‘You bastard, you bastard!’ screamed Lila.
Rodney lifted my hand. ‘I meant to ask you. How did you do this?’
I’ve never told you, have I? There’s this long scar across the back of my hand. The pinpoints of the stitchmarks have long since faded, but the raised purplish weal remains. Will remain, I guess, for ever.
‘I was attacked,’ I said. ‘I was doing drama therapy with some disturbed kids and one of them attacked me.’
Rodney was watching Lila. ‘Know something?’ he said. ‘That’s what she is. A disturbed kid.’
I didn’t know, then, just how disturbed she was. I knew she was fragile and volatile and insecure, a prey to her wildly swinging moods. I knew that fame can unbalance its victim, distorting reality and turning other people into sycophants and liars. But I didn’t yet know anything about her past – the father, the broken marriages, the mental breakdowns. I had read every magazine interview I could find, but they usually just plugged her latest film. All that came later.
At that stage, you see, I just thought it was Lila who was disturbed. That’s what I thought.
Something else happened that first week. It seemed unimportant at the time. In fact, I hardly noticed Lila’s remark – not until I needed it, months later.
She had joined me on the set of that afternoon’s shoot, the lobby of her lover’s apartment. I had done my bit and we were hanging around while the riggers repaired something. We sat in the canvas chairs; out in the street, faces pressed against the glass doors as people watched us. Maybe, just for a moment, they were confused. Two blonde actresses, sitting under the bright, white lights. Which was the star? Which twin had the Toni? From the back, who could tell? Except one canvas chair said MISS DUNE and the other said ARTISTE.
Lila and I were talking about Rex, the English director. This was another topic that drew us close, as apart from Irma I was the only person on the set who had ever met him.
‘The motherfucker,’ she said. ‘The lousy worm. He used to tie me to the bedposts, I had to put a whole lot of guck on my wrists the next day. Guess I was into self-denigration then. I’ve come through that now.’
‘You seemed quite spirited at the time,’ I said. ‘You and your ice.’ I started giggling. ‘Wonder if that phone number’s still up in the telephone box.’
‘Huh?’ She looked at me, her eyes blank.
I stared back at her. Then I explained what had happened. She asked me to repeat it, to make sure. She had genuinely forgotten the whole incident.
‘And you want to know why I quit drinking?’ she said. ‘See, I do things I don’t remember later. I wake up in these weird places and I don’t know how I got there. It’s real alarming.’ She shivered. ‘Once, I was in this guy’s room in a Ramada Inn. A Ramada Inn! How the hell did I get there? He used to play a cop in Hill Street Blues, that’s the only way I recognised him.’
I didn’t reply. I had never known any real alcoholics, I didn’t know what to say. We went on to talk about something else. But I must have remembered this conversation, because of what happened later. I must have stored it somewhere in the back of my brain, like a hammer which you don’t remember you have in the cupboard until you suddenly want to kill someone.
That night, I dreamed Lila was Karen Black in the movie Five Easy Pieces. I often re-dreamed movies. Not so strange, perhaps. After all, dreams are our nocturnal cinema visits, our sleeping screenings for which we need no entrance tickets. Nor was my re-casting inappropriate, for Lila had that same cheap, dumb-blonde sexuality that Karen Black exuded. Jack Nicholson was fucking her, remember that scene? Striding with her from room to room while she yelped with pleasure. And when he finally flung her onto the bed he pinioned her to the bedposts, tying her wrists and then her neck with leather thongs. Twisting under him, she struggled; first her blonde wig came off and then her head. It rolled onto the floor, breaking like a wine bottle, and he was fucking a body, it could be anybody’s, it could be mine. I tried to re-cast the movie, struggling awake, but I couldn’t wake up. I knew what was going to happen, you see. For when he finally lifted his head, and I saw his face, it was Trev, grinning.
Three
A PATTERN EMERGED, on the set. During a long shoot a pattern always emerges – a running gag amongst the sound crew, the setting up of a fall guy, shifting alliances, a temporary love affair between the grip and the make-up girl, a tension between two of the actors. Actors, however, come and go. The rest of us were constant. Being a stand-in, I was neither crew nor cast but something in between. In some sense I was isolated; in another I could be the confidante, the recipient of gossip and grievances, from either side. I was adrift in the no-man’s-land between the mechanics of film-making and the creation of characters.
