Gilded Lily (18 page)

Carlos, Alfredo's adopted son, who would have been the most vulnerable because he had lost his father two years before, seemed thrilled to have a new father. He even addressed two letters from boarding school to Mr. and Mrs. Bendahan, starting them “Dear mum and dad.” The gesture brought tears to Bendahan's eyes. “Perhaps it was his total and innocent trust in the stranger—But now I was determined to be a real father to him.” Later, Lily would tease
him relentlessly about the letters. “What do mummy and daddy want to do this evening?” she would say when the two found themselves alone.

It was eighteen-year-old Claudio, Lily's eldest son, who would put it best: “Welcome home,” he told Bendahan, offering his hearty congratulations when he spoke to them on the phone from Somerset. “How does it feel to be part of a mad family?”

How indeed? But if the comment gave him even the slightest pause, Bendahan shrugged off any doubt. He embarked on his honeymoon a very happy man, convinced that he had been accepted with open arms into a wonderful new family.

To add to his joy, Lily, who was then thirty-seven, announced that she had stopped using birth control while they were in Mexico and desperately wanted to have his children. As they left on the grand tour that would take them to New York, Rio de Janeiro, and the French Riviera, Bendahan saw his life in a new light—the doting husband and father, leading the Passover seder, taking the children for their Hebrew lessons with their grandfather. Life would be glorious! he thought as the couple sailed to South America.

“We arrived in Rio where again all her friends and all her family without exception expressed unqualified joy and commented how well Lily looked after several years of looking drawn.” Indeed, the photographs seem to say it all: A bikini-clad Lily running after a soccer ball on the lawn of her brother Daniel's home in Petropolis, in the mountains outside Rio; Lily sitting on the floor of a friend's living room, smiling and eating lunch with a group of her old friends in the elegant beachfront neighborhood of Leblon.

“She was so happy on that trip that while we were having lunch, she saw a Carnaval band passing on the street, and ran out to dance with them,” recalled her friend Elza Gruenbaum years after Lily's honeymoon in Rio. “Can you imagine! We all had such a great time with her.”

After nine days in Rio, the happy couple left by ship en route to Cannes. It was while they were nearing the port of Lisbon that Lily told Bendahan that she was now convinced that she was pregnant. “Back in London we even discussed the best place for us to be for the birth of our child and I think that we agreed that it might be best for him or her to have dual nationality and that the U.S. might be best…the Cold War still being very much daily fare.”

Like Bendahan, Lily may have also convinced herself that she had embarked on a new life, and when they arrived in Cannes, they checked in to the luxe Carlton hotel, where Lily made arrangements for Adriana and Eduardo to join them. Almost immediately after arriving in France, they went in search of the perfect home. The previous summer Lily had rented a house in nearby Vallauris, a picturesque suburb of Antibes in the Alpes Maritimes that was home to Picasso for a decade after the Second World War. She knew the house was for sale and she was determined that it would be in Vallauris, with its breathtaking views of the Bay of Cannes, that “we could make our home and have our first child,” she told Bendahan. Although the house was no longer available, Lily found an even grander stone villa, known as Mas Notre Dame, near Golfe Juan. The imposing structure boasted four principal bedrooms and four bathrooms, three staff bedrooms with two bathrooms, a kitchen, and laundry area. There was also a two-bedroom beach house, a sizable garage, and a swimming pool and outdoor bar on the property. Lily agreed on the spot to purchase the villa, and the couple returned to the Carlton hotel to draw up their plans for renovating the property on hotel stationery. She sent orders to her bank in Geneva to wire her 3.5 million francs for the purchase. She also demanded that a Geneva-based attorney, a man known to Bendahan only as Zucker, should draw up the paperwork immediately.

Willard Zucker, an American banker who lived in Switzerland and would make international headlines for setting up the complex
web of shell companies used to move funds in the Iran-Contra scandal more than a decade later, set out the terms of purchase in a letter to the owner of the house on March 6, 1972. “It is the desire of our client to conclude the transaction at the earliest possible date,” he wrote.

Lily was clearly in a hurry. But the haste was not so much to begin her new life in France. It became clear to Bendahan that she was in a hurry to get her hands on the money for the purchase before Edmond found out what she had done.

