Nothing but Gossip (27 page)
“How’d it go?” Richard said when I climbed into the car. “Sorry I missed it. I got tied up on a call.”
“Great, I guess.” I slumped down in my seat and rubbed my eyes. I was completely exhausted.
B
etter give this girl a drink,” Richard told Buck as we slid into the booth at about eleven-thirty. I laid my head on the table.
“Hey, Ec,” Buck yelled. “Bring us three triples of Irish and some of those cold meat-loaf sandwiches you made up this morning.” He turned back to me, a smug look on his face. “So, what have we got here? Just what I predicted? Prewedding jitters? Premarital troubles? You all going to back out?”
Ecstasy placed ten shot glasses and a huge pile of sandwiches on the table. “I brought an extra shot,” she said. “Even numbers are easier to keep track of.”
“Thanks, honey.” Buck drank the first one so fast I wasn’t sure he’d even touched the glass. Like that old joke: See this? Want to see it again? “That was one hell of a damn party last night. Your mother almost danced me into the ground, Richard. All right, now let me get this straight. You’re here because you need some counseling. Okay, so I’ll tell you what to do: Read my lips:
Don’t do it
.”
I started laughing. Richard and I clinked our glasses. “No, Buck, we don’t need any counseling, and we are going to do it.”
“We’ve been at the cemetery,” Richard explained as he swallowed. “Watching the Rutherfords be disinterred.”
“Oh, shit. No wonder you’re depressed. Here, honey.” He slid a full glass across to me. “Have another. I’ll join you.”
“You sure looked handsome last night, Buck,” I said. “I loved your toast.”
“Yeah, it was pretty good, wasn’t it? Redford wrote it.”
“Who?” Richard asked.
“Robert Redford,” Buck said.
“Robert Redford wrote your toast?”
“Yup,” Buck said. “He’s got a thing for Lilly.”
Richard closed his eyes and pinched his forehead. “This family,” he said tiredly. “You’re all nuts.”
“And you thought fat twin sopranos from Düsseldorf could be a problem,” I told him. “Come on, we’ve got to get going.”
“You going to Christian and Mimi’s luncheon at the country club?” Buck asked through a mouthful of meat loaf and mayonnaise.
I shook my head.
“I know it’s just for the out-of-towners,” Buck said. “But Christian said I could come. Have you met Mimi’s sister from Chicago? Wow. She’s as pretty as Mimi. And that Principessa Pagliacci or whatever her name is from Rome? Talk about a looker.”
“We’re going home to get some sleep,” Richard said.
“Give everyone our love. We’ll see you at five o’clock. Don’t be late.”
Buck stood up and put his hands on my shoulders.
His blue eyes twinkled merrily. “I’m really happy for you, Lilly.”
“I know, Buck. Thanks.” I kissed his cheek above the beard.
He shook Richard’s hand, and I could tell he wanted to wish him good luck, but by then Buck was too choked up to speak. So he gave him a bear hug instead and then punched him hard in the shoulder.
The day was so clear and beautiful—the weatherman said it was going to get up to seventy, a heat wave for September—we didn’t go directly home. We stopped at the wedding pavilion first.
Manuel, my parents’ butler, had gotten his crew up and out early, and now everything was almost ready for our two hundred special guests.
“I can’t believe what your mother has done,” Richard said as we climbed the steps into the pavilion.
The place was crawling with waiters setting the tables and the florist and his assistants putting the finishing touches on the centerpieces and trimming the brass hurricane lamps that hung from the thick pine-log posts.
“Did you know what she had in mind, or is this what you told her you wanted?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t even answer. The fact is, we hadn’t communicated much about it at all, except I’d said she should do whatever she wanted because I was her only daughter and she’d been thinking about my wedding since the day I was born. Besides, she had exquisite taste. Much better than mine. Neither one of us likes geegaws and glop, so I hadn’t worried that I’d end up with frilly white wicker flower baskets and burgundy
lace overcloths on the tables and a bunch of caged turtledoves dangling from the rafters.
Plus, Mother had made it clear that she fully appreciated the constraints of her challenge: I was a grown woman, not the dewy-eyed bride I would have been twenty-five or so years ago, and a ranch wedding could not, and should not, look like a city wedding. But it should also be formal, not casual. She had gone the plain-and-simple route, and the result was breathtaking.
“This is possibly the most elegant setup I’ve ever seen—even better than our
Traviata
set,” Richard marveled. “When the sun goes down, it will be like dancing in a diamond.”
The tables had all been lacquered in deep, glowing forest green, so shiny you could put your lipstick on in them, and in the center of each table, sterling-silver spittoons the size of basketballs overflowed with golden aspen leaves. Miniature silver hurricane lanterns surrounded each centerpiece, and every place setting included four gleaming crystal glasses—red wine, white wine, champagne, and water—and a full complement of glittering sterling flatware. The straight, ladder-backed kitchen chairs were lacquered in the same velvet green as the tables, and the floor looked like glass. Coronas of aspen leaves surrounded the brass sconces. Everything had been designed to glow and twinkle.
