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  More praise for

  Dominick Dunne

  and PEOPLE LIKE US

  “An insider’s look at New York’s new money crowd.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “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

  “Poison-pen fun.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “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

  “A superb behind-the-scenes melodrama of New York society in the 80s—a kind of companion piece to The Bonfire of the Vanities.… A masterly popular novel, on target consistently, by a man who knows—along with F. Scott Fitzgerald—that the rich are very different. And wonderfully fascinating.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  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 © 1988 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.

  Portions of this book have appeared in Vanity Fair.

  www.randomhouse.com/BB/

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-96719

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81511-8

  This edition published by arrangement with Crown Publishers, Inc.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  Prologue

  It was half after one, as Ezzie Fenwick always called it, in his rococo manner of speaking, on the Tuesday noon following Black Monday, and the midday social frenzy at Clarence’s was at its peak, with every table filled to capacity, as if a financial catastrophe had not taken place. The bar, where those who couldn’t get tables waited patiently until after the personal friends of Chick Jacoby, who owned Clarence’s and ruled Clarence’s with an iron hand, lunched and lingered over decaffeinated espresso for as long as they wanted, no matter how many people were waiting for tables, was three deep. Black Monday. Black Monday. Black Monday. It was the topic of conversation everywhere that noon.

  Ezzie Fenwick was securely seated in the window table, the very smart restaurant’s very best table, except on the rare occasions when the First Lady came to lunch, or the King of Spain, and the Secret Service advised Chick Jacoby that the window table was far too visible from the street, in times like this, with mad people about, and insisted on moving them into the unfashionable second room, where Ezzie Fenwick would never be caught dead sitting.

  The previous day the stock market had fallen five hundred and eight points, and there was panic in the city, especially among the speculators and the nouveau riche. There was also a smug satisfaction, only covertly expressed, that the new billionaires of New York, whom no one had ever heard of six or seven years ago, and who now seemed to control the financial, charitable, and social life of the city, were publicly hurting. Herkie Saybrook reported to Justine Altemus that one of the Zobel brothers, of Zobel Brothers, had been seen weeping uncontrollably at his desk over his enormous losses, ha ha ha, and might have to apply for a federal bail-out. Sims Lord reported that Milton Sofiar, whose personal fortune had been depleted by between three hundred and five hundred million dollars in a single day, had attempted suicide, although not seriously, and had been admitted to Harcourt Pavilion at Manhattan Hospital under an assumed name. The joke of the day was that the only winner on Wall Street the day before was Elias Renthal, who was in prison and barred from trading on the stock market forever, ha ha ha.

  Ezzie Fenwick, who knew everything about everyone, was, as always, surrounded by adoring ladies in the very latest of fashion who laughed and laughed each noon at his witty accounts of what had happened the night before at whatever party he had attended. Ezzie reported to Lil Altemus, who was born a Van Degan, and Matilda Clarke, who was the widow of Sweetzer Clarke, and old Cora Mandell, who was society’s favorite decorator, that he had dined the night before at the billionaire Bulbenkians, and that Reza Bulbenkian gave an ultimatum to his new wife, Yvonne, that her spending spree simply had to stop. Yvonne Bulbenkian, he explained to Lil Altemus, who sometimes pretended she didn’t know who people were, when she knew perfectly well who they were, used to be Yvonne Lupescu, when she was the constant companion of Constantine de Rham.

  Reza Bulbenkian, who was the richest of all the New People, as the Old Guard called them, now that Elias Renthal was in prison, was smarting already from the bad publicity engendered by Yvonne’s allowing their new limestone mansion on Park Avenue to be photographed by the Times Sunday Magazine in the same issue that featured a cover story on the homeless of New York. He begged Yvonne, even before the officers of his company begged him to beg her, to desist from her extravagant spending habits. How could he, he reasoned with her, fire a thousand of his employees, in an economic cutback, when Dolly De Longpre, the society columnist, was reporting in her column that Yvonne had spent a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars for a lynx coat and was planning to fly to Paris, on the company jet, for a private view of the new Lacroix collection, not to mention her noisy bidding at the auction of the Van Gogh irises, which had raised eyebrows, even before the crash.

  “She’s so frightfully common,” said Matilda Clarke.

  “The stories I could tell you about her,” said Ezzie, his hand to his heart.

  “Oh, tell, tell,” said old Cora Mandell, who knew that Ezzie only needed to be urged a bit.

