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  Not for the first time, Laurie marveled at her mother. Pete always insisted that a willingness to accept a lifetime of abuse from Duke was more of a weakness than a strength, but Laurie was in awe of Minnie’s unshakable calm in the face of just about any storm. She thought of her mother as some sort of tragic heroine, her unbreakable spirit emerging triumphant through all the batterings that fate and life could throw at her. If only she, Laurie, had inherited some of that spirit, that strength, then perhaps her own life wouldn’t be such an unholy mess.

  “So,” Minnie smiled bravely, anxious to end this emotional interview with her daughter, “why don’t we start sorting out those flowers for tonight? We want everything to look perfect for Daddy, don’t we?”

  To everyone who knew them, Duke and Minnie McMahon’s marriage was a perpetual mystery.

  When they’d first met, back in the late thirties, Minnie was the shy and incredibly beautiful teenage daughter of Pete Miller, the last in a long line of wealthy Connecticut landowners, and his wife, Marilyn, a respected society hostess. Duke, who’d been brought by a casual girlfriend to one of Marilyn Miller’s charity events, was a recognized young actor, still somewhere between up-and-coming and a major studio star, and already had something of a reputation as a gambler and a womanizer who liked to party hard.

  His attraction to the young Minnie Miller was instant and uncomplicated. Standing in the corner of the room, hiding awkwardly in the shadows behind her nerdy elder brother, Austin, she seemed to represent everything that had been denied him in his own early life: beauty, fragility, innocence, wealth, and breeding. She looked untouched and untouchable, exactly the sort of virgin Protestant princess whom polite society considered completely out of bounds for a dissolute Irish Catholic boy such as himself.

  He had asked her to dance that night, much to his companion’s chagrin, and Minnie had declined, blushing furiously and insisting she didn’t know how to, clinging on to her brother’s hand for dear life. Duke was charmed. He didn’t know that such naive girls still existed within a hundred-mile radius of Manhattan. Certainly, he had never met one before. He decided there and then that he had to have Minnie Miller, and for the next nine months he set about the arduous task of seducing her.

  For Minnie’s part, she had worshipped Duke from the moment she laid eyes on him. Not only was he breathtakingly good-looking, with his hair the same shiny blue-black as a raven’s, his firm, jutting jaw, and his wonderful, deep, lyrical voice with its lingering hint of Irish brogue. But there was also something dangerous about him, something adult, masculine, and forbidden that set him apart from all of her brother’s preppy Harvard classmates, or the boys she was introduced to at her mother’s carefully chaperoned society dances.

  Both the strength and nature of her feelings for him frightened the young Minnie. For her to be courted openly by Duke, a Catholic with no good family and what her mother referred to with shuddering disdain as “a reputation,” was quite inconceivable. On the other hand a secret romance was, in Minnie’s eyes, a step of such seriousness and gravity that for months she could barely sleep for thinking about it, tortured in equal part by her passionate love and desire for Duke, and by her desperate all-consuming guilt.

  Eventually, as is always the way, love and passion beat guilt hands down. She was still only eighteen when Duke took her virginity, in one of the old boathouses by the lake at her parents’ summer house in Maine. For Duke, who was used to the more practiced efforts of worldly Hollywood girls, the sex was, technically speaking, dreadful. She had lain rigid and shaking beneath him, her eyes wide open with terror, like a rabbit about to be shot. Afterward she had sobbed and sobbed in his arms until his shirt was soaked through.

  But his sense of triumph and elation, not just of breaking down her defenses sexually, but of winning the heart of something so rare and perfect and precious, more than outweighed the disappointment of the event itself. There was something about Minnie that made him want to be a better man, the man she deserved. No one was more surprised than Duke to discover that he had, for the first time in his life, fallen in love.

  They were married three months later in a little Catholic church off Broadway. An ashen-faced Pete Miller had led his daughter down the aisle. For Minnie to be marrying a scoundrel like McMahon was bad enough, but a Catholic wedding! His poor father and grandfather would both be turning in their graves.

