Armed in the mid-sixties with a high school degree and an abbreviated college career, my brother, Michael Van Lokeren of Grosse Pointe Park — George and Clarabelle Van Lokeren’s oldest son, managed restaurants and a bar for my middle-class parents. It was in those days in his early twenties when he became fast friends with Gary Stroh, a fourth generation heir to the Stroh Brewery dynasty who ultimately would run the Stroh’s ice cream division which began during Prohibition.
Back then, never one to worry about indiscretion, Michael fell in love with Gary’s wife, Linda, when Gary and Linda were having marital problems. Once they divorced, with Gary’s blessing and with Linda enjoying a substantial alimony package, Michael married Linda and became a stepfather to her two children, Suzanne and Greg. With the help of my father they purchased a home on a semi-private street at 34 Beverly in Grosse Pointe Farms near Grosse Pointe Boulevard.
After going to all the right parties for years, including debutante parties and chasing the Fishers and Fords, Michael had not managed to bag the blue blood for which he was so intently hunting. Linda brought to Michael what he had aspired to and been chasing — high social status and a club life. They were part of the tony Grosse Pointe “A List” and by all accounts led the good life together for 20 some years in Grosse Pointe. In the late 1980s and in his late forties the combination of Linda’s east coast affair and his excessive alcohol consumption put the marriage on life support, and they subsequently endured a rancorous divorce. In fact I was with them in Vail when Linda intimated to me that divorce was inevitable unless Michael laid off the sauce.
Michael was particularly estranged from his stepdaughter, Suzanne, a Wellesley grad, a gay woman who had taken an African-American partner and married her in a civil union — a reality sure to make anyone who knows Michael wince, imagining his utter disdain. An arch conservative, Michael had made his disapproval blatantly known. Embarrassed, he never spoke of her. Those of us who knew and loved her were embarrassed by his prejudice on both counts.
Energetic, intellectual, creative and extremely intelligent –Suzanne was a gem and she and I had become close over the years. But back then, it was a natural choice to stick with my blood brother and let her go from my life. A choice I would come to regret too many times. Why in our culture do we suffer fools of blood relatives through thick and thin? Why do we give way to them and let good people fade from our lives? How do we justify wrapping such behavior in so called unconditional love of family?
Ever since I can remember, Michael’s relationship with me and our three other siblings, David, Mary Alice and Vickie could be called, at best, remote. After we all left home, we saw him once a year, usually a three-day reunion up in Good Hart where he could flaunt his trappings – Akwesane with 400 feet of Lake Michigan frontage and Blisswood a historic property he and Mary Ann restored to its original grandeur with a lodge and 6 cabins on M-119. To boot there was an 80 acre spread a little further north. He never took an interest in what we were up to in life, and for sure he kept us apart from his.
Single once again, clutching remnants of the jet-set life, Michael’s once-coveted family life with Linda and the kids of almost a quarter century was utterly eviscerated. By now a principal in a commercial real estate brokerage in southeastern Michigan, he dated a number of women in Grosse Pointe and around the state of Michigan, as well as one in New York. After playing the field he concluded that to be happy he needed his social status back. He set his mind to get back into a high-profile life replete with social position and money.
He told me he was looking for a woman, but not just any mate. He was hunting big game — a woman of status and means.
He made a strategic move up to Northern Michigan to troll the Harbor Springs area, a playground for socialites of high net worth and social status. He rented an expensive home on the bluff to legitimize himself as a man of means and set out to once again plug into the upper echelons of society.
It’s not without irony that before long he became smitten with yet another woman from a beer empire that would become his second wife — Mary Ann Krey of Ladue, Missouri, a wealthy suburb of St. Louis. Her husband died after a courageous battle with cancer over a period of a few years and during that time she had assumed her husband’s role as operator of one of the most lucrative Anheuser Busch distributorships in the United States located in St. Charles County 20 miles northwest of St. Louis. After her husband’s death in 1986 she inherited the distributorship.
