Falling Star

by Patricia Moyes

  The reporters were scribbling and shouting questions. “Miss Fettini, have you read Mrs. Meakin’s open letter? What’s your comment? Will you carry on with the film? Who is to be the new leading man?”

  “I ’ave read that woman’s letter,” said Fiametta, with flashing eyes, “and my comment is that she can go and…”

  I decided it was time to break up the meeting. I pushed my way through the crowd and said, angrily, “Fiametta! What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Poo-ooge!” In her surprise, Fiametta dropped the monkey, which scampered off into the crowd and leapt on to the back of a particularly unpleasant journalist, the gossip man from the Smudge. Under cover of this diversion, I grabbed Fiametta’s arm and said in an undertone, “Go in at once.”

  “But Poo-ooge…”

  “At once,” I said. She did not move, so I took her arm again, and very firmly. “Gentlemen,” I said to the reporters, “and ladies, of course. Miss Fettini is, as you know, very unwell. I am afraid she cannot stay talking to you any longer.”

  “We were promised an interview,” piped an indignant female voice from the crowd.

  “Promised? By whom?” I looked sharply at Fiametta, but she shrugged elaborately and turned away.

  There was a moment of silence, and then a laugh, and somebody said, “Short memory, Mr. Croombe-Peters, haven’t you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You telephoned The Red Lion half an hour ago, dear chap,” said the man from the Smudge, “and promised us an interview and pictures. If you’ve changed your mind, you only have to say so.”

  This was so unexpected and outrageous that I let go of Fiametta and, I am afraid, gaped in sheer astonishment. By the time I had found the words to deny making any such telephone call, Fiametta had slipped away and run into the house, and the crowd of newshounds was dispersing. They had enough for a good story anyway. The last to go was the Smudge man.

  “I dare say you’ll want this,” he said, thrusting something live and wriggling into my arms. “Good-bye for the moment, Mr. Croombe-Peters.”

  I found myself standing in the lane alone, with the repellent Peppi chewing a button off my shirt front. Furious, I followed Fiametta into the house.

  She was standing by the window in the drawing room, looking out at the hollyhocks as though they were personal enemies and tapping her left foot dangerously; but I was too angry to be intimidated.

  “Now, young lady,” I said, “what is all this?” There was no reply. “Where is Louise?”

  “Shopping.”

  “Where is Giulio?”

  “In bed.”

  “In bed? Why?”

  “Funnily enough, he has a cold. I expect he caught it from me.”

  “Who telephoned The Red Lion and staged this ridiculous publicity act?”

  Fiametta shrugged again. Peppi, having detached the button, spat it out and began to demolish my tie. I tried to put him onto the floor, but he appeared to have developed a passion for my society, and merely clung to me with both arms, making plaintive noises. I realized that the wearing of a pink-bottomed monkey as a sort of feather boa did nothing to help my dignity, but that could not be helped. I rapped the question out again. “Who made that telephone call?”

  A voice behind me said, “I did.”

  I wheeled around, causing Peppi’s back legs to swing out in a centrifugal arc, which he enjoyed immensely. Standing in the doorway of the drawing room was Keith Pardoe.

  I tried as best I could to remain calm and keep a grip on the situation. I wanted to make some crushing and memorable remark, but the best I could think of was: “Are you out of your mind?” To which he replied, “No,” in a most reasonable tone.

  “But…what the hell do you think you’re…?”

  “Fiametta, darling,” said Keith, “would you trot upstairs like a good girl and take that terrible monkey with you? I want a word with Pudge.”

  “O.K.,” said Fiametta. I had never seen her so docile. “I take a drink to my poor little Giulio, no?”

  “You know best,” said Keith, “but I wouldn’t, myself.”

  “It is good for his cold,” said Fiametta with an air of finality, and left the room, leaving a disturbing aura of scent behind her. She did not take the monkey, which was now jumping up and down in my arms, chattering and begging to be swung again.

  “Can’t you stop playing with that animal?” Keith asked.

  “Since you ask,” I said, “no. It has taken a fancy to me and it is extremely adhesive.”

