Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  The same went for Jerome’s Hamlet and for Elizabeth’s Ophelia, Jerome being ‘swift, sardonic, passionate . . . a Hamlet this time made of steel, keeping his dangerous rage in check until he can stand no more . . . a master of repartee as well as swordsmanship, a nettle that must be grasped rather than as others have played it before as a weed to be plucked out . . . there is sadness, too, moments of brooding melancholy and introspection, but the final impression gained is of a man with a fiery spirit, all flash and fury when aroused, an angry fire which will not be dimmed . . .’ While Elizabeth’s interpretation of Ophelia was described as ‘the most believable yet, a young girl at first high spirited . . . able and ready to laugh with Laertes at her father’s foolishness, and then to cry with pain and bewilderment at Hamlet’s cruelty . . . a performance of such integrity that it breaks the heart . . . her descent into madness is all the more moving for being performed with such prosaic deliberation by Miss Laurence . . . it is no exaggeration to say that in Miss Laurence’s performance we see Ophelia most perfectly realized.’

  Both plays did capacity business, and, it was generally agreed, both stars deserved the praises heaped upon them. One or two dissenters hinted that the Didiers’ scandalous past and their now world famous marriage was the best explanation for their fabulous success, Roberty Dunster letting it be known privately that he considered that Jerome played Hamlet like a randy sergeant-major and Romeo like a sun-tanned bobbysoxer, while Sally Stanway, who had once played Ophelia to Sir Neville James’s Hamlet and was now appearing on Broadway in Virginia Ford’s A Willow By The Sea, let it be known in a televised interview that she considered Elizabeth Laurence a one-dimensional actress, far better suited to the screen than the stage, where her famous eyes could feature better and her thin little voice matter less. Apart from these odd lone cries in the wilderness, however, everyone else was of the same opinion, namely that together Jerome Didier and Elizabeth Laurence were the finest actors in the world.

  It was the word together that troubled them both the most. It had always troubled Jerome, of course, ever since he had first been artistically coupled with Elizabeth, and now here he was, one half of the creature he had dreaded becoming, the fearful double-headed Hydra. Since the time of Tatty Gray (he preferred to think of it thus, rather than the time when Pippa had left him), Jerome had been careful to do as much solo work as he could, which had been totally possible, since the prediction Cecil had made about the consequences of Jerome doing Oscar’s new play had worked out exactly as Cecil said it would. Jerome made such an impact as Sam in Tatty Gray that he had been invited over to Hollywood at the same time as Elizabeth. They had travelled over together, naturally, because by then they did nothing without the company of the other (except act), privately as a duo they were completely inseparable, but when they had arrived in Hollywood they went their own different ways at the Studios, Elizabeth to MGM, Jerome to Warner Brothers, where they both individually secured contracts for major motion pictures, Elizabeth to play Katie Molloy in The Forsaken Land, and Jerome to star in the remake of Captain Blood. Unfortunately filming was delayed on The Forsaken Land due to a change of director, with the result that by the time Jerome had finished Captain Blood and was on his way back to Stratford, Elizabeth was still hanging around their rented house waiting to commence shooting.

  Elizabeth was not good when left by herself, even as early on in their relationship as this was. She knew no-one out in Hollywood, and the Didiers were not yet rich enough (they weren’t even married to each other at this stage) to afford to travel with the retinue which was later to accompany them across the Atlantic and right around the world. The English colony of actors in Los Angeles soon befriended her, but although she was glad of their company, she was in no mood to make close friends, since when she wasn’t working, all she could think of was Jerome.

  She was surprised how much she thought about Jerome, and more particularly how much she thought of him. When she had started in pursuit of him, although in deadly earnest Elizabeth had never stopped to wonder why or even wherefore. She had just wanted Jerome, and when Elizabeth Laurence wanted something, with hardly an exception she got it. She desired Jerome, she admired him, she wanted him. It was as simple as that. They would be good for each other professionally, and together they would go to the top of the world, of that there was no doubt in her mind. There never had been, from the moment she had first seen him in Cecil’s office, and heard him read against her, Elizabeth knew that if only she could catch him, catch him and enthral him, together there would be no mountain high enough.

