The Mansions Of Limbo Part 5

The beauty of the much-married and much-widowed Enid Kenmare was so renowned in the years before and after the Second World War that it was said people stood on chairs in the lobby of the Htel de Paris in Monte Carlo to catch a glimpse of her as she pa.s.sed through. She was reported to be fabulously rich, owing to the various inheritances from her deceased husbands, who included an American millionaire, Roderick Cameron, and three English aristocrats: Brigadier General Frederick Cavendish, Viscount Furness, and the Earl of Kenmare. She was also a constant and successful gambler, who frequented the casinos of Monte Carlo and Beaulieu nightly, playing mostly trente-et-quarante. Her friends of that period claim that people would drop their cards or chips to look at her when she swept past the entrance without bothering to show the required pa.s.sport, so well known was she. There were always great stacks of chips in front of her, and she never showed any emotion, whether she lost or won. According to one popular story, she purchased her magnificent estate at Cap Ferrat with her winnings from a single big gambling night at the casino, but, like every story about her, it may or may not be true. "Enid became such a character that people began to invent stories about her, and she told stories about herself that contributed to that sort of talk," Anthony Pawson, a septuagenarian bon vivant, told me in London shortly before his death in December. "Enid was a mythomaniac," said an old bridge partner of Lady Kenmare's on the Riviera. "She'd invent stories, and that could be dangerous. You don't know why those people lie, but they do."

"She had fantastic posture, wore cabochon emeralds or rubies, and dressed for the evening in diaphanous and flowing gowns," remembered one of her friends. "It wasn't so much that she was superior as that she was in another sphere almost. She sort of floated, and she had the most amazing eyes."

Enid Kenmare's "other sphere" was, from all accounts, dope. "She kept her beauty because she didn't drink, but she was a heroin addict. Legally a heroin addict. She was on the drug list, you know, registered. Marvelous skin, never went in the sun," said a gentleman in New York. Another gentleman, in London, said, "She smoked opium certainly, and took heroin." A lady friend, more cautious, said, "I never noticed when people took dope." But another lady friend said, "She lived in a haze of drugs." Everyone commented on the fact that she drank Coca-Cola morning, noon, and night.

"If Enid were alive today, she would be, let me see, ninety-eight or ninety-nine, I suppose," said the Honorable David Herbert of Tangier, the son of, brother of, and uncle of various Earls of Pembroke, who knew Enid Kenmare for years and attended her fourth wedding, to Valentine Kenmare. "She walked down the aisle like a first-time bride," he told me, remembering the occasion. "She was very very wicked. Once, she said to me, 'Do I look like a murderess? Tell me, do I?' "

The other great beauties of her era, to whom she was often compared-Diana Cooper, Daisy Fellowes, and Violet Trefusis-are all dead. So, too, are most of the men she knew. But there are a number still, deep in their eighties now, or nineties, who remember her. Some are in rest homes. Some have come on hard times and live in greatly reduced circ.u.mstances from the period in which they flourished. Some are on walkers or canes. One died a week after I spoke with him in his modest bed-sitting-room in London. Another had a stroke. Still another had become so deaf that it was impossible to communicate with her. Different people remembered Lady Kenmare differently. One old gentleman said, "We used to call Enid the cement Venus. Actually, I think Emerald Cunard made up that name." Another said impatiently, "No, no, not cement Venus. It was the stucco Venus. That's what we called her. Stucco. Not cement." Some remembered her quite erroneously. A grand old dowager marchioness, wearing a fox fur around her shoulders, walked slowly across the lobby of Claridge's in London, leaning on her stick. "I remember Enid," she said. "She pushed Lord Furness out the porthole." And there are also the friends of her children, who are now in their sixties and seventies, who were, in those days, the younger crowd. "I don't think Enid killed anybody, but she might have given them drugs and helped them along," said one friend of her son Rory, who died in 1985 at the age of seventy.

She was born Enid Lindeman in Australia, one of five children. Her father, Charles Lindeman, raised horses and introduced vines to New South Wales, thereby pioneering the wine industry in that country. In later years, when she bred racehorses in Kenya, she would talk about riding bareback as a child. Her rise to international social status began at the age of sixteen, when she allegedly became the mistress of Bernard Baruch, the American financier and presidential adviser, who was then in his forties. During their liaison, Enid, an accomplished artist, had a brief stint in Hollywood as a scenery painter. Their friendship lasted until the end of Baruch's life, when Enid returned to New York to say good-bye to him before he died. A skeptic remarked to me that the trip was to ensure that she would be "remembered financially by Mr. Baruch."

Baruch felt that his beautiful young mistress should be married properly, and it was he who introduced her to her first husband, the American Roderick Cameron, who, like Baruch, was much older than she. They were married in 1913, and he died the following year, leaving her with a son, also called Roderick Cameron, known as Rory, who would himself in time become a known figure in social, literary, and decorating circles.

In 1917 she married for the second time, in England, where she had moved, to Brigadier General Frederick Cavendish, known as Caviar Cavendish. "At that time, it was the thing to do, to marry soldiers," said Tony Pawson. Peter Quennell, the octogenarian writer, described Enid then as "a very autocratic beauty, greatly admired by her husband's junior officers." At White's Club in London, an elderly gentleman listening to this description guffawed and winked, to indicate that the admiration of the young officers was romantic in nature. Enid was presented at court to King George and Queen Mary when she became Mrs. Cavendish, and was said to be the most beautiful Australian ever presented. The marriage to General Cavendish, who, had he lived longer, would have become Lord Waterpark, produced two children, Caryll, a son, who is the present Lord Waterpark, and Patricia, a daughter, who is now Mrs. Frank O'Neill, and lives in Cape Town, South Africa, where she continues to manage a stud farm that her mother purchased before her death. That marriage also produced a considerable inheritance.

