The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine Read online

  The few street signs I made out from the window had regal names, and if you were looking from the street you would think there were no houses here, only thirty-foot hedges, iron gates and video cameras. The tight streets, two-acre parcels and light traffic had the makings of a neighborhood, but there were no sidewalks. From what I could tell, people here didn’t borrow sugar—they sent their drivers to the store for it.

  Flowers hung from heavy vines and wept into the narrow streets, squeezing them even tighter. We didn’t have foliage like this in the rest of Los Angeles, and I wondered if the flowers were indigenous to only these six square miles. Perhaps the rain here was different, or maybe even the sun preferred Bel-Air. I reached out my window, and I plucked one of the dew-swept flowers off its vine, allowing it to wither between my thumb and index finger before placing it in my interior jacket pocket beside my tape recorder.

  Even as a little boy I had always been fascinated by wealth. I grew up in a working-class family, and while my teenage friends were content playing in the streets in Milwaukee’s rough inner city, I chose my running path along Lake Michigan, where behemoth mansions reminded one of another era, an era when the industry of the Midwest made millionaires. I dreamed of living in those manors with owners who didn’t have a care in the world. At fifteen, when it came time for employment, I eschewed fast food or gas stations. Instead, I worked for an older, wealthy gentleman by the name of Mr. Wayne. I had always been mechanically inclined, so in the evenings my head would be bent over the guts of his expensive hot-rod collection bringing dead cars back to life. In summers, I was a golf caddy at Milwaukee’s most expensive country club, even though it required multiple bus transfers to get to work. And then at Harvard, I was surrounded by wealth unimaginable for a boy from the working class of the heartland. For the first time in my life, money seemed accessible, something I could get. All I had to do was work in the world of investments, as most of my college buddies had done. When it came down to it, though, I had chosen a different path—one that would keep me firmly in the lot of the middle class for the rest of my life.

  Old iron gates opened. We hadn’t announced ourselves, but tiny video cameras blinked red in the eyes of the stone lions.

  The steep, narrow driveway ended at a cobblestone motor court with an ornate fountain depicting sea nymphs at play. Prehistoric-looking foliage surrounded an old stone Spanish-style mansion. The cacti were ten feet tall and blue lights illuminated trees with spiky leaves and exotic flowers.

  I tapped the front door’s heavy knocker. I heard the clackety-clack of heels on a tile floor and the door opened. A house cat with spots like a leopard sprinted across the foyer.

  The woman was in her late thirties and dressed for a rococo costume party, not an intimate dinner. Her outfit featured a tortoise-and-feather headpiece, white fur shawl, snakeskin pants so tight they might have been painted on and six-inch ostrich heels. I thought of Lily’s ivory necklace. I wondered if wearing endangered species was a status symbol in all of Los Angeles’s social stratosphere or just this specific circle of it.

  “You must be Thomas. Come in. You’re pale. It looks like you could use a drink. And a trip to Tahiti. But we can take care of that later.”

  We stood in a two-story entry the size of a ballroom. Red wax candles served as wall sconces and the only man-made light came from an overhead chandelier adorned with dragons and crystals. Juliet balconies above us were empty, but I got the sense that during grander parties violinists played there and during more intimate ones men and women did.

  “Everyone, this is Thomas, Lily’s friend,” the woman who answered the door said, leading me from the foyer to a smaller room.

  She did not bother introducing herself, but her manner was as theatrical as her attire and her words echoed on the stone. The four other people in the room hushed on cue, and I was embarrassed by their silence, their undeserved stares. In order to divert my eyes, I took in the room’s zebra chairs, antlered sconces and mirrored ceilings, wondering if I had fallen down the rabbit hole.

  “Thomas, darling, what are you drinking?” the oddly dressed woman asked.

  I scanned the group with the corners of my eyes. There was no Lily. My heart quickened, and I was so nervous I briefly and irrationally thought that I had shown up to the wrong party.

