The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  Then he heard the bells from the Campanile begin to sound across the city, ringing the hour of midnight. The day was over. He had lived. The gypsy fortune-teller from Tacoma was wrong. He leaped up from the bed, joyous again with his life, and picked up the telephone and asked the operator to connect him with another hotel in the city. He asked the operator in that hotel to connect him with the room of one of its guests. He could hear the telephone ring several times, and then it was answered by a sleepy voice.

  “Esme?” he boomed. “It’s Billy. Get up. Get dressed. Let me come and pick you up and let’s go out somewhere for a drink!”

  “She’s not afraid to lose control, you know. I am,” said Billy to Esme about Ann. They sat in the spring night in the bar on the roof of Esme’s hotel.

  “Why do you stay with her?” asked Esme.

  “There was a time when I loved her, and during that time I was the happiest that I ever have been,” he replied.

  “That was then. This is now.”

  “You will not admire me if I tell you why.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “I’m afraid of her. There is something reckless about her.”

  “Reckless?”

  “Once, when I was courting her, I went to the apartment she was living in, in the thirties somewhere, Murray Hill. She was a dancer in those days. For some reason the street door was open, and I went right through without ringing her buzzer, and ran up the flights of stairs to her apartment, and rang her bell. I was carrying flowers. She opened the door and she was holding a gun pointed at me, and there was on her face a truly horrible look, like a woman who had lost control completely, slack and loose and ready to kill. And then she recognized that it was me, and in an instant she pulled herself together and tried to turn the whole thing into an enormous joke, saying that the gun was not really a gun at all, but a starter’s pistol for races. I never knew who it was she was expecting, probably some boyfriend she was trying to break off with now that I had come into her life, but I have never forgotten the look on her face.”

  “Did you ever talk about it with her?”

  “She always made light of it. I think it embarrassed her that she had shown me her dark side so blatantly, but I was madly in love with her then, and she almost made me believe that I had imagined the moment.”

  “Could she kill, do you think?”

  “Dear God, Esme, we’re talking about my wife.”

  “Could she?”

  “On safari, none of the natives wanted to be with her. She shot first and looked later, they said. Nothing ever happened, of course, but she appeared dangerous to them, and I understood their feelings.”

  “Is she a good shot?”

  “She has an itchy trigger finger.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “She doesn’t wait. There is a recklessness about her.”

  “You must leave her, Billy.”

  “She never forgets an injury, Esme. She would eventually find her revenge.”

  “But what kind of a marriage is it you have?”

  “She enjoys being Mrs. William Grenville, Junior, and will never give up being that unless an Italian prince or an English lord or the Ali Khan asks her to marry him.”

  Esme looked away from Billy and sighed deeply.

  “Is that a sigh?” asked Billy.

  “I suppose it is,” she answered.

  “Will you translate it?”

  “I would have enjoyed being Mrs. William Grenville, Junior, too, you know, but I would have been a very different one.”

  “Oh, Esme.”

  “It’s time for us to go back home, Ann,” said Billy. They were on the Riviera staying at Chateau de l’Horizon as the guests of Ali Khan.

  “No, no, not yet, Billy,” pleaded Ann.

  “Well, I’m going back to New York.”

  “Please, Billy, just stay for the Marquis de Cuevas’s ball in Biarritz, and then, after that, I promise you I’ll go back.”

  “Every time I want to go home, you tell me of another party that’s bigger and better than the last party. There’s always going to be another party.”

  “Just this one, Billy, and then we’ll go. It’s costume, and they want us to be in the Dante’s Inferno tableau. It’s going to be such fun. I’m going to be a devil all in red and carry a pitchfork. Ali’s part of the tableau. And they want you to be dressed as—”

  “Listen to me, Ann.”

  “Don’t you remember how much you used to like me in my little cat costume?” She sensed a difference in his ardor toward her and applied herself to attracting him.

  “You don’t like costume parties, Mr. Grenville?” asked Simonetta d’Este. Billy had withdrawn from the spectacle, watching the ballroom below from the splendid isolation of a rococo balcony. She was an elegant Madame Du Barry in court finery, powdered wig, and magnificent pearls.

  “Why do you say that?” asked Billy.

  “Your white tie, your tails, your red sash across your chest. It’s what all men wear who hate costume parties but go to please their wives.”

  Billy laughed. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I’m Simonetta d’Este.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you hate to dance too, Mr. Grenville?”

  “My name is Billy.”

  “I know. Do you hate to dance too, Billy?”

  “I dance rather well, I think. Would you like to?”

  “I’ve sought you out. Of course I would.”

  To be part of the Dante’s Inferno tableau at the de Cuevas’s ball in Biarritz was of great importance to Ann Grenville. Among the dozen red-clad participants of Hades were some of the oldest titles in Europe as well as the kind of names that dazzled the readers of Fydor Cassati’s column back in New York. For her it represented a triumph of social acceptance that she felt she had never achieved in the New York and Long Island circles of her husband’s family. In the group of international partygoers and pleasure seekers that was then beginning to be called the Jet Set, people who got on airplanes and went to parties the world over, wherever the season was, she was accepted as the beautiful and witty Mrs. Grenville of the famous New York family, and who she was before she became who she had become was of no consequence, as it was on the North Shore. She was on this night at the peak of her beauty and fame.

