Liberty Silk (15 page)

‘Well, you’d better get cracking, sugar!’

Myra put the phone down, and Lisa did likewise. She would have loved to pick it up again, to call Lochlan, but of course that was out of the question in case his wife answered.

She and Lochlan had taken every opportunity they could for what he called their ‘trysts’. Lisa adored that he used such a romantic word, a word so redolent of the gallant knights of the Round Table and their lady loves. Sometimes he visited her apartment, sometimes they drove out to the hills to make love, and once he had been so overcome by passion that he had taken her rather roughly in her dressing room. ‘Never again,’ he’d said afterwards. ‘If anyone had walked in on us, our careers would be over, angel.’

Such circumspection didn’t come easily to Lisa, who longed to be able to announce her feelings to the entire world. It was especially difficult when she was confronted with pictures of her lover and his wife, Judy, in the trade papers. Judy wasn’t even particularly cute or glamorous: she was
homely
looking. Lisa felt so sorry for Lochlan, trapped in a loveless marriage.
Silver Screen
had recently published an interview with him in which he’d expounded on the ‘Invaluable Lessons’ he’d learned since marrying Judy, referring to her as ‘his other half’, and Lisa had cried when she’d read it.

‘The first thing I intend doing when this shoot is finished is go to Shwab’s and lay into strawberry shortcake and a malted. I have never been so miserably hungry in my life.’

‘Well, you know what they say. You’ve got to suffer for your art, angel.’

Lochlan and Lisa were sitting in the Orion commissary having lunch. Lochlan was tucking into pasta, while Lisa made do with a paltry salad of grated carrot and cottage cheese so that she could fit into her second-skin negligees and swimsuits: she had been on a perpetual diet since the day she had donned the satin gown for her screen test. It was the end of the second week of shooting:
Crimson Lake
was behind schedule because the entire second unit had had to be hospitalized for three days, having come down with a bad case of poison ivy after shooting exteriors at Del Monte up the Californian coast.

‘What on earth do
top
stars have to complain about?’

Lochlan raised an eyebrow. ‘They may be working gods and goddesses, but it’s a tough life. Stardom is a form of drudgery. All those celebrities might spend their working day hanging out in a trailer decked out like an empress’s boudoir, but the bottom line is that actors in this town are just glorified wage slaves. I mean – get a load of what you had to do earlier today. You spent an hour leaning up against a bloody board.’

Lisa had felt like an idiot when she’d first used the ‘slant board’, a device that actresses were obliged to rest on between takes so as not to crease their costumes by sitting down in them. Resting on the board was the dullest thing Lisa had ever had to endure. She had heard that Lana Turner insisted the studio hire a girl whose sole requirement was to turn over the records that the star liked to listen to on occasions when she had to spend time on
her
slant board, and she wondered if she’d ever have enough clout to make a similar request. Movie-making, she had discovered, really could get fearfully boring.

‘This is your official salutary warning,’ Lochlan told her. ‘Normal folk leave the job behind when they clock off for the day, but once you become a bona fide star, you’ve nowhere to escape to. You might go to London or New York or Paris, but Hollywood stays right there with you. You might nip outside to pick your paper off the stoop, but you better make sure you’re in full make-up when you do it. Fancy a Danish?’

‘No. I’ve got to suffer for my art.’

Despite all the suffering, stardom still held an irresistible allure for Lisa. Every time she drove through the famed art deco gate of the studios she pretended that the autograph seekers gathered there were hoping to get a peek at
her
. When she received her first fan letter – addressed simply to ‘the strawberry blonde in the Chrysler coupé’ – she pasted it into a scrapbook, hoping it would be the first of many. She was thrilled to become one of half a dozen starlets picked to endorse a brand of soda (the copy read: ‘a cooling relief from the hot Klieg lights’), and she was over the moon when
Modern Screen
ran a feature on her swimming prowess for which she posed in a bathing costume alongside the Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller and Cheeta the chimp. (She cut Cheeta out of the photograph when she added it to her scrapbook.)

