03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (11 page)

As a result, the girls had only their mother to turn to, the same mother who had abandoned them to foster homes whenever they’d been inconvenient, the same mother who’d yelled and screamed at them, insisting they were never good enough. That point must have been driven home further when, as soon as they got off the plane in Austin, Celeste stopped at Jimmy’s house to tell him what happened. After comforting Celeste and the girls, he told them, “You girls better take care of your mother, be there for her and do whatever she needs. Because now she’s all you have left.”

That was something Kristina understood—that she only had Celeste and that Celeste needed her. For Jennifer, it was very different. She grieved for her father. “For the first four days after we got to Austin, I stayed in the bedroom and cried,” she says.

Now that he was gone, Celeste, too, became preoccupied with Craig. In the months that followed, she badgered
Cherie, demanding his ring, watch, and even her last letter from Craig. Cherie refused. When Celeste wanted photos of Craig, Cherie told her no. Not to be denied, Celeste bought a full-page ad in a Stanwood newspaper that read:

The ad ended with a P.O. box and phone number. The twins knew nothing of the ad until she came to them giggling and said, “Look what I did.” Spurred by the ad, a Seattle television station requested an interview with the girls, and Celeste happily agreed. During the news footage, the twins said they missed their father and that his family had refused to give them photos. “I was a zombie, still really missing our dad,” says Jen. “Celeste told us to do it, and we didn’t refuse. You didn’t tell Celeste no. You just didn’t.”

In Stanwood, Cherie felt humiliated to have her family troubles so publicly aired. What remained of the relationship between her and her granddaughters dissolved the following year, when a Mother’s Day card arrived. Amid tiny hearts and a cheery verse that thanked Cherie for being an inspiration, was a letter that began: “Grandma, we really mean this.” It went on to voice an indictment of Cherie for turning her back on the girls and to gushingly praise Celeste.

Years later, Kristina would look at the letter and insist she
didn’t write it. “That’s not my handwriting,” she says. “It’s Celeste’s.”

In Texas, Celeste must have seen the grief in Jennifer’s eyes, as, for the most part, she left her alone. She did complain to Steve about the way her newly reclaimed daughter dressed: baggy pants and big T-shirts; Seattle grunge. While Celeste didn’t appear to know what to do with Jennifer, Steve opened his arms wide to the sad teenager. Each day, he drove the girls to Westlake High School for their freshman year. On Sundays, while Celeste and Kristina slept in, he and Jennifer began a weekly ritual: breakfast at the country club. “We’d just go and talk,” says Jen, smiling at the memory. “It was fun.”

On weekends, Steve, Jennifer, and Kristina loaded into his Cadillac and, while Celeste had plans with friends, explored the small Texas Hill Country towns, stopping for lunch at hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Before long Jennifer became Steve’s companion, driving to Home Depot with him to pick up things for the house, spending time together. For a girl whose heart ached for her lost father, he filled a painful void.

As time passed, Celeste’s world was becoming Steve’s as she methodically cut him off from his own children. Looking back, it would seem that he was trying to do for her and the twins what he’d done for Elise and his children: build a secure world, one based on solid footing. But Celeste undermined his best efforts. Although he showered her with gifts, it was never enough. No matter what she had, Celeste always wanted more.

That summer at the lake house, Kristina walked in and found her mother standing at a window, holding up a blank check over a cancelled one. With the light shining through illuminating the checks from behind, she traced Steve’s signature onto the blank check. Again, Chuck Fuqua called, this time to tell Steve that his personal checking account was
overdrawn. “I’m not sure how Steve figured it out, but what he came up with was that Celeste had gotten very, very good at forging his signature,” says Fuqua.

After that, Steve had his financial papers, including his bank statements, sent to a P.O. box. For a short time he again pondered divorce, telling Kuperman that all wasn’t well, but he never went forward with it. “I guess he just decided against it,” Fuqua would say later. “He did love Celeste and the girls. He thought of them as his family.”

Throughout that summer, Celeste was in a whirlwind. While Steve had controlled the design of the home itself, inside he gave her free reign. Little from the first house except personal mementoes would be moved. Instead, as the house neared completion, Steve took Celeste to Louis Shanks, Austin’s top-end furniture store, where he introduced her to Michael Forwood. Decades earlier Steve had bought furniture from Forwood’s grandfather, the original Louis Shanks, who founded the chain in 1945. With the house plans under his arm, he showed Forwood the vast rooms they’d need to furnish. “I don’t mind paying what’s fair, but I want a good price,” Steve said.

“We’ll take care of it,” Forwood assured him.

