Tycoon (36 page)

Kimberly sneered. “A boyish obsession. The first time you
go
up, you'll
throw
up. I really wish you'd
grow
up.”

John looked for a moment at Joni. “I won't throw up,” he said. “I already know how to fly. I have my license.”

“Who paid for—
Oh, shit!
Your father!”

“John's a skilled pilot,” said Joni.

“How would
you
know?”

“His instructors have said so. Anyway, I've been up with him. I've never been in the least afraid, with John flying.”

Kimberly stared at Dodge. “Both of my children,” she said, barely containing her fury. “I might have lost both of them. Jack is a consummate
ass!”

“No, he isn't,” Joni protested.

“No? Well, you're not going to see him anymore. You won't go down there
this
summer!”

“Mother, I'll be eighteen years old in August. I'm going to spend the summer in Greenwich . . . whether . . . you . . . like it . . . or not.”

“Then why don't you go now? Pack up your stuff and go to your father. Now . . . Tonight!”

J
OHN DROVE
J
ONI'S CAR, THE
B
UICK CONVERTIBLE THAT HER
father had bought for her a year ago. On the way down from Boston to Greenwich, Joni took John in her mouth twice. She told him it had been too long since she'd last had a chance to do it and that she'd missed it terribly. He admitted he'd missed it, too. They arrived in Greenwich at two in the morning. They had telephoned from Louisburg Square, so Jack and Anne were up, waiting for them.

“She's lost her mind,” were John's first words to Jack. “I didn't say it on the phone. I figured she was listening on an extension. But she's lost her mind. Joni can't live with her anymore.”

“Well, of course she doesn't have to,” said Anne.

“Wellesley—” Jack started to say.

“I don't want to go to Wellesley. That's too close to her. She'll harass me.”

“But you're admitted,” said Jack. “It may be too late to get admitted somewhere else.”

“If it is, I'll work for a year.”

“Doing what?”

“Daddy, I'll be a
waitress
if I have to!”

Anne interrupted. “We shouldn't try to make decisions in the middle of the night. You're very welcome to stay with us. We'll work something out. One thing that may help is that your father and I are building a house here in Greenwich. We're going to make it our chief residence, though we're not giving up the townhouse in New York. So there'll be a place for you here, or there'll be a place for you in New York. One way or another, it's going to be just fine, Joni.”

“Unless you get pregnant again,” Jack laughed, slapping his daughter gently on the shoulder.

1952-1953

J
ONI DECIDED SHE WOULD WORK FOR A YEAR BEFORE SHE
went to college. She said she was too disorganized to settle into any program of study and wanted a year to think.

She wept inconsolably when John left. Anne found that a little curious but did not guess the reason. She tried to involve the girl in the planning for the new house. Joni was enthusiastic but was conspicuously distracted. She began to look for a job.

Finding one was not easy. She had no secretarial skills and didn't want a secretarial job anyway. Jack offered to find a place for her in the company. She responded with a blunt question: “What could I do?” For a while she drove her car around in Greenwich, Stamford, and White Plains, answering employment ads in the local papers. When she turned eighteen, in August, she went to New York and moved into the brownstone. She came to Greenwich only on the weekends. Jack gave her an allowance, but she was embarrassed to take his money.

Finally, in October, she told Jack and Anne that she had a job and asked if she could continue to live indefinitely in the brownstone. They said yes and asked her what kind of job she had. As a model, she said. For Macy's. She would be photographed in clothes the store wanted to feature in ads in the
New York Times
and other papers.

Joni was pleased. This kind of modeling was not glamorous work, and the pay was meager, but she could live quite well without taking an allowance—as long as she lived in her father's luxurious apartment.

Before long Jack and Anne began to recognize Joni in advertising spreads in the
Times.
She modeled dresses and coats for a time; then she began to appear in bras and panties.

