Gilded Lily

by Isabel Vincent

  But Rosy and her mother claimed they were only protecting the interests of Carlos and were not after the money for themselves.

  As Regina’s lawyer made clear, “if as a result of this action Mrs. Regina Monteverde should obtain any benefit by way of property or assets, she now formally declares that she will take all the legal steps required for the purpose of assigning that benefit to the minor Carlos.”

  But after accusing the Monteverde family of trying to co-opt Scarlett to their cause, Lily seemed to turn around and do the same thing. It is not clear whether Edmond’s legal advisers paid Scarlett to withdraw her claim in Brazilian court, but it is clear that in the end Scarlett abruptly changed sides.

  On August 26, 1973, João Augusto de Miranda Jordão, Rosy’s attorney in Rio de Janeiro, sent an urgent telegram to Rosy’s home in Chiasso. “Scarlett in Rio with Lily’s American lawyer asking to stop the legal action, and saying she has come to agreement with Lily STOP.”

  Walter Weiner was “Lily’s American lawyer” who traveled to Rio to take control of the situation. But while Weiner was used to the wheeling and dealing that took place in American boardrooms and courts, the legal complexities of Rio de Janeiro proved a challenge even for him.

  Although Scarlett informed her Brazilian attorney that she did not wish to continue with the appeal, she did not have the authority to call it off. Her lawyer, Theodoro Arthou, had been retained by Regina, and he refused her request. Scarlett and Weiner then went from law office to law office in Rio trying to find a lawyer who would take her power of attorney and present a motion to the court to withdraw the appeal. They finally found a lawyer who was willing to take on the case. But it doesn’t appear as if he terminated the proceedings.

  “I learned only a few days ago that my instructions to terminate the proceeding had not been followed,” noted Scarlett in a June 1973 affidavit. “While I believed initially that the lawsuit instituted by me could benefit the minor, I realized finally the motives of Mrs. Regina Monteverde and Rosy Fanto were otherwise. In view of the aforementioned facts, I have decided to bring to a definite end the lawsuit which I initiated and which is now pending before the Federal Supreme Court.”

  Scarlett’s statement to the court withdrawing her action to adopt Carlos is worth noting in some detail because it so completely and utterly contradicts her previous statements.

  In her sworn deposition seeking the termination of her petition to adopt Carlos, she says that Carlos Monteverde is Alfredo’s “natural son.” Yet in a previous deposition, made in 1970, three years earlier, she admits that she and Alfredo adopted two children—Carlos and Alexandra—because they couldn’t have children of their own. Alexandra was never mentioned in the 1966 will because Scarlett had retained sole custody of the girl when she split from Alfredo in 1962.

  She also contradicted herself with respect to her former mother-in-law Regina. In 1970, she had signed a contract with Regina promising to honor each other’s wishes in the care of Carlos, arguing that this would be in the best interests of the child. But less than three years later, she viciously attacked Regina when she sought to have the entire case closed. “The thought of Regina Rebecca Monteverde being appointed as the tutoress of Carlos is absolutely appalling to me. Given the combination of the unstable temperament and advanced age of this woman, her appointment as tutoress would be most detrimental to the best interests of the minor.”

  Her petition to withdraw the legal action in Brazil appears to have been drafted to benefit Lily’s own claim to the boy, and to discredit the Monteverde family’s claims against Lily and the Trade Development Bank.

  “I am now firmly convinced that Lily Monteverde has fully and faithfully discharged her duties as turoress of the minor and administratrix of the estate and has acted in accordance with the wishes of Alfredo João Monteverde. I am of the firm conviction that the welfare of the minor Carlos Monteverde will best be served by the continued guardianship of Lily Monteverde. I am also convinced that Lily Monteverde is devoting all of her efforts to carrying out the wishes of Alfredo João Monteverde with respect to Carlos.”

  In the end, Scarlett’s testimony proved a key factor in Lily’s legal battle to adopt Carlos. Edmond had indeed fixed everything, and on February 8, 1973, the Brazilian courts cleared the way for her to adopt Carlos. As for the legal case against Lily and the Trade Development Bank in Britain, it was settled out of court, but the terms of the settlement were never made public.

