An Inconvenient Woman (2 page)

“I’m sorry to be so late, sir,” said Philip. “My plane got in from New York this afternoon, but one of my bags, the one with my dinner jacket in it, couldn’t be found.” Jules didn’t care, nor did he want to be involved in such a drab story. He had a mission of his own on his mind.

“Go in, go in, Mr. Quennell,” he said, directing him with a wave of his hand to a room on the right. “Pauline is in the drawing room. I must take a call and will join you then.”

Last year, when Malcolm McKnight, who is writing the biography of Jules Mendelson, asked Philip Quennell what his impression of him was the first time they met, Philip remembered this moment and hesitated.

“What came into your mind?” Malcolm persisted.

Philip couldn’t bring himself to tell McKnight that what came into his mind was how wonderfully cut Jules Mendelson’s dinner jacket was, for such an enormous man. What he did say to Malcolm was, “I thought that this was a man that I would never like to cross,” which had been his second thought.

For a newcomer without connections, Philip was extremely well seated that night, placed between Camilla Ebury, with whom he was to fall in love, and Rose Cliveden, a past-middle-age social celebrity of the area who would, inadvertently to be sure, cause havoc in the life of her great friend Pauline Mendelson. The reason for Philip Quennell’s excellent
placement
, however, had nothing to do with his desirability as a guest. A man named Hector Paradiso had switched their place cards before dinner, for reasons known only to him, and had moved himself to what Rose Cliveden considered a more advantageous position at a table where the former First Lady was seated.

“Live by the place card, die by the place card,” said Rose Cliveden to Philip’s left. She was slightly tipsy and greatly miffed as she revealed Hector Paradiso’s social disloyalty for the third or fourth time. Her neck had just the suspicion of a goiter, which moved up and down as she spoke in a voice deepened by years of heavy smoking. “Imagine Hector moving the place cards. He’s gotten entirely too full of himself lately.”

“Be careful what you say to Rose,” said Camilla Ebury, to his right. “No matter how drunk she gets, she remembers everything. Total recall.”

“Who is Rose Cliveden?” asked Philip.

“Old Los Angeles. Old money. Old friend of Pauline’s. Married three times. Divorced three times. Once had an affair with Jack Kennedy. In the White House. In the Lincoln Bedroom. Or so she says. She’s been known to exaggerate. What else do you want to know?”

“That’s pretty good coverage,” Philip replied. “You could be in my business.”

“Your business is what?” she asked.

“I’ve only arrived here today, to write a documentary film. Quite honestly, I’m surprised to have been asked here tonight.”

“Pauline collects people,” replied Camilla Ebury. She was pretty in a quiet way that was not at first apparent to Philip. Her blond hair was parted in the middle and held back by two gold barrettes, a style he associated with the debutantes he used to watch at dances when he was at Princeton. She was, Philip found out in due course, a recent widow, although she was only a year or two older than he.

Like Pauline and all of Pauline’s grand friends, Camilla’s range of conversation was on a more elevated scale, at least economically, than his. “Don’t ever die in a foreign country if you don’t speak the language,” she said, recounting her husband’s sudden death on a street in Barcelona. “It’s an absolute nightmare. The embassy was useless. Thank God for Jules Mendelson. He made a few calls and straightened everything out, and I was able to ship poor Orin home.”

At that point, noticing that he was listening attentively, she picked up his place card and read his name, although he had already told it to her twice. “Philip Quennell. Why have you come out here to the Golden West?” she asked.

“To escape the heat,” he said.

“What heat?”

“Something I wrote offended some very important people, and I thought it best if I left New York for a while.”

“Oh, my lord! Are you the one who wrote that book that made everyone so angry in New York?” she asked.

He was. “Yes.”

“No
wonder
Pauline invited you,” said Camilla, smiling. “That’s the sort of thing she adores.” When she smiled, dimples mysteriously appeared in both cheeks and her eyes twinkled. Each of them looked at the other with more interest. “Didn’t someone hit you? I think I read that.”

