Tycoon (46 page)

It was not the kind of business Jack Lear wanted to be in anymore.

L
ITTLE
J
ACK, AT SIXTEEN, WAS A STUDENT AT
B
RUNSWICK
Academy, a day school in Greenwich. The boys were encouraged to take part in athletics. Jack needed no encouragement. He loved all sports: lacrosse, soccer, field hockey, basketball. He especially liked sports that involved one-on-one competition and physical contact. Three times he was called before the headmaster.

“I hope I shan't have to tell you again, Mr. Lear, that you play too rough. Your aggressiveness on the playing fields is attracting unfavorable notice. The purpose of athletics is to build character as well as the body.”

“I supposed the purpose of a game was to win it, sir,” Jack said in his defense. “I play within the rules. I don't cheat.”

“That is not the point. You play too rough. What if someone were hurt?”

“I risk being hurt, too, sir.”

“Mr. Lear, I specifically order you to take it a bit easier when playing games.”

“Even if Academy loses, sir?”

“Even if Academy loses.”

C
URT
F
REDERICK RETIRED.
H
E WAS SIXTY-SIX, AND
J
ACK
couldn't talk him out of it. He bought a home in Scottsdale, Arizona—a stuccoed house supposed to look like adobe, so oppressed by the blazing sun that the front yard was green gravel instead of grass, which wouldn't grow there. The air conditioning was industrial strength, and in the backyard lay a large walled-in pool surrounded by lush shrubbery kept alive by nightly drenchings of water.

The Fredericks had been gone from New York about six months when a short story by Jason Maxwell appeared in
The New Yorker.
In part it read:

Many years ago, George Blake, being then a man frustrated and alone, had entered tentatively into a gay relationship. That is, he took a lover nicknamed Zip, a younger man willing to play the female role to his male role. In time George grew bored, even repelled, by his situation and left Zip and took a wife.

Zip was shattered. He felt he could not live without George's affection, without George's fatherly support, without even the discipline George had imposed on him—and George had imposed discipline on him, assiduously. Zip skidded downward in life, until he became a panhandler on the streets of New York.

Zip might have blackmailed George. He never did. He loved him too much to do that. He did one day diffidently suggest that George might help him a bit. George's wife, Jane, was a woman of fine Christian instincts, which is to say she was sympathetic and charitable, perhaps to a fault, and she suggested that Zip come and live with her and George. He could earn his keep, she said, by being useful around the apartment.

Thus was Zip turned into a domestic servant. He thrived in the role. George would no longer discipline him, but Jane would. Among the penances she imposed on him was requiring him to leave off his clothes for days at a time. Very close friends were allowed to see Zip. They were startled, to say the least, to be served cocktails by a stark-naked houseboy, and this in the home of a highly respected and eminently successful professional man.

Such a situation could not continue to run a smooth course indefinitely. Jane was hugely annoyed that Zip did not at all mind what she had supposed would be painful humiliation. No.
Au contraire
. Nothing could have pleased him more.

And so . . .

When Anne read the story she lied to Jack for the first time. Rather, she didn't actually lie to him; she just didn't tell him about the story Jason had written. Jack didn't read
The New Yorker
and didn't see the story. None of their friends said anything about it. The Fredericks said nothing about it. Maybe they hadn't seen it either.

But Anne was appalled. She knew that “George” was Curt, “Jane” was Betsy, and “Zip” was Willard Lloyd—Cocky.

She also knew how Jason had gotten the idea that Cocky ran around the Fredericks' apartment naked. Betsy had invited her to go to lunch one day. Anne had gone to the apartment to meet her. Betsy herself had answered the door. They had sat down for a drink before they went to the restaurant, and Betsy had served. Anne knew that Willard Lloyd, pleading abject poverty, had been allowed to join the Frederick household as a servant, and she had asked, casually, if it was the houseboy's day off. No, Betsy had said, Cocky was in the kitchen. Then Anne caught a glimpse of the houseboy and saw he was naked. With that, Betsy had laughed and called Cocky into the living room. “Our little secret,” she'd said. “I've always known who the little bastard is, and when I agreed to take him in as a servant I demanded—Don't tell Jack.”

Anne had not told Jack. But one day she had confided it to Jason, who apparently had found it too good a scene not to use.

She called him on it. “Jason,
for God's sake!
I trusted you!”

“And?” he asked, grinning. “Nobody's hurt. So far as I know, you're the only person who recognized the Fredericks. I've had no calls, no letters. But the story is
delicious!”

I
N THE FALL,
K
ATHLEEN
H
ORAN FOUND HERSELF ENROLLED
at a women's college with the phrase “Sacred Heart” in its name. Until now she had been educated at Sacred Heart day schools, but she would board at the college. No longer could she escape overnight from the strictures of the nuns.

She had heard stories of how the Sacred Heart nuns engaged in self-flagellation. Here, at the college, girls in the dormitory had seen nuns whipping themselves, never each other, with what they called “disciplines.” Under their habits some of them wore hair shirts that chafed them all day long. Small wonder that they were irritable and impatient.

They were capable of great kindness too, and no one could deny their devotion, but Kathleen quickly came to believe she had been placed in the custody of a gaggle of madwomen.

On the afternoon when she heard of the assassination of President Kennedy, she left the school without permission and went home. Her mother drove her back immediately, and Kathleen was campused for a month, meaning she could not leave her room after seven o'clock, except to go to the bathroom. Her mother approved, agreeing with the mother superior that Kathleen was becoming a bit willful.

