The Mansions of Limbo

by Dominick Dunne

  Along the way de Larrain met the Viscountess Jacqueline de Ribes, one of the grandest ladies in Paris society and a ballet enthusiast to boot. “Before Jacqueline, no one had ever heard of Raymundo de Larrain except as a nephew of de Cuevas. Jacqueline was his stepping-stone into society,” said another lady of international social fame who did not wish to be identified. The viscountess became an earlier admirer of his talent, and they entered into a close relationship that was to continue for years, sharing an interest in clothes and fashion as well as the ballet. Raymundo de Larrain is said to have made Jacqueline de Ribes over and given her the look that has remained her trademark for several decades. A famous photograph taken by Richard Avedon in 1961 shows the two of them in exotic matching profiles. At a charity party in New York known as the Embassy Ball, chaired by the Viscountess de Ribes, Mrs. Winston Guest, and the American-born Princess d’Arenberg, Raymundo de Larrain’s fantastical butterfly décor was so extravagant that there was no money left for the charity that was meant to benefit from the event. In time the viscountess became known as the godmother of the ballet, and she, more than any other person, pushed the career of Raymundo de Larrain.

  After the publication of The Double Door, the de Cuevases were often the subject of gossip in the sophisticated society in which they moved, but somehow they had the ability to keep scandal within the family perimeter. The relationship of both husband and wife with the unsavory Jan de Vroom, however, almost caused their peculiar habits to be open to public scrutiny. A family member said to me that at this point in Margaret de Cuevas’s life she fell into a nest of vipers. Born in Dutch Indonesia, Jan de Vroom was a tall, blond adventurer who dominated drawing rooms by sheer force of personality rather than good looks. A wit, storyteller, and linguist, he had an eye for the main chance, and like a great many young men before him looking for the easy ride, he attached himself to George de Cuevas. De Vroom was quick to realize on which side the bread was buttered in the de Cuevas household, and, to the distress of the marquis, who soon grew to distrust him, he shifted his attentions to Margaret, whom he followed to the United States. At first Margaret was not disposed to like him, but, undeterred by her initial snubs, he schooled himself in Mozart, whom he knew to be her favorite composer, and soon found favor with her as a fellow Mozart addict. He got a small apartment in a brownstone a few blocks from Margaret’s houses on East Sixty-eighth Street and was always available when she needed a companion for dinner. She set him up in business, as an importer of Italian glass and lamps. From Europe, George de Cuevas tried to break up the deepening intimacy, but Margaret, egged on by her friend Florence Gould, ignored her husband’s protests. As the friendship grew, so did de Vroom’s store of acquisitions. He was a sportsman, and through Margaret de Cuevas’s bounty he soon owned a sleek sailing boat, a fleet of Ferrari cars, a Rolls-Royce, and—briefly, until it crashed—an airplane. He also acquired an important collection of rare watches.

  Raymundo de Larrain and Jan de Vroom detested each other, and Jan, in the years when he was in favor with Margaret, refused to have Raymundo around. De Vroom had no wish to join the ranks of men who made their fortune at the altar; he was content to play the role of son to Margaret, a sort of naughty-boy son whose peccadilloes she easily forgave. A mixer in the darker worlds of New York and Florida, he entertained her with stories of his subterranean adventures. Often, in her own homes, she would be the only woman present at a dining table full of men who were disinterested in women.

  In 1960 the Marquis de Cuevas, in failing health, offered Raymundo de Larrain, with whom he was now on the closest terms, the chance to create a whole new production of The Sleeping Beauty, to be performed at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées. De Larrain’s Sleeping Beauty is still remembered as one of the most beautiful ballet productions of all time, and it was the greatest box-office success the company had ever experienced. The marquis was permitted by his physicians to attend the premiere. “If I am going to die, I will die backstage,” he said. After the performance he was pushed out onto the stage in a wheelchair and received a standing ovation. George de Cuevas attended every performance up until two weeks before his death. He died at his favorite of the many de Cuevas homes, Les Délices, in Cannes, on February 22, 1961. Margaret, who was in New York, did not visit her husband of thirty-three years in the months of his decline. In his will George left the house in Cannes to his Argentinean secretary, Horacio Guerrico, but Margaret was displeased with her husband’s bequest and managed to get the house back from the secretary in exchange for money and several objects of value.

