by Jilly Cooper
Baby rolled up at the subsequent press conference on the arm of a ravishing pony-tailed youth in a pinstripe suit. Gwynneth, the flabby crone from the Arts Council on whom Rannaldini had landed when Viking hit him across the room, was covering the event for the Sentinel. Wildly excited, she whisked the pinstriped youth from group to group, introducing him reverently as ‘Mr Spinosissimo’s partner’.
‘How long have you and Baby been together?’ asked the Telegraph.
‘Oh, he picked me up in the car park half an hour ago,’ grinned the youth.
‘D’you prefer guys to women, Baby?’ asked the Mirror.
‘I prefer sheep,’ said Baby. ‘If sheep could cook, I’d marry one.’
Over the roars of laughter, a blonde from the Scorpion called out, ‘Who’s this guy Schiller who’s done the tie-in?’
‘Shriller, if it’s Dame Hermione,’ drawled Baby.
The only obstacles ahead seemed to be that Baby must lose a stone before filming, if he were to look suitably lovelorn, and that the Don Carlos press officer, Bruce Cassidy, predictably nicknamed ‘Hype-along’, would have to try to hide the fact that Baby swung every which way including koala bears.
In another corner of the room, as the loudspeakers played Posa and Carlos’s Friendship Duet, Rannaldini and Tristan told a battery of cameras and tape-machines how delighted they were Baby was taking over and how equally excited they were about their new Russian discovery Mikhail Pezcherov. Rannaldini did most of the talking, as Tristan lit one Gauloise from another and looked languidly beautiful.
‘Bankable and bonkable,’ wrote the Mail.
‘You’ve been called the Italian stallion and the Kraut lout, Sir Roberto,’ piped up the Scorpion, ‘how come the Frog Prince is making a film with you?’
‘Rannaldini,’ said Tristan, in that husky, smoky accent with a slight break in it that sent shivers down every woman’s spine, ‘as my godfather and friend, has inspired and encouraged me. It has been my lifelong ambition to work with him on Don Carlos. I have every confidence in our collaboration.’
12
Alas, the recording was continually embattled. For a start, Rannaldini was only interested in the music sounding as he wanted. He would scrap even Hermione’s most glorious take if he didn’t like the intonation of the clarinets. Nor would he adjust his tempo to suit a singer, and had no intention of adjusting it for Tristan, for whom the timing of every bar was crucial.
Normally in films, music is added later to enhance the action, but in filming an opera, the action has to fit already recorded music. Thus, Tristan kept having to halt Rannaldini if he played something too fast or too slowly because when it came to filming the relevant singer wouldn’t have the right amount of time to run to the centre of the maze or indulge in a passionate clinch.
Rannaldini detested this. He had arranged for a camera to be on him constantly while he was conducting, so that the video could be shown on a huge monitor to guide the singers on location. Such was his monstrous vanity that he required endless lighting rehearsals, and would hold up a hundred musicians, not to mention singers, chorus and technicians, all on overtime, for twenty minutes while his hair was brushed and the shine taken off his nose. Once started, though, he was reluctant to be halted except at his own whim.
Nor were his singers behaving any better. Hermione was staying at the Lanesborough, Chloe at the Capital. The hotels were only a stone’s throw apart, but both divas insisted on travelling in different limos. When she discovered that Chloe’s dressing room was bigger than hers, Hermione was enraged and duly took her revenge the next day.
Singers are reputed to sing less well when they have their periods. Their vocal cords thicken and the diaphragm supporting the voice becomes sore and easily tired.
Next day Chloe recorded her great aria, ‘O Don Fatale’, and denounced her ‘fatal gift of beauty’ so gloriously, but with such controlled venom, it was impossible not to think it was part of her character. As she came to the end, however, and before the strings could tap their bows on the backs of their chairs in congratulation, Hermione had produced a Tampax from her bag, and thrusting it towards her, asked solicitously, ‘Are you needing this, dear?’
Chloe was outraged.
‘I can’t believe you’re still young enough to use those things,’ she snarled back, and retaliated later in the day by dropping her handbag in the middle of an exquisite take of Hermione’s aria in Act II. This triggered a five-minute screaming match, with Hermione threatening to walk out. Only Tristan managed to calm her.
