Empress Bianca

by Lady Colin Campbell

  There was a magnificent Tintoretto over the fireplace in the drawing room, a Picasso from his Blue Period over the fireplace in the dining-room and a stunning Corot over the fireplace in the library. Dotted throughout the apartment were works by David, Van Dyck, Rubens, Gainsborough, Modigliani, Dufy, Miro, Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Velazquez, Augustus John, and Sir Gerald Kelly. Pride of place in the entrance hall went to two massive oil sketches that the eighteenth-century English master Sir Joshua Reynolds had given to Lady Gordon: one of Charity, the other of Justice. These had originally been displayed in the staircase hall of the Earl of Winchelsea’s country house, Haverholme Priory, a century before. Their companions, Faith and Hope - as Bianca and Valerian knew only too well - reposed in the English residence of a famous British aristocrat whom she had met once.

  As with so much in Bianca’s life, the creation of this Fifth Avenue extravaganza was fostered by her determination to forge a well-cut future enhanced by a well-constructed past. Many of the items were found by Ion Antonescu, who had been in Europe ferreting out treasures, as he had done with L’Alexandrine, from the homes of the nobility or from the auction galleries and dealers at the commission rates agreed with Bianca at the time of their divorce.

  While Ion searched, and the apartment was taking shape, Mr and Mrs Philippe Mahfud lived in the old apartment at the Waldorf Towers that she and her late husband used to occupy whenever they were in New York.

  During this period, Ruth Fargo Huron helped to introduce Bianca and Philippe to her social set by hosting a series of luncheons and dinners for them. Word soon spread among this moneyed group that there was a new couple in town. ‘I can’t get over how easy New York is,’ Bianca observed to Valerian one day while they were choosing fabrics over lunch at Mortimer’s. ‘We’ve only been here for a few months, and already we’re inundated with invitations.’

  ‘That, darling one, is because Ruth and I have been spreading the word among the movers and the shakers.’

  ‘In Mexico or the South of France, social circles are so much more restricted. People won’t invite you to anything unless they’ve met you several times through friends, and you’ve known them, or the person who’s introduced you, for an eternity.’

  ‘New York doesn’t work like that. Success is the only criterion. If you have something to offer…if you’re beautiful or elegant or well connected or rich, Manhattan’s yours for the taking. And,’ he laughed wickedly, ‘we’ve been telling all and sundry how divinely elegant and entertaining and rich you are.’

  ‘Well, you know, darling, I’m the new kid on the block. I don’t really know how this great city of yours functions,’ replied Bianca, always one to disclaim knowledge she possessed if it served to make others feel good.

  ‘Take Ruth, for instance. It required a series of dexterous manoeuvres to work her way up from being just a partner in an advertising agency to being the pre-eminent socialite she now is.’

  ‘How did she do it?’ Bianca asked: so eager to catch a glimpse of the Holy Grail that she almost choked on her asparagus salad.

  ‘Well,’ drawled Valerian, sitting back in his chair and enjoying the power that gossip gave him, ‘it took her about ten years. First, she met John Lowenstein…he’s in public relations…and got him to get her on a few lists…you know, parties given by places like Sotheby’s and Tiffany’s and Belmont’s and Bergdorf ’s. That’s how she met Walter Huron…at a party at Bergdorf ’s. So, she meets him and dates him then she marries him. That was a big step up, because he’s a serious player in the airline industry, while she was…without being bitchy…just another middle-class success story. He catapulted her onto another level entirely. Then through him she met Aileen Mehle…that’s Suzy Knickerbocker the society columnist…’

  ‘I know who Suzy is. In fact, she was at a luncheon Ruth had for me three weeks ago…’

  ‘Did you like her?’

  ‘I thought she was charming.’

  ‘She is. But then, you’re just the sort of person everyone here wants to be charming to. A genuine British aristocrat with style, money and…’

  At those words, a warm glow suffused Bianca. It was so reassuring that all her new friends here accepted that she was an aristocrat whose adventurous father had gone to Panama to oversee the family fortune there before moving on to Mexico.

