03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (8 page)

F
rom their first days together, Celeste moved grace
fully into Steve’s life, artfully filling the void left by Elise’s death. Startled by his age, Kristina asked her mother why she was with him. Celeste didn’t hesitate.

“Steve’s rich,” she answered.

While she was blunt with Kristina, to others Celeste professed her love of Steve. In January she quit her job at the Austin Country Club and brought Anita a crystal vase to thank her for her help during the custody battle. “Sorry I couldn’t have done more,” Anita said, mindful that they’d lost. The final decision came down early that month, granting Craig custody of both twins. Aware of the pressure on her, Craig agreed to allow Kristina to live with Celeste. When it came to Jennifer, the judge granted Celeste visitation, but at Jennifer’s discretion, and she refused to see her mother.

But, Celeste wasn’t interested in the twins that day. Instead she gushed to Anita about the new man in her life, Steve Beard, a country club member. “I want you to meet
him,” she said. “It’s magic.” She explained that she’d moved in as his housekeeper and they’d fallen in love.

While some might have been shocked in the difference in their ages—Steve was sixty-nine and Celeste just thirty-one—Anita wasn’t fazed. Her husband, Jerry, was older than Anita, and they had a happy marriage. “I never thought age mattered,” she says.

Steve’s daughter had no such romantic notions about her father’s new girlfriend.

Becky Beard learned about Celeste Martinez when her father said he had a new housekeeper. Becky was surprised to see the young blonde who appeared at her door in Dallas that same month, holding some of her mother’s jewelry. Steve had wanted her to have a few of her mother’s things, Celeste said. They sat and talked, Celeste telling Becky a web of lies, including that she’d graduated with an accounting degree from Pepperdine University. “I got tired of accounting,” Celeste said. “It was boring.”

From that first meeting, Becky never believed Celeste was who she claimed to be. Rather, she worried about what her father was getting into. Her apprehension grew in January, when Steve had tickets for the Super Bowl, the Cowboys against the Buffalo Bills in Atlanta. Becky called his hotel room and Celeste answered. “I didn’t like what was happening, but I didn’t know what to do,” she says.

When Celeste invited Anita and her husband, Jerry, to the house for cocktails, the Inglises knew him only slightly from the club and had never spent any time with him. That night, Anita thought she understood why Celeste was attracted to Steve, as he joked and laughed, often poking fun at himself. Meanwhile, Celeste bragged about his accomplishments and the fun they had together.

“She appeared devoted to him,” says Anita.

It was abundantly clear that Steve was crazy about Celeste.
He beamed just looking at her. As so many other men before him had found, being with Celeste was invigorating. It wasn’t just her physical beauty. She exuded a playful, highly sexual manner, an infectious enthusiasm. To Steve, who’d just endured the most painful year of his life, she must have represented the promise that his life hadn’t ended with Elise’s death. She offered a new beginning, the opportunity to be loved again, and the chance—with Kristina—to start a whole new family.

In the months that followed, Steve’s secretary Lisa, grew accustomed to hearing Celeste’s wispy voice when she answered his phone. At first Celeste called about household matters, like getting the rugs cleaned or problems with the hot tub. Then, gradually, the reasons changed. As she had throughout the years, Celeste quickly shifted the spotlight back to herself. In early 1994 the issue that consumed her was the fight to recover Jennifer.

That summer, when the girls were twelve, Celeste left Austin, telling Steve she was traveling to Washington and intended to return with Jennifer. She was gone a few days when the phone rang at KBVO. “Celeste called and said she was in jail in Washington, for trying to see Jennifer,” says Lisa. Steve tried to calm Celeste, who sounded frantic. He hired an attorney and spent more than $20,000 on legal fees.

Later, Jennifer remembered nothing of her mother’s supposed arrest. She would, however, never forget the phone calls Celeste made to her that year. “I’m going to take you away from your father,” she said.

One night Steve answered the phone when Craig called to talk to Kristina. Craig’s brother, Jeff, overheard the call. “Celeste isn’t who you think she is,” Craig told Steve. “Be careful. You think she’s wonderful now, but she’ll hurt you. You have no idea who you’re dealing with. If you’re not careful, you’re a dead man.”

Jeff couldn’t hear Steve, but when Craig hung up he said, “He won’t believe me. No one believes Celeste’s as ruthless as she is until it’s too late.”

