Authors: Roberta Latow
“Okay, I believe this, a Paris Christmas in Athens. But Zazou allowing another dog in the house? You should apply to be secretary-general of the U.N.”
“That’s been suggested before. I’m taking over your home for forty-eight hours. Well, a few hours less than that. Tell me you’re pleased, or I’ll feel like an intruder.”
“Of course I’m pleased. A little overwhelmed, but really pleased that you should want to do all this for me.”
“Us,” he corrected.
“Us. Kurt, you’re always surprising me.”
“This is the way it’s going to be for us. Fun and exciting and surprises. Maybe not all the time, but certainly much of the time. Now we have just one delicate matter. Your bed.”
“You mean my mattress,” feeling very foolish that she had not made it a priority to go out and get for it at least a box spring.
“No, Sheynea, I mean the bed I have brought you from Paris, a Christmas gift, along with Paul Chabrey, the man with the skill to assemble and drape it for us. Tell me you’re not angry. But frankly, it was that or a hotel. And I knew you wanted to be in your home for Christmas. It’s an attractive bed. A rare thing, a campaign bed large enough for two comfortably. Wrought iron, with a domed canopy, and all its draperies. A traveling bed that was used in the Napoleonic campaigns. You are not angry with me?”
“Angry! I’m thrilled” was what she said. She did, however, marvel at the Napoleonic assurance with which he assumed she wanted him in her bed.
“Oh good. If you don’t like it, I will take it back with me tomorrow evening. I would not want to impose anything on you that you don’t want. It’s not my way. Not with furniture, at least. Now enough, we must leave everyone to their jobs. So you and I and the dogs, we will walk down to Zonar’s and begin where we began before, over coffee and cakes. When we come home in a few hours, voilà, it will be Christmas.”
Romeo had captured Zazou’s instincts, and the walk to Zonar’s seemed a miracle to Cheyney. Zazou for once spared Greek ankles, and Cheyney didn’t have to keep apologizing for her spoiled dog. Greeks in general felt a proper contempt for pampered animals and their owners. She could not stop thinking,
He even mesmerizes Zazou. A dog! How many times had she tried a dog with Zazou, and it had been a disaster! On the walk Cheyney told Kurt about the Barry Sole trial. She made him laugh a great deal, and then she told him about her Acton Pace legacy. She knew his pleasure at her having it was genuine. Of course he already knew about it. He knew everything about Cheyney, even Grant Madigan.
At Zonar’s he was introduced to some of her friends. With little exertion he impressed them. Invitations to them both for the evening followed. He was the first person she had met who could emphatically decline an invitation to join them, and yet step back from the
pareia
without an argument, excuses, or having the
pareia
turn things around so they joined Cheyney and Kurt. The
pareia
accepted rejection gracefully. She had never managed to accomplish that and rarely seen anyone else do it. It was a trivial enough thing, but it made her realize what a powerful presence Kurt Walbrook had. The authority he wielded over others. Though it was exciting, it was, too, a kind of charisma that she found not intimidating, but just a little bit sinister.
On their return home they stepped into a Christmas wonderland of pine trees draped in white fairy lights and shimmering silver balls, hand painted in sumptuous designs and colors. Red ribbon and Christmas carols. Dozens of presents wrapped in exotic papers with luscious bows were stacked under the trees. The aromas of a magnificent cuisine mingled with displays of fresh spring flowers, lilacs, and tulips. It was already dark, and you could see through the windows onto the terrace that circled the apartment. Boughs of spruce and holly and mistletoe studded with more fairy lights and draped in red ribbons and bows were wrapped around its banister. The city lights sparkled below and beyond like jewels.
Placed in the center of the bedroom, the Napoleonic campaign bed, a skeleton frame of iron gracefully shaped to culminate in a cage-like dome, draped in transparent handkerchief linen, its curtains tied back at the slender turned posts with white suede thongs. It was made up with white linen sheets and pillow cases trimmed in cream-colored lace. A blanket of chinchilla lay across the foot of the bed.
They ate a regal dinner. Fresh
foie gras en croûte
, oysters,
followed by fresh asparagus. Then the main course: roast goose, stuffed with chestnuts, apples, and sausage meat. There was Christmas-pudding ice cream covered with meringue and baked in the oven, then topped with brandy-flavored whipped cream. With the Stilton and biscuits a vintage port was served. Everyone left with orders not to return until Kurt called them. Cheyney and he sat with the dogs on the floor near the trees and opened Christmas presents. Cheyney was touched to see that he did really mean to share his Christmas with her. He had transported his gifts all the way to Athens to put under her tree, to open them with her.