‘There are women, Hermione,’ deliberately he made his voice even huskier, ‘who Verdi claimed are “born for others, who are quite unaware of their own egos, and who rise above the petty squabbles of lesser mortals”.’
Hermione was so moved she behaved herself for the rest of the afternoon.
On the other hand, she was not the only member of the cast to be worried that Fat Franco had been ousted by an unknown Australian. At least Franco would have ensured that Don Carlos was a commercial success. Confidence was restored, however, the moment Baby opened his mouth. The entire orchestra turned round to gawp, and at the end of his first duet with Chloe, Mikhail put down the score he was studying, ran across the hall and flung his arms round Baby. ‘You have most beautiful voice I ever hear. It will be privilege to vork with you.’
Mikhail’s own voice was just as impressive: Posa’s death scene had everyone in tears. Mikhail, however, was easily demoralized, particularly by Alpheus the bass who, in the great duet between Philip II and Posa, kept sighing and wearily holding the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, as Mikhail, with his poor command of English, fluffed line after line.
Baby and Mikhail on the other hand took to each other instantly, almost as an extension of their comradely role in the opera. In the evening they went on pub crawls, rehearsing their songs for the next day to the noisy delight of the punters. They tried to take Tristan with them but, to their disappointment, he insisted on returning alone to a friend’s flat he had borrowed overlooking Regent’s Park. After all the rows and hysterics, he needed peace to study the next day’s score.
Mysteriously with Mikhail’s arrival things started to disappear. Serena mislaid some pearl earrings, Alpheus some gold cufflinks. Chloe had quite fancied Mikhail until a large topaz ring, the only decent present Alpheus had ever given her, went missing. The cutlery in the canteen had to be replaced twice in a week. Only Baby, Mikhail’s buddy, remained unfleeced, which convinced Hermione, who’d made an unbelievable fuss about a missing umbrella, that he must be the thief.
‘All Australians are descended from convicts.’
‘I have never stolen anything in my life except thunder,’ snapped Baby.
Poor little Christy Foxe, the PA, had the thankless task of getting the cast to the right mikes on time. A singer meant to sound far away has to stand back from the mike, but if, in the middle of a number, he has a love scene with another singer, he has to rush to the mike next to them.
In the ensemble numbers, therefore, it was like Waterloo in the rush-hour, with little Christy shunting Dame Hermione, like a cattle truck, in one direction, and the chorus master propelling Alpheus, like the Intercity Express, in the other. Collisions, screaming-matches, kicks on the shin and slapped faces were inevitable.
There were more rows in the control room, which was where singers flocked after a stint of recording to listen to the playback and try to persuade Serena and Sylvestre, Tristan’s handsome blond French sound engineer, to use the take in which they had sounded best.
Baby, who knew he sounded best in everything, got so bored even of listening to his own voice, not even handsome Sylvestre could distract him, so he frequently started dancing round the recording-machines, much to Alpheus’s disapproval.
Alpheus already disapproved of Granny’s hunky boyfriend, Giuseppe, because if Giuseppe’s consumption of red wine didn’t impair the beauty of his voice he might one day topple Alpheus in leading bass ro
les, as Alpheus had toppled Granny. Alpheus also disapproved of Granny, who sat calmly knitting colourful squares for a patchwork quilt for his and Giuseppe’s bed, shaking with laughter at his own even more colourful asides. He hardly bothered to put down his needles when he sang, but chilled the blood every time he opened his mouth to deliver the words of the Grand Inquisitor.
Alpheus disapproved most of all of the orchestra.
‘I think the brass section have been drinking,’ he complained, during an evening session.
‘I should be extremely surprised if they hadn’t,’ said the orchestra manager calmly.
In turn, the orchestra, who worked flat out at every session, thoroughly disapproved of the singers, regarding them as lazy, stupid, hypochondriacal, hysterical and grossly overpaid. They did, however, forgive Baby, because he made them laugh and was monumentally generous. Whenever hampers or crates of wine rolled in from his increasing army of fans, they were handed over to the orchestra. Alpheus, who begrudged giving away anything, was horrified. No wonder Baby had difficulty with tax bills.
