Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

A Greek Bearing Gifts

New York City

1978

Julian Amsley, the president of Dena’s network, like Ira Wallace, was born on the lower east side of Manhattan and had grown up as the poor son of first-generation immigrants. Both men had been ambitious and driven, determined to claw their way out of the dirty streets one way or the other. Only their methods had been different. Wallace wanted money and power for money and power’s sake and did not care what people thought of him. Amsley wanted money and power to acquire the things he wanted most, to be accepted into society, to get as far away as he could from the seedy Greek coffee shops where his father had been a dishwasher. By the time he was eighteen, he had changed his name from Julio Andropulous to Julian Amsley, worked, and saved enough money to take speech lessons. He married the daughter of a network vice president, took a job at the network, and using his father-in-law’s contacts and name, moved up the ladder fast until he eventually got the old man’s job.

At night he studied the so-called society people as if they were a college course. He learned how they dressed, where they bought their clothes, how they named their children, where they went to school. He found out where they lived, how they lived, and what they liked. He learned French, studied art, music, drama. Amsley hired the darling of the right set, Sister Parish, to decorate his apartment and his “cottage” in the Hamptons, hired experts to buy a collection of art. He paid a down-and-out, drunken son of one of the best families to make sure he was invited to the right parties. He needed the right address and the right wife. He divorced the first wife, married another, and mysteriously managed to get an apartment in a building that would have never allowed anyone to move in who was not approved of by the board, and certainly not a person in the entertainment business. He had to buy the building but it was worth it. It had taken him decades to do it, but eventually he was rich enough and smooth enough to marry beautiful and elegant women, thinking that somehow what they had would rub off on him, change him, magically make him one of them. But self-hatred had a way of ruining the world for you. After he pursued and married the first two women from the “best families,” he had nothing but contempt for them. And eventually they left him. He had all the trappings—the money, the company of attractive women, the parties—but still that thing he wanted, class, had always eluded him, stayed just beyond his reach. He had tried to buy it, to marry it, to imitate it but nothing he did worked. It was like trying to grab smoke.

Still, his black valet had more true class in his little finger than Amsley had in his whole body and he knew it, and was baffled by it. Julian sat one night at a small white table in the middle of his huge, cold kitchen surrounded by the best stainless steel appliances that money could buy. He sat alone at 3:00 A.M., drinking a glass of milk, staring at the wall, wondering what to pursue next to try and fill that black, empty hole in his gut. He was dressed in eight-hundred-dollar black silk pajamas, a fifteen-hundred-dollar cashmere robe, soft leather slippers, and his two-hundred-dollar haircut, but underneath, he still felt like that hungry little boy from Third Avenue, still running, still desperately trying to grab an apple off the cart as it passed by. And lately Dena Nordstrom was the shining apple he was trying to grab.

The game show hostess he had been going with for two years had struck him in the head with a huge onyx ashtray while he was asleep because he wouldn’t marry her. That week she had gone back to Texas and married the man who had the second largest Cadillac dealership in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and who had always hoped she would. Amsley was looking for another beauty to take her place, and who better than Dena Nordstrom? She was just what he liked. She had class and she was hard to get.

The next day Dena received what he always sent and what had always worked before, diamonds, and she sent them right back. She turned his invitations down, week after week, but finally he said something that changed her mind. “Going out with me will give you more stature, more clout. I can introduce you to everybody who is somebody. Think of it as business, if nothing else.”

That appealed to Dena. It wasn’t love. But it wasn’t easy; Amsley was an older man but he was not harmless. He was trying to prove that he was still a virile Greek man and it came to be exhausting having to fight him off.

But by dating him, and moving in his circles, there was a feeling in the air that she was moving up. The pressures mounted. His friends had the mistaken idea that because she was at their parties she was one of their crowd. She wasn’t. She was a working girl. Her social life was work to her. When the wealthy wives were busy the mornings after, shopping, getting their faces lifted, sleeping late, Dena was at the studio—and she was getting worn out. Again.

At first she had been impressed with all the so-called beautiful people with whom Julian Amsley brought her in contact. They were for the most part active people, restless, always on the move, seeking pleasure, seeking possessions and publicity … always running in packs from place to place, from Palm Beach to Paris to Monaco or Morocco, anyplace that was the next, new In place. But after a while she found out that most of the so-called jet-setters were as boring as they were bored—and as cynical as she felt herself becoming.

The truth was that ever since Howard had died it seemed like a light had gone out inside her, and she felt more lost and lonely in the world than ever. She needed someone to inspire her. Someone who could excite her. But who?

There was one person in the world whom she had not met whom she really would like to know. She had never had the nerve. One particularly gloomy Monday morning she felt at the end of her rope and picked up the phone and called his agent. Her reply astounded Dena. “Miss Nordstrom, he usually will not meet with people, or give interviews, but our mutual friend Howard Kingsley thought so highly of you, I will do the best I can.”

Dena put the phone down. It was like a gift from heaven, if she had believed in heaven.