An Inconvenient Woman (27 page)

Pauline Mendelson was acknowledged to be one of the most gracious hostesses in society and one of the best conversationalists anywhere, but her skills in those areas applied only when she was with the sort of people she had always known, or with the creative people she mixed in with her own friends at her parties, or with the business, banking, museum, and government officials with whom Jules was involved in his myriad activities. The group of people she expected to encounter that Sunday evening at the home of Casper Stieglitz was not her kind of group at all, and she was prepared to make no effort whatsoever.

When the Mendelsons walked into Casper Stieglitz’s living room, they found a larger party than they had been led to expect. At the request of Arnie Zwillman, who exercised a control over Casper Stieglitz, Casper had enlarged his group so that it would be less conspicuous later in the evening when Arnie suggested a private conversation with Jules during the screening of the film. Pearl Silver, the widow of a prominent producer and a hostess of renown in the film colony, had been added only the day before. Ordinarily Pearl Silver would not have gone to Casper Stieglitz’s house, but she agreed to come when she heard that Marty and Sylvia Lesky had also accepted. Marty Lesky, the head of Colossus Pictures, was considered by many to be the most powerful man in the film industry, and Sylvia Lesky, whose father had been the head of the studio that her husband was now the head of, was a woman who had been brought up in the film industry and was referred to as Hollywood royalty by such chroniclers as Cyril Rathbone. Marty Lesky was deeply opposed to drugs, and for that reason would not have gone to Casper Stieglitz’s home ever, but he was told at a card game at the Hillcrest Country Club the afternoon before that the Jules Mendelsons were going to be there.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “Jules Mendelson is going to Casper Stieglitz’s house? And Pauline too? Will someone explain that one to me, please?”

Certainly Marty Lesky had no social ambitions, but, like many in the film industry, he had developed a great interest in
collecting art and had recently been made a member of the board of directors of the Los Angeles County Art Museum. He explained to Sylvia, who didn’t want to go to Casper Stieglitz’s any more than Pauline Mendelson or Pearl Silver wanted to go, that he thought it would be advantageous to get to know Jules Mendelson better, in the hopes of getting his renowned art collection left to the Los Angeles County Museum, instead of to one of the other art museums that were vying for Jules’s treasures.

Dom Belcanto, the famed ballad singer, who was said to have Mafia connections, and his fourth wife, Pepper, were also in the group. Dom was known to play cards every Friday night in Palm Springs with Arnie Zwillman, and it was Zwillman who had asked Dom and Pepper to come. The new additions to what had once been a small dinner were completed with Amos Swank, the late-night talk show host, who almost never went to parties and almost never spoke when he did go to parties, although he kept most of America in stitches five nights a week on his late-night talk show “After Midnight.” Amos had just married his fourth wife, and it was she who had talked him into attending a party he would never have accepted otherwise.

Although they were not her friends, Pauline had served on committees with both Pearl Silver and Sylvia Lesky, and greeted them warmly, as they, in turn, greeted her. They all understood, without anyone’s saying it, that they were there under duress. Pauline stood by herself, aloof, clasping her gold-and-diamond minaudiere in her hands, and pretended to be looking at Casper Stieglitz’s paintings, all of which she hated. Then, in the disparate group, she saw Philip Quennell, whom she had not seen since he had so enraged Jules at lunch at Clouds following Hector Paradiso’s funeral and, inadvertently, caused the toppling-over and cracking of their Degas sculpture of the fourteen-year-old ballerina with the original pink ribbon in her hair.

“Admiring the art?” asked Philip, when he made his way toward her.

Jules, standing nearby, acknowledged Philip with a brief nod but did not offer his hand.

“I hate this sort of thing, don’t you, big white canvases with a blue dot in the center?” answered Pauline.

“It’s not exactly van Gogh’s
White Roses
,” answered Philip.

Pauline smiled. “We’ve missed you,” she said.

“I don’t think Jules has missed me,” said Philip.

“Well, I’ve missed you then.”

“You seem different,” said Philip.

“How?”

Philip thought for a moment and then said, “Sadder. Is that the right word?”

She smiled at him fondly. “You know, Philip, if I weren’t a believer in conjugal vows, and if Camilla Ebury weren’t one of my best friends, I’d make such a play for you, even if I am fifteen years older, or maybe it’s sixteen, than you are.”

