The Jewels of Tessa Kent

by Judith Krantz

  “There were seven of us, sitting around a conference table—Lee Maine has lent the room to Maggie for the duration, and—”

  “Who were they? Pretend you’re a historian, baby. I want details.”

  “Besides Maggie and Juliet Tree and me, there was that girl Janet Covitz I told you about, and another I hadn’t met before, Dune Maddox by name, a rakish, very social blond with more brains than you’d think to look at her. Also there were two floaters Maggie recruited, kids, Sam, probably no more than twenty, and adorable, a matched pair of brunettes, both obviously bright and eager, named Aviva Beach and Joanne Corday.”

  “Were you the only grown-up there?”

  “No, Juliet Tree’s in her forties, a true professional who’s been at S and S for years, an elegant woman, the chignon and tailored suit type, who seems a bit square, especially compared to the others. Obviously Maggie’s a cult figure; the others are all Maggie clones, like Janet, even down to that haircut, and except for Juliet, they treat her word as writ.”

  “So you’re sitting there with a bunch of females, and you’re looking … how?”

  “Semi-movie-star. Oh, Sam, I was up half the night obsessing on what to wear, and I decided it would be affected to dress down the way I do for your department head, that I should look more or less the way they’d expect me to look, but not anything over the top, so I wore the same thing I had on the day I met you. I hoped it would bring me luck.”

  “But remember, you had me in thrall from adolescence on. Then what happened?”

  “Oh, I behaved myself. I pushed my chair just far enough away from the table so I wouldn’t seem to be intruding on Maggie’s turf, since she was running the meeting, and I shut up and listened. She explained how they announce an important auction, keeping it totally secret until the actual morning of the press conference, so it makes headlines all over the world. She said Hamilton Scott would make the announcement of the sale and then I’d speak, explaining why I’d decided to auction my jewels and telling the press that the proceeds would go to cancer research and answering questions … the usual stuff. Dune Maddox seemed surprised that I was going to be doing that, as if somehow a movie star wouldn’t be able to open her mouth without a script, and I told her public speaking didn’t bother me.”

  “So far, so good.”

  “Oh, Sam, you said to start at the beginning, damn it! So don’t keep giving me progress reports on what I tell you.”

  “Don’t you think you want a drink?”

  “Not particularly. It’ll just make me more depressed and worse tempered than ever.”

  “Don’t you think you need a drink?”

  “Probably. Thank you, darling. Why do you take such good care of me?” Tessa asked plaintively.

  “Why shouldn’t I? You’re my designated lifetime sweetheart, and on top of that, you’re a good provider. Now drink this and tell me more.”

  “Juliet wanted to know if I had any scrapbooks and I told her that Fiona had made them of every picture ever published of me since my first film and I’d let her know to send them here right away. They need the pictures for the catalog and to distribute to magazines.”

  “But there must be thousands upon thousands of photographs.”

  “There are. The idea is that every magazine that does a story on me will get entirely different photos from different movies and different occasions when I was photographed in real life wearing my jewels. Maggie’s trying for cover stories in most of the magazines I read—like Vogue, Town and Country, and Vanity Fair—and in some I don’t, like People and Hello! and Life and even in some of the decorating magazines like Architectural Digest or House and Garden—she says they rarely do celebrity covers but if they can come here to photograph me at home they almost certainly will. And she’s hoping for Newsweek and maybe even Time the actual week of the auction.”

  “Isn’t that publicity overkill? Almost the only ones she’s left out are Spy and Rolling Stone. ”

  “Apparently she doesn’t think overkill exists. She’s going after the big television interview shows too. I didn’t question it, just said I’d be available for anything except lying in my tub with bubbles up to my armpits.”

  “Will you mind if anyone gets wise to us? You’ve kept it so quiet all year.”

  “Mind? I’d take out an ad in Publishers Weekly if you’d let me. Will you mind is more the question.”

