by Gill Paul
A black car pulled in through the gates and Scott used the binoculars to read the number plate and note it down. That car stayed twenty minutes and, as it left, two more pulled in. They were expensive cars; clearly their owners had money. At one stage there were six cars in the forecourt; the traffic was constant. It was obvious to any bystander that there was something illicit taking place. Why didn’t the police keep watch here? If they raided the villa, they would surely find a lucrative haul. He pictured Helen coming there at night with Luigi and the huge risk she had taken amongst those Mafioso types. Her vulnerability was terrifying.
At five o’clock he rode back to the council office and waited in another long queue before being handed a slip of paper stating that the owner of the Villa Armonioso was a company called Costruzioni Torre Astura. He sighed. That was no help at all. He’d been hoping for a name, a person. Now he would have to try to find out who owned this construction company and what it did. Why had he ever thought the trail would be easy to follow? Of course it wouldn’t.
Scott spent Easter weekend in his office working on his article about the drugs trade in Rome. He decided to write about Helen but without naming her or giving any details that could identify her: the piece needed an innocent but anonymous victim to demonstrate the evils of the business. He laboured over his description of her drugged to delirium amongst ruthless drug barons: ‘like an angel in a school nativity play, but in her veins a poison has taken hold’. He described her in the doctor’s surgery: her brittle thinness, the fear in her pretty blue eyes, the way she gripped his hand so tightly it hurt as the doctor administered the injection. He wrote and revised, crossing out unnecessary words and searching for the perfect adjectives in an attempt to convey the pathos of the scene.
On Easter Sunday morning, he got a call from his editor’s office in Milwaukee.
‘The boss says the Sunday Times in London has a front-page story with pictures of Liz and Richard on vacation in Santo Stefano. He wants you to go there.’
‘Oh, crap!’ Scott swore. ‘What time is it for you? Why isn’t the boss in bed?’
‘It’s three in the morning here. He got wind of the piece yesterday and we’ve been trying to reach you ever since.’
Scott remembered that he had unplugged the phone in his pensione a few days earlier after a tearful call from Rosalia. He must have forgotten to plug it back in again.
‘Phone’s out of order,’ he lied. ‘I’ll see what I can dig up and get back to you later.’
His drugs story would have to wait. Where the heck was Santo Stefano anyway? He called an old college friend in London and asked him to read out the Sunday Times article, but it didn’t have much information. Liz and Dick had rented a villa under false names and tried to remain incognito, but they’d been spotted sunbathing on some rocks, feeding each other segments of orange, and now every photographer and journalist in Italy and beyond had arrived on the tiny island. There was a large photograph showing her in a bikini and him in bathing trunks. The story read that they were currently under siege, holed up in the villa with press on all sides, calling to try to tempt them out. Scott sighed. He wouldn’t get any exclusives by hanging out with a horde of paparazzi.
He jumped on his Vespa and sped across town to Gianni’s home. Although he was eating Easter Sunday lunch with his family, Gianni immediately agreed to leave for Santo Stefano. Scott went home and plugged in his phone to wait for news but it was the following day before Gianni called to say that Elizabeth Taylor had left the island and was heading back to Rome without Richard. No one knew why. Scott decided to go and wait outside her villa on Via Appia Antica with his own camera, reckoning he might get an exclusive with all the regular paparazzi out of town. He parked just along from the entrance gates but saw straight away that he had miscalculated because the place was crawling with photographers. They were perched in the trees, lining the pavements and lounging in cars with their feet up on the steering wheel.
Evening fell and as Scott waited, he chatted to some of the paparazzi and was told that Sybil Burton was having dinner with Walter Wanger at the Grand Hotel, where they were having ‘crisis talks’. He agreed to buy a picture of them emerging onto the Via Veneto together from another photographer.
At two in the morning, he was about to give up and head home when the gates opened and a car was driven out of the villa. The paparazzi began snapping away; Scott peered into the car as it passed and saw a shape on the back seat covered in blankets.
