In My Shoes: A Memoir (20 page)

In August Minty and I went to L.A. for a vacation. Tamara Beckwith, who is Minty’s godmother, was going to be there and I thought it would be fun to go to Disneyland and be tourists with our kids. One day we were sitting by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I was playing in the water with Minty. When I looked up, there was my mother sitting in the café not thirty feet away. She was with a friend, their chairs turned toward me, looking like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford on a stakeout. This was no accident. She’d heard that I was in town. But rather than call up and say, “Please bring Minty by,” she chose to spy on me. I ignored her, and she sat there for an hour, and then she went away.

I found it all so terribly sad. She had not seen her granddaughter in six years. Was she secretly hoping that I’d bring Minty over and let her say hello? But then she’d never engaged with Minty any more than she’d engaged with me.

The traffic in e-mails, the discussion of witnesses and affidavits had been consistent for a couple of years, but now it had ramped up, relentlessly.

We ultimately booked court time, and soon the case would proceed to trial.

M
y mother comes from St. Albans, which is a very middle-class suburb of London, comfortable but not rich, where her father had run a construction business. When my mother was still quite young, her mother developed breast cancer and went through a radical mastectomy. I don’t know exactly how that affected my mother’s early life, but I think it’s safe to say that Ann Davis did not have a carefree childhood. I try to take that into consideration, and I know that I’ll never be free until I’m able to forgive her for how she treated me, but, as I said at the outset, I’m still working on it. I think my mother was simply born a narcissist whose extraordinary beauty only made her solipsism that much worse. But how solipsism turned to sadism toward me remains a mystery.

It would have been so much simpler to have taken the bad deal that we’d discussed with de Figueiredo, but the feud had cost me too much, not just in terms of lawyers’ fees but in terms of lost sleep and ruined health. And now, with the booking of court time and all the attendant costs of preparation, the stakes were escalating into serious money. I felt like a character on the lam in a Western or a gangster film. I had to stop running. It was time for the final showdown.

The proceedings on the island of Jersey were to begin on Monday,
the eighth of November, and I flew over from Gatwick the day before. Technically, the case was between RBC, the company that managed my mother’s trust, and Ogier, which managed mine.

There was no certainty I’d be allowed into the court—ordinarily those likely to testify are not permitted to listen in until they’ve made their statement—but I felt compelled to witness every moment of this spectacle. Even though it was very difficult to be away from Minty, I wanted Nick Morgan, the feckless (perhaps criminal) trustee, to see me in court. I wanted to see my mother’s face as she tried to justify her claims. And mostly, I wanted to get to the bottom of this. What the hell had been going on with these trusts and my money? Somehow, I think I knew that finding the answer might offer some insight into what had been going on my whole life.

Jersey is like a dreary old people’s home, and the weather was grim and blustery as I arrived and checked into the island’s only five-star hotel, Longueville Manor, which, despite its pedigree, reminded me far too much of Fawlty Towers.

The weather did not improve during the nearly four weeks I was there, so after breakfast each day a car would pick me up and take me to the rather medieval town square where the high court was located. Happily, the opposing lawyer, Beverley Lacey, an advocate from St. Helier, agreed to let me observe, but otherwise she gave me a very chilly reception.

To offset that lack of warmth, on the first day the usher leaned toward me, extending a small piece of paper. “Ms. Mellon, I wonder if you’d mind signing this for my niece. . . .” It was the receipt for her first pair of Jimmy Choos.

The legal system in Jersey is medieval French. You don’t have a jury but rather two upstanding citizens known as jurats, who serve the function of jury, though they decide only on matters of fact, not matters of law.

As I sat and listened to the opening remarks of my lawyer, Anthony Robinson, also from St. Helier, I was impressed by the clarity with which he laid out the issues. This case would revolve around what was discussed at two meetings—the first held to approve the sale of the Phoenix shares to Lion, and the second at the Pelham Hotel to review how the proceeds of that sale were to be distributed between the two family trusts. Also central would be the validity of a certain document, a “declaration of trust” my mother’s side claimed gave her clear title to the 32,000 shares misappropriated to her. Once a declaration of trust is signed and stamped by the trustee, it is considered irrevocable.

