by Sue Margolis
“Look, I don’t know how these CDs got lost, but I really think you should do this. The last thing you want is for Sidney to stop paying you, and I promise you, he’s quite capable of it.”
She let out a long, slow breath. “God, why is it Sidney always gets what he wants? … OK, what time do I need to be there?”
“Now. They’re sending a cab.”
Mrs. M. and Geraldine said they would look after Jake until Albert got back. Dosed up on more Diacalm and Collis Brown mixture, she climbed into the cab.
When she got to the theater Sidney was waiting for her in the lobby. “Well, missy, don’t you look like a magnolia petal on a dewy summer’s morning.” He was all innocent smiles, as if the injunction hadn’t happened. She gave him a cold stare. “I’m not doing this for you, Sidney. I’m doing it for Konstanty.” Sidney’s smile turned to steel. He said he didn’t care who she was doing it for, just as long as she did it.
Konstanty hugged her when he saw her. “I don’t know how to thenk you,” he said. The Collis Brown was doing little to stop the cramps, which were now coming every couple of minutes. “Stephanie, you look as eef you’re een pain? Are you OK?”
“Bit of a tummy bug,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure,” she said with a reassuring smile.
“OK, come, I take you onto the stage and show you what to do.” As they worked their way through the backstage corridors, Stephanie asked him what songs he wanted her to sing. “ ‘I’m a Woman’ and ‘Big Spender,’ ” he said.
On top of feeling ill, Stephanie was starting to feel real fear. She’d never performed in a proper theater before, albeit from behind a pillar. Hundreds of people, including every theater critic in London, would be out there, listening to her. The stage, which had been transformed into a glitzy New York nightclub circa 1940, seemed vast. There was a grand Ziegfeld Follies staircase, a vast crystal chandelier and lots of red plush. At the back of the stage was a shiny black and silver twotier platform where the band would sit. In front was a small podium and one of those old-fashioned chunky metal microphones.
Konstanty explained that Peggy Lee’s entire life story, from her childhood with the stepmother who beat her, to her marriage to an alcoholic guitar player named Dave Barbour and her final performance at the Hollywood Bowl, where she was too frail to stand, would be told from this set. “You see Grecian pillar at side? Ve will mike you up and you can sing from behind, yes?”
“I guess,” Stephanie said with a shrug, “but do you think we’re really going to get away with it?”
“Once sound boys hef everything sorted out, nobody vill know, belief me.”
“If you say so,” she said, feeling too rough to raise any more objections.
Stephanie wasn’t due to do her bit from behind the pillar until after the intermission. The first half of the show was relayed to her through speakers into the theater manager’s office, where she had been allowed to camp out. She couldn’t believe how well the scam appeared to be working. Nobody was even remotely aware that K-Mart was lip-synching. After each song the applause was deafening. Theater critics were the hardest audience in the world to win over, and yet they couldn’t have been more enthusiastic. She didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. By now the medicine had taken the edge off the pain, but she was running to the loo every fifteen minutes or so. Each time she went, she felt sick and light-headed, as if she were about to pass out. When Konstanty came in during the intermission, she almost told him she wasn’t up to singing, but he seemed so desperate and so relieved she was there that she just didn’t have the heart.
As soon as the curtain came down after the first half, Konstanty and a sound engineer took her onto the stage. She was focusing so hard on how ill she was feeling that any nerves she’d had an hour or so ago completely disappeared. The soundman gave her a handheld mike and explained that her voice would be heard from speakers at the front of the stage, exactly as if the CD were playing. “Eet ees only two songs,” Konstanty reassured her. “Ve will sneak you off vhen stage lights go down between acts.”
“OK,” she said, desperately hoping she could hold out for twenty minutes without going to the loo.
As the audience returned, she could feel herself beginning to burn up. “Please, God, just get this over with. Please.” She had never felt less like singing in her life. Konstanty had explained there would be five minutes of dialogue, then she would hear the intro to “I’m a Woman.”
