The Camera Always Lies Page 9

  “We want all of Charity that you can get on the screen right out there in plain view. We want to ram her down their throats. The soundtrack should be very loud.”

  “‘Mini-Goody-Go-Go,’” said Max. “It swings.”

  “Wait till you hear it,” said Danny.

  “I thought it wasn’t written yet.”

  “Well, it’s just a little bit written.”

  Max blanched. “You people are awful; you really are awful. You have the psychology of ward politicians. You do everything with a low stratagem. What did you hire me for? I am not your enemy; there’s no need to go behind my back. I want the picture to do well, as much as you. But in the meantime, I would like to get out of this car. I’m getting carsick, or anyway sick.”

  “Are you agreeable to the Faiers proposal?”

  “Anything you like. Send Jasper a memo to work up some little step for her, and a running order. We can shoot it in a week. Have somebody send me a score of the arrangement so I can read over it, to get the feel. Would you ask this chauffeur of yours to let me out?”

  “Don’t go away mad, Max.”

  “Who is mad? I have my fee and my percentage. I never complain as long as I’m paid. I’m an artist. You want this bitch on the screen twenty-feet high, that’s what you get. You want to stupefy them.”

  Horler pronounced it like a benediction. “To stupefy them.”

  Max stood at the curb, by the open door. “They’ll never know what hit them.”

  9

  “So. I’m paying for the party?”

  “Horler said they would.”

  “They should, God knows.”

  “No, Rose, it’s customary for the star to do it, or something like it, you know as well as I do,” said Vogelsang a few days before the premiere, “but because Seth is . . . Seth is . . .” He had some trouble verbalizing it.

  “Since Seth has flown the coop and I’m all alone, a bereaved divorcee, I don’t have to pay, having no husband and no means of support, apart from what generous producers pay me; that’s nice. Will they pay me rent on the house, and a fee for insurance against breakage?”

  “Rose, Rose.”

  “Pooh. Pooh to you, Lambert. They’re simply using me and my house.”

  “Somebody has to give a party.”

  “Let Tommy Dewar give the party. He’s as much involved as I am.”

  “It’s more gracious like this.”

  She shrugged in amused disgust. “And just who is this French creep they’ve unearthed for me? Boy, have I ever had foreign producers.”

  “Jean-Pierre Fauré? Rose, dear, he’s very big in France, and on the art-house circuits. Films Vinteuil is his production unit. Feu James Dean was his first success. It’s supposed to be the first real new-wave film.”

  “Fauré, as in foray. He’s after money like all the rest of them. Art-movie producers are all alike, and he’s been after Horler and Lenehan to buy his pictures for the States for nearly a year. He’s just another of their creatures, like Max and Jasper.”

  “Have you met him?”

  “No, but they were always talking about buying his line of goods and getting into distribution. They haven’t done it though. They haven’t got the guts or the brains.”

  “He’s a director, Rose, more than a producer. He paid for his first movie himself.”

  “It can’t have cost much, if he used his own money.”

  Vogelsang said vaguely, “With those pictures made at a price you can sometimes get it back quick. I heard he did very well on his first two. He’s just a kid.”

  “What’s he doing in New York? He must be after money.”

  “Distribution. Name stars.”

  “He better not fool around with Horler and Lenehan or they’ll swipe his pictures from him, also his shirt, coat, pants, and anything else he might be wearing.” She felt angry. “So one of their parasites is going to be my date? Believe it or not, I prefer to arrange my own dates. I don’t need Danny and Bud to procure for me.”

  “Aw, Rose. Danny just thought it would do us all some good to have you seen with a new man. He thought it might put you in a more glamourous light . . .”

  “. . . instead of the unglamourous light of the wronged woman, not a very juicy part. You’re as bad as they are, Lambert, you just want to use me. So. What does this Fauré look like, anyway?”

  “Now there you won’t have any complaints. He’s a nice-looking boy, dark, tall for a European, around six feet. I’ll tell you who he looks a bit like, Henry Fonda.”

