Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company   The New York Times January 16, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section 1;  Page 28;  Column 1;  Metropolitan Desk  LENGTH: 1664 words HEADLINE: Husband of Slain Heiress Is Seen as Uneasy Traveler in the Land of Wealth BYLINE:   By JOSEPH BERGER,    Special to The New York Times  DATELINE: BRONXVILLE, N.Y., Jan. 14 BODY: The working world that Scott Douglas inhabited by day felt congenial to him, as right as the white painter's slacks he wore to paint other people's houses. Most mornings, the tall, rangy Mr. Douglas would saunter into the McDermott paint store in Greenwich, Conn., chomping on a bacon and egg sandwich and laughing as the clerks who sold him paint greeted him with "Great Scott, it's Douglas." Or he would trade yarns about catching bluefish off local piers. But in the more patrician world of cocktail parties and country clubs he inhabited here at night and on weekends with his wife, the newspaper heiress Anne Scripps Douglas, he felt darkly out of place, a closed, brooding presence who made little effort to gain friends. His two stepdaughters detested him virtually from the outset, acquaintances said. His wife's friends said they questioned his character, warning her that they knew people who had used illegal drugs with him. They also wondered about the purpose of a small apartment he kept in a ramshackle house in Greenwich, though by most accounts it was the place where he stored his brushes and paint cans. By the end of last year, his wife had joined the chorus of doubters, friends of the woman said.   Not Sure of Himself "He wasn't sure enough of himself to say 'I'm a housepainter, but I'm as good as you are,' " said Dorothy Brennan, a longtime acquaintance of Mrs. Douglas and a former village trustee. "Old money is not snobbish money. These people would have been kind to him. If nothing else they have good manners." Yet it was the exhausting effort by both Douglases to bridge the two worlds that may have doomed the five-year marriage of Scott and Anne Douglas and ultimately one and possibly both of its partners, friends and associates say. Early on New Year's Day, a month after Mr. Douglas learned he could be booted out of the Bronxville world by his wife's intention to divorce, she was found unconscious in a bedroom of their porticoed brick house, the victim of hammer blows to her head. She died six days later. On the morning of the beating, Scott Douglas's 1982 BMW was found idling on the Tappan Zee Bridge, the keys in the ignition. But there has been no trace of Mr. Douglas, and the authorities, who have charged him with his wife's murder, do not know whether he is alive. The beating was a sharp break in the tapestry of the Douglases' marriage. Some of Mr. Douglas's acquaintances say he had a charming but "chameleon" personality that would have been able to exploit Mrs. Douglas, who was said by her friends to have a guileless innocence, the product of a protected childhood. It does not appear, for example, that he told her that before their marriage he had fathered a child out of wedlock. Intimates of Mrs. Douglas also say that in recent months he repeatedly threatened her, vowing to kill her or warning her that he was going to take their 3-year-old child, Victoria, and "disappear off the face of the earth and no one will ever find me." She told one close friend that Mr. Douglas had wiretapped the home telephone, forcing her to devise codes like "Let's have lunch" so she could break off a candid conversation. "We begged her to leave or hire a bodyguard," the close friend said. "I told her, 'You see yourself as such a diminished person. We're not talking about a woman who is helpless.' " But at least until the end, Mr. Douglas did not physically attack his wife, one person familiar with Mrs. Douglas's divorce plans said. "Their relationship was not a Joel Steinberg-Hedda Nussbaum affair," that person said, referring to the notorious New York City abuse case. "As innocent as she may have been, she would not have stayed with a physical threat. She has two grown daughters."   A Good Start By all accounts, the courtship began in great ardor, though there was a nine-year difference in ages and a starker one in social background. The two met on New Year's Day 1988, precisely six years before she was bludgeoned, in Kelly's Sea Level, a popular Rye bar and restaurant. Mrs. Douglas, a small, stylish woman whose ancestors built a communications empire, had grown up outside Albany, been raised largely by a grandmother and been given a strict Roman Catholic schooling. Her first marriage in 1969 to Anthony X. Morell, a bond trader from Rye, ended after 18 years. She was coming off a divorce after 18 years of what had been an increasingly troubled marriage. And, said Mrs. Brennan, she was lonely in a village whose married set sometimes spurns single women as a threat. Except for a brief stint as a sales clerk in a local boutique, Mrs. Douglas did not work, supporting herself on a Scripps trust fund and devoting herself to caring for her two daughters. Scott Douglas had grown up with a brother and two sisters in a middle-class family in largely affluent Rye, and in the early 1970's attended Rye High School, where two acquaintances of the time said he hung out with the more bohemian, drug-experimenting students. Mr. Douglas's childhood remains something of a mystery because family members, said his lawyer, Luis Andrew Penichet, have decided against interviews, though they believe Mr. Douglas is dead. What is known about Mr. Douglas sometimes deepens the mystery. Mr. Douglas told his wife he was Jewish and his Oct. 22, 1988, marriage certificate said that he was the son of Norman Douglas and Michelle Acowitz. Anne Douglas, associates say, came to believe that Mr. Douglas had lied. For one thing, his mother's first name is Yolanda.   