Silent Partner

22

I spent the rest of the day getting a master’s degree in Leland Belding, starting where I’d left off- the demise of the Senate hearings.

Immediately following his reprimand, the billionaire threw himself into the movie business, renaming his studio Magnafilm, scripting, directing, and producing a string of combat sagas featuring rugged individualist heroes who bucked the establishment and emerged victorious. All were panned by the critics as mechanical and bland. Audiences stayed away.

In 1949 he purchased a Hollywood trade paper, fired the film critic, and installed his own yes man. Bought a string of movie houses and filled them with his product. More losses. In 1950 he went into deeper seclusion than ever and I found only one reference covering the next two years: Magna’s patent application for an aluminum-reinforced girdle that suppressed bulges but heightened jiggle. The device, developed for an actress with a tendency to corpulence, was marketed as the Magna-Corsair. American women didn’t go for it.

In late 1952 he emerged, suddenly a new man- a public Leland Belding, attending premieres and parties, squiring starlets to Ciro’s, Trocadero, the Mocambo. Producing a new string of films- vapid comedies heavy with double entendre.

He moved from his “monastic” apartment at Magna headquarters to an estate in Bel Air. Built himself the world’s most powerful private jet, upholstered in leopard skin and paneled with antique walnut stripped from a centuries-old French chateau that he reduced to rubble.

He bought Old Masters by the truckload, outbid the Vatican for religious treasures plundered from Palestine. Snapped up race horses, jockeys, trainers, an entire racecourse. A baseball team. An entire passenger train which he converted to a moving party pad. He acquired a fleet of custom-made cars: Duesies, Cords, Packards, and Rolls-Royces. The world’s three largest diamonds, auction houses full of antique furniture, more casinos in Vegas and Reno, an assortment of domiciles stretching from California to New York.

For the first time in his life he began contributing to charity- hugely, ostentatiously. Endowing hospitals and scientific research institutions, on condition that they be named after him and staffed by him. He threw lavish balls supporting the opera, the ballet, the symphony.

All the while, he was assembling a harem: actresses, heiresses, ballerinas, beauty queens. The most eligible bachelor had finally come into his own.

On the surface, a radical personality shift. But a Vogue writer, reporting on a bash Belding threw for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, described the billionaire as “standing on the sidelines, unsmiling and fidgety, observing the festivities rather than participating in them. He looked, to these admittedly cynical eyes, like a little lost boy locked in a room full of candy- so much candy that he’s lost his appetite for sweets.”

Given all the partying, I expected to find something about William Houck Vidal. But there was nothing, not even a snapshot, to suggest that the former “management consultant” had participated in the metamorphosis of his boss. The sole mention of Vidal during the early fifties was a quote in a business journal regarding early development of a new fighter bomber. A quote attributed to “W. Houck Vidal, Senior Vice-President and Head of Operations for Magna.”

One man going from businessman to playboy. The other reversing the process. It was as if Belding and Vidal were perched on a psychic teeter-totter.

Switching identities.

Then, in early ’55, all of it stopped.

Belding canceled a gala for the Cancer Society, dropped completely from sight. Then commenced what one magazine called “the greatest rummage sale in history.” The mansions, cars, jewels, and other trappings of princely consumption were sold- at great profit. Even the movie studio- nicknamed Magnaflop- earned millions in real estate appreciation.

The press wondered what Belding’s new “phase” would be. But there was none, and when it became clear that the disappearing act was permanent, coverage grew progressively sketchier until, by the mid-sixties, neither Belding nor Magna was mentioned other than in financial and technical journals.

The sixties: Oswald. Ruby. Hoffman and Rubin. Stokely and Rap. No shortage of actors willing to strip for the camera. No one cared about a rich hermit who’d once made bad movies.

In 1969, Leland Belding’s death was reported “somewhere in California, following a prolonged illness.” In accordance with the bachelor billionaire’s will, a group of former Magna executives assumed leadership of Magna, with the chairman of the board position going to William Houck Vidal.

And that was it. Until 1972, when a former reporter and hack ghostwriter named Seaman Cross produced a book claiming to be the unauthorized biography of Leland Belding. According to Cross, the billionaire had faked his death in order to achieve “true peace.” Now, having meditated in solitude for seventeen years, he’d decided he had something to say to the world and had chosen Cross as his Pepys, granting hundreds of hours of interviews for a proposed book before abruptly changing his mind and calling off the project.

Cross went ahead and completed the book anyway, titling it The Basket-Case Billionaire and obtaining a “strong six-figure advance.” During its very brief life, it had caused a furor.

Not my kind of stuff. I hadn’t paid much attention to it at the time. But I ate it up now, didn’t put it down until I finished.

Cross’s thesis was that a personal tragedy during the early fifties- a tragedy Belding refused to discuss but which Cross guessed was romantic- had plunged the young billionaire into a manic playboy phase, followed by serious mental collapse and several years of convalescence in a private mental hospital. The man who emerged was “a phobic, paranoid, self-obsessed devotee of a bizarre personal philosophy combining Eastern religion, militant vegetarianism, and Ayn Randish individualism taken to the extreme.”

Cross claimed numerous visits to Belding’s home, a hermetically sealed geodesic dome, somewhere out in the desert, which the billionaire never left. The mode of transport was dramatic: Cross was driven, always blindfolded, always in the middle of the night, to a heliport less than an hour out of L.A.- the implication was El Segundo- then flown to the dome for about two hours and whisked home before dawn.

The dome was described as equipped with a computerized communications panel by which Belding could monitor his international business interests, regulate air and water purification systems (developed by the Magna Corporation for NASA), automatic vacuuming and ambient chemical disinfection, and a convoluted network of pipes, valves, tubes, and chutes through which mail, messages, sterile food and drink entered and waste material exited.

