The Dowager Queen Catherine had a group of ladies-in-waiting called the Flying Squad, who were selected for their youth and beauty and willingness to sleep around and bring back news to the queen that they collected from their titled lovers. These ladies were lying upon the banks of the streams that line the approach to Chenonceaux, playing harps and singing as the royal wedding party advanced down an avenue lined with high trees forming a canopy overhead. The approach to Chenonceaux today is very evocative of this procession and the Mermaids of Chenonceaux, but the trees cannot be the same trees. Can they? These things interest me. If they are, they would have been little saplings then. No, they can’t be.
The Château of Chenonceaux is one of the great beauties of France. Henry II gave it to his mistress Diane de Poitiers, and she, in turn, made it into a wonderland. Beautiful parterre gardens on every hand and she had even had a bridge built from the château across the Cher River so the king could hunt on the other side of the river whenever it took his fancy. That’s thoughtfulness. And money.
Soon after Henry II was killed, Catherine de Medici immediately took Chenonceaux away from Diane de Poitiers. She probably thought she’d never be able to avenge herself on Diane in her lifetime. It must have been a real pleasure. Diane was a fabled beauty, and the Queen was never anything but plain. She avenged herself for all the plain women of the world.
And that is how it came to be that Mary, Queen of France and then Queen of Scots, came to have her wedding party at Chenonceaux. I tell you all this because Chenonceaux is only about seven miles from Cornichons, and I have been there a number of times. Catherine de Medici built a large ballroom on the bridge that crosses the river. When you stand in one of its windows with the Cher River flowing rapidly under your feet you have the feeling that you are flying. I’m sure Catherine did, too.
The rest of the story you probably know. Francis II, Mary’s husband, soon died, and she decided to return and take the throne of Scotland. Her husband, the beautiful and younger Lord Darnley, who also had a vague claim to the throne, was blown up while in bed with his lover. Soon after, Mary was captured by English forces invading Scotland and taken prisoner to England, where she was under house arrest for many years. She could never stop plotting to try to capture the throne of England. How could she help herself? She was next in line. And being queen of England was so much better than being under house arrest.
Elizabeth finally had her beheaded, although she didn’t really want to. It must have been a hard decision. Mary was the most like herself of all the people on earth. When the executioner lifted her head by her beautiful red hair, it came away. It was a wig. The gray-haired head rolled away. And her little dog came running out from under her skirts. The judges who observed the execution must have thought about that for a long time. I would hope. In those days you probably were an observer of many things that would put any one of us sissified moderns into trauma for the rest of our lives. Can you imagine telling your therapist you saw that little dog run out? And he says, “You saw what?”
Mary’s son inherited the throne from Elizabeth and became James I of England, James VI of Scotland. So, the Scottish really don’t have much of a claim to wanting to be independent. They were never conquered. They were joined together under James. He liked pretty men, too, like the two queens themselves. But that was all kept under wraps.
When I saw the son et lumière at Chenonceaux, the most beautiful moment was when the light in the window of Catherine de Medici’s study lit up, and a precise French voice quoted what she said when she heard that Mary had been executed: “What world do we live in when a queen of France can be killed in this way?”
Cass
The first time I met Cass he explained to me that his real name was Cassius. I think he thought that would add a little prestige in the eyes of someone who was involved in the theater festival.
“That’s a very serious name,” I said. “It’s such a tragic character. Were your parents actors? Did they expect you to go on to great things in the theater?”
I stopped there. I was fooling around, but perhaps they had. And the fact that Cass was an English handyman in the French countryside may very well have disappointed his family.
“No, not at all,” he said. “My father was a plumber. My mom fancies that she knows something about the arts, and she wanted to give me some kind of upmarket name. I guess I was lucky I escaped being named Othello. My full name is Cassius Brewster. People call me Cass.”
“Lawrence Olivier named his child Tarquin. A villain’s name from Shakespeare. Imagine doing that and thinking your child was going to grow up and not hate you,” I said.
