For Robert, the court decision was more than just a moral vindication: It was the equivalent of the signing of a personal declaration of independence. After working with his family for most of his life, Robert, then sixty-five, set about freeing himself and his family from the final relationship that blocked them from having complete control of their winery: Rainier’s ownership stake in the Robert Mondavi Winery. With a loan from the Bank of America, Robert triumphantly bought out his Canadian investors as soon as he could in 1978, assuring that his company would be owned and controlled solely by his family.
Robert was also moving toward declaring another form of independence: ending his decades-long marriage with his high school sweetheart, Marjorie Declusin. In the early years, Marjorie was the epitome of what some people in the valley called a “crush widow”—the winery wife who was frequently left on her own during the long days of harvest season. In Robert’s case, he also left Marjorie alone while he crisscrossed the country and the world selling his wines. Although the couple skied together and made a dashing pair on the dance floor at industry events, they began to grow apart as Robert’s business trips stretched to weeks at a time.
In the first, chaotic months of the Robert Mondavi Winery, Marjorie had prepared meals in a makeshift kitchen for Robert, Michael, and whoever might be visiting that day. Marjorie hadn’t known how to boil water when they were first married, and though she eventually learned to prepare lovely meals of roasts, potatoes, and vegetables, she never became a truly sophisticated cook. By all accounts, Marjorie deeply loved Robert and tried hard to please him. “Marjie’s first thought at all times was her husband and her children,” recalls Marilouise Kornell, one of Marjorie’s closest friends. “They were her life.”
But Robert and Marjorie’s union was clearly troubled, as Margrit Biever, the Swiss-born tour guide from Krug, assumed a more central place in Robert’s life. With her more sophisticated European palate, Margrit took over the cooking at the new winery from Marjorie, preparing lavish spreads of roasted chicken, cured meats, olives, crusty bread, and cheeses. At first, Robert had called and asked her to make a few sandwiches for a lunch meeting. After a few times, she suggested that she make a more elaborate meal for him, drawing on her own upbringing, where lunch had been the most important meal in her family’s Swiss home. From that, the idea evolved into picnics on the lawn, and the jazz concerts that quickly became a valley tradition.
What drew Robert and Margrit together was almost certainly more nuanced and deeply felt than Robert’s children, his employees, or even many of his old friends could grasp. Robert and Margrit shared the common experience of feeling alone and trapped in marriages they had begun in their twenties. Robert would often show up at the tasting room around closing time, knowing that the tour guides and other staffers liked to end their work day by having a glass of wine together. “May I join you?” he would ask the group. To Margrit, who continued to work as a tour guide and also liked to stay for the after-work drinks, her boss seemed lonely and reluctant to return home. Margrit felt the same way.
Margrit once asked Robert if he’d like to accompany her to the San Francisco Opera, where she had season tickets in the inexpensive section at the very top of the opera house. He leapt at the chance. “We knew right away we were going to end up together,” said Margrit, who felt a strong attraction to him almost from the start.
Around this same time, Roman Catholic bishops announced that Pope Paul VI had ended the automatic excommunication imposed on divorced American Catholics who remarried. Although Robert was not particularly churchgoing, he had been baptized as a Catholic, served as an altar boy, and had married Marjorie in a Catholic ceremony. Even though divorce was becoming more common in the 1970s, many people, and especially Catholics, continued to ostracize divorcés. And although Napa Valley was becoming more worldly and glamorous, as weekending San Francisco socialites made it a fashionable place to own a second home, among locals it remained a conservative rural community.
Faced with the disapproval of Robert’s children and the Italian families who had known the Mondavi family for decades, Robert and Margrit tried to keep their affair secret. But the spark between them had been evident even in the Krug days, when Margrit would occasionally slip in to see Robert, entering his and Marjorie’s home through the back door. Some members of the family were convinced he had begun an affair with Margrit as early as the mid-1960s. In a small town, their affair was hard to conceal when, for instance, they parked their cars next to each other’s in the local motel parking lot.