‘Is that her? Was she there the whole time? I thought she wasn’t back yet.’
‘Yes, that’s her,’ he was assured.
Scott jumped on his Vespa and followed the car through Rome until it pulled up outside a private hospital. He couldn’t get through the security gates but saw the figure covered in a blanket being led inside. Was she ill? No one was prepared to issue a statement.
Gianni arrived back in Rome the following day, but none of his contacts could find out why Elizabeth Taylor was in hospital, so Scott decided to call on Helen, to see if he could winkle any information from her.
She opened the door looking bright as a button, nothing like the frail creature he’d been writing about in his drugs story.
‘Wow! You look incredible!’ he said and she beamed. ‘How ’bout that dinner we talked about?’
‘Lovely!’ She seemed delighted. ‘Give me half an hour to get changed.’
Scott waited in a bar across the road until she reappeared in a knee-length polka-dot dress with a large bow at the waist. She had to sit side-saddle on the back of his Vespa as they drove to a nearby trattoria because her dress was too tight for her to straddle the bike.
‘How’s it going at Cinecittà?’ Scott asked as they drank cocktails and perused the menu. ‘Were you shooting today?’
‘No. We were supposed to be, but Elizabeth Taylor couldn’t make it so I’ve been sitting around doing nothing. It was deadly dull.’
‘Oh dear. Why wasn’t she there?’ Scott asked. ‘Did they tell you?’
‘I shouldn’t really say …’
‘Say what?’
‘Well …’ she hesitated, and he knew she was going to tell him. She didn’t have the ability to keep a secret. ‘So long as you don’t tell anyone else … Elizabeth and Richard were on holiday at the weekend and they had a big fight and he hit her.’
Scott was surprised. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah, she’s got a black eye. Joe – that’s the director – came to talk to her makeup artist about how they’re going to cover it. They’ll have to wait for the swelling to go down first. Sometimes I think we’re going to be stuck making this film forever because it’s one delay after another. I was originally hired for ten and a half weeks and it looks as though it could be ten months by the time we finish.’
The waiter came to take their order and Scott asked for a bottle of Chianti. ‘Do you get to talk to Elizabeth Taylor much or is her makeup done in a separate place from everyone else’s?’
Helen slurped the last of her cocktail. ‘It’s usually done in her dressing suite, but I’ve met her loads of times. You wouldn’t believe how nice she is. Everyone likes her.’
Scott asked for her opinion of Richard Burton and Helen screwed up her nose. ‘I don’t think he’s a very nice person. First of all, he used to make fun of Elizabeth behind her back. And then when they broke up for a while in February he brought over that other girlfriend, Pat. That wasn’t very nice of him, was it?’
‘It’s not very nice to give her a black eye either,’ Scott commented.
Helen shrugged. ‘Men are like that sometimes. They like to show who’s boss.’
‘Hey!’ Scott laughed. ‘Don’t put me in that category. I never hit a girl in my life.’
Helen smiled at him. ‘You’re an angel. You saved my life. I don’t think you have a bad bone in your body.’
Scott felt embarrassed. She might be disillusioned if she found out he was writing about her. He hoped she would never see t
he story. ‘So the vitamin injections have worked, have they?’
Helen beamed. ‘That doctor is a miracle worker. I’ve got my energy back and I feel like myself again, you know? It’s strange to remember how different I was on drugs. Instead I’m a vitamin addict now!’
Scott made a mental note to ask the doctor for more information about his miracle cure. If it were that simple, why wasn’t every heroin addict prescribed it as a matter of course?
Scott was sitting on a long couchette with his back to the wall while Helen was in a chair opposite, but after they finished eating, she came round to sit beside him.
‘You are absolutely the nicest person I’ve met in Rome, apart from Diana,’ she said. ‘She’s the nicest woman and you’re the nicest man.’
