Madness Under the Royal Palms (7 page)

Palm Beach is an island full of widows who assuage their aloneness with palliatives from booze to boys. Brownie attracted an ever-changing, eclectic entourage who were always ready to party. There were men, but they always seemed to disappear; friends were more reliable. Inviting Brownie to your gathering meant you invited her entire gang.

Brownie was never good with money. She traveled first class and stayed in only the best hotels. She tipped generously and spent carelessly. “Money doesn’t make you happy,” Brownie reflects. “Listen, I’ve had it all. I was born rich, and then you sit there and watch it all taken away. So what do you do? Why have money? If I have money, that’s the way it goes. It’s only the past few years that I’ve been watching what I spend. I’ve been very rich and I’ve been very poor. Many times, round and round we go.”

Brownie decided to get groups together to travel to various exotic spots. It would be fun, and she could make a little money. Her name still had a social cachet, and wherever she decided to go, people were welcoming. She charged her friends an all-inclusive fee and took care of all the details.

The late James Sheeran, the witty publisher of
Palm Beach Society
, dubbed them “Brownie’s Troop,” and soon they were flying everywhere from Argentina to Morocco. One evening at the hotel in Casablanca before dinner, the troop assembled in the bar. The hostess would not think of limiting the drinks, and everyone was knocking down Dom Pérignon like keg beer. The bill was eleven thousand dollars, but Brownie paid it with a smile and a secret grimace, since there went all her profits, and more, leaving Brownie looking up out of the same financial hole, as she returned to Palm Beach and its endless round of parties.

I
had only seen Eddy Louis on the tennis court, and I hardly recognized him at a charity ball impeccably garbed in a tuxedo that looked as if it had been hand-fitted to his trim form. His wife, Vera, was equally well dressed in a gown that fit just as perfectly. In the half-light of the ballroom, she looked no older than fifty, the perfect partner to her handsome husband. Many of the other married couples shuffled in pedestrian two-steps as if they were counting out each move, but Vera and Eddy seemed to float above the room, Fred and Ginger among a bunch of clods.

At my table I heard a couple of men berating Eddy as a repulsive showman who should have been parking their cars or serving their meals, not waltzing with one of the ladies of the island. But Vera and Eddy danced far above their pettiness and spite.

It took an extraordinary effort for Vera to create the illusion of youth. She began each day in her dressing gown in front of a large magnifying mirror, applying makeup. Vera worked with precision and concentration for close to an hour. She was a tiny woman with birdlike bones, dyed blond hair, and a trim, supple body that matched her countenance. In the proper lighting, and that was the only lighting in which she presented herself, she appeared at the oldest a well-preserved, pretty woman in late middle-age. She was eighty-five years old, but saying so was like exposing a magician’s greatest illusion and turning his masterwork into a tawdry trick.

Only when Vera was completely satisfied with her makeup did she leave her bedroom and walk into the library to have breakfast. Her morning breakfast was always two cups of black coffee followed by a glass of hot water as a constitutional. Fifty-four-year-old Eddy sat on a sofa across from her in a white fluffy bathrobe that, when he could not be naked, was his outfit of choice. Eddy was Vera’s greatest youth tonic. She did not think of Eddy as three decades her junior, but as her contemporary. He was as narcissistic as his wife, and as disciplined in his lifestyle. He not only swam in the nude, he gardened in the nude, oblivious to his seven-year-old daughter, the Latina maid, or anyone else who happened to be around. Vera celebrated that aspect of Eddy’s personality, taking great pleasure in looking at his tanned, naked body.

Vera was obsessed with retaining her beauty, and in that quest there was no journey too long and no act too difficult. She had waited until she was sixty to fly to London for her first face-lift. Since then she had gone through an endless series of procedures, including other face-lifts, breast lifts, tummy tucks, liposuction, and butt implants.

Not everything worked out well, and for a while her left eye would not close properly. That became something else that she had to disguise. To maintain her shapely legs, she took dance classes in which she was a good thirty years older than anyone else. She worked out in the pool every day holding a spring between her legs, an exercise that she believed kept her vagina tight.

In the mornings, Eddy often came into her bedroom for elaborate and lengthy lovemaking. Vera exalted in her sexuality, telling her husband, “I’m a lady in the drawing room, and a whore in the bedroom.” Eddy said that touching Vera’s body was unlike anything he had experienced before. Her breasts stood out with perfect precision and her buttocks were so firm that he was convinced he could have bounced a basketball off of them. At times, he worried that he might crush her small, fragile bones. In the end, she gasped and whimpered as they lay there spent in each other’s arms.