Meanwhile, Chloe and Alpheus had worked out their schedule so that whenever neither of them was singing they could slope off to bed.
The ladies of the chorus also thought Alpheus was yummy, and whiled away long, cold hours gazing at him. Predominantly middle-aged, given to baggy jerseys and straining leggings, they were of little interest to Alpheus. One member of the chorus, however, Gloria Prescott, rose like Venus from the permanent waves and was nicknamed ‘Pushy Galore’ because she always pushed her way to the front, nodding, gesticulating, shaking her blonde ringleted head and overacting to catch the director’s or conductor’s eye. She also sucked up to Dame Hermione.
‘Ay am such a fan.’
So Hermione befriended Pushy to infuriate Chloe. Alpheus, Rannaldini, Sexton, Sylvestre and Mikhail had all clocked Pushy. In return, Pushy whispered constantly in all their ears, including Tristan’s, that her greatest role at music college had been Elisabetta and wouldn’t she be younger and prettier in the role than Dame Hermione? One morning she was practising one of Hermione’s arias, and hitting all the high notes perfectly, when Rannaldini’s vulpine smile came round the door.
‘Would you like me to accompany you, my child?’ Then, as he was tinkling away, ‘You see, I am not such an ogre. When I say thees or that ees bad, it is because I have ears to ’ear the wrong things.’
The chorus were not booked for the following day, but Rannaldini confided to Pushy that he would specially like to send a limo for her tomorrow afternoon so she could hear the orchestra recording the overture that he himself had composed, and then perhaps they could have tea at the Ritz. Pushy was in heaven.
But if Rannaldini was histrionic when he conducted Verdi he was ten times more difficult when it came to his own music. Having reduced the orchestra to nervous wrecks in the rehearsal beforehand he started rowing with an increasingly demented Tristan.
‘If you take it that fast,’ yelled Tristan, ‘the hunt will never have time to stream down the valley.’
‘Then they must stream queeker.’
‘Then you will lose magical flowing effect.’
‘I must be faithful to my music.’
‘First time bastard’s been faithful to anything,’ muttered Viking O’Neill, the first horn.
‘I must be faithful to story,’ shouted Tristan.
‘OK, we rehearse two ways: queek then flowing.’
Rannaldini proceeded to take his overture at a breakneck speed, his stick a blur, and then at such a funereal pace that the strings ran out of bow, the woodwind and the brass out of puff, and all got screamed at again.
Tristan nearly killed Rannaldini. So did Serena, when she saw the ringleted, beribboned Pushy Galore at the back of the hall.
‘Rannaldini said no outsiders,’ she stormed.
‘Sir Roberto kaindly sent a limo for me,’ simpered Pushy.
Tristan sat shaking in the control room, his head in his hands.
‘Quiet, please, we now record,’ said Rannaldini imperiously, filling the musicians with such terror they could hardly pick up their instruments. ‘Remember, gentlemen, this is for ever.’
He then took his overture at a totally different, lilting, cantering tempo to which the orchestra had a mad struggle to readjust. At the end there was utter silence. Gazing at their shoes, waiting for the inevitable explosion, his musicians didn’t see the tears in Rannaldini’s eyes.
‘Thank you, gentlemen, that was absolutely beautiful,’ he said quietly. ‘You can have the rest of the afternoon off.’
So he can take me to tea at the Ritz, thought Pushy joyfully.
But ignoring Pushy, abandoning the gaping orchestra, Rannaldini bounded upstairs to the control room where, for once, Serena had lost her cool.
‘You cannot waste an entire session,’ she yelled, as she met him in the doorway. ‘What about the introductions to the other acts?’
But her tirade faltered, as Rannaldini’s hand crept inside her purple jersey.
‘We shall go ’ome to your flat.’
‘But Jessie is there with Nanny Bratislava.’
‘Tell little Jessie she must learn to call me Uncle Roberto.’
13
The next drama to rock the recording was when Rozzy Pringle finally turned up to sing Tebaldo, Elisabetta’s page. A seventies beauty, the doe-eyed, long-legged Rozzy was so like Celia Johnson that everyone had wanted to have unbrief encounters with her. She was much too old for the part, but at least she’d make Hermione look young, and she had a host of fans.