  Although Margaret had never truly shared her husband’s passion for the ballet, or for the ballet company bearing his name, which she had financed for so many years, she did not immediately disband it after his death. Instead she appointed Raymundo de Larrain the new head of the company. There was always a sense of dilettantism about George de Cuevas’s role as a Maecenas of the dance—not dissimilar to the role Rebekah Harkness would later play with her ballet company. The taste and caprices of the marquis determined the policy of the company, which relied on the box-office appeal of big-star names. This same sense of dilettantism carried over into de Larrain’s contribution. The de Cuevas company has been described to me by one balletomane as ballet for people who normally despise ballet, ballet for society audiences, as opposed to dance audiences.

  De Larrain’s stewardship of the company was brief but not undramatic. In June 1961 he played a significant role in the political defection of Rudolf Nureyev at the Paris airport when the Kirov Ballet of Leningrad was leaving France. The story has become romanticized over the years, and everyone’s version of it differs. According to de Larrain, Nureyev had confessed to Clara Saint, a half-Chilean, half-Argentinean friend of de Larrain’s, that he would rather commit suicide than go back to Russia. In one account, Clara Saint, feigning undying love for the departing star, screamed out to Nureyev that she must have one more kiss from him before he boarded the plane and returned to his homeland. Nureyev went back to kiss her, jumped over the barriers, and escaped in a waiting car as the plane carrying the company took off. De Larrain says that Clara Saint had alerted the French authorities that there was going to be a defection, and she advised Nureyev during a farewell drink at the airport bar that he must ask the French police at the departure gate for political asylum. He says that Nureyev spat in the face of the Russian security official. For a while Nureyev lived in de Larrain’s Paris apartment, and the first time he danced after his defection was for the de Cuevas company, in de Larrain’s production of The Sleeping Beauty. “He danced like a god, but he also had a spectacular story,” de Larrain told me. At one of his first performances the balcony was filled with communists, who pelted the stage with tomatoes and almost caused a riot. People who were present that night remember that Nureyev continued to dance through the barrage, as if he were unaware of the commotion, until the performance was finally halted.

  In Raymundo de Larrain’s affidavit for the probate, he assesses his role in Nureyev’s career in an I’m-not-the-no-body tone: “With the help of Margaret de Cuevas we made him into one of the biggest stars in the history of ballet.” The professional association between de Larrain and Nureyev, which might have saved the de Cuevas ballet, did not last, just as most of de Larrain’s professional associations did not last. “Raymundo and Rudolf did not have the same point of view on beauty and the theater, and they fought,” explained the Viscountess de Ribes in Paris recently. “Raymundo had great talent and tremendous imagination. He had the talent to be a stage director, but neither the health nor the courage to fight. He was very unrealistic. He didn’t know how to talk to people. He was too grand. What Raymundo is is a total aesthete, not an intellectual. He wanted to live around beautiful things. He was very generous and gave beautiful presents. Even the smallest gift he ever gave me was perfect, absolutely perfect,” she said. Another friend of de Larrain’s said, “Raymundo had more taste and knowledge of dancing than anyone. His problem was tha
t he was unprofessional. He couldn’t get along with people. He had no discipline over himself.” When the Marquesa de Cuevas decided in 1962 not to underwrite the ballet company any longer, it was disbanded. Then, under the sponsorship of the Viscountess de Ribes, de Larrain formed his own ballet company. He began by producing and directing Cinderella, in which he featured Geraldine Chaplin in a modest but much publicized role. The viscountess, however, couldn’t afford for long to underwrite a ballet company, and withdrew after two years. Raymundo de Larrain then took to photographing celebrities for Vogue, Town & Country, and Life. His friends say that he had one obsession: to “make it” in the eyes of his family back in Chile. He mailed every newspaper clipping about himself to his mother, for whom, de Ribes says, “he had a passion.”