  “I wish everybody knew,” Sam answered. He understood Tessa’s discretion intellectually. He realized that she didn’t want them to be the focus of worldwide gossip and speculation, but he yearned for an official romance. Hard to have with a public figure, he told himself impatiently. If only she’d marry him! She’d been on the verge, before the auction came up, but now all her emotional focus was turned toward Maggie.

  “Your study’ll be off-limits anyway,” Tessa continued. “Photographers won’t want me in front of a desk.”

  “You can do this stuff in your sleep, can’t you?”

  “Just about. I publicized every picture I made, but I never did an interview just for the sake of keeping my name in front of the public. That’s probably why I’m supposed to be something of a recluse. Anyway, I gave all the press department an open invitation to come on and take a good look at this place so they’ll have an idea of how it could photograph. Janet and Dune jumped at it, the two floaters didn’t quite dare speak up yet, though they’ll get here sooner or later.”

  “What about Maggie, doesn’t she want to see it too?”

  “Clearly no. She told them she was delegating all questions photographic to Dune and Janet. She gave Juliet Tree first choice of pictures for the catalog. They think there’s a good chance they can sell it in the hundreds of thousands, what with the serious buyers, the merely curious, the Irving Penn fans and my own fans. It can sell as a gift book since it’ll be out in time for Christmas. I told them that S and S was donating all their profits on the catalog to cancer research too.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “When I called Liz Sinclair this morning and suggested it.”

  “Do they know it’s your idea?”

  “Of course not; it’s got to be perceived as Liz and Hamilton’s gesture.”

  “So far, strictly as a historian, I don’t see where you blew it.”

  “The next thing that happened was I took a really good look around the table and I decided that whatever I said, no matter how informal or available I was, and believe me, I was giving my all, they were still looking at me—all but Maggie, that is—with a Stifling mixture of awe and curiosity and disbelief and oh-me-oh-my-she’s-really-Tessa-Kent stuff. They all called me ‘Miss Kent,’ of course, even Juliet Tree, and they couldn’t stop darting tiny sideways glances at me, checking me out over and over, all of them except for Maggie.”

  “But she knows what you look like,” he said reasonably.

  “No, Sam, that’s not the point. She made absolutely no eye contact with me, none, Sam, even though we had been in that meeting for at least two hours. She looked at all the others whenever she talked to them, but I could have been completely invisible. When she looked around the table she’d skim way above the top of my head, moving her eyes so quickly that no one could tell. She never once, not once, used my name, Sam, she referred to me as ‘the consignor’ as if I weren’t right there in the room, and managed to make it sound as if she were just being terribly correct and polite. She was actually ceremonial, as if I were the hundred-year-old hereditary ruler of some feudal country.”

  “So then you blew up?”

  “No, nothing that sensible. Then I suggested that since we were all going to be working together for a long time, we should be like people on film sets, at least my sets, and use first names. I asked everybody to call me Tessa, because that way Maggie would have to go along with the rest of them.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

  “They all looked at Maggie, as if for permission, and she raised her eyebrows slightly as if
I’d said something embarrassingly over-friendly, like a puppy dog wagging my tail, and that’s when—oh, shit, Sam, I was so frustrated by the icy, determined way she was giving me the invisible treatment, I was so desperately anxious for her to acknowledge me in some way, yes, Sam, just like a puppy jumping up and down for attention, and planting his muddy paws all over a white skirt, that I explained, in an entirely natural, casual way, that Maggie had been leaning over backward to be proper because she didn’t want to trade on or presume on the fact that we were sisters.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Not much, I wasn’t there. How did Maggie react?”

  “She didn’t. They did. They were rocked by the news. You could literally feel their astonishment hit as they took in the word ‘sisters.’ They were incredulous and shocked and fascinated and salivating at the gossip value, but, to their credit, they held it down pretty well. A couple of them blurted out ‘Sisters?’ and Juliet looked as if she’d just solved some large puzzle, and Maggie didn’t say anything at all, just kept on consulting her everlasting notes, so I blundered right on, doing a Miss Innocence number, and I said that I’d assumed they must all have heard by now, that Liz Sinclair and Hamilton Scott and Lee Maine knew and I simply imagined that everyone in the publicity department would know … Christ, I really blathered all over the place, fool that I am.”

