An Inconvenient Woman Read online

  More praise for

  Dominick Dunne and

  AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN

  “His best novel.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Dunne’s antennae are always tuned to the offbeat story.… He is magazine journalism’s ace social anthropologist whose area of study is the famous and infamous up close and personal.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  “He is one of those writers who seem effortlessly to collide with copy. Movie stars confide to his answering machine. Wanted men hail the same taxi. Heiresses unload their life stories in elevators. Except, of course, Dunne’s luck is not luck. People love to talk to him because he has a gift for intimacy that is real and generous.”

  —TINA BROWN

  “Dunne is a card-carrying citizen of the glittery world about which he writes—who somehow is able to keep his passport to it despite his keen eye for its foibles.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1990 by Dominick Dunne

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014, for permission to reprint a portion of lyrics from “You Better Go Now” (Bickley Reichner, Robert Graham), copyright © 1936 (renewed 1963) by Chappell and Co. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

  Portions of this book have appeared in Vanity Fair.

  www.randomhouse.com/BB/

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-96716

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81510-1

  This edition published by arrangement with Crown Publishers, Inc.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  1

  Later he was vilified and disgraced; Archbishop Cooning denounced him from the pulpit of Saint Vibiana’s as a corruptor, and the archbishop’s words spread throughout the land. But before the disgrace and the vilification Jules Mendelson was, seemingly at least, on top of the world: awesome in appearance, brilliantly married, and revered in the manner that the very rich are revered in America.

  Clouds, the Mendelson estate, which looks down on Los Angeles from its lofty mountaintop, remains unlived in but cared for, although the massive iron gates that once fronted a ducal residence in Wiltshire have become dislocated, their hinges pried loose by vandals. The caretaker on duty has backed the gates with plywood boards to keep the curious from staring in; but, even if they could stare in, they would see nothing of the house and gardens, for a few hundred feet up the drive there is a sharp turn to the right. Pauline Mendelson’s greenhouse, where she grew her orchids, has fallen into disrepair, but the kennels are kept up still, and a pack of police dogs patrols the grounds at night, as always.

  There was a time when people said that the views from Clouds were the prettiest views in the city. Pauline Mendelson, mindful of this, had created one room to take best advantage of the sunrise over the downtown skyline, where she and Jules were meant to have breakfast together, but never did, except once; and another room for watching the sunset over the ocean, where, on most evenings, she and Jules did indeed meet to drink a glass of wine together and discuss the events of the day before dressing for dinner.

  Probably no one ever conducted herself so well in a scandal as Pauline Mendelson. Everyone agrees on that. She held her head high and invited neither pity nor scorn. The city, or that part of the city that figured in the lives of these people, was beside itself with excitement. Nothing so thrilling had happened in years, except among the movie people, and no one they knew saw the movie people. Within a year of the events that riveted the city for so many months, Pauline became Lady St. Vincent and moved to England. She not only married quickly but also, being by birth one of the McAdoo sisters, the marrying McAdoos, as the papers often called them, married extremely well, even under the terrible circumstances. People say that all traces of her life as Mrs. Jules Mendelson have been totally obliterated, and in her new life she is not at home to people who knew her in Los Angeles, not even Rose Cliveden, and, God knows, if anyone was a good friend to Pauline Mendelson, it was Rose Cliveden.

  There were splendid times at Clouds for over twenty years. You had only to look at the signatures in the guest books when they came up for auction at Boothby’s, along with the furniture, the personal effects, and, of course, the extraordinary art collection, to get an idea of Pauline Mendelson’s voracious appetite for what she always called “interesting people.” As to the pictures, or the auction of the pictures, there is still rage in the art world today. The Metropolitan Museum in New York said it had been promised the collection. The County Museum in Los Angeles said the same, as did the Kimball in Fort Worth. And there were other museums, with lesser claims. But that was typical of Jules Mendelson. He liked being called on by heads of museums—being courted by them, as he put it—and hearing them praise his magnificent collection. He enjoyed walking them through the halls and rooms of his house, spelling out the provenance of each picture, as well as the stage in the life of the artist at the time the picture was painted. He liked letting each one think it was his museum to which the collection would go, in time; and surely he meant to leave it to one, because he often said, even in interviews, that he never wanted the collection to be broken up, and that he was leaving money for the construction of a wing, the Jules Mendelson Wing, to house it. But the fact remained that he did not make such a provision, although he had intended to, just as he had intended to make a provision for Flo March. Or poor Flo, as she came to be known. It was Pauline who decided to break up the collection and auction it off along with the furniture and personal effects, minus van Gogh’s White Roses and the bronze cast of Degas’s fourteen-year-old ballerina, with the original pink ribbon in her hair, which, some people say, are already installed in Kilmartin Abbey in Wiltshire.

