Muriel quietly processed this information.
“All right, honey, this is your stop,” said John as he kissed Muriel goodbye.
As Muriel waited for the elevator in her building, she pondered Dick Reynolds. Why would he leave his aristocratic first wife for a theater girl? He seemed awfully drunk all night—maybe he was just another alcoholic who tired of wives after a while and went in search of something younger.
Muriel also contemplated Dick’s clear interest in her. The attraction she felt was definitely mutual. She wasn’t the beauty that Marianne was, but maybe Dick was starting to tire of Redhead. Maybe it was time to coerce Dick Reynolds to move on to brighter, and more refined, pastures.
CHAPTER 8
Destiny Calls
1950–1951
A couple of weeks later, Muriel and her mother were planning a long trip to Europe, and she decided to throw a goodbye party in New York before their departure. Muriel invited both Dick and Marianne via telegram, in order to get a little more face time with Dick. The same day, Dick called her.
“Thank you for the generous invitation.”
“You’re quite welcome. Will you and your lovely wife make it?”
“I think so, yes. But we must go to the theater afterward. Would it be possible for us to come early?”
The night of Muriel’s cocktail party, Dick and Marianne showed up, both sober and crisp. This time around, Marianne looked really beautiful to Muriel. She could understand why Dick fell for her. In the course of their conversation, Marianne revealed that she and Dick had two small children. Muriel suddenly felt embarrassed by her barely concealed attraction to Dick. Marianne invited Muriel to a Christmas party later that month, but she declined the invitation since she would be traveling. Dick, becoming more drunk by the minute, didn’t want to leave Muriel’s place. Marianne finally dragged him out the door a couple of hours later.
After he left, Muriel considered their family, and she felt further shame for coveting Dick. Although her own marriage had failed, she wasn’t interested in becoming a home wrecker. Her ex-husband Richard Greenough had cheated on her and she was very lonely again, but that didn’t give her license to steal another’s husband.
Muriel and Eleanor
Muriel and her mother left for their cruise in December 1950 and sailed the Mediterranean. Onboard they met a group of RJR Tobacco employees who were traveling with their wives and children from Macedonia, where they worked in the tobacco fields. Turkish tobacco for Camel cigarettes had been grown and harvested there for over forty years. The tobacco they grew had to be aged for several years before it could be shipped out and manufactured into cigarettes. The employees informed Muriel that they had a handsome benefits package from the company—they were granted long leaves of absence and took all-expenses-paid holidays to Greece and other destinations of their choice. It was obvious that thirty years after their deaths, R.J. and Katharine’s legacy at the tobacco company lived on.
In the course of their conversation with Muriel, she told the employees that she had recently met R. J. Reynolds Jr. in person. Muriel said they looked at her, dumbfounded, as though she said she had met “God.” Muriel began to absorb the weight of the kind of man Dick Reynolds was. And she still couldn’t contain her growing feelings for him.
Muriel had originally planned to take the cruise alone, but her mother, Eleanor, wanted to go along. Eleanor was a constant thorn in Muriel’s side—she relied heavily on her young daughter, financially and emotionally, while also criticizing every move she made. Eleanor always found a way to squeeze herself into Muriel’s life, which strained every relationship she ever had. She also had an obsessive love of money that drove her incessant demand that Muriel be constantly attached to a rich man, first marrying her off when she was only sixteen. Sometimes Muriel wondered if her mother would doom her to a life of loneliness.
On this trip, Muriel was reminded why she wanted to travel without her mother in the first place. Every plan she had made for herself—a relaxing sail through the Mediterranean and the North Africa coast, and an extended stay in Cairo—was derailed for weeks on end because of Eleanor’s demands. They got only as far as Gibraltar and Tangiers, Morocco, before Eleanor coerced Muriel to go straight back to Spain and the French Riviera, and all the while they suffered many misadventures. They missed boats and planes, and their car broke down in Spain. By the time a truck full of orange farmers picked them up in Valencia, all Muriel could do was cry on the side of the road. After their car was repaired, they finally made it to the Riviera, where Muriel had given up entirely on her North Africa vacation.
