Lady of Fortune (61 page)

On 11 November 1918, while Kay was still fast asleep, and Effie was sitting up in bed with a cup of China tea, looking over the first architect's sketches for the house she wanted to build on Long Island, not far from Dougal's estate, the Germans surrendered unconditionally to the Allies in the railroad car of Generalissimo Foch. An hour later, Effie's telephone rang, and Jack Milward from the War Industries Board said, ‘Miss Watson? It's all over. The Germans have signed the surrender.'

That day in New York was extraordinary. Huge crowds gathered in the streets, shouting and cheering. Flags flew everywhere, and the sky whirled with hats, fireworks, and shreds of paper. Traffic was almost at a standstill. The war was actually over, and everybody was determined to celebrate. In eighteen months, it had cost 130,000 American dead, and over forty-two billion American dollars.

Effie spent the day in the office, intense and reserved, talking on the telephone to bankers and brokers all over the United States. If they had taken the day off, she called them at home. She said to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, ‘I think we're probably going to have a depression at first; but then business will start to boom.' Lodge, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a ferocious Republican, doubted if anything could boom under Wilson's stewardship. That man would only have to
look
at a dollar-bill, and it would shrivel up like a wilted lettuce-leaf.' But he promised to do what he could to help Effie in the House, and to vote in favour of any measure which might keep the banks free from government meddling, and ‘not unduly hampered' by the Reserve Board or the Treasury.

The years immediately following the war were years in which Americans frantically tried to find their small-town selves again, to burrow back under the bedclothes. They were years that were unfairly hard on the men whom Americans had chosen to lead them. Woodrow Wilson collapsed under the strain of trying to persuade a hostile Senate to support his idea of a ‘League of Nations' – especially after France and Britain had furiously rejected his belief that
harsh revenge on the Germans would only encourage them to go to war again ‘within the next generation'. Warren Gamaliel Harding, elected in 1920 on promises of nostalgia and ‘normalcy' and a return to old-time America, collapsed and died from the strain of trying to oversee a relentlessly corrupt administration of rich and rascally down-home friends. It was only when ‘Silent Cal' Coolidge was elected in 1922, with the slogan that America ought to ‘Keep Cool and Keep Coolidge' that a sense of genuine self-satisfied Americanism began to return – and with it a boom in national confidence and business.

Effie had already anticipated the boom. She had sensitively divined from her travels around the Middle West the new dreams that people were dreaming: of luxury kitchens, and cars, and radios. She had invested over $40 million of Watson's money in automobiles, drive-in motel chains, luxury bathroom appliances, hotels, realty, steel, and oil. The day that Coolidge beat Bob La Follette by fifteen million votes to eight million, she bought $2
million of preferential stock in Willard Oil, of Forth Worth, Texas, and exclusive rights to an oil-bearing salt dome in Sun Butte, Wyoming.

President Coolidge carried on the ‘normalcy' promised by Harding. He let big business get on with big business, banks get on with lending, and did less work and made fewer decisions than any President in American history. Effie took advantage of the Coolidge bull-market by expanding Watson's brokerage division, and changing Yellow Jonquil Inc. into the Women's Trust Inc.

American innocence, no matter how clearly it was missed, never came back. ‘Easy payments' were invented, and Americans began to expect to have today what they may not even be able to afford tomorrow. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote provocative novels about ‘jazz babies' and ‘sheiks'. In 1920, women won the vote, and in 1923 Women's Trust Inc. turned over $21 million worth of stocks, to women alone. Men wore wide trousers and talked about Knute Rockne and the Notre Dame team, and repeated stale jokes they had heard the evening before on WEAF. Girls wore short skirts and rolled-down stockings; students sat on the top of flagpoles for days on end. Liquor was prohibited by law, and bootleggers like Bugs Moran and Al Capone rose to extraordinary power and
everlasting notoriety. The Coolidge era, under the banner of continuing ‘normalcy', altered the social face of America, and the rest of the world, beyond recognition or retrieval.

