The Rich Are Different (101 page)

He offered me his chair and pen without a word and watched over my shoulder as I wrote with gusto: ‘My dear Cornelius, why all the fuss? My “triumphant progress through Germany”, as you so kindly phrased it, resulted in excellent publicity for Van Zale’s, and if I have my doubts about doing business with the Nazis it’s only because I hate to think of people like our friends the Reischmans treated as if they were cattle – or worse. In short I’d recommend you to concentrate a little less on my caution in Germany and a little more on my English successes. Why you should complain about my taking an old friend like Bill LeClair out to dinner I have no idea, but may I inform you that we expatriate Americans like to see someone from home occasionally. If you’d ever been out of the States you’d know that!

‘And what’s all this prune-mouthed description of Dinah as “my sexual partner”? She’s my wife! How would you like it if I said: “How’s your sexual partner?” when I inquired after Alicia’s health? And what’s all this earnest condemnation of promiscuity? I agree I’ve been no saint in the past, but neither have you! In fact since you wrote me this extraordinary letter you’ve probably been to bed with at least six other women besides Alicia – and
don’t tell me that you, with your obsession for apeing Paul, practise the marital fidelity you preach! Anyway as far as coldblooded sexual exercise is concerned, what does it matter where and with whom you perform the sexual act? I’ll bet it matters precious little to you, despite the amusingly pious tone of your letter. I’m sorry about your sister, who’s a good woman, but at least I’m not hypocritical enough to pretend such a dead relationship is still alive. I’ll leave that final hypocrisy to you, Cornelius. Regards, STEVE.’

‘He’ll never believe I wrote that,’ said Steve. ‘It’s much too cool and British and debonair, and he knows I’d just wade in waving a meat-axe.’

‘You can make it more obscene!’ I suggested, making him laugh, but he refused.

‘It’s the right reply to the little bastard,’ he said. ‘I’ll have my secretary transcribe it just the way it is.’ It was only after he had reread the draft that he asked curiously: ‘How did you know Cornelius is obsessed with Paul?’

‘Everything points to it. The way he took Paul’s full name after Paul’s death. The way he went to live at Paul’s house and to work at Paul’s bank. The way he called his daughter Vicky. The way Sam Keller talked about a “mystical” feeling Cornelius had towards Paul.’

‘I think he’s a lot more faithful to his wife than Paul ever was.’ He folded the draft carefully and tucked it away in his pocket. ‘He’s just crazy about that funny little fish-eyed girl.’

‘She obviously represents the Eastern Seaboard aristocracy to him. He probably feels inadequate because his father was merely an Ohio farmer.’ I was still holding his pen. Idly I drew a picture on the notepad of a mermaid as I considered the unknown Alicia with her piscine eyes. ‘What I can’t understand,’ I remarked as an afterthought, ‘is why they’re not hard at work reproducing themselves. Why is there no little Cornelius sitting beside them on the love-seat? Cornelius is just the sort of power-hungry despot who would equate a horde of sons with virility and virility with power.’

Steve laughed. ‘Well, the happy couple on the love-seat aren’t talking, but my own theory is that he came out of an attack of mumps the worse for wear. Do you know what can happen to an adult male who gets mumps?’

I shuddered. ‘I detest medical horror-stories!’ Curiosity overcame me. ‘Good God, do you mean he’s impotent?’

‘Apparently it needn’t affect performance. But you can forget the hordes of sons.’ He shrugged, glanced at his watch and turned to the door. ‘But so what? They have children from their previous marriages – there are plenty of other couples in the world who are worse off than they are.’

‘But not many frustrated fathers like Cornelius. That’s just the sort of disaster which could have a very unstabilizing effect on him, Steve. A whole avenue of power would be closed to him and all his aggression would have to be channelled elsewhere. My God, look what Henry VIII did when he started crashing around trying to reproduce himself!’

‘Was that the guy with six wives? I always kind of liked him. Honey, I’ve got to get going now or I’ll be late for my first appointment …’

We kissed
and parted, but for a long while I remained thinking about Cornelius, rearranging the puzzle of his personality and studying each shadowy feature as carefully as I would have studied an opponent’s pieces on a chessboard.

