Tycoon

by Harold Robbins

  “Do you think it is banal?”

  Jack nodded. “It is one of many shows on television, on my network and others, that are banal.”

  Three

  JACK AND ANNE DID NOT RETURN TO NEW YORK IMMEDIately. Later that day they sat in their suite in the Mayflower and watched the afternoon session of the Senate committee.

  Dick Painter was the witness.

  “Is You Bet! a rigged show, Mr. Painter?” Simmons asked.

  “Absolutely not,” said Painter, adopting an air of indignation. “We all went through that sort of thing a few years ago. We at Lear are not stupid enough to let it happen again.”

  Simmons opened a thick file. “A few days ago one of the contestants who won a great deal of money on You Bet! testified in executive session of this committee. We took the testimony in executive session to protect that person’s identity. That person testified that the questions to be asked on the show were revealed in advance, so that he or she could learn the answers before airtime. That person testified that before each half-hour broadcast you personally, Mr. Painter, asked the questions and heard the answers, which were then repeated on the air. Is that true? Did you do that?”

  Painter’s lawyer grabbed his arm and pulled him away from the microphones. They conferred for a minute; then Painter faced the microphones and the committee again and said, “Since I don’t know who your witness was, I can’t possibly answer your question.”

  “Oh, I believe you can, Mr. Painter,” said the committee chairman, Senator Donald Hooper, a Democrat from Kentucky. “Let me rephrase the question. Did you or did anyone else, to your knowledge, ever reveal the questions in advance to any contestant on You BetlT

  Painter leaned over and conferred with his lawyer. Then he said, “I respectfully decline to answer the question on the ground that my answer might tend to incriminate me.”

  Jack sprang from the couch facing the television set and grabbed a telephone. He put through a call to Cap Durenberger in New York.

  “You saw? You heard what Painter said? He’s going on with it, taking the Fifth to every question! Cap, advise security that Painter is not to be allowed to enter the offices. Seal his office. Seal his files. I’m issuing a statement from here that we are sealing his office and files and will allow only authorized federal investigators to have access to them. Kill You Bet! Run any goddamned thing in its time slot tomorrow night. And . . . one more thing. Have security put Cathy McCormack out the front door. Right now! Advise her she’s fired.”

  Four

  ONCE MORE JONI FAILED TO RECEIVE THE ACADEMY AWARD for best actress. David Breck, Though, received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, for his work in her picture Dandelion.

  Joni was bitter and decided to shoot a finger at Hollywood. She announced her pregnancy and announced at the same time that she was not going to marry the father of her baby.

  David was in love with her. Even so, neither of them was enthusiastic about marriage. Both of them liked the flexibility of things the way they were. They continued to live together, and David said he would help her rear the child, as its acknowledged father.

  In June the baby was born, a little girl they named Jacqueline Michelle. Jack and Anne flew to California in the new bizjet the company had acquired, ironically a Lear Jet. Joni assured them that she was very happy.

  Five

  ANNE ARRANGED TWO PARTIES FOR JACK’S SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY, one at home with the family and one at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York for an extended group of friends.

  No one guessed that she was deliberately seizing every opportunity she could find to bring the family together. Her blood count was low, and her doctors had switched her to a different, stronger medication. She could feel her energy diminishing, but she forced herself to be active.

  Despite her failing health, Anne telephoned and wrote all the invitations and made all the arrangements for the two parties.

  Of all those Anne called to invite to the family party, only Joni sensed the anxiety in her stepmother’s call. She and David suspended discussions with Harry Klein about a new picture and flew home.

  Joni tried to find a time to take Anne aside and talk to her alone. Sitting by the pool one evening, she saw Anne coming out of the house and asked David to go inside and leave her to talk with Anne alone. Anne sat down beside her, but in a moment Liz and Nelly came out to swim, so Joni suggested to Anne that they walk down to the lake.

  Anne preferred to swim in the lake anyway and slipped into the warm green water. Joni followed her, and for a few minutes they swam. They came out and sat down on the grassy bank in their wet bikinis.

