The Mansions of Limbo (13 page)

And there they were, Dorothy, Christine, and Phyllis, with Phyllis, as always, in the middle. Fake eyelashes, glitter on their blue eyeshadow, honey-colored falls on their honey-colored hair, and peach dresses covered with crystals. When they sang their familiar hits, like “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane,” “Melody of Love,” and “Sugartime,” which put them on the cover of
Life
magazine in 1958, they got excited applause of recognition. Phyllis gave the audience their cover charge’s worth. She did vocal impersonations of Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Merman, Pearl Bailey, and other stars of her era. And she was right: the audience loved them.

“Where do you sing next?”

“We might make a deal with Steve Wynn for the Mirage,” said Phyllis. The Mirage, due to open before the end of the year, is the newest of the hotels on the Vegas Strip. We were sitting at a table in a corner of the bar of the Fairmont, late, after her second show. Her sisters had gone upstairs. She was in a long red dress and wore dark glasses because she was still wearing her stage makeup.

“I don’t fear living, and I don’t fear dying,” she said. “You only live once, and I’m going to live it to the fullest, until away I go. And I’m going to continue singing as long as somebody wants me.”

June 1989

A
t first it seemed like a re-enactment of the sort of turn-of-the-century match Henry James or Edith Wharton might have written about, the marriage of a New World heiress and an Old World prince, a swap of money and title beneficial to both sides. Indeed, as we approach the turn of another century, the allure of grand titles for socially ambitious mothers with marriageable daughters seems not to have diminished, judging by the remarkable events in Venice during Easter weekend this year. No story by Henry James or Edith Wharton, however, would have ended with headlines such as this:
HEIRESS JILTED AS BRIDEGROOM RUNS OFF WITH BEST MAN
.

In this version of the tale, the heiress is an Australian named Primrose Dunlop, and the nobleman is the awesomely titled Prince Lorenzo Giustiniani Montesini, count of the Phanaar, Knight of Saint Sophia, Baron Alexandroff. A poor prince who claims to be “a small link in a chain that goes back to Constantine,” Prince Giustiniani, known to his friends as Laurie, is employed as a steward on Qantas Airlines. Lorenzo Montesini, as he was then called, appeared
on the social scene of Sydney in 1983, at a charity party at Fairwater, the mansion of Lady Fairfax, the widow of the Australian press lord. Affable, charming, socially adept, Lorenzo soon was in demand as an extra man. “He charmed his way into everyone’s house here,” one Sydney social figure told me. “He was asked to all the parties, between flights.”

When the Egyptian-born Montesini, who is forty-four, chubby, bouncy, elfin, and very short, arrived in Sydney from Melbourne, he came with his longtime companion, Robert Straub, with whom he had served in Vietnam. In Woolloomooloo, a middle-class suburb of Sydney, the men converted two rose pink cottages into their home, which they filled with gilded mirrors, Persian carpets, rococo furnishings, and tables covered with framed photographs of well-known people. Montesini described the princely possessions as “family things.”

Primrose Dunlop, the woman in question, was not a blushing debutante in her first bloom. Nor was she really an heiress, but merely the stepdaughter of a rich man who has two daughters of his own, who do not care much for their stepsister. Primrose is thirty-six, had been married before, briefly and unhappily, and is called Pitty Pat to distinguish her from her mother, Lady Potter, who is also named Primrose. Pitty Pat has had a variety of jobs over the years: she sold pots and pans in a department store, wrote social columns for two Sydney tabloids, did public-relations work for the British mogul Lord McAlpine, and, most recently, clerked as an eight-dollar-an-hour assistant to a haberdasher named John Lane, a great friend of her mother’s, who sometimes escorted Lady Potter on the endless round of parties and boutique openings that her much older husband did not wish to attend.