Margrit liked to say she came from a family of mangioni, people who love to eat. She was born in Appenzell, in northern Switzerland, and her family moved nine months later to the green and verdant Ticino canton around Lake Maggiore, just north of the Italian border. Her mother, Greta, like Robert’s mother, Rosa, always kept a kitchen garden, and her father, who had trained as a banker just before World War I, later became a practitioner of homeopathic medicine, producing and selling pills out of their home. He also made wine and maintained a modest wine cellar. Her parents embraced the bohemian spirit that swept through Europe in the years between the First and Second World Wars, striking up friendships with artists and attending the opera, even though they were not especially wealthy. Greta, in particular, was a free spirit and a nudist who wore a Californian’s golden tan.
Even so, in some respects, Margrit’s family was traditional in how it viewed her prospects. Although she expressed interest in her teens in becoming a doctor, her father refused to support her on that path, explaining, “You’ll marry.” So instead, at twenty, Margrit was attending a finishing school near Lausanne, Switzerland, when she met an American army officer named Philip Biever, who was stationed in Europe after the Second World War. Blond and effervescent, the young Margrit was swept up by a romantic fantasy. So was Philip, who proposed after meeting her only a few times. “I was his little Heidi,” Margrit recalls. “It had nothing to do with reality.” Buoyed by her mother’s belief that life in America would be more promising than in war-torn Europe, where meat and milk were still being rationed, the couple was married on December 5, 1946, in Orselina, Switzerland.
But the realities of life as an army bride were harsher than she had expected. For one thing, not long after she’d become a mother and moved to Germany with her husband and young children, she contracted tuberculosis and spent nine months recovering in a Swiss sanitarium. At one point, Margrit grew so ill the doctors thought one of her lungs might have collapsed. But she was young and eventually fought off the infection.
The Biever family moved fourteen times before finally settling in the Napa Valley in 1962. They lived in Japan, Germany, Puerto Rico, and Igloo, North Dakota, where the Black Hills Army Depot was located, with baking summers and freezing winters. “It was the most unbelievable place in the world,” Margrit told an interviewer decades later. “There wasn’t a tree for ninety miles. For someone from Switzerland, can you imagine? There were no fresh things—only iceberg lettuce—so I ordered seeds from Sears and planted a garden. It sprouted and I said, ‘See, I can do it.’ Then one morning, zingo, the locusts ate everything. I decided to have a goldfish pond. Then on August twenty-sixth—I remember the date because I keep a diary—the fish all froze. It went from a hundred degrees in the day to twenty-five at night.”
By the early 1960s, the Bievers had two daughters, Annie and Phoebe, and a son, Philip E. Biever, who was nicknamed Babo. After Philip retired from the military, they decided to settle in Napa Valley, which they had once visited briefly on a layover to Asia, struck by the memory of the scented bay trees and brilliant blue skies. Philip first became a physics and math teacher at Napa High School, then got his license as a stockbroker. He invested in real estate in Napa, as well, purchasing small properties as investments when the opportunity arose. Margrit went to work in the tasting room at the Krug Ranch and led tours through the winery. In 1967, she became one of the first Krug employees to follow Robert down the road to his new place, joining as one of three tour guides.
Margrit’s interest in wine soon became all-consuming and her family begged her to stop talking about it. At the same time, Philip declined to travel back to Europe with her, so Margrit began taking the three children on her own to visit her family in Switzerland. She also pursued her passions for art and opera. Driving a beige VW bug from her home with Philip in Napa to her job first at Krug and then the Robert Mondavi Winery, Margrit exhibited a touch of her mother’s free spirit, ostensibly disdaining the bourgeois pretensions of Napa Valley’s unworldly social establishment. Yet she also slowly usurped from Marjorie the role as the winery’s de facto hostess.
