Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  Christ, but it felt good to be back at the studio. She hadn’t worked in two weeks, since the last day of her last picture. She had needed the time to take care of the many details of her elaborate personal wardrobe, for which she never had a minute during a film. It had been like going on a two-week-long retreat into an overperfumed, overheated, worldly sort of convent, she thought, a world of giddy, chattering, excited women with only one thing on their minds. Now she was back in the world of men, thank the Lord.

  Delphine lingered at the open door of a set that had just been struck. She could smell the distinctive metallic odor of the lights as they cooled down, and she watched the electricians, the grips and the prop men as they dismantled the massive set, observing, with a quickening of her breath, the brute strength with which they hoisted and pushed and pulled and lifted, and went about their work without noticing her, their loud, careless voices calling to each other, in a hurry to get the job over with, and go home. She backed away from the open door into the corridor behind her, to avoid being brushed by a large flat that was being carried off the set. Suddenly she was struck a heavy blow across her left shoulder from the hand of a passerby, who was gesticulating broadly, in conversation with a group of three other men.

  “Hey! That hurt!” she exclaimed, shocked, and the man who had accidentally hit her, still moving fast and already several paces away, glanced back and shook a finger severely at her.

  “Sorry, but that’s a damn stupid place to stand and gape,” he called, turning away as he spoke, to continue his animated conversation.

  “Well, screw you too,” Delphine said out loud in English. She looked around angrily for someone to whom she could complain about such rudeness, but the corridor was now empty. Abel’s lateness was unforgivable, she thought, no longer pleased that she had managed to become invisible. She marched on down the hall, finally found the editing department, pushed open the door without ceremony, and spoke brusquely to a receptionist.

  “Monsieur Sadowski, please.”

  “He can’t be interrupted. What is it about?”

  “I’m expected,” Delphine said, annoyed.

  “Your name, please?”

  “Mademoiselle de Lancel,” Delphine said coldly. The receptionist blinked.

  “Excuse me, Mademoiselle, I didn’t recognize you. I’ll let him know at once. Will you have a seat?”

  “No, thank you.” Delphine stood, tapping her foot in impatience. She was not about to sit down as if she’d nothing better to do than to wait around at Sadowski’s beck and call in a reception room. She should have been escorted into his office immediately. Abel would have seen to that, damn him.

  “Mademoiselle de Lancel is here, Monsieur Sadowski,” the receptionist said into her desk telephone. “Yes, I understand.” She turned to Delphine. “He’ll receive you as soon as he has finished his meeting, Mademoiselle.”

  Delphine stared at her, outraged. She looked at her wristwatch. She was late as it was. If she had been on time she would already have been kept waiting ten minutes. She looked a fool, she thought, standing like a supplicant. She sat down in an uncomfortable chair and glared at the door to the corridor, expecting to see Abel rush in, full of apologies, at any second. Five more long minutes passed in silence, while the receptionist read a magazine. Delphine rose to her feet. She didn’t intend to wait another second. This had gone beyond the limit of possibility. Several men burst out of an office door, arguing, and walked past her out to the hall without a glance.

  “He’ll see you now, Mademoiselle,” the receptionist said.

  “You don’t say,” Delphine snapped. The receptionist looked confused, motioned her into a small office and disappeared, closing the door behind her. Inside, a man sat alone with his back to Delphine, holding up a long strip of film to the window and inspecting it closely. He swore out loud in a string of inventive obscenities while Delphine stopped in front of his desk. He was the man who had hit her in the hall. She could barely wait till he turned. He’d be mortified when he realized with what a lack of breeding he’d treated his star. She had the upper hand already—nothing could change what had happened.

  Still looking at the film, he flung words carelessly over his shoulder, “Delphine, babe, sit down. I’ll be with you in a minute. Lucky I didn’t hurt you back there—you should be more careful. I only hit women on purpose.…” His voice trailed off as he looked at the film intently. “Damn! God damn that cameraman. The cretin, a Neanderthal. I’ll tear his bloody guts out for him the next time I lay eyes on the bastard. No, no, it’s really not possible, what he did, just not possible, and, of course, entirely too late to do anything, but recut the whole scene. We’ll be here all weekend. Shit!”

