V.F. Archive Collection
December 1999 Issue

The Miranda Obsession

She said she was a beautiful, well-connected blonde named Miranda, and she enchanted an astonishing circle of powerful men—Billy Joel, Paul Schrader, Buck Henry, and Quincy Jones among them—with her flirtatious, gossipy phone calls. But who was the woman behind the voice?
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Paul Schrader took the first phone call at his hotel in New Orleans. It was 1981, and Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver and went on to direct American Gigolo and other films, was in Louisiana to shoot Cat People, with Nastassja Kin-ski. The woman on the line introduced herself as Miranda Grosvenor, and before Schrader could get rid of her, she had somehow managed to keep him talking for 20 minutes, gossiping about Hollywood and a number of famous men she seemed to know all about.

Intrigued, Schrader invited Miranda to call back, and she did, again and again. “She would just call you up,” says Schrader, “and she was very, very charming. Funny. Sexy. It was incredible. The information she had on people was very accurate. She knew who was where and who was going to do what project. Once that happened, you got into the game, too, because she knew half the dirt on someone, and you added 10 percent. Then she took that 60 percent and went to the next person. . . . And there was always sort of a tease, how good-looking she was, wait till you meet my friends. It was all about talking, flirting, power networking.”

Repeatedly, Schrader arranged hotel-lobby rendezvous with the shadowy Miranda, but she never appeared. Perplexed, he phoned one of the names she had dropped, Michael Apted, director of Coal Miner’s Daughter and Nell. Yes, Apted confirmed, he had talked on the phone with Miranda, too; no, he didn’t know who she was, either. Apted mentioned that Richard Gere had a host of his own Miranda stories to tell. Schrader also reached Buck Henry, the screenwriter and occasional Saturday Night Live host, who confessed he too was captivated by Miranda’s calls, though he also knew her only as a voice over the telephone. Amazed, Schrader nevertheless had neither the time nor the energy to unravel the mystery of his newfound friend. “This went on for five, six months,” he says, “till finally it got so frustrating, all these aborted meetings, I just kind of let it go. I never found out exactly who she was.”

Nor, apparently, did Robert De Niro, who, friends say, also took Miranda Grosvenor’s phone calls. Nor Billy Joel, who tried out songs in progress on her answering machine and considered turning their strange relationship into a musical. Nor Peter Wolf, lead singer of the J. Geils Band, who attempted to meet her at a Louisiana hotel. Nor, in fact, did most of the dozens of well-known and well-to-do men on both coasts who answered calls from Miranda during the 1980s and suddenly found themselves drawn into the most fascinating, invigorating telephone conversations several of them say they ever enjoyed. It wasn’t sex talk, everyone agrees, but it was flirty, gossipy, and more than a little mysterious. “You actually started living for these phone calls,” remembers Brian McNally, the noted Manhattan restaurateur and hotelier. “I was absolutely—I mean, I couldn’t wait for her call. She made you feel fantastic.”

“A lot of nights she was my only friend,” says Joel, who understood that Miranda was also phone pals with Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, and Sting. “As they say, she did give good phone.”

The story of Miranda Grosvenor, the riddle of who she really was and why she finally disappeared from the phone lines, has grown into a kind of urban legend in certain circles in Los Angeles and New York. The men who talked to her, a number of whom now decline to confirm they did so, came from all walks of the high life; they were actors and directors, rock stars and record producers, athletes and politicians, even a journalist or two. “[I believe] we’re talking about hundreds of people,” says Buck Henry. “This went on for 15 years. There’s lots of people who think they have seen her, and it was not her. We’re talking about someone who can con people into saying they saw her. It’s very complex.”

With her mellifluous, accentless voice—Henry thought she was British, others heard a hint of Manhattan’s Upper East Side—Miranda Grosvenor was a silky phantom who told men she was beautiful and blonde, lived in the South, did some modeling, and looked after her fabulously wealthy father in New York City. Many men believed her; at least a few actually fell in love with her.

