“You too,” said Junior.
“Oh, no, not me,” said Bratsie. “They’ll never get me.”
“Me either,” said Junior, but he didn’t mean it.
“Balls, my friend,” retorted Bratsie. “In a very few years every mother in New York with a marriageable daughter will be out to trap you.”
What William Grenville wanted to do was to avoid for his son the inevitable pitfalls of a young man pampered from birth who would one day inherit a great fortune. For his daughters he would say, “Learn golf and learn bridge, or you’ll have a very lonely old age,” and leave the rest of their upbringing to Alice, but for his son his counsel was more exacting.
“Out there in this world,” he told Junior, as Gibbs drove them uptown from Wall Street, “no one is going to feel sorry for your problems. They will say about you, no matter what befalls you, ‘I wish I had his problems.’ They will think that because you are rich the kind of problems you have are of little consequence.”
“Do you remember Brenda Frazier?”
It was what Ann Grenville asked me, when finally we spoke, aboard the ship on the way to Alaska. Do I remember Brenda Frazier indeed! Who could forget Brenda Frazier? Poor sad Brenda. She had been, Ann told me, Billy Grenville’s first girl friend, but I already knew that. At Edith Bleeker’s party, on the night of the shooting, when Jeanne Twombley brought me along at the last minute when Alfred couldn’t go, I was seated next to Brenda Frazier at dinner, and Billy Grenville was on her other side, so I heard about it straight from the horse’s mouth.
In 1938 there probably wasn’t a more famous woman in America than Brenda Frazier, and she was only seventeen years old and had accomplished absolutely nothing except being the most beautiful debutante of her time. Her picture appeared on the cover of Life magazine and people read more about her than any movie star in Hollywood. Her every step was chronicled in the society columns, and even the news pages, of every paper in the city.
In those days Billy Grenville was still called Junior. It was Ann who changed his name to Billy when she said she didn’t want to be married to a man called Junior. Well, Junior met Brenda going through the receiving line at her coming-out party in the old Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Madison Avenue, which has long since been demolished. She was a beauty, and he was a knockout, and when he asked her to dance, people stepped back to watch, and all the photographers took their picture, and Maury Paul, the society columnist then called Cholly Knickerbocker, wrote that Brenda Frazier and Junior Grenville were the most beautiful young couple in New York.
Needless to say, Alice Grenville was not pleased. She had those four daughters, but Junior was the apple of her eye, and she had big marital plans for him when that time came. She felt that Brenda Frazier got much too much publicity and not nearly enough parental supervision. Alice Grenville was of the old school who believed that a lady’s name appeared in the papers only three times—when she was born, when she married, and when she died—and Brenda Frazier, at least in New York, was a household word.
One day Brenda went to tea at that big gray pile of stone the Grenvilles used to live in, in the Eighties just off Fifth Avenue. It was Junior who asked his mother to invite her. All the sisters came too, just to stare at her. The sisters all had had their coming-out parties at home, in the family ballroom, with no press invited, and no outsiders on the list. They were all prepared to dislike her, but they couldn’t. She was too nice, and they found her absolutely charming. Even Alice, who called her Miss Frazier throughout, liked her and could see the possibilities of her.
They saw each other for a while, but Junior was starting Harvard and not ready to think about anything serious. Along came a football player called Shipwreck Kelly and swept Brenda off her feet and into Catholic marriage in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick’s cathedral. Alice breathed a sigh of relief.
The thing about Brenda was, she and Billy stayed friends right up until the last day of his life. She was probably the last person he spoke to that night at Edith Bleeker’s before he got into the fight with Ann.
“Do you remember Kay Kay Somerset?”
Ann Grenville asked me that too on the ship. She was Billy’s second crush. Her life didn’t turn out well, but in those days, she was pretty hot stuff, before all those marriages and the drink and the drugs took their toll. I once read in the columns about Kay Kay Somerset that she played tennis in white gloves so as not to coarsen her lovely hands, and she never played until after five when the rays of the sun ceased to burn. That was also about the time she was getting up.