For Cheyney there were cases of wine: vintage Chateau Margaux, Montrachet, Chateau Pichon Lalande, a case of Dom Perignon. Chocolates, and food hampers of delicacies from Fauchon. St. Laurent dresses and evening gowns, hats, gloves, handbags. A cashmere cape from Dior, a lynx coat from Revillon, diamond earrings from Van Cleef and Arpels. Even beautiful shoes and boots. Everything pretty and chic, feminine, yet classically beautiful. All the things any woman would delight in receiving for Christmas.
She dived in and out of clothes and shoes modeling for Kurt. She marveled that everything fitted, and not just-about, but perfectly. How could he have know the sizes? Lala perhaps? Of course, he had called Lala for her sizes.
Then it was time for his gift, the last present to be opened. They had to wade through hills of tissue paper and opened boxes spilling out their contents, before they could reach the box that Cheyney had pushed far under the tree. He helped her to pull it out where he could open it. He looked terribly happy. When she gave it to him, she kissed him on the lips. He seemed reluctant to let her go. Then she said, “Merry Christmas, Kurt. I don’t know it all. I don’t even want to know it all. The things that you have done for me that have helped me to get where we are now. But I know that it is much more than you will ever let me know, and I hope that this gift will be a way of saying thank you for that, and for all this, a Christmas I shall never forget.”
His response was unexpected. He took her in his arms and kissed her deeply, with an uncontrolled passion that set her aflame. Then he released her and opened his gift. He held the
piece in his hands and admired it in silence. It was so remarkably fine an example of its kind that it threatened to make everything around them look like dross. He said, “If I say any more than that it is super, and that I am touched very deeply by your generosity, and that I thank you very much, then I will say too much. I would rather show you how I feel.”
With that he took her by the hand and led her to the bedroom. This time he chose not to lull her into a half daze with his lovemaking, but to excite her lust with his erotic demands. He allowed his long-restrained appetite for her to take command of them both. They were imaginative sexual cravings, responses to erotic fantasies she had heard about but had hardly experienced before now. He hushed her fears of being subjugated totally to his sexual will with the mesmerizing erotic lust reflected in his eyes, and his soft, honeyed voice that promised her sexual delights she would never have experienced, and his love forever.
She thought her heart would burst, it pounded so hard from that sweet combination of fear, anticipation, the thrill of the unknown, untried, of being at the mercy of the god Eros, who took them both over. He knew every inch of her skin, had kissed and licked and made love to it. He was a forceful lover whose thrusts had drawn from her copious orgasms they both reveled in; she swallowed his come on his demand and had never known such sexual ambrosia as that until then. He watched her enjoyment of him, and sex, and he knew that he had always been right about Cheyney Fox. She could be taught to appreciate the wilder side of sex. His kind of sex, the forbidden sex he craved, she would crave. He wasted no time. He rolled her over in his arms and laid her on her front and lay on top of her and kissed the back of her neck, her shoulders, down the center of her spine, while he tied her wrists to the bedposts, and then he caressed her bottom with hands and kisses and raised her onto her knees. The scent of jasmine and roses enveloped her before she felt the oils caress her skin, his searching fingers seduce, the slow deflowering where no other man had ever been. He silenced her protests with kisses and erotic poems and long, slow, deep thrusts until she was open and coming as he took her alternatively first in one place and then
another, again and again until she was lost in licentious oblivion.
He promised her that was only their beginning and drew her into a web of new and exciting sex that triggered her own erotic fantasies. He had command of her not even as Grant Madigan had had her. And yet, when he left the following day, there was a fragment of Grant Madigan in her heart that Kurt Walbrook would never be able to remove. He called her from Austria on Christmas day, and New Year’s Day. And they settled down to loving each other.
Among her other calls on Christmas day had been one from Saigon. Grant told her that things were much worse than he had been led to believe from the reports he had had previously about the Vietnam War. That, although he was there to do research on the war from the time the French had command of the country, he was being increasingly drawn into the present conflict. How good it felt to be the journalist in the field again. Yet this war was something he could not just research and run away from. That he felt, with his connections to the high-power players in the conflict, he would have to do a few programs on the immediate problems while at the same time work on his book and his series. And, all the while, she kept thinking, Grant, don’t let me slip away into a life with Kurt Walbrook. I don’t want you to lose me. He said nothing to indicate that he loved her in any way as she loved him.
