AN Outrageous Affair

by Penny Vincenzi

  Naomi MacNeice was clearly very ill. She was stick thin, so thin it seemed her skin could not contain her sharp bones. Her face was wizened, her hair sparse. She was wearing a trouser suit of aquamarine silk, which hung off her bones like washing on a line. When she smiled, her tiny, thin face could scarcely accommodate the width. And this was the lady who had been so powerful in Hollywood she could pick people up and drop them again like discarded Kleenex: well, thought Fleur, the mighty certainly did fall.

  ‘Miss MacNeice. I’m Fleur FitzPatrick. It’s so kind of you to see me.’

  ‘Come along in, dear. Come right in and have some tea. You don’t mind if we sit inside, do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Fleur. ‘No, of course not.’ The house was hot and dark, and smelt stale; she felt slightly queasy.

  ‘Good. Only I don’t like the sunlight these days. It’s awfully bad for the skin, you know.’

  She led her into a dark, sunken room, the walls lined with leather-bound books. A fire, the inevitable accompaniment to Californian luxury life, roared in the grate. It was unbearably hot. The chairs were all black leather; chinoiserie-style cabinets and cupboards stood against all the walls. There were photographs everywhere: Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Burton and Taylor, Mike Todd and Taylor, Gable, Bogey and Bacall. All grinning, all signed, ‘To Naomi’ or to ‘Dear Naomi’ or even ‘Dearest Naomi’. Fleur’s eyes ranged over them, looking, hoping, to see one of her father. It was impossible and in any case the room was terribly dark; the few lights were fringed and dim. She began to feel she was in some kind of nightmare.

  ‘Now then, what can I do for you?’ said Naomi. ‘If you want news of your father I have no idea where he is. He left straight away, you know. I should try that agent of his if I were you. The one in New York. The one there was all the trouble about.’

  ‘What a good idea,’ said Fleur. ‘You don’t – you don’t have his number, do you?’

  ‘Oh yes, dear.’ The reply was almost shocking in its crispness and efficiency. ‘Never mislay a number. Just a moment. Mappy! Mappy! Bring me my address file, will you?’

  A Hispanic maid appeared with a huge black file; Naomi MacNeice took it.

  ‘Right. Both in New York. Can you get to New York, dear?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ said Fleur.

  ‘Good. Do be careful there, won’t you? Such a frightening place these days. Now then, Clint. Kevin Clint. Nasty piece of work. Yes, here we are, look, write them down, here’s a pad. What a disagreeable pair. Do be careful, dear, don’t let them sign you up for anything, will you? Hand in glove I’m afraid. They’ve brought a great deal of trouble to this town over the years.’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Fleur. ‘Er – what kind of trouble?’

  ‘Oh, the usual trouble. They didn’t waste their time with anyone who wouldn’t play ball. No, I’m afraid no smoke without fire and all that kind of thing. That was why the article was so damaging.’

  ‘Miss MacNeice,’ said Fleur, very quietly and gently, ‘do you have a copy of the article?’

  ‘Oh no, dear. I had every copy I could get hold of shredded.’

  ‘And you don’t know who wrote it?’

  ‘I really don’t want to go into all the details,’ said Naomi MacNeice and she looked oddly sad suddenly. ‘Oh, it was such a waste. So stupid of him. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut. But we did have fun while it lasted. And he was doing well. I handled him very cleverly. Everything Tony Curtis did, I found something similar. He was Tony’s style, you see. And it did work.’

  ‘Miss MacNeice, my father was living with you, wasn’t he? When – when he was doing so well?’

  ‘Yes, dear, of course. Well, some of the time. Of course I kept him in an apartment of his own as well. It doesn’t do to have one’s actors too much in one’s pocket. But yes, we were together. But that wouldn’t have meant he wouldn’t have been with Clint and Berelman as well. Nothing means anything very much, dear, not in that way, not in Hollywood. You do what you have to do. Byron did what he felt he had to do. But it was unfortunate they found out.’

  ‘Found out what, Miss MacNeice?’ Fleur’s voice trembled slightly. ‘Please tell me.’

