Lady of Fortune (74 page)

Effie and Caldwell's marriage made nationwide news: they were photographed for newspapers and magazines all over America, and interviewed on every subject from managing a household budget to the state of potato farming in Idaho. Effie suddenly found that, as a wife, she was much more acceptable to the public and to the banking community. She was respectable now, she was Caldwell Brooks' ‘little woman', and if anybody really had any trouble with her, they could always rely on Caldwell to straighten things out.

She did nothing to disenchant either the press or the banksters. If they felt happier doing business with her because she was married to Caldwell, and because she had given her recipe of ‘Scottish buns' to
Farm & Fireside
, then she was quite content. To the farmers and fruitgrowers of California, she seemed to have just the kind of reliable, traditional, down-home personality they were looking for in a woman. She even made a point of wearing classic, tweedy dresses when she was at work; and renting a plain black sedan instead of the Pierce-Arrow or a Cadillac.

The offices of a Commerce Bank of California were opened at the corner of Flower and First Streets on 25 July 1928. The building had originally been a plant and flower shop (‘Flowers on Flower'), and Effie had ordered that the decorators should keep intact all the original red-and-white marble cladding on the outside, and all the cool marble floors inside the main entrance. The bank was advertised on the radio, and in every California newspaper and magazine. The slogan, which was written for Effie by Arthur Pendler of Young & Rubicam, was, ‘Dan McKay is Sowing Tomorrow's Seeds Today …'
The ad wasn't another ‘All Right, Ann Ward' or a ‘Tell It To Sweeney', but it brought more than 800 customers in the first week, and by the closing days of 1928, the Commerce Bank of California was the fastest-growing and most profitable new financial enterprise on the West Coast.

Caldwell, as president, ran the bank with prestigitorial efficiency and smoothness. There were some heart-lurching moments – such as the time when he inadvertently offended one of their biggest new customers, the oil tycoon R. Walter Leaming, by kissing the hand of Leaming's fat Spanish maid and saying, ‘How do you do, Mrs Leaming.' But most of the time he was calm and orderly and brilliantly popular with the bank's staff, and when he asked them to save on paperclips and cut down on personal telephone calls, he always managed to sound sympathetic rather than stingy. The Commerce Bank was run on the lowest overheads and the tightest salary budget of any West Coast bank – partly because Effie didn't approve of waste, and partly because they needed all the money they could get to send representatives out to canvas for new business. Caldwell hired a team of twenty salesman (most of them handsome and personable young Hollywood extras) and sent them out in a fleet of rented Model A Fords to Bakersfield and Kettleman City and Fresno and Tulare, each with a clearly-written sales-pitch and a suitcase full of free gifts (a Commerce Bank calendar in simulated leather, a Commerce Bank moneybox in the shape of a castle). Their brief was simple but strong. Talk to the grower, and warn him that bad times are coming. He has an inkling of that already, because he's seen how steeply the price of his produce has been falling. Tell him that his money will only be safe, and available for next year's planting, if he trusts in the honest and straightforward policies of the Commerce Bank. Money that's put into Commerce accounts isn't used for wild stock-market speculation, no sir, nor to line the pockets of fat Sacramento politicians. At Commerce, even the
chairman
has to save her paperclips, because they're paid for by the customers, and
nobody
, but nobody, from the mail-room clerk to the founder, is
ever
allowed to waste the customer's money. No matter what happens, Commerce guarantee payout of all deposits; so when the bad times come, Commerce may go through bad times too, but your money will always be safe.

‘Don't you
owe
it your family?' the salesmen would always wind up, with an expression on their faces which Effie and Caldwell had worked out between them. A mixture of Abraham Lincoln wisdom, Dale Carnegie faith and Jackie Coogan wistfulness. Effie had said, at the policy meeting, ‘Make them feel guilty … make them lose sleep if they don't change their account to Commerce Bank.' Then, in the spring of 1929, she ordered a series of third-page newspaper advertisements with the caption ‘Commerce Makes Sense accompanied by lithographs of happy, wholesome, California families. None of her customers ever complained that she was running the most expensive advertising campaign that any American bank had ever run. They only remembered that she too was obliged to save paperclips.