Muriel and Eleanor had many friends scattered around Cannes and they were happy to be in a place that felt like home after their wild trip. They checked into the Carlton Hotel and settled in for several weeks.
As Eleanor hobnobbed with elderly folks she knew, Muriel took long walks in the hills along the border with the Italian Riviera by herself. She would pack a picnic lunch and sit alone, looking out at the breathtaking panoramic views of the Mediterranean. She thought a lot about Richard, and how she was twice divorced before she was even forty years old. She hoped to find someone new, and she thought a lot about Dick. She still felt horrible, pining for a married man, but she couldn’t help it. He had money, he was handsome, and he was a warmhearted and bubbly American. What a catch he was—too bad he was caught up with a Broadway floozy like Marianne O’Brien. Muriel felt the jealousy rising up in her. No, don’t go there. Don’t ruin your vacation with these thoughts.
Muriel spent her nights gambling. The first time, she became enraged when she lost $200 right off the bat. Determined to win it back, she kept gambling, winning some, then losing, and then losing more. Muriel was hooked. She spent the next month in Cannes and Monte Carlo with her mother, gambling. She managed to lose $5,000 of the $7,000 she had left for the rest of their holiday.
After two months in the Riviera, Muriel had lost too much money to take her mother anywhere else. The only thing left to do was cut their vacation short and go back to London and hibernate for the rest of the year. And hopefully find a new husband somewhere.
The Ritz
Muriel moved into the small vacant home at 73 Lyall Mews West near Belgrave Square that she once shared with Richard Greenough. It was May 1951 and Muriel was bored, since she was broke and had no plans for the rest of the summer.
A few weeks later, her old friend and neighbor, Thea, called and invited her to lunch at the Ritz, and Muriel accepted. As always, Eleanor wanted to tag along.
At 1:00 P.M. that Friday, they met at the Ritz. The dining room was nearly empty as Muriel sat down with Thea and her mother to eat. Much to Muriel’s surprise, three tables away sat Dick Reynolds, who was just finishing his dessert. He looked up and smiled at Muriel. She said, “Aren’t you Dick Reynolds?”
“Yes, I am,” Dick said, as he got up and went over to their table.
“Do you remember me?” asked Muriel. “I was at the Knickerbocker Ball?”
“Of course. How could I forget?” Dick said, as he reached for Muriel’s hand.
“Won’t you join us for coffee?” asked Muriel.
And so he did.
Muriel couldn’t have been more happy or excited to be in Dick’s company, and Eleanor couldn’t have been more pleased that her daughter had gotten the attention of a Reynolds. Dick left a searing impression in the minds of the women at the table. He was jovial, handsome, fun-loving, and, especially to Eleanor, he was rich. After a lingering talk over lunch and coffee, Dick stayed on with Muriel after Thea and her mother excused themselves. Muriel’s luck seemed to be unending—Dick later confessed to Muriel that he had not been getting along too well with his wife while they were traveling through Europe the year before.
Dick told Muriel that a few months after the Knickerbocker Ball, he had had a big fight with Marianne. One evening, after Dick got very drunk on their yacht, the Zapala, which was docked in France, Marianne disappeared for a week. When she returned, she claim
ed that she had been out with girlfriends, but Dick found out she had really been with Porfirio Rubirosa, which was later reported in Walter Winchell’s gossip column. Muriel gasped. She knew exactly who Rubirosa was, of course. Not only was he Doris Duke’s ex-husband, he was probably the most notorious playboy in the world. If a woman was seen with Rubirosa, there was no question she was sleeping with him. Several society people had seen Marianne and Rubirosa together and Dick was sure that he’d caught her in a lie. On another night in New York, Dick was out with friends at the El Morocco club when he caught Marianne and Rubirosa in an embrace. How stupid of Marianne, to sabotage a marriage with a man like Dick, Muriel thought.