  The protracted legal battles in London and Rio de Janeiro left Lily a nervous wreck. According to those who knew her at the time, she lost weight and had trouble sleeping.

  But while the battles must have caused both Lily and Edmond much anxiety, they also drew them closer together. Although they were forced to keep their personal relationship under wraps while the legal actions were playing themselves out in court, they clearly found time to be together. Edmond visited Lily on his regular trips to London to oversee the London branch of the Trade Development Bank. Lily frequently traveled to Geneva where Edmond convened meetings with the new principals of Alfredo’s companies—many of them Halabim business associates, who reported directly to Edmond. While Lily and Carlos were now the majority shareholders in Globex and Ponto Frio, Edmond was clearly in charge.

  Although they were trying to be discreet, many of their friends said that Lily and Edmond frequently went on holiday together. Their favorite destination was the French Riviera, with its fine restaurants and azure waters. In Antibes they could relax on a yacht moored off Millionaires Quay in the shadow of Fort Carré, the sixteenth-century fort where Napoleon Bonaparte was once imprisoned. In the evenings they headed to Juan-les-Pins, the picturesque village that had been the seaside haunt of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and other luminaries in the 1920s and 1930s.

  In the summer of 1970, Lily rented a yacht called the Blue Finn. Ever cautious, Edmond told her to rent the boat under a third-party name. The boat, rented under the name Dr. Iperti from Milan, was later traced to Lily Monteverde.

  Their friend Marcelo Steinfeld recalls visiting the two lovers and spending a few days with them aboard the yacht. In a black-and-white photograph he took of their boat trip on the Riviera, a relaxed, balding Edmond appears in bathing trunks sitting next to Lily, who is wearing a terry-wrap over her bathing suit, her wet hair pulled back from her suntanned face. They are on the sun-splashed deck of the boat, digging into a late lunch.

  “They really knew how to enjoy themselves,” said Steinfeld.

  Soon after arriving in London, Lily bought herself a full-length sable coat. She became such a good customer at the couture houses in Paris that she was soon on friendly terms with the legendary designers Valentino and Givenchy, later inviting them to her sumptuous balls and intimate dinners. Like a princess in a fairy tale, Lily was finally living her grandest dream, but in order to gain even greater entry into the grandest salons of Europe, she needed to be even more fabulously wealthy. That would surely come when she married one of the world’s most distinguished bankers.

  But although Edmond was in love with Lily, he wasn’t ready for marriage. For one thing, his family did not approve of her. Not only was she divorced and quickly approaching middle age, she had four children from previous marriages and she was an Ashkenazi Jew—an outsider. Joseph had made his family proud when he had married Vicki, a fellow Halabim. Most of his sisters—Eveline, Gabi, and Huguette—would go on to marry within the Sephardic community in South America. The exception was Arlette, who had insisted on a “mixed” marriage to an Ashkenazi Jew. Edmond, who, despite geographic distance was still extremely close to his siblings, knew the grief it would cause his family in São Paulo if he married Lily against their will. At her age, how would she produce heirs to take over the banking empire that he was building?

  The free-love hippie movement may have taken hold in Europe and North America, but in the Halabim communities of São Paulo many clans lived much as they had done in the nineteenth
century. In São Paulo, a Halabim man was supposed to marry within the community. If he couldn’t find a mate at the synagogue or through family connections, there were ways of finding suitable young women among their extended families still in Syria or the ones who had settled in Brooklyn and New Jersey. There had to be thousands of young, good-looking, eligible women whose families would literally jump at the chance to have a rich man like Edmond as a son-in-law.

  “The Safras put a lot of pressure on Edmond not to marry Lily,” recalled Steinfeld. “They thought no good could come of the marriage, and they wanted nothing to do with her.”

  At first, Edmond might have made excuses about the legal obstacles they both faced with the Monteverdes breathing down their necks in the British and Brazilian lawsuits. Furthermore, they couldn’t possibly get married so soon after Alfredo’s death. That would invite gossip—something Edmond clearly abhorred. Lily had to think of the children and her own reputation. No, it was better to wait. They could simply go on as before.

