Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  The maid held open the bedroom door and Cecil went in. There was a nurse sitting by the bed, who looked up briefly when Cecil came in before returning to read her book.

  Elizabeth was propped up in bed, but fast asleep, just as Jerome had indicated she would be. She was wearing a black silk négligée trimmed with jet black fur which matched the hair which was spread out on the pillows. She looked for all the world just like something out of a film she might make, except for the four deep, red and wickedly angry weals which ran in identical formation down each of her cheeks.

  Cecil then noticed her hands which lay either side of her outside and on top of the bed linen. Both her hands were heavily bandaged into mitts, and taped tightly round the slender wrists, so that no more damage could be done. The sight of Elizabeth like this deeply troubled Cecil, so he backed quickly out of the room and was only too happy to accept the ready offer of a stiff drink from the waiting Jerome.

  ‘Dear God, dear boy,’ was the best Cecil could initially muster. ‘What the devil’s been going on?’

  ‘She got in a bit of a temper, dear boy,’ Jerome replied. ‘Most probably because for once she couldn’t get her own way.’

  ‘But I don’t understand.’ Cecil was totally bewildered. ‘To do that to herself. She must have lost her reason. What’s she been doing?’

  ‘What’s she been doing?’ Jerome examined the question over deliberately and calmly.

  ‘You know what I mean, dear boy. Has she been drinking? Has she been drugging? I mean what has she been doing?’

  ‘What has she been doing?’ Jerome nodded as he repeated the question. ‘I’ll tell you what she’s been doing, dear boy. She’s been drinking, certainly. Only champagne, I’ll grant you, and only one bottle at a time. She hasn’t been eating. She’s been staying up all night, and I imagine to do that she’s been popping a few bennies, but then that’s how it goes, isn’t it? That’s show business. But besides that, all she’s been doing is injecting herself with cows’ piss – there’s no need to look like that, dear boy. They all do it! All the actresses! How do you think they keep those fabulous figures? With regular injections of cows’ piss. And besides the cow piss injections, and the diuretics, and the twice a week colonic washouts kindly arranged and performed by Miss Page, she has been sticking her pretty little fingers down her pretty little throat on the rare occasions when she does eat something, so that she can sicky-it-all-up-again, and not get fat, and just to make doubly sure she doesn’t get fat or worse – feel like eating something, she has been smoking about sixty cigarettes a day. That’s about the size of it, Cecil, dear boy. Get the picture? That is what little Miss Laurence has been doing.’

  Cecil stared into his drink and then up at Jerome, who was chain-smoking and pacing the room, up and down, up and down, immaculate as ever in a beautifully tailored double-breasted grey suit, his hair brushed and brilliantined back in the style he now liked to wear it.

  ‘Yes?’ Jerome said in answer to Cecil’s stare. ‘Well?’

  ‘You’re going to have to take her home, dear boy,’ Cecil said.

  ‘Correction,’ Jerome replied. ‘You’re going to have to take her home. One of us has to do this blasted movie.’

  ‘But you said she won’t fly.’

  ‘She won’t. You’re going to have to go back by boat.’

  Over lunch, Jerome told Cecil what had happened. It had all come to a head on the Sunday, the day after the end of their triumphant Broadway season, in the hangover of a huge last night party thrown by Gloria Van Der Post.

  ‘For once it had been a rather good bash,’ Jerome said. ‘Rather civilized as it turned out, rather fin de saison rather than fin de siècle. Bethy was in her element, and, I have to say, looking a million dollars once again. Probably because the season had finished. She’d kept complaining towards the end of it of depression. Said it was all the fault of those dreary cows Juliet and Ophelia, as she liked to call them. She found Ophelia’s mad scene particularly taxing.’

  ‘I can believe that,’ Cecil said. ‘I’ve never seen it played so well. She was tremendously convincing.’

