Free Madness Under the Royal Palms by Laurence Leamer

with enough class or beauty to add to his sparkling, nocturnal fusion. Brownie made her way there, often with her friend from Virginia. “She and I were popular because we were young, fresh, and I guess we were pretty enough,” Brownie reflects. “We looked innocent enough where they’d say, ‘We’ll take advantage of those two chickens,’ but they didn’t do it.” She and her girlfriend tipped the doorman in their apartment house five dollars a month to tell their escorts that they could not go upstairs, the most efficacious way to say no. That was the way she liked to do things, never raising her voice, never making a scene, but always waltzing away from trouble.
    Brownie pieced together a living as best she could, doing some modeling and working for a while as a hat check girl. The wealthy young heirs Brownie was dating came from old money families that lived by the axiom: “A lady should see her name in the papers only three times in her life, when’s she engaged, when she marries, and when she dies.” Yet the old aristocratic imperatives were giving way to a “celebritocracy,” the gossip columnists taking the place of the Social Register. Ambitious young women read gossip columnists such as Cholly Knickerbocker and Ed Sullivan to learn the players and the places.
    One evening Brownie attended the tennis matches at Forest Hills with the mysterious Howard Hughes. All during the event, she kept looking down at his dirty tennis shoes and wondering why she had agreed to the date. Things changed for Brownie in the morning when she picked up the Daily Mirror and read in Walter Winchell’s column: “Mildred ‘Brownie’ Brown, Virginia socialite, at Open with Howard Hughes.” Winchell’s column had the staccato rhythm of a telegram, and it affected people like a telegraph boy shouting the message throughout Manhattan. Now she had become just what Winchell said she was, a Virginia socialite frequenting the elite clubs of the city.
    In a matter of a few years, Brownie transformed herself into an elegant, upbeat woman whom wealthy men found irresistible. To do so, she had to employ immense mimicry based on the most astute observations of the habits, manners, and mores of a whole new class of people. It took subtle empathy, and a faux intimacy, always reserving something of herself. She had always to pretend that she was something she was not or never had been. She could never drop the veil of illusion, until one day the veil became a virtual part of her skin.
     
     
    I N 1948, B ROWNIE MARRIED George Schrafft, heir to a popular chain of restaurants frequented by secretaries and shop girls. The twenty-seven-year-old playboy was dependent on the erratic largesse of his mother, who wanted her son to do something other than race speed boats and fast cars. He had already been married once and had a daughter, but he was game to go at it again. The couple eloped to New Jersey and returned to stay in Brownie’s little apartment overlooking Sutton Place in Manhattan.
    When Brownie became pregnant, poor George no longer had a voluptuous blond playmate able to carouse day and night. George was not about to wait around for the good times to return, and he found other young playthings ready to zoom off in his Aston Martin. George had scarcely taken off his britches when his pregnant wife was onto his adulterous games.
    As soon as Victoria Schrafft was born, Brownie started having her own affairs. It is unclear whether she started dating John Jock McLean II when she was still technically married to George, or after she had filed for divorce. In any event, Jock was everything George was, only bigger and better. He was richer. He was better looking. He was taller, born for a tuxedo, and a spitting image of Brownie’s father. He bore a far more distinguished name. His late mother was not the owner of a chain of déclassé luncheonettes, but Evalyn Walsh McLean, whose father had discovered the legendary Camp Bird gold mine in