VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  Very smoothly, Dobbsie leaned across the table until his face was only inches away from hers. “There’s a terrific meeting at Saint Bart’s. Yes, Saint Bart’s, where you two almost flunked Confirmation. Liz and Lee and Liza and Mary are regulars. I’ve tried to get Ash to come with me, but she says she can’t sit in a room with Bowery bums. As if it were a poor person’s disease. Twixt thee and me, half the Social Register has the same problem and you’ll find a hell of a lot of them in the Fellowship. The first step is, you’ve got to admit you’re powerless over the sauce and get spiritual. I’ve been trying to twelfth-step Ash for six years.”

  “Ash can be contrary,” Babe said.

  “I hope you don’t mind my being frank,” he said. “About her problem.”

  “I think there are times when it’s appropriate to be frank.”

  “Babe, you’re terrific. Just the way Ash described you. Now Ash said you want to know about Scottie’s trial.”

  “I want to know what happened after they closed the courtroom and sealed the record.”

  “I can give you a few facts and some gossip and some theories. Why don’t we get together and talk about it at my place, so I don’t have to lug my notes around town.”

  He gave her his card. She looked at the address.

  “But that’s the museum,” she said, surprised.

  “It’s the museum plus Beaux Arts Tower. We’re going through a little notoriety these days—had a murder over Memorial Day weekend.”

  Ash returned to the table. Her eyes were clear, bright, and calm, and she was walking a straight line. She settled smoothly into her chair. There was a curious smile on her face. She signaled the waiter for another bottle of Moët.

  Dobbsie chatted about some Texans who were funding the Metropolitan Opera’s new Il Guarani and who were hooked on cocaine, and then he saw a woman across the room and waved. “That’s the Duchess de Chesney, used to be Anita Starr, showgirl slash schoolteacher slash porno star, now there’s a story I want to get. Will you girls excuse me?”

  “Have you got his book?” Babe asked as soon as she and Ash were alone.

  “Dobbsie’s book on you? It’s divine, of course I have it.”

  “May I borrow it?”

  29

  THE LAMPLIGHT LAY STILL and liquid on the bedsheets. Propped on two pillows, Babe opened Mortal Splendor: Inside the Babe Vanderwalk Devens Affair.

  She read slowly, carefully.

  It is in the nature of beginnings, Dobbsie wrote in his prefatory note, that they begin … somewhere. Every comedy, every tragedy, every act of life-giving or life-taking, has its beginning in some other event. The Freudian tells us it all began in the unconscious where forgotten childhood trauma festers. The Marxist tells us it all began in the class struggle that shapes the destiny of every human, be he capitalist drone or proletarian drudge. The Bible tells us, not unwisely, that it all began in the cataclysm of the Creation.

  Where then did the chain of events begin that climaxed in Babe Vanderwalk Devens’s drug-induced coma?

  In the needfulness of a six-year-old little princess who had every luxury but parental love? In the ambition of a Kentucky mountain boy who preferred martinis to beer, the music of George Gershwin to the twang of a guitar? In the grinding three-hundred-year poverty of Appalachia? In the Babylonian glitter of New York City that has dazzled and appalled the world ever since the Robber Barons burst upon the scene?

  Maybe the Bible gives us the clue. Maybe it all began … in the beginning.

  Babe frowned and turned the page. In the first chapter, “By Their Roots Shall Ye Know Them,” Dobbsie examined bloodlines.

  Through marriage licenses he had been able to trace Scott Devens’s ancestry back through three impoverished Kentucky generations; he said that research further back had been made impossible by “a wall of illegitimacy.”

  Dobbsie then turned to Babe’s family tree. He had unearthed the name Pieter Isaak Valk in the register of the Shearith Israel Synagogue of Amsterdam—a remarkable congregation where, almost seven decades earlier, the name Jan Jakob Astor had been similarly inscribed—Jan, of course, being the Dutch form of John. (The name Valk, Dobbsie explained, was related to the Dutch word for falcon, which also served as a slangy Lowlands pejorative for a sharp operator. Imagine, he said, a young American called Peter Isaac Shark, and you have the picture.) Pieter Isaak, the youngest son of a peddler, had been bar mitzvahed in 1830 and in 1833 had emigrated to New York on a ship of the Dutch West Indies Company. He went into the fur-trading business, hauling barrels of Dutch rum into the Indian reserves in upper New York State and Quebec; he bartered liquor for animal pelts, shrewdly extending credit to the tribes, and forged a monopoly.

