Shades of Fortune Read online

  “Your granddaughter mentioned that your husband used to read from an appointment book, Mrs. Myerson.”

  “Oh, yes. His appointment book. Every Sunday afternoon.”

  “Was that what you meant when you mentioned a diary the other night?”

  “Oh, no. The appointment book was an appointment book. The diary was a diary. He put everything in the diary, the good things and the bad. He read the appointment book to us to remind us of how busy he was, of how hard he had to work, and also to help him memorize all the appointments he had in the week to come. It was a loose-leaf thing. At the end of each week, he threw all the used pages out. But the diaries he kept. Eventually, there was a stack of them”—she holds out her hand—“there was a stack this high. He used to read aloud to me from them. I was never much of a reader, but I liked to listen to Adolph read to me from his diaries. He never read to anyone else from these because, well, frankly, Mr. Greenway, because there were a lot of things in there that were confidential. Family matters. Not for publication.”

  “And the diaries are gone now?”

  “Gone, yes. Disappeared. If you ask me, Leo took them, but I can’t prove that. Leo’s dead now, and there’s no way of proving that. Leo was a crook.”

  “A crook?”

  She holds up her hand. “No. Don’t put that in. Don’t put it in that I said Leo was a crook. Leo is dead, and speak no ill of the dead is what I always say. Just say that Adolph and Leo had … different business philosophies. Yes, that sounds good. Different business philosophies. And my husband was smarter, what with coming up with the idea of names.”

  “Can you remember any details from the diaries, Mrs. Myerson?”

  “Ha!” she says. “I might choose to remember some of the good things, Mr. Greenway. But you won’t get me to remember the bad things. You heard what Mimi said Thursday night at her party: ‘Say only nice things about the company to Mr. Greenway.’ I was thinking before you arrived that there are some not-so-nice things I could say about my son Edwee—things even my daughter doesn’t know—but I’m not going to say them. They’re not for publication—not yet, anyway. We’ll see. Besides, most of the bad things are dead things now. They died with my husband, with Leo … and with poor Henry, I suppose. But where was I? Oh, the good things, the good things …”

  “What are the good things, Mrs. Myerson?”

  “The good things are that we’re the recognized leader in the American cosmetics industry today!” she says triumphantly. “And you can quote me! That’s for publication. The Magnificent Myersons—that’s what they called us back in the thirties. That was the headline of the article about us in Town & Country. I could probably dig the article out for you, if you’d like. They called us magnificent then. Then there were some hard times. But now we’re magnificent again, and you must give Mimi all the credit for that.”

  Now, as I set this material down, I notice that a strange thing has begun to happen. Though I have been working on this story for less than four weeks, it is as though each member of the Myerson family is trying to adopt me, for his or her personal reasons. It is as though I am to serve as a kind of private messenger, a bearer of personal sentiments between them. There are only seven members of the immediate family (I am not counting Edwee’s wife, Gloria, as an immediate family member), so this doesn’t present much of a chore. But it’s as if, even in a family as small as this one, lines of communication between the individuals are often jammed. And I have been assigned the task of unjamming them, passing along the little dispatches from one to another. I feel a bit like Jodie, who is the traffic manager in Mimi’s office, a formidable Irishwoman whose formidable responsibility it is to see that each new job is carried out from initial concept to finished product ready to be shipped.

  For instance, when I was interviewing Brad Moore in his Wall Street office yesterday about the problems—or rewards—of a two-career household, he said a strange thing. I see Brad as a decent, intelligent, and somewhat shy man who, as a lawyer, doesn’t want his own feelings to be revealed too much. Behind the obvious polish and poise of the man, there is a certain dignified reserve, and it is easy to see why, in considering various New Yorkers to fill the late Armitage Miller’s unexpired term in the U.S. Senate, the name of Bradford Moore, Jr., has been brought up several times. But occasionally there are breaks in that reserve. And yesterday he suddenly said to me, “You know, Jim, you must make it clear in whatever you write about us that my wife is the most important person in the world to me. Not just the most important woman. The most important person. Whatever you hear in this very gossipy business she’s in, no matter what you may hear the gossips say, she is the most important person in the world to me.”

