Princess Daisy

by Judith Krantz

  Everyone in the room waited for Shannon to receive this latest idea. Helen Strauss, although she was the advertising director of Elstree, had again realized that this decision was not hers to make. The silence lengthened as Shannon thought.

  “Luke, it’s a good idea, but it turns me off because I think that the Jet Set, which is really what you’re talking about, is perceived as basically worthless—the old, idle rich. If Daisy is constantly shown as a part of that world, she’ll be tainted with the same brush. I think you risk creating envy and a woman won’t go and buy the products that are being touted by someone we’re deliberately giving her every reason to envy. Our consumers, so far a nonexistent group, will be drawn from a population in which over half the women work and the other half are housewives or students. We don’t need to sell the idle rich because there aren’t enough of them. But I like the idea of presenting Daisy as an aristocrat—that’s what Supracorp’s buying in her—but in another, more subtle way. I keep visualizing her in England, for some reason, and I’m not absolutely sure why.”

  “It’s because she still has a tiny, almost unnoticeable trace of an English accent—she was brought up in England until she was fifteen,” Luke informed him.

  “How do you know so much about her?” Patrick asked with a sudden touch of suspicion which surprised him even as he heard it in his voice.

  “I’m … ah … engaged to her roommate,” Luke said sheepishly. Being engaged was as square a thing as original, unconventional Luke Hammerstein had ever done.

  “The roommate from Grosse Pointe?”

  Luke nodded.

  “Kiki Kavanaugh—United Motors? Congratulations, Hammerstein, that’s wonderful.”

  Everyone in the room looked at Luke with new appreciation. Kavanaugh—Detroit—United Motors—well, well! Good for Luke! They’d known he was smart—but not that smart.

  Luke, annoyed, hurried back to the subject. “You said England, Mr. Shannon?”

  “Yes, and castles—I see her with castles in the background, always castles, and doing something like galloping up to the entrance—no model alive can ride like that girl, or maybe walking dogs in a garden with a castle behind her …”

  “Corgis—that’s the dog the Queen of England always has with her—they’re the royal favorites,” Candice Bloom said helpfully.

  “A lurcher, maybe two,” Shannon said in a visionary voice, confusing everybody.

  “Eating strawberries and cream on a lawn, with the castle in the background,” Oscar Pattison said.

  “Good—that’s a nice one,” Shannon agreed, “yup, outdoors, England, castles—maybe a guy with her—always a guy with her—but no male models—real lords, young ones—but a gentle approach, simple things, so long as you have that castle … she’ll supply all the rest, the glamour and the romance. Every woman would like to be a princess and live in a castle—maybe not for always but certainly once in a lifetime,” Shannon said, finally satisfied. “And since she’s American they can identify with her—by the time this campaign is ready to go the whole country should know that she’s an American working girl who also happens to be a princess.

  “Candice,” he continued, turning to the publicity woman, “you’re going to make sure of that. I want the biggest publicity push you’ve ever worked on for Daisy—a fabulous party to introduce her to the press right before we launch the perfume, and really lean on all your contacts for interviews and photos. It’s a natural for the press, considering who her parents were and considering that she’s pretty much of a mystery girl—but just because it’s a natural, I don’t want you to wait for them to come to you—be as aggressive as if you had an absolute unknown to work with. Of course we’ll get Women’s Wear and Vogue and Bazaar and the syndicated columnists, but I want the mass magazines too, Good House and the Journal and Cosmo—you know the drill. But more than anything else, I want People. I want a cover on People just before Thanksgiving—in fact I’m counting on it.”

  Candice Bloom merely nodded. She knew how good she was. She could probably deliver just about anything except covers on Time, Newsweek and People. If Daisy were a teenage rock singer, or the star of a weekly comedy sitcom—or a new pope—she could maybe get People—but what the hell, she had contacts over there she’d been saving for something crucial and it was worth a try, if she wanted to keep her job, and she did. P.R. was pure shit but she liked it—even her analyst didn’t know why.

