Gilded Lily (19 page)

Still, days after the heated exchange, all seemed to be well again. Klein showed up for the good-bye party aboard their ship before it sailed to Europe. Lily sat chatting and chain-smoking Eve cigarettes as Klein expressed his good wishes for the happy couple.

Now, during this terrible crisis in their marriage, Klein had again appeared on the scene in London. He probably had urgent news of the Brazilian business, or perhaps he was bringing Lily the cash she had demanded. At that moment, Bendahan didn't stop to think about why Klein was in London; he simply agreed to drive her to the nearby Mayfair Hotel where Klein was staying. Lily kissed him and promised that she would return within the hour, in time for a late dinner.

But as the hours passed, Bendahan grew distraught. He called the Mayfair repeatedly and had Klein paged. For nearly four hours, there was no answer. Then Bendahan grew completely desperate and called his nemesis Edmond Safra, who he knew was in London on business and staying at the Dorchester hotel. “I felt that with the court case to be heard in London shortly that it was possible that my wife and Mr. Klein had gone to see Mr. Safra.” It was ten to midnight on March 11, 1972, when the hotel operator connected Bendahan to Edmond's suite.

“Mr. Safra informed me that he had not seen my wife and not un
naturally seemed a little surprised that I should be unaware of her whereabouts after six weeks of marriage,” Bendahan said.

At about half past midnight, Bendahan heard a knock on the door. Finally, she had returned! But why wasn't she using her key? Bendahan rushed to the door, ready to greet his wife, but stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Klein and the man he knew only as Raymond, an executive from Edmond's bank who was in charge of delivering Lily's weekly packages of cash. Both had dour expressions, and immediately Bendahan knew that the nightmare of the previous week was about to begin again in terrible earnest.

In measured tones the two businessmen took turns explaining that Lily was very confused and needed a few days on her own to recover from an unspecified ailment. They explained to him that such things happened occasionally with Lily, that she was inclined to behave irrationally. But they assured him that the best chance for her recovery and their marriage would be for Bendahan to respect her wishes and leave the flat immediately.

At first, Bendahan stood his ground.
But I am her husband
, he argued.
Lily is my wife.
Klein and the other man were unmoved, and repeated that Lily wanted him out of the flat immediately. How could this be happening? How could these two strangers kick him out of the matrimonial home?

“I asked to speak to Lily but they told me that she was under great stress and that a doctor had had to be called and that she was under sedation,” recalled Bendahan years after the event that would result in the end of his marriage.

“So I left to their repeated assurances that everything would be all right the next day. By then, I clearly remember, my heart was beating so hard that I could hardly hear them and my mouth was so dry as to hardly be able to speak.”

Bendahan says he spent the next month in a cloud. For the first time in his life, he began to take sleeping pills every night in order to rest.
Bewildered by the bizarre turn of events, he sought out a lawyer, writing out the whole story of his and Lily's meeting and courtship as if to affirm to himself and the world that it really had happened, and that as recently as a few weeks before the dreadful meeting with Klein and his accomplice at the London flat, they had both been deliriously happy. He made repeated and rather pathetic efforts to contact his wife.

“I have tried to reach my wife at the Plaza Athenée in Paris, at the President Hotel in Geneva, at the Palace hotel in St. Moritz, at the Hotel du Rhône in Geneva, at the Dorchester in London,” he told his lawyer.

But there was no response. Lily seemed to have disappeared without a trace.

“This is in effect how our marriage broke up,” he later wrote. “With no more prelude than I have described.”

 

IN THE SPRING
of 1972, Edmond Safra was a busy man. In addition to preparing his defense in the lawsuit that was threatening his beloved Trade Development Bank in London, he was in the process of acquiring another bank—the Kings Lafayette Bank in Brooklyn—and preparing to meet with U.S. regulators.

But clearly Lily's marriage was the most pressing item on his agenda. After all, she must have represented one of the single biggest depositors at his bank. Of course, he was also desperately in love with her, and underneath his hard-nosed business exterior, he was extremely hurt by her behavior and must have been insanely jealous of Bendahan, who was younger and far more handsome than himself.