  Anne said nothing. She stared at the water and at the setting sun. Joni had noticed this tendency of Anne’s to lapse into introspective silence.

  “Will you forgive me if I intrude into something that is none of my business?” Joni asked.

  Anne frowned. “I’ll forgive you, but you won’t forgive yourself. If I take you into my confidence, a heavy burden will fall on your shoulders. It might be just as well you let it go.”

  “Anne, something’s wrong, isn’t it? Something bad.”

  Anne nodded. “I need to talk to someone. How old are you, Joni? Thirty-one? If I talk to you, I need your absolute, unqualified promise you won’t tell your father. Or anyone else.”

  “Is it a man?” Joni asked, suddenly alarmed and hoping that was all it was.

  “No. Not a man. Will you promise?”

  “I promise,” Joni said emphatically. “What is it, Anne?”

  “I’m dying, Joni.”

  Standing by the pool, watching Liz and Nelly swim, Jack saw Anne and Joni embrace and cling to each other. He smiled. His grown-up daughter had become a friend to his wife.

  Six

  JONI KEPT THE SECRET. THE FAMILY WEEKEND CONTINUED.

  Little Jack, home from Ohio State University, proudly announced that he had tried out and been accepted for the football squad. He swaggered. His sister Liz despised him.

  Linda, who had accepted a position as a microbiologist on the staff of Yale-New Haven Hospital, was engaged to a young man named Guy Webster, a senior associate in a New York City law firm.

  When the young man was introduced to people at Jack’s birthday party, he promptly informed them that he was a member of the John Birch Society. He impressed Jack as a rather stiff, self-important young man—in fact, a boring nincompoop—and Jack wondered what in the world Linda saw in him.

  Joni, too, concluded that Guy Webster was a consummate ass. Seventeen-year-old Liz reached the same conclusion and shared it with Joni.

  Jack was standing by the pool talking with Joni when Liz ran up to them laughing. “I heard Linda say something to him! You’ll never guess! She said, ‘If you tell one more person you’re a member of the John Birch Society, I’m going to kick you in the balls. It’s bad enough that you are, without my having to hear you brag about it.’”

  Jack grinned and shrugged. “Maybe she knows what she’s doing after all.”

  “I wish we dared to interfere,” Joni said grimly.

  Seven

  IN AUGUST ANOTHER SHORT STORY BY JASON MAXWELL APpeared in The New Yorker. Part of it read:

  Overheard at Lutèce:

  “You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he’s the sexiest man alive.”

  “Dear! I did it with Jack Kennedy.”

  “Jack Kennedy! Really. That’s not what I mean. You know nothing until you’ve spent a night with the master.”

  Jefferson Le Maître was a man of catholic tastes when it came to the erotic life. His first wife had been a woman of universally recognized elegance who had smoothed his rough edges and made him the cultured, cosmopolitan gentleman he was. That first wife introduced him, however, to another sort of taste. Their most intimate friends, and their most intimate friends only, knew that elegant Madame Première was an obsessive masochist who loved to be bound and beaten. Le Maître was at first unwilling to accommodate her; but ultimately, to keep
her happy and to keep their marriage intact, he consented and learned to flog her with abandon until she screamed for mercy.

  He was a man of Catholic tastes as well, and a fling with a gorgeous Catholic lass resulted in the termination of his first marriage.

  Wife One found another partner to play sadist to her masochist. They played rough games. Sometimes she hung from a rafter by handcuffs while he whipped her with a riding crop. One night while she hung, her arms spread by two pairs of handcuffs, he suffered a myocardial infarction and died before her horrified eyes. She could not escape. She hung there for agonizing hours, until at last she too died.

  Jefferson Le Maître deeply regrets the tragic way his first wife died. Even so he cannot resist saying that, in a medical sense, she died almost exactly the same way Christ died—of circulatory failure caused by hanging with outspread arms.