  Luke thought that this was the first time he’d created a campaign with a sponsor in on it from the beginning and doing most of the talking, but it seemed to be working. He had heard of a “hands on” top-level manager, and now he understood what that meant. However, Shannon didn’t know everything. Luke had a few cards still up his sleeve.

  “Mr. Shannon, a major problem here, for Elstree as for any perfume sold in America, is that women tend to treat their perfume as an art object. They buy the bottle or get it as a gift and then they only use it for special occasions or let it sit on their dresser tops unopened—unlike the Europeans, who will wallow in the stuff and then buy more. American women really use the cosmetics, but they act as if perfume were champagne instead of Gallo white wine. We haven’t talked yet about the copy line for the Princess Daisy campaign. We’re trying to sell two things—an entire line of cosmetics, and an entire line of perfume and cologne. I’d like to use only one line in every commercial and on every piece of print advertising, a line which applies as well to the cosmetics as to the perfume—and a line which has the advantage of being one which Daisy can say convincingly, without having to be an actress.” Luke rose to his feet. Only a loser presented the copy sitting down. He paused for exactly the right beat and then spoke. “I wear it every day—Princess Daisy—by Elstree.”

  “Perfect!” Shannon said. As soon as the word left his lips, the room was as clamoring with congratulations as it would have been full of silence if Shannon hadn’t liked it.

  “Simple but eloquent!”

  “Easy to remember!”

  “Great product identification!”

  “Tremendous message! It’s better than Western Union!”

  Luke smiled modestly. He felt modest. Art it wasn’t, but it sure as hell was a living.

  Ram walked briskly along Old Bond Street toward his club on St. James Street. He was at least five minutes early for lunch, but he saw no temptation to stroll in the miserable London weather of late February 1977. He passed into the warmth of Whites quickly, swinging his umbrella and greeting a young man he knew who was leaving. The man neither returned his words nor seemed to have seen him. But surely, Ram thought, they had spent several evenings together last fall? Wasn’t the fellow one of the group who had hung around Sarah Fane? Or perhaps he just looked like him? In any case, he was a nobody. Ram shrugged and went into one of the lounges to wait for Joe Polkingthorne of The Financial Times.

  Ram had, in past years, made a habit of lunching with this journalist every three months or so. Although the great newspaper he worked for had correspondents all over the world, Polkingthorne was often sent abroad to write special reports. He had a shrewd flair for sniffing out areas that were ripe for financial development, and his advice had sometimes proven to be rewarding for Ram and his investment trust. Polkingthorne, for his part, thought of Ram as one of the two or three brightest and best informed men in the City, one who would surely become more powerful with each year, and it pleased him to exchange pieces of information and opinion that they both considered, quite rightly, as more valuable than any material gift they might have made each other.

  Before Ram could order a drink from one of the stewards, he saw Lord Harry Fane and several other men he knew leaving the lounge on their way to lunch. Ram had not seen Henry Fane since he had stopped showing attention to the man’s daughter, almost two months before, but he had prepared himself mentally for the inevitable time when they would resume their business relationship. As Fane came closer, Ram inclined his head at precisely the proper, impersonal, yet friend
ly angle which would, as no words could, indicate that he, Ram, did not intend to allow any hasty and shallow behavior on the part of Sarah Fane to make any difference to him. He held no foolish grudges.

  Harry Fane stopped walking as he saw Ram. He looked at him incredulously and then turned an angry red from his collar to his hairline. The men with him hesitated. Then Lord Harry Fane started to walk again, scowling fiercely, his fists jammed into his pockets, passing by as if Ram were invisible, followed by his friends, none of whom greeted Ram, although they had all known him for years.

  Ram sat down in a deep chair and heard his voice calmly requesting a whiskey and water from the steward. This was impossible, he said to himself, even as his body, which knew what had happened, felt as if he had received an all-but-killing blow in the gut. This was not the eighteenth century, his rupture with Sarah Fane was the sort that happened constantly among young men and women busily arranging and rearranging and generally sorting themselves out into couples. While he was telling himself this, Ram knew that there must be something more to explain his having been cut—cut, for God’s sake, actually cut—by five men in the space of a few minutes. What had happened to destroy the respect that he had always prided himself on so intensely? He had spent an entire lifetime shoring up that respect against any attack, respect that had always been a thousand times more important to him than any amount of affection or good-fellowship.