In 1933, Enid Cavendish married the very rich Lord Furness, known as Duke, short for Marmaduke, heir to the Furness shipping fortune. He had a private railroad car, two yachts, and an airplane. They were each other's third spouse. Lord Furness was himself no stranger to homicidal rumor and controversy. His first wife, Daisy, had died aboard his yacht the Sapphire, on a pleasure cruise from England to the South of France, and he had buried her at sea. "They say she was pushed off the yacht, but no one could ever prove it," said Tony Pawson. Thelma Furness, his second wife, in her memoir, Double Exposure, glides over the event of her predecessor's death. "They were forced to bury her at sea. There were no embalming facilities on the yacht, and they were too far out to turn back to England and not near enough to Cannes to make port." Had he been tried and convicted, it is said that, as an English lord, he would have been hanged with a silk rope, but there was never an arrest or a trial. Thelma, during her marriage to Furness, had become the mistress of the then Prince of Wales, and it was she who, inadvertently, brought her friend Wallis Warfield Simpson into the orbit of the prince, thereby losing her lover, her friend, and her husband. After Furness's subsequent marriage to Enid, he several times sought out his former wife, with whom he remained on friendly terms, for solace. His marriage to Enid was never happy. Thelma Furness was of the opinion that Enid got Furness on drugs. In her book, she tells of an occasion when Furness was nervously biting his knuckles. "We went up to Duke's suite.... Duke took off his coat and asked me to give him an injection-a piqre. I couldn't do this because I did not know how; I had never handled a hypodermic needle. Finally, he asked me simply to pinch his arm, and he gave himself the injection." Of the last time she saw him on the Riviera, she wrote, "I've never seen a man look so frail, so mixed-up, so ill. I cried, 'Oh, Duke, if I could only put you in my pocket and take you away.' "

Elvira de la Fuente, a longtime Riviera resident who was a great friend of both Enid and her son Rory and a fourth at bridge with Somerset Maugham, sat on the quay at Beaulieu recently and talked about Furness's death in 1940. "Furness died at La Fiorentina," she said. "He used to get drunk every night. He was carried out of there when he died. There was a rumor that Enid killed him. I don't think she did, but she was quite capable of letting him die." The most persistent story of Furness's death was that it took place in the little pavilion at La Fiorentina, which Enid had constructed overlooking the sea, and where she and her friends played cards every day. On the night Furness became ill, she went back to the house to get his pills, locking the door behind her. The next morning he was found dead in the pavilion. Furness's death left Enid a very rich woman, and Thelma Furness tried to have her charged with murder, but Walter Monckton, the pre-eminent lawyer of the day, refused to take the case, and it never went to trial.

Enid's last marriage, to the sixth Earl of Kenmare, took place in 1943. He was an enormously fat man, 255 pounds, who once accidentally sat on a dog and killed it. Known as Valentine Castlerosse until he became an earl, he had a reputation for lechery and avid gambling that made him disliked in certain segments of society. He was the first English aristocrat to write a gossip column. Hopelessly in debt, he was rescued by Lord Beaverbrook, who paid him 3,000 a year plus expenses to write a column for the Sunday Express. Kenmare's family estates in Ireland were ma.s.sive, 118,600 acres, but yielded only a modest annual income by the standards of the day, 34,000. He once said of his life, "I dissipated my patrimony; I committed many sins; I wasn't important." Elvira de la Fuente remembers that Enid sent her son Rory a telegram saying, "Do you mind if I marry Valentine Castlerosse?" "Valentine used to be married to Doris Castlerosse, who was a great friend of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. She'd be about a hundred now," said de la Fuente. Doris Castlerosse died of an overdose of sleeping pills mixed with drink in 1943. Three weeks after the inquest into her death, Enid and Kenmare were married in a Catholic ceremony in the Brompton Oratory. One guest described the event as "taking place in a nightclub setting, for all the t.i.tled crooks and rogues in London were there." When Kenmare died less than a year after the marriage, Chips Channon, the English diarist, wrote of him, "An immense, kindly, jovial witty creature, Falstaffian, funny and boisterous, and always grossly overdressed; yet with a kindly heart and was not quite the fraud he pretended to be." "Enid was supposed to have given him an injection, but I never believed that," said Tony Pawson. As Kenmare had no direct heir, the inheritance was to go to his bachelor brother, Gerald. Eventually it went to Beatrice Grosvenor, the daughter of his sister, but Enid, in one of her boldest ventures, claimed to be pregnant, although she was approaching fifty at the time. She was thus able to hold on to the income from the Irish lands for an additional thirteen months. Said Tony Pawson about the pregnancy, "I never heard that, but Enid was up to that sort of thing."

David Hicks, the English decorator married to the daughter of Earl Mountbatten, was a frequent visitor at La Fiorentina. "They used to say about Enid, she married first for love: Cameron. And then to Cavendish, for position-it was a very good name. Then Furness for the money. And Kenmare for the t.i.tle," he said. But there were lovers too. "The Duke of Westminster was in love with her," said Tom Parr, the chairman of Colefax and Fowler, the London decorating firm. The Duke of Westminster, Britain's richest man, had been a friend of two of Enid's husbands, Furness and Kenmare, and the third of his four wives, Loelia, d.u.c.h.ess of Westminster, was sometimes a visitor at La Fiorentina. "There was one of the Selfridges too, of the store," said Elvira de la Fuente. "A rich man. He gave her money. He was very unattractive too. Some women can only go to bed with handsome men. With Enid, it didn't seem to matter."

"Before the war, the international upper cla.s.ses were doping a great deal, but none of them showed it," said Tony Pawson. "They weren't like those drug addicts today."

"There was a terrible scandal in New York, but I wouldn't want to talk about that," said an ancient lady in London. In Paris, an ancient gentleman said, lowering his voice, "Have you heard what happened in New York? Such a scandal!"

The New York scandal they were referring to was what has become known in social lore as the Bloomingdale scandal. Donald Bloomingdale, a sometime diplomat, was forty-two, handsome, a rich man who enjoyed an international social life, maintaining apartments in Paris and New York. "Donald had very chic French friends," said Elvira de la Fuente. "He spoke French well. He was quite a sn.o.b. He married one of the Rothschild heiresses, the sister of one of them, but the marriage didn't last." Donald Bloomingdale was also a particular friend of Enid's son Rory. "Rory was very much in love with Donald Bloomingdale, but at the time Donald was in love with an Egyptian, called Jean-Louis Toriel, who was very drugged," Elvira de la Fuente told me. Toriel was an unpopular figure among the fashionable friends of Donald Bloomingdale. Tony Pawson remembered that Toriel had a dachshund that he turned into a drug addict. "A horrid little skeletal thing. Too awful. He was really evil." On several occasions, Bloomingdale went away for drug cures, but, because of Toriel, he always went right back on drugs, once while driving to Paris immediately after his release from a clinic in Switzerland.

