An Inconvenient Woman (52 page)

“Someone get this
tramp
out of here,” said Pauline.

Tears streamed down Flo’s face as she shook her head in denial of the word
tramp
. “I’m sorry,” whispered Flo again. She felt so humiliated she could not move.

Camilla looked at the two women staring at each other. She leaned over and took hold of Flo March. “Come on, Miss March,” she said gently. She put one arm behind her back and held her hand with the other as she led her from the church.

From the altar the Reverend Doctor Rufus Browning began the Lord’s Prayer. Sims Lord led Pauline back to her seat. The servants from the house and the employees from the office all looked down, as if they had not witnessed what they had just witnessed.

On the steps outside, Flo began to cry. “I feel so ashamed,” she said. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” said Camilla quietly, but there was no reprimand in her voice.

“I thought it was a funeral, like Hector’s,” said Flo.

“No,” said Camilla.

“I better go,” said Flo.

“Yes,” said Camilla.

“Listen, Camilla, before I go, I want to tell you something. Please listen.”

“Of course.”

“It’s important for me that you know this.”

Camilla nodded, waiting to hear what Flo had to say.

“I don’t blame her for hating me so much, but I want you to know something. I really loved the guy. It wasn’t the bucks, I swear. I really loved him,” said Flo.

Camilla looked at her helplessly, divided in her sympathies and loyalties.

“And Jules used to tell me he loved me. Really. At the end he even said I was his reason for living,” said Flo.

Camilla stepped forward and hugged Flo. Then she turned and ran back into the church.

•   •   •

The death of the Beverly Hills billionaire and art collector Jules Mendelson was announced the day after his funeral. The
Los Angeles Tribunal
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
New York Times
, and the
Wall Street Journal
carried the story on the front page. Bernie Slatkin, the anchorman of the NBC Nightly News, had a special segment on his newscast, with a film montage of events from the great financier’s life, including shots of him in intimate conversations with Presidents of the United States and other world leaders at various economic conferences. Several of the weekly magazines, including
Time
and
Newsweek
, paid homage to his distinguished career.

Hortense Madden had worked for weeks on her story of the discovery of the lost manuscript of Basil Plant, the author who had died in drunken and drugged disgrace, without turning in the book that he considered to be his masterpiece, a novel about the smart set with whom he had been spending his time. The book, if it existed, could never be found after his death. Hortense credited Philip Quennell with some small part in the recovery of the long-missing manuscript, but in her story in
Mulholland
, for which she had been promised the cover by Lucia Borsodi, she herself was the heroine, who knew in an instant that the manuscript was the one Basil Plant’s publishers had long since despaired of recovering. It was she, according to her story, who had sought out the mysterious young man called Lonny Edge, in whose Hollywood bungalow the manuscript had been located. There was a hint that perhaps, just perhaps, Mr. Edge had starred in a few pornographic films, and advertised his wares in prurient magazines, to heighten the interest in her story and suggest an unsavory relationship between the two, but as she was a literary critic, and a member of the intellectual establishment of the city, she did not dwell on the sensational. Lonny Edge, however, was reluctant to be interviewed, even though he was unaware that the mousy Hortense Madden and the blond Marvene McQueen, who was singing at Miss Garbo’s on the night he went home with Hector Paradiso, and thereby became permanently persona non grata at that nightclub, were the same person.

Hortense Madden’s rage knew no bounds when Lucia Borsodi called her into her office to tell her that her story had been bumped—“Just temporarily, Hortense, calm down”—in favor of Cyril Rathbone’s story on the former coffee shop
waitress, Flo March, who had become the mistress of one of America’s richest men, Jules Mendelson, and lived in splendor in Beverly Hills, where she was credited by the doctors with saving his life after he had a massive heart attack in her house.

The picture on the cover of that week’s issue showed Flo March carrying a centerpiece of dying tulips to the Pierce Brothers Mortuary in Westwood. Inside was the long-forgotten photograph of Flo March escaping from the fire in the Meurice Hotel in Paris, carrying her jewel box, with Jules Mendelson in the background.

