Empress Bianca (35 page)

‘If we have two large parties a year here, the way you used to when you were married to Bernardo,’ Philippe replied, ‘and a series of intimate dinner parties, you’ll have New York eating out of your hand. And that’s before we take a box at the Met and entertain friends there or take a table at the fancier charity balls and take along a group of friends. Just you wait and see. I give you two years before you’re right up there with Ruth Fargo Huron and all those other
grandes dames
.’

Deferring to her husband’s wisdom, Bianca turned her attention to generating as much publicity for herself as she could. This she did under the guise of assisting Valerian Rybar, but he was not deceived. ‘If it would help your future commissions, I won’t mind if you get this apartment featured in one of the better magazines,’ she had offered. He saw only too clearly, however, that this new friend and client was trying to use his connections to raise her profile and promote herself into becoming a more visible figure in New York society, but as his interests coincided with
hers, he was pleased to assist. Over the next weeks, therefore, he ensured that he trooped the features editors of Vogue,
Architectural Digest, Interiors, House and Garden, Town & Country
and
Harper’s Bazaar
through the apartment, pointing out to them that it was not yet finished but would be in a few more weeks. As Rybar had expected, all the magazines wanted to do spreads, to include several pages of photographs and an article about the amazingly rich Mr Mahfud and his elegant wife.

When Bianca referred the offers back to Philippe, he was much less enthusiastic than she had hoped he would be. ‘Publicity is a double-edged sword which too frequently draws the blood of those who use it,’ he said.

‘We don’t want to become like some of those new friends of yours, who are always in Suzy’s column. But just this once might be useful, so long as we choose the right magazine.’

‘Once?’ said Bianca, a pained look flickering across her perfectly formed features. The thought of all that delicious attention disappearing before her very eyes was enough to bring her close to tears.

‘Once. We don’t need to be famous in the street so long as we’re known in the right drawing-rooms and boardrooms. Those are the only places fame counts. Everything else is bullshit.’

Recognizing the wisdom of what he was saying, even if the sillier and frothier side of her personality would have dearly loved to avail herself of all that unnecessary attention, Bianca cheered up at the thought of achieving recognition from the people who mattered to her, if only this once. ‘Which magazine do you think we should go for?’ she asked.

‘That is not my province. I don’t know enough about it to make an informed decision. Why not discuss it with Valerian? He’ll be sure to steer us in the right direction.’

‘Why not Ruth or Ruby? Surely they know the scene better. Ruth is one of the most successful advertising executives in the country, and Ruby one of Manhattan’s top realtors. They’ll know more than an interior decorator.’

‘I doubt it. He’s terribly social and besides, this feature will be useful to him only if it brings in commissions for him from the very sort of people we want it to reach. If we ask Ruth or Ruby for advice, they may think we’re desperate for advancement, and we’ll lower ourselves in their eyes.’

So Bianca turned to Rybar, who advised over lunch at Mortimer’s that
she choose Town & Country.

‘Why
Town & Country?
’ she asked. ‘I thought you’d suggest
Vogue
or
Harper’s.
They certainly have a higher circulation and are more famous.’

‘Yes,’ he said, betraying how fully he saw through Bianca’s motives in allowing the feature, ‘but you’re not a dress or jewellery designer, and neither am I.
Town & Country
is the magazine that all the people with serious money read. It might not be as big as
Vogue
or as chic as
Harper’s
, but its target audience is precisely the sort of people I want to reach, and, I daresay, are also potential clients for your husband’s bank.’

So
Town & Country
it was.

Sure enough, when the article was published, Valerian Rybar was proved right. That one article went quite a way towards enhancing the Mahfuds’ reputation. Invitations flooded in, and by the end of the year, Bianca considered herself to be well on the way to being one of New York’s social luminaries.

There were, however, two social sets in New York. These functioned in separate orbits and overlapped only occasionally. The more visible set was the nouveaux riches: the more eminent and prestigious, the Old Money set. Many of the
nouveaux riches
employed press agents who planted information about them in the gossip columns, fame being the yardstick by which they could measure their success. Old Money, on the other hand, wouldn’t condescend to employing an agent, with the result that the
nouveaux
riches
were more visible. That, of course, did not mean that Old Money did not live equally interesting lives, or that joining their hallowed ranks had lost any of its desirability. It simply meant that it was harder to scale their walls, and once in their compound, the way to lose your place within it was to make yourself too available to public inspection via the press. Publicity was seen as a cause for sympathy, not for celebration.

