“She was only using the guy to make Edmond jealous,” said Steinfeld in his home in Rio de Janeiro years later. “Everyone could see that.”
It was a view that was repeated by a number of Lily’s friends, and surely there must have been some desire on Lily’s part to teach Edmond a lesson after he had refused to marry her. But it’s not entirely true. As her intimate letters to Bendahan and his own recollection of their courtship and marriage suggest, the thirty-seven-year-old Brazilian widow fell hard for Bendahan, calling him five or six times a day and writing him anguished, heartfelt letters when he was away from her.
On that mild October night in London, as she saw the last guest to the door, Lily playfully grabbed Bendahan’s arm and begged him to stay on for more coffee and brandy. Bendahan effectively moved in some weeks later.
It’s not clear when Bendahan became fully aware of Lily’s extraordinary wealth. There were hints early in their courtship, of course—the Mercedes convertible she stowed in a nearby garage, the exquisite clothes, the obsequious servants, the chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. Although he was a successful businessman who ran his own small company, Bendahan’s income fell far short of his new lover’s staggering net worth.
Bendahan, who had never had servants of his own, loved spending time at Lily’s Hyde Park Gardens flat. “The real comfort came from the (mostly) excellent staff that she employed.” Lily had brought Djanira, her maid from Brazil, and along with the chauffeur, she employed a butler, cook, laundress, and housekeeper. Bendahan also loved “the delightful view onto the private gardens and the terrace overlooking these.”
It’s a testament to how enamored Lily was of Bendahan that she found herself confiding in him some of the most intimate details of her life in Brazil. She told him that she had inherited her wealth from her second husband, an appliance store magnate whose real wealth—the “black money,” as she called it—had come from smuggling gold in and out of Brazil.
Bendahan, who considered it in bad taste to ask too many probing questions, didn’t pursue the topic. It made him extremely uncomfortable, as did the rather “dour and funereal” photos of “poor darling Freddy” scattered throughout Lily’s flat. “As all this was beyond my life’s experience, I treated it as though it were a scene from some B movie and gave no credence to the rumors that she had just imparted to me.”
There were many things that Bendahan would simply choose to ignore. He didn’t probe too deeply when Lily received the calls—sometimes several times a day—from Geneva that sometimes left her shaking and in tears. And he looked the other way when he saw Lily accepting the thick packages of pound notes that arrived every week by personal courier from the Trade Development Bank.
In the end, it was Bendahan’s naivete, his reluctance to dig deeply into Lily’s past, that would end up ruining his own life. Why didn’t he ask about her life in Brazil, her fortune, the strange ironclad hold that Safra had on her financial affairs? To this day, he confessed that there is so little about her past that he knew. Was she really born Jewish, or did she convert to marry her first husband? Why was her maiden name–Watkins—Welsh? Where was her mother born? What had really taken place in Brazil?
But it never occurred to him to ask such questions when he was with her. Bendahan says he was being a gentleman, and gentlemen simply don’t ask embarrassing questions. From a young age, he says, his father explained to him “that it was rude to ask personal questions for fear that these might sadden the person questioned. This, coupled with a distinct lack of ‘nosiness’ on my part, resulted in my asking very, very few direct questions at any period in my life.”
But could there have been other reasons for his willful blindness? As he tells it, he was in love for the first time in his life. But perhaps he was also in love with the comforts of this new fairy-tale existence—the servants, the Rolls-Royce, the exquisite caviar at Annabel’s several times a week. Perhaps he didn’t ask questions because he would have too much to lose if he didn’t like the answers. Too many questions might annoy Lily, who could easily get rid of him.
The widow did indeed have a mysterious past and present, but why tempt fate now? In those early days of their romance, Bendahan simply couldn’t believe his luck.