Vera had told her closest friend, Countess Mimy Landau, that she never had an orgasm. She expressed no more regret than if she had said she had never visited Lhasa, a distant, fascinating city, but one to which she had never managed to travel. Romance was her favorite performance art, and her climaxes were as much theater as the rest of it. She was a sensualist who enjoyed the intimate play of sex, and considered it little more than an ironic quirk that climaxing was a mystery to her.

Vera saw sex primarily as therapeutic, another device to prevent her body from sending out a deceitful message. “Okay, that’s my face,” she said, looking into the mirror, in a monologue recorded by her granddaughter Renee Fadiman. “It’s always a surprise to me that my body grows old around my very young soul.”

I
N ADDITION TO BEING
preoccupied with her looks, Vera was obsessed by the Shiny Sheet. Two days after Barbara’s party for Prince Edward, the story of the event covered half the front page of the
Palm Beach Daily News
. At the top was the three-column photo of Barbara greeting the prince, her hands enveloping Edward’s, and a second smaller photo of the royal place setting. Vera had a former lover who had been the Lord Mayor of London, and she would have conversed naturally with the prince. It had apparently been a splendid evening marred by a faux pas that Vera never would have made, and that society editor Shannon Donnelly duly noted. A number of the guests had made “three or four glances at the next table, and it was clear that the royal personage was enjoying himself in high style, and he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. No matter. Palm Beach being Palm Beach, a few guests started quietly slipping away. Somebody had to be home before the milk truck.”

If Vera had been married to someone other than Eddy, she and her husband would have been desired guests at many splendid parties. She always behaved with impeccable manners, and never would have left Elephant Walk before Prince Edward. She was full of the melancholy sense that she might never again attend such a gathering; not with Eddy, and perhaps not with anyone else.

W
HEN
V
ERA
L
OUIS LEFT
the house just before noon in March 1997, Eddy brushed his lips against his wife’s cheek and told her, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” Vera said in a voice that was scarcely a whisper as she hurried out the double doors and got into her Rolls-Royce. Her husband had kissed her, but nothing was the same.

Vera generally drove the British automobile with the stately slowness that seemed to be its most appropriate speed. However, she was already a few minutes late for lunch with two of her lady friends at a midtown restaurant, and she drove up Regent Park with uncommon urgency.

Regent Park made a dangerous, blind entrance onto South County Road. Vera always had a nervous moment gingerly nudging out of Regent Park, hoping that the cars cruising southward would see her Rolls and slow down. As she quickly pulled across the road and turned north, she could have driven straight into the Bath and Tennis Club, its back to the road as if it wanted no truck with the riffraff who traveled along the public highway.

In her three decades on the island, Vera had never entered the portals of the restricted B&T as a guest. Vera was a flawlessly well-mannered lady with every human attribute the club members celebrated, except for Christian faith. Her father, Mendel Racolin, had been a Menshevik, a social Democrat, in Czarist Russia. Born in 1911, Vera was brought up in an antireligious home, in which her father viewed Judaism as an anachronistic relic. Vera grew up believing in disbelief, her atheism as pronounced and as certain as her belief in gravity.

Her father had left Russia and was successful enough buying apartment buildings in New York City that he gave up practicing his profession of dentistry. The properties were worth tens of millions of dollars, and all of her adult life, Vera had been immune from most financial concerns. Her wealth and her atheism worked in tandem, giving her life an imperative to take what she wanted and to enjoy it.

Vera had no sooner passed B&T than the apricot-colored spire and red Cuban tiled roof of Mar-a-Lago loomed up, the property stretching from the ocean to the Intracoastal Waterway. Mar-a-Lago is the most famous monument on the island. The 114-room building has a mythical aura, as if somewhere in the recesses of the 62,000-square-foot mansion resides the spirit of Palm Beach’s earliest years.

Vera had been to this most celebrated of Palm Beach estates many times. When she had arrived on the island in 1970, Marjorie Merriweather Post still reigned over Mar-a-Lago with an impeccable sense of propriety that had changed little since she opened the estate in January 1927. The four-times-married cereal heiress was largely deaf, but that didn’t prevent her from having formal dinners for thirty-six, in which a liveried footman stood behind every chair in the gilded dining room. And she still had her celebrated weekly square dances, when notables and professional dancers mingled in cowboy garb, cloverleafing and do-si-doing until precisely ten o’clock, when the heiress ordained that it was time for everyone to leave.

