Great Big Beautiful Life(49)

“Gambling, mostly,” she says. “His…idiosyncrasies were more about what he’d bet with.”

This, I’ve read about. “Physical labor instead of money, right?”

Her chin dips, her mouth tight with distaste. “Money was of so little consequence to him that I guess losing or winning it didn’t provide much of a thrill. He preferred to play with humiliation on the line. He once had the third-wealthiest man in San Francisco mucking out his sister Francine’s overly bloated stables for a week. And he found himself on the other end of those situations plenty too.”

“How did your father get people to agree to these kinds of terms?” I ask.

“Honey, you haven’t been around many exorbitantly wealthy people, have you?” she says.

“I’ve interviewed a lot of actors and singers,” I disagree.

“That’s different,” she says. “That’s fast money. Money a person finds. The people who are born with it, they’re different.”

“You were born with it,” I point out.

“That’s how I know!” she says. “Remember, I was married to Cosmo Sinclair. I knew someone like your usual interview subject. Cosmo’s family had nothing. He never got used to the money or the attention. He was afraid that either he’d burn through the former, or the latter would burn through him. More like Lawrence.” Another one of her sad smiles, the kind that still makes her eyes seem flinty. “Cosmo missed it, the life he couldn’t go back to. All the time. But I couldn’t miss it, because I could barely imagine it.”

Hearing her talk about him makes me feel like there’s a hook in my heart, and I’m eager to be reeled in, to hear more about their love and their life together.

“I was a news story the moment I was born,” she goes on. “From before my first breath, there were two distinct Margaret Iveses. There was me, and then there was the other one, the one who belonged to the public. Who got written about. Who people loved at times and hated at others, and no matter where I stood with the public, I understood that it wasn’t really me.

“It was just a character the press made up. For Cosmo, he was splintered. His fame came on hard and fast, and once he got tangled up with me, it only got worse.

“Every bad thing that every perfect stranger said about him mattered. Because he wasn’t used to discounting it. He was used to people’s opinions of him having been formed by…well, him. His actions and intentions, their personal experience with him.

“It was killing him long before the accident.” She peers across the marsh, losing herself in the haze of memory.

I want to reach out and touch her hand, comfort her, be a friend to her. But I’m not, not yet. And I can’t be one more person projecting my knowledge of the iconic Tabloid Princess into belief that I actually truly know her.

So instead I let her sit, take her time, hoping she knows it belongs to her. That I don’t consider it mine, just because of who she is.

She blinks, facing me again. “Anyway, it wasn’t hard for my father to talk men of absurd wealth into absurd bets. He enjoyed his ridiculous life in San Francisco, and his sister, Francine, did too, right up until the moment Gerald sent for them. Neither had any interest in joining their father in Los Angeles, but not a single penny they’d been spending was truly theirs, so in the end, they had no choice.

“At first, my father and my aunt Francine tried to resume their previous lifestyles, but Gerald was down to business then. He decided it was time for his kids to get serious too, or risk being cut off. He wanted Francine to get married and my father to learn the family business.

“The irony was, Aunt Francine had decided she didn’t ever want to get married. She felt so strongly about it that she decided her best bet was to try to earn a place in the family business instead. Whereas the only thing my father felt strongly about was doing as little work as humanly possible.

“Dad thought he could skate by if he started working at the film studio, so Gerald set him up there, and Francine took over a failing ladies’ magazine. There had been women journalists there for years, but she was the first female coeditor in chief, then editor in chief when the coeditor quit. Years later, she told me she knew in her heart that when her father gave her that journal, the point was to scare her into marriage. Instead she worked hard to learn the business, and she turned it around. She had something my father lacked.”

I ask, “And what was that?”

“Desperation,” she says. “My father didn’t find his until later.”





The Story


Their version: Frederick Ives was a jealous man.



* * *



? ? ?

Her version: Frederick Ives was a jealous man.

As a boy, he was jealous of his schoolmates. Of their grades, of their success in sports. Of their teachers’ affection for them, and sometimes even of the ire they could inspire.

At home, he was jealous every time his sister, Francine, took the seat at the head of the dinner table, and when he started arriving early so he could have it, he was jealous of how casually late she’d stroll in, still covered in mud from the stables, how unbothered she seemed by their mother’s disapproval.

When he was twenty, a girl who’d spent weeks batting her eyelashes at him got engaged to another man, and though he had no intention of marrying her, he was jealous then too.