“Edmond will kill me when he finds out,” she told Bendahan, in a moment of utter fear and paranoia that should have given Bendahan some pause. “He'll never let me transfer the money to buy us a house!” Lily had constantly complained to Bendahan that Edmond kept her on an extremely tight financial leash. The only time that she had disobeyed Safra was when she insisted on leasing the Rolls-Royce, which she did shortly after moving to London in 1969. He was furious at her extravagance. So this was simply her banker being cheap, thought Bendahan. Foolishly, he did not read anything ominous into Edmond's potential disapproval.

The newlyweds blithely continued with plans to purchase the French property, with Bendahan insisting upon paying half the purchase price (he would take out a loan from Lily), and Lily instructing Zucker to draw up a contract. She also told Zucker to set up a Panamanian company to purchase the property, with the shares being held in equal parts by herself and Bendahan. Zucker suggested a Swiss company instead, and busied himself with the paperwork.

But Bendahan should have been extremely disturbed by the course of events in France. He was well aware that Safra controlled Lily's assets through his bank in Switzerland. “It would seem that Safra had an unassailable grip on the Freddy fortune,” he said. “And this continued well into my day, with Lily expressing great nervousness about what Safra would do to her money when he learned of our mar
riage.” Knowing this, how could Bendahan ever have imagined that he and Lily would be allowed to live happily ever after?

Of course, where Edmond was involved, Bendahan was destined to learn his lesson the hard way. For Edmond controlled more than Bendahan could have imagined. In addition to dispatching, via personal courier, several thousand in cash every week for Lily's expenses in London, he also took care of the leases on her flat, the Rolls-Royce, and the Mercedes convertible. For tax and legal reasons, she still had no assets in her name in London, and no credit card. Both Lily and the Trade Development Bank were still in the thick of Rosy and Regina's lawsuit against them, both in London and in Rio de Janeiro. Furthermore, Lily had not yet obtained probate on Carlos's English assets. Edmond's control was so complete that Lily still routinely used his Geneva address, 56 Moillebeau, on her hotel bills.

Despite Lily's worries about Edmond, Bendahan seems to have deluded himself into thinking that everything was going smoothly. In fact, he was so sure that he would soon be the co-owner of the stone villa that he left $500 with the gardener, telling him to buy new plants and clean the pool. Lily also suggested that they unpack their summer clothes and leave them at the house, since they wouldn't need the clothes upon their return to London. In the evenings, they continued to dine out with Lily's friends on the Riviera (the Abitbols were in town from Rio de Janeiro) and draw up their renovation plans for the property on hotel stationery. “We were excited to be together but, also, totally at peace with each other,” recalled Bendahan.

But after Adriana and Eduardo arrived in Cannes, Bendahan couldn't help but notice “a dramatic decline” in his new wife. Days later, Lily informed him that Werner, her London chauffeur, was also flying down to Cannes to meet her.

Why was Werner flying down?

“Oh, he is bringing down a pair of shoes that I particularly like for
walking,” she told Bendahan, who immediately became suspicious. Since they had been together, Lily had never gone out walking. And while they were staying in Cannes, she never put on those shoes. “I can only assume that Werner was carrying a letter from Safra, either containing threats and/or promises. Probably both.”

Bendahan began to press Lily for details of her financial arrangements with Edmond, and the reasons for her sudden anxiety. After Werner's visit, “the pressure became intense,” recalled Bendahan. Lily began receiving “endless telephone calls during which I chose not to be present.” The calls were clearly from Safra. But again, this was nothing new. Since Lily had begun dating Bendahan, “there was pressure from the day that Safra found out that she was no longer spending her evenings at home in the event that he might phone or visit.”

Safra seems to have found out about the marriage during the negotiations to purchase the house at Golfe Juan. Did Zucker inform him? Or perhaps Lily broke the news to him herself. Perhaps this was her little bit of revenge on the Lebanese banker who had refused to make her his wife.

Regardless of how he found out, Lily began to receive a “fusillade” of calls from Edmond. Those calls clearly unnerved her, although it was unclear to Bendahan what they were discussing. Yet during one of those calls from Geneva, Lily passed the receiver to Bendahan. It was Edmond, straining to sound cheery. “He offered me his warmest congratulations on getting married to Lily.”

Still, Lily was clearly dreading her imminent return to London. In Cannes, “she was subjected to a barrage of telephone calls which had a discernible effect on her. I was concerned about this and she told me that she was under very great pressure as ‘he never thought I would marry you.'”

