by Emma Morgan
*****
https://callmechiara.blogspot.com/
Fancy-dress Fantasy
Posted by Chiara on October 07, 2010
Predictably, our first session didn’t go well. Stacey had cotton-wool ‘memories’ at best, insisting her mother was a saintly apparition rather than a real woman with a most-likely fatal drug addiction. So we agreed to try again after lunch; in the meantime, Stacey would retire to her room and scrutinize the papers she brought with her for clues, and I would do some background research on the mother that never was.
What I managed to learn before lunch was this: Stacey’s mother had a barebones Wikipedia page – and terrible timing.
In mid-September 1975, she ‘disappeared’. Her apartment was left in disarray, the door kicked in, and an unmarked van was seen squealing away from the scene; onlookers aware of her lineage feared the worst. When reporters managed to contact her well-guarded mother, the grand dame quipped, “My god, the Gettys did this years ago – how gauche!” in reference to John Paul III’s 1973 kidnap. Perhaps believing her daughter was crying out for attention, or cash, rather than weeping for mercy from mercenaries, she refused to pose for pictures or supply any snaps of her only child to aid rescue efforts. And then, before ransom demands were issued, the unimaginable happened.
Patty Hearst was arrested.
As presses prepared to roll on the story, news of the FBI’s successful raid on a San Francisco apartment filtered through. After 20 months on the run, Patty Hearst – who was now calling herself Tania – had been apprehended, and faced bank-robbery charges.
So Stacey’s mother’s absence/abduction became but a bitchy blind item in that day’s gossip columns – “Which aging Oscar nominee’s daughter seems to be auditioning for a part in the Patty Hearst biopic? She’s gone AWOL but her mother is not worried, dismissing the disappearance as ‘gauche’...”
She was never seen in the US again and, with Hearst’s upcoming trial all anyone could talk about, no-one really noticed. Her social profile was so low she might as well have been born poor, and the LAPD didn’t deem her disappearance a criminal matter, so the investigation ended before anyone realised it had even been opened. A day earlier and she might have at least been a sidebar to Patty Hearst’s capture but, on September 18th, she was instantly obsolete.
The fascinating thing was, none of the news reports I read knew she wasn’t alive. Every ten years, someone, somewhere would fill a page about her disappearance and wonder about her whereabouts, but no-one ever considered that she had died. Instead, they hypothesized that she had eloped with someone rich and was the head of an obscure European family now, riding polo ponies and entertaining visiting heads of state. Not that she had wheezed her last in Marrakech within a year.
While wondering whether Stacey’s mother was pregnant before her ‘kidnap’, I noisily prepared pasta and pesto, the clanking a sign to Stacey to join me at the table. We ate in silence and I started the recorder going before she’d finished her last mouthful.
“So, what do you know about your mother now, what have you read?” I asked.
“Not much,” she said, her mouth full of fusilli.
“There must be something?”
She thought as she masticated: out loud.
“There was something from a hotel, the Mountain or Mamounia or something like that, in Marrakech, an invite to an event.”
“When, do you remember?”
“1975, I think. It was for a Halloween party.”
“An invite sent to your mother, that’s a good start.”
“And my dad.”
Her father? She knew who her father was? Why had she been holding all this back from me – what was she playing at?
“I didn’t think you knew who your father was?”
“What? My adoptive dad. And my adoptive mum. The invite was sent to them. But they might have met my birth mother there, right?”
At some point between September 1975 and August 1976, Stacey’s mother had been pregnant and given birth. She might have given birth prematurely – not unlikely if she was malnourished and addicted – so that could shorten the gestation period but she couldn’t have been more than three or four months along when she disappeared, otherwise people would have noticed. If she was four months along, she could have given birth in January, a month or so early, and Stacey would have been six or seven months when her mother died.
Too young to remember anything about her; no wonder we were getting nowhere.
“Your mother would have been missing for about six weeks by Halloween 1975, so if she attended that party, it was the first sighting of her since her disappearance,” I said, “but if the dress code was fancy dress, I suppose no-one realised.”
“So...” Stacey started to speak before she had fully formed the sentence in her mind, like she was hoping the right words fell out, “we have got an exclusive, then? No-one has seen my American mum since September 1975 but we know she was in Marrakech at Halloween. That’s pretty big news, right?”
