A Hamptons Christmas (20 page)

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Authors: James Brady

BOOK: A Hamptons Christmas
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He blessed himself quickly, in the right to left manner favored by the Eastern Church.
“Mahogany speeding boats. How fortunate you are,” Alix said somewhat vaguely.
“Would anyone like a drink?” Nicole asked, the tea never actually having arrived. I certainly did but didn't want to say so, maintaining a stiff upper lip with people the cut of whose jib my father didn't like.
“Is there some champers?” Alix inquired, not permitting her prejudices to get in the way of a properly chilled Dom.
While we waited to see if the drinks trolley would eventually arrive, Nicole launched into a catalog of her former husband's sins.
“Last year when his father died, Dick's father, mind you, not mine, a decent old party totally unlike his son, I hurried to Geneva, snatched up my daughter from the convent, and flew to New York at my own expense to attend the funeral. But when I billed Dick later for airfare, hotels, limos, and the like, he refused to pay.”
When neither Alix or I expressed outrage at this, Nicole drove home her point:
“It was
his
old man we were burying. And at
my
expense. Did you ever?”
The front desk called up, a clerk on Sister Infanta's payroll reporting in.
“A Mr. Odets is down here in the lobby asking questions about your visitors, Ms. Driver. Shall I issue a no comment?”
“Odets! That bastard,” Nicole exploded. “Dick's paid thug. Mademoiselle Javert, can you—”
“‘Sister Infanta,' please. Let's try not to blow my cover.”
“Of course.”
Sister continued. “I'll nip down the back stairs and plant a false trail or two. A
bientôt
.”
Count Vlad had a bottle tucked somewhere in the luggage and pulled it out now to pour himself a drink, not bothering to offer one to the rest of us. It seemed to be a vodka or gin with an indecipherable Balkan label.
“Chin-chin,” he toasted us, drawing a raised eyebrow from Alix.
“I say,
are
they sending up some champers?” she asked.
Nicole was the one pacing now. “What concerns me, and what really should be the focus of our attention, is of course—”
“Your child,” Her Ladyship offered.
“Yes, yes,” Nicole said dismissively, “there's that. But I know Dick. He's a louse but clever. He'll have Howard Rubenstein putting out press releases any hour now, pleading his case and trashing me and the count, claiming it's my fault our daughter ran away. There's another court hearing coming up in The Hague next month, and he's out to score points.”
Vlad looked up from his glass.
“He do that all times, Dick. What a bastard, mein Gott, worser than der Turks of old, worser even than the ruffians in our Coastal Guards.”
“Well, he'd better act swiftly,” Nicole declared, “because I'm ready with a preemptive strike. Just wait till I get Peggy Siegal on the phone. I don't want desk clerks issuing ‘no comments' when I can get Peggy Siegal. If we're to have a public-relations war, let it begin with Peggy.”
Even the London-based Alix knew about Peggy Siegal, New York's “flack from hell.”
“I say, Beecher. They're rolling up the heavy artillery now. When you call on Peggy, these are indeed desperate hours.”
When I brought the conversation back to Emma and inquired if either parent had any intention of seeing her while in the Hamptons and assuring themselves she'd get safely back to Switzerland and the convent, Nicole said vaguely that anything was possible and thanked us for our concern. By the time we left a few moments later, she was tearing and ranting over the phone to Peggy Siegal and drafting releases. “Put out that quote from the
National Enquirer,
what Dick said about the models. Yes, that's it, ‘So many cover girls, so little time.'” She was still talking to Peggy as we left, without having settled with us just how or when, or even
if
, she wanted her daughter back.
Were the Stowe family plus Alix more or less acting
in loco
parentis
until the convent reopened? Or would Dick Driver be more malleable and agree to take the kid back?
The walk-in closet—the goddamned closet!—needs a $6,500 carpet …
We left the Admiral comfortably ensconced before a roaring fire in his den, being cheated at poker by the kid, and drove over to confront Driver at the Meadow Club (Odets had spoken carelessly and Jesse Maine phoned with his whereabouts). Having failed totally with Nicole, I was anything but hopeful. Yet one had to try. Alix and I were in agreement on that; the Drivers were dreadful people. But they were Emma's parents.
