President Coolidge carried on the ‘normalcy’ promised by Harding. He let big business get on with big business, banks get on with lending, and did less work and made fewer decisions than any President in American history. Effie took advantage of the Coolidge bull-market by expanding Watson’s brokerage division, and changing Yellow Jonquil Inc. into the Women’s Trust Inc.
American innocence, no matter how clearly it was missed, never came back. ‘Easy payments’ were invented, and Americans began to expect to have today what they may not even be able to afford tomorrow. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote provocative novels about ‘jazz babies’ and ‘sheiks’. In 1920, women won the vote, and in 1923 Women’s Trust Inc. turned over $21 million worth of stocks, to women alone. Men wore wide trousers and talked about Knute Rockne and the Notre Dame team, and repeated stale jokes they had heard the evening before on WEAF. Girls wore short skirts and rolled-down stockings; students sat on the top of flagpoles for days on end. Liquor was prohibited by law, and bootleggers like Bugs Moran and Al Capone rose to extraordinary power and everlasting notoriety. The Coolidge era, under the banner of continuing ‘normalcy’, altered the social face of America, and the rest of the world, beyond recognition or retrieval.
It also made Effie one of the richest women ever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
In 1927, at the age of forty-three, Effie was estimated by the Wall Street Journal to be worth $127 million. She was slightly less well known than Aimee Semple McPherson, and slightly better known than Renée Adorée. Her house on Long Island was featured again and again in Life and Ladies Home Journal, and she was one of Dorothy Dey’s favourite items in her hot-gossip column in the Morning Telegraph. ‘Xillionairess Effie Watson attended a party given last night by Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, where her sequined silver dress outshone absolutely everybody, including Ziegfeld lovely Mae Murray and Salomé star Alla Nazimova. Mrs Sinclair Lewis, clearly frustrated at not being the belle of the ball, left early, with a headache(!) Miss Watson was most notably seen exchanging pleasantries with refreshment magnate George ‘Spats’ Sabatini, and one guest was heard to remark that they got on together like a distillery on fire.’
In late July 1927, Dougal protested to Effie in a rambling office memorandum about her public friendship with George Sabatini. Two weeks later, when Sabatini was murdered, he sent Mariella around to Effie’s house on Long Island with eleven red roses. Effie said to Mariella, bitterly, ‘There’s no memorandum?’
Mariella said, ‘I don’t understand you.’
Perhaps more than anything else it was George Sabatini’s death, and Dougal’s indifference to her grief, that led Effie to take stock of herself that year. For more than a decade, her work at the bank had occupied her time, but not her emotions. Her close relationship with Kay, who was ten now, and cute as a button, had occupied her affections, but not her desires.
Men were afraid of her, because she was such a brisk and efficient businesswoman; but the truth was that she was equally afraid of men. She was afraid of being dominated by them, of being made to do things which she didn’t want to do; and she was also afraid of losing them. This was an era when the most attractive men were the men who were most dangerously at risk, and Effie was petrified by the idea of falling in love with yet another hero, yet another villain, only to wake up to find that he was gone for ever.
She was svelte and sophisticated to the point where Dorothy Dey called her ‘the knife-edge of chic’. She was very thin: she dieted as matter of habit, following an eating plan specially devised for her by nine diet doctors at the Betswick Foundation in California, and she regularly took Vitamin B-complex supplements and Japanese seaweed tablets. When she looked at herself naked in her mirror every morning, as Kitty laid out her clothes, she saw a woman as striking and as young-looking as Dolores Costello, the Hollywood motion-picture star, with fashionably-bobbed hair, fashionably flat breasts, prominent ribs, and skinny thighs. Her face was regularly packed with an extract made from the placenta of Swiss goats, blended with milk, lanolin, and mud from Louisiana. Her legs and her underarms were waxed by Le Charot, of Paris. Her nails were exquisitely manicured, and as long as a cheetah’s claws.
