Lady Ina observed: “You can see those girls have swung a few big deals in their time. I know many people can’t abide either of them, usually women, and I can understand that, because they don’t like women and almost never have anything good to say about any woman. But they’re perfect with men, a pair of Western geisha girls; they know how to keep a man’s secrets and how to make him feel important. If I were a man, I’d fall for Lee myself. She’s marvelously made, like a Tanagra figurine; she’s feminine without being effeminate; and she’s one of the few people I’ve known who can be both candid and cozy—ordinarily one cancels the other. Jackie—no, not on the same planet. Very photogenic, of course; but the effect is a little … unrefined, exaggerated.”
I thought of an evening when I’d gone with Kate McCloud and a gang to a drag-queen contest held in a Harlem ballroom: hundreds of young queens sashaying in hand-sewn gowns to the funky honking of saxophones: Brooklyn supermarket clerks, Wall Street runners, black dishwashers, and Puerto Rican waiters adrift in silk and fantasy, chorus boys and bank cashiers and Irish elevator boys got up as Marilyn Monroe, as Audrey Hepburn, as Jackie Kennedy. Indeed, Mrs. Kennedy was the most popular inspiration; a dozen boys, the winner among them, wore her high-rise hairdo, winged eyebrows, sulky, palely painted mouth.
And, in life, that is how she struck me—not as a bona fide woman, but as an artful female impersonator impersonating Mrs. Kennedy.
I explained what I was thinking to Ina, and she said: “That’s what I meant by … exaggerated.” Then: “Did you ever know Rosita Winston? Nice woman. Half Cherokee, I believe. She had a stroke some years ago, and now she can’t speak. Or, rather, she can say just one word. That very often happens after a stroke, one’s left with one word out of all the words one has known. Rosita’s word is ‘beautiful.’ Very appropriate, since Rosita has always loved beautiful things. What reminded me of it was old Joe Kennedy. He, too, has been left with one word. And his word is: ‘Goddammit!’ ” Ina motioned the waiter to pour champagne. “Have I ever told you about the time he assaulted me? When I was eighteen and a guest in his house, a friend of his daughter Kek …”
Again, my eye coasted the length of the room, catching, en passant, a bluebearded Seventh Avenue brassiere hustler trying to con a closet-queen editor from The New York Times; and Diana Vreeland, the pomaded, peacock-iridescent editor of Vogue, sharing a table with an elderly man who suggested a precious object of discreet extravagance, perhaps a fine grey pearl—Mainbocher; and Mrs. William S. Paley lunching with her sister, Mrs. John Hay Whitney.
Seated near them was a pair unknown to me: a woman forty, forty-five, no beauty but very handsomely set up inside a brown Balenciaga suit with a brooch composed of cinnamon-colored diamonds fixed to the lapel. Her companion was much younger, twenty, twenty-two, a hearty sun-browned statue who looked as if he might have spent the summer sailing alone across the Atlantic. Her son? But no, because … he lit a cigarette and passed it to her and their fingers touched significantly; then they were holding hands.
“… the old bugger slipped into my bedroom. It was about six o’clock in the morning, the ideal hour if you want to catch someone really slugged out, really by complete surprise, and when I woke up he was already between the sheets with one hand over my mouth and the other all over the place. The sheer ballsy gall of it—right there in his own house with the whole family sleeping all around us. But all those Kennedy men are the same; they’re like dogs, they have to pee on every fire hydrant. Still, you had to give the old guy credit, and when he saw I wasn’t going to scream he was so grateful …”
But they were not conversing, the older woman and the young seafarer; they held hands, and then he smiled and presently she smiled, too.
“Afterward—can you imagine?—he pretended nothing had happened, there was never a wink or a nod, just the good old daddy of my schoolgirl chum. It was uncanny and rather cruel; after all, he’d had me and I’d even pretended to enjoy it: there should have been some sentimental acknowledgment, a bauble, a cigarette box …” She sensed my other interest, and her eyes strayed to the improbable lovers. She said: “Do you know that story?”
“No,” I said. “But I can see there has to be one.”
