Unfamous

by Emma Morgan

  *****

  https://callmechiara.blogspot.com/

  Kismet? Hardly...

  Posted by Chiara on October 14, 2010

  “Two lumps for me dear? Thank you. Now, where were we? ...Ah yes. So, oh, that’s a lovely cup, delicious, so, yes, I was on Broadway. And... yes, I’d come up with my stage name. Very important, that. You can’t be a star if people don’t know who you are. I mean, I remember hearing about amazing girls on Broadway, singers and dancers and great beauties, and people would rave about them but never remember their names. So they never came to anything. You need a name. A memorable name.

  Mr Monopoly was the first person I told my new name to, or rather he was the first to find out. When he and the producer had finished laughing at my innocence, he checked in on me before leaving. Usually, he’d drop a dinner-date invitation at this point in the evening, but I think he knew I was in no fit state. So he just stuck his head around the door to make sure I was fully recovered, and found me sketching. ‘Another string to your bow? Show me!’ he insisted, so I did. I suspect he was hoping for a bit of backstage life drawing, as the chorines changed between routines, but, no, it was just the front of the movie theatre. He understood the significance of the sign right away – he was terribly bright really, underneath all the drink and gadding about. ‘Louise Dulac... I like it! It sounds Arthurian and European. Stylish.” Now I didn’t know what ‘Arthurian’ meant, but ‘stylish’ and ‘European’ were what I’d wanted to hear, so I was happy. He studied my face while murmuring my new name; ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it suits you very well. I will call you that from now on.’ And so the next day, when I arrived in my dressing room, wearing a belt buckled as tightly as I could bear, to prove I was no more pregnant than anyone else – although, that didn’t count for much, not in that production – I found a new shoebox. And even before I opened it I knew what it contained. A new pair of shoes, embroidered with the name ‘Louise Dulac’. How he found someone able to do such work so quickly I don’t know, but money is an amazing catalyst and we were on the borders of the Garment District, so I suppose it wasn’t so hard for him.

  I’ve never been so proud as when I stepped out on stage that night in those shoes, never. Everything that came afterwards was, to me, just as an after-effect of becoming Louise Dulac – the shoes were the only proof I needed of my new identity. I danced as never before and sang with such gusto that I truly felt I’d earned every second of that night’s applause. I did encore after encore, and every one received an ovation. The other girls looked daggers at me but I didn’t care because I knew I wasn’t long for that theatre – I’d be the star of my own revue soon, at least, if indeed the call didn’t come from California first. And it was also that night, during that ‘epic’ – not my word, dear – performance that I saw Mr Monopoly as he really was. He didn’t look all predatory, like I was a pretty little scalp for his trophy room, an anecdote to be shared at his club and forgotten as he moved onto another nubile newcomer, I was something special to him. Or rather, that my talent was now what attracted him. I mean, I was exquisite, you can tell that even now, I’m sure, bone structure doesn’t lie. But I could see his chest swell as I sang, and his eyes shine as I twirled and tap-danced. He was in awe of me, and so, at last, I found something attractive about him too. I loved that he loved my talent. And so, when that night he asked me to dinner, I accepted. He hadn’t expected a ‘yes’ and so was already walking out of the room having extended the invitation. He had to pivot on his heel and pretend he was copying one of the steps from the show, but I knew I’d caught him off guard. You see, he was used to always getting what he wanted, and I’d worn him down with my refusals. I was probably the only woman who ever turned him down, so I’d earned respect, and I never squandered it. There was a sizeable age gap between us, but mentally I was the more adult, and from that night on I made the decisions as to where we dined, what he wore and where we’d live.

  Well, as I’m sure you could have guessed, he’d fallen madly in love with me the first time he saw me, as drunk as he was on deck, and so had bought an engagement ring the minute he arrived back in America. And when the desserts were delivered to our table at the Stork Club that night, the ring came with them. Shoes and tickets to premieres were one thing, but jewellery was another, so I had no idea what size of ring or rock to expect when I opened it. And I was petite, so to me prising open this big velvet box was like opening an entire treasure chest. All I need say is that our waitress gasped. The rock was enormous – egg-sized, almost. If the Dutch had bought Manhattan with it, the Indians would have got a good deal, you know? So, of course, I refused it.”