In the winter of 1954, Enid Kenmare and Donald Bloomingdale were in New York at the same time. People remember things differently. Some told me it happened at the Pierre. Some said it happened at the Sherry-Netherland. And some said it happened at the since-razed Savoy-Plaza Hotel, which used to stand where the General Motors Building now stands on Fifth Avenue. At any rate, Donald Bloomingdale wanted some heroin, and Lady Kenmare gave it to him. One New York friend of Donald Bloomingdale's told me the heroin was delivered in a lace handkerchief with a coronet and Lady Kenmare's initials on it. Another New York friend said the heroin was in the back of a silver picture frame containing a photograph of Lady Kenmare. However it was delivered, the dosage proved fatal. "It was apparently a bad mixture," said Tony Pawson. The rich Mr. Bloomingdale, who would have been far richer if he had outlived his very rich mother, Rosalie Bloomingdale, was found dead of an overdose the next morning by a faithful servant. Good servant that he was, he knew how to handle the situation. It was not his first experience in such matters. He called the family lawyer immediately. The lace handkerchief with the coronet, or the picture frame with Enid's picture, or whatever receptacle the heroin had come in, was removed, as were the implements of injection. The family lawyer called the family doctor, and the police were notified. Meanwhile, Lady Kenmare was put on an afternoon plane with the a.s.sistance of her good friends Norman and Rosita Winston, the international socialites, who for years had leased the Clos, a house on the grounds of La Fiorentina. "She was out of the country before any mention of Donald's death was ever made," said Bert Whitley of New York, who leased another house on the grounds. The servant, who had been through previous sc.r.a.pes with his employer, was left money in Bloomingdale's will, as were Rory Cameron and Jean-Louis Toriel, the Egyptian, who later also died of a heroin overdose. The newspapers reported that Bloomingdale's death had been caused by an overdose of barbiturates. No connection between the countess and the death of Donald Bloomingdale was ever made publicly. "But everybody knew," I was told over and over. "Everybody knew."

Probably n.o.body knew better what happened that night than Walter Beardshall, who was Lady Kenmare's butler and valet at the time and who remains her fervent supporter to this day. Now crippled by post-polio syndrome, Mr. Beardshall lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is mostly confined to a motorized wheelchair. "I traveled around the world with Her Ladyship," he told me. "Elsa Maxwell spread the rumor that I was her gigolo, and everyone gossiped about us, but I wasn't. I was twenty-four at the time, and Lady Kenmare was sixty-two." According to Beardshall, the incident happened at the Sherry-Netherland. "Mr. Bloomingdale had a permanent suite at the Sherry-Netherland, and we were his guests there. He filled Lady Kenmare's room with flowers and everything. The next morning the telephone rang very early, and Her Ladyship asked me to come to her room as quickly as possible. 'How fast can you pack?' she asked. 'We're leaving for London.' We had only just arrived in New York. She said, 'I had dinner last night with Mr. Bloomingdale. He told me I could borrow his typewriter so that I could write Rory a letter. When I called him this morning, his servant told me that he was dead. I was the last person to see him alive. We have to leave. You know how the American police are.' "

After the Bloomingdale incident, Somerset Maugham dubbed his great friend Lady Kenmare Lady Killmore, although some people attribute the name to Noel Coward. At any rate the name stuck.

"Did Enid ever talk about Donald Bloomingdale?" I asked Anthony Pawson.

"It was always a tricky subject," he said. "She didn't talk too much about it, because of all the rumors going round."

"Did Rory talk about it?" I asked a lady friend of his in London.

"Those stories about Enid were never discussed. I mean, you can't ask if someone's mother murdered someone. Rory told me, though, that once, when she arrived on the Queen Mary, the tabloids said, 'Society Murderess Arrives,' " she replied.

"When Donald died in New York that time, we all expected to know more about it, but nothing came out," said Elvira de la Fuente. "She ran from New York after that."

Daisy Fellowes, another of the stunning women of the period and a famed society wit, maintained a sort of chilly friendship with Enid. The daughter of a French duke and an heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, she didn't think Enid was sufficiently wellborn, describing her as "an Australian with a vague pedigree." Once, in conversation, Enid began a sentence with the phrase "people of our cla.s.s." Mrs. Fellowes raised her hand and stopped the conversation. "Just a moment, Enid," she said. "Your cla.s.s or mine?" After the Bloomingdale affair, Daisy Fellowes announced she was going to give a dinner party for twelve people. "I'm going to have all murderers," she said. "Very convenient. There are six men and six women. And Enid Kenmare will have the place of honor, because she killed the most people of anyone coming."

Lady Kenmare was aware of the stories told about her, and she was sometimes hurt by them. Roderick Coupe, an American who lives in Paris, told me of an occasion when the social figure Jimmy Donahue, a Woolworth heir, cousin of Enid's friend Barbara Hutton, and often rumored to have been the lover of the d.u.c.h.ess of Windsor, asked Enid to his house on Long Island. After a pleasant dinner, he began to ask her why she was known as Lady Killmore. She explained to him that it was a name that caused her a great deal of heartache. Donahue, who had a cruel streak, persisted. "But why do people say it?" he asked several more times. Enid Kenmare finally announced she was leaving. Donahue told her he had sent her car back to New York. Undeterred, she made her way to the highway and hitchhiked to the city.

"She was one of the most accomplished women. She rode. She shot. She fished. She painted very well. She sculpted. She did beautiful needlework. She cooked marvelously. There was nothing she couldn't do," said Tony Pawson. Looking through alb.u.m after alb.u.m of photographs of life at La Fiorentina, with its unending parties, one doesn't see an angry or worried face among the people pictured. Any age, any generation, eighteen to eighty, in and out of the house, and dogs everywhere. Although Lady Kenmare was thought of as a famous hostess, a word she greatly disliked, her lunch parties at La Fiorentina were often haphazard affairs, with unmatched guests. Celebrities such as Greta Garbo, Barbara Hutton, Claudette Colbert, Elsa Maxwell, and the Duke of Vedura came, but so did people no one had ever heard of. Guests would be thrown together-friends of Rory's, friends of hers, the well known and the unknown, the young and the old, the inexperienced and the accomplished-with no care as to a balance of the s.e.xes at her table. Enid was diligently unpunctual, arriving, vaguely, long after her guests had been seated, once prompting Daisy Fellowes to remark on her hostess's absence, "Busy with her needle, no doubt." Another guest remembered, "She had no sense of time whatsoever. She'd arrive when the meals were over, or be dressed for the casino, in evening dress and jewels, in the afternoon." Tom Parr said, "She was an ethereal character, nice to us who were Rory's friends, adorable even, but then she'd float off." On one occasion, she was struck by the handsomeness of a young man sunning himself by her swimming pool. "Do please stay on for dinner," she said. "But, Lady Kenmare, I've been staying with you for a week," the young man replied.

