by Jilly Cooper
‘Where the hell’s Rannaldini?’ Even the normally ebullient Baby was uptight over all the hanging around.
‘Having a poke, I expect,’ sighed Granny. ‘He always poked the prettiest chorus girls at the Garden, bending them over the red velvet balcony of the royal box between rehearsals. If anyone came by, he used to pretend he was showing them round the opera-house.’
Granny rose, still knitting, and went into a sequence of languid pelvic thrusts. ‘Down there ees the peet, where my orchestra play [thrust], and zat is rostrum where I perform miracle [thrust], and zat is proscenium arch [thrust].’
‘When you ’ave feenish, Granville,’ said a chilling voice.
The laughter died. Granny dropped several stitches.
‘Dame ’Ermione soldier in. At least ’ave the courtesy not to keep her waiting.’ Rannaldini glared round.
‘Anyone got a Fisherman’s Friend?’ came Hermione’s pathetic bleat.
Limping ostentatiously, she joined Baby and Flora on the platform.
‘Just like the Teddy Bears’ Picnic,’ hissed Flora, glaring at Hermione’s full-length mink.
‘I assure you, this will be no picnic,’ hissed back Baby.
Rannaldini just had to stand there. His cruel, cold, pale, malevolent face was enough to give a performance its special edge. He raised his stick. Viking’s dying horn call floated out of the bar.
Flora was so terrified she began loud and sharp. It didn’t take Rannaldini long to put the boot in. After the fifth take, when she’d finally got the notes right, he said, ‘That was better, Flora, but you are expected to act.’
Flora flushed. ‘But I thought—’
‘Don’t,’ said Rannaldini crushingly. ‘You do not have the necessary equipment,’ he added bitchily. ‘To be a singer you have to have a voice. To be a musician you have to have a brain. Don’t confuse the two.’
There is a limited number of times you can ask a singer to repeat herself and get the words, notes and acting right. Rannaldini exceeded it. Flora was also slimming, and the rare perfect take was invariably wrecked by her rumbling tummy.
‘This is hopeless,’ yelled Rannaldini, calling a lunch break. ‘We will finish scene tomorrow.’
The last day was even more tempestuous, particularly when George Hungerford rolled up with Trevor, Flora’s terrier, and sat at the back of the hall scowling at Rannaldini. Flora got even more flustered, particularly when Trevor started howling at Hermione’s rather dubious top notes, which reduced both chorus and cast to fits of laughter, so master and dog were banished from the hall.
‘That nasty little dog is, alas, a critic,’ said Serena, as she picked up the telephone in the control room to ring Rannaldini on the rostrum. ‘Dame Hermione has lost her top.’
‘Where? Where?’ said Sexton, looking round the control room in excitement.
‘Her top notes, you bloody idiot.’ Serena slammed down the receiver.
Rannaldini decided to take a break and listen to the playback. Tristan bore George off for ‘a cup of tea and a piece of shortbread for Trevor’.
Smarmy frog even knows the name of my dog, thought George ungratefully.
‘And then you can sit in the control room,’ added Tristan.
‘No, he can’t,’ snapped Serena, who’d nipped down to the canteen to grab a cup of tea, and who hadn’t forgiven George for choosing to live with Flora rather than her. ‘Our singers’ weaknesses and how we conceal them are entirely our secret.’
‘Weaknesses?’ squawked Hermione, who, having clocked Rannaldini’s preference for Serena, had been spoiling for a fight. ‘What weaknesses? How dare you, you patronizing hussy?’ Grabbing cups and saucers, she started smashing them on the floor.
‘Pull yourself together, Hermione,’ said Serena bossily. ‘My little Jessie wouldn’t behave like that.’
Appearing in the doorway, Rannaldini ducked to avoid a milk jug and frogmarched a screaming Hermione off to her dressing room. Three minutes later, he came out zipping up his flies.
‘She’ll be OK now.’
‘But we’re going to have to drop in someone else’s top notes,’ whispered Serena.
Tristan decided to placate George with a large whisky instead and bore him off to find one.
‘Flora is wonderful,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘She is determined not to betray her panic to Elisabetta, but listen to the tension in her voice.’
‘She’s not having to act,’ snarled George, ‘and who’s that damn sight too good-looking boy playing Carlos?’
