Diamonds at the Lost and Found

by Sarah Aspinall

  The Queen Mary liner had been hastily requisitioned to take nearly two thousand brides to their new lives waiting for them in America. The ship seemed massive, towering over Audrey and Sadie as they stood among the crowds waiting to wave off their loved ones. They had only a few moments before Sadie was herded away. The boat was swarming with women, some holding babies and small children, some leaning out of portholes, as the long mournful horn sounded and the tugs began to take her out to sea.

  Standing watching the great ship sail out reawakened Audrey’s desire to know more about this vast continent that she was half in love with, from the movies and from the long sighs of the convalescing airmen she had met, pouring out to her their dreams of home. Their descriptions of the bustling snow-covered streets of their hometowns, shining with lights at Christmas time, or the sounds of kids playing baseball on summer nights in the Midwest, all fed her hungry curiosity and she longed to see it all for herself.

  The crossing took just over a week, and before long Sadie was sending Audrey and her mother long letters. She enclosed the daily on-board newspaper Wives Aweigh, in which she had written an article about the Palace Club and Audrey’s day out with Clark Gable. She explained the holes in the newspaper were where she had torn out the recipes for suggested meals to cook for your new husband, including, she said, ‘breakfast pancakes, meat loaf and corn fritters’.

  Sadie was relieved to find Mike eagerly awaiting her amid the chaos of the Red Cross staff, who were attempting to reunite hundreds of brides with their luggage and husbands. Luckily Mike seemed just the same as ever, and Sadie said she was very happy in her nice little apartment with its modern all-American kitchen, making breakfast pancakes for her all-American husband.

  But her most exciting news was that she was now sending Audrey a ticket to join her there for a holiday, and to travel on that very same ocean liner. Mike knew how much Sadie had wanted Audrey to come to see her in her new home, and so he had saved for it, and here it was, along with the latest green nylon stockings that girls were queuing up for and which wouldn’t reach Britain for a long time.

  Audrey unwrapped the emerald-green stockings, and stared at the ticket feeling torn between powerful excitement and sadness. She only wished the timing had all been different. But when James heard the news he surprised her by encouraging her to go, believing that this would give her just the adventure she needed before they married and started a family. This was an idea that she could hardly resist, although it would be a wrench to be apart from him. She only had the money for a short holiday, and to have at least seen New York would be something; the rest of America would wait.

  Her mother travelled with her down to the Southampton docks to see her off. The long tangle of streamers linked those up on the ship’s decks with their loved ones waving and weeping down below. A band played, and they arrived to find the gangway crowded with fans and reporters – the actor Rex Harrison was boarding the liner.

  Audrey had bought an emerald-green suit and hat to match the new green stockings. She now tapped the photographer of Illustrated Magazine on the shoulder.

  ‘Excuse me, I’m a newspaper journalist myself, but I can offer you a bit of a scoop if you are interested?’

  ‘Always interested in a scoop, miss.’

  She pointed down to her legs.

  ‘Just something for the ladies, but these happen to be the first green nylons in Britain – another sign that colour is coming back into our lives now that the war is over.’

  The picture he took shows her posing beside the gangway with complete confidence, her foot forward in her best beauty-queen pose, as if the surrounding crowds gathered to see off Rex Harrison were really all there just for her. As Harrison turned to look, Audrey called out to him, like an old friend, ‘I must say, Rex, I thought Anna and the King was divine.’

  She kept that copy of the magazine, sent on to New York by her mother, showing herself in a full-page spread with a caption saying, ‘The First Girl in Green Nylons – Miss Audrey Miller Boards the Queen Mary for New York.’ The serendipity of that moment seemed to hint at what was to come. I knew this story well. I longed to know what had happened next, and why she had wept that day at the beach beside the Nag’s Head Casino.

  10

  The Further Adventures of Audrey

  MORE GREYHOUND BUSES, more long roads that stretched to the horizon, and more stops in bus stations with smelly toilets and nasty sandwiches, but at least we were leaving the Kill Devil Hills.