The curtain was still down. From behind the pillar she watched the band come onstage and take their places. Several smiled and gave the thumbs-up. As the curtain went up and the stage lights came on, her nerves finally kicked in. On top of everything else, she could feel herself shaking. Hidden behind the pillar she didn’t see K-Mart come onstage. All she was aware of was the dialogue. Since the band was behind her and she had to stand facing the pillar in front of her, there were no visual clues from the band that the first number was coming up. She had to wait. Finally she heard the intro. Somehow she managed to come in on cue:
“I can wash up forty-four pairs of socks and have them hanging out on the line …” She could hear the words coming from her mouth, but she felt disconnected somehow, as if her voice wasn’t coming from her, but from somewhere way off in the distance. By now the nausea really began to overtake her. She could literally feel the blood draining from her head. Still singing, she leaned against the pillar. “ ’cause I’m a woman, W-O-M-A-N …”
It was then that the world started to spin and turn a strange shade of green. The audience full of theater critics looked on aghast as Stephanie lurched from behind the pillar, wobbled for a few seconds and then collapsed spectacularly onto the stage, microphone in hand, mumbling “I’m a woman.” Then she threw up.
Chapter 18
Stephanie was too busy being sick over one of the double bass players who had rushed to her aid to be aware that the curtain had come down and that K-Mart was standing over her screaming, “You selfish bitch, how could you do this to me?” Or that Sidney Doucette had to pull her off and drag her into the wings, where they stood spitting and cursing and making plans for a swift exit to South America. Nor did she have any idea that the theater critics, who at first sat in shocked silence along with the rest of the audience, would soon be congregating in the bar laughing their heads off and screaming into their mobiles to their respective news editors that there hadn’t been a scam like it since Singin’ in the Rain, when Debbie Reynolds’s character, Kathy Seldon, pretended to be the voice of Lina Lamont. For anybody privy to the commotion, it was clear that the Peggy debacle was about to hit the headlines big-time and that the search was now on to identify the voice behind K-Mart.
One of the girl stagehands helped Stephanie to the loo and stayed with her while she carried on throwing up. At one point, while she was having a break from puking and was instead sitting in the locked cubicle diarrhea-ing, she heard Konstanty’s voice. He asked her if there was anything he could do to help. “Oh, Stephanee, I am so sorree. I could see you veren’t well. I shouldn’t haf made you go through vith it. Ve should haf just dropped the missing songs from the show. Now ve are all in the sheet.”
“Yeah, but right now,” she said, gripping her stomach, “some of us are just a bit more in the sheet than others.” She asked him if he would phone Albert and ask him to come and get her. She knew it would mean bringing Jake, but she didn’t think she had much choice. She couldn’t go home in a cab and risk chucking up over the upholstery.
She didn’t dare leave the ladies’ room. After about twenty minutes Albert appeared at the cubicle door. By now she was kneeling in front of the loo again, puking. “Don’t come too close,” she said, looking up at him. “I’ve got sick in my hair.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said, bending down and rubbing her shoulders. “Do you think you can make it to the car?”
“I don’t know. I’ll try.” Since all the ha
cks were camped out at the main entrance and stage door, they had to leave by a tiny side exit. Albert had parked her car on double yellow lines outside. She sat slumped in the back holding a Waitrose carrier bag to her mouth. “Oh, God,” she said as he started the engine. “Who’s with Jake?”
“Shh, don’t worry. I called Mrs. M.’s Geraldine.”
When he got her upstairs to the bedroom, Albert put towels over the pillows so that she wouldn’t get sick on them. Then he sat on the bed gently wiping her face with a warm flannel. She carried on throwing up for the next couple of hours. He stayed with her, holding her head. Whenever the stomach cramps came and she needed the loo, he guided her across the landing in case she fainted again. Then he waited outside until she’d finished and took her back to bed.