SAMUEL HAIM BENDAHAN was born in Marrakech on April 1, 1936, in what was then the French part of Morocco. Following the sudden death of his mother less than two years after he was born, he was raised by his father, Judah Meir Bendahan, a pillar of the Jewish community. Bendahan père, who was known as Merito to observant Jews throughout the country, was a fifth-generation mohel, religious teacher, and founder of several synagogues in Marrakech and Casablanca. He prepared a generation of Jewish boys for their bar mitzvahs, led the choirs in several synagogues, and by most accounts was singularly devoted to his only son, who was later educated at Jewish boarding schools in Brighton and Oxfordshire after the Second World War. To this day, Bendahan, who is in his seventies, idealizes his father, who at a time when it was unheard of for a man to raise a child on his own did just that. Judah Bendahan never remarried.
Bendahan was equally devoted to his father until his father’s death in London in 1993. When Bendahan launched himself in business, he insisted upon supporting his father financially, renting a flat for him in London within walking distance of his own so that he could dine with him on the Jewish Sabbath. Although Bendahan is not as observant as his father was, he takes great pride in his heritage. He bought burial plots, side by side, for his father and himself on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, where Judah Bendahan is buried.
“I come from a proudly and ancient Orthodox family,” Bendahan said. “My mother, too, was a Sunday school teacher and came from an Orthodox family. I have not kept up their strict religious code but am proud of my ancestry and our religion.”
This family pride explains why he bristles whenever he sees himself depicted in the media as the gigolo third husband of Lily Safra, and why he has never consented to speak until now. In several interviews conducted over the course of a few months, Bendahan spoke of his family’s noble Jewish lineage, and was eager to relate the “truth” about his relationship with Lily, and, by extension, Edmond Safra. In addition to Bendahan’s father, there was his great-grandfather Judah Bendahan, a headmaster of the English School in the Moroccan city of Mogador. When he died in 1907, an obituary in London’s Jewish Chronicle noted his “piety, humility, simplicity of manner and gentleness of disposition.”
These were all qualities that were passed on to his grandfather and father, said Bendahan. Before his father’s death, Bendahan helped him compile a history of every circumcision that generations of their family had performed throughout Morocco and in Paris. In all, he chronicled a total of 2,257 circumcisions, spanning nearly a century, that his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had performed. The records are now part of the Anglo-Jewish Historical Society and the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation in London.
As Bendahan proudly pointed out, “our ancestors chose to be expelled from Spain rather than to submit to the demands of the Inquisition, and, to this day, on all our ketubot [Jewish marriage contracts] we are entitled to state we are ‘of the Expelled,’ a title of some significance.”
This may explain why Samuel Bendahan, a self-confessed playboy and bon vivant, did not take marriage lightly. He idealized it and fantasized about the perfect woman—“the nice Jewish girl” who would be virtuous enough to present to his dear father.
Was Lily good enough to marry Samuel Bendahan? During those early days, he wasn’t sure, which might explain why Lily never met Bendahan’s father.
Still, in London, they acted like a wealthy married couple. They dined out several nights a week at ultra-exclusive clubs such as dell’Aretusa and Les Ambassadeurs. As Bendahan recalls, Lily was elegant in Valentino black tails and a smoldering Eve cigarette in hand. He said she turned heads, resembling a rather thin and petite version of Marlene Dietrich.
In late October 1971, as Lily and Bendahan
arrived for dinner at Annabel’s, they were stopped at the door by Louis, the maître d’hôtel. Lily had clearly dined there often with her former lover Safra, and as she breezed in with her latest conquest, Louis “whispered conspiratorially that we might not want to come in as ‘monsieur Safra est ici.’ I could not care less one way or another but Lily refused to be dictated by her past and asked Louis to take us to his table,” recalled Bendahan. Perhaps it was also Lily’s way of showing off her new lover to Edmond, who had bowed to his own family’s pressure in refusing to marry her.
Lily touched up her makeup before taking Bendahan’s arm and steering her trophy lover—this younger, much more attractive man—to the legendary banker’s table. Edmond, who was dining with a group of dark-suited business associates, glanced up at his former lover in some surprise. It was a momentary look of disgust, recalled Bendahan. But in the end Edmond’s Old World breeding won the day, and he extended his hand to Lily’s new lover. Still, “his smile was somewhat frozen.” For the rest of the evening, the happy couple ignored the Lebanese banker and continued their intimate dinner “as if nothing had happened.”