This photo opportunity had been set up by Myra, who was glad to know that one of the skills listed on Lisa’s CV was actually genuine. Her swimming prowess really had been pivotal in landing her this role, because
Crimson Lake
included a scene in which a tipsy Daphne performs a swan dive over the edge of a cliff. This necessitated hours floundering around in a tank on the back lot with the actress playing the lead, Mabel Philips. Mabel had been a star of the Ziegfeld Follies a decade ago, and still possessed a blowsy glamour.

‘I’m milking it for what it’s worth, kid,’ she told Lisa. ‘If I lay off the booze I might have another year or two left.’

‘What happens then?’ asked Lisa.

Mabel laughed. ‘People write you off,’ she said. ‘You become a nobody.’

And Lisa thought of poor Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, on whom the lead role was said to be based, her looks ruined, her dancing days over. She thought too about the time she’d been surprised by her own nondescript reflection in the mirror in Sefridge’s, and how terrified she had been that she might be perceived as a nobody, how she had considered it a fate worse than death. Now, as the weeks wore on, Lisa came to realize that Lochlan had been right when he’d warned her about the downside of working in the industry. The lustre wore off – literally as well as figuratively. Her skin and hair took heavy abuse – not just from the gallons of bleach that were added to the water in the tank, but also because of the numerous tweaks she had to endure from hair and make-up. Ziggy wasn’t happy with the script, and every day she was presented with fresh pages to memorize – each new line of dialogue, to her mind, worse than the last. The original screenplay was by now virtually unrecognizable, and when poor Scott Fitzgerald died of a massive heart attack, nobody was really surprised.

However, as the movie evolved under a new committee of writers, so too did Lisa’s role. From being a cameo, the character of Daphne grew to play a more pivotal part in the drama. Lisa welcomed the opportunity to make an impression, but the promotion had little financial impact, for, being a contract player, she was not paid for the extra time she worked. She was on call six days a week, setting her alarm for 5 a.m. to be in the studio before seven. Rehearsals started at nine and often she didn’t get to leave the studio until midnight or even later, occasionally opting to sleep in the dressing room rather than drive home.

By the end of her next film – a convoluted thriller shot hot on the heels of
Crimson Lake
– Lisa was so exhausted that the studio doctor was administering daily shots of thyroid extract and vitamin B-12. She lost weight without even trying, make-up and hair were working overtime, and she was too tired to make love. She lived in fear that Lochlan would tire of her – especially now that he had a bouncing baby boy in his life, courtesy of ‘his other half.’

The headline in
Silver Screen
had read:
THE CARDINAL RULES OF MARRIED LOVE – Hollywood’s Happiest Husband Tells How He Stays That Way.

JESSIE AND COUNT
Demetrios were in an open horse-drawn cab, bowling down the rue du Coq d’Or. Jessie had changed into her evening dress and was curled against the leather upholstery, shabby raincoat over her shoulders, bare feet tucked beneath her.

‘Where to?’ asked the driver.

‘Boulevard Péreire,’ the count told him.

‘You can’t be serious!’ Jessie protested. ‘I can’t go there! I look like a vagabond.’

‘A
vagabonde
!’ The count smiled. ‘A perfect conceit – like the heroine of a novel by Colette. I shall tell Monsieur Lantier that I happened upon you in the Tuileries Gardens, wandering barefoot and confused, entirely lost, with no idea how you got there.’

It was hardly a conceit. Jessie really did feel confused and lost. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What do you hope to achieve by such pretetense?’

‘You’re reinventing yourself. Why not? The war has changed everything.
Anything
is possible.’

‘It’s preposterous, Count!’

‘Precisely. I want a shock effect. The impact you make this evening shall resound among
le tout Paris
tomorrow.’

‘But—’

He held up a hand to forestall her. ‘You asked me to help you. It is not an exaggeration to say that I saved your life, Mademoiselle. Now,
you do as I say
. Let your hair down.’

Jessie’s hair had been damp when she’d twisted it up earlier that evening. When she released it, it rippled over her shoulders lending her the appearance of some wild fairy-tale creature.

‘Perfect!’ he said. ‘A Pre-Raphaelite Venus.’ Reaching into the pocket of his opera cloak, he took out a cigar, cut the end with a silver pocket knife and lit it, inhaling deeply as he studied her. ‘Have no fear that you can’t carry it off. I observed you last summer playing charades in the salon of the palazzo Saciaro – a game at which you excelled. Now it is time to play the game for real.’ He reached for her hand and gave her a reassuring smile. ‘What name shall we fabricate for the role you are to play? A fairy-tale name.’