Kathleen decided she hated everything about the school and everything about her life, including her pietistic mother. But there was no escape.

1964

A
LTHOUGH
J
ACK OWNED AND OSTENSIBLY CONTROLLED
C
ARL
ton House Productions, he left its day-to-day operations in the hands of skilled men and women who had been with the company for a long time. His brother Bob had essentially retired. He and Dorothy had built a home in New Mexico and spent most of their time lying in the sun and playing golf.

Carlton House owned a vast and valuable library of films. Jack had authorized the spending of money to buy up the libraries of studios that had ceased production. He enlisted CH in a program to preserve old films, transferring them from the brittle and flammable materials on which they had been shot to more durable materials. Opening old film cans often resulted in bitter disappointment—the film had dissolved and lay as dust under corroded reels.

Selected films were copied to videotape. This made them available for television broadcasting. Dr. Loewenstein believed that a new business would develop: that of selling videotapes to home consumers, as video players came down in price for a consumer market. The tapes would be a lucrative business asset, he predicted.

The CH soundstages were now devoted almost exclusively to television production.

Sally Allen had quietly remarried Len, somehow managing to avoid publicity. They came to Jack and proposed to make a picture based on the lives of two married couples who were neighbors and shared the ups and downs of everyday life. Jack read Len's script. It had humor, but it was not a comedy. Sally would play a serious dramatic role. Jack consulted with people whose judgment he trusted and agreed to make the picture. They put it together fast, on a low budget, starring Sally and
players from several successful but now canceled situation comedies.

To Jack's dismay, when Oscar time came, Sally Allen and Joni Lear both were nominees for Best Actress. Sally won.

1965

F
OR THE FIRST TIME,
J
ACK WENT TO
S
T
. C
ROIX WITHOUT
Anne. She had begun to feel chronically tired, and at the suggestion of her doctor she checked into Greenwich Hospital for a few days for a series of tests. Not wanting Jack to hang around the hospital wringing his hands, she virtually ordered him to fly to St. Croix for a few days in the sun.

The day before he was to leave, he ran into Jason Maxwell at lunch. He mentioned his trip and said sadly it was going to be a lonely few days because neither Anne nor any of his children could accompany him. Jason brightened and said he'd be glad to fly down and try to be amusing.

Jack accepted his offer and said he'd pay his fare. Jason wouldn't hear of it.

They arrived in St. Croix on Wednesday, February 17.

Jason was as diverting as he had promised he would be. During the whole visit he rarely wore anything but a pair of skimpy shorts—cutoff jeans with frayed bottoms—and a hat made of palm fronds, which he'd bought from a beach peddler.

Jason was just thirty-two, which reminded Jack that
he
had only a year to go before he turned sixty.

The hair was gone from the front of his head, leaving his forehead bald. The rest of his hair was thick but mostly gray. He combed it forward as best he could, but it still didn't cover his entire pate. He had developed jowls, and the flesh under his chin was loose. His eyes, which had always tended to droop, now had wrinkles at their corners. Nonetheless, his face was still lively and expressive, and he smiled readily.

His body did not show his age as much as his face did. Even without dieting or exercising in any systematic way, he remained nearly as trim as he had been as a man of forty. He had not slowed down.

On their third night in St. Croix, Jack encouraged Jason to dress so they could go out to dinner. After a couple of rum cocktails, they ate a seafood dinner accompanied by wine. It was a pleasant evening, largely because of Jason's all-but-obsessive effort to be entertaining. Over dinner he gossiped about a dozen celebrity-type men and women, not so much about sexual peccadilloes as about embarrassing situations into which they had fallen.

One story had to do with a Broadway actress who had wet her pants at 21. Another had to do with a United States Senator who had been wakened by the police in the stairwell leading to a cellar that housed a notorious Queens numbers drop.

Jack knew these were the kinds of stories Jason told Anne because they so much amused her. When the two men arrived back at the house, Jack poured brandy and sat down in the living room to hear more.

They drank, and Jason told two more stories. Then he fell moodily silent.

“Well,” said Jack. “I suppose it's time to call it a day.”

“Jack . . .” Jason murmured.

“Hmm?”

“Have you ever slept with a man?”

Jack shook his head.

“Did you ever want to? Did you ever think about it?”

Jack, who had been poised to stand, settled back in his chair. “I can't say I've never thought about it or wondered about it. Why?”

Jason lifted his eyebrows and smiled. “Well . . .”

“It's your thing, isn't it? What am I hearing, a proposition?”

“A suggestion. Respectfully offered. You won't hate me for asking, will you?”

Jack leaned back in his chair and for a moment closed his eyes. “No, Jason, I'm not going to do it, but I won't hate you for asking.”

“You impress me as a man who wants to experience everything this world has to offer. I imagine there is not much that
could happen between a man and woman that you haven't tried. That's why I thought you might want to complete your inventory of experiences.”

Jack reached for the bottle and poured himself more brandy. He handed the bottle to Jason and said, “I won't deny that it's an intriguing idea. You're right when you suggest there is little I haven't experienced.”

Jason curled his lips in a salacious smile. “Me too,” he said. “I have a friend—I see him rarely, and you'll understand why—who beats me with a whip. He puts real
welts
on me, Jack! And—can you believe this?—it is
delicious!”

Jack stared into his glass for a moment. “My first wife was like that: an utter masochist. Not at first. Later, when it took more and more to satisfy her. Jason . . . it killed her.”