Here, however, my Englishness enhanced my peculiar status. Though mute when working, though merely a body to be shunted around, when I opened my mouth I was everybody’s darling. They loved to hear me speak. ‘Say to-ma-to again,’ they urged, copying my English accent. I told them that I was an actress, I could do American accents too, lots of them. I gave them my three Barbra Streisands, my six Meryl Streeps and (bitchily, because I was jealous of her) my one-and-a-half Diane Keatons. I could do a Marlon Brando, that slid, through The Godfather, into nasal incomprehensibility; I could do both the male and female Dustin in Tootsie. I was a terrific mimic. Unused for so long, my voice limbered up. I made people laugh – a refreshing sound I hadn’t heard since playing in Bedroom Farce in Hornchurch.
Lila, you see, couldn’t be anyone but herself; as an actress her range was pitifully limited, utterly one-note. I was a chameleon, a ventriloquist – I was an actress. But by one twist of fortune, nobody knew this. When Bump came out, it would be Lila there, up on the screen. Mine would be a name glimpsed by nobody, a name rolled on as the cinemas emptied, one name lost amidst dubbing editors, stand-by gaffers and plasterers. It would be Lila who would be interviewed amongst the popping flashbulbs.
Lila, I think, recognised my expertise. In those days she was anxious to learn. I sat in her trailer hearing her lines – she had a memory like a sieve. We ran through scenes together, with me playing her lover or her son. ‘Mom,’ I whined, ‘is that fink coming to dinner again?’ ‘He’s no fink,’ she replied, ‘he’s the man I love.’ I helped her with the interpretation of her part, the struggle between her motherly and romantic impulses, her son and her lover, developing them from the wooden and hackneyed script, fleshing them out.
I showed her how to improvise. ‘You’re Mary-Lou,’ I said. Mary-Lou was the name of her character. ‘Now let’s see you being short-changed in the grocery store, what will you say? You’re stuck in an elevator between two floors, how will you deal with it? Your mother’s come to stay, what’s she like, how do you relate to her?’
She was so fascinated that she even turned off Tammy Wynette. She had never gone to drama school, she’d never had discussions like this. Her looks had propelled her straight from beauty contests into showbusiness, from New Jersey Dairy Products to a long-running TV soap, and there had been no time for anything except intensive grooming and a series of disastrous love affairs with her leading men, most of whom had since turned out to be bisexual.
So I became the resident intellectual. Sometimes I felt like Professor Higgins in Pygmalion and she was my willing Eliza. On the set, I was considered clever just because I used to read. One day Lila picked up my copy of Middlemarch. She looked at the author’s name.
‘What’s he like?’ she asked. ‘He a good writer?’
I told her that George Eliot, in fact, was a woman. She clapped her hand to her mouth.
‘Don’t tell them,’ she hissed, indicating the camera crew, who were drinking coffee nearby. ‘They think I’m an airhead.’
Another time, during a break, Chuck spotted me reading my Penguin Ibsen. He paused beside me; he was a small, muscular man, as fidgety as a monkey; like all directors he was an egotistical bastard – they have to be, to do their job – but I l
iked him.
He said, ‘I’d be doing Hedda if I didn’t have three sets of alimony to pay.’ He shrugged. ‘But come to think of it, maybe Ibsen wouldn’t have written Hedda if he’d had three sets of alimony to pay.’
Lila was sitting nearby, selecting shoes. When he had gone she whispered, joking, ‘Now you’re going to tell me this guy Ibsen, he was a broad too.’
I laughed. ‘Hedda Gabler was.’ I took out a packet of Salems, offered her one, and told her the story. I said Hedda Gabler was an underused, intelligent woman who ends up shooting herself. I said that I had played her myself.
Lila asked to borrow the play-text. She was an eager pupil, she wanted to learn. She said she would read it that night. But later that evening, when I switched on my TV set, there was an item on the WCBS News. Some new movie, I’ve forgotten its name now, had just opened and there were shots of celebrities arriving for the première. Among them was Lila. Her hair was piled up and she wore a fur coat. On her arm was a chubby, elderly man who I later learnt was her agent. In the spotlights she looked dazzling; she flashed a smile at the camera, at the jostling crowd, and was gone. So much for Ibsen.
