The LeBaron Secret

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Her maid found her. They think she tried to—tried to commit—”

  “Oh, God. How is she?”

  “They say—they say she’s going to live.”

  “Thank God. You must get over there right away, Peter.”

  “I can’t—can’t face it, Sari.”

  “Then I’ll go,” she said quickly, and hung up the phone.

  “I’m her sister-in-law,” she said to the nurse at the desk outside the Intensive Care Unit. “How is she?”

  “We had a close call,” the nurse said. “But we’re going to make it. We pumped her stomach out. Sleeping pills.”

  “Intentional, do you think? Or an accident.”

  “We don’t know. They tell us there was no note left. She’s awake now, if you’d like to go in to see her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Just for a few minutes. We’re still a little uncomfortable.”

  “Joanna dear,” she said in as tender a voice as she could muster. “It’s me.”

  “Oh, Sari,” she said, turning her head toward her. Joanna’s still-beautiful face was gray, there were dark circles under her eyes, and her hair was damp and matted about her forehead. “I’m so sorry.”

  “What happened, Jo?”

  “I was so discouraged and depressed. There seemed nothing left for me to live for.”

  “Jo, don’t say that. You have everything.”

  “No. It’s you who have everything. You have Peter—”

  “Nonsense. You also have Peter, and you have me. We love you.”

  “You have the business. Years ago, when we used to go out and work with the field hands, I used to feel a part of things, a part of your lives, a part of the business. But now we’re all becoming rich again, and there’s nothing for me to do. Lance is off at school in the East, growing up. I’m all alone, turning into a bored, useless, middle-aged rich person. You have your job. You have your adorable little twin babies … I have nothing. Even our friendship doesn’t seem what it was.”

  My adorable little twin babies, Sari thought. Is there possibly a connection between them and this? In Joanna’s plan, perhaps I was not supposed to have any adorable twin babies. But instead she said, “Would you want to do something for the company, Jo?”

  “What could I do? I have no talent. I have nothing.”

  “Perhaps we could think of something,” Sari said.

  “In school, my teachers used to say I was creative …”

  “If you’re interested, we’ll think of something.”

  Joanna closed her eyes. “Peter … why didn’t he come?”

  “He’s in Sonoma today,” she lied. “We’re still trying to reach him.”

  With her eyes still closed, she smiled a wan smile. “I have a saint’s name,” she said. “I’m bound to be martyred.”

  That afternoon, Sari dictated an interoffice memorandum to her husband. He was, after all, the president of Baronet, and this was a matter of company business that she was proposing.

  TO: P.P.LeB.

  FROM: A.L.LeB.

  I spent some time with your sister at the hospital this morning.

  One of the things that seems to be on her mind is her feeling of being “out of things” in terms of Baronet, whereas in the 1930s we all worked together in the vineyards, etc. Joanna feels that now that her son is nearly grown she is in danger of becoming an indolent woman of leisure, and she expressed an interest in being given something to do.

  You may recall that several years ago your sister made an astute suggestion on how we might advertise our wines to servicemen during the war. This suggestion was never followed up, but it was a good one. And I think you will agree with me that Joanna has a keen creative mind.

  You also know that you and I have both expressed dissatisfaction with our present advertising agency in New York, and that those fellows on Madison Avenue sometimes seem to have no idea of what goes on in our vineyards and wineries in California. Joanna, meanwhile, grew up in the wine business and knows it well.

  My proposal is this: that Joanna be placed in charge of our advertising for at least two years, on a trial basis, and that funds be set aside for her to open her own New York agency, with Baronet as her principal account. This would of course require her relocation in New York, but that should present no problem.

  I believe this would give your sister the “shot in the arm” she appears to need so much at this point in her life. And I believe she’d do the job well. A further advantage of such an arrangement might be that, whereas advertising agencies charge commissions of 15% of billings, Joanna might be persuaded, as a “family,” or “in-house” agency, to charge a lower percentage.

