Princess Daisy

by Judith Krantz

  As she dressed, Daisy admitted to herself that in spite of her impatience to finally get down to work, healthy consuming work, in spite of her feeling that once the whole Elstree business started, her boredom and restlessness would be cured, she was terrified of that future moment. I’m going to be such a big target, she thought, confusedly, not knowing precisely what she meant. All she was sure of was that she had kept a low profile for all of her adult life in the nebulous hope that it would prevent her from losing any more than she already had. Now, with her face and name soon to be exposed many hundreds of thousands of times in the most public way possible, she felt an almost superstitious fear of the future. Fool, she thought again, but didn’t say out loud, to spare the feelings of her dog.

  As Daisy roamed SoHo with Theseus, trying to keep busy, Luke found time to telephone North.

  “All packed and ready to go?” he asked heartily.

  “Fuck off, Luke.”

  “Thanks, North, but you haven’t answered my question.”

  “I’ve decided that I decline to be any part of this absurd production. Get yourself another commercial maker.”

  “No way. Arnie bid on the job, we accepted the bid, and we’re counting on you.”

  “It’s not the same job—the conditions have all changed.”

  “However much money Arnie wants to tack on because we’re shooting in England, is going to be all right with the agency—I can guarantee that. But we want a Frederick Gordon North commercial, my boy, we want your verve, your sense of design, your perception of volume and contrast, the nuances of your unique lighting, your inspiration and audacity, your inimitable taste and your technical integrity—or, to put it more bluntly, we won’t let you off the hook because Shannon stole Daisy from you.”

  “That has absolutely nothing to do with it!” North shouted.

  “Splendid! I’m relieved to hear it, because I admit that I certainly could have understood it if you were unable to do these commercials because you can’t function without Daisy. Since that’s not the case, as you’ve just assured me, you have a commitment to us, and, as one of your old and faithful friends, and occasional major customer, we certainly expect you to honor it Gee—I’m sure glad to hear there are no hard feelings.”

  “Shitweasel!”

  “Temper, temper.” North was still his good pal, Luke thought, but he needed him, or rather Daisy would need North’s skill to direct her. Of course, he had no legal hold on North, but sometimes a little arm twisting was in order, especially if you know how to use a man’s failings against him—and North’s was pride. Or rather, pride was one of his failings.

  “We’re waiting to get permission from the National Trust—they own the castles we’re going to use,” Luke told North. “I hope your new producer has settled on Daisy’s wardrobe and decided who you’re bringing to England and who you’re going to hire over there and all the other little, petty, niggling details Daisy used to handle with such dispatch.”

  “You really are a first-class prick.”

  “How many times have I told you that compliments don’t affect me? Oh, and by the way, North, will you be my best man? We’re having the wedding after the shoot so you can’t use that as an excuse. And I think you’ll enjoy the ambiance of Grosse Pointe. It’s shaping up into a fairly decent little wedding; unpretentious, impudent, almost, but not quite, petulant, and of a promising year.”

  “I’m not the best-man type,” North snapped.

  “I quite agree … but it happens to be one of the burdens of friendship. Why should you escape? I had to do it twice for you.”

  “Go shit in your hat, Luke.”

  “I take it that means you accept? Knew you would.”

  Now, late in June, Daisy looked forward-with a feeling of urgency to the next month when they would all leave for England, where a ten-day shoot was scheduled. Meanwhile, from her position of outsider, she watched in concealed anxiety as Mary-Lou Duke, North’s new producer, coped with the job of getting the shoot organized. Daisy had, as a courtesy, offered to show her the ropes at the studio, but her offer had been coldly declined by the woman North had hired away from his closest competitor by dint of paying her one and a half times as much as Daisy had been getting.