  ‘Yes, but Bethy’s not usually one for all this agonizing about internals,’ Jerome said. ‘All this Strasberg bollocks. All this methodizing they go in for over here, this agonizing in corners. She doesn’t give it that.’ He snapped his fingers on that, right on the beat, sharply like a castanet. Jerome never missed an effect. ‘So all the more surprising,’ he continued, ‘that she let her dreary cows get to her. I mean last week, dear heart, I came back late one afternoon from the Guggenheim, and walked straight into Hamlet, Act Four, scene five. At least it might as well for all the world have been. There she was, wandering round the apartment half naked, her hair all over the place, muttering to herself with the tears streaming down her cheeks.’ Jerome put down his knife and fork and stared at Cecil. ‘I was seriously worried, Cecil. Was? What am I saying? I am seriously worried! There are times when I think she may be losing her mind,’ he said, dropping his voice to a suitably sotto pitch. ‘She won’t stop washing her hands. She washes her hands all the time, just like Mrs Macbeth. And yet at other times, like on Saturday night at the party, like most nights when she’s partying, she’s her old self. Funny, mischievous, witty, flirtatious, a little dangerous, very much the original coinage, very much the Elizabeth Laurence we all know and love.’

  Cecil drank some wine and wondered about everyone loving Elizabeth. Not many people loved her, not those who really knew her. They treated her with a healthy respect, because they knew how formidable she could be, how wilful, and how utterly singleminded, but few of her acquaintances actually loved her. Her coterie did, her famous camp-followers, they adored her, and the worse she was, the more they worshipped at her shrine. But probably even they didn’t actually love her, Cecil thought, before briefly glancing across the table and wondering if Jerome still really loved her, or if in fact he ever really had done.

  But Jerome was talking, carrying on with his story, so Cecil put down his wine glass and paid him full attention.

  ‘She got very drunk at the party, of course,’ he said. ‘But then she always does on these occasions, because she never eats a thing. Mind you, you would have to know her pretty well to know that she was drunk. She doesn’t make a nonsense, slur her words, or fall about the place, she’s not at all the stage drunk. She just gets very beady, very glittery, and – and this is the frightening part – even more coherent than ever. She was very coherent around about dawn on Sunday, dear boy, I can tell you. Very coherent. Ever so.’ Jeremy threw in a little of his stage cockney, not to lighten the telling, but to flavour his sarcasm. ‘It was the film apparently. One of her fairy crew had put it about at the party, particularly in Bethy’s hearing, that Goldberg had only agreed my being in the film in order to secure her.’

  ‘They always say that,’ Cecil said heedlessly, and then realized his gaffe as he saw the dark look in Jerome’s eyes. ‘Sorry, dear boy. What I meant was that surely you must be used to that by now.’

  ‘Go on,’ Jerome said icily. ‘It’s getting better by the moment.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Cecil floundered on helplessly. ‘I mean that you two cause such an enormous amount of professional resentment you can’t any longer be surprised by what people say.’

  ‘Of course I’m not!’ Jerome snapped, pushing his plate away and then beckoning for a waiter to come and remove it at once. ‘What surprised me was that it bothered Bethy. Apparently all hell let loose at the party and she took herself home in a high old dudge, long before yours truly, for once. And when I crawled in with the dawn, there she was, like Medusa, in a blind, white-hot rage. She said nobody said things like that about me, nobody, it didn’t matter who they were. And to show them how utterly untrue sucha stupid bloody rumour was, she was going to withdraw from the film. She was not going to do the film, because she knew better than anyone that the person MGM really wanted was not her, but me. And she would stake her reputation on
it. She was going to scotch this nonsense once and for all—’

  ‘What nonsense?’

  ‘What nonsense, dear boy?’ Jerome looked at Cecil with amazement, as if he couldn’t understand the naïvety of the question. He then pushed his chair back and leaned away from the table before continuing, seemingly unaware (although Cecil very much doubted that he was) that he now had most of the restaurant as his audience. ‘The nonsense she was going to scotch, once and for all, was this blatant misconception that I play second fiddle. That without her I am just another starry actor, and not the genius she knows I am, and that everyone knows I am. So to show them, she was going to walk off the blasted movie, she wasn’t going to do Encounter in the Park.’

  ‘She’s mad,’ Cecil said, thinking of his lost commission and earning himself another very hard stare from his client. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that either. I didn’t mean Elizabeth is mad. I meant that was a mad thing to say. To think of doing.’