Lady Potter, who once raised French poodles and is
most often described by her friends as vivacious, became the fourth wife of Sir Ian Potter in 1975. Sleek, stylish, and very well dressed, she speaks in the grand vocal tones of a society lady. Her previous marriage, to Dr. Roger Dunlop, a surgeon, who is the father of Primrose, ended in divorce. Lady Potter, a tireless fund-raiser for charity, with a hardy appetite for publicity and social recognition, had set her sights far beyond Sydney and Melbourne. Described by an English acquaintance who has sat next to her at dinner on several occasions as “an expert dropper of key names meant to establish her credentials,” Lady Potter is referred to in the Australian social columns as “the Empress” and is said to revel in her nickname. She is considered by many to be the queen bee of the Sydney-Melbourne social axis, and her public-relations consultant, Barry Everingham, has gone so far as to describe Sir Ian and Lady Potter as the closest thing that Australia has to royalty.

Sir Ian, eighty-eight, is one of Australia’s most respected businessmen, but age has caught up with the old man. A number of people I spoke with described him as slightly “gaga.” Others said he was amazingly sharp for a man of his age. He played an integral, albeit passive, part in the Venetian nuptials, however, because his money was paying for everything. His fortune, which has been estimated at $48 million by some, less by others, was to finance the splendid wedding for the bride, and it was thought by many to be the lure for the groom. Sir Ian has a daughter named Robin from his first marriage, and a daughter named Carolyn Parker Bowles from his second marriage. Mrs. Parker Bowles, who lives in London, is the mother of Sir Ian’s two grandsons. “Sir Ian is a self-made man of enormous ability who, until all this, has been very quiet. He is a great Australian,” one Australian businessman
told me. “The poor man has been dragged into a situation which will appear in his obituary.”

Last year Lorenzo Montesini brought out a novel about Sydney society called
Cardboard Cantata
, which he dedicated to Lady Potter. Since no publisher picked up on it, the book was printed privately. It has been rumored that Lady Potter financed the publication of the four thousand copies, and she gave a launch party for the book, in an art gallery, which attracted three hundred of the city’s smartest citizens. It was on the occasion of that party that Lorenzo first aired his previously unsuspected titles of prince, count, knight, and baron.

The sheer awfulness of Lorenzo Montesini’s book was conveyed to me by the editor of an Australian magazine, who said, “I defy you to read it.” In an earlier, snobbier time, it would have been called a shopgirl’s book. The three leading characters, who vie with one another for leadership of Sydney society, are named Babylonia Grushman, Cooii Rundle, and Lady Millicent Bosenquet. Another character is described as coming from a “well-to-do but poor family.” Despite its social send-off, the book was, predictably, a colossal flop. Stacks of unsold copies gathered dust until the recent publicity created a belated demand and elevated them to the status of collector’s items. But the point was not the book, and the literary life was not the prince’s ambition. It seemed that it was the book
party
that led to the plans for a wedding. That night Lady Potter told the press, “I’ve known Lorenzo for years. He’s a dear sweet boy. Ian and I look upon him as family.” The steward-author-prince smiled and said, “I have arrived.”

From there, things moved quickly. The rose pink cottages became the setting for a round of parties, at which Pitty Pat and Lady Potter were always present. “Unless you entertain, you’re dead,” said Lorenzo in an early television
interview, speaking in his chatty manner, seated on a thronelike chair. “Montesini brought a manservant down from Thailand and dressed him in a
King and I
costume with the Giustiniani coronet on it,” said a friend who attended his parties. Surprisingly, it was Robert Straub, Lorenzo’s great friend, who inadvertently brought about the engagement when he jokingly remarked one evening after dinner, “Think about it, Primrose. If you were to marry Lorenzo, you would become a princess.” Although the remark was greeted with hoots of laughter, it set the idea in motion.

Soon after that, Lady Potter confirmed in a magazine interview that Lorenzo “telephoned and formally asked for my daughter’s hand in marriage.… I said that as long as he makes her happy, the answer’s yes.” He gave her an engagement ring of aquamarine and diamonds, modernized from a piece handed down to him by his grandmother.