  “So does Seth. In fact Seth is the one who wasn’t Hemy Fonda, perhaps on a smaller scale.”

  “I think of Fonda as essentially a stage actor,” said Lambert.

  “What are they after?”

  “They just want you at the premiere with a presentable man.”

  “To show that I’m not dead yet.”

  Vogelsang did something he almost never did; he showed a trace of impatience. “Will you go with him or not?”

  She said, “Have them tell him where to come. Have them get a decent car for him. I’m not going to jockey mine in and out of the garage.”

  “A limousine,” her agent promised.

  “It damn well better be.”

  When he turned up the night of the premiere, he seemed very Americanized, his clothes, his cigarettes, everything but his haircut, which was very long on the sides and combed low on the forehead, flopping in his eyes. Like Belmondo, she thought. Belmondo was the only French star she knew much about, and she’d enjoyed several of his pictures.

  Her feelings were crazy, ridiculous, teen-ager stuff, as she looked down at him from the top of the stairs. He stood in the hall, perfectly quiet and well behaved, and gave his dark topcoat to Macha, who took it away as though she did this all the time. But Rose hadn’t been out with anybody but Seth, except on business dates, for fifteen years.

  She had to steady herself against the staircase wall, feeling the way she used to at sixteen when her mother had been lining up dances for her, with potential college men, before she left Bristol, Connecticut. She, hard-bitten Rose Leclair, who had been through it all. My God, she thought, how ridiculous, meeting a boy for the first time. I may blush.

  And to her great surprise and embarrassment as she came down the stairs, seeing that Jean-Pierre Fauré was a couple of years younger than she was—though he might not grasp this all at once—and seeing that he was tall and really quite good-looking, she found herself blushing; her cheeks grew very hot. She knew that her colour would show because she could produce it at will for pictures. She hadn’t blushed involuntarily since her adolescence.

  He turned from calling some politeness after Macha in a pleasant murmur, and looked at her with a serious expression, an almost placid look, very calm, very composed. His face had none of the anxiety and none of the driven, compelled set and tension of the conscious careerist, a look which she had noticed sometimes in Seth’s face over the last few years.

  Seth and Jean-Pierre Fauré might each resemble Henry Fonda in his own way, purely physically; but they didn’t look like each other. What caught her envious attention immediately was this rested and restful quality in the French director; she didn’t feel invaded or threatened by him, which was rare with men in the picture business. Usually they tried at once to put you down, to show that they were more important than you were, that their salary was bigger, or that if it wasn’t, this was owing to some incomprehensible lapse in the front office. Rose was known in the industry as a big earner, and a lot of men sheered off from her because of it; they didn’t dare compare incomes.

  Jean-Pierre Fauré had made money from his early pictures, those he’d financed himself and therefore owned outright; but he couldn’t possibly ask Rose’s price per picture. No French star or director could, with a single possible exception, not Belmondo or Delon or
Moreau. The market just wasn’t there. He might be holding more capital, but he didn’t make her salary. She took a second look as he came closer. Quiet, he seemed quiet.

  She asked him if he’d like a drink and he refused.

  “We have a few minutes before the car comes around,” she said.

  “Could we sit down and talk?”

  “Yes, certainly,” she said jumpily, “come in here.” On the ground floor of the house to the right of the front door there was a small conservatory with plenty of light and some comfortable chairs. Rose thought it the most agreeable room in the house, and as the rest was all polished up for the party, she led him in there.

  “Have you seen the final print?” he asked casually.

  “Just a couple of rough cuts. I’ve been very busy, I’m afraid.”

  This was a real curve ball for him to handle. She had been very publicly busy, in a rather noisome, and noisy, situation. She had spent the time from mid-December to early March getting her decree, and seeing Seth and Charity safely and irretrievably deposited in each other’s arms. It was all dreadfully, uncomfortably, indecently—what was the word—odiously, horridly public property. She was the betrayed wife, the drab homebody, the superannuated ingénue, everything dully pitiable, and he must be aware of this; it had been in all the papers, all winter.

