‘I’m sorry you had so much trouble. Really sorry.’
‘Why were Nell and Aida Young stonewalling me, Rosie?’
‘I don’t think they were.’
‘You married or something?’ Johnny asked, his voice suddenly sharp.
Rosie took a deep breath. ‘I was. I’m separated. I’m getting a divorce.’
‘I see. What’s your Paris number?’
Rosie gave it to him, then said, ‘When exactly do you think you’ll be in Paris?’
‘I’m not sure. About the middle of January, I guess. I hope. I’ll let you know. Have a nice Christmas, honey, and I sure am glad I found you.’
‘And you have a happy Christmas. Thanks for calling, Johnny.’
Rosie put the phone down, and stood with her hand on it for a moment, her face reflective.
From the door of the sitting room, Collie said, ‘I wasn’t eavesdropping, but I couldn’t help hearing, Rosie. Are you really going to divorce Guy?’
Swinging around, Rosie stared at Collie for a long moment, and then she slowly nodded her head. ‘Your father and I discussed it the day I arrived. He brought it up, and I realized, as we talked, that he was making a lot of sense.’
‘All I can say is thank God!’ Collie came into the sitting room and embraced Rosie. ‘It’s about time you had your freedom. I’m so glad you’re going to take this step. It’s long overdue.’
‘You don’t think Guy will come for Christmas, do you?’ Rosie asked worriedly.
Collie shook her head with some vehemence. ‘I doubt it. I don’t think even he would be that crass, I really don’t. He must know he put his foot in it once and for all, and that he’s not welcome.’
‘I guess you’re right, I hope you are.’ Rosie sounded doubtful.
‘He won’t come,’ Collie reassured her in a firm voice.
‘I suppose I will have to see Guy at some point, tell him I’m going to divorce him,’ Rosie murmured, heading towards the ladder.
‘I don’t know why. My brother doesn’t deserve any kind of consideration from you, in my opinion, anyway. He hasn’t treated you in a nice way. Not at all.’
‘That’s true. I guess I won’t see him then. But I will start the divorce proceedings.’
Collie gave Rosie a hard stare, and a small smile pulled at the corners of her mouth, as she said, ‘Was that Johnny the famous singer who just telephoned you?’
‘Yes. He’s coming to Paris in the new year. He wants me to have dinner with him.’
‘I think that’s wonderful, Rosie darling. Toujours l’amour… toujours l’amour.’
Rosie stared back at her sister-in-law, and she felt herself blushing; she opened her mouth to say something as Annie hurried into the room.
‘Madame de Montfleurie, this package just came for you. By special courier. From California. I signed for it.’
‘Thank you, Annie,’ Rosie murmured as she took the package from her.
Annie turned to leave, then stopped and peered at Collie. ‘You look pale, tired. Dominique has made a wonderful soup for lunch. Des légumes, un poulet… un grand potage, très bon.’ With these words Annie disappeared.
As she opened the package, Rosie exclaimed to Collie, ‘It’s from Gavin in Los Angeles! Oh great, it’s the script of Napoleon and Josephine! And there’s something else.’ Rosie placed the screenplay on the step ladder, and examined the other item—a box, obviously a gift, wrapped in heavy blue paper and tied with gold ribbon. Attached to the box was a small envelope. Taking the card out, she read it aloud to Collie: ‘Thank you, Rosie, for the most beautiful costumes ever, for being such a great trouper, and for being my friend. Happy Christmas and much love, Gavin.’
‘How nice of him,’ Collie said. ‘Open the gift, Rosie.’
‘Maybe I should wait, put it under the tree and open it on Christmas Eve when we give out all the presents to everyone.’
‘Don’t be silly. I’m dying to see what he’s sent you. Let’s look at it now.’
Rosie tore off the paper, and held a dark-blue cardboard box with the initials HW in the bottom right-hand corner. Inside the box was a leather case with the same initials stamped in gold. ‘It’s from Harry Winston,’ Rosie said, awestruck, and lifted the lid. She gasped when she saw what was inside. ‘Oh Collie, look! The most beautiful South Sea pearls I’ve ever seen.’ As she spoke she lifted them out, showed them to Collie, whose eyes also widened.
