Lace

by Shirley Conran

  Then, one evening, Judy telephoned and said that she had arranged for Kate to interview one of her clients, a once fairly famous ballerina, now over the hill, who was heading for London.

  “What?” Kate squeaked with horror. “You wouldn’t dare?”

  “Why not give it a try?” New York sounded faint, a million miles away. There was a transatlantic hiss, then Judy shouted, “I’ll kill you if you don’t, after I’ve fixed it.”

  “I’ll kill you if you do,” yelled Kate, “and she’ll kill both of us.”

  “No, she won’t. Remember that Joujou knows nothing about London or anyone in it. Or anything else. And as a matter of fact she’s quite fun.”

  “Well, what would I do? How would I go about it?”

  “Just ring the Ritz and make an appointment with her secretary. I’ve told her you work for the Globe.”

  “But I don’t!”

  “Then avoid saying that you do. But they’re expecting you to telephone and for Chrissake act cool. Don’t let Joujou guess it’s your first interview. She thinks you’re a top magazine writer, and I’ve seen enough top magazine writers to know that you could be.”

  “But I can’t!”

  “Where are your British guts? The Dunkirk spirit? The anatomical area that we Americans label your backbone? Stop dithering and just get on with it, Kate. What’s so terrible about failing, anyway? Not that you will, Kate.”

  Judy’s bark sounded faint, but Kate could hear that it would be infinitely less alarming for her to face Joujou than to face Judy if she didn’t. After another expensive pause, Kate capitulated.

  Wearing a pale-pink, moon-girl, thigh-length Courrèges tunic dress with shiny white vinyl boots, Kate sat on the edge of Joujou’s bed, notebook open. She felt breathless, dizzy and apprehensive. Now more of a TV glamour personality than a ballerina, Joujou had beautifully streaked blond hair and very good skin: she had looked thirty-five for twenty years. The picture of domesticity, she sat demurely in a persimmon brocade armchair, glasses at the end of her nose, delicately dipping into a little sewing kit. She was mending some love beads that had been torn off in a brawl the night before.

  The bed was littered with diamonds and date-stamped photographs of jewelry. “I have to have photos because it’s a rule in the States that you’ve got to prove you’ve taken them out when you bring them back,” explained Joujou. She nipped into the bathroom, shed her caftan for a towel, returned, swept Kate, the diamonds and the photos off the bed and slid onto it herself. A masseuse started to attack Joujou’s right calf. Without being asked, Joujou disclosed that the secret of life was not to look too thin or too young and never to nag. “Every man I meet who wants to marry me says, ‘Joujou, I used to love my wife, but she nags me so, and after a day at the office I can’t take it anymore.’ Ze ozzer zing zat men love is to enjoy their meals, so they can’t stand women who are dieting under their noses. And a woman can’t be too thin if she wants a good face, so she has to choose. I am eating my ass off, but carefully.”

  Joujou recalled occasions only by the dress she had worn. What happened when she met General de Gaulle? “Oh, I wore my brown lace.” How did she like to spend her day? “Shopping. Always. Me and clothes, it is a love affair. I have brought twenty-eight feet with me,” she said, jumping up from the bed and shunting Kate into her dressing room. Exquisite garments hung on coat hangers from a twenty-eight-foot length of clothes rail.

  “Not much when I travel. I prefer to be chic, not showy,” explained Joujou, “I buy everything from Christian Dior, my favourite dressmaker. What size? I’m size eight, dahleeng. Well, maybe size nine, no, to be honest, I’m a ten.” She held matchless, pale-gray chinchilla in front of her towel. “I have the most beautiful clothes in the world. That’s why I work, to pay for them. But because of the work I don’t have enough time to shop. I don’t have time to try them on, you see.” She cast a speculative look at Kate. “You should never go alone to shop, you know. They persuade you into buying things that are bad for a big ass—I have a big ass and so do you swidhart, never mind, the men love it.”