It also made Effie one of the richest women ever.

In 1927, at the age of forty-three, Effie was estimated by the
Wall Street Journal
to be worth $127 million. She was slightly less well known than Aimee Semple McPherson, and slightly better known than Renée Adorée. Her house on Long Island was featured again and again in
Life and Ladies Home Journal
, and she was one of Dorothy Dey's favourite items in her hot-gossip column in the Morning
Telegraph
. ‘Xillionairess Effie Watson attended a party given last night by Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, where her sequined silver dress outshone absolutely
everybody
, including Ziegfeld lovely Mae Murray and
Salomé
star Alla Nazimova. Mrs Sinclair Lewis, clearly frustrated at not being the belle of the ball, left early, with a headache(!) Miss Watson was most notably seen exchanging pleasantries with refreshment magnate George ‘Spats' Sabatini, and one guest was heard to remark that they got on together like a distillery on fire.'

In late July 1927, Dougal protested to Effie in a rambling office memorandum about her public friendship with George Sabatini. Two weeks later, when Sabatini was murdered, he sent Mariella around to Effie's house on Long Island with eleven red roses. Effie said to Mariella, bitterly, ‘There's no memorandum?'

Mariella said, ‘I don't understand you.'

Perhaps more than anything else it was George Sabatini's death, and Dougal's indifference to her grief, that led Effie to take stock of herself that year. For more than a decade, her work at the bank had occupied her time, but not her emotions. Her close relationship with Kay, who was ten now, and cute as a button, had occupied her affections, but not her desires.

Men were afraid of her, because she was such a brisk and efficient businesswoman; but the truth was that she was
equally afraid of men. She was afraid of being dominated by them, of being made to do things which she didn't want to do; and she was also afraid of losing them. This was an era when the most attractive men were the men who were most dangerously at risk, and Effie was petrified by the idea of falling in love with yet another hero, yet another villain, only to wake up to find that he was gone for ever.

She was svelte and sophisticated to the point where Dorothy Dey called her ‘the knife-edge of chic'. She was very thin: she dieted as matter of habit, following an eating plan specially devised for her by nine diet doctors at the Betswick Foundation in California, and she regularly took Vitamin B-complex supplements and Japanese seaweed tablets. When she looked at herself naked in her mirror every morning, as Kitty laid out her clothes, she saw a woman as striking and as young-looking as Dolores Costello, the Hollywood motion-picture star, with fashionably-bobbed hair, fashionably flat breasts, prominent ribs, and skinny thighs. Her face was regularly packed with an extract made from the placenta of Swiss goats, blended with milk, lanolin, and mud from Louisiana. Her legs and her underarms were waxed by Le Charot, of Paris. Her nails were exquisitely manicured, and as long as a cheetah's claws.

Her jewellery – most of which was kept at the bank – included the Grange diamond of 71.2 carats; and an emerald and ruby necklace which had once belonged to Mme de Pompadour. She was driven everywhere in Manhattan in a dark green Rolls-Royce, with curtained windows.

She was rich enough to be utterly perverse and infuriatingly eccentric, and she often was. Although she was still not officially a partner of Watson's New York; and although her sex precluded her from being admitted to the New York Stock Exchange, she was generally recognized on Wall Street as the one person to go to if you wanted a fast million-dollar loan for something novel, and quirky, and highly profitable. She had her failures, of course: she supported an Omaha insurance company which dealt solely in automobile claims, and lost $760,000. But her successes were stunning: she helped to finance Piggly Wiggly stores when they first introduced ‘Scientific Merchandising', which later developed into self-service, and then into ‘supermarkets'. She lent five million dollars to Adolph Zukor, the
autocratic head of Paramount Pictures, when he wanted to buy up the entire Scheinman movie-theatre chain, twenty-four movie theatres in one acquisitive gulp.

But she knew she needed more than money; more than success; more than silk and velvet and jewels. She needed even more than the devotion of Kitty and the rest of her staff; even more than the love of her daughter.