From then on Celeste took over. The first time Greg Logsdon, a salesperson at the store, met Celeste, he saw an attractive blonde wandering the store in jeans and a T-shirt.

“Is anyone helping you?” he asked.

“No,” she said, flippantly adding, “probably because of the way I’m dressed. I want to see your Henredon and Baker catalogues.”

Fifteen minutes later Celeste had flipped through the Henredon catalogue and chosen $20,000 in occasional tables and benches. When she instructed Logsdon to put in the order, he asked for a deposit.

“You won’t need that,” she said. “Tell Mike Forwood that Celeste Beard was in.”

Later that day Logsdon relayed the message. “Order anything she wants. Mr. Beard is good for it,” Forwood instructed.

Over the next three years, Celeste was Logsdon’s best customer. She never quibbled about price, and she chose only the very best. For a woman who’d had little money in the past, everyone at Louis Shanks had to admit that Celeste knew what to buy. Sometimes, her requests were exceptional, however, even for a store as upscale as Shanks. There was the time she bought a heavily carved bedroom suite from the Henredon line named Natchez, after the Mississippi city. The king-size, four-poster bed alone ran more than $4,000. Celeste had Logsdon custom-order a heavy damask bedspread and pillows. While such a purchase wasn’t unusual, Celeste’s next request was: She wanted a duplicate of the bed made including the bedding but on a small scale, for her cocker spaniel, Nikki.

They did, at a cost of $3,000.

“I think that’s the first time we ever had a request like that from a customer,” says Forwood. “We were all frankly amazed.”

Steve, however, never questioned the expenditure. In fact, he rarely balked at any of her purchases. The one exception: the day Celeste spent $7,000 on throw pillows. When the bill arrived, Celeste called Logsdon.

“Steve got the bill,” she said. “He called me every name in the book, except my own.”

To mollify the situation, Logsdon gave Celeste an adjustment on the bill. But the next time she walked into Louis Shanks, Steve was beside her, watching over her shoulder as she made purchases. At times, he shook his head no. Celeste bristled.

“That’s why I don’t like to bring him shopping,” she said
to Logsdon, loud enough for Steve to hear. Looking back, Logsdon would say it was as if Steve were a father with an errant child, paternal, wanting her to be happy, yet monitoring her actions.

“She was clearly unhappy he was there,” he says.

Throughout the three years she bought from him, Celeste spent more than $100,000 each year, for a total of nearly $400,000. She was always polite, always easygoing, never questioning prices or asking for discounts. “She was a dream customer,” he says.

Logsdon, then, found it difficult to understand why the women at Louis Shanks grated at having to deal with Celeste. While she was calm with him, with the women Celeste’s mood turned churlish with little provocation.

“Do you know who I am?” she said, irritated when things weren’t going her way.

The Bank of America teller who refused to cash Celeste’s check that summer when she went through the drive-through without identification was a woman. Celeste caused a scene, screaming, “Do you fucking know who I am?” Steve’s banker, Chuck Fuqua, was called. “She read me the riot act,” he says. All the while she was yelling he was recalling the way she’d talked about Steve at the last party. “She said he was disgusting.”

At the end of August, Brian Rahfls flew in from Dallas to discuss funding Steve’s trust. That day at the country club, Steve stopped Rahfls frequently to ask Celeste questions, making sure she understood the trust with its $7 million in cash, stocks, and bonds, explaining what her situation was should they remain married when he died. In a grand gesture, he had made Celeste the main beneficiary.
If
she remained his wife at his death, she wouldn’t have access to the principal but would receive all the earnings from the estate.
At a twelve percent return, Rahfls estimated the trust would produce $290,000 a year.

That October, Steve and Celeste went on the radio station trip, this time to Madrid. During their stay at the palatial Ritz Hotel, Celeste grew angry. That night, she took his American Express card and left. The next morning she was gone, flying home on a first-class, one-way ticket. At breakfast Steve looked sheepish, not wanting to tell the others what had happened. Instead, he said that Celeste had something at home she had to attend to. But he told the truth to Roy Butler and Gene Bauman. “He kind of grinned, like ain’t this wild,” says Butler. “I got the feeling Steve thought he had a wild pony by the tail.”

Afterward, Butler and Bauman compared notes and figured Celeste’s impulsive departure probably cost Steve in the neighborhood of $7,000. Four days later the travelers returned to Austin. When they got off the plane, Celeste waited for Steve, waving and calling his name, as if she couldn’t wait to have him home.