  For Duke, the day was one of unadulterated elation, and he couldn’t understand it when, driving his new wife home from their rather subdued reception at the Millers’ Manhattan town house, she had burst into tears.

  “What on earth’s the matter?” he’d asked her, handing her his handkerchief with a look of bewilderment and dismay. “Don’t tell me you’re regretting it already?”

  “Oh Duke, no,” she insisted between sobs, “of course I’m not. It’s not that. It’s just that tomorrow we’re going to be leaving for California. I’ve never been away from Mommy and Daddy before, not for more than a week anyway, and I’m gonna miss them so much. Oh, and Austin!”

  At the thought of her brother, she began wailing again. Duke fought down his feelings of annoyance. What the hell did she see in that chinless, judgmental, preppy little son of a bitch anyway?

  “Come on now,” he said, reaching over and patting her thigh sympathetically. “It’s not like I’m taking you to Europe or something. Your parents can come visit. I bet you we see them all the time.”

  Minnie shook her head sadly. “I’m not so sure,” she said. “You know how much they disapproved of us getting married. What if they never forgive me?”

  “Sure they will,” said Duke. Although privately he wished his wife didn’t already think of their marriage as some sort of sin to be forgiven.

  The first year of the marriage was a happy one. Duke had bought them a large house in North Hollywood, back when L.A. property was still dirt cheap, and Minnie delighted in decorating it and playing house while her new husband was on-set. His career was going from strength to strength, and in 1941 he landed his first leading role, in a farcical comedy called Checkmate. The rift with her family remained strong, and she saw her parents only once in that first year, spending an agonizingly awkward long weekend with them at the newly developed resort of Palm Springs. But life with Duke was so blissful, and Minnie was so caught up with establishing herself as a hostess among his new and exciting Hollywood crowd, that she found herself feeling less and less homesick, and less and less guilty, by the day.

  Then came the war. And as for so many young couples, overnight it seemed, everything changed.

  Duke was sent to Asia, where he was to spend the next three and a half years. He was, as he liked to tell people later, one of the lucky ones. He came home. But the home, and the woman he came home to, had changed out of all recognition.

  For the first six months after he was conscripted, Minnie remained in Hollywood, trying to make a life for herself among the other army wives there. But loneliness soon overcame her and, encouraged by her mother and brother, she decided to return home to Connecticut. She missed Duke terribly and wrote to him religiously twice a week. But she also found herself naturally slipping back into the old rhythms of life at home. Soon she was going riding with her father and out to lunches in Manhattan with her mother, just like the old days, and her married life back in California began to feel more and more like a distant dream.

  Duke would come home on leave and stay with the Millers. His father-in-law was civil—now that he had seen active service, Duke had apparently become a smidgen more acceptable in the old man’s eyes—but still always treated him with a patronizing sense of social superiority that Duke bitterly resented.

  When he complained to Minnie about it, she dismissed his concern. He was imagining slights and insults where there were none.

  Duke wanted her to move back to L.A., but the mere suggestion made her almost hysterical.

  “What’s the point of me being there when you’re away?” she asked. “I’m
isolated and I’m lonely, whereas here I have friends and family to support me. Things are so much better now with Mom and Dad. Please, please don’t ruin it all again.”

  He couldn’t really argue with her. Still, he returned to the front with a gnawing sense that he was somehow losing her. That she was no longer completely on his side.

  After the war, they did move back home, and for a while life got back to something approaching normal. Duke went back to work at the studio, and Minnie almost immediately fell pregnant with Peter. The cracks, however, did not take long to start appearing.

  Minnie’s parents’ snobbery and East Coast prejudices seemed to have oozed into her personality in the last three years by osmosis. Whereas before she had been quite happy to have friends over for an impromptu kitchen supper in the evenings, she now insisted on full silver-service dinners every time they entertained, which Duke found pretentious and unnecessary. Worse, she began to show signs of embarrassment at his own social behavior, reprimanding him in public for excessive drinking, and even on one occasion correcting his grammar in front of the whole crew on-set.