On the Sunday that followed, Archbishop Cooning, whose mission was morality, preached from the pulpit of Saint Vibiana’s Cathedral on the disgrace of a man who used his vast wealth to corrupt the morals of a girl young enough to be his daughter.

When Dudley removed the biodegradable plastic cover from the new issue of
Mulholland
, Pauline, watching, noticed that he reacted to the photograph of Flo March on the cover.

“Did you ever know her, Dudley?” asked Pauline.

“No, no, I didn’t,” said Dudley, but his face flushed with embarrassment at the same time. He turned away to attend to a chore; some petals from a flower arrangement sent by the White House—“Darling Pauline, Our love and thoughts are with you, George and Barbara,” the card read—had fallen onto a tabletop, and with one hand he swept the petals into the palm of his other hand, a task usually attended to by a maid.

“Dudley,” said Pauline.

“Yes, Mrs. Mendelson.” He was emptying the petals from his palm into a wastebasket.

“Turn around.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Was that woman ever in this house?” There was a long silence. “Answer me truthfully, Dudley.”

“Yes, Mrs. Mendelson.”

If Pauline Mendelson were to live her life over again, she would not have made the decision she made that day, a decision that she knew at some deep level was a wrong decision even as she was making it. But her pride overtook her senses, and she made the decision that no amount of persuasion on the part of people who had her best interests at heart could
dissuade her from making. She decided to cut off Flo March without a cent, even though she knew it had been Jules’s intention to provide handsomely for her.

Her decision had nothing to do with money, for there was ample money. Only three days before, the day after Jules’s funeral, there had been a discreet inquiry from Titus Fairholm in Melbourne, Australia, who had always admired van Gogh’s
White Roses
, to see if the estate wished to sell it, at the proper time, for forty-five million dollars. Pauline knew it would probably fetch even more at auction at Boothby’s. Money did not figure in Pauline Mendelson’s decision.

She could not bring herself to provide for a woman she regarded as little more than a whore, a whore who had destroyed the final years of what had appeared to be a perfect marriage.

“That woman was here in my house,” said Pauline. “When I was in Northeast Harbor visiting my father, she came here into my home. What kind of a person would do a thing like that?”

“Pauline, as your husband’s adviser, I must caution you against this. He made arrangements. She has papers. They are signed by Jules. And by me. And they are witnessed by Miss Maple and Olaf Pederson, who was the orderly with Jules.”

“I know perfectly well who Olaf Pederson is. Olaf Pederson was in cahoots with Flo March. They were only after Jules’s money. I heard him talking on the telephone to her at almost the moment that Jules was dying. ‘She’s in there with him,’ he said. The ‘she’ he was talking about was me, Jules’s wife. I happen to know for a fact that she stole some yellow diamond earrings out of Jules’s pocket on the day of his heart attack. Friedrich Hesse-Darmstadt told me himself that he had spoken with Jules only a short time before the heart attack, and that the earrings were being sent back to him in London.”

“I don’t know anything about yellow diamond earrings, Pauline, or about her and Olaf. What I do know is that the papers she has in her possession are legal. I can vouch for that,” said Sims. Sims Lord had had a career both enhanced and obscured by his proximity to the dominant presence of Jules Mendelson. Now, emerging from the shadows of that dominance, he sought to use patience in dealing with the widow.

“Are these things written in the will?” asked Pauline.

“They aren’t in the will, but the papers were already executed.”

“When?”

“Last week.”

“Only last week? And when did Miss March receive those papers?”

“On Friday.”

“Friday? The very day Jules died, you mean? The day of the CAT scan, when Olaf, old loyal Olaf, dropped him off at her house on the way home from the hospital?”

“Yes,” said Sims.

“In anticipation of death then?”

“It could be so construed, I suppose.”

“I’ll take her to court. This constitutes undue influence on a sick man. Remember, there are witnesses who saw her sneak into his room in intensive care at Cedars-Sinai, dressed in a stolen nurse’s uniform, and passing herself off as his daughter. Remember all this, Sims.”