  Even as Ram asked himself this question, he simultaneously acknowledged that it had been over a month—perhaps more—since he had received any invitations, either to dinner or for the weekend. After his return to London, after that accursed trip to Nassau to try to reason with Daisy, he’d been too busy working to worry about his social life. In any case he’d had no desire to see anyone in London, and he had paid only faint attention to the fact that his mail consisted chiefly of bills and that his phone rang only for business calls.

  Yet last year at this same time he’d been out six nights a week and refused twice as many invitations as he could accept. He sipped his whiskey and water as he added up the evidence that told him that he was a social outcast. At the very moment that he asked himself what had caused this to happen, he understood, with cold and complete horror, that he would never know.

  Sarah Fane could not possibly have told anyone what had actually happened between them without ruining her own reputation. Therefore, she had invented something—some lie that was plausible enough for everyone to believe, some foul, degrading, disgusting lie that he would never hear repeated but that would follow him forever throughout the only world in which he cared to live.

  Ram knew the rules and he knew he was finished. He could still work effectively; Sarah Fane’s lie would not tarnish his placements of capital all over the world. Her words could not reach the ears of art dealers or the men from whom he bought rare books or custom suit makers or the men who sold him horses or who farmed his land. But, sooner or later, it would come to the attention of everyone who mattered in the world in which he had been one of the most sought-after bachelors in the land.

  English society had a way of dealing with people it thrust out from itself; a silent, deadly, irrefutable method that Ram had seen at work before. There was no court of appeals because there was no one to whom an appeal could be addressed, no one to whom a question could be put, no one who would admit to having heard anything. If he had had friends … Ram realized that there was no man nor woman among the hundreds of people whose parties he had attended in the last years whom he could consider a close enough friend to go to in this moment. A lawyer? What was there to say? Could he imagine himself complaining that some men with whom he was acquainted had not greeted him? Could he claim damages because he had not been invited to dinner? It was nothing—and it was everything. And the shame could never be brought to light and reduced to the lie that it must be.

  Whatever she had told people, this girl who was the reigning debutante of her year, this girl with her hundreds of years of aristocratic English blood, it would go no further than the members of a small group. Ram was free to make a new life among intellectuals, among artists, among businessmen without society connections, among foreigners who lived in London, among people of the theater or among people who cared for politics. He would be barred only from some country houses and certain parties, from shooting with a particular selection of men and from riding with others. He would lose—had lost—only the company of everyone in the world whose respect he valued.

  “Well, there you are, Valensky!” Joe Polkingthorne thrust out his hand and Ram shook it as he rose from his chair. “Not going to finish your drink? Well, there’s always wine … make up for it at lunch, eh?” As Ram found himself feeling grateful for the journalist’s hearty, easy manner he first realized the full measure of his destruction. When the headwaiter led him to his usual table and informed him, deferentially, of the various specials of the day, when the wine steward waited attentively as he made his choice, when he looked around and realized with relief that the men at the next table were strangers, the great, yawning wound in his middle opened wider. Each attention by a paid servant, each new face cautiously observed, was another door shutting behind him as he walked into the jail in which he would spend the rest of his life.

  He listened intently as Polkingthorne discussed South Africa and the impossibility of depending on the gold miners; he launched himself with more vivacity than he had ever displayed into a long account of the most recent doings at Lion Management, he ate avidly and drank more than his share, as he tried to do something to stem the seepage he felt in his center, but it was steady and relentless.

  “Well, shit, what’s the point of arguing about it ourselves? Let’s call up and make sure that Shannon didn’t really mean only castles—he was probably thinking of great houses and palaces, too,” said Kirbo Henry.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Luke answered warningly.