Also that night, the press got to work and managed to worm their way in among the cast and the band and get various members to talk. By the next morning the story was all over the papers. The headlines were pretty predictable: “Martinez Sensation,” yelled one tabloid; “Star in Voice Swap Con,” screamed another. The broadsheets devoured the story too; old stills from Singin’ in the Rain appeared on several front pages. The day after that, pictures appeared of K-Mart and Sidney fleeing their hotel, their heads hidden under blankets as they were smuggled into a limo with blacked-out windows, apparently bound for Heathrow.
The doctor came and diagnosed food poisoning—as if she didn’t know—and told her to drink plenty of fluids. Albert immediately went out and bought a dozen bottles of Gatorade. She managed a little that first day without bringing it up, but mostly she slept. In the evening Albert helped her into the bath and washed her hair. For the next three days he ran up and downstairs, shopped, cooked for Jake and kept him amused. She couldn’t have asked for more, particularly as the keeping-Jake-amused bit was particularly hard. There was a thicket of reporters permanently camped outside the front door, and whereas Albert was prepared to go out alone and shoulder his way through the mob, he wasn’t prepared to risk Jake being traumatized. The upshot was that Jake didn’t go out for nearly a week and as each day passed he became more and more stir-crazy.
Cass, Lizzie and her mother phoned each day, but she wouldn’t let them visit because she didn’t want them being set upon by the reporters. They wouldn’t have been able to handle them the way Albert did. He’d become adept at barging his way through the crowd, refusing to make eye contact with any of the reporters or answer questions. And when a woman from the Sun started calling through the letter box pretending to be from Interflora, Albert was wise to the ruse, thanked her sweetly and swiftly closed the slot.
However badly Albert had behaved toward her before he went to Berlin, he had certainly made up for it now. Whether or not this change in him would be permanent, she didn’t know. Somehow she doubted it. But there was no getting away from it: while she was ill the three of them had become a proper family. Yes, she was passionately in love with Frank; of that she was in no doubt. And before they had said good-bye at his flat he had made it clear he still wanted her. And yet … and yet.
As the days went by and she got stronger physically, doubts began forming in her mind. She would lie in bed remembering what Albert had said to her the first time he asked her to marry him: “The whole in love thing wears off in no time. You know that.” Maybe she did. Time and again, her thoughts returned to Jake. She couldn’t forget the image of him and Albert playing together with the Jeep, the way her small son had climbed into her lap and asked her so sweetly if his daddy could come and live with them. Her heart ached as she heard his voice in her head. Part of her felt like a tragic Jane Austen heroine, torn between duty and true love. Then she would realize how self-indulgent she was being and snap out of it. Her position wasn’t remotely tragic. Tragic heroines were forced into loveless marriages. She, on the other hand, did love Albert. And it was Albert, not Frank, who was the father of her child.
“You know,” she said to Albert one morning as he leaned her forward in the bed and plumped her pillows, “I really don’t know what I’d have done without you these last few days. Thank you.” When he’d finished, he sat down on the bed. She reached out and took his hand. “When I watched you and Jake with the Jeep the other day, it almost made me cry. You were wonderful with him. He adores you. I know he wants us all to be a family … and I think I do too. When I’m better I don’t want you to go home.”
“You sure?”
She nodded. “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to make up my mind.”
“Wow, principessa, that’s fantastic.” He was saying the words, but the expression on his face seemed muted, as if deep down he wasn’t sure.
“You are pleased, aren’t you, Albert? This is what you want?”
“Yes. Yes, of course it is. I couldn’t be happier. I’ll go over to the flat tonight and pick up my stuff.” She couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but he suddenly seemed distant, disconnected from her somehow. He carried on being a bit quiet for a day or so, but afterward he went back to his usual self. She put it down to his being exhausted from looking after her and Jake and thought no more about it.
Each day another letter would arrive from a newspaper offering Stephanie money for her story. Albert would bring them to her. They were all of the “We just want to give you the chance to tell your side of the story” variety.