  But Lily wanted to be married, and she wanted to conquer high society. She did wait for a few years, but then she grew tired of waiting.

  Edmond, who had been taught to size up a person by looking them straight in the eye, clearly slipped when it came to his lover. For all his intelligence and street smarts honed in the souks of Beirut, he never foresaw the emotional tidal wave that was about to wash over him.

  FIVE

  Two Weddings

  LILY WATKINS MONTEVERDE, as she now called herself, couldn’t have picked a more unromantic spot for the beginning of a torrid affair, but unlike almost everything in her life since Alfredo’s death, some things eluded even her control.

  On September 28, 1971, more than two years after arriving in London, Lily sat slightly slumped in a dentist’s chair at a private clinic in Devonshire Place waiting for her dentist, Brian Kanarek, to examine her days before he was scheduled to extract her impacted wisdom teeth. Lily sat gossiping with Dora Cohen, a former sister-in-law who was married to her first husband’s brother, and who had accompanied her to the dental clinic. Although Lily had long since divorced Mario Cohen, she still maintained a relationship with the family. Friends say that Lily and Mario did not get along, but were forced to speak frequently to arrange the children’s visits between two continents.

  Deep in conversation with Dora, she barely noticed when Kanarek finally arrived, striding into the clinic with the handsome stranger who would shortly change her life.

  Or rather, she would change his.

  The year had not been a particularly good one for Lily Watkins Monteverde. The lawsuit brought by her former in-laws, who were alleging that she was hiding Alfredo’s fortune, continued with no end in sight; her son Eduardo had left yet another school; and Adriana, now a teenager, was challenging her mother’s authority and getting into frequent arguments with Lily. Claudio remained her “perfect son” and was a big help to Carlos, who was lonely and full of self-doubt after the death of his father. Then, on July 25, her mother, Annita Watkins, a diabetic, died quite suddenly of a heart attack at seventy-one in Rio de Janeiro. On top of everything, Edmond was still insisting that they hide their relationship, at least until the end of the court cases in Brazil and England. But she knew he wasn’t serious about marriage, and that his conservative family in Brazil would never accept her.

  So perhaps on the day she went to see her dentist in London, she wasn’t thinking very clearly. Perhaps she needed a diversion—something to dull the pain of her mother’s sudden passing and Edmond’s tacit rejection.

  She instinctively sat up when the diversion walked through the door. At the time, Samuel Bendahan was Kanarek’s best friend, and a patient. To Lily, he seemed perfect—one of the sexiest men she had ever seen. And after two years of widowhood and a frustrating affair with Safra that seemed to be leading nowhere, she was eager for a new conquest. She raised a hand to her hair to make sure it was perfectly coiffed. She would no doubt have loved to freshen her lipstick and touch up her makeup, but she couldn’t very well dig into her purse and reach for her compact, not after the handsome stranger walked into the room.

  “I caught a very quick glimpse of her looking bored but the instant that she saw me, she was sitting up and her hand went up to check her hair,” recalled Bendahan, years after that first meeting with Lily at the clinic. “This became a shorthand piece of intimacy between us. If subsequently I put my hand up to my hair and went through exaggerated motions of checking my coiffure, you could be sure that this would elicit a broad grin from her. She would do the same to me if, for example, we were in company and she wanted to convey to me that she was impatient for us to be ‘alone’ (and all that implies!).”

  At thirty-five, Bendahan was tall, dark, and exotic, with black hair and brooding brown eyes. Born in Marrakech, educated in England, he seemed the perfect combination of cosmopolitan businessman, charming gentleman, and witty intellectual.

  The way Bendahan tells the story, it was clearly love, or rather lust, at first sight, at least on Lily’s part. But while he may have instantly seen through her intentions, nothing prepared Bendahan for the dizzying whirlwind of the next few months.

  If he could have fast-forwarded his life at that moment—standing in an antiseptic London clinic, politely shaking this woman’s hand, making small talk—he never could have imagined the bizarre and dangerous twist his life would take.