  For years Margaret de Cuevas’s physical appearance had been deteriorating. Never the slightest bit interested in fashion or style, she began to assume the look of what has been described to me by some as a millionairess bag lady and by others as the Madwoman of Chaillot. “Before Fellini she was Fellini,” said Count Vega del Ren about her, but other assessments were less romantic. Her nails were uncared for. Her teeth were in a deplorable state. She had knee problems that gave her difficulty in walking. She covered her face with a white paste and white powder, and she blackened her eyes in an eccentric way that made people think she had put her thumb and fingers in a full ashtray and rubbed them around her eyes. Her hair was dyed black with reddish tinges, and around her head she always wore a black net scarf, which she tied beneath her chin. She wrapped handkerchiefs and ribbons around her wrists to hide her diamonds, and her black dresses were frequently stained with food and spilled white powder and held together with safety pins. For shoes she wore either sneakers or a pair of pink polyester bedroom slippers, which were often on the wrong feet. Her lateness had reached a point where dinner guests would sit for several hours waiting for her to make an appearance, while Marcel, her butler of forty-five years, would pass them five or six times, carrying a martini on a silver tray to the marquesa’s room. “She drank much too much for an old lady,” one of her frequent guests told me. Finally her arrival for dinner would be heralded by the barking of her Pekingese dogs, and she would enter the dining room preceded by her favorite of them, Happy, who had a twisted neck and a glass eye and walked with a limp as the result of a stroke.

  Her behavior also was increasingly eccentric. In her bedroom she had ten radios sitting on tables and chests of drawers. Each radio was set to a different music station—country-and-western, rock ’n’ roll, classical—and when she wanted to hear music she would ring for Marcel and point to the radio she wished him to turn on. For years she paid for rooms at the Westbury Hotel for a group of White Russians she had taken under her wing.

  In the meantime Jan de Vroom had grown increasingly alcoholic and pill-dependent. “If someone’s eyes are dilated, does that mean they’re taking drugs?” Margaret asked a friend of de Vroom’s. “I’ve been too kind to him. I’ve spoiled him.” Young men—mostly hustlers and drug dealers—paraded in and out of his apartment at all hours of the day and night. In 1973 two hustlers, whom he knew, rang the bell of his New York apartment. On a previous visit they had asked him for a loan of $2,000, and he had refused. When de Vroom answered the bell, they sent up a thug to frighten him and demand money again. Jan de Vroom, in keeping with his character, aggravated the thug and incited him to rage. A French houseguest found de Vroom’s body: his throat had been cut, and he had been stabbed over and over again. Although he was known to be the person closest to Margaret de Cuevas at that time in her life, her name was not brought into any of the lurid accounts of his murder in the tabloid papers. De Vroom’s body, covered from the chin down to conceal his slit throat, lay in an open casket in the Westbury Room of the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel at Madison Avenue and Eighty-first Street. Except for a few of the curious, there were no visitors. A little-known fact of the sordid situation was that, through the intercession of Margaret de Cuevas, the body was laid to rest in the Rockefeller cemetery in Pocantico Hills, the family estate, although subsequently it was shipped to Holland. The killers were caught and tried. There was no public outcry over the unsavory killing, and they received brief sentences. It is said that one of them still frequents the bars in New York.