  Pauline Mendelson was one of those people totally at home in the inner circles of several cities, although she seemed to belong to none. Even after twenty-two years of living in Los Angeles, and becoming a prominent citizen there, Pauline always seemed like a visitor rather than a resident. Her parties at Clouds were famous, and rightly so. She left nothing to chance in the planning of her evenings. It was through one such party that young Phil
ip Quennell was brought into the orbit of the renowned couple. Pauline liked to ask writers and artists to her house to mix with her grand friends. Once Philip had seen her take communion at Andy Warhol’s memorial service at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and he had met her once before that, by accident, during the intermission of a play in New York. Pauline knew the stepmother of the woman he was with, and, after introductions, she and his companion chatted briefly while Philip stood by, simply watching her. She spoke in a fashionable contralto. “Awfully light, isn’t it, but I’m being amused, aren’t you?” she asked, about the play. They answered yes. “Dreadful about Rocky, isn’t it?” she asked, about someone Philip didn’t know, but his companion did, whose private plane had recently crashed. “Both his pilots were killed, but he’ll be fine, in time,” Pauline added. And then the bell rang, and it was time for the second act, and they didn’t see her again. Given this minimal exposure to Pauline Mendelson, Philip Quennell was therefore surprised to find an invitation to her party, hand-delivered to his hotel by her chauffeur, on the very day he arrived in Los Angeles for what turned out to be a considerably longer visit than he could ever have anticipated. It was his birthday. He was twenty-nine, turning thirty that night, but of course that milestone, known only to himself, could have nothing whatever to do with the invitation from Mr. and Mrs. Jules Mendelson, as their names read in engraved script on the ecru-colored card.

  He was late. The parking valet told him so. So did the maid who opened the door. Inside, on a hall console table where little envelopes with dining-table numbers inside had been alphabetically placed, there was only one left, his. The convivial sound of sixty voices, talking and laughing, could be heard from an interior room. Even late, however, with a butler hurrying him toward the voices—“They’re about to sit down,” he insisted—it was impossible for Philip to be oblivious to the grandeur of the interior of the Mendelson house. There were six ground-floor doors opening onto the front hallway. A curved staircase of superb proportions seemed to float upward on invisible pinions, its green moiré wall lined with six Monet paintings of water lilies, Philip’s first glimpse of the Mendelson art collection; below, at its base, were masses of orchid plants in blue-and-white Chinese cachepots and bowls.

  “Beautiful,” said Philip, to no one in particular.

  “It’s Mrs. Mendelson’s hobby,” said an efficient, secretarial-looking woman.

  “What?” asked Philip.

  “The orchids. She grows them herself.”

  “Ah.”

  “Will you first sign the guest book, please,” she said. She handed him a pen, and he wrote his name beneath the names of one of the former Presidents and his First Lady and that of the great film star Faye Converse, now in retirement. His eyes scanned the signatures. Although he knew no one, he recognized many of the illustrious names. It was not the sort of crowd that Philip Quennell was used to dining with.

  Just then one of the six doors opened, and the party sounds increased in volume as Jules Mendelson entered the hall. He closed the door behind him again and strode across the marble floor with the purposefulness of a man who had been summoned to take an important telephone call. He was enormous, both in height and in girth, unhandsome and compelling at the same time, the possessor of an appearance that was likely to intimidate the fainthearted. His aura of power enveloped him like a strong scent. But people discovered on meeting him that he could be surprisingly gentle, and, more surprisingly still, a gentleman. When biographers of great men questioned him for his reminiscences of their subjects, Jules invariably replied (if he could not get out of replying) with kindness and benevolence, even about great men he had disliked or done battle with, for he was always aware that his own biography loomed as a certainty at some future time.

  Philip stared at him, fascinated, in a way that he would come to see many people stare at Jules Mendelson in time to come. Introduced by the secretary, Mendelson shook Philip’s hand in passing, met his eye, and sized him up in an instant as one of Pauline’s “interesting people,” in whom he had very little interest. Political figures, senatorial and up; ambassadors; business tycoons, like himself; and heads of museums were the kinds of people who interested him. It was once written about Jules Mendelson in a magazine article that he had simplified the spelling of his family name from Mendelssohn to Mendelson because he figured he wasted seven and a half minutes each day correcting or explaining its spelling. His great-grandfather had been a second cousin of the Mendelssohns of Berlin, one of the most important families of the Jewish upper bourgeoisie and minor nobility before the war. Born in Chicago, Jules Mendelson had taken his inheritance and turned it into a vast fortune. All that was part of his public story.

