All That Glitters (25 page)

I got in touch with Frank—he’d left Rome for England to make arrangements regarding Babe’s London opening—and explained the problem. Did he have any suggestions? He’d already had a notion of what was going on; rumors flew around Rome like confetti and it never took long for the latest scandal to be reported. Frank said he’d see what he could arrange.

Next morning Faun received a curt note from her amigo, Joselito, saying he was unavoidably called out of town and regretfully would not be able to see her again. The day after, Faun was on a plane, booked via London over the Pole to Los Angeles, where Maude awaited her. No one mourned El Gatto, least of all Belinda. I had to laugh, though. What sprang our flamingo dancer out of Rome was a surprise invitation from Dodi Ingrisi to a large party she was giving for a movie producer who was looking for a Spanish dancer who could “flamingo” good. Joselito didn’t get the job.

There was this about Belinda: she possessed the knack or ability to surmount whatever the winds of chance happened to blow her way. The mind of the public is notoriously short in such matters, they are a forgiving lot, and it wasn’t long before most people had forgotten that the star of
Zenobia
,
Queen of Palmyra
had more or less disgraced herself in Rome.

This was just as well, and by the time she returned to the States no one was more surprised than she to discover that she was in love again. She’d met Grant Potter thirty-five thousand feet over Cleveland, New York to L.A. By the time the plane was over Albuquerque and the captain was announcing the Grand Canyon coming up, she was head over heels in love. Potter was a rich, aggressive contractor-builder with a variety of business interests, some of which took him to Mexico on frequent trips. He’d built a house in Acapulco and it was there, on a terrace overlooking the bay, with a vermilion sun setting into the gray-blue sea, amid a bower of flowers that smelled like heaven itself, that Belinda Laurel Seacombe Apper Pritchard Antrim became Mrs. Grant Potter. It turned out to be a mistake of no ordinary ilk.

For a while all went fine—of course it did. She adored Mexico, she became an aficionado of the bullfights, she learned sufficient Spanish to run the house smoothly, and she made a charming hostess. She even did a film, the unfortunate
El Gatto nel Sol
; the picture came and went like the mayfly it was. She kept her mahogany tan, wore beautiful clothes and expensive jewels, and was a worthy chatelaine to Las Flores Rosas, which was the name of the house. The President of Mexico was a frequent visitor, and several of His Excelencia’s mistresses—not simultaneously, however. Grant and Belinda made a handsome couple and were frequently photographed together with their teen-age children, Faun and Dane. One shot even appeared in
Town & Country
, which had a lot to say about where Mrs. Potter stood at the moment on the social ladder. Who remembered Benny Vidor or the flamingo dancer now?

When Grant’s business required his presence in Los Angeles, they usually occupied the Mandeville house that had been Belinda’s and Perry’s and which she’d had completely redecorated in all of Grant’s favorite colors. There they lived the life of country squires, enjoying the rural atmosphere of the western Sunset area, yet being seen at all the best Brentwood and Beverly Hills parties. Hollywood proved that it can overlook both misfortune and bad taste when it elected to readmit Belinda to her former elevated status in its society; “forgive and forget” was its motto—“but don’t do it again.”

In return, the doors of the Mandeville house were flung wide, and celebrated guests came and went—producers, directors, actors and actresses, as well as many of Grant’s extensive list of business associates, because it was all business, anyway, wasn’t it? The marriage was a noble undertaking and we all gave Belinda full marks. Her efforts at creating a solid family unit were warmly chronicled in the papers, and the credit line “Mr. and Mrs. Grant Houghley Potter” was often seen on the lists of charitable committees, and while Grant was occasionally mistakenly referred to as “Mr. Carroll,” he took it with grace. That was what happened when you married a movie star, he said.