  “Damn it, Luke, a real castle, by definition, has to be defensible by a fucking army … most of them are in ruins, for Christ’s sake—they haven’t been built since feudal times, unless you’re going for the fake ones the Victorians built which, in my opinion, look like backlotsville. Take Culzean Castle in Ayrshire—it even has palm tree in the foreground! I mean look at these pictures, will you—Hedingham Castle in Essex and Rochester Castle in Kent—they simply don’t look lived in!” he said, handing Luke pictures of the ruins of great square twelfth-century towers, menacing Norman keeps, massive and square.

  While Luke shook his head at them, Kirbo produced pictures of Stourhead, that meltingly lovely, enormous Palladian villa which was built during a period which lasted from 1727 to 1840. “I’m sure that’s what he had in mind—it’s where Kubrick filmed Barry Lyndon—it’s absolutely gorgeous! Can’t we check it out, at least?”

  “Shannon said a castle and he meant a castle. Don’t show me anything without a tower, a keep, a moat, a drawbridge, battlements, ramparts—some place where you can pour boiling oil down on the enemy, Kirbo. Just stop complaining and get back to the research. There have got to be castles in England that people still live in, or that look that way, because that’s the concept.” Luke dismissed his grumpy art director, who was pissed off, in his opinion, because he hadn’t thought up the castle idea himself.

  “Gelatinous!” Daisy said rebelliously to Theseus. He looked at her questioningly. She had always talked to him, but this was not within the range of his understanding. “The way the time goes,” she continued, “the hurry up and wait … it’s driving me crazy.” Daisy continued to complain to Theseus as she walked around the apartment looking without success for something to put in order, something that might be blessedly in need of mending or straightening or fixing. The months since she had signed the Elstree contract had passed in the most unexpectedly slow manner. Somehow, having made her decision, she had imagined that she would be caught up at once in a whirl of work, but she found out that instead she was a prisoner of Supracorp.

&nb
sp; Although they didn’t need her on a full-time basis until July when commercials would be shot, they wouldn’t let her leave town either, because she was sporadically needed for public-relations opportunities. “I’m sorry,” Candice Bloom had said firmly, “but you really cannot go to England, not even for just a few days. Leo Lerman’s giving me a call about lunch and I’m not sure what day he’ll be free, Trudy Owett at the Journal wants to see you for a possible fashion layout and I’m waiting to hear from her any minute … no, Daisy, I want you where I can get my hands on you in five minutes.”

  During the long, tedious spring and early summer Daisy’s days were broken up, from time to time, by consultations and fittings with Bill Blass, who was doing a capsule Princess Daisy wardrobe both for her personal wear in public appearances and for use in store promotions. There were also occasional interviews, most of which had not yet appeared, as well as photographic sessions for the Elstree ads.

  She huddled, disconsolate and wistful, in one of the wicker armchairs in the living room and wished that Kiki were there. Although Kiki still nominally shared the apartment with Daisy, in reality she spent most of her time at home, in Grosse Pointe, doing complicated, ritualistic things connected with her wedding. Whenever she was in New York, she stayed at Luke’s, flying in and out of the apartment like a demented bee. Daisy felt as abandoned as a dog who had been left alone locked in a car, unexpectedly, with no reason given. She had not been fully aware of her need for Kiki’s volatile, insouciant, brazen and consistently confused presence until her friend had disappeared into the busy world of premarital goings-on.

  Kiki with monogrammed towels indeed, Daisy thought sadly, as she realized that the towels were only a tiny sign of the difference Kiki’s marriage was going to make in her life. “I am suffering from separation anxiety,” she announced to Theseus. It started as a joke, but as she said it she heard the catch in her voice. “Fool, silly fool—no, Theseus, not you, me,” Daisy assured the dog, realizing that behind her feeling of impending loss at the thought of Kiki’s getting married were other losses, ancient losses she could not afford to dwell on, lest she start to weep. She got up briskly and started to get dressed. In a mood like this, the only answer was to take to the streets with Theseus, avoiding butcher shops and other temptations, but, at all costs, getting out of the empty apartment.