  Please let me know what you think of this suggestion, and whether we should put the proposal to her when she has recovered from her current illness.

  And so that was how Joanna LeBaron became the Media Maven of Manhattan.

  “Melissa has found out,” Joanna is explaining to Eric on the telephone from New York. “This is exactly what I was afraid would happen.”

  “How did she react?”

  “Angrily. Bitterly. Bitter at me, bitter at your mother.”

  “Who told her?”

  “Your mother, of course. Who else?”

  “That was a shitty thing to do.”

  “Yes. Shitty. But typically Sari. She denies it, of course, but obviously she felt she had nothing to lose by giving Melissa the facts—and everything to gain. So there we are.”

  “Well,” he says, “now that she has the facts, what’s she going to do with them?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Eric. I’ve been trying to reach her on the phone for the past two days. Obviously, she’s not taking or returning calls.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Do you think you might have better luck getting through to her, Eric?”

  “When she’s in one of her moods, I’m not sure.”

  “Will you try? It would be helpful if we knew how she intends to vote.”

  “I’ll try, Aunt Jo. It’s just that I’m not very hopeful.”

  “Otherwise, I guess we’ll just go into our meeting on the thirtieth and let the chips fall where they may.”

  “Yes.”

  “And, frankly, I’m not hopeful about any of this, Eric, now that this has happened. Unless you can somehow manage to persuade her otherwise, I’m terribly afraid that Melissa is going to take your mother’s side.”

  “What makes you think that, Aunt Jo?”

  “Sari LeBaron has been trying to poison Melissa’s mind against me for years,” Joanna says.

  This last, about poisoning Melissa’s mind, is a damned lie, and Joanna knows it’s a damned lie. But, Sari sometimes thinks, in the years since Joanna has become the Medusa of Madison Avenue, the Hecate of Hucksterism, she has built a very lucrative career on lying—on exaggerating and inflating the merits of her clients’ products, and falsely denigrating and ridiculing the claims of her clients’ competitors: “Nine out of ten hematologists recommend Bonzo Mouthwash …” “Are you still using old-fashioned Grippo for flu symptoms, when you could be dancing under the Miami moon after one dose of doctor-recommended Flu-Go?” “Kills Lice by the Millions on Contact!” Lies. Garbage. Lies are Joanna’s stock in trade. At least, in Baronet’s advertising, Sari has never pretended that her wines were anything other than what they were: plain, old-fashioned, no-frills wines for the working man. And when it comes to Joanna’s claim that Sari was trying to poison Melissa’s mind against her, the truth is the exact opposite. One example will suffice.

  It was in the summer of 1955, when the twins were ten, and were spending the month of July at a boys’ camp in Maine. Soon they would be on their way to Bitterroot, where the whole family was to spend the month of August, and Melissa—so changed, so improved—was helping Sari plan a homecoming party for them. Melissa was twenty-eight now, and Sari had begun to wonder whether she would ever marry. And yet, at the same time, she had grown accustomed to Me
lissa’s presence in the household, and enjoyed her companionship. That morning on the Montana ranch had been clear and golden. The sun was reflected in silver half circles on the lake and, while Peter worked outside at clearing his trees, the mood of the two women in the ranch house was buoyant and expectant as they planned the little family party. “I wonder if they’ll have changed much, after their month at camp,” Melissa was saying, and Sari said, “They’re probably brown as berries, and grown another inch or two.”

  Then she suddenly laughed and said, “Melissa, do you remember years ago, when I found out I was pregnant again, you were so upset about it?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “Why was that, I wonder?”

  “I was frightened, Mother. Of course, when the twins were born, and everything was all right, I saw I shouldn’t have been, but at the time I was terribly frightened.”

  “Frightened of what?”

  “Frightened that the baby would be born a—monster. Deformed. And frightened that you were going to die.”

  “Whatever put that notion into your head?”

  “It was something Aunt Joanna said.”

  “Joanna?”

  “She told me that if you had another baby, it would be born deformed. She told me that if you had another baby, it would probably kill you. I used to have nightmares about it.”