Her jewellery – most of which was kept at the bank – included the Grange diamond of 71.2 carats; and an emerald and ruby necklace which had once belonged to Mme de Pompadour. She was driven everywhere in Manhattan in a dark green Rolls-Royce, with curtained windows.
She was rich enough to be utterly perverse and infuriatingly eccentric, and she often was. Although she was still not officially a partner of Watson’s New York; and although her sex precluded her from being admitted to the New York Stock Exchange, she was generally recognized on Wall Street as the one person to go to if you wanted a fast million-dollar loan for something novel, and quirky, and highly profitable. She had her failures, of course: she supported an Omaha insurance company which dealt solely in automobile claims, and lost $760,000. But her successes were stunning: she helped to finance Piggly Wiggly stores when they first introduced ‘Scientific Merchandising’, which later developed into self-service, and then into ‘supermarkets’. She lent five million dollars to Adolph Zukor, the autocratic head of Paramount Pictures, when he wanted to buy up the entire Scheinman movie-theatre chain, twenty-four movie theatres in one acquisitive gulp.
But she knew she needed more than money; more than success; more than silk and velvet and jewels. She needed even more than the devotion of Kitty and the rest of her staff; even more than the love of her daughter.
One Tuesday evening in February 1928, when it was beginning to snow outside the Watson Bank building on Broad Street, she left her suite of offices on the eighth floor and went up to see Dougal. Dougal’s secretary said hurriedly, ‘He’s all tied up, I’m afraid, Miss Wa –’ but Effie ignored her, and pushed open the door of Dougal’s office as if she were a G-man pushing open the door of an illicit whisky factory.
Dougal was sitting behind his wide bird’s-eye maple desk in his shirt-sleeves, the heat in his office turned up to full. He was wearing small dark-lensed spectacles, in spite of the dimness of the lamplight, and his face looked white and puffy, like a large fungus.
Effie had already heard from several sources – some malicious, some friendly – that Dougal habitually sniffed cocaine; and she knew for herself that he was rarely invited to house-parties these days because he always ended up blindingly drunk, and stumbled over tables and chairs and fish-tanks, and insulted women, and vomited everywhere. After a party on Park Avenue last month to welcome in the New York for 1st Yankee Bank he had thrown himself in a football-tackle through a huge plate-glass door, and cut his shoulder so badly that it had needed eighteen stitches.
She had tried before to talk to him at the office; tried everything she knew to soothe and calm him; but he was always so abusive and bad-tempered that she gave up. One evening, when she was at home in Fifth Avenue, he had telephoned her, drunk or drugged or both, and screamed at her that she was a harlot, a filthy whore who preferred money to men, and that he hated her. She had hung up on him; and hadn’t allowed him to say any more. But that evening, calm and collected as she was, she had given up loving him as a brother, and begun to think of him only as a boorish and unpleasant colleague from the office where she worked.
‘Are you busy?’ she asked Dougal. She could see that he had been trying to solve a crossword.
‘I’m waiting for a call,’ Dougal told her. ‘Didn’t Louise tell you I was tied up?’
‘Too tied up to see your own sister?’
Dougal put down his gold propelling-pencil. ‘Effie,’ he said impatiently, ‘I’m waiting for a call from the Coast. If you’ve got anything to say to me, you can say it in a memorandum, or on a phonograph record.’
‘The way you informed me that you disapproved so strongly of George Sabatini?’ Effie asked him.
Dougal retorted, ‘The way any employee of Watson’s New York sends messages to the company president, that’s a
ll.’
‘I see,’ said Effie, sitting down, and spreading out the pleated skirt of her green-and-gold Worth day-dress. ‘I own 28.7 per cent of the bank’s stock; I’ve personally given guarantees for more than $35 million that the bank has advanced to small borrowers; I’m completely in charge of the bank’s brokerage business; and I’m the bank’s only reliable connection with anybody at the Federal Reserve Board. Yet, you have the face to call me an “employee.”’
‘As usual, you’re determined to be a nuisance,’ said Dougal.
‘Quite the opposite,’ Effie told him. ‘I’ve decided to stop being a nuisance. I’ve decided to quit.’
