The Slipper (44 page)

“You!” she shrieked. “Carol Martin! How could a decent American girl appear in such a filthy piece of Commie propaganda!” Hedda had recently elected herself the guardian of American democracy. “It's a scandal! It's an outrage! How can you—”

And suddenly, from out of nowhere, Jean-Claude Bresson was there in front of her, wearing tight gray pants and wide black belt and loosely fitting white silk shirt with full-gathered sleeves, looking exactly like some jaunty buccaneer with his battered face and wavy black hair. Carol couldn't swear he had swung from a chandelier and leaped into the middle of the crowd, but it seemed he had. Enormous brown eyes flashing with excitement, wide mouth curling in a devilish grin, he pushed a photographer away, knocked a reporter to the floor, swept Carol up into his arms. With debonair aplomb he cradled her close with one strong arm and pushed his way through the crowd, socking a reporter in the jaw, kicking a photographer in the groin, dozens of flashbulbs blazing silver-blue as he carried her to the elevators, the press in hot pursuit. She caught a quick glimpse of Hedda clutching the arm of a sofa, dragging herself up from the floor, flowered hat hopelessly crushed, and then the elevator doors opened and Jean-Claude shoved her inside and slugged a couple more reporters and then darted in himself just as the doors were closing.

“You're absolutely insane, you know,” she said dryly.

“I was marvelous!” he protested.

“We'll be on the front pages of every scandal sheet in the world.”

“It will be good for the movie, no? Guy will be delighted. We are a hot item.”

Jean-Claude spoke no English and his French was heavily accented. He was half Sicilian and, though born in France, had spent half his life in Italy and spoke in a raspy twang that combined the worst features of both languages. It was a unique sound and wildly sexy.

“Did you actually swing from a chandelier?” she asked.

“Is easy. I leap up on a table, grab the chandelier, give myself a send-off and—voilà! I swing over their heads and drop down in front of you. It is the snap for me to do. Before I take up wrestling, I am an acrobat in circus in Milan.”

“Lord!”

“They love it! They get a few bruises but they get a marvelous story and some fantastic photos, no?”

“I can't believe you're for real.”

“Me, I am going to be a big movie star now, no? I don't have the pretty face like Alain Delon, but I have the panache, the personality, the rugged sex appeal. I read what they say about me in the papers. It is a blast, no?”

Carol couldn't help smiling as the elevator doors opened and they stepped out. Jean-Claude was full of innocent arrogance and boyish braggadocio, an utterly charming lad of thirty-six who was a disarming combination of both Peter Pan and Captain Hook. Long, lean, loose-limbed, he had wildly unruly hair and a thin, pockmarked face with hollows beneath those huge, guileless brown eyes. His nose had been broken a number of times, and if his mouth wasn't actually a mile wide, it seemed that way. Virile, athletic, breezily confident, he was a primitive, unspoiled, and there had never been anyone quite like him in movies before. He was going to be a huge star.

He followed her into her suite and promptly went over to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a strong whiskey, grinning happily as Carol ran fingers through her hair and checked herself in the mirror for bruises. She and Jean-Claude had been lovers ever since the second day of shooting. He was an amusing playmate, incredibly sexy and absolutely phenomenal in bed, but his boyish antics had begun to pall after all these months. She adored him and he adored her, but, for both, the relationship was merely a lighthearted diversion, very French, not at all serious.

“This American film producer, he waylays me this morning,” he confided. “He wants me to come to Hollywood, wants to make me a big cowboy star like Gary Cooper. I tell him no, I think not. I do not speak the English, and it is too hard for me to learn. I think I become huge superstar in France first and
then
go to Hollywood and become a cowboy.”

“You'd look great in chaps and a ten-gallon hat,” she told him.

“You think so? With this ugly mug of mine?”

“That ugly mug of yours is arguably the sexiest mug I've ever seen,” Carol said. “The women are going to go crazy over you and men are going to love your carefree independence and
joie de vivre
.”

“This is so,” he admitted. “Me, I am determined I will become the champion wrestler in Europe, and this I do. Once I get them in my headlock, they are at my mercy. I tell myself I will become the big movie star, too, and already it is happening. I knock them off their socks.”

