Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  “And that’s all he said?” Vivianne asked.

  “Wasn’t it enough? More than enough?”

  “Perhaps he’s right,” the older woman said slowly.

  “Do you really think that? You too?”

  “Yes, my little one. Paris is no place for a girl without a solid situation of some sort, and that, Madeleine, is something that Monsieur Alain Marais can never give you. I think the more of him for realizing it. What he said—about returning to Dijon—is it possible?”

  “No! Absolutely not! I love him, Vivianne, and no matter what you or even he says, I won’t leave him. If I went back … home … they would expect … God knows what they would expect! It’s unthinkable.”

  “Then there is an alternate solution, but only one.”

  “Why do you look at me that way?” Eve said, suddenly alert.

  “I’m wondering. Are you capable of it?”

  “Of what, for the love of God?”

  “Of getting a job.”

  “Of course I could get a job. What do you take me for? I could be a salesgirl, I could learn to operate a typewriter, I could work at the telephone company, I could …”

  “Madeleine. Hush. I’m not proposing to put you to work in some store or office for which a million other girls are just as well suited as you. No, little one, I mean a job worthy of your gifts. I am speaking of a job on the stage of the music hall.”

  “You can’t be serious!”

  “On the contrary, I’ve been thinking about it for months. Since I first heard you sing, as a matter of fact. I wondered why Monsieur Marais never thought of it himself, but then I realized that you never sang when he was home. Does he even know that you sing? No? I suspected as much. You were too much in awe of his … professionalism … to display your own unimportant, miserable squeak of a voice … that was it, wasn’t it?”

  “Make fun of me, Vivianne, I don’t care. I didn’t sing for him because I thought that perhaps … oh, I’m not really sure, perhaps he wouldn’t like me to sing too, perhaps he would think I expected to sing duets with him or something stupid like that.”

  “Or perhaps you have a better chance to be a success than he does? Eh? Is that what you thought?”

  “Never!”

  “Why not, since it’s true? Don’t bother to deny it. I know it and I believe that you must know it too.”

  A complicated silence fell between the two women. Each one of them knew that they were skirting the boundaries of a subject they had no intention of ever discussing. At the same time, neither of them knew precisely how much the other was aware of. And yet this was no time for discretion. Finally Eve ventured to speak, leaving Vivianne’s last question unanswered.

  “Why do you think I could sing on stage? I’ve never performed in public, only for myself and … at home, and for you, once you found me out.”

  “There are two reasons. First, there is your voice. It has the strength that’s necessary if you wish to be heard in the balcony of the biggest theater in Paris; it has a tone that conveys emotion as if it were joined by your lips to the heart of the listener; it has a special quality for which I can’t find a name, that makes me listen to you sing over and over without ever tiring; and, most important of all, when you sing about love, I believe every one of the words. And I don’t believe in love, as you well know.

  “Second, you have a genre. You have a type. Mere talent, the possession of a voice is never enough in the music hall—you must have a type to succeed.”

  “What type do I have?” Eve asked with intense curiosity.

  “Your own. The best of all, my little one, the best of all! I remember what Mistinguett said to me once: ‘What is important is not my talent but the fact that I am Mistinguett. Any extra can have mere talent.’ Ah, the Miss, how she likes to talk about herself. Little one, you are greatly talented and on top of that you are unique, you are Madeleine! With those two assets you can conquer the music hall.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “Impossible. I am not wrong about such things. But you must dare to try.”

  “Dare—of course I dare. I always dare,” cried Eve, her eyes alight.

  “Then we must find the right songs and arrange for an audition. The sooner the better. Thank God I still have my contacts at the Olympia—Jacques Charles will always listen to you sing if I bring you to him.”

  “The Olympia?”

  “Of course, where else? We start at the top, as any sensible person would.”

  Energetic, ambitious and imaginative, Jacques Charles was a veteran producer of the music hall at only thirty-two. He stood, stroking his neat black mustache, his eyes filled with a curiosity that never failed him, in his customary place for an audition, almost at the back of the second balcony of the Olympia. If a performer couldn’t be heard from that position, so far from the stage, he had no interest in him, no matter how appealing the talent.