Cheyney would not suffer for this love of Grant Madigan. She made up her mind about that when she saw him off to Vietnam. It was as much what passed between them during those two days together as his leaving for his wars that had decided her. He had been so angry about the deep carnal attachment he had with her. He would not let her force him into some sort of a love commitment as a result of it. He obliged her to confront this; whatever he felt for Cheyney, it would always have to be a thing of the moment and nothing more. His call only reinforced her resolve. She would do nothing but what her own life — not any man’s life, but Cheyney Fox’s life — dictated. On Christmas night at a party, she raised a glass and silently toasted the two men she loved.
N
ineteen sixty-nine was a vintage year for Cheyney. She assembled a large collection of handicrafts from the Middle East and shipped them to the museum shop in the States. She traveled to Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia. She worked by day and played by night with friends made through Kurt. She felt the heartbeat of the countries she traveled to, learned about their political and economic problems in a world made ever more hectic by instant communication, where money and military arms were the real heads of state. Where indigenous extreme-right factions feared Westernizing liberals and exercised their paranoia on anything politically left. Even more so if they were leaning toward Moscow. She listened and learned and began to understand what power playing was all about. She made few judgments. Cheyney’s view of the world was expanding, and her reward went far beyond job satisfaction, or a monetary recompense. Making new and interesting friends, she was growing as a human being. Occasionally she thought of Grant Madigan and what she was missing by not being with him, that special kind of oneness with another human being. A corner of her heart was not happy.
She placed her four Acton Pace paintings in a traveling exhibition that went to the Fogg Museum in Boston, to the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburg, to the Chicago Art Institute. The show culminated at the Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York, where, six days a week, it was drawing lines of people that stretched around the block. She shocked the New York art world without ever appearing in it. Especially Rowena
Sicle, who had never seen the paintings nor been told that they existed, let alone that Cheyney Fox owned them. It was claimed that they were some of Acton Pace’s finest works. Reha Pace, more angry than ever with Cheyney, now felt betrayed by both her dead husband and his friend. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musem of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum suffered institutional indignation that they had not been offered the collection for exhibition, that it had gone to a somewhat obscure small museum. Acton would have approved. Cheyney Fox suddenly found herself courted by the three big museums in the city and dozens of others around the world.
Cheyney chose and bought her second painting from the Pace estate.
Both she and Kurt agreed that if she were to deal for him on any works of art, that it would only be fair to do so by dealing just as they had before through Roberto and Lala. That arrangement still worked for all concerned. She bought three items for him from private collections, one from Damascus, one from Montevideo, and another from Lisbon.
Kurt and she took several holidays together. A week in Rome and Venice with the dogs and Roberto and Lala. They stayed in his palazzo. That was where she began really to see how he lived and worked, to sense his wealth and the power the Walbrook Collection and his curators wielded in the art world. They stayed with his friends in extravagant houses, rich in art treasures, in Rio, Caracas, and Buenos Aires. Her favorite holiday with him was when they went alone to the Galápagos Islands and Patagonia. Together they selected an architect to design the building for Kurt’s collection of Acton Pace paintings.
In 1969, Grant Madigan called Cheyney just once from India. He spoke about his trip to China to interview Chou En-lai. Now he was in India to see Mrs. Gandhi. In July, the call came from Algeria. He was setting up base operations there for a few months. Once that was established, he was returning to Vietnam. He was making a last attempt to have talks with Ho Chi Minh. He scooped every other journalist with that interview. Ho Chi Minh died in September. It became a kind of autographed obituary.
The next year she changed houses in Athens as a concession
to Kurt and the new decade. She would make no decision to leave Athens to live in Paris, London, or Rome. By now she knew many more of Kurt’s friends, some of whom she liked very much, while others stirred her distaste.
