The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  “She was found to be blameless, though, wasn’t she?” asked Taytsie Davis.

  “Thanks to Billy’s mother,” said Piggy. “Alice Grenville is a saint. She loathed Ann and stood by her.”

  “Who are those people with her?” asked Taytsie.

  “Foreigners. They’re the only ones who see her.”

  “However you look at it, she’s ruined,” said the fascinated Taytsie, unable to take her eyes off Ann’s table.

  Ann remembered every slight, every averted eye, and stored this away in the recesses of her mind, to be dealt with later, when her life began again. This was not life that she was in. This was an interim period, a limbo, between what was and what would be.

  “She was a woman who took advantage of every opportunity that life offered her, and the prowler offered her the opportunity of widowhood.”

  Tucky Bainbridge

  Key figures in Alice Grenville’s life let it be known to friends, who passed it on to acquaintances, that she wished not to have the tragedy mentioned to her. True to her word, she stood behind her daughter-in-law, appearing with her in public on occasion to give the show of unity in her family. Although people in their world were tolerant of Ann in the presence of the beloved Alice, they remained hostile to her when Ann, alone, tried to brazen out her situation in New York.

  Leaving the opera with her one night, Alice told Charles that she had decided to go straight home rather than on to dinner in a restaurant, as had been planned. When he had closed the window that separated the chauffeur from the passengers, she sat in silence for a while looking out at the New York night while Ann talked on about someone she had seen in the box next to theirs.

  “Yes, yes, you saw her, Mère, wearing that same dress Cordelia wore to the Pells last week. She’s married to a Cypriot violinist and lives in Paris. The story is that she once—”

  “I think you must give some thought to leaving the city, Ann,” interrupted Alice, who had not been listening.

  “What do you mean, leave the city?” asked Ann.

  “Just that,” replied Alice. “Move away.”

  As she always did when she felt trapped or nervous, Ann concentrated on a different activity. She opened her gold-and-diamod minaudier and took out her compact. Staring at herself in the compact mirror, she applied scarlet lipstick over and over to her lower lip.

  “Your makeup is absolutely fine, Ann,” said Alice.

  “I was thinking of going to Palm Beach for a few weeks,” said Ann, continuing her application.

  “When you have completed your ministrations, I will continue this conversation,” said Alice, looking out the window at Park Avenue.

  The word “ministrations,” pronounced in four syllables, signaled to Ann that her mother-in-law was not to be deterred. She put her compact back in her minaudier, clicked it shut, breathed deeply, and stared straight ahead. The two women sat in silence for a block.

  “I think you should move to a different place,” Alice began. “And I don’t mean going to Palm Beach for two weeks. I think you should consider leaving the city, perhaps even leaving the country.”

  “Never,” answered Ann, aghast at the suggestion.

  “You must be aware that things have changed for you here.”

  “What about Newport?”

  “I’ve decided against opening the house in Newport this year.”

  “I sense a beat missing in this story,” said Ann.

  “They have turned you down for membership at Bailey’s Beach, Ann. Not your children. Just you. It would be an impossible situation there.”

  Ann, stung, wanted to retreat to her compact again, but dared not.

  “Let us overlook sensibilities for a moment,” said Alice, “and deal in realities. You are being dropped, right and left. Can’t you feel it yourself?”

  “I suppose you’ve heard from Felicity that Edith Bleeker cut me dead at Piping Rock last weekend. She must have loved running to you with that one.”

  Alive Grenville did not answer. The Packard drew up in front of Ann’s house. Ann looked out at her black front door, expensively glossed, and saw the ending of her life in that perfect house that she had created and where she had reigned.

  “Have you seen the new edition of the Social Register?” she asked, as if she were playing a trump card. “I have not been dropped by it.”

  “That’s so.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  Alice Grenville smiled sadly. “If you were not listed, Ann, I would have withdrawn my name and the names of my four daughters.”

  “It was a deal then?” asked Ann.

  “It was a deal.”