  “How can you be so sure if she didn’t react?”

  “Because the entire rest of the meeting, which lasted another endless hour, Maggie still didn’t look at me or use my name, and I could tell that she’d become ten times colder than before, and now she was deeply resentful, because I’d pushed too hard and confronted her. And I had! Oh, Sam, I had, damn it to hell! I pushed her into being in charge of the publicity for the auction and then I pushed her again, the very next time I saw her! I didn’t need to bring that up, Sam. I should have let it come out if and when Maggie chose for it to come out, or never be mentioned at all, if that’s what she wanted. Instead of walking lightly and carrying no stick at all, I stomped on her toes and bashed her over the head with a baseball bat.”

  “Okay, so you’ve had a setback, I won’t try to tell you otherwise, but you haven’t ‘blown it,’ darling.” Sam said after a moment’s thought, “You’ve gotten a modified version of the truth out in the open, so at least you don’t have to go around acting as if you two had never met before, which would be pretty hard to keep up for six months, especially since other people at S and S already knew. And it’s good that everyone will be calling you by your first name and feeling more comfortable with you. You’re not just Tessa Kent anymore, you’re Maggie’s big sister, so that makes you human.”

  “Do you really think that or are you just saying it?”

  “I really think it. You know I don’t soft-pedal things to you. When you get right down to it, it’s not the sister stuff that’s the big deal. It’s the mother-daughter connection that’s making her act the way she does, and that’s been going on for so long that it won’t go away until … it goes away. Somehow. Or other.”

  “Oh, Sam, I was so awful!”

  “You were natural, you weren’t on guard, you were too happy to see her, you wanted to shout from the rooftops. You weren’t very smart. Even you, darling, have moments like that. But, remember, you’ve still got six months. Anything can happen. Six months is a long time.”

  “Oh, Sam. Six months? Six months! They’ll go by so quickly! ”

  “You can accomplish miracles in six months … we’ve only been together a little more than a year and I can’t even imagine how time passed before I knew you. ”

  “I guess … time … is always relative,” Tessa said in a small voice, drifting to the window and looking out blindly. Six months, not even two full seasons of one year. One day Sam would be a fine old man, a famous old man, still teaching, still writing, happily married, the father of a family, one day, twenty or thirty unimaginable years from now. Oh, Sam, when you look back, will you still think six months was a long time? Will you have any idea how much I would have given to grow older, year by year, with you? How often will you remember me, my darling? How long before a day will pass without your thinking of me? How long until you meet another woman? Please, be happy, Sam, but don’t forget me—not too soon …

  35

  You look so tired,” Polly told Maggie, inspecting her friend’s face. “Is it the same reason I’ve been hearing about for the past few endless months so I can keep on feeling guilty, or is it something else?”

  “Keep feeling guilty,” Maggie said grimly. “You have no reason to hope for anything better.”

  “Tessa Kent is still the trooper of troopers?”

  “Honestly, Polly, if you could just see her. Today, in a long list of other appointments, we had an interview lunch with a particularly difficult stringer from the London Times who obviously considers movie stars deeply beneath him, particularly those with spare jewelry to hawk—an old-line Labour Party supporter who made it clear that he’d confiscate the Crown Jewels if he could and abolish, if not behead, the entire Royal Family—and by the time she’d finished charming him, the guy’d have agreed to increase the Prince of Wales’s revenues and chipped in his own money to help buy the House of Windsor a new yacht. Talk about manipulative! Thy name is Tessa Kent.”

  “Isn’t that her job?”

  “Sure it is, I’ll give her that. But she’s such an operator. It’s sickening to see the way she gets people to eat out of her hand.”

  “How’d she do it?” Polly asked, always avid for details.