  “Sweetheart. Is everything okay?” the woman pressed me, after her question had gone unanswered.

  She stood beside the type of formal mirrored bar you would’ve found in a 1920s Art Deco speakeasy in Manhattan. There were no off-the-shelf bottles; liquor was kept in heavy crystal decanters. Sterling silver–framed snapshots surrounded the crystal on all sides. It was then that I realized Lily Goldman had invited me to a dinner party at someone else’s house.

  I paused for a moment. I needed to choose a drink that was both elegant and available in one of those anonymous bottles. I thought of my ex-girlfriend—she had been a girl who would have known what to order in a scene like this. A gimlet. That had been her drink of choice.

  “Yes. Sorry. A gimlet, please. On the rocks.”

  “A gimlet—how old-fashioned and moneyed of you. I’ll have to remember that,” she said. “I love anything old-fashioned. Right, George?”

  “And moneyed, which is the only reason you fell in love with me,” George said with a glint in his eye, as if he knew it was true but was also flattered by it.

  “Fell in love maybe, but stayed in love no. California’s a community property state. Even half your money would’ve kept me in couture and a G5,” she said as she squeezed three slices of lime into the drink she had prepared.

  George walked over and preemptively sandwiched my hand in both of his. His squeeze was more appropriate for a long-lost high school chum than a random dinner-party crasher, and I immediately liked him for it.

  “George Bloom. My wife, Emma, has many wonderful traits—I love her dearly—but introductions aren’t one of them. Welcome to our humble abode.”

  So this was why Rubenstein had so easily moved my deadline.

  Everyone knew George Bloom as the most powerful man in the music business. He grinned, and his large-toothed smile was as wide as his jaw was formidable. It was easy to imagine him bestowing that same charming grin on musicians he wanted to sign to his record label—with great success. Unlike his wife, whose outfit must have been the result of vintage binge shopping and weeks of planning, George wore a golf shirt and khakis more appropriate for a round of links than a dinner party. I was sure his casual attire was neither picked nor approved by Emma, so George’s message was clear: he was boss of this castle.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. “Thanks for having me.”

  “It’s our pleasure, truly. Lily’s on her way. In the meantime, come in. Meet the rest of the group.”

  George placed his hand on my back, nudging me deeper into the drawing room.

  A gimlet magically appeared in my hand, and I studied it, not knowing if I was supposed to wait for a toast. George saw my hesitation. His eyes said, “Go ahead, drink, young man.”

  I took a hurried sip of my drink. In the corner, I caught a glimpse of David Duplaine, undisputedly Hollywood’s most powerful man. He leaned back in his chair, tips of his fingers together so his hands formed a pyramid, his legs crossed. I diverted my eyes from his and focused on the sofa.

  “Carole, Charles, David...everyone, this is Thomas. Thomas is a close friend of Lily’s.”

  Carole Partridge was one of the most famous actresses in the world, and here she was, within ten feet of me, lounging on a purple velvet sofa, stroking the leopard cat. She balanced herself on a bony elbow and a curvy hip, and her pale bare feet were the equivalent of George’s golf shirt—proof she was important enough to do whatever she damn well pleased.

  Reality and fantasy briefly merged and I felt as if I was looking at Carole on-screen from the first row in a m
ovie theater. Her retro-hourglass figure was the stuff of Playboy. Her arms and legs were lean and muscular. Her hazel eyes were sleepy in a seductive way, and her flawless, milky-white skin seemed as if it belonged in a black-and-white film—Technicolor, or real life, made it appear almost fake.

  “Would you like me to get up?” Carole asked in a bored manner, as if after three minutes in the room my presence was already growing old.

  “Not necessary,” I declared.

  Carole’s husband, Charles, stood up in her stead.

  “Thomas, nice to meet you,” Charles said. “Sit down, join us. We were thrilled when Lily said she invited you. We need some new blood around here.”