  She hadn’t given a thought to what effect they might have on each other personally, not one. She had simply seen them as a couple, a couple who were destined for each other, and as a couple who not could but would be world famous. What she didn’t know because she never once stopped to think about it was that the reason they were both finally so violently attracted to each other was because of a mutual need. Many of their personal critics later said if Jerome hadn’t been in love with Pippa when Elizabeth first saw him, and if they both hadn’t been married when they finally transgressed, they would probably have not been attracted, or as Roberty Dunster was to put it so delicately, if Jerome hadn’t been so remorselessly unavailable Lizzie L would never have bothered with getting into Jerry’s knickers.

  But once she had, once she had taken Jerome into her bed she found to her astonishment that not only did he become totally enthralled but that she did too. What had happened, and what she said to Jerome had happened was all true, that night in Manchester, the night they had broken down the door.

  Jerome thought of little or nothing else either (except when he was acting). Once he had realized that Pippa had gone and was intending to stay gone, his first thoughts were only ever about Elizabeth, and about making love to her. She excited him like no woman had ever excited him. He could become sexually aroused just by thinking of her, not of specifics, not of what they had done, or of what they might do, but just of her, just of Elizabeth simply as a being, as an existence. Often in those first months, which soon turned into their first two years together, they would have to get up in the middle of a meal they were eating and leave the restaurant, to hurry back speechlessly in a cab to either one of their houses where they would make passionate and sometimes violent love in a silence broken only by their gasps, their groans and their cries.

  They might be anywhere, in the cinema, at an art gallery, out shopping, or just walking. It happened everywhere and all the time. Once they were both at their dentists, at the same time. Jerome had laughed himself stupid afterwards, howling with mock anguish that if you were going to choose the most sexless place in the world, it surely had to be your dentists! But there they were, sitting silently and properly either side of the waiting room in Harley Street, reading back numbers of Country Life, and all Elizabeth had done was slip the toe of one high heeled shoe inside one of Jerome’s trouser legs, and that was it. Jerome had got up, smiled at the other patients still waiting, taken Elizabeth by the hand and then her arm, apologized to the receptionist without giving a reason for their departure, summoned the lift, hailed a taxi, gone back to Park Lane, dismissed the staff, and taken Elizabeth to his bed, keeping her there for an extremely active twenty-four hours.

  Which was why their first enforced separation had been so terrible for Elizabeth, when she was filming The Forsaken Land. Any other actress would not have had the time to think about anything except the part she was doing, so difficult was the role Elizabeth had been chosen to play, particularly for an actress as inexperienced as Elizabeth was when it came to the shooting of a film of epic proportions. Yet what occupied her most was not how to sustain such a demanding role, but how she was going to live without making love with Jerome, and born out of that thought what would happen to her should anything ever happen between them and she had really to live without making love to Jerome.

  In the best book written about her life and career, an unofficial biography by Edwar
d Neil entitled A Way to The Stars, his given reason for Elizabeth’s superlative and Oscar winning performance as Katie Molloy is that it was the very real private concern which showed in Elizabeth’s famous green eyes that made her so believable, and that had she in fact been fully in control of herself and her art she would not have succeeded quite so triumphantly, because she would have made Katie Molloy too knowing, instead of the girl the camera captured, namely a beautiful but insecure young woman, a young woman who had been so cruelly jilted, and as a consequence of that hurt, mistrustful for ever after about love. Neil wrote:

  The camera reveals all. Nothing and no-one hides from the camera, particularly when that camera is being directed by one of Hollywood’s old masters, Henry Losch. And what it revealed most of all in The Forsaken Land, besides the fact that Elizabeth Laurence was even more beautiful than painted in previous Hollywood pictures, was that like all actresses she could suggest what she was feeling simply by just thinking about it. There is absolutely no doubt at all that this first painful and (it later emerged) potentially damaging separation from Jerome Didier obsessed her, and contributed greatly to her remarkable performance, most of all because it is there for us all to see, behind those wonderful eyes.