I nodded. “It would be massive if we had photos to prove it...”
Through work, I had logins to a good few online picture agencies, so I pried my laptop open once more and ran a search for ‘Mamounia’.
On the first site alone, around 500 images were instantly listed – but there was nothing when ‘Halloween’ or ‘Hallowe’en’ was added, or the date-range of October 1975 to August 1976. Pages and pages of beautiful deep blue pools, illuminated deco arches and handcrafted mosaics, yes, but smoking-gun images linking a diplomat and his wife to the disappearing daughter, no.
I tried ‘Mamounia’ on all the other sites I had access to, Google images too, and was just about to search for Stacey’s mother by name, when an email alert popped up in the corner of the screen, painfully slowly.
The subject matter said, ‘Mamounia, eh?’
My heart stopped.
It was from the paper’s Picture Editor.
‘I don’t mind you using the logins,’ she wrote, ‘but you do know everything you search for comes up in my account window, right? Don’t go looking for anything you don’t want me – or anyone else here – to know about.’
Shit.
‘But if it’s vintage Mamounia pics you’re after,’ she continued, ‘I might be able to help. Dad was a society snapper for a bit in the ’70s, between movies,’ – he was a director, I think, TV mainly – ‘so he might have something stashed away. Let me know what you are looking for and I’ll see what I can do. Am seeing the Olds tonight, so...’
Could I trust her? Did I have a choice?
‘You rumbled me!’ I wrote back. ‘A friend is working on a photobook about the most decadent parties of all time, and she has heard the Mamounia in Marrakech held some pretty amazing fancy-dress parties for Halloween in the ’70s. She is especially interested a Halloween one in 1975...’ – why, why? – ‘...because she thinks it might be when she was conceived!’
Surely that was enough to pique interest?
I sent the email and logged out of all the picture library sites. I didn’t want to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to my exclusive, and let idle pub chat scupper the book. I had to go off-radar and rely on what Stacey could remember, what I could scurry up online for free and whatever my picture editor pal could find in her Dad’s filing cabinets.
Another email: ‘Her and me both – I wonder if she is my half-sister ;) ’ read the response. ‘Will send scans of anything interesting. Happy Swallows & Amazons xx’
It seemed the story was convincing enough and while I might be rapped on the knuckles for using a company login, it wouldn’t see me sacked. They might expect first dibs on the party book, in case we uncovered anything interesting, and if so I would give them an old mobile number I knew wouldn’t be answered in work hours and shrug it off. “Well, you know how French publishers are...” As if we did.
So I was back to bog-standard search engines. Everything I could find was just a slightly reworded
version of the Wikipedia entry, or the same text entirely. No sightings since September ’75, only a few photos beforehand. Stacey’s mother had been at university at the time but, in an era before Facebook, she had managed to keep a low profile. Few people in her tutorials remembered her, she was so quiet, and none of them knew whose daughter she was. Before closing the enquiry, the police had done some cursory questioning of her campus contemporaries; everyone said it would be highly unlikely she would just take off, being so bookish, and could think of no reason for her to be kidnapped. When one was provided, the response was a universal: “What, her?”
With nothing new to go on, I could hardly complain when Stacey went and sat in front of the TV rather than watch me tap idly at the laptop. She flicked through Freeview until a movie channel met with approval. A Technicolor Doris Day and James Stewart were playing happy families, sitting on the back seat of a bus, back-projected scenery not adding to the realism. But perhaps escapism was what we needed – we weren’t getting very far with the facts.
Maybe Stacey had the right idea. I made myself a drink and sat down next to her just as the shot changed, to the outside of the bus. ‘CASABLANCA – MARRAKECH’ was handpainted down the side in block-capital English, followed by the Arabic version.
If this struck Stacey as strange, it didn’t show.
I pointed at the screen.
“The Man Who Knew Too Much,” she said, with the authority of someone who has just read it off the EPG.
Maybe I was seeing signs everywhere – it probably wasn’t even filmed in Morocco (the on-board sequence certainly wasn’t). But when the coach broached the city walls, honking its way through a crowd of locals like a big imperialist bully, it all looked very authentic.
“Do you recognise it?” I asked Stacey.
