Tell the Girl

by Sandra Howard

  Chapter 4

  August 1961

  ‘Hello, hello, bye bye-ee,’ Frankie screeched, with monotonous regularity.

  ‘Hello, bye bye-ee,’ Joe mimicked, dropping his head from side to side with birdy jerks. ‘Frankie, you squawker, you middle-class mynah, that’s the pits! Fart, fuck, titties, turnips – gonads, jockstrap – anything but bye bye-ee! Okay? Got it?’

  Joe swung round and told me, ‘It’s your fault, wifey. I’ve heard you. “Bye bye-ee”!’ He pushed back his chair and went over to the cage. ‘Fart, fart, Frankie, tits, gonads – got it? God, you do pong! Your cage is a smelly old cesspit. Frankie Wanky was a bird, Frankie Wanky laid a turd. He stinks like a Sudanese sewer.’

  Cleaning out the cage was on my to-do list. I’d just come in, dumped down my heavy tote bag and kicked off my yellow summer sling-backs; after a long day on a shoot for Harper’s Bazaar I was knackered, very glad it was Friday. Working under lights in a heatwave, modelling winter clothes – a Hardy Amies fur coat, a John Cavanagh tailored tweed suit – wasn’t much fun.

  Frankie, the mynah bird, named after Frank Sinatra whom Joe idolised, lived in the dining room. It was a gloomy room linking the hall and kitchen, which was brighter but tired-looking with chipped, scratched units that I longed to replace. Our ground-floor flat in a redbrick block was rented, though, and between the household bills and having spent too much on it already, I was feeling the pinch. Joe, for whatever reason – booze, horses or Alicia – was always broke and borrowing from me.

  He’d sat down again, stretching out his legs under the dining-room table that was late Georgian and one of his many hopelessly extravagant buys. ‘How’ve you been?’ I asked, worrying about him at home all day in a stuffy Kensington flat, drinking, playing LPs, running up stratospheric phone bills – if not out seeing Alicia.

  He wasn’t bothering with an answer so I went through to the kitchen, taking a couple of plates, the breadboard that had left a mess of crumbs and a dish of sweating butter. ‘The photographer was Richard Dormer,’ I called. ‘He’s such a nice man. He’d seen the play and loved it; thinks you’re in the genius class.’

  ‘Well, I’m off now,’ Joe said, staying put, as I returned to brush up the crumbs. ‘Two more nights of kissing that snot-nosed halitosis redhead, ninety-seven to date, and all the matinées; I’ll be celebrating when we get to Rory’s bash on Sunday night, I can tell you.’

  I gave him an anxious look. ‘Coming home for supper? Be nice if you did,’ I said, rubbing the back of my heel, sore from a day in the stiff new chisel-toe shoes. ‘Richard Dormer’s a class cook and he’s told me how to make a delicious-sounding cold soup out of whirred-up left-over salad.’

  ‘Is he queer or something? Anyway, it sounds more like stagnant pond-water to me. I’ll settle for breakfast – I’ll be home for that.’ Joe was in one of his most maddening moods. It didn’t mean he wouldn’t turn up, just that I wouldn’t know. I eyed the empty glass and tonic water bottle beside him. No vodka on show. Where’d he keep it?

  ‘Cy Grant’s a mate of Rory’s and he’ll be at the party with his guitar.’ Joe held up his hands, spreading out his fingers. ‘Should be good.’

  Joe’s fingers were quite stubby, considering his lean elegant build. His looks had an intensity that was hard to ignore; a long gaunt face with sunken cheeks, periwinkle-blue eyes, dandyish flowing brown hair that reached his collar. He was a natural for Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde parts, but with the electricity in his every movement and sharpness of his wit, he tended to play more cutting roles than the foppish aesthete.

  ‘Oh, and I talked to Henrietta,’ he said, still studying his hands. ‘According to her friend Gloria Romanoff, Sinatra’s due in London any day now, coming with Dean Martin on a private visit – aside from a day at Shepperton with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. They’re filming Road to Hong Kong, and Frank and Dean have cameo parts – astronauts in space suits. I told Henrietta she had to get me to meet Frank or else!’

  Henrietta was warm and good sparky fun, which couldn’t be said of all Joe’s aristocratic chums. He’d nagged her to bits ever since discovering she knew Frank Sinatra – Elizabeth Taylor as well, through Gloria Romanoff, Joe thought, who was apparently a great confidante of Frank’s. Gloria and her husband, Mike, who’d chosen to be the last in a great line of Russian aristocrats, owned Romanoff ’s Restaurant in Beverly Hills where all the big-name stars hung out. Henrietta had been out to stay once and had a fabulous time.

  ‘I should go,’ Joe said, still not making a move. He yawned. ‘It’s so bloody hot.’

  ‘Aren’t you quite late?’

  He looked at his watch and leaped to his feet. ‘Bugger! Shit! Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘Bye bye-ee, bye bye-ee!’ Frankie screeched on cue, as Joe reached the door.

  He stopped and turned. ‘No, no, old sport,’ he said, wagging a stubby finger. ‘Fart, fart, fartee-tartee. Bye, wifey,’ he called, a choice of word that gave me cause for a weary smile. ‘See you.’

  I followed him out into the hall. ‘Hope it’s a good audience. Make it home if you can.’

  On Sunday morning I woke feeling low, headachy and dreading the day ahead. Nothing was planned. Joe would be at his worst, morose and uncommunicative. He needed invitations to large country houses, lunch with rowdy friends, anything to avoid a quiet day at home. He’d drink heavily and secretly, play records non-stop, nodding and tapping his fingers in time to the music. There was Rory’s party, but Joe still had to get through the hours before then. He couldn’t handle his own company, let alone mine.