“Patrick believed she was the most ravishing woman on earth, with a red Ferrari, a powerful family, airplanes landing on the lawn,” recalls Cynthia O’Neal, whose late husband, the actor Patrick O’Neal, became one of Miranda’s most fervent phone pals a decade before his 1994 death. “She called him endlessly. I remember arriving at an airport someplace and Patrick was being paged. It turned out to be her. . . . In the early stages, Patrick was really, really— well, she was intriguing. It made me nervous. Personally—and I didn’t say this to him, not till after, when Patrick would talk about her—I kept seeing this image of this lonely, very fat girl sitting in a room. I don’t remember how it ended, but he never talked about it afterwards.”

The name Miranda Grosvenor, in fact, is one that any number of famous and respected figures would just as soon forget. “No, never heard of her,” Gil Friesen tells me from his car phone one morning in Beverly Hills. Friesen, a former president of A&M Records, is now president of the board at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

“From the phone,” I clarify, having been told that Friesen was on close terms with Miranda.

“Oooooh. . . Ohhhhh, my God. Yeah,” Friesen says. “Oh, my God.”

Friesen takes a moment to collect his thoughts as I list the names of some of Miranda’s confidants. “Jesus,” he finally says. “Well, Bob De Niro and Quincy Jones I can confirm. I know that through Quincy.”

Friesen dates his relationship with Miranda to the early 1980s, her heyday. “She called me in the office,” he remembers. “She just had an incredibly sexy voice and she had a great game, delivery, come-on. She said she was from—where?—Louisiana? I’ve never been there, but I was ready to go. . . . We were going to hook up in Florida and of course that never took place, because that was never her intention. Her game was just to have fun with this. You know, Quincy thought she was this really large woman.”

Friesen laughs. “This went on for weeks,” he continues. “She keeps you on the line because she has a very, very engaging way of making you feel that she is dying to talk to you. She knew the male psyche quite well. [Eventually] I think I just dropped it, once I put two and two together and realized this was one of the silliest things I had ever done. It wasn’t going to go anyplace. It wasn’t real. It was just someone with a switchboard and a vivid imagination.”

Brian McNally, who has operated some of Manhattan’s most glamorous restaurants, such as Odeon and Indochine, received the first call at his Tribeca loft in 1982. It was supposedly a wrong number, but then the woman on the line, who introduced herself as Miranda Grosvenor, seemed to have a spark of recognition. “Oh, you’re the guy who has Odeon!” she exclaimed.

“So we started talking,” McNally remembers. “She sounded very funny, charming, and incredibly sexy. The whole situation was sexy, though she never, ever spoke about sex. You couldn’t get her on the subject. We talked for 20 minutes. So I said, ‘Callback.’”

And she did. Before he knew it, McNally was hooked. Miranda seemed to know everything about everyone, especially in Hollywood—which director was considering which scripts, which actor was secretly dating whom. She alluded to friendships with Warren Beatty and Ted Kennedy. “It was amazing—she knew all these disparate sorts of people, all of them famous,” McNally says. “Ask Buck [Henry], ask everyone—everyone was completely obsessed with this girl. It was just extraordinary.”

Whatever doubts McNally had about Miranda’s contacts evaporated when she phoned him one day at Odeon. A busy dinnertime crowd was buzzing around him when an aide handed him the phone, saying it was “Miranda from New Orleans.”

“So who all’s there today?” she asked.

McNally craned his neck and rattled off several names, including that of Alexander Cockburn, the Anglo-Irish journalist.

“Alex!” Miranda cried. “I know him!”

“No, you don’t,” McNally replied.

At Miranda’s insistence, McNally walked over and handed the receiver to Cockburn.

“Oh, hi, Miranda!” Cockburn said.

“How did she do it? I don’t know,” says Cockburn, who spoke off and on to Miranda when he lived in New York in the early 1980s. “She would just ring up and say something flattering. She probably told Brian what great spring rolls he made. She would gab away, and she was very funny. She obviously had a romantic effect. We weren’t talking about Socrates.”

McNally says he began to have second thoughts about Miranda only after an episode in which he heard firsthand the effect she had on men. “She had a tape of Alex, on [her] answering machine, I think, and she played it for me,” says McNally. “It was very funny. Alex was begging. ‘Why haven’t you called? You were going to call. I have your Solidarity T-shirt for you.’” McNally was disconcerted to discover that Miranda might be taping her calls. Still, he kept talking to her for months after. He couldn’t help himself. It was Miranda who stopped calling. “She dumped me!” he yelps today.

