Princess Daisy

by Judith Krantz

  So what could go wrong? Christ—almost everything, Hilly Bijur thought, shuddering. In the crazy world of fragrance, who the fuck knew?

  “Of course she’s unimportant, a totally unimportant miserable little bitch. You don’t have to tell me that … it only makes it worse, Robin, don’t you understand?” Vanessa said furiously. “She was never worthy of our kindness. And no, I do not want a Miltown or a Valium or a sleeping pill, so will you please stop trying to make me take one?”

  It was three in the morning and Vanessa had awakened, as she had so often in the last months, in a knotted fury. Although she tried not to disturb him, Robin always seemed to know when she couldn’t sleep and woke, loyally prepared to listen as Vanessa poured once again over the rosary of her grievances. It made him sad to look at her. Although her long, slashingly elegant body was unchanged, her mouth was tightened in an unattractive line and her face looked thinner than it ever had, almost gaunt But no matter how he tried to distract her with plans for vacations, new ideas for redecorating, no matter how often he held her tight and massaged her upper back where the worst of the tension was, she wouldn’t forget Daisy and what Daisy had done to her.

  “First and foremost, and you have to admit it, Robin, she was never properly grateful, not for a second. Oh, she said thank you, but only when it was absolutely necessary, when I persuaded Topsy to let her do the children in oil and when I got her that other commission. But how did she say thank you? As if she were doing me a favor! If there is one thing I can’t forgive, it’s ingratitude—she never had me fooled for a minute. And she owed us so much! How many parties I invited her to was she ‘too busy’ to come to? Who the hell does she think she is? No one—no one—is too busy to come here. Ever!”

  “Vanessa, everyone who counts says you give the best parties in New York. What does she matter?” Robin said patiently for the hundredth time.

  “That’s not the point and you know it. It’s her whole attitude! That high-and-mighty ‘You can’t touch me because I’m special,’ and ‘You don’t impress me no matter what you do’—it’s that I simply cannot endure. And what about those dresses you gave her? You practically had to force them on her, for Christ’s sake—you’d think she preferred to wear those crazy, playacting castoffs of hers.”

  “She has to wear decent clothes now,” Robin said, realizing an instant too late that he could hardly have been more tactless. Vanessa had been filled with wrath on the topic of Daisy ever since the unfortunate yacht incident last winter, but when the news of the Princess Daisy campaign was announced, when personal publicity started to appear about Daisy, when the story of the million-dollar contract was bruited about and, finally, now that she had heard that there was to be a People cover story, Vanessa’s envious outrage grew until it consumed her.

  “I notice she didn’t come to you for them,” she sneered at her husband spitefully. When he merely shrugged and refused to answer, she sighed and touched his arm tenderly. “Sorry, darling, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Her taste is so outlandish that of course she wouldn’t have the intelligence or the class to wear your things, that’s all.”

  “It’s all right,” he assured her. “Would you like a little wine? It might make you sleepy.” Vanessa shook her head again, sternly.

  “Robin, I assure you that I’m indifferent to all those cheap advertising ploys—I’d say let her have her moment in the limelight and who cares—but what I can’t forgive, what I’ll never be able to forgive, is the way she ruined that yachting party. Don’t you have any comprehension of what a fool she made me look? Do you have any understanding of the things people have been saying about us ever since? Yes, ever since, even now! Everyone on that boat must have blabbed to every last solitary soul they knew in the whole world. It’s been months and months and people haven’t stopped baiting me … ‘Vanessa, love, so that little family reunion you planned backfired, did it?’ ‘Vanessa, I’ve heard the most fascinating story … what really happened, darling?’ ‘Vanessa, why on earth did you have to turn the yacht back—Why did Daisy Valensky sneak off in the middle of the night? What could have caused Ram Valensky to spend the rest of his trip in his cabin … so rude of him, poor sweet … do tell … I’m sure you know more than you’re saying … how could they act that way toward you?’ Oh, Robin, you just wouldn’t believe the rumors—vindictive, mean, stupid, ugly—and all of them making me look like the biggest idiot alive. And it comes from everyone—people I thought were friends—I hardly dare to make a lunch date even now because I know there’s going to be this inquisition. Don’t you see what she’s done to me, that pretentious bitch!”