  Ann’s heart sank. She knew it was true. Charles stood outside in the cold night waiting to open the door. She motioned out the window that she was ready.

  “One more thing, Ann,” said Alice, putting her hand on the sleeve of Ann’s fur. “I would like to bring up my grandchildren.”

  Ann turned to her mother-in-law, flushed with anger. “I knew this was what was on your mind. I knew it from the day you came to visit me at Doctors Hospital. Never will you take my children from me. Never!”

  Outside the car Charles heard the raised harsh voice and did not open the car door.

  “I will send them to spend vacations with you. You may visit them anytime when you return to this country, but I would like to take over their education and upbringing. ”

  “I repeat, never.”

  “Wherever you go, for the rest of your life, people are going to point at you and say, ‘That’s the woman who shot her husband.’ Do you think that’s fair to your children?”

  “I think I know what’s best for my children,” snapped Ann.

  “Diantha and Third have been deeply wounded by this terrible tragedy. Can’t you see yourself how silent they’ve become? It is a wound that cannot begin to heal until the notoriety dies down. ”

  “I will hire lawyers and go to the press before I allow you to take my children, Alice,” said Ann, leaning forward to her mother-in-law. She had never called her by her first name before. It was not spoken with affection, and the time for calling her Mère was at an end.

  “Let me remind you that we made a deal in the hospital that you would never talk to the press as long as you lived,” said Alice.

  “And let me remind you,” said Ann, pointing her finger toward her mother-in-law’s face, “that the deal we made referred to my not talking to the press, or anyone else, about the night of the accident in Oyster Bay. It had nothing to do about not talking to the press about your taking my children away from me.”

  “Don’t point your finger at me.”

  “Have you picked a place for me?”

  “The sneer in your voice is not necessary.”

  Ann tapped on the window for Charles to open the door. As she left the car, she turned back to Alice Grenville. “If Billy had accidentally shot me, everything would have gone on as normal.”

  “Billy Grenville would be alive today if he hadn’t married that actress.”

  Sass Buffington

  More than ten years in their midst had not made her one of them. The doors that counted on the Upper East Side, the North Shore, Newport, and Southampton were slammed in her face. The kind of people who were willing to see her were not the kind of people she was willing to see. In that world, once you were mixed up in a scandal that knocked the lid off their kind of life, it was inevitable that you would be dropped.

  She felt rage at the lot that life had dealt her and refused to reason that it was she, not life, who had fired the shots that blew off her husband’s head. There were those who believed that it was an accident, as she steadfastly maintained, but even those knew that she was capable of doing what the others believed she had done.

  With no other options than what her mother-in-law suggested, she sold her house in New York and left the country. The house in Oyster Bay, with no buyers interested, was closed up. At the end of their school term, her children followed her to Sw
itzerland.

  * * *

  Although the Europeans were more tolerant of the position Ann Grenville found herself in than the Americans she knew, everyone felt she returned far too quickly to her old life in the International Set playgrounds. As if frightened she would be forgotten, she did not retire for a year or two of obligatory mourning and reflection, or even motherhood, in a quiet country atmosphere, but plunged back into the set that got on airplanes to go to parties. Wherever she went, it was at the height of the season. She told new acquaintances she felt banished, dramatizing her plight. They, mostly Europeans, accepted that what had happened was an accident, or else that it was passion, and, for them, a crime of passion was an excusable act.

  Kay Kay Somerset, who no longer spoke to her, saw her at the Givenchy collection in Paris, sitting on a gilt chair in the front row checking off numbers on her program as models in evening dress paraded in front of her, as if she were anticipating a gala season ahead. Worse, under the circumstances, she continued to shoot and traveled with four gun cases to shooting weekends at country estates in Austria, France, and Spain.

  It was in the bar of the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz, at the height of the season, that I heard her, in quite a loud voice, cast aspersions on my nature. I won’t say the word she used. It pains me. Not that it’s not true; it is. Of course, she was drunk at the time, or well on her way to being.