“I got the call in the middle of the night-this was in ‘80 or ‘81,” remembers Buck Henry. “It was a confusing long-distance call, apparently from somebody I knew. I called back, got an operator, but of course [I now know] it was all phony. It was an act. Ultimately I’m talking to this girl who says she has no idea who I am, and I have no idea who she was. During the conversation she suggests I am remiss not to know her, because she is this great-looking English girl going to school at Tulane.”

Henry, like so many of his peers, was entranced by Miranda. “She was hip, funny, smart,” he says. “If I brought up someone, she would know something about that person a civilian wouldn’t know. What she did brilliantly was cross-reference everybody. She networked everything. I knew right away it was some kind of con, but I liked talking to her.”

In the weeks to come Henry spoke often with Miranda, who always seemed to know his whereabouts, whether he was in New York or Los Angeles. Occasionally an operator would break into the call and say something like “Senator Kennedy calling from Aspen,” an experience remembered by McNally and others as well. Yet Henry couldn’t dismiss it as a put-on. Once, as he was fishing for information about her, Miranda volunteered that he would meet someone she knew the following Tuesday night. She suggested cryptically that he ask that person about the restaurant ‘21.’ That Tuesday, Henry was on The Tonight Show, and during a commercial break it hit him. He leaned over and asked Johnny Carson, “Did you ever have anyone come up to you at ‘21’ and say they’re a friend of mine?” A look of recognition crossed Carson’s face. “Yeah,” he said. “A blonde girl, good-looking too.”

“My mind reeled,” Henry says. Ever since, he has made a hobby of collecting all the information he can about the woman who called herself Miranda Grosvenor. “I have a book’s worth of material on her,” says Henry. “I couldn’t begin to tell you the whole story. It would take 10 hours to tell it all. . . . The stories are too long, and I want to save some of them.... And I’ve only scratched the surface. Some of it is really dark and strange.”

The real story is indeed dark and strange. But it is also a love story. Or two. Or more.

On a cul-de-sac high in the hills above Sunset Boulevard, behind the gates of a sprawling Art Deco—style home Ronald Reagan built for Jane Wyman in 1941, Richard Perry gazes out at the evening lights of Los Angeles. Perry, 57, is a fixture in the L.A. music scene: one wall of his den is lined with the gold records he has produced over the years for the likes of Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, and the Pointer Sisters; on another are dozens of candid photos of Perry with friends and collaborators, an arm around Frank Sinatra, cuddling with Diana Ross, sharing a laugh with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. Perry’s once longish brown hair is now tastefully short and gray. He is an earnest, thoughtful man with a smooth baritone, a romantic who after two failed marriages lives alone in this one-acre compound, surrounded by Tiffany lamps, 1940s-era furniture, and two hissing cats.

“My story,” he says, sinking into a desk chair and pouring himself a glass of 1989 Château Lafite-Rothschild, “begins with a phone call.”

It has taken considerable prodding to get Perry to talk about the events that, friends say, preoccupy him to this day. He isn’t proud of what happened, nor is he ashamed. But he knows what people may say about a man who fell for a woman he had never met. He doesn’t want to sound pitiful. He doesn’t want to sound cruel.

She reached him at home for the first time on a night in May 1982. Somehow, giving only the name “Ariana,” she managed to keep him on the phone. In retrospect Perry realizes she had done considerable research on him. She knew his résumé by heart and within minutes had coaxed him into a conversation about his passion for 1950s doo-wop records. She knew all about Big Joe Turner and the Platters and even mentioned a classic recording he had never heard but later rushed out and bought, a duet by Ray Charles and Betty Carter. “I’m open and adventurous,” Perry concedes. “I was having fun with it. I was getting off on this mystery woman.”

They talked for 20 minutes, and he invited her to call back anytime. That led to another long talk and then another and another, until Perry realized he was looking forward to her calls. In a throaty, sexy voice, Ariana was funny and empathetic and made him feel wonderful about himself without being obsequious. She gave him a nickname, “Sicko.”

In their second or third conversation she said she lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but attended Tulane University in New Orleans. She said she had done some modeling.

