The St. Tropez Lonely Hearts Club (2 page)

So how has it come to this? Is this the end?

Cannes Film Festival, May 2015

As I attempt to sweep up the red-carpeted steps to the Palais des Arts, the agonising pain in my hips makes me feel faint. I clench my teeth, as well as the hands of Frick and Adolpho, my two faithful style gurus who support me, one on each arm, whispering encouragement while I smile for the sea of lenses.

‘Courage, Sophie. Be brave,
cara –
you are still the most beautiful; don’t let them see your pain,’ Frick encourages.

‘And wipe the lipstick off your teeth,’ hisses Adolpho.

And of course I won’t, can’t, let them see the effort it has taken me to strut up those velvet-sheathed stairs in six-inch Louboutins and a dress I haven’t worn since
The Princess and the Playboy
in ’68. Gina has let it out several inches in the waist and hips, but even with the steel corset it’s torture. ‘You must suffer to be beautiful.’ The words of my mentor, the great director Charlot Benedicto, ring in my ears as I recall his insistence on having me strapped in corsets to play the young Marie Antoinette. ‘She would have remained standing even after they chopped her head off,’ I joked behind his back. Always behind his back. The corset had taken my then twenty-three-inch waist down to eighteen inches, and I had worn it the whole ten-hour shooting day, unable to eat or go to the bathroom. I also cracked a rib but never complained. Not to his face, at least.

I smile again at the cheering crowds of paparazzi, and fans pushing behind them, who line the staircase. How ugly most of them are. Where do they come from with their werewolf teeth, their hideous tattoos, their greasy hair and their pierced ears, noses, tongues, and nipples? And fat! So many are bursting out of their jeans, their white bellies exposed in all their cellulite ugliness, wearing nothing but T-shirts with stupid slogans that mean nothing. Not one elegant jacket, not one nice shirt – just shorts and jeans and crop tops and pale ugly skin spilling out of them, but with the occasional brilliantly dressed transgender
fashionista,
like a cherry on stale icing.

At the top of the steps a civilised crowd awaits. Amongst the coiffed, gowned and black-tied, I glimpse Deneuve and Depardieu, and make a gigantic effort with the last few stairs. Both my hips are now torturing me. Why hadn’t I listened all those years ago when I was warned that the acrobatic exercise videos I was making, each one featuring my more and more excessive contortions, would eventually cripple me? ‘Your bones are like Swiss cheese,’ the blunt American doctor had pronounced. Did I detect a note of suppressed delight in his voice? Was I to be his retirement pension? ‘If we don’t give you two hip replacements within a year, you’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life.’ He sounded slightly too pleased about that.

The rest of my life? How long will that be? I’m seventy-four now but I feel 104, and by the time I get to 104, I’ll probably be long dead. But of course I don’t look my age. No way. Frick and Adolpho see to that. Naturally, when I’m slopping around with the dogs and cats in overalls covered in dog hair, I look like an ancient Jane Fonda in
Barbarella.
Only my faithful menagerie and Frick and Adolpho help keep me sane and vaguely interested in what passes for a life. They don’t care how I look and only insist I hide when the postman comes or the occasional fan or paparazzo manages to sneak into my remote property, concealing themselves behind the olive trees and trying to steal a snap.

What vile creatures they are, knowing that a photo of one of the most famous sex goddesses of the 1960s, now gone to seed, would fetch a fortune with the tabloids. ‘Sophie Silvestri’s so faded, she’s almost invisible,’ one cruel reporter had written. How nasty these people can be. One managed to ooze his way in through the oleander bushes last week while I was deadheading my hydrangeas. He’d begged for a photo, even offering to pay me, so I haughtily gave him my best Bette Davis line: ‘I admit I’ve seen better days, but I’m still not to be had for the price of a cocktail or a salted peanut’ before throwing him out.

That Davis woman, she sure had a way with words, and we’d had a few when I was playing the second lead in one of her movies. She accused me of stealing her boyfriend. Boyfriend! Fifty if he was a day, and I only flirted with him because he was the director of photography and giving me great lighting, so I occasionally gave him something else in my dressing room during lunch break, careful not to smudge my make-up.

I was so gorgeous then, I had to fight ’em off. Why are people so horrible to the elderly? Being beautiful and getting old is like being rich and becoming poor. One day they’ll be old (if they’re lucky) so why should they be so unkind? There should be a law against ageism. There are laws against racism, homophobia, sexism and the mocking of midgets – sorry, vertically challenged. So why can’t we be polite to the over-sixties?

But the fans still try to break in. Usually Frick and Adolpho and my dear dogs manage to get rid of them. Of course, there was the unfortunate incident a couple of years ago when my favourite Doberman Pinscher took a little snack out of some fat fan’s fanny. The idiot was bending over behind the bougainvillea bushes, camera posed, ass in the air – naturally dear Faustus couldn’t resist the temptation of that gelatinous white builder’s cleavage.