  “It was just a nine-day wonder, darling. I’m sure people can’t still be talking about it,” Robin said, without conviction. He had been the target of many questions himself.

  “Bullshit—and you know it. It might have been all right if Ram hadn’t acted the way he did. I could have just said that Daisy was seasick or had an allergic attack or something, but he had to go and shut himself up, for God’s sake, and not even say goodbye to anybody—that’s what really did it, that’s what really made people talk. When I think how much trouble I went to for that bastard, talking Daisy into coming with us, I could die. Even if he did finance your new line, nothing entitled him to hold me up to ridicule,” she raged.

  “Vanessa, dearest, please, you’re just eating yourself up about this. You can’t go on … you’ve got to try and put it behind you.”

  “I damn well will!” Vanessa pulled herself up from her pillows and wrapped herself in a bathrobe.

  “Robin, what time is it in England now?”

  “Morning. Why?”

  Without answering him she placed the call to London, waiting in their bedroom, that often photographed jungle of Victorian chintz and Edwardian lace, until she had Ram on the line.

  “Hello, darling—it’s Vanessa! Robin and I were just having a nightcap and suddenly we both realized how frightfully long it’s been since we’ve had news of you. So I thought, why not just pick up a phone? We were so sorry you weren’t well on the yacht—in fact we were rather concerned. But of course I understand, I get the most fearful migraines too. No, no, don’t apologize. But you’re fine now? I’m so glad. Yes, Robin and I are both in the pink. And I suppose you’re up to date on all the good news about Daisy? She must have written you … such excitement, my dear, you can’t imagine. They’re making simply the most marvelous fuss about her—isn’t it thrilling? To think that she just never seemed to have two dimes to rub together and now a million dollars! That old title of yours is worth something over here after all … democracy or no democracy, like the English, we dearly love a lord. Even People is doing a cover story on her now and if anything will put her on the map, that will. So you, my darling, had better get used to seeing your little sister simply plastered all over the billboards and magazines and television—even in England—hadn’t you? Just imagine, a Valensky touting lipsticks and God knows what else. Still, I suppose there are just no lengths she won’t go to for Patrick Shannon. What do you mean, what about Patrick Shannon? He’s the head of … sorry, darling, obviously you know who he is. What I meant was that they’re madly in love. Everyone in New York is gossiping about them ever since they came back from England together. They’re having the most glorious affair! It’s simply delicious to watch them … makes you believe in romance again. But didn’t you see them when they were over there together? Oh, I see … in the Mideast … so you missed the lovebirds. Well now, there is where I think Daisy’s been particularly clever. People covers are all well and good, but Patrick Shannon is the most divine man these old eyes have seen in years. And a man who gets everything he has ever wanted. Just yesterday there was an article about Elstree in The New York Times and they quoted him as saying that Daisy was ‘one of a kind.’ Pretty faint praise, considering—but, on the other hand, he was probably just being discreet—the last time I saw them at a restaurant together he could barely keep his hands off her. Now
don’t be old-fashioned, Ram! Daisy’s hardly a teenager. She has a perfect right to a dozen lovers … but she only wants Shannon it seems, and who could quarrel with that?

  “Well, listen sweetie, I won’t keep you any longer. Just checking to make sure you were better—old friends shouldn’t be out of touch for so long. Robin says to tell you he sends his best. Goodbye, love. See you in the funny papers, as they used to say.”

  With the first genuinely pleasant look he had seen on her face in months, Vanessa put down the phone very softly. “Robin, perhaps I’ll have a little wine after all.”

  “Feeling better darling?” Robin asked anxiously.

  “Infinitely!”