As Philippe had shrewdly discerned, the fact that he and Bianca did not seek publicity led observers on the social scene - and the social scene proliferated with observers - to categorize them as being more Old Money than nouveaux riches. Bianca further enhanced this perception in clever ways. One was the judicious use to which she put Clara and Rodolfo’s title. Without ever letting on that her sister-in-law would sooner kill her rather than speak to her, she frequently let slip that ‘my brother-in-law’s a marquis’. She also said, from time to time, ‘My father
was a real British gentleman.’ Both claims were hard to verify but credible, so she got away with them.

Within a year of being in New York, Mr and Mrs Philippe Mahfud were under the impression that they were accepted everywhere - as she would put it - ‘as Old Money’. She was out every day for lunch, and when Philippe was not away on business they were out every evening with the likes of Mr and Mrs Donald Trump, Mr and Mrs Walter Huron, and Mr and Mrs P Adolphus Minckus, the real estate developer who would shortly change wives by marrying the former Miss Cyprus, Stella Reocleous.

It was an interesting, glamorous and busy life, but she was still not quite where she wanted to be, although she would never let on to anyone, not even to Philippe. As far as she was concerned, her position in New York was on a par with her position in society when she was married to Bernardo. Having experienced the sensation of being the Empress of Mexico while married to Ferdie, she would not be satisfied until she had replicated that position in her new habitat. Only when she was wining and dining
en famille
with Jackie Onassis and Maurice Tempelsman, with Paul and Bunny Mellon and Brooke Astor, would Bianca feel that she was where she truly deserved to be. In the meantime, it was consoling to see that people considered her to be a luminary of New York society. To them, she was already what she wanted to be; and, as perception was more than half the battle, she counted herself a partial, although by no means a total, success.

If Bianca did not actually possess the stature she was perceived as having, the opposite was true of the younger generation of her in-laws in Ferdie’s extended family. Their positions within the top drawer of English society became firmly established during the seventies. Ferdie’s niece Magdalena became engaged to Lord John Witherton, second son of the Duke of Arlinton, whom she married in 1975 as the second of four husbands, while by 1979 her half-first cousin, Delia Bertram, had become quite a celebrity in her own right as a result of her equestrienne activities, her close friendship with Princess Anne, and her husband, the film star Charles Candower, whose motion picture,
Return to Castle Howard
, was one of the greatest hits of the decade.

Bianca, who believed in using whatever was at hand to further her cause, frequently interwove the connections and accomplishments of
Ferdie’s relations into her conversation, taking care never to mention that she was
persona non grata
with them. But it was when she was tooting her own daughter’s horn that she enjoyed the full benefits of name-dropping.

‘The only thing that impresses me is sincerity,’ she loved to say. ‘I’ve brought all my children up to think the same way, and they do. Take my daughter Antonia. One of her little school friends is Princess Caroline of Monaco. I’ve made sure she’s treated Caroline the same way she’s treated all her other friends, with the result that she and Caroline have become fast friends and she’s always staying at the palace in Monaco. Caroline is such a sweet unspoilt girl, and Antonia doesn’t have an affected bone in her body. Of course, Caroline doesn’t look a thing like her mother, but she’s every bit as pretty and down-to-earth as dear Grace, who couldn’t be sweeter to Antonia when she stays at the palace in Monaco. I make sure we hold up our end too, by having Caroline to stay at L’Alexandrine as much as possible. It’s so easy for royalty to feel that they’re being used. One does have to keep things on an equal footing, otherwise one loses the human element of the relationship, don’t you think?’

As the decade progressed, and Antonia and Caroline left school and drifted apart, Bianca still continued to drop the princess’s name whenever she could. She even did so to Moussey Najdeh, Antonia’s first serious boyfriend after school, and made sure that Caroline and her husband Philippe Junot were put on the guest list when Antonia married the handsome heir to one of the Middle East’s great fortunes in November 1978.

By then the Lebanese civil war was raging, but that did not affect the Najdeh family fortune to any large extent, although it did mean that the family had to flee their country and take refuge in Paris, where they bought a superb
hôtel particulier
that once belonged to the Ducs de la Rochefoucauld on the Avenue St Germain. After marriage, Antonia took up residence there with Moussey, his parents giving them the top floor as their own apartment.