  Charles had the general aura of someone for whom work had always been optional. His speech was tinted with a rarified East Coast accent that was most likely cultivated with lacrosse buddies at Choate or a place like it. At Harvard I knew plenty of guys who were born into a lifetime of financial security, and they, like Charles, always seemed to have a general calm about them, as if their money was a superpower.

  “Thanks,” I said, settling into a chair and taking a long sip of my gimlet.

  “Lily tells us you’re a reporter,” George said.

  “That’s correct.” I focused intensely on my drink, experiencing a bit of stage fright. At the mention of the word reporter the tape recorder felt heavier in my interior pocket, reminding me of my second-class and gauche life.

  “A friend of mine—may he rest in peace—always said that the difference between journalists and reporters is that journalists lie, reporters just make shit up,” George said.

  “In that case I’m a journalist. I’ve never had a good imagination. If I did I would have been a novelist or written for the movies,” I replied.

  “Charles just wrote a screenplay DreamWorks bought for seven figures,” George said genially. There was a ring of pride in his voice.

  Something about George reminded me of Mr. Wayne, the gentleman with the hot-rod collection I had worked for in high school. They both oozed charm and seemed inclined to grab your hand, squeeze it and escort you to that glorious and splendid place where they had ended up.

  Charles smiled good-naturedly. “The stock market was flat so I was bored. I copied one of Spielberg’s movies scene by scene, inserting different names and monsters.”

  There was a hearty round of laughs from the group.

  Though I had only just met Charles, I could already imagine him alone in a plush home office, sitting at an old-fashioned typewriter, a heavy glass of Macallan 21 beside him, and the rest of the bottle close enough to be in eyesight but too far for a refill. The television on the wall would be paused on a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  I cast a sideways glance at Carole. Her fingertips were so deeply burrowed in the leopard cat’s neck folds they disappeared to the knuckle. She hadn’t joined the group in laughter, hadn’t cracked a smile.

  “How did you meet Lily, Thomas?” Carole was thirty-eight, but her voice was forty-eight and smooth as cognac. It was more of a purr than a voice.

  “I’m doing a story on her father.”

  The question didn’t seem like small talk, and I hoped I answered correctly. I had never been in the close presence of someone so famous, and I had yet to find that gray area between feigned ignorance and asking for an autograph.

  “A great man, Joel Goldman,” Emma said, as she adjusted a feather in her hair and gave a peripheral glance to her husband. “George did the music for many of Joel’s films. Right, love?”

  “David and I both worked for him. Were it not for Joel we wouldn’t be sitting here, or it would have had to happen some other way.”

  An imaginary breeze rolled in. David Duplaine was still sitting, silently, in the corner, and now the group shifted their attention his way. Even the leopard cat gave a lazy glance in David’s direction before settling back under Carole’s palm.

  David Duplaine was the chairman of a movie studio—the pinnacle of off-camera stardom in Los Angeles. But that wasn’t all. In addition to producing many of the world’s top-grossing movies, David had grown the studio’s subsidiary television network from infancy to its presently dominant state. He was now in the process of gobbling up major market newspapers and technology companies to create a media empire across all platforms. David was the most powerful media titan in the world.

  My job at the Times wasn’t as much writing as it was reading—people. And I knew from the moment I saw him that David Duplaine would be a difficult man to read.

  I avoided eye contact at first, homing in on his sneakers, which in any other city would be too young for a man of fifty. He wore a white T-shirt that might have been Hanes or Gucci but whatever the case fit perfectly. He was small of stature and build, and his head was shaved in the manner fashionable for men who are balding. His brown eyes were heavily lidded and bored looking, his eyebrows lively and interested and his strong nose as crooked as if it had survived a few street fights along the way. Yet the combination came together to form someone who was quite interesting looking and, in fact, he was always included in eligible-bachelor lists throughout the globe.

