Scruples

by Judith Krantz

  They went first to Chanel, whose two-thousand-dollar suits were being worn like uniforms by every chic woman in Paris. It was a period during which women, lunching together at the Relais Plaza of the Plaza Athénée Hôtel, the most elegant “snack bar” in Paris, invariably devoted the first hour of their meal to deciding which of the other women in the room were wearing “une vraie” and which were wearing “une fausse” Chanel. Clever copyists were able to reproduce everything, even to the gold chain that weighed down the bottom of the jacket lining and made it hang perfectly, but something always gave une fausse away: a slightly less than authentic button, fringe on the pockets that was two millimeters too long or one millimeter too short, the right fabric in the wrong color.

  At Chanel, Billy ordered six suits, still in part guided by Lilianne’s advice. Ellis, to Billy’s surprise, seemed to be making notes on the tiny pads they had been handed when they entered, using his old Parker fountain pen rather than the dinky little gold pencils that were passed to the others. As the three of them walked up the Rue Cambon, back to the Ritz for tea, he said, “Lilianne, your first fitting is ten days from today.”

  “My poor darling, you are quite mad,” she answered.

  “Nope. I ordered three suits for you, numbers five, fifteen, and twenty-five. You didn’t expect me to sit through all that without having a little fun, did you?”

  “It is totally out of the question,” said Lilianne, deeply shocked. “I could not possibly let you. Never. Absolutely never. You are too kind, Ellis, but no, simply no.”

  Ellis smiled indulgently at the stunned Frenchwoman. “You have no choice. The directrice gave me her solemn assurances that she was going to be personally responsible for making sure that work will have been started on them this very minute.”

  “Impossible! I wasn’t measured and they would never do anything without measurements.”

  “This is an exception. The directrice promised me that she could make an excellent guess. She’s almost exactly your size. No, they’re under orders to go ahead, no matter what. If you won’t wear them, I’ll have to give them to the directrice.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Lilianne said, protesting wildly. “I told you at lunch that I’ve disliked that woman for years. Ellis, I accuse you of using blackmail.”

  “Yup. You can call it whatever you like, poor darling.”

  “Oh. Oh!” For once in her life the Comtesse couldn’t find the right words, and the right words to a Frenchwoman come with the milk of maman. Ellis had picked exactly the suits she would have chosen for herself. She would do anything short of murder to own either number five, fifteen, or twenty-five. But all three!

  “Look at it this way, Lilianne, either you do it my way or you’re in big trouble with me. You don’t want that, do you? I’m forcing you, poor darling, in my brutal American way, and you can’t help yourself.” Ellis tried to look as menacing as possible but only succeeded in looking delighted.

  “Well, of course,” the Comtesse said, more mildly, “I am totally helpless, after all, am I not? When you are fond of a crazy man, you cannot risk offending him.”

  “Good, that’s settled,” said Ellis.

  “Ah, but wait. Tomorrow we go to Dior and there you must promise not to play those tricks on me.”

  “I won’t order anything else without letting them take your measurements first,” Ellis assured her. “But those suits at Chanel were all for the daytime, weren’t they, Wilhelmina, my sweetheart?”

  Billy smiled assent with tears of pride in her eyes. To be able to give to someone who had given her so much was a joy she had never known existed.

  “So, Lilianne, you still have to get some things for evening, right Wilhelmina? Only makes sense.”

  “No, I will not go with you under those conditions.”

  “Oh, Lilianne, please,” Billy pleaded. “Ellis is having such a good time. And I wouldn’t enjoy it if you weren’t there. I need your advice. You simply must come—please?”

  “Well,” the Comtesse relented, filled with bliss, “in that case I will accompany you, but Ellis may choose only one, only one number for me.”

  “Three,” countered Ellis. “It’s my lucky number.”

  “Two, and that is final.”

  “You’ve got a deal.” Ellis stopped in the middle of the dazzling, long corridor lined with showcases displaying the best Paris has to offer that connects the back of the Ritz to the front. “Let’s just shake on that, poor darling.”