“Er, as I haven’t seen it before, no,” she snapped.
“Not the movie – Marrakech!”
She frowned. “It’s not really Marrakech, you know, it’s a studio, stupid.”
But as the scene changed to the marketplace of Djemaa el Fna, with the minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque rising in the background, she shut up. Either the movie had a budget as big as Cleopatra, or...
“It’s Marrakech!”
Stacey was now rapt, her eyes scanning the screen.
We watched in silence as the bus skirted the square, sharing the disappointment as Doris and Jimmy disembarked in front of more back projections.
“Maybe the Marrakech stuff is second-unit footage, you know, they get another crew to shoot it and edit it in around the action for the right feel,” I suggested, sadly.
Then the three-strong McKenna clan got into a carriage that was actually standing in Djemaa el Fna before making its way down real roads, out of the Medina and up to...
“The Mamounia!”
I knew it even before the camera watching the carriage pivoted around to the front of the building, the bland frontage with the French flag flying above it, the words ‘HOTEL DE LA MAMOUNIA’ picked out in individual white metal letters against the pink stucco wall. (I had stayed there to do some travel puff-piece a year or two back.)
Stacey seemed to be straining to remember something.
“There was a story,” she started, “about how my dad saw this woman at a party and thought she was dressed as Marlene Dietrich?” – she said the name like a question, as if checking that such a person ever existed – “but really it was someone else.”
I watched realisation slowly ripple across her face.
“The party was in Marrakech! And yes, he thought this woman he met was dressed as Marlene Dietrich.”
Hang on...
“Dressed as? She was ‘dressed as’ someone, not just dressed like someone?”
The film went to an ad break and Stacey looked straight at me.
“It must have been a fancy-dress party.”
“So, your father went to a party and met a woman he thought was dressed as Marlene Dietrich... there must be more, it’s not much of an anecdote otherwise – think!”
“What did she say, what did she say?” Stacey asked herself, squeezing her cheeks like stress toys.
Her mother must have told her the story, then; she would have been there too.
“I remember... He called her ‘the lady in the lake’.
“Is that some sort of Camelot reference?” I pondered. “Maybe she had some sort of medieval costume on – didn’t Dietrich play Joan of Arc? Or was that Garbo?”
Stacey gave me an easily deciphered ‘How the fuck should I know?’ look.
And then something clicked.
“What if she was dressed as your grandmother?”
“My grandmother?”
“The Lady in the Lake.”
Stacey’s face lost all expression.
“She was an actress, in the ’30s and ’40s. She was younger than Dietrich but they styled her the same way, so your father might have thought it was intentional.”
“Wouldn’t I have heard of her?”
“I think she was big at the time but she married money and retired... Strange behaviour, though, to dress up as the mother who was so blasé about her disappearance.”
“Not if it’s a Halloween party,” snorted Stacey. “Maybe she was going as the ghost of her mum’s career!”
I had to laugh.
“And your father was the only person who got the reference, that was how they became friends and did the noble thing...” – When she died, I said in my head. “Well, we know enough to get started now. We can write what we like so long as it’s not libellous and no-one knows it’s not wholly true.”
“Knock yourself out,” said Stacey, turning back to the TV as the ads ended.
So I sat down with the laptop and started to write her possible life story:
‘In the weeks since she had left America, she had changed a great deal. Her awkward relationship with her mother had ended, giving her a new-found sense of independence. Within her, a baby gestated – an heir to the oil millions her mother had married into three decades earlier. She had first thought the morning sickness was simple anxiety, at being snatched from her home, her plight ignored by her mother, and taken abroad against her will. But as she settled into her new surroundings, the sun of North Africa somehow familiar after a childhood spent in southern California, she felt calm, perhaps for the first time. There were no rows waiting to happen, she wasn’t blamed for every minor misfortune that occurred; she simply existed. Finally, as a symbol of her new life – and the new life growing within her, she changed her hair. That centre-parted brown mane was chopped off to a jaw-length pageboy style, lightening a little each day as she basked in the Moroccan sun. If she realised it was a homage to her mother’s heyday, she would have been shocked; she felt no affinity to that faded star, whose only companions were dust-encrusted reels of her forgotten performances and tattered posters with her name low on the cast list. But as she pondered a costume for the Halloween party at Marrakech’s most luxurious hotel, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and laughed. Revenge was revenge, even if the intended recipient was 6,000 miles away and oblivious to everyone but herself.
