Not Without You (10 page)

‘Sophie Leigh?’ Harvey says. ‘She’s too stupid even for Patrick Drew.’ They laugh. ‘How snoozefest is that movie gonna be? Him crashing into walls on his skateboard, her smiling from under her bangs in some titty top, following him round, saying, “I LOST MY RING!”’ They all join in and collapse with laughter. ‘“Oh, here it is, Patrick!”’ Harvey mimes a ring down an imaginary cleavage. ‘“Oh, it’s here, here are my tits, look at my tits!” Then an argument with a mom or a wedding planner, yadda yadda yadda. GET ANOTHER HAIRCUT, LADY! BOR-ING.’

‘I liked one of her movies,’ says a girl behind another desk, taking a sip of her coffee. ‘The one in LA. What was it called?’

‘You’re a moron,’ says Harvey cheerfully. ‘Seriously, these people. Patrick Drew doesn’t give a damn so at least you give him props for that. But Sophie Leigh – oh, man, I hate that girl! She’s so fucking fake and smiley and you know she’s going through the motions for the cash. “Hey, honey. Put this tight top on so the guys can stare at your tits. Now smile, now say this pile of shit dialogue and put on a wedding dress the girls like, repeat every year till your tits reach your knees and everyone’s died of total boredom …”’ He looks up. ‘She’s probably watching this now. Hey, Sophie! Your films suck! Message from me to you: I LOST MY WILL TO LIVE!!’

His voice is deadpan. The others are laughing hysterically. I switch the TV off and lean back in the chair, pretending to smile though no one’s watching. My heart’s beating. My BlackBerry buzzes.

Oh. Well. It’s very quiet in here. In my head I list the things I love about my life. I think about the house, my white bedroom with the closet filled with lovely clothes, Carmen’s ceviche, my firm smooth body that the best director in town says he wants, the cache of Mulberry bags I haven’t even looked at yet. I have to count like this; otherwise I’d go mad, and sometimes I wonder if I’m not going a bit mad, and it’s just that everyone else here is too so I haven’t noticed. I wish I had someone to talk to about it, someone I could ring up now and say, ‘Hey, could you come over?’ But there’s no one. Somehow. And that’s my fault.

I shiver, and switch over to TNT.
Lanterns Over Mandalay
is on. Eve Noel is a nun in the Second World War and she falls in love with an army captain, played by Conrad Joyce, while they’re fleeing the Japanese occupation of the city. Something tragic happened to Conrad Joyce, too, I forget now. He was killed? He died young anyway, then he totally fell off the radar. Hardly anyone remembers him now, but he was just divine. I gaze admiringly at his firm jaw, his sleek form in uniform which is immaculate despite the fact that they’ve just crawled through several miles of mud and barbed wire.

‘
Damn it, do you know what you’re getting yourself into?
’ Captain Hawkins demands angrily. ‘
Diana, you’re a fool if you try to take these people out of here. We can manage it alone, but to attempt the rest – it’s suicide!
’

I pull the rug over me, snuggling down so I’m as comfy as I can be and as hidden away as I can make myself. The black-and-white figures on the screen seem to glow in the darkening room. A world I can lose myself in where everything is, like the line says, fine and noble. I stare hard at the screen, sharp tears pricking my eyes.

‘
I know, Captain. But I won’t leave them here to die. I simply won’t.
’ I’m mouthing along with her, watching her perfect rosebud mouth, the dark, intelligent eyes that hint at something but never quite tell you what their owner is thinking. ‘
I’m standing up for something I believe in. I’m trying to do something fine and noble in this awful mess. I’m trying to do something wonderful.
’

Where is she? I look around our house, wondering how she came to lose her life here. How maybe I have mislaid mine.

I’ll be around

Hollywood, 1958

EVERYONE WENT TO Romanoff’s. It had started life as a small bistro on the Sunset Strip, run by His Imperial Highness Prince Michael Alexandrovich Dimitri Obolensky ‘Mike’ Romanoff (otherwise known as Harry Gerguson, a small-time crook from Brooklyn). I never did find out where he acquired his knowledge of Russian aristocracy or English country houses – he was able to describe the guest bedrooms at Blenheim Palace in detail to me. Perhaps the library at Sing Sing was particularly well stocked. But despite the fact that he was a crook, and the food was middling to fair at best, everyone went there. When I say
everyone,
of course I mean stars. By the time I was first taken there, it was well established in Rodeo Drive. Almost two years had elapsed since I came to Hollywood but it was still the place to go and be seen.