Cass said, “Maybe he wanted him to grow up and be like everyone else. A lot of people hated Lawrence Olivier.”
“Marilyn Monroe did,” I said. “I just read a book about the making of the movie she did with Lawrence Olivier. He hated her for always being late on the set, and she hated him for not realizing she couldn’t do otherwise.”
“He also hated her because no one looked at anyone else once she hit camera,” Cass said.
“You’re an unusual person to run across in France,” I said.
“Oh, we handymen have our moments,” Cass said.
We were at a garden party being given by the local Dutch family in Cornichons. Evidently it was an annual affair at their big red brick house in the countryside. They were an unusual bunch. Three sisters and a brother who had come to the French fields and rivers to give their animals a better life. People spoke of their arrival in Cornichons with vans full of horses, sheep, goats, dogs, and cats. I don’t believe they brought any cows. Cows get a bad rap. Because people eat them, I guess. They want to think they are just a bunch of steaks wandering about giving milk.
Just the night before I had had a conversation with one of the student actresses who was a vegetarian. Her name was Judy, of course. I don’t want to wander too far away from the subject here, but have you noticed that vegetarians are never reluctant to accept an invitation to an expensive restaurant? And then drive the headwaiter crazy because they only want green beans? And there aren’t any. And their veggies cost about fifty dollars. But that’s just one thing that’s annoying about vegetarians. If I were a vegetarian, I’d try to see if I could keep it to myself. It would involve eating a lot of pasta in restaurants, but I think you could never let anyone know if you were astute.
So I asked Judy if she would be willing to get along without milk and milk products if we did away with beef eating. She hadn’t thought about that. “Well,” she said, “we could just have them for milk. And let them die in the pasture in their own sweet time.”
I said, “I don’t think the farmers would go for that.”
Judy then explained that she didn’t eat eggs because she didn’t want to eat chickens in their embryo form. I then explained that very few eggs had embryos in them. She obviously thought this was unnecessary information. And that I was a paid killer.
My last thought on cows. I wish they had developed them for riding purposes instead of horses. Maybe not so fast but much more comfortable. Particularly if you sit sideways. They never run. In fact, Lord Byron said that women and cows should never run. I guess it’s all those tits swinging. There’s something very unsexy about lady athletes, don’t you think? But I ramble on. Back to the Dutch, and then back to Cass.
On the lawn in front of the red brick house which looks a lot like Holland, about forty people were standing with drinks in their hands. This is pretty much the international community of Cornichons in the summer, plus the cast of characters from the theater festival, plus the local hangers-on. Whenever you have a theater festival, people hope to get laid. Maybe Cass is among them.
The Dutch horses were observing us, hanging their heads over a fence on the far edge of the lawn. The Dutch sheep are no longer in evidence, but the Dutch dogs are everywhere, romping in large black and blond ways about the lawn. There are a lot of them, with a sprinkling of English spaniels among th
em. The sisters are attractive women who speak about a million languages, and their brother I can see peering from the attic window. A bit like a Charles Addams’s cartoon in the New Yorker. And among all these women with their high heels sinking into the pelouse and men in wrinkled linen jackets is Cass, whom I noticed was babbling away in French with a small girl who works at the Abbey as a secretary.
Cass is sort of attractive in an American footballer kind of way. He’s tall enough that I don’t have to lean forward and down to speak to him. He was wearing a short sleeved shirt without the compulsory linen jacket and seemed pretty well put together, although I wouldn’t call his waistline narrow. And he was wearing loafers and no socks. I wonder where he got that from? I thought they were only still doing that in Palm Beach. I noticed his tan stopped where his shirtsleeves began, and that was a plus.
I was mulling his remark about handymen and their moments and wondering what his moments might include when Francine, one of the Dutch sisters, came and led him away. She said, “I want you to meet the Lindermans. They’ve just bought a gentilhommiere near Blois, and I think they could use your help.”