“Manuel,” I caught up with him in the kitchen. “Congratulations. This is magnificent.”
He smiled and nodded. “We’re getting close.”
“How many Valiums so far today?”
“None yet. Your mother is on her best behavior. I think maybe she’s taking them today instead of me.”
Mother had flown in Daniel Proust from Manhattan to do the cooking, and he was busy tying sprigs of fresh
tarragon to long tenderloins of Circle B Angus. Each one looked like a work of art.
“Look at this.” Manuel opened the door to the walk-in cooler, where cases and cases of 1995 Puligny-Montrachet Les Courcelles and 1985 Dom Perignon were stacked against the back wall. Six one-kilo tins of Petrossian beluga and fillets of smoked Scottish salmon sat on one shelf. Our wedding cake, a three-tiered concoction topped with a cascade of creamy roses, luscious devil’s food invisible behind thick white fondant icing, sat on another.
I squeezed Richard’s hand. “Can you believe it?” I said.
“Yes.” He squeezed back. “And I like it.”
The awful morning was banished. My wedding day had begun anew.
“Check this out,” Richard said once we were back in the pantry. He ripped open the top of a case of Domaine Drouhin Oregon Pinot Noir and held a bottle up to admire. “This is fine. This is going to be an excellent affair.”
“Go down by the river,” Manuel said. “I think you’re going to like it. Very simple. Then you’d better go home. There’s not much time.”
It was true. It was one o’clock. We had to be back at the barn by four.
Richard and I walked quickly down to where the wedding ceremony itself would take place, where my cousin, the Very Reverend Henry “Hank” Caulfield Bennett, Bishop of the Wind River Diocese, would officiate. The altar, actually one of the green tables with a big gold cross, held a bed of pine boughs and two large sterling vases of aspen leaves. There were rows of plain pine chairs with green cushions on the mowed ground.
It was all just as it should be. Beautiful. Solemn. Intimate.
We sat down on the riverbank. The water was at its lowest point, ready to call it a summer and freeze up for a few months. It skimmed along the rocky bed like molten glass.
“I’m glad we came down here,” I said. “It’s helped things start over.”
“You can say that again.”
“I’m sorry I fouled up our week so much,” I told him. “I had no idea.”
“We’ve all survived. You and I weren’t designed to lead boring lives.”
Y
ou’re pretty much what I would consider useless as a best man,” Richard said to Elias as he followed him slowly up the stairs to our bedroom, where we were dressing. “
You’re
supposed to be tying
my
tie, not the other way around.”
In spite of the fact that Elias had the constitution of a bull, he had had most of his blood replaced three days earlier and was still a little weak and pale. His arm was in a sling, the wound hidden behind thick packing and bandages.
“I may be useless, but I’m happy.” He settled himself onto the chaise in my bedroom and poured himself a glass of whiskey. “I know I should be drinking champagne,” he said defensively to my matron of honor Sparky Kendall, who was frowning at him, “but this works better as a painkiller.”
“You shouldn’t be drinking anything at all,” she scolded Elias, then came into the dressing room and started in on me. “You know this manicure cost me thirty dollars. And these little buttons are a bitch. If
you’d had Vera Wang make these dresses instead of Armani, she would have hidden a thin little zipper behind them, and they just would have looked like actual buttons.”
“I don’t care. They’re worth it.” I was standing in my dressing room looking at myself in the triple mirror. “I love these gowns.”
“Everybody ready?” Richard called from the bedroom.
“Ready,” I answered.
“Oh, my,” he said, turning me around. “You are lovely.”
All we could do was smile at each other like two idiots.
“Want to get on down there and do it?”
“Let’s.”
Roundup Morning News
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1998
Lilly McLaughlin Bennett and
Richard Welland Jerome, Jr.,
Wed in Ranch Ceremony
by Pat Collier, Society Editor
If anybody thinks for one second the rich aren’t different from you and me … think again. Yesterday afternoon, in what will go down in history as one of the West’s most memorable and glittering weddings, Bennett heiress
Lilly McLaughlin Bennett
and
Richard Welland Jerome, Jr.
, General Director of the Roundup Opera Company and scion to one of Manhattan’s most venerable banking dynasties, said their vows at the two-hundred-thousand
acre Bennett family ranch, the Circle B, outside of Bennett’s Fort.
Everyone agreed the bride’s parents,
Mr. and Mrs. Elias Caulfield Bennett III
… our beloved Katharine and Eli … pulled out all the stops for their only daughter, and we all know that when it gets down to pulling stops, they have more than most.