She leaned up to kiss him but he turned his head so that she kissed his cheek alongside his mouth.
‘Sorry, Helen, but I’m not the right guy for you. I’m not nice enough to girls. Best if you and I are just friends.’
Helen smiled. ‘Yeah, I guessed that was the case after you told me about Rosalia. I’m not having much luck with men here. I thought there was someone last week but he hasn’t called since. I don’t suppose you could fix me up with a friend of yours, could you?’ She was staring at him, her pupils huge and black, and she’d never looked lovelier.
‘I’ll think about it,’ Scott promised. ‘It would have to be someone pretty special. Leave it with me.’
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Trevor left Rome on the Saturday after Easter and Diana waved him off with genuinely mixed feelings. She would miss his company but she wouldn’t miss the discomfort she felt when he put an arm around her shoulders or took her hand, or if their legs accidentally touched in bed. It felt wrong to be touched by any man but Ernesto.
She missed her lover but part of her wished that she had an evening on her own, in order to clear her head, instead of meeting him for dinner later. At the same time the thought of lying in bed with him, skin to skin, and feeling his lips on hers was thrilling. She missed him with a physical ache in her belly and when he arrived at the restaurant, ten minutes late, she leapt from her seat and ran across to throw her arms around him.
Ernesto returned her hug, but when they sat down he seemed cool and distant. Diana chatted about the sightseeing she had done, sharing anecdotes about the city, but when she asked about Ernesto’s Easter with his family he was monosyllabic.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked at last. ‘Have I done something to upset you?’
He shrugged. ‘You’ve spent the last ten days sleeping with another man. Why should that matter?’
Diana sighed. ‘I swear to you there was no physical contact. He’s like an old friend now. He didn’t even try to make love to me.’
‘So when are you getting a divorce? You haven’t mentioned this.’
Diana took a deep breath before explaining their agreement that they wouldn’t do anything irrevocable until filming had finished. ‘You must see that it’s not straightforward. For a start, where will I live when I leave Trevor? Where will I work? I can’t risk being homeless.’
‘So you stay with him for a roof over your head? That makes you a puttana.’
She gasped at the cruelty. ‘I know your feelings are hurt, but there’s no need for insults. You’re being unreasonable.’
Their food arrived and she could tell he was trying to snap out of his black mood. ‘I can’t help it.’ He looked at her sadly. ‘I love you too much. Forgive me.’
Over the meal, they talked about the film and Ernesto told her about Elizabeth Taylor having a black eye and a badly bruised nose. ‘The story is that she hit her face when her car braked suddenly on the way back from Santo Stefano.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘But no one believes it for a moment. They say it will be at least three weeks before the bruising goes down enough for filming to resume.’
‘Oh God, poor Elizabeth. What’s the next disaster going to be? This film is jinxed.’
‘The next disaster is that Joe wanted to film the outdoor scenes at Torre Astura this week but the army have a training exercise in the land next to the set and there will be guns firing. We are paying rent and they have built the set but still nothing has been shot there. Walter blames me, of course.’
‘That’s not your fault. I’m just astonished at the way this film is being created in such a haphazard manner, lurching from crisis to crisis. If they end up with any kind of coherent narrative, it will be a miracle.’
They rode back to her pensione after eating, and as they climbed the stairs Ernesto’s mood flipped again. ‘Have you changed the sheets since he was here?’ he demanded.
‘Of course I have. I gave them all to the padrona this morning. Everything is fresh.’
Ernesto picked up a pillow and sniffed it. ‘Did you turn the mattress over?’
She sighed. ‘I didn’t think that was necessary.’
Instantly, he ripped off the covers and insisted on turning the mattress and remaking the bed. When it was done, he pulled her down onto it and made love to her in a rough, unaffectionate manner. There was no kissing, no stroking, no attempt to make her happy. It was about possession, pure and simple, and she lay there feeling lonely and miserable.