  “Getting a divorce,” he said surprisingly.

  “That’s right.”

  He smiled for the first time. “Where were you married?”

  “In Palm Springs.” She remembered her father’s regrets, and blurted out, “In the middle of the night by a little man in a nightgown, a justice of the peace or something.”

  His smile grew broad. “Not in a church?” She suspected that she was confirming his worst prejudices against the tone of American life.

  “No, not in church.”

  He stood up suddenly and looked at his watch. “Time to go.” He picked up her wrap and walked her to the door and out, off the plank.

  Going very deliberately across town to the premiere, in the big anonymous hired car, with passers-by putting their faces to the windows to see what dignitaries were inside, Fauré seemed to have divorce and marriage and churches and that sort of thing stuck in his head. Perhaps he had panicked and couldn’t avoid the subject out of pure tactlessness. She had a distinct impression that he’d read up on her background in some file before coming to pick her up, maybe even before agreeing to date her, so she put a leading question. “Why do you ask specifically ‘in church?’”

  He grinned. “We’ve only known each other fifteen minutes.”

  “Oh, say twenty.”

  “Twenty, then. As we only met twenty minutes ago, I have no right to question you, I know that. But I’ll ask anyway because I’m incurably inquisitive. Besides, a star is public property.”

  “No, she isn’t,” said Rose automatically.

  “Oh yes she is! You’re entitled to reasonable privacy, but you must always concede the public the right to curiosity. That’s why I have the right to mention your divorce; it’s a matter of public record and interests me because I’m one of your fans, and I buy tickets. I own part of your life.”

  “Isn’t that awful?” she murmured.

  “I don’t think so. You probably like it; anyway it’s inescapable. You are rich, famous, beautiful, admired, and in return for this you sacrifice your privacy, but only to a certain extent. Some things the public needn’t know; but they will talk about your divorce. When was it?”

  “I got the decree about three weeks ago. It was kind of a shock.”

  “But you’re not in mourning.”

  “I haven’t lost a thing.”

  “A Nevada divorce?”

  “Yes, perfectly legal anywhere.”

  “I’m sure it is, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

  She laughed at him; he wasn’t her idea of a Frenchman. “Aren’t you a prig!”

  “A prig? I don’t know the word.”

  “A snob, a puritan, one of the hundred-percenters.”

  “I see. Un snob, un Tartuffe, des bien-pensants . . . les honnêtes gens.”

  “I think you’ve got it.”

  “I don’t believe in casually entertaining other men’s wives,” he said, “but that’s not entirely to the point because, equally, I don’t believe in divorce. I think that after the first marriage there is no other. If you are once really, sacramentally married . . .” The look on Rose’s face stopped him. “What is it?” he said.

  “Are you religious?”

  “Of course, I’m a Christian. It’s possible to be quite intelligent, you know, even quite modern, and religious as well.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  There was a lot of noise outside the car, coming closer. He laughed at her, and his laughter mixed with the crowd’s. “The religious question is still open,” he said with assurance, “because the evidence isn’t all in. Certainly I believe that marriage can only be dissolved by death, once it is really effected. This is, there’s no such thing, morally and psychologically, as a divorce. Maybe you were never married at all.”

  “Because I wasn’t married in church?”

  “No. It isn’t the priest who marries you. You marry yourselves. In your case there might not have been a fully formed intention, on one side or the other.”

  “This sounds silly.”

  “Correct. Nobody talks like this nowadays. But it’s a perfectly logical attitude to love and marriage, once you allow the notion of a sacramental union. Also it makes marriage and sexuality, and sexual love, very valuable, very important, crucial, holy, like getting born or dying. None of the most important things in life can be done more than once: birth, growing up, aging, dying, choosing a profession. And marriage is the same. It seems to me an advance on the idea that it can be accomplished an indefinite number of times, depending on the state of one’s glands. It makes it worth more.”

  “Is sex that important?”

