Diamond Girl

Part 2



Golden Girl





Chapter 2



My sisters and I were raised to never use the words 'I want'. It wasn’t that our parents didn’t know that we would naturally want things; it was stressed to us that while it was okay to want things, it was simply not okay to say it aloud.

What was okay was to say, “I will have that.”

I don’t know why I could never stop being annoyed over such a simple distinction. I thought it was petty and stupid. Maybe that’s why, in retaliation, I learned early to say, 'I will have those' instead. I waited for restraint that did not come, or for my parents to notice that though I wanted for nothing, I was still taking everything.

I didn’t like being told not to want things. Automatically it made me desire things fiercely, but I may have expected that someone, anyone, would step in and tell me to at least cut down on having so many things, to calm down about acquiring things, buying things, buying everything - but nobody said a word.

It’s a typical loser's cliché to say that I wanted things that I would never have, like being the center of my parents' hearts, or believing even for an hour that I was good enough, beautiful enough or special enough to belong to a family like mine. Yet, like a lot of eye-rolling clichés, it’s also true.

Poor little rich girl, money doesn’t buy happiness, money can’t buy you love, starving at a banquet, they aren’t just sayings. Oh well, I mean they are sayings, obviously, but it’s because someone before I came along actually did say them, lived them, lived like me. I’m guessing from the depressing nature of those statements that they figured out pretty early on that being rich isn’t for people with weak stomachs, or weak investment portfolios either. The latter is never an issue in my family, it’s the former that will bust you up on the rocks. My short life story, for example, I am guessing is going to turn into a world class cautionary tale. By the age of nine or so I gave up showing that I wanted those silly sentimental things and began to focus very seriously on getting the things I could have, which worked out fine. I quickly learned that what I could have was pretty much everything.



* * *



In the beginning there were the Kellehers, and that is my family. We are considered old money. Here in America, old money means it’s over fifty years old, and we have been rich, really rich, unimaginably rich, people would say 'filthy rich', for three times that long. We aren’t famous in a tacky new money entertainment way, though our last name is a household word in a very literal sense, but people don’t, or I should say didn’t, recognize us as individuals until I made us famous.

There is almost no one alive who hasn’t added to my family’s money. If there is a headache, or depression or a surgery going on anywhere in the world, then it’s a good bet that a Kelleher Pharmaceutical is being used to make someone feel better, or to make someone unconscious, which is usually the same thing.

The genius of my great-great grandfather is that he understood even before people did themselves that they were going to need pharmaceuticals to help them get through their lives. My family’s drugs do that and the money rolled in like water down a fall, creating an American dynasty built on human pain. All-in-all that is a pretty fair analogy for my life story.

My father, Kells, is the direct descendant of the first John Kelleher, also called Kells. There is always only one Kells Kelleher and, like a king in the old storybooks, all gifts and punishments rain down from the current Kells.

My cousins are descended from another Kelleher, David Kelleher. He was a wild man even by standards in my family, and that is saying something. When he was in his eighties, he married a twenty year old non-English-speaking Latino maid and left her nearly all of his three billion dollar fortune. His heirs have since been forced to live out their lives on the remainders of their trusts. Even the richest amongst them is only worth seven hundred million or so to this day. We call them the poor relations. It’s a little inside family joke but really I think they agree with it, as do those of us on the Kells Kelleher side.

In my family money is no laughing matter.

Since my father is a direct line Kells, we are all much richer or will be, or might be, as Daddy, the ruling Kells, decides. My father’s net worth, his personal fortune, is estimated at a conservative fifty billion dollars.

That is just cash and holdings because he still retains a third of the publicly held stock of Kelleher Pharmaceuticals, and as long as people remain in pain, the money will never stop. Most people don't think about families like mine. When they think about money, they think of the Sultan of Brunei or Bill Gates, even Donald Trump. But they forget that every time they pop a pill, or pump their gas, or eat a bowl of cereal, that some living person somewhere must have invented it and that daily, all across the world, all the people using these ordinary things are giving more money to families like mine.



* * *



I was born at our family’s Palm Beach compound. It’s called Kelleher’s Rest. In the family we just refer to it as 'The Rest'.

The main house all fifty thousand feet of it, sits perched upon a man-made hill looking out over the ocean, surrounded by one mile of private fenced and patrolled grounds. When I was really little, I thought my father also owned the ocean which is not as wild as it sounds because he does own most of the beach and you can't have an ocean without a beach, just like you can’t have envy if there is no one better off than you. My father, who had graduated from Brown University a few years before with a useless degree in Art History, met my beautiful mother at a party in SoHo. At the time he decided to marry her, he believed that they would be happiest living at The Rest, where he could indulge his passion for painting bad seascapes that he never allowed anyone to see. It was assumed, with so many pleasures available to her, that my mother would develop passions of her own to fill her days until she gave birth to the next Kells, at which time she would become a devoted mother by carefully overseeing the selection of staff and furnishings for the nursery.

At the time my mother, Ellen, married my father, Kells, she was a successful model for Dior and her passions, if she had any, probably revolved around clothes and nightclubs. But once a Kelleher, she adapted with lightning speed to Daddy’s life and became an accomplished equestrienne and a nine-handicap golfer. Her interest in clothing was refined down to front row seats at the Paris collections where she flew twice yearly on the Kelleher corporate jet. She was smart, though, my mother. She was willing to risk losing her size two figure to quickly produce the Kelleher heir, so I was born eleven months after their wedding, the Kelleher heiress as it turned out, a name I would be known by my whole life, long after it became not only inappropriate but a lie.