  AT THAT FIRST meeting, Lily didn’t waste any time. Less than twenty minutes after being introduced to him, she asked him on a date. Bendahan claims that he demurred, slightly put off by her aggressive behavior. Had Kanarek purposely set up the meeting between his handsome single friend and the wealthy widow?

  But whether it was accidental or by design, that first meeting between Lily and Bendahan must have surprised them both. For in the course of their first conversation, they discovered that they had much in common. Not only did they share the same dental surgeon, but they frequented the same high-powered supper clubs in London, and they both banked at the same Swiss bank—the extremely understated Trade Development Bank in Geneva. As luck would have it, they would both be in Geneva on business the following week. Lily would be passing through with Dora Cohen. Later, the two friends planned to travel to Paris and Tel Aviv.

  Perhaps they could all meet for a drink, say, at the Hotel President Wilson, suggested Lily.

  Bendahan agreed to stay in touch with Lily, but he didn’t commit to anything, still wary of the pushy blonde with the continental accent. Where was she from? He couldn’t tell, nor did he care, at least at that moment. He was preoccupied with his own import-export business, with redecorating his new flat. There were also repairs on his father’s flat to organize before embarking on a business trip to Switzerland and Belgium.

  The following week, in Geneva, Bendahan went about his affairs and didn’t think much about the encounter in Kanarek’s clinic. Then, on October 5, as he packed his suitcase and prepared to leave for more business meetings in Brussels, the phone rang in his room at the Hotel du Rhône, an art-deco hotel favored by European businessmen on the right bank of the Rhône River.

  “Much to my surprise Mrs. Monteverde telephoned me to inform me that they were already in Geneva and that she very much hoped that I would delay my departure to Brussels until the following day,” Bendahan recalled. As his presence in Brussels was in no way urgently required and “as frankly her insistence to meet me again touched me,” he agreed to her request.

  The two met hours later at the bar of the Hotel President Wilson with its fabled view of Mont Blanc. Lily arrived without her traveling companion, telling Bendahan that “Mrs. Cohen had preferred to let us be alone for the evening,” recalled Bendahan later. “This from a total stranger!”

  After dinner and a few drinks at a nearby club, Bendahan found himself drawn to the cultivated Brazilian widow. He even confided in her a secret ambition: He was ready to give up his business and pursue his dream of enrolling in law school. Lily “seemed i
mpressed with this” and after dinner she invited him up to her suite for another drink. Bendahan politely declined and bid her good night.

  Lily was clearly infatuated with Bendahan, who continued to keep his distance. Perhaps he wanted to see how far it would go. In any case, he was enjoying the game. As Bendahan recalled years later, the widow was persistent. She showed up at the Geneva airport the next morning as Bendahan prepared to board his flight to Brussels. “Much to my stupefaction, Mrs. Monteverde asked me to cancel my trip to Brussels,” he said. “I naturally refused to do this as elegantly as I could.”

  Undeterred, she telephoned hotels in Brussels in an effort to find Bendahan after she arrived in Paris. Lily was unsuccessful but she was used to getting her way and refused to give up. She wrote him a letter from the plane en route to Tel Aviv and several postcards—one for every day of her stay in Israel. Bendahan found the notes at his flat when he returned to London on October 20. In fact, barely twenty minutes after he entered his apartment, the telephone rang. It was Lily inviting him for dinner at her home that evening. It was to be a small gathering of friends, she said. Bendahan initially declined, but after some prodding, agreed to join her and her guests for coffee after dinner at her flat at 6 Hyde Park Gardens.

  Bendahan remembers few details of that evening with Lily and her chattering guests, all of them well-heeled European and South American couples. Marcelo Steinfeld, who had traveled to London from Rio de Janeiro on business and to deliver the remainder of Lily’s shares in Alfredo’s company, attended the dinner that night, and recalled meeting Lily’s latest conquest. Later, he shared a good laugh with his wife, dismissing Bendahan out of hand as “Lily’s latest gigolo”—a description that would haunt Bendahan for the rest of his life. Steinfeld was so unimpressed with Bendahan that he could not even recall his name.