It was during my long evenings that I missed Trev the worst. Sometimes it seemed ludicrous, that he was only living in my flat because I wasn’t there. I couldn’t decide if he was more likely to misbehave on my territory or not. On the one hand he would feel more guilty, my rows of maidenhair ferns chastising him; on the other hand, my flat was so much more salubrious than his (not a hard task) that it would certainly make a more seductive venue in which he might, as he put it, get his rocks off. As I lay on my hotel bed switching TV channels, my imagination festered. When I phoned he was often out. I pictured him in the Coach and Horses, scribbling down girls’ phone numbers on his packet of Rizla cigarette papers. I pictured him padding, naked, across my spotless bedroom to join some hateful little scrubber, fifteen years my junior, under my duvet.
When we spoke I tried to paint a glamorous picture of my life in New York. ‘Come over,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay.’ I lay there, in my jeans and t-shirt, and murmured, ‘You’d love what I’m wearing. It’s this leather corset, laced so tightly, and this lacy black suspender belt, mmm, and silky stockings . . .’
But he said he couldn’t, this project was just coming to the boil. It was ever so hush-hush, he said, ever so exciting. He said he missed me; he made some dirty suggestions down the phone, things he was going to do to me when I got back, and that was that.
Lila and I had the same days off, of course. Remember that song, Me and my Shadow? That was me, bound to her. When she was released, so was I. Usually, however, when we finished for the day she just disappeared – to her fancy apartment, I guess, or to one of the battalions of experts who serviced her psyche and her muscle-tone. Maybe she had lunch with producers in places like the Russian Tea Room, places I’d read about. Maybe she lay blindfolded, plastered with mud packs. Maybe she sat, bingeing on bagels and watching re-runs of M.A.S.H. while Irma gave her a pedicure. God knows. Her life was so different to mine that I couldn’t imagine what she did with her time. What did film stars do? I longed for us to be intimate but there were always people who spirited her away, a car was always waiting, its engine purring, its driver listening to the baseball commentary and smoking Marlboros.
And then, one day in November, two weeks into shooting, Lila said she would take me shopping. We were sitting in her movie brother’s gym – Bump had an unconvincing sub-plot where Mary-Lou’s keep-fit fanatic of a brother was training to be an astronaut – and the next day they were shooting scenes that didn’t include us. I was sitting on what looked like a surgical examination couch, trying to work the levers.
‘Honey, you look like Orphan Annie,’ said Lila. She fingered the cloth of my skirt like a Jewish tailor, tut-tutting. It was an old denim skirt from Fenwicks. ‘Let’s go shopping, huh? I want to show you my city, like you showed me yours. How about it? Shall we have some fun?’ She sat down next to me. ‘I meant to have gotten round to it sooner. I’m feeling more together now.’
In fact, she looked more together. Her eyes were bright; her face radiant. Something must have happened. At the time I just thought she had met somebody, some man, or maybe she just felt better about her character in Bump, thanks to our sessions in her trailer. I didn’t know, then. Besides, I was too pleased to care. She said we’d go shopping and take in some lunch somewhere. Me, out to lunch with Lila Dune! It was one thing to be dose to her on the set, but quite another to accompany her into the outside world. I felt stupidly flattered, and then contemptuous of myself.
‘OK,’ I said, casually.
A Maizin limo arrived the next morning, very late – Lila was always late. She was wearing a silky pantsuit and dark glasses. Around her head she had wrapped a scarf, her public disguise. It made her both more ordinary and yet curiously tantalising, like those snapshots of the incognito Marilyn Monroe. She was in good spirits, flirting with Randy, the driver, and telling us about the first time she came to New York, as a teenager, how she had hitched a ride with a girlfriend and they walked arm-in-arm down Broadway looking at the lights.
‘One day, I told her, I said one day my name’s going to be up there.’
‘What happened to your friend?’ I asked.
‘She married a pig farmer in Idaho and they had three kids. Three little girls.’ She sighed. ‘My gynaecologist says my tubes are all fucked up, the way I’ve abused my body. There was this time, see, when I’d swallow anything. They called me the Walking Laboratory.’
‘You look very well on it,’ I said, before I could stop myself.