Just before Christmas a telegram arrived from Boston:

DEEPLY HUMILIATED BY TIMES PHOTOS OF JONI IN HER UNDERWEAR. TRUST YOU ARE HAPPY ABOUT TURNING OUR DAUGHTER INTO A WHORE. TRUST SHE IS HAPPY BEING ONE
.

MRS. DODGE HALLOWELL

Jack and Anne did not show Joni the telegram. They didn't need to. Joni had received one of her own:

YOU HAVE THOROUGHLY HUMILIATED YOUR GRANDPARENTS AS WELL AS DODGE AND ME BY ALLOWING YOURSELF TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED ALL BUT NAKED FOR PUBLIC DISPLAY IN NEWSPAPERS. SUGGEST YOU NEVER AGAIN APPEAR IN THIS CITY
.

MRS. DODGE HALLOWELL

Joni did not show that telegram to Jack or Anne. She answered it with a wire to her mother:

GO TO THE DEVIL.

JONI

Her mother's telegram only made her more determined to find success in the work she had chosen to do. When the time came to apply to colleges and universities, she did not apply. Instead, she had a portfolio of photographs taken of herself and began to visit modeling agencies.

In April 1953 she was accepted by the Rodman-Hubbel Agency. Her assignments then became more varied, and she appeared in slick magazines instead of department-store ads in newspapers.

O
CTOBER
1953

J
ACK AND
A
NNE HAD TWO CHILDREN:
L
ITTLE
J
ACK, WHO WAS
now six, and Anne Elizabeth, who was four. Jack was forty-seven. Anne was forty. They talked about having more children and decided they should not.

Anne went to her gynecologist in the spring and was fitted for a diaphragm. She found it uncomfortable, and Jack could feel it when he was inside her and didn't like it. They relied on condoms instead. But neither of them liked those, either. Both were bothered by the feel of rubber between them.

In bed one night in the Manhattan townhouse, where they had come after a formal dinner honoring Curt Frederick, they talked about what they had come to regard as a problem.

“I love you so much, Jack,” Anne whispered to him as they lay together. “I want to
make
love with you. All the time. I . . . have been thinking that maybe I should have my tubes tied. It's not a big operation. It—”

“I have a better idea,” he said. “The operation that
I
can have is much easier.”

“Oh, but, baby!”

“It's much easier. It's not painful. And it doesn't change anything, as far as feeling is concerned. Curt had it done when he was fifty and Betsy was forty-seven. He assures me he cannot tell the difference. He says it's just as good for him as it ever was.”

“You wouldn't feel you were . . . How can I say it?”

“Less of a man? I'd feel I was
more
of a man, for having done something . . . responsible. Why should you have to undergo surgery when I can have this done as an office procedure?”

Ten days later he lay on a table in a surgeon's office and submitted to the procedure. It was not painless, but it was not major surgery, either. The discomfort was gone in a week.

Three times Anne used her hand to make him ejaculate into a glass and went with him when he took the sample to a lab, where it would be examined under a microscope. The third time, the lab found no sperm cells in his semen.

He and Anne made love with a new freedom. She offered him more, as if she wanted to make it up to him for having had the operation. She had never withheld anything from him, but now she welcomed him with new fervor.

D
R.
L
OEWENSTEIN HAD BEEN RIGHT.
N
OT EVERY TELEVISION
station had to be a separate entity. A station could be connected by wire to satellite stations. What was more, local commercials could be inserted in the commercial breaks in a program. During commercial breaks in a Carlton House movie, local businesses could advertise their goods and services.

Late in 1953, LCI began an experiment in transmitting signals from its major stations to satellite stations by using a series of microwave transmitters. A microwave transmitter could send its signal only on line of sight, not over the horizon. Even so, a properly situated microwave transmitter could send its signal for twenty-five or thirty miles. A series of stations could send a program from a major television station to a community of satellite stations for a fraction of the cost of leasing wires.

Frequency allocations were another problem. With only twelve VHF channels available, competition for them was aggressive. For a time, the seventy UHF channels were all but ignored. Independent and public television stations took them. So did LCI.