  “Laurance knew all this was going to happen,” said Lil Altemus, getting back to the crash, because it did not interest her to discuss people like the Bulbenk
ians. “Laurance has been saying for some time that the market was at an unsustainably high level.” Lil Altemus quoted her brother, Laurance Van Degan, more than any other person in her life. She spoke with the ease of someone whose fortune had remained intact throughout the recent financial panic. “Laurance got out of the market a week ago, and, of course, I did too, and so did Justine.”

  Although they all liked to say that they had gotten out of the market in time, or that their losses were only on paper, as if they didn’t matter, Rochelle Prud’homme, of Prud’homme Products, makers of cordless hairdryers, pulled Chick Jacoby aside to tell him that she was canceling her dinner dance for one hundred and forty people that she had booked the restaurant for several weeks earlier, and Chick Jacoby, who had already ordered fourteen pink moiré tablecloths and a hundred and forty pink moiré table napkins cut and hemmed by the seamstress around the corner, looked crestfallen. Jamesey Crocus, the specialist in fine French furniture, arrived at Clarence’s for lunch with the distressing news that the auction of fine French furniture that morning at Sackville’s had been a major bust, with most of the ormolu-encrusted pieces not meeting their reserve prices. And Maisie Verdurin, the art dealer, looked particularly peaked behind her smile, although she had as yet told no one that two of her most important clients had reneged that morning on Post-Impressionist pictures that they had agreed to buy.

  On the very rare occasions that Ezzie Fenwick removed the dark glasses he invariably wore, you could see that he had one peculiar eye, rather like a poached egg in appearance, that looked off in a different direction entirely from his other eye, and it made you believe him when he said, as he often did, in his nasal voice that all his friends could imitate, “I never miss a trick. When I’m walking on Fifth Avenue, I can tell you what’s happening on Madison and Park.” So none of them was surprised when Ezzie interrupted Lil Altemus, who thought she had his full attention with all her inside information about the crash, to say, “My dears, you will not believe who just walked into this restaurant.”

  No one appreciated social drama the way Ezzie Fenwick did, and he was beside himself with joy when the reclusive Ruby Renthal, so long out of sight, and the just-released-from-prison Augustus Bailey walked into Clarence’s at that moment, without a reservation. Ezzie’s companions, and everyone else in the front part of Clarence’s, where all the good people, as Ezzie called them, sat, turned to look at the curious duet who stood quietly just inside the door waiting for Chick Jacoby to hurry forward to greet them, albeit with furrowed brow. Chick Jacoby spent the latter part of each morning seating his luncheon tables with the artistic precision of a stage director, as aware as Ezzie of the ever-changing marital, financial, and social statuses of his regular customers, and last-minute changes, such as this one now, upset his sense of divine order. But it was, after all, Ruby Renthal who was upsetting the divine order, and the businessman behind the perfectionist in him knew that Dolly De Longpre would surely print that the unusual couple had lunched at Clarence’s in her column the next morning if he seated them prominently and then got to the telephone in time to beat Dolly’s deadline.

  “For heaven’s sake,” said Chick, who could scowl and smile at the same time, pushing his round-rimmed glasses up on the bridge of his nose with his long forefinger.

  “I’m a country lady these days, Chick,” said Ruby. She spoke in the deep throaty voice that people used to remark on in the days when she was the most discussed woman in New York.

  “She looks beautiful,” said Cora Mandell, who had decorated the Renthals’ famous apartment.

  “Good-looking suit she has on,” said Matilda Clarke.

  Lot Altemus did not look at her. She could neither forget nor forgive that Elias Renthal’s despicable financial manipulations had sullied the name of her brother, Laurance Van Degan, causing him to have to resign as the president of the Butterfield, which broke his heart, and she was sure caused the slight stroke that had moved his mouth to the side of his face.

  “You watch,” said Ezzie, in his nasal voice, to Lil and Matilda and Cora. “Chick will move Lord Biedermeier and Constantine de Rham over to his own table, as if he’s giving them a big treat, and put Ruby and the jailbird there.”

  “What possessed us to come here?” asked Ruby.

  “I haven’t a clue,” said Gus.

  “Did you see Loelia?” asked Ruby. Ruby didn’t have to tell Gus that Loelia Manchester used to be her best friend.

  “And Matilda, and Lil, and Ezzie, and Cora,” replied Gus. “And Lord Biedermeier and Constantine de Rham. Nothing seems to change.”

  “There was a time when I found all this very attractive,” said Ruby, looking around, as she put her napkin in her lap, but not meeting anyone’s eye. “There’s Maisie Verdurin over there. I bet she’s not selling many Post-Impressionist paintings today,” said Ruby. Maisie Verdurin had probably never had a client who had made her as rich as Elias and Ruby Renthal had, with the accumulation of art they had collected.

  “The first time I ever met you was at one of Maisie Verdurin’s parties,” said Gus.