Carol smiled again and started toward the bedroom. “We're due at Festival Hall at seven,” she said. “We're supposed to look very glamorous for the screening, and that's going to take me at least a couple of hours. Run along to your own suite, pet.”

“But I am horny!” he protested.

“It'll keep,” she assured him.

“You are throwing me out? I rescue you from the clutches of the bad guys and this is the thanks I get? You are a heartless bitch.”

“Guilty as charged,” she replied.

He scowled a mock scowl. “I make you pay for this later.”

Jean-Claude finished his whiskey in two gulps, grinned amiably, waved his fingers at her and left. Carol sighed, relieved. She was in a blue mood and not at all up to amorous dalliance, however pleasant it might be. She removed robe and bathing suit, slipped on a thin white silk wrapper and poured herself a whiskey, wandering over to the window to gaze out over the Croisette and the Mediterranean beyond. She was worried about Gaby and tempted to call, but she knew Gaby would think she was checking up on her and probably resent it. Gaby would get over her depression. She would find another lover, and there would be another film. The one she had written had been shown last night, a typical Bernais love story set in the twenties, elegantly costumed, gorgeously shot in muted Technicolor, full of wit, sighs, sadness, with a glorious Michel Legrand score. It had been viciously booed by the hypercritical, politically oriented festival audience and Gaby herself had been hissed as they left the
palais
. Ordinarily she would have shrugged it off with a pixie smile, but Gaby was already sad over the breakup with Edouard, her most recent blond tough. She had left Cannes early this morning, heading for Paris in her Aston-Martin.

Poor Gaby. The muscular blonds were getting tougher, more venal, and the hedonistic life-style—the jazz, the whiskey, the nightclubs, the fast cars—was beginning to take its toll. Her work had suffered. The short, sad novels of bittersweet love were all very well, but it was time for the artist to grow now, to reach, to develop new themes. Gaby had it in her to become a genuinely great novelist, but this would never happen if she continued to repeat herself. Gaby knew this. She felt guilty about it. Of late she had driven herself to even greater excesses with liquor, jazz, men, speed. It was no longer charming and piquant. The artist within her demanded a settled life and time for reflection, the very things Gaby denied herself. Her last two novels had sold well enough, but the critics had called them shallow and repetitive, and, indeed, they had been. Gaby had pinned all her hopes on the film she had written, hoping it would re-establish her credit with the critics. While sumptuously produced and superbly directed and acted, it was as empty and insubstantial as the last two novels. Unless something happened soon, Gaby's career was in serious trouble.

Finishing her whiskey, Carol set the empty glass on the windowsill, gazing out with sad eyes. The sun was almost gone now, the sky deepening to purple, a violet-gray haze settling, and lights had begun to come on aboard those elegant yachts, flickering like pale golden fireflies in the dusk. Carol felt the pain and loss inside, as she always did when she was alone, when there was no distraction. She missed him still, after all this time, missed him as much as she had that first day after she had driven him along the coast to the airport. He had not written. There had not been so much as a postcard from him, and she understood. She knew that it was probably better this way. She had sent a lovely wedding present to Cliff and Stephanie and had received a charming thank-you note and, months later, a witty letter from Cliff describing the honeymoon in Acapulco and the ground-breaking ceremonies for the big shopping mall he was building. He sent his love. He did not mention his father.

Those first weeks after Norman's departure had been sheer hell, and Carol could never have survived them without Sir Robert and the other marvelous cast members who had formed her own personal support group. Lilli Palmer had taken her shopping, her husband, Argentine-born German actor Carlos Thompson, patiently squiring them around and keeping them amused with his witty stories of his Hollywood years costarring in movies with Lana Turner and Yvonne DeCarlo as a fiery Latin lover. Margaret Rutherford watched over her on the set like a fussy mother hen, giving her tea and teaching her to knit and smothering her with affectionate attentions. In the evenings Sir Robert took her out to dinner and to clubs and tried his best to keep her smiling. Her heart was breaking over the loss of Norman and she often went on crying jags and she felt she had made a dreadful mistake and not a day passed that she didn't want to abandon the movie and fly to him.