  Another speculative glance, then Joujou said in an offhand voice, “You are lucky, you are my size.”

  Kate looked surprised. “But I’m a size twelve, and only that with difficulty,” she said.

  Joujou looked carefully at her. “Well, try some of my clothes.”

  She was right. They were the same size. “Now we can buy some more clothes for me and you can try them on,” explained Joujou. She immediately phoned the Christian Dior boutique and asked them to send around a selection of “appearance clothes.” Kate struggled in and out of them in the sweltering hot bedroom, while Joujou lay back on the bed, having her cellulite massaged away, and bought the lot.

  Then the phone rang again. Joujou listened and then said coldly into the mouthpiece, “I’ve never had a facelift. I started to sue that columnist Suzy for a million dollars because, of course, I’ve never had anything lifted, but who the hell has time for a lawsuit?” She crashed down the telephone receiver and gave a loud snort.

  Kate instinctively recognised a good wrap-up line and shut her notebook. Judy had warned her not to stay too long. She waved her thanks to Joujou, dodged past two hairdressers and out into Piccadilly. The roar of London’s traffic was peaceful compared to Joujou’s bedroom.

  38

  LILI LAY SLUMPED on the slimy, seaweed-covered rocks. Her legs and arms were bleeding, her wet hair was dripping over her shoulders and what remained of her pink dress concealed very little of her nubile, seventeen-year-old body. Against the blue Aegean sea she looked exhausted, but not quite exhausted enough.

  “Cut,” said Zimmer, “and watch that eye, Lili.” Lili’s left eye squinted slightly when she was tired.

  “I’d like to try one more take before the sun gets too hot, please,” said Zimmer. “Remember that you’re nearly dead; you can hardly move, you’ve just survived a shipwreck.”

  Please. That summed up the difference between Serge and Zimmer, she thought. Zimmer didn’t treat you like a lump of meat. He was always courteous, encouraging, thoughtful no matter what was going wrong on the set—and something was, of course, always going wrong. If Zimmer stopped to work out whose fault it was, the argument would be endless and they’d never get started, so he just smiled the tight, little smile that was his danger signal—a gentle nodding of the head that indicated a sort of internal prayer, “God give me strength to deal with this situation.”

  Zimmer’s polite consideration was a carefully acquired working habit, especially useful when working with women. He knew very few men who were really kind to women unless it was part of their job. But the way to get the best performance out of a woman, whether it was in the kitchen, the bedroom or on the set, was to praise and reassure while still remaining authoritative.

  It was important to remember that an actress probably had no self-confidence, however cool she looked, so her confidence had to be built up. In a word, he had to give her the maximum possible attention. The average woman needed twenty-five hours a day of it, and if she could get a bit more, she’d try for it; but in return for that you would get the average woman’s maximum performance.

  There was a great difference between handling men and handling women. Women tried harder. Zimmer had seen women slumped and exhausted because they’d been up since five in the morning and it was now eight in the evening and they had to come to life again in front of the camera. And they could do it every time because, though they lacked the physical stamina of men, they had terrific reserves of determination. The actresses who succeeded were the ones who had a little luck and tapped that extra determination—but they all lacked confidence, poor cows, and they all needed reassurance. Zimmer doubted whether there was one really happy actress in the world. The responsibility and the sheer hard physical work finished them: by the time women were starring, they were terrified of losing their looks; once they reached the top and realised the insecurity, they could never believe
they had made it. They always felt—and rightly—that they were walking a tightrope.

  Lili was determined, she was a worker and she was a beauty, but she’d end up like the rest of them. That much he knew.

  “Cut. Okay, print it. That’s all until three o’clock, kids. When you’ve freshened up, Lili, would you mind coming to my trailer please? I want to discuss the beach scene with you.”

