Cheyney Fox (45 page)

“No, Mr. Madigan, don’t ask me about that part of my husband’s life. Nor about the paintings that are supposedly the foundation of my husband’s collections. I know they’re said to have been stolen from museums by the Nazis, the confiscated property of Jews put to death in concentration camps. You must take my word when I tell you I have had every one of them investigated. So have several foreign agencies, the CIA, Mossad, MI5. There is no hard evidence that they are. If ever
any turns up, I will happily relinquish them to their former owners, in the name of my husband. But it will never happen. We must leave it at that, Mr. Madigan. That is my first and last statement concerning the matter. Not because of any cover-up, but because I don’t want my husband’s reputation mixed in with untruths and speculation. There has been enough of that.

“Kurt Walbrook was one of the great patrons of the arts of this century. His contributions all around the world were magnanimous, on a scale no other private person has ever matched. His museums, his traveling exhibitions, have added greatly to the world. You might consider one day doing a posthumous profile of him. This one, however, is of me.”

“Cut. That was great, Cheyney, really great. Look, can I speak to you in private for a moment?” asked Grant as he propelled her across the room.

They withdrew into Cheyney’s sitting room. He confided in her, “I think I had better level with you, Cheyney. I know the secret reasons, as well as the obvious ones, for which you are so well received in high places all over Europe as well as here in the States. Why you have powerful friends in the intelligence agencies. Why you’re under the protection of some very grateful people, like my friend Irving Kirshner. I would like you to talk on camera about all those people you helped during the years you were married to your husband. All the Nazi treasures you did see and did lead various agents to, that were eventually returned at least to the families of the original owners, or their country. Maybe you could say something about the several Nazis who have been convicted of crimes against humanity.”

“Impossible, Grant. Out of the question. It would be putting my own life and my son’s in danger. My condition for helping was always that I should remain anonymous. The fact that you have that information frightens me. I would rather be called a Nazi sympathizer than have that information revealed.”

“It would be a brilliant character-reference for you. Win over lots of doubting Thomases.”

“Out of order. It could also get me killed. You must promise me never to reveal what you know to anyone.”

Grant had to admire her courage. He, older and wiser himself, was moved by the life Cheyney had made for herself
within a marriage. She had hinted there had been a dark side to that marriage, though she gave nothing specific away as to what it was. Over the years Grant had heard about Kurt Walbrook from several of the man’s former mistresses. Women still in love with the memory of Kurt Walbrook. He had woven a spell around them that had spoiled them for loving any other man. Grant sensed that was not the case with Cheyney. He could only assume Cheyney had risen to a sexual life that answered her husband’s strong and bizarre erotic demands. The very idea of the carnal Cheyney with Walbrook excited desire for her in Grant. He placed his hands on her arms and drew her to him. He felt her tremble against him. Not taking her eyes from his, she firmly removed his hands and stepped back. There was no embarrassment, no anxiety involved. Just a firm gesture of retreat. He grazed her cheek with the back of his hand and said, “Okay then, the subject is closed. I will do what I can to ensure the files are buried so deep in Washington you need never worry again.”

They returned from the sitting room. Cheyney went to stand by the fireplace. Grant stood a few feet away from her. She waved a hand at the cameraman to let him know she was ready when he was. Then, turning back to Grant, she said, “My husband picked me up out of the gutter, you know. Long before I even knew he was doing it. I only found out about it a year after his death. A friend confessed she had helped him help me.

“I haven’t, until now, found it easy to talk to you on camera, Mr. Madigan. But, as this interview has progressed, I have come to realize this is my only chance to speak out about how the circumstances and the environment of one’s life can effect one’s pattern of behavior. How, for example, I got into the gutter. What it’s like being there. What it took to get out.”

She told her story: her pathetic little successes, the failure of her gallery. She named Tony Caletti as her blackmailer. She told what was behind Andy Warhol and his Campbell’s soup cans. The horror of being down-and-out, penniless and broken-spirited, emotionally unbalanced, in New York City. About the extraordinary love of a man who would wait years for her to heal herself, solve her problems. Who would watch her begin her life again and grow secure within herself and be able once
more to leave her years of obscurity and move out into the world again. How his patience never wavered while he waited for her to choose to make a life with him.

Moved by her story, Grant Madigan could not but wonder at his former inability to involve himself with Cheyney Fox’s life. All qualms about that were now gone. He found his way into her monologue. It became their own dialogue. He was able to lead her on with the right questions and comments into riveting revelations about the art world and her place in it, her life as the wife of Kurt Walbrook, as a woman and mother of her time. Why she wanted the job the president had offered her.

