Mortal Friends (23 page)

V
iolet, Peggy Myers, and I had lunch together once a week, mainly to discuss what was now referred to as “the Grant situation.” We always went to Café Milano, and we always sat at the same corner table and ordered the same thing. We hunkered down in deep conversation over plates of chicken paillard and grilled vegetables. Marge Horner once told Peggy that we looked like “a trio of suicide bombers.”

Although Grant and Cynthia were seemingly inseparable in public, his divorce was going slowly, and not because Violet was doing anything to hold it up. She had a prenup, and there was not much she could do. On the contrary, it was Grant who seemed to be stalling. This gave Violet hope. She had been waiting anxiously for the report from the private detective, and it finally came. Peggy and I were dying to know the results.

“I can’t believe you hired an investigator,” Peggy said.

“Why should we believe what this woman says about herself, huh?” Violet said.

“No one who courts the limelight as much as the Trailblazer can afford to lie,” Peggy said.

Violet waved a dismissive hand at Peggy. “Don’t kid yourself. Everyone can afford to lie. They just can’t afford to get caught. This would hardly be the first time a big shot has told a big lie in Washington.”

Violet knew as well as I did that if she could turn up some really unsavory detail about Cynthia, Grant would abandon her in five seconds flat.

“Grant’s always been so careful about who we
connected
ourselves with,” Violet said, imitating Grant’s supercilious lockjawed tone of voice. “Just imagine if Cynthia actually turned out to be a convicted felon or something. He’d kill himself. Or her. That’s why I hired the detective. And I just got the results this morning.”

“
Well?
” Peggy and I said in unison.

Violet paused for effect, then deflated.

“Nada, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t tell me! Well, there goes thirty thousand dollars down the drain,” I said.

Peggy’s eyes widened. “Is that how much they cost?”

“More,” Violet said glumly. “A lot more.”

Unfortunately for Violet, Cynthia Rinehart appeared to be exactly who she said she was: a smart, self-made cookie who had made her fortune in the insurance business. She’d never been married, though there was talk she’d had an affair with the married chairman of the insurance company she worked for, and that’s how she got her start. But there was no proof, only rumors. That affair didn’t matter to anyone except Violet, who said it showed Cynthia had a history of targeting married men.

The only bright side was that although Cynthia appeared to have made her money legitimately, there were questions about how she was spending it. That wasn’t covered in the detective’s report. But I now knew from Grider that people had to be very careful about how they ran a foundation. Aside from having to give away a percentage of the foundation’s assets every year, they had to be scrupulous about how they spent the foundation’s money. If they were not careful, they risked being in serious violation of the tax code.

Since putting money into a foundation is a way of avoiding taxes, you can’t turn around and squander foundation money on a lavish lifestyle. In other words, you couldn’t pay yourself a huge salary, buy a big house, take people on junkets in your private plane, and give expensive gifts, all in the name of philanthropy. There were strict rules and regulations.

Peggy, who was on the board of two Fortune 500 companies and who knew her way around corporate America, pointed out that a foundation had to be very well endowed indeed to own and operate its own plane in the first place, much less fly people around in it the
way Cynthia did. It was also unclear what Cynthia’s Rinehart Retreats had actually accomplished—except to provide a luxurious venue for networking celebrities.

As Grider said, Cynthia gave a million dollars a year to the Kennedy Center, independently of the hundred-million-dollar pledge she had yet to fulfill. But as Violet was quick to point out, “She spends nearly that whole budget on those ridiculous Golden Key dinners and other events. Meanwhile, the staff sits in offices the size of coffins and the roof leaks. There has to be a better use for that money than food, flower arrangements, and inappropriate entertainment.”

The three of us decided that unless Cynthia had a vast personal fortune no one was aware of, what she was doing with her foundation’s money wasn’t strictly legal, and that she eventually could be held accountable. In that case, she would need a protector—one who was titanically rich. I wasn’t the only one who wondered if Cynthia had picked Grant, not for his unscintillating personality, but for his very scintillating pocketbook. God knows this wasn’t lost on Violet either, who said to us, “It would serve Grant right if Washington’s biggest philanthropist turned out to be Washington’s biggest gold digger.” And we weren’t the only ones asking these questions.

