Lace (59 page)

Then the phone rang again. Joujou listened and then said coldly into the mouthpiece, “I’ve
never
had a facelift. I started to sue that columnist Suzy for a million dollars
because, of course, I’ve never had anything lifted, but who the hell has time for a lawsuit?” She crashed down the telephone receiver and gave a loud snort.

Kate instinctively recognised a good wrap-up line and shut her notebook. Judy had warned her not to stay too long. She waved her thanks to Joujou, dodged past two hairdressers and out into
Piccadilly. The roar of London’s traffic was peaceful compared to Joujou’s bedroom.

L
ILI LAY SLUMPED
on the slimy, seaweed-covered rocks. Her legs and arms were bleeding, her wet hair was dripping over her
shoulders and what remained of her pink dress concealed very little of her nubile, seventeen-year-old body. Against the blue Aegean sea she looked exhausted, but not quite exhausted enough.

“Cut,” said Zimmer, “and watch that eye, Lili.” Lili’s left eye squinted slightly when she was tired.

“I’d like to try one more take before the sun gets too hot, please,” said Zimmer. “Remember that you’re nearly dead; you can hardly move, you’ve just survived
a shipwreck.”

Please.
That summed up the difference between Serge and Zimmer, she thought. Zimmer didn’t treat you like a lump of meat. He was always courteous, encouraging, thoughtful no matter
what was going wrong on the set—and something was, of course, always going wrong. If Zimmer stopped to work out whose fault it was, the argument would be endless and they’d never get
started, so he just smiled the tight, little smile that was his danger signal—a gentle nodding of the head that indicated a sort of internal prayer, “God give me strength to deal with
this situation.”

Zimmer’s polite consideration was a carefully acquired working habit, especially useful when working with women. He knew very few men who were really kind to women unless it was part of
their job. But the way to get the best performance out of a woman, whether it was in the kitchen, the bedroom or on the set, was to praise and reassure while still remaining authoritative.

It was important to remember that an actress probably had no self-confidence, however cool she looked, so her confidence had to be built up. In a word, he had to give her the maximum possible
attention. The average woman needed twenty-five hours a day of it, and if she could get a bit more, she’d try for it; but in return for that you would get the average woman’s maximum
performance.

There was a great difference between handling men and handling women. Women tried harder. Zimmer had seen women slumped and exhausted because they’d been up since five in the morning and
it was now eight in the evening and they had to come to life again in front of the camera. And they could do it every time because, though they lacked the physical stamina of men, they had terrific
reserves of determination. The actresses who succeeded were the ones who had a little luck and tapped that extra determination—but they all lacked confidence, poor cows, and they all needed
reassurance. Zimmer doubted whether there was one really
happy
actress in the world. The responsibility and the sheer hard physical work finished them: by the time women were starring, they
were terrified of losing their looks; once they reached the top and realised the insecurity, they could never believe they had made it. They always felt—and rightly—that they were
walking a tightrope.

Lili was determined, she was a worker and she was a beauty, but she’d end up like the rest of them. That much he knew.

“Cut. Okay, print it. That’s all until three o’clock, kids. When you’ve freshened up, Lili, would you mind coming to my trailer please? I want to discuss the beach scene
with you.”

For nearly two weeks the cast and crew had been stationed ten kilometers outside Athens and Lili had yet to play one scene decently dressed. Still, it was a change to wear
any
clothes. Tying the sash of her blue cotton kimono, wet hair flopping down her back, Lili flung herself into a canvas chair in the shade of a silver-gray olive tree. She looked down over
the little sandy beach. Aquamarine water lapped over the rocks off the cove. At the back of the beach, where sand mingled with scrub, some fifty people were gathered around cars and trailers.
Carrying scripts and clipboards, wearing floppy cotton hats and sunglasses, gleaming with suntan oil, they moved slowly about their business. Lili could see Stan Valance arguing with Zimmer. The
aging American actor’s face was lean as a skull—she’d never come across anyone who was on so strict a diet: the man never ate anything except
biltong
—thin shreds of
dried beef that he had specially imported from South Africa. He chewed it like tobacco.

