Tycoon (49 page)

“You saw? You heard what Painter said? He's going on with it, taking the Fifth to every question! Cap, advise security that Painter is not to be allowed to enter the offices. Seal his office. Seal his files. I'm issuing a statement from here that we are sealing his office and files and will allow only authorized federal investigators to have access to them. Kill
You Bet!
Run any goddamned thing in its time slot tomorrow night. And . . . one more thing. Have security put Cathy McCormack out the front door. Right now! Advise her she's fired.”

O
NCE MORE
J
ONI FAILED TO RECEIVE THE
A
CADEMY
A
WARD
for best actress. David Breck, Though, received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, for his work in her picture
Dandelion.

Joni was bitter and decided to shoot a finger at Hollywood. She announced her pregnancy and announced at the same time that she was not going to marry the father of her baby.

David was in love with her. Even so, neither of them was enthusiastic about marriage. Both of them liked the flexibility of things the way they were. They continued to live together, and David said he would help her rear the child, as its acknowledged father.

In June the baby was born, a little girl they named Jacqueline Michelle. Jack and Anne flew to California in the new bizjet the company had acquired, ironically a Lear Jet. Joni assured them that she was very happy.

A
NNE ARRANGED TWO PARTIES FOR
J
ACK'S SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY,
one at home with the family and one at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York for an extended group of friends.

No one guessed that she was deliberately seizing every opportunity she could find to bring the family together. Her blood count was low, and her doctors had switched her to a different, stronger medication. She could feel her energy diminishing, but she forced herself to be active.

Despite her failing health, Anne telephoned and wrote all the invitations and made all the arrangements for the two parties.

Of all those Anne called to invite to the family party, only Joni sensed the anxiety in her stepmother's call. She and David suspended discussions with Harry Klein about a new picture and flew home.

Joni tried to find a time to take Anne aside and talk to her alone. Sitting by the pool one evening, she saw Anne coming out of the house and asked David to go inside and leave her to talk with Anne alone. Anne sat down beside her, but in a moment Liz and Nelly came out to swim, so Joni suggested to Anne that they walk down to the lake.

Anne preferred to swim in the lake anyway and slipped into the warm green water. Joni followed her, and for a few minutes they swam. They came out and sat down on the grassy bank in their wet bikinis.

Anne said nothing. She stared at the water and at the setting sun. Joni had noticed this tendency of Anne's to lapse into introspective silence.

“Will you forgive me if I intrude into something that is none of my business?” Joni asked.

Anne frowned. “I'll forgive you, but you won't forgive yourself. If I take you into my confidence, a heavy burden will fall on your shoulders. It might be just as well you let it go.”

“Anne, something's wrong, isn't it? Something bad.”

Anne nodded. “I need to talk to someone. How old are you, Joni? Thirty-one? If I talk to you, I need your absolute, unqualified promise you won't tell your father. Or anyone else.”

“Is it a man?” Joni asked, suddenly alarmed and hoping that was all it was.

“No. Not a man. Will you promise?”

“I promise,” Joni said emphatically. “What is it, Anne?”

“I'm dying, Joni.”

Standing by the pool, watching Liz and Nelly swim, Jack saw Anne and Joni embrace and cling to each other. He smiled. His grown-up daughter had become a friend to his wife.

J
ONI KEPT THE SECRET.
T
HE FAMILY WEEKEND CONTINUED.

Little Jack, home from Ohio State University, proudly announced that he had tried out and been accepted for the football squad. He swaggered. His sister Liz despised him.

Linda, who had accepted a position as a microbiologist on the staff of Yale-New Haven Hospital, was engaged to a young man named Guy Webster, a senior associate in a New York City law firm.

When the young man was introduced to people at Jack's birthday party, he promptly informed them that he was a member of the John Birch Society. He impressed Jack as a rather stiff, self-important young man—in fact, a boring nincompoop—and Jack wondered what in the world Linda saw in him.

Joni, too, concluded that Guy Webster was a consummate ass. Seventeen-year-old Liz reached the same conclusion and shared it with Joni.

Jack was standing by the pool talking with Joni when Liz ran up to them laughing. “I heard Linda say something to him! You'll never guess! She said, ‘If you tell one more person you're a member of the John Birch Society, I'm going to kick you in the balls. It's bad enough that you are, without my having to hear you brag about it.'”

Jack grinned and shrugged. “Maybe she knows what she's doing after all.”

“I wish we dared to interfere,” Joni said grimly.

I
N
A
UGUST ANOTHER SHORT STORY BY
J
ASON
M
AXWELL AP
peared in
The New Yorker.
Part of it read:

Overheard at Lutèce:

“You wouldn't think it to look at him, but he's the sexiest man alive.”

“Dear! I
did
it with Jack Kennedy.”

“Jack Kennedy! Really. That's not what I mean. You know nothing until you've spent a night with the master.”

Jefferson Le Maître was a man of catholic tastes when it came to the erotic life. His first wife had been a woman of universally recognized elegance who had smoothed his rough edges and made him the cultured, cosmopolitan gentleman he was. That first wife introduced him, however, to another sort of taste. Their most intimate friends, and their most intimate friends only, knew that elegant Madame Première was an obsessive masochist who loved to be bound and beaten. Le Maître was at first unwilling to accommodate her; but ultimately, to keep her happy and to keep their marriage intact, he consented and learned to flog her with abandon until she screamed for mercy.