Granny and Rannaldini, who’d often worked with her, admired her inordinately. Serena and Alpheus had long collected her records. On the other hand, Hermione disliked all other sopranos on principle, and Mikhail, Baby and Chloe, being from a younger generation, scoffed that Rozzy was past it.
Tristan was livid with them. Enchanted at the prospect of working with one of his heroines, he filled Rozzy’s dressing room with spring flowers.
But when Rozzy finally came through the door, on a dank, grey, viciously cold morning, he was appalled. She looked old enough to be Hermione’s grandmother, and was purple with cold to match the darned violet blazer she was wearing over her long, flowered dress. To combat the ageing hippie look, she had curled up her hair but it had dropped in the fog, and fell in lank straight tresses over her jutting collarbones. Everyone greeted her effusively to conceal their shock.
‘Hi, Rozzy, I’m such a fan,’ said Chloe, clanking cheeks. Then, ten seconds later to Baby, ‘She must have lied about her age in Who’s Who. She’ll never see fifty again.’
Having thrust a beautifully wrapped present into Tristan’s hand, ‘a little something because you’re so kind to book me’, Rozzy fled to the loo.
‘Such a drag having Rozzy Pringle here, stinking out the lav again,’ grumbled Hermione, half an hour later, as little Christy Foxe propelled her towards the microphone.
‘You have to move to mike four, next to Baby, in bar forty-five, Dame Hermione,’ he reminded her for the tenth time. Then, consulting his score, he said, smiling at Rozzy as she crept grey and shaking out of her dressing room, ‘You start off standing twelve feet from mike two, then move up close to mike three, Mrs Pringle.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Tristan put his bomber jacket round Rozzy’s trembling shoulders. ‘Tebaldo’s just as petrified as you in this scene. Just make sure those opening “Hey theres” really ring out.’
Rozzy, Baby and Hermione were all in place, their breath rising in white plumes as Rannaldini swept in.
‘Morning, Rozzy, lovely to have you with us. Shall we catch up over a spot of lunch?’ he called out, eliciting scowls from Serena, Pushy and Hermione.
It was too early for the offstage band, waiting in the bar, to have got drunk. Seeing Rannaldini raise his stick on the monitor, Viking O’Neill came in with the mournful, fading sob of the departing hunting horn.
‘“All is silent, night approaches, and the first st
ar glitters on the horizon,”’ sang Baby, who worked the mike like a rock star.
Now they’ll eat their bitchy words, thought Tristan, as Rannaldini nodded, smiling at Rozzy, but despite her anguished face and frenzied mouthings, no ‘Hey theres’ came out.
Rannaldini halted the orchestra.
‘Rozzy?’
‘Sorry, Maestro.’
‘From the top.’ He raised his baton.
Viking’s horn, then Baby, both hauntingly exquisite, were followed by silence, and a dreadful, strangulated croak.
‘Relax, Rozzy, one, two, three,’ called Rannaldini.
Rozzy’s heart was crashing, the blood pumping through her veins, but her throat was drier than the desert. Even after ten minutes of struggling, all she could produce were scraping gasps. Tristan, in the control room, felt as if he was watching a dog, whose vocal cords had been cut in the vivisection clinic, trying to cry out as the surgeon’s knife went in. By the time he had run down into the hall, Rannaldini had lost his temper.
‘How dare you call yourself a professional singer?’ he was screaming.
‘You’ve let us all down,’ reproached Hermione, as Rozzy fled to her dressing room, her body racked as much with coughing as with sobs.
Rannaldini picked up the telephone to the control room.
‘Who booked her, for Christ’s sake?’
‘You and Tristan did,’ snapped Serena. ‘We’re going to have to reschedule.’
‘Tebaldo was my favourite part at college,’ piped up Pushy.
Rozzy’s present to Tristan was a cushion, green velvet on one side, the other exquisitely embroidered with the words, ‘The Lily in the Valley’.
Tristan couldn’t bear unhappiness. Leaving everyone fighting, and Baby and Hermione to finish their duet, he drove Rozzy to Harley Street with his car heater turned up.
