An Inconvenient Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

unhappy love affair. His small but perfect house on Humming Bird Way, between Oriole and Thrush, in the Hollywood Hills, had been photographed for a house magazine and had been the scene for many a cocktail party through the years. He often said that his was one of the few houses where the many diversified groups of the city overlapped. They did, but not at the same time.
    Anyone who wanted to know anything about Los Angeles society always called Hector. He knew the answers because he knew everyone, and those he didn’t know, he knew about. “We may not all know each other, but we all know who each other is,” he was fond of saying. He was able to interconnect the old families of the city for generations back. Like old Bronwyn Doheny, Caroline Phillips’s mother, age ninety-one, whose funeral was to be held the next day at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills. “Bronwyn was born a Parkhurst,” he said to his friend, Cyril Rathbone, who wrote a social column for
Mulholland
, explaining it all in a nutshell. “She was Judge Parkhurst’s second daughter. Her grandfather built that enormous French house on West Adams Boulevard, which is now the Center for the Church of the Heavenly Light. That whole neighborhood has gone black, you know. When I was just a child, I used to go to Caroline’s birthday parties in that house before they moved to Hancock Park. Now, Bronwyn’s first husband—who was
not
, I repeat not, Caroline’s real father, that’s another story entirely—was Monroe Whittier, and then when Monroe died, she married Justin Mulholland, who embezzled the money, do you remember that story? Now Justin Mulholland, who died in jail, was the first cousin of Rose Cliveden.” When Hector Paradiso wasn’t dancing, that was the sort of conversation he could carry on for hours, and did, when he was spending the evening with the kind of people he had grown up with, or, at least, the first part of the evenings, the part that preceded midnight. He was, furthermore, and had been for many years, the man who led the cotillion and taught the debutantes how to curtsy to the ground at the Las Madrinas Ball, where the daughters of the Los Angeles elite made their bow to society.
    After midnight, Hector Paradiso’s life took on a very different aspect, one that might have shocked some of his Angeleno friends. Even as sophisticated a couple as Pauline and Jules Mendelson could not have guessed the extent of hislate-night adventures, looking for strangers to pay to kiss. Although they might have suspected there was another element to Hector’s life—he had, after all, never married—it was not a subject ever voiced, even by people like Rose Cliveden, who often fought with Hector, but who fully intended to leave him the life use of one of her trust funds, should she die before him. Earlier, in his youth, there had been women in his life, like Astrid Vartan, the late ice skating star to whom he had once been engaged, and even, briefly, Rose Cliveden herself. Rose, who was never at a loss for words, reported that his equipment, as she called it, was minimal—“a rosebud, darling, no more”—but that he was marvelously adroit with his tongue. After midnight, Hector visited places that his friends in high society had never heard of, much less visited. One of these, more reputable than some he frequented, was Miss Garbo’s.
    Miss Garbo’s was a late-night cabaret club located on a short street in West Hollywood called Astopovo, between Santa Monica Boulevard and Melrose Avenue. Hector, ever mindful of his own importance, even in an area where it was highly unlikely that he would run into any of the kind of people he knew from the main part of his life, pulled his small Mercedes into the rear of the parking lot himself, rather than give it to a parking boy in front of the club, so that, when he left, he would not have to stand in front of the club, possibly with a companion in questionable dress, and wait for his car