The Gilded Life Of Matilda Duplaine

“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 movie 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.

“Work thing,” David responded. “Never sleeps.”

“How was your dinner, Thomas?” Charles asked, changing the subject.

“Delicious. You’re a wonderful cook, Emma.”

“I can’t take credit for it. But I can take credit for hiring the chef. Cordon Bleu, Paris. I went there personally and dipped my spoon into all of their kettles. I liked Francois’s the best.”

Charles raised his glass in toast and everyone went back to their side conversations. The dessert wine went on for another half hour or so, and I found myself staring through a large picture window at a majestic date palm covered in blue lights. That tree had to be a hundred years old. I looked at the lights intently until they blurred together into a filmy blue that saturated the air. To my right, I noticed Carole gazed at the same blue air. She seemed lost in it. When she finally tore her eyes away, she stood up from the table. She took her drink with her and never returned to the room.

* * *

Twenty minutes later the group congregated for a postdinner brandy in what Emma called “the card room.” I had never been to a house with a room dedicated to cards before, but it made sense since Emma had specifically said that she loved “anything old-fashioned,” and cards would have certainly fallen into that category.

The glass room was lined in lattice more suitable for the outdoors than an interior space, and its plants had been allowed to run wild. Two oversize square tables were illuminated by massive pagoda-shaped chandeliers, their crystals generously casting off light.

Admittedly, I had never been a card guy—in fact, I didn’t even know how to play simple games like bridge or poker—so I excused myself to make a phone call, but instead slipped outside to have a stealth cigarette, a habit I had picked up a few years earlier and never quit. I settled into a lounge chair next to a grass-bordered body of water that resembled a swamp. Its water was green and murky and my eye caught an occasional minnow swimming beneath its lily pads. Were it not for the diving board at the northwest end, I wouldn’t have even known it was a swimmable pool.

I lit a match and put it to the tip of my cigarette. What a night it had been. I was here in Bel-Air with some of the most important people in a city full of important people. I was so high I never wanted to come down. I knew Lily’s motive for the invitation, and it had nothing to do with feeding a sweet Midwestern kid a home-cooked meal. Over crème brûlée, Lily had insisted everyone at the table give me quotes about her father. She was no fool, and she knew that favorable quotes from some of the most important people in the industry carried heavy weight.

But then I reflected on a scene from that afternoon—of Lily’s fingers on my neck. I wondered if there had been some other reason for Lily’s invitation.

I took a puff of my cigarette. I watched its golden tip light the clear, starry Bel-Air sky. We were in the middle of the city, but the quiet sky belonged in a countryside somewhere. It made me feel vaguely existential, as if above and beyond us there was nothing—nothing to hope for, no afterlife, nothing to make us choose one course of action over another.

The leopard cat jumped onto my lap and snapped me out of my reverie. Just then I heard a slight rustle from a dark spot in the corner of the property.

I saw a single shadow, but then it divided in half—into two separate shadows. The gestures of their hands and their body contact indicated a familiarity, and I was certain they were two of the dinner guests who had slipped outside for a side conversation. But despite my journalist’s curiosity, I instinctually turned away. I had always felt uncomfortable intruding on others’ privacy, so I looked at the swimming pool instead. An orange minnow slithered against the pool’s muddy edge, and the leopard cat’s eyes grew large, but he didn’t pounce.

Then, as quickly as they had appeared, the shadows were gone.

I finished my cigarette and headed back into the house.

“Wanna come in, big guy?” I asked the leopard cat, whose eyes shone like green lights. I held the door open for him, but he darted away into the deep black night.

I found the card room on my second try. I opened the huge wooden doors, expecting to find two of the dinner guests absent. They were all there, though, engaged in a six-person game of poker. I shouldn’t have finished the cigarette.

“Thomas, where did you disappear to?” Lily said.

“I fold.” Carole threw in her cards.

“I fold,” George repeated.

“The swimming pool,” I said.

“Would you like to borrow a bathing suit?” Emma asked. “We usually swim in the buff, but we have extras in the pool house.”

“No, thank you. I went outside for a cigarette.”

“I fold,” David said.

“You’re so silly, Thomas.” Emma presented me with a gold ashtray in the shape of a lion. “I bought this at the Duquette sale and I have been absolutely dying to use it. Besides, smoke makes the house feel lived-in. That was my goal with all this—” She spread her arms out wide. “Can’t you tell?”

I almost started to laugh, but then caught the seriousness in her eyes.

“Well, you’ve done a good job of it,” I said, lifting a brandy—a drink I hated—in toast.

Emma smiled before returning to her card game. There was nothing about this mansion that would indicate Emma Bloom’s desire to make it feel lived-in—not the cold stone floors that echoed conversation, not the swampy swimming pool, nor the stiff-backed zebra-covered chairs in the drawing room.