  “What’s up today, Patron?” asked one of his assistants, Maurice Appel, surprised at the morning audition on a day normally devoted to afternoon rehearsals.

  “A favor, Maurice. You remember Vivianne de Biron, don’t you, my lead Walking Girl at the Folies Bergère? What a marvel, that Vivianne; never late, never sick, never pregnant, never in love and never tired. What’s more, she was smart enough to retire before her breasts stopped pointing halfway to the ceiling. Since she left, there hasn’t been one who could touch the way she paraded across the stage wearing nothing warmer than a ton of feathers on her head. She asked me to listen to a friend who sings. How could I refuse?”

  “Her guy?”

  “No, a girl, it seems. There she is now.”

  The two men looked at Eve, who had walked out on the stage wearing a copy of the newest dress in Paris, Jeanne Lanvin’s navy serge chemise. But this history-making dress that had no waistline had been copied by Vivianne’s dressmaker in a perfect red crepe whose singing color was reflected in Eve’s strawberry blond hair, brushed out into two shimmering wings on either side of her face. On the dark stage she seemed like a flash of midsummer sunshine in which the brightness of the footlights had become entangled, a part of her own inner luminosity. Eve stood with composure, her right hand just touching the piano, at which an accompanist was already seated, with her music open in front of him. From her stance, so natural to one who had studied for years with Professor Dutour, it was impossible to tell that she was more nervous than she had ever been in her life.

  “At least you can see her,” Jacques Charles said.

  “Shall we have a little bet, Patron? She’ll have the genre Polaire.”

  “Why not the genre Mistinguett while we’re at it?”

  “Yvonne Printemps?” countered Maurice.

  “You forgot Alice de Tender.”

  “Not to speak of Eugenie Buffet.”

  “That covers most of the possibilities. She can’t intend to waltz in that skimpy dress, so Paulette Darty isn’t in the contest. I’ll go for Alice de Tender, and you, Maurice?”

  “Printemps. I have an instinct.”

  “Five francs?”

  “Done.”

  “Mademoiselle, if you please, you may start,” Jacques Charles called.

  Eve had prepared two songs. She had been frantic at the problem of finding new songs to sing at a time when every decent songwriter was working night and day for established stars, but Vivianne had proposed a solution to that problem.

  “It’s evident to me, little one, that you must not sing something original. It must not be the song that they notice, but you. Only you and your genre. I propose that you sing songs that are each famous as belonging, above all, to the women who launched them, songs that people think of as inseparable from Mistinguett and Yvonne Printemps—Mon Homme and Parlez-moi d’Amour. That way you will challenge them on their own ground and show that it is not the song that counts but the singer.”

  “Dear Lord, Vivianne, isn’t that just going to make it harder on me? I’ll sound as if I haven’t an
idea in my head,” Eve had protested.

  “Nobody cares about your brain power when you’re standing on a stage, my dear. You are there to impose yourself. Make yourself unforgettable.”

  Unforgettable, Eve thought, as she stood with the footlights in her eyes. All I have to be is merely unforgettable. And I have five minutes in which to accomplish this. She took a deep breath and remembered the endless horizon as she had seen it from the big red balloon, remembered the moment when she had been at one with the reckless pilots of the great Air Show. Well, why not? she asked herself. After all, is it so remarkable to be unforgettable? I will, at least, dare.

  Eve gave the accompanist the sign to begin, and as the first notes of Parlez-moi d’Amour sounded in the empty theater, Maurice held out his hand to his boss and Jacques Charles began to dig into his pocket. But as her voice crossed the distance between them, that contralto voice which was so intimate, so immediate, that voice which seemed to be singing directly into his ear, although the distance between the stage and the second balcony was great, he stopped and listened.