No one loves a party more than Lady Potter, and she saw fit to celebrate the joyous news of her daughter’s engagement with two, one in Melbourne and a second in New York, at fashionable Mortimer’s, to which she invited some of the most promotable of New York’s social names, including Leonard Lauder and Nan Kempner.

The romantic city of Venice was decided on as the location for the wedding. Not only was Giustiniani one of the great titles of Venice, but Lady Potter had been renting palazzi there for several years and had come to know the small and exclusive English-speaking colony. In preparation, Pitty Pat became a Catholic; she received instruction from Father Vincent Kiss, and she was sponsored by John Lane, her boss and her mother’s walker. The Sydney and Melbourne newspapers followed every detail of the arrangements. The date was set for April 16, the day after Easter. The wedding would take place in the Basilica di San Pietro,
to which the bride would be oared in one of a flotilla of gondolas, followed by a grand reception and candlelit dinner in the marble hall of the Palazzetto Pisani on the Grand Canal, which the bride’s mother had leased for the occasion. Seventy Australian guests were invited to the lavish event.

Despite encouragement from Lady Potter, the affianced couple appeared in public infrequently, giving rise to rumors that theirs was a nonromantic liaison reeking of ulterior motives on both sides. When Montesini and Robert Straub, whose relationship was causing titters in Lady Potter’s circle, showed up at a party to celebrate the opening of a Chanel boutique in Sydney, John Lane, acting for Lady Potter, said to Lorenzo, “Don’t be seen in public with that man again.” The bride’s family was less than enthusiastic when Lorenzo announced that Straub would be his best man. Dissension arose. There were rumors, all unconfirmed, that lurid photographs existed.

Stories persisted in Sydney society that the prince was in it for the money. He himself reported to Pitty Pat that John Laws, one of the highest-paid radio announcers in the world, had told him, while he was pouring champagne for him in the first-class cabin on a Qantas flight, that his title should be worth at least $2 million to the Potters. Lorenzo was shocked. “People suggest that there is money in this for me. That’s utter rubbish,” he protested.

Before their departure for Venice, the prince and his princess-to-be posed for pictures and gave an interview for a long article in
Good Weekend
magazine in the
Sydney Morning Herald
, and it was that article, with the royal-looking photographs, that began the unraveling of their plans. Previously unknown relations of the prince came out of the woodwork and mocked his pretensions, disputing both the title and his right to use it. One cousin, Nelson Trapani, a
forty-nine-year-old retired Queensland builder, told the press, “Really, all this speculation about a title is a load of bulldust. I’d sooner sit down with a pie and watch the telly.”

Nonetheless, the group, which included Father Kiss, who was to perform the ceremony, took off amid whispers that all was not as it was supposed to be, with either the title or the romance, or anything else. Dr. Roger Dunlop, Pitty Pat’s real-father, was so opposed to his daughter’s choice of husband that he boycotted the wedding ceremony.

If Lorenzo was having second thoughts, he nonetheless went along with the plans, flying to Venice with Robert Straub and John Lane, Lady Potter’s great friend, who had been assigned the paternal function of giving the bride away, owing to the refusal of her real father and the inability of her stepfather because of his age. The groom-to-be was the only member of the wedding party without a confirmed seat on the plane. He traveled standby economy-class at his own expense. A curious twist of alliances occurred during the trip. Lane, who had previously been unfriendly to Montesini and Straub and had warned them at the Chanel opening not to appear together in public, discovered, Lorenzo later said, that “we were really quite nice guys after all and not as bad as we had been painted.”

On Good Friday, as Leo Schofield, an Australian journalist, and other guests were boarding their plane in Sydney for the long flight to Venice, they heard that the wedding had been called off.

What had up to then been merely a Sydney-Melbourne gossip-column story quickly turned into international headlines, and Pitty Pat and Lorenzo became, however briefly, household names, more famous in their disaster than they would ever have been in their marriage. “If it
was publicity they all wanted,” said one friend, “they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.”