  “Oh, I remember. I was a nervous wreck that night. Dressed all wrong. Bright blue sequins. I bought it in Cleveland. Said cunt by mistake to Maisie, and she looked at me like she was thinking, Where did this girl come from? Then I ate the artichoke with a knife and fork.”

  Gus roared with laughter. “You sure changed quick.”

  Ruby smiled. She was the most elegant lady in the room.

  “Was it awful in prison?” she asked.

  Gus shrugged. “I knew when I did what I did I was going to go to prison. For me, it was just part of what my life was supposed to be. And I wrote a book there.”

  “Ezzie Fenwick always said you were going to write a book. He said you were always listening.”

  “For once Ezzie Fenwick was right.”

  1

  Except for July and August, when everyone was away from the city, Maisie Verdurin, the art dealer, entertained in her Park Avenue apartment at large monthly dinner parties that had become so significant a part of the social life of New York that even people in the subways, at least those people in the subways who read the social columns, knew her name. In her interviews, as a hostess of repute, Maisie Verdurin often talked about society today being made up of people of accomplishment—the doers, she called them—and she had only words of contempt for the highly pedigreed few who rode through life on inherited wealth and social perfection. What she could not, simply could not, stand, ever, was to be bored, she often said, and the kind of people who came each month to sit on her sixty gilded ballroom chairs placed around eight tables—six tables of eight, two tables of six—set up in her drawing room, dining room, and library, were guaranteed to provide the kind of conversation that could never, ever, bore.

  All the Cézannes, Van Goghs, Picassos, and Monets on her green moiré walls were for sale, and her dinners, which her detractors claimed she used as tax deductions, were a way of doing business and bringing together the political, financial, media, and literary figures of New York into her Rigaud-scented rooms.

  Maisie infinitely preferred her own dinners to other people’s dinners, but on the occasions she was asked back by the people she had invited, she sometimes called Augustus Bailey to escort her. Gus Bailey, a perennial spare man, obliged if he was free, and their conversations, in taxicabs on their way to and from the dinners, were always monopolized by Maisie, who rarely expressed any curiosity about Gus’s life. She knew that he had a California past; she knew he had been something or other in films at one time; but neither California nor films interested her, in the way that Wall Street financiers did, or arbitrage traders, or real-estate entrepreneurs, whose first step on the road to riches was the acquisition of art, and she simply assumed Gus’s agreement when she sometimes asked, “Aren’t you glad to be away from California?” Gus was glad to be away from California, but not for the reasons Maisie supposed, which had mostly to do with what she called a singleness of
theme, the movies, in dinner-table conversations “out there.” Maisie also knew that Gus had a wife in California, with money, called, improbably, Peach, whom a lot of people knew, but that sort of information was of less interest to Maisie than the facts that Gus Bailey had a good dinner jacket, could keep up his end of the conversation, and didn’t have to be whispered to by the butler to remove the finger bowl and doily before the crème brûlée could be served.

  Maisie took Gus to Rochelle Prud’homme’s party at Clarence’s to launch her new line of cordless hairdryers, which Gus hadn’t wanted to go to, but there he ran into his old friend Nestor Calder, a Brooklyn-born novelist of note, whose latest book, Judas Was a Redhead, was on the best-seller list.

  “I liked your new book, Nestor,” said Gus. “It’ll make a terrific movie.”

  “They don’t make movies of books anymore, Gus. They make mini-series of books. One of the studios is interested in making a mini-series of it,” answered Nestor. “But they don’t want me to write the screenplay, and I’ll only sell it if I do write the screenplay.”

  “It seems to me I’ve heard that song before,” said Gus.

  Nestor laughed.

  “How’s it going, Gus?” asked Nestor Calder. They had once worked on a film together.

  “Oh, okay,” replied Gus. When anyone became personal with Gus Bailey, he replied in as few words as possible.

  “How’s Peach?” he asked.

  “She’s okay.”

  “Do you hear from her?”

  “Sure.”

  “Give her my love, will you?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m going to be in L.A. next week to meet with the studio,” said Nestor.

  “Peach will want to hear from you,” replied Gus.

  Even after they were divorced, people who had been their friends still thought of Gus and Peach Bailey as a couple. Gus and Peach, people would say. “Do you remember that night at Gus and Peach’s house in Malibu?” Or, “I still think that Gus and Peach’s black-and-white dance was the prettiest party I’ve ever been to.” When friends would meet Peach in California, they’d say to her, “How’s Gus?” Or, if they ran into Gus in New York, they’d say, “How’s Peach?” as if they were still one when they hadn’t been one for nearly as many years as they had been.