  The pain Ram had felt ever since he had crept away from La Marée, leaving Daisy bleeding on her bed, had been a pain of such need, of a wanting so great that it lived in a place where no one knew about it but himself, a place so far inside that his sanity was unquestioned because his outward appearance was correct, impeccable. He was to continue to live and function without Daisy because no one else had her. But she had always lived on in his fatally obsessed mind as if she still belonged to him lived on in a cage of hopeless, endless longing from which he had neither the will nor the desire nor the power to escape, a cage which contained no images but those of Daisy and himself. True, she turned away from him, in the cage, but she did not turn toward anyone else. How could she, since she was his possession?

  Ram had not been jealous because there was no one to be jealous of, no actual threat, no embodiment of a third person between him and his fantasies.

  Now, with a few insinuating words, chosen with her infallible instinct for weakness and vulnerability, Vanessa had aroused a literally unbearable sense of impotence, of mutilation. There was no place left for Ram to stand, no inner core in which to take refuge from the pain. Jealousy was born, ravening and gibbering, as old and as mad as if it had had a million years in which to reach hideous, unendurable, acid-drenched maturity.

  He dressed quickly, and within half an hour after Vanessa’s phone call he was at the mews garage in which he kept his Jaguar.

  Ram had always known where Danielle was. The directors of the school were accustomed to his occasional phone calls as he checked up to find out if Daisy had been able to continue to pay for Danielle. For years he had waited for the day, the inevitable day on which she would be unable to shoulder the burden and would be forced to come to him for help.

  Within twenty minutes Ram was headed out of London, speeding in the direction of Queen Anne’s School, by a route that had been clearly mapped out in his mind for many, many years.

  25

  Oh, my God, NO!” Candice Bloom screamed. Jenny, her assistant, whirled around. Her boss had turned the color of a Kleenex and on her desk was an advance copy of People which had just arrived by messenger, a magazine that would be on every newstand in America twenty-four hours from now.

  Jenny rushed over to Candice’s desk, almost afraid to look at the cover. She was sure they’d been bumped for another story … Candice had been dreading that all along. She’d always said it was too good to be true. But no, there was Daisy … obviously rebellion was one way to inspire Danillo … it was a marvelous picture. On the side of the cover a copy line, in red, shouted “PRINCESS DAISY: Her life isn’t just sweet scents; the strange, secret story of Francesca Vernon and Prince Stash Valensky’s daughter.” Jenny’s hands fumbled as she tried to find the page on which the story appeared.

  “Page thirty-four,” Candice gasped.

  Jenny finally found the double spread with which the cover story began. The entire right-hand page was one huge black-and-white photograph. She stared at it, read the caption and then looked again at the picture. The world was reduced to that page, that photograph, those two girls, two girls with blonde hair and black eyes, two girls with the same faces, two girls with their arms around each other, two smiling girls of about twenty-three, so alike, so impossibly alike. The caption read: “Princess Daisy on a recent visit to her identical twin sister, Danielle, in the home for permanently retarded children in which she has been secreted since she was six.”

  The two women stood frozen, staring, staring, unable to speak, struggling for comprehension of something that just could not be.

  Finally, in a white voice, Candice said, “She … she’s a little shorter.”

  “Her eyes … they’re the same … but her look is … vague?” Jenny’s words stumbled. She could only absorb the shock detail by detail.

  “And her hair, it’s just shoulder length and it’s not as, not as … bright … but it grows in just the same way, exactly the same way.” Candice sounded as if she were speaking from another room.

  “Her features are different, no, not different really, but just not quite as … clear, not as fine. She looks, oh, younger, as if she doesn’t have a sense of humor,” Jenny said wonderingly. “But it is the same face … Daisy’s face.”

  “No!” Candice said. “Not the same—you wouldn’t look twice at her!”