  Mary-Lou was a woman in her thirties, handsome, almost imposing and placid. Placidity, constant, indestructible, relentless, was her secret weapon. She was as sparkling as lead, as much fun as an empty beer barrel, as humorous as a plain pipe rack—but you could depend on her. While Luke’s people were finishing their own preproduction work, she took Daisy on a tour of Seventh Avenue, selecting clothes for the shoot. Mary-Lou hailed the cabs, she held the elevator door open for Daisy, and led the way into the showrooms with Daisy, captive, at her side. Daisy, so used to being the fusser rather than the one fussed over, felt like a cop, accustomed to absolute charge of passing traffic, now reduced to watching a ten-car collision without raising a hand. But she resisted all her impulses to jump in and try to make decisions. She knew damn well, even as Mary-Lou was informing designers of just what she was looking for, that most, if not all, of the clothes they brought back to the studio for North’s final approval would be rejected. She kept silent as North, increasingly impatient, sent them back for different clothes on three occasions. After the third time Daisy had to go through a wardrobe parade, and after North had again turned down the clothes, Daisy felt she had to say something. They had only seven days of preproduction time left. She took the new producer aside.

  “Mary-Lou—may I make a suggestion?”

  “If you feel it’s that important,” she said reluctantly.

  “The reason North doesn’t like the riding jackets and the shirts we’ve been bringing back is that I shouldn’t be in a tailored jacket and shirt—I have to be in proper riding clothes from the waist down, but above the waist I should be wearing something dashing and unusual.”

  “But that wouldn’t be proper,” Mary-Lou said severely.

  “No, not at all, but it’d work, for what they want.”

  “But if people don’t ride dressed like that …”

  “The number of people who’ll know the difference will be tiny. It’s the general effect that counts—don’t you think?”

  “If you don’t mind breaking the rules …” Mary-Lou shrugged. Even her shrug was inexpressive, not an easy thing.

  “And for the picnic on the lawn, the trouble is nobody is doing the right clothes for that this year … but I know a place, a special place I’ve never been able to afford, where we might find just the thing,” Daisy said eagerly.

  “Daisy, perhaps you’d better just run along and look for clothes without me,” Mary-Lou decided. It went against her principles to delegate any authority but she had so many more important things to do.

  Mary-Lou didn’t care when people insisted on trying to contribute ideas, just as long as they didn’t get in the way of her logistics. Ideas were like balloons children play with—let them have their fun being “creative”—logistics were serious business. Her mind was almost entirely occupied with the mechanical details of getting North and company to England, picking up the English technicians, conveying everyone to their locations, housing them, feeding them, and making sure that they had every last piece of equipment they needed. The only thing that bothered her was that the first-class section on British Airways seemed to be heavily booked on the day they were leaving. Now that was something she couldn’t wait to get her teeth into.

  Daisy, released, dashed out to costume herself, not forgetting that she had an appointment with the Elstree make-up people that afternoon. They were taking no chances on untested English make-up artists. A top commercial make-up expert would be part of the troupe that went to England, as would one of the highest paid hairdressers in commercial work. They were each getting fifteen hundred dollars a day plus all expenses for each day they’d be away from New York. “Hardship pay” they called it, although it was difficult to see where the hardship lay in England.
However, they would have charged no more to go to the Sahara. Once out of Manhattan, it was “hardship,” and let no producer forget it.

  Since the make-up expert had her own prized collection of dozens and dozens of hard-to-find, recherché types of make-up she had discovered over the years, she was not at all happy about having to use only Elstree products, but truth-in-advertising laws forced her to do so, since Daisy was going to say, “I wear it every day.”

  “Luckily,” she said, looking at Daisy, “you don’t need much make-up—I’m not used to this muck.”

  The Elstree product-line manager flinched. “They’re excellent products,” Patsy Jacobson said in irritation.

  “Yeah—but its not theatrical.” The two women glared at each other.

