The Mansions of Limbo (33 page)

Although Margaret had inherited a vast fortune, she was to inherit a vaster one through the persistence of her husband. George de Cuevas’s wooing of his wife’s grandfather, old John D. Rockefeller, turned Margaret from a rich woman into a very rich woman. While John D. had bestowed liberal inheritances on his four daughters during their lifetimes, he believed in primogeniture, and in his late seventies he turned over the bulk of his $500 million fortune to his only son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the father of Abby, John D. III, Nelson, Laurence, Winthrop, and David. He retained the income for himself. Margaret at that time was indifferent to her inheritance, but George, for whom the prospect of Rockefeller millions had surely been a lure in his choice of a life mate, was not one to sit back and watch what he felt should be his wife’s share pass on to her already very rich Rockefeller cousins. He set about to charm his grandfather-in-law, and charm him he did. He even became his golfing companion. Rockefeller had never come across such a person as this eccentric bird
of paradise that his granddaughter had married. Surprisingly, he not only was amused by him but genuinely liked him. The family legend goes that one day George took Bessie and John by the hand to the old man and said, “Do you want to see your great-grandchildren starve because their mother has not been taken care of the way the rest of the Rockefellers have been?” The tycoon calmly assured him that Margaret would be provided for. Old John D. then began investing his enormous income in the stock market and in the last years of his life made a second fortune, the bulk of which he left to Margaret on his death, when she was forty years old.

In 1940, in Toms River, New Jersey, George de Cuevas became an American citizen and renounced his Spanish title, claiming he would henceforth be known as merely George de Cuevas. However, he continued to be referred to by his title, and once his role as a ballet impresario grew to international prominence, he changed the name of the company associated with him throughout his career from the Ballet de Monte Carlo to the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas. From 1947 to 1960 the marquis toured the company all over the world, with the financial support of his wife, who donated 15 percent of her income to his troupe. He introduced American dancers to France and French dancers to America, and soon became a beloved figure in the dance world. The impresario Sol Hurok in his biography described him as “a colorful gentleman of taste and culture … perhaps the outstanding example we have today of the sincere and talented amateur in and patron of the arts.”

Actually, de Cuevas is better remembered for one episode of histrionics and temperament than for any of his productions. In 1958 the dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar, then fifty-two years old, became angry when the marquis’s
company changed the choreography of his ballet
Black and White.
After a heated exchange of words the marquis, who was seventy-two at the time, slapped Lifar in the face with a handkerchief in public and then refused to apologize. Lifar challenged de Cuevas to a duel, and the marquis accepted. Although neither of the combatants was known as a swordsman, épées were chosen as the weapons. The location of the duel was to be kept secret because dueling was outlawed in France, but more than fifty tipped-off reporters and photographers showed up at the scene. The encounter was scheduled to last until blood was drawn. For the first four minutes of the duel Serge Lifar leapt about while the marquis remained stationary. In the third round the marquis forced Lifar back by simply advancing with his sword held straight out in front of him, and pinked his opponent. It was not clear, according to newspaper accounts of the duel, whether skill or accident brought the marquis’s blade into contact with Lifar’s arm. “Blood has flowed! Honor is saved!” cried Lifar. Both men burst into tears and rushed to embrace each other. Reporting the event on its front page, the
New York Times
said that the affair “might well have been the most delicate encounter in the history of French dueling.”

As a couple, the Marquis and Marquesa de Cuevas became increasingly eccentric. “It was unconventional, their marriage, but, curiously, it worked,” said Viscountess Jacqueline de Ribes, who was a frequent guest in their Paris apartment. “There were always people waiting in the hall to have an audience—it was like a court,” said one family member. Another longtime observer of the inner workings of the de Cuevas household, Jean Pierre Lacloche, said, “Margaret was always in her room during the parties. She hated coming out, but usually she finally did. She gave in to all of George’s pranks. She didn’t care. He made life
interesting around her.” George de Cuevas often received visitors lying in bed wearing a black velvet robe with a sable collar and surrounded by his nine or ten Pekingese dogs, while Margaret grew more and more reclusive and slovenly in her dress. She always wore black and kept an in-residence dressmaker to make the same dress for her over and over again. When she traveled to Europe, she would book passage on as many as six ships and then be unable to make up her mind as to which she wanted to sail. If she wanted to go from Palm Beach to New York, she would book seats on every train for a week, and then not be able to make the commitment to move. Once, unable to secure a last-minute booking on a Paris-Biarritz train and determined to leave, no matter what, she piled her daughter, her maid, ten Pekingese dogs, and her luggage into a Paris taxicab and had the driver drive her the five hundred miles to Biarritz. The trip took three days.