Cornelius never replied to Steve’s letter but gradually the telephone calls between Steve and Sam ceased and Steve bent all his energy towards establishing our new issuing house. It was an anxious time for us both, but at last the house was ready to be launched and on 12 February 1936 Steve cabled his resignation to his partners in New York and later announced that the new London issuing house of S. & D. Sullivan & Co. had opened its doors at number twelve-and-a-half, Milk Street.

[2]

Having made our historic coup we held our breath, pricked up our ears and surveyed the landscape.

In America at One Willow Street an icy silence greeted our announcement.

In England the National Government had been re-elected to power and Baldwin was busy puffing his pipe. The government dithered vaguely over foreign policy, one moment supporting the League but the next moment giving way to Italian aggression, and the Peace Ballot revealed massive support among the people for the League of Nations, for disarmament, for the belief that the Fascist dictators would submit to non-military coercion.

But in Germany that March Hitler reoccupied the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland and no one tried to stop him.

‘Well, we won’t think of Hitler,’ I said brightly to Steve. ‘Boring little man!’ And in fact I was so busy helping to arrange our huge celebration party to promote our new house that I didn’t have the time to pay attention to international affairs. In May we gave our famous masquerade ball at the Savoy and five hundred guests came to celebrate with us.

‘It’ll cost the earth!’ I said when Steven first suggested the idea, but he simply laughed and told me we could well afford to pay. This was true, but I remembered my penniless days too clearly to embrace extravagance with ease, and also my riches were still mostly on paper. After the taxes had been paid and our new house established we were hardly the richest couple in England, and as a precaution I set up a trust for the children and established a fund for my old age. I did not tell Steve. I was afraid he might interpret my insecurity as a lack of confidence in him, although in fact he would most probably have approved of my foresight; he was no fool. However his attitude to his money was very different from my attitude to mine, and I thought it was extraordinary as well as ironic that he seemed to have little interest in his income after it was earned. Making money was the game which enthralled him, and once the commission had been safely salted away he forgot about it and plunged back into the chase. He had only the sketchiest notion what his brokers were doing, and the idea that he
could make himself immensely rich by imaginative management of the money he already had bored him. So long as he had enough money to live exactly as he pleased he was satisfied, and fortunately for him he always did have the money he needed, but he was haphazard about his private financial affairs and I often thought how odd it was that although he usually had no idea of the balance in his cheque-book he could and did calculate his clients’ affairs down to the last farthing.

He reminded me of a doctor who tirelessly saved people’s lives while his own family staggered unnoticed beneath the burden of a dozen minor ailments.

Another anomaly of his position was that although he had made fabulous amounts during his years at Van Zale’s he had surprisingly little to show for it. He had lost money in the Crash, he was now paying alimony not only to Emily but to his first wife in California, he was overwhelmingly generous to me and all seven of his children, and he liked to live well. In his eyes a ball at the Savoy was not an extravagance but a necessary business expense, and when I pointed out that we could promote our new house successfully on a less lavish scale he was incapable of seeing my point of view.

‘If we’re going to make a splash let’s whip up a tidal wave!’ he explained exuberantly, and there was no doubt later that the ball’s huge success more than vindicated his policy of extravagance. The event was reported in all the international magazines and described with breathless detail in the popular press. However, England is not America where size and spectacle are all-important, and I knew a certain segment of society considered our celebrations were vulgar.

My friends, who were pleased by the degree of autonomy I had won for them from Lord Malchin, wished me well with good grace. Harriet came dressed as Lady Macbeth, Cedric masqueraded as a Tottenham Hotspur football player and both did their best to pretend my decision to sell had not upset them.

My own feelings were ambivalent. I regretted the sale yet embraced it. It was indeed the end of an era, but it was also the beginning of another. I had had thirteen extraordinary, exciting, arduous years of Diana Slade Cosmetics but it was time to move on, and on the horizon was the new issuing house, intricate and mysterious, its doors leading into a mouth-watering new world of challenge and adventure. I went to the ball to celebrate the future and although I was nostalgic about the past I had no regrets.