"Enid was completely original. Very elegant. Very distinguished. She always made an entrance, like an actress, carrying a flower," said Jacqueline Delubac, a retired French actress who was once married to Sacha Guitry. She was always surrounded by dogs, "a mangy pack," according to John Galliher of New York. Walter Beardshall remembers her entrances more vividly. "All her guests would already be seated. First you would hear the dogs barking. And then you would hear her voice saying, 'Be quiet. Be quiet.' Then you would hear her high heels clicking on the marble floor. And then the dogs would enter, sometimes twenty of them, miniature poodles, gray and black. And then she would come in, with a parrot on one shoulder and her hyrax on the other." She fed her hyrax from her own fork; although at the cinema she would sometimes pull lettuce leaves from her bosom to feed it. Many people mistook the hyrax for a rat. It is a small ungulate mammal characterized by a thickset body with short legs and ears and rudimentary tail, feet with soft pads and broad nails, and teeth of which the molars resemble those of a rhinoceros and the incisors those of rodents. She taught the hyrax to pee in the toilet, standing straight up on the seat, and sometimes she let her guests peek at it through the bathroom window, keeping out of sight, since the hyrax was very shy. She trained her parrot to speak exactly like her. When the telephone rang, the parrot would call out, "Pat, the telephone," so that Enid's daughter, Pat, would answer it.

The fashion arbiter Eleanor Lambert often stayed with Rosita and Norman Winston in the Clos on Enid's property. She said that Lady Kenmare never seemed to sleep. She remembered looking out of her window during the night and seeing her walking through her garden dressed in flowing white garments, with the hyrax on her shoulder. "She looked like the woman in white from Wilkie Collins's book," Eleanor Lambert said.

"Enid was never social, really," said Elvira de la Fuente. "You could ask her to sit next to a prince or a waiter, and it never mattered to her." Indeed, the girl from Australia never went grand in the grand life she espoused and kept marrying into. She remained fiercely loyal to her Australian family back home, at one time investing money in the failing wine business even though her lawyers advised her not to. "They are my family," she said to them, according to Beardshall, who traveled to Australia with her. Along the way in her rise, she lost her Australian accent. Tony Pawson said she had "an accent you couldn't quite define, Americanized but not really American." James Douglas, who used to escort Barbara Hutton to La Fiorentina, said, "There was no trace of Australian at all, but sometimes her sister came from Australia to visit her, and then you could hear the way she once had talked." However, she did acquire irregularities of speech that were unique for a woman in her position at that time. According to Walter Beardshall, she used certain four-letter words before people started printing those words in books. He remembered a time when the Countess of Drogheda asked her, "What was Kenmare's first name, Enid?" Enid replied, "f.u.c.ked if I know. I was only married to him nine months before he died."

Some people say that Enid thought she would marry Somerset Maugham after Lord Kenmare's death, but more people scoff at this. "Nonsense!" said David Herbert. Tony Pawson agreed. "I don't believe she ever wanted to marry Willie Maugham. Unless it was for the money. Willie wasn't interested in ladies, you know." Jimmy Douglas said, "It's too ridiculous. What about Alan Searle [Maugham's longtime companion], for G.o.d's sake?" And Elvira de la Fuente said, "Enid had no friends, really, except Willie Maugham. She adored him. She and Maugham were a funny couple. They were intimate because of bridge. They played all the time. He was already old and grumpy at the time. It was companionship and affection, but there was no thought of romance."

At one time, friends say, Enid, who kept a residence in Monte Carlo and was a citizen of Monaco, harbored a desire for her daughter to marry Prince Rainier and become Her Serene Highness, the Princess of Monaco, but the prince showed no romantic inclinations toward Pat, nor did Pat toward the prince. Pat preferred dogs and horses, and was not cut out for princess life, or even society life on the Riviera, and soon decamped to Kenya and Cape Town to breed horses. Bearing no grudge toward the prince, Enid happily attended his wedding to Grace Kelly. As the tall, statuesque Lady Kenmare emerged from the cathedral at the end of the service, she was cheered by the crowds, who mistook her for a visiting monarch.

"Before anything else, Enid was a mother," said Yves Vidal of Paris and Tangier, who was a frequent visitor at the villa. "Most of the things she did, marrying all those men, were for the children more than herself." "She never never did what family people do-criticize and mumble about her children," said Elvira de la Fuente. Walter Beardshall said she tried to keep her drug taking from her children. "Once, Pat found one of her syringes. 'What's this, Mummy?' she asked. 'Oh, it's Walter's,' Lady Kenmare replied. 'He leaves his stuff all over the place. Get it out of here, Walter. Take it to your own room.' "

But it was with Rory, her older son, that she was the closest. "I always thought Rory was in love with Enid," said a London lady. "At Emerald Cunard's parties, they used to come in together, covered in rings and not speaking." Certainly they had an extremely close mother-son relationship. "It was really Rory's life that Enid came to lead, after all the marriages," said Elvira de la Fuente. "He used to say to her as a joke, 'Now you'll never find a fifth husband after you've killed four of them.' They lived as a couple, but it wasn't incestuous. Rory told Enid he was a h.o.m.os.e.xual when he was forty. She had never suspected. It was a terrible shock to her, but a shock she overcame in a day or two." Yves Vidal said, "She didn't really like social life. She was actually miscast in the grand life of a chatelaine and hostess of the Riviera." Another guest said, "She was in a way a pa.s.senger at La Fiorentina. As she got older, people began to think of it as Rory's house. This famous lady was always in the background. Sometimes she'd go for days without coming out of her bedroom."

The magnificent house, located on the finest property on the Riviera, commands the entrance to Beaulieu Bay. It was considered a strategic position during the war, and the Germans, who occupied the house, built extensive fortifications on their property against an Allied invasion. Near the end of the war they blew up the fortifications, destroying half of the house and most of the gardens. When the house was returned to the family, Rory redesigned it in the Palladian style, and the interiors were decorated by him. As Enid Kenmare grew older, she developed curvature of the spine, and her once-perfect posture gave way to a bent-over condition. She began leasing the house. Elizabeth Taylor and Mike Todd occupied it for a time, and for years the American philanthropist Mary Lasker rented it during the peak months. The house is now owned by Harding and Mary Wells Lawrence, the former chairman of Braniff Airways and the founder of the advertising agency Wells, Rich, Greene. Mary Lawrence said, "When we bought La Fiorentina, there were no lights in the bathrooms. Lady Kenmare couldn't bear to look at herself in the mirror anymore."

She moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where she bought a stud farm and raised racehorses. Her daughter, Pat, had preceded her there. For a while Enid employed Beryl Markham, the author of West with the Night, to train her horses, but the two women, who had known each other since Enid's marriage to Lord Furness, were such strong personalities that their partnership did not work out. Pat had two lions she had brought up from the time they were cubs that had the run of the house. A New York friend of Pat's who used to visit La Fiorentina every summer also visited the two women in Cape Town. She remembers seeing one of the lions drag an unperturbed Enid through the living room and out the French doors. "She was not remotely frightened, and later Pat told me, 'It happens all the time.' "

"Enid was mysterious," said Yves Vidal. "I remember once watching her run down the steps of La Fiorentina followed by her dogs. She was so beautiful, and she knew she was very beautiful. Until the end, she kept a wonderful allure. What made her life and ruined her life at the same time was her beauty."