James Beckman brought in millions of dollars' worth of small business; nectarine orchards, orange groves, tomato farms, and some of the larger growing-combines too. One of the greatest prizes he won was the overseas account of The San Joaquin Apple Corporation, a huge association of apple-growers which was organised and overseen by Vito Malucci and his brothers, three powerful and wealthy Neapolitan immigrants who had once been photographed with Al Capone on board his houseboat in Florida. Anybody who tried to undercut Malucci's apple prices usually found their trees sprayed with acid, and their pet dogs dead.

Effie personally won several million-dollar accounts outside of the fruit and vegetable industry. Three oil companies from Seal Beach transferred their working funds to Commerce; as did the Jenners Seaplane Corporation, in order to finance a new US Coastguard contract for fifty-five Seaspray observation aircraft. She really knew that the Commerce Bank was a genuine success, however, when she was telephoned one morning by Douglas Bean Wallis, the owner of the Wallis Newspaper Corporation. Wallis asked her to lunch at his fabulous hilltop mansion
Santa Ysabel
, at Woodland Hills, and in between the shrimp and the
bombe
surprise, in an echoing banqueting-hall that smelled sharply of California cedar, he had wiped his mouth with his napkin and said, ‘I'm giving you the Los
Angeles Post
account.'

‘Oh,' Effie had said.

‘Is that all you have to say?' Wallis had asked her. He was swarthy, and gross, and bearded, like one of the Borgias. He
had been holding up a gold-plated goblet, about to take a mouthful of wine.

‘Do I need to say anything else?'

Wallis had thought about that, and then chuckled. ‘I don't think so. You might have said, “Be gentle with me.”'

Effie had looked down at her plate, looked up again, and smiled. ‘I think if anyone ought to be appealing for gentleness, it's you.'

By the summer of 1929, the Commerce Bank was rivalling every other bank in California, and was unofficially rated as the fifteenth largest bank in the United States. In June, after a year of living at the Bel-Air Hotel, Effie and Caldwell bought a large white stucco mansion on Benedict Canyon Drive – eleven bedrooms, a pillared ballroom, a billiards room, and a sloping garden that was crowded with orange and lemon trees, bougainvillaea, jasmine, and heliotrope. The house had been built in 1921 by the silent picture star Owen Stark, a rumoured lover of Ethel Jackson. Stark had retired from motion pictures in 1924 when talkies came in, mainly because of his high-pitched Italian accent. He had called his house ‘Case Superba', but Effie renamed it ‘Caledonia'.

In September, Caldwell met Kerry T. Scryman of the Renown Picture Corporation at a noisy champagne reception in Culver City, and within a week the Commerce Bank had lent Renown more than $2 million for a two-hour motion-picture version of The
Life of Christ
, starring Gloria Pesca and Nolan Twilley. The Reverend Charles E. Coughlin, the popular rabble-rousing radio priest of the early 1930s, was to remark later that ‘
The Life of Christ
is doing more to preserve the hope and courage of the American people through these days of Depression than any other inspirational message, in any medium.' Coughlin's endorsement wasn't strengthened by the later discovery that he owned $15,000 worth of shares in the picture; but nonetheless
The Life of Christ
earned $71 million in three years.

It was on the last day of August, when Effie and Caldwell were both sitting on the balcony of Caledonia, overlooking the garden, that Effie received, unexpectedly, a crucial letter from Dougal. Their Spanish butler Primo had been serving them breakfast, grapefruit juice and fresh coffee and Danish pastries, when he came out on to the balcony with the
letter on a silver tray. ‘It come by messenger,' said Primo. ‘He is panting down the stairs.'

Effie said, ‘Give him a dollar, would you, Primo?' and tore the letter open.

‘Who's that from?' asked Caldwell. He was sitting with his feet up, sipping coffee and reading the Saturday-morning paper. They had both been to late business meetings last night, and then to a dinner and dance at the Lost Angeles Bar Association Country Club.