Perry had just broken off a long-term relationship with an actress, and as spring turned to summer he found himself increasingly drawn to the witty, wise woman on the phone. They began talking two, three, sometimes four times a day. Before long Perry was scheduling his studio time around her calls; he made sure to finish work every night by seven, then he would race home, lay out his dinner, pour a glass of wine, and put Ariana on the speakerphone as he ate. They would talk late into the night.

“As it grew,” Perry says after a sip of wine, “she would weave her spell and make you feel closer and closer and closer to her, until you’re saying to yourself that this is the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever met in my life. I thought, I’m falling in love with her.”

The photographs and letters didn’t hurt. Perry had pushed to meet her, but she always had an excuse: She had to study. There was a problem with her father. She had to work. But she did send him a photo, cut out of a magazine, of a lithe, voluptuous model. A separate snapshot showed a white Ferrari parked on what appeared to be a college campus, with a blonde behind the wheel. Perry admits he swooned.

Then, at a recording-industry cocktail party, Perry ran into Gil Friesen. When Friesen asked how his love life was faring, Perry told him everything. An odd look crossed Friesen’s face. “The same exact thing happened to me,” he said. And then Friesen told Perry of the frisky calls he had taken from Miranda Grosvenor, who said she lived in Baton Rouge but attended Tulane. Both men realized it had to be the same woman.

“It was a knife through my heart,” Perry says simply. Yet so deep were his feelings for the woman on the phone that he willed himself not to believe Friesen. “I was just livid, incensed,” he says. “[I thought] Gil was doing this just to fuck with me. I felt no other human being could experience what I’m experiencing now. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Shortly after his talk with Friesen, Perry discovered that his friend Buck Henry was also obsessed with Miranda Grosvenor. Henry’s perspective, however, contrasted sharply with his own. Henry’s initial infatuation had given way to a bemused disillusionment, and while he continued taking Miranda’s calls, he had begun to investigate who she really was.

Henry’s suspicions were triggered by a picture she had sent him, a photocopy of a leggy blonde model standing on a rock in a magazine fashion layout. “I thought it was a really bonehead move on her part,” Henry says. “The model was fairly well known at the time, and it took me about 10 minutes to find out who the model was. I thought, Wait a minute. Something’s going on.” Henry confided his doubts to a friend, who mentioned that Jack Haley Jr., the That’s Entertainment producer who was once married to Liza Minnelli, had taken Miranda’s calls, too. Haley told Henry, in Henry’s words, to “watch your step, I think this is some kind of con job.” (Haley confirms the story but remembers no details.)

Miranda, in turn, took pains to persuade Henry she really was a rich, gorgeous blonde, an effort that led to the Johnny Carson incident and an even stranger episode in New York. Henry was staying at the Essex House on Central Park South, to which he returned late one Friday night after a long rehearsal as host of Saturday Night Live. At the desk was a message from Miranda Grosvenor. The next morning the hotel staffer who had taken the message told Henry it had been left by a beautiful blonde woman who had stepped out of a fire-red sports car and was leading a tiny corgi dog.

Henry determined to find out who Miranda Grosvenor really was. He and his then girlfriend, Time magazine designer Irene Ramp, gave Miranda’s phone number to a Time stringer in Louisiana. Somehow, presumably using a reverse telephone directory, the stringer was able to come back to Henry and Ramp with an address in Baton Rouge and a name Henry had never heard: Whitney Walton. The stringer also found a clipping from the September 20, 1978, edition of Baton Rouge’s The State-Times, which quotes a Whitney Walton discussing how local elderly people can avoid being scammed by con artists.

The next time Miranda phoned, “I confronted her [about] Whitney Walton,” Henry says. “She turned that into part of the made-up story. ‘Yes, I’m also Whitney Walton. But so what? I’m adorable and so are you.’ And then the relationship kind of petered out.”

Henry wasted no time briefing Perry on his mystery love’s real identity. “I told him she was a phony,” says Henry. “He got angry at me and stopped talking to me. She got him thinking I was trying to wreck her relationship with him because I was so in love with her.” Perry did take Henry’s advice, however, to begin taping his calls with Ariana/Miranda/Whitney.

“Ironically,” Perry says, “the first call I taped was the first time she told me she loved me.”

The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. . . . That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within, not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear. —Portion of a letter from “Ariana” to Richard Perry, September 11, 1982.