  “I’m sorry to be so late, sir,” said Philip. “My plane got in from New York this afternoon, but one of my bags, the one with my dinner jacket in it, couldn’t be found.” Jules didn’t care, nor did he want to be involved in such a drab story. He had a mission of his own on his mind.

  “Go in, go in, Mr. Quennell,” he said, directing him with a wave of his hand to a room on the right. “Pauline is in the drawing room. I must take a call and will join you then.”

  Last year, when Malcolm McKnight, who is writing the biography of Jules Mendelson, asked Philip Quennell what his impression of him was the first time they met, Philip remembered this moment and hesitated.

  “What came into your mind?” Malcolm persisted.

  Philip couldn’t bring himself to tell McKnight that what came into his mind was how wonderfully cut Jules Mendelson’s dinner jacket was, for such an enormous man. What he did say to Malcolm was, “I thought that this was a man that I would never like to cross,” which had been his second thought.

  For a newcomer without connections, Philip was extremely well seated that night, placed between Camilla Ebury, with whom he was to fall in love, and Rose Cliveden, a past-middle-age social celebrity of the area who would, inadvertently to be sure, cause havoc in the life of her great friend Pauline Mendelson. The reason for Philip Quennell’s excellent placement, however, had nothing to do with his desirability as a guest. A man named Hector Paradiso had switched their place cards before dinner, for reasons known only to him, and had moved himself to what Rose Cliveden considered a more advantageous position at a table where the former First Lady was seated.

  “Live by the place card, die by the place card,” said Rose Cliveden to Philip’s left. She was slightly tipsy and greatly miffed as she revealed Hector Paradiso’s social disloyalty for the third or fourth time. Her neck had just the suspicion of a goiter, which moved up and down as she spoke in a voice deepened by years of heavy smoking. “Imagine Hector moving the place cards. He’s gotten entirely too full of himself lately.”

  “Be careful what you say to Rose,” said Camilla Ebury, to his right. “No matter how drunk she gets, she remembers everything. Total recall.”

  “Who is Rose Cliveden?” asked Philip.

  “Old Los Angeles. Old money. Old friend of Pauline’s. Married three times. Divorced three times. Once had an affair with Jack Kennedy. In the White House. In the Lincoln Bedroom. Or so she says. She’s been known to exaggerate. What else do you want to know?”

  “That’s pretty good coverage,” Philip replied. “You could be in my business.”

  “Your business is what?” she asked.

  “I’ve only arrived here today, to write a documentary film. Quite honestly, I’m surprised to have been asked here tonight.”

  “Pauline collects people,” replied Camilla Ebury. She was pretty in a quiet way that was not at first apparent to Philip. Her blond hair was parted in the middle and held back by two gold barrettes, a style he associated with the debutantes he used to watch at dances when he was at Princeton. She was, Philip found out in due course, a recent widow, although she was only a year or two older than he.

  Like Pauline and all of Pauline’s grand friends, Camilla’s range of conversation was on a more elevated scale, at least economically, than his.
“Don’t ever die in a foreign country if you don’t speak the language,” she said, recounting her husband’s sudden death on a street in Barcelona. “It’s an absolute nightmare. The embassy was useless. Thank God for Jules Mendelson. He made a few calls and straightened everything out, and I was able to ship poor Orin home.”

  At that point, noticing that he was listening attentively, she picked up his place card and read his name, although he had already told it to her twice. “Philip Quennell. Why have you come out here to the Golden West?” she asked.

  “To escape the heat,” he said.

  “What heat?”

  “Something I wrote offended some very important people, and I thought it best if I left New York for a while.”

  “Oh, my lord! Are you the one who wrote that book that made everyone so angry in New York?” she asked.

  He was. “Yes.”

  “No wonder Pauline invited you,” said Camilla, smiling. “That’s the sort of thing she adores.” When she smiled, dimples mysteriously appeared in both cheeks and her eyes twinkled. Each of them looked at the other with more interest. “Didn’t someone hit you? I think I read that.”

  He had indeed written a book, on a particular leveraged buyout, that had offended several important people in the New York business community. One well-known figure on Wall Street threatened to have his legs broken, and Philip did not think of his threat as simply a figure of speech, nor did his lawyer. The well-known figure was known to have “connections,” as they are called. When Casper Stieglitz, a Hollywood producer, contacted him through his agent to see if he would be interested in writing a screenplay for a documentary based on the proliferation of drugs in the motion picture industry, he leapt at the opportunity, although he knew absolutely nothing about either the motion picture industry or the proliferation of drugs in it. He leapt at the opportunity because he thought a four- or five-month paid sojourn in Southern California might be just exactly what he needed in his present circumstances.

  “This is a very swell party,” said Philip, looking around the room.