked stunning enough to have been the bride herself in opalescent mushroom satin … Carolina Herrera made three trips to the ranch to make sure it was perfect … with every single one of the famous Bennett family diamonds. I don’t know which sparkled more, her eyes or the necklace.
The setting for the nuptials was on the banks of the Wind River … a fleet of private helicopters and limousines was parked tastefully out of sight over the hill in another valley altogether … looking across the vast, historic ranch where a handful of championship Black Angus grazed like props in the distance. The two hundred or so guests … I figure they invited one per acre so no one would get that closed-in feeling … included the Duke and Duchess of Westminster—she had on what one might call a few very important pieces of jewelry, so important, in fact, that a bank guard hovered discreetly in the wings—and Baron and Baroness Heinrich von Singen und Mengen. She had on practically nothing at all, but when you’re as young and pretty as Lulu, you don’t need much.
While waiting for the wedding party to arrive, everyone chatted comfortably from the rows of cushioned—that Katharine thinks of everything—ladder-backed pine chairs, sipped French bubbly, and listened to rousing selections by Puccini, Rachmaninoff, and Beethoven performed by the Roundup Opera Orchestra, known affectionately to those in the know as Richard’s Band.
Right on the money, at five o’clock sharp, yours truly thought she was in a scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. As the sun headed for the hills, the orchestra let fly with Copeland’s Billy the Kid, and five riders in formal charcoal-gray three-piece suits and black cowboy hats thundered over the horizon, right out of the setting sun, tail-coats flying, their horses at a full gallop. It was that drop-dead gorgeous groom himself, Richard Jerome, and his men: best man Elias Caulfield Bennett IV, still recovering from a near-fatal shotgun wound suffered at the Rutherford Oil annual meeting last Wednesday; Richard’s twin sons Richard III and Charles—what lucky girls will nab these two young studs?—and his team-roping partner, the bride’s other brother, Christian Bennett, President and Chief Operating Officer of the Bennett empire. They circled the guests twice at full speed, whooping and hollering and throwing mud all over the place (but only in the right direction, not one guest was splattered) before dismounting and taking their places by the altar, which Katharine had loaded up with pine boughs and aspen leaves. Simple. Simple. Simple. Always is best.
The Bennetts like to keep things all in the family, so on hand to officiate was the Very Reverend Henry Caulfield Bennett, Bishop of the Wind River Diocese, resplendent as ever in his red miter and antique pectoral cross with all its rubies. “It’s so helpful to have money of one’s own when one decides to go into the clergy,” Katharine Bennett once confided, and boy oh boy, is she ever right. And we all just knew underneath those red, white, and gold satin vestments, Bishop Hank had that dinner-plate-sized Saddle-Bronc Champion buckle holding up his trousers.
We don’t get to welcome many true American aristocrats like Mr. and Mrs. Richard Welland Jerome, Sr., to Roundup. Alida Jerome is such a gracious lady—she was Alida van Rensselaer, one of those original Dutch New Yorkers, the ones who bought the island—and she didn’t appear even slightly out of place in the wilds of Wyoming as she went down the aisle on her husband’s arm in her Hardy Amies tea-length salmon beaded chiffon. Mr. Jerome is the Chairman and CEO of Jerome Guaranty Bank & Trust, that hallowed banking house where it’s said one needs an opening deposit of one million. But you get unlimited checking.
And if all this weren’t enough, four of the most beautiful gals in town—Matron of Honor Sparky Kendall and bridesmaids Mary Pat McArthur, former Miss Texas Pitty-Pat Palmer and Mimi Bennett (Mrs. Christian)—glided up the grassy aisle like swans in full-length, long-sleeved, sage-colored, coupe de velours Armani gowns.
The only thing that could have outdone this group of beauties was the bride herself, and she didn’t let us down. Lilly and her dashingly handsome father—the personification of the West in his tailcoat and cowboy hat, reins firmly in hand as usual—arrived in the shiniest buckboard I’ve ever seen, draped with garlands of roses and drawn by a team of perfectly matched Percherons with roses woven into their manes and tails.
Lilly’s gown was the same cut-velvet Armani as her attendants’, but fawn-colored, setting off those Bennett blue eyes like laser guns. She carried a tumble of fully blown, teacup-sized Oceana roses and wore her great-grandmother’s pearls. The simplicity of the bride’s dress and jewelry defined the elegance of the occasion perfectly.
No one could ever say that Lilly Bennett, one of the country’s most successful security consultants, rushed into marriage, and this was a match and an occasion worth waiting for. Not a dry eye in the house as her elegant, dignified father handed her off to her handsome groom, considered to be the Last of the Twentieth Century’s Most Eligible Bachelors.