Life with Lily seemed blissful in those early days. They lingered over coffee and newspapers in the mornings. In her love letters to Bendahan at the time, Lily writes about her delight at the routine that quickly became their morning ritual. She would wash his hair in the bathtub. At breakfast, she poured his coffee and buttered his croissants. There are also the racier notes in which she refers to herself as Madame Claude, the infamous Parisian brothelkeeper who provided women for France’s power elite in the 1960s and 1970s. She also compared herself to Elizabeth Taylor and pretended Bendahan was Richard Burton, sometimes addressing the little love notes, inscribed in English on elegant little cream cards with the initials LWM, to “Richard.”
In those early letters, many of them written when Bendahan was on a series of business trips abroad, she refers to herself as his wife. In one letter, she calls him “My adorable husband (oh! How nice).” In other notes, she begs him not to drink too much alcohol because he needs to be in good health in order to have children with her (“lots of them!”).
Lily seemed so comfortable with her new lover that she felt it perfectly respectable to take him to visit Carlos and Claudio at the Millfield School in Somerset. In the photographs Bendahan took of that visit in November 1971, there is one of Lily gazing lovingly at Bendahan, fixing her coiffure (“with all that implies!”) and vamping for the camera beside Adriana.
There are also similar photographs of the happy couple taken on a trip to Villars, in the Swiss Alps, to visit Carlos, who had fractured his leg while skiing with his classmates.
In those early weeks, Bendahan recalled that the two never argued and their sex life was “excellent.” Lily had “introduced me to One Hundred Years of Solitude, she had introduced me to the Lanvin mode of dressing, [and] she had a superb sense of humor.”
In letter after letter, Lily expressed her intense longing for him. Writing “from our home” in London, Lily writes of her happiness at having found true love. In another letter, the second written on the same day, Lily refers to Bendahan as “my love, my darling, my beloved, my husband, my man, my everything.”
Still, there were strains, especially as Bendahan prepared to embark on an annual month-long business trip that would take him from Bangkok to Mexico, with several stops in between. Bendahan would be accompanied by Kanarek on a trip that he admitted was “partly for business, and mostly to clear my mind in regard to, what to her and to me, seemed to have become a serious relationship.” Kanarek, at the time, was also “suffering from nervous exhaustion” and needed to get away from London.
The truth is that Bendahan was looking forward to being away from this all-consuming relationship with Lily. In mid-December, approximately two months after moving in with Lily, Bendahan announced that he would leave for Bangkok in a few weeks’ time. The news did not go over well with a woman who had grown accustomed to wielding absolute control over the people around her.
“Mrs. Monteverde was of course incensed that I should appear to be giving someone else priority over her, however much I explained how loyal and affectionate Mr. and Mrs. Kanarek had been to me over the years,” he later told his lawyer. Nevertheless, on January 2, 1972, Bendahan and Kanarek left for Paris in order to catch an early flight the next morning for Bangkok.
Perhaps Lily’s protestations of love were a little too stifling to a bachelor used to his freedom. Despite the geographic distance between them as he traveled to Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Tahiti, Bendahan simply couldn’t get rid of her. Lily pursued him. She wrote to him every day about how she suffered in his absence, how intensely she missed him, how she dreamed of making love with him. Her first letter, written several days before his departure, was already waiting for him in Bangkok when he arrived. And she called incessantly—this in the days when making overseas calls was truly a chore, requiring her to stay glued to the telephone for up to five hours, “to which inconvenience must be added the time differential between London and those places,” said Bendahan.
In the course of some of those long-distance conversations, Lily suggested that she fly to meet him. But her life was so filled with luncheons, shopping, and meetings with interior designers—she had undertaken to supervise the work on Bendahan’s new flat and his father’s flat—that he didn’t take her very seriously. Then at the end of his trip, as he was waiting for his luggage at the Acapulco airport, “I suddenly caught sight of Lily bouncing up and down like a four-year-old.” Without any warning, Lily had jumped on a plane to surprise him.