‘Dougal, I think,' Effie told him. It wasn't unusual for Dougal to write to her. Since they had been in California, he had kept in regular touch on matters of major business, particularly the £24 million investment plan which Robert had been arranging for him. Up until now, though, the scheme had all seemed quite routine; and Effie's suspicions about it had almost completely evaporated. The stock market still appeared to be holding up strongly. Robert had kept his word and assisted with all Dougal's arrangements. Watson's in London and New York had both begun to do brisk business in overseas investment – including the construction of a high dam on the River Kabala in East Africa, which Watson's New York customers were financing through Watson's in London. Despite the dangerous instability of most of the European banks, and the depression which had already brought down hundreds of German and Austrian businesses and factories and finance houses; despite the skyscraping inflation of the New York stock market, the Watson brothers were growing wealthier by the week, and their combined future as heirs to the world of international banking seemed secure.

But Dougal had written, in his own handwriting, ‘Dear Effie, For reasons I cannot easily explain I am growing suspicious of Robert's investment arrangement. Is there any possibility of your returning to New York within the next few days?'

That was all. The letter wasn't even signed. Effie turned it over, then read it again, and finaly folded it up. Caldwell glanced up a her, and said, ‘Anything interesting?'

‘I'm not sure. I think I'm going to have to go back to New York.'

‘New York? When?'

‘As soon as possible. Today.'

‘Today? You're joking.'

Effie handed Caldwell the letter. ‘Something's wrong here,
Caldwell. I mean it. You don't know Robert the way I do. He takes a peculiar kind of pleasure out of banking swindles – or near-swindles, at least. Remember I have twenty million dollars of my own money tied up in Watson's New York.'

‘Can't you telephone him? For goodness' sake. Do you really have to go in person?'

Effie leaned over and kissed Caldwell on the forehead. She loved the smell of him when he had just showered and washed his hair. She said, ‘I can take the Pennsylvania Railroad's new air-rail service. Did you read about it? You leave the Grand Central Air Terminal at Glendale at about nine in the morning, fly to New Mexico until nine in the evening; then you transfer to a sleeping car on the railroad until you get to Oklahoma in the morning; then you fly to Indiana until the following evening, and finally take a night train into New York. I could be there by Tuesday morning.'

Caldwell looked extremely unhappy. He folded up the letter, and tossed it on to the breakfast table. ‘Your family,' he said sourly. They only have to whimper and you come running. They're men. At least they're supposed to be. Why can't they look after themselves?'

‘Can you look after yourself?' Effie asked him, kindly. ‘Do you think I can? We're all in this business together. Dougal needs me, and I have to go. You can come if you want to. James can easily keep an eye on things for a week.'

Caldwell shook his head. ‘No, thanks. I'd really rather not.'

Effie stood beside him for a moment, one hand resting very lightly on his shoulder. Then she said, ‘All right. But you do understand that this could be serious, and I really have to go.'

‘Oh, sure,' said Caldwell, and noisily turned over the page of his newspaper. ‘So serious you won't be here for my birthday.'

Effie kissed the top of his head, then his ears, then his cheeks. ‘I can't give you your present on your birthday anyway.'

‘I don't want any present. Just forget it.'

‘Oh, stop being so sulky! I went away for a week to San Francisco and you didn't make a fuss about
that
. Besides – you've
got
to have my present, whether you want it or not.'

Caldwell tossed his paper aside and glared up at her
angrily. He couldn't sustain his anger for very long, though; especially since Effie was smiling at him with such exaggerated cuteness. He pursed his lips tightly, and tried to stay grim, but after a moment or two he let out a blurt of laughter.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I guess it's my hangover. So what's this present you're going to give me?'

‘It's nothing fancy.'

‘I don't want anything fancy. All I really want is to have you around.'

‘Well … I'm not 100 per cent sure … I haven't had it confirmed yet … but I believed it's possible that you're going to be a daddy.'

Caldwell stared at her. ‘You're pregnant?'

Effie nodded.

‘But you're –' his mouth opened and closed but nothing came out.

Effie waited, but Caldwell didn't seem to be able to speak at all. ‘But I'm what?' Effie asked him, at last. ‘Forty-four years old? Too ancient to have a baby? Caldy, I'm pregnant, and that's all there is to it, so I can't be all
that
decrepit! You sound as if you don't even want your own child!'