Kay Kay was a very different cup of tea from Brenda and the Grenville sisters. She was very very rich; even rich people called her rich. The money came from spark plugs on her mother’s side and a hydraulic drill used in the production of oil on her father’s. Her kind of out-of-town money, no matter how much of it there was, never seemed the same to people like the Grenvilles as their kind of New York money. Remember, too, in those days, people were still concerned about family, as in bloodlines.
Kay Kay went to the very best schools, and came out at a party even more lavish than the lavish party of Brenda Frazier, under a tent lined with ice-blue satin at an estate in Southampton, marred only by Bratsie Bleeker’s swinging from a chandelier while drinking champagne out of a bottle.
Kay Kay was not asked to join the Junior Assembly, as all the Grenville sisters were, and the flaw of it heightened her glamour in the eyes of Junior Grenville, on whom she had cast her eyes. “It would be a wonderful first marriage for you,” said her mother, the spark-plug heiress, a remark unheard by Alice Grenville but nonetheless sensed by her.
William Grenville was disinclined to interfere in Junior’s affairs of the heart, being secretly pleased that his early fears of other inclinations were unfounded. However, when Junior announced to his astonished family that he would leave the day after Christmas for a cruise in Caribbean waters on a hundred-and-eighty-foot yacht made available to Kay Kay by her indulgent father, it was felt that the time was at hand to break off the incipient romance.
His father forbade him to go. Junior, accommodating always, did not accommodate. Suppressed wrath surfaced instead; a litany of remembered disappointments poured out. Shocked by the unexpected outburst, William Grenville remained implacable. Bratsie Bleeker, in a similar outburst with his mother, ran off and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. Junior Grenville threatened to do the same. On the day following Christmas, he left for Palm Beach, where he joined Kay Kay Somerset and her party on the yacht called Kay Kay. He did not feel triumphant in his victory.
Shortly thereafter, certainly unrelatedly, William Grenville suffered an aneurism of the aorta, a bursting of the main blood vessel to the heart. The Packard, with Gibbs at the wheel, awaited him at the front of the house to drive him downtown and to the business day. When he had not appeared at nine minutes after eight, Gibbs went to the front door and informed Cahill, the butler. He was found by Cahill in his bathroom, to which he had repaired, as was his habit, with the Times and the Wall Street Journal, after his breakfast.
Alice Grenville, who would achieve personal fulfillment in widowhood, telephoned the home of the Somersets in Palm Beach and asked Arthur Somerset to contact the yacht, wherever it was, and have Junior call his home in New York. Within several hours a call came from Junior in Barbados. “He is dying,” said his mother. “You must come right away, to speak to him.” She understood the never-reconciled chasm between son and father.
But it was not to happen. He stood in the hospital room of Bleeker Pavilion at New York Hospital, with his weeping mother and weeping sisters, and watched the expiration of a man who did not want to expire. When he felt nothing but relief that his days of disappointing were over, he simulated grief, for appearance’s sake, for grief was the order of the day.
The casket was open and set up in the reception room off the main hall. Over the mantelpiece was a large portrait of three young ladies in long white dresses poised in elegant comfort among the cushions of an immens
e green sofa. They were the Pleydell triplets, painted by John Singer Sargent nearly forty years before. Alice Pleydell was on the right. The legend was that William Grenville had fallen in love with the face in the picture, pursued her, and won her.
Alice, and Junior, and the four sisters stood in front of the mantelpiece and received the hundreds of mourners who passed through their house: the banking world, the racing world, the membership of his nine clubs, the part of New York society in which they moved, and the friends of Alice, and Rosamond, and Felicity, and Grace, and Cordelia, and Junior. The smell of flowers was oppressive. Outside it was raining.
And then Bratsie Bleeker arrived, unexpectedly, in his Royal Canadian Air Force uniform, waiting his turn in line, behind Archie Suydem, the family doctor, ahead of Edith Bleeker, his own mother. “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Junior after making his amenities to the family. “Where?” asked Junior. “Wherever,” said Bratsie.