That fall, Steve, Celeste, and the girls finally moved into the Toro Canyon house. Two months later they hosted an elaborate holiday open house. More than a hundred guests arrived to view the house and the treasures the Beards had amassed. Celeste had so many antique Staffordshire dogs, she couldn’t display them all, keeping many in closets. Over the living room fireplace hung a painting Celeste had commissioned for Father’s Day the previous year. It depicted Kristina, Jennifer, and Celeste in the forefront, with the koi pond fountain in the background. Buried in the fountain pedestal was a small medallion bearing Steve’s face. “Mom wanted it that way for a reason,” says Kristina. “She said it would be easy to paint over him when he died.”

The following February, 1997, a full year before she would have been entitled to the money under the prenup,
Steve funded a $500,000 trust for Celeste. Perhaps he thought she’d be happier with money of her own. To counsel her on investing the sum, he brought in a specialist from Bank of America. Six months later every penny was gone. Celeste had spent it all. From that point on, his financial obligation to her in a divorce was satisfied. Even if they remained married for a decade, if they were to divorce, he owed her nothing, and she’d leave the marriage with only her half interests in the houses and her personal property.

From that point on Steve was worth considerably more to Celeste dead than alive and divorced.

T
hroughout 1997 and into 1998, life at the Toro
Canyon house resembled an advertisement for living the American dream. The whole family traveled to St. Thomas for Christmas. One summer, the girls studied biology in Hawaii for two weeks. At home, Celeste played on the country club bunco league—evenings she called “drunko bunco”—took golf lessons, and had her hair styled twice a week and nails manicured. And she doted on Steve, throwing him elaborate parties, once reserving an entire restaurant for his friends. He showered her with jewelry, and she gave him a bronze fountain of a young girl reading a book for the front yard. To those who didn’t know what lurked beneath, Steve and Celeste, the twins, and their menagerie of pets—cats Priscilla and Ollie and dogs Meagan and Nikki—seemed picture perfect. And when Celeste wasn’t wrestling with yet another crisis, Steve did appear happy. Ray called one day, and Steve answered the phone.

“What are you doing?” Ray asked.

“Playing Mr. Mom. I’m getting ready to take the girls to soccer practice.”

“Boy, things have sure changed.”

“Yeah,” said Steve. “But not in a bad way.”

“Steve was crazy about the girls,” remembers Anita. “And when Celeste wasn’t doing something awful, he was crazy about her, too.”

Even when she was furious, yelling and screaming, Steve dismissed her tantrums. “She doesn’t mean it,” he told Kristina. “Your mother’s a firecracker, and sometimes she blows up. Don’t pay attention. She’ll get over it.”

“I don’t know why he loved her, but he did,” says Kristina.

To visitors walking in the front door, the Toro Canyon house, too, looked perfect. If the maid jarred a knickknack, Celeste rushed to reposition it. It was as if the house had to testify to her perfection, no blemish ignored. Yet, out of the sight of guests and Steve, it was very different. Like their marriage: faultless on the surface and troubled beneath.

Celeste barred Steve from the girls’ wing—Kristina’s bedroom and the guest room, now Jennifer’s territory— telling him it was improper for a man to go into young girls’ quarters, even his daughters.’ There, in the attic crawl space and closets, Celeste hid what she didn’t want him to see, including credit card bills that poured into her four P.O. boxes. She was so bent on keeping them secret that one afternoon when Steve was out and she fell and broke her arm climbing down from the attic, she staged a second fall in the living room in front of him, to explain the injury.

When sleeping, Steve wore an oxygen mask for his sleep apnea, one that hummed and thumped throughout the night. Sometimes Celeste slept with him. Other nights she complained that the machine kept her awake, and she bunked in a spare bed in Kristina’s room. Until late in the night, Celeste
sat at the computer, typing, searching the Internet. “It got so I had to be able to sleep with the light on and typing in the background,” says Kristina. “Sometimes she stayed awake all night.”

When she did sleep, Celeste had some odd habits. Not liking her toes to touch, she packed tissue between them. She felt the same way about her enhanced breasts, and wore a bra to bed to keep them from pressing against her chest. “No matter how late she was up, she put the tissue between her toes,” says Kristina. “She was obsessive about it.”

As perfect as she kept the front of the house and the master bedroom, she threw the twins’ wing into chaos. Celeste kept extra clothes in their closets, often throwing them on the floor so she could change after Steve fell asleep and go to the bars or shopping. She had a voracious appetite for reading, especially crime books, finishing three or four a week. Her books were scattered everywhere.