The interview was going at a rocketing pace. Only once did it falter. Grant Madigan had begun a question, “Ms. Fox, you have had only one son, and he has retained your maiden name, Fox. Why did you …?”

Cheyney interrupted him, “That is not true. An oversight in your research, I am afraid.”

She spoke not unkindly. She surprised him not by the news that there had been another son, Andrew, but by the pain in her voice and in her eyes when she added, “Even now, after all these years, the death of my baby son in a hideous accident is a loss that is still unbearable for me. In that, I am no different from any other mother who has lost a child. My children are the most precious thing in my life. Yes, even the boy who is dead, vanished from my world, still lives on in my heart. Please, leave me at least the privacy of my love for my children. Both of them.”

Grant Madigan had to take a break. Although she remained composed and in control, he felt her pain too acutely to go on. It grew dark. They lit the fires and turned on lamps, adjusted film lighting. The pause was a brief one. Momentum must not be lost.

The cameras were rolling once again when, sitting oposite Grant Madigan, she admitted, “I know I am a survivor on a grand scale. That I am a most unusual woman, even for these times. But I didn’t start out wanting to be an unusual woman. Life made me that way. And now, by God, I love who I am and what life did to me.”

Grant Madigan had to fight back tears for this woman he
had once abandoned so ruthlessly because he had been unable to love the old, vulnerable, failed Cheyney. He felt himself slipping into a new kind of love for the woman standing before him who had conquered adversity and come back a winner.

“And, Cheyney Fox, if you could wish for one thing, what would that be?” The deceptively benign probe, often inserted to close a Madigan interview.

The camera caught her pensive look and the slow breaking of a smile across her lips. “To begin all over again. To call out, ‘Come back, Deanna Durbin, come back.’ ” She gave a brief laugh. “I suppose that does call for some explanation. You see, I was brought up in the shadow of Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin. And, believe me, those two little misses have got a lot to answer for. They ruined my life.

“Now, more than forty years later, still picking up the pieces, here I am, an unwilling minor celebrity, a Nicky Lauda in the fast lane of the art world. Not in gratitude, but, well, just dismay that I should be rewarded with the honor of being nominated to be the first Secretary of Arts for my country. And all because I could never tap dance, didn’t have dimples or long blond curls or a twinkle in my voice. Nor goodness and kindness and innocence oozing from delectable, pouting lips as I wiggled my little bottom into America’s heart. Which I was made to believe was the way to success and happiness.”

The camera panned away from Cheyney’s face and in on Grant Madigan. It caught the glint of amusement on his lips, the controlled smile on the handsome rugged face. He gave that on-camera throaty laugh, a wry note that rose only just above a whisper. The camera loved it. His public awaited it. The cameraman pulled back and now held them both in his lens.

Cheyney interrupted his laugh with; “Well, you may laugh at little victims like me. And to think it didn’t even end there. If Shirley Temple was the trauma of my childhood, then Deanna Durbin was the trauma of my adolescence.

“Oh, how I squirmed in my seat at the cinema as she sang her way into the hearts of dashing, world-weary heroes, who fell for her seductive voice and her pubescent sweetness and light. She could move mountains, bring off miracles, and always get her man with that voice and that innocence, all that
dormant sexuality reined in under girdles and bra, and pinched-in waist and demure costumes topped off with a saucy hat here and a spiky heel there.

“The men she had crushes on and chased after in her films finally succumbed, like all America, to her goodness and loving nature, her virginal passion. Which of them could resist the innocence of pure love and blind adoration? They donned their silvery armor and became knights and protectors, who never destroyed her innocence, but married her for it.

“That, Mr. Madigan, was the stuff I was made of when we first met in a rainstorm many years ago. And, although I blush to think how shallow a woman I was in those days, there is still in me something that cries out, ‘Come back, Deanna Durbin. Remind me of your good celluloid self. Let me confess that what you stood for I never had. And worse, I laughed at it to get where I am today. Come back, Deanna Durbin, the singing star and Goody-Two-Shoes that I was never able to be. Let me tell you how painful it is, how cruel and heartbreaking it is to be not you but me. I know, too well, that it’s better to be a winner than a loser, on top rather than under the heap. Because the crawl up the slippery slope is lonely and hurtful. Having done it twice, I should know.’

“Mr. Madigan, I can still watch her on the late-night movie and be reminded, forty years on, even with all my dreams and innocence lost, that to escape into one of her films and be shown how it might have been still gives one a breather, a kind of hope. It took a lifetime of pain and pleasure, a great deal of living, to forgive her perfect, sugared little world — and myself for being intimidated by it.”