  In 1848 Valk, now a stock market millionaire calling himself Peter Isaac Vanderwalk, rescued the United States Treasury from bankruptcy, forming a consortium to buy up the largest bond issue ever floated by the federal government. From 1860 to 1864 he bankrolled Abraham Lincoln’s Union government in its struggle against the Confederacy.

  At age sixty-eight, Peter Isaac married Isabella Hadley, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of the president of the New York Stock Exchange. On the wedding day, Isabella’s father, under grand jury indictment for embezzlement, was able to make good all discrepancies in the Exchange’s books, effectively mooting the charge.

  Because Vanderwalk so openly used his power, society considered him a robber baron and shut him out.

  Dobbsie told a story dating from the 1880s, when the Astors and the Vanderbilts had sworn they would never say more than two words to any Vanderwalk.

  Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt, competing for the position of absolute leader of New York society, had filled their mansions with quantities of European art and sculpture. But one prize eluded them: neither could persuade her husband to spend the half-million dollars which the Austrian chancellory was asking for its Rubens Adoration.

  Isabella Vanderwalk determined to exploit the situation and make her long-delayed mark in society. At his wife’s insistence, Vanderwalk paid the Austrians a half million and hung the painting in his Fifth Avenue mansion.

  Society faced a dilemma: how to view the Rubens without appearing to accept Vanderwalk’s hospitality. Finally Mrs. Astor’s friends decreed they were willing to visit the Vanderwalk mansion, but only between two and four in the afternoon, taking no food or refreshment. Mrs. Vanderbilt’s friends decreed they were willing to visit between four and six, with the same condition.

  Vanderwalk thereupon announced that he would give the Rubens to the Metropolitan Museum, with an endowment to keep admission free. However, he gave both the Vanderbilt and the Astor factions one last chance to see the painting privately: he invited them to dinner at his home the evening before the gift was to be made. (It was well known that Mrs. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Astor never entered the same private home or sat at the same table.)

  After agonizing whether it was better to dine with one’s enemies in the home of a robber baron or to rub shoulders with one’s inferiors in the Metropolitan Museum, society opted for the more comfortable humiliation, dinner.

  The etiquette of the time required that invitations had to be returned, and by accepting Vanderwalk’s, New York society obligated themselves to invite him and his family into their homes.

  There was, however, no obligation to speak to a Vanderwalk.

  Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt both arrived at exactly 8:15. As they had sworn, they said only two words to Vanderwalk: “Good evening.” They had arranged that any other messages would be communicated by their banker, Pierpont Morgan.

  The ladies found the Rubens hanging in the grand salon, covered by a gold velvet curtain. Pierpont Morgan asked, “Do you not have something to show these ladies?” Vanderwalk answered in his Dutch accent, “Whatever the ladies like.” The ladies said nothing. “Well, then,” Vanderwalk said, “I will show them a fine dinner.”

  After the four-hour twelve-course seated banquet, Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderb
ilt again stood before the curtained Adoration, and Pierpont Morgan again asked Vanderwalk, “Are you absolutely sure you do not have something to show these ladies?” Again Vanderwalk said in his Dutch accent, “Whatever the ladies like.” The ladies still were silent. “Well, then,” Vanderwalk said, “I will show them some fine dancing.”

  The guests repaired to the ballroom, where the New York Symphony played the latest waltzes and quadrilles. At two in the morning, when a light breakfast was served, Pierpont Morgan spoke in great anger to his host. “Sir, to put it plainly, have you not an Adoration by Peter Paul Rubens to show us before we go home?”

  Vanderwalk looked astonished. “Indeed I had, but at midnight it became the property of the museum, and the workmen removed it.”

  “Why in God’s name did you not uncover it?”

  In his Dutch accent, Vanderwalk replied, “Out of consideration for Mrs. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Astor. They have criticized me, in society, for displaying my possessions.”

  “Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt would not have criticized you tonight.”

  “Bless me, but I am buffaloed. The ladies had only to say the word.”

  Over the next two years, Vanderwalk’s five hundred guests dutifully invited him and his Mrs. to five hundred dinners; at none of the gatherings was one word beyond “Good evening” addressed to either of them.