  For nearly two weeks the cast and crew had been stationed ten kilometers outside Athens and Lili had yet to play one scene decently dressed. Still, it was a change to wear any clothes. Tying the sash of her blue cotton kimono, wet hair flopping down her back, Lili flung herself into a canvas chair in the shade of a silver-gray olive tree. She looked down over the little sandy beach. Aquamarine water lapped over the rocks off the cove. At the back of the beach, where sand mingled with scrub, some fifty people were gathered around cars and trailers. Carrying scripts and clipboards, wearing floppy cotton hats and sunglasses, gleaming with suntan oil, they moved slowly about their business. Lili could see Stan Valance arguing with Zimmer. The aging American actor’s face was lean as a skull—she’d never come across anyone who was on so strict a diet: the man never ate anything except biltong—thin shreds of dried beef that he had specially imported from South Africa. He chewed it like tobacco.

  He had a remote manner and didn’t waste an atom of energy talking to anyone on the set except Zimmer.

  At three o’clock they shot the beach scene. Lili played a rich, spoiled, turn-of-the-century cruise passenger, and Stan Valance played the stoker who had just hauled her to shore from the shipwreck.

  “Take your hands off me!” she spat at him, as he painfully dragged her out of the water by her armpits. She jerked her wet arms away from Stan’s lean grasp and lay, exhausted, in the foam. “I can swim perfectly well,” she panted. “I could have made it on my own!”

  She tried to stand, then a look of surprise came over Lili’s face as she found that her trembling arms wouldn’t support her body, and her head fell forward onto the wet sand. Wordless, gasping for breath, Stan grabbed her hands and tried to pull her clear of the water. With difficulty, Lili lifted her face and through gritted teeth said, “Don’t you dare touch me!”

  Her voice made it clear that Stan was a servant and a man, and that she wore only the wet, torn shreds of her nightgown. With those five words, Lili managed simultaneously to convey exhaustion, indomitable, spirited arrogance, and shocked, virginal modesty. She also looked extremely sexy.

  “Cut!”

  Later, in the darkness, Zimmer and Stan Valance were watching the rushes.

  Suddenly Stan leaned forward and said: “Shit, the cunt can act!”

  The following morning Valance waited until Serge was out of the way and then ambled over to Lili’s chair under the olive tree. He didn’t waste words. “I knew Marilyn, kid, and I’ve worked with them all, Joan Crawford, Vivien, Liz, you name it, and I’m telling you—don’t sell yourself short. You’ve got what it takes. . . . The way I used to.”

  “You really think so?” she looked up eagerly, her eyes shining.

  “Sure thing. Whatever you’re doing, it works. So don’t let anyone change it. And don’t take any shit.”

  He means Serge, Lili thought, as Valance sauntered away. Serge never left her for a moment when she was off the set. This was just as well, because Lili needed Serge. She needed him because of her notoriety and her own reaction to that notoriety. Success had made Lili feel that she was merely a property that anyone could exploit or sneer at; success had made Lili feel humiliated. She could no longer shelter behind anonymity; sometimes she felt that everyone had seen the famous calendar and those horrible films. People looked at her nervously—women with unconcealed envy, men with a hard appraising stare. Lili grew increasingly paranoid. She could no longer buy a bunch of flowers from a street vendor without wondering whether he’d seen that calendar, wondering whether he knew what she looked like naked, wondering whether he’d recognised her, whether she had lubricated his dreams.

  Eventually, she avoided such small human contacts; she rarely walked in the streets. She ordered what she wanted by telephone or asked Serge’s new secretary to get it for her. Her insolent self-assurance was merely a pose to hide her uncertainty. When she was with people she didn’t know, her manner was abrupt, awkward, rude. Often she would say something foolish, immediately regret it, then, to cover her embarrassment, say something worse.

  Her mistakes were gleefully repeated around Paris and printed in the gossip columns—often inaccurately—which only increased her fear of people. Time and again her trust proved mistaken; people were nice to her only because they wanted something—and suddenly so many of them wanted something! Her autograph, her photo, her telephone number, buttons from her coat, hair torn from her head, interviews. . . . Strangers whispered that they had wonderful ideas for her; well-dressed, charming women invited her to endorse sweaters or deodorants, even a vibrator. Swift-talking, plausible men tried to get her to sign papers without reading them or tried to get her into bed, certain that she would agree. (“Well, darling, what difference could just one more make?”)

