“I asked to speak to Lily but they told me that she was under great stress and that a doctor had had to be called and that she was under sedation,” recalled Bendahan years after the event that would result in the end of his marriage.
“So I left to their repeated assurances that everything would be all right the next day. By then, I clearly remember, my heart was beating so hard that I could hardly hear them and my mouth was so dry as to hardly be able to speak.”
Bendahan says he spent the next month in a cloud. For the first time in his life, he began to take sleeping pills every night in order to rest. Bewildered by the bizarre turn of events, he sought out a lawyer, writing out the whole story of his and Lily’s meeting and courtship as if to affirm to himself and the world that it really had happened, and that as recently as a few weeks before the dreadful meeting with Klein and his accomplice at the London flat, they had both been deliriously happy. He made repeated and rather pathetic efforts to contact his wife.
“I have tried to reach my wife at the Plaza Athenée in Paris, at the President Hotel in Geneva, at the Palace hotel in St. Moritz, at the Hotel du Rhône in Geneva, at the Dorchester in London,” he told his lawyer.
But there was no response. Lily seemed to have disappeared without a trace.
“This is in effect how our marriage broke up,” he later wrote. “With no more prelude than I have described.”
IN THE SPRING of 1972, Edmond Safra was a busy man. In addition to preparing his defense in the lawsuit that was threatening his beloved Trade Development Bank in London, he was in the process of acquiring another bank—the Kings Lafayette Bank in Brooklyn—and preparing to meet with U.S. regulators.
But clearly Lily’s marriage was the most pressing item on his agenda. After all, she must have represented one of the single biggest depositors at his bank. Of course, he was also desperately in love with her, and underneath his hard-nosed business exterior, he was extremely hurt by her behavior and must have been insanely jealous of Bendahan, who was younger and far more handsome than himself.
“Edmond told me that he couldn’t sleep at night thinking of Lily, that she had gotten married, that she was living with someone else,” said his friend Albert Nasser.
The escapades of the previous few months simply couldn’t be allowed to continue. He had to put an end to her marriage and regain control of Lily, even if it meant going public with their own relationship and eventually marrying her against his family’s wishes.
He summoned his various aides and top executives from around the world, beginning with Simon Alouan, the able Lebanese mathematics professor he had put in charge of Alfredo’s old company. “He called Alouan and asked him to go to London to tell Lily that if she divorces, Edmond will marry her, even against the wishes of his family,” said Nasser. But Bendahan needed to be eliminated first.
For weeks, he plotted. Paying off the man who had become Lily’s husband must have turned Edmond’s stomach.
But what to do?
First, he needed to put Lily in her place. At the Geneva headquarters of the Trade Development Bank, Edmond asked his secretary to get him on the next flight to London. He called Alouan, who hated Lily and didn’t want to travel to London, so he settled on Felix Klein, ordering him to get on the first flight from Rio de Janeiro to London.
We have an emergency.
Klein, a chain-smoking Romanian émigré who was fond of dark suits and Brylcreem, knew better than most how to deal with emergencies. He had arranged everything in Rio after his former employer Alfredo died.
Now Edmond was entrusting him with a far more sensitive mission as he realized the huge threat that Bendahan represented to his future. If he were to lose Lily, he might also eventually lose Alfredo’s fortune—a situation that could prove catastrophic for his growing banking empire.
The night that Lily left Bendahan alone at Hyde Park Gardens, Klein escorted her to Edmond’s hotel. It’s not clear what was said behind closed doors, but Edmond, who had repeatedly asked her to put an end to her foolish marriage to Bendahan, must have resolved to do it himself—by any means necessary.
“I CAN ONLY think that my wife is either very sick or very evil and with much regret I can’t but feel that the latter is true,” wrote Bendahan in a letter to his attorney eight days after Klein and his assistant ordered him to leave Lily’s flat.
But the signs had been everywhere during their relationship. And in the dark days after his ouster, as he struggled to come to grips with what had happened to his marriage, he searched through the letters and notes in an effort to understand what had just befallen him.