  “Damned if I know. She used the familiar wit and the familiar warmth and smiled at his attempts at jokes and pretended she didn’t hear his snide remarks, and finally, God knows how, got him to tell her about his wife and how he had been suckered into buying her an engagement ring from Asprey, who are three times ‘by appointment’ to members of the Royal Family, because that’s what his wife had been dreaming about all her life, and after that it was off to the races about the psychological reasons for women’s inner attachments to jewels until finally she led him down the garden path with historical stuff like Mary Stuart’s famous black pearls that Queen Elizabeth got her hands on even before she ordered Mary’s head chopped off—”

  “Aha, the old black pearl ploy.”

  “Exactly. Now this Brit has decided to do a two-piece story on the whole subject, concentrating on her collection of a particular kind of rare and valuable Tahitian black pearl—their color is called ‘peacock’ because it ranges from deepest purple to dark green—a large, perfectly matched string could bring close to a million dollars … please, Polly, it’s sickening. This reporter is well on his way to becoming a black pearl expert and there are some seventy different shades of them. She hooked him good, with the help of poor Queen Mary … she played Mary years ago, that’s how she knew about Mary’s pearls. Aviva was sitting there looking as fascinated as he was, but then of course she can do no wrong with her little cheering section.”

  “It’s not so little,” Polly murmured.

  “Only Juliet, Aviva, Janet, Joanne, and Dune. Every last person in the press department,” Maggie admitted grimly. “Lee can’t get over her either, the way she’s cooperating. I always bring at least one of the others along for an interview and they’re all getting a version of the treatment I got when I was a kid—the stories she tells the press are simply more adult, more detailed, and cleverly tailored versions of the way we used to play with her jewels when I went to visit her. She had ways of making these stones into more than they really are, and somehow adding their luster to her own. Oh, I’m so confused, Polly! She’s doing a dream job, no one of us could ever come close to working the press the way she does—after all the jewels don’t belong to us, we don’t know anything about them, we’re not the person who’s auctioning them for a good cause—but it still makes me furious! I’m disgusted with myself, but I can’t help it.”

  “You
’re not, by any chance, just a little jealous of her admirers?”

  “Polly, that’s sick! The reason she’s collected this little band of worshipers is that she’s trying to get at me, and who knows it better than you, who talked me into it in the first place? And if I don’t bring one of them along, I’ll end up being alone with her in the limo on the way to the restaurant and back.”

  “God, I honestly don’t know what made me say that! Sorry! I must have forgotten, for a minute, why all this is happening.”

  “I wish I could forget,” Maggie said limply.

  “She must be totally determined to ‘get at you,’ as you put it, or she couldn’t possibly be going to all this trouble,” Polly said thoughtfully. “I imagine that Tessa Kent has better things to do with her life than win over some journalist who came into the lunch with a hostile attitude … she can’t be used to having to do that.”

  “Of course not. When the studios arranged her press interviews it was always a major coup for whoever got to meet her. ”

  “So look,” Polly said hopefully, “don’t jump down my throat, but if she’s putting herself through all these hoops, with months more of the same to come, with every day an exhausting one, which you’ve admitted yourself, to say nothing of the travel still to come to those foreign cities where you’re taking the highlights of the collection and where she’ll be doing mobbed press conferences—not to mention that she might even be attached to some of these jewels she’s selling—why couldn’t you—”

  “Don’t start with me!”

  “Why couldn’t you be … a little less … unbending, I guess is the word I’m searching for.”

  “Polly, you promised!”

  “I know, I know, but these complaints of yours have been going on and on for months. You know what my opinion was of Tessa Kent when you told me your story, but now I’m beginning to think no matter how bad a mother she was to you for eighteen years, she’s trying her hardest to get to know you now, and that now should maybe … be given some, just a little bit of … credence, allowed to have some truth of its own. It’s real enough, God knows. You can’t dismiss it when you live with it all day, when you see the effort she’s making—and all of it to try to get through to you.”