Autumn winds moan and thrash the pines outside Perry’s window as he answers a phone call, then flips on a CD of soft jazz. He says he remained angry at Friesen and Henry, but their allegations nagged at him. Not long after, he finally confronted Ariana. For the first time he asked pointed questions: “What are you doing? How many other men have there been? What’s the point of all this?” Over the course of several calls, she seemed to come clean. She said Whitney Walton really was her real name. Yes, she had called dozens of famous men. She wasn’t sure why she did it. It was like a game. She called it “jacking” men. She referred to men who talked with her as “jackable.”

“She said her goal—her ‘get-off’—was she felt she could make any man on the planet fall in love with her,” Perry says. “Whether it was a farmer in Iowa or a senator in Washington.”

Amazingly, Whitney’s admission only deepened Perry’s feelings for her. Now, he told himself, he knew the “real” Whitney. “It didn’t matter to me,” he sighs. “I was so deeply involved.”

By the fall Perry found himself drawn even further into Whitney’s calling game. She told him of talks with Robert De Niro, Bob Dylan, and Paul Schrader and other Hollywood directors. He was surprised to learn that one of her closest phone pals was his friend Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band; when he called Wolf, the singer freely told him of his own infatuation with “Miranda.” Wolf related a story similar to Henry’s Essex House experience. In Baton Rouge for a concert, Wolf had arranged a rendezvous with Miranda at his hotel. When he arrived, he found only a message at the front desk, dropped off, the hotel clerk told him, by a striking blonde in a red Porsche. Instead of being put off, Perry was in awe of Whitney’s talents. It seemed she really could get anyone to fall in love with her.

MTV had debuted the previous year, and one night Whitney proclaimed to Perry her fascination with the lead singer of a Canadian rock band whose video was in heavy rotation on the new channel. “This guy’s really cute,” she said. “I’d love to jack him.” A few days later she brought up the singer’s name again. He was visiting Los Angeles, she said. Would Perry agree to meet him? Maybe he could help the singer’s career. Perry reluctantly consented, and the singer appeared at his house late one night, “completely love-struck,” as Perry puts it, “to pour his heart out about her. He wanted to marry her.” Perry consoled the young man, wished him well, and never saw him again.

That fall Perry, an enthusiastic University of Michigan alumnus, flew to Ann Arbor to watch one of his favorite football players, the celebrated Michigan wide receiver Anthony Carter. He had mentioned his interest in Carter to Whitney, only to have her insist she would arrange a chat. When Perry arrived in his hotel room, the phone rang. “Richard Perry, this is Anthony Carter,” the voice on the other end said. “Whitney Walton asked me to give you a call.”

“That blew my mind,” Perry says. “She had gotten Carter out of a football meeting to call me, just to give you an example of her powers.”

Not long after the Michigan incident, and only after months of pleading and cajoling, Perry persuaded Whitney to meet him in New York. He mailed her an airline ticket and reserved a room for her at the Park Lane on Central Park South; at her insistence, he promised to stay at a different hotel, the Sherry-Netherland, not far away, on Fifth Avenue. Friends urged him not to go, but Perry wouldn’t listen. He was fully aware his heart might be broken, he told Henry. But he had to go. He had to know.

At J.F.K. airport in New York, Perry was met by one of Whitney’s friends, whom she had introduced him to over the phone. Walking to the baggage-claim area, he spoke frankly. “Look, if you really care about Whitney,” he said, “if she’s not the person that she has made herself out to be, tell me now, so I can prepare myself, so she won’t have to see in my face the shock and letdown of knowing I’ve been conned.”

The woman thought for a moment. “She’s not,” she said.

Perry brooded all that night, steeling himself for the worst, but allowing himself to hope for the best. The next afternoon Whitney checked into the Park Lane and telephoned him at his hotel room. They agreed he would go to her room at seven to meet her. She asked him to wear a blindfold. He refused. They compromised. She would leave the room darkened but with the curtains open. The only light, Perry recalls, “was to be the city lights coming in the window.”

Just before seven Perry walked to the Park Lane. Within minutes he was standing before her door. His mind raced. He didn’t know what to expect—a model, a college student, a maniac with a carving knife, or the woman he would spend the rest of his life with. He knocked. The door was unlocked and he pushed it open. She was sitting on the edge of the bed. He sat beside her and took her hand. As his eyes adapted to the darkness, he began to see her face.

