The LeBaron Secret

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  But who knows whether she actually made such a promise to herself at the age of eight? Sari LeBaron, as we know, has a tendency to exaggerate things, dramatize things.

  In the beginning, she thought of him as her new father, because he seemed about her father’s height and age. Only later did she discover that, at the time, Gabe Pollack was only fourteen. And the woman at whose house Gabe Pollack lived, Mrs. Bonkowski, she decided was her new mother. Like her real father, Gabriel Pollack was gone from early in the morning until late at night. He worked, he explained, as a messenger and delivery boy for a newspaper called the Republican. A small cot had been set up in Gabriel Pollack’s room for her, and in her old home she had also slept in the same bedroom as her parents. In the house, Mrs. Bonkowski performed the same tasks her real mother had done—cooking, mending, washing clothes. As had been the case in the old home, there were certain chores that the little girl was expected to do—help hang out the wash, help dry the supper dishes, and at Mrs. Bonkowski’s house there were many dishes to do because there were four other boarders, in addition to Gabriel Pollack and herself, all of them men. Mrs. Bonkowski was teaching her English.

  “This is called a ‘coffeepot,’” Mrs. Bonkowski said. “Say it. Coffeepot. Before Bonkowski died, rest his soul, I had a grand life. We had a cabin at Lake Wawasee. That’s upstate. I never thought I’d come to this, taking in p.g.’s—that’s what I call them, p.g.’s—paying guests is a better class than boarders, but that’s the life and what’s to do since Bonkowski passed away? Died of consumption. He was a skinny little man, but he was a good provider, Bonkowski was. Up on Lake Wawasee there’s Indians, red Indians, and we even had one to fetch us stuff from the store. This is called a—what? An ‘apple-corer,’ I guess you call it, to core apples with. Say it. Apple-corer. Red Indian used to catch rabbits for us, even deer, possum sometimes, but I didn’t care for that. We lived off the fat of the land. I never thought I’d be taking in p.g.’s, Jews even, like your friend, and me a Disciple of Christ. Never trust a Jew, my mother used to say, a Jew is either at your feet or at your throat. Bonkowski was a Polack, but he was no Jew. Catholic, mackerel-snapper, cat-licker, my mother used to say. Bonkowski played pinochle, but never for money. He was a good provider, worked at Samson’s Lumber Yard, and thank the dear Lord for his insurance. Without that, the dear Lord knows where I’d be. This is called a ‘ladle.’ Say it. Ladle. It’s like a big spoon. I have a set of silver spoons, you know, sterling silver, Bonkowski bought them for me. They’re put away in a safe place, believe you me. Who can you trust these days? We’re getting niggers here lately. Railroad brings ’em. You can trust a red Indian, but you can’t trust a nigger. They’re shiftless. We’ve got to think up a new name for you. Anzia—that just doesn’t sound like a white-person American name, Anzia. Sounds Dutchy. In America, everybody is the same, you know, and that’s the beauty of it. The dear Lord knows how I’ve suffered with a name like Bonkowski, a Polack name. Nobody can pronounce it, nobody can spell it, and sometimes even I forget how to spell it, that’s how long it’s been since Bonkowski passed away, but that’s the way the name comes on the insurance check, so I suppose I’m stuck with it. I’ll think of a good white-person American name for you, just give me time. You can’t go off to school with a name like Anzia. You’ll be laughed off the face of the map with a name like that. This is called a ‘bread knife.’ Say it …”