As far as Bianca was concerned, her daughter could not have married better and never ceased to let people know how happy and rich Antonia was. She beat that drum with as much frequency and regularity as she beat out her elder son’s accomplishments. ‘I’m so proud of my son Julio. He’s such a good boy. So responsible. He graduated
cum laude
from Harvard before transferring to Oxford to take his doctorate in philosophy. Poor
boy. He’s had to sacrifice it all to go into the family business. He’s now managing director of Calorblanco. It hurts me to see someone so young and talented burdened with so much responsibility, when all he really wants to do is become a Don in Philosophy at Oxford. He’s been offered a place there, you know, but fate has decreed another, less academic path for him to follow, so he makes the best of it. And he’s married such a nice girl and given me such a beautiful granddaughter. She’s named Biancita in my honour and looks just like me too.’

In fact, Julio’s marriage was a sore point with his mother, although she was too proud and too smart to let anyone know. When he returned to Mexico in 1977, to take up his position in the family firm, he promptly fell in love with his secretary. This was a girl who was the antithesis of every ambition his mother had for him. She was middle-class. She was Catholic. Worst of all, she was of Spanish origin, or, as Bianca put it:

‘
Verrrrrrry
Mediterranean-looking.’ Caring not a jot that she was pretty, bright and sweet natured, Bianca saw only her daughter-in-law’s swarthy complexion, aquiline features and the brown down that covered her arms.

Because Julio was her favourite, Bianca trod softly from the very outset. She kept her disapproval to herself and instead attacked the problem sideways when it became apparent that Julio was serious about her. ‘Are you sure she wants you for yourself?’ was the first question his mother asked him when he declared his love for her.

‘What sort of question is that, Mama?’ Julio said, his face flushing perceptibly.

‘Well, you’re my son, and I love you and need you to be sure that this girl wants you for yourself and not because we have a lot to offer in worldly terms.’

‘Mama, she wants me for myself. Of that I’m sure. But if it makes you happier to put her to the test, I’ll let her know I have no money in my own right.’

‘You do that,’ Bianca said and hammered home the point on several occasions in the twenty-one months that elapsed between that conversation and Julio’s marriage to Dolores Gonzalez Irigoya.

The marriage was a happy one; and Bianca was pleased, despite the child’s maternity, when Dolores gave birth to a baby girl who bore an uncanny resemblance to her blonde, green-eyed grandmother. She was even more delighted when Julio and Dolores named the baby Bianca in
her honour. To her regret, however, she saw very little of the baby, because Julio and Dolores lived all the time in Mexico, in a villa which they rented near the Piedraplata family home.

As for Pedro, his relationship with his mother had degenerated to the point where there was virtually no contact between them. They did not speak by telephone or write letters to each other. On the odd occasion when they were thrown together, mother and son either had a blistering row within the first ten minutes or spent the whole time avoiding one another. This, however, did not worry Pedro. He had never liked his mother, even if he had always wanted her love, while she had never liked him, even though she claimed to have feelings of love for him. In truth, Pedro was alarmed by his mother. He considered her to be one of the most poisonous and dangerous people he had ever known, despite the fact that she had used her considerable influence to settle him in a life of some security. He was in charge of public relations at Calorblanco or, as Bianca phrased it when offering him the job: ‘You may as well get paid for your gift for dramatics.’ Pedro had taken the job, not because it interested him but because it gave him unparalleled freedom. Caring little for the things of this world but hungry for spiritual knowledge and experience of life, he took full advantage of this sinecure by seldom showing up for work. Instead, he continued to live at the Piedraplata family home, which Julio had vacated upon marriage, and spent his days with his friends, either exploring the countryside or just sharing time with them. Sometimes, they smoked a joint or two, as many others of their generation did, but Pedro’s bent was so intellectual that he would never try anything stronger. This, however, did not stop Bianca from describing him - even to her friends - as ‘my problem son with a drug problem’. This gained her sympathy from her friends while having the desired effect of neutralizing any comments Pedro might make about her, for, whenever they had their spats, as he would still throw in her face his belief that she had played a part in the death of his beloved stepfather.