She was playing a giddy, lighthearted, carefree British girl. Comedy was much more difficult to do than heavy drama, required perfect timing and a sure deft touch, but, because of the wonderful support and assistance of her fellow workers, she gave one of the best performances of her career.
Knaves Like Us
was the finest movie she had ever made, and she fully expected it to bring her to the attention of those in Hollywood who had spurned her after the Berne disaster. That wasn't to be. Kitchen-sink realism was in vogue in England, Angry Young Men and LShaped Rooms and Lonely Long-Distance Runners.
Knaves Like Us
was considered old-fashioned, bombed in Britain and had a very limited distribution in America. She had given up so much in order to make this particular film—and for what? She had lost Norman. She had gained nothing whatsoever.

She had done two more French films in quick succession, one with Marc Allegret, one with Louis Malle, both fine, neither released in America. She had deliberately kept as busy as possible—work was a kind of anesthesia, holding the pain at bay, work was her salvation—and she found herself drinking more, smoking more, taking more lovers. While never promiscuous, she had had three brief, unsatisfying affairs before
Le Bois
and Jean-Claude, and that concerned her. Carol wasn't pleased with herself and didn't like what she was becoming. Despite five years in France working in an ultrasophisticated milieu, she was still the clean-scrubbed American girl from the Midwest, and … and she was terribly homesick. She didn't want to be a glamorous expatriate. She wanted to go home.

Abandoning the window, Carol took a long, hot bath, did her hair, applied her makeup. She missed Julie and Nora. They were sisters in spirit, sisters in heart, and she hadn't seen Julie in five years, had only seen Nora when she came for her brief visit several months ago. Nora was a best-selling novelist now, a glamorous celebrity in her own right, and Julie was in Hollywood with a fabulous seven-year contract, doing her first movie. Contracts like hers were a rarity nowadays, but the studio believed in Julie, believed she was going to become a great, great star. Carol felt cut off, felt left out. She wanted to share her friends' successes, revel in them, be there for them. That was difficult to do with only telephone calls and letters. She missed them both, and she missed America, missed hot dogs and pizzas and trashy television shows and foolish fads and that glorious, generous American spirit that made her country so great. Ike and Mamie were out and John and Jackie were in, inaugurating a whole new era, shorter skirts, bouffant hairdos, go-go music, and she felt she was missing out on it all. She loved Paris, and the French had been very good to her these past years, but … oh how she longed to speak her own language and be with her own kind.

Finally dressed, Carol stepped over to the full-length mirror for a quick inspection. The sleeveless, glossy black satin gown had a long, narrow skirt, a very high neck and no back at all. It was simple, understated and extremely elegant. Her short-clipped hair was like a gleaming, closely fitted dark-gold cap, feathery edges framing a face that seemed thinner now, the eyelids etched with soft gray shadows, high cheekbones more pronounced. Her mouth was a dark pink, sad, and the deep-blue eyes were much too worldly, much too wise. There was nothing of the college girl about her now. She was a sophisticated woman, sleek, glamorous, with her own special style, but inside she felt as young, as frightened, as vulnerable as she had the day she fled her high school commencement exercises and ran into the cornfields.

There was a merry knock on her sitting room door and a moment later Jean-Claude strolled jauntily into her bedroom, where she was still standing before the mirror. He looked marvelously dashing in his tuxedo, his black tie a bit crooked, his jacket unfastened and swinging as he moved, a black satin cummerbund at his waist. The elegant attire accentuated that ugly-fascinating hoodlum face with its enormous brown eyes and incredibly large, incredibly sensual mouth. He came up behind her and grinned at her in the mirror and gripped her shoulders with huge, strong hands. He nuzzled the nape of her neck. His lips moved down her spinal cord, and Carol arched her back.

“I love this gown,” he told her. “It leaves your back bare.”

“Don't be naughty, pet. We're due downstairs in ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes? That's plenty of time. I shall ravish you thoroughly, and you will not look so sad. You are not wearing the bra,” he said, discovering it with his hands.

“Not with this gown.”