Jenny and I were invited to several affairs at Mandeville, and I found it easy to believe that Belinda had at last found the happiness she’d sought for so long. Then life took another little spin. By now Faun had graduated from Westlake School and there was a big party to celebrate. She went on taking her equitation classes and rode in the Westbury horse show and the one at Nod’s Ridge, and Dane Potter often participated, for he enjoyed riding, too. A year after her high-school graduation, Faun made her debut at a party given by Grant and Belinda at the Bel Air Country Club; the tables were decorated in tuberoses and asters, with ginger leis flown in from Honolulu for the guests, and in the center of the buffet table there was a fountain of champagne from which guests might imbibe. The party was a big success and in another month Faun Antrim and Dane Potter were secretly married in Arizona. Seven months later the bride was delivered of an eight-pound, fourteen-ounce boy, christened Gary. Rumor had it that Faun lacked the maternal instinct. She turned her baby over to a nurse while she scooted around, and this lack of responsibility no doubt led in the long run to the child’s mysterious disappearance. But that wasn’t until some years later, when Faun had disconnected from the world and entered into the life of a Flower Child in the then-dawning Age of Aquarius, withdrawing to a commune to preach free love and raise bean curd and alfalfa sprouts, and then setting out to discover the wisdom of the East. Good luck!

For a time Belinda disappeared from my life—not that she’d been that much in it, but one way or another we’d managed to keep in touch. Jenny and I had even flown down to Acapulco for her wedding, and I’d seen the look of adoration on her face as she’d raised it to kiss her new husband. Grant seemed an uncomplicated kind of guy, four-square, the real McCoy, shrewd and hardheaded in business matters but a loving, tender mate and putty in Belinda’s hands. They traveled a lot at that time, and she had everything any woman could possibly want—except a child, which they both wanted, the proof of their love; but it was getting late for her to have a baby. It helped some that their children had between them concocted a baby, but the fact that Faun and Dane were stepbrother and -sister added something slightly louche to the whole thing, something the least bit off, like Tuesday’s fish. There were even mentions of that dread word “incest,” as if by having fallen in love they’d committed some terrible crime, when of course there were no blood ties whatever.

The senior Potters were obliged to swallow their embarrassment when the baby was born with such obvious prematureness, though as grandparents they put a good face on the whole thing. But the future dimmed when it was learned that Dane, an exercise enthusiast, took a profound satisfaction in beating up his new wife, a habit he couldn’t seem to break. Faun was fast becoming the battered bride, and the marriage was over before it began.

At the same time Belinda was discovering that her own union was all but on the rocks. The writing was not on the wall, however, but in a poison-pen letter addressed to her and signed “a friend,” divulging the information that her husband, whom she loved and trusted, was secretly seeing a woman in San Francisco, a city to which he made frequent business trips.

I became privy to this little item because I’d accidentally stumbled across Belinda in the most unexpected way. Vi Ueberroth was practically one of the charter members of the Sand and Sea Club, that exclusive enclave on Pacific Coast Highway, an establishment catering to only the most exclusive social element in the city. Occasionally Vi would invite me out for lunch and an afternoon of sun poolside or, if I chose, a lie-out on the beach, listening to Vi chatter away; you could always count on Vi to bring you up-to-date on the latest dirt.

This particular afternoon, when she’d got into one of her beloved poker games, I went for a stroll along the beach. I suddenly discovered I had acquired a pal in the dog that ran up and barked for the stick I was carrying. I winged the stick, the dog bounded after it, pulled it out of the surf, and trotted back to me with the stick in his jaws. The next time I threw it, the dog dashed right across a blanket where two women were sitting with a baby under an umbrella, and then by golly if the dog didn’t get the stick and plow right back across the same blanket, splattering water all over the place.

When I stepped over to apologize to the women, I had my surprise: one of them turned out to be Belinda Carroll.

“Well, look who’s here,” she said musingly, shading her eyes at me. “I was just thinking of you not two hours ago.”

“What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that it’s been ages since I’ve seen you. You never call me.”

“I don’t know where to get you. I tried Mandeville. Aren’t you there anymore?”

She shook her head so her hair swung and she drew me down and introduced her companion, a young Finn who was her current
au pair
girl, a buxom milkmaid type with the look of the young Bergman about her, hired to look after the three-year-old baby, whom its father had left with Belinda! Faun, fortunately, had no interest in hauling the baby around with her on her “spiritual pilgrimage.”