  Till his death, Vanderwalk remained an unregenerate embarrassment, speaking English with a thick accent, cheating at cards, dining with dirty hands and dripping food on himself, calling for Dutch rum with his meals, even though fashion insisted on French wine. Old Vanderwalk even went so far as to tell bawdy stories in mixed company that included the wife of President McKinley; for this he was roundly scolded in his New York Times obituary.

  With the expansion of wealth and the slackening of moral codes that resulted toward the end of the 1890s, the entry requirements for New York Society shifted. It was enough to have money and not to have been convicted of a crime. The New York that had shut Vanderwalk out welcomed his young wife, his son, and his dollars.

  Vanderwalk’s son, Hadley Vanderwalk, Sr., attended Princeton University, married a Rockefeller, produced three sons, built a telephone and telegraph monopoly, served in World War I and in the kitchen cabinet of three presidents, never drank or smoked, financed Lend Lease, and spent a lifetime living down his father’s reputation.

  But perhaps Hadley Vanderwalk, Sr.’s most fateful act, Dobbsie wrote, was to bequeath to his youngest granddaughter—Beatrice Wilmerding Vanderwalk—half of all the aluminum in the United States—making her, at age three, one of the ten richest women in America.

  As Babe read on, she felt she was seeing herself in a fun-house mirror. The person that Dobbsie called Babe bore only a distant, distorted resemblance to the self she remembered and knew.

  As a five-year-old, Dobbsie reported, Babe had been photographed by Cartier-Bresson, playing with her two hundred dolls, her thirty-two doll houses, and her two thousand doll gowns; the photographs had appeared in Vogue.

  At eight, Babe was given her first pony; at ten, her first Arabian mare. Photographs appeared in Town and Country.

  At twelve, Babe was given her first yacht, the sloop Cygnet. Each summer, for the four weeks that the family lived at Hampton Court, their fifty-two-room summer “cottage” in Newport, she had at her disposal her own captain and two-man crew. At sixteen, old enough for a New York State driver’s learning permit, she was given her first Mercedes-Benz. The car had a refrigerated glove compartment.

  Babe had her coming-out at Hampton Court. Hadley Vanderwalk, Jr., spent one and a half million dollars providing three orchestras, a quarter-mile-long buffet, and a dozen bars for his daughter’s twelve hundred guests. Babe wore a seven-thousand-dollar gown designed for her by Yves Saint Laurent; she was featured on the cover of Life magazine curtsying to the duchess of Windsor, and news cameras of the three networks covered the event.

  It was not surprising, Dobbsie said, that Babe—an only child—grew into a rebel. For homes she had had the old Flagler mansion off Fifth Avenue; the Newport “cottage”; the house in Palm Beach, scene of the family’s Christmas celebrations; the winter chalet in the Swiss Alps and the summer “chateau” on the French Riviera. As an infant she had played in sandboxes with Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. Educated at America’s finest institutions—Spence, Farmington, Vassar—she had broadened her circle to include the children of board chairmen of AT&T, ITT, IBM, United Fruit, TWA. Never separated from those patrician playmates for longer than a summer vacation, she took privilege for granted—above all the privilege of flouting the very conventions that legitimized her own wealth and status.

  At nineteen she defied her parents and plunged into a scandalous marriage to internationally renowned concert pianist Ernst Koenig, a thrice-divorced man thirty-eight years her senior. Vassar expelled her.

  Dobbsie felt that this first marriage was more than an adolescent acting-out: it was a cry for help, an ominous signal that Babe Vanderwalk wanted in marriage what she had missed in childhood—nurture by loving, as opposed to paid, hands. In Koenig, she had tried to turn a father figure into a husband. Her alchemy had failed, and the solution, she must have decided, was to reverse the transformation. With one failed marriage securely under her belt, she packed her eight-year-old daughter into a Swiss boarding school and set out to find a husband she could turn into a father.

  Scottie Devens, Jr., a new chapter began, is the kind of man women can’t resist: good-looking, polished, not doing everything he could with his gifts—a perfect candidate for rescue.