“Edmond told me that he couldn't sleep at night thinking of Lily, that she had gotten married, that she was living with someone else,” said his friend Albert Nasser.

The escapades of the previous few months simply couldn't be allowed to continue. He had to put an end to her marriage and regain
control of Lily, even if it meant going public with their own relationship and eventually marrying her against his family's wishes.

He summoned his various aides and top executives from around the world, beginning with Simon Alouan, the able Lebanese mathematics professor he had put in charge of Alfredo's old company. “He called Alouan and asked him to go to London to tell Lily that if she divorces, Edmond will marry her, even against the wishes of his family,” said Nasser. But Bendahan needed to be eliminated first.

For weeks, he plotted. Paying off the man who had become Lily's husband must have turned Edmond's stomach.

But what to do?

First, he needed to put Lily in her place. At the Geneva headquarters of the Trade Development Bank, Edmond asked his secretary to get him on the next flight to London. He called Alouan, who hated Lily and didn't want to travel to London, so he settled on Felix Klein, ordering him to get on the first flight from Rio de Janeiro to London.

We have an emergency.

Klein, a chain-smoking Romanian émigré who was fond of dark suits and Brylcreem, knew better than most how to deal with emergencies. He had arranged everything in Rio after his former employer Alfredo died.

Now Edmond was entrusting him with a far more sensitive mission as he realized the huge threat that Bendahan represented to his future. If he were to lose Lily, he might also eventually lose Alfredo's fortune—a situation that could prove catastrophic for his growing banking empire.

The night that Lily left Bendahan alone at Hyde Park Gardens, Klein escorted her to Edmond's hotel. It's not clear what was said behind closed doors, but Edmond, who had repeatedly asked her to put an end to her foolish marriage to Bendahan, must have resolved to do it himself—by any means necessary.

 

“
I CAN ONLY
think that my wife is either very sick or very evil and with much regret I can't but feel that the latter is true,” wrote Bendahan in a letter to his attorney eight days after Klein and his assistant ordered him to leave Lily's flat.

But the signs had been everywhere during their relationship. And in the dark days after his ouster, as he struggled to come to grips with what had happened to his marriage, he searched through the letters and notes in an effort to understand what had just befallen him.

In a chatty letter she wrote to Bendahan during the first glorious weeks of their life together describing the progress of decorators at his new flat and professing her undying love for him, Lily also confessed to a terrible premonition. She wrote that she was very afraid for their future together. It was January 5, 1972, and she was off to Geneva and then on to St. Moritz for undisclosed business. Bendahan had just begun his round-the-world tour, and the letter must have reached him in Bangkok or Tahiti.

Bendahan dismissed the sentence, as he did all of the other troubling little insights into her character. What did he make of a subsequent letter, dated only three days later? On Saturday, January 8, 1972, Lily wrote to her beloved from the train en route to Gatwick airport to pick up her daughter Adriana. The previous evening she had heard from an ex-brother-in-law in Buenos Aires that her son Eduardo had come down with an illness and suffered hallucinations. A maid at the penthouse apartment where he was staying called his uncle, who took him to a local hospital.

Lily went on to describe how she felt about her son's condition. She informed Bendahan that her eldest son, Claudio, whom she referred to as her “Jesus Christ, Esquire,” had offered to bring his brother to London. But if she couldn't convince him to travel, Lily was prepared to “see to it” that Eduardo would be sedated and brought to London, accompanied by a doctor. The letter ended with Lily pleading with Bendahan to find a solution to be with her because she could no longer cope on her own. In a separate letter to Bendahan, written
on the evening of the same day, Eduardo's problems seemed entirely forgotten and she spent much of the letter writing about her feelings for Bendahan.

Was Bendahan at all perturbed by this response to Eduardo's situation? Bendahan said he advised Lily not to bring her son to London by force. In the end, Lily seemed to forget about her son's state of mind since she was able to hop on a plane to meet her lover in Acapulco.