  The press soon became particularly fascinated by Billy’s wardrobe. The average rich woman doesn’t come into her own, in fashion, until she has been married a number of years, if, indeed, she ever finds the style that suits her. But Billy had had that intensive apprenticeship with Lilianne de Vertdulac to educate her to the limitless potential of elegance, and now, with Ellis behind her, insisting that she dress as superbly as she had ever dreamed of, as much to delight him as herself, she became one of the fashion world’s chief customers.

  Billy could carry any dress ever made. The carte blanche she received at the age of twenty-one might have made a laughingstock of a woman with less taste and less height, but Billy never overdressed. Lilianne’s strict sense of perfection as well as her own innate eye kept her from excess. Nevertheless, when grandeur was called for, she went full out. At a state dinner at the White House she was the most resplendent figure there, only twenty-two years old, wearing pale lilac satin from Dior and emeralds that had once belonged to Empress Josephine. At twenty-three, when she and Ellis were photographed on horseback on their thirty-thousand-acre ranch in Brazil, Billy wore plain jodhpurs, boots, and an open-necked cotton shirt, but at the presentation of a new Yves Saint Laurent collection two weeks later, she wore the landmark suit from his previous collection, while Ellis, who was becoming an old Paris hand, whispered to her the numbers of the dresses he thought she should order in a way that made people with serious fashion backgrounds remember the black-tie spring collection at Jacques Fath in 1949, sixteen years earlier. At that presentation the late Aly Khan, sitting beside a young, glorious Rita Hay worth, had decreed, “The white for your rubies, the black for your diamonds, the pale green for your emeralds.”

  Billy, too, had a treasure of princely jewels, but her favorites always remained the peerless Kimberley Twins, the perfectly matched eleven-karat diamond earrings that Harry Winston had said were, among the finest gemstones he had ever sold. Heedless of convention, she wore them morning, noon, and night, and they never looked inappropriate. In her twenty-third year Billy spent more than three hundred thousand dollars on clothes, not counting furs and jewelry. A substantial part of the money was spent in New York because Billy, a perfect size eight in American designer clothes, wanted to avoid too many of the time-consuming fittings in Paris that kept her away from Ellis and their enjoyment of the city. That was the year she first appeared on the Best-Dressed List.

  Soon after their return to New York the Ikehorns rented and redecorated an entire floor high in the tower of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue, which became their main address. From their windows they had a 360-degree view of the city: All of Central Park spilled like a green river at their feet. Ellis Ikehorn still dominated the vast holdings of which he held a voting majority of the stock, and they were often in Manhattan. Since Ikehorn Enterprises was a publicly-owned company, his board of directors and executive officers had been consistently and brilliantly chosen by him to carry on after his death. All of them owned enough stock to guarantee their loyalty. Now, increasingly, he found that he was able to spend his time with Billy in far-off places. When Billy was twenty-four they bought a villa at Cap-Ferrat with legendary gardens and grassy terraces that descended toward the Mediterranean like a vast Matisse; they maintained a permanent suite of six rooms at Claridge’s for their frequent trips to London, where Billy collected Georgian and Queen Anne silver whenever Ellis had to spend part of the day in business meetings. They bought a hideaway house on a hidden cove in Barbados
, to which they often flew for a weekend; they traveled widely in the Orient; but of all their homes, they both preferred the Victorian manor house in Napa Valley, where they could watch the grapes for their Château Silverado wines being tended in a countryside as pastoral, as comforting to the spirit as that of Provence.

  Whenever Billy and Ellis were in New York, Aunt Cornelia, who had been widowed shortly after Billy’s marriage, came to spend a week or two with them. A deep friendship had sprung up between Cornelia and Ellis, and he was almost as bereft as Billy when Cornelia died suddenly some three years after their marriage. Cornelia, to whom bad health was something one simply didn’t do, had a first and fatal heart attack, dying, as she would have wanted to, without fuss, in a brisk and well-organized fashion, without even waking the servants. Billy had resisted going back to Boston during her marriage because the city held such painful memories for her, but now, of course, she and Ellis traveled there for Cornelia’s funeral.