  Daisy, who was sitting in front of a mirror, as motionless as a mannequin, was seized by an urge to get into this conversation. Severely she stopped herself. Develop an attitude, she told herself. Be a star! Don’t get into their act. If they’re having problems, that’s not something I should be worried about at this stage of the game. It’ll put them in shock if I turn back into Daisy the Fixer. It’ll get resolved faster and better without me and if it winds up being something I don’t like, I’ll simply tell them to start all over again, until I do like it. If I dare. If I dare? Of course, I’ll dare, won’t I? After all, I am the star.

  She sat quietly, thinking of the check for three hundred and thirty-three thousand dollars, and thirty-three cents, she had received from Supracorp last January when she had signed her contract.

  She had written Anabel as soon as she had made the deal with Patrick Shannon at Le Cirque, telling her the news of her riches, telling her she knew of Anabel’s illness, telling her not to sell La Marée whatever she did, telling her that she, Daisy, could easily meet all of Anabel’s expenses, in addition to Danielle’s, and that Anabel was not to even think about money but just concentrate on getting better. She never mentioned Ram. Even as Daisy wrote the letter she knew that she wasn’t being rash in making these promises before the contract was signed. Whatever kind of man Patrick Shannon was, he wouldn’t change his word, once given. She knew that as surely as she knew that Columbus had not circumnavigated the globe.

  There had been several other dinners with Shannon in the months between then and now, oddly formal dinners, Daisy thought, to which various members of the Supracorp hierarchy were invited, almost as if she were being presented to them, or them to her. Shannon had been away a great deal, off and on, during the last months, on Supracorp business, and he had not renewed his suggestion about a rendezvous between his lurcher, Lucy, and Theseus. Daisy wondered if perhaps her princess act had been a little too convincing.

  At last, it was July, and the shoot had officially begun, although filming would not start for another day.

  Daisy was alone in her suite at Claridge’s. Somehow, by means she preferred not to discuss, Mary-Lou had contrived to get them all first-class seats on the flight they wanted. Now she and North were conferring with the actors who had been chosen to be with Daisy in each commercial. Shannon’s desire to show her with genuine lords had given way to North’s absolute refusal to use more than one untried, nonprofessional in the shoot.

  As Daisy wandered about her suite, so large that its closets could have been small bedrooms, she thought of all the things she might be doing in London, from riding in Hyde Park to hunting up a jumble sale. She had only a few hours before they all met the English location crew to leave in a procession of cars and equipment-filled trucks for their first location, in Sussex. Not enough time, she fretted, to visit Danielle and be sure to be back in time. But once the shoot was over a few days would belong to her. Then—ah, then she’d see Danielle, and go to visit Anabel.

  As she waited, she felt absolutely alien in the city that had been her home for so many years. Who knew who now lived in the pale yellow house on Wilton Row in which she’d grown up? Who had bought Anabel’s house in Eaton Square? The only places in which she might perhaps feel a sense of belonging were the stables in the Grosvenor Crescent Mews or at Lady Alden’s School, and something kept her from revisiting these old haunts. Restlessly Daisy went down the great flight of stairs to buy some magazines to read in her sitting room, which was large enough for a cocktail party of sixty.

  “Magazines, Madame?” the head hall porter said politely. “Oh, we don’t keep magazines, Madame. However, if you will just tell me what you require, I’ll send a lad to get them for you, immediately.”

  “Oh, never mind, it’s perfectly all right.” Daisy retreated to her room, furious with herself and furious with a hotel so uncommercial that it didn’t even have a magazine stand. She realized why she hadn’t gone out anywhere, why she had not chosen to leave the absolutely protective luxury of this monolithic hotel during these last free hours before work started. She was afraid of meeting Ram.