  For days preceding the ball, the merrymakers rehearsed their entrance with the dedication of courtiers, as if winning a prize for best tableau were a thing that mattered.

  And win they did, the dozen devils of Dante’s Inferno, amid hugs and kisses and toasts and congratulations. Ann, delirious with her success, looked among the celebrants for her husband, wanting his approval, needing his approval, knowing he would brag about her back in New York, to his mother, to his sisters, to his friends. She took a drink from a passing tray.

  “Have you seen Billy?” she asked someone.

  “He’s dancing, I think,” was the reply. She drank her drink and drank another.

  “Have you seen Billy?” she asked someone else.

  “He’s dancing, I think,” came the reply.

  “Which room?”

  “The nightclub.” She drank another drink. He had, she realized, not seen the tableau, nor witnessed her moment. Her eyes flashed dangerously at the marital slight. The pills she had become used to taking—to wake, to sleep, to diet, to remain calm—and the liquor she drank combined to free the latent savagery within her.

  In another room of the de Cuevas villa, fitted out for the evening as a nightclub, Billy Grenville danced with Simonetta d’Este, oblivious to the pageantlike festivities of the ballroom. It was a romance, but the romance of a party, without sex, without kisses even. Champagne, banter, laughter, dancing.

  “… and I thought that when the audience with the Pope was scheduled on the very day that the fortune-teller told me was going to be my last, it was a sure sign that she was right.”

  “What a marvelous story this is,” said Si
monetta. “No wonder you didn’t come to that silly lunch at that silly monsignor’s. I would have done the same thing. You were preparing yourself, in case.”

  “Exactly, And at midnight the Campanile rang. You can’t imagine the relief. I never believed it, but at the same time I did, and it’d been hanging over me.”

  “And now you have a new life ahead of you.”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking. You’re a wonderful dancer.”

  “So are you.”

  Eyes closed, abandoning herself to the music, Simonetta d’Este was unprepared for the force with which Ann Grenville grabbed her from behind by the shoulder and yanked her away from her husband.

  “Bitch!” screamed Ann.

  “Ann!” cried Billy.

  Not satisfied, Ann grabbed Simonetta again, tearing the front of her Madame Du Barry costume and breaking the strands of precious pearls that were around her neck. Pearls fell all over the floor of the darkened room.

  “Ann, for God’s sake,” said Billy.

  “You stay away from my husband!” screamed Ann.

  The orchestra stopped playing. The room was in silence as people crowded around to witness the melee, stepping on the scattering pearls. Billy grabbed Ann, but she pulled herself away from him, then turned on him, scratched his face, and tore his tie away.

  “Please, Mrs. Grenville,” pleaded Simonetta d’Este.

  “I know your tricks,” screamed Ann, attacking the woman again. She was out of control, and people stepped away from her.

  “Someone, call the police!” It was the outraged voice of the Marquis de Cuevas, who, dressed as Cardinal Richelieu, pushed his way into the crowd surrounding the fight. “Get these people out of my house!”

  Drunk and shamed for the scandal she had created, but convinced of her rightness in the matter, Ann retreated to the Hotel de Palais, where they were staying. Her purse lost, still in her red devil costume, she made her way across the white-and-gold lobby, aware, by the looks she was receiving, that word of her social debacle had preceded her return in the early-morning hours. Her face assumed the look of hauteur as she demanded the key to the Grenville suite.

  “If my husband should return,” she said to the hall porter, in the measured words of drunkenness, “please inform him he is to seek accommodations elsewhere.”

  Once inside, she locked the several doors of her suite, after hanging Do Not Disturb signs on the exterior handles. In a standing gold-framed three-way mirror, she caught sight of herself. What she saw was not the elegant lady of international society that she had become, but who she once was—a chorus girl in a chorus-girl costume looking like a chorus girl. In addition, her stockings were ripped, her makeup was smeared, her hair was in disarray. To her own snobbish eye she looked common and aging, and it reawakened her terrible rage toward her husband. She pulled his suitcases from closets and piled his clothes inside. She opened the door of the suite and pushed his luggage into the hall, bags half closed, sleeves hanging out, his brushes and shoes thrown after them.

  Mollified somewhat, she sat on the edge of the tall, deep, old-fashioned bathtub and took several pills. Sleep, she knew, would obliterate the night for her, and she would deal with tomorrow when it came.

  Billy, unable to get another room in the crowded hotel, too embarrassed at that hour to telephone friends with villas to get a bed for the night, used his key and entered the suite, bringing in his luggage, shoes, and brushes from the hall outside. He made up a bed for himself on a sofa in the sitting room. When he went into the bathroom, he found his wife passed out in the tub, still dressed in her costume of the evening.

  The tub was too deep for him to lift her out and carry her to her bed without awakening her. He took her shoes off and went into the bedroom to get a pillow to place under her head in the tub and a sheet to cover her.