He had indeed written a book, on a particular leveraged buyout, that had offended several important people in the New York business community. One well-known figure on Wall Street threatened to have his legs broken, and Philip did not think of his threat as simply a figure of speech, nor did his lawyer. The well-known figure was known to have “connections,” as they are called. When Casper Stieglitz, a Hollywood producer, contacted him through his agent to see if he would be interested in writing a screenplay for a documentary based on the proliferation of drugs in the motion picture industry, he leapt at the opportunity, although he knew absolutely nothing about either the motion picture industry or the proliferation of drugs in it. He leapt at the opportunity because he thought a four- or five-month paid sojourn in Southern California might be just exactly what he needed in his present circumstances.

“This is a very swell party,” said Philip, looking around the room.

Camilla, following his look, nodded. “It’s always very swell at Pauline’s,” she said.

“Is there an occasion for an evening like this? I mean, is there a guest of honor, or is it a birthday or an anniversary, or something like that? Or do you people out here just have sixty for dinner with rare wines and a flown-in orchestra on a nightly basis?”

Camilla laughed. “You’re right. It is quite special. I shouldn’t act like I take it for granted, but I’ve been coming to parties here for so many years that I might have lost my sharp eye.”

“You mustn’t ever lose your sharp eye, Mrs. Ebury,” said Philip. “Or ear, for that matter. You might miss something.”

Camilla looked at Philip, interested. “Camilla,” she said.

“I’m Philip,” he answered.

“I know.”

“What kind of people are these?” Philip asked, holding his hand out to indicate the guests. “Aside from the former President and the film star, I mean.”

“Oh, the core, I suppose. My father used to describe them as the kind of people who can keep things out of the newspapers,” said Camilla.

“What kind of things?”

“Oh, things.”

“The woods are full of bodies, you mean?”

She laughed. “In a manner of speaking.”

Philip looked around the room again. “This is all quite glamorous in a way. At least it is for me.”

“I suppose it is when you’re traveling like you are, staying a few days or a few weeks; but if you were to stay longer, you would begin to see that each evening is a variation on the same theme, except at the Mendelsons’, where it’s a little more extravagant, but then the Mendelsons aren’t really Angelenos in the sense that the rest of us are who were born and brought up here. There are about two or three hundred of us who dine together in various combinations, and we rarely widen the circle, and you rarely read about us in the newspapers.” She smiled almost apologetically and made a helpless gesture.

“Go on. I’m fascinated,” said Philip.

“Well, we never mix with the movie crowd, and only sometimes with the people from Pasadena, except for civic evenings or certain charities, like the museums or the Music Center. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s the way it is and the way it always has been. If you want to know the truth, I’d love to know a few movie stars.”

Philip laughed. Camilla looked at Philip and saw that he gave her his full attention. She moved in closer to him and spoke in a lowered voice. “Now that you mention it, I think there was originally a point for this party. We all thought that an announcement was going to be made tonight that Jules was being sent by the President to Brussels to head up the American delegation at the statehood of Europe. It would have meant staying there for the whole of nineteen ninety-three, at least, and Pauline was looking forward to it enormously. She speaks perfect French, and I think she sometimes gets bored here.”

“It’s not to be?” asked Philip.

“Oh, yes, it is to be, but not to be announced as yet, apparently.”

Philip nodded. “Good soup,” he said.

“Marvelous.”

A Mendelson party was, even for the initiated, a heady experience. The food was prepared by their own chef, a famed figure in gastronomic circles, and the wine, from Jules Mendelson’s own cellar, was superb. There were orchids, and antiques, and priceless art on every wall in every room. In the library, which the Mendelsons used for a sitting room when they were alone, there were more French paintings, and English furniture, and armchairs and sofas covered in glazed chintz. There was a long table for photographs in silver frames, including several of Pauline and Jules with Presidents and First Ladies at White House dinners, as well as signed photographs from the monarchs of Spain and Great Britain. There was a matching table on the other side of the room for magazines, changed weekly or monthly, and newspapers, changed daily. Tall French windows, elaborately curtained and swagged, opened onto a terrace with umbrellaed tables, and a garden beyond, and a lawn beyond that. People who visited the Mendelsons always said about this room, “How marvelous!” So Philip Quennell, a newcomer to such grandeur, can be excused for gasping and exclaiming aloud when he wandered into this library, looking for a lavatory, and saw van Gogh’s
White Roses
, which just happened to be his favorite picture, hanging over the fireplace.

