Princess Daisy

by Judith Krantz

  Nevertheless, as a veteran now of at least a dozen interviews, Daisy realized that each reporter, no matter how pleasant or charming, was looking for an edge, waiting for her to say the one thing she shouldn’t say, probing, in a seemingly random and innocent way, for the stray remark that would make news. Just the day before, one of them had actually asked her if she liked the way the new perfume smelled. My God, did he actually think she’d say no? But it was all part of doing his job, she realized—and if she had said no, it would have made a much better story.

  She dressed carefully in one of her new things. That was another part of her job. Everytime she was interviewed, she was closely scrutinized; every detail of what she had on went into the reporter’s notebook. The image, the absolutely essential image was being created day by day, interview by interview, dress by dress, question by question. Perhaps eventually, Daisy thought, she’d get hardened to it, accustomed to the process, but she still had to remind herself of that million dollars before she could get started on the morning metamorphosis. But it went with the job, and, by God, what went with the job, she did. Daisy brightened as she realized that she could save all the new clothes she was being given and then, thirty or forty years from now, bring them out again and really enjoy wearing them. She’d be the most originally dressed sixty-year-old in the world.

  She looked at her watch. She just had time to feed Theseus, get him settled on his pillow, and rush down the street to the Café Borgia II for a quick cup of espresso before she had to start uptown for her lunch interview. It had taken her a full hour to dress, put on her make-up and do her hair. This patient triangulation of her obligations to the image had, in the past, taken only seven minutes, or less. Being a princess just took too much time, Daisy thought, as she grabbed her mail without looking at it and hurried out.

  At the café on Prince Street, she found an outside table. She sat there and basked in the September sun while her sense of smell leaped in response to the odor of freshly made bread from the bakery across the street. But she wouldn’t have anything to eat now. She’d learned it was important to eat heartily at lunch interviews because the excuse of a mouthful of food gave her time to consider her words, before she had to speak. She finished her espresso and ordered another. With Kiki gone, there was very little mail. Why had she brought along this manila envelope? Now she’d have to carry it around all day. She looked at it again. It had been delivered by hand and the name of the researcher from People was written on the left corner. In dismay, she thought that she hadn’t planned on facing that until tomorrow. She supposed they meant to be nice, but an advance copy was the last thing she wanted. However, she might as well get it over with. She opened the envelope and drew out the magazine. A smile of pure delight spread over her face as she saw the cover photograph. She knew she’d been right to take off all that awful make-up. As she read the cover line, her smile stopped. “The strange, secret story?…” She turned to the inside pages in a sudden fright, the slippery paper evading her fingers. What editor could have turned the detailed, exhaustive, but resolutely cautious interviews she’d given the researcher into a “strange, secret story,” she asked herself as the chill of what she still did not know, except in some part of her brain that had always, always, always, been alert to attack, began to creep over her.

  She turned another page.

  The cruelty exploded inside her heart and spilled into her entire chest cavity. She screamed and shut the magazine. A waiter approached and she waved him away, covering the copy of People with her handbag. A violent burst of pain, like steel knitting needles driving their points into her breasts, made her clasp her hands tightly to them in an incredulous attempt to protect herself. It couldn’t continue to hurt like this for long or she wouldn’t be able to breathe. A sharp, rippling feeling of breakage and rupture made her pull her head down to her hands as if to doubly protect her heart, yet it would not stop. She felt lacerated, attacked from all sides, by gratuitous evil, utterly exposed to the tearing and crushing of the teeth of nameless beasts.

  The waiter came back, an expression of concern on his face. In another second he’d speak. Daisy got up, clutching the magazine and handbag and staggered, with the cautious, clumsy movements of an old woman, to a table inside in the corner of the empty café where she couldn’t be seen from the street. Panting with savage pain, streaming with the sweat of utter panic, she hunched over the table and opened the magazine and read the entire article. Then she read it twice again. There were no tears, just as there were no words in her mind. Nothing existed except the article and the need to stop the feeling that she was being cut apart, opened up, her insides torn out. She could not believe that the floor wasn’t covered with her blood. Daisy folded the magazine and hid it in her handbag. She wrapped her arms around her body and bowed her head, trying to become as small as possible.

  “Another espresso?” the waiter asked softly.

  She nodded.

  She drank as if it might save her life. Slowly her brain began to work again. The evil fastened at her breast with metallic teeth, but she began to think. She had to get help. There was only one person who could help her. She put some money on the table, walked swiftly to the street and stopped a passing cab.

  In Patrick Shannon’s office three people sat silently: Shannon, Hilly Bijur and Candice Bloom. Only Candice knew what time it was and that Jerry Tallmer and Daisy were waiting for her at Le Perigord Park. Thank God Tallmer was a gentle, kind man and thank God Daisy knew where to meet him for lunch. They wouldn’t miss her.

  Bijur was the first to break the silence. “Pat, this doesn’t have to be a disaster.”

  Shannon looked at him without comprehension. He had to find Daisy before she saw this. “Where’s Daisy?” he asked urgently.