  Ann awakened to see Billy coming down on her with a pillow in his hands. Drunk and drugged, she thought he meant to kill her, and a piercing scream was heard up and down the corridors of the staid Hotel du Palais.

  Police were called for the second time. “My husband tried to kill me,” said the hysterical Ann to the prefect. “You must believe me, he tried to kill me. He was going to smother me, but I awoke, just in time, to see him coming down on me with a pillow in both hands. He was going to put it over my mouth.”

  “I found my wife passed out in the bathtub,” said Billy to the prefect. “If you ask any of the people who were at the ball this evening, they will tell you that she had too much to drink. What I was doing was trying to make her comfortable in the tub, as it was apparent she was going to spend the night there.”

  By morning the Grenvilles had departed Biarritz by separate cars.

  Adultery was not the straw that broke the camel’s back. The marriage survived their mutual infidelities, as did the marriages of most of the couples in the circles in which they traveled, in both New York and Europe. However, Ann’s public displays of jealousy and erratic behavior caused much speculation that she was either mad or taking too many diet pills, and his friends wondered for just how long poor Billy Grenville was going to put up with his beautiful wife’s unfortunate scenes. Even the most casual observer of their lives knew that the marriage was in poor straits. The fact that Fydor Cassati, the society columnist, had not reported on it was attributable to his deep affection for Billy, who had always treated him as a fellow gentleman and not as a newspaper writer, playing golf and tennis with him and inviting him to lunch at the Beach Club in the summer. There was hardly a person in café society who had not heard that Ann had thrown a drink in Rita Sinclair’s face at El Morocco over an imagined flirtation with Billy, and that Billy, shamefaced for his wife, had taken her home. The debacle in Biarritz had stunned the international assemblage, and the resulting gossip and publicity on both sides of the Atlantic were agonizing for Billy, who worried always about what his mother would think.

  Walter Winchell, who had written items about Ann Grenville when she was a show girl, reported in his column that “the veddy social Grenvilles of sassiety and racing circles have Reno on the beano.” Finally they separated. Billy’s friends breathed a sigh of relief. He moved out of the house into the Brook Club, where according to Doddsie, the night porter, he spent long and sullen evenings alone in the bar. He returned to the house only to see the children, at a specified time in the late afternoons, and it was a condition of his visits that Ann not be in the house at the time, because she created embarrassing scenes in front of the servants. Whatever his family said among themselves was not known, but they remained noncommittal to people who questioned them about the separation. When Billy asked Ann for a divorce, she became hysterical and told him she would never grant him one.

  To the surprise of all, themselves included, apartness diminished rather than enhanced them. They did not stand up singly as they had as a couple. With all his social perfection, and good looks, and excellent manners, there was a blandness of personality about Billy that made him less interesting alone than as a partner to the firebrand he had married. He missed, he discovered, the relentless social life that Ann was expert at arranging for him. He missed also, he discovered, the comforts of the beautiful house that Ann had put together for him. He liked comfort, but he liked comfort arranged for him; he did not know, nor want to cope with, the intricacies of arranging it himself. The Brook Club was fine for the moment, but its bylaws forbade him to stay on there indefinitely.

  Ann appeared on the scene with great fanfare as the latest companion of the notorious womanizer, Ali Khan. They were photographed in nightclubs and at the yearling sales in Saratoga, on her husband’s home turf, but her stature as his companion was lessened by his continued attachment to the film star Rita Hayworth. There followed an Italian prince, with whom she had dallied in Rome, but he found her less exciting, and more demanding, now that she was available, and he returned to Italy.

  All their friends expected a divorce, but to everyone’s surprise they appeared together
smiling and lovey-dovey at a large party at Alice Grenville’s house a few weeks later attended by all the members of Billy’s family. They did not so much reconcile as go back together. The marriage was over but endured with decreasing ties. Each recognized the other’s signals of conclusion. She began to smoke in bed again, a habit that enraged him. He no longer lifted the toilet seat to pee, a habit that enraged her. First she wanted separate newspapers. Then she wanted separate bathrooms. Eventually she wanted separate bedrooms. After they stopped loving each other, or even liking each other, they continued, on occasion, to be attracted to each other, although rarely at the same time, so that lovemaking, on those occasions, was often unsatisfying and unpleasant.

  Billy said he was having lunch at the Brook Club with Teddy Vermont, but when Ann called the club she found that he was not there and had not been there, and Teddy Vermont was in Lyford Key with Alfred and Jeanne Twombley. A look of displeasure passed over her face. Distracted, she knotted and unknotted the sleeves of the sweater that hung fashionably over her shoulders. She thought back on the conversation of the morning.

  “The Haverstrikes are here from California, and I said we’d meet them for lunch at ‘21,’ ” she had said.

  “Can’t,” he had replied, brushing his hair with two brushes.

  “About the safari.”

  “Still can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m having lunch at the Brook Club with Teddy Vermont.”

  “Teddy Vermont?” She did not know Teddy Vermont.

  “Groton,” he had replied, explaining him, removing him from her sphere.

  “What does Teddy Vermont own? The state?”

  “You should be on television with your wit—Leave It to the Girls,” he answered, walking out the door.