As a member, not of the Meadow, but of the Maidstone, I was able to give the secret club handshake to a flunky and send up my name to Driver. He was truculent at first, which I fully understood, given that I had written a fairly critical piece for
Parade
about that megalomaniacal ninety-story high-rise he was building near my apartment in Sutton Place, which was going to cast into perpetual shadow much of the East Side (unless the FAA's preliminary injunction held up in court). And then there was the photo op manqué at FAO Schwarz. But when I introduced Her Ladyship, Dick overcame his sneering disdain for Grub Street and turned on the old smooth, inviting us to drinks in the club bar. That was where Driver, with or without help from the Whitneys or the late Alf
Vanderbilt, had set up a command center, issuing statements hourly through the Howard Rubenstein public-relations apparat, contradicting rival claims put out by Nicole's PR woman, and extolling Dick's charities and virtues of every sort.
Alix ordered a Dom and I took black coffee. When we'd settled in, I got to the point. “This girl of yours, Driver.”
“Which one, Kim or Miss Israel?”
“Your daughter, remember?”
“Oh, sure. Good kid. How is she?”
So far, as bad as he was, Dick was one up on Nicole, who hadn't really asked.
When I nailed him on the question of which parent was willing to take responsibility and ensure that Emma returned safely to school in January, Dick became expansive.
“Look, Stowe, Your Ladyship, in theory of course a child ought to be with her mother. But a Dragon Lady like Nicole?” Dick pulled out several sheets of yellow legal-pad stationery. “Listen to this, her latest demands above and beyond alimony and basic child support. Next month at The Hague she'll formally petition the court. I got hold of the details through, well, let's not get into that.”
I saw the fine hand of Odets here somewhere. But Dick began to read:
“For our daughter's bedroom, the bedroom alone, mind you, at Nicole and Vlad's place in Bucharest: $130,000 in furnishings and decorations, a $19,000 antique desk and chair, $6,500 to paint the ceiling, a bed for $6,500, a toy chest for $1,560. All that just for the kid's bedroom. For her bathroom there are $10,000 curtains, $4,500 in wallpaper, $7,540 in plumbing. The walk-in closet—the goddamned closet!—needs a $6,500 carpet, $2,300 in wallpaper, and $3,900 in prints. Prints? What prints do you need in the closet? The damned kid's ten years old!”
There was plenty more. When a club page came up with a cell phone, Driver excused himself to take the call. “Howard Rubenstein's office,” he told us in an aside.
“Yes? Absolutely. If Peggy Siegal is sending out releases about me and Heidi Klum, issue a dignified ‘no comment.' But then
release some of the juicier stuff in Nicole's last sworn deposition, about the Impaler. Yes, that's the stuff. Pull it out of the transcript and call it in to Cindi Adams and Rush and Molloy in the
Daily News.
Liz Smith? No, give her something exclusive. You know how she gets.”
When he hung up, Dick told us with a smirking grin about the trancript passage he especially liked:
“Someone got an audiotape of Nicole and the Count at a hotel in Venice during their lovemaking. Apparently in the urgency of passion, Nicole is heard to cry out, ‘Impale me! Impale me!'”
He seemed quite pleased with himself, but even Alix blinked at that one. “I say, Mr. Driver!”
“Sorry, Your Ladyship,” he said, trying to wipe away the smirk. I reminded Dick why we were here, that the Stowe family's only concern was the Drivers' daughter, not their lawsuits or press releases. But when I pressed the question, Dick said he might have to return quickly to the city and it would be inconvenient to be burdened with a child.
“Your
child,” I couldn't resist pointing out.
“Of course, of course. But so many things are moving too fast. Certain moneyed interests are said to be buying a vast tract out here in Montauk. I've got to see my people on this.”
“Oh?” I smelled something here. “Is there a Native American tribe involved?”
Driver jumped up from the table. “Damn, yes! I thought we had the exclusive on the deal. Don't tell me it's common knowledge.”
“Not at all,” I said smoothly, “a few insiders only at this stage. Might I ask who your contact is?”