Katharine looked stunning enough to have been the bride herself in opalescent mushroom satin … Carolina Herrera made three trips to the ranch to make sure it was perfect … with every single one of the famous Bennett family diamonds. I don’t know which sparkled more, her eyes or the necklace.
The setting for the nuptials was on the banks of the Wind River … a fleet of private helicopters and limousines was parked tastefully out of sight over the hill in another valley altogether … looking across the vast, historic ranch where a handful of championship Black Angus grazed like props in the distance. The two hundred or so guests … I figure they invited one per acre so no one would get that closed-in feeling … included the
Duke and Duchess of Westminster
—she had on what one might call a few very important pieces of jewelry, so important, in fact, that a bank guard hovered discreetly in the wings—and
Baron and Baroness Heinrich von Singen und Mengen
. She had on practically nothing at
all, but when you’re as young and pretty as Lulu, you don’t need much.
While waiting for the wedding party to arrive, everyone chatted comfortably from the rows of cushioned—that Katharine thinks of everything—ladder-backed pine chairs, sipped French bubbly, and listened to rousing selections by Puccini, Rachmaninoff, and Beethoven performed by the Roundup Opera Orchestra, known affectionately to those in the know as Richard’s Band.
Right on the money, at five o’clock sharp, yours truly thought she was in a scene from
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. As the sun headed for the hills, the orchestra let fly with Copeland’s
Billy the Kid
, and five riders in formal charcoal-gray three-piece suits and black cowboy hats thundered over the horizon, right out of the setting sun, tail-coats flying, their horses at a full gallop. It was that drop-dead gorgeous groom himself, Richard Jerome, and his men: best man
Elias Caulfield Bennett IV
, still recovering from a near-fatal shotgun wound suffered at the Rutherford Oil annual meeting last Wednesday; Richard’s twin sons
Richard III
and
Charles
—what lucky girls will nab these two young studs?—and his team-roping partner, the bride’s other brother,
Christian Bennett
, President and Chief Operating Officer of the Bennett empire. They circled the guests twice at full speed, whooping and hollering and throwing mud all over the place (but only in the right direction, not one guest was
splattered) before dismounting and taking their places by the altar, which Katharine had loaded up with pine boughs and aspen leaves. Simple. Simple. Simple. Always is best.
The Bennetts like to keep things all in the family, so on hand to officiate was the Very
Reverend Henry Caulfield Bennett
, Bishop of the Wind River Diocese, resplendent as ever in his red miter and antique pectoral cross with all its rubies. “It’s so helpful to have money of one’s own when one decides to go into the clergy,” Katharine Bennett once confided, and boy oh boy, is she ever right. And we all just knew underneath those red, white, and gold satin vestments, Bishop Hank had that dinner-plate-sized Saddle-Bronc Champion buckle holding up his trousers.
We don’t get to welcome many true American aristocrats like
Mr. and Mrs. Richard Welland Jerome, Sr.
, to Roundup. Alida Jerome is such a gracious lady—she was Alida van Rensselaer, one of those original Dutch New Yorkers, the ones who bought the island—and she didn’t appear even slightly out of place in the wilds of Wyoming as she went down the aisle on her husband’s arm in her Hardy Amies tea-length salmon beaded chiffon. Mr. Jerome is the Chairman and CEO of Jerome Guaranty Bank & Trust, that hallowed banking house where it’s said one needs an opening deposit of one million. But you get unlimited checking.
And if all this weren’t enough, four of the most beautiful gals in town—Matron of Honor
Sparky Kendall
and bridesmaids
Mary Pat McArthur
, former Miss Texas
Pitty-Pat Palmer
and
Mimi Bennett
(Mrs. Christian)—glided up the grassy aisle like swans in full-length, long-sleeved, sage-colored, coupe de velours Armani gowns.
The only thing that could have outdone this group of beauties was the bride herself, and she didn’t let us down. Lilly and her dashingly handsome father—the personification of the West in his tailcoat and cowboy hat, reins firmly in hand as usual—arrived in the shiniest buckboard I’ve ever seen, draped with garlands of roses and drawn by a team of perfectly matched Percherons with roses woven into their manes and tails.
Lilly’s gown was the same cut-velvet Armani as her attendants’, but fawn-colored, setting off those Bennett blue eyes like laser guns. She carried a tumble of fully blown, teacup-sized Oceana roses and wore her great-grandmother’s pearls. The simplicity of the bride’s dress and jewelry defined the elegance of the occasion perfectly.
No one could ever say that Lilly Bennett, one of the country’s most successful security consultants, rushed into marriage, and this was a match and an occasion worth waiting for. Not a dry eye in the house as her elegant, dignified father handed her off to her handsome groom, considered to be the Last of the Twentieth Century’s Most Eligible Bachelors.