Looking back on those years, Robert and some of his family members concluded that Marjorie was simply unable to keep up with her husband’s tireless pace. As Robert himself wrote, “Throughout some forty years of marriage, Marge did her share and more, but she never loved the wine life as much as I did. Who could? In the end, it wore her out. I wore her out. I did not do this deliberately; I was simply oblivious to her needs and feelings.”
But what Robert failed to mention in this account of how his first marriage broke down was Marjorie’s struggle with alcohol, which became so overwhelming at times that she required hospitalization. Family members noticed that she started drinking early in the morning and continued into the night, preferring vodka to wine. She was in and out of the St. Helena Sanitarium over the years and her drinking problem was compounded by heavy smoking, which she continued despite her emphysema and gastric problems brought on by drinking iced coffee throughout the day and by poor eating habits. In the early days, friends and acquaintances didn’t sense anything unusual when Marjorie drank Bloody Marys during the day by the pool at Wine Institute meetings, since many of the other wives did too. But by the mid-1970s, as her marriage was collapsing and the situation on the ranch grew tenser, her drinking intensified.
Some family members blamed Robert’s neglect for Marjorie’s heavy drinking, a particularly ironic charge since it was the sales and marketing of an alcoholic beverage that had consumed so much of Robert’s attention over the years. Michael, for one, believes his father’s behavior, including his relentless criticism and his frequent absences, drove his mother to alcoholism. Yet Robert himself blamed the breakdown of his marriage on Marjorie’s drinking, according to Bobbe Serlis Cortese.
During this time, Robert conducted a long and increasingly open love affair with Margrit, who by the early 1970s had expanded her duties beyond being a tour guide to running the retail room and to handling public relations and much of the winery’s hospitality programs. Robert and Margrit tried to be discreet, but they were not very successful. They were spotted during those years picnicking together during the work day, relaxing on a blanket laid out in the vineyards. Likewise, sometime in the late 1960s, Robert invited Margrit and her husband for a ski break with him in the Sierras.
On what Margrit says was their first date in 1971, the couple went to Chez Panisse, the restaurant founded by Alice Waters and the epicenter of the movement to create a new American cuisine. Tucked away in a shingled Victorian house in Berkeley—across the Bay from Napa—it seemed like a hideaway where the couple was unlikely to be spotted by people from the valley. But as they walked toward the restaurant’s entrance, they saw that two of the winery’s newly hired tour guides, Arlene and Michael Bernstein, were seated by the door and clearly saw them. Robert and Margrit turned around quickly, hoping they hadn’t been noticed, but Arlene Bernstein leapt up from the table and raced out the door, aiming to convince them to come in.
“Oh, come on you two!” Arlene pleaded. “We know!”
Robert and Margrit quickly became close friends with the Bernsteins, double-dating with them and beginning a new social life apart from the valley community that Robert and his wife had been part of for decades. Many of their new set, like the Bernsteins, were well-educated and sophisticated refugees from the city. In the Bernsteins’ case, Michael had been an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission in San Francisco and Arlene was an artist and photographer. They were starting their own “boutique” winery, Mount Veeder, in the valley’s eastern hills. But despite the Bernsteins’ and other friends’ efforts to be discreet, Robert and Margrit’s love affair very quickly became fodder for the valley’s gossips. “It was a soap opera,” Margrit acknowledges.
In 1973, Robert and Margrit continued to appear in public together just as a winery owner and his employee. It was that year they were invited to attend a week-long series of classes and events called the Great Chefs of France, organized by a couple, Michael James and Billy Cross, who had begun looking for a corporate benefactor to sponsor their idea of pairing great chefs and wines. Robert, along with every other vintner James and Cross contacted about getting involved in the program, initially turned them down but accepted an invitation to attend the large and elegant first-night dinner party at an estate in Oakville called Hightree Farm. Robert brought Marjorie, just as Margrit that first evening brought her husband, Philip.