  ‘Of course you did.’ Jerome rocked on his chair for a moment, staring up at the ceiling, then he set it back down on all four legs, sat forward and folding both arms on the table in front of him, buried his head in them. ‘Anyway,’ he muttered, but quite loudly enough for Cecil to hear everything. ‘The long and the short of it was this. I said no, she was not walking off the film for my sake, I said it was a wonderful part, they were both good parts, but for her and for once, recently, it was an extremely well-written and realized role and she must play it, I didn’t mention the money, the bills here, the bills at home, the vast and ever increasing budget it costs to run this goddam roadshow, I never once said she had to do it for that reason, although she knows full well we have to make movies to pay our way. For Christ’s sake, Cecil, we haven’t made a penny out of this blasted tour! Not a dime! Not a nickel, not a goddam cent! Not on top of our salaries! This tour has eaten up all the money we made from the last three movies! From Dinner Date, The Silver Fox and Meet Me at Nine. That’s what this tour has cost us. It’s the blasted management who’s coined it. It was a crazy idea having us bankroll ourselves, and bring everything over including the kitchen sink! Whoever dreamed up such a lunatic deal?’ He looked up briefly at his agent, to stare at him beadily, before burying his head back in the fold of his arms. ‘Anyway – where was I?’

  ‘You were saying you hadn’t mentioned the financial necessity for you both making Encounter in the Park,’ Cecil reminded him, resisting the temptation to remind him also that the lunatic who had thought up the deal for the Broadway season was none other than Jerome himself, although Cecil suspected that Jerome remembered this was the case from the speed with which he resumed his story.

  ‘Good. Yes, well I didn’t. I didn’t say a word about money, because I happen to think it’s a damn good movie anyway, and it is a film she should make. But in hindsight, it probably would have been better if I had made money the reason, because she might have seen sense.’ Now he sat up, bolt upright, and placed both his hands palm down on the tablecloth. ‘Instead of screaming and yelling at me that if I wouldn’t allow her to walk off the movie,’ he concluded, ‘then she would make it impossible for her to do the film her own way. Whereupon she shut herself in the bathroom and tore her face to ribbons. With her wretched fingernails.’

  Cecil accepted some more wine from the waiter, knowing that he needed it, and that he was going to need even more.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, Cecil,’ Jerome sighed, ‘but it won’t wash. They won’t delay shooting, I’ve already talked unofficially to Mort Goldberg and he says much as he’d love to—’ Jerome shrugged his shoulders high, and left the rest of the sentence hanging in the air. ‘And even if they did, Cecil, Madam promised me before I got the doctor to her that if I insisted that she do the movie, she would continue to carve her lovely face up at every given opportunity. So negotiate, Cecil. I have to do this movie. I need to do a movie right now, and I need to do this movie, because it’s a good one, and you got us very good money. I don’t want to lose this one, Cecil. So convince them I can carry it. They can find another actress. I do not want to lose this job, Cecil. Because I do not want to have to sell Sainthill.’

  It was the house, Cecil thought morbidly as the liner pitched and heaved in the heaviest seas Cecil had ever encountered. All Jerome cared about was the house, and all that absurd posing as the country squire. He didn’t care about anything else. All he seemed really concerned about was Sainthill.

  There were storms and high winds all through their first night and day at sea, making it practically impossible to eat, sleep, or do anything other than drink. By mid-morning, tired of trying to stay upright on his feet, like most sensible passengers Cecil had taken to his cabin and was lying on his bed, thinking over the events of the last twenty-four hours. There had been the most frightful scene on embarkation, when having successfully smuggled the semi-sedated and heavily veiled and caped Elizabeth on board the liner, she had managed to escape from her cabin while the doctor was trying to give her the other half of the sedative. She had then run riot through the First Class lounges and bars, shouting and screaming that everyone was trying to kill her, with Jerome, Cecil, Miss Toothe, and the doctor in pursuit. They had managed finally to run her to ground in the library, where under the noses of four elderly passengers already settled at the bridge table, Elizabeth put up a spirited defence, kicking and lashing out at her pursuers while filling the air with expletives, until quite unexpectedly and all of a sudden she burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter and allowed herself to be led quietly away back to her suite of cabins.