He had a remote manner and didn’t waste an atom of energy talking to anyone on the set except Zimmer.

At three o’clock they shot the beach scene. Lili played a rich, spoiled, turn-of-the-century cruise passenger, and Stan Valance played the stoker who had just hauled her to shore from the
shipwreck.

“Take your hands off me!” she spat at him, as he painfully dragged her out of the water by her armpits. She jerked her wet arms away from Stan’s lean grasp and lay, exhausted,
in the foam. “I can swim perfectly well,” she panted. “I could have made it on my own!”

She tried to stand, then a look of surprise came over Lili’s face as she found that her trembling arms wouldn’t support her body, and her head fell forward onto the wet sand.
Wordless, gasping for breath, Stan grabbed her hands and tried to pull her clear of the water. With difficulty, Lili lifted her face and through gritted teeth said, “Don’t you
dare
touch me!”

Her voice made it clear that Stan was a servant and a man, and that she wore only the wet, torn shreds of her nightgown. With those five words, Lili managed simultaneously to convey exhaustion,
indomitable, spirited arrogance, and shocked, virginal modesty. She also looked extremely sexy.

“Cut!”

Later, in the darkness, Zimmer and Stan Valance were watching the rushes.

Suddenly Stan leaned forward and said: “Shit, the cunt can
act
!”

The following morning Valance waited until Serge was out of the way and then ambled over to Lili’s chair under the olive tree. He didn’t waste words. “I knew
Marilyn, kid, and I’ve worked with them all, Joan Crawford, Vivien, Liz, you name it, and I’m telling you—don’t sell yourself short. You’ve got what it takes. . . .
The way I used to.”

“You really think so?” she looked up eagerly, her eyes shining.

“Sure thing. Whatever you’re doing, it works. So don’t let anyone change it. And don’t take any shit.”

He means Serge, Lili thought, as Valance sauntered away. Serge never left her for a moment when she was off the set. This was just as well, because Lili needed Serge. She needed him because of
her notoriety and her own reaction to that notoriety. Success had made Lili feel that she was merely a property that anyone could exploit or sneer at; success had made Lili feel humiliated. She
could no longer shelter behind anonymity; sometimes she felt that everyone had seen the famous calendar and those horrible films. People looked at her nervously—women with unconcealed envy,
men with a hard appraising stare. Lili grew increasingly paranoid. She could no longer buy a bunch of flowers from a street vendor without wondering whether he’d seen that calendar, wondering
whether he knew what she looked like naked, wondering whether he’d recognised her, whether she had lubricated his dreams.

Eventually, she avoided such small human contacts; she rarely walked in the streets. She ordered what she wanted by telephone or asked Serge’s new secretary to get it for her. Her insolent
self-assurance was merely a pose to hide her uncertainty. When she was with people she didn’t know, her manner was abrupt, awkward, rude. Often she would say something foolish, immediately
regret it, then, to cover her embarrassment, say something worse.

Her mistakes were gleefully repeated around Paris and printed in the gossip columns—often inaccurately—which only increased her fear of people. Time and again her trust proved
mistaken; people were nice to her only because they wanted something—and suddenly so many of them wanted something! Her autograph, her photo, her telephone number, buttons from her coat, hair
torn from her head, interviews. . . . Strangers whispered that they had wonderful ideas for her; well-dressed, charming women invited her to endorse sweaters or deodorants, even a vibrator.
Swift-talking, plausible men tried to get her to sign papers without reading them or tried to get her into bed, certain that she would agree. (“Well, darling, what difference could just one
more make?”)

Serge, with his easy self-assurance, found Lili easy to exploit and naturally did whatever he could to underline her lack of identity and consequent dependence upon him.

Serge’s new secretary opened Lili’s mail and answered the telephone. Lili herself stayed all day in the smart white-and-glass apartment that Serge had bought in the rue
François I. She stayed there alone. Serge wouldn’t even allow her a kitten because of his hay fever. He now wore Cerruti suits and was always out, too busy to be with Lili, huddled
with advertising men or businessmen or directors or lawyers—cold-eyed men in dark suits with briefcases who looked at Lili with tight smiles and eyes that remained carefully blank. She was
not a person to them. She was a deal to be made, an asset to be handled with care, “meat on the hoof,” as one agent said. Handling Lili was a major job.