“Though it’s not what you think. Uncle Willie could have made something divine out of it. So could Henry James—better than Uncle Willie, because Uncle Willie would have cheated, and for the sake of a movie sale, would have made Delphine and Bobby lovers.”
Delphine Austin from Detroit; I’d read about her in the columns—an heiress married to a marbleized pillar of New York clubman society. Bobby, her companion, was Jewish, the son of hotel magnate S. L. L. Semenenko and first husband of a weird young movie cutie who had divorced him to marry his father (and whom the father had divorced when he caught her in flagrante with a German shepherd … dog. I’m not kidding).
According to Lady Ina, Delphine Austin and Bobby Semenenko had been inseparable the past year or so, lunching every day at Côte Basque and Lutèce and L’Aiglon, traveling in winter to Gstaad and Lyford Cay, skiing, swimming, spreading themselves with utmost vigor considering the bond was not June-and-January frivolities but really the basis for a double-bill, double-barreled, three-handkerchief variation on an old Bette Davis weeper like Dark Victory: they both were dying of leukemia.
“I mean, a worldly woman and a beautiful young man who travel together with death as their common lover and companion.
Don’t you think Henry James could have done something with that? Or Uncle Willie?”
“No. It’s too corny for James, and not corny enough for Maugham.”
“Well, you must admit, Mrs. Hopkins would make a fine tale.”
“Who?” I said.
“Standing there,” Ina Coolbirth said.
THAT MRS. HOPKINS. A REDHEAD dressed in black; black hat with a veil trim, a black Mainbocher suit, black crocodile purse, crocodile shoes. M. Soulé had an ear cocked as she stood whispering to him; and suddenly everyone was whispering. Mrs. Kennedy and her sister had elicited not a murmur, nor had the entrances of Lauren Bacall and Katharine Cornell and Clare Boothe Luce. However, Mrs. Hopkins was une autre chose: a sensation to unsettle the suavest Côte Basque client. There was nothing surreptitious in the attention allotted her as she moved with head bowed toward a table where an escort already awaited her—a Catholic priest, one of those highbrow, malnutritional, Father D’Arcy clerics who always seems most at home when absent from the cloisters and while consorting with the very grand and very rich in a wine-and-roses stratosphere.
“Only,” said Lady Ina, “Ann Hopkins would think of that. To advertise your search for spiritual ‘advice’ in the most public possible manner. Once a tramp, always a tramp.”
“You don’t think it was an accident?” I said.
“Come out of the trenches, boy. The war’s over. Of course it wasn’t an accident. She killed David with malice aforethought. She’s a murderess. The police know that.”
“Then how did she get away with it?”
“Because the family wanted her to. David’s family. And, as it happened in Newport, old Mrs. Hopkins had the power to prevail. Have you ever met David’s mother? Hilda Hopkins?”
“I saw her once last summer in Southampton. She was buying a pair of tennis shoes. I wondered what a woman her age, she must be eighty, wanted with tennis shoes. She looked like … some very old goddess.”
“She is. That’s why Ann Hopkins got away with cold-blooded murder. Her mother-in-law is a Rhode Island goddess. And a saint.”
Ann Hopkins had lifted her veil and was now whispering to the priest, who, servilely entranced, was brushing a Gibson against his starved blue lips.
“But it could have been an accident. If one goes by the papers. As I remember, they’d just come home from a dinner party in Watch Hill and gone to bed in separate rooms. Weren’t there supposed to have been a recent series of burglaries thereabouts?—and she kept a shotgun by her bed, and suddenly in the dark her bedroom door opened and she grabbed the shotgun and shot at what she thought was a prowler. Only it was her husband. David Hopkins. With a hole through his head.”
“That’s what she said. That’s what her lawyer said. That’s what the police said. And that’s what the papers said … even the Times. But that isn’t what happened.” And Ina, inhaling like a skin diver, began: “Once upon a time a jazzy little carrot-top killer rolled into town from Wheeling or Logan—somewhere in West Virginia. She was eighteen, she’d been brought up in some country-slum way, and she had already been married and divorced; or she said she’d been married a month or two to a marine and divorced him when he disappeared (keep