“Cheyney Fox, what you are telling us, then, is that your experiences have transformed what you claim was your ordinariness. Is that right?”

“Yes, I guess I am. Talking this out with you, Mr. Madigan, leaves me overwhelmed by the immaturity I clung to in the name of the American dream embodied in Hollywood child stars. How could I have lived half my life without recognizing a way of relating for humans alternative to the Deanna Durbin romance formula. She isolated the false, marzipan element of sweetness, innocence — teasing, adolescent, sexual charm, all wrapped up in clean living. And I thought that was going to
get me everything I could ever want. Now, having left all those fantasies behind me, I deal in the real world, with real life, and that is what I am all about. And that is what I want the public to know about me.

“Standing in the limelight, with all my mistakes showing and having them fed back to me in the media, is a dreadful experience. But it makes me see that, all through my first foray into the art world, I lugged around all those old Hollywood values of mid-America, expectations of emotional comfort and success; the Shirley Temple era’s pout and wiggled bottom, the baby-sex allure of all cuddles and no fuck, or the art-boy meets art-girl version of love. Recognition through experience of the dark side of that cuddlesome universe leaves me shattered by my own ignorance. It is grossly unfair for the media to use the woman of then against the Cheyney Fox of now.”

Cheyney’s piquant speech to Grant Madigan induced an even stronger emotional truthfulness. It came over in combination with her beauty and sincerity to show her as overwhelmingly impressive. And that was all they needed, all they wanted. Cheyney Fox, a star in her own right. For fifteen minutes? Longer, maybe.

Chapter 40

G
rant Madigan, won over completely by the courage and inner strength of Cheyney, felt himself falling in love with her in a way he had never done before. The filming completed, he watched his crew crowd around her. He had only to see their reaction to Cheyney and the interview to know the public would take to Cheyney Fox. But he had his doubts about the
establishment, the powers-that-be who vote on such matters. What might they think when viewing a powerful and fascinating personality such as hers? Might they find her in the end too sensational an individual, insufficiently stereotyped, to get security clearance for the most prestigious position in the American art world? Grant had been around long enough, seen enough, to be concerned for Cheyney’s chances of winning once their interview had gone out.

The team broke away from Cheyney to congratulate Grant. “Dynamite,” said Harry, pumping Grant’s hand. Bob took longer over his enthusing. Sara told him they were great together, and, “I’m wiped out by her ‘Come back, Deanna Durbin.’ ” So was Grant. He intended to use that segment as his opening gambit in the television profile of Cheyney Fox and the art world.

At last they gave him a chance to say something to Cheyney. He went to her and, placing an arm around her shoulder, he lowered his head to kiss her with great tenderness. He told her how wonderful she was. How much he had learned, not only about her but about himself, in the last few days with her. Which was not wholly untrue.

Grant Madigan began to understand the pain and allure of the life Cheyney Fox had led. He was particularly disturbed or intrigued by her recurring nightmare. The retrospective exhibition of Barry Sole’s work when the artist’s personality snaps, and, poisoned by his madness, the assembly imitates his Nazi-style salutes, oblivious to the legacy of evil within those gestures. Why did she really have this horrible recurring dream? Was it, as she had suggested, a feeling of tremendous guilt over her failures and her successes? Or was she suffering guilt that belonged to others: Warhol, Sole, Walbrook? Grant Madigan was no psychiatrist, but some of the incidents in that dream might at least have suggested those possibilities.

In the days they had spent together filming the interviews, Cheyney realized that the retrospection was serving to reframe her own sense of herself. She was induced by the leading questions of the world-hardened yet sympathetic Madigan to reexperience the illusion of her onetime bourgeois hopes, her star view of art. To see that, as a child, she had known art only as a wonderland inhabited by creatures not easily distinguishable
from Hollywood idols. The adolescent Cheyney had wanted art to be the vehicle for her ideals of beauty and fulfillment. In the Warhol era, she had been obliged to admit again the screen-idol element — an art centered on personality rather than the work.

She saw its sources had been a mishmash of smother-love at home, and a saccharine view of the world created for her by Shirley-Temple-like films when she was a child. She saw that for her the American dream had meant the expectation of success. And success through the discovery in herself of some wonderful and fully sanitized gift that the world would acknowledge and cherish. She was to be her own artist, her own life, her own wonderful creation. The world would gasp. How stupid, how vain, egocentric, embarrassing, and wholly human she had been.