  ‘It’s sweet of you to make me sound so desirable. But how did Ruth parlay being just another rich man’s wife into the social leading light she now is?’ Then, in case Valerian realized that she wanted to know the strategy so she could replicate it, she added as a disclaimer: ‘It’s always so interesting to hear how one’s friends function.’

  ‘Well,’ Rybar said, licking his lips gleefully with his tongue. He did so love it when his audience yanked him back onto the path of revelation.

  ‘Let me see…where as I? Ah, yes. The upward trajectory. Well, my darling, she did it the way everyone else does it. Through the charity world.’

  ‘You mean things like the Cancer Society…’

  ‘Good God, no,’ Rybar said, a look of genuine horror settling on his face. ‘Cancer and those other diseases kill more than just people. They kill social aspirations as well, unless you combine one of the fashionable charities with them. The only causes that count in New York are the arts. You know, things like the Metropolitan Opera or the ballet or the Philharmonic or one of the museums. Ruth started out by supporting the Met and the Museum of Modern Art and has ended up on the boards of both institutions. Of course, it’s cost her…or rather, Walter…dearly. They say the Met’s cost him $3,000,000 and the Museum of Modern Art closer to $7,000,000. But I’m sure he and Ruth think its been worth the price, because they’re now powers to be reckoned with socially…which was not the case before she first took to charity.’

  To Bianca $10,000,000 did not seem too high a price to pay to fulfil her ambition of becoming one of New York’s most powerful socialites.

  Later that evening, after Philippe had returned from the office, she recounted her conversation with Rybar. ‘Maybe it would be good for the bank if I got involved with a charity or two in New York,’ she concluded.

  ‘Bad idea,’ Philippe said. ‘We don’t need any more invitations than we have, and the whole venture would be counter-productive and could impact adversely upon my business. If you start supporting charitable causes too actively, people will interpret your efforts as a sign of weakness. They’ll say: “Oh, we thought Mrs Philippe Mahfud was this fantastically rich widow who’s married to this fantastically rich banker and is a figure to be reckoned with socially in Europe and Central America. Why would someone who is so grand need to be scavenging around in the dustbins of New York society, trying to make her mark through charity work? We thought she was already established. She can’t be, if she’s trying to establish herself here the way all the other climbers have done.” You see the logic? Your actions will diminish the regard people have for us and will ultimately undermine our reputations. No. All we need to do is behave in a Latin American, European or indeed a Middle Eastern way. Go out and about. Accept the best invitations, and reciprocate when the apartment’s ready. The way you entertain, I promise you, everyone will beat a path to our door.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ Bianca asked, mentally allocating some of the sums she had set aside for endowing charities to the buying of lavish presents for all her new and future friends. It was something for which she was already acquiring a reputation. As far as she was concerned, everyone loves a giver, and she was going to show New York what she had already shown Mexico and the South of France: when it came to giving, she had no equal.

  ‘If we have two large parties a year here, the way you used to when you were married to Bernardo,’ Philippe replied, ‘and a series of intimate dinner parties, you’ll have New York eating out of your hand. And that’s before we take a box at the Met and entertain friends there or take a table at the fancier charity balls and take along a group of friends. Just you wait and se
e. I give you two years before you’re right up there with Ruth Fargo Huron and all those other grandes dames.’

  Deferring to her husband’s wisdom, Bianca turned her attention to generating as much publicity for herself as she could. This she did under the guise of assisting Valerian Rybar, but he was not deceived. ‘If it would help your future commissions, I won’t mind if you get this apartment featured in one of the better magazines,’ she had offered. He saw only too clearly, however, that this new friend and client was trying to use his connections to raise her profile and promote herself into becoming a more visible figure in New York society, but as his interests coincided with hers, he was pleased to assist. Over the next weeks, therefore, he ensured that he trooped the features editors of Vogue, Architectural Digest, Interiors, House and Garden, Town & Country and Harper’s Bazaar through the apartment, pointing out to them that it was not yet finished but would be in a few more weeks. As Rybar had expected, all the magazines wanted to do spreads, to include several pages of photographs and an article about the amazingly rich Mr Mahfud and his elegant wife.