Most television sets received only the twelve VHF channels. Sets that could receive the UHF channels cost a little more money. Also, the UHF channels did not reach such great distances. The solution, said Dr. Lowenstein, was to make consumers
want
to receive the programming on UHF.

In many areas—rural areas, especially—people could watch Milton Berle and
Your Show of Shows
on their VHF sets but had only heard of the interesting, risqué
Sally Allen Show.
They wanted it. They bought UHF sets and put up the additional little antennas that were needed to bring in the UHF stations.

By the end of 1953, the Lear Network was being called the fourth network. It was a status Jack Lear would not claim, but he was pleased with the result of his adventure in television.

I
N THE AUTUMN OF
1953 J
ACK AND
A
NNE RETURNED TO
L
ON
don. They spent a week seeing shows and visiting shops, then drove to Weldon Abbey for a three-day visit, bearing gifts and also photos of the home they were building in Connecticut. The Countess put them in the bedroom where they had spent their wedding night.

A big fire burned in the fireplace. Tonight it warmed the room.

“The fireplace didn't do much for us
that
night, did it?” Jack remarked. “The bed had been warmed for us, but this room was
cold!”

“I'd intended to wear the white negligee,” said Anne. “Remember it? I bought it for our wedding night. But this room was so cold that night that we couldn't come out from under the covers.”

“Without frostbite,” he chuckled.

She smiled. “It was a wonderful night for snuggling, though, wasn't it? The bed was warm, but you'd have kept me warm even if it hadn't been.”

“We were in Majorca before you could wear the negligee. I wish we had it now.”

“We do,” she said with a playful smile. “I brought it. Give me a minute to put it on.”

The white negligee consisted of a sheer pleated skirt and a
snug lace bodice that scooped under her breasts, leaving them bare. It was held up by narrow silk straps that ran from her armpits and over her shoulders. She modeled it for him, the way she'd done in Majorca. The pleats stirred as she walked, yielding glimpses of everything the skirt covered.

She sat down on an eighteenth-century settee that faced the fireplace. While he took off his clothes and pulled on a knee-length black Japanese silk robe, she poured cognac into two snifters. He sat down beside her, and before he took a sip of the brandy he kissed her, first on the mouth, then on each nipple. Then he dipped his tongue in the cognac and transferred a few drops to her lips and a drop or two to each nipple, where he knew it would tingle.

Anne dipped her tongue in the brandy and transferred a few drops to the tip of his penis.

They laughed.

“Can I ever express to you how much I love you?” he asked.

“Maybe not with words,” she said. “Anyway, you don't have to express it. I know it. I feel it.”

They moved to the bed. In one respect, Anne was a woman like none he had ever known before. She was
wet!
Sometimes, with others, he had put saliva, even Vaseline, on himself to effect a smooth entry. Never with Anne. From the time he began to kiss her, she became wet. Entering her had never been difficult; she was ready and slippery as soon as he approached her.

The only sexual difficulty they ever experienced was a minor one. Well hung though he was, Jack could never seem to penetrate Anne as deeply as she could accept. She could be satisfied without deep penetration, but she loved to feel him as far inside her as he could reach. They achieved the best penetration when he lay on his back and she mounted him. She would spread as wide as she could and lower herself on him.

She had a joke: “Oh, lover! I feel you in my
throat!”

As she impaled herself on him, she grunted, “You didn't get in like this on our wedding night. Damn that cold night and those down comforters!” She began to pump. “Damn!”

He looked up and studied her closely. She kept her chin high, her eyes tightly closed, and drew her lower lip back
between her teeth. She grunted and sometimes squealed, as she raised her hips and slammed them down, driving his shaft into her. Her breasts bounced, and sweat began to gleam on her lithe body. Who could have guessed
this
of the polished, dignified, aristocratic Countess of Weldon? Nobody, he judged. Besides every other wonderful thing she was, Anne was a carnal animal.