I spotted Nina and Graham and headed their way. Graham was certainly the best-looking man at the party. They were both in pale blue which made their blue eyes stand out like a border of flowers. “You were talking to Cass,” Nina said.
“I was,” I said. “His real name is Cassius.”
“Cassius Brewster,” Nina said. “I wonder if that’s true.”
“He said his mother had pretensions to culture,” I said. “He actually verged on being witty. Do you think he’s going to be my new best friend?”
“Not if about twenty women around these parts have anything to do with it,” Graham said. “He’s infamous. British. Speaks perfect French for some reason. Has a renovation business. Starts renovations on someone’s château, has an affair with the lady of the house, she then wants to leave her boring old hubby, and Cass disappears. Leaving the house half-finished. There are about six of them standing about like that near Cornichons.”
“Well, as long as the tide of foreigners keeps coming this way, Cass’s going to get laid a lot,” I said.
“My mother used to say of some men, ‘Whatever he’s got, it doesn’t show,’” Nina said.
“Did she ever say that of me?” Graham asked.
“No. What you’ve got both shows and doesn’t show,” Nina said. I was beginning to find all of this very interesting. It certainly made me want to see some private parts around these parts.
“I hope Mother comes for a visit,” Nina said. “She could give us her opinion on Cass.”
“And me,” I said.
“Oh, what you’ve got is very evident, my dear,” Nina said. “You’re gunning for the most beautiful boy in the Loire Valley Award this season. I’ve been getting calls inquiring about you. You’re going to be besieged with party invitations after this little exercise. It can get very hectic here. Dinners and luncheons and the Sheep Festival is about to come up, and then your shows. You are going to be a very busy boy trying to get your lines memorized and rehearsals out of the way.”
“Could we make that ‘beautiful man award.’ I am twenty-five. And speaking of rehearsals, where’s Toca?”
Nina said, “He’s really shy. He probably hates these big evenings where you have to talk to dozens of people.”
“I would never have described him as shy,” I said. Nina gave me a quizzical look.
As I was heading toward our hostesses to say thank-you and good-bye, someone said in my ear, “I’d really like to fuck you.” I turned and Cass was standing with his back turned, talking to someone immediately behind me. Hmmmmmm, I thought. Could be, couldn’t be. The plot thickens. Then Nina, Graham, and I left.
The Season
Toca Sacar had planned a rather unusual theater festival for Cornichons. After The Trojan Women, we were going to do Racine’s Phedre. He had decided against doing Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as The Merchant of Venice. Phedre, with all its blood and guts and wild drama, was to be recited in a very stately French and some kind of English, as far as I knew. Then we were going to do Victor Herbert’s The Red Mill. Largely because Toca’s friend Kitty Carlisle Hart had starred in it originally and had said she would come to Cornichons if there was a production. Not to star in it, I guess. She’s ninety-four. And then we were going to wind up the season with Tea and Sympathy because Toca felt I was a young Anthony Perkins and should be given my chance to shine. At least that’s what he told me.
Since there was obviously no one in the student company who could at all handle the lead in Phedre, Toca had arranged that the French actress Brigitte Balnéaire would come to Cornichons to play the lead. “Why not Brigitte Bardot?” Nina had muttered. Brigitte Balnéaire had been a sex kitten some time in the distant past although I think she first came to fame as a child actress during the war. I figured she had to be in her sixties and that the claims that she had been a collaborator when she was four was something we could excuse.
Where the students were going to fit into this production was problematical, but I was going to play the role of the young son with whom Phedre falls in love. “It’s a tunic-and-toga kind of thing, which makes the costumes easy,” Toca said. “And you have the legs for it. And Brigitte will probably welcome being all swaddled up in a toga. She always had good arms and that will be about all you will see. Good hair, too. She’s perfect for Phedre.”
“Can she act?” I said.
“Never could,” Toca said, “but who cares? It’s Racine. Nobody can act Racine. Everyone is just going to be drowned in iambic pentameter. How’s your French?”