  “Why in the world would Joanna have said a thing like that?” she said.

  “She said you were too old. She said you were past your child-bearing years. She said it would be like Athalie. But even worse.”

  “I was only thirty-five …” But suddenly she was so angry that she could no longer speak, and her anger had a color—crimson—that seemed to spring up in a swordlike shaft from her groin to the ceiling of her brain. Finally, she said, “I’m going out to pick some wildflowers for the table.”

  She followed the sound of Peter’s ax-strokes until she found him where he was laboring at his clearing in the woods, and she paused a little distance from him to watch him—bare to the waist, still tall, arrow-straight, muscular, and slender. The drops of perspiration flew from his forehead and shoulders in the same arcs as the pearly chips from the tall pine he was felling. A thought floated across her mind. He was fifty years old. From the early 1930s until after the war, they had not visited the ranch at all, and during those years much of the land he had cleared previously had turned into forest again, and in the years since he had managed to clear perhaps eighteen acres of the four hundred he planned for his sheep range, along with the new undergrowth that sprang up inexorably year after year. He always insisted on working alone, refusing the help of Mr. Hanratty, the ranch superintendent. Even though old, Hanratty was an excellent woodsman. “I want the feeling of personal accomplishment,” he would explain to her, “and I want the exercise.” But now, as she watched him, she saw that there would never be a sheep range, that he could never possibly live to finish the project he had undertaken, not if he lived to be a hundred. She saw it all as his delusion, his obsession, another form of his self-punishment, and she saw it all as somehow connected with Joanna.

  She stepped closer to him. “Peter,” she said, “how do you ever intend to finish this unless you get some others in to help you?”

  The question seemed to irritate him, and he paused, frowning, leaning on his ax, and mopped at his brow with a red-checked handkerchief. It must have been a question he had begun to ask himself, and Sari knew she should not have asked it.

  “It’s coming along,” he said finally, and resumed his chopping.

  In the middle distance, Mr. Hanratty passed through the clearing, on his way to some errand or other, and Sari smiled and waved at him, but Hanratty was not on her mind. She was trying to decide how to tell Peter what Melissa had just told her, or whether in fact to tell him at all.

  But, as though he had been reading her thoughts, he said, panting, between swings of his blade, “Had a—phone call—from Jo this morning.”

  “Oh? What did she want?”

  “Wants to—have Lance—come out here for the rest of the summer.”

  “Really? Why?”

  He paused once more, and mopped at his brow again with the handkerchief. “Lance is between jobs, and has been staying with her. But it seems she’s got to go to Japan on business, and wants to let her servants go for the month and close the apartment. She wants to know if we can take Lance.”

  “Well,” Sari said, “we can’t.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want Lance here. If she wanted to send Lance out here, she should have asked me.”

  “I thought the twins would enjoy it,” he said. “Having an older fellow around—someone closer to their age than you or me.”

  “Well, I don’t want him here. He can’t come.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m afraid I already told her we’d be glad to have him.” And he resumed his chopping.

  “What?” she cried. “You told her he could come without even consulting me? I’m going back to the house right now, and telephone her, and tell her that he can’t come. That he’s not welcome, that I don’t want him.”

  “Ah, you wouldn’t do that, Sari.”

  “I certainly would, and I certainly will. That bitch has some nerve—”

  “Don’t be so hard on Jo, Sari. It hasn’t been easy for her, raising the boy without a father.”

  “And what about me?” she said. “I’m sick and tired of doing everything Joanna wants! I’ve raised her daughter, haven’t I? I’ve raised enough of her damned children. I’m sick and tired of cleaning up after your sister’s dirty little messes. Your sister is nothing but a plotting, conniving woman who wants to create dissension between us. First it was Melissa who was dumped on me. Now it’s Lance. Well, I won’t have it, Peter.”

  “Now, Sari, you don’t mean that.” He was circling the tree now, studying it, analyzing the cuts he had already made, planning the next ones. “Jo’s your best friend.”