  Outside it was nearly dark. The bar was mobbed. Late diners were still in après-ski dress, preparatory to going to their rooms to dress for dinner. Early diners were already in evening clothes. Every seat was taken. I, a celebrity now and in great social demand after the enormous international success of my book Candles at Lunch, made into an equally successful film with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, was seated on a bar stool in conversation with the always entertaining Madame Badrutt, the then wife of the fashionable innkeeper who owned the Palace Hotel and kept the riffraff out. A Europeanized American who spoke English with a foreigner’s intonations, Madame Badrutt, formerly of the San Fernando Valley, gave me a short précis of each guest whose looks interested me and brought many of them forward to meet me. “This is Mr. Basil Plant,” she said to a very old woman emblazoned with diamonds. She was a countess, or a viscountess, or a duchess, or something, but she, an admirer of mine, told me to call her Kitty.

  “Kitty knew Proust,” said Madame Badrutt.

  “Why, Kitty!” I cried, clapping my hands in delight. “How simply marvelous. Tell me everything. What was he like?”

  “Ghastly!” exclaimed the old lady.

  There were shrieks of laughter. The bar was in full cocktail swing.

  “Of course, even in this swell group, the American murderess stands out in the pecking order,” said Madame Badrutt.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Grenville,” she said.

  “Where?” I asked, fascinated, pushing my mimosa to the bartender to be refilled.

  When the crowd broke, I saw her across the room in a corner. Her shoulder caressed the arm of the man with whom she was seated.

  “Let’s have another one of these,” said Ann, pushing her empty glass ahead of her. He pushed his glass forward and signaled to the waiter.

  “Who’s the man?” I asked Madame Badrutt.

  “Count Zeilern,” she said. “No money. Fair title. Likes rich women.”

  Mrs. Grenville whipped out her lipstick and gave herself bright new lips. Her companion turned his attention back to her and whispered something in her ear. She looked at him. Her lovely mouth, long unkissed, yearned, not for love, but for promiscuity. When he, reading her signal, leaned forward to kiss her, she joined in the kiss. His whiskeyed tongue intoxicated her, and her eyes closed in public passion. Rarely am I shocked. In my mind I was figuring the time difference to New York and wondering if Jeanne Twombley or Petal Wilson would be at home, knowing it was the sort of story they would love and a pay-back, to boot, for all the juicy tales they had whispered in my willing ears.

  As she opened her eyes from her lovemaking, she caught sight of me across the room staring at her. We had not seen each other since she had snubbed me, once again, at Edith Bleeker’s party on the night of the tragedy. Her back became intimidatingly rigid. She was thinking, I knew, that Basil Plant was a bearer of tales.

  That is when I heard her, in quite a loud voice, cast aspersions on my nature. Others heard it too and turned to me for my reaction. The dynamics of our acquaintance had changed. I excused myself from the woman who had found Proust ghastly, and from Madame Badrutt, rose from my bar stool, and walked across the crowded room to where Ann Grenville sat with her German. His mouth, I noticed, bore the stains of her lipstick. Ignoring him, I stared down at Ann Grenville, who had always resisted my attempts at friendship, and she, knowing she had made a mistake, gazed back insolently at me.

  Suddenly I raised my hands, as if I were positioning a shotgun, one hand on the imaginary barrel and the other on the imaginary trigger, and aimed the imaginary shotgun straight at her head.

  “Billy, is that you?” I called out. My high-trebled voice reverberated through the Palace bar. Silence screamed. Waiting for my moment, like the actor I always wanted to be, I then cried out the word, “Bang!” and pulled the imaginary trigger, allowing my body to react to the imaginary force of the imaginary shot. And then I repeated again, “Bang!” as if firing for the second time, again allowing my body to react to the imaginary force of the imaginary shot. Then I lowered the imaginary shotgun, my eyes never leaving hers. I watched a look of shame and humiliation replace the look of arrogance and insolence that had adorned her beautiful face only a moment before.

  “When I write this up in my mosaic, Bang-Bang, I’ll send you an advance copy.”