  He put down the film, swung his chair around and, abruptly, smiled. The director half rose, leaned forward and extended his hand over the desk. Sadowski gave her a quick shake. “A filthy métier, isn’t it, babe?”

  He was very tall, Delphine saw, with an astonishing head. Masses of black hair, straight, ridiculously long, rumpled in every direction. He was young, not much more than twenty-five, and his face was like her idea of a hawk, all eyes and nose and alive with energy. There seemed to be more energy bursting from behind his desk than if he were fighting a duel. He wore huge horn-rimmed glasses, which he took off and placed on his desk, rubbing the place on his nose where they pinched him.

  “Abel not here yet? Good, I didn’t want him here anyway, but he insisted.” He talked rapidly, intensely. Delphine was speechless. The director was using the familiar tu form of address with her, and calling her by her first name. That could happen between a director and a senior crew member when they knew each other well, but never otherwise. Absolutely never between a director and a star, unless they were old personal friends. Just who the hell did he think he was?

  Sadowski sat back and studied her in silence through his glasses, making a tent of his hands, so that his own face was partly hidden, staring at her as if he were alone in a room in front of a painting he had bought in an absentminded moment and wasn’t at all sure he liked. “Take off your beret and your raincoat,” he said finally.

  “I think not,” Delphine replied stiffly.

  “Are you cold?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Then take off your hat and coat,” he said impatiently. “Let’s see what you look like.”

  “Haven’t you seen my films?” She emphasized the formal vous, but he took no notice.

  “Sure. I wouldn’t have hired you otherwise. I want to see what you look like to me, not to other directors. Come on, babe, hurry up. I haven’t got all day.”

  Still sitting down, Delphine removed her hat and shrugged out of her coat, allowing it to drop to her waist, watching to spy his eyes widening in admiration. Sadowski’s unconvinced, suspicious, grudging expression didn’t change. He sighed. She waited, as impassive as he.

  “Stand up and turn around,” he demanded abruptly. His eyes, unshielded, were black, the irises huge, the pupils small, as if he were a hypnotist.

  “How dare you? I’m not a showgirl!”

  “You waiting for me to get down on my knees and beg?” He glanced at her face. “Something similar would be acceptable, wouldn’t it? Ah—actresses! What else is new? Forget it, babe, you’ve come to the wrong place. I make films here, not pretty speeches. No brassiere?”

  “I never wear one,” Delphine lied.

  “I’ll decide that.” He gestured for her to stand. Delphine inclined her head mockingly and decided to rise, knowing that her beauty was the ultimate reproach for his crude, offensive manner. She turned around by inches, offering him the time to become humble. She permitted herself no expression of triumph, not even the minuscule lift of an eyebrow, when she faced him again. He had taken down the tent of fingers and rested his chin on one hand, nodding negatively. “I don’t know. I just don’t know … maybe yes, maybe no … it’s worth a try, I suppose.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  �
��This whole little masquerade of yours, the schoolgirl shit, your skirt-and-sweater Shirley Temple number. It could just work. It’s not as dumb as it looks, you may have something there.… We’ll do a Chloe costume and makeup test and find out.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He snapped his fingers. “Wake up, Delphine! Chloe, the character you’re going to play, the rich bitch? Isn’t that why we’re here? Obviously you realized Chloe could decide to dress down to put the police inspector off the scent after the murder. It’s an idea. Cute. Childish, I admit, and, of course, completely obvious to anyone with any brains, but yes, decidedly cute. It makes you look almost innocent. I like an actress who tries to make a creative contribution. Not too often, of course. Don’t get carried away, honey.”

  “I’ll …”

  “Fine. O.K., we’re done. You can go.” He swung his chair around and resumed inspecting the strip of film, his back toward her again.