Outside was Bratsie’s Cadillac convertible, its bright-yellow color glaringly inappropriate for the circumstance, between limousines with umbrella-carrying chauffeurs helping elderly people in and out of the huge Grenville house. They entered Central Park at Seventy-second Street and sped across in silence. Junior was lost in thought, believing, even in death, that the disapproving eyes of his father were upon him.
At a red light on Central Park West, three toughs eyeing the young swells raised their thumbs in the hitchhiking position. “We’re only kids and we have a Cadillac,” screamed Bratsie at them, gunning the car and speeding off, breaking the gloom within. As always, Junior was Bratsie’s best audience and screamed with shocked laughter.
“Let me ask you something, Junior,” said Bratsie.
“What’s that?” asked Junior.
“The truth,” stipulated Bratsie.
“The truth,” agreed Junior.
“Have you ever been laid?”
“Bratsie!”
“The truth.”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“What’s this all about?”
“I am about to introduce you to the establishment of Miss Winifred Plegg, also known as Bootsie, on West End Avenue and Ninety-first Street.”
“Tonight?”
“It’s the perfect time.”
The Grenvilles were not the kind of people who cried at funerals. To remain stoic in adversity was, like honesty, a trait learned early. At William Grenville’s funeral at St. James’ Church and the burial in the family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery, with Dr. Kinsolving in attendance, William Grenville, Junior, stood, stalwart, by his mother’s side, his long elegant hands holding her arm, guiding her through the rituals of the long day with nothing in his demeanor to divulge the debauchery of the night before at the establishment of Miss Winifred Plegg on West End Avenue.
Junior Grenville was much admired, and it was whispered from pew to pew that he would be, after Harvard and the war, a worthy successor to the positions and responsibilities of his father. When, at the graveside, his eyes fell on the Caribbean-tanned Kay Kay Somerset, he felt a deep disinclination toward her, as if his single act of disobedience, over her, might have caused the burst blood vessel that ended his father’s life.
William Grenville left his large estate in perfect order, so there would be no lessening of grandeur in scale of living for any of his descendants during their lifetimes. His daughters, already married rich, became independently rich. His widow, Alice, received all the houses outright to do with as she wanted, with the fervent hope expressed that the vast structure off Fifth Avenue, which he had built, would continue to be lived in by her for her lifetime and then, dynastically, be passed on to Junior so that he could raise his own family, when that time came, in the house in which he had been raised. Alice, who understood money, got the main bulk of the fortune, with it, in turn, to be passed on to Junior when she died. Junior himself received ten million dollars, a vast sum in that preinflationary decade, making him one of the wealthiest young men in the country.
Life resumed, after the mourning period, in the Grenville houses in New York and Long Island and Newport. Alice’s children would have been surprised to know that their mother felt released by her widowhood. Slowly the strictures imposed on all their lives by William Grenville abated, and, despite the impending war, laughter was heard again in the huge houses where they lived. Alice, freed from the constant entertaining of bankers and horse breeders that had made up her husband’s life, enjoyed more and more the companionship of her children and her friends, and parties and concerts filled the houses.
It was inevitable that when the war actually came Bratsie Bleeker would be the first to enlist, transferring from the Royal Canadian Air Force, and the first to distinguish himself in combat, where his natural bent for recklessness was often mistaken for bravery.
Junior Grenville could not wait to follow suit, but he promised his mother that he would finish Harvard first. He did, spending most weekends in New York enjoying the renewed adoration of his four sisters. Immediately upon graduation he enlisted in the Navy and entered Officers Training School, from which he graduated as an ensign.
On February 19, 1943, Ann Grenville, who was then called Ann Arden, and before that had been called Urse Mertens, walked into the life of Ensign William Grenville, Junior.
“Glamorous” was more the word than “beautiful” that applied to her. She had a bright glow about her, and there was an interplay between her lovely blue eyes and glossy red mouth that captured you with its seductiveness. From the age of twelve she knew, even before she really knew, that she could wrap men around her little finger, an expression her mother was fond of using.
