Stardust

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘What previous experience have you had, dear girl?’ He sounded more than a little impatient. ‘I need to know what you have done.’

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ Jenny said.

  ‘Why not?’ Her father smiled up at her, removing his glasses. ‘Why not?’

  ‘How did you think I read?’

  ‘Very well. Extremely well, if you must know.’

  ‘Yes, I must. Did I read well enough for you to consider me for the part?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think I could play the part?’

  ‘Yes. Do you?’

  ‘Yes. So why do you need to know what else I have done?’ Jenny said. ‘You can’t have done anything before your very first part.’

  ‘I went to drama school.’

  ‘Not every successful actor went to drama school.’

  Her father pursed his lips, and tapped them with his folded glasses.

  ‘Did you go to drama school, young lady?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you don’t want to tell me what you’ve done before?’

  ‘I don’t see that it’s relevant. I might have played something so unlike this part and been so good in it, that you might think less of my chances.’

  ‘Very good!’ Jerome laughed, leaning forward on the brass rail. ‘The best answer I have ever heard to that question.’ He turned and marched off back into the darkness. ‘We have your agent’s name I take it?’ he called, not even over his shoulder.

  ‘Yes!’ Jenny replied. ‘At least—’

  ‘She’s with Leslie Stone, Sir Jerome!’ Jerome’s assistant called.

  ‘Thank you!’ the voice called back. ‘Next please Wilkie!’

  Before she left the theatre, Jenny rang Leslie Stone’s office in Soho and asked for an appointment.

  ‘Any particular reason why I should see you?’ a rather gruff voice asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Jenny said. ‘I think I might be playing the lead in the revival of Tatty Gray.’

  ‘You realize that was her?’ Jerome asked his junta, now gathered around him in the stalls with all auditioning done. ‘The girl in the tennis shirt. The denim skirt. That mop of brown hair. That was her.’

  ‘No-one seems to know who on earth she is, Sir Jerome,’ Wilkie said, running his finger down the list of names on his clipboard. ‘No-one’s ever heard of her.’

  ‘Does that matter, d’you think, Wilkie?’ Jerome asked, pacing up and down one aisle of the auditorium. ‘This part requires total innocence! And that girl had it! That girl in her tennis shirt, her old blue skirt, and those long brown legs.’

  ‘I agree that she read the best,’ a man in an ill fitting suit and clear spectacles said from where he was sitting, long legs draped over the back of the seat in front. ‘Far and away the best.’

  ‘The rest were no competition,’ Jerome said, almost with a groan as he sunk into a seat on the other side of the aisle, ahead of the man in the clear glasses, Andrew Black, his new producer. ‘I have never seen a contest so one sided.’

  ‘Do you want me to call her back?’ Black enquired.

  ‘No,’ Jerome replied. ‘I want you to call her agent. And offer.’

  ‘Don’t you think we should find out just a little bit more, Jerry?’ His producer had got up and was walking down to where Jerome was slouched on the edge of his seat, his chin resting on hands which were folded flat on the back of the stall in front. ‘I’ll ask Leslie for her details,’ Black said. ‘Get him to send round her c.v.’

  ‘Do what you like,’ Jerome replied. ‘It won’t make any difference. That is the girl. That girl is Tatty Gray. I should know, for God’s sake.’

  ‘OK, Jerry,’ his producer said. ‘It’s your show.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jerome agreed, before continuing, more to himself, ‘I just wish I knew what I’d seen her in.’

  ‘Saint Joan,’ said the red-faced man behind the untidiest desk Jenny had ever seen.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the Lycée Theatre,’ Jenny replied.

  ‘Do you mean the Lyceum?’ Leslie Stone asked, growing more bewildered by the moment.

  ‘No, the Lycée,’ Jenny said. ‘In Tours. I studied in France.’

  She placed a batch of cuttings in front of the bemused agent. He put on a pair of glasses with heavily finger-printed lenses and stared at them.

  ‘These are in French,’ he said. ‘I don’t speak French.’ He handed them back to her. ‘Read me out the relevant bits.’