Dick said that the marriage had been in trouble for some time anyway. He had long since grown weary of Marianne’s insatiable love of the theater, café society, and fancy hotels, while he preferred his yacht, the ocean, and the open wilderness. He also disclosed that she was cruel to him—she verbally and physically abused him, threatened him, pushed him around, and threw things at him, once cutting his forehead. She called him a “sissy” and mocked his recurring illness, calling him “the body” when he wasn’t around. Dick even wanted custody of his two children if he pursued a divorce—he told Muriel that Marianne drank during both of her pregnancies, and told the story of when Marianne was once found in Michael’s nursery asleep with a burning cigarette.
Then Marianne’s relationship with Rubirosa began. Dick said he had heard rumors that Marianne was seeing Rubirosa for months before it was verified, and that she was also dating Prince Aly Khan. Dick suspected that her affair with Rubi-rosa had begun as early as the summer of 1950 when they were in Capri and Paris. Rubirosa was following Marianne all over Europe and even tried to call her at their house on several occasions. One night at the Hotel George V, Dick got very drunk and fought heavily with Marianne. He left her to go to a bar, and she retaliated by disappearing for the night. When he sobered up the next day, he went on the hunt for her, questioning her friends all over town. Some lied and claimed she had been with them, others simply wouldn’t disclose her location. Dick hired investigators to find out where she went, and they learned she was with Rubirosa. Dick didn’t say anything to her at the time.
As always, Dick was an expert at protecting his own interests and assets when he was ready to dispose of a wife, and he soon deployed the “smoke screen.” In late 1950, he made a conscious decision to stay with Marianne through the holidays and kept his suspicions of her affairs a secret for a while. He lavished her with expensive gifts and jewelry so she wouldn’t suspect anything. Before he had heard of the affair, Dick had renovated his yacht so that he, Marianne, and their two boys could live and travel on it in the Pacific for at least a year or two. Now, Dick planned on making that journey alone. But he wasn’t even sure if he would divorce Marianne just yet—it might be too much trouble.
It wasn’t until the affair with Rubirosa became public that Dick knew the marriage was over. He finally dealt Marianne the coup de grâce and threatened divorce for the first time. But Marianne wouldn’t be swayed so easily. She angrily defended herself, saying that while she had spent time with Rubirosa, she had not slept with him and that the gossip columnists were lying. Dick wasn’t sure what to think.
To clear his head, Dick sailed to the Virgin Islands for a few weeks. From there, he activated his lawyers, got his financial affairs in order, and organized his income taxes to prepare for a possible divorce. Marianne called daily, trying everything she could to win him back. When he returned to their Miami home, Marianne convinced Dick to give it another try. They threw a party and invited Marianne’s family down for a reunion. Marianne, on her best behavior, implored Dick to take her and the family on a vacation in the Caribbean after the party. They needed to spend some family time together, she said, and focus on mending their recent disagreements. Dick apprehensively went along with the idea.
They sailed the Caribbean and eventually checked into a hotel in Puerto Rico, where Dick took Marianne and the family out to dinner. As the night wore on, she became drunk again and openly flirted with male guests at the restaurant. Dick and Marianne exchanged insults and jabs. Dick already felt his compromise was a huge mistake.
Before the night was over, Dick tiptoed out of the hotel and walked to the docked yacht to begin his solitary journey right then and there. By then it was January 1951. He would make arrangements for Marianne and her family to fly home on their own.
Marianne woke the next morning to find that Dick was nowhere to be seen. She was furious. In the meantime, Dick was en route to Sapelo Island.
On Sapelo, Dick closed down the severely neglected Sapelo Plantation Inn. When he wasn’t there to supervise everything, his manager, Frank Durant, often ran it for himself as a country house, and sometimes even refused guests so he wouldn’t have to work. On one occasion, friends of Dick’s tried to make a reservation, and Dick knew from the logs that there was plenty of availability, but Durant pretended it was booked so he could have a two-week vacation. Dick never confronted Durant and kept him in charge in spite of these warning signs, but he soon realized it would be impossible to continue the business unless he gave it his personal attention. Dick entertained the idea of building an eighteen-hole golf course, but his financial advisers convinced him he’d never make a profit for the same reasons.