  But the most important thing Elizabeth discovered when left behind in Hollywood, without Jerome for the first time since they had become lovers in Manchester, was the devastating realization that she loved him. If it hadn’t been for William Devine, Hollywood’s favourite resident English actor, it is generally supposed by those closest to Elizabeth at the time she would never have got through the filming of The Forsaken Land, and that particularly famous chapter in the history of film-making would never have been written.

  William Devine had found Elizabeth in a state of near collapse when he had called at her house the night he and his wife were due to dine with her. Devine wasn’t in the picture, he was shooting some incidental comedy for Howard Mann at the time, but he had met Elizabeth at the pre-production party thrown in her honour, and they had at once established a great but totally platonic rapport (Devine was happily married at the time to Kay Silvers). He and Kay were to take Elizabeth to the Brown Derby, but when she didn’t show up at their house that evening as arranged, William Devine, unable to raise her on the telephone, drove immediately to the house Jerome and she had rented in case something was wrong.

  The front door was open when he got there, and fearing the worst Devine ran in expecting to find the beautiful young actress either raped or murdered. She was neither. She was sitting on the edge of a vast six seater sofa, a tiny figure still in her bathrobe, sobbing uncontrollably. Still imagining she had been the victim of some sort of attack, he went to comfort her, whereupon Elizabeth had gone for him, screaming and shouting incoherently and uncontrollably. When at last the actor had finally managed to calm her down (he had to slap her twice, hard, and throw water in her face), Elizabeth threw her arms around his neck and started to laugh.

  ‘Oh my God, Willy!’ she had cried. ‘You must think me quite crazy! I’m like this because of J! J just called me, Willy, and God! God – I never realized how much I loved him!’

  From then on both William Devine and his wife Kay had hardly let Elizabeth out of their sight. Every moment she wasn’t filming one of them was with her. They both knew what a lonely and frightening town Hollywood was for first-timers, particularly if they were alone, and particularly if they were as sensitive as the Devines supposed Elizabeth to be. So they chaperoned her every move, and because of them and their infinite care, and for absolutely no other reason, Elizabeth pulled herself together, completed the picture without further incident, and – well – the rest is cinema history.

  But it was now ten years on and the Didiers were once more back in America, in New York, in triumph, carrying all before them as happened wherever they went. But behind the scenes, in the backstage of their lives, they were by now finding it all but impossible to continue the charade. On this particular day they were in their palatial suite in the Plaza Hotel and it was late afternoon, only two hours, perhaps less, before they had to leave for the theatre and prepare for that evening’s performance of Hamlet. Jerome was standing by one of the huge windows, looking out on Central Park, wiping his forehead regularly with the backs of the fingers of one hand, while behind him, seated coincidentally again on an over-large sofa, Elizabeth, with her dark head bowed over, was sobbing into both of her hands.

  ‘What is it, Bethy?’ Jerome finally asked, yet again. ‘You must tell me, Bethy, you know I have to know before we leave for the theatre.’

  ‘It isn’t anything, J!’ Elizabeth sobbed, still into her hands. ‘I told you! I keep telling you! It’s just me! It’s just me being a damned fool!’

  ‘You should have something to eat. You aren’t eating anything, Bethy.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with my diet for Christ’s sake! If it was anything to do with my diet, J, I’d be passing out on stage! I’d be fainting, wouldn’t I? Or giving a feeble performance! But I’m not, am I!’ It wasn’t a question, it was a statement of fact, and Jerome didn’t deny it. He just kept his back to her, and shrugged. ‘It isn’t anything to do with eating, J!’ Elizabeth shouted. ‘Why don’t you bloody well listen!’

  ‘Bethy, darling,’ Jerome turned and looked at her. ‘Bethy we have to go on-stage in less than three hours. We can’t have this. We can’t have this every day. Not unless you tell me what is going on.’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Elizabeth said, suddenly stopping her crying and standing up, brushing her blouse and her skirt scrupulously, as if they were covered with dust or animal hair. ‘There’s no point. You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Jerome’s heart sank when he saw where his wife was headed.