  “You need a haircut,” Delphine sputtered.

  “I know. I’ve heard. It’ll have to wait until I’ve made this fucking, rotten scene work. Bring some scissors and do it yourself if it bothers you. Be my guest.”

  “Asshole!” Delphine said in English.

  Sadowski swung around and eyed her with a spark of genuine pleasure. “Right! Nice! I’d forgotten you were American. I have cousins in Pittsburgh—you from anywhere near there? ‘Asshole’—there’s just no perfect word for it in French, is there?” He waved, indicating the door. “See you Monday. Bright and early. And when I say early, babe, I mean early. Don’t oversleep. Fair warning. And the last one you’ll get.”

  “And if I should, by chance, oversleep?” Delphine asked, panting in fury.

  “Don’t worry about it, you won’t. See, you don’t want to give me problems, babe, because you know it won’t work. Right? Now go away. Can’t you tell I’m busy?”

  14

  FREDDY checked to make sure that her helmet was firmly fastened. The dark curls of the Brenda Marshall wig blew about her face, tickled her nose and got into her eyes, as she sat at the controls in the modified open cockpit of the little old Gee Bee. She knew better, after almost two years as a stunt pilot, than to try to convince the wardrobe department that no woman pilot would fly with her hair spilling fetchingly out of her helmet onto her shoulders. Anyway, in Freddy’s opinion, the female jewel thief with a heart of gold and nerves of steel, who always escaped the scene of the crime by air, that she was supposed to be in Lady in Jeopardy, was capable of almost anything, including flying a plane in an evening gown, as she had done only last week.

  She checked her altitude. She was exactly at four thousand feet, as she had planned. Freddy took her hands off the controls. She had trimmed the plane carefully; there was no turbulence aloft on this early August day of 1938, and the ship flew straight and level by itself, and could continue on in this way for a long time. There was a mirror sewn into the inside flap on the sleeve of her jacket, which Freddy now used to inspect her lipstick. It was as bright as when makeup had finished with her, an hour ago. Ready to start, she looked around for the four camera ships, one close to her left, and three below, each at a different altitude, flying in a tight formation that would guarantee complete coverage of her bail-out. She waggled her wings, in her signal that she was ready to start, and watched each of the four planes. This was not the sort of stunt for which you could afford a retake.

  The big, sturdy camera ships all responded with the signal that meant the cameras were turning. O.K., Brenda, time to get a move on, Freddy told herself, and assumed an expression of alarm that changed quickly into one of decision. She grabbed the velvet prop bag full of jewels, jammed it into her jacket, quickly pulled up the zipper and hauled herself, parachute and all, to the side of the plane.

  “So long, boys and girls, here goes nothing,” Freddy shouted, dialogue she thought was as implausible as the plot. She could see the camera in the plane directly alongside, catching her mouth shaping the words that would later be revoiced by Brenda Marshall. She pressed a bright red button positioned on the side of the cockpit that would activate the dynamite in fifteen seconds, after she was well past it, so far away that none of the debris of the explosion could stray in her direction. The instant she pressed the button, she dove out of the plane, expertly clearing the side of the ship, careful not to let the wind catch her, and fell free. At the count of ten she would open her chute.

  “One … two … three …” she counted, beginning to reach for the ripcord. Above her, twelve seconds too soon and far, far too close, the plane blew up. The shock wave of the premature explosion knocked her unconscious. Burning gasoline, in arching sprays of fire, and shattered, jagged fragments of the plane were thrown in all directions around her falling body. The heavy motor missed her by a yard, a burning wing by inches.

  She fell, inert, a piece of motionless flesh in a flying suit, headed for the ground below. When Freddy came to, she had no idea how long she had been falling. Her instantaneous reaction was to pull the ring on the ripcord. Within seconds her descent slowed, as the great parasol of white silk opened above her. She wasn’t on fire, she realized with a disoriented burst of relief. The gasoline had missed her. Swaying from side to side, she scanned three hundred sixty degrees of sky to see if any of the pieces of the plane were too close. The air around her was a mess of plunging fragments, but they were at an acceptable distance. The three camera ships still seemed to be holding their steady courses.