  “Having lunch—she’s okay,” Candice reassured him.

  “Pat, will you just listen! Look, for Christ’s sake, just let me read some of this stuff back to you,” Hilly insisted. He turned to the second page of the article. “ ‘Queen Anne’s, a well known school for retarded children, is regarded as one of the finest institutions of its kind. The fees are high, averaging twenty-three thousand dollars a year for each child. Mrs. Joan Henderson, head of the school, said that four years after Prince Stash Valensky’s death in 1967, Princess Daisy took over the entire financial burden of her sister’s support.’ And then they quote this Mrs. Henderson, ‘It could not have been easy for her,’ Mrs. Henderson said, ‘since we sometimes had to wait for her checks, but eventually one always came. I don’t believe that more than a few days in any week have gone by in the last ten years’—the last ten fucking years, Pat—‘that Danielle hadn’t received a letter containing a drawing or a picture postcard from her sister. Princess Daisy always visited every Sunday while she still lived in England, even though she and Danielle were only six when they were separated.’ Six—only six, Pat! And, look, here she says, ‘The twins are very close in spite of the difference in their intellectual capacities. Danielle certainly understands Daisy better than she understands any of her teachers—indeed, in a long lifetime, I have rarely seen devotion such as Princess Daisy’s.’ End quote. And then there’s the picture of Daisy painting a kid on a pony, and just listen to this caption, ‘Daisy’s expert portraits paid for her twin’s continued residence in the only home she’s ever known, while Daisy herself lived in a low-rent SoHo walk-up and held down a full-time job as well.’ ”

  “On the next page, right under the picture of Daisy on a set wearing her baseball jacket and her sailor hat, there’s a quote from North. Let me read that one, Mr. Bijur,” Candice said eagerly.

  “Top commercial director, Frederick Gordon North, says that he was very disappointed when Princess Daisy decided to leave her job with him. “She was unquestionably the most creative and hardest working producer any director could hope to have. Everyone who ever worked with her loved her. She has a great talent for this business.” When he was asked if he missed her collaboration on such widely ad
mired commercials as those he directs for Dr Pepper, Downy, and Revlon, Mr. North said with a rueful smile, “She can have her old job back any time she wants. I wish her well.” ’ ”

  “Mr. Shannon,” Candice said, “Daisy’s a heroine.”

  “My point, my point exactly!” Hilly Bijur said in increasing excitement “Look, Pat, yesterday we had just another pretty face going for us and today we have a candidate for Joan of Arc—she can fucking get the Helen Keller humanitarian award of the year—look at it that way, for Christ’s sake.”

  “But,” Candice said with a trace of timidity rarely heard in her, “how do you think Daisy’s going to feel about having this all come but? Since she’s kept it secret for so long, she couldn’t possibly have wanted anyone to know.”

  “What the fuck does it matter how she feels!” Hilly Bijur gloated, fairly jumping up and down with glee. “It’s probably the best fucking publicity break anybody ever got in the history of fucking fragrance. Holy shit, it’ll make every paper in the country tomorrow. Ha! Just you tell me Candice baby, what Lauren Hutton or what’s her name Hemingway or Catherine Deneuve or Candy Bergen have in their private lives that could be one-tenth as fascinating as this? Those stores are going to be mobbed when she makes her personal appearances! Every woman in the country will want to see Daisy with her very own eyes. She can get on Phil Donahue … a whole hour! Merv will love her, Mike Douglas, The Today Show’ … maybe even Carson … sure, Carson, too …”

  Patrick Shannon stood up. “Get the hell out of my office, Hilly, and don’t come back,” he shouted at the president of Elstree in a passion of disgust.

  Shannon had told all his three secretaries to go to lunch and he was still sitting, his elbows on the desk, his head in his hands, a copy of People open before him, when Daisy silently opened the door of his office. She saw immediately what he was staring at although he slid the magazine into a drawer the instant he realized she was in the room.

  “You don’t have to hide it,” Daisy said, in a voice without color, as if she were apologizing to someone in a dream.

  Shannon jumped up from his chair and strode across the room. He took her in his arms as she stood just inside the door, wearing her fine new dress, with the face of a punished, terrified child. She was so cold, so frighteningly icy that he did nothing but try to warm her, clasping her with all his warmth and strength, kneading her back with his big hands, cuddling her head to his chest, murmuring endearments like a mother. When he touched her hands and felt how frozen they were, he took them and slipped them under his jacket so that the heat of his chest might thaw them. Daisy pressed into him as if he were the only refuge in the world. As he hugged her to him, as she felt his heart beating strongly under her hands, as he stroked her hair and tried to fit her ever more closely to the shelter of his big body, she could feel the shattering pain in her heart becoming less shrill, as if it were being absorbed into him, melting from her coldness into his warmth. The relief was so great that at last she felt tears come to her eyes and, as he kept holding her and stroking her, she thawed even further and was able to sob, great howling sobs that came from her guts, but no matter how violently she shook, Shannon continued to clutch her firmly, taking her grief into himself with a total acceptance that gave her the freedom to hold nothing back. At last, after a long time, her shuddering, open-mouthed sounds became weeping and she finally reached for his handkerchief to try to dry her cheeks.