  Herstmonceux Castle, in Sussex, had been chosen as the location of the first of three thirty-second commercials. The soft-rose brick building was surrounded by an exceptionally wide moat which could be crossed only by a long drawbridge, built on a series of graceful arches sunk into the deep waters of the moat. Its builder, Roger de Fiennes, Treasurer of the Household of Henry VI in the mid-fifteenth century, must have had good reason to suspect that someday he might need to defend himself, for he had built a strong and most beautiful fortress, with a gatehouse protected by two powerful octagonal, crenelated towers, above which stood double fighting platforms. This castle had been chosen for the commercial in which Daisy would ride up to the entrance, since Kirbo, when he had finally found pictures of it, had suddenly seen that a gallop across a bridge was more visually interesting than a gallop up just any driveway. North planned on shooting at Herstmonceux first, since it involved horses and would demand less of Daisy’s acting ability than the other commercials.

  When North had first seen the pictures of the castle, he was disgusted. “That bridge is thirty feet above the surface of the moat, Luke. Even with a barge and a crane, I can’t get high enough—it’s a helicopter or nothing, for the approach and the gallop, and then as she rides closer and gets off the horse I’ll only have the width of the bridge to work on.”

  “Old Roger didn’t want to make it easy for strangers to walk in uninvited,” said Luke, unmoved. If there was one thing he never let worry him, it was the technical problems of commercial makers. He had never met a good one who couldn’t have humped a camera to the top of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh—all by himself if necessary. They wallowed in stories of technical impossibilities they’d conquered; their magazine, Millimeter, was full of harrowing tales of difficulties overcome, and while it was true that nine commercial makers had been killed in helicopter accidents, they’d still swim a river crawling with man-eating alligators for the right shot … or get out of the business. Even as Luke refused to react to North’s niggling objections, North himself was thinking that the old bricks of Herstmonceux would look even lovelier through an amber filter and a few smoke bombs set off in the background would make it seem to literally float on the surface of the moat, a trick he thought he might have invented even before David Dee.

  As North stood just outside the great portcullis of Herstmonceux that first week in October, with Wingo just inside, riding the camera, watching Daisy, her hair flying like the standard of a great queen, galloping toward him on a huge black horse, followed by a white horse carrying an actor who looked more like a lord than any lord could have, he had to admit that she didn’t look like an amateur. She didn’t even sound like an amateur as she dismounted and spoke her one line, dressed in fawn breeches, black boots, and a soft, open-necked, full-sleeved, billowing white silk blouse such as one of the Three Musketeers might have worn. The changes of expression on North’s face, flickering with quick emotions, sometimes crossed by a smile he didn’t know was there, the descriptive pantomime gestures of his hands, as if he were engaged in hypnosis or legerdemain, led Daisy through her paces over and over, and still once
more, and then again, and yet again, until he was satisfied. She had never, not even in Venice, felt so much closeness between them as during each take. She finally understood his particular genius in its very special manifestation and she knew, finally, why he had married his two best models—she knew already why they had divorced him.

  Even before he looked at the rushes in London, less than three hours away by car, North was aware that he had something extraordinarily special on the film; he could tell by the way a chill had run down the back of his neck and upper arms each time Daisy galloped closer to the camera and he anticipated the lyrical moment when she pulled up her huge beast and leapt off, laughing. It had been years since he’d felt that chill, that promise of something inexpressibly right.

  The mystery that had always engaged him, the deep unsolvable mystery of the human face and its ability to convey emotion—even if it was only an emotion that led the viewer to a certain counter in a supermarket—this mystery was charged with power by Daisy’s features on film, North realized, as he watched the rushes. Why had he never even thought to film her before? He resented her excellence only a little less than he was relieved by it.

  From Sussex, using cars, planes and trains, with admirable precision, Mary-Lou led the entire company far north, to Peeblesshire, in Scotland, where the castle called Traquair House was located. Totally different from stern Herstmonceux, it had evolved from a simple stone tower built in the middle of the thirteenth century. By the time of Charles I, the castle itself had grown into a tall, pale gray edifice guarded by a long expanse of delicate iron gates which had been shut by the owners until such a time as a Stuart was again crowned King of England, and, even for Frederick Gordon North, they could not be opened. However, right outside the gates was a flower-dappled meadow in which Daisy, and an actor, were to picnic on strawberries and cream.