by Gill Paul
Arriving at the studio on the 13th of December, Diana could sense the heightened atmosphere on the Cleopatra set. Actors and technicians had turned up at Cinecittà even though they hadn’t been called and were sitting around in the commissary or the bar, whispering and watching. Outside the paparazzi had got wind that something was up. Everyone coming into the studios was offered money to take photos that day: five hundred dollars, a thousand dollars, or millions of lire. Little did they realise that only a select handful of people would be permitted onto the sound stage to watch the filming, and even they would be searched on the way in, because Elizabeth Taylor had a nude scene in which Cleopatra would be massaged by her handmaidens.
Security had been tight around the set since a girl had been caught the previous week with a camera hidden in her bouffant hairdo. Diana knew there was no chance she would be allowed into the sound stage – she’d only seen three scenes being shot in two and a half months. Like everyone else, she was curious that day and she joined Helen in the bar from where they could watch the comings and goings.
Eddie Fisher hurried between his wife’s dressing room and the sound stage, head down, as if on some vitally important mission, but, as Helen whispered to Diana, he was probably just making sure her special chair was set up in the right place. When Elizabeth finally appeared in full Cleopatra hair and makeup with a bathrobe wrapped around her, Eddie was glued to her side, part of a little entourage of assistants fussing over her. When she saw the crowd watching from the terrace outside the bar, Elizabeth waved and called ‘Hi there!’ before disappearing into the building.
‘When are you going back for Christmas?’ Helen asked. ‘I hope you’ll be here for the Christmas party at Bricktop’s. Isn’t it amazing that we’re all invited, and not just the stars? I can’t wait.’
‘Of course I’m staying for it,’ Diana told her. ‘Irene Sharaff has offered to lend me a dress. I’m sure she’ll lend you one as well if I ask. She’s got dozens.’
‘Fab!’ Helen said. ‘You’re a brick. I haven’t bought anything new in ages.’
Some time later, a door opened and a technician came out for a cigarette. He whispered to a friend and soon there was a buzz going round the bar that Richard Burton had made a rude comment about Elizabeth Taylor’s figure. Seemingly he had said that it changed shape after being massaged.
‘Isn’t that mean?’ Helen exclaimed. ‘He sounds horrid.’
Diana wasn’t surprised. She’d already formed a low opinion of him. She wondered if the film would be given an X certificate. Surely it would have to be if there was nudity? Helen didn’t know any more than she did.
They went to visit the kittens, who were growing bigger and noisier by the day. Helen had livid scratches on her arms from their claws but still she loved to pick them up and cuddle them, nestling them against her cheek. Afterwards, Diana wandered back to the production office and was about to phone Trevor to tell him the time of her flight home on Christmas Eve when the door burst open.
‘Hi! We haven’t been introduced. I’m Eddie Fisher.’ He had a friendly smile and very white teeth.
‘Diana Bailey.’
‘I need your help. Do you know where I could find some sanitary napkins and belts? I figured one of you girls might have a supply. It’s kinda urgent.’
‘We’ve got some in our bathroom cupboard.’ Diana jumped to her feet. ‘How many do you need?’
‘Just two or three will do until we get home. Thanks a million, sweetheart.’
Diana fetched the towels, all the time wondering how Elizabeth could be doing a nude scene if she was menstruating. Wasn’t she supposed to take three days off when she had her monthlies?
As she handed them over, Eddie grinned again. ‘They’re not for Elizabeth, if that’s what you’re thinking. They’re for our dog, Baby. She’s bleeding all over the dressing room, the messy bitch.’
Diana snorted with laughter. ‘Are you sure these will fit? I don’t know how much the belt will tighten.’
‘All I can do is try. Nice to meet you, Diana. I’ll see you around.’
After that first encounter, he always stopped to have a friendly word whenever they passed on set. He remembered her name and asked her how things were going, commented on the weather or made some remark about the scenes being filmed that day. She found him very unaffected and natural, which seemed odd considering the woman to whom he was married. Maybe that’s why Elizabeth loved him. Perhaps his genuine niceness was rare in her world.
