The subject of this metaphysical talk, Louise herself, was without question a great beauty: her dark sleek hair cut almost boyishly to frame a pale, exquisitely sculptured face. But she was also an ambitious and intellectually astute woman, who wasn't interested in being an objet d'art for Cadmus or anybody else. She left for Germany the next year, to star in two pictures there, one of which. Die Biichse de Pandora, would immortalize her. Cadmus was by now so enraptured that he sailed to Europe in the hope of a liaison, and it seems she was not entirely scornful of his advances. They dined together; and took day trips when her filming schedule allowed. But it seems she was dallying with him. When she went back to filming she complained to her director, a man called Pabst, that the presence of Geary on set was spoiling her concentration and could he please be removed? There was some kind of minor fracas later that week, when Cadmus-who had apparently attempted to purchase the studio that was making Die Btichse de Pandora in the interim, and failed-forced his way onto the set in the hope of talking to her. She refused to speak to him and he was forcibly removed. Three days later he was on a ship headed back to America.
His "folly," as he would later call this episode, was over. He returned to his business life with a sharpened-even rapacious-appetite. A year after his return, in October of 1929, came the stock market crash which marked the beginning of the Great Depression. Cadmus rode the calamity like a broncobuster from one of his beloved Westerns; he was unshakable. Other men of money went into debt and penury or ended up dead by their own hand, but for the next few years, while the country suffered through the worst economic crisis since the Civil War, Cadmus turned the defeats of those around him into personal victories. He bought the ruins of other men's enterprises for a pittance; putting out lifeboats for a lucky few who were drowning around him, thus assuring himself of their fealty once the storm was over.
Nor did he limit his business dealings to those who'd been relatively honest but had fallen on hard times; he also dealt with men who had blood on their hands. These were the last days of Prohibition; there was money to be made from supplying liquor to the parched palates of America. And where there was profit, there was Cadmus Geary. In the four years between his return from Germany and the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, he tunneled Geary family funds into several illicit booze and "entertain ment" businesses, raking off monies that no taxman ever saw, and ploughing it back into his legitimate concerns.
He was careful with his choice of business partners, avoiding the company of individuals who took too much pleasure in their own notoriety. He never did business with Capone or his like, preferring the quieter types, like Tyler Burgess and Clarence Filby, whose names didn't make it into the headlines or the history books. But in truth he didn't have the stomach for criminality. Though he was reaping enormous sums of money from these illicit dealings, in the spring of 1933, just before the repeal was passed by Congress, he broke all contact with "The Men in the Midwest," as he called them.
in fact it was Kitty who forced his hand. Normally she kept herself out of financial affairs, but this, she told him, was not a fiscal matter: the reputation of the family would be irreparably harmed if any association with this scum could be proved. He readily bowed to her pressure; he didn't enjoy doing business with these people anyway. They were peasants, most of them; a generation ago, he'd said, they'd have been in some Godforsaken corner of Europe eating scabs off their donkeys. The remark had amused Kitty, and she took it for her own, using it whenever she was feeling particularly vicious.
So Prohibition and the grim years of the Great Depression passed, and the Gearys were now one of the richest families in the history of the continent. They owned steel mills and shipyards and slaughterhouses. They owned coffee plantations and cotton plantations and great swaths of land given over to barley and wheat and cattle. They owned sizable portions of real estate in the thirty largest cities in America, and were the landlords of many of the towers and fancy houses and condominiums that were built on that land. They owned racehorses, racetracks, and racing cars. They owned shoe manufacturers and fish canneries and a hot dog franchise. They owned magazines and news papers, and distributors who delivered those magazines and newspapers, and the stands from which those magazines and newspapers were sold. And what they could not own, they put their name on. As though to distinguish his noble family from the peasants with whom he had ceased to do business in '33, Cadmus allowed Kitty to use tens of millions of Geary dollars in philanthropic endeavors, so that in the next two decades the family name went up on the wings of hospitals, on schools, on orphanages. All these good works did not divert the eyes of cynical observers from the sheer scale of Cadmus's acquisitiveness, of course. He showed no sign of slowing up as he advanced in years. In his middle sixties, at an age when less driven men were planning fishing trips and gardens, he turned his appetites eastward, toward Hong Kong and Singapore, where he repeated the pattern of plunder that had proved so successful in America. The golden touch had not deserted him: company after company was transformed by Cadmus's magic. He was a quiet juggernaut, unseen now for the most part, his reputation almost legendary.
He continued his philandering, as he had in his younger days, but the hectic business of sexual conquest was of far less significance to him now. He was still, by all accounts, a remarkably adept bed partner (perhaps consciously he chose in these years women who were less discreet than earlier conquests; advertisements for his virility, in fact); but after the Louise Brooks episode he never came so close to the blissful condition of love as when he was in full capitalist flight. Only then did he feel alive the way he had when he'd first met Kitty, or when he'd followed Louise to Germany; only then did he exalt, or even come close to exaltation.
Meanwhile, of course, another generation of Gearys was growing up. First there was Richard Emerson Geary, born in 1934, after Kitty had suffered two miscarriages. Then, a year later, Norah Faye Geary, and two years after that George, the father of Mitchell and Garrison.
In many ways Richard, Norah, and George were the most emotionally successful of any of the generations. Kitty was sensible to the corruptions of wealth: she'd seen its capacity to destroy healthy souls at work in her own family. She did her level best to protect her children from the effects of being brought up feeling too extraordinary; and her capacity for love, stymied in her marriage, flowered eloquently in her dealings with her children. Of the three it was Norah who was most indulged; and Cadmus was the unrepentant indulger. She rapidly became a brat, and nothing Kitty could do to discipline her did the trick. Whenever she didn't get what she wanted, she went wailing to Daddy, who gave her exactly what she requested. The pattern reached grotesque proportions when Cadmus arranged for the eleven-year-old Norah-who had become fixated upon the notion of being an actress-to star in her own little screen test, shot on the backlot at MGM. The long-term effects of this idolatry would not become apparent for several years, but they would bring tragedy.