Many things seemed to occupy her thoughts that year. As she had been since childhood, she was fascinated with finding her biological mother. She hired a private investigator, tracked the woman down, and Celeste and Steve left for California to meet the woman who’d given her birth. They stayed at a country club, and she hired a limo to take them to the meeting. Celeste arrived dripping in jewelry, but the woman, whom she described as married to a wealthy and powerful man, wasn’t impressed. “She told me she was just an incubator,” Celeste said later. “I felt like renting a billboard and putting her name up there, with a picture of me that read, ‘I’m her illegitimate daughter.’”

The story of how she met her biological mother became fodder for the beauty salon circuit. At Tramps, Celeste confided in Denise Renfeldt about the injustice. She never lowered her voice to keep others from hearing, even when she grumbled about Steve. One day she laughed, saying, “He’s
so dumb he thinks my breasts are real.” Another afternoon, when she was particularly animated, Celeste groaned about their sex life, although it wasn’t true, complaining she had to give Steve shots in his penis for him to get an erection. “I threw the needles away, so now he just makes me give him oral sex,” she whined. “Once a week, every Sunday, I go make some money. I call it the Sunday suck.”

Word traveled back to Steve’s friends, including the Baumans. As upset as they were, Gene decided not to tell Steve. “I told a friend once that his wife was unfaithful, and he wasn’t grateful,” he says. “I figured the worst that would happen was Steve’s reputation would get tarnished. I never thought it could be more serious.”

A businessman at heart, Steve kept to his old habits. He had a daily planner in which he carefully jotted down each day’s schedule, and he asked Celeste and the girls to do the same. The appointment book was filled with social events, commitments with the girls and Celeste, doctor appointments and vacations. But it wasn’t enough. Steve was used to running a television station, and he was bored. That spring he called Gus Voelzel, complaining, “Now that the house is finished, I don’t feel like I have a job.”

Voelzel told Steve about Eatsies, a trendy grocery store, gourmet carryout in Dallas and Houston. Robbie Mayfield, a contractor Voelzel knew, was developing an exclusive shopping center down the hill from the Beards’ new house, on Capitol of Texas Highway, next to a dress shop where Susan Dell, Michael Dell’s wife, sold the expensive little frocks she designed. “Why don’t you open an Eatsies in it?” Voelzel asked.

Intrigued by the idea, Steve went to Dallas to see Eatsies and considered the possibility, ultimately deciding it would entail too much work. Instead, he bantered about the idea of
a liquor store in the new shopping center. Voelzel made the introductions, and Steve came away from the meeting with Mayfield convinced he wanted to be involved not as a lessee, but as one of the lessors. So, instead of renting space in the center, Steve became the money man, supplying the funds to back the development.

That year, Jennifer played on the Westlake High School softball team, and Steve was a frequent spectator, clapping for her in the stands. Celeste never made it to one of the games. “Where’s your mom?” the coach asked. When Jennifer replied that she wasn’t coming, he made light of the situation. Years later Jennifer would remember the sting of knowing that of all the players’ moms, only hers never came. When she’d finished her required physical education credits, Celeste wouldn’t let her play. “I think she just wanted to make me miserable. Or maybe it reminded her of our dad,” says Jen. At times Celeste yelled at her for the way she opened Coke cans, saying it reminded her of Craig. As many times as Celeste screamed at her, Jennifer did it anyway.

Before long many at Westlake High knew Celeste better than they cared to. She had arguments with teachers and counselors, and pulled the girls out at a moment’s notice for capricious reasons. Once, a shouting match with the girls’ biology teacher became so heated that a security guard was called. Another day, when Jen forgot a book, Celeste brought it to school. She fumed when the office staff told her to leave it with them and wouldn’t let her take it into Jennifer’s classroom. Furious, Celeste screamed that they’d better call Jennifer to the office. When Jen arrived, she told her they were leaving. Soon, the staff stopped questioning the girls’ absences. “They knew it wasn’t us. It was our mom,” says Kristina. “Jen and I did as we were told.”

At times Bess and Bob Dennison wondered about the girls, who migrated to the house next door off and on during
the week. Bess thought the girls seemed lonely, “like they wanted a little love.” They were charmed by the teenagers, especially their naiveté. When Bob talked to them about college, they seemed reluctant to attend a large university and terrified to leave Austin and live alone. “I’d be afraid to do that,” Kristina told him. “I’m not sure I could take care of myself.”

“She was really a timid young girl,” says Bess. “The girls looked like their mother, but they were like a shy reflection of her.”

What the Dennisons didn’t understand was that since they were toddlers, the girls had grown up afraid of their own mother. So much so that when Jennifer walked in one day to find Celeste grinding up sleeping pills and mixing them into Steve’s food, she never asked why. Another day, she saw her topping off his Wolfschmidt bottle with Everclear. “You’d better not say anything,” Celeste told her. “Keep your mouth shut.”