  Stacey’s face fell. She splayed her left hand, wiggled the ring finger and sighed.

  “No, really I did. It was tactical. If Mr Monopoly thought I was really only after his money, that this whole dance had been an elaborate way of getting at his millions, I’d be no better than any other girl. And believe me, I’d had to have earned that stone somehow, eventually. Also – and it’s up to you whether you believe this or not – t was ugly. I know some women love any diamond, the bigger the better, but I’ve always felt that style doesn’t come in large sizes. Less is more, and that applies to jewellery too. I’ve seen some women wearing as many necklaces as their spines can support, and been better impressed by the girl with the single solitaire pendant. Style is everything. And this ring simply had no style. The band was chunky, to support the stone, and the diamond wasn’t even well cut, it didn’t have the sparkle one would expect, so I said no. So the waitress gasped again, but Mr Monopoly smiled. It had been a test of my mettle, and I’d passed. And I’d admired him for trying. Every other girl in the revue would have traded an eyeball for that sparkler, but not me. Which meant two things to him: one, he had been right to favour me from the off and two, I had star potential. As we drove home that night, he said, ‘A true star would know not to accept the first offer she gets, because she knows her worth. You’ll be so big you’ll be able to buy rings like that for yourself before too long. You don’t have to rely on me. You know your worth and you’re not prepared to settle for anything less than great success. And so it will come.’ And he was right, although I’d be lying if I said it happened overnight. It took a few weeks.”

  “She is unbelievable,” said Stacey as the first tape finished. “How much would a ring like that be worth – and she said no? She’s mental. I don’t want to be her heir.”

  “She’ building her mythology, don’t you see that?” I said. “No celebrity biographies read: ‘I was a good performer so I went to London or Hollywood or Bollywood or wherever and got lots of good jobs and now I am rich and happy.’ They’re all about the struggle, otherwise they’re not interesting. We don’t really want to read about success, we want to read about the obstacles to it. Movies aren’t about people falling in love and defeating evil, they’re about setbacks and disappointments. Otherwise they would all be shorts. Adversity is interesting, success is just the punchline.”

  “I would have taken it.”

  “After that night, although I hadn’t actually accepted the engagement ring, Mr Monopoly and I were an item. And everyone knew about it. We’d been seen at the Stork Club together – that was really the only reason anyone went, the steaks were very tough – and word soon reached the dressing rooms. Of course, this didn’t put paid to the rumours that I was expecting but, as they say, it’s better to be talked about than not. I was a hot topic even then, and I hadn’t even stepped before a camera yet. Of course, no-one else knew about my name change, they hadn’t seen the subtle change to my shoes, so when a gossip column reported that a certain star of stage was in the family way, it didn’t hurt my career one bit. Whatever they said about Agatha was water off my back; I was now Louise Dulac and they didn’t have any dirt on her.

  Anyway, being friends with the producer meant Mr Monopoly could ask favours, so he managed to finagle a short break for me, to go out west with him for a week, saying he had a family f
unction to attend. He was friends with Lindbergh, so we flew. I was fine, it was no worse than the boat-crossing to me, so I stared out of the window at the cornfields and mountains – an amazing way to see America, so untouched in those days – and read some of the books he’d given me that I’d kept, the more compact ones. But poor Mr Monopoly, he was so ill! Well, I knew then why he’d got the boat from England, not that he fared much better at sea. He clutched the armrests all the way and didn’t drink a drop, which was how I knew he was suffering, poor thing. Again, because I was so composed and took care of him, I showed I was devoted to him, not to his wealth. I read aloud to distract him and when we finally landed he was so grateful you’d think I’d cured him of some dreadful disease!