That September evening, forty guests gathered at the Victorian estate that James and Cross had leased for their cooking school. At a time when the main road in Yountville was still a gravel path and walnut groves and prune trees outnumbered grapevines in the southern half of the valley, it was a stunningly elegant scene: James and Cross had set the long table with Limoges china, sterling flatware, and candelabra. For the first course, they served a rolled cheese soufflé in a tarragon cream sauce cooked by the famed French chef Simone Beck, whom James and Cross had flown in for the occasion. Robert and Margrit enjoyed the evening so much that the next day they sent bottles of the winery’s best Cabernet Sauvignon reserve to their hosts in appreciation for the evening.
Then they came back later in the week; one night Margrit came on her own, then on another night Robert and Margrit came together. It wasn’t long before James and Cross realized that Robert and Margrit’s relationship was more than just professional: “Margrit is more than just a colleague to me,” Robert told Cross before long.
At Margrit’s urging, Robert hungered to bring this kind of experience of the good life—a sumptuous meal paired with fine wines—closer to home. But with the exception of Domaine Chandon’s restaurant, which opened in 1977, Napa Valley was a culinary desert. For years, the most popular place for a fancy meal was Jonesy’s Famous Steak House at the Napa Valley Airport. So the Robert Mondavi Winery sponsored the Great Chefs program, which aimed to meet the high standards of European aristocracy rather than the plainer ones of rural California farmers. The template, like so many others at the Robert Mondavi Winery, came from France.
The first chef to teach at the program was Jean Troisgros from Roanne, followed by Michel Guérard from Eugénie-les-Bains, and even the famed Paul Bocuse, who, by the time he taught in the program, still presided over his restaurant near Lyon in his chef’s coat piped in red and blue, though he hadn’t actually cooked for many years. French chefs who had earned three Michelin stars were soon joined by American chefs shining brightly in their own new firmament of American cuisine. Alice Waters once cooked a bouillabaisse outdoors in the vineyards, stirring the seafood stew in a big copper pot set over a fire of vine cuttings. The students’ mouths watered as they waited to dip the fire-toasted bread into Alice’s mixture of scallops, fish, clams, and crabmeat. Julia Child taught in the program a number of times and once, when a student asked her what she would have done with her life if she hadn’t discovered cooking, she replied, in her high-pitched voice, “I would have married a Republican banker and become an alcoholic!”
Starting in the late 1970s, James and Cross would transform the Vineyard Room every night for a week or two each year to host these dinners and the celebrity chefs who cooked them. Overnight, crews would haul in huge, twenty-foot-high mirrors and towering floral arrangements that looked as if they’d come from the foyer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Waiters, many of them gay, wore black satin evening suits from the San Francisco clothier Wilkes Bash-ford. It wasn’t unusual to launch a hunt for three hundred stems of rare white orchids just a few hours before the event, sending a staffer with a fistful of cash to buy up as many as he could. And on a beautiful evening, the ceiling would be rolled back to expose a sky full of stars. Robert’s support of the Great Chefs program paid dividends: After the chefs spent a week at the winery, many made sure to add Mondavi wines to their lists, even if they were placed in the last paragraph of the final page.
Capable, socially confident Margrit complemented and enabled Robert’s dream. She frequently accompanied Robert on his travels, including a three-week trip she organized in 1978 for Robert and the winery’s top staffers to visit the great European wine estates—the first of many such company visits to Europe that Robert hosted. The couple stayed in separate single rooms. Yet it was clear they were romantically linked. As well, Margrit played a valuable role in smoothing their way in Europe because of her facility with languages: To varying degrees of fluency, she spoke seven languages, including French, German, Italian, and Japanese. Once, when the group’s tour bus broke down in a small town in Germany, Margrit was able to ask for directions in German, translate them into French for their French bus driver, and then explain what was happening to the English-speaking winery executives. On that same trip, Robert, Margrit, and the other staffers ended up in a red-light district of Paris, stumbling into a raunchy motorcycle show in the early hours of the morning, and struggling to stay awake during wine tastings after disco dancing until dawn. More sophisticated than Robert, Margrit understood art, appreciated fine food, and was in touch with European culture in a way that Robert aspired to be, but—having grown up in Lodi as the son of hardworking immigrants—was not.