I sat on the outskirts of the game, watching as Emma shuffled with the expertise of a Vegas casino dealer. I thought again of the shadows outside, of Carole and David’s exchange at dinner. Sure, I was here to pull some quotes on the recently departed Joel Goldman. But something told me the real story was much bigger and more far-reaching than that.

Professor Grandy’s Journalism Rule Number Two: The dead are only interesting in the context of the lives they left behind.

* * *

“I hope you don’t mind—we’re going to drop David off. His driver fell ill unexpectedly, poor thing,” Lily said, as Kurt helped her into her champagne mink shrug, which seemed too warm for the weather. “He only lives around the corner. It won’t be much out of our way.”

“Of course,” I said.

Kurt opened the car doors for us. David sat in the front, Lily and I in the back.

While Kurt had listened to classical music on our long drive, now the station was tuned to the radio affiliate of David’s cable news network.

It was only a block away, and we drove it in silence. The radio commentator was the only one who spoke. He pontificated, with left-wing conviction, about the upcoming presidential election. In the Midwest this one block would have been a nice after-dinner walk, but there were no pedestrians in Bel-Air. The streets were too narrow and the people too rich for that.

We took one turn before stopping in front of an impressive barricade of palatial gray iron gates. They were simple and unadorned, and they opened like magic.

We passed through the gates into the grandest estate I had ever seen. We had just come from a property so magnificent it took my breath away, but compared to David’s estate, Emma and George’s felt humble. The long driveway meandered through acres of gently rolling hills sparsely dotted with trees. At the end of the driveway was a grand old Palladian manse. The first floor was glowing. Upstairs, only one room was lit, its curtain closed.

My first reaction was to notice how impersonal David’s estate seemed. The regal house was surrounded by carefully pruned formal gardens and thirty-foot hedges.

We stopped in the octagonal motor court.

“Thanks for the ride, Kurt,” David said. “Lily, I’ll call you in the morning.” He looked at me intensely, with that incongruous combination of bored eyes and lively eyebrows. I was captivated. “And, Thomas—” David let the name sit by itself for a moment. “I look forward to reading the article on Joel. And I wish you the best of luck at the Times.”

They were the first words David had said to me all night.

A valet attendant in his midtwenties dressed in starched whites opened David’s door for him.

“Welcome home, Mr. Duplaine,” he said.

Before I could say thank-you or good-night, the valet had already closed David’s door behind him. Kurt turned off the radio. I watched through the tinted glass as David was briskly escorted through the front door by a butler. Soon after, the upstairs light went dark.

Three

It was one of those magical nights I didn’t want to end. So when Lily invited me over for a nightcap I accepted.

Once we left David’s manor, it was a turn, a turn and another quick turn before we arrived at the end of a cul-de-sac. Kurt pointed a clicker at a gate covered by flowers. We drove up the cobblestone driveway slowly, arriving at a large stucco manor with ivy crawling up its walls so densely the windows were mostly covered with leaves. Like Lily, the refined and glamorous place seemed as if it belonged more in the South of France than in Los Angeles. I guessed the property to be an acre or so—smaller than the Blooms’ and tiny compared to David’s. But it was lusher than both; the house was nested in the most stunning flowers and trees I had ever seen.

Kurt opened the thick antique front door and we walked into a small foyer that was too diminutive for a house of this magnitude. Moments later I understood: the foyer was meant to set expectations low, to make the fifty-foot-long living room appear even grander.

The house was furnished in the same manner as Lily’s shop. Heavy antiques rested beside modern chalk art; bookcases were filled to the brim with rare books that were wrapped in cellophane to fight off dust. Almost miraculously, ivy grew along the leaded glass doors and crawled up the interior walls to the ceiling.

“What are you drinking?” Lily asked, as she walked to a smaller version of the Blooms’ bar.

“Water’s great. Thanks.”

Lily poured Evian water into a glass made of tortoise shell.

“The ivy—how does it live?” I asked.

“It doesn’t,” Lily said. “With no sunlight or fresh air it dies.” Lily pointed to the ceiling, to ivy that was brown and petrified.

Lily picked up a lemon but then couldn’t find a paring knife. Her eyes briefly searched for Kurt, before she abandoned the idea of sliced lemon altogether and gave me my room-temperature water as is.

It struck me as odd how Lily and her friends employed housefuls of servants but then did random things for themselves. For example, Lily had referenced “the staff” in her shop, but she had busied herself moving antiques. Likewise, Emma had personally answered the door and prepared my gimlet, but the staff-to-dinner-party-guest ratio in that household appeared around two to one. And David: in the span of a three-hour dinner, had his driver really fallen too ill to drive one block?

Lily sat on the couch, her bare feet curled beneath her. She unclasped her cuffs, and she placed them on the table beside her as if they were handcuffs she had been eager to unshackle. She then shivered, though two wood-burning fireplaces taller than me flanked the room, with fire reaching to their brims. Kurt must have stoked the embers for hours before Lily had returned home.