On our side, we were counting on the elucidation of the financial technicalities and terms of art that were at the heart of the case: the shares, the “deep discount bond” or loan, and the “institutional strip” that represents the shares and was stapled to the loan note. The eight-hundred-pound evidentiary gorilla in the room was the fact that the shares and the loan notes in these transactions were always stapled together
because one was a marker for the other
. This single bit of evidence showed without question that the shares had everything to do with me and my reinvestment in Jimmy Choo, and nothing at all to do with my mother.

In contrast to Tony’s mastery of detail, it sounded to me as if my mother’s lawyer had no understanding of any of this. She seemed hardly prepared, which made we wonder: Was this some kind of sham to exploit my mother’s delusions? A Potemkin village of a case, taken
on just for the fees? Which might have helped to explain all the blustering and bullying—they knew all along that they had nothing.

I had asked my therapist, Martin Freeman, to come along with me for the trial, and I think we were both surprised by just how similar the whole experience was to rehab. When you’re trying to free yourself from narcotics or alcohol, they regiment the day to help you overcome the chaos of your life. Rehab helps you regain a routine that respects day and night. It forces you to take time for meals and other rituals that provide structure.

On Jersey, the court proceedings were virtually identical from one day to the next. Then each afternoon, after adjournment, Martin and I would go back to the hotel, have a pot of tea, nibble at the shortbread biscuits and smoked salmon that seemed to be the only decent thing on the menu, and spend an hour or two processing both the facts and the feelings. Then I’d have a workout and go to bed.

My mother was the one suing me, so after two days of opening statements and submissions, her witnesses would go first. This is what I wanted to hear: how this elaborate fantasy had been construed, and how my mother had drawn so many other people, including professionals who should have known better, into it.

Raj Patel, the accountant for the trusts, was the first to take the stand. Asking questions from a dozen different angles, Tony Robinson began to scrape away like an archaeologist with a dental pick, gradually revealing each of the artifacts of truth he was looking for. Through that tedious process, he was able to isolate and demonstrate where the lies and the false assumptions were hidden, and to make the solid facts emerge, incontrovertibly, on our side.

Eason Rajah, senior counsel from London, sat behind Tony, slipping him notes from time to time. At the end of proceedings each afternoon, they’d get together to read the transcripts of the testimony so far and to work out the questions for the next day.

It shouldn’t be surprising to hear someone speak the truth under oath in a court of law, but right from the start, Raj’s admissions were so damaging that I was blown back in my chair. When Tony asked him directly, “Did you make false accounts?” his answer was, “Yes.” When Tony asked, “Are these sham accounts?” again, the answer was, “Yes.”

My immediate thought was that we should push for criminal prosecution, but Eason advised me not to. “Raj will hide behind Nick,” he said.

I could only speculate about how my mother must have worked over Raj, who was not exactly the pick of the litter when it came to accountants, but I can well imagine it all starting with his saying, “Do you realize how much these shares are worth?”

Their greed, or ignorance, willful or otherwise, was then compounded by my mother’s delusions, as well as her ability to either charm or intimidate others into accepting her highly idiosyncratic, and egocentric, view of the world. Madness, combined with stunning beauty, gave her an air of certainty and rectitude that certain men had always found difficult to withstand.

“I’m Tom’s wife!” I can hear her saying. “You know how much Tom wanted to provide for me.”

On Monday, the sixteenth, the next witness to appear was Timothy Gere, who managed investments for us. He had been at both meetings
after the Lion deal, but he hid behind confidentiality agreements and revealed very little.

But then on the seventeenth, Nick Morgan took the stand and was grilled for three and a half days.

He managed to maintain a modicum of credibilty, at least for a while. The heart of his testimony dealt with the declaration of trust that assigned the shares to Marqueta. Supposedly this document had been executed on September 5, 2005, but then Tony was able to demonstrate that it had been written much later and backdated. “Oh,” Nick said. “The original got lost.”

This obvious gap in credibility would all be sorted out later, Beverley Lacey said, by a lawyer who had actually witnessed the signing. I waited eagerly for this bit of testimony.

Adding to the incongruities of Nick’s posture was the fact that, at the very beginning, he had been very open about the mistake. Sitting in my lawyer Andrew Roberts’s office years before, he’d freely admitted how he’d called my mother to say there’s been a mistake and that he was going to have to put the 32,000 shares at issue back in Araminta. We can only imagine her response. “Do that and I’ll sue you,” is my best guess.