Serge was no longer as indulgent with her. Lili was now safely tied up so he didn’t have to bother with her needs or problems; his secretary got Lili everything she needed within a certain
budget (Serge didn’t want her spending a fortune on Yves Saint Laurent), and frankly, Lili bored him now. She was nearly eighteen, but an ignorant little bitch—it was lucky the school
inspectors had never caught up with him—and if it weren’t for the money he would have dumped her long ago. A man could get tired of even the most luscious pair of tits, especially when
they belonged to an uneducated, unsophisticated little girl, who whined for attention like a kid.

Slowly, Lili felt Serge’s growing lack of interest in her. She didn’t understand—she didn’t
want
to understand—the reasons, but it was obvious that she
exasperated him and he no longer wanted her around. On the other hand he wouldn’t let her set foot outside the front door without him.

Lili was puzzled and anxious. If she didn’t
belong
with Serge, then she belonged nowhere, she had no place in the world. For nearly five years, Serge had told her what to do, what
to say, what to wear, how to behave. Lili was terrified that he might tell her to go, as he sometimes hinted he would if she wasn’t obedient.

“And just remember you were
nothing,
” Serge would snarl, snapping his fingers under her nose, “
nothing
before I found you. And without me you’d be nothing
again!”

Q
was premiered in Paris just before Lili’s eighteenth birthday, and in spite of the fact that it was a low-budget film with a meagre publicity allowance, the
movie was an immediate hit. At the premiere Lili smiled triumphantly at the flashguns, her head held high as she posed in a cream silk tuxedo, matching pants and a see-through, cream voile shirt,
which demonstrated her new star status while by no means hiding the reasons for it.

After fighting their way through the crowds to return to their hired limousines, the stars, the director, the producer, the backers and the show’s press agent headed for Chez Lipp, where
theatre custom ordained that you should wait amid the engraved mirrors, the gilt and the red velvet for the next day’s first editions—and the reviews.

Since the budget didn’t run to the large chunk of extra money that Stan Valance demanded to attend the premiere, Lili got most of the attention. Escorted by Zimmer, still wearing his
tight, grim little grin, Lili smiled, while the police formed a cordon around her until she was able to scramble into the limousine.

“You must practice getting in and out of cars slowly,” Zimmer commented. “Always move
slowly
in public. If you want to be a great star, you need more than good looks and
talent, you must have style and class; you should always look in public as if you were being helped out of a Rolls, not running for a bus.”

As the limousine nosed out of the crowd, Zimmer turned to Lili, his face alternately shadowed and lit by street lamps. “Lili, I want to tell you two things, one of which is none of my
business,” he said. “I was surprised to find how good you really are. You’ve got a natural instinct for the camera. You respond to it as if you were in love with the damned thing.
And you listen to direction, you really
listen
to what I’m saying. You don’t just wait until I’m finished and then tell me what
you
feel should be done. You’ve
got the makings of a good actress, Lili. Provided you work with good directors.”

He rested his left arm along the backseat and was silent for a moment, then he continued: “I can’t help wondering if poor Serge knows the difference between a good director and a
second-rate one. A second-rate director will spot the obvious things about you, but he’ll probably miss the wistfulness, the fragile charm, that hopeful trust that you project. But those are
the magic qualities that will keep you a star, Lili.”

As the limousine crossed the Pont de la Concorde Zimmer sighed. “Now we come to the part that’s none of my fucking business,” he said. “Christ knows why I’m telling
you this, because I’m careful not to get involved in other people’s lives, but do you know that we paid you a fee of twenty thousand dollars, to a Zurich bank? Of course we had to pay a
lot more to get Valance, but we needed an international name. Now, I can’t help wondering how much of that money you’re going to see? Christ, Lili, why don’t you get
away
from him? You don’t
need
the bastard.”