Afterwards, Diana turned to the wall and tears started rolling down her cheeks. She tried to stop them but attempting to suppress the emotion made it worse.
Ernesto tried to placate her. ‘Cara mia, don’t cry. I don’t mean to be horrible. I’m just a jealous, possessive Italian man and I can’t bear the thought of you with anyone else. It eats me up inside.’ She was crying harder now and he began stroking her hair. ‘I love you, please stop crying.’ He rolled her over to kiss her tears. ‘I will keep kissing you until you stop crying. I’ll kiss every part of you, in places you’ve never been kissed before, until you beg me for mercy.’
She calmed down at last and when they made love again it was tender and beautiful and she felt better. She lay awake in his arms afterwards thinking about the bewildering twenty-four hours since her promise to Trevor through to her reconciliation with Ernesto. She noted that the latter hadn’t made any promises at dinner when she mentioned that she had to consider where she would live if she and Trevor divorced. He hadn’t offered to get an apartment with her in Rome, hadn’t asked her to marry him when the divorce came through. Even if he did, could she relocate to Italy? She realised she didn’t even know if Ernesto wanted children. She assumed he did. All men did. Would he want her to have his children and become an Italian housewife? She couldn’t imagine herself in that role. There were a lot of conversations to be had.
The next day, she got back to a pile of work on her desk: requisition notes for extras’ costumes for the grand procession scene, and plans for the Alexandria scenes that would be shot at Torre Astura as soon as the army exercises were over. At lunchtime, she went to find Helen but she was nowhere to be seen in the makeup department and no one seemed to know where she was. Diana scribbled a note asking her to get in touch. Perhaps she had been told not to come in since they weren’t shooting. The lot was very empty.
On her way back to the production office, Diana saw a car pull up and Elizabeth Taylor stepped out just beside Joe’s office. She was wearing huge dark glasses and a leopardskin-patterned coat and looked very small and fragile.
When she spotted Diana, she waved and called ‘Hi there!’ but didn’t come over to chat.
‘Hello,’ Diana called back, before Elizabeth turned and walked into Joe’s office. She had said Diana should stop in after Easter but obviously this wasn’t a good time.
‘Richard’s wife and children are here,’ Hilary told her. ‘He’s spending time with them at their villa. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s parents have flown from LA to stay with her. I think everyone is trying to make the pair of them see sense and put an end to this crazy affair. There are too many people getting hurt.’ She looked sternly at Diana, and Diana blushed, wondering if this was also a comment on her own affa
ir.
How was the outwardly stoic Sybil coping? Had she decided to put her foot down and make Richard behave responsibly? How was their handicapped daughter? And what about Elizabeth’s children and the newly adopted baby Maria? At least in Diana’s own situation there were only three people being hurt: Trevor, Ernesto and herself. The Burton–Taylor romance was much more complex.
Diana wondered if Elizabeth felt guilty about the harm she had caused. To everyone on set, she seemed to be the one doing the chasing. She was forever running to Richard’s dressing room and hovering on the sidelines while his scenes were shot. She had decided she wanted him and wouldn’t take no for an answer – at least, that was the perception in Cinecittà.
When Diana went to the bar to pick up a sandwich and a coffee, she eavesdropped on an animated conversation between a group of American camera crew and realised they were running a sweepstake. Would Richard leave Sybil for Elizabeth? The odds they were taking were three to one against.
Chapter Forty
Scott had been keeping the packet of cocaine he’d bought from Luigi on the dressing table in the room where he lodged, hoping to try it next time he got lucky and had a girl back to stay. However, he was startled one day when he returned home to find that the padrona had come in and tidied up and his paperfold was stacked neatly in a pile with some matchbooks. Had she been at all streetwise she would have recognised what it was and called the carabinieri. Perhaps he should throw it away rather than risk a criminal conviction in a foreign country? But it seemed like evidence of a sort, so he decided to take it to his office and hide it somewhere. That way, if anyone found it, he could blame it on his predecessor.