Nick had other problems in that he had to rectify the millions in cash he had “hidden” during my divorce. It is not unreasonable to think that the declaration of trust was the quid pro quo my mother demanded for her compliance. It was on the third day of Nick’s testimony that my mother and brothers flew in to give theirs. Though the weather had been grim all along, I couldn’t help but notice that just as my mother’s
plane passed overhead, the skies turned absolutely black and the clouds assembled to disgorge wind and rain. It was like the Wicked Witch appearing in
The Wizard of Oz
.

We had been warned that my mother had made reservations at the Longueville Manor, so we thought, “Well, that’s going to be awkward.” Beverley Lacey, my mother’s advocate, suggested that we move. My response was, “No fucking way. Let my mother get her own hotel.”

As a precaution, we did arrange to seal off a lounge as a private sitting room.

The manager said, “That’s going to be expensive.”

I said, “We can handle it.”

Ultimately, my mother chose to stay at another hotel, the Atlantic, so we’d won the first round.

On that first blustery morning after they’d arrived, I was walking across the cobblestone square from Tony’s office, he in his long black robes a bit like Harry Potter, when we came upon my mother and brothers in her black Mercedes. I saw the three of them ducking down behind the tinted windows, trying to avoid being seen.

Arriving on the same plane with my mother was Joshua Rubenstein, the trust lawyer from Katten Munchin Rosenman in New York, who had set up Marqueta II to reduce my mother’s tax liability during her move to the United States. He was the first witness that next day, and he was presented as the kind of expert on trusts who speaks at all sorts of international conferences.

Again, Mr. Rubenstein had reviewed all the documents early on and told my mother she had no case. But then it seems he’d changed his tune. I can’t believe that such a prestigious expert would be so hungry
for billable hours, but in agreeing to appear, he appeared to support the premise that even the maddest delusions have a right to expensive, expert representation.

There’s an old lawyer’s adage that says, “When the law is on your side, argue the law. When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When neither the facts nor the law are on your side, attack the other person.” Unfortunately, that’s the tack that my mother, by way of Mr. Rubenstein, chose to take with me.

He had written an affidavit that was so demeaning to me personally—busloads of men I’d slept with, wild parties I’d attended—that the judge refused to allow it to be read in court. Of course, it was all rubbish provided by my mother. She was utterly shameless about trying to shame me, presenting me to the world as evil, conniving, and utterly immoral. And how lovely it is to have your own mother portraying you as a slut in a public dispute.

With character assassination disallowed on the stand, the main line of argument in Rubenstein’s testimony shifted to my supposed instability. Fortunately, Tony was brilliant in cross-examination: Exactly how many times have you met with Ms. Mellon? For how long? And how do you come to this assessment of instability? Is that a judgment based on some professional qualification?

Rubenstein kept dodging the “how do you know this?” questions by saying, “It’s my opinion.” Tony responded brilliantly: “Given that you are not privy to the sort of factual background,” he admonished, “do you not feel uncomfortable in having sworn an affidavit in this court advancing these theories? You are a professional man. You are a lawyer, Mr. Rubenstein. All the court requires of you is for you to express in a
neutral fashion your understanding of the facts. Not venture your opinion based on hearsay information from Mr. Morgan or Mrs. Yeardye, which may have got twisted in the telling. Do you still feel comfortable with this?”

Rubenstein replied, “I feel comfortable that that is my opinion as to what happened.”

My mother had brought Daniel and Gregory to testify against me, but when they took the stand she repaired to a café across the street. It was a bit like throwing her sons to the wolves.

As I listened to Daniel answer the advocate’s questions, I couldn’t help thinking about all the times I’d paid for him to go to rehab and how I’d bought him a car when he first moved to L.A. And then I thought about the time when he’d relapsed and kicked my mother out of her own house, refusing to let her back in, so that she had to go stay with a friend for three or four days.

And then there was the image of Gregory, having to share a room with her for six months at the Peninsula because she was too cheap to pay for an extra, and he was too much of a weakling to move out. He’d had a date one night, and when he got back she threw a fit, screaming and flinging all the wooden coat hangers at him,
Mommie Dearest
style.

Why they’d never found the wherewithal to escape from her clutches and live their own lives, I don’t know. They were both big guys, well over six feet, and here they were in the thirties, still clinging to their mother’s skirts.