‘My whole life’s one big fuckup,’ she said, gazing through the tinted windows. ‘But yesterday I went to see this woman, she’s highly respected, she has politicians, everyone. So she read my cards and there were these conjunctions, one was the High Priestess, she says something very positive’s going to happen.’
So that was why she was looking so well. Lila was a feminist’s nightmare. It was as if she didn’t exist until she was told something – by her astrologer, her nutritionist, her agent; by the script which gave her the lines she had to speak. That’s what made her so attractive to men, I suppose. Despite her fame and wealth she was helpless, she was an empty vessel to be filled. She was intensively female. In the eighties there weren’t many women left like her, she was an endangered species. Most of the women I knew were strong and independent, or pretended to be, clomping around in Doc Martens and demanding everything from gay rights to multiple orgasms.
And where was I in all this? I thought I knew, I thought I was strong and independent, but nobody is quite as simple as that. I felt myself pulled, seduced, by something in Lila. Maybe she was starting to feel just a little affected by me. Maybe.
It was a glorious sunny day, dimmed by our dark windows. We slid along Madison Avenue and stopped outside the Ralph Lauren shop.
‘This is so damn British,’ she said. ‘You’re going to love it.’
We left Randy outside, leaning against the limo and chewing Lifesavers. Lila and I went in. The store gave me the strangest sensation; it was like stepping onto the stage set of an English country house. It was like going back home to Sussex. Rooms were laid out with brass beds and fireplaces; there were old Persian rugs on the floor. Gymkhana rosettes were pinned to the walls; I could have won them myself. Polished oak furniture displayed photos of people’s ancestors in silver frames; one of them strongly resembled my Uncle Charles. I almost expected to see my old Famous Five books on the bedside table.
Lila pulled out a Shetland sweater and held it against me.
‘I don’t want to be English,’ I protested. ‘I want to be American.’ I suppose I meant: I want to be more like you. ‘Take me somewhere you go,’ I said.
So we drove down to Saks. I can hardly remember the drive. I was concentrating on amusing Lila, entertaining her. The whole thing seemed so unlikely – the film star sitting beside me, the Ralph Lauren shop so phonil
y confronting me with my own past. The limo smelled of Lila’s perfume; it was not the sort she had given me, it was sharper today. What had Nobby said? You look like her long-lost cousin, the family swot. Me, with my mousy hair and my home-made clothes.
We went into Saks and she took me up to the lingerie department. She said she was a sucker for lingerie. When she took off her dark glasses people turned to stare – Americans are less inhibited about this than the English. She was no Jane Fonda but she was famous enough, particularly over here, where she had done a lot of TV work. I stood next to her proudly, rifling through the racks of lacy underwear. An elderly assistant, with a hairy mole on her chin, came up and hovered ingratiatingly.
‘You need any help, Miss Dune?’ she simpered. ‘We haven’t seen you in a while.’
‘I’ve been in London this summer,’ said Lila. ‘This is my pal, Jules Simpson.’
‘Sampson, actually,’ I said.
The woman smiled at me unctuously, as if mine were a famous name too. Lila selected a silk slip, in cream and peach, for herself. I looked at the price tag; I suddenly thought of Gertie, and our grant being cut.
Lila turned to me impulsively. ‘You’d look great in aquamarine,’ she said, and grabbed one from the rack. It was the palest blue slip, as light as dandelion fluff. She laid it over my arm; I stroked it, lovingly.
We went into two cubicles. Through the wall I heard Lila moving around as she undressed. I felt curiously aroused. I knew, then, that there was something of Lila in me, the part of me that flowered for Trev, the part of me that nobody else knew. The me who threw aside her jeans and t-shirt and trussed herself up in satin and stockings. I didn’t want to think about it. I undressed and wriggled into the slip.
‘Can I come in?’
The door opened and Lila appeared. Standing together in the cubicle, we inspected ourselves in the mirror.
I felt short of breath, as if I had been running. I looked at her reflection. She was ravishing – tanned and somehow riper than I had expected. Womanly. Though she was fine-boned, her breasts were surprisingly heavy. There was a sheen of perspiration in the cleft of her cleavage. Close-up, I could see the freckles on her shoulderblades when she turned to look at herself from the side. I could feel the warmth of her skin.
The Stand-In Page 10