  We were in a limousine for the rest of the journey. It was dark and I didn’t really know where we were going so I rolled down one of the windows – and do you know what the first thing I saw was? The Hollywood sign! Can you imagine? Of course, in those days it said ‘HOLLYWOODLAND’, it was an advertising sign, actually, but it meant everything to me. It meant I’d arrived, literally – as you all seem to say these days – where I was always meant to be. So I stayed. The producer was terribly cross and sent all sorts of threatening telegrams to the hotel, but Mr Monopoly talked him round. He pointed out that he had Agatha under contract but that Agatha no longer existed. And so that was the end of my Broadway career, and the beginning of Louise Dulac’s Hollywood career. And it all began, in my mind, when I saw the sign.”

  “This is all so well,” huffed Stacey, “but what about Estella? Can’t we speed through it a bit, to get to the more relevant bits? It would be great if you went back later and listened to the other stuff, for the book, but right now, we just want facts, don’t we?”

  We did. It was getting late and I was sure I could hear an intermittent buzz from my phone next door. I had been off-radar all week but now someone was trying to get hold of me and I couldn’t feign poor coverage if I wanted a job to go back to...

  “Fine.”

  Stacey took charge with the second tape. We had an excerpt about Mr Monopoly’s beautiful home – “the envy of everyone, especially Hearst. They say that’s why he built the castle at San Simeon...” – and snippets about screen tests: “They were just about to light me when the director said, ‘She doesn’t need it, she’s already glowing!’ Can you imagine? What a compliment, especially as so many of the really big names of the time, who I won’t mention but you can imagine, needed to hike back their hair to sculpt their faces and then have the lighting and make-up men do the rest. I just stood there, my hair down, and smiled, and got the part. I didn’t even read a line, and this was for talkies, I only ever did talkies. But the director just knew...”

  “When would Estella have been born, again?” asked Stacey, audibly annoyed.

  “Mid-50s, if she was 20-ish when she disappeared.”

  She ejected the second tape and thrust the third into the Walkman in its place.

  “Now, you would think, in all the time we’d been together, that the subject of marriage would have come up, but no. And of course this caused a terrible scandal at the time, only no-one ever really said anything because we were so popular and everyone wanted to come to our parties, even Hearst and he hated parties. So there was a kind of understanding that we were married and, anyway, as we’d never had children there wasn’t really any proof that anything untoward went on. Lots of older men had young companions who were really more like doting daughters to them, and had lot of affairs on the side without worry. So I think most people thought I was just arm candy, and that suited me fine at the time. I lived well and I was happy and we travelled and everything was hunky dory.

  And then Estella was born. Now, the trend at the time was to pass off awkward babies onto family members, who would raise them as their daughters, and no-one need ever know. It was easy to spend six months or so in Europe, pretend you had some nervous condition that could only be treated in a Swiss clinic, then come back when you felt yourself again, if a little larger. You could blame that on the fresh air and chocolate – and plenty did. But when I realised what was happening, I made a decision. I was going to keep my daughter and raise her, as brazen as that might seem.

  I won’t pretend I wasn’t worried – poor Gene Tierney had a terrible time with her daughter and never recovered, poor thing, and I did worry that being... well, why lie, being almost 40, I wasn’t in the first flush of youth and things could go wrong. But Mr Monopoly made sure I had only the best doctors to hand and it all went smoothly. Not that I could say the same for our relationship around the time.

  I often threw lavish banquets in his widowed mother’s honour, so we had became great friends. She reminded me a little of my own mother, although she was quite a bit older, and we would play cards and gossip together. She loved movies and had a cinema within her mansion, so we would watch films and I’d fill her in on the off-screen shenanigans of her favourite players.

  So she told me about the marriage and, I must say, I was rather surprised – I’d been with Mr Monopoly for over 20 years at this point, so I felt it rather remiss that he’d never mentioned it. It was when I’d gone to see her share the news about the baby, so of course I was already in shock. As I said, we’d been together 20, maybe 25 years at this point and nothing had ever happened before. Remember that nasty fall I had from the horse, not long after I first moved to California?”