Every night while staying at the cottage they all dressed for dinner. Cheyney had surprised them when she suggested they bring dinner jackets. She explained that she was in the habit, no matter how busy or traumatic her day might have been, always to dress for dinner, even when she dined alone. A habit formed while living with Kurt Walbrook. Or a throwback to some English colonialist ancestor. She claimed it kept her civilized.

This was their last night in the Cape Cod house. They would all fly back to New York in the morning. The remainder of the work could be done there in the cutting rooms. They were certain of what they had on the film. It was a Go, with a capital G. The publicity machine was to move into action first thing in the morning. In a week’s time the public would have been brainwashed to stay home to meet Cheyney Fox with Grant Madigan. It would go out on prime-time TV across America, in England, several European countries.

There was cause for great celebration. Sara looked lovely in a short, cerise Halston evening dress. Cheyney wore a long, black, St. Laurent tissue-thin cashmere dress, easy as a fine silk bathrobe — and twice as sensuous, because it opened halfway up the thigh with every step she took. Dazzling, art deco, Cartier diamond earrings and bracelets. The men were handsome in black tie. The wine flowed, the food was delicious,
they had music. The evening had the sweet enchantment of success all the participants were so fond of.

Madigan watched, intrigued that his gentle probing had reawakened in the woman he once briefly loved her sense of herself. He was responding to the courage of her investigation of herself, to its emotional truthfulness. During the evening he watched her recognize that her dream had driven her away from loving men and women into using them. He listened to her alcohol-induced confession to Sara of how she once destroyed the love she felt for men, subtly but surely, by recreating them in an image more suited to the needs of her own ego. He sensed a dimension emerging within her that had been missing in the younger woman he, for too short a time, enjoyed. Only now did he understand that their time together had not been enough. He wanted her, wanted again what they had once had together.

The ranging talks off camera had already informed Cheyney of Madigan’s never having married, his sadness that he had never made time to have children, the unusual relationship he maintained with women, the desire for family life that he had never indulged — active, ambitious newsmen don’t make good husbands.

He found Cheyney to have now those things once lacking in her. A rekindling of the same erotic feelings he always had for Cheyney made it impossible this time around to restrain his falling back into love with her. Madigan was led to consider his own reasons for abandoning Cheyney.

Alone. They were having one last brandy together. She watched him swish the Courvoisier around in its finely blown glass snifter and marveled that she should love him still, and with no less passion than she had ever had for him. This man, the natural father of her only son. Here was a truth that she could not ignore. She watched him take great swallows of the golden liquid and shamelessly imagined herself absorbing his sperm, of having his own luscious liquid swirling within her. Bathing in it. To have again from him those same powerful orgasms that acted upon her like an aphrodisiac and had helped create with her the most perfect thing in her life, Taggart. Their own son.

It was Grant who broke the spell of the moment. “Cheyney,
we had to come a long way apart so as finally to come together. Does that make any sense to you?”

“More than I like to admit.”

She drained the glass of its ambrosia. Without taking his gaze from hers, he removed the glass sphere from her hand. He placed both glasses on the stone mantel. The house was provocatively silent, the others having long since gone to bed. The sensual tension building between Cheyney and Grant was not wasted on either of them. Lost in their own emotional feelings for this unexpected coming together, they chose to remain silent, not wanting anything to intrude on what was happening between them. Grant escorted Cheyney to her room. They made it easy for each other. There seemed no point in doing otherwise.

He opened the bedroom door for her. She took his hand and they stepped into the room together. Suddenly, to him Cheyney Fox was like finding the other half of his soul.

For her, all those years without him vanished as if they had never been. All the negation of Grant Madigan from her heart had been a useless exercise.

There remained still that same voracious carnal hunger they had always had for each other. Only this time there was to be more. They walked into the center of the room, Cheyney switching on pools of soft, sensuous light that seductively emanated through ivory silk lamp shades. The light did nothing to dispel the erotic tension so acute as to be explosive.

Cheyney walked to the foot of the white wolfskin-covered bed, Grant a few steps behind her. With deliberately slow, graceful movements she untied the sash of her cashmere evening dress and slipped it off her shoulders. Grant watched the soft, wickedly sensuous folds of the black, paper-thin woven wool fall seductively down her back, over her curvaceous bottom and to the floor around her feet. Naked, save for the art deco diamond and emerald bracelets around her wrists that winked depravity, she raised her arms and pulled the combs from her hair. She dropped them on the floor.