  Mrs. Bonkowski, she explained, had been raised in a small town in central Kansas, “in the heart of Saline County, near Salina, everyone knows where that is,” and her two sons, Tescott and Culver, had been named after two nearby towns. She had never had a daughter, but if she had she would have named it Rosalia—another Kansas town. “Isn’t that a beautiful name, Rosalia? But you can’t have that. Rosalia was saved for my daughter, if I’d had a daughter, so that name’s already spoken for. I’ll think of something. Just can’t have you going off to school named Anzia and be laughed off the face of the map. Which it sounds like a Jew name, you see, not that I mind your friend Gabe, even if he’s a Jew, he’s a good boy. How about Assaria? Assaria was just down the Smoky Hill River from Bridgeport, first big town between Bridgeport and Salina, not far from Tescott, and not far from Culver, either. Sort of the middle, Assaria. I think I like that. What do you think of that? I think I like it. And now we’ve got to give you a good white-person American last name. That last name of yours I can’t pronounce, and I’ve had two years high school. Let’s see. Let me think. I’ll think of something. How about Latham? That was a little-bitty place down in the southeast corner of the state, real pretty. Yes, I think I like that. What do you think? I like it—Assaria Latham.”

  And that was how, out of a dream of lost prairie villages, Assaria Latham got her name. “Say it. Assaria Latham.”

  It was summer, and soon, she was told, it would be time for her to go to school.

  And that is really all there is to know about her early childhood, which is always the least interesting part of a person’s life to tell about. Except, perhaps, one or two things.

  A year or so later, when she was nine or ten, she suddenly said to Gabe, “You know, I can’t remember my parents’ names!”

  He remembered them, of course, and told her. But by then they were the foreign names of strangers.

  That, and the fact that by the time she was fourteen she had fallen in love with him. But he didn’t know that then.

  “You know, it’s almost like thought transference,” Joanna LeBaron is saying. “I was just about to telephone you and say I wanted to see you, when you telephoned and said you wanted to see me. My brother and I—your father and I—often used to have experiences like that, thinking the same thing at the same time. Have you ever had that, with your twin?”

  “Sometimes,” Eric says. “We used to.”

  They are sitting in the living room of Joanna’s New York apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, overlooking the museum and Central Park, and the park has just received a dusting of light, fresh snow. And this is the extraordinary Joanna LeBaron herself, in a long, pale green hostess gown by Adolfo, still tall and pencil-slender, her silver hair brushed with streaks of honey. This is the woman whose photograph you will still see in W, and Vogue, and Town & Country—photographed not only for her beauty and her sense of fashion, but for less frivolous things, such as her business acuity, and her extraordinary success in what is usually considered the man’s world of advertising. The secret of her success, she has often told interviewers, is her sense of organization. Everything in her house, like everything in her office, is organized, and she will often show interviewers her closets—the racks of dresses in clear plastic bags, each arranged according to color and season and time of day; the drawers of sweaters and blouses and gloves and stockings, also arranged according to hue; the tall racks of shoes, one rack for daytime, one for evening, and so on. “Organization is the key,” she often says, and then, with her husky laugh, “I often think that if I were marooned on a desert island, the first thing I’d do would be to organize the grains of sand on the beach according to size, shape, and color.” Because the colors of her living room are varying shades of yellow, she always keeps this room filled with bowls of yellow flowers—roses, yellow calla lilies, or, tonight, with the first yellow tulips of the season her florist has found for her.

  Joanna stands by a window now, holding a glass of sherry, looking out at the nightscape of the park and the snow. Eric is sitting in a lemon-colored, satin-covered loveseat, legs crossed, sipping a Scotch and soda.

  Turning from the window, Joanna says, “Anyway, I’m glad you came, darling boy. Now who’ll state his business first?”

  “You,” he says. “You, Aunt Joanna.”

  She laughs. “Age before beauty, is that it? Well, I’m afraid what I have to say to you may strike you as unpleasant, darling.”

  “Go ahead. I’m a big boy now.”

  “I’ve decided,” she says, “to resign the Baronet account. You look surprised. Well,
it wasn’t an easy decision. I never thought this account would present a problem, but now—from what Mike Geraghty has reported to me of yesterday’s meeting in San Francisco—there is one. You—and I was behind you—have been wanting to turn Baronet wines in a new and exciting direction. While your mother—”

  “Wants to stay exactly where she’s been since nineteen fifty-five.”

