The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine Read online

  The story begins with a dinner party invitation…

  When young journalist Thomas Cleary is sent to dig up quotes for the obituary of a legendary film producer, the man’s eccentric daughter offers him entrée into the exclusive upper echelons of Hollywood society. A small-town boy with working-class roots, Thomas is a stranger in this opulent world of private jets and sprawling mansions.

  Then he meets Matilda Duplaine.

  Matilda is a beautiful and mysterious young woman who has never left the lush Bel-Air estate where she was raised. Thomas is immediately entranced by the enigmatic girl, and the two begin a secret love affair. But what starts as an enchanted romance soon unravels a web of secrets and lies that could destroy their lives—and the lives of everyone around them—forever.

  A modern-day Gatsby tale filled with unforgettable characters and charm, The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine is a sparkling love letter to Los Angeles and a captivating journey beyond the golden gates of its most glamorous estates. Timeless, romantic and utterly absorbing, it is a mesmerizing tale of privilege, identity and the difficult choices we make in the pursuit of power.

  ALEX BRUNKHORST

  The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine

  To John

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  One

  The tinkle of an antique servant bell announced my arrival.

  The shop was so cluttered with priceless art and centuries-old furniture that maneuvering among them was impossible. I stood in place, hoping someone would come to my rescue. Sixty seconds later, she did. I did not hear the opening or closing of a door, and there was nothing to indicate how she had entered the room. Had she been watching me from behind the ceiling-height Asian room divider she would have seen me grasping for distractions—my cell phone, my reporter’s notebook, a feigned interest in a chalk drawing that hung on the wall.

  Nothing I had read could do Lily Goldman justice. She was in her midfifties, but she could have passed for forty-five. Her eyebrows were tweezed in an arched manner, and her blond hair was expertly coiffed in a tame bouffant that looked as if she had come from a salon. Her face was small and refined save for a prominent nose that belonged on a woman twice her size. It was her most striking feature, one that a less self-confident woman of means would have done away with years ago through plastic surgery.

  “May I help you?” Lily asked. Her voice was surprisingly low, and it had a hint of a lady who smoked too much—though I was certain Lily had never picked up a cigarette in her life. Her breeding was too fine for that.

  I discreetly rubbed my right hand on my pant leg, hoping to dry it. I reached over an antique oak writing desk, where my proffered hand hung in the air. She looked at it blankly.

  “Yes, I’m Thomas Cleary. I’m a reporter, for the Times.”

  For the first time she made eye contact, and I thought I detected a slightly favorable response, but then:

  “I hate reporters. I never speak to the press,” she said.

  “You must be Ms. Goldman.” Phil Rubenstein, my editor, had warned me about Lily Goldman’s disdain for journalists before sending me on this mission. I got the distinct impression he thought it would be fruitless.

  She looked away, focusing on a bronze candlestick in the shape of a bird. She rotated the bird one hundred eighty degrees.

  “Birds don’t migrate north, they migrate south. It is autumn, after all. This place is such a mess. I need to speak to the staff. Where did you go to school, Mr. Cleary?”

  “You can call me Thomas. I went to Harvard.”

  “At Harvard I bet they taught you that birds migrate south for the winter, north for the summer.”

  “I recall picking up that tidbit at St. Mary’s, my grade school in Milwaukee.”

  “A Catholic boy,” she said with a wry smile.

  She waited for me to respond, but I didn’t. I was nervous because I was on what I hoped was my big-break assignment. It was my first and only story on the entertainment beat—a short retrospective on Joel Goldman, who had just passed away.

  Despite the fact that we were only steps away from one of Los Angeles’s most bustling intersections, it was strangely quiet in Lily’s shop. I had come here straight from the paper, which was alive with phones ringing, keyboards clicking and frantic deadlines being met. Here, there hadn’t been a single phone call, not a single customer. No car had passed. There was a formal English garden in front, but its chaises were bare, and its birdbath and trees were devoid of birds.

  “Were you taught by nuns in Milwaukee? I hear they can be terrible on the self-confidence,” Lily said.

  “I was,” I said, nervously shifting my position. The reclaimed wood beneath me creaked. “It was Harvard that wiped away the self-confidence, though. The nuns weren’t so bad in comparison.”

  “Milwaukee to Harvard. Quite the journey. Let’s just hope it was a one-way ticket out.”

  “That’s still uncertain,” I replied—a gross understatement.

  “And Los Angeles? Is this another layover or your final destination?”

  “Yet to be determined, as well.”

  Lily fixed her eyes directly on me. They were deep set and an extraordinary shade of green.

  “Do your parents miss you?”

  “My mother passed away a year ago.” The memory was still fresh and I forced down the lump that formed in my throat. “And, yes, my dad misses me. I’m an only child. He wants me to come home and work for the local paper. But a hundred thousand in student loans later I can’t bear to take a U-turn like that.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your mother...and the student loans.”

