The Mansions of Limbo (27 page)

“I think this is the rudest thing I have ever heard,” fumed one of Lord Glenconner’s guests, and then proceeded to fume against all Americans for Miss Welch’s rudeness, especially since a member of the royal family had consented to attend her party.

“But Miss Welch is not American, Julian. She’s English,” said his wife.

“Oh dear,” said her husband, calmly accepting the correction, although he had been right to begin with.

“If she can’t be bothered to attend her own party, I can’t be bothered to attend it either,” said another guest.

“Disgraceful!”

“Movie stars always back out at the last minute.”

“They’re insecure in social situations.”

“You don’t suppose they’re getting a divorce, do you, Mr. Weinfeld and Miss Welch?”

On the night of the ball, after a whole week of partying, guests ran up and down the passageways of the
Wind Star
borrowing feathers, remarking on one another’s costumes, pinning and sewing up each other—all with the excitement of boarding-school students preparing for the annual spring dance. John Stefanidis had gone to Paris to borrow jewelry to wear with his Indian costume from Loulou de la Falaise, who works for Yves Saint Laurent, and indeed his pounds of pearls, rhinestone necklaces, and long drop earrings were the most elaborate jewelry at the ball—after the host’s, that is.

All during the evening, Lord Glenconner’s eyes shone
with the excitement of an accomplished creation—a symphony composed, an epic written, a masterpiece painted. Wearing a gold crown and ropes of pearls, he was dressed in white magnificence, his high collar and robes heavily encrusted with gold embroidery. The Glenconner house, called simply the Great House, is a Taj Mahal-like palace designed by the ultimate stage and ballet designer-fantacist, the late Oliver Messel, uncle of Lord Snowdon, former husband of Princess Margaret. Magical even in broad daylight, by night, for the ball, it was bathed in pink and turquoise fluorescent light, which gave the illusion of a Broadway-musical version of India. Handsome, almost nude black males from Saint Lucia and Mustique, their private parts encased in coconut shells painted gold, with strips of gold tinsel hanging from their shoulders to the ground, lined the pink-carpeted walkway to the house. Inside the double doors, more natives, in pink and blue Lurex fantasies of Indian dress inspired more by
The King and I
than by
The Jewel in the Crown,
stood cooling the air with giant peacock feather fans on poles.

Standing under a pink marquee, with the palm-tree-lined beach in the background and the
Wind Star,
fully lit, on the sea beyond, Lord and Lady Glenconner, with their son Charlie by their side, received their elaborately dressed guests while their son Henry called out the names as they arrived.

“Mrs. Michael Brand,” called out Henry Tennant.

“I am the Honorable Mrs. Brand, not Mrs. Michael Brand,” corrected Mrs. Brand.

The natives on the island of Mustique call Princess Margaret simply Princess, with neither an article preceding nor a name following. Well, Princess was late, and the procession that was to open the ball could not take place until Princess arrived, because Princess was the principal
participant. The fact was, Princess had arrived at the Great House, but she was still sitting in Lady Anne’s bedroom, which boasts a silver bed with silver peacocks on the head- and footboards. One story had it that Raquel Welch had also finally arrived on the island, and that Princess, not wishing to be outdone by her, as she had been the previous evening, when Miss Welch had not shown up at her own party, where Princess was an honored guest, was delaying the procession until after Miss Welch’s arrival. If such was the case, Princess lost another round.

Finally, despairing of Miss Welch’s ever arriving, the royal procession started. The sisters of Lady Anne, Lady Carey Basset, with one of her three sons, and Lady Sarah Walter, with her husband, Prince and Princess Rupert Lowenstein, and the Americans, Miss Jerry Hall and Mr. and Mrs. James Coleman, Jr., moved slowly from the house to the receiving tent. They were followed by Viscount Linley, in a white peacock headdress, which he never removed for the whole night, and his beautiful girlfriend, Susannah Constantine. Then came Princess Margaret, the great friend of the Glenconners. On her head, complementing her dress, which was a gift from Lord Glenconner, she wore a black velvet headband tiara-style, onto which her maid, that afternoon, had sewn massive diamond clips. Her resplendence had been worth the wait.

“Her Royal Highness, Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon,” called out Henry Tennant. All the Indian-clad ladies dropped in curtsies as she passed, and all the men bowed their heads. Under the tent, Lady Anne kissed her on both cheeks before doing a deep, curtsy. Then Lord Glenconner removed his crown, as did his son Charlie, and they bowed to Princess.

When Princess Margaret first saw the Indian sari that Lord Glenconner had had made for her in India, she exclaimed,
“I’ve been dreaming of having a dress like this since I was six.” During dinner a maid spilled a tray of potatoes on the dress, but Princess’s dinner partners, Sir John Plumb, the eighteenth-century historian, and John Nutting, an English barrister of note, were able to right the wrong with a minimum of fuss and very little stain.

Miss Welch, the lone dissenter from Indian costume, finally arrived during dinner, dressed in a gray metallic shirred evening gown and shoulder-length methallic shirred evening gloves, which she kept on while she ate. She was seated between Prince Rupert Lowenstein, a noted wit and conversationalist, and Mr. Roddy Llewellyn, the extremely affable suitor, before his marriage, of Princess Margaret, at whose Mustique house he and his wife, Tania, were houseguests, but conversation with the film star was pretty much uphill.

“Have you read the Sinatra biography?” Prince Rupert asked her.

“No,” she said, “but I made a picture with Frank. If Frank likes you, he’s behind you all the way. He wrote me a letter when my father died.” Then she massaged her neck with her hand and said, “My neck’s out. I’ve been wearing a neck brace, but I couldn’t wear a neck brace with this dress to Colin’s party. It’s stress. I’ve been under a lot of stress. Would you get my husband, please? I need my pills for my neck. Andre, would you get my pills for my neck. Two of the yellow ones.”