  Jenny smiled. ‘Do you trust me?’ she asked. ‘If you don’t speak French, I could tell you what I liked.’

  Stone stared at her through his smudged spectacles, and then pressed the intercom on his desk.

  ‘My secretary understands French,’ he said. ‘Maureen can translate.’

  The secretary spoke tolerable schoolgirl French, enough to decipher the passages in the cuttings Jenny had outlined in pencil. Leslie Stone sat and listened impassively while rave notice after rave notice for a young actress called Jenny Nichole were slowly decoded, notices which Jenny had carefully edited with her black marker pen so that all references to the performance being not only an amateur one but a school one were excised, and which pronounced her interpretation of St Joan to have been la meilleure (the very best, prompted Jenny) in living memory, a performance of such fire, integrity, poetry, passion and éclat (brilliance, Jenny prompted again) that the critics jointly couldn’t wait to see what she would turn her hand to next.

  ‘I thought your name was Jane Greene,’ was about all Stone said after the eulogy was over. ‘So what’s with Jenny Nichole?’

  Jenny explained that her mother had remarried since that time, and she had decided to take the new family surname for her career in England, and that Jane was her baptized name.

  ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.’ Stone grumbled. ‘Equity, was it? Some other actress called Jenny Greene, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jenny agreed blithely, showing him her passport lest he should think she had stolen some other girl’s press cuttings.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter, love,’ Stone sighed. ‘If Sir wants you, and I tell you he wants you all right. His bloody office was on to me twice before you got here. Maureen had to cover. Say I was at the dentist. Anyway, as I was saying, if Sir wants you to play Tatty, if Sir’s made his mind up, it won’t matter what you have done or what you haven’t done. And it doesn’t matter a toss to me either.’

  He flipped Jenny back the batch of press cuttings and leaned back in his chair to light a fresh cigarette.

  ‘Does that mean you’ll represent me, Mr Stone?’ Jenny asked.

  Leslie Stone started to laugh and cough excessively, both at the same time.

  ‘If Jerry Didier wants to star you in a play with him, my darling girl,’ he sputtered, ‘it shouldn’t be you asking me. I should be the one doing the bloody asking.’

  News of the revival of Tatty Gray had already created great interest. It had after all been the play which had indisputably established the young Jerome Didier as a star and an actor of exceptional merit, and now that he had chosen to revive it, albeit a revised version, theatrical tongues had really started to wag, the on dit being that he was playing safe, that because he had just endured a string of flops both on-stage and on screen since his all conquering version of Macbeth, he was playing for percentages, he was making assurance double sure rather than persisting in his attempt to find a new image. Some even had it, particularly Elizabeth’s still loyal camp-followers, that the nerve had gone since Macbeth, the theory being that with that particular performance he had peaked, and now found himself hoist with his own petard.

  ‘Well, think of it,’ Roberty Dunster would ask whenever and wherever possible. ‘It’s rather like the greatest sex ever, isn’t it? You think well, my dear, what ever can we do next? Talk about follow that.’

  In a way all of these rumours were true, and in another way none of them were. Yes it was true J
erome had lost his way since Macbeth, and had taken the wrong turning in trying to establish himself as a modernist. Jerome’s acting had always been just slightly larger than life, and therein lay its appeal. He could be truly heroic, truly tragic, or truly comic, but to be any of these things successfully, let alone to be able to be all three of these things successfully, required acting of a certain dimension, a size which was not necessarily always suited by the minimalist style of the new and fashionable playwrights. So he was right to choose something tried and true from his repertoire. Tatty Gray might have been written by a living playwright, but it had an old-fashioned feel to it, a sense of romance, mysticism and poetry which the modern writers were deliberately eschewing. Furthermore, the role of the tormented painter had been expressly written for him, and now rewritten for him, so he knew the suit fitted him. There was nothing untried or off-the-peg about The Tale of Tatty Gray.