Philip, pleased, blushed. “I can’t remember when I’ve felt so flattered.”

“This is certainly an unlikely place to have a reunion,” said Pauline, indicating the room and the other guests.

“Yes, it is. I couldn’t believe it when I heard you were coming.”

“Neither could I,” she said.

“How’s the Degas ballerina?” asked Philip.

“Gone to Paris for repairs. Jules took her over on our plane. There’s a marvelous man at the Louvre that Pierre Rosenberg told us about.” She clutched her minaudiere to her and looked around the room. “Tell me, Philip. Is Mr. Stieglitz married?”

“He recently became single with a lot of drama, apparently,” said Philip. “But they still go to award shows together. My informant is the butler, Willard.”

Pauline laughed. “Tell me, who are all these other people? I know Pearl Silver slightly, and Sylvia Lesky and I were co-chairpersons of the Cedars-Sinai benefit, but the others. Who are they? Do you know them?”

“No, but I know who some of them are,” said Philip. “I don’t know Amos Swank, but he’s the talk show host.”

“Oh, of course,” said Pauline.

“And I don’t know Dom Belcanto.”

“Oh, I know who Dom Belcanto is. He sang at one of my charities. But who are the others?” asked Pauline. “Who is the prim maiden with the buckteeth?”

“Hortense Madden, the book critic of
Mulholland
.”

“And the lady talking movie business a mile a minute with Marty Lesky?”

“Mona Berg, a famous actors’ agent, and the man with her is Joel Zircon, another agent.”

Whereas the evening was no more than a disagreeable chore for the Mendelsons and the Leskys, it was a great step forward in the social life of Joel Zircon. He had been pressed into service at the last minute as the escort of Mona Berg, who did not wish to arrive alone. Joel had never heard of the Jules Mendelsons, but he was thrilled to be in the same room with the Marty Leskys and the Dom Belcantos and the Amos Swanks, and seemed not to mind that they did not include him in their conversations when he went to stand by them. When he spotted Willard, Casper Stieglitz’s butler, with whom he often drank and cruised at Miss Garbo’s, he pretended, for propriety’s sake, that he had never seen him before.

“And which one is Arnie Zwillman?” asked Pauline. “He is one of those people one hears about, but I haven’t a clue what he looks like.”

“Deeply tanned, talking to Dom and Pepper Belcanto,” answered Philip.

Pauline turned to stare at him. Arnie Zwillman never allowed himself to be photographed. When the
Los Angeles Tribunal
had done a special report on the Mafia infiltration of Las Vegas several years back, they were unable to illustrate their section on Arnie Zwillman with a picture, other than a flash photograph taken at a nightclub in London fifteen years earlier, when he was having a romance with a singer then performing at Talk of the Town.

“Who the hell is Arnie Zwillman anyway?” asked Pauline. “Can you explain him to me?”

“He’s the man who burned down the Vegas Seraglio for the insurance money.”

“That’s all anyone ever says about him. It still doesn’t explain him.”

“His brother was shot to death in his swimming pool in Las Vegas. His previous wife was hospitalized at Cedars several times after having been beaten up by him, and no charges were ever brought against him. He has been connected with a number of gangland murders, and he has managed to elude the nets of the last six attorneys general. Does that explain him better?” asked Philip.

But Pauline had stopped listening. Entering the room was someone she did not wish to encounter. “Oh, heavens, a host of favorites,” she said.

“Who do you see?” asked Philip.

“Mr. Cyril Rathbone,” answered Pauline.

“The gossip columnist?” asked Philip. He looked over to where Pauline was looking and immediately recognized the man he had met in Lonny Edge’s bungalow on the day he had gone to ask Lonny about Hector Paradiso’s death.

“Yes. He drives me mad. He has a fixation on me. Never stops writing about me. I beg of you, don’t leave me,” said Pauline.

Unused to entertaining, Casper Stieglitz was not the kind of host who took each new arrival around the room to meet the other guests, but then, Cyril Rathbone was not the kind of guest who waited to be introduced. Seeing the famous Pauline Mendelson across the room, he abandoned Pepper Belcanto in midsentence and darted in her direction like a prancing fawn, his hand extended, crying out in his florid English voice, as if they were the greatest of friends, “Pauline! How marvelous!”