  “It’s ‘I should have,’ darling, not ‘I should of,’” she’d piped up brightly, overhearing him rehearsing some lines.

  Duke was furious.

  “Yeah? Well, maybe you should have stayed at home and minded your own fuckin’ business, Min,” he snapped.

  The worst of it was that Minnie herself couldn’t perceive any of the changes Duke accused her of. In her own mind, she was the same as she had always been, and she still loved her husband desperately.

  “Of course I’m on your side, darling,” she’d protest tearfully. “I love you so much, Duke. You must know that.”

  But increasingly, he wasn’t sure if he did know it. With her love and approval, he truly believed he could be a good man, a good husband and father. Without it, there was nothing to stop him from going back to his old ways.

  He began an affair with one of his costars. It spluttered on for a few months, after which, miserable and guilty, he came home one night and confessed to a distraught Minnie.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I didn’t know what to do. I feel like I’m not good enough for you anymore.”

  “Oh, Duke, that’s nonsense! How can you say that?” she cried.

  Even in her despair, she seemed to be dismissing him.

  “Well why won’t you sleep with me then? For Christ’s sake, Minnie, it’s been months and every time I come near you you push me away! You make me feel like some sort of fucking disease.”

  “I’ve told you!” she shouted at him. “It’s because of the baby. I’m just scared, Duke, I want our baby so much, I don’t want anything to go wrong.”

  “And nothing will,” he said, pulling her to him and holding on to her tightly. What the hell was he doing, cheating on her? God knew he loved her, so much it scared the wits out of him.

  That night they had made love, but it was a disaster. Duke, desperate for her love and forgiveness, had tried everything he knew to please her. But she was so terrified of losing the baby, she remained rigid with tension throughout, suffering his attentions as a mother must tolerate the needy suckling of her child. The woman who had once filled him with such confidence and made him feel like such a strong, powerful man now made him feel useless, rejected, and alone.

  Things went from bad to worse. The baby was born, and instantly little Peter became the center of his mother’s world, leaving Duke feeling even more excluded. He began another affair, then another, each time hoping to shock Minnie into realizing that he needed her.

  She loved him, and was deeply hurt by his infidelities. But as the affairs became more and more frequent, she eventually stopped believing that she had any power to stop them. Duke was rapidly becoming a huge star, with some of the world’s most beautiful women throwing themselves at his feet. Obviously, Minnie thought, he no longer loved her. She learned to take comfort and joy in her children instead of her marriage, and she cloaked herself defensively in the stoic, reserved conservatism of her upbringing. Slowly but surely, she and Duke grew ever further and more irreparably apart.

  And yet, to the surprise of all who knew them, they never did divorce. In fact, they never even discussed the possibility. Some said it was Duke’s almost superstitiously strong Catholicism that held the marriage together. Others saw Minnie as a masochist who would put up with just about anything for her children’s sake and to avoid a society scandal.

  The truth, in fact, was much simpler. Somewhere, buried very deep in both their hearts, beneath the hatred, the bitterness, and all the many betrayals—a tiny fragment of love survived.

  CHAPTER TWO

  From Duke’s perspective, Caroline’s arrival was a huge success.

  By eight o’clock the house was looking immaculate. Enormous vases of pink and white lilies jostled for position on the delicate Louis XV walnut tables littering the hacienda’s enormous marble entrance hall. Real log fires crackled in the dining room and drawing room (or “den” as Duke embarrassingly insisted on calling it, despite its palatial proportions), and a festive smell of pine mingled with the sweet, heady scent of the flowers. Two assistants had been hired to help Conchita, the McMahons’ cook, ensure that the lobster bisque, monkfish casserole, and lemon syllabub were cooked to perfection, much to that formidable Mexican matron’s fury. Minnie hated to upset Conchita, but it was imperative that tonight’s meal was beyond reproach.

