THE MAN WHO LED A DREAM LIFE
by David Handler
January 1983 finds celebrity novelist Stewart Hoag happily wedding award-winning actress Merilee Nash. Their planned honeymoon is another story.
On the very day that Hoagy and Merilee tie the knot in a private civil ceremony, Merilee’s cousin Phoebe Singleton, her maid of honor, confides that she’s untied her own by filing for divorce from wealthy, orphaned, mega-philandering heir Junior Singleton. Eager for the newlyweds to buy the swanky Manhattan town house she kept in the split, she invites them over to look around. That’s when they realize her marriage has been ended even more decisively than they thought by whoever stabbed Junior in the eyeball in his dressing room with one of the eight steak knives the couple received as a wedding gift. Even worse, the killer has made off with a second steak knife that seems, and is, destined for another target. Though Det. Lt. Meyer Golden, the NYPD homicide detective in charge of the investigation, laments the “acute shortage of genuinely sleazy people in this case,” there are plenty of suspects who might have wanted Junior to become the last of his line because he cheated on them or got them pregnant or pulled the funding for their research or infected them with HIV in the days before lifesaving therapies. Tentatively accepting a commission from Phoebe’s mother, Pippa Trowbridge, the dragonish editor of SHE magazine, to write a memorial profile of Junior, Hoagy tags along with Golden, dutifully reporting all the latest dirt for readers who missed these revelations the first time—and then yet again in the deeply old-fashioned denouement Hoagy feels obliged to stage before that honeymoon can commence.
It’s great to hear more about the hero’s heady life in the days before he became a has-been.