George de Cuevas liked to entertain, and he filled their homes with society figures, titles, celebrated artists and dancers, and a constant flow of Russian émigrés. “At the Cuevas parties were such as the Queen Mother of Egypt, Maria Callas, and, of course, Salvador Dalí, who was a regular in the house,” said Mafalda Davis, an Egyptian-born public-relations woman who was a great friend of George de Cuevas. George was a giver of gifts. He bought old furs and jewels from the poor Russians in Paris and gave them away as presents. He gave the Viscountess de Ribes a sable coat, and he gave Mrs. Gurney Munn of Palm Beach a watch on which he had had engraved “May the ticking of this watch remind you of the beauty of a faithful heart.”

Somehow, in the midst of this affluent chaos on two continents, Bessie and John de Cuevas were raised. A relative of the family told me that Margaret had a good and strong relationship with her children. “Not a peasant-type
relationship,” he said, “not conventional,” meaning, as I understood him, not many hugs and kisses, but strong in its way. Another relative said, “After a short period with her children—and later with her grandchildren—she was ready to send them out to play or to turn them over to their nanny. Margaret, who throughout her life was notorious for never being on time, arrived so late for her daughter’s coming-out party at the Plaza Hotel in New York, which was attended by all of her Rockefeller relations, that she almost missed it. When Bessie was seventeen she met Hubert Faure, who became her first husband. “She was an extraordinary-looking person,” said Faure about his former wife, with whom he has retained a close friendship. “English-American in intellect with a Spanish vitality behind that.” Hubert Faure, now the chairman of United Technology, was not at the time considered a catch by the Marquis de Cuevas, who wanted his daughter to marry a Spanish grandee and possess a great title. But Bessie exhibited an early independence: she went ahead and married Faure in Paris in 1948, when she was nineteen, with no family and only another couple in attendance. John, her brother, was also married for the first time at an early age. The children, as Bessie and John are regularly referred to in the upcoming court case with Raymundo de Larrain, have at times shown a bemused attitude about their life. Once, when questioned about her nationality, Bessie described herself as a third-generation expatriate. John, during a brief Wall Street career, was asked by a colleague if he could possibly be related to a mad marquesa of the same name. “Yes,” he is said to have replied, “she is a very distant mother.”

The apex of the social career of George de Cuevas was reached in 1953 with a masked ball he gave in Biarritz; it
vied with the Venetian masked ball given by Carlos de Beistegui in 1951 as the most elaborate fete of the decade. France at the time was paralyzed by a general strike. No planes or trains were running. Undaunted, the international nomads, with their couturier-designed eighteenth-century costumes tucked into their steamer trunks, made their way across Europe like migrating birds to participate in the
tableaux vivants
at the Marquis de Cuevas’s ball, an event so extravagant that it was criticized by both the Vatican and the left wing. “People talked about it for months before,” remembered Josephine Hartford Bryce, the A&P heiress, who recently donated her costume from the ball to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Everyone was dying to go to it. The costumes were fantastic, and people spent most of the evening just staring at each other.” As they say in those circles, “everyone” came. Elsa Maxwell dressed as a man. The Duchess of Argyll, on the arm of the duke, who would later divorce her in the messiest divorce in the history of British society, came dressed as an angel. Ann Woodward, of the New York Woodwards, slapped a woman she thought was dancing too often with her husband, William, whom she was to shoot and kill two years later. King Peter of Yugoslavia waltzed with a diamond-tiaraed Merle Oberon. And at the center of it all was the Marquis George de Cuevas, in gold lamé with a headdress of grapes and towering ostrich plums, who presided as the King of Nature. He was surrounded by the Four Seasons, in the costumed persons of the Count Charles de Ganay; Princess Marella Caracciolo, who would soon become the wife of Fiat king Gianni Agnelli; Bessie, his daughter; and her then husband, Hubert Faure. As always, Margaret de Cuevas did the unexpected. For days beforehand, her costume, designed by the great couturier Pierre Balmain, who had paid her the honor of coming to her for fittings, hung,
like a presence, on a dress dummy in the hallway of the de Cuevas residence in Biarritz. But Margaret did not appear at the ball, although, of course, she paid for it. She may have been an unlikely Rockefeller, but she was still a Rockefeller, and the opulence, extravagance, and sheer size (four thousand people were asked and two thousand accepted) of the event offended her. She simply disappeared that night, and the party went on without her. She did, however, watch the arrival of the guests from a hidden location, and a much repeated, but unconfirmed story is that she sent her maid to the ball dressed in her Balmain costume.

