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By Root 765 0

talk today you’d think his father had been a concert violinist—a myth he likes to perpetuate, because Izzy did, in fact, play the fiddle. Lionel gives lots of money to the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera, and every time he comes up with another million-dollar check, Rogers & Cowan gets him plenty of media coverage for it. Last year he was hailed as “Philanthropist of the Year” in Manhattan, inc., got the Légion d’Honneur in France and an O.B.E. in England. These things are not exactly bought, but it is astonishing how gullible people who should know better are about the motives for philanthropy. Lionel and Lindsay move in social circles in which giving million-dollar checks to arts organizations has become as de rigueur as the Lacroix pouf and the Turnbull & Asser tie.

Lionel opens his jacket to show me something. Inside, on the paisley silk, I see his initials, “LS,” and below that a little label that says, in silk script, “Turnbull and Chung.” Lionel laughs.

“Whaddya think? I had thirty-seven cashmere suits made in Hong Kong, and I got ’em to make up these labels—Turnbull and Chung. Jeezus, they fought me on it—but I prevailed.” He makes the universal money gesture by rubbing thumb and forefinger together.

I laugh and hug Lionel. He sees the game of it all, and for that I like him.

“If you dare do that at the Principessa Tavola-Calda’s in Venice, I’ll kill you,” says Lindsay, a former stewardess from K.C., who doesn’t see the game of it and never will.

“Leila, baby,” says Lionel, “if you ever get rid of that stud, don’t go to strangers—okay, babe?” He looks down my dress and raises his eyebrows. “Mamma mia, what a poitrine.” He does this in front of Lindsay to keep her in line. She pretends not to care, but she glares at me briefly before wandering off.

“She hates doing it,” Lionel says. “And you know me—can’t get enough, pussycat. Where are you gonna be this summer?”

“In Connecticut. Painting.”

“In your famed phallic silo?”

“The same.”

“Where’s the stud?”

“He went out.”

“Lissen—I’ll call you when I get back from Europe, okay? Maybe I’ll take the chopper up to your neck of the woods.”

“Call me,” I say. And I go off to find Wayne. Maybe what I need is a vulgar billionaire in Turnbull and Chung suits. Could it possibly be worse than Dart?

Where is Wayne? I haven’t seen him since he took off for the loo.

I make my way through the sprawling apartment, which has recently been redone by some hot new decorator much addicted to Concordeing back and forth to London. All the latest trends are represented: one room in Biedermeier fruitwood and Impressionist paintings; another room full of Important Pieces in seventeenth-century japanning and gilt, with seventeenth-century Dutch still lives of dead birds and fruit on the walls; another room full of Victoriana—chairs with leopard legs, chandeliers and tables made out of antlers and that sort of thing, Pre-Raphaelite paintings. The place is a hodgepodge. Sally often jokes that she moved next door because she and André couldn’t agree on decor. She is into Bauhaus-minimalist-modern, he into excess with a vengeance.

His bed, for example, which I come upon in the master bedroom overlooking leafy Central Park, once belonged to Henry VIII. A taller tycoon than André would never fit. But this hideous regal Tudor four-poster has been outfitted with an inner mirrored canopy, a sound system built into the four posts, and a television that rises ominously from a steel-banded antique sea truck at its foot. (This media boîte once belonged to a sailor in the Armada.)

When I come into the bedroom, Wayne is stretched out half naked in André’s bed, moving the television up and down and giggling maniacally. The sweet smell of sinsemilla fills the room.

“Join me?”

“You’re crazy, Wayne. I’m going to call André.”

“Call him. He expects us to act like maniacs. That’s why we’re here. ‘Round up the usual suspects,’ he tells his secretary. ‘See if the tsatskeleh will drive down from Connecticut and the biker will bike up from SoHo.’ We’re the sideshow to his Barnum. You know