To Sims Lord, the elegant and refined Pauline Mendelson had become a different woman since Jules’s death, maddened by hatred of Flo March, but he was struck by her power. “Pauline, next to you, I was probably the person closest to Jules. This was what he wanted,” said Sims patiently.

Pauline’s voice rose. She had become quick to anger of late. “Whose side are you on, Sims?” she asked. “We’d better get that straightened out right here and now.”

“Of course, I am on your side, Pauline,” said Sims, in a placating tone. “That is a thing you never have to question. But there could be consequences, very unpleasant consequences, to what you are suggesting.”

“How much does it come to, what she wants?” asked Pauline.

“Over a million. Under two, I suppose. I suggest you pay her, and be done with it,” said Sims.

“Pay her over a million dollars! Are you mad?”

“That’s what that ring cost that’s on your finger. It’s a sixth of what that Sisley picture costs behind your head,” said Sims, holding out his hands in exasperation to indicate the absurdity of her concern for a million dollars. “What the hell difference does it make? Pay her.”

“Never!” Pauline spat out the word. “If she is so broke, tell her to sell the yellow diamond earrings she stole out of my
husband’s suit pocket on the day he had his heart attack in her house.”

Sims shook his head. “I’m terribly afraid you’re going to be sorry, Pauline.”

Pauline wondered, looking out her library windows at the lawn and sculpture garden, and beyond at the pool and pavilion, if she and Jules had ever been happy, or if Clouds was no more than a magnificent set for the performance of a marriage.

Flo’s Tape #22

“I ordered my new sofas, and I picked out the gray satin fabric for ninety-five bucks a yard. Jules used to say it was an outrageous amount to spend, but I didn’t care. He had the money. If Pauline had said she spent ninety-five bucks a yard, or even a hundred and ninety-five bucks a yard, he wouldn’t have thought anything of it
.

“Let me tell you about these sofas, because they’re important to the story, especially since Kippie Petworth dripped blood all over one of them. Nellie Potts, my high-class decorator, said they were copied from a design of Coco Chanel from her apartment in the Ritz Hotel in Paris. I liked the sound of that. I waited and waited for them, in anticipation. They took forever to make. And then finally they came. And I arranged them where they should be, and there was great excitement, and for a few days I could think of nothing else but my new gray satin sofas, and I’d sit on different places on the sofas, until I found just the right place for me to use as my regular place to sit down. And then I got used to them. And it was back to plain life again, waiting for Jules to come at a quarter to four each afternoon. Or playing with Astrid. Or drinking ice tea with Glyceria, the maid from next door. The sofas, they were nice, but they weren’t it. Do you know what I mean? IT. They weren’t it. They were just sofas. And I was just a mistress again.”

F
lo March. Flo March. Flo March. Since her picture appeared on the cover of
Mulholland
, Flo March had become notorious. People discussed her everywhere. The discredited mistress of a disgraced billionaire, the magazine called her. “Have you heard? She crashed Jules’s funeral, and there was such a scene you wouldn’t believe it, darling, between Pauline and this ghastly woman.” Her name became as well known at fashionable dinner parties as it was at the Viceroy Coffee Shop, where she used to work, and where all the customers wanted to hear about her. Curly and Belle, who defended her, became important for having known her. At the bar at Miss Garbo’s, Manning Einsdorf and Joel Zircon had stories to tell about her. Women who had sat next to her under the hairdryer at Pooky’s Salon and not noticed her, or not spoken to her, now claimed to have been acquainted with her. Even those closest to Pauline Mendelson could not resist, among themselves, supplying each other with every bit of information about the woman in whose house Jules Mendelson had suffered the heart attack that eventually killed him. “She went to communion at Hector Paradiso’s funeral. Pushed her way right past the casket.” Or, “Of course you’ve seen her. She has her hair done at Pooky’s. Very pretty, in a cheap sort of way, all tarted up in Chanel.” Or, “Madge White actually met her, at a steak house in the Valley, having dinner with Jules,” Or, “She ran over Faye Converse’s dog. Killed it. That sweet little Astrid, that used to belong to Hector.”