Belinda

by Anne Rice

  Well, whatever the case, I didn’t let him off the hook. I just didn’t say things that made it OK.

  I went out looking for Susan. And this time she was back in the room and she was really knocked down. She was for leaving the festival that very night. Everything was finished, she said.

  “Kiddie-porn, that’s what they’re calling it. They’re saying everything is wrong politically now for our film.”

  “That’s where you fucked up,” Sandy said, “using her at her age and all.”

  But Susan shook her head. She said there was all kinds of stuff being shown in the teen exploitation flicks in the U.S. It’ was a matter of labels and word getting around and people being deliberately frightened off. Even the smallest distributors had left her high and dry. Yet everybody said Final Score was a wonderful film.

  I was crying. I was miserable. But she hadn’t really turned against me, that was clear. She said she was going right on with the Brazilian film.

  “Are you for that, Belinda! ....You better believe it,” I said. I told her then what Marty had said.

  “Marty Moreschi’s television,” she said. “But I think I can get the backing I need, even with Final Score in the can, when I get to LA.”

  When I left Susan, I knew I was too angry and disappointed and confused to go back to the suite. I couldn’t have gone to sleep.

  I went back to the lobby and out to the Croisette. I didn’t know where I was going exactly, but just being in the twenty-four hour crowd and the excitement of Cannes was helping me. I could not calm down.

  I had money in my purse, I figured I’d get a sandwich or something or just walk around. People were looking at me. Somebody recognized me and came over and took my picture. Yeah, Bonnie’s daughter, and suddenly out of the blue there was my dad. My adorable dad.

  Now one of the worst parts of the secrecy between us, Jeremy, was that I could never tell you about my dad. His name is George Gallagher, but, as I said, he is known all over the world as G.G., and he is very big in New York, having one of the most exclusive salons. Before that, he had one in Paris, which is where he met my morn.

  Now there had been a big fight between my mom and my dad, as I already mentioned, and this was before I went to school in Gstaad. I’d spent a lot of time with G.G.—G.G. had always been wonderful to me. G.G. would fly to a city and wait for hours just to see me for lunch or dinner or take me for a walk in the park. We’d done quite a few advertisements together when I was little—his blond hair and my blond hair, shampoo ads, that kind of thing. We even did one with both of us naked which was in magazines all over the Continent, though in America they only showed us from the shoulders up. Eric Arlington photographed us for that one, the same guy who does the Midnight Mink pictures exclusively and who later did the famous Bonnie-with-dalmatians poster of Mom.

  Anyway, when I was nine, G.G. and I went to New York on vacation, promising Mom we’d be back in ten days. We did a lot of work for a line of hair products Dad was marketing, and we also had an absolutely wonderful time. One week stretched into two, then three, and pretty soon we were gone a month. I knew I should have called Mom to ask her if it was OK to stay, I should have known how insecure she could be, but I didn’t call because I was afraid she’d say, Come home. Instead I just sent messages back by cable and ran around with G.G., going to musicals, plays, hitting Boston and Washington, D.C., for tourist weekends, that kind of thing.

  The upshot was, Mom got terrified she was losing me to G.G. She got hysterical. She finally reached me at the Plaza in New York and told me I was her daughter, G.G. wasn’t my legal father, that she had never even intended for me to know G.G., that G.G. was breaking their original agreement for which by the way G.G. had been paid. She was incoherent finally, talking about her mother’s death and how nothing in life was worth it and how she’d kill herself if I didn’t come home.

  GG. and I were terribly upset, but the worse was yet to come. When we got off the plane in Rome, G.G. was hit with all kinds of legal papers. Mom took him to court to force him to stay away from me. I felt horrible for G.G. I felt I should have known Mom would flip like this, and there was G.G., spending a fortune on Roman lawyers and not even understanding what was happening. I could have died. But I couldn’t leave Mom for a minute. She was in a state of nervous collapse. Gallo was in the middle of a picture and furious on account of the delay—and so was Uncle I)aryl. Blair Sackwell was there, but nothing he said helped. I always Named myself.