Death must have been on Steve’s mind a lot that year. In February he’d been in for a checkup with Dr. George Handley, an avuncular man who’d been his personal physician and friend for many years. At five-ten and 312 pounds, Steve suffered from high blood pressure, asthma, and sleep apnea that forced him to use an oxygen machine while sleeping. Even worse, on a chest X ray, Dr. Handley discovered that Steve’s heart was enlarged, a sign of heart disease. Rich foods, drinking, and a lack of exercise had taken their toll. As spry as he may have seemed, as young at heart as his friends found Steve, he was aging quickly and not well.

That spring, Celeste put Steve on a diet. He walked and paid attention to his health. In no time he’d dropped fifty pounds and looked better than he had in years. He went to see Dr. Handley and told him that he needed help with his sexual prowess, now that he was with a younger woman. Handley suggested monthly testosterone injections. Steve laughed and agreed, jokingly dubbing the shots his “Vitamin T.”

At KBVO, Ray McEachern wondered if he’d been wrong about Celeste. From the first day they’d met, he hadn’t liked her, sizing her up as an opportunist out to cash in on a lonely, rich old man. “But I couldn’t deny that Steve looked happy,” he says. “He told me older women had bankrolls of their own and didn’t appreciate what he had to offer. But he could spoil Celeste, and she enjoyed what he could give her. He could bring stability to her life, and for the first time since Elise’s death, he wasn’t lonely.”

Yet Craig had been right. There was much Steve didn’t know about Celeste. As she had with Jimmy, she’d reinvented her past, spinning a web of lies. She failed to tell
Steve about her second marriage, to Harald Wolf, only admitting to having been married twice, to Craig and Jimmy. “It was hard to know what to say,” says Kristina. “She told one person one thing and another something else. I just kept quiet.”

Although she was technically the housekeeper, Celeste knew little about how to care for a home. At one point she went to the store to buy new sheets. She bought four-hundred-thread-count cotton sheets that came out of the dryer in a ball of wrinkles. Since Celeste didn’t iron, the sheets went with all the clothes, even the underwear, to the dry cleaner.

Yet, Celeste knew what was important to Steve. He was a careful man, one who’d spent a lifetime keeping his world in order. He’d retained habits he learned in the navy, where he had little room aboard the ship, and kept his possessions neatly folded and stored. She didn’t wash his shirts, but made sure they were organized, neatly stacked, and arranged by color in his closet. Celeste smoked, but only outside, often commenting that she was being careful of Steve’s house, making sure the smoke from her Marlboro Light 100s didn’t ruin the paint.

Yet her talents as a housekeeper undoubtedly meant little to Steve, who wanted a companion and lover, not someone to wash his floors. He wasn’t accustomed to a woman he could rule. Elise had always spoken her mind, and Celeste did the same, giving him back everything he shot at her. Steve liked that. He’d never wanted an anemic woman who danced around issues. He told friends he liked Celeste’s spunk.

From her first days there, Celeste slept in Steve’s bedroom and moved Kristina into an extra bedroom, enrolling her in Hill Country Middle School, where the students came from affluent families. “Kristina wasn’t like a lot of the kids,” says
another student. “She wasn’t spoiled. She hadn’t grown up with money.”

Perhaps remembering her own girlhood when she was considered odd, Celeste appeared determined to see that her daughter fit in. To that end, she threw a slumber party, inviting thirty girls from the soccer team. Celeste made up the guest list and reigned over the party, laughing and gossiping with the girls. Instead of talking like a parent, she joked about sex and Steve, saying he was fat and old but that his money made him good-looking. Late that night, she took them to a neighbor’s house, loaded down with shopping bags of toilet paper. Stifling giggles, Celeste and the girls threw roll after roll into the air, allowing the long strands to hang from the trees. Through it all, Celeste laughed like the teenagers. When they finished, it looked like the site of an aberrant snow storm, one that had befallen one house without touching the rest of the block.

“Celeste wasn’t like the rest of our moms,” says one girl. “She was young and pretty and liked to have fun. I thought she was just the coolest mom.”

