Chapter 9 #3
“Thank you for the name. I’ll call her back.
” Charlotte hung up and looked at the name she’d jotted down.
Lillith Jones. It was a start. She hoped the rest of the research would be as easy.
It made her think of Ben and her time on the boat with him.
She hoped he was okay. She really missed him.
But it was a pain she knew she had to get used to, until it finally went away.
She knew it would one day, and then he’d just be a memory she could live with, not a dull ache whenever she thought of him, as it still was, and would be for a long time.
The wound where he had been was still raw, like a severed limb.
Researchng John Williams would be a good distraction.
—
On the assumption that the interview would go through, Charlotte didn’t want to waste time, and started her research that afternoon.
If John Williams refused the interview, she could archive the information for future use.
Nothing was ever wasted. With a man like him, of enormous wealth and stature in the community and business world, she was likely to need it again someday.
She started at the New York Post and the Times’s photo archives to see what she could come up with and was surprised by how little she found.
John Williams and his wife were old guard New York society.
Charlotte found them in the Social Register, which gave her the names of John’s wife and daughter.
At the Post, she found photographs of John and Helen at opera and ballet openings, and at some gala charity events.
Charlotte studied the photographs carefully.
A few of the photographs were from the past two years, and she noticed how thin Helen had gotten, obviously ravaged by cancer by then.
John looked much the same from year to year, with a full head of white hair, and Charlotte could see how pretty Helen had been before she got ill.
She had a sweet face and a beautiful smile.
She wore simple, elegant evening gowns, and had a nice figure.
She wore her hair in a bun most of the time.
Charlotte found photographs of Helen and John at equestrian events with their daughter in her riding habit, when Gabrielle was younger.
She looked like her mother. The captions under the photographs took due note that Gabrielle had won first prize.
She was a serious horsewoman, and had won first and second prizes at some well-known, highly regarded equestrian events.
In one of the photographs, Helen was in a riding habit too.
The photographs went all the way back to when their daughter was in her teens, some twenty years earlier.
And Helen got more beautiful as the photos got earlier.
She was really a lovely-looking woman, and she and John had made a handsome couple at all the major New York social events.
Charlotte found a photograph from Gabrielle’s debut eighteen years earlier, which placed her at around thirty-six now.
And she got as far back as John and Helen’s wedding announcement, and a photograph of the wedding party, with fourteen bridesmaids and a maid of honor, and an equal number of ushers all in formal morning coats.
It was actually fun looking at the pictures.
The wedding, their engagement prior to that, and Gabrielle’s debut were all immortalized by the same well-known society photographer.
Helen was from an important New York society family of equally blue-blooded ancestry as John’s.
It had been a distinguished match. Charlotte saw nothing salacious or surprising in the archives, just the evidence of distinguished lives conducted in a respectable manner.
She found Helen’s recent obituary, which made her sad to read.
If one read between the lines, she had led a small and proper life at her husband’s side.
She had graduated from Vassar and done nothing of note after that, other than her place on some predictable charity boards, and her chairmanship of some Red Cross events.
The obit said she was survived by her husband and only daughter, who still bore the family name at the time of her mother’s death.
She wondered if Gabrielle was still single at thirty-five when her mother died.
No husband of Gabrielle’s was mentioned.
There was nothing of note or shocking in the archives, and there were several photographs of an enormous sailboat built in Italy ten years ago at the Perini Navi shipyard, and a photo of the three of them standing in front of the yacht at the launch.
John and Helen were beaming and Gabrielle looked bored and annoyed and wasn’t smiling.
Charlotte made copies of some of the images, and had written down a list of dates, but nothing of interest had emerged.
No divorces, no scandals. She ran a national computer search then, and a criminal check just for the hell of it, which sometimes turned up youthful transgressions or the trail of an alcohol or substance abuse problem, which she thought was unlikely, and came up blank.
What was slightly more interesting was that Gabrielle had gone to Stanford undergraduate and medical school, and was a Colorado resident, living in Aspen, so she wouldn’t be hard to find, if she was willing to be interviewed about her father, if the interview went in a more personal direction.
Charlotte combed various magazines for interviews with John Williams, and there was a certain chill to all of them.
He was a brilliant businessman but gave up very little about his personal life.
Maybe there was nothing much to say. He was an avid sailor and a member of the New York Yacht Club and had a remarkable boat, as Charlotte had seen for herself, and there must have been more to him than he admitted, if he had a woman in her twenties with him as a companion.
But whatever he did in his personal life, he did it well below the radar and was discreet.
There was no gossip about him on Page Six, in the tabloids, or anywhere.
He led an extremely private life. There was no depth or texture to anything she read about him.
You couldn’t get a sense of the man. His giant sailboat was the only visible sign of luxury of an extravagant nature in his life.
He owned a house in Southampton, but there was nothing in the social pages about parties there or important guests.
There was one photograph of John and Helen with a very social couple, Isabelle and Steve Phillips, who had owned an important ad agency, and Charlotte saw that Steve Phillips was deceased and that Isabelle had retired and sold the agency several years ago.
She was a visible social presence in New York, but there were no photographs of her with John after her husband’s death, so there was nothing noteworthy there.
Charlotte was going through her notes when Henry called her two days after their meeting. “He’s in,” he said when she answered her phone.
“John Williams?”
“I spoke to him myself. There is only one condition, and I told him I had to clear it with you. I know you don’t like conditions and you won’t like this one.
He won’t answer questions about his personal life.
Strictly business. I told him we’re not Forbes or Fortune, we’re a social magazine about people and their lifestyles, and we’re not People either, we’re not a tabloid, but it can’t be only about business.
Knowing you, you’ll be able to get some personal stuff from him, but those are the parameters he set. Would you still want to do it?”
“I can probably get what I need from other people,” she said pensively, thinking of what she had so far.
“He’s a big persona, and people have opinions about a man like him.
That may give us enough juice to make it interesting.
Did you have to give him approval of the piece before we run it?
” She hated those and they didn’t give text approval often, because people quibbled with every sentence and they got deadlocked into arguments that sometimes led to pulling the piece completely, which meant all of the work was wasted.
“No. Maybe he forgot to ask for it or didn’t know he could.
He remembered meeting you on Ben Sharpe’s boat and he’s read some of your profiles and liked them, but he was very clear about the ‘No Personal,’ so you’ll have to be delicate about it.
I know you will be. Has anything interesting turned up so far?
” Henry asked, pleased that the article could go forward.
“On the surface, just a very proper, old guard social history. His daughter is a doctor in Aspen, which is a little different. But other than that, it’s all very correct and conservative, married for thirty-seven years to the same woman.
Nothing dicey.” The magazine didn’t look for seamy details or sordid lives, but a little hint of spice brought interviews to life, and their readership didn’t want anything too outrageous.
There was no sign of it with John Williams anyway.
“Nothing dicey except that he was traveling with a woman forty years younger than he is. That’s a sign of something,” Henry said cynically.
“That he’s human maybe? He has to float around with someone on his incredible sailboat,” and Lillith had been the lucky winner.
Under what circumstances Charlotte didn’t know yet, but she intended to try to find out what role Lillith Jones had in John Williams’s life.
“I have the girl’s name, by the way. She probably won’t say much, if she’s involved with him.
He won’t let her. She’ll be too scared to tell us anything of value. ”
“You never know.” Henry was impressed that Charlotte had found her.
“When can I get started?” she asked.
“It sounds like you already have,” he said with a laugh.