One Tuesday evening in February 1928, when it was beginning to snow outside the Watson Bank building on Broad Street, she left her suite of offices on the eighth floor and went up to see Dougal. Dougal's secretary said hurriedly, ‘He's all tied up, I'm afraid, Miss Wa –' but Effie ignored her, and pushed open the door of Dougal's office as if she were a G-man pushing open the door of an illicit whisky factory.

Dougal was sitting behind his wide bird's-eye maple desk in his shirt-sleeves, the heat in his office turned up to full. He was wearing small dark-lensed spectacles, in spite of the dimness of the lamplight, and his face looked white and puffy, like a large fungus.

Effie had already heard from several sources – some malicious, some friendly – that Dougal habitually sniffed cocaine; and she knew for herself that he was rarely invited to house-parties these days because he always ended up blindingly drunk, and stumbled over tables and chairs and fish-tanks, and insulted women, and vomited everywhere. After a party on Park Avenue last month to welcome in the New York for 1st Yankee Bank he had thrown himself in a football-tackle through a huge plate-glass door, and cut his shoulder so badly that it had needed eighteen stitches.

She had tried before to talk to him at the office; tried everything she knew to soothe and calm him; but he was always so abusive and bad-tempered that she gave up. One evening, when she was at home in Fifth Avenue, he had telephoned her, drunk or drugged or both, and screamed at her that she was a harlot, a filthy whore who preferred money to men, and that he hated her. She had hung up on him; and hadn't allowed him to say any more. But that evening, calm and collected as she was, she had given up loving him as a brother, and begun to think of him only as a boorish and unpleasant colleague from the office where she worked.

‘Are you busy?' she asked Dougal. She could see that he had been trying to solve a crossword.

‘I'm waiting for a call,' Dougal told her. ‘Didn't Louise tell you I was tied up?'

‘Too tied up to see your own sister?'

Dougal put down his gold propelling-pencil. ‘Effie,' he said impatiently, ‘I'm waiting for a call from the Coast. If you've got anything to say to me, you can say it in a memorandum, or on a phonograph record.'

‘The way you informed me that you disapproved so strongly of George Sabatini?' Effie asked him.

Dougal retorted, ‘The way any employee of Watson's New York sends messages to the company president, that's all.'

‘I see,' said Effie, sitting down, and spreading out the pleated skirt of her green-and-gold Worth day-dress. ‘I own 28.7 per cent of the bank's stock; I've personally given guarantees for more than $35 million that the bank has advanced to small borrowers; I'm completely in charge of the bank's brokerage business; and I'm the bank's only reliable connection with anybody at the Federal Reserve Board. Yet, you have the face to call me an “employee.”'

‘As usual, you're determined to be a nuisance,' said Dougal.

‘Quite the opposite,' Effie told him. ‘I've decided to
stop
being a nuisance. I've decided to quit.'

‘Quit?' demanded Dougal. ‘What do you mean, quit?'

I've decided to pack up my troubles in my old kitbag, and let you run Watson's New York on your own.'

Dougal took off his dark glasses, laid them carefully down on the blotter in front of him, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his finger and his thumb. When he eventually looked up, and his face was caught in the light of his green-shaded desk-lamp, Effie was horrified by the pigginess of his eyes; how small and yellow and watery they were.

‘Well,' he said, ‘it seems as if the good old Watson spirit has surfaced in you at last. Destroy your brother, destroy your mother, destroy your sons, and your daughters, and your first cousins. Funny, isn't it, how a family's inherent rottenness will always come out?'

Effie looked at him levelly; although she could hardly bear to. She said, ‘Dougal – the day that you invited me to join you, Watson's New York was a young and respected bank – the kind of bank that was going to influence lending habits all over the world. A new kind of bank altogether, in a new
world. Watson's was so well thought of on Wall Street that I was
terrified
when I gave birth to Kay that I might damage your reputation. Can you believe that?'