March 1991

THE Pa.s.sION OF BARON THYSSEN.

It was a late-fall twilight on Lake Lugano. We were standing in the open window of an art-filled sitting room in the Villa Favorita, one of the loveliest houses in the world, looking out over the lake, listening to waves lap against the private dock below. Across the water the lights of Lugano, a city of 30,000 people and fifty banks in the Italian-speaking corner of Switzerland, were coming on. My companion in reverie, the Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, has been looking out at the same view for over fifty years, since his father, Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, bought the seventeenth-century villa from Prince Friedrich Leopold of Prussia in 1932. For those who need an introduction, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza is generally conceded to be one of the richest men in the world ("in the billions," say some people, "in the high hundred millions," according to others), as well as the possessor of one of the world's largest private art collections, which is rivaled in size and magnificence only by that of the Queen of England. It was the art collection I was there to discuss, for the baron, now in his sixty-seventh year, has begun to have thoughts about mortality, and for the last five years the disposition of his collection has been uppermost in his mind.

He is called Heini by those close to him, and that evening he was dressed in a dinner jacket and black tie, awaiting the arrival of guests for dinner. The Thyssen fortune, he was telling me, had been made originally in iron and steel in Germany. "My mother irons and my father steals," he said, in the manner of a man who has told the same joke over and over. Early in life, his father had left Germany and moved to Hungary, where he had married into the n.o.bility; thus the t.i.tle baron and the addition of the hyphen and the name Bornemisza. The current baron's older brother and two sisters were born in Hungary, but the Thyssen-Bornemisza family fled to Holland when the Communist leader of Hungary, Bela Kun, sentenced the children's father to death for being a landowner. Heini Thyssen was born in Holland and spent the first nineteen years of his life there.

The baron's attention was distracted from his story by the arrival at the dock below of a flag-bedecked lake boat bringing his guests, thirty-one formally attired members of the Board of Trustees and the Trustees' Council of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., who were on a two-week tour of Swiss and Italian churches, museums, and private collections, headed by the gallery's director, J. Carter Brown. Among the members of this art-loving group were the Perry Ba.s.ses of Fort Worth, the Alexander Mellon Laughlins and the Thomas Mellon Evanses of New York, and the Robert Erburus of Los Angeles.

"But it's too early," said the baron, looking down. "They've come too early. The baroness is not ready to receive them." And then he added, to no one in particular, "Send them away." He had his gun-toting American bodyguard tell the driver of the boat to spin the distinguished guests around the lake for half an hour and then come back. As we watched the drama from upstairs, we could hear Carter Brown call out, "Ladies and gentlemen," and then explain to his group that they were not to get off the boat yet but would instead take another short ride. This announcement apparently created some discord, because people began to get off anyway. The baron shrugged, sighed, smiled, and went down to greet them. Drinks were served on an outdoor loggia overlooking the lake. A night chill had set in, and the ladies hugged fur jackets and cashmere shawls over their short black dinner dresses and pearls. For some time the Baroness Thyssen-Bornemisza did not appear.

t.i.ta Thyssen, a former Miss Barcelona and later Miss Spain, picked by a jury that included the American-born Countess of Romanoes and the great bullfighter Luis Domingun, is the baron's fifth and presumably last baroness and, if all goes according to plan, his first and last d.u.c.h.ess, for the on-dit in swell circles is that the King of Spain is prepared to confer on her the t.i.tle of d.u.c.h.ess when the Thyssen collection, or at least 700 of the A and B pictures in the 1,400-picture collection, goes to Spain permanently. That "permanently" is the catch.

"Where is she?" one wife asked, meaning their hostess.

"We heard she's not coming at all," said the lady to whom she spoke.

"I heard that too," said the first lady, and they exchanged "Miss Barcelona" looks.

But then the baroness did appear, the last arrival at her own party, although she was only coming from upstairs. She was stunning, blond, tanned from the sun, dressed in a long black strapless evening gown. "Balmain," I heard her say to someone. She has the persona of a film star and understands perfectly the technique of making an entrance. In an instant she was the center of attention, and earlier opinions of her were soon favorably revised. Like all the baron's wives, his fifth baroness is the possessor of some very serious jewelry. On her engagement-ring finger was a large marquise diamond that had once belonged to the baron's second wife, the ill-fated Nina Dyer, who married the baron at the age of seventeen and divorced him at the age of twenty-five to marry Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, the half-brother of the late Aly Khan and the uncle of the current Aga Khan. Indifferent to gender when it came to love partners, Nina also dallied with a succession of ladies, who called her Oliver and vied with her husbands when it came to showering her with jewels. One of her most ardent admirers, an international film actress, gave her a panther bracelet designed by Cartier with an inscription in French which read, "To my panther, untamed by man." Before she was forty, Nina committed suicide. "She'd just had it," was the explanation someone who knew her gave me. Her jewelry, according to the baron, was stolen by her friends at the time of her death. Years later, he saw a picture of the marquise-diamond ring in an auction catalog. Although it had no listed provenance, he recognized it as the diamond he had given Nina years before, and bought it back for his fifth wife for $1.5 million.

The baroness was wearing diamond-and-ruby earrings, and around her neck, hanging on a diamond necklace designed to accommodate it, was the Star of Peace, which she had told me earlier in the day was the "biggest flawless diamond in the world." I explained to one of the guests who gasped at its size that it was 167 carats. The baroness heard me say it. "One hundred and sixty-nine," she corrected me, and then, hearing herself, she roared with laughter.

t.i.ta Thyssen speaks in a husky, international voice, often changing languages from sentence to sentence. She is fun, funny, and flirtatious, with a nature that is best described as vivacious. She is refreshingly outspoken, and makes no bones, for example, about her dislike of her immediate predecessor, the former Denise Shorto of Brazil, whose divorce from the baron was extremely acrimonious, resulting in a settlement rumored to be in the neighborhood of $50 million, in addition to jewels worth $80 million. At one point in the proceedings Denise Thyssen was briefly jailed in Liechtenstein for leaving Switzerland with unpaid bills in excess of $1.5 million, and the baron accused her of failing to return certain jewelry and other items belonging to his family. Ultimately, Denise was allowed to keep all the jewels, on the ground that they were gifts made to her during her marriage, not Thyssen heirlooms. "A gift is a gift," she was quoted as saying. We are talking here about very, very, very rich people. Now in her late forties, Denise Thyssen lives in Rome with Prince Mariano Hugo zu Windisch-Graetz, who is in his mid-thirties, and their liaison is not smiled upon by the Prince's family. She refused to be interviewed for this article with the pointed comment that "Heini's present wife is very publicity-minded. This article belongs to her. I don't see my place in it."

