licensed doctor, he had sold a company that made medical-training
films for more than $50 million a few years earlier and drove a
Porsche and a Ferrari. He was also a medical inventor who licensed
out his patents and reaped the royalties. During one excursion the
families made together to the zoo, Justin Fuisz remembers, Elizabeth’s
younger brother, Christian, told him, “My dad thinks your dad is an
asshole.” When Justin later repeated the comment to his mother,
Lorraine chalked it up to jealousy.
Money was indeed a sore point in the Holmes household. Chris’s
grandfather, Christian Holmes II, had depleted his share of the
Fleischmann fortune by living a lavish and hedonistic lifestyle on an
island in Hawaii, and Chris’s father, Christian III, had frittered away
what was left during an unsuccessful career in the oil business.
Whatever simmering resentments Chris Holmes harbored did not
prevent Noel Holmes and Lorraine Fuisz from being good friends. The
two women stayed in regular contact even after the Holmeses moved
away, first to California and then to Texas. When the Holmeses
returned to Washington for a brief period in between, the Fuiszes took
them out to a nice restaurant to celebrate Noel’s fortieth birthday.
Lorraine arranged the outing to make up for the fact that Chris hadn’t
thrown his wife a party.
Lorraine later visited Noel in Texas several times, and they also
traveled to New York City together to shop and sightsee. They brought
the children along once and booked rooms at the Regency Hotel on
Park Avenue. In a photo from that trip, Elizabeth can be seen standing
arm in arm between her mother and Lorraine in front of the hotel.
She’s wearing a light blue summer dress and pink bows in her hair. On
subsequent trips, Noel and Lorraine left the children at home and
stayed in an apartment the Fuiszes purchased in the Trump
International Hotel and Tower on Central Park West.
In 2001, Chris Holmes hit a rough patch in his career. He had left
Tenneco to take a position at Enron, Houston’s most prominent
corporation. When Enron’s fraudulent practices were exposed and it
went bankrupt in December of that year, he lost his job like thousands
of other employees. In the aftermath, he paid a visit to Richard Fuisz