Into the Hilltop Home After a living-room wedding ceremony, Mr. Douglas moved into the stately hilltop house in Bronxville that Mrs. Douglas had acquired during her first marriage. In the early years, the marriage seemed happy enough and soon there was Victoria, now 3. Mrs. Douglas brought him to all her parties and introduced him to her friends. But it was evident that Mr. Douglas was having trouble adapting to the sometimes clubby world of Bronxville, a village of 6,200 that is home to many corporate chief executives. He could doff his painter's clothes and tool around in a BMW, but personal conversations seemed to make him uneasy, acquaintances say. When Dorothy Brennan would approach as the Douglases wheeled the stroller down the block, Mrs. Douglas was genial but Mr. Douglas would grow impatient, telling his wife, "We'd better get going." "It was evident he was uncomfortable," said Mrs. Brennan. Despite recent published reports of Scott Douglas's "double life," the fact that Mr. Douglas had a three-room Greenwich apartment was not a secret from his wife, her lawyer said. It was the same flat at 174 Davis Avenue in a working-class quarter of Greenwich that he had before they met. He kept his painter's van parked outside, moving his Bronxville BMW into the van's parking space. The apartment did not seem to be a romantic hideaway. He almost never slept there. And Janina Owoc, a retired Polish immigrant neighbor, said that though for a time he had a French-speaking male roommate, "I never saw him with girls up there." Mr. Douglas confessed to one neighbor, Eleanore Hannon, that he had fathered a 7-year-old child, a fact confirmed by law enforcement authorities. But Mr. Douglas did not pass himself off as a bachelor. Fred Powell, a clerk at McDermott paints, recalls that he once teased Mr. Douglas about being a painter with a BMW and Mr. Douglas replied: "My wife's got the money." Mr. Powell said Mr. Douglas spoke more than a year ago of taking Victoria on vacation to the Florida Keys. "Scott Douglas was one of the nicest guys you ever met," Mr. Powell said. More than a year ago, the Douglases separated for a time and were reconciled, but peace did not last; one friend of Mrs. Douglas remembers a loud argument last summer at a wedding in Rye over her dancing with friends from her first marriage. By November, Mrs. Douglas spoke to a lawyer, Stephen R. Lewis, about a divorce on the ground of cruel treatment, and a date for a filing was set for Jan. 5, a lawyer in the case said. Mr. Douglas did not want the marriage to end and, according to Jeanine Pirro, the Westchester County District Attorney, who is heading the investigation, he was adamant about keeping his daughter. On Dec. 6, concerned that Mr. Douglas might flee with Victoria, Mrs. Douglas obtained an order of protection in New Rochelle's Family Court. With little evidence of violence, it barred Mr. Douglas only from taking the child on his own, allowing him to remain in the house. Although friends advised her to move, she told them she was concerned that abandoning the family could damage her divorce case. Mr. Douglas's lawyers, meanwhile, said they would seek substantial alimony . Shortly after Christmas, she returned to Family Court to bar Mr. Douglas from the house, but, because of the holidays, she was bounced between courts in White Plains and New Rochelle without seeing a judge. In the days since the murder, Mrs. Douglas's daughters by Mr. Morell, Alexandra, 24, and Anne, 22, have told friends they should have been suspicious about Mr. Douglas's purchase of camping gear last month, an action they said was a signal of some premeditation in the killing. They believe he has now gone into hiding. But there are also indications that the killing may have been an emotional reaction. In the last few months, the police were called to the house a half-dozen times after Mr. Douglas made various threats to his wife's life. As Anne was leaving for a New Year's Eve celebration, her stepfather was acting in a threatening manner, the daughter told family friends, but her mother dismissed his behavior as "one of his moods." Also, law-enforcement authorities say, sometime after the bludgeoning, Mr. Douglas called his brother, Todd, to tell him something had happened at the house. Friends of Mrs. Douglas add that he told Todd: "I've done something really bad this time."