  “I certainly do mean it,” she said. “And with a friend like that, I don’t need enemies. All she wants to do is to drive another wedge between us. Don’t you see? It’s all she’s ever wanted.”

  There was another blow of the ax, and the tall pine quivered, its limbs lifting and sighing in the wind, its needles whispering in a kind of protest. “I told Jo we’d help her out,” he said.

  “Why? Why do we have to help her out? Haven’t we helped her out enough? Is it—” she began, as the ax fell again, “—is it because you think she’s better in bed than I am? Is that it? Is it because she’s the better lay?” She was screaming at him now, as the ax fell again. “Or is it because Lance is your son, too?”

  The tree began to fall, and she saw it tumbling toward her, tried to run, then stumbled and fell as the tree crashed upon her. “Oh, my God!” she heard him cry. “Oh, my God, Sari!”

  Mr. Hanratty, who had heard her screams, came running, and between them the two men tried to raise the weight of the tree that had fallen across her legs, and all she could hear was Peter sobbing, “Oh, Sari! Oh, my God, Sari!”

  Later, from what she dimly recognized was a hospital bed, she opened her eyes and saw his face bending over her. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Sari,” he was saying. “The wind shifted, and then you ran—right into the path of the fall—”

  “No,” she said. “It wasn’t the wind. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have said that. It was all my fault.”

  “Don’t say that,” he said. “It was an accident, Sari—I swear to you it was!”

  She closed her eyes. No, she thought, perhaps it was not her fault or his fault.

  It was Joanna’s fault.

  Fifteen

  From the front page of the Peninsula Gazette:

  KERN-McKITTRICK TAKEOVER BID SPARKS FAMILY FEUD

  San Francisco, March 28. A complex family-business drama is unfolding in the boardrooms of two of California’s most prestigious corporations, and in the drawing rooms of two
of the Bay Area’s wealthiest families. Pitted against each other, furthermore, are two of the city’s toughest street fighters, oil magnate Harry Boyd Tillinghast, and Assaria Latham LeBaron, president and chief executive officer of Baronet Vineyards, Inc., and dowager of the LeBaron wine clan. Tillinghast’s Kern-McKittrick Corp., it seems, would like to get into the wine business, and has made Baronet shareholders a $56 million stock offer to prove it.

  The issue is complicated, however, by a couple of factors. For one, Harry Tillinghast’s daughter, Alix, is married to Assaria LeBaron’s son, Eric, 39, of Hillsborough. And Assaria LeBaron has flatly rejected the Tillinghast offer as “chickenfeed”—that’s $56 million worth of chickenfeed, mind you.

  Related Factors

  Sparks began to fly in the LeBaron family in February when Baronet’s New York ad agency, LeBaron & Murdock, Inc., resigned the Baronet account, claiming “differences in advertising philosophies.” LeBaron & Murdock is owned by yet another family member, Mrs. Joanna LeBaron Kiley, Assaria LeBaron’s sister-in-law, who is known professionally as Joanna LeBaron.

  Insiders, however, claim that the differences were more than philosophical, and that the real reason for the split was Baronet’s refusal to pay full commissions on advertising placed through the agency, and Baronet’s contention that it is entitled to “family prices.”

  But that intra-family dispute may also have been sparked by Assaria LeBaron’s earlier announcement that her son Peter P. LeBaron, Jr., would be appointed co-director of advertising and marketing for the company, along with his twin brother, Eric. Eric LeBaron was reported as having been unhappy with this arrangement, which his mother defended as “bringing new strength to the Advertising-Marketing Division.”

  Eric LeBaron’s unhappiness is said to explain his support of the Tillinghast takeover bid, which is also supported by Joanna LeBaron Kiley, another major Baronet shareholder. Thus, two sisters-in-law are pitted against each other for control of the company, and mother is pitted against son. Eric LeBaron has been dismissed by the company. His brother, Peter, remains, and will presumably support his mother in the struggle.

  Family Secret