  But it wasn’t true to say that Jerome had lost his nerve. It actually took a lot of nerve to revive a role which had already passed into theatrical legend, particularly over two decades later. It also took courage to request that the role be rewritten, for there was no guarantee that Sam at forty-five years old would have the same magical appeal as Sam at twenty-five. It would be a different ball game altogether, and given someone brilliant opposite him as the wilful and savant sprite Tatty Gray herself, there was every chance of Jerome coming home an also-ran. So no, Jerome couldn’t rightly be accused of losing his nerve. Jerome had not lost his nerve in any way. All that was to come.

  Jenny’s main concern was with the publicity. The fact had at least occurred to her that at some time there would be a blaze of publicity, but what she hadn’t counted on was the blaze being so early. Like the day after she was offered and had accepted the role.

  Of course, it was only the national Press, because the story was of little interest outside of England, but even so, there would, Jenny imagined, be pictures and news in the trade papers, and as Jenny was well aware, the only foreign papers Oscar took were the trades, most notably Variety which he read religiously from cover to cover. Besides that, there was just the off-chance that Oscar would go back on his word and take some interest in what was happening to his old warhorse, as he described the play, and in whom was in fact going to take the role of Tatty. Again, taking indirect advice from her stepfather, Jenny had decided to busk this one. Oscar was a great believer in busking. So taking a leaf out of his book Jenny decided to do nothing until asked. If she didn’t get the part, which was just as likely if not more so than her actually being cast, then there were no worries. Nothing had been gained so there was nothing to lose. But if she did win the role, then she would have to think of the best way of handling the problem. Like maybe taking Oscar into her confidence.

  Fortunately and unfortunately he wasn’t there when she rang, he wasn’t at the farm. Neither was her mother, but then Jenny knew that. She knew her mother was in Florence for an exhibition of her paintings, but she didn’t know Oscar was in America. Nancy told her. She said her stepfather had left a week ago, that he had been called to Hollywood to work on the final shooting script of his latest movie, and that he would be gone a month at the very least.

  This would not stop the news from reaching him, however, Jenny thought after she had put down the phone. He would either read it in Variety, or if he was really interested, he’d find out from his agent. Somehow Jenny saw she had to stop up both loopholes.

  The photo call was for twelve o’clock the following morning at the Savoy. It was now half-past eight on the evening before, the evening of the day Jenny had formally been offered the role, and by quarter to eleven that night her father at long last got home.

  Jenny was waiting for him, on the doorstep of his new home in Montpelier Square. Under her old raincoat which was open she was wearing exactly the same clothes as she had worn for her audition, as if they were the sort of clothes she always wore. She was sitting on the doorstep, legs together, with her arms linked tightly round the front, just as Sam sees Tatty sitting on the stool when he reopens up his studio.

  But unlike Tatty in the play, Jenny had been sitting on her father’s doorstep waiting for over two hours.

  ‘Hello,’ she said as he walked alone from the cab towards his front door.

  ‘Good God,’ he said after a moment. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve always been here,’ Jenny said, her first line in the play. ‘You just haven’t seen me.’

  Making a poor show of reluctance, her father took her in, telling his ever-faithful Dingo to bring them up a hot drink and some biscuits. Then he poured himself a drink while Jenny watched him.

  She hadn’t been able to judge him at all in the half-light of the theatre, but now she could size him up properly. He was shorter than she had imagined. In his films he gave the impression of height, of being nearer six foot than the five foot eight or nine he most probably was, but he was in excellent physical shape. Handmade suits were made to flatter the figure, Jenny knew that, but nonetheless she could see her father was perfectly proportioned and built like an athlete. As if to demonstrate the fact, once he had poured himself a whisky, Jerome unbuttoned and peeled off the jacket of his suit as only a skilled actor can, tossing the expensive garment casually aside and loosening the top button of his handmade shirt with one square tipped finger, while staring at the girl in his armchair through his extraordinarily ordinary eye-glasses.

  ‘Why do you look at me that way?’ he said, standing in front of her.

  ‘I was wondering about your spectacles,’ Jenny replied. ‘They’re rather mundane.’