  “Oh, well then, keep it if you want to.”

  “I do not want to,” I pointed out. “It is merely that…”

  “Look,” said Keith, “there are serious things I want to say to you, and you will keep on talking about monkeys.”

  “I am not talking about monkeys,” I said with some heat. “It is you who…”

  “Sit down,” said Keith abruptly.

  I did so. I was aware that the initiative had effectually passed out of my hands and into his, and I blamed the wretched Peppi. I made an attempt to recapture my lost momentum. “I am waiting for you to explain your extraordinary behavior,” I said.

  “Yes.” There was a long silence. Keith studied the tip of his glowing cigarette. I wondered if he were ever going to speak again. I said nothing. At last Keith said, “I wonder if I can ever make you understand. Nobody was more upset than I about Bob’s death. I think you’ll agree to that.” I made no comment. He went on. “A week ago, when Bob died, it seemed as though everything had come to an end. Now it is apparent that Northburn Films and Street Scene will continue, unless you succeed in bungling matters with the insurance company.”

  This seemed to me to be a pretty ungracious way of acknowledging my foresight and hard work, but again I said nothing.

  “That being so,” continued Keith, “we have to keep going, from all points of view. Heaven knows who we shall be able to get to replace Bob. It’s far too short notice for any of the big names. Sam and Biddy and I have decided that we shall have to launch a new, unknown actor, which is a very risky thing to do. So, we are left with Fiametta as our sole asset, publicity-wise, and if we want to sell this picture, we’ve got to exploit her instead of locking her up down here with Louise as though she had the plague.”

  “You know perfectly well,” I said, “that until the insurance claim is settled we have to be most careful…”

  “My dear fellow,” said Keith, “Fiametta’s line is a hopeless love for Bob. She’s the last person in the world who’s going to tell the press that she pushed him downstairs. Sonia Meakin’s story and the inquest verdict have finally killed the suicide rumors, I hope. What we have to do now is to cash in, and to keep ourselves and the picture in the public eye until we can get going again.”

  “You have still not explained how you came to use my name on the telephone.”

  Keith laughed. “My dear Pudge, I couldn’t use mine. The Art Director does not organize publicity stunts.”

  “Exactly.” I said with triumph. “And nor, in this case, does the Executive Producer.”

  “It was a very good stunt,” said Keith. He sounded like a small boy, sulking. “Fiametta ill—the monkey escapes—she pursues it in her nightgown—leaves her sickbed to help her dumb chum…”

  “It’s repellent,” I said, “and you know it. I thought you were supposed to be dedicated to art for art’s sake.”

  “This isn’t art,” said Keith patiently. “This is publicity.”

  “Well, I’ll thank you to leave me out of it in future.”

  “Oh, Pudge, Pudge.” said Keith. “How can you be so wrong all the time about everything?”

  “I do not propose,” I said, “to stay here just for the pleasure of being insulted.”

  “No,” said Keith, “you’re quite right. I should leave at once, if I were you. And you might take Louise with you.”

  “Why?”

  “She wants a lift to London.”

 
; “She is supposed to be looking after Fiametta.”

  “We shall all,” said Keith calmly, “be returning to London tomorrow. Life goes on, you know.”

  “Then you can bring Louise yourself,” I said, and walked out, slamming the door behind me.

  It was only when I had covered about fifteen miles in the car that I remembered that I had not carried out the original object of my mission to Medham. But since I heard the following day that the insurance company, on the advice of their lawyers, had agreed in principle to pay our claim in full, I was in no mood to bother. As Keith had said, life went on.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LIFE WENT ON, and so did Street Scene. I suppose it sounds heartless, but I cannot deny that poor Bob’s death did make all the difference to the film. Of course, the exact amount of insurance compensation was still being worked out by an expert accountant, but the bank made no difficulty about advances. A great weight seemed to be lifted from the unit. Typically, just because we were no longer fighting a financial rear-guard action, our luck seemed to turn and everything ran our way.