‘They’re real,’ Collie exclaimed. ‘They must be real if they’re from Harry Winston.’
Rosie nodded. ‘Gavin always gives me something very special when we finish a movie, but never anything quite like these pearls before. Look how beautiful they are in the light.’ She held them up in front of the window, then passed them to Collie.
‘They’re fabulous,’ Collie murmured, her voice also awed. ‘And obviously very valuable.’
‘Yes, they must be. I must call Gavin later, to thank him. It’s still the middle of the night in Los Angeles, three o’clock, actually. I’ll put through a call this evening around six our time. It’ll be nine in the morning there.’
‘Here you are,’ Collie said, handing the string of pearls back to Rosie. ‘Now, if you’ve got five minutes, can we discuss what I’m going to wear for Father’s wedding? I understand from Lisette that she and Yvonne will be dressed in cherry-red velvet. But not I—I hope.’
Rosie laughed. ‘No. Two bridesmaids only, no matrons of honour, I said that to Kyra last night. I thought you and I could wear something we already owned. To tell you the truth, it’s going to be tough enough for me to make the two dresses for the girls in time.’
‘Perhaps Yvonne can help you.’
‘She volunteered, and certainly she can sew the Juliet caps. I’ve already ordered the fabric from Madame Solange in Paris, and she’s sending it by overnight courier. It should arrive tomorrow, and I’ll start the dresses at once.’
‘You’ll have your hands full,’ Collie murmured, sitting down on the sofa, watching Rosie as she climbed back onto the ladder. ‘Their marriage is only ten days away.’
‘I know.’ Rosie straightened the holly spray, and eyed it, then she said over her shoulder to Collie, ‘I’ll get the dresses done, even if I have to stay up all night, every night, to finish.’
‘I know that, Rosie. There’s nobody like you… you’re quite amazing.’
TWENTY-FIVE
The skies of Paris were an etching in grisaille, a monochrome of sombre greys. Overcast, they seemed to threaten rain.
Gavin Ambrose stood at the sitting-room window of his suite in the Ritz Hotel, morosely gazing out. The weather was bleak, dreary, on this Sunday morning and not a bit inviting.
The day and evening loomed ahead before he caught the Concorde to New York on Monday. It seemed like an endless expanse of time to him; he didn’t know what to do with himself until then.
Unfortunately, Rosie was noticeably absent, gone to the Loire for Christmas. Apart from her, the only people he knew in Paris were a couple of executives from Billancourt Studios. He had seen them on Friday and Saturday; now, today, he was at a loose end.
The prospect of being alone alarmed and depressed Gavin.
This was unusual for him. He was known as a loner, enjoyed his own company, had never minded solitude in the past. But lately he had come to dread it. When he was alone he had time to think; for months his thoughts had been disturbing.
His life was a mess. His marriage was in shreds. All he had was his work. At least he loved that. It was the essence of him, his entire reason for being. One of the reasons he went from film to film without a break was to keep busy. That way he was able to avoid dealing with his personal problems; nor did he have to confront his private demons.
He had begun to acknowledge, if only to himself, what a terrible sham his marriage was. There was nothing there. Only a black hole. Gaping. Bottomless. There was no emotion. Not even hatred. Only indifference. Louise and he had nothing between them, not even the sembla
nce of a relationship. He wondered now if there had ever been one.
Louise was a self-important, self-involved little bitch, with very few brains and absolutely no understanding of him, his work, his demanding career, his life in general. Or any understanding of anybody else. She was singularly dim-witted in that respect.
His fame didn’t mean all that much to him, it was merely a by-product of what he did—his acting. But his fame had gone to her head. Also, for a long time she had had no interest in him as a man. Greener pastures beckoned. Not that he cared. He was guilty, too, in one sense, because he had no real interest in her either.