Lily later met up with Eduardo in Rio de Janeiro. After a year of being apart from him, she didn't seem very happy to see him in Rio, recalled Bendahan. “It is clear that she is uncomfortable with him and he with her,” said Bendahan, referring to a photograph he took of mother and son on their honeymoon in Rio. “To be fair to her, pretty well everybody was uncomfortable in his presence. I went out with him a few times in Cannes and although he was friendly I was always conscious of an undercurrent of some demon that he was wrestling with.” Later, there was a reconciliation of sorts, and Lily convinced Eduardo to join his brothers and sister in London, no doubt so she could keep a watchful eye on him.

But on occasion, Lily's behavior did give Bendahan some pause. For one thing, she discarded friends with seemingly little feeling. When he asked her if she was going to keep in touch with Carmen Sirotsky, a woman she described as her “best friend” in Rio, Lily said she simply didn't have time. She also tossed off her friendship with Jo Kanarek, the dentist's wife, when she was no longer useful to her, Bendahan said.

But if Bendahan was concerned at her flip-flopping emotional state, it was only in hindsight. “For the first time in a letter there is an indication of her mental makeup, the significance of which unfortunately escaped me at the time,” Bendahan later confessed, referring to the letter she wrote to him on January 8, 1972, outlining Eduardo's emotional problems. Bendahan added that her anguish and depression at being away from him was extremely short-lived.

Later, the callous treatment of the man to whom she had professed her undying love should have come as little surprise to Bendahan.

Still, for weeks after he left Lily's Hyde Park Gardens flat, Bendahan tried to contact her. But in the end, it was Lily who contacted him through her lawyers. She was demanding a divorce, and her lawyers wanted him to sign the legal papers quickly, releasing her from any financial responsibilities. Bendahan refused. Years later, he claimed that he was not after money so much as a final meeting with Lily. He even suggested the tea room at Claridge's Hotel in London. Or, if her advisers suspected that he might have the press or police present, he was prepared for them to pick him up and take him to a meeting place of their choosing without giving him any kind of advance knowledge of where that would be. But Lily's lawyers “were persistent and categorical in refusing to let Lily spend a minute in my presence, even under close supervision.”

In the final negotiations leading up to the divorce Bendahan demanded payment for the decorating work Lily had commissioned on his flat—a figure roughly equivalent to $35,000, which she agreed to pay. He also demanded compensation for his suffering. The strain had left his business “in tatters” and he would need the next two years to bring it back up to speed. Lily refused to negotiate. The final indignity came when her lawyers invited him to go to New York to negotiate his divorce settlement in person. Bendahan's father, who was only ever told a small part of the story of his son's marriage and untimely separation, told him not to go.

“He advised me against this and recommended that I let lawyers take care of that unpleasantness,” recalled Bendahan.

Bendahan should have heeded that advice, for almost as soon as he stepped off his plane at John F. Kennedy International Airport, he was arrested by a plainclothes policeman. Bendahan spent a terrifying night at the Rikers Island jail, charged with “attempted extortion.” He was charged with trying to extort $250,000 in a final divorce settlement from Lily. One Brazilian newspaper erroneously
reported that he tried to extort more than $6 million from her. Bendahan would later settle for what he claims amounted to a pittance.

According to press accounts, Bendahan had threatened to conduct an investigation into Lily's business interests in New York and in Brazil unless the money was paid to him. Among other things, he accused her of transferring funds illegally from Brazil to Switzerland.

During his brief stay at Rikers Island, Bendahan claims that he shared a cell with a self-confessed murderer and saw a man throw himself off an upper floor. “You can well imagine the impact this had on me,” he recalled. “One minute married to the woman of my life who adored me, and the next, incarcerated with murderers, rapists, etc.”

Bendahan's lawyers obtained his release the following day after paying $50,000 in bail, although he was forbidden to leave the country. In the weeks of arduous divorce negotiations that followed, he claims he was bullied and threatened by Lily's lawyers, who told him that if he did not do exactly what they wanted they would arrange for him to be sent to prison for a much longer period of time in the United States.