  Dobbsie chronicled Scott Devens’s troubled childhood as the son of a Kentucky dirt farmer, his rowdy high school education, his early involvement with “Cuban elements” in Miami. This part of the book was full of quotes from unidentified sources: “Scottie Devens’s closest chums,” “a former sweetheart who wishes to remain anonymous,” “the mother of his aborted child,” “a Rumanian diplomat and drug courier”; “there are even those who swear …”

  Like two oppositely charged particles in a cyclotron, it was inevitable—according to Dobbsie—that sooner or later Babe Vanderwalk and Scott Devens would collide.

  The Paris Review was holding a Vietnam peace rally—fundraiser at P.J. Clarke’s, a perpetually trendy bar on New York’s Third Avenue. Babe, doing her bit, was passing drinks. Scottie, doing his, was playing cocktail piano.

  The room was overcrowded. Reports vary as to who pushed whom—some say that Jackie Kennedy stumbled against Mrs. Leonard Bernstein, others swear that Truman Capote gave Mrs. William Paley what he intended to be a joking shove.

  In the ensuing thirty-second domino effect, drinks were spilled, dresses were ruined, friendships were suspended, and love began: Babe Vanderwalk was shoved onto Scottie Devens’s keyboard. Never missing a beat, he continued playing “I’ve Got a Crush on You”—on Babe’s abdomen.

  Pieter Isaac Valk, the little Jewish boy from Amsterdam, had not been able to earn social acceptance in a lifetime of unremitting work; Scottie Devens, the hard-drinking ivory-tickling WASP from blue grass country, had it handed to him in five seconds.

  Three weeks after that meeting, Babe married Scottie, and together they embarked on the lives of jet set royalty. Within a year Babe discovered she had a gift for designing clothes, and Scottie discovered he had a yen for Doria Forbes-Steinman.

  This part of the book was full of things anyone could have known: who owned what, who made how much, who worked where, who knew whom, who lived with whom. It was also full of things Gordon Dobbs had obviously invented: descriptions of people’s houses that were quite simply inaccurate, the underwear people wore, the way they smiled and the way they kissed, the exact things they said to one another during chance encounters at huge parties.

  Scottie’s romance with Doria, Dobbsie claimed, became serious five and a half years before Babe’s coma. He described excursions the lovers had made to Paris, Antigua, Acapulco, quoting various unnamed s
ocialite gossips, bellboys, doormen, private investigators.

  Dobbsie then described the “crime” and the trial, summarizing the prosecution’s case in detail.

  Cordelia Koenig, Babe’s daughter by her first marriage, was awakened at three in the morning by strange sounds emanating from the bedroom shared by her mother and stepfather. Peeking into the hallway, she saw Scott Devens tiptoeing from the bedroom into his dressing room. He was carrying a syringe.

  When Babe Devens failed to awaken the next morning, an ambulance was dispatched from Doctors Hospital.

  Babe was admitted to the hospital, comatose, with an abnormally high level of insulin in her blood. Emergency room personnel administered one massive glucose injection at 9:00 A.M. and a second at 10:12 A.M. Babe failed to respond.

  A little after noon that same day, Cordelia confided to the maidservant, Faith Stoddard Banks, what she had seen the night before.

  Mrs. Banks searched the closet of Scott Devens’s dressing room and found a tan alligator carrying case. Within this case she discovered a syringe.

  Mrs. Banks phoned Babe Devens’s mother, Lucia Vanderwalk, who phoned her lawyer, William Frothingham. In turn, Frothingham phoned Harrison Jonik, a former New York City detective with thirty years’ experience who had gone into private practice.

  Jonik conducted his own search of the closet and discovered that the tan alligator carrying case contained not only a syringe but three bottles of insulin and one of liquid Valium.

  The bottles and syringe were turned over to ChemLab of Union City, New Jersey. Encrusted solution was found around the needle. The solution was shown to contain Valium, ammobarbital, insulin, and salinated water.

  Dr. Wallace Walker, a prosecution witness and chairman of the Department of Endocrinology and Diabetic Research at Southern Queens Hospital, testified that Babe Devens’s coma was the result of a “massive injection of insulin.” He based his findings on Babe’s blood sugar and insulin levels. Under normal circumstances a patient receiving two such massive glucose injections over a period of seventy-two minutes would show a rising blood sugar level. But Babe’s blood sugar level had failed to rebound, a clear indication that she had been injected with a toxic quantity of insulin.