Mar-a-Lago was now a club owned by Donald Trump. Vera had not joined, largely because she did not have the ready cash that everyone thought she had, but she and Eddy were frequent guests, especially at charity balls. Just the previous month, they had been there for the Heart Ball. Vera bought one new gown a year, and for this occasion she had purchased a stunning, full-length brocaded dress.

A
S
V
ERA PASSED
M
AR-A-LAGO
and continued north on the coastal road, she drove by mansions to which she had been invited over the years. When she looked at these estates, she often thought as much of the social occasions as of the people who lived there. She had measured out her life in wine and canapés, spending endless days preparing for parties, attending parties, and reflecting on parties.

Vera’s first husband, James Fadiman, was a story editor at RKO and MGM, and the father of their two sons, Jeffrey and James. Fadiman was an austere, principled intellectual, and as time went on, Vera could hardly abide him.

Vera was used to being the most beautiful woman in a room, and she was always anxious when she went with her husband to Hollywood parties attended by stars such as Rita Hayworth or Jane Russell. One evening as Vera sat before her mirror preparing herself, Fadiman paced the room looking at his watch. “Let it go,” he fumed in exasperation. “You’ll never be pretty enough to compare with the people at the party.” Vera said nothing, but she added the brutal dismissal to her list of reasons why she was beginning to despise this unpleasant man she had married.

When young James fell sick with tuberculosis, Vera moved with her two sons to the dry air of Tucson, Arizona. Although she had no more interest in the management of her fortune than she did in the journey made by her veal cordon bleu from pasture to table, she was as much defined by money as if she had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Whatever the momentary vicissitudes of her life, she had a way out.

Whereas many young mothers would have accepted the tedium of their days succoring their sickly son while married to a man they no longer loved, to Vera it was a cruel attempt to block her pursuit of pleasure. She needed to have a life full of dramatic romance. She was a beguilingly feminine woman with gentle manners, and a hushed voice that men leaned forward to hear. She had the first of her many affairs in Tucson. Most of the men she loved never realized that the pursued was the pursuer, and that this was an imperious woman who sought her pleasures with single-minded purpose.

As soon as her sons were largely grown up, Vera divorced not only her husband, but everything he valued. She was not a reader of books, and found tedious the palaver of his Hollywood set. She walked away from that former sort of life for good. “My mother equated my father’s ice-cold intellectuality with weakness,” says her son Jeff. “She sought out men who were very different. Having bad taste in men meant choosing men who were anti-intellectual, verbally crude, and with ethics geared more toward the exploitation of women and the harming of men than the uplifting of women and the camaraderie of men.”

Vera turned determinedly toward a life of pleasure. She found fascinating what others would have called only trouble. She liked wild, bad boys, and fancied that other women would have liked them too, if only they dared. Vera married one of the worst, or as she saw it, one of the best: a gorgeous impecunious young Corsican who had the morals of a pirate. That marriage did not last, but it hardly mattered, for there was always a chorus line of men waiting to step forward to whirl Vera around for a dance or two. She was rarely alone.

In 1957, Vera settled upon Philip Lukin as her third husband, a twice-divorced New York advertising man who had the brash aggressiveness that was the next best thing to a true bad boy. She entered into Lukin’s hard-drinking, hard-smoking, blazingly fast world. If one party bored her, they moved on to the next.

When Lukin retired from his New York company in 1970, the couple moved to Palm Beach, where Philip purchased the
Palm Beach Social Observer,
a society magazine now called
Palm Beach Society
. The publication held more to advertising than to journalism, and was a natural for Lukin. Nary was a harsh word written about the princes and pretenders of Palm Beach. Having your photo in formal dress in the
Social Observer
granted immediate status, and there were few limits to what aspirants would pay and do to be in its pages. For the most part, Lukin celebrated many people who invited him and Vera into their homes only because of what he could do for them in his society magazine. And every evening they were part of the endless swirl of parties and balls that made up the season.

When Vera’s two sons came to visit, they could not abide staying for more than a day or two. As much as they loved their mother, they despised everything they believed Palm Beach represented. Their lives became studious critiques of wealth and privilege. Jeff was one of the first Peace Corps volunteers, and after serving in Tanzania, spent most of his life in the African bush either leading wildlife safaris or pursuing academic research. James became a Jungian psychologist, and lived modestly like his brother.