  Then I turned and walked out of the bar, secure in the feeling that I had done the right thing. Within minutes the story spread throughout the hotel. That night the dinner parties at the Palace Grill, or at the Chesa Viglia, talked of nothing else. The next day the skiers and the group who arrived by funicular to lunch at the Corviglia Club at the top of the mountain had embellishments on the story. “Is that you, Billy?” people were saying over and over, followed by a reenactment of my bang-bang performance, followed by helpless laughter. People claimed to have been eyewitnesses to the event who had not witnessed it at all but could not bear to be left out.

  Next morning Mrs. Grenville left for Paris with instructions that her luggage, twenty-eight pieces and four gun cases, be packed for her and sent on to the Ritz Hotel. Count Zeilern did not accompany her. The name Bang-Bang did.

  “Don’t you find this odd?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, look here.” I was sitting in an upstairs office of the Mineola Police Station, after hours, reading the statements of the guests at Edith Bleeker’s party on the night that Ann Grenville shot and killed her husband. “The Duchess of Windsor, from her suite in the Waldorf Towers, described the Grenvilles to Inspector Pennell as an ideally suited couple.”

  “What’s odd about that?” asked Detective Meehan, looking toward the door, nervous that he had allowed himself to be conned by me into opening what was supposed to be a closed file on the Grenville shooting. In the old you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours theory, I had agreed to read the short stories of Margaret Mary Meehan, the detective’s daughter, a sophomore at New Rochelle, and tell her, honestly, whether or not I thought she should pursue a literary career or go into nursing as her father wanted.

  “Nothing, in itself. But look, on this page Brenda Frazier, in her New York apartment, described the Grenvilles to the inspector as an ideally suited couple. And here Mrs. Phipps, at her house in Westbury, described the Grenvilles as an ideally suited couple. And so did old Edith Bleeker. In fact, thirty-three of the fifty-eight people who attended the same party the Grenvilles attended on the night of the shooting described the Grenvilles to the police as an ideally suited couple. That’s what strikes me as odd.”

  “I’m not following you.” Det
ective Meehan was being, I felt, deliberately obtuse, but I chose to treat him as a confrere.

  “Those words, ‘an ideally suited couple,’ are not four words that spring to the forefront of your mind, at least most people’s minds, when asked to describe a couple, especially a couple who were most definitely not ideally suited.”

  “Are you building to a point?” asked Detective Meehan, gathering up the report and returning it to the file.

  “I am. Yes. Closing the ranks, it’s called. Bringing the stagecoaches in closer. Keeping the outsiders out. There must have been behind-the-scenes phone calls. Tell them, somebody must have said, when they question you, that Billy and Ann were an ideally suited couple, and the guests were, at least thirty-three out of fifty-eight of them, sufficiently uncreative as to repeat the exact words. That’s the point I’m building to.”

  “You better clear out of here now.”

  “About that prowler.”

  “Another time. You better get out of here now.”

  “She traveled from country to country, made a gaffe, and moved on.”

  Eve Soby

  She was a good traveler, kept track of an enormous quantity of luggage, gun cases, and fur coats, and intimidated customs officials into speeding her through. People thought it odd that she continued to shoot, after she had shot and killed, but she enjoyed her reputation as a huntress, and continue to shoot she did at shooting parties across the Continent.

  In Austria she insisted that her host, Prince Windisch-Graetz, dismiss his gamekeeper for making improper advances toward her, when the truth of the matter was, as old Prince Windisch-Graetz and every other guest at the shooting party knew, that it was Mrs. Grenville who had made the improper advances toward the gameskeeper. Mrs. Grenville left. The gameskeeper remained.

  In Spain the Duke of Lerma introduced her to the Marquis de Fuego as America’s most famous instant widow, and she did not take offense. When, a few weeks later, their affair having expired, the Marquis de Fuego walked out on her, down the stairs of his hunting lodge, she toppled over a marble bust, narrowly missing him.