‘Quit?’ demanded Dougal. ‘What do you mean, quit?’
I’ve decided to pack up my troubles in my old kitbag, and let you run Watson’s New York on your own.’
Dougal took off his dark glasses, laid them carefully down on the blotter in front of him, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his finger and his thumb. When he eventually looked up, and his face was caught in the light of his green-shaded desk-lamp, Effie was horrified by the pigginess of his eyes; how small and yellow and watery they were.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it seems as if the good old Watson spirit has surfaced in you at last. Destroy your brother, destroy your mother, destroy your sons, and your daughters, and your first cousins. Funny, isn’t it, how a family’s inherent rottenness will always come out?’
Effie looked at him levelly; although she could hardly bear to. She said, ‘Dougal – the day that you invited me to join you, Watson’s New York was a young and respected bank – the kind of bank that was going to influence lending habits all over the world. A new kind of bank altogether, in a new world. Watson’s was so well thought of on Wall Street that I was terrified when I gave birth to Kay that I might damage your reputation. Can you believe that?’
Dougal said nothing, but cupped his podgy hands in front of his face, so that only his tiny glittering eyes showed over his fingertips.
Effie dropped her gaze, to the soumac rug on the floor. She said, in a much softer voice, The trouble is, Dougal, that as each day goes by, Watson’s New York is increasingly affecting my reputation. Everybody knows we’re going through a boom: but you’re acting like a small boy in a cake shop. You used to have judgement, as well as enthusiasm. Now you don’t seem to have any judgement at all, and people on Wall Street are beginning to sense it. Look at you. You hardly ever come out of this office; and when you do, you do something disastrous, like failing through a plate-glass window. You’ve been throwing loans around like nobody’s business. I don’t know whether you’re drunk, or stupid, or just plain rash.’
‘I see,’ said Dougal, his voice muffled behind his hands.
Effie looked up at him again. ‘Dan Kress showed me the figures for last month’s loans. I don’t understand all of the entries, but it seems as if you’ve advanced more than $147 million to National City Bank. Is that something I should know about?’
‘You have no particular right to know anything,’ said Dougal. ‘You’re on the board, certainly, but this wasn’t a board decision. You can read about it in the annual report.’
‘You lent $ 147 million without the board’s approval? You’re seriously trying to tell me that?’
‘It’s on paper, that’s all. It’s just call money. Charles Mitchell at National City wanted to get around the Reserve Board’s restrictions on lending.’
‘In other words, it’s a bootleg loan.’
‘In other words, it’s a way of keeping the market booming, that’s all.’
Effie was silent for a moment. She took a cigarette out of her purse, and put it between her pink-painted lips. Dougal picked up his desk-lighter, in the shape of The Spirit of St Louis, and flicked the propeller to light it. Effie ignored him, and lit her cigarette with her own matches.
‘The market won’t boom for ever,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do when it declines?’
‘It won’t,’ said Dougal.
‘You don’t think so? It could drop just as spectacularly as it rose. It’s only built, on confidence, Dougal, and not much else.’
Dougal lit a cigarette himself, and noisily blew smoke through his nose. ‘Didn’t you hear what that Yale professor said? Stocks have reached a permanently high level. It’s boom time, Effie. Things won’t get anything but better.’
Effie said, ‘For God’s sake, Dougal. Where’s your sense? I don’t mind pumping money into a bull market; I don’t even mind lending up to 36 per cent of our deposits; more, it it’s possible. But where are our reserves? What’s going to happen if the market falls, and even a quarter of those little people all over America want to cash their stocks in for hard dollars at today’s prices? Watson’s New York would be wiped out overnight. You may be able to create the illusion that you’re juggling five balls in the air when you only have three; but sooner or later somebody’s going to ask you if they can have those five balls back, and then what are you going to do? Run along to Morgan’s, to back you up? Go begging on your knees to the Reserve Board?’
Dougal said, ‘I don’t need kindergarten lessons in banking from you, thank you very much.’