In a chatty letter she wrote to Bendahan during the first glorious weeks of their life together describing the progress of decorators at his new flat and professing her undying love for him, Lily also confessed to a terrible premonition. She wrote that she was very afraid for their future together. It was January 5, 1972, and she was off to Geneva and then on to St. Moritz for undisclosed business. Bendahan had just begun his round-the-world tour, and the letter must have reached him in Bangkok or Tahiti.
Bendahan dismissed the sentence, as he did all of the other troubling little insights into her character. What did he make of a subsequent letter, dated only three days later? On Saturday, January 8, 1972, Lily wrote to her beloved from the train en route to Gatwick airport to pick up her daughter Adriana. The previous evening she had heard from an ex-brother-in-law in Buenos Aires that her son Eduardo had come down with an illness and suffered hallucinations. A maid at the penthouse apartment where he was staying called his uncle, who took him to a local hospital.
Lily went on to describe how she felt about her son’s condition. She informed Bendahan that her eldest son, Claudio, whom she referred to as her “Jesus Christ, Esquire,” had offered to bring his brother to London. But if she couldn’t convince him to travel, Lily was prepared to “see to it” that Eduardo would be sedated and brought to London, accompanied by a doctor. The letter ended with Lily pleading with Bendahan to find a solution to be with her because she could no longer cope on her own. In a separate letter to Bendahan, written on the evening of the same day, Eduardo’s problems seemed entirely forgotten and she spent much of the letter writing about her feelings for Bendahan.
Was Bendahan at all perturbed by this response to Eduardo’s situation? Bendahan said he advised Lily not to bring her son to London by force. In the end, Lily seemed to forget about her son’s state of mind since she was able to hop on a plane to meet her lover in Acapulco.
Lily later met up with Eduardo in Rio de Janeiro. After a year of being apart from him, she didn’t seem very happy to see him in Rio, recalled Bendahan. “It is clear that she is uncomfortable with him and he with her,” said Bendahan, referring to a photograph he took of mother and son on their honeymoon in Rio. “To be fair to her, pretty well everybody was uncomfortable in his presence. I went out with him a few times in Cannes and although he was friendly I was always conscious of an undercurrent of some demon that he was wrestling with.” Later, there was a reconciliation of sorts, and Lily convinced Eduardo to join his brothers and sister in London, no doubt so she could keep a watchful eye on him.
But on occasion, Lily’s behavior did give Bendahan some pause. For one thing, she discarded friends with seemingly little feeling. When he asked her if she was going to keep in touch with Carmen Sirotsky, a woman she described as her “best friend” in Rio, Lily said she simply didn’t have time. She also tossed off her friendship with Jo Kanarek, the dentist’s wife, when she was no longer useful to her, Bendahan said.
But if Bendahan was concerned at her flip-flopping emotional state, it was only in hindsight. “For the first time in a letter there is an indication of her mental makeup, the significance of which unfortunately escaped me at the time,” Bendahan later confessed, referring to the letter she wrote to him on January 8, 1972, outlining Eduardo’s emotional problems. Bendahan added that her anguish and depression at being away from him was extremely shor
t-lived.
Later, the callous treatment of the man to whom she had professed her undying love should have come as little surprise to Bendahan.
Still, for weeks after he left Lily’s Hyde Park Gardens flat, Bendahan tried to contact her. But in the end, it was Lily who contacted him through her lawyers. She was demanding a divorce, and her lawyers wanted him to sign the legal papers quickly, releasing her from any financial responsibilities. Bendahan refused. Years later, he claimed that he was not after money so much as a final meeting with Lily. He even suggested the tea room at Claridge’s Hotel in London. Or, if her advisers suspected that he might have the press or police present, he was prepared for them to pick him up and take him to a meeting place of their choosing without giving him any kind of advance knowledge of where that would be. But Lily’s lawyers “were persistent and categorical in refusing to let Lily spend a minute in my presence, even under close supervision.”