  “No, no … you would not.” Jenny agreed in horror. “My God, look at that other picture,” she said, pointing with a finger that shook. It was a reproduction of the Life cover of twenty-five years before … Stash and Francesca, and the laughing baby on Merlin’s back. She read the caption out loud. “No one knew, when Prince and Princess Valensky posed for Life that another child had been born to them, a child they hid away from the eyes of the world.”

  “Jesus God!” Jenny whispered. They both started to read the story, flipping through the five pages, skimming and reading out loud.

  ‘In an exclusive interview with Prince George Edward Woodhill Valensky, half-brother of Princess Daisy, People learned of the existence of … sister … I.Q. of a four-year-old …’ My God, Candice, a four-year-old!”

  Candice stopped Jenny firmly. “Shut up, Jenny—there’s more. Listen to this, just listen! ‘Prince Valensky violently opposes the commercialization of his ancient family name by his half-sister whose endorsement of a new line of cosmetics he termed “a vulgar and unseemly action.” ’ That son-of-a-bitch!” She continued reading in a voice that grew progressively louder. “ ’In his opinion, if Francesca Vernon had not abandoned his father and kidnapped the twins, they might have had a normal childhood, but by the time his father regained the children, it was too late to help Danielle … Prince Valensky, seven years older than Princess Daisy, is a highly respected investment adviser. Bitter toward his sister, who has been paid one million dollars for her endorsement, he said, “She inherited ten million dollars and let it slip through her fingers because she was too foolish to take any advice. She’ll go through this money just as quickly.” ’ ”

  “My God,” said Jenny, “do you think she did?”

  “Wait! Here’s the worst. ‘Daisy Valensky has been called “one of a kind” by Patrick Shannon, the sometimes controversial president of Supracorp’—Jesus, Jenny, ‘one of a kind’—‘who is betting many millions that her face and name will lend prestige to the line of.… Last year Elstree’s losses were reported at over thirty million … unparalleled media blitz to promote the newest face in the beauty business including …’ That’s it, I can’t read one more word.” Candice sat down. “Get Mr. Bijur on the intercom, Jenny, and tell him I’ve got to see him immediately.”

  In spite of the urgency of Candice’s order, both she and Jenny stood for another minute looking at the photograph of Daisy and Danielle. Neither woman could take her eyes off the haunting picture of the twins. They were unable to stop comparing the slight but all-important differences in their faces which made of one a glorious beauty and left the other unformed, unfinished, uninteresting, with a muted little smile, pathos in her big black eyes.

  “ ‘One of a kind,’ ” Candice murmured. “God—we’ve had it—by tomorrow this picture will be seen all over the world.”

  “Do you think People knew about this stuff when they decided on the cover story?” Jenny asked.

  “No way
. They angle stories in a special way, but not as bad as this. I can tell by the way the text reads that it must have come in at the last minute—it’s hasty, reads more like a newsmagazine piece than a People story.”

  “But then how could it have happened?” Jenny asked.

  “God knows, and I don’t care. When something this bad happens, ‘how’ just doesn’t matter any more. Get me Bijur’s secretary.”

  “May I make a suggestion?” Jenny asked.

  “What?”

  “Fix your eye make-up before you see him. You’ve been crying.”

  “So what? So have you. Oh, okay, okay.”

  Daisy woke late on the morning that Candice and Jenny were reading People, and considered her day. At lunch she was going to be interviewed by Jerry Tallmer of the New York Post for a feature article, at 2:30 she had another interview with Phyllis Battelle of King Features and at 5:00 a date for drinks and an interview with Lammy Johnstone of Gannett for their national wire service. Candice would be with her at all these interviews, somehow disappearing into the background as Daisy answered questions, yet listening carefully and sometimes stepping lightly into the conversation to amplify a statement or suggest a new line of discussion. Even though that skinny, swaggering, terse young publicity woman was only three years older than Daisy, she managed to convey a faintly maternal feeling; that of an accomplished and socially secure matron introducing her daughter to the ladies who run the debutante cotillion. She was able to gently point to Daisy’s qualities in a way that Daisy would never have been able to do for herself.