  Le Maître. The master, the teacher. Der Lehrer. The teacher. Johann Lehrer had been a teacher in Germany. Erich had changed the family name to Lear. The connection was obscure—but not to anyone who knew Jack’s family history. The masochistic first wife. A few people knew about that. A very small number of cognoscenti would know who Jefferson Le Maître was.

  Eight

  “WE DON’T DARE EVEN CUT HIM,” SAID ANNE.

  She lay on a sofa in the living room of the Manhattan apartment. The magazine lay on the coffee table. She had read the Jason Maxwell story this morning, and now Jack had read it.

  “I’d like to kill him,” Jack said.

  “No. We invite him to join us for lunch at Lutèce. We must be seen with him in public, like great good friends who have nothing to quarrel about. That says to the world that it has never dawned on us that he could have been writing about us. About you. If we cut him, that says he was writing about you, and we know it.”

  “Are we to pretend that the story is amusing?”

  “We might as well. There are not fifty people who know he was writing about you. If we do anything negative, a hundred times that many will guess.”

  Jack sighed loudly. “All right. I only wish I could find some way to stick a knife in his back.”

  Nine

  JONI CALLED HER FATHER FROM CALIFORNIA. HER VOICE WAS cold. “Couldn’t you have told me how she died?”

  “I’d have had to tell John, too. I didn’t think either of you needed to know. You were just twenty-two, Joni.”

  “I’m thirty-two now. You could have told me. Anyway, I warned you about Jason Maxwell. How many people are going to make the connection?”

  “Anne and I are taking the little bastard to lunch. We want to make it look like we’re all buddy-buddies, so he couldn’t have been writing about me.”

  “Good luck. And, uh . . . Daddy . . . I always knew you were the sexiest man alive.”

  THIRTY - FIVE

  One

  1967

  NO ONE SAID ANYTHING. IT WAS PLAIN, JUST THE SAME, THAT more than a few people had made the connection between Jason Maxwell’s Le Maître and the real-life Jack Lear.

  Men who had nodded at Jack in the Harvard Club bar now nodded and smiled. At the harvest ball at the Greenwich Country Club, women asked him to dance and then whirled around the floor beaming at their friends, as they nestled in the embrace of “the sexiest man alive.”

  A writer for Esquire called and said she wanted to do a profile of him for the magazine. During the interviews with him and Anne, not a word was said about the Maxwell story, and no mention of it was made in the subsequent profile; but it was plain from the tone of the interview and the story that readers would want to know more about the real Le Maître—and that most of them would know that Jack Lear was Le Maître.

  Worst of all, Jack and Anne had to appear in public with Jason Maxwell and pretend he was still their amusing friend. When the three of them lunched together at Lutèce, the meeting received notice in three gossip columns, one of which specifically identified Jack as the prototype for Le Maître. Photographers were not allowed inside Lutèce, but the Post published a picture of the three leaving the restaurant and walking, with conspicuous smiles, along the street.

  Over lunch Jason said nothing of the story. Neither Jack nor Anne mentioned it. Jason tried to amuse them with a story about how a month ago a janitor cleaning the Oval Office had found a pair of Jackie Kennedy’s panties under a couch. “How’d he know they were Jackie’s?” Anne asked. “She had her initials embroidered on all her underwear,” Jason confided. Anne changed the subject. She congratulated Jason on the publication of his new novel, Norma, which had won gushing reviews everywhere and was already at the top of the bestseller list. “A bagatelle,” said Jason.

  Jack could see nothing to do but live with the new notoriety Jason had given him. He was angry but not devastated.

  TWO

  HARRY KLEIN WAS A BIGGER PRODUCER THAN EVER. JONI looked around his office, which she had first visited seven years ago. It was a lot more impressive now that Harry had two Best Picture Oscars displayed in it.

  Harry had always kept autographed photographs of stars on his office walls, but now he had pictures of some of the biggest successes of the past seven years. Joni was pleased to see that her autographed photo was displayed among the others. Framed and prominently displayed also was an autographed picture of Harry shaking hands with a grinning President Kennedy.