Dick then set sail for Panama, carrying seaman’s work permit papers he’d acquired when he carried freight there on the Harpoon. Dick’s plan was to cross the isthmus over to the Pacific, but he was restless and irritable for most of the journey, thinking about what to do with Marianne. After sailing for several weeks, he received word from Camper Nicholsons shipyard in England that he had an offer to buy his current yacht. Dick planned to use the proceeds of the sale to start work on a new sixty-five-foot teakwood yacht. Dick immediately ordered the yacht be turned around and set sail for England, where he would sell the boat and start work on his new one. It was a dramatic move that symbolized his new intentions.
As always, Dick had a drink in hand almost continuously as the ship churned through the Atlantic. With hardly a moment sober from Central America to England, he contemplated the direction his life was going yet again. He had been here before. He just never thought it would fall apart so soon. He never thought Marianne would cheat on him either. How he missed those passionate first days with gorgeous, carefree Marianne. In 1946, not long after they married, Dick threw her a large birthday party at Sapelo, which made headlines. It was a good year in many ways. Dick had sold his Eastern Airlines stock when the company reneged on its agreement to make Winston-Salem the hub of its North Carolina operations. He used the profits to buy up more stock in Delta, keeping it in competition with Eastern and raising the stock value. Dick always knew how to make his money and investments work in his favor.
Dick wanted to impress Marianne, so he chartered five airlines to bring guests in from Winston-Salem, New York, and Miami. He loved spoiling his new wife. He had even scribbled out the note that deeded her all of Sapelo just to prove his devotion to her. It was hard to believe those heady days and nights had soured so quickly. He now regretted ever marrying Marianne and even lamented his bad judgment in leaving Blitz for her. While the marriage brought him two more beautiful boys, he felt they were the only good things to come out of it. By April 1951, he told Marianne that it was over and he was never coming home.
He finally missed all his boys. Before he arrived in England, he contacted Blitz and invited his two oldest boys, whom he had hardly seen since he left her, on a cruise for the first time. She agreed that they could join him once he docked in Europe.
Dick drank so much that he was seriously ill by the time the yacht docked in Gosport, England, and he had to see a local doctor. He was advised that he had to stop drinking and get plenty of rest. It would be the first warning of many to Dick to stay off the bottle. When Dick finally recovered, he finished the arrangements for his yacht at Gosport, and traveled to Ireland where he ordered a
small, twenty-seven-foot day sailor, called the San Dera. About a month later, he headed to London to visit for the day. It had been a while since he had been there. The place brought back bittersweet memories.
While he had a terrific love for the city and the countryside, he had also spent time in jail in England as a youngster. A chill went down his spine at the thought.
On his arrival in London, Dick was starving and headed for the Ritz for lunch. He sat down for a quiet meal alone and that’s when Muriel caught his eye.
Looking back, Muriel said it was nothing less than destiny that they should be there at the same time.
After Dick charmed Muriel over lunch, he decided he would spend the night in London.
“Would you like to go to the theater with me tonight?” he asked. Muriel had another date that night, but canceled in order to accept Dick’s offer.
“Are you sure you’re comfortable with that? Would your wife mind?”
“I’ll pick you up at seven.”
After going out with Muriel, Dick ignored the doctor’s orders to stop drinking and he set about working on two projects: building his yacht, and winning Muriel’s heart.
CHAPTER 9
Dick and Muriel’s Secret Affair
1951
Dick picked up Muriel for their first real date in front of her home in the quaint, cobblestoned street of Lyall Mews. They walked the short distance to the West End to see a play and have dinner at fashionable Quaglino’s.
In the restaurant’s inviting sunken dining room, Dick had an amazing time with Muriel, who challenged his wit and stimulated his intellect. He’d already told himself that he wasn’t going back to Gosport the next day. After a romantic evening, Dick asked her out for a second date the next night.
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