“Hellohowareyou?” replied Pauline, the four words becoming one. Pauline was sure that Cyril Rathbone intended to kiss her on both cheeks. While it was impossible not to take the hand that he offered her without creating a minor incident, she had no intention of allowing a man she disliked to do anything so intimate as kiss her. Seeing his face move toward hers, she stepped back away from him. “I have a cold,” she said, shaking her head at the same time to forestall such an act.

Rathbone, rebuffed, became very red in the face. Cyril hated Pauline for her aristocratic high-handedness toward him, but he was, at the same time, grovelingly impressed with being in proximity to such grandeur as she represented to him. Had she so much as smiled in his direction, even once, or invited him to one of her famous parties, his hatred would have evaporated into nothingness, and he would have become her most adoring acolyte. But that was not to be.

“Do you know Philip Quennell? Cyril Rathbone,” said Pauline.

Cyril looked at Philip, curious to know who the young man was who had been engaged in such deep conversation with Pauline when he entered the room. For an instant Philip looked familiar to him.

“What was your name?” he asked Philip.

“Quennell. Philip Quennell.” He remembered that Lonny had not been able to remember his name that day and had called him Phil Quin when he introduced him to Cyril.

“Have we met?”

“I certainly would have remembered if we had,” said Philip. If Philip had been standing next to anyone but Pauline, Cyril Rathbone would have instantly remembered the circumstances under which they did meet.

Cyril turned back to Pauline. “Even though you’re here, and the Leskys, and Pearl, this is a B-group party,” he said, as if he himself, along with the Mendelsons and Leskys and Pearl Silver, stood head and shoulders above the other guests. If he had expected that this comment would endear him to a lady who always resisted him, he was mistaken, as she neither laughed nor agreed with his statement.

“How is your yellow phalaenopsis coming along?” he asked, trying again. He was referring to the rare orchid she was developing in her greenhouse, which he had written in his column she was going to show to the Los Angeles Garden Club.

“Very well,” she replied.

“I was thinking just today about our mutual friend Hector,” he said, as a last resort for a conversational opening.

She nodded.

“Hardly a day goes by that something doesn’t happen that I want to share with Hector,” said Cyril. It was Cyril Rathbone who had sent Hector Paradiso the clipping from the Paris newspaper showing Flo March fleeing from a fire in the Meurice Hotel, with Jules Mendelson in the background. “We talked every day.”

Pauline was unwilling to be drawn into a conversation about her great friend Hector with Cyril Rathbone. She looked downward. She had never understood why Hector found Cyril so entertaining, and she knew that any statement she made would be printed in his column, and not necessarily correctly. She observed during her downward look that Cyril Rathbone was wearing the tie of an English public school he had not attended and had little feet with highly polished shoes from Lobb on St. James’s Street.

At that moment dinner was announced, and Pauline immediately seized the moment to distance herself from the man she found so disagreeable.

“Good heavens,” she said, shuddering and wondering again what she and Jules were doing at such a house.

“You weren’t very polite to Mr. Rathbone,” said Philip.

“Cyril Rathbone is uninsultable,” replied Pauline. “I hope you’re seated next to me at dinner, Philip.”

“If I’m not, I’ll pull a Hector Paradiso and change the place cards,” said Philip.

In another part of the room, Jules stood in a group with Marty Lesky and Dom Belcanto and their host. He pretended to admire the art on Casper Stieglitz’s walls, which had been picked out for Casper by the studio art director who decorated his house for him. Actually, Jules, like his wife, hated the art on Casper Stieglitz’s walls, but, as a great art collector, he was always courteous about other people’s art, even if he found it inferior. His reputation on matters pertaining to art was so respected that his word was considered authoritarian, and Casper was delighted with Jules Mendelson’s false admiration. He wished he could remember the name of the artist who stuck the broken dishes and coffee cups in the canvas when Dom Belcanto asked him, but he couldn’t. He excused himself, whispering to Jules man-to-man that he had to take a leak and then check on the dinner. Casper was anxious that the dinner start on time so that the film afterward could start on time, as he was expecting Ina Rae and Darlene and a porn star called Lonny, whom Ina Rae insisted on bringing, for a four-way scene after the film, and he wanted all his fancy guests out of his house before they arrived. Arnie Zwillman seized the opportunity of Casper’s disappearance to introduce himself and his about-to-be-wife, Adrienne Basquette, to Jules. Then dinner was announced.