At eight, Babe was given her first pony; at ten, her first Arabian mare. Photographs appeared in Town and Country.
At twelve, Babe was given her first yacht, the sloop Cygnet. Each summer, for the four weeks that the family lived at Hampton Court, their fifty-two-room summer “cottage” in Newport, she had at her disposal her own captain and two-man crew. At sixteen, old enough for a New York State driver’s learning permit, she was given her first Mercedes-Benz. The car had a refrigerated glove compartment.
Babe had her coming-out at Hampton Court. Hadley Vanderwalk, Jr., spent one and a half million dollars providing three orchestras, a quarter-mile-long buffet, and a dozen bars for his daughter’s twelve hundred guests. Babe wore a seven-thousand-dollar gown designed for her by Yves Saint Laurent; she was featured on the cover of Life magazine curtsying to the duchess of Windsor, and news cameras of the three networks covered the event.
It was not surprising, Dobbsie said, that Babe—an only child—grew into a rebel. For homes she had had the old Flagler mansion off Fifth Avenue; the Newport “cottage”; the house in Palm Beach, scene of the family’s Christmas celebrations; the winter chalet in the Swiss Alps and the summer “chateau” on the French Riviera. As an infant she had played in sandboxes with Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. Educated at America’s finest institutions—Spence, Farmington, Vassar—she had broadened her circle to include the children of board chairmen of AT&T, ITT, IBM, United Fruit, TWA. Never separated from those patrician playmates for longer than a summer vacation, she took privilege for granted—above all the privilege of flouting the very conventions that legitimized her own wealth and status.
At nineteen she defied her parents and plunged into a scandalous marriage to internationally renowned concert pianist Ernst Koenig, a thrice-divorced man thirty-eight years her senior. Vassar expelled her.
Dobbsie felt that this first marriage was more than an adolescent acting-out: it was a cry for help, an ominous signal that Babe Vanderwalk wanted in marriage what she had missed in childhood—nurture by loving, as opposed to paid, hands. In Koenig, she had tried to turn a father figure into a husband. Her alchemy had failed, and the solution, she must have decided, was to reverse the transformation. With one failed marriage securely under her belt, she packed her eight-year-old daughter into a Swiss boarding school and set out to find a husband she could turn into a father.
Scottie Devens, Jr., a new chapter began, is the kind of man women can’t resist: good-looking, polished, not doing everything he could with his gifts—a perfect candidate for rescue.
Dobbsie chronicled Scott Devens’s troubled childhood as the son of a Kentucky dirt farmer, his rowdy high school education, his early involvement with “Cuban elements” in Miami. This part of the book was full of quotes from unidentified sources: “Scottie Devens’s closest chums,” “a former sweetheart who wishes to remain anonymous,” “the mother of his aborted child,” “a Rumanian diplomat and drug courier”; “there are even those who swear …”
Like two oppositely charged particles in a cyclotron, it was inevitable—according to Dobbsie—that sooner or later Babe Vanderwalk and Scott Devens would collide.
The Paris Review was holding a Vietnam peace rally—fundraiser at P.J. Clarke’s, a perpetually trendy bar on New York’s Third Avenue. Babe, doing her bit, was passing drinks. Scottie, doing his, was playing cocktail piano.
The room was overcrowded. Reports vary as to who pushed whom—some say that Jackie Kennedy stumbled against Mrs. Leonard Bernstein, others swear that Truman Capote gave Mrs. William Paley what he intended to be a joking shove.
In the ensuing thirty-second domino effect, drinks were spilled, dresses were ruined, friendships were suspended, and love began: Babe Vanderwalk was shoved onto Scottie Devens’s keyboard. Never missing a beat, he continued playing “I’ve Got a Crush on You”—on Babe’s abdomen.
Pieter Isaac Valk, the little Jewish boy from Amsterdam, had not been able to earn social acceptance in a lifetime of unremitting work; Scottie Devens, the hard-drinking ivory-tickling WASP from blue grass country, had it handed to him in five seconds.
Three weeks after that meeting, Babe married Scottie, and together they embarked on the lives of jet set royalty. Within a year Babe discovered she had a gift for designing clothes, and Scottie discovered he had a yen for Doria Forbes-Steinman.
This part of the book was full of things anyone could have known: who owned what, who made how much, who worked where, who knew whom, who lived with whom. It was also full of things Gordon Dobbs had obviously invented: descriptions of people’s houses that were quite simply inaccurate, the underwear people wore, the way they smiled and the way they kissed, the exact things they said to one another during chance encounters at huge parties.
Scottie’s romance with Doria, Dobbsie claimed, became serious five and a half years before Babe’s coma. He described excursions the lovers had made to Paris, Antigua, Acapulco, quoting various unnamed socialite gossips, bellboys, doormen, private investigators.
Dobbsie then described the “crime” and the trial, summarizing the prosecution’s case in detail.
Cordelia Koenig, Babe’s daughter by her first marriage, was awakened at three in the morning by strange sounds emanating from the bedroom shared by her mother and stepfather. Peeking into the hallway, she saw Scott Devens tiptoeing from the bedroom into his dressing room. He was carrying a syringe.
When Babe Devens failed to awaken the next morning, an ambulance was dispatched from Doctors Hospital.
Babe was admitted to the hospital, comatose, with an abnormally high level of insulin in her blood. Emergency room personnel administered one massive glucose injection at 9:00 A.M. and a second at 10:12 A.M. Babe failed to respond.
A little after noon that same day, Cordelia confided to the maidservant, Faith Stoddard Banks, what she had seen the night before.
Mrs. Banks searched the closet of Scott Devens’s dressing room and found a tan alligator carrying case. Within this case she discovered a syringe.
Mrs. Banks phoned Babe Devens’s mother, Lucia Vanderwalk, who phoned her lawyer, William Frothingham. In turn, Frothingham phoned Harrison Jonik, a former New York City detective with thirty years’ experience who had gone into private practice.
Jonik conducted his own search of the closet and discovered that the tan alligator carrying case contained not only a syringe but three bottles of insulin and one of liquid Valium.
The bottles and syringe were turned over to ChemLab of Union City, New Jersey. Encrusted solution was found around the needle. The solution was shown to contain Valium, ammobarbital, insulin, and salinated water.
Dr. Wallace Walker, a prosecution witness and chairman of the Department of Endocrinology and Diabetic Research at Southern Queens Hospital, testified that Babe Devens’s coma was the result of a “massive injection of insulin.” He based his findings on Babe’s blood sugar and insulin levels. Under normal circumstances a patient receiving two such massive glucose injections over a period of seventy-two minutes would show a rising blood sugar level. But Babe’s blood sugar level had failed to rebound, a clear indication that she had been injected with a toxic quantity of insulin.
Dobbsie’s account of Scottie’s defense was little more than a summary of unrelated and unsavory cases that Scottie’s lawyer, Ted Morgenstern, had defended. Dobbsie detailed Morgenstern’s ongoing skirmish with the IRS and the New York Bar Association’s repeated attempts to disbar him. There were two pages quoting Morgenstern’s denial of rumors that he was a homosexual and had had four face-lifts.
Dobbsie described the six days of jury deliberation that led to the guilty verdict. He cited rumors that Charles (“Chassie”) Rockefeller, a drinking and polo buddy, had not only posted Scottie’s bail but had ponied up a million dollars to retain the dean of Columbia Law for advice in masterminding Scottie’s appeal. He quoted Scottie’s statement that he still loved Babe more than any other woman on earth, and were she to regain consciousness tomorrow, he would be back in Sutton Place, with Doria’s blessing, at the side of his lawful wife.