You’re right if you’re thinking “Miranda Grosvenor” is hardly unique. Tales similar to hers—the latest versions include anonymous romances blooming in Internet chat rooms—float through dinner parties in Manhattan and Los Angeles on a regular basis. Right now Connecticut is home base for a woman who represents herself as a Saudi princess and who has lured several prominent Wall Streeters into business deals; she was recently unmasked by The Denver Post after making an unsuccessful $450 million bid to buy the Denver Nuggets basketball team.

During the late 1970s, a woman using nothing but a telephone and a sexy voice enticed a number of wealthy Los Angeles men to give her gifts of cash and jewelry. One young man, the scion of a prominent Southern California family, fell hard for her. A local prosecutor, urged by the young man’s family to investigate, found the woman was a fraud. It didn’t matter to the young heir. He met the woman and married her. The two lived happily ever after until, family friends say, the woman died in the mid-1990s. The story was ultimately turned into a screenplay that was never filmed. The photographer Peter Beard, who has dabbled in film projects over the years, read a screenplay with a similar story about 20 years ago. “I remember it well,” he says. “The story had supposedly happened to Warren Beatty, who called the police, the F.B.I., and Missing Persons to find this woman who was calling him. We were going to try to get Beatty to [star in] it, make it like a nonfiction, drama thing. But it went nowhere. I’ll never forget the last scene. Beatty finds the woman, rings the doorbell, and the woman comes out. She’s a real hog. The movie ends with them embracing.”

Screenplays, sadly, are not real life.

She was no model. As Perry’s eyes adjusted to the darkened room, he saw a short, frumpy woman in her 30s, maybe 30 pounds overweight, with a large mole on her right cheek. She wasn’t ugly. But she wasn’t, he realized in a moment of self-loathing and almost unbearable sadness, a woman he could spend his life with. “I felt I had been conned,” he says today. “Thank God I had been prepared.”

They walked to the Plaza Hotel for an awkward dinner at Trader Vic’s. Perry strained to keep his composure. “I didn’t want to let her know I was freaked out, that I was devastated,” he says. But after talking in circles for a time, Perry gave vent to his feelings. He told her he was deeply disappointed. She tried to explain. “[She said] we were in too deep for her to admit the whole thing was a fraud. She had gone too far, she didn’t know how to deal with it. I had given her a dose of her own medicine. She said she was hoping I could see beyond the deception. But I couldn’t.”

They parted with a hug and a quick kiss, and Perry agreed reluctantly to meet her the next evening at the Carlyle Hotel bar. That afternoon Perry went to the apartment of singer Art Garfunkel to pour out his woes. Garfunkel, he was aware, had also taken Miranda’s calls. In fact, Garfunkel said, he had been so enraptured by Miranda he had almost taken a Swiss vacation with her. The two men were so deep in conversation Perry almost forgot his second meeting. “Wait! You’ve got to finish the story!” Garfunkel yelled after Perry as he ran out.

Their meeting at the Carlyle, Perry says, “was not a pretty sight.” Perry told her again that he felt duped. She begged him to look beyond her lies. “I never expected to fall in love,” she told him. She began to cry. He told her he felt used and rose to leave.

She grabbed his arm and begged him to stay. He removed her hands. “I’m terribly sorry, Whitney,” Perry said. “But I don’t think I was treated fairly. I’m not in the habit of giving my heart easily. And you should have respected that. I can’t ever really trust you again.” And then he walked out, leaving her in tears.

Perry returned to Los Angeles. Several weeks later he received a handwritten note at his home. It said simply, “You have broken my windows and crashed through all my doors. W.”

The episode lingered with Perry for months, in scenes he would replay in his mind again and again. In time he got over it.

Then, two or three years later, Perry was dining at the Ivy, a restaurant in Beverly Hills, when he heard someone call his name. He turned, and, to his surprise, there was Whitney. She was sitting on a banquette with a man. He walked over and saw it was Quincy Jones.

“Quincy and I are buying a house in Bel Air!” Whitney exclaimed.