  “Sex isn’t the whole of marriage, but it’s the necessary condition. I’d say that sex, as the physical consummation of mutual love, is of enormous importance. It’s as valuable as religious practice and art, one of the three most important things we can do, of vital importance. I can’t express the value perfectly, but that’s what my films are about.”

  “But you aren’t married.”

  “No. I’ve been foolishly promiscuous.”

  “That seems inconsistent.”

  “It’s worse than that, it’s wrong. I mean bad. I shouldn’t have done it. I hope not to do it again.”

  Nobody had said to her for years that what they had done was wrong and that they regretted it.

  “You likely had good reasons,” she said, trying to be helpful.

  “There are no good reasons for bad actions,” he said.

  Rose was horrified at this view. “Oh, but there are.”

  He gave a negligent laugh, plainly not taking her answer seriously.

  “Don’t patronize me,” she said. “I’m just as clever as you, and more important.”

  The noise around the car was shocking. “See?” she said. “Nobody in that crowd knows who you are; they’re screaming at me.”

  He had to raise his voice. “You’re quite right. You’re much more important than I am, both here and in France. There, your pictures earn more than mine, even though mine are the native product.”

  “Are the earnings the only measurement?”

  “Earnings are probably the most accurate measurement of a great film, over the very long run. I don’t want to make coterie films. I want to be seen by the great public; that’s why I’m looking for a star.”

  Their chauffeur turned around and spoke. “This is as close as I can get, Miss Leclair. The cameras are over there, and the interviewers are in the bullpen, up back of the foyer. Mr. Lene
han is with them, and he asked me to ask you not to speak to anybody till he sees you. He has it all planned.”

  The crowd was calling for her in cadence. “We want Rose; we want Rose; we want Rose; we want Rose.” As she stuck a leg out of the car, she shouted to Jean-Pierre over her shoulder, “They’ve got it all planned.” She caught his answering grin and the encouraging nod of his head, and then she launched herself forward into the uproar.

  The first thing she saw was an enormous horse’s behind, a horse’s enormous behind, the horse was enormous, his behind was enormous, the noise was enormous, so was the occasion. This horse had somehow jockeyed between their car and the curb, and there was a mounted policeman on it with some kind of bullhorn or megaphone in his hand. He waved this cone, looking down at Rose, and then hailed her through it, and this sound too was very great.

  “GO AROUND BEHIND ME, MISS LECLAIR.”

  She did as she was told. Coming out from behind the horse’s ass, she stepped into a huge pool of coloured light. They had rigged floodlights over the entrance, which changed colour constantly, and there was a crazily mixing and blending wash of colour at her feet, green orange red blue yellow, on the pavement and sidewalk. Together with the noise and the intrusive horse and the shoves from behind that Jean Pierre gave her, the whole impression was that of a blurred confusion.

  Her dress was simple and not hobbling; she’d picked it on purpose to allow freedom of movement. Sometimes in a premiere crowd you had to make a quick change of position, and if your dress had bits of stuff hanging loose here and there you might in an instant be stripped bare. So she wore a simple sheath and no expensive accessories which might be grabbed at close quarters by souvenir hunters and carried off, to her financial loss.

  She could walk easily in her sheath, and run if necessary, and felt no special hesitation about mounting the sidewalk at her handsome escort’s side. She looked around through the maze of coloured light for the TV cameras and placed two of them. There must be more, she thought. You’re here to be seen, so be seen. Where are the others? Aha, aha. Now she had four of them, and that was par for the course out here. More inside. She took Jean-Pierre by the arm; he stood storklike on one foot, then on the other, and she knew exactly how he would look in the TV news clips, awkward and unused to his evening clothes. They always did, even people in the business, when they weren’t used to performing. Her own training, more than fifteen years of it, made her move and hold herself firmly erect, exhibiting herself, her modest décolletage and the fit of the sheath over her hips, and her very feminine stride. She walked and turned, lifted her breasts, smiled, pulled poor Fauré here and there, as though she were the director and not he.