"I believe in destiny," t.i.ta Thyssen said, discussing the Star of Peace. "This stone proves to me that destiny is always there. I first saw it in the rough, before it was cut, in the Geneva office of Harry Winston, before I met Heini. They left me alone with it and let me play with it. They told me they were thinking of doing an adventure with somebody and cutting it. The person involved turned out to be Heini, but I did not know him yet. I talked with the store from time to time, and three times it was almost sold. Then Heini gave it to me."

Among the guests that evening was her friend and jeweler, Fred Horowitz, who used to be with Harry Winston and is now an independent jeweler with offices in Geneva and Monte Carlo. It was through Horowitz that the baroness met Heini Thyssen. She was staying with him and his then wife, Donatella, who is now married to the Mercedes-Benz heir Mick Flick, on their boat in Sardinia. "It was time for me to go back to my house on the Costa Brava, but my friends begged me to stay one more day, and I did," said the baroness. The next day Horowitz took her to a party on Heini Thyssen's yacht. "The look he gave me when we met, now that I know him better, is the look he gets when he sees a painting that he knows he is going to buy. He knew he was going to get it." Then she added, "Only I'm more expensive than a painting, and you don't have to change the frame with me." Her husband listened to her story, amused.

According to one guest on the Thyssen yacht that day, t.i.ta and Heini remained aloof from the party and played backgammon for hours. Also on board was Thyssen's fourth wife, Denise, though their marriage was already in its last stages. Seeing her husband and t.i.ta together for so long, she made a slighting remark of the "upstart" variety about t.i.ta, and with that the two women's mutual dislike began.

"We have never been apart more than a day since we met," t.i.ta said, taking her husband's hand. "We have been married three and a half years now, but we have been together seven. We discuss everything."

Spotting Fred Horowitz, she turned her attention from the National Gallery group to him. "It doesn't hang right," she said about the enormous stone she was wearing. Horowitz had made her the two-row necklace of matched diamonds from which the Star of Peace hung as a pendant: The diamond was too heavy for the necklace and tipped upward. For several minutes she and Horowitz and his new wife, Jasmine, also jewel-laden, discussed in French what was wrong with the diamond necklace. Then realizing that she was neglecting her guests, she turned back to them and said, in a playful, self-deprecating manner, "These are very nice problems to have."

At dinner we sat at five place-carded tables of eight, and she held her table in thrall, all the while chain-smoking cigarettes. The fifth baroness is steeped in the lore of her husband's family and, like him, is an expert storyteller. She told one story about Heini's stepmother, the beautiful Baroness Maud von Thyssen, who during her marriage to Baron Heinrich Thyssen, fell madly in love with twenty-six-year-old Prince Alexis Mdivani, "one of the marrying Mdivani brothers," as they were called. Alexis had just negotiated a lucrative divorce from the American heiress Barbara Hutton. The lovers rendezvoused in a remote village in Spain. After the tryst, Maud had to return to Paris, and the prince drove her to her train at breakneck speed in the Rolls-Royce that Hutton had given him. "There was a terrible crash," the baroness said. "Mdivani was killed. Maud's beautiful face was half-destroyed. Heini's father divorced her." At that point a waiter accidentally dropped a dozen dinner plates on the stone floor, with a crash that brought the room to silence. The baroness looked over, shrugged, and returned to her conversation with the same aplomb that her husband demonstrated at his table across the room. Why let a few broken plates ruin a good party?

A stranger to art before her marriage, the baroness has become deeply involved in her husband's collection, and if she is not as conversant as he on the subject of old masters, she has made herself more conversant than you or I-knowledgeable enough to be the main force behind her husband's selection of Spain, over England, West Germany, the United States, j.a.pan, and France, as the resting place for his treasure. Many people consider the choice odd, since the baron himself has no real connection with Spain and no long-standing friendships there. It is the baroness's dream, however, according to one Spanish t.i.ta watcher, to live in Spain and to be accepted by people who once neglected and even snubbed her.

There are pictures everywhere in the villa. Up a secondary stairway, outside the men's lavatory, hangs an Edvard Munch, and in every corridor is a profusion of pictures, around any one of which the average millionaire might build an entire room. The bar in the family sitting room is a seven-part coromandel screen, broken up to conceal a refrigerator, an icemaker, gla.s.ses, and liquor bottles. Walking through a drawing room that the baron and baroness almost never go into, we pa.s.sed a Bonnard portrait of Misia Sert, and in a formal dining room so infrequently entered that the light switch didn't work-a room too large for intimate groups but not large enough for big groups from museums-hung a pair of Ca.n.a.lettos.

"Would you like to see our bedroom?" the baroness asked her guests.

Is the pope Catholic? Of course we wanted to see the bedroom, which contains three p.i.s.sarros, a Renoir, a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Winslow Homer, a Manet, and more that I don't remember. The pictures in the villa are quite different from the pictures that hang in the galleries of the museum next door-the t.i.tians, the Tintorettos, the Carpaccio, the Goyas, and the El Grecos, which the baron would show the group the next day.

"Do you move these pictures with you to your other houses?" someone asked her.

"No, we have others."

Their bedroom, in contrast to most of the Mongiardino-decorated rooms, is soft and feminine, done in pale colors. It opens into Heini's enormous bathroom, which has a tub the size of a small pool, and into t.i.ta's sitting room, which has an early Gauguin over the daybed and a Corot. Although it was October, the perpetual calendar on a side table still indicated June. The Thyssen-Bornemisza family crest is embossed on the message pad next to every telephone in the villa; the motto reads, "Vertu surpa.s.se richesse"-Virtue surpa.s.ses riches.

The baroness opened the doors of closet after closet full of clothes. "Most of my clothes are still in Marbella," she said. She is dressed mostly by the Paris couturiers Balmain and Scherrer. When her schedule makes it impossible for her to attend the couture showings in Paris, the designers send her videotapes of their collections and she chooses from them.

"What's it like to live this way?" she was asked.

"It took me some time to get used to all this beauty," said the baroness quite modestly. "At first I was in shock."

"How long did it take before you got used to this kind of life?" I asked her.

"About two days," she answered, and burst out laughing at her joke.

Her native language is Spanish, which the baron does not speak well. His native languages are Dutch, Hungarian, and German, which the baroness does not speak well. When they are alone together, they speak sometimes in French and sometimes in English, heavily accented English, his Teutonic-sounding, hers with a very Latin inflection. "But," said the baroness, "if we have been with French friends, we continue in French for a day or so."