George de Cuevas increasingly made his life and many homes available to a series of young male worldlings who enjoyed the company of older men. In the early 1950s Margaret de Cuevas purchased the town house adjoining hers on East Sixty-eighth Street in New York. The confirmation-of-sale letter from the realty firm of Douglas L. Elliman & Co. contained a cautionary line: “The Marquesa detests publicity and would appreciate it if her name weren’t divulged.” An unkind novel by Theodora Keogh, called
The Double Door
, depicted the marriage of George and Margaret and their teenage daughter. The double door of the title referred to the point of access between the two adjoining houses, beyond which the wife of the main character, a flamboyant nobleman, was not permitted to go, although the houses were hers. The drama of the novel revolved around the teenage daughter’s clandestine romance with one of the handsome young men beyond the double door. Inevitably, the marriage of George and Margaret de Cuevas began to founder, and for the most part they occupied their various residences at different times. They maintained close communication, however, and Margaret would often call George in Paris or Cannes from New
York or Palm Beach to deal with a domestic problem. Once when the marquesa’s temperamental chef in Palm Beach became enraged at one of her unreasonable demands and threw her breakfast tray at her, she called her husband in Paris and asked him to call the chef and beseech him not only to quit but also to bring her another breakfast, because she was hungry. George finally persuaded the chef to recook the breakfast, but the man refused to carry it to Margaret. A maid in the house had to do that.

At this point in the story, Raymundo de Larrain entered the picture. “Raymundo is not just a little Chilean,” said a lady of fashion in Paris about him. “He is from one of the four greatest families in Chile. The Larrains are aristocratic people, a better family by far than the de Cuevas family.” Whatever he was, Raymundo de Larrain wanted to be something more than just another bachelor from Chile seeking extra-man status in Paris society. He was talented, brilliant, and wildly extravagant, and soon began making a name for himself designing costumes and sets for George de Cuevas’s ballet company. A protégé of the marquis’s to start with, he soon became known as his nephew. An acquaintance who knew de Larrain at that time recalled that the card on the door of his sublet apartment first read M. Larrain. Later it became M. de Larrain. Later still it became the Marquis de Larrain.

In Bessie de Cuevas’s affidavit in the upcoming probate proceedings, she emphatically states that although various newspapers have described de Larrain as the nephew of her father and suggested that he was raised by her parents, there was no blood relation between the two men. In a letter to an American friend in Paris, she wrote, “He is not my father’s nephew. I think he planted the word long ago
in Suzy’s column. If there is any relationship at all, it is so remote as to be meaningless.” Yet as recently as November, when I spoke with de Larrain in Palm Beach, he referred to George de Cuevas as “my uncle.” That fact of the matter is that Raymundo de Larrain has been described as a de Cuevas nephew and has been using the title of marquis for years, and he was on a familiar basis with all members of the de Cuevas family. Longtime acquaintances in Paris remember Raymundo calling Margaret de Cuevas Tante Margaret or, sometimes, perhaps in levity, Tante Rockefeller. In her book
The Case of Salvador Dalí
, Fleur Cowles described the Dalí set in Paris as follows: “On May 9, 1957, the young nephew of the Marquis de Cuevas gave a ball in honor of the Dalís. According to Maggi Nolan, the social editor of the
Paris Herald-Tribune
, the Marquis Raymundo de Larrain’s ball was ‘unforgettable’ in the apartment which had been converted … into a vast party confection,” with “the most fabulous gala-attired members of international society.” Fleur Cowles then went on to list the guests, including in their number the Marquis de Cuevas himself, without his wife, and M. and Mme. Hubert Faure, his daughter and son-in-law. Although Cowles did not say so, George de Cuevas almost certainly paid for Raymundo’s ball.