But Margrit’s presence was also an incendiary issue within the winery, particularly among Robert and Marjorie’s adult children. None of them understood or were tolerant of their father’s affair with a married employee, particularly at the beginning. During the court trial, according to John Martel, tensions between Robert and his offspring were strained by their anger with him over his alliance with Margrit. All three of Robert’s children saw their mother as the injured party and blamed their father for the breakdown of the marriage. From their perspective, their father embraced Margrit’s gifts—her worldliness, her ability to flawlessly orchestrate a multicourse meal or event, her appreciation of beauty—but he remained, from their perspective, stunningly blind to her faults, which some saw as her determination to marry the boss, regardless of the objections of his children and two long-standing marriages that stood in the way.
To her detractors, Margrit represented the archetype of the scheming “other woman.” She was not a great beauty, tending toward feminine roundness rather than the slender, long-legged look then in fashion. Nor was she young: By the mid-1970s, Margrit was already in her fifties. But she was dynamic in a way that Marjorie was not and shared Robert’s goal of creating a world-class winery. Unlike Marjorie, who was unwilling or perhaps unable to keep up with the endless string of business functions and travel, Margrit relished being Robert’s partner. And more than simply a companion, she was a business asset to him, able to engage a visiting winemaker with intelligent questions about the temperature at which he fermented Sauvignon Blanc grapes or to greet a group of visiting Bordeaux vintners in flawless French.
But Margrit’s relaxed sense of style grated on some people in the valley, as well as on Robert’s children. Unlike their mother, who dressed conservatively and whose posture was beautifully erect, Margrit favored beads, bright colors, and flowing fabrics. Margrit created a stir at one blessing-of-the-grapes ceremony by wearing a traditional Swiss outfit with a bonnet and broad skirt—a look that staffers dubbed “Little Bo Peep.” The kids also belittled her contribution to the winery. When their father would rise from his seat in the Vineyard Room, praising Margrit in front of employees and guests, they cringed. They would exclude her from business meetings that she should have been invited to attend and, in the instances when she did attend, they’d pointedly ignore her, failing to ask her opinion on issues related to hospitality or public relations. They would mimic her thick Swiss accent and question her ideas and their cost.
The Great Chefs program, which Margrit shepherded along, was one of their broadest targets for criticism. Viewing it as her pet project, Robert’s children treated the program as a waste of time and money. To some extent, they may have been justified. It didn’t help Margrit’s credibility or reputation as a manager, for instance, when the program’s heads, Billy Cross and Michael James, were unable to locate a whole salmon they needed for a dinner prepared by the famed French chef Jean Troisgros at the Oakville winery and so arranged for one to be purchased at the well-known Swan’s Market in San Francisco and delivered by taxi, which charged $165 for the metered journey, at a time when the winery was trying to save money. Margrit, who later would joke about how the “salmon came via taxi, lying in the backseat all by himself,” was blamed for this seemingly extravagant expense and other management snafus.
Another criticism of Margrit, and one that would linger for decades, was that she brought too lavish a sensibility to the winery, which was not welcomed by some family members or employees. From a business perspective, charging thousands of dollars per couple to attend a Great Chefs program was criticized by some as elitist and not in the winery’s best interests, if it were to continue to appeal to a wide range of customers. Yet Margrit and others rightly countered that the program helped get Mondavi wines onto some of the most exclusive wine lists in the world. And, from the beginning, extravagant flair had been Robert’s hallmark. Likewise, through Margrit’s efforts, the Robert Mondavi Winery became Napa Valley’s community center—a place to hear Dave Brubeck, Harry Belafonte, and the New Orleans Preservation Hall Band on a summer evening. Streams of guests from all over the world flowed through the winery, often welcomed by Robert’s warm and effervescent partner.