Of course, she knew that as soon as she was fully recovered she would have to speak to the press. The story was refusing to go away and it was the only way to get the journalists off her back. She also knew they were unlikely to show her any mercy and that it was possible she would never work again.
Konstanty attempted to come to her rescue. He gave an interview to the Mirror (“Director in Singin’ in the Rain Scandal Speaks Out”) in which he confessed his part in the scam and said he was deeply ashamed. He said he’d only done it to raise the money to rebuild the theater in his hometown, but he admitted that was no excuse. When asked about Stephanie, he said she was a deeply talented, struggling singer and single parent who only accepted Doucette’s offer because she was about to lose her home. The next day’s headline read: “Martinez Exploited Refugee and Social Security Mum.”
Of course, Stephanie had never been on state benefits in her life and the encamped journalists could see perfectly well that she lived in a large house in a middle-class neighborhood. None of this seemed to be important, though. Instead, the newspapers turned the real story into something resembling a plot for a silent screen melodrama starring Sidney Doucette as the evil, wax-mustached baron, Katherine Martinez as his ruthless, cold-blooded but beautiful sidekick and Stephanie as the innocent, impoverished peasant girl on whom they prey.
Grateful as she was to Konstanty, Stephanie felt compelled to set the record straight.
The press had been stationed outside her house for four days when she decided to go out and speak to them. Still feeling weak and shaky, she blow-dried her hair, put on some makeup and pulled on a pair of jeans and a ribbed polo neck. The second she opened the front door the flashes opened up like an electric storm. There were probably no more than a dozen reporters there, mainly young women, but they all started bombarding her with questions and pretty soon it felt as if there were hundreds. “Stephanie, how do you feel about the way Katherine Martinez exploited you?”
“I wouldn’t say she exploited me, exactly. I was fully aware of what …”
“Stephanie, how do you keep your figure so trim?”
“Well, personally, I find vomiting and diarrhea works pretty well.”
“So, better than the Atkins Diet? That’s interesting.”
“How would you describe your feelings toward Martinez? You must be experiencing a sense of deep anger.”
“I’m not sure I would put it quite that strongly …”
“Will you be getting counseling?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you think Katherine has had breast implants?”
“Look, I can’t see how that’s r
elevant.”
“So, that’s a yes?”
Since none of the reporters seemed remotely interested in hearing what she had to say, she told them she still wasn’t feeling very well and hoped they would understand if she called it a day. As she turned to go, the reporters all surged forward, clamoring for her to answer “just a couple more questions.”
When Albert showed her the article in the following morning’s Daily Mail, quoting her as saying: “Silicone-breasted Martinez made me bulimic,” she threw the paper across the bed. Albert told her to take it easy and that she should be grateful the press wasn’t tearing her to shreds. She supposed he was right, but she couldn’t get away from the feeling that being torn to shreds was what she really deserved.
“Well, your wish has been granted,” Ossie said when she told him how the lack of punishment was bothering her. “Sid’s refusing to pay you a brass farthing.” Apparently Sidney had phoned Ossie from Brazil, where he and K-Mart were hiding out until the heat died down, saying that since the game was up, he could see no reason to pay anybody anything.
“What?” Stephanie said. “Nobody? Not even the band?”
“Nobody.”
“Bastard.”
So, here she was, penniless, jobless, about to lose her home and yet deep down she couldn’t help feeling she’d gotten what she deserved.
Stephanie had hardly eaten for a week. Then, on the eighth day, she woke up starving. Albert, who had been sleeping with Jake (he’d become a bit clingy since Stephanie got ill), asked her what she fancied to eat. “Don’t mind,” she said. “Just as long as there’s lots of it.”
“Wow,” he said. “Somebody is on the mend.” He said he would bathe Jake and then, as they didn’t have much in, the two of them would go shopping. At that point, as he had every day, Jake started campaigning to go to the park. Since the reporters had disappeared after having gotten their interview with Stephanie, she insisted Albert take him. “I haven’t eaten for a week. I can hang on for a couple more hours.”