‘Baby Spinosissimo. He’s sublime, but extremely gay.’
The ladies of the chorus, who were not needed in the finale, were drifting away. Pushy’s hard little heart was breaking as she knocked on Rannaldini’s door.
‘Ay’ve just come to say goodbay, Maystro.’
‘My dear, can you keep a secret on pain of death?’
‘Of course,’ lied Pushy, wriggling inside.
‘How would you like to sing Dame Hermione’s top notes?’
At last the recording was over. Tristan heaved a sigh of relief that Rannaldini would now whizz off round the world out of their hair, allowing himself, Serena and Sylvestre to get on with the editing.
But, to his horror, Rannaldini went nowhere, hogging the edit suite, putting his stamp on everything, causing endless rows over which take was used, twiddling knobs so some singers sounded less good and others better than they had at the recording. Granny, getting to the end of his career, needed careful editing. Hermione, as Rannaldini’s mistress and more importantly because of their mutual record sales, couldn’t sound less than perfect. Sylvestre dropped in Pushy’s top notes so no-one could detect the join.
Still disappointed that Tristan hadn’t made a move, Serena put it down to the fact that she had supported Rannaldini on every artistic decision. She had also, reluctantly, become very smitten with her Italian stallion. It was so sweet of Rannaldini on the last day of editing, because her involvement in the film was ended, to invite her, Sylvestre and Tristan back to his flat overlooking Hyde Park for a farewell dinner.
As Serena was leaving to relieve the babysitter, because it was Nanny Bratislava’s night off, she handed Rannaldini a picture her daughter Jessie had painted specially for her ‘Uncle Roberto’.
‘How charming of Jessie,’ Rannaldini wiped away a tear, and as he ushered Serena into her minicab, promised he would call her later.
Bounding back into the house, however, he rolled up Jessie’s picture, plunged it into the drawing-room fire and lit his cigar with it.
‘What are you doing?’ demanded Tristan in horror.
‘Now the recording is sewn up,’ Rannaldini inhaled happily, ‘I have no more need to ingratiate myself with little Jessie’s mother.’
There were more fireworks in March when members of the cast were issued with cassettes of themselves singing so they could learn the words to which they had to mime on location and time their movements to them. Then they discovered how much Rannaldini had doctored the recording. Chloe was incensed by the cuts in the ‘Veil Song’ and in ‘Don Fatale’.
Rannaldini blithely blamed Serena.
‘Anyway, those numbers don’t add much to the plot, my darling.’
Baby was outraged he’d been so often drowned by Hermione. Alpheus felt Rannaldini had consistently favoured the orchestra and every other singer. It was sacrilege to cut his great solo in Act IV and his character didn’t ‘garner sufficient sympathy’.
Mikhail was so cross, he rang up Rannaldini in the middle of the night. ‘Why did you not use my third and best take in death of Posa?’
‘Because it was too slow,’ said Rannaldini coolly. ‘Serena wanted to get Acts Four and Five on to one CD for when the record comes out.’
‘At this rate my billing will be so small and low down, only snails and mice will be able to read it,’ sighed Granny, who’d also been savagely cut.
‘Think of poor Verdi,’ snarled Rannaldini. ‘He had to drop the entire fir
st act of Don Carlos, because the Parisians couldn’t get their last trains home.’
‘And directors have been putting it back ever since,’ said Granny drily.
Sylvestre, the handsome French sound engineer, felt Hermione’s performance had been so enhanced by subtle additions that he sent her her cassette with utter confidence. In a frenzy Hermione returned the tape by taxi, shrieking down the telephone and threatening legal action. ‘You have rejected every single take I wanted and my top notes sound terrible.’
Sylvestre waited four days, wrote to Hermione saying he’d laboured all round the clock on a new tape, and sent her back the old one. By return of post, he received from Hermione a letter, which he framed, saying, ‘You have worked miracles.’ Also included was an invitation to luncheon, which lasted twenty-four hours.
There was great consternation when a hatchet job, on the horrors of recording with Rannaldini, appeared in the Sunday Times, written by little Christy Foxe. As Christy subsequently turned out to be Rupert Campbell-Black’s godson, and the son of Janey Lloyd-Foxe, a very dangerous columnist, Rannaldini and Tristan wondered uneasily if this were the first round in Rupert’s war of attrition.