He was a man of Catholic tastes as well, and a fling with a gorgeous Catholic lass resulted in the termination of his first marriage.

Wife One found another partner to play sadist to her masochist. They played rough games. Sometimes she hung from a rafter by handcuffs while he whipped her with a riding crop. One night while she hung, her arms spread by two pairs of handcuffs, he suffered a myocardial infarction and died before her horrified eyes. She could not escape. She hung there for agonizing hours, until at last she too died.

Jefferson Le Maître deeply regrets the tragic way his first wife died. Even so he cannot resist saying that, in a medical sense, she died almost exactly the same way Christ died—of circulatory failure caused by hanging with outspread arms.

Le Maître.
The master, the teacher.
Der Lehrer.
The teacher. Johann Lehrer had been a teacher in Germany. Erich had changed the family name to Lear. The connection was obscure—but not to anyone who knew Jack's family history. The masochistic first wife. A few people knew about that. A very small number of cognoscenti would know who Jefferson Le Maître was.

“W
E DON'T DARE EVEN CUT HIM,” SAID
A
NNE.

She lay on a sofa in the living room of the Manhattan apartment. The magazine lay on the coffee table. She had read the Jason Maxwell story this morning, and now Jack had read it.

“I'd like to kill him,” Jack said.

“No. We invite him to join us for lunch at Lutèce. We must be seen with him in public, like great good friends who have nothing to quarrel about. That says to the world that it has never dawned on us that he could have been writing about us. About
you.
If we cut him, that says he
was
writing about you, and we know it.”

“Are we to pretend that the story is amusing?”

“We might as well. There are not fifty people who know he was writing about you. If we do anything negative, a hundred times that many will guess.”

Jack sighed loudly. “All right. I only wish I could find some way to stick a knife in
his
back.”

J
ONI CALLED HER FATHER FROM
C
ALIFORNIA.
H
ER VOICE WAS
cold. “Couldn't you have told me how she died?”

“I'd have had to tell John, too. I didn't think either of you needed to know. You were just twenty-two, Joni.”

“I'm thirty-two now. You could have told me. Anyway, I warned you about Jason Maxwell. How many people are going to make the connection?”

“Anne and I are taking the little bastard to lunch. We want to make it look like we're all buddy-buddies, so he couldn't have been writing about me.”

“Good luck. And, uh . . . Daddy . . . I always knew you were the sexiest man alive.”

1967

N
O ONE SAID ANYTHING.
I
T WAS PLAIN, JUST THE SAME, THAT
more than a few people had made the connection between Jason Maxwell's Le Maître and the real-life Jack Lear.

Men who had nodded at Jack in the Harvard Club bar now nodded and smiled. At the harvest ball at the Greenwich Country Club, women asked him to dance and then whirled around the floor beaming at their friends, as they nestled in the embrace of “the sexiest man alive.”

A writer for
Esquire
called and said she wanted to do a profile of him for the magazine. During the interviews with him and Anne, not a word was said about the Maxwell story, and no mention of it was made in the subsequent profile; but it was plain from the tone of the interview and the story that readers would want to know more about the real Le Maître—and that most of them would know that Jack Lear was Le Maître.

Worst of all, Jack and Anne had to appear in public with Jason Maxwell and pretend he was still their amusing friend. When the three of them lunched together at Lutèce, the meeting received notice in three gossip columns, one of which specifically identified Jack as the prototype for Le Maître. Photographers were not allowed inside Lutèce, but the
Post
published a
picture of the three leaving the restaurant and walking, with conspicuous smiles, along the street.

Over lunch Jason said nothing of the story. Neither Jack nor Anne mentioned it. Jason tried to amuse them with a story about how a month ago a janitor cleaning the Oval Office had found a pair of Jackie Kennedy's panties under a couch. “How'd he know they were Jackie's?” Anne asked. “She had her initials embroidered on all her underwear,” Jason confided. Anne changed the subject. She congratulated Jason on the publication of his new novel,
Norma
, which had won gushing reviews everywhere and was already at the top of the bestseller list. “A bagatelle,” said Jason.

Jack could see nothing to do but live with the new notoriety Jason had given him. He was angry but not devastated.

H
ARRY
K
LEIN WAS A BIGGER PRODUCER THAN EVER.
J
ONI
looked around his office, which she had first visited seven years ago. It was a lot more impressive now that Harry had two Best Picture Oscars displayed in it.

Harry had always kept autographed photographs of stars on his office walls, but now he had pictures of some of the biggest successes of the past seven years. Joni was pleased to see that her autographed photo was displayed among the others. Framed and prominently displayed also was an autographed picture of Harry shaking hands with a grinning President Kennedy.

Harry himself, almost fifty years old now, had changed little. If his hair was turning gray, he was having it colored. He still favored dark-blue polka-dot bow ties. He'd changed his style in only one respect: gone were the big horn-rimmed glasses he had made almost a trademark; in their place he wore contact lenses.

“I hear you're gonna be featured in
Esquire,
” he said.

“Yeah. As the often-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride girl,” Joni said acerbically. “The twice-nominated actress.”

“Hey! What do you expect? Cary Grant's never had an Oscar. Tyrone Power never got one. Bob Hope's never had one. There's a lot of
respect
for you in this industry.”

“I've done three pictures in seven years.”