  I thought: Fair enough. Then I thought, “My wife.” Not “Mimi.” And, question: If he wishes to convey the message that his wife is the most important person in the world to him, why does he tell me? Does he want me to pass that word along to her? Has he ever told her that himself?

  7

  It is Wednesday night, and Mimi and Brad Moore are having dinner at home alone at 1107 Fifth Avenue. “This will be a rare pleasure, sir!” she said to him cheerfully on the phone when he called to say that, for a change, he would not be working late tonight.

  “A rare pleasure?”

  “It seems like ages since you and I have had dinner together at the usual time and place.”

  “Only three and a half weeks.”

  “Anyway, we can have a good talk, darling. I’ve got loads to tell you about.” And she thought: Interesting, that he has been keeping count of the days and weeks as well. But counting them, perhaps, for a different reason.

  She has been telling him about her idea for applying a scar to the face of the male model, but he has seemed only mildly interested. “Anyway,” she says, “who knows whether it’ll work? I hope I’m not boring you with this.”

  “It’s not that,” he says, spooning his fresh raspberry dessert from a raspberry-decorated dessert plate. “It’s just that I don’t have a pictorial sort of mind, I guess. It’s hard for me to visualize what differences it would make.”

  “Do I have a pictorial sort of mind? Maybe I do. You, being a lawyer, have a mind trained to deal with facts, which is why you’re so good at what you do. Me, in the beauty business, I deal all day with fantasy—artifice. Women’s fantasies, for the most part, not hard, male facts.”

  “Are facts exclusively male?”

  “I think, for the most part, yes. Don’t you think women fantasize more than men do?”

  “I’ve never really thought about it,” he says.

  “You see? There you are. The difference.”

  They sit catercorner at one end of the long candlelit table, and she thinks: Is she blackmailing you, my darling, this nameless, faceless woman? Surely you, the brilliant lawyer, would know how to deal with a blackmailer. But I do know this: if she is blackmailing you, then I do hate her, this other woman whom I would love to hate. She says, “Is something on your mind, darling? You seem … preoccupied. Is it the Sturtevant case still?”

  He touches his lips with his napkin. “Well, yes, I suppose so. It’s still going on. It’s all over money, of course. Sturtevant père versus Sturtevant fils. I had to spend an hour this afternoon listening to Sturtevant père tell me what an asshole his son is. Can you imagine it? A father and his son fighting over money?”

  She laughs softly. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I can,” she says.

  “Oops. Sorry. I forgot about that.”

  “And it’s not that much money, is it?”

  “Lousy thirty thousand dollars. By the way, I met Leonard Lauder today.”

  “Ah. My stiffest competition.”

  “Somebody brought him over to my table at lunch and introduced him. He said, ‘I know who you are—you’re Mimi Myerson’s husband.’”

  “Honestly. I’d have thought Leonard could have come up with a snappier opening line than that.” And she thinks: So, my midnight guess was corr
ect. It does bother him, this sort of thing. It’s gone on for years, but it’s finally begun to get under his skin, and who can blame him? She says, “And so what did you say?”

  “I said, ‘And I bet you’re one of Estée Lauder’s kids.’”

  “Ah!” she cries. “Good for you, Brad. Wonderful. I can just see the expression on Leonard’s big, dopey face!”

  “He did look a bit, well, crestfallen, I guess.”

  “Does that sort of thing bother you, Brad? Tell me the truth. I mean, I get it too. At that Statue of Liberty party, for instance, when your firm hired that party boat, and it was all lawyers. And all the men, and their wives, came up to me and said, ‘You must be Brad Moore’s wife.’ Most of them had never heard of Mimi Myerson.”

  “Hell, I’m used to it by now,” he says.