I’ve found that in this world, you can get away with a lot if people like you. But if you’re high-handed and make promises you don’t keep—like pledging money and then withdrawing it, or not paying your bills—people start to dislike you. Dislike leads to complaint. Complaint gives rise to rumors. True or not, those rumors will almost certainly reach the ears of a zealous reporter anxious to check them out.

Corinna Huff was like a bad cold: there was no avoiding her once you were exposed. I often ran into Corinna at social events around town. She seemed vaguely aware of who I was, but we were not what I’d call friends. When she marched into my shop one sunny May morning, eager to talk to me, I knew she wanted something—and I figured it wasn’t a discount.

She said she was writing an article for the
Washington Post
. I was impressed. Corinna rarely wrote articles anymore. She was far too busy with social life. Her marriage to Barkley Huff, the grand old man
of the Senate, had catapulted her to the pinnacle of Washington society, where she reigned with purpose and élan. Few subjects were powerful enough to lure Corinna out of her semi-retirement as an investigative reporter. Clearly, she had found one worthy of her fabled poison pen.

“I’m doing a piece on Cynthia Rinehart,” she said, pausing to appraise my reaction. “I understand you know her.”

“And how,” I said.

“Can I talk to you?”

It was well known that Corinna’s sly ability to put people at their ease was the way she coaxed them into saying things they would later regret. But if she was leveling her pen at Ms. Rinehart, who was I not to pass her some ammunition? I played hard-to-get for a few seconds—just because I felt like paying her back for all those times she never remembered my name. But I finally gave in and led her upstairs to my office, where we spent the next hour and a half drinking bottled water and discussing a subject that was near, but far from dear, to my heart.

Corinna was all charm and chat. She’d never been so affable to me before. She had the manner of a sophisticated college girl. Her bobbed brown hair and youthful looks masked a kind of slithery determination. At first she talked to me conspiratorially, like she just
knew
that she and I were kindred souls who shared the same slightly wicked points of view. It was like yakking with a great girlfriend I hadn’t seen in ages. The conversation was easy, effortless, and fun because we had so much to say to each other on a variety of subjects, and we agreed on everything, most especially on what we disliked.

Gradually, however, I realized that she was luring me into deeper waters—getting me to tell her about Cynthia stealing Grant and how it almost ruined my friendship with Violet. I told her how Cynthia had stiffed me when I was decorating her house. As I spoke, I knew I was being indiscreet. But that was Corinna’s great gift: she got me to the point where I didn’t care what I said. I just wanted to keep on chatting with this very clever, very entertaining, very sympathetic woman.

I called Violet immediately after she left.

“You’ll never guess who was just here,” I said, feeling a vague sense of unease.

“Corinna Huff,” Violet said without missing a beat.

“How did you know?”

“Because she called me up and wanted to see me. But I didn’t think it was seemly of me to talk to her, so I told her to call you. I hope you gave her an earful.”

That’s the thing about Washington: you never know when you’re being used.

Ten days later, Corinna Huff’s article appeared on the front page of the Style section. Once again, there was a large picture of Cynthia standing in front of a great Washington institution—only this time, instead of the Kennedy Center, it was the Folger Shakespeare Library. Silhouetted against the elegant Art Deco neoclassical building, Cynthia stared defiantly at the camera. With her arms crossed in front of her and her chin angled upward, she resembled a defending champion on the eve of a title bout. The headline read: “Much Ado About Rinehart.”

The peg for the article was the firestorm brewing around Cynthia’s ten-million-dollar donation to the Folger Shakespeare Library. The rumors were true. Cynthia was threatening to withdraw the grant because the Folger had refused to use the funds as Cynthia wished them to. She was demanding the creation of a Rinehart Room, devoted to writers, artists, and film directors of her choosing. The trustees had earmarked the money for other projects, especially “Picturing Shakespeare,” the expansion of their online image database of ten thousand drawings, prints, and photographs relating to Shakespeare and his era.