She was at this time a show girl by night and a radio actress by day. Although she was voted the most beautiful girl in radio, it was as a show girl that she was magnificent. Elaborately costumed in sequins and feathers and giant headdress, she held her arms aloft and beautifully presented her beautiful body as she glided across the stage of a Broadway musical behind the star, Miss Ethel Merman. Her most ardent admirer would not have called her talented, as either a singer or a dancer, but she possessed something that called attention to herself—there was amusement in her eyes and a private smile on her lips—and men followed her every movement across the stage, ignoring the other girls in the line. And of all the girls in the line, she was the most sought-after, and her nights, after the show, were spent with the kind of men who took chorus girls to nightclubs, and whose names occasionally appeared in Broadway columns. There was always the hope of being discovered by a talent scout from Hollywood, and the possibility of movie stardom was a dream that she cherished.
Sometimes it terrified her that her life was advancing, had advanced, in fact, and she had not achieved her potential. Young still, she had already begun to lie about her age to make herself younger. It was when she was looking into a mirror, applying powder and colors to her face, that she confronted herself. She was not a star; she was not going to be a star. Adele Jurgins, with whom she had danced in the line at Fefe’s Monte Carlo, had gone on to Hollywood and was starring in films at Republic, and Babette Lesniak, with whom she had danced in the line at the Copacabana, well, everyone knew what had happened to Babette, or, at least, everyone who read the tabloids knew what wonders had come to Babette. Perhaps, she thought, this is not what I am supposed to be doing. Perhaps this is not it, after all.
Overdrawn at the bank again, rent looming, fighting off feelings of despair, she dressed and went to El Morocco. You never know what’s going to happen, she thought to herself. Tonight I might meet the man who is going to change my life.
She was with the Argentinian playboy Arturo de Castro. She thought he was the best dancer in New York, and she told her best friend, Babette Van Degan, that the Latin beat was in his blood. She loved to dance and knew that people looked at her when she and Arturo took to the floor, but she realized, before he told her, that he was about to kiss her off. She had read in Cholly Knickerbocker�
��s column that he was seeing a Standard Oil heiress, and she knew that the affair would be winding down and that her days were numbered. She fought down the rage of rejection that was within her, determined that she would not make a scene at El Morocco. She concentrated instead on a white fox jacket he had seen her admire in the window of Saks and hoped he would at least give her that when the end came.
She loved El Morocco, with its white palm trees and blue-and-white zebra-striped banquettes, and could never stop looking around her at the other tables and the other people on the dance floor.
She had a habit of singing into the ear of the man she was dancing with in her deep throaty voice:
“Dear, when you smiled at me,
I heard a melody
that haunted me from the start.
Something inside of me
started a symphony.
Zing went the strings of my heart!”
At that instant zing went the strings of her heart.
“Who’s that?” asked Ann.
“Who’s who?” asked Arturo back.
She had spotted him over Arturo’s shoulder when he entered. She didn’t know who he was, but she knew right away that he was more than just a handsome naval officer on leave. Johnny Perona himself was on the door that night, and Johnny Perona greeted Junior Grenville with the deference he usually reserved for Alfred Vanderbilt and Gary Cooper and the Rockefeller brothers.
“That ensign saying hello to Brenda Frazier,” answered Ann, refraining from saying the one with the beautiful teeth and the beautiful smile.
“Where’s Brenda? I don’t see Brenda,” answered Arturo.
She had an instinct for quality. It went beyond looks and clothes; she could spot it even in nakedness. When she squeezed past the ensign on her way to the ladies’ room and said, “Excuse me,” in a teasing but somehow intimate tone, he noticed her for the first time. She was wearing a black satin dress cut low. Her looks brought pleasure to his eyes, and he feasted on them for the moment of passage. The thing that he noticed about her, that he would always notice about her, even when he was long used to her, was her breasts. He was alone, having come from one of his mother’s parties, having slipped out during Madam Novotna’s musicale. He was standing in the same place when she came back from the ladies’ room.
The Two Mrs. Grenvilles Page 3