Another job for Kurt. She purchased two of the finest Van Goghs she had ever seen. Long after she left Paraguay with them in tow and delivered them to Roberto in Rome, those paintings and the man she bought them from kept haunting her. The corn-yellow haystacks against the cobalt-blue sky at night studded with stars, an image so vivid she often had physically to shake her head to try to shake it from her mind. It was a troubled painting, wrenched from a tortured mind. There was such outrageous beauty in that painting. The violence almost leapt from the pigment. And there was something about the owner that had repulsed her. A thin little weasel of a man with the most hateful eyes she had ever seen. Arrogant, with a stiff, formal manner, he was almost impossible to deal with she was so appalled by him. He was evil, she only figured that out on the plane, with the carefully wrapped paintings occupying the seats next to and across from her. How could such a terrible, inconsequential little man, living in an upper middle-class suburb of a fascist country like Paraguay, come by such magnificent paintings? It had been Cheyney’s first inkling of something not so right about some of the collectors she had met through Kurt. When she tried to speak to Kurt about him, Kurt had smoothly glided past her questions. The subject was dropped.
Cheyney received a cable from Grant. “Thanks for change of address and telephone. In touch.” That had been in the middle of the year. It was pathetic that her heart should still jump a beat when she heard anything from him.
She made only one trip for handicrafts, and Kurt joined her for one week. He marveled at her in the field, working to try and save the crafts as old craftsmen died out and a new generation neglected their skills in favor of migration to the cities and menial work for faster money. He had to admire how clever she was furnishing villages with an oven, a well, a school-teacher, in exchange for their crafts. It did more for them than money. All over the world the crafts were dying out. She was doing her tiny bit to save them. Admirable. But even she was
beginning to see that it was a losing battle. She had gone as far as she could in that job, now it was simply a matter of keeping what she had organized going. She had grown beyond it. Time to move on. She began training a Greek friend to take over from her.
That gave her more time in Athens to realize that her world had widened and life there was no longer as much fun as it had been. She had long since been healed even of the psychological wounds that her hard fall in New York had dealt her. If not completely, certain enough to leave Athens and start again somewhere else. There was no rush. She would know when it was time to go.
She had more time for Kurt. They made several trips to South America. In Peru they skied in the Andes and in Lima they saw the finest private collection of Inca gold artwork ever assembled. Their host presented her with a priceless necklace once worn by an Inca prince. They sailed down the Chilean coast of South America, stopping to visit his friends who entertained them on a lavish scale. He bought her a vineyard that stretched from the mountains to the shores of the Pacific Ocean and had on it a small romantic villa set in a semitropical garden high up on a bluff with nothing but the Pacific Ocean and sky for neighbors. It was there and on the ski slopes of the Andes that she felt herself falling more under Kurt’s exotic-erotic spell. In Argentina he played polo and cut yet another dashing figure for her to contemplate as something permanent in her life.
They went on a mystery holiday that turned out to be a week in a white-marble palace floating in the middle of an Indian lake. A week of erotic and exotic sex and sleeping and drinking and eating and swimming in the mother-of-pearl pool in an open courtyard in their bedroom. Of being pampered and spoiled by servants who answered their every request, by attendants who massaged their bodies with scented oil of jasmine, gardenia, rose, and knew ways to excite their erotic desires Cheyney never imagined possible. Masters of kama sutra made of her an admirable pupil. Kurt watched her rise to every erotic occasion. Taught by a sexual guru how to let herself flow in a steady stream from one orgasm to another, she was fast becoming the sexual instrument Kurt wanted her to be. Soon
she would, as he had long planned for, fall at last into his arms forever.
He draped her in saris of transparent silk embroidered in pure gold and set with tiny diamonds, others in silver and semiprecious stones. But mostly he kept her naked, draped in fresh flowers: white orchids and roses and jasmine ropes of tiny yellow lilies whose scent was in itself an aphrodisiac. Or draped her in necklaces of priceless pearls, diamonds, emeralds. Their imaginative sexual games often culminated in a priceless gift, as when he inserted one by one real pearls the size of cherries into her vagina and then fucked her slowly with deep thrusts. The sensations of the pearls and his cock simultaneously rubbing and clinging, rolling against her sensitive vaginal walls, up against her cervix, tantalizing her womb, tortured her with pleasure beyond anything she had ever had. She squirmed on the bed and begged to be released. He continued, knowing he could give her yet greater pleasure. Her protestations slowly changed to whimpers and then cries of ecstasy. Tears streaked her cheeks. He watched her flush pink, revel in her own passion as she began to come, again and again. He felt her steady flow of orgasm. It drove him on until he thought she might actually swoon with exhaustion. He came and then sucked the pearls from her cunt one by one and placed them in her hands.
