A millionaire fakes a terminal illness to fleece his former girlfriends.

Cecil Fox is a 20th-century millionaire living in the old world splendor of a 17th-century palazzo in Venice. After attending a performance of his favorite play, Volpone , he devises an intricate plan, Volpone -style, to trick three of his former mistresses into believing he is a dying man. Although the three women are wealthy in their own right, all of them have good reason to covet his fortune. To assist him in his scheme, Fox hires William McFly, a gigolo and a sometime actor, to act as his secretary-servant. After receiving invitations to visit Fox at his deathbed and remain for the reading of his will, the three former mistresses arrive at the villa. First there is Merle McGill, a fading Hollywood sex symbol whose career was launched by Fox; second there is Princess Dominique, who once took a cruise on Fox's yacht; and third there is Lone-Star Crockett, a Texas hypochondriac who travels with an enigmatic companion/nurse named Sarah Watkins. As Fox and McFly act out their charade, the brazen Lone-Star boldly states that she is the only one entitled to the inheritance since she has been Fox's common-law wife. That night Lone-Star is found dead from an overdose of sleeping pills. Sarah Watkins immediately suspects McFly of murder and flatly tells him so. When he locks her in her room, she escapes in a dumb-waiter, ends up in Fox's chambers and discovers the "dying man" wildly pirouetting about the room (ballet dancing is his only unfulfilled ambition). It soon becomes apparent that Fox is Lone-Star's murderer. Flat broke, he had hopes of inheriting her vast fortune. Realizing his scheme has failed, Fox does a dance of death into one of the Venice canals. And it is Sarah who inherits Lone-Star's wealth--and McFly.