‘Perdita,’ said Jessie without hesitation. It was the name of the stray kitten she had taken in as a child. ‘It’s from
The Winter’s Tale.
It means “lost soul”.’

‘Lost soul,’ echoed the count. ‘Perfect. The name, the hair, the dress – all a little bizarre, all more than a little intriguing.’

The carriage had drawn up outside an imposing building. Count Demetrios produced a large silk handkerchief and handed it over to the coachman along with the fare. ‘Take this,’ he instructed, ‘and soak it in that drinking fountain – see there? Across the road.’

The coachman set off, and was back in a moment with the square of wet silk.

‘Perhaps,’ said the count, ‘you would assist the lady to alight.’

The coachman obliged. Jessie could tell by the way he was avoiding her eyes that he could scarcely believe the audacity of a woman who stepped barefoot and bareheaded onto the pavement outside one of the most prestigious addresses in Paris.

She followed the count to the steps that led to the front door, and then he did a most surprising thing. He knelt down and gently took first her left foot, then her right between his hands, and wiped them carefully with the handkerchief. ‘It is one thing,’ he said, ‘to go social climbing in bare feet. But it is quite another thing to do it in dirty feet.’

He removed the raincoat from her shoulders, handed it to the coachman, then crooked his elbow, inviting her to take his arm. ‘
Courage
, Perdita,’ he said.

The comtesse de Valéry’s apartment was on the top floor of the building. The lobby was all understated chic, in tones of eau de Nil and rose and gilt, and the salon beyond was peopled by the most outlandish individuals Jessie had ever laid eyes upon.

The women were of the type she had seen on the Boulevard Saint-Germain when the count had taken her shopping. No female face in that room was unpainted – bar her own. The women’s complexions were clown white, their mouths scarlet gashes, their eyebrows surprised circumflexes. Some resembled exotic birds preening in peacock and marabou and ostrich feathers, some were oriental princesses in embroidered Turkish trousers of looped silk chiffon and boleros of silver lamé, and some were beautiful barbarians trailing trains fashioned from leopards’ skins and serpents’ scales. And the colours! The room seethed in an orgiastic riot of colour: violent harmonies of incandescent reds and jewel-bright emerald, clashes of vermilion and purple, and an explosion of exuberant azure and opulent indigo.

The moment she and Count Demetrios stepped hand in hand over the threshold, the level of the hullabaloo and the chattering in the salon plummeted. It was replaced by a chorus of little gasps and squeaks and titters of embarrassment and astonishment. ‘Who is
she
?’ Jessie heard. ‘How very . . . quaint!’ ‘How very
gauche
!’ ‘How very
outré
!’

How very
outré
! That was rich, thought Jessie, coming as it did from the lipsticked mouth of a woman who had a geyser of bird-of-paradise feathers erupting from her head and whose legs were hobbled by tiers of shocking pink tulle. A small smile began to play around her lips.

Count Demetrios strolled through the room, his eyes flickering over the assembly, searching for – searching for
whom
? Jessie could not remember what she was doing here, and she suddenly didn’t care. Armoured by the absinthe she’d downed earlier, impervious to the sniggers that were continuing like bursts of machine-gun fire, she held her head high, moving with the careless grace of a dancer, surveying her audience with a kind of cavalier amusement.

At the other side of the long salon, beyond floor to ceiling French windows draped in dove grey velvet, two men in evening attire were standing on a balcony, deep in conversation. One was leaning against the balustrade, smoking a cigarette. In contrast to the strict penguin suits of the other male guests, he appeared in a state of virtual undress: his jacket was slung over his shoulder, he sported unlinked French cuffs and unknotted tie, and his hair hung like a lopped raven’s wing over one eye. Jessie recognized him as the raffish man to whom the count had been talking yesterday on the terrace of the café on the rue Mouffetard. This must be Gervaise Lantier.

Alerted to the charged atmosphere in the room by the sudden drop in decibel level and witchy hisses, Lantier looked up. Count Demetrios paused on the threshold of the open French windows, released Jessie’s hand, and gestured to her to advance a pace or two.