Perhaps Winthrop acquired the tendency from his mother, Deborah Lorimer an Ardsdale Smythe-Barton, currently Countess of Trendino. As a sub-deb, it had been considered quite a coup for Deborah Lorimer to snare Alistair Van Ardsdale for a husband. Her family was considered nouveau riche, having made their money in plastics, and while their wealth matched Alistair’s portion of the Van Ardsdale riches, socially they were parvenus by comparison to the old-line Dutch-American family.
Still, Deborah didn't stay married to Alistair long enough for the family to get in all its snubs. Indeed, she left him only three months after the nuptials, taking with her the embryonic Winthrop tucked snugly in her womb. It was quite a scandal, with Smythe-Barton, her second husband, an Englishman of noble birth, coming off as something of a second-rate Duke of Buckingham. But “the woman I love,” as Smythe-Baron referred to Deborah, figuring that what was semantically valid for a throne heir was good enough for him, proved unwilling to devote her life to legend. Still toting Winthrop, now aged five, she fled Smythe-Barton for an Italian, the Count of Trendino. It took another ten years for them to get around to legitimatizing the relationship, by which time the Count barely had enough breath left to whisper “I do” before cashing in his countly chips. Deborah had remained unmarred—if not chaste—thereafter, a widow with an adolescent son who was precocious enough to impregnate one of his noble Italian cousins in celebration of his sixteenth birthday.
As a result of this precosity, Winthrop was shipped to America to stay with his father, the theory being that the paternal influence would be stabilizing. In a sense, it was. When Winthrop was arrested at a pot party a few years later—the culmination of one disgraceful episode after another—his father stabilized their relationship by cutting the boy off without a cent. Winthrop cabled his mother for fare back to sunny Italy. Instead, she sent him a long letter which vacillated between detailing her latest romance—with a 25-year-old Greek who thought she was much younger than she was and who might be scared off if he learned that she had a son almost as old as he was— and chastising Winthrop for his unruliness. The letter concluded with the news that she would arrange to have an adequate allowance sent to him each month -- but only so long as he stayed away from her.
Well, Winthrop may have been rejected, but still it was a generous rejection as long as it lasted. The trouble was it didn't last past his first year in Hollywood, where Winthrop had gone on a whim. The year culminated with Winthrop’s walking into a meeting of the Los Angeles chapter of “Mothers for America,” mounting the podium, and proceeding to take off all his clothes. When the police arrested him, the reporters who were present asked him why he’d done such a thing.
“To show contempt for motherhood,” Winthrop had replied. “All mothers screw. That’s how they get to be mothers.”
The logic was incontrovertible, but nevertheless one of the stodgier syndicated columnists who happened to be present took umbrage at the slur. “You wouldn’t want someone to talk about your mother like that!” she lectured Winthrop.
“Why not? My mother’s the worst of all. She's the queen of all the whores.”
Editing slightly for the family newspaper trade, the lady columnist had printed the story along with a condemnation of Winthrop and a side jab at his mother, who was then making a name for herself as a hostess on the Riviera. Deborah might not have minded so much if the item hadn’t been seen by her Greek, who did some fast calculating and caught the next plane back to Athens. Older women were all right, he’d decided, but there were limits. Deborah rightly blamed Winthrop for his departure, and she sent her son a nasty letter with a check for five thousand dollars which, the letter assured him, was the last money he’d see from her.
Winthrop cashed the check and flew to Paris. Here he rid himself of the money in one wild night. He threw a party to prove that the day of the orgy was not yet past. The French government threw him out of the country. Indeed, they were so eager for his departure that a special bill was passed in the Chamber of Deputies to allot the money for his fare back to Hollywood.
It was shortly after that incident that I met Winthrop. Everything I knew about him prejudiced me against him. Yet, to my surprise, I found myself liking him very much. He was a rogue, but a rogue in the engaging tradition of Casanova, Francois Villon, and Jean Lafitte. He was a warm and witty man, good-looking and appealing-to women, athletic and companionable to men. He drank like a gentleman—sometimes. He was courtly and polite - when he wanted to be. He was well-read and intelligent — despite those occasions when he chose to appear boorish and uncultured.
When he’d returned from Paris, he’d switched targets from Mums to Dad and decided to embarrass the Van Ardsdale side of the family. He’d accomplished this by becoming an actor. What he lacked in talent he made up in good looks and charm. He was never very successful, almost always settling for bit parts, but he usually managed to land the sort of role calculated to enrage his father. Thus he played anarchists, beatniks, sex perverts, junkies and rapists. And he fought off all attempts by the Van Ardsdales to force him to change his name.
Given Winthrop’s style of living, however, it was obvious that he couldn’t support himself by his occasional acting chores. Locked out of the paternal cash box, weaned from the maternal money teat, Winthrop nevertheless managed to maintain his playboy status. Human nature, his own canniness, and his ability to generate excitement kept him going.
He’d learned early in his Hollywood days that actors were impressed by high society. And he’d learned that high society was drawn to the fever of the entertainment world. So he’d brought the two worlds together, using his connections in both spheres and enlarging them, providing movie celebrities to impress the wealthy and providing money-men to pick up the tabs for celebrities. He established an “in” with all the columnists, and they soon learned that any event which Winthrop Van Ardsdale was involved in usually provided good copy. He’d become Hollywood’s chief free-loader, and he made no bones about it. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. And nobody minded that he never grabbed a check, that he came for a weekend visit and stayed a month, that he charged liquor, food, sometimes even his clothing to those who were eager to be counted among his friends, as members of the “in” crowd.
Occasionally he performed more concrete functions. He was no procurer, but he knew every pimp and hooker in town and he wasn’t above making a phone call for someone who proved their friendship to him. More legitimately, he sometimes used his connections to help an out-of-town publicity man trying to push a personality or a property in Hollywood. He was never paid outright for either of these services. But the indirect contributions which resulted from them kept Winthrop well-dressed, well-fed, and well-liquored.
Still, there were lapses in his champagne-and-caviar existence. There were times when the wealthy bypassed Hollywood for Palm Springs or Las Vegas, times when his movie star friends were abroad, or involved in movies that necessitated their being on the set at six in the ayem, which meant beddy-bye before midnight, times when Central Casting couldn’t even provide a walk-on for Winthrop. During such times, Winthrop relied blithely on the resiliency of the rubber check.