  Pete McMahon arrived home from work at six. Although more physically attractive than his younger sister, Pete was no heartthrob and, like Laurie, bore very little resemblance to either of his parents. To begin with, he was ginger-haired, although with age his coloring had mercifully faded from the carroty orange of his childhood to a nondescript sandy color, prematurely flecked with gray. He had his mother’s pale complexion, but while Minnie’s skin was luminous and pure, Pete looked permanently pasty and ill and had a tendency toward excessive sweating. He was well built, despite being short and physically lazy, and there was a certain bulldog strength about him that some women found attractive. Nevertheless, he generally made the worst of his looks, such as they were, thanks to a tragic penchant for ill-fitting suits as well as the scowl of resentment that hung almost permanently over his otherwise regular features.

  Today he was looking even more bad-tempered than usual. What a shitty, shitty day it had been. His long-anticipated meeting with the producer Mort Hanssen had turned out to be a complete waste of time. Pete aspired to produce himself, and had had a couple of vanity credits on some half-decent low-budget pictures. But Mort, like everybody else in Hollywood, clearly still viewed him as Duke McMahon’s kid. The fact that at the age of thirty he still lived under his father’s roof obviously did nothing to improve his credibility. Man, he really had to do something about that, take the bull by the horns.

  He and Claire, his quiet, shy new wife, remained largely financially dependent on Duke, living in a suite of rooms in the south wing of the main house. Although he had never shown even the most glancing interest in either of his two children, Duke was insistent that his entire extended family should remain living at Hancock Park. Having grown up the youngest of seven children in a vast Irish tribe, sleeping two or three to a bed, Duke liked big families. He also had a nearly pathological fear of being alone.

  For Pete, living on the estate was like fucking torture. No privacy. No escape. After the day he’d had today, the last thing he needed was to play welcoming committee for some bimbo of his father’s.

  Walking into the drawing room, he watched Minnie as she darted from kitchen to drawing room, tasting the soup or plumping up the already perfect overstuffed cushions. His heart lurched for her. He felt a sickening combination of love, sympathy, and an agonizing, impotent rage. Somehow his mother had made it a matter of pride to have the house looking wonderful for that little bitch. As if the fucking priest were coming over for Thanksgiving or something. Jesus. Why couldn’t she just once, just once stand u
p to him?

  But Pete knew, probably better than anybody, that it wasn’t that easy to stand up to Duke. As a small boy, he had watched helplessly as his father systematically destroyed his mother’s happiness. It wasn’t just the other women. In fact, sexual infidelity, Pete reflected, was probably one of the least of his father’s crimes. Lust, after all, is instinctive. Whereas vindictiveness, decades of consistent casual cruelty, of emotional torture—now that was something you had to work at.

  And boy, Duke had really worked at it. Jealous of Minnie’s better breeding, her East Coast education, and her innate good taste, he had brutally asserted his authority through a combination of economic control—Minnie never had her own bank account, nor did she spend a cent without first having to beg her husband’s permission—and sheer force of personality.

  It didn’t help that for all Pete’s life, his father had been a megastar. A matinee idol in the thirties and forties, he had invested his earnings wisely and grown to become a respected Hollywood powerbroker. People fawned over Duke. People who didn’t even know him were mesmerized by him. Men fantasized about being him, women about screwing him. But none of them knew the real Duke McMahon—the vicious husband, the cold, autocratic father. Pete knew him, and for as long as he could remember, he had hated him.

  But never more so, he thought, than today. Initially, he had refused to attend the dinner, telling his father rather pompously, but with an uncharacteristic display of nerve, that he and Claire would never break bread with his latest whore. In the end it was Minnie who persuaded him to change his mind. She needed him there when Caroline arrived, needed his and Claire’s moral support. Reluctantly, he had given in.

  By eight-fifteen, Pete was sitting, stony-faced, in front of the drawing room fire, angrily shrugging off his wife’s feeble attempts to comfort him. His sister, Laurie, still looking tear-stained and lumpen in an utterly unsuitable, over-the-top gold lamé evening dress, was pacing the room anxiously, a habit that failed to improve Pete’s foul temper. Why did she always have to look such a fright?