The NCHS Teacher Who Got Snookered

In my last post, I posed the following question:

•  Which dictator’s daughter, during a New Canaan teacher’s summer job in a recording studio, when it came to paying her bill of $5,000, said, seriously, “Do you take gold?”

Ms. Rukmini Sukarno (born around 1943) is a daughter of Indonesian President Sukarno (6 June 1901 – 21 June 1970). An opera singer, she lived in Rome in the 1960s. There, she met and married the American film actor Franklin Latimore Kline (28 September 1925 - 29 November 1996). Their son, Chris Kline, is a journalist. 

Her husband once arranged a concert for her at Carnegie Hall, dubbing it Fiesta Mundo (World Party).

I not only was an NCHS English teacher but also I co-owned a major independent recording studio in Times Square:  Variety Recording Studio, just off Broadway on 46th Street “in the heart of showbiz” (which also is the title of my autobiography.

During school summer sessions, I spent days managing the studio and my partner (Fernando Vargas, also my paramour) managed late-afternoons and evenings.  We worked with Robert Whitehead (After the Fall, 1964; Medea, 1982); Arthur Miller (cues for After the Fall, 1964); Paddy Chayevsky (Joseph D, 1964), David Amram (music for Joseph D, 1964); and Hal Prince (Fiddler on the Roof, 1964).

Marvin Hamlisch brought Liza Minnelli in 1963, when she was a junior at Scarsdale High School, to record a track for Best Foot Forward, her first dub.

For Jerry Bock, we recorded tracks for his “Fiorello” (1959) and “Fiddler on the Roof” (1964).  

For jazz great Sun Ra and his Arkestra, we completed master acetates from 1961 to 1990.

Ms. Sukarno was a beauty, and her two guards although friendly were tense.  When I made out the $5,000 statement for the tapes to be used three hours hence for a performance at which she would sing in Spanish at Carnegie Hall that evening, she didn't want a receipt and asked, seriously, if the studio accepted gold.

The program was only three hours away, and the guards suggested we bring the tapes, put them on the tape machines, and listen to the program for free, then pick the tapes up and she would return the following day with cash.

We could go anywhere we wanted backstage and had the best seats in the house. She sang partly in Spanish and her band was first-rate.  What a surprise, to hear an Indonesian singing Spanish. She claimed to speak eight languages.

Well, I got snookered! 

The event was over, would not be repeated, and she no longer needed the tape!

If we could have found an address, we would have turned her over to Dun & Bradstreet. By the late 1970s, she was the sole owner of Frankenburg Import-Export Ltd., a Kansas corporation registered in Mexico as a middleman-supplier of steel products to that country. In December 1978, Petroleos Mexicanos, "Pemex", Mexico's national oil company, accepted her bid to supply some 93,000 meters of steel oil field pipe, and in March 1979 forwarded Frankenburg-Kansas a purchase order requesting various types and quantities of pipe for which Pemex was willing to pay approximately $5.2 million.

In March 1986 and later editions, The New York Times reported that upon her conviction on felony charges, she had 

surrendered to the authorities, was held in $500,000 bail, and was jailed in Houston, Texas. Convicted of misapplication of $5.6 million in fiduciary funds, she was sentenced to 14 years and a $10,000 fine. After her indictment, she moved to Mexico but was deported in 1984 and returned to Houston, where she was arrested. Free on $250,000 bail, she disappeared.

In an e-mail last month to the District Attorney who had convicted and had her jailed , I learned that she still is on the loose.

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Following are the next questions.  

• Who were a New Canaan teacher’s two paramours, both of 

whom died having AIDS? 

•  Why, in Paris during a Russian Orthodox ceremony, did the eunuch from the Don Cossack Chorus remember a New Canaan teacher? and 

•  Which New Canaan teacher received an autographed photo from the hands of Mae West, of Marlene Dietrich, and of James T. Farrell?