My father was only twenty-six, and he and my mother were still in love. She had enough coal left in her then to still have some soft edges. The diamond hard bitch that she would grow into was still a few years down the road and I think for a little while she might have been as happy to meet me as he was.

My birth coincided with a crossroads time in Daddy’s life. He had quickly realized that being an artist wasn’t for him, and five months into my mother’s pregnancy with me, he had opened negotiations with the National Football League to buy the Carolina Lions franchise. The whole negotiations thing was a disaster for Daddy who, once having decided that he wanted to own a football team, refused to let his lawyers interfere in the money talks and ended up paying a hundred million over the original asking price.

He didn’t care. The Lions gave him a new identity and purpose. In those early exciting days, when owning a football team and having a little girl were still a novelty, he chose my name to commemorate his new persona, Kells Kelleher, team owner. One of my favorite possessions is a picture of him holding me up with a tiny Carolina Lions hat on my head. The Lions made the play-offs the year I turned two, and Daddy told a fawning sports world that I was his golden girl. He really loved me, I know he did. For a long time he loved me best of anybody.

My father was a quiet, not very tall, buttoned-up, thin, blond man with a distinctive left side dimple. All the Kelleher men had that dimple and I did too. Though he wasn’t very distinguished or tall, I can’t remember a room he ever walked into where he wasn’t the focus of everyone’s eyes and attention. Unimaginable wealth and a great family name gave him plenty of stature. There is an old joke that when Kells Kelleher stood on his wallet, he was always the tallest man in any room.

My mother, who was not born a Kelleher but was nearly six feet tall in her stocking feet, was looked at too, but not with the fawning admiration that Daddy drew. Women eyed her, wondering what she had that had allowed her to capture one of the country’s great names and fortunes, and men stared at her because she was beautiful and because she had been dusted in gold by her grand marriage. At first I don’t think she liked the scrutiny too much; it made her fidgety. Later, on any night that she wasn’t the most watched woman in the room, it could send her into a depression which lasted for weeks. Fortunately, thanks to Daddy’s wallet, those occasions were few and far between. Ellen Kelleher’s jewels alone would always make her the focus of every eye. I’m not sure when things like that started to matter to her more than anything else, but it must have happened early on because, until my sisters and I were old enough for parties and the attention of photographers, she usually acted like she had forgotten we even existed whenever she accidentally ran into us.



* * *



I don’t remember the first few years of my life in Florida. We moved to New York right before I turned three. That was the year my father’s mother died and the legendary Kelleher Apartment at 800 Fifth Avenue fell into his hands. It was also the year that my mother was pregnant for the second time with what everyone assumed was the fifth Kells. Instead, my sister Kelly was born in the Kelleher pavilion at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. My Aunt Georgia later told me that my father had not wanted my mother to name his second daughter 'Kelly'. He had told her it would be confusing when the inevitable John Kelleher, to be called Kells VI, was born.

Back then I don’t think it occurred to him that my mother might not give him a son. It occurred to her, though, and that was the first year that she began to be afraid. Being afraid made my mother mean, and meanness doesn’t work with my father, it’s foreign to him, and what is foreign to him he withdraws from. None of it is my sister’s fault. Kelly was, and is, a beautiful girl, and she had the Kelleher blond hair and my mother’s striking facial features. Not me. I was a female copy of my father, from my round dimpled face to my petite stature, and that is what Daddy mentioned to any admiring adult who looked at me if they didn’t say it first. “Look at my Carey. Isn’t she a Kelleher through and through?”

I was indeed a true Kelleher, and like all members of the Kells descendants, I would grow up in a castle high and unreachable to ordinary humans. In my case, the castle was the family apartment at eighth and fifth. My great-great grandfather had been the second tenant to buy in after the Rockefellers. He was a competitive man, my great-great grandfather, and, not wanting to be outdone, had created a larger living space than the apartment’s founding family.

Our apartment rose three stories and the principal windows looked out at the polar bears in Central Park Zoo. There were five family suites, three guest suites, a ceiling painted to look like the Sistine Chapel, and a staircase that my great-grandfather had purchased from King George when Sandringham was being remodeled.

At first we had a staff of eight, but by the time I was six, it had been increased to fifteen. They all lived in and no one was crowded. I’m sure of that because one of my earliest memories is wandering around the huge downstairs rooms in the early dark of New York’s winter and never finding anyone at all to talk to me.

For my mother, though, thirty thousand square feet of living space could feel cramped by the presence of at first two little girls and then a disastrous third, and so, at my mother’s urging, my father purchased Tamerlane, a massive old estate in Connecticut. Using the excuse of fresh air, we were shipped out to the country for most of our infancy. Later, when school started, we were always at Tamerlane on the weekends. Christmas was a family holiday, though, even in families like ours, and my mother made sure that wherever we were at Christmas - Connecticut, New York or Palm Beach - no matter how busy her social calendar was, she always made the time to come to us, accompanied by the photographer from Town and Country, to have her picture taken with us by the tree. It was our one unbreakable holiday tradition.