The Saint-Tropez gendarmerie hushed up the potential scandal, of course. The man looked like a pervert anyway, and Captain Poulpe and his daughter Gabrielle used the persuasiveness of truncheon and their posse of grim-faced goons to banish him from our lovely village for ever. Dear Captain Poulpe. He has always been one of my biggest fans. I think he has a tiny crush on me too. Sadly he’s on the point of retirement, which is what I should probably have done years ago.

I wince as I make the top step and air-kiss Deneuve on both cheeks. The bitch looks far too good and, as I kiss, I try to check behind her ears, but all that real blonde hair (double bitch) gets in the way. After all, we are almost contemporaries. The crowd cheers, the cameras click, the flashes flash insanely, recording the moment when two queens of the French cinema reunite, and I feel the instant rush of adrenalin that these events still give me. After all, I
am
still a star.

La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires, February 2015

Nicanor Di Ponti was lowered to the ground as his entire family and his beautiful wife Carlotta wept, the tears running down her oval face. The drizzle of the Argentine summer rain was as steady and copious as the tears of the mourners, but the tears, like the rain, did not all come from the same cloud. In Carlotta’s case, the tears were tears of freedom, tears of joy.

Carlotta had met Nicanor when she was a sixteen-year-old virgin from a poor family and he was a twenty-nine-year-old sex addict from a rich one. They had married and had a baby girl and their marriage seemed storybook, although sadly – and despite herculean efforts by Nicanor – Carlotta was unable to give him the male heir he longed for. They lived in mansions around the world, paid for by the vast sugar-cane fortune that the Di Ponti family had established, but which Nicanor’s mother had made into a global brand. With its distinctive image of a gaucho riding free on the plains of the pampas, Di Ponti sugar was the staple in every supermarket, kitchen and restaurant in the world. How far from the truth that was, Carlotta often thought. What if they knew that the handsome man in the gaucho photograph, which Nicanor had posed for when he was twenty-two, was into kinky bondage and hardcore sex?

I had never seen anything so beautiful as the villa that Nicanor took me to on our first date. I had been sitting by the fountain in the middle of our village square, thinking for a long time that my life had been ‘one step forward and two steps back’. Ever since I left school last year, I’d been working in the chocolate factory owned by the powerful Di Ponti family. They owned practically everything in the village and the surrounding towns and villages too.

Nicanor was driving a very fancy car, red. The top was down and the wind was blowing his thick black hair into a pompadour. I recognised him immediately. ‘Gaucho’ – his photograph – was on every bag of sugar and on every wrapper of the delicious chocolate bars sold everywhere. However, they were not so delicious when I worked ten hours a day in the factory that made them.

‘Want a ride?’ he asked, the sun glinting on his blue-mirrored glasses.

I couldn’t see his eyes but I knew they were black, black as the night that comes so quickly in our village.

My mother had brought me up to never accept anything from strange men, but this was no stranger. This was ‘Gaucho’ – a man admired and worshipped by all young girls and women in Argentina, his face on the front of every carton of sugar.

‘Where to?’ I asked, wondering if I sounded too eager.

‘We’ll go see the countryside,’ he laughed, and I had never seen such brilliant white teeth before. He was wearing a red polo shirt that matched the colour of his car, which featured a black horse inside a yellow shield on the bonnet.

He asked me my name and what I did for a living, and I told him.

‘That’s not good enough for a beautiful girl like you,’ he laughed. I blushed. ‘Are you a virgin?’ he asked.

I blushed even more fiercely and hung my head. My mother would kill me if she knew I was talking so freely to a man. But he wasn’t just a man – he was ‘Gaucho’ – he was almost a God!

‘Of course,’ I replied, ‘I’m only sixteen.’

‘Good, that’s very good,’ he said. He had a kind smile.

We drove around to his family’s sugar-cane plantation and he spoke most amusingly of places I had only heard of – Paris, Vienna, Capri. He seemed to have travelled the globe many times; his stories were captivating but they also made me laugh a lot.

I became worried that it was getting late and I asked him to please take me back to the village.

‘Only if you promise you will go out with me tomorrow,’ he replied.

I was stunned. ‘Gaucho’ asking me, Carlotta Perez, a poor girl who worked in one of his factories, to go out with him? What else could I say but yes?

I told my mother I was going to go visit my cousins in the next village, and Nicanor arranged to pick me up in a quiet grove near the windmill.

He was in a different car this time. The windows were made of black smoked glass and it looked quite old.

‘It’s a classic Bentley. I collect vintage cars,’ he informed me as I clambered in. He didn’t offer to help me. My mother had told me to expect men to help me, but I was young and agile and, after all, he was ‘Gaucho’ and everyone did things for him.

We drove for miles until we came to an enormous pink villa perched on a hill with a beautiful view of the sea.

‘Where is this?’ I whispered. I tried not to be afraid even though it was getting dark, but it seemed he sensed my fear and put a hand on my knee.