  After that, G.G. left Europe. And I had always feared that Mom had something to do with the closing of his Paris salon. But I was just turning ten when these things happened, and the subject couldn’t be mentioned without Mom starting to cry.

  Now, as the years passed on Saint Esprit, I became a little bitter about G.G. Of course, G.G. and I kept in touch. I knew G.G. had become lovers with Ollie Boon, the Broadway director, and that he was very happy in New York, and sometimes when I went to Paris, I tried to call G.G. from there, which was easier than calling from Saint Esprit. But I felt horribly guilty for what had happened. And I was scared to know how bad for G.G. it had really been. G.G. and I finally drifted apart.

  I don’t know if you ever saw the shampoo commercials he did or the big magazine pictures we did together that time. If you did, then I think you will agree G.G. is very goodlooking, and he will look young forever with his snub nose and little-boy mouth and blond curly hair. No matter what the style his hair is always cut real short with just the curls on top. He looks like the all-American boy actually. He is six feet four. He has the bluest eyes in the world.

  Anyway there he was on the Croisette in Cannes. And Ollie Boon was with him—and so was Blair Sackwell of Midnight Mink, who has always been a real good friend of G.G.’s, too.

  And G.G. was all dressed up in a black dinner jacket and a boiled shirt and so was Ollie Boon (I will describe Blair in a minute) and they were on their way to a party when we just collided on the Croisette.

  Now I had never met Ollie Boon. He came across as very sweet like rny dad. He is past seventy, but he is charming and goodlooking, too, with white hair and pretty teeth and silver-rimmed glasses and darkly tanned skin. As for Blair, well, he is what I would call divinely elegant, even though he is not over five feet one and has very little hair and a nose that is enormous and a voice so loud you would swear there is a mike in his chest. His dinner jacket and pants were lavender, his shirt silver, and. of course, he had a mink-lined cloak over his shoulders, which made him look absolutely insanely gorgeous at the moment that he screamed, “Belinda, darling!” and brought us all to a halt.

  Anyway they just showered me with kisses, and Dad and I hugged and hugged, and Blair said that I should come with them, they were going to a party on the yacht of a Saudi Arabian and I would love the guy and do come right now. I was crying and Dad was crying. And we just hugged each other over and over till Ollie Boon and Blair decided to make fun of us and they started hugging each other and making fake sobs, too.

  “Come on to the party with us now!” Dad said.

  But I was not about to dump all this misery on my dad. In a big rush I told him only the good things. About Susan and our standing ovation and that Mom was going to do “Champagne Flight.”

  Dad was so disappointed that he hadn’t seen the film. “Daddy, I didn’t know you’d be here,” I told him.

  “Belinda, I would have come to Cannes to see it,” he said.

  “Well, how do you think I feel that I didn’t see it!” Blair yelled. “Your mother told me she was going to Cannes! She didn’t say anything about this film!” It turned out Ollie had heard of it, heard it was terrific, and he congratulated me very formally while Blair fumed.

  But then seriously Blair wanted to know why Mom hadn’t told him when he had spoken to her long-distance in Paris, and a funny thing happened. I wanted to answer him, make some excuse, and I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

  “Come on to the party with us, Belinda,” G.G. said.
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  Then Blair got excited about Mom doing “Champagne Flight.” What if she did Midnight Mink again? Did I think she would do it?

  I didn’t say anything, but secretly I thought, It’s starting already, this “Champagne Flight” madness. Mom had been Blair’s first Midnight Mink girl. But in all these years Blair had never never mentioned Mom doing Midnight Mink again.

  Anyway Dad started pulling me towards the yacht.

  “I’m not dressed up, Dad,” I told him.

  And he said, “Belinda, with that hair, you are always dressed up. Come on.”

  The yacht was posh all right. The Saudi women, the very same who wear veils when they get home to Arabia, were all walking around the low-ceiling ballroom in knockout fashions, and the men all that had deep burning look in their eye that meant they could carry you off to a tent. The food was fabulous and so was the champagne. But I felt too disheartened to enjoy it. I was just putting on a good face for Dad.