The reunion was passionate, and during the first few days they spent most of their time in their suite at the luxurious Regency Hyatt hotel. Judging from the notes that she wrote on hotel stationery and left for Bendahan, Lily was ecstatic with the man she called her “Red Indian” lover. In one note, she tells Bendahan to put on his “beautiful Alain Delon’s [sic] hat and come down and kill all the women!”
It was the same straw hat that Lily would borrow to wear on their wedding day at the local registry office in Acapulco. While their marriage may have had the air of spontaneity to an outside observer, there was nothing extemporaneous about it. Lily had planned everything. When Bendahan and Lily went to visit the British consul in Acapulco to discuss the documentation they needed to marry in Mexico, he told them that as it appeared the wedding had not been pre-planned, it would be impossible to marry without Lily producing proof of her divorce from her first husband and the death certificate of her second husband. Of course, Lily was prepared. “She had traveled with these!” recalled Bendahan years later.
Although everything seemed to be in place, Bendahan still urged caution. He was still unsure about Lily. “As a very last precaution I did insist that we wait just one more week so as to be sure yet again that our enthusiasm to marry was not merely a result of the euphoria that we felt at being reunited,” he said.
In the days before their wedding, Bendahan was nervous. What did he really know about this woman he had met at a dental clinic? He was also a little embarrassed. “I would be number three in an age when even having a number two was frowned upon.” He also said that he was “very concerned about the disparity in our bank accounts. After much insistence on my part, she finally agreed that I would pay for the staff at her London residence”—a large amount for Bendahan, who was also paying his and his father’s expenses in London. In order to prove to both himself and the world that he was not marrying Lily for her money, he insisted that they marry under “separation of assets”—a fact that is clearly reflected on their marriage license.
As Bendahan later pointed out, this is not the course that a “dedicated fortune hunter” would have chosen. “Please remember that she had just flown halfway across the world to be with me and for the first time in a long time, she felt truly happy,” he said. “Thus, modesty aside, she could have been putty in my hands. If I had had an ounce of the Rubirosa in me, she
would have agreed to any demand that I made at that time. But the fruit never falls far from the tree and such a thought never entered my mind.”
But there was another issue: How would Lily pass muster with his father? Was she really the woman for him—was this to be his wife? “She [Lily] was well aware of the fact that my mother had died when I was one year old and that my father had never remarried,” he said. “I therefore, perhaps wrongly, held an idealistic view of marriage and would enter into such a union only upon being certain that it would be a permanent union of love, of affection, of tenderness and of loyalty, and most important that it should at all times be based on Truth. All these things she professed to admire and to agree to.”
In hindsight, of course, there was little of the Truth that Bendahan so craved in what was about to become the most important relationship of his life.
Despite the bachelor’s nagging doubts, Samuel Haim Bendahan entered the municipal registry office with its white-washed stucco walls and dusty wooden floors. Sweating from the heat, he handed over the three-peso fee to the clerk, who duly typed up the marriage license on a manual typewriter. With no fanfare, the presiding judge, Israel Hernandez, married Samuel Bendahan and Lily Watkins (there is no Monteverde on the marriage license) at 11:15 a.m. on January 31, 1972. Their witnesses were Brian Kanarek, the dentist; Humberto Morales, the taxi driver who drove them to the registry office; Graciela Roman, a clerk from the registry office; and Margarita Ramos, an eighteen-year-old maid. They would have a religious ceremony when they were back in London, Bendahan said.
Strangely, only Bendahan thought to wear white for his wedding. In a photograph snapped by Kanarek after the ceremony, Bendahan is smiling, resplendent in white trousers and a long-sleeved white shirt, the first few buttons casually undone. Lily wears a patterned skirt and dark silk blouse, her expression hidden behind her large sunglasses and the Alain Delon straw hat.
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