  ‘Oh no, dear, you’re much too young to understand. Although you’re a big girl for ten, aren’t you? But I had to ask him to leave. Of course I did.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Fleur automatically. ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘But he’s a nice boy. A charming boy. I was very fond of him. So many people were. That was half his trouble. And then he’d get so involved with people. There was that terribly handsome English boy, for one. I never trusted him. Although I’d like to sign him now. You don’t know where he is, do you, dear?’

  ‘Who?’ said Fleur. She was getting increasingly confused, panic illogically rising in her.

  ‘Oh, I forget his name. He was in Town Cousins. It’ll come back to me. Now where was I?’

  ‘You were saying my father got – got too involved with people.’

  ‘Yes, he did. He couldn’t cope, you see, he wasn’t bright enough for them all. Just couldn’t cope.’ She was silent for a long time; Fleur began to think she must have gone to sleep. She shifted in her chair, and coughed. Naomi sat up with a start and looked at her. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I do get so tired. It’s these terrible migraines. I wonder, dear, would you mind going? Now if you see Clint or Berelman, they might be able to help. And ask them if they’ve got anyone exciting to send over to me while you’re about it. I need a big star, to get back on the circuit, you know. Tell them I don’t mind if he’s fucking chickens as long as he’s good in front of the camera. Will you remember that, dear?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fleur, ‘yes, I’ll remember.’

  ‘And if you find your father, dear, do give him my regards.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fleur, ‘yes I will.’

  Fleur walked out to the car in silence; the sudden sunshine hurt her eyes. She got in without a word, and sat looking away from Joe out of the window.

  ‘You OK?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, I think so. She was gaga. Absolutely gaga. Let’s go and get a drink.’

  ‘All right. What about going to Alice’s restaurant? On Malibu Pier. You’d like it.’

  Fleur shrugged. ‘If you like.’

  The restaurant was pretty; they sat and watched the surfers. Joe bought her a Bacardi and Coke and himself a beer.

  ‘Fleur, you mustn’t –’

  ‘Oh Joe, don’t worry, don’t start fussing. I told you. She was gaga. She didn’t make any sense at all. She thought I was still ten.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘She did give me his agent’s address, though. And the talent scout. In New York.’

  ‘Fleur, I really don’t see why you want those.’

  ‘Well I do. I need to find them. To know what Miss MacNeice was talking about. She – oh, it doesn’t matter.’ Her voice shook slightly; she turned away again. Joe caught the flash of tears in her eyes.

  ‘Fleur, look at me. What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She sounded irritable. ‘I keep telling you she’s gaga. There’s no more.’

  ‘Then why are you crying?’ he said gently.

  ‘I’m not. Well, not really. Oh, she upset me. That’s all.’

  ‘All right. Don’t tell me. Do you want anything to eat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Much later that night she was crying; she thought quietly, but Joe knocked on the door. ‘You all right? Bad dream?’

  ‘It wasn’t a dream.’ Fleur sat up, sniffing, wiping her eyes. ‘It was awful, Joe. Awful there with Miss MacNeice.’

  ‘Want to tell me now?’

  ‘Yes, maybe I do.’ She sniffed loudly. Joe handed her a handkerchief. ‘Thank you,’ said Fleur, handing it back to
him.

  ‘Keep it. I always have dozens. Ready for when I cry.’

  ‘Oh – all right. Well anyway, she seemed to imply that – well, my dad was doing something terrible. With those guys. Clint and Berelman. What could it have been, Joe? Drugs, maybe? Or – oh, shit, Joe, something – something else. Something horrible. What do you think? What do you know?’ Her face was working, panic in her eyes; she looked like a small, scared child.

  ‘Oh Fleur, I don’t know,’ said Joe, carefully baffled. ‘Really I don’t. You said she was gaga. Obviously she is. Don’t cry, Fleur, don’t take any notice. Nothing she said, nothing, could possibly be worth taking seriously. You mustn’t be upset.’

  ‘No,’ said Fleur. ‘No of course it couldn’t. But I need to find those guys. I really do. Oh and Joe, she said something about some English guy. A boy, she called him. Does that mean anything to you?’

  ‘No,’ said Joe, intrigued, ‘no, it doesn’t. Did she say a name?’

  ‘No, she’d forgotten. He was in some film called – what was it? Cousin something.’