  “Exactly. Or so it seems. Tastes in wines have changed dramatically in the last twenty years, as you and I know. There is a whole new market now for light, elegant table wines. Wines served in bottles with graceful shapes, snappy-looking labels—chardonnays, Chablis, merlots, cabernet sauvignons. Look at what Almaden has been doing, look at Bob Mondavi. The young-urban-professional market. We thought we were ready for Baronet to tackle that market. But your mother—”

  “Wants to stick with the skid-row winos. The market she knows.”

  “So it seems. And I can’t, in good conscience, go along with that any longer, Eric. LeBaron and Murdock can’t go along with that. I run a service business, but I can’t serve a client who’s going at cross-purposes with what I believe ought to be done. I can’t work with a product I don’t believe in any longer. I can’t work like that. If I’ve stopped believing in a product, I can’t help sell it. It’s as simple as that. I’d be betraying my employees if I did that. I’d be betraying my whole industry. Worst of all, I’d be betraying myself. And I’ve tried bloody hard never to do that. So there’s my decision, darling boy. I hope you understand.”

  “I do. Completely.”

  “I never thought it would come to this, but it has. Now the campaign Mike presented to you and your mother may not have been—”

  “I thought it was—”

  She holds up her hand. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter what you thought of it. That campaign is quite, quite dead, darling. It’s been flushed down the agency loo, and we won’t be offering another. The relationship between my agency and Baronet has come to its quiet, dignified end with that quiet, dignified campaign we tried to do for her.”

  He nods.

  “Of course, it wasn’t easy for me to decide this,” she says, and now there is an audible catch in that throaty voice. “There’s the sentimental attachment to the account, and the family attachment. Baronet was my very first account when your father first asked me to try my hand at it. It was right after you and Peeper were born, and it represented a whole new life for me at a time when—well, at a time when my life seemed particularly empty. Baronet was the account that got me started—as a person. It was the account that was responsible for my first success. It was the foundation of this agency, and I’ve never been able to thank your sweet, divine father for doing all that for me. Your darling father had the key to my salvation.”

  Eric says nothing. At this delicate, emotional moment, it would not serve any purpose to remind Aunt Jo that his mother has always taken the credit for giving Joanna her agency, and that Eric has seen—in the files—old interoffice correspondence from 1945 that bears this out.

  Now Joanna laughs her husky laugh. “But I can’t take sentiment into consideration, can I? And—and this is no secret, darling—Baronet has never exactly been a super money-maker for us, since we’ve always drawn our commission at family prices. In that sense, resigning the account will not result in any great financial loss to us.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “And meanwhile, because I happen to be bloody good at what I do, and because the merchandising of wines happens to be something on which I’ve made my reputation, I wouldn’t be honest with you if I didn’t tell you that there are at least three other major vintners who are eager to give me their business—which I haven’t been able to accept up to now because of conflict of interest.”

  “And who would pay you the full freight.”

  She laughs again. “Well, there’s that. But money’s only money. Still, it’s bloody nicer to have it than to bloody not, isn’t it, darling?”

  “Yes. Which brings me to—”

  “Of course, from the public-relations standpoint, there may be some unfortunate aftereffects of this decision of mine. The trade press, for example, will probably try to treat it as some sort of family feud.”

  “Which, in a sense, it is.”

  “Well, I intend to do everything I can to avoid creating that impression. I plan to prepare a very mildly worded release, saying that after nearly forty years of a pleasant and profitable relationship, Baronet and my agency have come to a friendly parting of the ways due to differences in advertising and marketing philosophies. Something like that. Of course, what your mother says to the press may be another matter.”

  “She’ll probably be furious, call her own press conference, and call you a dirty double-crosser.”

  “Or say that I’m getting soft in the head. I gather she said something to that effect at yesterday’s meeting. Well, I’m afraid I have no control over what darling Sari might decide to say.”