Still, Robert and Marjorie’s oldest and closest friends as a couple were chagrined by the flash and sizzle that accompanied Margrit. It was a far cry from the days when Robert spent his Saturday nights square-dancing at the Lodi Farm Center. While countercultural types in the valley lived together without being married in the late 1970s, the couple did not consider that an option. “Robert Mondavi could not live with me in the Napa Valley without being married [to me] at that time,” Margrit recalls. Yet, they found it impossible to keep their affair private for long, since they worked together alongside Robert’s children almost every day and lived in a small valley where there were few secrets.
Margrit initially faced the most hostility from Timothy, as it became clear his parents’ marriage was breaking up. Robert’s youngest and ostensibly most free-spirited child was the most cutting in his remarks to her at first. He did not hold his tongue in letting his father’s lover know how he felt about her, confronting her with questions such as “Why are you seeing my father? Don’t you realize he’s a married man?” Employees who witnessed Timothy’s aggressive stance toward Margrit considered his behavior rude and immature, even if they privately shared some of his concerns about their workplace affair.
Michael also expressed his disdain for Margrit. He was convinced she had set her sights on Robert from the beginning, drawn up a plan to ensnare him, and was in the midst of successfully executing it. In one meeting, with lawyers, accountants, and staffers present, he referred to her as “my father’s mistress.” Robert repeatedly urged his children to be polite in public toward Margrit, at the very least. Margrit, in turn, never doubted Robert’s support of her, even when she faced the most intense hostility. His support helped her make it through each day of work, however difficult.
In a similar vein, when Michael suggested the idea of his sister becoming head of public relations, in part to foil what he saw as Margrit’s angling for the job, Marcia refused as long as “that woman” stayed at the winery too. Margrit, with her coquettish ways and her habit of cloaking her intelligence under a blond veneer, was abhorrent to Marcia, who sought to remain close to both her parents but sided largely with Marjorie in the breakup. Presenting her father with an ultimatum—choosing his own daughter or Margrit to work at Oakville—Robert chose the woman he loved, even though he knew it would provoke Marcia’s wrath. Storming into her father’s office, where he was sitting with Harry Serlis, Marcia vented her anger and frustration at Margrit, unleashing a string of invective. Marcia, perhaps because she was female, was the only one of Robert’s children who would take Robert on directly.
Robert, who adored Marcia and treated her with a softness that his sons had never known, just absorbed Marcia’s outburst. Harry, in turn, sat uncomfortably through Marcia’s screed against the interloper Margrit. But although Robert heard out his daughter, he didn’t fire Margrit from the winery, nor did he change his relationship with her in any discernible way. He refused to give Margrit up, even though his children clearly despised her. “It was a very, very bitter thing and I don’t think I could have done it if my children hated someone as much as they hated her,” says Bobbe Cortese. It didn’t take long for Marcia to realize that she would be much happier living on the East Coast, far away from her family, helping to represent the winery with restaurants and distributors. So Margrit became the winery’s public relations chief instead of Marcia. The women worked three time zones away from each other, which suited them both better.
After a while, the siblings’ strategy was to say nothing around her, following the well-worn advice of “If you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all.” Eventually it was Michael who was the first to soften toward Margrit, recognizing that there was little chance of changing his father’s mind about her.
The couple did manage to find places of refuge, away from the resentment and hostility and far from the winery. Harry Serlis, the prickly marketing genius who’d served as the Wine Institute’s president from 1969 to 1975, offered the guesthouse of his Palm Springs home to the couple as a love nest, offering them cover for their romance. Serlis, who was born in Kansas City to a Jewish family, had become by then one of Robert’s closest friends and advisors. In addition to serving on the Mondavi board, Serlis was a “rabbi” or special counselor to the family, helping to teach Michael the ropes in sales early on and proving loyal to Robert in the uncertain months before a settlement was reached. Serlis, who was in his third marriage himself by that time, was certainly sensitive to Robert’s fraught personal situation and understood his friend’s need to escape Oakville occasionally.