As Michael told it that summer — he lived on the bluff, he had been invited to a high-profile party out on Harbor Point at an exquisite Victorian summer cottage, an opportunity to hunt big game. There he met the demure, steely-eyed blonde, Mary Ann Krey of Anheuser-Busch fame, dressed with dowdy panache. He liked her pompous, high-end taste for life, and shared her distaste and disdain for the pedestrian. She saw in Michael his Michigan Rolodex of friends in powerful places and of high social status, invited to the same A-list level parties as she and found unexpected yet provocative his unaffected boyish charm and clownishness and brute Chevy Chase quirkiness.
Michael had found his meal ticket. As always, laser-focused on getting what he wanted, he pursued her like a giddy puppy dog, becoming her “honey-do” overnight. She seemed to tolerate well his loud off-color jokes as if they were just part of his self-made, colorful persona. His drum beat of inappropriate comments and sailor-like humor always made her grimace with a disapproving half-smile, always punctuated with an admonishment, “Oh, Michael”, a faux irritating chronic sigh of tacit approval.
Though their founding cultures clashed, all together it all seemed to balance out. In an odd way, they seemed good for each other.
Mikey had come a long way since the dog days of divorce when he accidentally drove his car off the frontage road and through a fence above I-94, rolling down an embankment onto the freeway, apparently unscathed. His luck in that incident was a harbinger for his future. It wasn’t long before they were engaged.
My three siblings, Mary Alice, David and Vickie, and myself first met Mary Ann when she and Michael visited our father George at the Cleveland Clinic before his aortic heart valve replacement in 1992. To my siblings and me she seemed haughty, snobby and severe, old English royalty like in her gaze and countenance. Mary Ann showed no interest, no, it was plain and simple disinterest in Michael’s siblings. She was always civil to us, but we’d observed many times — like once when a caterer failed to keep the wine glasses full at a dinner party — those powerful, fiery blue eyes that can flash the evil-eye like no other. We were in that category.
Short on listening skills, Michael’s need to be the center of attention made it hard for him to concentrate on what someone else was saying. Brutally and forcefully honest, once at a dinner table full of my siblings he once voiced disgust when he opened an evergreen short-sleeved cotton shirt my wife had picked out for his birthday. Blurting out that he didn’t wear those kind of shirts, only long-sleeved starched striped cotton shirts, he passed it over to me. My wife of mere middle class values was struck to the bone by his callousness and sheer insensitivity.
Neither Mary Ann nor the siblings were surprised by his behavior — he was always an ungrateful, spoiled snob — but we were hurt beyond words by what happened next.
Michael and Mary Ann didn’t invite his siblings or his father to their wedding.
Now back in the saddle with the high-class he so cunningly stalked, shunning his family stunned us, yet seemed true-to-form for a man whose high society friends always came before family.
Only close friends, his step-son Greg Stroh and the wealthy elite and powerful they hobnobbed with were allowed to witness his second union, which took place April 15, 1994 on Sea Island, a small iconic upscale island off the coast of the Georgia known for high society weddings. The siblings knew when and where he was getting married but we kept it from our father because we knew it would break his newly repaired heart to learn we were all shunned this way by our oldest brother.
Our father George died March 30, 1994, shortly before they were married, never knowing that he had not been invited to his oldest son’s union with a beer baroness and St. Louis socialite.
The merger brought high-end results to both of them. With Michael’s connections — in 1997, the well-educated Mary Ann and recent Washington University MBA now, became a Board member of Masco Corporation, whose chairman, Richard Manoogian, was a long time friend of Michael’s. She held that highly paid directorship for 21 years until 2018 receiving many millions of dollars over that time frame. It always puzzled me how a multi-billion dollar conglomerate which manufactures and sells construction supplies worldwide, could find value in the experience of the owner of a local beer distributorship with a small territory in Missouri. I often wondered what her compensation from Masco translated to as an hourly rate.
Together they hobnobbed socially with the Busch family of Anheuser Busch. And they fraternized financially with the Bushes of political repute whose photographs with them, incidentally, were always more prominently displayed than family photos in their six mansions from Michigan’s Good Hart and Grosse Pointe Farms to Missouri’s Ladue and Florida’s Boca Grande.
Crowned by his friends “Half-a-Dozen Mike”, of which he bragged to me, Michael relished in his largess. By 2008 when it was in vogue to downsize, they pulled up roots in St. Louis and downsized to five mansions, relegating him, I guess, to Cinco de Mikey.