It took me a long time to decide what I should wear, but after fobbing off such double-edged suggestions that I should dress as the Virgin Queen or Catherine the Great, I decided to go as Cinderella. I went to Norman Hartnell who dressed Gertrude Lawrence and Evelyn Laye, and he designed a gorgeous creamy-yellow gown in the style of the late eighteenth century and shoes encrusted with metallic discs to give the illusion of glass slippers. Steve’s costume was originally intended to recall the eighteenth century too, but he soon decided that the necessary wig would be tiresome and that George Washington’s identity wasn’t the most tactful to assume in
the circumstances. It was I who suggested he masqueraded as the Duke of Wellington, and he eventually made a dazzling entrance in skin-tight white trousers and a cut-away coat which made me realize how sexy men’s fashions were in 1815. He complained he couldn’t sit down but I told him that everyone occasionally had to make sacrifices in order to be beautiful.

All the children came to the ball, even Alan who had obtained a special exeat from Winchester. He was dressed as a turbaned Indian page and the twins came as a Dresden shepherd and shepherdess. They were an absolute menace with their crooks, but Nanny somehow managed to prevent them from doing too much damage.

Nanny was dressed inevitably as Nanny and looked as Queen Victoria might have looked if she had been taken by magic carpet to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Since she had her hands full watching the twins the latest nursemaid was in charge of George who was now fourteen months old and could stagger along in drunken fashion on his fat little legs. George came as a cherub. We popped him into a little white tunic and attached a pair of silver wings to his back, but fancy dress bored him and after pulling off the wings he fell asleep beside a tray of petits-fours.

We hired the best band in London, ordered eight hundred bottles of 1928 champagne at twelve pounds a case and flung open the ballroom doors.

‘Some party!’ gasped Steve as we snatched a dance with one another some time after two.

I thought of his party ten years before on Long Island when I had listened to the band blaze into the Charleston. The twenties seemed far away now, almost as far away as that remote epoch before 1914. I looked around at the luxury from which all brashness had been ruthlessly excluded. The band was playing an old-fashioned waltz.

The dancing lasted till dawn when a party of us drove to Mallingham for breakfast. It must have been a long night for the chauffeurs but we slept on the journey and awoke ready to begin the party all over again. At noon I was suddenly smitten not only by exhaustion but by a desperate desire to be alone, and abandoning my guests I rowed out over the Broad and found a quiet spot in the reeds. Steve arrived an hour later. He rowed the dinghy around the Broad until he found my hiding-place and after climbing into the rowing-boat so clumsily that he nearly capsized it he fell asleep with his head on my breast. It was a quiet ending to such a flamboyant occasion, and kissing him with relief I lay back to watch the clouds floating over the wide Norfolk sky.

All but the oldest and most conservative of his clients followed Steve up the road to the new house, and across the Atlantic a new man was dispatched without comment to pick up the pieces at Six Milk Street.

A month later I read that Mrs Cornelius Van Zale had held a dazzling fashion show in her beautiful Fifth Avenue home and all the proceeds of this charitable gathering had been donated to medical research. For the benefit of European readers the article noted that Mrs Van Zale was the
wife of the well-known philanthropist who had just launched a new foundation to assist struggling writers and artists, and there was also a picture of Alicia looking devastating in a little black dress which had probably cost at least fifty guineas. I thought Steve had been unkind to her in his descriptions. Mrs Van Zale said when interviewed that she and her husband had simple tastes and liked nothing better than a quiet evening alone together while they listened to their favourite radio shows; they were looking forward to their usual quiet summer holiday at Bar Harbor with their three children; they did not care to travel abroad. Mrs Van Zale was a regular client at Miss Elizabeth Arden’s salon and was dressed by Chanel whose designs she liked because they were ‘simple’ and ‘quiet’. She had no views on politics but understood her husband was in favour of international peace.

In Europe the British and French governments, also much in favour of international peace, rushed to arrange for non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War and all the major European powers including Germany and Italy signed this agreement at the end of August.