Hundreds of times he had asked himself why he had ever married Louise. Foolish question that; he knew the answer only too well. He had married her because she was pregnant. Her pregnancy had turned into a horror: a terrible, heartbreaking tragedy.
He had stayed with Louise because of this. To see her through it all, to see her through her physical and psychic pain. Sincerely wanting to help her to heal, he had also realized he would heal himself just by helping her.
Inevitably, she became pregnant again, and when David was born, almost eight years ago, he had fallen in love with his son. He had stayed in a bad marriage because of his child.
Through her infidelities, Louise had elected to betray their marriage when David was still a toddler. He had never tried to stop her, having ceased to care what she did, and anyway they were no longer sharing a bed by then.
He wondered, suddenly, what would happen to David if they got a divorce. Would the child become the victim of a virulent tug of war? Gavin’s mind closed down on him. He simply couldn’t cope with that thought. Not now. Not today. Not ever.
You’ll wait it out, he told himself. Surely, if he waited long enough, Louise would be forced to ask for the divorce. She was on the brink already. He was fully aware how heavily involved she was with the senator she saw in Washington. The widowed senator. The rich senator. The socially-correct senator. Allan Turner was the perfect mate for Louise.
Yes, he would wait it out. Then, at least, he might be able to dictate some of the terms. He had no intention of trying to take the child away from her; that would be unconscionable. Ready access to David, and joint custody, that was what he wanted, and he aimed to get it.
Cursing mildly under his breath, Gavin turned away from the window, crossed the floor, went into the bedroom, glancing at his watch as he did. It was almost eleven o’clock.
He needed to get out, to breathe fresh air, to walk in order to shed these dismaying thoughts. But going out presented something of a problem. One of the disadvantages of his kind of fame as an actor was high visibility and an all-too-recognizable face.
He put on a scarf, a felt fedora, and shrugged himself into his cashmere overcoat, added dark glasses and peered in the nearest mirror. He grinned. He didn’t even recognize himself. Nor was he recognized by anyone else when he went through the lobby and out into the Place Vendôme.
***
Paris was not a city Gavin knew well, but since he always stayed at the Ritz, the area surrounding the hotel was familiar to him, and he set off in the direction of the Place de la Concorde. Once he was outside, walking briskly, his dourness and discontent with himself began to evaporate.
Gavin soon found he was focusing his thoughts on Napoleon and Josephine. He was seeing Paris through the eyes of a film-maker, and also through the eyes of Napoleon, who had done so much to change the architectural face of Paris and make it look the way it did today.
Gavin knew from his research that Napoleon had wanted to subsidize French architecture for ten years, French sculpture for twenty years. To do so he had planned to build four triumphal arches, celebrating the battles of Marengo and Austerlitz, peace and religion.
But in the end he had built only two, the smaller one commemorating Austerlitz, the larger one the Grande Armée, ‘the army I have the honour to command,’ he had said to his architect.
Now, standing at the bottom of the Champs-Élysées, Gavin stared up the long and elegant boulevard, his eyes trained on that great arch built by Napoleon and dedicated to his beloved army. The Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile looked just the way he had wanted it to look, the Emperor having remarked that ‘a monument dedicated to the Grande Armée must be large, simple, majestic and borrow nothing from antiquity.’
And that is exactly what his architect Chalgrin gave him, Gavin decided, as he continued to walk up the Champs-Élysées, heading towards it, absently glancing at the Christmas decorations decking the street as he walked.
For Gavin, making this particular film was the fulfilment of a childhood dream. Even when he was a teenager he had been intrigued by men of achievement and great deeds, and especially by Napoleon.
As a kid growing up in New York he had been drawn to history books, wanting to know more about the men who had put their inimitable and indelible stamp on the world. His fascination had known no bounds. What had made them tick? Why were they different from other men? What had their emotional lives been like? Why had they loved the women they had loved? Or bonded with the men they had bonded with? What inner force had motivated them, driven them to such heights? What was the secret ingredient within their make-up that had lifted them out of the norm? Very simply, why had they been greater than their contemporaries?
