Dunne - The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

MURDER MOST SWANK This summers required reading.

Vanity Fair

A LUSCIOUS NOVEL composed of just the right measures of sex, glamour, passion, and psychological motivation. Dunne recreates the milieuthe shallowness, the obsession with appearances, not to mention the clothes and the partiessplendidly. This is a candy box of a book.

Cosmopolitan

ELEGANT ESCAPE Upper-crust scandal Dunne captures the romance of glamorous society types dancing their lives away in the Stork Club of the 40s A saga of love, social climbing and murder set in the privileged circles of Manhattans Upper East Side.

Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

ICY AND DIVERTING The summers most intriguing potboiler.

Glamour

SMOOTHLY WRITTEN, ENGROSSING Ann is a heroine you love to hate, a woman who cuckolds her husband while extracting from him a kings ransom in jewels, magiccarpet voyages to shoots in Scotland and safaris in Africa Will be read with enormous enjoyment for the personalities, from Brenda Frazier to the Duchess of Windsor, that decorate its pages and for the knowing glimpses of high living in high places.

Publishers Weekly

ENDLESSLY ENTERTAINING.

Susan Toepfer, New York Daily News

FAST AND ENJOYABLE Perhaps a fable, but it has the smudges of newsprint on it.

Los Angeles Times

FAST PACED, STEAMY Devourers of society columns will have a field day reading between the lines.

Newsday

SIZZLING Moves with the speed of a bullet.

Copley News Wire

STEAMING HOT.

New York Post

COMPELLING Read it.

Liz Smith, New York Daily News

SPELLBINDING.

Celebrity Bulletin

THE MOST WELL-WRITTEN AND ABSORBING NOVEL about real crimes since Capotes In Cold Blood.

Eleanor Lambert, syndicated columnist

THERE IS A SUCCESSOR TO TRUMAN CAPOTE DOMINICK DUNNE.

San Francisco Examiner

Dominick Dunne is the best chronicler of American Society since Truman Capote. He is the only person writing about high society from inside the aquarium.

Tina Brown, Vanity Fair

THE TWO MRS. GRENVILLES
A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with Crown Publishers, Inc.

PRINTING HISTORY
Crown edtion published March 1985
Bantam edition / June 1986

Grateful acknowledgment is made for the following:

ZING: WENT THE STRINGS OF MY HEART, copyright 1935 (renewed) Warner Bros., Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
JUST ONE OF THOSE THINGS, copyright 1935 (renewed) Warner Bros., Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

All rights reserved.
Copyright 1985 by Dominick Dunne.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by
mimeograph or any other means, without permission.
For information address: Crown Publishers, Inc.,
One Park Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

eISBN: 978-0-307-81513-2

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words Bantam Books and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103.

v3.1

T he room was filled with the heady scent of roses past their prime. Pink petals fell from swollen blossoms in a Chinese bowl onto the polished surface of an ormolu escritoire. Although it was day, rose-shaded lamps were lit, and curtains of the same hue, drawn for the night in voluminous folds, remained closed. The bed had been rested upon, but not slept in, its rose-colored linens still pristine and uncreased. A vermeil clock, unwound too long, had ceased to tick; a radio, left on too long, had lost its tonal focus.

Lying on the floor, face down on the rose border of an Aubusson rug, was a golden-haired woman in a satin-and-lace nightgown. She was dead. More than a day dead. Perhaps even two.

Had she been alive, she would have told you, whether you asked her or not, that the Chinese bowl had once belonged to Magda Lupescu; that the escritoire had once belonged to Marie Antoinette; that the vermeil clock had been given to the Empress Elizabeth of Austria by the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria; that the Aubusson rug was a gift of the Belgian court to the Empress Carlotta of Mexico. That they were ill-fated women was of less consequence to the deceased than the sense of luster she acquired when repeating the history of her possessions.

The dead womans name was Ann Grenville. Leaning against a wall of her bedroom was the infamous portrait by Salvador Dali that had so deeply offended her on its completion years before. Long gone from sight, surprisingly present now, it stared out from its canvas at the rose-hued tableau, its knife-slash repaired, its prophecy fulfilled. Carnage had it promised. Carnage had it delivered.

Her obituary, when it appeared, was not impressive. If you had not been reading about the defeat of the German Chancellor on page one of Section A of the New York Times that continued over on the next-to-last page of Section D, after the business news and stock market quotations, you might have missed it, for that was where it appeared. There was her name, Ann Grenville, with the word Dead after it, and then a few paragraphs, all easily missable.

On second thought, of course, the placement of Ann Grenvilles obituary was probably exactly where Old Alice Grenville wanted it to be, and if she had called whatever Sulzberger was in charge of the Times and requested exactly that remote a placement in the paper for her daughter-in-laws obituary, no one who knew her would have been surprised. It would not have been her first call asking for considerations from the newspaper on behalf of her family. Exceedingly old, in her nineties, Alice Grenville, born one of the Pleydell triplets, was still running things in her family, and one thing she felt, and felt strongly about, was that her family had been far, far too much in the news.

The obituary said Ann Grenville had been found dead in her apartment on Fifth Avenue. It said she was the widow of sportsman William Grenville, Junior, the mother of Diantha Grenville, the daughter-in-law of Alice Grenville, the philanthropist and social figure. It said she had a history of heart ailments. It said she was fifty-seven years old. It said she had been cleared in 1955 of slaying her husband.

She wasnt fifty-seven at all, and hadnt been for three years, but her lie, if lie it could be called, was closer by far to the truth than the age she had given twenty years earlier, at the peak of her notoriety, when, at forty, she had claimed to be thirty-two.

Mrs. Grenville. Mrs. Ann Grenville, called out a ships steward, hitting the gong that he was carrying as he walked along the decks and through the public rooms. Telephone for Mrs. Ann Grenville. Not a head turned at her paged name. Too many years had gone by. Not a soul on the ship remembered what Life