Grant watched the long black tresses fall to her waist. A mass of silky threads. A voluptuous snare. He walked up to her and grazed his lips across her hair. Placed his cheek against the back of her head for a moment. Before he touched her any
further, he begged her, “Cheyney, love me. I never knew I could ever want anyone to love me as I want you to. This time around, my love for you will never waver. I promise. If we come together as I know we both want us to, I will never leave you. In the past I forced myself to run away from loving you.” Grant heard the emotional catch in his voice and had to pause to clear it and gain control of himself before he could go on. “We have both come a long way from the people we once were. I promise I will never leave you again, ever.”

Only then did he place his hands on her naked shoulders. She raised her arms and held them straight out above her hips until they were level with her shoulders. He caressed them down to her diamond-covered wrists with his strong, rough hands and the most soft and tender kisses. She trembled with expectation under his touch. Then, with one hand around her bare narrow waist, he pulled her roughly against him. The feel of her naked in his arms spurred his need to possess her. Carnal love took possession of him. He sensed her need for him was as great.

Still in his arms, she made a tight, seductive turn around to face him. Erotic love, sexual bliss, real love, all she felt for him at that moment, that she had felt for him in the past, all she would ever feel for him in the future shone in her eyes.

He was overwhelmed by her love for him. He crushed her hard into his arms and kissed her. A hungry, thirsty kiss, as if he had been deprived of such real sustenance all his life, until that very minute. She pulled the jewels from her ears and dropped them on the bed. He kissed her again, deep, luscious kisses, to the point where Cheyney and Grant lost themselves in the passion those kisses were generating. Now he licked and sucked one earlobe and then the other, her neck, her breasts; sexy, tantalizing erect nipples. And, once again, mouths opened and tongues teased, while she pulled his dinner jacket from his shoulders, dissolved the black satin bow tie and slid it from around his neck. Impatient to see him naked, feel his skin against hers, the taste of him in her mouth, she ripped open his shirt and fumbled with his trousers.

She wanted Grant, but found it impossible to tell him so when she could show him just how much. Acknowledge to him that she believed he loved her, now and forever. And so
she took over. And together they undressed him, and they lay down on the soft, long-haired white fur. They spoke to each other with lips and tongues, caressing hands. No words. For them words would always be superfluous to feelings. Nothing could still their hearts, even though their animal passion for each other, their erotic extremes, blotted out all else in their need for sexual oblivion.

Sixteen years of sexual excesses with other people, all erotic fantasies explored, of accepting the overt libertine in themselves, and offering sex to each other that enticed, thrilled, frightened for the power that it wielded on each other, led them through orgasms and ecstasy all through the night. Nothing was held back, all was given and accepted in the name of sex and Eros and depravity. Pure carnal love.

Cheyney’s eyes fluttered open against a tide pulling her down into a luscious, warm, deep sleep. She heard herself whimper, and the unmistakable sound of a woman in the throes of sexual ecstasy. The short, quick breaths and moans. He was holding her tight in his grasp, his body wrapped around her like a second skin. She felt the hugeness, hardness of his penis as he slowly moved in and out of her. Long, deep thrusts. She felt her vagina contract, sucking him into herself, then releasing him, with a rhythm of her own, still in a half sleep. She raised her legs and wrapped them around his waist. She placed her arms around his neck and felt him even deeper, as if to the very core of her being. And she woke up.

Her first words to him were “I love you. I have always loved you.” And they kissed. “I have never loved any man as I love you now. Nor belonged to any man as I belong to you.”

“Now and forever,” he whispered in her ear.

He felt her come in a sweeping orgasm and held back, wanting only to continue to give her pleasure. Have her come again and again, until both felt immersed in her sweet streams of pleasure. She called out his name in her throes of ecstasy, and he begged her, “Say it. Cheyney, say it, ‘Now and forever.’ That you love me, now and forever.”

Unable to hold back another orgasm, Cheyney grabbed for Grant’s hair with both her hands. She pulled his head back, the better to see his face. Then she kissed him with a wildness
that dissolved them both this time. Only then did she say, “Yes, now and forever.”

Cheyney and Grant recognized each other anew, as soul mates able to share themselves wholly with each other. They rediscovered a love they had blanked out of their consciousness for sixteen years. And a life together began for them.

Grant watched Cheyney sleeping and marveled that there should be a better way to live. That he had nothing more in his life to prove. That he was where he wanted to be. Doing what he wanted to do, which was to share his life with Cheyney Fox. He suddenly felt as if he were having the best time of his life, and that was a great place to be.