  She would not allow herself to be sedated, however. She made that perfectly clear, giving warning to the entourage that if any attempt was made to drug her without her direct permission, whenever she awoke from the enforced sedation the very least she would do would be to attempt further self-mutilation.

  At this point Jerome had requested to be left alone with her and afterwards told Cecil what had occurred between them, since Cecil was to be in charge of her on the journey home. Jerome said he had asked his wife why she was doing this to herself, to him, to both of them in fact, to which Elizabeth had replied very calmly that there was nothing to worry about, not any more, because she was herself again. The problem was simply one of total exhaustion, she’d explained, something which no-one had seemed fully to have taken into account. She needed rest and the journey back could be the beginning of that rest, but, and this is why Jerome had to spell it out to Cecil, she had made it quite clear she was not going to travel under sedation because the thought of it terrified her. Suppose something happened when they were at sea? She had wanted to know what would happen to her if there was a fire on board, or a collision with another ship, and she was just lying there unconscious. Is that what Jerome wanted? she had asked. And even if there wasn’t to be an accident, if she was sedated she would worry, whenever she was awake, that there might be, that something might happen when she was drugged and helpless, and so she had told Jerome she simply couldn’t take that worry. It would kill her, she said. Or worse, she might even kill herself.

  That, of course, had been enough to convince Jerome to persuade the doctor to give her nothing more than a mild tranquillizer then, and to promise in front of Elizabeth to recommend to the ship’s doctor not to prescribe anything stronger than the dosage he had administered thereafter unless the circumstances truly demanded it.

  ‘Which they won’t, darling,’ Elizabeth had promised Jerome after he had helped settle her down. ‘I have Toothy here to help me. And Maggie, my maid. And dear Muzz to look after me. As well as Cecil Fussbudget to make sure I behave. Besides—’ She had put an arm up around Jerome’s neck and eased him down so that she could confide in him. ‘Besides,’ she had whispered, ‘Bethy’s all better now. Bethy’s quite herself, darling. You really don’t have a thing to worry about as long as Bethy’s in charge.’

  Shortly before midday Cecil arose and went to the bar for a medicinal brandy. Having downed a doubl
e Courvoisier, he then went as he had been instructed by Jerome to visit his charge and monitor her behaviour, and was both relieved and pleasantly surprised to find Elizabeth sitting up in bed, smoking one of her favourite Sobranies and playing gin rummy with her ever-faithful dresser. Muzz left them alone to talk, and Elizabeth was her old bright and cheerful self, gossiping and chattering away about the season in New York, and even discussing plans for the forthcoming season in London. Finally, when she had sent Muzz off on some errand or other and they were alone in the cabin, Elizabeth told Cecil that she wished to confide in him.

  ‘That’s what I’m here for, dear girl,’ Cecil said, lighting a cigarette. ‘Shoot.’

  ‘It’s not me that’s causing all this trouble, Cessy,’ she said, dropping her voice. ‘I want you to understand that.’

  ‘I see,’ Cecil said, not seeing at all, but needing to say something in the long silence which had ensued. ‘I see.’

  ‘Cecil.’ Elizabeth’s voice now had a hard edge to it, as if she was irritated and doing her best not to show it. ‘The point is, Cecil,’ she continued, ‘no-one seems to understand. They all think it’s me, but it isn’t. It isn’t at all.’

  ‘I see,’ Cecil said again, trying to buy time so that he could work out what Elizabeth could possibly mean. ‘Ah. You mean it’s Jerry?’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Jerry’s the problem, is he?’

  ‘Oh.’ Elizabeth dropped her cigarette which was still alight into the ashtray and immediately lit another, talking as she did so. ‘So you don’t want to talk about my problem.’

  ‘I want to talk about whatever you want to talk about, Lizzie,’ Cecil replied, stubbing out Elizabeth’s still smouldering cigarette.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ Elizabeth suddenly snapped. ‘Who’s Lizzie?’

  ‘I’m sorry, dear girl, I was forgetting.’ Cecil had indeed momentarily forgotten how Elizabeth could suddenly take against any unwarranted or unauthorized abbreviation of her name, and Cecil had never really been given formal permission to call her by anything other than her proper name. ‘You were saying?’ he asked.