  Jacques Charles listened to a voice that created a hunger in him where none had existed before, a voice that satisfied his hunger and then left him still needing more of the sound that was like the private beating of a beloved heart, a voice that seemed to hold some invaluable, yet still unlearned lesson. The impresario realized that he had grown so accustomed to hearing the pretty melody sung in Printemps’s wistful soprano warble that he had never paid attention to the words. The “tender things” that the lyric begged for touched him with thoughts of tender things remembered, tender things hoped for, and, during the space of a minute, lovesickness brushed him amorously, born in the throat of the girl in red.

  Maurice started to say something when Eve finished her first song, but the producer put his fingers to his lips. “Please continue, Mademoiselle,” he called, and Eve began Mon Homme. She sang the lyrics of a song that both men knew, as an article of faith, belonged to the great and evil-tempered Miss as absolutely as her fabulous legs belonged to her, as completely as the young Chevalier belonged to her. Maurice thought that it was a lucky thing for them both that the Miss hadn’t been here today to listen to this bold-faced and incredibly successful appropriation of her property. It would never belong to her again, not as it had before, and she would have been capable of murder. For his part, Jacques Charles thought that it was a shame that Chevalier, a good fellow, was not present to glimpse this opportunity to escape his stormy affair with the Miss. Or rather to escape it for another kind of enslavement, for no man who listened to this girl in red would leave the theater the same man he had been when he entered.

  Eve finished singing, and both men found themselves clapping and shouting “Encore!” before they looked at each other sheepishly. It was not their business to scream for more like the customers. They were not civilians, after all.

  Encore indeed, Vivianne de Biron thought in triumph. Madeleine would give them encores, but all in good time. First there was a contract to negotiate, and if they hadn’t been carried away they might have gotten her on decent terms. Now … it was another matter.

  “To work, Maurice,” Jacques Charles muttered. “Perhaps la Biron will think we were just being polite.”

  “You can always try to say that, Patron.”

  “Not to Vivianne de Biron. I wouldn’t even try.”

  “Because she was such a great Walking Girl?”

  “Because she’d laugh in my face, idiot. I said she never got pregnant, I didn’t say she was stupid.”

  4

  HARD-HEARTED she might be, and undoubtedly a wicked woman, Vivianne de Biron reflected, but it was not a bad thing at all, in fact a decidedly fortunate thing, that Alain Marais had not improved as quickly as he had hoped. The doctors had insisted that he remain in the hospital until they were satisfied with him, and since the winter still continued wet and freezing and looked as if, in typical Parisian fashion, it might remain that way until Bastille Day in July, there was no danger that he might come home and discover his Madeleine in the process of being transformed into a debutante at the Olympia, the glorious Olympia, which he knew he could never hope to enter except as a ticket holder.

  Vivianne had warned Madeleine to say nothing to him about her new job, and the girl had accepted her advice promptly, and without asking why. She must finally have heard Fragson sing. It was inevitable, since they were working on the same stage, in the same show, and Madeleine had been rehearsing new songs of her tour de chant every day at the theater. Yet she had said nothing, Vivianne thought. Some matters needed no comment, particularly between friends.

  Vivianne shrugged her shoulders and thought about Maddy’s future, for that was the name that the management had decided to give Madeleine. As Jacques Charles said, “Madeleine” had a decidedly religious ring to it, and if there was one thing you could say about Madeleine’s singing, it was more inspired by Venus than by any virginal saint.

  He had decided to launch his debutante during the first half of the current revue, since it wasn’t destined to be replaced by a new show until summer.

  “I don’t want to wait till then,” he had told Vivianne, once the contract had been signed and they were friends again, “because she’s ready now—I’ll make sure that the critics know she’s appearing. A new attraction’s always a good way to get them back into the house in the middle of the season. Maddy’ll go on after the Hoffmann Girls and before the magician. Then Fragson sings, followed by the intermission. It’s the perfect placement.”

  “How will you dress her?” Vivianne had demanded promptly, ready to go to battle if need be.