The more time they spent together, the more Kurt Walbrook was able to bind Cheyney closer to him. They both knew she was under his spell. They made their most memorable trip together; they went to Tibet. There she saw the spiritual side to this fascinating and complex man’s nature. They spent an hour with the Dalai Lama that affected her profoundly. She returned to Athens to contemplate on what to do with her life.
By this time Andy Warhol gave up being a celebrity painter in order to become an even greater celebrity. After his successful exhibitions of Campbell’s soup cans and money in the early sixties, there had been frantic cablegrams chasing her. “What should I paint next?” “Have you any ideas for me?” “Call Andy.” She had never answered any of them. Andy Warhol and Cheyney Fox were worlds apart now. It was therefore rather embarrassing when in London, while walking down Bond Street one summer’s day, their paths crossed. Surrounded
by the freaky entourage he was now famous for, they confronted each other in silence. All he thought to utter was “Oh, I thought you were dead,” before he was swept away by them. The same ghost of a human being, but even less interesting now that he had become nothing more than a media machine for his own ego, had been her only reaction, except what bliss anonymity could be.
In September, Kurt took her for the first time to Austria. To Schloss Garmisch-Konigsberg, his favorite house, the place he really called home. She met his mother. Cheyney found her incredibly cold, somewhat unnerving. She sensed an unhealthy adoration of her son. Disturbing though, because he was a most extraordinary man. Cheyney spent an uncomfortable half hour alone with the baroness, at which time she told Cheyney, “My son is besotted by you. I can see that you would make him a good wife, even though I don’t approve of you for reasons beyond your control. Do you know that you love him? You had best accept that. The sooner the better. There are many women who would like to be the next baroness. Are you one of them?”
“I am not sure, madam,” Cheyney had answered coldly.
“I know my son. He has made up his mind to make you happy. So he will. Don’t behave like a stupid American, thinking you can change him. He is a complex man, a far deeper person than he presents himself to be. He holds many secrets, and never reveals himself. He is devoted to me because I have given him everything and asked him for nothing. And I allow him his private world. I suggest you do the same, or you will suffer. He has been grooming you to be a Walbrook for years. I recommend a long engagement. It might be preferable, until you are very sure you can obey his every wish. That is, if you intend to be the next Walbrook matriarch.”
“My God, what a bitch you are,” snapped Cheyney. She was immediately furious with herself. She had lost her poise before the baroness.
“Yes, that’s quite true, and how American of you to come right out and tell me so. You see, that is my point. If you marry my son, you will have to cultivate some manners and many changes of attitude. Common behavior is unacceptable to him.”
Unsurprisingly Cheyney and the baroness avoided each other after the skirmish. They met twice — once in South America, the second time at her birthday ball in Vienna. But they never spoke to each other again, beyond an exchange of greetings. Kurt said nothing about it to Cheyney or his mother. It was characteristic of him never to get involved with such formidable tensions. On both occasions he showed respect and attention to his mother, love and adoration for Cheyney.
Cheyney could not bring herself to ask Kurt about the coterie of men who danced attendance on his mother, men of all ages. Some, the younger men, almost caricatures of Teutonic army officers. Others mimicked a Viennese charm, intended to soften ruthless, unbending minds, ever inclined to rigidity during conversations on world politics. Nearly all of them fascists. Kurt’s only answer to her questions: “It would be good to remember that they are my mother’s friends. They were devoted to my father, and, as such, I am devoted to them.” Cheyney did take note that his real friends were nothing like these people. They were wealthy sportsmen, men of letters, scholars, and a handful of international playboys, a brace of industrialists. And several quite remarkable women, who were all of them in love with Kurt Walbrook. One day she might think she was the woman closest to him. The next, she wasn’t very sure she knew him at all. But it didn’t seem to matter. They were happy together, and Grant Madigan was not there to challenge their happiness.
Once, in a fit of pique, after a particularly unsavory conversation at a dinner party, she attacked Kurt: “What is it with your mother and the Walbrook family friends? Do they ban the poor, the middle classes, anyone that’s not an Arian? Everyone I meet is powerful or power mad, wealthy and avaricious, white and well-bred. They are all so polite to me, generous with their attention. But lifeless and formal. They never really speak to me. More at me, or past me. I think they resent my being an American. No, don’t say a word. They don’t count in my life, anyway.”