In the shadow of her mother, Kristina was Celeste’s opposite. As mercurial and outgoing as Celeste was, Kristina was soft-spoken and shy. Yet there was a connection between the mother and daughter that seemed almost unnatural. Steve’s secretary Lisa learned quickly that when Celeste was in turmoil, Kristina was the only one who could calm her. “Kris would talk to her, tell her that it would be all right,” says Lisa. “No matter how upset Celeste was, she’d calm down with Kris.”

After all he’d been through, Steve appeared both taken aback and overjoyed by the turmoil and excitement Celeste brought to his life. When he complained that he couldn’t keep toilet paper in the house, blaming Celeste for using it to T.P. the neighborhood, he’d ask, “Is this what teenagers do?” When Celeste said it was, he laughed heartily.

As always, Celeste was on overdrive, hustling through her days with enough energy to take her well into the night. With Steve, her youth brought a special charm. He was a man who saw old age staring him in the eye. Being a dad again also held its allure. He talked about Kristina with friends, discussing the differences between teenagers in the nineties and when his own daughter had entered her teen years, thirty years earlier. In the mornings, Steve drove her to school while Celeste slept in. “Steve loved Kris from the start,” says Anita. “We all did.”

On Mountain Terrace Drive their lives took on a routine. As long as the house was well cared for, Celeste was free to do as she pleased, while Kristina was at school and Steve at work. Sometimes, Steve even found himself taking over the household tasks, as on the morning Becky called and discovered her father at home. Celeste, the alleged housekeeper, was out, and he was waiting for a maid to arrive to do the actual cleaning.

Each evening at five Steve poured himself and Celeste their first cocktails of the night and started cooking dinner. While he drank martinis made with Wolfschmidt, an inexpensive vodka, and two olives, Celeste only drank top brands, usually Stoli. He wouldn’t buy it for himself, but he bought it for her. “Celeste kept up with him,” says Gene Bauman. “She matched him drink for drink.”

That summer, Steve purchased a lot in the Windermere Oaks subdivision in Spicewood, Texas, thirty-five miles west of Austin, in an unincorporated area of Burnet County, on the south shore of Lake Travis. The homes in the area started at $200,000, and his corner lot was covered with gnarled live oaks and across the street from homes that overlooked the lake. Down a winding road lay a row of covered boat slips and a pier. From dam to dam Lake Travis, a constricted stretch of the Colorado River, measured sixty-four
miles, and on summers and weekends it buzzed with boats, skiers, and jet skis.

Once he had the lot, Steve hired a local home builder, Jim Madigan, to construct a one-story house. It was small, just three bedrooms and two baths, but well-appointed. Constructed of limestone, it had a solid look. Steve installed two heavy wood front doors bearing elaborate carvings of nymphs riding seahorses, and the flower beds were lined with white stone. “The idea was that it would someday be Celeste’s,” says Anita. “By then he cared about them and didn’t want Celeste and Kristina to ever be without a home.”

In August, Celeste’s divorce from Jimmy Martinez became final, clearing the way for her to marry Steve, if he asked. His bankroll must have looked ever more attractive to her as that year drew to a close. In October, an offer to purchase KBVO came from Granite Broadcasting Corporation, a New York media giant that was buying up stations across the country. Steve grew excited as it appeared he’d be able to cash in on more than a decade of hard work. He negotiated hard. Granite offered $54 million, and since Steve owned thirty percent, his share came to $16.2 million. Later, Granite flipped networks, turning it into KEYE, the city’s CBS affiliate. “Steve was proud of what he’d built,” says Lisa. “He said he was ready for a new chapter.”

As 1994 drew to a close the KBVO staff gathered to bid Steve good-bye. As a remembrance, they gave him a plaque bearing a branding iron that read: “You really made a mark on Austin.” Steve packed up his office and walked out the door a very rich man.

In no time at all he was bored.

“It wasn’t as sweet as Steve thought it would be,” says McEachern. “His two great loves in life had been Elise and the station, and now they were both gone.” Steve had always had an eye for art, and he tried painting, but that failed to
catch his interest. One day in early 1995 he called McEachern. “I’m going to marry Celeste,” he said. “Hell, we’re already living together. We might as well.”

In hindsight, Steve’s friends wondered if they should have tried to talk him out of the marriage. Early on there were signs that Celeste had only contempt for him.

As the wedding drew near, Steve called Gene and asked a favor. “Celeste hasn’t any friends in our group,” he said. “Would Sue go to lunch with her?”