Serlis was highly intelligent and had a talent for quickly grasping the core of an issue. He had entered college at the age of fifteen and, in his early forties, was appointed president of Schenley Distillers, one of the nation’s largest wine and liquor companies, with such brands as Roma and Cresta Blanca. Because he had achieved success at such a young age, he grew a mustache to make himself look older. In later years, he became a memorable figure, always wearing impeccably tailored suits and French cuffs that he would flick upward in a nervous habit, as well as a diamond ring on his little finger.
Cliff Adams found himself in the middle of issues that arose between staffers and the couple on whether to report their expenses as business-related or personal. Robert and Margrit always flew first class, for instance, even though the company’s rule was that flights under two hours should be economy class. They also stayed at five-star hotels and racked up enormous entertainment bills, in part because Robert would almost without exception order French grand crus at lunches or dinners to compare against his own wines, as he always had. With Adams mediating, some expenses that the couple’s assistants felt should be paid by the company were bumped back to Robert and Margrit as personal instead.
In 1978, Robert decided to end his marriage. On the short car ride from their home on the Krug Ranch to a wedding he and Marjorie had been invited to attend in Yountville, Robert delivered his bombshell: He wanted a divorce. The couple arrived at the event, which was being held at Vintage 1870, an old winery transformed into upscale shops, galleries, and restaurants, and joined a table with a group of their closest longtime friends, all of whom they’d known for decades. Marjorie, who normally kept her feelings inside, was distraught and wept silently at her husband’s decision. To comfort her, Marjorie’s friends gently tried to remind her that Robert had been straying for years.
Robert separated from Marjorie in June and then, eight months later, petitioned the court for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. The request was granted just two months later, on April 27, 1979, leaving aside for the time being the division of the couple’s assets—with the sole exception of Robert’s request that the common stock of Robert Mondavi Enterprises, the holding company that held his stock in his own winery and C. Mondavi and Sons, became his separate property. Under California’s community property laws, Marjorie probably would have been entitled to 50 percent of the stock in the Robert Mondavi Winery, but Marjorie never insisted on an even split, getting about 30 percent instead. Fighting over money or shares with Robert would have been unseemly. Robert held about 45 percent and their children owned the remainder.
The couple had spent almost all of their married lives living in company housing on the Krug Ranch, so when they went their separate ways, Robert insisted on buying her a lovely, old-fashioned home of her own, providing her with the money to remodel it. The “old crowd” wondered if Robert had bought Marjorie the house to salve his own conscience, noting that he’d ended up with the lion’s share of the assets accumulated during the marriage.
Margrit, in turn, was the petitioner to end her long-standing marriage. She separated from Philip on December 20, 1978, six months after Robert had separated from Marjorie. That first Christmas with each other was a wrenching one. Christmas Day, Margrit called Michael James and Billy Cross and asked what they were doing: They invited her and Robert, who was then in his mid-sixties, over to their house, and they ended up staying through dinner, explaining that they had not been welcomed anywhere else, including at their families’. “They had nowhere else to go,” recalls Cross. “Michael and I were the first openly gay men in the Napa Valley and we knew what it was like to be ostracized.”
Other employees also helped the couple get through that difficult period. The Bernsteins sat on orange crates in the nearly empty house on Spring Mountain that Margrit was camping in after her separation and drank a champagne toast to the couple’s new life together. Margrit filed to dissolve her marriage eleven days after Robert’s divorce was formalized, in May of 1979, also citing irreconcilable differences with her spouse of thirty-two years. The court granted her petition quickly, but it took several more years for the Bievers to work out their property settlement. In early 1982, after struggling with coronary artery disease for several years, Philip, then sixty-five years old, suffered a heart attack. He died before the couple had completed the division of the property and money accumulated during their long marriage, so Margrit ended up entering into an agreement with her three adult children, the administrators of their father’s estate.