  Blair wouldn’t stop talking about Mother doing Midnight Mink again until Ollie Boon told him gently that he was talking shop and to shove it. And then Dad and I danced. The best part.

  The band was playing Gershwin, and Dad and I just danced very slow together to some sad song. I almost cried again thinking about what happened and then, while we were dancing, I realized I was looking at this guy on the sidelines of the dance floor, another dark Arab I must have figured until I realized it was no Arab, it was Marty Moreschi of United Theatricals and he was watching me.

  As soon as the song came to an end, he cut in on Dad and we dancing before I could say no.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I could ask you that. Doesn’t anybody care about you? Where you go. what you do?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I’m fifteen years old. I take care of myself. Besides, the guy I was dancing with was my father, if you want to know.”

  “No kidding,” he said. “You mean that’s the famous G.G.? He looks like a high school kid.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “and he’s an awfully nice guy.”

  “What about me, you don’t think I’m nice?” he asked me.

  “You’re OK, but what are you doing here? Booking a prime-time called ‘Sheiks on the Riviera’ or what?”

  “There’s money here. Can’t you smell it? But if you want the truth, nobody’s taking tickets at the door and I just followed you in.”

  “Well, you don’t have to follow me or worry about me,” I said.

  But the chemistry was started between us. I was feeling something Do strong that it was embarrassing. I mean my face must have been sort of flushed.

  “Come back to the hotel with me and have a drink,” he said, “I want to talk to you.”

  “And leave my dad? Forget it.” But I knew right at that very second that I was going. And when the number ended, I introduced Marty to Dad and Ollie Boon and Blair, and there was a lot of kissing and hugging again between me and Dad and swearing to see each other in LA.

  Dad was pretty smashed. He whispered as we were hugging. “Don’t tall Bonnie you saw me, OK?”

  “Are things really that bad?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to tell you all of it, Belinda,” he said, “but I’m coming LA to see you this summer, of that much you can be sure.”

  Ollie was yawning and saying he wanted to go now, tOO. And Blair meantime had glommed on to Marty and was pitching the idea that Mid* night Mink coats could be used on “Champagne Flight.” Marty was doing a diplomatic number of noncommittal enthusiasm, which I was to see a thousand times in Hollywood later on.

  I kissed Dad. “In LA,” we said.

  I was very nervous leaving with Marty. When I think about it now, I realize that the physical attraction you feel to a person can make you feel that something momentous is happening. It can create the illusion that nothing else matters at all.

  It was the same thing I felt with you later on. But I v, as more prepared for it then, and that’s why I did the disappearing act over and over in those first few days with you.

  This time was the first time, and I didn’t know what was happening, except I liked the touch of this man very much. And we did not even speak to each other as we went back to the Carlton and up to Marty’s suite.

  Now this was part of United Theatricals quarters at Cannes, and it was even more fancy than Mom’s rooms. There was a buffet there, all kinds of wine, and the same clutter of flowers everywhere you looked. But except for a couple of waiters, the place was empty. And nobody saw Marty and I go into Marty’s room.

  Well, something is going to happen, and I do not know why I am letting it happen, I figured. I am as unimpressed with this guy’s credentials as a girl could be. I mean, he killed my picture, didn’t he? And I don’t even know what or who he really is. Yet I was going into his bedroom with him and trying to be very cool to him and saying, “OK, you wanted to talk?”

  Well, what happened is, he started to talk. No big putting the make on me. He just talked. He lit a cigarette, poured me a drink, poured himself a drink, which he never drank by the way, successful producers almost never drink, and then he started asking me all about myself and life in Europe and what I thought about coming back to the States and saying how weird all this was for him, this Cannes number, and how he had grown up in a fifth-floor walk-up in Little Italy in New York. He looked around this fancy room with the damask wallpaper and the velvet couches and chairs, and he said, “I mean, like, where are the rats?”