Their life is planned months in advance, mostly around art openings, for loans from their collection are constantly traveling from country to country and exhibition to exhibition. In their family sitting room, there are the inevitable silver-framed photographs of them, together or alone, with the Reagans, the Gorbachevs, the pope, and the president and matronly First Lady of Portugal, with whom t.i.ta posed in a miniskirt six inches above the knee. They entertain at lunch. They entertain at dinner. They are forever on the move. The baroness knew as we talked in Lugano that seven weeks from that day she would be giving a party at L'Orangerie in Los Angeles ("Liza Minnelli can't come," she said to her husband. "Betsy Bloomingdale can"), and that the night before they would be dining in Palm Springs with Sir James Hanson, the British financier, and that they would be lunching the day after their party with Niki Bautzer, the widow of the Hollywood show-biz lawyer Greg Bautzer, at the Bistro Garden in Beverly Hills.

The baron is considered a prime kidnapping target. In all the houses there is closed-circuit surveillance with electrically operated doors. And bodyguards. And dogs. The bodyguards are American, part of a security force that handles only three international clients. The bodyguard I became acquainted with was a cross between Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood. He packed two weapons beneath his suit, a pistol in a holster and what appeared to be a sawed-off machine gun tucked into the back of his trousers. He is with the baron all the time. "We never stay anywhere for longer than a week," he told me.

There are people who knew t.i.ta before her marriage to Baron Thyssen who will tell you that she's changed, but, in all fairness, to enter the life she has entered and not change would be difficult for almost anyone. In addition to the Villa Favorita in Lugano, they have a new house on the outskirts of Madrid that rivals in movie-star luxe and size the Aaron Spelling mansion in California, as well as houses in Barcelona and Marbella and a house on the Costa Brava that was hers before they married; a town house on Chester Square in London; a house in St. Moritz and what she called a "small palace-tiny, really," in Paris, which they just purchased from the late Christina Ona.s.sis's last husband; a house in Jamaica; a suite at the Pierre Hotel in New York; and probably more that I did not hear about. Of course, there is a private plane for their constant peregrinations from house to house and art opening to art opening, and somewhere a yacht, which they occasionally use, and there are the servants who travel and the servants who stay put, plus the ever-present security guards.

The people who say that t.i.ta Cervera has changed are the same people who say, with a roll of the eyes, "Have you met Mama yet?" By Mama, they mean Carmen Fernndez de la Guerra, t.i.ta's mother, whom I did not meet. She is, from all reports, not unlike the mother of Robin Givens, a strong and determined woman who plays a major part in her daughter's life. The Cerveras were originally a family of extremely modest means from Valladolid, a small city several hours from Madrid. t.i.ta has always been, and continues to be, a devoted daughter. In the period before she met Thyssen, she was at an extremely low ebb in her life, with a child to support and no money. At her mother's insistence, she went to Sardinia in the hopes of meeting a rich man. That she connected with one of the richest men in the world, and then married him, must have surpa.s.sed even Carmen's wildest dreams. The baron, who was at first amused by his mother-in-law, is said now to want to spend less and less time with her. Although Carmen is headquartered mostly in Barcelona and Marbella, where she is frequently photographed for the Spanish magazines, her influence is such that recently she tried to keep her son-in-law from bringing Alexander, his fourteen-year-old son by Denise, into the Thyssens' house in London for fear that the boy, through his mother, would put an evil spell on the house. In fact, t.i.ta and her mother are both worried about having evil spells put on them, and they have been known to ask Brazilian friends to bring them sandalwood twigs to ward off hexes.

t.i.ta's own son, Borja, born out of wedlock by an unnamed father, was adopted by Baron Thyssen even before their marriage. The child was given the name Bornemisza and baptized with great style in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, with the American billionairess Ann Getty for his G.o.dmother and the Duke de Badajoz, the King of Spain's brother-in-law, for his G.o.dfather. Since his mother's marriage to the baron, he has been given the full last name, Thyssen-Bornemisza. The eight-year-old Borja was nowhere in sight during my visit. The baroness said, "He used to live in Lugano. He is now going to live in Madrid."

The Duke de Badajoz has been the most influential figure in Spain in working with the Thyssens to bring their art collection to his country. Along with the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough and the late automobile tyc.o.o.n Henry Ford, the duke was a witness when the Thyssens were married three and a half years ago at Daylesford, a magnificent English estate that the baron had purchased sixteen years earlier from the late press lord Viscount Rothermere. Although Daylesford was Thyssen's favorite house after the Villa Favorita, the estate has since been sold, for a reputed $16 million. The new baroness felt they spent too little time there to justify keeping such a large establishment, and preferred a house in Madrid, where they would be spending more and more of their time. According to one Spanish lady, t.i.ta is also pushing her husband to sell the Villa Favorita.

The baroness was happily married for eight years to the late Lex Barker, who gained international fame as one of the successors to Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan films. She was Barker's fifth wife, too. "He dropped dead on Fifty-ninth and Lex on his way to lunch at Gino's," the baroness said. "Greg Bautzer phoned me in Geneva with the news." Barker had formerly been married to the fifties film star Lana Turner, and in the last year he has been accused by Turner's daughter, Cheryl Crane, in her memoir, Detour, of having repeatedly abused her s.e.xually when she was ten years old. Crane gained her own measure of international fame several years after the alleged child abuse by stabbing to death her mother's lover, gangster Johnny Stompanato. Baroness Thyssen is fiercely loyal to the memory of her late husband, and she decried Crane's book. "I was so mad at that book," she said. "I was furious. I wanted to sue, but my lawyers told me you cannot sue over someone who's dead. If you're married to a man, you know very well if he likes little girls or not. Women fell down in front of Lex. He liked me. He liked women, not little girls, believe me. That woman is destroying the memory of Lex. I am trying to restore Lex's image."

The baroness is more reticent about discussing her second husband, Espartaco Santoni, a Spanish-Venezuelan movie producer and nightclub owner who now lives in Los Angeles. "We were only married a year," she said. During that marriage she acted in two films, one with Curt Jurgens and Peter Graves and the other with Lee Van Cleef. "In both those films I was killed for being unfaithful," she told me, laughing.