  Into this void in the life of the Marquesa Margaret de Cuevas moved Raymundo de Larrain. People meeting Margaret de Cuevas for the first time at this point were inclined to think that the cultivated lady was not intelligent, because she was unable to converse in the way people in society converse, and they suspected that she might be combining sedatives and drink. The same people are uniform in their praise of Raymundo de Larrain during this time. For parties at her house in New York, Raymundo would invite the guests and order the food and arrange the flowers, in much the same way that her late husband had during their marriage, and no one would argue the point that Raymundo surrounded her with a better crowd of people than Jan de Vroom ever had. He would choreograph a steady stream of handpicked guests to Margaret’s side during the evening. “ ‘Go and sit with Tante Margaret and talk with her, and I will send someone over in ten minutes to relieve you,’ ” a frequent guest told me he used to say. “He was lovely to her.” Another view of Raymundo at this time came from a New York lady who also visited the house: “He was so talented, Raymundo. Such a sense of fantasy. But he got sidetracked into money-grubbing.” Whatever the interpretation, Margaret de Cuevas and Raymundo became the Harold and Maude of the Upper East Side and Palm Beach. Bessie de Cuevas, in her affidavit, acknowledges that “Raymundo was always attentive and extremely helpful to my mother, particularly in her social life, which consisted almost exclusively of gatherings and entertainments at her various residences.”

  On April 25, 1977, at the oceanfront estate of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson C. Lucom in Palm Beach, the Marquesa Margaret de Cuevas, then eighty years old, married Raymundo de Larrain, then forty-two, in a hastily arranged surprise ceremony. The wedding was such a closely guarded secret that Margaret de Cuevas’s children, Bessie and John, did not know of it until they read about it in Suzy’s column in the New York Daily News. Bessie de Cuevas’s friends say that she felt betrayed by Raymundo because he had not told her of his plans to marry her mother. Among the prominent guests present at the wedding were Rose Kennedy, Mrs. Winston Guest, and Mary Sanford, known as the queen of Palm Beach, who that night gave the newlyweds a wedding reception at her estate. In her affidavit Bessie de Cuevas states, “I had visited with my mother at some length at her home in New York just about two months before. She was clearly aging but we talked along quite well about personal and family things. She said she would be leaving soon to spend some time at her home in Florida. She did not in any way suggest that she was considering getting married. After I read the article, I called her at once in Florida. She could only speak briefly and seemed vague. I assured her that of course my brother John and I wanted anything that would make her comfortable and happy, but why, I asked, did she do it this way. Her reply was simply, ‘It just happened.’ ”

  Wilson C. Lucom, the host of the wedding, was also married to an older woman, the since-deceased Willys-Overland automobile heiress Virginia Willys. Lucom, who had trained as a lawyer, never practiced law but had served on the staff of the late secretary of state Edward Stettinius. Shortly after the wedding, in response to an inquiry from the Rockefeller family, he sent a Mailgram to John D. Rockefeller III, the first cousin of Margaret Strong de Cuevas de Larrain, stating his position as the representative of the marquesa and now of de Larrain. “Do not worry about her or be concerned about any rumors you may have heard,” the Mailgram read. “She was married at our house with my wife and myself as witnesses. It was a solemn ceremony, and she was highly competent and knew precisely that she was being married and did so of her own free will being of sound mind.” Bessie de Cuevas says in her affidavit, “I had never met or heard my mother speak of Mr. Lucom.”

  For the wedding, Ray
mundo told friends, he gave his bride a wheelchair and new teeth. He also supervised a transformation of her appearance. “You must understand this: Raymundo cleaned Margaret up. Why, her nails were manicured for the first time in years.” He got rid of the white makeup and blackened eyes, and he supervised her hair, nails, cosmetics, and dress. “Margaret was never better cared for” is a remark made over and over about her after her marriage. De Larrain would invite people to lunch or for drinks and wheel her out to greet her guests; he basked in the compliments paid to his wife on her new appearance. However, lawyers for the Chase Manhattan Bank, which represents Bessie and John de Cuevas’s interests, told me that the two health-care professionals who cared for the marquesa at different times in 1980 and 1982 recalled that de Larrain did not spend much time with his wife, and that she would often ask about him. But when attention was paid by him, it would be lavish; he would send roses in great quantity or do her makeup. Since he had arranged it so that no one would become close to his wife, “she was particularly vulnerable to such displays of charm and affection.” During her second marriage, she became known as Margaret Rockefeller de Larrain. Although this was illustrious-sounding, it was incorrect, for it implied that she was born Margaret Rockefeller rather than Margaret Strong. “The snobbishness and enhancement were de Larrain’s,” sniffed a friend of her daughter’s.