  I detected no judgment in Lily Goldman’s words, but I suddenly felt embarrassed by the fact that I had referenced the death of my mother and my student loans in the same sentence.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Twenty-six.”

  “She died young, then?”

  “She was forty-eight. Pancreatic cancer.”

  “It must have been devastating.”

  Few people had taken this level of interest in my life since my mom had died, and I almost forgot why I was there to see her. I wanted to sit down in the distressed leather chair to my right, light a cigarette and tell Lily Goldman everything—about my mother, who shriveled into a skeleton while I toile
d on inconsequential stories thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, a city I hated; about my grade school piano teacher, Sister Cecilia, who whacked my knuckles with an iron ruler; about the kids who used to pick me last for Red Rover.

  And I wanted to tell her about Manhattan. What had happened there.

  Professor Grandy’s Journalism Rule Number One: Never let your subject change the subject.

  “Enough about my situation. I apologize for taking so much of your time,” I said. Even as a young boy I had always shunned attention, particularly from strangers, and here I was escorting Lily into the dark corners of my life rather than visiting hers. “I’m very sorry to hear of your father’s passing. We’re doing a piece on him, and I was hoping you could give me a quote or an anecdote, something that will make the reader know him better—something to remember him by.”

  “Ah, yes, my father.”

  At first that was all she said. I didn’t blame her, because he was that kind of man. Joel Goldman’s story was as legendary and epic as the movies he had brought to the screen. He had grown up in Nazi-occupied Poland, escaped the gas chamber, passed through Ellis Island as a boy with only a nickel in his pocket and within ten years catapulted his way from reading scripts in RKO’s story department to creating one of the big movie studios.

  According to Joel Goldman’s former business associates, Joel had been known for his micromanagement, and that was putting it kindly. When he stepped on set—which he did almost daily—he practiced lines with his leading ladies, he whispered in his directors’ ears, he berated craft services for everything from dry strudel to weak coffee. In the age of typewriters, Joel had been known to tear up entire first acts and shred them to the floor while horrified scriptwriters looked on. He scoured expenses to the penny and had been a ruthless negotiator. As a former studio chairman had anonymously told me over the phone that afternoon, “If Joel Goldman sat across from you and you dropped a penny on the floor, he would pick it up and put it in his own pocket and consider himself the luckier for it.”

  My strongest trait as a journalist was not in asking, but in listening. So I waited.

  “A hell of a man, my father,” Lily finally said. “The first man to produce a movie that made a hundred million dollars. Can you believe it? He started a movie studio when he was only twenty-eight years old. That’s unimaginable. Nowadays boys your age are pushing mail carts at talent agencies, not winning Academy Awards. That was the golden age of the cinema, of Hollywood. Bogie and Bacall used to come to our house in Cap d’Antibes for tea.”

  She smiled at the memory, and then I lost her behind the Asian screen. “Have you been to Antibes?” she called.

  “I can’t say I have.”

  Lily reemerged. She stared at an imaginary point in the distance through heavily leaded antique glass that distorted the outside garden. “We used to sit on the veranda, watch the boats and sip tea with rum. I know it sounds awful, but it’s the most delightful drink. It was there that Bette Davis auditioned for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The sea there is incredible, so green—so different than the sea in Los Angeles.”

  “It sounds wonderful,” I said.

  “The most exciting time of my life. I often think—well, it sounds silly—but I often think that if we go to Heaven we’ll be allowed to live our lives again, fast-forwarding through the bad times, of course.” She looked away, as if she might have revealed too much to a stranger. “I would go back there. To those times with my father in the South of France. I have no use for Hollywood. I only care for what it bought us.”

  She glanced at the notebook, unopened in my hand. I hadn’t written a thing. It might have been nerves, or maybe Lily’s personal memories were like coins she had dropped to the ground by accident. Unlike her father, I could not pick them up while she was steps away from me. It would be stealing.

  “Is that the sort of thing you’re looking for?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “The quote.”

  “Yes, that’s perfect.” I scribbled to catch up.

  “I figured as much. Intimacy—it’s what we’re all looking for.”

  She focused squarely on me again, this time homing in on my clothes. I had picked up the shirt several years earlier in Cambridge at a discount store and had ironed the shirt and pants myself that morning. The result was deep creasing that was worse than if I had let the dryer have its way with them.

  “How does the paper allow its reporters to dress like they just came from a late night of too much drink?”

  Lily wore all brown—sweater, knee-length skirt and two-inch pumps. But even in its singular color and simplicity the outfit bled money. The ensemble brought to mind a Parisian tailor on hands and knees with pins in her teeth. The only pizazz in the outfit was a substantial ivory necklace. I had only known Lily for a few minutes, but it already made sense. Diamonds could still be bought on the open market; elephant tusks could not.