On the 23rd of December, Diana and Helen got ready together and caught a taxi to Bricktop’s basement piano bar for the Cleopatra Christmas party. When they walked down the steps it was already thronged, with a four-piece band playing in the corner. Helen headed straight for the dance floor and Diana watched with admiration, because she seemed to know all the latest dance moves and undulated with effortless, unselfconscious rhythm.
‘She’s good,’ Ernesto said in her ear. He handed her a drink. ‘And you look amazing. I almost didn’t recognise you.’
She glanced down at the tight-fitting turquoise shift dress that stopped just above her knees. ‘It’s not really me but one has to make an effort.’ She smiled. ‘How are you?’
They found a corner table to sit and chat and Diana was delighted he was there because she barely saw Helen for the rest of the evening. If it hadn’t been for Ernesto she would have been utterly on her own. He told her he was spending Christmas with his family and that he would be forced to eat industrial quantities of his mama’s food. She told him that she and Trevor always spent Christmas Day together before going to visit his relatives on Boxing Day.
‘Are you looking forward to seeing him?’ Ernesto asked and she replied ‘Yes, of course.’ It was true. She couldn’t wait.
Rex Harrison and Rachel Roberts got up to dance and Diana saw that she was obviously inebriated and hanging on to him to keep her balance. Her face was flushed and she couldn’t stick to the beat. Suddenly she reached down and tried to open the fly of Rex’s trousers and he batted her hand away in an angry gesture that made her hoot with laughter. Rex charged off the dance floor back towards their table, and Rachel flung her arms round an Italian boy standing nearby, making his friends roar and wolf whistle.
‘I hate women who drink too much,’ Ernesto confided, watching the scene.
‘And yet you ply me with alcohol wherever we go,’ Diana teased.
‘Yes, you are another case entirely. You need to be loosened up. This is my strategy.’ Their faces were close and he looked directly into her eyes.
Diana raised an eyebrow. ‘Your strategy indeed! Perhaps you had better rethink it or you will turn me into one of the drunk women you hate.’
Ernesto was staring at her. ‘I love the way you can make one of your eyebrows lift but not the other. I practised in the mirror at home but I can’t do it. I think I have the wrong sort of eyebrows.’
‘It’s only the right one,’ she told him. ‘I can’t do it with the left.’ They both tried for a while, twitching their faces comically.
There was the usual hush as Elizabeth and Eddie arrived at the party. ‘They won’t stay long,’ Ernesto told her. ‘It’s a guest appearance because Walter asked them to come. They don’t usually mix with the common people.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I know many things, my little Diana. You just ask me and I will tell you them.’
Rachel Roberts was trying to open the Italian boy’s fly now and Diana thought someone should stop her but Rex was nowhere to be seen. When the boy began to grope her breasts and she didn’t make an attempt to remove his hand, Diana leapt to her feet.
‘Excuse me, Miss Roberts,’ she said, taking Rachel’s arm and pulling her away. ‘You are needed in the ladies’ room.’
The boy released her without a murmur, aware he’d been pushing his luck. Rachel came like a lamb, leaning hard on Diana’s arm even though they’d never met.
‘Where’s Rexy?’ she asked.
‘I
’m not sure, but if you sit here I’ll go and find him for you.’ There was a comfortable armchair in the corner and she lowered Rachel into it.
‘Will you get me a drinkie-poo?’
Diana agreed she would, although she had no intention of doing so. She hurried back out into the club and pushed through crowds looking for Rex Harrison.
‘Are you OK?’ Eddie Fisher asked when she passed their table, but in response to her query he said he hadn’t seen Rex all night.
Diana found Hilary sitting in a corner with Rosemary Matthews and Joe Mankiewicz and asked what she should do about Rachel. Immediately, Hilary leapt to her feet.
‘I bet Rex has gone home without her again. Let’s get her into a car.’
By the time they arrived back at the ladies’ room, Rachel had fallen asleep but, with one of them on either side, they managed to pull her to her feet and guide her out the main door to where the Twentieth Century Fox drivers were waiting. A few flashbulbs popped, but a drunken Rachel Roberts wasn’t the picture the paparazzi were hoping for that night.