  They got more than they had paid for this time, Freddy thought, as she looked upward to inspect the canopy of the blessed parachute that had opened so promptly. Leaping circles of flames, caused by drops of burning gasoline, rimmed large, gaping tears in many places all over the saving umbrella and were spreading rapidly, eating away at the silk that meant her life. She glanced down at the ground. She estimated that she had more than two thousand feet still to fall before she landed. In that time the parachute would burn to ash, the flames fanned by the air through which she was plunging. Even if it didn’t burn up entirely, there wouldn’t be enough of it left to slow her fall.

  Opening a chute was easy—closing it in midair was fucking impossible, she thought savagely, as she pulled on all the shroud lines she could reach with both of her arms, grappling them toward her, fighting for her life with every ounce of her strength. Gradually the parachute, and the air that filled it, yielded, as she hauled the lines in together at the bottom, preventing any more air from entering the parachute. Faster and faster she fell. Now only the bulging top of the silk umbrella, where air was still trapped, slowed her descent toward earth. She refused to look up to see if the chute was still burning. All her senses were concentrated on picking the right moment to release the shroud lines that would allow the parachute to open in time to break her fall, and before it burned away.

  “Now!” she shouted above the circled area where she could see the cameramen grinding on the ground. She could see Mac running toward the place where she would land. She opened her arms, letting all the straining shrouds escape her grip. With a jerk, the silk billowed out again, but still too fest, a deadly trifle too fast, the ground approached. She landed badly, her body meeting the field heavily. Her left arm and her right ankle broke at the same moment, and then, still fighting with her good arm to spill the air out of the chute, to keep from being dragged along the ground, Freddy passed out. When she recovered consciousness, Mac had fallen on top of her to bring her body to a stop, and the cameras were still grinding away. The last thing she heard was the director screaming, “Keep going, keep going, we’ll write him into the script.”

  “Promise me you won’t get soap in my eyes?” Freddy asked Mac anxiously, as she knelt on the floor of the bathroom, naked to the waist. Her ankle and arm were still in the plaster casts which she had been warned not to get wet, when she left the hospital a few days before. Mac had figured out that the only way he could wash her hair was if she hung her head into the bathtub, supporting herself on her knees, wit
h her shoulders leaning on the edge of the tub.

  “Why would I get soap in your eyes?”

  “By accident … it’s a mystery … no matter how hard people try to give someone a painless shampoo, they always end up getting soap in their eyes. There’s nothing I hate more,” she answered.

  “You like to jump out of airplanes and you hate to have a shampoo?”

  “You’re beginning to understand me.”

  “Get your head down in there, close your eyes tight, and don’t worry.”

  “Wait!” she said, alarmed. “It’s not the soaping, it’s the rinsing that’s the dangerous part. How are you going to do it?”

  “With this cooking pot. It’s simple. I’ll fill it with water from the cold and hot taps and pour it over your head. Jesus!”

  “Go get a pitcher with a spout,” she ordered. “A pot … only a man would try to use a pot.”

  “How about a watering can? That would give me perfect control, a drop here, a drop there …”

  “Great. No, on second thought, it would take too long. Just a pitcher.”

  “Don’t go anywhere, Freddy. I’ll be right back.” He ran downstairs to the kitchen, and found a pitcher. He was, he knew, trying unsuccessfully to keep from fussing over her like a mother, but he was just so damn glad to have her back in one piece, that he’d wash her hair for her a strand at a time with a wet toothbrush, if that was what she wanted. The heavy, lopsided casts emphasized the airy, exquisite delineation of her feet and wrists, but Freddy was so strong that he kept catching her trying to hop around in spite of his fear that she’d fall and break something else. She was so brave, so fine, so undefeatable, this precious girl of his—too much by half, he thought as he raced upstairs, three steps at a time.