  “Candice said you were having lunch or I’d have come to find you.”

  “She didn’t know. They sent me an advance copy and I got it this morning.”

  “Daisy, come sit down. There.” He nestled her close to him on the couch, one arm protectively around her shoulders. He found another handkerchief in his trousers and mopped gently at her face, but soon gave up the hopeless job and simply took both of her hands in his free one. She sighed deeply and laid the whole weight of her head on his shoulder. They sat there like that, breathing together for many minutes, before Daisy broke the silence.

  “It was Ram.” Her voice was unemphatic and flat, without emotion.

  “Ram?”

  “My half-brother. He was the one person I didn’t tell you about.”

  “I don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell me about him? Why should you hate him so much? Why did he do this to your?”

  “He must have gone to the school and taken the picture,” Daisy said, not answering his questions. “It was on the wall of Dani’s bedroom. And then he told them those terrible lies about my mother. They must be lies if Ram told them. And I’ll never know the truth—I’ll never, never know it—everybody who might know is dead. Even Anabel said my father would never talk about it.”

  “But why would your brother want to hurt you?” Shannon persisted. “What was his motive? He says it’s commercialization of the family name—but I can’t buy that, it’s not enough of a reason, not in this day and age.”

  Daisy gently disengaged herself from Shannon and pulled herself back on the couch so that they were sitting six inches apart. She clasped her hands tightly together and looked straight into his eyes.

  “When I was a little girl, I loved him best next to my father. And then, when my father died and I was fifteen, Ram was the only one left. That summer … that summer …” She shook her head with impatience at her own cowardice and went resolutely on. “There was a week that summer after my father died when we were lovers. The first time he raped me. And he had to rape me the last time, too. But the other times in between, I—I didn’t try hard enough to stop him. I let him. I didn’t tell Anabel. I wanted someone to love me so badly … but that’s no excuse.”

  “The hell it isn’t!” Shannon said, taking her interlaced fingers in both his hands, and trying to pull her toward him.

  “No, let me tell you the rest,” Daisy said, holding herself away stiffly. “Ever since, ever since I got away from him I’ve refused to answer his letters. Finally, I wouldn’t even read his letters—that’s why my money was all lost I think. Of course, I could never ask him for a penny. But then, finally, when Anabel got cancer, Ram knew I couldn’t manage it by myself anymore. Last Christmas I was trapped into seeing him. He said he’d take care of everyone, Anabel and Danielle, too—In exchange, he just wanted me to move back to England. But I know Ram and I knew enough to be afraid. That’s why I took your offer, to be safe from him. This—this story—it’s his way of having his revenge. He doesn’t hate me, Pat, he loves me in his own way, he wants me the way he used to, he’s never stopped wanting me.”

  “Daisy, he’s a monster, a madman! That happened when you were fifteen?”

  Daisy nodded.

  “Didn’t you tell anybody? Couldn’t anybody do anything?”

  “I finally told Anabel—when it was all over—and she found a way to send me far away from him. And now you know. Nobody else. I’ve never told anyone else, not even Kiki. I was too ashamed.”

  “I’m going to kill him,” Shannon said quietly.

  “But what good would that do?” Daisy dismissed his threat. The damage had been done. Done and done. She reached into her handbag for the copy of People and opened it to the photograph of herself and Danielle. “I wonder if Dani ever noticed that this picture is gone? It was her favorite, because we looked the most alike in it,” Daisy said in sad wonderment “She probably didn’t notice. Oh, I hope she didn’t.”

  Shannon reached for the magazine and put it behind him. “Daisy, don’t think about it anymore.”

  “Don’t think about it! You’re crazy! My God, that’s all they’re going to want to know about now. I know how they’ll slide into it ever so tactfully—’How did you feel about that piece in People, tell us more about your sister, how well does she talk, what exactly do the two of you find to say to each other, what does it feel like to have an identical twin who can’t, can’t’—oh, they’ll find the way to ask, they’ll find a way to accuse me of keeping her a secret because I was ashamed of her instead of the real reason …
and Pat, I just don’t know anymore. Oh, God, Pat, those questions, it’ll be like having fingers tearing at my face, it’ll be like being naked to everybody. Can’t you hear them too? You don’t think they’re going to pretend they don’t know, do you?”

  “It doesn’t matter what anyone would like to ask you,” Shannon said. “Nothing would make me put you through more publicity. Candice will cancel all your interviews and all the store appearances. You’ll never have to talk to anyone from the press again for the rest of your life.”

  “But the launch, the whole campaign? Pat, you can’t do that.”

  “Don’t worry about details. It’s all going to go as scheduled except for your personal participation. Just leave it up to me.”

  “Pat, Pat, why are you doing this? I’ve been in advertising too long not to know what difference it’s going to make. You can’t fool me.”

  “Daisy, you know how to make commercials, but you’re not an expert on Supracorp’s business.” He took her in his arms again and kissed her lips. “I am, and I say you are not going to do it.”