One fresh evening in March, Gilbert and I drove there for supper. We were both feeling extremely happy, on top of the world, in fact. We had just that day completed the purchase of a house just off Mulholland Drive called Casa Benita: a sprawling white clapboard bungalow high in the Hollywood Hills, complete with tennis court, swimming pool and suitably impressive views. We had looked at places in Beverly Hills, but I wanted to be able to see the city, not be right in the thick of it.

You were part of the club if Mike waved you into Romanoff’s without a reservation. I had seen him turn away millionaire oil barons, nouveau riche Valley residents, and New York society matrons by the dozen. Aspiring producers, new punk actors, hotshot directors – all were shown the door. Yet Gilbert and Mike were old pals, and at some point Gilbert had obviously helped His Imperial Highness out. Whenever we turned up, there was no problem.

‘Get a table for Mr Travers and Miss Noel. Snap to it, boys. Miss Noel, may I take your coat— Who, those sons of bitches? Fat fucks from Wyoming – get rid of them.’

Gilbert was always in a good mood at Mike’s. His old cronies were there, the rest of the original Rat Pack that had hung around Bogie when he was alive. A lot of people had deserted Gilbert when he came back to Hollywood after the war. It was the way of these things: they called him a hero, but the truth was he’d been out of pictures for five years, was heavier and older and things had changed. The audience had moved on, and Gilbert Travers’s brand of charming English gent wasn’t what American teenagers were looking for. I winced whenever we passed a billboard for
Jailhouse Rock.
Gilbert hated Elvis, with a passion that was almost violent.

As we sat down at a discreet banquette, an executive from the studio with whom I’d dealt on my last film,
The Boy Next Door
, passed behind us. ‘Great work on the
Life
magazine spread, Eve,’ he said. ‘Mr Baxter’s delighted they chose to run the feature about you.’

‘Two White Ladies.’ Gilbert flicked his hand to the waiter. ‘They’re lucky to have her,’ he told the executive. Then he gestured to one of the shots on the wall behind us, me arriving at Romanoff’s after the premiere for
Helen of Troy
the previous year in my white Grecian goddess gown, gold sandals, gold jewellery, real gold thread in my hair from the Welsh Valleys and spun into a beautiful diadem especially for me, reflecting my mother’s Welsh heritage. (Mummy was a vicar’s daughter from Berkhamsted, but the publicity department never allowed the facts to obscure a good story.) On one side of me stood Cliff Montrose, my co-star, and on the other, his arm around me, Joe Baxter. ‘Look at you, my dear,’ Gilbert said. ‘Many more such nights to come, I’m sure.’

His hand lightly pressed my arm, and I gazed up at him.

When the studio ‘suggested’ we go on a date together, I’d leapt for joy with excitement, but then demurred. It was well known in Hollywood that Gilbert Travers had a drinking problem. Margaret Heyer, his second wife, had left him and gone back to England three years ago;
Confidential
and
Photoplay
had still been full of it when I’d arrived here. He was a drunk; he beat her; she’d run out of the house naked, screaming, to be rescued by a zoologist who happened to be down on Wilshire Boulevard – which was a neat coincidence as Margaret Heyer’s latest film was about a young wife who goes to the Congo and falls in love with a zoologist. (The publicity machine at work again; Hollywood wasn’t ever that original in its ideas. Even I’d learned that, by then.)

But I thought about it some more and I felt sorry for him. I couldn’t help it. Gilbert had enlisted the day Great Britain went to war with Germany, had seen his friends killed, had caught dysentery and nearly died, and had come back to Hollywood to find film stars who’d never fought a day in their lives playing war heroes and lapping up the adulation of an admiring public. He never talked about the war to me, and after a few cock-eyed attempts to find out more, which he rebuffed angrily, I never asked him again. I understood, at least I thought I did. We both had secrets, things we weren’t to tell each other, and it was for the best.

The cocktails arrived and Gilbert lit our cigarettes. ‘Well, my dear,’ he said. ‘This is quite a red-letter day. Our house, us together. Are you excited?’

I looked around nervously. If the wrong people found out we were going to be living in sin, even if only for four weeks, it would be the end of my career. I’d laugh, afterwards, at how hypocritical it all was: what actually went on in this city while the proprieties were so slavishly observed. The studio, and Mr Featherstone, had spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on my image, the perfect English rose. If Louella or Hedda, or some other unfriendly source, should be close by and should overhear, all hell would break lose. ‘Yes, of course, dear,’ I replied. ‘But – do keep your voice down.’