  “And the two of you used to be the best of friends.”

  “Darling boy, we still could be. I’ve always wanted to be her friend. We’ve been friends since we were both sixteen. People used to call us Mutt and Jeff, because she was tiny and dark, and I was tall and blonde. But somewhere along the line the friendship began to change, and she began to see me as some sort of competitor. Mind you, I don’t mind being seen as her competitor, because I’ve always been a very competitive sort of person. What I do mind, however, is when she treats me as one of her bloody employees. That started to happen after your father died. I am not one of her employees. I hold the exact same position in Baronet Vineyards that she does, and in terms of the company I expect to be treated as a peer. That’s been the basis of some of our recent—differences.” Moving toward him, she says, “You know, Eric, sitting there in that soft light, you could be your father thirty years ago. It was so tragic that he died when you and Peeper were so young, and you couldn’t have grown up to know my brother as a man. That’s the real tragedy.”

  “Yes.”

  “And so,” she says, “that’s my sorry decision. I regret having to make it, but I have.”

  “But maybe not,” he says.

  “What do you mean, darling?”

  Leaning forward in his chair, Eric says, “Now let me get to the business I want to discuss with you, Aunt Jo.”

  “Of course. I’m simply bursting with curiosity to find out what’s going on in that handsome head of yours.”

  “As you know, we’re one of the very last family-owned wineries in California of any size. One by one, the others have all been taken over by larger corporations, as a result of mergers and acquisitions, and they’ve profited enormously from this trend, which has placed large amounts of working and expansion capital within their reach.”

  “I realize this.”

  “Over the years, we’ve been approached by various outsiders—Uniroyal, Gulf and Western, Pepsi—but we’ve always been the holdouts. We’ve refused to sell.”

  “Yes. Darling Sari has refused to sell.”

  “And, as you also know, I sold some of my shares in Baronet to Harry Tillinghast a while back. It pissed Mother off, but it was a purely private transaction between Harry and me.”

  “Pissed her off! She bloody well hit the ceiling, if I know Sari!”

  “Now Harry has come up with an acquisition offer for the company that I think we ought to seriously consider. For each Baronet share we own, Harry offers twelve point five shares of Kern-McKittrick. Kern-McKittrick is currently trading at about fifty-three, so I think you’ll agree that’s not a bad offer, and Kern-McKittrick is as good as gold. I wouldn’t be surprised if, when we get into actual negotiations, we can’t get Harry to sweeten his offer a bit. But for an opening bid, it isn’t bad.”

  “Very interesting,” Joanna says. “Of course, Harry Tillinghast isn’t exactly my favorite man.”

  “Nor mine,” says Eric. “But we’re not talking about marrying the man. We’re talkin
g about marrying his company. And, as you know, in the marketplace Kern-McKittrick is nothing but blue chip. And Harry himself may not be likable, but he’s honest, and he’s strong, and he keeps his word.”

  “That’s true.”

  “If we become a subsidiary of Kern-McKittrick, Harry offers to put me in the top spot, with complete autonomy. Of course, he may feel he has a certain amount of control over me, but I’ll also have a certain amount of control over him.”

  “Oh? How’s that?”

  “Harry is particularly anxious to keep my somewhat shaky marriage from falling apart.”

  “I see,” she says. With a perfectly lacquered fingertip, Joanna touches one of the yellow tulips in a tall vase full of blooms, and rearranges it until it is just so. “Of course, the only thing I really want is your happiness, darling boy,” she says.

  “Thank you, Aunt Jo.”

  “And,” she says to the still wayward tulip, “for me—besides a lot of Kern-McKittrick stock, what would I get?”

  “I’m coming to that. For you, Harry offers an exclusive contract to handle Baronet’s advertising for as many years as you care to specify. And he offers to pay you full commission on your billings.”

  “Hmm,” she says. “How very nice of Harry.”