Driver looked around furtively. “Odets came up with him. A local fellow of enmormous influence and connections. The idea is to dredge a deep-water port at Montauk suitable for ocean liners, a shortcut avoiding all that New York Harbor traffic. A duty-free port and a Native American Indian casino all in one. Bullet trains into midtown Manhattan every hour on the hour. Every car a club
car. With roulette wheels and slots if statutes permit. It'll be the biggest thing since the Opera House in Sydney. A local developer named Wyseman Clagett wants a piece of the deal, and I'm to do the contracting.”
“Which Indians you dealing with?” I asked.
“The Shinnecocks. A chief named Maine.”
“But he's …” Her Ladyship began.
“Alix, we've been sworn to secrecy. Chief Maine made us promise.”
Driver's eyes were bigger than ever. This thing could be huge. He was counting the money already.
“Of course,” Alix said, nonchalance at its best. “How thoughtless of me.”
A promising little firm headed by two men called Allen and Gates …
I made one more hapless stab at the subject of Dick's daughter, and we left, using Alix's phone to call Jesse from the car, telling him what Driver said.
“That's Montaukket land, not Shinnecock,” I reminded Jesse. “You can't sell it because you don't own it. Besides, you've been claiming for years, on religious grounds, that you oppose casinos.”
“Hell, Beecher, you know that and I know that. But there's a lot better profit margin if you can sell something you don't own. That way you don't have to put up no cash first. There's no damned initial investment. And this Driver is just gonna love them Montauketts down there taking the waters at Gurney's. They'll get along fine. Clagett's in it, too. And he's so crooked he'll lie even when truth wins the election. Or so I casually suggested to Lefty, who passed on the info to his boss.”
Jesse Maine, who'd been hanging with Lefty Odets, was eloquent in his admiration for Driver's generosity. As he assured his new pal:
“You know, Lefty old compadre, your Mr. Driver could win friends for hisself here in the Hamptons and right across the country, setting up scholarships and all manner of gifts and grants for
worthy applicants among the Shinnecock Indian Nation. Gestures like that do win favor with oppressed people. And might even convince us to let Mr. Driver in on opportunities undreamt of by less generous and charitable men.”
Without letting Odets know about it, Jesse had at the same time affixed a bumper sticker on the rear of Lefty's rented car (and was wondering if he could also slip one onto Dick Driver's limo): AMERICA WAS BUILT ON INDIAN GRAVES.
This tended not to be a popular sentiment with many of the locals, but it cheered the Shinnecocks. And impressed innocent outlanders like Driver, who thought he was catching, quite early in the curve, a new wave of Native American indignation, which he might ride to a very profitable conclusion. When it came to the art of deal making, whom would a prudent investor back: a lousy Indian tribe or the bright young man who outsmarted his mentor and, in the end, took away Jacob Marley's own company?
Well, if you read the tabloids and tune in occasionally to
Entertainment Tonight
or the
Geraldo
show, you know about the twenty-four-hour firefight that ensued.
January was swiftly bearing down on us, a new year, a brand-new century, a fresh millennium, and more to the point, a return ticket on the Concorde to Paris and Emma's convent school beckoning beyond the Alps. If we—Alix, my father, and I—were ever to accomplish a single constructive act on behalf of our little girl lost, it was now. The problem was, both Nicole and Dick were threatening a return to Manhattan or other parts before a fresh blizzard buried eastern Long Island, closed down the airports, and cut the roads and railroads in between. Nicole and Count Vlad wanted to get out simply because they were bored; Dick Driver had the legitimate excuse of needing to appeal a Federal Aviation Administration injunction against his skyscraper. Left behind, in the “boring” and soon-to-be-snowbound Hamptons, to keep an eye on young Emma and Nosey Parkers like us, would be Mr. and Mrs. Driver's private eyes, and their respective PR counsels. Just how, if ever, were we going to get Nicole and Dick and their only child on the same damned page?