16
One of the secrets of Rannaldini’s success was that he knew when he had pushed those he needed too far. Immediately the editing was finished he suggested he, Tristan and Meredith, the set designer, should recce the state rooms at Buckingham Palace.
Rannaldini and Meredith went back a long way. They had done up numerous houses together without falling out. Aware that Meredith had been the lover of Hermione’s charming husband, Bob Harefield, for fifteen years, Rannaldini had never outed them because he was fond of Meredith, and Bob, as orchestral manager of Rannaldini’s old orchestra, the London Met, had made life incredibly easy for him.
Neither Rannaldini nor Hermione, on the other hand, had made life easy for Bob, who’d pretended he was far too stretched in Australia setting up a new opera company, to come home and organize Don Carlos for them.
Meredith, a hugely successful interior designer, had turned down a mass of work to create the sets for Don Carlos, but he intended to screw a vast fee out of Liberty Productions, and although missing Bob a great deal, he was very excited about working with such an enchanting Frenchman.
On the day of the proposed trip to the Palace, so many builders’ lorries and cars belonging to outraged planning officers were already whizzing in and out of Valhalla that the Fancy Fish frozen foods van slipped through the gates unnoticed. Famed for his cheeky, cheery manner, which could sell shellfish à la King to a barmitzvah party, Terry, the Fancy Fish rep, had long had designs on Valhalla, particularly now rumours were spreading of a film crew rolling up at the end of March.
Harriet Bussage, Rannaldini’s PA, had tipped Terry off that Sir Roberto was in rare residence. On his way to make his pitch Terry decided to pop into Bussage’s cottage, which nestled in a copse half-way up Valhalla’s drive, to deliver a cardboard box of sole Véronique as a thank-you present. Loading up other boxes, in case Bussage was tempted to place an order (Terry never missed a sales opportunity), he was just admiring the snowdrops and aconites in her little garden when he heard a male voice, sepulchral and terrifying:
‘How dare you spell Spinosissimo wrong!’ followed by a great thwack and a shriek.
‘I’m sorry, Maestro.’ It was a woman’s voice now, quavering, pleading. ‘Please don’t hurt me.’
‘How dare you put a comma in that letter to Lord Gowrie, when I dictated a semi-colon,’ intoned the man’s voice.
More thwacks were followed by even more piercing shrieks:
‘Punish me, Maestro, I’m so sorry.’
Rushing to the rescue through the back door, Terry froze with shock. A naked Miss Bussage was spread-eagled face down on the kitchen table, with wrists and ankles strapped to each wooden leg.
Beside her, an equally naked Rannaldini, with an erection rivalling the tower of Pisa, was laying into her reddening but surprisingly trim bottom with a hunting whip. Watching them with indifference was a large fluffy white cat.
Next moment sole Véronique, garlic king prawns, not to mention jumbo crispy cod fingers, destined for Little Cosmo, went flying all over the kitchen and Terry had fled.
‘It was the bleedin’ excitement on their faces fixed me,’ he told his wife that evening.
Five minutes later, Meredith and Tristan, having enjoyed a merry champagne brunch at the Heavenly Host, bounced into Bussage’s parlour to find Rannaldini, immaculate in a pinstripe suit and shocking pink tie, autographing a pile of photographs.
‘Helen said you were here,’ giggled Meredith. ‘The helicopter’s waiting. What the hell did you do to that sweet Fancy Fish man? He’s just taken the side off Tristan’s flash car.’
Booked in for a two-hour trip round the state rooms, which was all the time Rannaldini could spare, they lunched beforehand at Green’s in Bury Street. Over oysters, lobster and Sancerre, they decided they needed ideas for the Great Hall, which was going to be turned into Philip II’s bedroom. They also required a set, probably the Summer Drawing Room, into which Philip summoned Carlos from the polo field for a pep talk. This was a duet composed by Rannaldini, so he didn’t want a too-spectacular décor to distract people from his music. But they could go to town on the state room in which Philip had his great political debate with Posa, which had only been written by Verdi. For this Rannaldini had evil designs on Helen’s Blue Living Room.
Arriving at the Palace, Meredith commandeered the red guidebook. ‘That’s the arch through which diplomats and heads of state enter,’ he announced, as they peered down into the pink-gravelled quadrangle.