* * *
“Did you hear that?” I said to Richard, as we shot our way into the morning sun in the G-5 at six hundred miles an hour, headed for France. “ ‘The Last of the Twentieth Century’s Most Eligible Bachelors’?”
“You didn’t know that?” He poured me a glass of champagne. “What else does it say?”
For the guests, the wedding was just the beginning of an evening of sheer fantasy: what we all would do, if we could.
Katharine’s florist, that divine genius Kenny Wallace, must have stripped an entire forest to provide the gigantic bouquets of aspen leaves, which were at their absolute peak of color. Thousands of candles. Unlimited caviar and champagne. A stupendous dinner prepared by New York’s unparalleled Daniel Proust and nonstop music from Bob Hartwick and his full sixty-piece orchestra.
And the guests themselves were as glittering as the occasion. All of Old Roundup was there, including Mercedes Rutherford, who reports her company’s Siberian venture is off once and for all, and her escort, presidential candidate Duke Fletcher … looks like there could be something serious going on there. Mercedes looked remarkably well considering her brother-in-law had strangled her almost to death only two days before. Ah, the wonders of makeup for concealing all manner of things. And William Hewitt was t
here with his fiancée, our favorite rodeo superstar, Miami McCloud, who, just in case you’ve forgotten, used to be a Texas high school football star before that doctor in Montrose, Colorado, turned her into one of Wyoming’s prettiest gals. It appears William’s mother, the formidable Victoria Hewitt, has given her blessing for his and Miami’s nuptials, which are scheduled for Christmastime. I hope Miami’s doing some serious planning, if she ever hopes to top this affair. Watching her and Alida Jerome chat was worth the price of admission.
A contingent of Roundup’s finest, including Chief Jack Lewis, was on hand, as was the Commandant of Fort Hickock, Brigadier General John Taylor, whose arm bridesmaid Pitty-Pat Palmer (Texas)—now divorced from number three—never let go of once the ceremony was over. The general has replaced Richard Jerome as Wyoming’s most eligible bachelor. Another also-ran in the Lilly Bennett Stakes (if you choose to believe the gossip) was Chief Justice of California’s Supreme Court, Wink Harrison, whose wife, Jayne, never took her razor-sharp eyes off hizzoner the whole time.
Joan Chamberlain—not there with estranged husband number five, Dickie, who attended with a dishy young thing—left the dance floor long enough to tell me she had done her best to grab Richard herself.
Televangelist Johnny Bourbon and his wife, Shanna, were locked deep in conversation with our own Perry Mason, Paul Decker, probably discussing Decker’s latest client, truck tycoon, ex-golfer, and all-round bad boy Wade Gilhooly, whose recently late wife, Alma Rutherford Gilhooly, was expected to bequeath a bundle to Johnny Bourbon’s Christian Cowboys. Don’t look now, Johnny, but a little birdie told me she’s left the whole caboodle to the National Rifle Association. Why is no one surprised?
Nobody wanted the party to end, but at eleven o’clock, after a final toast by Elias Bennett, and after Lilly had tossed her bouquet to a tall redhead who’d been tending to him all evening, the newlywed Jeromes kissed their families and friends good-bye, climbed into the family’s navy-blue helicopter, and headed off to spend their wedding night at the Grand. By the time you read this Sunday morning, they will be on their way to a friend’s chateau in Burgundy—nonstop on the family’s navy-blue Gulfstream-Five—and a well-deserved rest from this exhausting ranch-style life.
One last note … As I stood there watching the chopper sail away into the stars, a familiar voice behind me said, “Story of my life. I never even got to meet her. One of these days I’m going to get the girl.”
It was Robert Redford.
If you enjoyed Marne Davis Kellogg’s NOTHING BUT GOSSIP, you won’t want to miss any of the tantalizing mysteries in the Marshal Lilly Bennett series.
Look for the latest, BIRTHDAY PARTY, at your favorite bookseller’s, coming from Doubleday in hardcover in December 1999.
For the other men in my life—
Nelson, Nick, and Harry
By the same author
TRAMP
CURTSEY
BAD MANNERS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A fifth-generation Westerner, MARNE DAVIS KELLOGG lives with her husband in Denver, Colorado, and Norfolk, Virginia. Nothing But Gossip is her fourth Lilly Bennett mystery, and she is now at work on her fifth, Birthday Party.
Visit the author at her website:
www.marnedaviskellogg.com
Nothing but Gossip Page 22