The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [217]
“‘It would be a hell of a scandal, C. Z.,’ Jakey said smoothly. ‘The headlines alone would kill you, even if you spent ten years trying to prove none of it was true. And it would kill Magic. Why don’t you just give in gracefully and let us run the company? You’ve had your day—now it’s mine.’
“Zev stared at his grinning face and he wanted to punch his teeth right down his throat, but he knew it wasn’t worth it. He suddenly realized that Jakey had never loved Azaylee, it had all been an act. That’s what you wanted right from the beginning, wasn’t it?” he said.
“Jakey stared back at him with that cocky grin. ‘You betcha!’ he replied.
“The next day Zev announced his resignation as chairman of Magic. Filmmaking was not the way it used to be in the beginning, now it was all big corporations, television, takeovers, and money men. He wanted no part of it. He had bought a winery years ago and now he decided to take an interest in that.
“Nothing was ever heard about any enormous sums of money supposedly ‘missing’ from Magic’s accounts, and Alan Rackman was appointed as the new president with Jakey as chairman. Suddenly Magic had all the money it needed and Jakey had exactly what he wanted.”
Missie smiled sadly as she looked at Cal and said, “That’s why C. Z. Abrams died a forgotten man. And Jakey Jerome became a legend in his own time.”
“Azaylee walked out on him. She stayed at the Lexington Drive house alone except for her dogs and the servants. Jakey barred her from Magic’s lot and sued for divorce, claiming she was mentally unstable. It was the cruelest thing he could have done and he knew it, but he didn’t want any counterclaim and he also knew she could not contest it.
“The divorce went through quickly but it certainly hit the headlines, and there were those awful pictures of her hiding behind dark glasses and a big hat, looking as if she were playing a role in a bad movie. Of course she cracked under the strain and ended up in another clinic, and once again we had to try to put her back together. Eventually, when she was allowed home, she went to live with Rachel and her boys at their new house in Beverly Hills. Rosa had finally married again, a builder by trade, and had gone to live in San Diego. And Zev and I were at the winery in northern California.
“He had bought it years before as an ‘investment’ but it had never made a penny, and we used to laugh about how bad the wine was. Now, with Magic gone and nothing to occupy his mind, he decided to take it up again. But being Zev he was going to do it properly, just the way he had with the movies. He wanted to learn everything about making wine so of course that meant another trip to France to see how it was done there.
“We went to all the big châteaux, and I was thrilled to see how quickly he put his mind away from Hollywood and concentrated on his new business. Without Magic and Zev’s enormous salary we were no longer as rich as we had been, and we decided to sell Lexington Drive and build ourselves a new house on a hill overlooking our five hundred acres of vineyards. While work was going on we lived in a little ranch house and Zev went to work every day with his estate manager to watch the planting of his new French vines. He had a ten-year plan and then he said the world would really start to hear about California wines, especially ‘C. Z. Vineyards.’
“He liked to drive over there in the evenings to show me how his new little vines were growing. He was so proud of them, I swear he knew every single one. The climate is different in northern California, especially in those long valleys where you get a chill wind, like the French mistral, blowing in from the northwest. Zev still behaved as if he were living in the south and rarely wore a jacket or a sweater. One night when we went to the vineyards and strolled around as we usually did, chatting about the crop and the type of wine he wanted to produce, I saw him shiver in the wind. It was October and really quite raw, and I wanted to leave. But there was just one more thing he wanted