  Harry himself, almost fifty years old now, had changed little. If his hair was turning gray, he was having it colored. He still favored dark-blue polka-dot bow ties. He’d changed his style in only one respect: gone were the big horn-rimmed glasses he had made almost a trademark; in their place he wore contact lenses.

  “I hear you’re gonna be featured in Esquire,” he said.

  “Yeah. As the often-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride girl,” Joni said acerbically. “The twice-nominated actress.”

  “Hey! What do you expect? Cary Grant’s never had an Oscar. Tyrone Power never got one. Bob Hope’s never had one. There’s a lot of respect for you in this industry.”

  “I’ve done three pictures in seven years.”

  “You could have done five or six. Don’t forget the scripts you’ve turned down.”

  “Harry, I want the role of Jason Maxwell’s Norma.”

  “My God, Joni! That’s penciled in for Ingrid Bergman!”

  “She’s too old.”

  “Audrey Hepburn’s interested.”

  “She’s not earthy enough. No audience is ever going to believe Liza Dolittle is Norma.”

  “Joni, I don’t see how we can give you Norma.”

  “I need it, Harry. It will make a hell of a big difference.”

  “You put me in a hell of a position.”

  Joni smiled lazily. “Suppose I get into a hell of a position? Let’s go back to square one, Harry. I’m asking you to do something for me, the same as I did seven years ago; and I’m willing to do what I did seven years ago, to persuade you.”

  “How can I say no to that?”

  “Just remember, I’m good enough for the Norma part. You’re not making any big-deal sacrifice. You’re just going to do me a favor. And I’ll do one for you.”

  “One?”

  “Now and again. Whenever. Deal?”

  He reached for her hand as though to shake it, but when he had his grip on her he jerked her into his arms and kissed her fervently. Neither of them undressed. On her knees, she pulled out his parts. She slavered over his cock and over as much of his balls as she could reach through his underpants. It was not the way it had been before. He came in a minute.

  Three

  JACK AND ANNE FLEW TO COLUMBUS, OHIO, TO SEE LITTLE Jack play football for Ohio State. Liz refused to go.

  She missed a spectacle of grand dimensions. Their host, the manager of the local Lear television station, drove Jack and Anne from the airport to the stadium, detouring through some residential neighborhoods to show them a display of glorious gold and red maples and oaks. The stadium was an immense horseshoe, filled with some eighty thousand
rabid fans who generated pandemonium. The university band—all men, no women—marched with military precision and played the same way. Its trademark formation was to spell out “Ohio” in script. The band marched through the letters until the word was complete. Then a bandsman capered dramatically into place and dotted the i with a big white sousaphone.

  Coach Woody Hayes had decided Little Jack was not the big, heavy boy he thought he was—not big or heavy enough to play guard or tackle, as he had supposed he would. Instead, he played as a linebacker. He was heavy enough for that, and he was fast. For good work, Coach Hayes awarded players buckeyes—outlines of buckeye leaves painted on their helmets. In this, his second season, Little Jack had six buckeyes on his. He earned a seventh that afternoon by sacking the Wisconsin quarterback so hard he knocked the ball loose, which Ohio State recovered.

  The kind of play that had been decried by his prep school was extolled in big-time college football. Little Jack loved to hit. There was nothing personal about it; he just loved to hit a ball carrier and knock him sprawling. College football players were in such superb physical condition that getting hit didn’t hurt them. Little Jack was in such superb physical condition that he could take return hits, too.

  His nickname, Little Jack, was known at the university, but it didn’t seem quite appropriate, and the undergraduates gave him a new nickname: LJ. Twice during the game, when he’d made a spectacular hit, the crowd chanted, “LJ, LJ, LJ!”

  Because Coach Hayes did a postgame show on the Lear television station, he made himself available to Jack and Anne for a short private visit. They met in a Spanish-style restaurant not far from the stadium. A little later they would join the crowd of supporters and parents in the main room, but the coach took his first drink with Jack, Anne, and Little Jack.