  We drove into Los Angeles to stay somewhere that my mother seemed very excited about, called the Roosevelt Hotel, which was right in Hollywood. When we arrived it was disappointing; ‘it had gone way downhill’ she told me, and the lobby was now full of young women who were ‘ladies of the night’. She was too scared of the busy streets to try driving in Los Angeles, and she explained that the place was ‘impossible without a car’ so we wouldn’t be staying long. But fiddle-de-dee, we would soon be on a bus again anyway, travelling somewhere else to see a lady called Miss Gillette, but for now we were here in this place I’d heard so much about.

  We dressed up in our best clothes, made our hair flicky with Carmen rollers then walked down Hollywood Boulevard together looking swanky. She told me stories about Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and pointed out the big yellow stars in the pavement and did funny impersonations of the people whose names were written on the slabs. She acted out scenes from films they had been in and people stopped to watch, laughing.

  I could tell she was feeling sorry that the Kill Devil Hills had not been much fun for either of us, and she was now trying to make it up to me, so we held hands and sang songs, and she hugged me a lot, calling me Sallylicious and My Poppet. I knew that when she was happy and looking forward to something it was easier for her to love me.

  We sat in a fancy restaurant for dinner and, as she was in such a good mood, I asked her, ‘Tell me again how you met Miss Gillette?’ This was the lady who we were going to see, and I’d only heard fragments of this tale before and never quite joined up the pieces.

  ‘It was on board the ship that I first met her. The ticket that Auntie Sadie had sent me was just tourist class and I was dying to see the really swanky parts of the ship, the First Class restaurants with all the fancy people and lovely ballrooms.

  ‘At night I’d wander the decks, and would see movie stars like Rex Harrison as he smoked a cigarette up on the top deck, but I had no access to go up there.

  ‘Then I made friends with the ship’s butcher, as it was his job to walk the First Class doggy passengers on the sports deck each morning, so he knew all the gossip. You learn that as a social columnist – how to find the person with the inside track. So I asked him about the dogs and their owners and made notes about them in my reporter’s notebook.

  ‘“Well, this little fluffy one belongs to Miss Gillette – you know, like the razor blades,” he told me, and I asked him, “And are the dogs like their owners at all, would you say?”

  ‘“Well, he’s a nice little dog, and Miss G is a very nice older lady.”’

  Matching dogs to their owners became a sport; she waited, chatting to her friend the butcher one day, until Miss Gillette, the razor-blade lady, came to pick up her dog, then Audrey befriended her.

  At first the ship had just felt like a floating city, a huge immovable thing past which the ocean rolled, but then out in the Gulf Stream they hit a winter storm. The liner began a slow pitching, and soon many of the passengers disappeared into the cabins feeling unwell. As First Class rapidly emptied, Miss G, who was made of sturdier stuff, found herself deserted by her friends, and so made Audrey her constant companion; together they strolled the more elegant of the lounges and cocktail bars and the lavish ballroom with its nightly orchestra and dances.

  Miss G was a rather splendidly handsome woman who had never found a man good enough, and busied herself with gossip and philanthropy. She hosted her legendary lunches in Los Angeles, and loved to name-drop all her famous gue
sts. As the weather improved Audrey continued to spend time with her amusing new friend, who was tough, and had a cutting tongue, but showed Audrey real kindness. Afternoons were spent playing cards with Miss G and her companions in the First Class lounge as they chatted about their well-known acquaintances. One of Miss G’s oldest friends in Los Angeles was Audrey’s role model, the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and Audrey entertained everyone with a version of the popular song ‘A Hat for Hedda Hopper’, using whatever was handy to assemble into a funny hat.

  Take a table-tennis bat, and here’s a crab –

  That’s quite a whopper!

  Add some flowers and what have you got –

  It’s a hat for Hedda Hopper!