  They stayed at the venerable Ritz-Carlton, a dowdy relation of the parade of other Ritzes they knew so well, the Lisbon Ritz, the Madrid Ritz, and, still best of all, the Paris Ritz. Nevertheless, the hotel beat with the heart of a Ritz in spite of its muted Boston flavor.

  Before setting off for the church in Chestnut Hill where the services were to take place and where Cornelia was to be buried next to Uncle George, Billy looked one last time at herself in the mirror. She was wearing a sober Givenchy dress and coat in black wool with a black hat that she had telephoned Adolfo to send over to her as soon as she heard the news of Cornelia’s death from her cousin Liza. Ellis watched as she removed the diamonds from her ears and slipped them into her handbag.

  “No earrings, Wilhelmina?” he asked.

  “It’s Boston, Ellis. I just think they look wrong.”

  “Cornelia always said you were the only woman she’d ever known who could look natural wearing them in the bathtub. Seems a shame.”

  “I’d forgotten, darling, so she did. And why am I worrying about Boston anyway? Poor Aunt Cornelia. She spent so many years trying to make this ugly duckling into a swan—you’re right, I should do her proud. She’d like that.” Billy put the earrings back on, and as they flashed the winter sunlight back into the mirror in a most un-funereal splash of brilliance, she said softly, “Supremely vulgar for church, especially in the country. I wonder if anyone will have the gall to tell me that?”

  If anyone even thought it at the Bostonian version of a wake that followed the burial, in the drawing room of a great house in Wellesley Farms, which belonged to one of Aunt Cornelia’s sisters, it was never mentioned aloud. As always, after a funeral, everyone drinks either a lot or at least a little more than usual, and the subdued exchange of greetings of the first half hour was soon followed by a surprisingly hearty hubbub of talk. Soon Billy realized that she and Ellis were the center of a group of her relations who seemed sincerely and openly delighted to renew old acquaintance with her, some of them even claiming a closeness that had never existed. She had been braced for remarks like, “Just what kind of name is Ikehorn, Billy? I’ve never heard anything like it before. Where on earth was he born, my dear? What did you say his mother’s maiden name was?” But these remarks never came.

  “I don’t quite understand, Ellis,” she said when they finally returned to the hotel. “Somehow I imagined they’d all be just polite to me but standoffish toward you. But there were the uncles treating you as if you’d been born here, and my aunts and cousins were all over me. Even my father, who hasn’t spoken to anyone but a microbe for years, was talking to you with what I can only call animation. I’ve certainly never seen him like that in my life. If they weren’t Boston and I didn’t know them too well, I’d think they were impressed by your money.”

  No, thought Ellis to himself, they aren’t impressed by money unless it’s money that has been given in the name of Ellis and Wilhelmina Winthrop Ikehorn to their hospitals and research centers and universities and museums. He was deeply glad that he had quietly contributed so much money to Boston’s varied philanthropic institutions since he had married Billy, in the certain expectation that someday she would return to that city.

  His protectiveness of his wife was complete and extended to every detail of their life together. As the years went by she lived entirely within this magic circle, forgetting more and more of even the most minor problems of ordinary life, becoming so accustomed to having her every desire fulfilled that she grew gently yet totally autocratic without either of them realizing it. With a limousine and chauffeur at her disposal twenty-four hours a day, it quickly became unimaginable that she had ever owned an umbrella. Wet feet became as remote a possibility as bed linens that weren’t changed every day. A room that wasn’t filled with fresh flowers was as foreign to Billy as the idea of running her own tub. When the Ikehorns traveled to any of their homes, they took their chef, Billy’s personal maid, and their housekeeper to supplement the permanent staff already in residence. The chef, who knew their tastes in food perfectly, presented the menus for each day for Billy’s approval, and her maid was also a trained masseuse and hairdresser. She grew spoiled in a way only a few hundred women in the world could begin to understand. This particular kind of spoiling, no matter how graciously accepted, has a subtle way of changing a woman’s character, giving her a thirst for control that becomes as natural as a thirst for water.