In the final negotiations leading up to the divorce Bendahan demanded payment for the decorating work Lily had commissioned on his flat—a figure roughly equivalent to $35,000, which she agreed to pay. He also demanded compensation for his suffering. The strain had left his business “in tatters” and he would need the next two years to bring it back up to speed. Lily refused to negotiate. The final indignity came when her lawyers invited him to go to New York to negotiate his divorce settlement in person. Bendahan’s father, who was only ever told a small part of the story of his son’s marriage and untimely separation, told him not to go.
“He advised me against this and recommended that I let lawyers take care of that unpleasantness,” recalled Bendahan.
Bendahan should have heeded that advice, for almost as soon as he stepped off his plane at John F. Kennedy International Airport, he was arrested by a plainclothes policeman. Bendahan spent a terrifying night at the Rikers Island jail, charged with “attempted extortion.” He was charged with trying to extort $250,000 in a final divorce settlement from Lily. One Brazilian newspaper erroneously reported that he tried to extort more than $6 million from her. Bendahan would later settle for what he claims amounted to a pittance.
According to press accounts, Bendahan had threatened to conduct an investigation into Lily’s business interests in New York and in Brazil unless the money was paid to him. Among other things, he accused her of transferring funds illegally from Brazil to Switzerland.
During his brief stay at Rikers Island, Bendahan claims that he shared a cell with a self-confessed murderer and saw a man throw himself off an upper floor. “You can well imagine the impact this had on me,” he recalled. “One minute married to the woman of my life who adored me, and the next, incarcerated with murderers, rapists, etc.”
Bendahan’s lawyers obtained his release the following day after paying $50,000 in bail, although he was forbidden to leave the country. In the weeks of arduous divorce negotiations that followed, he claims he was bullied and threatened by Lily’s lawyers, who told him that if he did not do exactly what they wanted they would arrange for him to be sent to prison for a much longer period of time in the United States.
“Imagine how popular a good-looking boy like you would be with all those violent Negro criminals,” said one of the lawyers, who worked with Edmond.
Lily’s lawyers were anxious that Bendahan sign off on any rights to Lily’s estate. The legal proceedings dragged on for the next two years, during which time Bendahan nearly declared bankruptcy.
For Lily, life went on swimmingly. Despite protracted legal proceedings against her and Edmond in London and the messy separation from Bendahan, Lily emerged triumphant. That year, she was named one of the best-dressed women in London society.
Bendahan demanded the payment of the decorating bills. But Edmond wanted revenge and insisted upon proceeding, even as his lawyers must have told him he had a weak case against Bendahan, trying to nail him for attempted extortion. When Edmond finally did lose the case, he went on to appeal. The case was eventually dismissed by a panel of five judges.
In the meantime, Lily applied for a divorce in Reno, Nevada. During the proceedings, she made a request to the presiding judge that she not be present in the courtroom with her soon-to-be ex-husband.
Lily and her third husband appeared separately, although their paths briefly crossed in the corridors of the Second Judicial District Court of the State of Nevada. Ever the gentleman, Bendahan stepped aside when he saw her approach. As she passed him, she instinctively raised her hand to her head.
And all that implies!
But this time she wasn’t checking her coiffure. The gesture was no longer meant to impress or to seduce. In his last sighting of his wife, Bendahan was certain that she was raising her hand to cover her face in shame.
LILY AND EDMOND didn’t formally extricate themselves from l’affaire Bendahan until three years after Lily’s divorce, when the appeal in New York State Supreme Court was thrown out in July 1976 because it was wasting valuable court time.
“There is no reason for the State of New York to be concerned with protecting the property interests that were threatened,” noted Justice James J. Leff, the appeals judge. “Those interests are in Brazil and Britain. If carried to a conclusion this case will continue to preempt valuable court time, utilize the limited staff of the prosecutor’s office and impose a burden on criminal justice facilities.”