“Good God,” he said, walking over to it and staring upward. It was worth, he knew, forty million dollars at least, even in a depressed art market. He wanted to touch the thick vivid paint, and almost did, but resisted. Then he had a sense that he was not alone in the room. He turned, and there was Pauline Mendelson, sitting in a chair by the telephone, or, rather, perched on the edge of a chair by the telephone.

“That’s my treasure,” she said, about the painting. “It was my wedding present from Jules twenty-two years ago.”

She looked, as she always looked in the photographs he had seen of her, resplendent, and was dressed, he was sure, from Paris, from the couture, black velvet cut in a classical fashion, having nothing to do with the trend of that season. She was more elegant than beautiful, although
beautiful
was always the word used to describe her in social columns and
fashion magazines. She was tall and slender, and, even without the two strands of grape-sized pearls she was wearing, he would have noticed her astonishing neck. In a flash he remembered the Avedon photograph of her exquisite neck. It was no wonder that she was married to one of the country’s most powerful men. It would have been unthinkable to imagine her in a lesser sort of union.

“I saw this picture at the van Gogh exhibit at the Met,” he said.

“So you did,” she replied.

It couldn’t possibly be, he thought, that she had been crying, but there was a trace of moistness in her eyes and something about her face that was in disarray. She rose and walked over to a table over which hung a Chippendale mirror. From a box on the table she took out a compact and lipstick and expertly and quickly rearranged her face. He noticed that she seemed quite comfortable away from her sixty guests and in no hurry to be finished with him to return to them.

“I often wondered who owned it. I remember it said ‘On Loan from a Private Collector.’ ”

“That was its first and last loan-out, believe me. I’ll never let it go out of this house again. It was a nightmare. It seemed as though the whole mountain was blocked off when they took it out of the house to fly it east.”

“Why?”

“Security. You wouldn’t believe all the security, even police helicopters hovering above. They were terrified it was going to be hijacked, because of all the publicity. It’s worth, they say, oh, I wouldn’t even dream of telling you what they say it’s worth, but it’s ridiculous, I know, considering that poor Mr. van Gogh was never even able to sell it.”

She spoke rapidly, barely stopping for commas and periods, in a low whispery voice, with that kind of accent that no one can really duplicate who hasn’t had English nannies and French governesses and been educated at a school like Foxcroft. Philip understood why fashionable people were intrigued by her, quoted her, imitated her.

“Besides,” she went on, “I missed it, all the time it was gone, hanging there over the fireplace. I find it such a comforting picture, and this room was forlorn without it. I kept trying other pictures there, but nothing looked right, after the
White Roses
. I’m mad about that color green in the background.”

“Oh, yes,” he replied, looking back at it.

“Is it true that Reza Bulbenkian threatened to break your legs?” Pauline asked, unexpectedly.

“Yes.”

“Do you think he meant it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Hmmm,” she said.

“Do you know Reza Bulbenkian?” asked Philip.

“Jules is on his board, and he’s on Jules’s board, and I sometimes have lunch with Yvonne Bulbenkian when I’m in New York.”

“She’s a piece of work.”

“Isn’t she?” Pauline agreed, smiling. “Hector says—have you met my friend Hector Paradiso? Terribly naughty, but very amusing. Hector says that Yvonne has calluses on her hands from social climbing.” Pauline laughed. “She called her twins Oakley and Ogden, can you imagine, and speaks to them in French, poor little creatures. New York is so changed now. I’ve rather lost my taste for it, I’m afraid. It’s not at all the way it was when I lived there.” She walked over to a cymbidium plant and picked off a dying bud. “How long will you be staying in California?”

“Several months, if all goes well. I’m here to write a film.”

“I heard that. For Casper Stieglitz.”

“You do know everything.”

“I don’t know Casper Stieglitz. We don’t see many of the movie people.”

“Except Faye Converse.”

“Faye’s different. Faye belongs to the world, not just Hollywood. Faye talks about things, not just what’s going on on the set, which is so boring, don’t you think? Movie talk drives Jules mad.”