‘Her Majesty lives on the opposite side,’ said Rannaldini, pointing to a dark blue door.
‘Why don’t you give her a bell?’ suggested Meredith. ‘Ask if we can pop in for a brandy. You must have met her when she gave you your K.’
‘And on many other occasions,’ said Rannaldini icily. ‘Anyway,’ he added, looking up at the empty flagpole, ‘she is not in residence.’
‘“In 1826 George IV chose John Nash to design a new palace,”’ read out Meredith, ‘“but he was hampered by a chronic lack of funds.” Nash et moi. I expect he gnashed his teeth.’ Rather like a child swinging between two parents, Meredith linked arms with Tristan and Rannaldini. ‘You will give me a decent budget, won’t you, boys? We can’t stint on royalty. Oh, look, they’ve got Sky Television. Lovely to think of that butch Prince Andrew watching all that golf.’
Tristan was gazing up at the lion-coloured columns of the ambassadors’ entrance.
‘The English stole the idea for that double portico from the Louvre,’ he grumbled. ‘They steal all our decent ideas.’
‘Well, we won both of those,’ Meredith waved the guidebook at two panels celebrating the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo, ‘so boo sucks.’
‘Weeth a little help from the Germans,’ said Rannaldini crushingly. ‘Now concentrate. Not now,’ he snarled, as a group of middle-aged tourists tiptoed up reverently in the hope of an autograph.
Meredith was disappointed the tour didn’t include the ballroom. ‘You’re only admitted’, announced Rannaldini pompously, ‘if you’re getting a decoration.’
‘Get you,’ said Meredith, who was now busily sketching a grand staircase, which unfurled like the frill round a golden wedding cake.
Tristan, lost in thought, was admiring a lovely marble of a lurcher having a thorn removed from its paw by Diana the huntress. He must find a postcard to send to Lucy Latimer. Thank God he’d booked her to do the make-up and to calm Hermione and Chloe when filming started. There were dogs in every painting too, which meant he’d have to include lots in the film. Dogs, he reflected wearily, were almost more of a nuisance than children.
‘This is the Green Room,’ Rannaldini paused on the threshold, ‘where one mingles before proceeding to the Throne Room to meet one’s hosts.’
‘How lucky we are to have you to i
nitiate us,’ said Meredith gravely.
‘Stop taking the pees, you little popinjay,’ said Rannaldini. ‘How about this décor for one of the drawing rooms?’
‘No good for your colouring,’ said Meredith firmly. ‘Green’s awful with grey hair and a sallow complexion. Someone would spear you with a cocktail stick. Although we could drag the dungeons this colour to cast a sickly glow on poor, doomed Posa.’
Tristan kept having to hide his laughter by examining paintings.
‘This is how I want room where Posa defies Philip,’ said Rannaldini, as he hustled them into the Throne Room, which was the length of a cricket pitch. The crimson silk walls were lined with gold sofas. Huge cut-glass chandeliers glittered from the ceiling like a fleet of Jack Frost’s air balloons.
‘The ceilings at Valhalla are too low for chandeliers,’ protested Meredith.
‘Then raise them,’ said Rannaldini imperiously.
Through an arch flanked by white-winged genii holding gold paper chains, burgundy red steps led up to two crimson thrones, embroidered with the initials EIIR and P.
‘We must reproduce those for Elisabetta and Philip II,’ said Tristan in excitement.
‘And keep them permanently at Valhalla after filming’s over,’ giggled Meredith, ‘we can unpick the E and P and change it to R for Rannaldini and H for Hermione, or Helen or Harriet Bussage,’ he added slyly, ‘depending on who’s in favour.’
Rannaldini allowed himself a chill smile, but he could only think of a throne initialled T, with naked Tabitha sprawled on its faded damask, waiting for him to mount the burgundy red steps and her.
In every room there were beautiful clocks depicting heroic scenes. How slowly the minutes must have ticked by for the young Princess Diana, thought Tristan, and for Carlos and Elisabetta. How d’you cure a broken heart in a gilded cage, particularly when every ravishing piece of Sèvres showed idyllic scenes of young shepherds and shepherdesses in love?
‘I want a scrolled codpiece for Christmas,’ said Meredith, bringing everyone back to earth.