In the end, Whitney Walton isn’t that hard to locate. A public-records search turns up a current address in Baton Rouge, near the Louisiana State University campus, just down the street from the Mississippi River levee; the phone number, ironically, is unlisted. An Internet search of local newspaper archives uncovers a half-dozen mentions of a Whitney Walton during the 1990s, including a letter she wrote to thank people for donations to Head Start and other programs benefiting disadvantaged youth. On the flight down to find her in Baton Rouge, I imagine her as a sedate housewife, dressed in blue blazer and white Keds, active in local charities, her secret past as Miranda Grosvenor shed and half forgotten, perhaps a crazy prank she dreamed up with sorority sisters.

A call to the local Head Start office leads to a run-down elementary school in a poor area of north Baton Rouge within sight of the levee. Directed to a door marked SOCIAL SERVICES, I stick my head in, peek over a room divider, and ask for Whitney Walton. “I’m Whitney Walton,” a woman sitting behind a corner desk says. She rises to join me in the corridor outside, and I see she is a weary-looking woman around 50, maybe five feet six and 250 pounds. She wears shocking-pink stretch pants and a matching top, a Slinkylike assemblage of gold bangles and chains around her right wrist, what appear to be diamonds twinkling at her earlobes and knuckles, and the fading remnants of a blond dye job. There is a large mole on her right cheek.

I begin to explain my quest. Before I can finish, she hisses, “Keep your voice down!” and then leads me into an indoor play area. There, as we sit on folding chairs, I tell her the whole story, of an enchanting woman who called herself Miranda Grosvenor and who once made powerful men swoon with the sound of her voice.

Her reaction is immediate and irritated. “It rings no bells with me,” she snaps. “I don’t know anything about it.” I begin to list the names of Miranda’s many confidants. “I don’t know these people,” she interrupts.

There is no surprise in her reaction, no dismay, no sense of hearing an outlandish story for the first time. Only anger and a dash of sarcasm. I press, saying I am certain she is Miranda Grosvenor. “It’s not me,” she says flatly. “There’s a lot of people named Whitney Walton This is intrusive, this is invasive. I’m a social worker.”

A crowd of kindergartners file into the room and begin to play. Eyeing the children’s teacher, she again admonishes me to keep my voice down. She quickly grows impatient, refusing to answer questions about her background and issuing an unyielding wall of stern denials. After a bit, I rise to leave and apologize for bothering her. She stalks back into her office.

In a half-hour with Whitney Walton I sense not the slightest whiff of joie de vivre, of curiosity, of playfulness or whimsy, any of the qualities men have attributed to Miranda Grosvenor; in fact, it is impossible to reconcile this woman with the stories told of her. As I drive off, a question nags at me: Is there some chance this Whitney Walton isn’t Miranda Grosvenor?

Then, later that night, unable to sleep, wondering how to handle the contradiction, I return to the tidy off-campus duplex where Whitney Walton lives.

In the rear carport sits a fire-red Porsche.

“Oh, I remember Miranda,” giggles Barbara Davidson.

“Oh, and she used Ariana,” says Genny Abel. “And Brianna.”

“She was proud that she knew famous people,” says Davidson. “It was her social life.”

“It was her life,” says Abel.

Abel, a smiling woman in granny glasses and a navy “Take Back the Night” T-shirt, is director of Baton Rouge’s battered-women’s center, in a brick building on a shaded street north of downtown. She and Davidson, her co-worker, joined the center in 1982 and were assigned to a three-woman office with Whitney Walton. Walton, after earlier jobs as a librarian and a consumer-fraud investigator for the city, had joined the center a year earlier as a counselor.

“The first thing I remember is she had a big poster of Vitas Gerulaitis, the tennis player, on her door,” says Abel. “I remarked on it. She said they were great friends. They talked on the phone a lot.”

For the next three years, until she left in 1985 to become a social worker, the two women say, Walton spoke endlessly of her many famous friends. To convince them she was telling the truth, she played her answering-machine tapes for them at the office. The two women remembered that Walton’s friends included Peter Wolf, Buck Henry, Art Garfunkel, and others, including two other tennis pros, Yannick Noah and Guillermo Vilas.