  Serge, with his easy self-assurance, found Lili easy to exploit and naturally did whatever he could to underline her lack of identity and consequent dependence upon him.

  Serge’s new secretary opened Lili’s mail and answered the telephone. Lili herself stayed all day in the smart white-and-glass apartment that Serge had bought in the rue François I. She stayed there alone. Serge wouldn’t even allow her a kitten because of his hay fever. He now wore Cerruti suits and was always out, too busy to be with Lili, huddled with advertising men or businessmen or directors or lawyers—cold-eyed men in dark suits with briefcases who looked at Lili with tight smiles and eyes that remained carefully blank. She was not a person to them. She was a deal to be made, an asset to be handled with care, “meat on the hoof,” as one agent said. Handling Lili was a major job.

  Serge was no longer as indulgent with her. Lili was now safely tied up so he didn’t have to bother with her needs or problems; his secretary got Lili everything she needed within a certain budget (Serge didn’t want her spending a fortune on Yves Saint Laurent), and frankly, Lili bored him now. She was nearly eighteen, but an ignorant little bitch—it was lucky the school inspectors had never caught up with him—and if it weren’t for the money he would have dumped her long ago. A man could get tired of even the most luscious pair of tits, especially when they belonged to an uneducated, unsophisticated little girl, who whined for attention like a kid.

  Slowly, Lili felt Serge’s growing lack of interest in her. She didn’t understand—she didn’t want to understand—the reasons, but it was obvious that she exasperated him and he no longer wanted her around. On the other hand he wouldn’t let her set foot outside the front door without him.

  Lili was puzzled and anxious. If she didn’t belong with Serge, then she belonged nowhere, she had no place in the world. For nearly five years, Serge had told her what to do, what to say, what to wear, how to behave. Lili was terrified that he might tell her to go, as he sometimes hinted he would if she wasn’t obedient.

  “And just remember you were nothing,” Serge would snarl, snapping his fingers under her nose, “nothing before I found you. And without me you’d be nothing again!”

  Q was premiered in Paris just before Lili’s eighteenth birthday, and in spite of the fact that it was a low-budget film with a meagre publicity allowance, the movie was an immediate hit. At the premiere Lili smiled triumphantly at the flashguns, her head held high as she posed in a cream silk tuxedo, matching pants and a see-through, cream voile shirt, which demonstrated her new star status while by no means hiding the reasons for it.

  After fighting their way through the crowds to return to their hired limousines, the stars, the director, the producer, the backers and the show’s press agent headed for Chez Lipp, where theatre custom ordained that you should wait amid the engraved mirrors, the gilt and
the red velvet for the next day’s first editions—and the reviews.

  Since the budget didn’t run to the large chunk of extra money that Stan Valance demanded to attend the premiere, Lili got most of the attention. Escorted by Zimmer, still wearing his tight, grim little grin, Lili smiled, while the police formed a cordon around her until she was able to scramble into the limousine.

  “You must practice getting in and out of cars slowly,” Zimmer commented. “Always move slowly in public. If you want to be a great star, you need more than good looks and talent, you must have style and class; you should always look in public as if you were being helped out of a Rolls, not running for a bus.”

  As the limousine nosed out of the crowd, Zimmer turned to Lili, his face alternately shadowed and lit by street lamps. “Lili, I want to tell you two things, one of which is none of my business,” he said. “I was surprised to find how good you really are. You’ve got a natural instinct for the camera. You respond to it as if you were in love with the damned thing. And you listen to direction, you really listen to what I’m saying. You don’t just wait until I’m finished and then tell me what you feel should be done. You’ve got the makings of a good actress, Lili. Provided you work with good directors.”