  No one who read about the Ikehorns in the newspapers or the magazines, which carried so many stories about their life, understood that while Billy and Ellis seemed to be part of the world of society and privilege, they nevertheless always held themselves just to one side of it, never truly joining in. They were encapsulated in a world of their own, which made close relationships with other people not just unnecessary but impossible. They never identified themselves, as a couple, with any particular crowd or set or clique or pack or group. Jessica Thorpe Strauss and her husband were their only close friends, no matter how much they entertained or were entertained. When they had to spend time with Ellis’s business associates and their wives, Billy felt abruptly out of synchronization with the world. Why was she sitting at a table with men in their sixties and their grandmotherly wives while around them dined tables of young people, people her own age? Mustn’t she look like someone’s daughter or granddaughter, brought along because she didn’t have a date for the evening? Yet, as soon as she and Ellis were alone, they seemed to be the same ageless age, two loners who traveled together as a tight team. When Billy was twenty-seven, it was with a particular pang of fear that she realized, on Ellis’s birthday, that he was now eligible for Medicare.

  In the world of that band of New Yorkers or Parisians or Londoners who are photographed at the Prix Diane, at Marbella, at Ascot, or at Broadway opening-night parties, Billy felt much more at home. There were many young women of her age sprinkled in among the middle-aged women of the world. At a certain level of society, heiresses are treated with the same attention as women of accomplishment, just as a Princess Caroline of Monaco or a Princess Yasmin Khan took their places while still in their teens at great events. There, in this press of fame and luxury, Billy Ikehorn and Ellis Ikehorn were a fascinating and enigmatic couple because they never allowed themselves to be labeled and classified and, in a certain sense, owned by those who choreograph that particular social whirl. They were amused and diverted by the passing spectacle, but neither of them took it seriously. It was as if they had made an unspoken pact, on the day they decided to get married, that none of the conventions of ambition and social position were going to reach them.

  In December 1970, when he was sixty-six and Billy was just barely twenty-eight, Ellis Ikehorn had his first stroke, a minor one. For ten days he seemed to be making a rapid recovery, but a second, far more serious stroke removed those hopes forever.

  “His brain is active, just exactly how active we can’t tell,” Dan Dorman told Billy. “It’s his left lobe that has been affected. That’s most unfortunate because the speech center is l
ocated in the left lobe of the brain. He’s lost his ability to speak as well as the use of his entire right side.” He looked at her sitting rigidly in front of him, her powerful throat bare and white, and he felt as if he were running a knife across that taut skin. He knew he had to tell her just how bad it might get, now, while she was still in shock.

  “He’ll be able to communicate with you with his left hand, Billy, but I can’t predict how much effort he will be able to expend. Right now I’m keeping him in bed, but in a few weeks, if nothing else happens, he’ll be able to sit in a wheelchair in relative comfort. I’ve ordered three male nurses, around the clock. They’ll be necessary as far in the future as he lives. We’ve already started physical therapy to keep the muscles of Ellis’s left side functioning.”

  Billy gave him a mute nod, her hands bending and unbending a paper clip she couldn’t seem to put down. “Billy, one of my chief worries is that Ellis will become terribly restless, claustrophobic, if you stay here in New York. Once he’s able to get about in a wheelchair you should live in a place where he can sit outside, be moved around, feel in touch with nature, see things grow.”

  Billy thought of the old men she had passed on the streets of New York being wheeled to Central Park by an attendant, their frail knees covered by a thick blanket, dressed in expensive topcoats, muffled in cashmere, eyes blank.

  “Where should we go?” she asked softly.

  “San Diego probably has the best climate of any city in the United States,” Dan answered, “but you might get bored to death there. You can’t fall into the trap of thinking that you’re going to sit by Ellis’s side every minute of every day for the rest of his life. He would hate that far more than you would. Are you listening to me, Billy? It would be the height of cruelty, and he wouldn’t be able to tell you how he felt.”