  I raised an accusative eyebrow at Stacey – what other information had we missed?

  “The doctors had all said it would be a wonder to conceive after that, what with the damage to my pelvis, so I’d never really questioned it. And we had so many animals that I never missed having children – If I felt broody, I’d get a new puppy and get it out of my system. So in many ways it was a miracle baby to me and I wanted to tell someone other than Mr Monopoly. I mean, he was thrilled, he’d longed for a son – if only so he could let the mantel of the family’s good name rest on someone else’s shoulders, I suspect – so he never balked when I told him, or suggested I terminate it or give it away to a family member. I hadn’t seen any of my relatives in years. We went back for a premiere in the late ’30s but after that, what with the war and everything, we never got around to it again. Although we did keep going to France and Italy, come to think of it... Anyway, they were all quite rough-looking by now, and I think if I’d have fobbed off a baby on them at that stage no-one would believe their bodies would be capable of it. They were like crones, or something. Pollution, presumably.

  So I went and told his mother and she said, ‘What does his wife think?’ and I thought, ‘Oh no, she’s gone doolally.’ She was rather old and here she is thinking I’m not me and she’s wondering what I think. So I said, ‘I’m fine about it, thrilled, who wouldn’t be?’ And she frowned and said, ‘No, Louise, not you, you silly woman. Claudine.’ I couldn’t think of any Claudines we knew – and we knew a lot of people, a lot; everyone, I thought – so I said, ‘Who’s Claudine?’ And she said, ‘His wife. How odd he’s never mentioned her.’ So that was how I found out all this time I’d been the Other Woman.”

  Stacey grinned salaciously at the soap-iness of it all.

  “So I telephoned Mr Monopoly, at his club, and said ‘I wonder, do you have an address for Claudine, I’d like to tell her our happy news... ’ and he went awfully quiet and was at his mother’s in half an hour, which I think set some sort of land-speed record for the era. And he apologised and said he’d never had the right moment to mention it, as if he’d told me in Manhattan I’d never had agreed to go on a date with him, and if he’d told me in California I’d have gone back to Manhattan or even London. And I said, crossly, ‘Well I can’t believe there’s not been a single moment in the past 20-whatever years when you haven’t been able to blurt it out’ and he said, ‘For the past 20-odd years I’ve not been able to think of any other woman but you’ and I thought that was lovely so I forgave him. Just like that. You might say that’s not very feminist o
f me but I was pregnant, remember, and had been easing up on the acting so I was thinking of the baby perhaps more than myself, being pragmatic. And he was so, so apologetic and almost pathetic with grief about it all, that I feared for his health.

  He never got divorced, though. The thing was this – he’d got married mid-bender, down in Mexico somewhere. The girl wasn’t Mexican herself, ‘Claudine’ isn’t a very Mexican name, is it? But they’d started drinking in Los Angeles and ended up over the border, got wed on a whim and then repented at leisure. Only he didn’t really realise, and had gone off to Europe and then saw me on the boat on the way back and the rest you know. So it wasn’t until we were back in California that he got word from the friends he’d been drinking with that night that his wife was looking for him. He made them swear they didn’t know him, couldn’t get in touch with him, and he asked the family lawyers to try and annul the marriage, which was how his mother found out about it all, of course. Only they couldn’t annul it without her finding out who he really was – and more importantly, what he was worth – so he spent a fortune on tracking her whereabouts, so he wasn’t unpleasantly surprised at some function and sued for half his earnings. Not that he actually earned a penny, ever, it was all allowance, but his allowance was generous and half of that would have been a sizeable sum to some starlet who’d never amounted to anything. So that’s why we never got married ourselves.