  When Bianca referred the offers back to Philippe, he was much less enthusiastic than she had hoped he would be. ‘Publicity is a double-edged sword which too frequently draws the blood of those who use it,’ he said.

  ‘We don’t want to become like some of those new friends of yours, who are always in Suzy’s column. But just this once might be useful, so long as we choose the right magazine.’

  ‘Once?’ said Bianca, a pained look flickering across her perfectly formed features. The thought of all that delicious attention disappearing before her very eyes was enough to bring her close to tears.

  ‘Once. We don’t need to be famous in the street so long as we’re known in the right drawing-rooms and boardrooms. Those are the only places fame counts. Everything else is bullshit.’

  Recognizing the wisdom of what he was saying, even if the sillier and frothier side of her personality would have dearly loved to avail herself of all that unnecessary attention, Bianca cheered up at the thought of achieving recognition from the people who mattered to her, if only this once. ‘Which magazine do you think we should go for?’ she asked.

  ‘That is not my province. I don’t know enough about it to make an informed decision. Why not discuss it with Valerian? He’ll be sure to steer us in the right direction.’

  ‘Why not Ruth or Ruby? Surely they know the scene better. Ruth is one of the most successful advertising executives in the country, and Ruby one of Manhattan’s top realtors. They’ll know more than an interior decorator.’

  ‘I doubt it. He’s terribly social and besides, this feature will be useful to him only if it brings in commissions for him from the very sort of people we want it to reach. If we ask Ruth or Ruby for advice, they may think we’re desperate for advancement, and we’ll lower ourselves in their eyes.’

  So Bianca turned to Rybar, who advised over lunch at Mortimer’s that she choose Town & Country.

  ‘Why Town & Country?’ she asked. ‘I thought you’d suggest Vogue or Harper’s. They certainly have a higher circulation and are more famous.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, betraying how fully he saw through Bianca’s motives in allowing the feature, ‘but you’re not a dress or jewellery designer, and neither am I. Town & Country is the magazine that all the people with serious money read. It might not be as big as Vogue or as chic as Harper’s, but its target audience is precisely the sort of people I want to reach, and, I daresay, are also potential clients for your husband’s bank.’

  So Town & Country it was.

  Sure enough, when the article was published, Valerian Rybar was proved right. That one article went quite a way towards enhancing the Mahfuds’ reputation. Invitations flooded in, and by the end of the year, Bianca considered herself to be well on the way to being one of New York’s social luminaries.

  There were, however, two social sets in New York. These functioned in separate orbits and overlapped only occasionally. The more visible set was the nouveaux riches: the more eminent and prestigious, the Old Money set. Many of the nouveaux riches employed press agents who planted information about them in the gossip columns, fame being the yardstick by which they could measure their success. Old Money, on the other hand, wouldn’t condescend to employing an agent, with the result that the nouveaux riches were more visible. That, of course, did not mean that Old Money did not live equally interesting lives, or that joining their hallowed ranks had lost any of its desirability. It simply meant that it was harder to scale their walls, and once in their compound, the way to lose your place within it was to make yourself too available to public inspection via the press. Publicity was seen as a cause for sympathy, not for celebration.

  As Philippe had shrewdly discerned, the fact that he and Bianca did not seek publicity led observers on the social scene - and the social scene proliferated with observers - to categorize them as being more Old Money than nouveaux riches. Bianca further enhanced this perception in clever ways. One was the judicious use to which she put Clara and Rodolfo’s title. Without ever letting on that her sister-in-law would sooner kill her rather than speak to her, she frequently let slip that ‘my brother-in-law’s a marquis’. She also said, from time to time, ‘My father was a real British gentleman.’ Both claims were hard to verify but credible, so she got away with them.

  Within a year of being in New York, Mr and Mrs Philippe Mahfud were under the impression that they were accepted everywhere - as she would put it - ‘as Old Money’. She was out every day for lunch, and when Philippe was not away on business they were out every evening with the likes of Mr and Mrs Donald Trump, Mr and Mrs Walter Huron, and Mr and Mrs P Adolphus Minckus, the real estate developer who would shortly change wives by marrying the former Miss Cyprus, Stella Reocleous.