Although Edmond would have loved to have put Bendahan in his place, the matter was now clearly out of his hands. Edmond and Lily traveled back and forth between New York and London, where Lily finally established her residency, and vacationed on Edmond’s yacht in the Riviera. Edmond took Lily’s children under his wing, helping Carlos to study for his bar mitzvah when he turned thirteen in 1972. Later, he would put him to work at his banks. Eventually, Edmond also gave Claudio a plum position at Ponto Frio in Rio de Janeiro. Eduardo was pretty much left to his father’s care in Argentina. Like her mother, Adriana was being prepared for marriage when she reached her late teens. Edmond would help find her a suitable mate in the Sephardic community—a Lebanese businessman named Michel Elia.
But despite what appeared to be a happy family life, he refused to marry Lily until all legal actions against them were firmly settled. Edmond still lived in mortal fear that the Monteverde family might find some excuse to go after them, even though the actions against Lily and the Trade Development Bank had been neatly settled out-of-court in Brazil and in England.
Edmond was also mortified that Lily had caused him so much unwanted gossip. What if Bendahan decided to go to the press? Not that Bendahan would dare go public after all the legal threats Edmond had made against him. Edmond and his boys had done a good job of putting Lily’s third husband firmly in his place. But even the powerful Edmond Safra must have realized that certain types of human behavior were beyond his control, and Bendahan, whether he knew it or not, had the power to deeply embarrass the international financier and philanthropist.
But Bendahan also preferred to put the whole matter out of his life. When the appeal ended in his favor, he tried to recapture his old life in London. He returned to his “old harem,” and Shabbat dinners with his father. He bought himself a condominium in southern Spain, and he even helped his father compile an historical account of his family’s services to the Jewish communities in Morocco and England.
Following the unsuccessful appeal in July 1976, Edmond finally decided that it was the right time to marry his mistress, even though the Safra clan was still very much against the union. Now more than ever, they looked upon Lily with a great deal of distrust. How could Edmond marry such a woman who had embarrassed him with this English gigolo? Would she also drag the worthy Safra family name through the mud?
But Edmond had had enough of his family’s interference in his personal life. Although he agreed to marry Lily, he insisted that it be a low-key affair in Geneva, but he made sure that no one less than Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, then Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, presided at the traditional ceremony.
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Lily, who loved ostentation, was no doubt deeply disappointed that her fourth wedding—by far her most brilliant accomplishment—had not generated more publicity. She would have loved at least one boldface mention in Women’s Wear Daily, but it was not to be. Nothing she could do or say would sway Edmond Safra, and she knew better than to press her luck on this point.
Deeply disappointed at the low-key nuptials, to which only a handful of their friends were invited, Lily made sure that the next marriage in her life would make headlines.
SIX
“The Billionaires’ Club”
THE HEAD OFFICE of a media conglomerate in Rio de Janeiro’s historic but down-at-the-heels Gloria neighborhood may not have been the most elegant venue for an important society wedding. But by the time Lily Safra got her hands on the guest list and the preparations for the 1983 marriage of her son Claudio Carlos Cohen to Evelyne Bloch Sigelmann, the nuptials would go down in the city’s history as the most luxurious and stunning society soiree of all time.
When Claudio announced that he was determined to marry Evelyne, Lily threw herself into the wedding planning with great gusto—much to the annoyance of her son and future daughter-in-law, who would have preferred that she not interfere. But it wasn’t to be. Lily was determined to create a magnificent party.
Clearly, Lily wanted to make up for her own understated wedding to Edmond by turning her eldest son’s nuptials into a day no one in Rio high society would soon forget. As most of those who were close to Lily knew, she simply adored Claudio—the tall and handsome boy she had once referred to as “Jesus Christ, Esquire.” Claudio was her first-born, beloved son. “As a mother she was totally besotted with her eldest son, Claudio,” said Samuel Bendahan.
Gilded Lily Page 17