  David hadn’t bothered to acknowledge me in any manner, but I felt his presence the way a gazelle feels a cheetah in the depths of night on the plains—he was there, waiting, and whatever my next move was it wouldn’t matter.

  “Hello, everyone,” announced a woman’s voice.

  I felt an extraordinary sense of relief when I saw Lily in the doorway. She was draped in black silk and her ivory necklace was gone in favor of wide cuffs that covered half her forearms in gold webs of pearls and emeralds.

  “Lily!” Emma stood up and handed Lily a drink. “How are you, sweetheart? Those cuffs... I hate you for them.”

  “Oh these—they’re terribly old and I never think to wear them. You can have them, in fact. I’ll messenger them to you tomorrow.” Lily smiled at me. “Most important, has everyone met Thomas?”

  “Yes, yes. He’s lovely, absolutely lovely. And so good-looking,” Emma said, as if I weren’t in earshot. “Now let’s eat. I’m bloody famished.”

  * * *

  We passed through an arch to a saffron-colored formal dining room prepped to comfortably seat seven, though it could do the same for forty if larger-scale entertaining were in order. The first thing I noticed were the flowers—gothic, untamed arrangements of twigs, branches, berries and deeply colored, oversize, drooping roses.

  The rectangular table was set with heavy gold plates, glass goblets and a tall candelabra that held so many candles the room seemed on fire. Emma was not one for fine china and dainty centerpieces.

  I almost made the mistake of sitting down before seeing the place card with my name written in a medieval font.

  “Thomas, you’re sitting next to me. I never seat couples beside each other. I figure we have enough time together as it is. Not that I don’t love my husband, because I do. Ridiculously so.” Emma blew George an air-kiss as she sat down at the head of the table.

  Emma sat to my left, Carole my right. While the first course was served, my presence was still new and exciting. Lily and Emma shelled me with rapid-fire questions—“Do tell. What was it like to grow up in a town like Milwaukee?”—and Charles and George interjected here and there. They dropped plenty of names—movie stars, studio heads, political figures. Just hearing those names gave me a rush. I felt as if I was a part of it. Had I chosen to whip out my notebook or betray confidences, I would have had enough fodder for ten juicy stories. Instead I kept quiet, hoping an off-the-record meal would create more on-the-record content later.

  The novelty of a stranger at the table had grown thin by the time we reached the entrée, and as I ate my Alaskan salmon theatrically drizzled with an exotic sauce and accompanied by a vegetable I didn’t recognize, I was generally ignored. />
  I didn’t mind being left out—situations like this were exactly why I had become a reporter in the first place. Although I could’ve chosen more lucrative occupations to be sure, my fascination with people had led me to the world of journalism. It was my job to observe behavior and collect information. For example, over the span of entrée to dessert wine, I noticed that Emma picked up a call from someone she later called her “stylist” and I saw George shoot his wife a “Don’t be rude” look when she did so. It was obvious that Lily didn’t care for Emma’s choice of heavy goblets by the way she lifted her glass a quarter inch off the table and then immediately put it back down, as if the sip of wine wasn’t worth the exertion. Charles and George seemed to be best friends—this was clear by the way they knew the minutiae of each other’s lives. Charles, for example, asked about the weekly Billboard numbers for one of George’s albums, and George in turn expressed concern for Charles’s pet pigeon that had mysteriously disappeared three mornings earlier.

  Despite the odd pigeon comment, if I were to home in on the two most interesting characters at the table it would have been Carole and David. I say this because introverted people intrigue me. I always think they have something to hide or, at the very least, want people to believe they do. It was too early for me to say if this was the case here, but there was something about these two that made me want to know more.

  I watched each of them closely, searching for clues. In the span of an entire dinner there was only one: just after our main course, David’s cell phone vibrated, indicating a text message. He pulled out his phone and glanced at it. Carole watched discreetly, and then she made eye contact with him.

  “Is everything okay?” Carole asked, voice low but concerned.