“But her big romance,” Abel says with a grin, “was Billy Joel. She let us listen to their calls. He was always calling to see how she was. It wasn’t sexual; it was intimate, like he was courting her. He wanted to send her stuff. He did send her a Rolex with diamonds. He [asked] did she get it. He talked about buying her a grand piano. And an emerald ring. She didn’t want an emerald with diamonds in it. She wanted a plain emerald. He couldn’t find one.” At various times, they say, Walton returned from vacations claiming she had been with Joel in New York. Once, they listened as she called Manhattan real-estate brokers to help him find an apartment in the city.

Abel and Davidson had no doubt it was the real Billy Joel because, among other things, he sang to Walton’s answering machine, experimenting with music and lyrics as he went. When the album Joel was working on at the time was finished, the two women believed that its title, Uptown Girl, referred to Walton, not Joel’s new love at the time, Christie Brinkley. Walton, they say, returned from one vacation, in St. Barts, claiming she had spent time with Joel and had been present when he met Brinkley. But then she also claimed that Peter Wolf had spent a week staying in her small Baton Rouge apartment, where she lived alone with two tiny dogs.

“She complained about that,” says Abel. “She said she didn’t like him touching her things.”

“We never knew whether to believe her or not,” says Davidson with a roll of her eyes.

“It was just so bizarre,” says Abel.

“I knew her as Whitney Walton,” says Billy Joel. “At first [when she called] it was a pain in the ass. [I said,] ‘I don’t know you, what’s the catch?’ [But] she seemed to know a lot of people in my business. Stevie Winwood. Sting. Eric Clapton. [So] I thought she was on the level. . . . This was just before I started dating Christie Brinkley. I was dating Elle Macpherson at the time.”

There ensued the familiar pattern. They talked a little, and then more. He appreciated her quick mind and began rehearsing lyrics and rhythms over the phone with her. “Musicians,” he says, “get calls from all kinds of wacko people. . . . But this girl was different. . . . She was awfully good company.” Joel pushed to see her.

She demurred. If he wanted to know what she looked like, she suggested he go to the drugstore and buy a bottle of Clairol ashblond coloring; she was the model on the box, she said. Rendezvous were arranged, but she never appeared. Joel insists he never actually sent her any gifts of note— only a stuffed animal perhaps.

But then “one day,” he says, “someone showed up at my house with a gift, I don’t know what it was, a toy or something. It was a friend of hers. Her car was out front. There was a person sitting in the back of the car. I couldn’t see who it was. I assumed it was her.” He says she grew oddly possessive. When he dated other women, says Joel, “she would get jealous. . . . I think I sent her a tape of a song. It was called ‘And So It Goes.’ It was actually written about someone else. . . . I sent it to her to kind of say I was seeing other people.”

After she failed to appear at their third appointment, “I just said that’s it, this is some kind of phony,” Joel remembers. “When it was ending, she said she was going to start seeing Sting.” He pauses. “I was even thinking about making a musical about this, because every time I tell people this story, they never believe it.”

Probably no one other than Walton knows exactly why Miranda Grosvenor and her alter egos retired, if that’s what happened. Buck Henry heard an unconfirmed story that Miranda may have “disappeared” in the wake of threats from the late Vitas Gerulaitis’s lawyers; the Gerulaitis estate’s current attorney says he knows nothing about it.

Few of the men Walton courted are willing to shed any light on what transpired. Her relationship with Quincy Jones apparently ended abruptly after Richard Perry saw them together; though a Jones spokesman refuses to comment on the matter, a Los Angeles friend says Jones sent Walton packing within days of seeing Perry at the Ivy. Warren Beatty, Peter Wolf, Richard Gere, Michael Apted, Art Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Ted Kennedy, Eric Clapton, Sting, and Robert De Niro all declined to be interviewed. But if Miranda Grosvenor is dead and gone, her memory lives on. What men such as Richard Perry remember most was her eloquence. In the absence of any tape recordings—Perry says he lost his—her words can be found only in letters, including one Walton wrote to Perry after their awful encounter in New York.

“On a good day,” she wrote, “I feel like a shipwrecked person spotting the sight of some nearing shore: a taste in the wind, a softness in the light, a sudden passage of words. Love is so easy in the movies. No conflicts are too hopeless to resolve, no obstacles too painful to overcome, no resolutions too final for last minute reconsideration. Love means forever in the movies. Not to worry—what was ignited when I loved you continues to burn.”

Somewhere.