Gilbert clinked his glass against mine, his thin moustache twitching above his lip as he smiled. ‘You’re too concerned with appearances, Eve dear. We’ll be married as soon as the shoot’s over. And anyway, goddammit – you’re a star. They can’t touch you.’ He gulped most of his drink down and put his huge hand on my thigh. ‘Hm?’

‘Miss Noel …’ A photographer appeared, flanked by Mike and one of the doormen. ‘Coupla shots, please?’

‘Of course,’ I said, smiling slightly. One had to be polite to the press, no matter how much the inconvenience. And the story of the quintessential English gentleman actor, once at the top of his game but mentally scarred by war, brought back into love and life again by a young English beauty, star of the highest-grossing picture of 1957 and heroine of every fan magazine, was proving to be addictive to the American public. They lapped us up, Gilbert and me. The studio, and Gilbert’s new agent, fed the magazines and the radio shows a soapy romance about how I’d lured him out of his shell, taught him how to laugh again, and he had protected me, a young shy ingenue, from the bear pit that was Hollywood. It was a little ridiculous, sure, but I rather wanted it to be true, too. My old life – oh, it seemed as if someone else had lived it and then told me about it: a memory acquired elsewhere, not my own. My parents, the house by the river … Rose, her great fits of anger, her death, and my life without her – all solitary, sad, strange – and then my time in London, so much fun and so different again from this life here. Back in England, I had grown up feeling lost without Rose. I was working towards something unattainable. The reward was satisfaction of a job well done. Here, you just had to smile, and people told you how wonderful you were.

Gilbert put his arm around me. I moved against him, hoping he wouldn’t crush the black silk birds that perched on each shoulder of the heavy cream silk dress. We paused for the photograph, holding our cocktail glasses high, heads touching, smiles wide. All of Gilbert’s teeth had been replaced by a zealous MGM in the thirties. Five of mine had been capped, but that was the least of what they’d done to me since I’d been here.

‘Anything to say about the rumours that you guys are headed for the altar?’ The photographer licked a pencil and took out a pad.

‘We couldn’t possibly comment,’ Gilbert said. ‘However, Miss Noel and I greatly enjoy each other’s company.’

‘Gilbert, how does it feel, stepping out with Hollywood’s biggest new star?’

‘She’s just Eve to me,’ Gilbert said. ‘You have to understand, Sid. When we’re together, such considerations aren’t relevant.’ He signalled for another drink.

‘Eve, Eve – what’s next for you?’

I paused, and blinked several times, smiling sweetly as if flattered by the attention; humble. ‘I’m making a wonderful picture, Sid, with Conrad Joyce, which I very much hope the movie-going public will enjoy.
Lanterns Over Mandalay
. It’s about a nun during the war, and it’s a most powerful story.’

‘She’s going to be absolutely wonderful in it,’ Gilbert said warmly. ‘Just wonderful. Aren’t you, darling?’

‘And Eve, you and white roses – are they still your favourite flower? You’re famous for it!’

My throat tightened; I felt hot, trapped behind the table, fixed to the floor. ‘I—’ I began.

‘No, Sid,’ the doorman said firmly. ‘Three questions. We told ya.’ He grabbed the photojournalist by the scruff of the neck and steered him past the tables and out through the door.

I breathed out. ‘Gosh,’ I said, taking another sip of my cocktail.

Gilbert said nothing, but stubbed a cigarette out viciously into the wide crystal ashtray, then immediately lit another.

‘Darling, what would you like to eat?’ I asked.

No answer.

‘Gilbert—’

‘You could have mentioned
Dynasty of Fools
,’ Gilbert said. He sucked on his cigarette tartly, his nostrils flaring. ‘I backed you up. You should have done the same for me.’

‘Oh,’ I said, appalled. ‘I’m sorry – darling, I didn’t think.’ I shook my head and tried to slide out of the banquette. ‘I’ll go and tell him how good you are, everyone’s saying so—’

‘Forget it.’ His hand was heavy on my shoulder, pushing me back down. ‘Forget it. You couldn’t be bothered to remember then so what’s the point now?’ There was a ripping sound. ‘Oh, this damned fool dress.’

I looked in agony at the little black silk bird on my shoulder, torn and dangling, its beak almost in my armpit. ‘It’s fine,’ I said, though he hadn’t said anything. ‘Perhaps I should just—’