When I pretended to suppose it was her own, she gave me a playful sock. “This is our beautiful Master Gary Potter,” she explained. “Kirstig and I are baby-sitting while Dane is in Salt Lake City on business. Say hello to the nice man,” she said, and the baby cooed. “Feel how heavy he is, this little dumpling,” and she handed him over to me. I sat him aboard my thigh and dandled him a bit, until he began to squall and Kirstig relieved me of him.

“Oh goodness, I thought so,” she said in her English-accented Scandinavian voice, “the little mischief has gone toy-toy in his nappy. Let me just go change him, I shan’t be a minute.”

With an apologetic smile she got up and bore the pooped-up baby away, leaving me to talk with Belinda, an interval both pleasant and enlightening.

The surprise of stumbling across her had taken my breath away, but now the mere sound of her voice worked like a tonic on me. There were little crooks and lines around her eyes that, while they made her appear older, were nonetheless intriguing. She was weathering, all right, but wonderfully. Her vivid beauty was paring down to a fine handsomeness rare in women, and I found her quite as extraordinary-looking as ever.

She seemed pleased to see me, too, and asked me many questions—about my health, my work, how things were going with Jenny and me. She’d rented a place here on the beach for the whole summer and urged us to come out any time we liked. The sun and salt air were good for the child and she was so delighted to have him. “Me, a grandmother? Come
on
.”

“And Faun? What’s become of her?” I waited for her answer.

“I had a letter, surprise, surprise. Wrong—not a letter, a card. From Delhi. She’s been at the Taj Mahal. There was some difficulty, evidently—they had to drag her out of the pool. It’s against the law to swim there.”

“What’s she doing in India? Killing all the sacred cows?”

“She’s meditating and learning yoga and has something called a mandala. She also has a mantra. Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes—I guess she jingles as she walks. She sent me a snapshot of herself with a diamond in her nose—how on earth do they get them to stay in? Now she’s living at an ashram somewhere and eating goat cheese. She can even make her stomach touch her spine or something. But I don’t think goat cheese is the answer.”

Though she made light of the whole thing, I could tell that Faun was rattling Belinda’s cage again. Because she seemed embarrassed to talk about it, I looked for another topic of conversation. “Where’s Grant these days?” I asked finally.

She didn’t look at me. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know. Singapore, maybe. Or Botswana, or Honduras. Or… San Francisco…” The funny way she said it made me pay closer attention.

“What’s in San Francisco?”

“Oh, you know, the usual—Nob Hill, Golden Gate Bridge—and somebody named Curtwright.”

Who, I wondered, was Curtwright.

Candace Curtwright, it came out, was a San Francisco socialite type, glittering hostess, patron of the arts, chairman of the Opera Ball, thirty, blonde, and a dilly.

“Blondes are fatal for Grant,” she said. “But what a way for me to find out.” She fetched her striped beach bag, delved inside, and produced a letter, which she handed over to me. “Read it and weep, darling.”

The letter, handwritten on drugstore stationery, said:

Must you spend your whole life being dumb? Did it ever occur to you why your darling husband insists on spending so much time these days in the lovely City by the Bay? As Tony Bennett says in the song, “I left my heart in San Francisco.” You know, dear—where the little cable cars climb halfway to the stars? Take a tip, the name is Candy Curtwright, she’s pretty and she’s loded [sic]. But don’t cry, it happens to us all. Just ditch the bum.

The lines were unsigned. I stared at them, trying to analyze the handwriting. There was something so blatantly vulgar, so cheap and obvious, even obscene about the note that I inwardly cursed its author. What kind of woman—of course it was a woman—could be so deliberately cruel?

I folded the pages to return them to their envelope, and as I did so, I caught the faint fragrance that clung to them, and noted Belinda’s tentative glance from under her lashes.

“Mm.” She wet her lips as she took the envelope back and stashed it in the bag. I wondered why she carried it with her. Presently Kirstig returned with the baby and we ventured into other realms of conversation.

An hour later, when I got back to the club and found Viola, who was sunny as Spain because she’d won three pots and filled an inside straight, I told her about the letter. Wise in the ways of her sex, Vi was neither as surprised nor as shocked as I. “Bitches, dear, we’re all bitches,” she said matter-of-factly. But I could see she was upset, for she liked Belinda and was one of the few women permitted to address her as “Blindy,” the nickname Maude Antrim had given her back when she was married to Perry.