  “But it isn’t always Leonard Lauder who does it—and you get the chance to zap him the way you did. Congratulations, darling.”

  “Well, I must say I thought I was pretty quick on my feet today.” His craggy, homely-handsome Yankee face is smiling now, recalling it, and Mimi thinks: Ah, the ice is beginning to break a little bit.

  And why, she asks herself, do I always think of his as a Yankee face? Because of the prominent nose, of course. Why are the Jews often thought of as a big-nosed people? Mimi’s own nose is small. So is her mother’s, and her grandmother’s. So have been the noses of everyone she has known in her family. Yet the noses of old New England families like the Moores—big, rawboned outdoorsmen, descended from Highlanders and Gaels and Celts—were inevitably large, with flaring nostrils. Looking at her husband now, she is pleased to see that Brad, at fifty-one, has not lost his rugged good looks, not lost his hair, which is going grey in all the right places, and, perhaps best of all, not lost his figure. You are a fine figure of a man, she tells him wordlessly. I can see what she sees in you, whoever she is, wherever she lives, whatever she does for you. For that, I can sympathize with her.

  The maid appears to clear the dessert plates and says, “Would you like me to serve coffee here, or in the library, Mrs. Moore?”

  “We’ll have it here, I think, Edna. It’s easier.” To Brad she says, “Really, the only reason why I use the name Myerson in the business is because a lot of our customers still associate Miray products with Grandpa. I actually overheard a salesgirl at Magnin’s in Chicago saying to a customer, ‘You know, there really is a Mireille Myerson who makes this night cream; she’s the granddaughter of the founder.’ I think it gives our customers a good feeling to know that there’s an actual person behind the name.”

  “Of course. Makes damn good sense.” Their coffee arrives.

  “It doesn’t bother you that much, then.”

  “It wouldn’t bother me at all, if every time it could be Leonard Lauder.”

  “Do you know that we’re the only company in the industry that’s kept a member of the family at its head into the third generation? All the others—Revlon, Rubinstein, Arden, all of them—got gobbled up by conglomerates the minute the founder died. Which reminds me. I got the silliest letter from Uncle Edwee today.”

  “Really? What’s he want?”

  “Well, among a lot of other silly stuff—really, Uncle Edwee has got to be the silliest man on two feet—he wants me to give him the home telephone number of—are you ready for this, darling?—of our new male model.”

  Brad Moore appears to choke slightly on the first swallow of his coffee. “My God,” he says. “I thought Edwee had stopped chasing after the little boys. I thought that was what Gloria was for.”

  “Actually, it worries me a little bit. If there was any kind of scandal—even any kind of backlot talk—about our supposedly virile young male model and Uncle Edwee, it could knock our campaign into a cocked hat, if you see what I mean.”

  “Don’t you have a morals clause in the kid’s contract?”

  “Oh, we do. But that doesn’t stop the titillating little rumors from circulating through the industry. Rumors alone could sour the whole campaign, if not sink it altogether.”

  “What about little Gloria?”

  “Exactly. If Gloria suspected some sort of hanky-panky was going on, there’s no telling what sort of fuss she might kick up. Suddenly, Gloria’s become a loose cannon in all this. Stupid Uncle Edwee!”

  “Gloria’s a bimbo.”

  “And a dumb one, to boot. I can deal with smart people easily enough. It’s the dumb ones you have to watch out for.”

  He is smiling again. “Which category do I fall into?” he says.

  She laughs. “I’ve been dealing with you all these years, haven’t I?”

  “So I take it you’re not going to supply Edwee with the young man’s number.”

  “Let’s say I’m not running a dating service. If he keeps after me—and he may—I’ll say I have no idea what his number is. I’ll suggest that he call the agency, who won’t give out telephone numbers, either.”

  “Would it help if I had a word with Edwee?”

  “What would you say to him, Brad?”

  “I’d just say that I’m aware of this, ah, interest of his, and I’d suggest that he’d be playing with fire if he decides to pursue this interest. Just a word or two from me might be enough to scare him off.”