Despite the tension, Bendahan was still hopeful about their relationship. “On the airplane to London I asked Lily if she wanted to sit
next to her [daughter] as they [Lily and Adriana] had after all been separated for over a month,” he said. “Lily thought it a ridiculous suggestion and we held hands for the whole of the flight from Nice to London.”

However, things deteriorated almost as soon as they arrived in London. Within minutes of entering the Hyde Park Gardens flat, Lily showed signs of tension again, and went around inspecting every lampshade “as she claimed that burnt-out bulbs were never changed in her absence.” Suddenly, she had trouble sleeping.

“I now no longer had to press her to speak for she quite calmly told me that she was wondering if we had not made a mistake in marrying so hastily and that she was no longer even sure whether she loved me.” Lily told her new husband that she wanted to be alone for a few days, and even helped a dazed Bendahan pack a suitcase.

Bendahan was devastated, but agreed to give his new wife her own space. Surely Safra was putting pressure on her, but what else was driving this bizarre behavior? Perhaps it was the lawsuit that was scheduled to go to trial shortly in London. For weeks, Lily had repeatedly spoken about how much she hated her former sister-in-law Rosy and how Rosy was making her life miserable. On one occasion, she became so distraught about the upcoming trial that she begged Bendahan to hide a painting that she claimed was a Van Gogh that Rosy was alleging belonged to her family. Bendahan readily obliged and hid the painting, which was “dark and ugly” and belonged to the period before the artist discovered the French countryside. In more innocent days, it was the same painting that Alfredo had convinced his friend to cart from the Rio airport in a Volkswagen van years before. Lily had the painting professionally crated and shipped to Bendahan's office. That night, in a coincidence that he is hard-pressed to explain, thieves broke into his office, overturning his desk drawers, ransacking filing cabinets. They were clearly in search of valuables, but, curiously, they did not steal the Van Gogh, even though they had
punched several holes in the crate. The incident left him shaken, and he immediately called Lily to have the painting removed.

“That evening, she told everybody about the event and could not stop laughing about it and teasing me,” recalled Bendahan. “I wonder what her reaction would have been had it been stolen. I do not know what happened to the painting after she had it collected.”

Perhaps now the stress of the upcoming legal battle with Rosy was simply too much for her, thought Bendahan as he returned to the cold comfort of his messy flat, which was still in the process of being redecorated by Lily's interior designer. The old fabric had been torn off the walls, which were now bare, and the sitting room was littered with fabric swatches and paint samples. Later, he would be stuck with more than £10,000 in unpaid decorating bills.

Two days passed without word from Lily. Alone and completely bewildered, Bendahan grew frantic, dialing her number several times a day. There was no response from his wife. The servants had obviously been instructed not to forward his calls. On the one occasion when he was able to get through to her, he encountered a cold response: “When I thought that I would not be able to live through another minute I telephoned again and my wife calmly informed me that upon further consideration she had thought that it would be wiser not to call me back after all.”

When he couldn't stand to be away from her anymore, he showed up at her flat, sick with worry and completely sleep-deprived. Lily fell into his arms, clearly relieved to see him again. In that moment, life seemed to return to some sense of normalcy. They traded heartfelt apologies and made plans to have dinner later in the evening. Lily was scheduled to meet with Felix Klein, Alfredo's former business associate who had been so useful to her in the days after Alfredo died. Klein had been dispatched to Switzerland to remove Rosy's power of attorney from Alfredo's Swiss holdings at the Union Bank of Switzerland. He had also allegedly threatened Rosy when she tried to launch an investigation into Alfredo's death. Bendahan had met Klein in Rio
during their honeymoon. Klein, who now handled Lily's business affairs in Brazil, had met with the couple in the bar of the beachfront Leme Palace hotel in Rio where they had discussed Lily's finances. It was the only time he had seen Lily in a vicious mood. Where was the $15 million that was supposed to have been transferred to her in Europe? she had demanded of Klein. What had her “thief-director” done with her money? she demanded. Unbeknownst to Bendahan, Lily was speaking about Geraldo Mattos, Ponto Frio's chief director, who had been so indispensable to her when she was dealing with the arrangements for Alfredo's funeral and the annoying police investigation in Rio.