Fortunately for Toca my French is pretty good. Although I was obviously going to be speaking with an accent. Nina suggested I coach with Mme. Cretonne in Charlestour. She was a French teacher and somehow an acquaintance of Nina and Graham. “You’ll never lose your accent, but at least she’ll steer you around the worst parts. It will give the natives an opportunity to complain a lot about Racine being debased by Americans, which is always fun for them. As though anyone really wanted to see anything by Racine in the first place. And having Brigitte Balnéaire come down is not a bad idea. A little star power for the festival. God knows, no one here is going to have any idea who Kitty Carlisle Hart is.”
“Who is she?” I asked. We were all sitting around the kitchen table before I left for rehearsal. A large plate in the center of the table was heaped with croissants, pain raisin, and pain chocolat. “I could never live very far from a bakery,” Nina said. “At least in France.”
“Nina is the only person I know who can prepare lunch by going to the bakery,” Graham said, reaching for another pain chocolat. “And this is only breakfast.”
“I’ll have trouble getting into my tights if I keep this up,” I said, deciding that one croissant was really enough. As I left the table Nina said, “Kitty Carlisle was a singing actress in the 1930s. I think she was too much of a lady for Hollywood. She married the big Broadway playwright Moss Hart, and she did a television show called What’s My Line? She’s a smart woman. Dorothy Kilgallen was also on that show. She died in mysterious circumstances, drowned in the bathtub.”
“Maybe Kitty did it,” I said.
“She probably would have liked to,” Nina said. “Dorothy was quite a pain in the neck. No lips.”
“I know the type,” I said. “No lips means they just don’t want to give.”
“You have a nice full mouth,” Nina said.
“Let’s not go there,” I said. “That’s me. Give ’til it hurts.”
“I wasn’t talking about sex,” Nina said.
“Everything is about sex finally,” I said.
“I suppose you’re right. Either about getting it or not getting it.”
“It’s the not-getting-it people who always think it’s not important,” I said.
“Where were we?”
“Kitty Carlisle.”
“What more is t
here to say?” Nina said.
“I must run. I have a great fear that Toca thinks I can sing and that I’m going to be the male lead in The Red Mill.”
Nina said, “Whatever can possess him?” and I left.
Part of my work with the Festival was teaching the younger students. As though I knew anything about teaching. I had done a TV series when I was teenager and then hadn’t worked again until I left college. But the people I had met on the series were working all over the place and so I had contacts. Which is how I did the revival of Little Mary Sunshine Off-Broadway right out of college because a friend of mine was playing the lead and they needed one more Canadian Mountie. That was me. I can sing if I’m kind of the last in the crowd. After I did that I did Naughty Marietta in New Jersey at the Papermill Playhouse, and then was out of work for only about two weeks before the director took me with him for summer stock in St. Louis. You know they say in theater “It’s not who you know but who you blow.” But my career has been pretty free of that. Of course, there are always older men giving you lingering glances, but that’s not very flattering. If it’s warm, and has a penis, and is under thirty, they’re going to be giving you those hungry looks. I hope when I’m middle-aged I’m not going to find every man under thirty attractive. It’s so desperate.
Maybe that’s one of the things I can teach the kids here. When it comes to sex, don’t get desperate. Of course, you can’t mention a thing to teenagers although that’s what they want to know most about. When I think of myself I was a pretty hot ticket at sixteen. And nobody’s even supposed to touch you until you’re over eighteen.
My class was waiting in the old riding stables at the Abbey. Well, not exactly stables. What would you call it? The manège. The indoor riding arena? At any rate, what had once been the large building where they had practiced riding. The monks rode? Who knew? Actually the Abbey had been a national military school for some time and the students had practiced here. In the time of Louis XVI. You don’t think of people like Marie Antoinette riding, but they did. Wearing enormous hats with plumes if the old prints are correct. Imagine all that hair topped off with a feathered hat when your horse runs away with you. Must have been a mess.
Love in the Loire Page 4