One thing he had discovered, much to his amazement, was that the men who had been giants in their lifetimes and become immortal after death had been only too human and remarkably flawed.
But it was these men of historical greatness who had been his heroes, not football players, baseball stars or rock musicians, whom his friends had constantly put on pedestals. He had admired a few actors, of course, being an aspiring actor himself. Paul Newman and Spencer Tracy were a couple of the very special ones who were in a league of their own.
Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock was hard to top; so was Newman in Fort Apache, the Bronx. The latter had been released in 1981, and he had seen it four times in as many days, gripped by Newman’s performance. The movie, about a precinct in the Bronx and the cops who ran it, had had an immense impact on him from an acting point of view.
The Bronx. What memories that name conjured up for him. He had grown up in the Belmont section of the Bronx, not half so tough or rough as the South Bronx, where the movie was set. But what a far cry his childhood and teenage years in Belmont were from Paris and his life today and his immense fame.
Sometimes he wondered how it had all happened.
One moment he had been unknown, a struggling actor, counting himself lucky when he got any kind of job, whether off-Broadway or in television. The next he was a star of the Broadway stage at the age of twenty-five, being hailed as the greatest talent to hit the boards since Brando had immortalized the role of Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar in 1947. He had always questioned that comparison, then and now, since his debut had been in that very role. It had been an easy and obvious comparison for the critics. Did he deserve it?
The year had been 1983. An eventful year. His son had been born, Hollywood had beckoned, and he had gone. And for several years thereafter he had rushed back and forth between the two coasts until he had finally settled in Hollywood. But he had always been known as an East Coast ‘ethnic’ actor, lumped together with Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Armand Assante. Not bad company to be in, since they were all great, although it was Pacino whom he admired the most these days. He was brilliant, mesmerizing, heroic, the consummate actor.
The odd thing was, Gavin Ambrose had never expected his breakthrough to happen the way it had, with such suddenness, without warning, and he had been momentarily stunned. It was as if he had been catapulted up, had gone flying higher and higher into the sky, and thank God he had never come down, had never landed on his ass with a thud. At least, not so far. A wry smile slid onto his face at this thought. Success to him could be categorized as ephemeral, in a certain sense. In his business, you were only as good as your last movie, and wasn’t that the
truth really.
Gavin was glad about his success. He loved the work he did, was so passionate about it he was consumed, and it would have been unnatural not to want the recognition, the applause. The only regret he had was that his mother and grandfather had not lived long enough to see it, to enjoy the fruits of his success with him. By the time he got his first break in Streetcar, which had resulted in instant stardom, they were both gone, having died in the same year—1976—when he was eighteen years old.
Tony Ambrosini, his father, had passed away after a heart attack when he was only nine, and his mother, Adelia, and he had gone to live with his father’s parents. She simply couldn’t cut it financially on her own.
The senior Ambrosinis had welcomed them lovingly, but sadly his Grandmother Graziella had died within seven months of her son. His grandfather and his mother had consoled each other in their mutual grief, and had given moral and financial support to each other. He had become the centre and focus of their lives, and they had doted on him.
His mother had worked in the costume-jewellery department of Macy’s, his grandfather had been a master cabinetmaker, and they had pooled their resources, shared the responsibility of raising him. As a family they hadn’t been rich, but they hadn’t been dirt-poor either, and somehow they had managed. There was no bitterness in Gavin, and he remembered his youth with affection.
His mother and his grandfather had given him an enormous amount of love and encouragement. Home had been comfortable if not luxurious, and his Grandfather Giovanni had spoiled him, had enjoyed taking him shopping every Saturday to the huge Italian food market on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. It was here that Giovanni had purchased favourite delicacies, imported from the Old Country, to share with his grandson and Adelia.
But it was his mother who had taken him to the movies from the time he was very young. This was her special treat to herself twice a week, and it was his, too. It was from the movies that he had learned so much about acting, watching those men up there on the silver screen doing their stuff. Later he became a devotee of Lee Strasberg and a student of his until his death in February of 1982. But it was really those early days at the movies when he was small that had engendered in him the desire to be an actor.
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