  ‘They’re spectacles,’ he said, whipping them off and dropping them on to his desk. ‘What do you expect them to look like? A rose is a rose is a rose.’

  ‘You can get much better spectacles than those nowadays,’ Jenny said. ‘Much more flattering ones.’

  ‘I am quite sure,’ Jerome said, spinning out the first few words of the sentence, ‘you did not come here to discuss my – spectacles.’

  Jenny laughed. She couldn’t help it. His enunciation was almost like a parody of himself, but even so there was much good humour behind the intended sarcasm, even an element of self-mockery, and Jenny found herself laughing. Which she considered to be all to the good, since she knew her first consideration was to flatter him.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ she confessed. ‘That was very rude, and I only remarked on your glasses because I suppose I don’t think of you wearing them. I don’t suppose anyone does. I don’t suppose anybody in the world does. I suppose we all see you as we think you are.’

  ‘And how would that be?’

  ‘As we’ve seen you. As we imagine you. As millions of people I suppose must dream of you.’

  Jerome frowned at her, suddenly, and bent himself forward, a well-rehearsed and much-employed move, Jenny concluded.

  ‘And what about you, Jane Greene?’ he said. ‘Do you dream of me?’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘But then I have very weird dreams.’ It was her turn to pause. ‘I’d rather dream of yeu,’ she said, as factually as she could, ‘than of fragments dropped from day’s caravan.’

  ‘I like dreaming,’ Jerome said, still looking at her before topping her quotation. ‘In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream. Now tell me why you’re here.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Wait.’

  Her father’s manservant had arrived with a tray of hot chocolate and what looked like homemade biscuits, which he was directed to place on the table in front of Jenny.

  ‘This is Miss Greene, Dingo,’ her father said. ‘This is my new Tatty Gray.’

  Dingo smiled at her and handed her a white napkin, but said nothing, not to either of them. He just turned and walked soundlessly out of the room, his feet cushioned by immaculately white tennis shoes.

  ‘Well?’ Jerome reminded Jenny. ‘You were going to tell me why you are here. And I should tell
you I can’t spare you more than half an hour.’

  ‘Oh, it won’t take nearly that long,’ Jenny said. ‘The reason I’m here is to tell you I won’t be at the photo call tomorrow.’

  She knew he’d have the right reaction to that piece of news, but even the well tried look of wide eyed and stunned surprise, followed by a light and disbelieving laugh couldn’t quite conceal the real shock he was feeling at her insouciance. Jenny said nothing more, quite deliberately, determined not to throw him any sort of life line.

  ‘All right,’ he said, finally breaking the silence. ‘Any particular reason? Or do you perhaps simply have another and more pressing appointment?’

  ‘I just have a better idea than simply announcing me to the Press, that’s all. That’s what everyone does. Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to meet the latest discovery. Then they all take their photographs, they all publish them and their stories at the same time, and after that, your story is just something to put down on the floor to train the new puppy.’ (Pure Oscar.)

  ‘Well?’ her father enquired, slowly raising both eyebrows. ‘Your suggestion please?’

  ‘You call the photo call and I don’t turn up,’ Jenny said, again having found her inspiration in her stepfather and his tale from Hollywood, this particular anecdote being How They Launched A No-Talent Actress Called Madison Williams. ‘Everyone asks not who am I, but where am I?’ Jenny continued, ice-cool. ‘And you don’t know. Not any of you. All right, the Press ask, then at least tell us who she is. Which you refuse to do until you have located me and made sure that I’m all right. The hunt goes on, right up to when rehearsals start, and maybe even a day or so into them, who knows? By which time, of course, you have found me, but for reasons you won’t disclose (you’re afraid I might bolt again. I’m an unknown, remember. Over-awed by what’s happened to me), you keep my identity secret until the very last moment. I’m never seen outside rehearsal in anything other than dark glasses and with a protective entourage. You have to play it day by day, you tell them, because although I’m a discovery, maybe the most exciting discovery you’ve made since I don’t know—’