In consequence of trying to answer that question, we would have our own bloodless version of a “gunfight at the OK corral,” featuring Dick versus Nicole, Sister Infanta versus Lefty Odets, Peggy Siegal versus Howard Rubenstein, and a ten-year-old girl in the middle. Before it was over, even Jesse and the Shinnecocks, merchant banker Henry Rousselot, Park Avenue lawyer Bryan Webb, as well as Peanuts Murphy and the Bonac Boys, would be involved. As Chief Maine put it, “It would of done credit to the Earps and the Clantons.” Though there were a few frayed and hanging threads still to be tidied up.
My father, the Episcopalian, blamed Rome. “That Papal Nuncio they sent out here to check out Sister Infanta. He seems to be conducting a foreign policy all his own. Whatever happened to the separation of Church and State?”
The Admiral tended to exaggerate when it came to Catholic bashing. But on this, he did seem to have a point.
Even on the marginal question of whether a visiting Catholic prelate should be meeting with a minor émigré group such as Professor Wamba dia Wamba's. The two men had a cocktail at Nick & Toni's, but Wamba came away without anything like official recognition of the Congolese government in exile.
“De facto recognition, my dear Wamba,” said the Nuncio, “must depend on the willingness of your People's Popular Front to guarantee freedom of action for our missionaries in the field. Shooting priests and raping nuns just isn't the way to go, old chap, I suggest to you in all sincerity.”
“You have my word, Nuncio.”
“Then, my good fellow, count on my conveying your assurances to the appropriate figures in Rome.”
Less successful was the Papal Nuncio's brief meeting (this time the drinks were at Della Femina's on North Main Street) with Count Vlad.
“Transylvania,” the count began, “can't be extending friendship hands to the Church, I swear to Gott, thanks to Romanian bastards.”
“But it would be such a decent gesture on your part,” the Nuncio
persisted, “and go a long way toward convincing other nations to look favorably on an independent Transylvania.”
The Impaler shook his handsome head.
“Us Transylvanians is, ourselves, der victims, Gott knows, Bishop. An oppressor state is Romania, everybody could tell you dat. But I swear to Gott, the minute dey put my own family on der throne of a free Transylvania, recognition of duh Vatican will be der first business. Dat first morning I put on duh crown, you got my vote. But don't hold no breath, Nuncio. Dem Romanians is ruffians. Worser den Turks. Don't give nothing up for free. Dey like owning Transylvania!”
“My God!” the Nuncio thought to himself. He was too polite to say, “These people are worse than the Congolese.” But at least the Transylvanians didn't shoot, or not at priests. Too busy shooting one other. He and Count Vlad wrestled for the drinks check (the Impaler permitted the priest to get it).
Sister Maria Infanta took advantage of these distractions to resign the Nicole account and departed by hired car for Manhattan to take a meeting at Michael's restaurant on West Fifty-fifth with Binky Urban, the powerful ICM literary agent. Hucko's miraculous return, after a month in the north Atlantic, had deeply impressed Binky (who doesn't impress easily, I assure you). Perhaps the nun's prayers and a Russian trawler were pure coincidence. But America was hungry for heroics, and best-sellers had been conjured up from less, so that a book deal was in the works.
Was Sister really the heiress apparent to Mother Teresa's charitable mantle? If so, the “Bride of Christ's” thoughts, favorite prayers and hymns, and pithy sayings might well sell in a handsome trade paperback as interpreted and translated into readable, colloquial English by a marquee name writer. No one was quite sure if the idea would fly, but they were already talking TV movies and Internet Web sites. Also a very interested, though somewhat uneasy, party, George Plimpton, who'd been taking down Sister Infanta de Castille's every word for yet another of his oral histories.
“I admit,” George told chums at the Maidstone, “she gets off some wonderful lines. But to segue from that to her being the next
Mother Teresa, well, it's a reach. For one thing, she's a poseur. Not even a genuine nun.”
“Oh, hell, George!” one club member protested, knocking back a gin, “the woman tells a good story. What does it matter if she's taken vows? A bit racier if she hasn't, eh? Is there a former husband in the murky background somewhere? A discarded lover or two?”
There was that, Plimpton agreed.
Lefty Odets had also decamped, hardly in triumph and not at all in good odor with his client Dick Driver. But damned glad to be off the assignment. “I ain't tackling Rome,” he informed colleagues. “And this woman, Sister Infanta, you don't mess with her.” Odets instead was busily phoning Imus's producer Bernard Mc-Guirk, desperate to book himself on the show and get across his version of events in the Hamptons before Driver did, only to be told:
“Bo Dietl was on last Thursday. Imus says enough cops for a while.”