No one but Belding was allowed inside the dome; no photos or sketches were permitted. Cross had been forced to conduct his interviews from a booth on wheels, positioned so that it abutted a speaker panel on the dome.

“We communicated,” he wrote, “by a two-way microphone system that Belding controlled. When he wanted me to see him, he afforded me a view through a clear plastic window- a panel that he could blacken with the touch of a button. He used this blackout panel, not infrequently, to punish me for asking the wrong question. He would withhold his attention until I apologized and promised to be good.”

Bizarre as that was, the strangest part of the story was Cross’s description of Belding:

Emaciated to near-Auschwitzian dimensions, full-bearded, with long, matted gray hair reaching halfway down his back, tangles of crystal necklaces hanging from his wattled neck, and huge crystal rings on every finger. The nails of those fingers were polished a glossy black, sharpened into points, and appeared nearly two inches long. The color of his skin was an eerie greenish-white. His eyes, behind thick rose-tinted lenses, bulged exophthalmically and never ceased to move, darting from side to side and blinking like those of a toad hunting flies.

But it was his voice that I found most unsettling- flat, mechanical, completely stripped of emotion. A voice devoid of humanity. Even now I shiver when I think of it.

Cross’s posture throughout the book was one of morbid fascination. He couldn’t conceal his antipathy toward the billionaire, but neither could he tear himself away.

At regular intervals [he wrote] Belding would interrupt our sessions to nibble on raw vegetables, drink copious amounts of sterilized water, then squat to urinate and defecate, in full view of this writer, into a brass pot that he kept atop an altarlike platform. Once the pot had sat on the altar for precisely fifteen minutes, he’d remove it and expel it through an evacuation chute. During the process of excretion, a self-satisfied, near-religious expression would settle upon his gaunt, raptorish features, and though he refused to discuss this ritual, my reflexive impression was: self-worship, the logical culmination of a lifetime of unbridled narcissism and power.

The latter half of the book was fairly dull stuff: Cross pontificating about the weakness of a society that could create a monster like Belding, transcripts of Belding’s ramblings on the meaning of life- a barely intelligible amalgam of Hinduism, nihilism, quantum physics, and social Darwinism, including indictments of the “mental and moral dwarfs who deify weakness.”

The biography ended with a final burst of editorializing:

Leland Belding represents everything wrong with the capitalist system. He is the grotesque result of the concentration of too much wealth and too much power in the hands of one eminently fallible and twisted man. He is the emperor of self-indulgence, a fanatical misanthrope who views other life forms as nothing more than potential sources of bacterial and viral infection. He is preoccupied with his own body on a corpuscular level and would like nothing more than to live out his days on a planet denuded of all animal and plant life, other than those organisms required to sustain what remains of the wretched life of one Leland Belding.

The Basket-Case Billionaire had been a well-kept publishing industry secret, catching even the Magna Corporation by surprise, garnering massive post-publication attention, and shooting immediately to the top of the nonfiction best-seller list. A record paperback sale was made. Magna lost no time in suing Cross and his publishers, claiming the book was a hoax and libelous, producing medical and legal documents proving Leland Belding had indeed died, years before Cross claimed to have spoken with him. Reporters were taken to a gravesite at company headquarters; a body was exhumed and verified as Belding’s. Cross’s publisher got nervous and asked the writer to produce his data.

Cross reassured them and held a defiant news conference, his editor at his side, in front of a public storage vault in Long Beach, California, where he’d stashed thirty cartons of notes, many of them supposedly signed and dated by Leland Belding. Cameras whirring, he unlocked the vault, opened box after box, only to find each stuffed with notes unrelated to Belding. Frantic, he continued searching, produced old college essays, tax returns, stacks of bound newspapers, shopping lists- the detritus of a life soon to be ruined.

Not a word on Belding. Cross’s horror was captured in close-up as he shrieked conspiracy. But when a police investigation concluded that no one but the writer had entered the vault, and his editor admitted she’d never actually seen the alleged notes, Cross’s credibility vanished.

His publishers, faced with public humiliation and a legal adversary rich enough and tough enough to bankrupt them, settled quickly: They ran full-page ads in major newspapers featuring apologies to the Magna Corporation and the memory of Leland Belding. Immediately ceased further publication, and recalled all volumes shipped to stores and wholesalers. Refunded the record paperback advance to the soft-cover house.

The publishers then sued Cross, demanding return of his advance plus interest plus punitive damages. Cross refused, hired attorneys, countersued. The publishing house filed a criminal complaint for fraud and misrepresentation in New York District Court. Cross was arrested, fought extradition and lost, was shipped back East and imprisoned for five days at Riker’s Island. During that time he claimed to have been beaten and homosexually raped. He tried to sell his account of the ordeal to several magazines but none was interested.

Released on bail, he was found one week later in a tenement room on Ludlow Street in New York’s Lower East Side, head in the oven, a note on the floor admitting the book had been fiction, an audacious scam. He’d taken the risk, believing Magna would be too publicity-shy to challenge him, hadn’t meant to harm anyone and was sorry for any pain he’d caused.

More death.

I turned to the magazines, looking for coverage of the hoax, found a long feature in Time, complete with a picture of Cross, shackled, in police custody. Next to that was a shot of William Houck Vidal.

The chairman of Magna had been photographed walking down courtroom steps, a wide smile on his face, the fingers of one hand held in a victory V.

I knew that face. Big and square and deeply tanned. Narrow pale eyes, a few blond hairs remaining in the brush-cut hair.

A country club face.

The face, fifteen years younger, of the man I’d seen with Sharon at the party. The old sheik she’d been trying to convince of something.