“I did because I didn’t think Steve would believe me. If I told him and he believed her, not me, she’d make my life miserable,” she says. “And I didn’t think it would really hurt him. I never thought it would give him more than a bad hangover.”

By 1998 the twins had a tight group of friends, including Justin Grimm, a tall, dark-haired, shy teenager, who met Kristina when they were yearbook photographers. Kristina and Justin were just friends, but Jennifer was dating a sandy-haired, jowly teenager with small blue eyes, Christopher Doose, whose family had oil money. The fifth member of their tight-knit group was Amy Cozart, a pudgy, wide-faced girl with vivid blond hair. “Amy, Justin, and Christopher were the first friends we brought home,” says Jennifer. “They liked us enough to put up with Celeste.”

As extensions of her daughters, Celeste treated all five
teens as her servants, sending them to retrieve her mail from her secret P.O. boxes and ordering them to run errands. “You’re my little niglets,” she said, laughing. “Now go off and do as you’re told.”

Celeste always seemed too busy shopping or partying to run her own errands or fulfill her promises, even when her friend Dawn needed help raising money for her son’s Montessori school. For months Kristina sold tickets to a fund-raising dinner and convinced local merchants to donate items for the auction. “Then Celeste took the credit,” says Anita. “She acted like she’d done the work, never mentioning Kristina.”

When the teens weren’t off chasing about Austin as she directed, Celeste presided over them, flirting with Justin, teasing Christopher, and confiding all manner of things, including details about her sex life with Steve. When they were at the Beard house on Sundays, she made a show of getting ready for sex with Steve. “Time to make some money,” she’d say, ordering them to take the dogs out of the master wing, complaining, “It takes him too long if he gets distracted.”

Often when she was angry with him, Celeste raged, “That fat old man, I never thought he’d live this long.”

Afterward, in front of the others, Celeste bragged about her sexual prowess, giving the girls pointers on what she considered the essentials of life, including her insights into the finer points of oral sex. Embarrassed, the twins tried to deflect the conversation.

Still, Celeste could be great fun. Rarely did she allow a quiet moment, and for the teens her enthusiasm could be infectious. There were pizza raids, when Celeste placed phone orders for stacks of pizzas and had them delivered to an unsuspecting family, then sat in the car with the teens giggling when the delivery man walked dejectedly back to his car still
carrying the full cardboard boxes. When a family bought a lot at the lake, Celeste held a lot party, supplying orange juice and vodka screwdrivers and a grocery store cake. Celeste, the Madigans, the twins and their friends, and Celeste’s other lake friends partied, laughing and carrying on. At one point Celeste drove around the subdivision pilfering For Sale signs to litter the new buyers’ lot.

If the others were amused by her mother, Jennifer never lost sight of the real Celeste. “I walked on eggshells around her,” she says. “When she’d be in a good mood, laughing and fun, it never seemed real, because any minute she could change.”

When she did, her favorite subject was Steve, complaining that he was controlling and mean. At first the twins’ friends believed her. “I thought Steve was evil,” says Justin.

Over time, however, their views changed. Slowly they grew to like the girls’ cantankerous stepfather, who often bellowed at them, as if for fun, then laughed. They noticed it wasn’t Celeste who made it a point to be there for the girls, but Steve. Although Celeste fawned over her friends, showering them with gifts, she was very different with the girls. “She treated them like nonpersons,” says Justin.

One day, driving the thirty-five miles from the lake house back to Toro Canyon with Jennifer, Justin, and Kristina in her new Ford Expedition, Celeste was in one of her flamboyant moods, smoking and laughing, when she suddenly became serious. “I don’t like the way Steve’s will is written,” she told them. “I deserve more of his money. I’m his wife. I’m going to have to do something about getting it changed.”

Whatever she did, it worked. On July 30, 1998, Steve not only finalized his trust, naming her beneficiary, but he drew up a new will. If he died and they remained married, she’d receive both houses, free and clear, mortgages paid up by the
estate. On top of that, she was entitled to his personal property, including his IRAs and club memberships, plus the $500,000 gift in the original will. When Steve died, Celeste could expect to become a very wealthy woman. As before, if they divorced, she’d get much less.

That November, Steve took Celeste on a $14,000, seventeen-day tour of China, including two days in Hong Kong, two in Beijing, and a cruise down the Yangtze River. They walked on the Great Wall and saw Tiananmen Square and the burial grounds of the Ming emperors. Despite bringing home suitcases full of souvenirs, Celeste returned groaning that she hated every minute of the trip. At Tramps, she ridiculed how he’d hired rickshaws to “pull his fat ass up and down the street.”