  “Well, let’s wait and see if we hear anything more from him. Maybe it was just a … passing fancy, though I wish I didn’t suspect that that casual little postscript of his was the whole point of his letter. But sometimes, if you ignore a problem—”

  “It gets bigger. I think I should have a word with Edwee.”

  “All right. Yes, do that, Brad.” Suddenly she reaches out and covers his hand with her own. “Have I told you lately, darling,” she says, “how wonderful you are to put up with my crazy family? My crazy family, and this crazy business we seem to be in?”

  “It’s certainly never dull, is it.”

  “Neither is life in a lunatic asylum. Tomorrow, for instance, I’m having lunch with Michael Horowitz.”

  His eyes flicker with interest. “Oh?” he says. “What’s that to be about?”

  “I’m not sure yet. But have you noticed how Miray stock has been behaving? For most of this year it’s hovered between fifty-two and fifty-five. Today, it closed at sixty-seven and five eighths.”

  “Rumors about the new fragrance, maybe?”

  “We thought perhaps it was institutional buying. But Badger’s found out that it’s not an institution. It’s Michael himself.”

  “What for, I wonder? His game is real estate, not the beauty biz.”

  “That’s what I intend to find out. Badger and I think he may be attempting some sort of takeover.”

  “Again, what for? He’s always been a kind of family friend, hasn’t he?”

  “Well, yes, in a funny way I guess you could say that. He seems to have a peculiar interest in anything to do with the Myersons. First, after Grandpa died, and there didn’t seem to be any money left anywhere, Michael appeared on the doorstep to help Granny sell the Madison Avenue house. Then he helped her sell and subdivide the place in Bar Harbor.”

  “Those were good deals, weren’t they?”

  “Oh, yes—at the time. Very. Good deals for Granny, as the seller, and for him as the developer. Then, for a while, we didn’t hear much from him. Then, two years ago, he suddenly bought Grandpa’s Palm Beach house and moved into it.”

  “That was a good deal, too, wasn’t it? The place was a white elephant nobody else wanted. Granny Flo couldn’t even give it away.”

  “Well, he made us our best offer—after letting the place sit on the market for years, begging for buyers, until it began to look like a distress sale.”

  “Better than paying taxes on it for another twenty years.”

  “And now this. Do you see a pattern emerging, Brad? I do.”

  He hesitates. Then he says, “Wasn’t he an old beau of yours, Mimi?”

  “Oh, I guess, sort of. Once upon a time, years ago.”

  “Wel
l, maybe that’s it,” he says.

  “Oh, no,” she says. “That’s silly. In any case, he’s not behaving like an old beau now. He’s been buying our stock very secretly and underhandedly, through dozens of different brokerage accounts. This seems definitely hostile. Badger thinks so, too.”

  “Know something? I bet he’s still in love with you.”

  “Oh, no,” she says, perhaps too quickly. “It’s not that. He was—oh, it was so long ago I don’t even remember it. Anyway, what I wanted to ask you was, if it begins to look as though we’re heading into a takeover fight, would McSwain, Moore and Hollowell represent us? Or would that be a conflict of interest?”

  He is thoughtful for a moment and then says, “No, I don’t think that would be any problem. I’d have to discuss it with the other partners, of course. But I think we could handle it. After all, one of our young guys got Bob Hollowell his divorce.”

  Divorce, she thinks. Why does his mind fly to divorce, when we have been discussing takeovers and acquisitions, which, after all, are his specialty? She says brightly, “I might as well hire the best law firm in town if I’m going to lock horns with someone like Michael Horowitz.”

  “Compliment noted,” he says.

  “Because,” she says, “I don’t want this company just for myself. I want it for Badger, and we both know that it’s what he wants, too. I don’t intend to hang on here for too many years. In a few more years, I’m going to turn it over to Badger; he’ll be ready. After all, we are unique in this industry. I’m the third generation, and Badger will be the fourth, and then—”