“They’re back on the boat,” joked Prince Rupert. “In the Dufy suite.”

“No, I’m not staying on the boat,” she said. “I’m at the Cotton House.”

At the far end of Lord Glenconner’s enormous swimming pool stands a maharajah’s pleasure palace, discovered in India, purchased in India, and then brought to Mustique,
along with two Indian stonemasons to put it together again. Constructed entirely of white marble, it has lattice marble screens on all four sides, which gives the interior constant dappled light by day. By night, for the ball, its interior was illuminated by gold fluorescent light, and smoke from smoke pots drifted through the lattice screens. A plan to have Raquel Welch emerge from the pleasure palace as part of the entertainment portion of the evening had been scratched, and an alternative plan had been substituted: another princess.

Princess was not the only princess at Lord Glenconner’s ball. Princess Josephine Lowenstein was there, as well as her daughter, Princess Dora Lowensteih. And then there was Princess Tina—just Tina, no last name. Princess Tina provided the cabaret entertainment, appearing late in the evening in front of the pleasure palace, doing gymnastic gyrations while she balanced full glasses of something on her head and pelvic area. The crowd surged out to watch her—blacks and swells vying for the good positions from which to view the tantalizing spectacle. One heavily wined English lady sat in the reflecting pool in front of the pleasure palace and pulled up her skirts to the refreshing waters. “My God, look at her—she’s showing her bush!” another lady cried out.

Thrice Miss Welch upstaged Princess Margaret. She didn’t show up at her own party on the
Maxim’s des Mers,
at which Princess Margaret was a guest. She arrived later than Princess Margaret at the Peacock Ball. And on the day following the ball, at Princess Margaret’s party, a picnic luncheon on Macaroni Beach, under the same pink marquee from the ball of the night before, transported after dawn from the Great House, Miss Welch, accompanied by Mr. Weinfeld,
made another late entrance, as the princess and her guests were finishing dessert. Miss Welch was all smiles as she greeted her hostess. Princess inhaled deeply on her cigarette through a long holder protruding from the corner of her mouth, exhaled, pointedly looked at her watch, wordlessly established the time, and then returned the greeting with a stiff smile. One-upmanship was back in the royal corner.

That night, Lord Glenconner’s party drew to a close with a farewell dinner aboard the
Wind Star.
New friends were exchanging addresses. Bags were being packed. Princess arrived on board and was seated at the right of Lord Glenconner. People said over and over again that they would never forget the week-long celebration. John Wells, who writes the “Dear Bill” column in
Private Eye,
rose and in mock-Shakespearean rhetoric recited a long poem to our host which ended with these lines addressed to Princess Margaret:

Amid cheers and tears, Lord Glenconner rose. Dressed all in black, his energies spent now, his production over, he thanked the people who had helped him in his yearlong preparations: Lyton Lamontagne, Nicholas Courtney, and
others. He thanked his son Charlie “for getting a little better,” he thanked his son Henry and Henry’s friend Kelvin for working out the treasure hunt on the island of Bequia. He thanked his daughter-in-law Tessa for her constant assistance. He did not thank Lady Anne, who seemed not to notice not being thanked. “You all say you’ll never forget,” he said wistfully. “But you do, you know. You do forget. I can’t even remember own wedding day.”

March 1987

I
n retrospect it’s always easy to say, “Oh, yes, I knew, I always knew,” about this one or that one, when this one or that one comes to a bad end or winds up in disgrace. Any number of people who knew Roberto Polo have told me that when they first heard that disaster was about to befall him, they said to the person who informed them, “I’m not surprised, are you?” and the informant invariably replied that he or she was not surprised either.

Polo, a thirty-seven-year-old Guban-born American citizen with residences in Paris, New York, Monte Carlo, and Santo Domingo, is currently in prison in Italy, where he was arrested in June. He is wanted for questioning in Switzerland, France, and the United States concerning the alleged misappropriation of $110 million of his investors’ money. At the time of his arrest, he had been a fugitive from the law for five weeks, and had been rumored either to have sought and bought refuge in Latin America or to have been murdered by the very people he was said to have swindled, on the theory that, if caught, he might reveal their identities.

“Roberto had so many personas it was hard to know which was the
real
person,” one of his former employees said to me in describing him. A middle-class Cuban with dreams of glory, Polo appeared to be many things to many people, from family man to philanderer, from elegant boulevardier to preposterous phony, from fantasizer to fuckup of the American Dream. A man with the capacity to endear himself to many with his likability and charm and to enrage others with his grandiosity and pomposity, he provided uniformity of opinion among those who knew him in one thing only: He had exquisite taste.

I first met Roberto and his extremely attractive wife, Rosa, a Dominican by birth, the daughter of a diplomat and the cousin of a former president of that country, in 1984, at a small dinner for eight or ten people in New York, at the home of John Loring, senior vice president of Tiffany & Co. They were the youngest couple in the group, known to all the guests but me.

It was not until we sat down to dinner that I noticed the extraordinary ring Rosa Polo was wearing, a diamond so huge it would have been impossible not to comment on it. As one who has held up the hands and stared at the ice-skating-rink-size diamonds of Elizabeth Taylor, Candy Spelling, and Imelda Marcos, I realized that the young woman across from me was wearing one bigger and perhaps better than all of them. I asked her about it, and before she could reply Roberto called down from his end of the table and gave me the whole history of the jewel. It was the Ashoka diamond, a 41.37-carat D-flawless stone named after Ashoka Maurya, the third-century B.C. Buddhist warrior-emperor. Polo had bought it for his wife from the Mexican movie star Maria Felix.