  Lily made a small adjustment to my collar, and her hands rested on my upper spine. It had been a long time since a woman had touched me, and I tightened.

  As a reporter I was trained to see the tiniest of clues—those fragments and fingerprints others could only see under a microscope. There was, at that moment, a brief spark in Lily’s green eyes. And then, just as quickly as her eyes bloomed, they withered and went almost black.

  I had thought that Lily had been the one to bare her soul in this interview, but instead she had set the course so I would be the subject who revealed too much.

  “You’re a very handsome young man. Don’t let poor clothing choices get in the way of that,” she said, before calling out to the other room, “Ethan, come here.”

  A few seconds later a slight man around my age entered through the French doors in the back.

  “Yes, Ms. Goldman.” He spoke in little more than a whisper, and if his slim-fitting attire was off-the-rack it was off an expensive one.

  “Thomas here is going to be attending dinner this evening. Please arrange with Kurt to pick him up.”

  “Thank you for the invitation,” I interjected. “But I have a deadline, and I’m not exactly the fastest typist.”

  “That’s one thing you’d think the nuns would have done right,” Lily said. “It’s a fabulous group—some of the guests worked with my father and are quite newsworthy in their own rights. I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

  In truth, I generally would have forgone a dinner party invitation, but if there was any opportunity for this dinner to beef up my story on Joel Goldman I knew I had to attend. I gave Ethan my address in Silver Lake, an area on the east side of Los Angeles known as a bastion for artists—all of them hipper than I. Ethan arranged for me to be picked up at seven o’clock sharp.

  “Good. It’s decided, then,” Lily said. “Thomas, I’ll see you soon. Ethan, make sure everything goes smoothly.”

  Lily would soon disappear behind the Asian screen, but just before she did, she turned around and set her eyes on me one more time.

  “Once again, I’m sorry about your mother, Thomas. You must be terribly lonely.”

  Before I could respond, Lily had vanished among the antiques.

  Two

  And so that was how it began. Simply, without the fanfare one comes to expect from an evening that turns life’s course from left to right. I called Phil Rubenstein to let him know I would be late with the story. Rubenstein hated slipped deadlines, but once I informed him that I would be joining Lily and a “newsworthy” cast for dinner, he let this one slide a few hours to accommodate the extra research. He then shocked me by changing the story from a one-column to two.

  I had only one sport coat—a sales-rack special from a big-and-tall store in Milwaukee. I was tall and broad in the way Midwestern Germanic men are, but I was not big enough to fill out the coat properly, and its fit had always
been loose. I was hoping Lily wouldn’t notice. I splashed on some aftershave I had got for college graduation, and I slid my notebook and tape recorder into my jacket’s interior pocket.

  At precisely seven o’clock, my building’s downstairs buzzer rang. An Asian man of about fifty, with an expression stern as his handshake, stood at the door.

  “I’m Kurt,” he said in the same manner one might use to greet a girl not attractive enough to sleep with.

  “I’m Thomas, from the Times.” I added that last part as an afterthought, as if it somehow legitimized me.

  Kurt opened the back door of a silver Mercedes sedan and I slid in. It smelled of new leather. I suspected Lily was the type of woman whose cars always smelled of new leather. An Evian water and, coincidentally or not, today’s Los Angeles Times rested in the seat pocket. I opened the paper to the Local section. My one-column article on the proposed 405 Freeway expansion was on page three.

  I put the paper back in the seat pocket as we headed west down Sunset Boulevard, toward the sea, as Lily Goldman had called it. I had never been driven by a private driver before and I didn’t know if I was meant to make conversation or sit in silence. I decided to take Kurt’s cue. He didn’t address me once during the hour-long journey; he listened to classical music on the radio and never glanced into the rearview mirror unless it was to change lanes.

  Finally, after our long sinuous trip across town, Kurt put on his blinker, preparing for a sharp right into a narrow road that traveled between colossal white walls. A filigree black-iron signpost announced where we were going. The words Bel-Air lit up the twilight in a curious shade of blue-white, the color of an ice-skating rink. The words were written in an old-fashioned glitzy font embellished with curlicues and arcs. It was a font from the days when more meant more.

  Bel-Air wasn’t gated, as some Los Angeles communities were. Instead, it was simply known as a place that commoners like me didn’t visit.

  We took a soft left and then a sharp right, and then we drove through the winding hills. I opened the tinted window halfway. We were a mere thirteen miles away from my apartment, but the air felt as if it had rolled in from another lifetime. It was foggy and cool, and it smelled of smoke from real chimneys, of lawns freshly cut, of hedges just pruned and of autumn-blooming flowers. Silver Lake reeked of the pavement and the people who slept on it.