  ‘I won’t be a minute, it’s all right,’ Elizabeth replied. ‘I’m just going to wash my hands.’

  You’ve just washed your hands, Jerome thought. You washed them ten minutes ago. And ten minutes ago before that as well. You’re always washing your hands now, Bethy.

  But he didn’t bother to try and stop her. He’d tried too often and failed. He simply lit a tipped cigarette and went back to staring out over the park as dusk began to fall.

  He had tried to put a starting date on it, on the moment she had begun to get so unreasonably upset, when they had begun to argue, not as lovers, but as people opposed to one another, but so far he had failed, beyond what he privately considered to be a spurious notion, namely that it had all begun after that odd meeting she had demanded they convene in the company offices in the Princes Theatre.

  Elizabeth had wanted the meeting called because she wished to withdraw from two of the plays in the forthcoming season, one of the Shakespeares and one of the Anouilhs. The latter posed no great problem. If it had been the great French playwright’s version of Antigone, which Jerome had pencilled in for the following season, that would have been very different, but as it happened it was one of his comedies, Ring Round the Moon, in which Elizabeth would not be irreplaceable. The Shakespeare was a different matter altogether. They had planned to open that season with The Taming of the Shrew, and without Elizabeth as Katherine, there was no point in even thinking about doing it. In the end Jerome had won the argument and Elizabeth had reluctantly agreed to co-operate, but Jerome felt this first major artistic confrontation had left its marks.

  ‘Why?’ he had demanded when they had arrived back in their house in Cadogan Square where they now lived. ‘Why not ask me in private, damn you, rather than call an extraordinary meeting of the whole wretched committee?’

  ‘Oh, do stop shouting,’ she’d replied. ‘You’re always shouting.’

  ‘I just happen to feel this was a matter between us,’ Jerome had continued. ‘This was something which could have been settled here, at home, in private. We have that advantage, Bethy! We can discuss things like this between us, without involving committee meetings! Without involving anyone else, dammit!’

  E
lizabeth had said nothing straight away. She had started to sing softly to herself, rung for the maid and asked her to bring up some champagne, and then stretched herself out full length on the black, silk-covered sofa. When the maid had gone, she had taken Jerome’s hand with both of hers as he walked by her.

  ‘I was afraid, my darling man,’ she had confessed. ‘You can be so very, very fierce.’

  ‘Full of sound and fury, Bethy,’ he had sighed, sinking on to the sofa beside her. ‘Signifying bugger all.’

  ‘Darling,’ Elizabeth smiled. ‘Signifying everything. You know I think you’re wonderful.’

  ‘Why didn’t you bring the matter up here, Bethy?’

  ‘Because you would have talked me out of it, I know you. You can talk me in and out of anything.’ She had lit a Black Russian Sobranie, and lifted one of her sleek brown cats which had padded silently into the room up on to her flattened stomach to scratch the creature just in front of its sticking-up tail. ‘You see, I do have my reasons, J,’ she had continued, although addressing the cat, not him. ‘And the reason was, why I wanted not to do at least one of the plays, was that I think I’m doing too much, you see. I’m doing too much, and it’s just not fair on you.’

  That had been the start of it, Jerome thought as he stared across the heart of New York, definitely, that had been where the derailment had begun. He laughed to himself, though not with any humour. I’m doing too much, and it’s just not fair on you. She could have put it a little more tactfully, or perhaps she had meant it that way. Perhaps she had meant it as a put-down. It wasn’t so much that she was doing too much, what she meant was that what she was doing she was doing much better than he was. Whatever play they did, as long as she was in it, they filled. Whatever play they did, as long as she wasn’t in it, they did not fill. ‘QED,’ he said out loud, angrily. Quod erat bloody demonstrandum. Elizabeth Laurence was box office, and Jerome Didier wasn’t, at least not by himself, he wasn’t.