‘Is she often like that?’ Diana asked as the car pulled away.
‘I’m afraid so. She and Rex have rather a volatile relationship and she drowns her sorrows. They’re planning to marry early in the New Year and perhaps things will settle down after that.’ Hilary didn’t sound too convinced.
When they got back inside, Diana went to find Ernesto again. As she sat down, she noticed an odd sight: Elizabeth Taylor dancing cheek to cheek with Richard Burton. Diana was amazed: she’d assumed that they wouldn’t get on with each other, that the two oversized egos were bound to clash. They looked good together, though. Even in heels, she made him look tall and his muscular physique was in stark contrast to her voluptuous curves. The number finished and they parted, laughing, to go back to their respective spouses.
Diana turned to Ernesto, a question in her head that she hardly liked to put into words. ‘Surely not?’
‘Yes, I think maybe it will be so.’ Ernesto was deep in thought, almost talking to himself. ‘I think Eddie Fisher is not a man who will keep her interest for much longer.’
Diana thought of the affable guy who had come to borrow a sanitary belt for a dog and felt concern for him.
Chapter Twenty
Scott’s editor wanted him to stay in Rome over Christmas and New Year so his parents said they would fly over from the States to spend the holidays with him. He booked them a suite at the Intercontinental Hotel and arranged for a driver to pick them up at the airport, all the while bracing himself for the moment when his mother walked into the lobby and saw his broken nose. She’d be hysterical.
However, on the 23rd of December, the day they were due to arrive, there was a horrific train crash in Calabria and Scott’s editor sent him to cover the story. The train had been crossing a viaduct when it derailed and carriages plunged 130 feet into a river below. Scott sped south in a hire car and spent some time at the crash site talking to investigators, in the hospital talking to survivors, and at a nearby shrine created by relatives of the seventy-one passengers who lost their lives. It was the first time he’d covered a major tragedy and he felt very moved by it and unsure how to talk to the traumatised survivors. As he shaved in his hotel room that evening, he found tears rolling down his cheeks.
He drove back to Rome late on Christmas Eve, amidst the clamour of church bells announcing midnight mass. When he got to his apartment, he found a long letter had been slipped under the door and he ripped it open and started to read. It was from Rosalia. She had been hoping to spend Christmas with him and his parents; she’d arranged her hospital shifts so she would be free on Christmas Day, but he hadn’t been in touch. What was she to think?
Scott hadn’t invited her to meet his parents, hadn’t even hinted at the possibility – that was all in her head – but at the same time he knew he had behaved badly towards her. As soon as Christmas was past he’d have to let her down as gently as possible.
The following morning, he telephoned a subdued Rosalia and lied to her, saying that he had been delayed down south covering the rail crash and didn’t know when he would be back. She couldn’t argue with that but he knew he had ruined her Christmas and felt very guilty. He dressed in a suit and tie for the first time since arriving in Rome, and jumped on his Vespa to drive to the Intercontinental. As he walked in, Rosalia was still on his mind so at first he couldn’t work out why his mother screamed when she saw him.
‘Sweet Jesus, what happened to you?’
His nose. Of course. ‘A man attacked me in a bar. It was a case of mistaken identity. He was arrested. Don’t worry, Mom, I’m fine.’
‘But your nose is broken. Couldn’t they fix it up better than that? It’s a mess.’
‘It’s OK, Mom.’
She turned to Scott’s father. ‘We should take him back to the States for plastic surgery with that colleague of yours. What’s his name?’
‘He doesn’t do cosmetic work,’ Scott’s father replied gruffly. ‘If the boy says he’s fine, he’s fine.’
They drank Martinis in the lounge before going into the grand dining room for Christmas dinner, and throughout Scott’s mother wouldn’t stop asking questions about the attack and worrying that he wasn’t safe in Rome. Maybe he shouldn’t go out after dark. Certainly he should stop going to bars. Every time he had to wipe a drip from his nose, her face wore an anguished expression.