Cynthia’s argument was that anyone who gives money to an institution should have a say in how said money is used. The Folger’s position was that dealing with the preservation and dissemination of all the priceless books and materials already in their possession was a full-time project. They didn’t need another room.

Douglas Reed, the president of the Folger, described by Corinna as “a soft-spoken, scholarly man,” was quoted as saying simply, “There has obviously been a very deep misunderstanding.”

Corinna went on to chronicle the origins of Cynthia’s fortune and her cometlike ascendancy to the top of Washington society through her unparalleled philanthropy. Nothing new there. But then the ar
ticle got into dicier stuff—like how Cynthia had bought Gay Harding’s house and allegedly got into a dispute with her decorator over charges she refused to pay. That decorator would be me! And how she used her foundation’s plane for pleasure junkets and personal errands. She apparently sent the decorator who replaced me on a trip to the Maastricht Art Fair to buy antiques and pictures for her house.

The article chronicled Cynthia’s early friendship with the Boltons, stating that Cynthia had originally approached Grant Bolton, “the president of the Potomac Bank and the scion of one of Washington’s most generous and private philanthropic families,” to seek his advice on matters relating to her foundation and which institutions and projects she should support. She described Violet as “a major rung on the social ladder,” who took Cynthia under her wing and introduced her to many powerful and important people in Washington.

Corinna went into the scandal in some detail.

“Shortly after Mr. Bolton was honored at one of Ms. Rinehart’s Golden Key dinners, he left his wife of fifteen years and took up with Ms. Rinehart. They have not tried to keep their relationship a secret. On the contrary, Ms. Rinehart and Mr. Bolton have become a power couple around town. She recently gave Mr. Bolton a birthday party at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, which drew a stellar crowd.”

Then the piece got really delicious. It went into the whole thing about the Kennedy Center and how Cynthia didn’t have to fork over the money until Congress matched the funds. And the million dollars she did give every year in a separate grant was used primarily for lavish parties “rather than any enrichment or support of the arts.” An unidentified source was quoted as saying Cynthia used these “often inappropriate and over-the-top events to further her influence by entertaining important people and garnering a lot of publicity.”

Corinna had somehow gotten hold of the lavish invitation to the Golden Key Awards Dinner, which she described as “a giant fold-out card flecked with red velvet and embossed with gold and silver lettering.”

Marge Horner, bless her heart, was quoted as saying: “When I received it, I thought it was an invitation to the opening of a bordello!”

An “unnamed source” at the Kennedy Center called Cynthia “a philanthropic philistine, with a corrugated tin ear.” It didn’t take a genius
to figure out that that “source” was Leonid Slobovkin, the disaffected conductor whose job was now in jeopardy. And although Kyle Michaels, the brilliant and popular artistic director of the center, diplomatically observed that Cynthia’s “supreme generosity outweighed any other considerations,” even he mentioned that she was sometimes perceived to have “a slightly misshapen agenda.”

Corinna listed several examples of how Cynthia had pledged money, only to renege later after she had garnered publicity, given a party, or made an important new contact. “Sources close to the investigation” mentioned Constance Morely’s Childhood Lupus Foundation as a case in point. I figured those sources were me and Constance herself.

A famous actor who was a recipient of a Golden Key Award was quoted as saying, “She courted me like crazy until I finally accepted the dinner. Presents, phone calls, trips, the whole nine yards. Halfway through that evening, I looked down at this big gold key hanging around my neck, and thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’”

It was a scathing profile. But if you really want to hang someone in print, make the noose out of their own words.

Corinna interviewed Cynthia herself and the article was peppered with her quotes. Cynthia admitted that her newfound celebrity was “sweet revenge for all the years of drudgery and being dismissed.” She said that philanthropists were “the new rock stars of the planet.” She said that her purchase of Gay Harding’s house was like “the passing of the torch.” She said that people were just jealous of her because she had raised “the giving bar” to a new height, which now meant that everyone had to “dig so much deeper into their old-fashioned pocketbooks.”