He pushed back his chair, and stood up, and walked around her with a podgy jerkiness that reminded Effie, painfully, of Robert at their mother’s funeral. Big fat bottom, swollen thighs.
He said, ‘I do have backing, as a matter of fact, even if there is a temporary lull. Which there won’t be.’
‘Oh yes. What backing?’
He laid his hand on her shoulder, and squeezed it two or three times. ‘Hmmph,’ he said, amused with himself, and sucked at his cigarette. ‘It’s Robert. I’ve been corresponding with him lately, and he’s agreed to underwrite us.’
‘Robert?’ said Effie. ‘You mean brother Robert?’
‘That’s right. Didn’t I tell you? I wrote about three months ago, and asked if he’d be interested in co-operating with us. He’s coming over on the fifteenth.’
‘The fifteenth? The fifteenth of what?’
‘April. Didn’t I tell you? Well, well, well, that was remiss of me. It’ll be just like old times again. Just like home.’
Effie felt cold; then colder; as if someone had slowly poured a jug of iced water over the back of her dress. She said, ‘You can’t have! I think you’re teasing me.’
Dougal nodded, with flares of smoke pouring out of his nostrils. ‘You can’t bear a grudge for ever, can you? Well, you can, maybe, but I can’t. But why should you care, anyway? You’re quitting aren’t you? Throwing in the towel. Just in case your spotless reputation gets splattered.
‘Dougal –’ said Effie.
Dougal sat down behind his desk again, and tilted back his swivel chair. He looked so swollen and strange behind those dark glasses that Effie felt as if she were having some kind of illogical nightmare, in which an inflated, synthetic person was masquerading as her brother. He didn’t look like Dougal and he didn’t speak like Dougal, and yet he was Dougal. She saw him for the briefest glimpse as a boy, in a brown tweed coat, standing at the windy top of Arthur’s Seat, and saying – ‘Look, Effie, look- ’ but then the words were gone, swallowed by too many years of time, too many years of turmoil; and by the grotesque reality of the man who sat opposite her now, obese and unsympathetic, and speaking in a language which she found it almost impossible to penetrate.
Dougal said, ‘You might be interested to know that I saw May again last week.’
‘May? You mean the girl you –’
‘That’s right. That May. She married, you know. Can’t blame her for that. Met her by accident in Macy’s, by the perfume counters, when I was looking for something for Mariella. She’s not – not wealthy, you know. Not by any means. You should have seen her coat. Shabby! Well, very shabby; patches and everything. Well, not patches, but very cheap. We hardly recognised each other, until I told the assistant what my account was.’
Effie said nothing at all. Watching Dougal now was unbeara
ble. One minute he was agonizing; then he was cursing; then he was trying to be cunning and clever. The pain of his performance was extreme.
‘We …’ said Dougal, then reached forward and forcefully tapped the ash from his cigarette. ‘We, um … made some arrangements to see each other again. In time, you understand. Neither of us wants to rush into anything. But, well, she said …’
There was a crushing silence of almost a minute. Then Dougal put down his cigarette in his ashtray, with great care, and pressed both his hands over his face, and began to weep. Deep, wrenching, sobs that made his whole body shake.
After a while he took off his glasses again, found his pocket-handkerchief, and wiped his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to be,’ said Effie.
Dougal sniffed; folded his handkerchief over twice, and loudly blew his nose. ‘It ruined me, that affair. You’ve no idea. It ruined me.’
‘You could have left Mariella. You could have gone with May.’
‘I wish I could.’
Effie said, ‘I’ve never known why you two stay together. Mariella loves you, I suppose; but you certainly don’t love her; and she’d be far better off with somebody else.’
Dougal had regained his composure now. He stuffed his handkerchief back in his pocket, and tugged at his lapels, and sniffed again, and straightened his pens and his onyx-handled letter-opener next to his blotter. The letter-opener had been a gift from President Coolidge. He said, ‘Guilt, I suppose, that’s all. Plenty of people stay together because of guilt.’
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