  Miss Gillette took a picture of Audrey in one of these creations to show Hedda when she got home, and she made Audrey parade around the whole First Class dining room wearing the crab-shell and bat hat to everyone’s amusement. By the time they arrived in America, Audrey’s collection of contacts had grown considerably.

  In New York a dense fog had descended and the sights that Audrey had crowded on deck to see, the Statue of Liberty and beyond it the skyscrapers of Manhattan, were shrouded in an icy mist. For some time the liner couldn’t enter the harbour and Audrey just stood there, pulling her coat tightly around her, as their foghorn and the neighbouring boats wailed to each other across the bay. Then suddenly the ship was on her way, so full of life, as everyone made ready for the arrival. At last, through patchy fog, she saw it, the tall statue looming beside them, holding her lamp aloft and the lights of the city beyond, all twinkling through the winter gloom. She could hardly breathe, it felt so unreal that she was actually here in America.

  Crowds waited to greet them on the long balcony overlooking the harbour. Sadie and Mike excitedly pushed their way through to Audrey as she stepped off the ship, waving goodbye to her travel companions.

  Sadie and Mike’s apartment was not as she had imagined, which was something up among the skyscrapers or overlooking Central Park, but on the corner of a modest block on a side street of a working-class suburb. Every morning of her holiday she would leave early with Mike, who travelled in to his job in a big hotel, and when she emerged into Manhattan she would marvel at ‘the Wonder City’ as it honked, roared and rushed past her.

  Each day she felt more at home, buying the glossy pretzels and malted milk from the street carts, inhaling the New York smells of fresh bagels and salty air blown in from the water. She loved to walk in the deep shadows of the tall buildings and feel the breathless flurry of the crowds all about her, the exhilaration of people as they dashed into doorways, cabs and subway entrances.

  ‘Of course in my fantasies I was in the New York of the movies,’ she would say of this time. ‘I was off sipping Martini at the Copacabana Bar with Cary Grant, not sitting each night in Mike and Sadie’s little apartment with our TV dinners on a tray. But how was I going to change that with only a few dimes in my pocket?’

  One day she found herself outside Macy’s department store, and saw people crowding in, the air buzzing with excitement. She followed the crush of jostling shoppers to the ballroom, and squeezed through to the front to see what was happening, then watched intently as a line of girls stepped up to audition for a radio show called Queen for a Day. She read the flyer saying that one of the prizes was ‘Dinner with Your Favorite Movie Star!’ When the radio host asked if anyone else wanted to take part, Audrey quickly raised her hand and joined the line.

  That evening she decided not to tell Sadie and Mike that she had passed the audition and won a chance to compete in the final the following day. She put on her lucky green suit and stockings and set off with Mike for the city in the morning, although she was jittery with nerves as she made her way back to the Macy’s ballroom. The show was a live broadcast and when her time came the hospitality girl counted her in and pushed her forward.

  She took a deep breath and stepped up to the podium, telling herself that this wasn’t so very different to being lifted onto that kitchen table back in Bootle as a little girl to ‘do a turn’. She knew she must give it her full PERSONALITY.

  ‘So, Audrey Miller, why do you want to be Queen for a Day?’ the host asked.

  She began with the story of her escape from her Bootle childhood, where ‘on a Saturday night the streets echoed with all the drunken singing, as I ran for my life when the police saw me coming out of the pub with the bets …’

  She talked about the sighs of ‘those young airmen, who would pour out their dreams of home’ as they recovered from their injuries, and of the many invitations she’d been given to come and visit them in cities and farms across America.

  Audrey, New York, c.1946.

  She described the moment when ‘who should jump out of that jeep but Rhett Butler, right in front of me, right out of the movie screen and into real life …’ to offer her his personal invitation to come and see him too … and how she longed to take up that invitation …

  The applause at the end was heartfelt, as the commentator announced that Miss Audrey Miller was the winner, and the host signed off with, ‘This is Jack Bailey, wishing we could make every single woman a Queen, for every single day.’