She said that the time she spent acting was the happiest period of her life, but she ended her acting career when that marriage ended. Now she paints, and she feels the same inner satisfaction doing it that she once felt acting. An acquaintance described her paintings to me as "colorful, light, and tropical, the kind you see on guest-room walls." But painting is only an occasional occupation, for her peripatetic life does not allow for a commitment to it. It is what she does in Jamaica. They spend two weeks a year at the house in Jamaica, called Alligator Head, which Baron Thyssen has owned since the fifties. There they relax completely, and the baroness paints. "I always say to my guests, 'If you have any problems, go talk to the butler or the maid, not me. I came here to relax and paint.' "

"That's a Van Gogh behind you," said the baroness.

"An early one," said the baron.

There was also a Van Gogh to the right of me and another one to the left. We were at lunch in the small family dining alcove of the Villa Favorita with the photographer Helmut Newton.

In the center of the table were pink and yellow flowers from the Thyssen-Bornemisza gardens and greenhouse. The flowers are changed for each meal, and arranged by the head gardener of the "six or eight, I can't remember" gardeners on the grounds. Lunch was served by the butler and a footman, both in dark coats and white gloves. The butler, Giorgio Pusiol, is one of the servants who travel. "Don't you think he's chic?" asked the baroness when he left the room. The footman went from place to place shaving white truffles onto the saffron rice that accompanied our os...o...b..co.

The baron and baroness were both most agreeable to all of Helmut Newton's suggestions for photographing them, even when he asked them to change into evening clothes in the middle of the day and pretend lunch was dinner. The baroness began the meal wearing a strand of perfect pearls, the size of large grapes, later changed to her sapphires, both blue and yellow, the baron's latest gift to her, and then to her rubies, and with each set came a different dress from Balmain or Scherrer. "Change of colors, I see," said the baron as he leaned over to examine one necklace.

Suddenly, surprisingly, from out of nowhere, as coffee was being served, the baroness turned to me and said, "Have you ever heard of Franco Rappetti?"

"Yes," I replied. I had heard of Franco Rappetti, but having come to Lugano to discuss the transfer of a great art collection from Switzerland to Spain, I had hardly expected to get into the darkest shadow in the life of the baron, yet here it was, offered up with the demita.s.se by the baron's fifth wife. Anyone who has ever dipped into the Thyssen saga has heard of Franco Rappetti, a tall, blond, handsome Roman who was at one time the baron's European art dealer. He was also-and this is no secret, at least in the social and art worlds in which the Thyssens moved-the lover of Denise, the fourth baroness, during her marriage to the baron. A onetime playboy, compulsive gambler, and drug user, Rappetti has been described to me by a woman who knew him well as a man who shared women with many powerful men. On June 8, 1978, while on a visit to New York, Rappetti, thirty-eight, went out a window at the Meurice, a building on West Fifty-eighth Street favored by artistic Europeans who keep apartments in New York. His mysterious death has fascinated society and the art world ever since.

"Did you hear how he died?" she asked.

"I heard he either jumped or was thrown out the window," I answered.

"Thrown," said the baroness, and then named the person who she believed had had it done. Only days before, a friend of mine had attended a lunch party in London following a memorial service for the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava; there the conversation had also turned to Franco Rappetti, for some reason, and one of the guests had named a well-known figure in the New York art world as the one who threw him out the window. The person the baroness named as having had Rappetti thrown and the person named at the London lunch party as having actually thrown him were not the same.

"He was thrown out the window," the baroness repeated. The baron was sitting with us but read a letter during the exchange. "He was going to have his face changed so he could not be recognized. He wanted to get away from someone."

"His faced changed?"

"Surgery." She named the person Franco Rappetti had wanted to get away from. "He was going to move somewhere and start a new life." She said that Rappetti had been acting in a hyper manner before the defenestration, and had been injected with a tranquilizer to calm him down. It was in that state that he was thrown.

Residents of the building who knew Rappetti disagree violently with the theory that he was pushed or thrown. "He was not murdered," said one emphatically. "He jumped. It's as simple as that. He was depressed. He had money problems."

Franco Rossellini, the Italian film producer and nephew of the great director Roberto Rossellini, lives in apartment 10-J of the building. He said that police came rushing into his apartment before he knew what had happened and asked him if he knew who had jumped out the window and he saw the body, clad only in undershorts and an elaborate gold chain with charms and medals, lying ten floors below on the roof of a Volkswagen bus. "My G.o.d, for a moment I thought it was my butler," he told me. The body had come from the apartment above his, 11-J, where Rappetti had just arrived as a guest. One article written about the case stated that he had arrived "with a small suitcase and some very pure cocaine."

When the police left, Rossellini contacted Diane Von Furstenberg, the dress designer and perfume manufacturer, who was an acquaintance of Denise Thyssen's and who had, coincidentally, spoken with her on the telephone only a short time before. Although Denise Thyssen and Rappetti were in the city at the same time, supposedly neither knew the other was there. Von Furstenberg called the baroness at the Waldorf, realized she had not yet heard about Rappetti's death, put her mother on the telephone in order to keep Denise's line busy, and raced to the Waldorf Towers to break the news before she heard it from the police or news media. "Denise was hysterical," remembered Rossellini. Von Furstenberg then called Heini Thyssen in Europe to tell him what had happened, and contacted Rappetti's sister, who absolutely refused to believe that her brother had jumped. Later, Von Furstenberg accompanied Denise to the city morgue. Since Denise could not bear to go in and see her dead lover, Von Furstenberg identified the body. Only then was she able to relinquish the grieving baroness into the care of closer friends-Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, the daughter of Rita Hayworth; Nona Gordon Summers, then the wife of a London art dealer; and Cleo Goldsmith, the niece of international financier James Goldsmith.

"n.o.body pushed him out," Rossellini a.s.serted. "That is a fact. He was running away all the time. He was paranoid. He thought someone was after him. He was not eating anything anymore. He was afraid someone was trying to poison him."

Just as authoritatively, a woman who knew Rappetti well insists that he was not a suicide. "Oh, no, I don't believe Franco jumped. He was so vain about his looks, he would never have gone out the window in undershorts."

"It would be almost impossible to throw a six-foot-three-inch, well-developed man out the window," said Mariarosa Sclauzero, the person most likely to know the exact circ.u.mstances of the death. Sclauzero, a writer, still lives in Apartment 11-J, along with her husband, Enrico Tucci. They were both close to Rappetti, and Mariarosa was in the apartment at the time of the death, though in a different room. According to Sclauzero and Tucci, Rappetti had arrived in New York two days before and had registered at the Summit Hotel, after stopping to see Tucci at his office, where he told him, "There is no way out. I have n.o.body in the world I can trust anymore, not even my butler." Alerted by Tucci that Rappetti was in a highly excitable state, Sclauzero went to the Summit and brought him back to the apartment. He was indeed carrying a suitcase, but, Sclauzero maintains, it contained no cocaine, just clothes and a picture of his small son.