She was still in her first trimester, and barely showing, but she would take attention off her dress (and the bump beneath) with her hair and make-up – waves in her blonde-ing bob and pitch-black eyeliner to match starkly outlined red lips. She powdered down her sun-kissed skin – the plan was to look positively ghoulish. She wanted everyone’s abiding memory of her mother to be as a spectre of her former self, a Christmas Past of a once-glittering career. Little did she know, as she sat before the vintage foxed mirror in her riad, she was also determining the appearance of her own epitaph that evening.
As stated on the invitations, hand-delivered to a select group of local dignitaries and esteemed ex-pats, the party began with a drinks reception at 7pm in the ballroom of the Mamounia, the exclusive Moorish hotel then celebrating 50 years in existence, set in exquisite gardens several hundred years old
. In keeping with Islamic law, the artwork adorning the Art Deco walls was non-figurative but the geometric designs were as beautiful as any depiction of a handsome human: stars perforating doors, finely wrought wooden screens, exactingly laid tiled floors and walls, it was a hymn to local craftsmen.
Her costume harked back to the early days of the establishment, when stars such as Marlene Dietrich stayed at the hotel’s luxurious suites whilst filming in Marrakech itself and beyond. Indeed, it was Dietrich’s performance in long-term collaborator Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco that would lead to an important, essential meeting that evening. A meeting that would ensure the continuation of her bloodline – even though no-one would realise for decades to come.
Dietrich and von Sternberg had filmed part of their 1930 romantic drama at the hotel itself, so to any vintage-movie enthusiasts present, her appearance would surely bring the film to mind. And indeed it did, for one young diplomat, in attendance with his wife. The ballroom could accommodate as many as 400 people but that evening the capacity was intentionally kept to an intimate 80, not counting the discrete but ever-present phalanx of attentive staff. It meant everyone invited could meet and spend time with all the guests, but after she caught his eye, the diplomat had eyes for no-one else.
He and his wife made their way around the perimeter of the room, trying to find seats where they could sit out the socialising. Their attendance at the function was an obligation of his job, but neither felt festive. It was only weeks since they’d experienced the heartbreaking loss of their first child, and they were yet to break the news to family and friends back in London, using unreliable local post and telephone operators as an excuse to keep quiet. Did they think everyone would eventually forget, if they stayed away long enough? Would they, if they kept moving from country to country? If indeed they agonised over their options, they would soon be relieved, as fate was to hand them an answer, of sorts.
Somehow, they saw a kindred spirit and surrendered the intention of keeping only their own company. “Marlene Dietrich?” he offered, as they both reached for drinks from the same platter at the same time; champagne for himself, freshly squeezed orange juice for the women. Her reaction would determine the destiny of all three, indeed all four of them. Had she reacted to the mistaken identity with a withering sigh and turned on her heel, their story would likely end there. But as fate smiled on the trio/quartet, she followed suit. “Close,” she replied, indulgently. “Same sort of era but a much lesser star.” The young diplomat looked to his wife, who smiled shyly but shared none of his enthusiasm for old movies, and scrunched up his face comically in thought. He glanced at the costume but could not attribute it to a specific movie. It was when his eyes moved to her face the answer became obvious. That lipline, those dark eyes, that hair... all could be crafted on any white woman of the right age, his wife even. But the dimples, the aquiline curve of the nose, the slightest suggestion of a cleft in the chin, these were the trademarks of only one actress he knew.
“The Lady in the Lake?” he asked, to the bemusement of his wife, who knew the garb was all wrong for anything from the Middle Ages – what was he thinking? And yet the girl smiled and nodded. “How did you know?” she asked, genuinely surprised. “I just knew,” he replied. And in that moment, she did too.’
(7 comments)
*****
Daily Mirror, FRIDAY 08.10.2010
SHH! It looks like someone’s after our jobs – the latest online exclusive-spoiler is one big blind item, leaving the naming’n’shaming game to everyone’s favourite celebrity tattle-tale, but we still hear lawyers are trying to break the contract for the extracts...