Read Online Gilded Lily by Isabel Vincent - Free Book Online Page B

dark depression. During one euphoric state, Alfredo tried to convince his accountant to allow Globex to buy forty homes for Ponto Frio workers. Maria Consuelo, his savvy secretary who was by then used to her boss’s sudden acts of extravagance with company money, did not allow the deal to go through. However, other more costly ones did.
    â€œI spent a lot of time undoing Fred’s whims,” said Ademar Trotte, the Ponto Frio accountant Alfredo hired in 1946 when he started the company. “When he went on a shopping spree, we had to convince people to give us his money back, or we had to re-sell the things Fred bought.”
    Alfredo went on mad shopping sprees for things like mills, warehouses, and large plots of land when he was in his euphoric states, and then would sink into a soul-crushing depression when he realized what he had done. On many occasions, when the deals became too complicated for his secretary or accountant to fix, Geraldo Mattos, the director of Ponto Frio, would be called in to try to clean up the mess. At one point, in an act of extreme folly, Alfredo handed over all of his own shares in his company to Geraldo.
    â€œGeraldo had a difficult time trying to fix things up when Fred went shopping,” recalled Lourdes Mattos, Geraldo’s widow. “I thinkGeraldo spent an awful lot of time just repairing the damage from those flights of euphoria.”
    But as bad as his depressions became, observers say they never seriously affected his ability to do business. “There was no one like him in business,” said Marcelo Steinfeld. “Nobody could have ever put together the fortune he did so fast, even with all his psychological problems.” Indeed, in just over twenty years, Alfredo built a sizable empire, with property and assets spread around the world.
    By the late 1960s, Alfredo Monteverde had a staggering net worth of nearly $300 million. Although he had a long list of business interests in Rio, his most successful enterprise remained Ponto Frio.
    But when his depressions became overwhelming, Alfredo was indeed forced to retreat temporarily from the daily responsibilities of running his businesses. Friends say that during one of those early bouts of depression, he tried to commit suicide. Regina knew that her son suffered from the same malady that had plagued his father, and she often told Alfredo that she feared he would end up killing himself if he didn’t get the proper treatment.
    During his worst crises, Alfredo checked himself into a luxurious suite at the beachfront Excelsior hotel or the nearby Copacabana Palace where a steady stream of specialists were admitted by his majordomo Caruso, who was dispatched to the local pharmacy with a small stack of prescriptions for antidepressants, vitamins, and sleeping pills, hastily scrawled on hotel stationery. In the early days, Rosy would fly into Rio from wherever she happened to be in the world, to help her beloved brother through his darkest hours. But later, when she was preoccupied with her own business and demands on her time, Alfredo was left pretty much to the mercy of his various psychiatrists and closest business associates when a depression struck. On occasion, a nurse would visit to give him regular injections of vitamins B 12 and C, which were considered an early form of therapy for manic-depressives.
    For despite his phenomenal success in business, there was always something missing in Alfredo’s life—something money could never buy. In a letter to his sister written in the summer of 1956, Alfredo tried to come to grips with his depression when he wrote, “we really make little progress in finding our happiness. When I came back from [a trip to] the States I did everything to fill my life—worked hard, played hard, but of no use for I was unhappy inside of myself. I thought that it was my old spring disease that came again.”
    Perhaps it was the “spring disease”—a deep