  Louis Jourdan.

  Her first excited question was about the prize of dinner with a real movie star, but she was told this did not include a trip to Hollywood to meet Mr Gable. Instead she was offered dinner with a young actor who was here in New York, and given a free makeover to prepare for it. She spent the day being coiffed and groomed in the store’s beauty parlour and picked out the perfect black dress with a fishtail, and was given jewellery to wear with it. Then she was taken by limousine to a supper club where a grand dance floor revolved to the sound of a big-band orchestra. She was, for once, almost frozen with nerves as the publicist walked her across to join Louis Jourdan, a handsome young French man at a secluded table.

  She soon found that Louis was easy company; he was young and, although he’d just starred in a Hitchcock film, he was still new to the film business. They chatted about their lives, their war experiences, his time in the French Resistance, and his impressions of America. The club had a magician who came over to their table and conjured a red rose from behind her ear, which she later pressed to send in one of her love letters to James. At the end of the evening Louis gave her a signed photograph and wrote on the back the name of the restaurant he had told her about. ‘To Audrey, remember – Antoine’s in New Orleans, see you there to eat snails! Your friend, Louis!’

  Her thoughts of seeing any more of America could only be fantasies, as she knew that she had just enough money to see her through her remaining couple of weeks. She was barely managing on her small amount of savings as it was, and James was waiting.

  Then, as the Macy’s publicist put her into a car to take her home, she asked Audrey if she wanted to hand over the jewellery, just to keep in the Macy’s safe. Up to this moment Audrey had missed the fact that the little diamond pendant at her throat was so valuable. The publicist told her that, if she preferred, she could return it to Macy’s and take the cash instead.

  The next morning Audrey went into Macy’s and was handed a banker’s draft for three hundred dollars, a small fortune. Her decision was made in an instant, and in fact was hardly a decision at all. She went to the station and bought a train ticket to Los Angeles. Then she returned to Jackson Heights, packed her bag and sat down to share all the excitement with James.

  I know, my darling, that you will understand why I am staying away for a little longer, before we settle down to our wonderful new life together. It will all be something to tell our children.

  She signed the letter ‘your very own Queen for a Day, and soon to be your Queen for ever’.

  Sadie and Mike waved her off anxiously, making her promise to send addresses and news from wherever she was.

  I liked this story, but I still wanted to know if she had seen Miss G again, after the cruise ship? She was tired and would only say that yes, sh
e had, but she would tell me about that another time.

  11

  Palm Springs

  WE FINALLY TOOK a Greyhound bus through California to meet Miss Gillette who was now very old and lived in a place called Palm Springs. For once somewhere looked like its name, with beautiful homes with soft green lawns, roads lined with tall palm trees and rose coloured mountains in the distance.

  We were picked up from the bus station by a chauffeur in uniform called Nick. He was very small and looked just like My Favorite Martian, a TV show I liked, and I thought he was very funny. He described himself as Miss G’s ‘close companion’ and when we arrived at the palatial house, where Miss G was in bed, he showed us around proudly as if it was all his own.

  He took us through the rooms, telling us about each object, which French Impressionist painted this painting, or how some desk came from ‘a real French chateau’. There were stories about how Queen Alexandra had had the tea set commissioned for her trousseau, which Nick explained meant when she got married, but my mother was tired and said afterwards that she could have done without the tour, and that he was nice, but ‘terribly camp’.

  Our bedroom was lovely, with gardens outside and sweeping views. In the morning a maid showed us to a dining room where our breakfast was all laid out, and Miss Gillette joined us for coffee. She seemed very pleased to see my mother but told us that she got tired easily, but that Nick would be all ours during the visit and he would be our tour guide. My mother didn’t seem very pleased about this and was already restless. It was just like her to want to be somewhere else, even when we had just arrived at the place she had been so keen to get to.