  Keith had been quite right—there was no hope of replacing Bob with a well-known actor at such short notice, so we tried to make a virtue of necessity by running a public competition and auditioning anybody and everybody for the part. “Your chance to star opposite Fiametta Fettini” made an attractive slogan; and we had thousands of entrants, each accompanied by a recent photograph, details of experience (if any), and biographical details (to be written in the applicant’s own handwriting). In point of fact, of course, we already had in mind a couple of likely actors—small-part players whose names were as yet unknown to the public. We had arranged to show the “finals” on television, and it was agreed that the short list would consist of two genuine amateurs plus our professional nominees. If neither amateur proved outstandingly good, we would then give the part to whichever of the professional actors seemed most suitable; and we would have the comfort of knowing that his name and his face were already widely known to millions of viewers and newspaper readers.

  I am not suggesting for a moment that the competition was a pure publicity stunt. We had arranged to include the actors simply because you cannot be certain of getting anybody suitable out of a purely haphazard contest of that sort. Biddy, Sam, Keith, and myself were the judges, of course, and our decision was final; but we promised to give weight to the volume of applause which each contestant drew from the studio audience. It was perfectly open and above board, and there was every chance for a member of the public to win.

  We started off by rejecting more than eighty percent of the entrants on their photographs and written applications alone. Some were obviously over sixty and others under twenty—we had laid down twenty-eight to forty-five as the age limits. Some were illiterate and some were hideous and some were much too beautiful and wrote in mauve ink on scented writing paper. Having whittled the possibles down to fifty, we started interviewing candidates at our London offices.

  It was a depressing business. We had previously decided to limit actual screen tests to ten, but it was difficult enough to find even that number of remotely suitable applicants. Eventually, however, we dredged up ten names and arranged for studio tests. Among the ten were a couple of men whom I thought myself might be useful material—one of them a real-life university professor who looked too suave and elegant for the part but who spoke beautifully and easily and was as urbane and cultivated a man as I have met; and the other, a slow-spoken countryman from Dorset, whose appearance had just the right sort of genuine, English appeal, and who was certainly by nature as gauche and clumsy as Biddy could ever have envisaged Professor Masterman as being. I considered that if Sam could coax a spark of acting fire out of this rather dead wood, we might have a winner.

  I was wrong. When it came to the point, the university don dried up completely in front of the camera and began giggling like a schoolboy. The beautifully modulated voice came out as a sort of frenzied squeak, and the lean, sensitive hands seemed to swell to twice life size and hang like bunches of bananas in the foreground. We did not even have to bother to tell the professor that we would let him know. He bolted from the studios like a scared rabbit, more shaken, I imagine, than he had ever been in his life. I was amused to read, not long afterward, a brilliant but spiteful letter which he wrote to the editor of the Times, protesting against the salaries paid to actors, and describing the theater as a profession “which requires neither learning nor discipline, training nor application, rightly described as the province of the mountebank.”

  By contrast, our slow, solid countryman turned out to be a king of melodrama. It was impossible either to stop or to control him. As a parody of a Victorian ham actor, his performance might have been a sensation in a revival of Maria of the Red Barn; for us, it was hopeless. Of the other eight candidates, only one was tolerable, a young sanitary engineer from Manchester, who had the right look of slightly worried abstraction and who, although no actor, was at least amenable to taking direction and capable of understanding what Sam said to him.

  When it was all over, we had a glum little conference. We had promised the television people four finalists for their program. Two were our “seeded” actors. The sanitary engineer would do, in a pinch, for the third. But we simply dared not let any of our other hopefuls loose in front of an audience of several million viewers.

  “We’ll have to get another actor,” said Sam.

  “We can’t,” said Keith. “We’ve promised two genuine amateurs, and we’ve got to provide them somehow. Otherwise it looks like a put-up job.”

  I appealed to Biddy. “You wrote the beastly character,” I said. “Didn’t you perhaps base him on somebody you knew or had met? Couldn’t you…?”

  Biddy laughed. “If you really want to know,” she said, “I based Masterman on…” Her voice trailed off. She sat for a moment, considering, her small head tilted on one side like a bird’s. Then she said slowly, “I don’t see why he shouldn’t bloody well do it.”