  But his mother was very generous when she learnt about the baby and had the lawyers add us to the family trust, so we’d always be provided for whatever happened to Mr Monopoly. And she didn’t have to do that, we really had no legal standing and of course this was all before DNA tests so we couldn’t have proven the paternity if it had got ugly. So anyway, that’s how we became part of the family, legally, even though we never wed. Eventually, of course, Claudine died. I felt for her, in a way, because she’d never been able to remarry in good conscience, being already married, so I think she had a rather unhappy life. When we heard that she’d died, we made vague plans to finally marry ourselves, to ensure the legacy and all that, only after years of trying Mr Monopoly finally drank himself to death just a few months later, so that was the end of that.

  I’d never have told her as much, but I think Estella killed him. Indirectly. Not only did we not have DNA tests in those days, we also didn’t have access to ultrasound machines, so there was no way of knowing the sex of a baby until it was born. We did all the old tricks – dangling the watch and so on – and they all indicated a boy, so of course Mr Monopoly was thrilled and started picking out names and colleges and baby-sized blazers with the family crest on them. I told him not to be so certain but he didn’t listen. So there I was in the delivery room, utterly exhausted, and the nurse went outside to tell him I’d delivered a healthy girl and he shouted so loudly that the surgeon knocked all the scalpels on the floor and he had to be sedated. Mr Monopoly, that was. I don’t think it was the money he’d spent, that was nothing to him, I think it was the pride of siring a son and finally having done something worthwhile with his life, rather than just living well and financing films and spending time with me. I was terribly hurt and we had a row and he didn’t come home for a week. Which meant I got to name the baby.

  Do you remember I said a Spanish girl told me about the name Estella, back on Broadway? Well I’d liked it all these years so I checked that it meant what she said and it did, so my baby became Estella. Estella Dulac, because her father was behaving so abominably. And that was how I became the world’s most famous single mother. It was an enormous scandal that she hadn’t been given his name, and everyone took it as a sign that we’d split up and I was destitute and ruined, but it meant nothing of the sort. It was meant as a wake-up call and it worked. Not that the drinking ever stopped, but that was the family disease, you see, so something would have triggered it eventually. And this was years before Betty Ford, so everyone just suffered in silence back then, and hoped they’d get over it themselves but they never did, really. Sad.

  The studios were all very moral in those days, they didn’t think they’d be able to market a movie starring an unmarried mother, so the job offers stopped coming in, but I didn’t really care. If I never walked onto another hot, sweaty set in my life I’d have been perfectly happy, and so I devoted myself to my daughter. And there’s not a lot to tell about that – we were very happy and she grew into a beautiful young woman and... do you think we might stop there, dear? It’s surprisingly tiring, just talking, talking, talking, even about oneself. Perhaps we could carry on tomorrow?”

  “Good idea,” I said, yawning as I went to retrieve my phone from next door. My fellow columnists were already busy and a big party had come up they needed me to cover, apparently, so my orders were to return to London at the first opportunity. I diligently booked us tickets on the 10am train back, leaving me just enough time back at the flat to shower, dress and dig out my Dictaphone for an evening of tittering at stale asides and trying to squeeze secrets out of inebriated guestlisters.

  “The holiday is officially over,” I told Stacey. “We will have to listen to the rest of the tapes on the train back tomorrow – OK?”

  “Fine, fine,” she said, sounding as tired as I felt.

  “Sorry we can’t stay longer, but...”

  “I understand. See you tomorrow.”

  With that, Stacey slunk off to her room and I booked a taxi to the station, then stuffed the tapes, Walkman and laptop into my bag, ready for a quick getaway the next day, should we oversleep.

  Which we did.

  Or rather, which I did.

  The alarm on my phone didn’t go off, didn’t seem to have ever been set, and the radio alarm seemed to have turned itself off in the night, even though the clock on the cooker showed there hadn’t been a power cut.

  If it wasn’t for the taxi driver knocking insistently on the door, I might have slept all day and never realised how late it was – or that Stacey was long gone.

  As was my bag.

  (39) comments

  *****

  Daily Mirror, FRIDAY 15.10.2010

  SHH! Which publisher has seriously cold feet about their celebrity-penned acquisition? The book in question surely has little left to say and many believe they got a fuller story for free online. Who’ll be lining up for signings? It all depends on a bombshell ending...