In the meantime, Robert and Margrit’s affair became public knowledge; Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle’s famed gossip columnist, called to ask the couple when the wedding would be, since he wanted to write an item about it for the paper. The Baron Philippe de Rothschild had offered his château in Bordeaux as a place for them to celebrate their wedding. Realizing that such an event would attract attention and upset Marjorie and his children, Robert declined the baron’s invitation, explaining they preferred a quiet wedding instead.
But before the couple married, Robert’s children insisted that Margrit sign a prenuptial agreement. The financial implication of their father’s remarriage was an explosive issue for Michael, Marcia, and Timothy, since it potentially meant that Margrit could have inherited Robert’s financial interest in the winery upon his death. To smooth the way for their union, Margrit agreed to several conditions: She waived all rights to any ownership of the winery and agreed to retain her current name, thus never using the honorific “Mrs. Mondavi,” which Robert’s children felt should be reserved for their mother. At Michael and his other children’s insistence, Robert also agreed to put a dollar limit on his gifts to Margrit in any one year—a provision arising out of his children’s concerns about such purchases for her as a full-length mink coat, emerald ring, and other luxuries over the years. While it wasn’t in the legal agreement, the pair also promised to keep their nuptials low-key, especially since they occurred only two weeks after Margrit’s marriage was legally dissolved.
The couple quietly wed, without informing Robert’s children, on May 17, 1980, in the tiled living room of the Palm Springs, California, home of their friends Harry and Bobbe Serlis. Margrit was wearing a wraparound silk dress in a shade of deep rose. The ceremony took place in the late morning. A justice of the peace officiated and the Serlises acted as witnesses. When the justice pronounced them man and wife, Robert turned to his new bride and asked, “Okay, Mrs. Mondavi, are you satisfied now?” Bobbe interpreted the remark to mean Robert had been promising to marry Margrit for many years and had finally kept his promise. Margrit looked elated. To celebrate, the two couples sipped champagne and nibbled on caviar. Then Robert and Margrit disappeared into the guesthouse, near the pool.
That evening, the Serlises hosted a dinner party that included Prince Andrej and Princess Eva Marie of Yugoslavia and other glitterati. The Broadway actress Mary Martin was a close friend of the Serlises and had confided her own romantic interest in Robert to Bobbe, telling her friend, “I could really go for that man!” But Robert and Margrit wanted to keep their marriage a secret, at least for a while, so told no one at the party that they had wed earlier that day. Bobbe Serlis told them, “This is your wedding reception but nobody knows it’s a reception.” Robert was also relatively anonymous as he filed the forms necessary to marry Margrit in Palm Springs. Because of the court case and his winery’s growing reputation, Robert by that time was often recognized when he traveled in San Francisco and Napa Valley, but he was still relatively unknown beyond northern California. So when a clerk at the registrar’s office in Palm Springs had asked him before the ceremony, “How do you spell Mondavi?” he laughed and spelled it out for him.
The newlywed couple spent several days with the Serlises and then jetted off to Europe for a month-long honeymoon. When they returned to the winery, they picked up their jobs where they’d left off.
But the news of their nuptials soon spread through the valley—although Robert’s own children were among the last to know. Indeed, it was only after Michael was invited to a gathering in Robert and Margrit’s honor hosted by the grape grower Rene di Rosa that he discovered to his chagrin that they’d eloped. At the party, Michael tried hard to be civil to Margrit, making a point of clearing the air by telling her that while it was no secret the two of them had had a rough relationship, he would promise to support her if she loved and supported his father.
While Michael’s promise at the di Rosas’ spread helped pave the way for a détente between him and his stepmother, other members of the family remained suspicious. Robert’s sister Helen expressed the feelings of other members of the extended family that Margrit had successfully carried out her long-range plan. “I told Marj twelve years ago, ‘That woman’s going after your husband!’” she fumed to a family friend. The pain and suspicion surrounding Robert’s remarriage would haunt his children for many years, as Margrit became the indispensable consort to Napa Valley’s king.