  “Why who shouldn’t do what?” I asked. None of these people ever said what they meant straight out.

  “Keith,” said Biddy.

  “Keith?”

  For a moment we didn’t grasp what she meant. She went on in a rush. “I had Keith in my mind all the time I was writing Masterman. I saw him as Keith—tall and lean and a bit stooping and shambling—not a bit like Bob Meakin. Bob Meakin was never right. He was too good-looking and too intense; when he tried to be vague, he simply gave the impression of sulking. Keith’s the original Masterman as far as I’m concerned and, after all, he’s not an actor; he’s an artist, so he’d do perfectly well for the TV show, and he couldn’t be worse than what we saw today, now could he? And think of the publicity gimmick we could make of that one!”

  There was a pause, while we all thought it over.

  At last, Sam said, “Well, Keith? Will you do it?”

  “I think you’re crazy,” said Keith. He had gone very pale. “I can’t act.”

  “It doesn’t matter, darling,” said Biddy. “It’s only for the TV show. It’s all arranged that Edward Myers should play the part anyway, isn’t it, Pudge?”

  “Nothing is arranged,” I said. “It depends on the outcome of…”

  “Oh stuff it,” said Biddy. “You know very well what I mean. Will you do it, Keith?”

  “Yes,” said Keith. He swallowed hard. “If you want me to, I will.”

  What happened is, of course, a matter of history; but I welcome this opportunity of going on record to state once and for all that the outcome of our contest was not pre-arranged. That is to say, even though a certain result might have been—shall we say—expected by the company, the actual winner took us all by surprise. Keith had not even bothered to do a run-through with Sam, apart from the lighting rehearsals at the television studios, where he walked the part, making the required movements and repeating his lines like a parrot. The most that I personally hoped for was that he would get through somehow
without disaster.

  On the program itself one of the professional actors came first, put up a creditable show, and got a fairly generous round of applause from the studio audience. He was followed by the sanitary engineer, who did as well as could be expected. He was obviously not a serious contender for the part, but I thought that the audience was a little mean; his amateur status, I felt, warranted a bigger hand. Third on the bill was Edward Myers, and he was good—authoritative, polished, a sound professional performance which drew prolonged applause. At the judges’ table, we pretended to be busy making notes, but the thing was a foregone conclusion. And then Keith came on.

  In describing his performance I can only say that he was Professor Masterman. Before he opened his mouth the character was established—the walk that was almost a run, head thrust forward; the nervous gesture with the unlit pipe, a didactic movement trailing into indecision; the spectacles removed in order to study things more closely—these and a score of other tiny factors etched the man with blinding vividness. The voice matched—diffident, but with the diffidence that is born of a conviction of superior knowledge; vague with the vagueness of a man who sees all sides of a question, who dares not be precise because he appreciates the hugeness of the problem; and suddenly, at moments, splendid and strong. The audience went mad. Sam and Biddy and I exchanged worried looks, and then I pushed a piece of paper over to Sam on which I had written: “We can’t let him win. What the hell are we going to do?”

  Sam turned the paper over, scribbled on the back, and pushed it back to me. He had written: “We can’t let him lose.” I had no choice but to concur. I showed it to Biddy and she nodded. Meanwhile, the producer of the program was having difficulty with the audience. Not all the notices in the world marked “Finish Applause” would keep them quiet. Against the background of their fervor, the camera swung toward the judges’ table, and concentrated on Sam.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Sam, very North Country, “you haven’t half put us in a spot.” Delighted laughter and more applause from the studio audience. “As you know, Keith Pardoe is a colleague of ours who only stepped in at the last moment because one of our finalists fell ill. We at this table can’t judge Keith; we know him too well. It’s obvious that the audience here liked him, but maybe they’re all his friends and relations.” More laughter. “So I’m going to ask all of you viewers who saw this program to send us your choice, on a postcard, please. Just send it to me, Sam Potman, at Ash Grove Studios. I think I’m right in saying that this will be the first time that a star has been made by the public ; whoever you choose, it’ll be you who put him up there in the limelight, and it will be your support that keeps him there.” And so on—all good strong stuff.