  I had to laugh, but he was fascinating me, really fascinating me, he was like a New York stand-up comedian, making his own connections one after another and talking about how Los Angeles was “Dedicated Surface” and how he felt like a gorilla in his five-hundred-dollar suits and he had to sneak off to get hot dogs after he left the fancy restaurants where the United Theatricals execs ate tiny portions for lunch.

  “I mean, a plate of marinated mushrooms and a piece of dead fish at Saint Germain? This is lunch?”

  I thought I would die of the giggles, absolutely die. I mean, I was utterly utterly hysterical listening to him.

  “You can do anything, can’t you?” he says to me. “I mean, I told you that junk out there on the buffet was squids in ink and you ate it. You just ate it. I saw them introducing you to some prince or something on that yacht and you just smiled. What’s it like to be you?” he asked. “And that Blair Sackwell guy, all my life I’ve seen his ads in magazines, and you just put your arm around him and kissed him, just pls. What’s it like to live the way you live?”

  And when I started telling him a few things, I mean answering his questions, explaining how I’d always envied the school kids I saw in Europe and America, how I wanted to be part of something and all, he really listened. He did. His eyes got this gleam and he asked little questions that showed me he was responding to what I had actually said.

  But I was also getting a pretty good fix on Marty during all this. He is not that untypical of LA at all. He does not believe that television is terrible. He lives with gradations of badness, and they are for him his standards. He defends TV by saying it is by the people, for the people, of the people and so was Charles Dickens. But he has never read one page of Charles Dickens. The pinnacle for Marty is what he calls hot. In hot everything comes together—money, talent, art, popularity. Marty has not sold his soul for hot—hot is his religion. He is the saint of hot.

  Yet what gives Marty his force is New York street desperation and a sort of gangster style. He speaks in threats and ultimatums and pronouncements almost exclusively when he is not relaxed.

  Like: “And I told them, ‘Look you motherfuckers, you either give me that eight-o’clock slot or I walk,’ and ten minutes after, the phone rings and they say, ‘Marty, you’ve got it,’ and I say, ‘Damned right.’” It is forever like that.

  But it has a naivet6 to it. I mean, it is charmingly crude because Marty is so sincere about it. And Marty is a success at being this way.

  Ye
t you only act like this when you are really afraid you are nobody, and that, too, is Marty all the way.

  He will never forget where he came from, as he puts it, and it is not like being poor on the Coast, where the waitresses on Sunset Boulevard speak perfect English, where you drive through clean middle-class neighborhoods in San Francisco and they say this is the ghetto. Poor in New York is really poor.

  I guess what I am trying to tell you, what I want you to understand, is that this was the beginning of a big affair, this conversation. That I talked for two hours to this guy before we went to bed, that bed wasn’t the only thing he wanted. And to tell you the truth, I had been hating myself for the fact that going to bed was just about the only thing in my head.

  Anyway it was pretty exciting. It did not and never did have the mystery that we had together, you and me. There wasn’t the sense I had with you, that this is a once4n-a4ifetime great romance. It wasn’t wonderful like that.

  But I liked him, I really liked him. And then after about an hour of all this, something happened that really tipped the scales. Marty had been to the screening of Final Score.

  This I never expected. I mean, these people in Hollywood they don’t have to see a picture to kill it. They’ll buy a book for the movies when nobody has actually read the book.

  But Marty had gone to see Final Score.

  And when we got to talking about it, he said some amazing things. He said Susan had guts and vision. She was damned professional. And my part was dynamite, all right. I stole the picture from Sandy. No experienced actress would have let that happen. But what was wrong with the picture was that I looked more American than anybody in it. I had G.G.’s snub nose and little mouth and all that.

  “So this chick goes to a Greek island and she finds a high school cheerleader?” he asked me. It did not work. The Texas dopers, they were terrific, the writing first-rate. But the Greek island and my looks? It was a like foreign film. It didn’t work.

  Well, I don’t know to this day whether or not this is true. But it surprised me coming from him, this kind of thought. But even more surprising was that he cared enough to think about the picture at all.