  It was an interesting, glamorous and busy life, but she was still not quite where she wanted to be, although she would never let on to anyone, not even to Philippe. As far as she was concerned, her position in New York was on a par with her position in society when she was married to Bernardo. Having experienced the sensation of being the Empress of Mexico while married to Ferdie, she would not be satisfied until she had replicated that position in her new habitat. Only when she was wining and dining en famille with Jackie Onassis and Maurice Tempelsman, with Paul and Bunny Mellon and Brooke Astor, would Bianca feel that she was where she truly deserved to be. In the meantime, it was consoling to see that people considered her to be a luminary of New York society. To them, she was already what she wanted to be; and, as perception was more than half the battle, she counted herself a partial, although by no means a total, success.

  If Bianca did not actually possess the stature she was perceived as having, the opposite was true of the younger generation of her in-laws in Ferdie’s extended family. Their positions within the top drawer of English society became firmly established during the seventies. Ferdie’s niece Magdalena became engaged to Lord John Witherton, second son of the Duke of Arlinton, whom she married in 1975 as the second of four husbands, while by 1979 her half-first cousin, Delia Bertram, had become quite a celebrity in her own right as a result of her equestrienne activities, her close friendship with Princess Anne, and her husband, the film star Charles Candower, whose motion picture, Return to Castle Howard, was one of the greatest hits of the decade.

  Bianca, who believed in using whatever was at hand to further her cause, frequently interwove the connections and accomplishments of Ferdie’s relations into her conversation, taking care never to mention that she was persona non grata with them. But it was when she was tooting her own daughter’s horn that she enjoyed the full benefits of name-dropping.

  ‘The only thing that impresses me is sincerity,’ she loved to say. ‘I’ve brought all my children up to think the same way, and they do. Take my daughter Antonia. One of her little school friends is Princess Caroline of Monaco. I’ve made sure she’s treated Caroline the same way she’s treated all her other friends, with
the result that she and Caroline have become fast friends and she’s always staying at the palace in Monaco. Caroline is such a sweet unspoilt girl, and Antonia doesn’t have an affected bone in her body. Of course, Caroline doesn’t look a thing like her mother, but she’s every bit as pretty and down-to-earth as dear Grace, who couldn’t be sweeter to Antonia when she stays at the palace in Monaco. I make sure we hold up our end too, by having Caroline to stay at L’Alexandrine as much as possible. It’s so easy for royalty to feel that they’re being used. One does have to keep things on an equal footing, otherwise one loses the human element of the relationship, don’t you think?’

  As the decade progressed, and Antonia and Caroline left school and drifted apart, Bianca still continued to drop the princess’s name whenever she could. She even did so to Moussey Najdeh, Antonia’s first serious boyfriend after school, and made sure that Caroline and her husband Philippe Junot were put on the guest list when Antonia married the handsome heir to one of the Middle East’s great fortunes in November 1978.

  By then the Lebanese civil war was raging, but that did not affect the Najdeh family fortune to any large extent, although it did mean that the family had to flee their country and take refuge in Paris, where they bought a superb hôtel particulier that once belonged to the Ducs de la Rochefoucauld on the Avenue St Germain. After marriage, Antonia took up residence there with Moussey, his parents giving them the top floor as their own apartment.

  As far as Bianca was concerned, her daughter could not have married better and never ceased to let people know how happy and rich Antonia was. She beat that drum with as much frequency and regularity as she beat out her elder son’s accomplishments. ‘I’m so proud of my son Julio. He’s such a good boy. So responsible. He graduated cum laude from Harvard before transferring to Oxford to take his doctorate in philosophy. Poor boy. He’s had to sacrifice it all to go into the family business. He’s now managing director of Calorblanco. It hurts me to see someone so young and talented burdened with so much responsibility, when all he really wants to do is become a Don in Philosophy at Oxford. He’s been offered a place there, you know, but fate has decreed another, less academic path for him to follow, so he makes the best of it. And he’s married such a nice girl and given me such a beautiful granddaughter. She’s named Biancita in my honour and looks just like me too.’