  ‘Not Burton, surely?’ said Joe, incredulous. ‘My Cousin Rachel?’

  ‘No. No, that wasn’t it. Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’ She was silent for a while. Then she said, her face utterly bleak and white, her fierce blue eyes dead and blank, ‘Joe, I don’t know if I can bear this. Supposing – well supposing –’

  ‘Don’t suppose,’ he said and opened his arms, and drew her into them. She lay against him, quite silent; his closeness, the wonderfulness of being held by him meaning nothing, nothing at all but comfort, peace. He stroked her, her back, her hair, her neck, saying her name, over and over again, quietly, tender.

  After a bit she sat back and looked up at him, smiling shakily. ‘I’m sorry. I just suddenly couldn’t stand any more.’

  ‘You’ve stood a lot,’ he said, ‘such a lot,’ and as he spoke, she saw the familiar tears in his eyes. It restored her to normality, to courage.

  ‘Now you are not to cry,’ she said, smiling. ‘That’s just not fair. You’ll start me off again. What a good good friend you are, Joe. Even crying for me. Nobody ever cried for me before. Except maybe Grandma.’

  Joe lay awake for much of the night, thinking about the increasingly labyrinthine puzzle of Brendan FitzPatrick, and wondering what he had truly been like, this man, who Caroline and Fleur had loved so much and who seemed so unworthy of either of them.

  Background to Lost Years section of The Tinsel Underneath. Transcript of telephone conversation with Michael Williams, porter at Santa Monica Hospital, August 1957.

  I remember Gerard Zwirn being brought in. I wish I didn’t. I wish I could forget it. Fifteen years later, I can still hear him screaming. I never saw a man in such pain. He’d fallen off the pier. It was a miracle he hadn’t died. Better he did. His spine was completely wrecked – broken in three, four places. He couldn’t speak, just this godawful screaming every time he hit consciousness.

  I really couldn’t tell you who brought him in. I didn’t take much notice. It was a man, that’s all I know, a tall man. He’d put him in his car; it was the worst thing he could have done. Made the injuries worse. He seemed very upset. Then I got a trolley and we took Zwirn into Emergency, and that was all I can tell you. I asked how Zwirn was from time to time, because I couldn’t get him out of my head; he was there for months, not getting better; then he went off to Rehab and I never saw him again.

  1963–4

  ‘But – would it were not so – you are my mother.’

  The sorrow, the wretchedness in the voice reached out and touched Joe: touched everyone who heard it. He put out his hand to take Caroline’s, feeling, fearing she must have felt it more than most; she did not respond, she was far from him, caught up, entirely engrossed in the scene in front of her.

  What have I done, that thou dar’st wag thy tongue,

  In noise so rude against me?

  Gertrude’s face, sensually foolish, looked at her son; her son, distant with distaste, stared back at her.

  They must have prayed for this, thought Joe, all of them, to do this, to be on this stage, tonight, one of the most glorious nights in theatrical history, the debut of the National Theatre at the Old Vic: Peter O’Toole, as Hamlet, with all his tense emotional passion, his hair dyed white in the Olivier tradition; Diana Wynyard, as Gertrude, Michael Redgrave, Rosemary Harris, Max Adrian; on and on it read, a roll-call of theatrical aristocracy, the programme bearing for the first time the words the National Theatre. It was a great privilege, he felt, to be there at all, part of it; worth even climbing into his dinner jacket, even worth sewing two buttons on to his dress shirt, listening to Caroline’s reproaches in the taxi as she noticed that he wore brown shoes with his suit. ‘Caroline, who is going to look at me amongst that lot –’

  They had had a lottery in the office of the Mail, one of the papers Joe worked for: four tickets had arrived, a pair for the theatre critic and his wife, the other two won by Joe. Joe had a reputation for luck.

  He had wondered about taking Caroline: not because he didn’t want to, but there were uncomfortable echoes in the play for her, he felt: a dead husband, a new love, a critical hostile child. Well, two critical hostile children, two daughters, but the one on this side of the Atlantic was currently causing her the greater grief. Distanced from her mother ever since she had found the letters from Brendan, had discovered the existence of Fleur, Chloe had become further estranged since the death of her beloved father. She had been overtly antagonistic at first, coldly polite later, and avoided contact whenever she could. She had gone straight back to school after the funeral, and had arranged to be away for much of the holidays. Caroline was finding it hard: she was accustomed to being easily able to dominate Chloe, and now suddenly she was helpless, powerless in the face of her dislike.