Eventually his father changed the subject. ‘I haven’t seen any Pulitzer Prize candidates in the articles you’ve been writing. What’s with all this movie star nonsense?’
Scott shrugged. ‘I have to do what the editor asks.’
His father snorted. ‘You’re in Europe in the middle of the Cold War. Why haven’t you interviewed Italian politicians about their views on the East–West divide? How does post-Mussolini society view the Reds?’
‘I did write a piece on the Italian Communist Party. And I’m working on something important, but it’s taking a lot of research.’
‘You don’t want to get a reputation as a shoddy gossip columnist. You’re not exactly using your brain, are you?’
Scott felt wounded. His father had always been critical: his high-school marks were never quite good enough; he didn’t try out for the football team, preferring athletics, to his father’s grave disappointment; and he hadn’t got into the most prestigious fraternity at Harvard. Ridiculous that it still affected him, but he couldn’t help it. It was partly to get away from the pressure his father subjected him to that he had sought a foreign posting in the first place.
The meal stretched on interminably, from an antipasti dish of cold meats to a pasta course and then roast turkey. There had been an option of stuffed pigs’ trotters, which the waiter assured them was a great delicacy, but the Morgans all opted for a traditional turkey dinner. Of course, it didn’t come with all the trimmings they’d expect in the US – no cranberry sauce, no stuffing even – but it was moist and tasty.
‘Have you heard anything from Susanna?’ his mother asked, and Scott sighed. She was the college girlfriend who’d left him. His mother had frequently intimated that he’d been crazy to let her ‘slip through his fingers’, as if there was something he could have done differently, some way he could have stopped her choosing his team-mate instead.
‘Not since I’ve been here,’ he said. ‘I don’t think she has the address.’
‘She could find you if she tried. She could always call me. Never say never,’ his mom said, trying to sound upbeat.
They exchanged presents after the meal. Scott’s parents had bought him some binoculars and a new pair of chinos. What on earth was he supposed to do with binoculars, he wondered. Take up birdwatching? He gave his mother a silk scarf and his father a cigarette lighter with the Colosseum engraved on it. Everyone remarked on how well-chosen the gifts were and self-consciously tidied them back into their boxes, then they went for a walk round the nearby streets. Scott pointed out some landmarks but everything was
closed and there was a chill in the air so before long they went back to the hotel for a coffee. He tried to stop looking at his watch, but time dragged as his mother chatted about friends of theirs from home and his father scowled, bored to distraction.
In the early evening, Scott pretended he had to go to his office for an hour or so to check in with the newsdesk, but it was an excuse to get away. His parents were staying in Rome for another three days and they stretched in front of him like a jail sentence.
‘I’m not sure that motorcycle is safe,’ his mother called as he mounted his Vespa. ‘Why don’t we buy you a car instead?’
He pretended he hadn’t heard, struck his foot hard on the pedal and accelerated up the street as noisily as he possibly could.
Chapter Twenty-One
During the flight home and the train journey from Heathrow, Diana was excited about seeing Trevor. She yearned to feel his arms around her and smell the woody scent of pipe tobacco from his clothes, to sit down and ask him about his work and tell him the edited highlights of her three months away. So much had happened that it seemed much longer since she’d seen him. She missed his pithy insights, but most of all she wanted to feel as though he had forgiven her and that they were going to be fine.
She caught a bus from the station and alighted just past the zoo, then hurried down the frosty street to their rented flat in a Nash terraced house in Primrose Hill. It was only three in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, but already getting dark.
She knocked on the door first because it felt strange simply to barge in after so long away, even though it was her home. She’d just taken out her keys to unlock the door when Trevor pulled it open.
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Hello!’
Straight away she saw that he looked terrible. His pallor was grey in the harsh electric light of the hall and he seemed very thin. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ she said with concern, giving him a hug.
‘Perhaps a bit,’ he said. As he picked up her bag and carried it in, she noticed that there were holes in the elbows of his sweater and one shoe was flapping off his foot because the shoelace was broken. She had a stock of shoelaces in one of the kitchen drawers but he obviously hadn’t found them.