But it was Sis Marley who dominated the scene as New Year's Eve approached.
Summoned urgently by E-mail and cell phone, we convened at her house at the marina about ten one morning: the Admiral, Alix, the kid, Jesse Maine, both Nicole and Dick Driver (she accompanied by the Impaler, Dick alone and looking rather naked without Miss Lithuania), Peanuts Murphy and several Bonac Boys, restored to Sis's good graces, and a distinguished-looking gentleman, about my father's age, whom I'd met before. The Drivers looked especially uneasy, their departures for Manhattan abruptly canceled at the last moment.
“All right, boys,” Sis began, calling the meeting to order, “this gent is Mr. Rousselot, who's the biggest banker around since David Rockefeller or Felix Rohatyn and just as smart, too. Henry Rousselot, chairman of Rousselot Frères, the finest merchant bankers this side of Threadneedle Street.”
My father knew Henry Rousselot pretty well (Rousselot Frères were the Admiral's own private bankers) and nodded vigorous agreement as the banker got into it. Didn't take long, either.
Addressing Sis first, thanking her for the invitation, then Emma Driver, as his client, he got swiftly to her parents, opening his case with an indictment as chill as anything old Judge Welch ever handed down when assailing Senator Joe McCarthy on Capitol Hill and over nationwide television, back in the fifties:
“Mr. Driver, Ms. Driver, you may wish to consult your respective attorneys regarding what I'm about to say, but considering your less-than-pleasant record of recent litigation, I'd not recommend it. For more than half Miss Emma's life, you two have treated your only child as a volleyball, batting her back and forth across the net of your own egos and ambitions, and I think you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Though, as Emma's banker, it's not my role to deliver lectures, but to handle her money.”
He paused to let that sink in, then went on.
“When Miss Emma Driver was born some ten years ago, her father was still Jacob Marley's protégé, his junior partner, in some ways his surrogate son, succeeding, if never actually replacing, the boy killed on the Sag Harbor road trying to avoid a deer. Having no other close relatives, save his sister, who had resources of her own, Jake decided to create a little trust fund for Emma Driver that would provide for her education. She was an appealing child, and Jake still liked her father, was amused by her mother, and wanted to do something for the girl. And for them. But instead of putting in a few dollars, he bought stock. Funded the trust with stock, from the third or fourth week of Emma Driver's young life. He chose the stock, a curious new company he rather fancied, but left it to me to manage the shares as executive trustee. Sis Marley and Jake himself were the other trustees, along with an estates-andtrusts lawyer named Bryan Webb, a distinguished member, incidentally, of your Maidstone Club, who is here today, having braved the roads to drive out from his Park Avenue offices.
“Mr. Bryan Webb.”
Webb—who had gone to Williams College, affected bow ties, and did a very good impersonation of Charles Osgood—smiled warmly at Emma, thinly at her parents, nodded to the rest of us, and sat down again without wasting a word.
I could see Nicole nattering at the Impaler under her breath and Dick fidgeting impatiently. He had a full schedule; what was all this about? When would this dry-as-dust banker get to the damned point?
Emma was the one Driver who seemed interested. But then, it was her money, wasn't it?
Rousselot now resumed, got to “the damned point.” Which the banker's “dry-as-dust” accounting made even more impressive.
“The stock Mr. Marley purchased ten years ago in trust for Emma Driver was issued by a promising little Seattle firm headed by two young men named Allen and Gates. Their company was called Microsoft, and very few Americans had ever heard of it and even fewer knew just what it did or expected to do. A year later, on young Emma's first birthday, Jacob Marley bought more Microsoft. The market was down that year and he bought cheap. Picking up more shares because the price was lower but investing about the same amount of actual money. Over the next five or six years, depending on the Dow and on his own mood, Jake continued to buy Microsoft and to place the shares in trust for Emma Driver. The stock split. Split again. Split once more. And Emma Driver got richer. On paper, of course.

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