  As Gertrude was: Joe switched his attention back to the stage.

  ‘Good night, Mother,’ said Hamlet with exquisite courteous irony, dragging Polonius off the stage in his wake; the curtain came down, to a sudden silence and then wave on wave of applause. Seats snapped up, people rose, pushed their way to the bar. Joe hated this part of theatre-going: the battle to get a drink, the struggle to find something relevant to say, the crush in the bars.

  ‘Want to go out?’ he said to Caroline, and she shook her head, still half lost in Elsinore, in the play, and they stood aside to let people out and then sat down again.

  There was scarcely a face that was not famous in the stalls: everyone was there, Olivier himself of course, beamingly benevolent, the Redgrave family, Kenneth Tynan exotic as always – Joe wondered whether the rumours about his homosexual relationship with Olivier were true, and decided, looking at the pair of them, quite possibly so – George Devine, Peter Hall, Peter Brook, the Grades, Robert Morley, Rex Harrison, dozens of pretty girls, scores of famous faces from the gossip columns, David Bailey, Jean Shrimpton, Terence Stamp. Joe sat back contentedly, eating his way through the box of chocolates he had bought Caroline, looking at them all, at their faces, all locked into the smooth unruffled smiles of first-nighters and wondering if it was just another thing they learnt at drama school.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a voice in his ear, and Joe stood up to let its owner past: a male face of extraordinary beauty, remarkable even in such company; that face had never grown, he felt, it had been carved, sculptured out of bone and flesh and blood, the wide high cheekbones, the fine jaw, the poetic mouth. The hair was light brown, almost golden, the eyes grey and absurdly long-lashed; he was only saved from perfection – and thus effeminacy – by a nose that was just a fraction too long, not quite straight enough, but was still remarkable, a pleasure simply to see.

  He smiled at Joe and said thank you, ushering a girl before him; she was tall and slim and arresting-looking, with a mass of wild red hair, and looked somehow familiar, and then Joe, look
ing after them both, realized who the man was: Piers Windsor, the new, great white hope of the British theatre, whose Henry V had caused such a stir, whose Romeo currently had women swooning in the aisles, who was turning his hand now to directing, and wasn’t there talk of a musical? He was strongly tipped to take over the Olivier mantle in maybe ten, fifteen years’ time.

  They settled now, three seats on from Caroline, and Windsor’s head was bent towards the girl who was smiling at him, whispering something in his ear; Caroline had recognized him now and was flushed with pleasure.

  ‘He is just amazing-looking,’ she said in a hiss to Joe. ‘I never thought he’d look that good.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he?’ said Joe, mildly nettled by her obvious admiration.

  ‘Because usually they don’t. He looks marvellous. As good as in that film.’

  ‘What film?’

  ‘Kiss and Don’t Tell. It was wonderful. And the other one. Country something. Can’t remember.’

  ‘I didn’t know you went to the cinema so much,’ said Joe, laughing at her.

  ‘I don’t usually. But I take the children in the holidays.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What was it, the other one? It’s annoying me. Country Wife? Country Girl? Joe, you must know.’

  ‘I don’t. Sorry. Oh, thank God, they’re all coming back, it’s going to start again. There’s a long way to go yet. It’s the full length you know, this one, all five hours of it.’

  ‘I know,’ said Caroline.

  The lights were just going down when she turned to Joe and hissed in his ear, ‘Town. Not Country. Town Cousins.’

  ‘What was? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Piers Windsor’s film. It was called Town Cousins. I can settle down now.’

  Joe shook his head, smiling at her indulgently, settled into his seat. And then saw Piers Windsor’s perfect profile etched against the light from an exit and reflected on what a bastard he probably was, a complacent, conceited bastard; and then thought what a silly name Town Cousins was for a film; and then, unbidden, idly tracing its way through his head, he heard Fleur’s voice, after she had left Naomi MacNeice: ‘She said something about some English guy . . . a film called Cousin something . . .’