  “In red, as you did, naturally. Your instincts were right. Just because you never wore clothes onstage doesn’t mean you didn’t understand them. With her hair she must always wear red, but not a chemise. No woman will ever dishonor my stage in a dress without a waist again. It’s far less seductive than a pillow slip. Maddy has the body, thank God, that is promised by her voice. I intend to do her justice, as I did you, Vivianne, before you turned into a professional manager.”

  “Ingrate!”

  “Ah, the classic stage mother,” he laughed, and kissed her hand. “Too bad you never could keep step with the others, but now I see your talents lie in other directions. I am deeply grateful to you, Vivianne, you know that, don’t you?”

  “As you should be. I shall keep an eye on her costumes, Patron, don’t think I won’t.”

  “I have every faith in you.”

  “I shall also keep an eye on you,” she said severely.

  “And quite right you are. Why should you be the first person in history to trust a producer?”

  “Now,” said Jacques Charles to Eve, as she entered her dressing room on a morning in mid-March, the day after her first performance, “you’re ready to begin work.”

  “But … I don’t understand.” She looked at him in astonishment.

  “Yesterday Paris took you to its heart. The audience made a decision. They fell in love with you, my Maddy. Only an audience can confer that kind of love, and once they give it, they never take it away. It was victory, an unconditional victory. Look at these reviews—it’s glory, Maddy, nothing less than glory. So I say you’re ready to begin work.”

  “I still don’t understand.” After the ovations that had followed her first performance, Eve had half expected the flowers and notes with which her dressing room was already filled, she had anticipated the compliments she had received from the other performers, but his words didn’t make sense.

  “From the first time I saw you on stage, Maddy, I never thought of you merely as a singer. The tour de chant is the first step in your career. Absolutely necessary, of course. Without it you can’t own the public. But it can also be a prison for a major talent. You have a potential I haven’t seen in years. You could become a star, the kind of star around whom a revue is created, for whom a revue is created. That means you must dance and act as well as you sing. Lesso
ns, my girl, lessons!”

  “But …”

  “Don’t you want to be a star?”

  Eve sat down on the couch in her dressing room and looked at the young impresario in confusion.

  “I see,” he said, “you thought that you were already a star. And no wonder, after that reception by the crowd. But Maddy, there are stars and stars. You are indeed a star now, not a great star, not yet, although you shine so brightly. You will never share your place in the sky with anyone who has not also held the public of the Olympia in the palm of one hand.”

  He looked at her closely and saw that his words had wounded her. “Don’t misunderstand, Maddy,” he said hastily, “you have every right to call yourself a star, if, to you, ‘star’ means being one name on a playbill, one name among many others. But if you have another dream, if you dream that one day people will flock to the Olympia just to see Maddy, never mind in what, because it is Maddy who matters more than any show, if you dream that one day Maddy will be known all over the world and tourists will fight for tickets to hear you, if you can see posters of Maddy on every kiosk in this city—then we have the same idea, you and I, of what it means to be a star. So! What do you say?” In his eyes Eve saw the unmistakable and utterly genuine excitement of a man who was offering her the world. This producer, who could engage any performer he chose, thought—no, he knew—that she had a chance. More than a chance.

  “Nothing. For the moment. Thank you very much, Patron, but I have nothing to say.”

  “Nothing?” he said, incredulously.

  “Please, don’t think that I’m ungrateful or stupid. I … I’m still confused … I was so excited after last night that I didn’t sleep at all … I … I just don’t know what I want right now.”

  “I understand, Maddy—it’s normal. Look, I’ll give you all the time you need to think about it. Take a day, take two days—and when you’re ready, come and see me in my office. We have a lot to talk about.”

  He gave her an encouraging smile and hurried off, thinking gloomily that not to know what you wanted was almost as bad as not wanting anything at all. If Maddy wanted to become a star, she shouldn’t need more than half a minute to think about his offer. If she really wanted to become a star, she should have been pounding at his office door early this morning, the minute he’d arrived at the theater, demanding to know what his plans were for her.