  He was beside me in bed, dead to the world; he’d flung off the sheet and was lying on his back, naked, sweaty, smelling of stale smoke and booze. I’d gone to the last night of Old Love, but failed to stop Joe getting extremely drunk at the party afterwards. He’d insisted on driving home; it had been a very erratic car ride.

  I shifted in bed and felt a slight stickiness, an unexpected trickle between my legs, and had to fight tears; the irregularity of my periods was cruel. If only I could get pregnant, Joe would feel proud and it would bring us closer, I felt sure.

  It was unbearably humid. Through a gap in the curtains the sky looked black and ominous, almost as if there was an eclipse; a storm was about to erupt. I eased out of bed, washed, took a couple of painkillers, put on a blue-spotted sundress, loose-fitting and cool, and left Joe to sleep on.

  The Sunday Dispatch was on the doormat. I took it to read at the dining-room table with a cup of tea and toast. I needed comfort food, not the boiled eggs and black coffee I lived on all week. It was the latest diet craze, protein, oranges and nothing else. Some of the models went to a guy in Harley Street for an injection in the bum to speed up the weight loss, but I was too squeamish for that. I sipped the tea slowly, gratefully, and spread a scraping of butter on the toast.

  The first crack of thunder came without warning, as shocking as gunfire; my pulse raced. Frankie cowered in his cage, hunched deep into his silky blue-black feathers. I opened the door, cooing and trying to soothe him. ‘There, there, Frankie; there, there.’ He wouldn’t even step onto my finger and I finally gave into the tears.

  Alicia would be at Rory’s party. Alicia, whose glossy auburn hair hung straight and lusciously down her back, hair that Joe fondled on dance floors. Alicia, whose thigh his hand caressed under dinner tables. Alicia, whose bikinied body had been such a lure. She’d spiked the workings of the marital clock, possibly irreparably; it could never be wound back to a time of happily-married-ever-after. I burned to know when the affair had started, whether it was before the Capri holiday, whether it still went on, but it was the memories of Capri that caused the most acute pain.

  Joe and I had been invited to stay with Alicia’s cousin, Sophia, at her holiday home on the island. We’d met her through Alicia and she was an older age group, her husband a land-owning peer. Well connected, as Alicia was herself. They were keen theatregoers and lovers of the arts, and had taken Joe under their w
ing.

  The first sight of the cliff-top villa perched high above a startlingly blue sea, an extended and sensitively modernised old farmhouse in mature gardens, had been a magical moment. I’d felt rapturous, that mellow evening, and gazed back at Joe guilelessly, lovingly, babbling about being the luckiest nineteen year old alive.

  Now, in retrospect, a couple of months on and a year older, I shuddered to think of such naivety. It had all been so obvious. To Sophia our host, whisking me off on hot pointless trips to Capri’s super-chic boutiques. To Hughie, the flabby, pink-skinned MP also staying, trying in his kind earnest way to distract me – suggesting cliff-top walks or going for a spin in the speedboat. Alicia’s husband, Toby, rich, remote, heavily built and balding, had been detached from it all, absorbed in his books and interminable games of chess with an Italian neighbour.

  I swam and sunbathed when left to my own devices, and just before lunch one blistering day had gone into the poolside changing room to dump my wet towel in the basket. Backing out again, heart pounding, hands clammy, sick to my stomach, I’d wanted only to be on the first plane home. Joe had come running out seconds later, chasing after me, trying to hug me, saying it was all in the heat of the moment and meant nothing, nothing at all. But something was lost in that moment, my blind innocent trust. Our marriage was holed, salt water seeping in.

  I sighed and washed up my cup and plate, starting when a violent streak of lightning suddenly lit up the window, a brilliant vertical flash, as jagged as broken glass. The thunder that followed was deafening, I almost missed the ringing phone.

  It was Henrietta, giggling with glee. ‘It’s all fixed. My friend Gloria is coming for drinks at six – and guess who she’s bringing? Frank Sinatra and his valet, George! Can you and Joe come at, let’s say, ten past? Tell Joe that timing matters. He’d better not be as late as always, as they may not stay long and it’s probably his one and only chance.’

  ‘I can’t believe this! You’re fantastic to have fixed it. Joe will love you forever more.’

  He’d be uncontainable. I stayed by the phone in the hall feeling a sense of the unreal, spiralling off with excitement and relief. I had to ring my parents, couldn’t wait to tell them whom I just happened to be having a drink with at ten past six that night.

  My father was a doctor with a country practice, much depended on locally; he worked all hours of day and night and many of his patients felt they owed Henry Forbes their all. He was a great film buff and as a child I’d gone to the pictures with him almost every weekend. His favourite actor was Edward G Robinson; I must have seen every film Edward G had ever made.

  ‘And isn’t it tonight that you’re going to be meeting Cy Grant as well?’ said my mother Betty, who had a huge crush on him. ‘I told you the bad patch would pass, darling,’ she murmured, not wanting my father to hear.

  ‘It hasn’t and it won’t,’ I snapped. ‘Why do you always have to be so accommodating and trying to make wrong things right?’ It was mean of me. I was beastly far too often; self-centred, heaping the smallest panic onto those thin uncomplaining shoulders and expecting sage sympathy and support. I got it unfailingly, but how could she mend a torn heart? What could she say about Alicia other than that life had to go on?

  The bedroom door crashed open and Joe stood framed in it, looking like an overgrown schoolboy with his thin bare chest and a pale blue towel tucked round his middle. He groaned. ‘Christ, I feel poisonous, mouth like a furred-up kettle. I’m going to die. Who was on the phone?’

  ‘Henrietta. We’re on. Six o’clock tonight, drinks with Sinatra at her place.’

  Joe forgot all about his hangover and Sunday decline. He transmogrified into a comparative saint; loveable, hugging me like a child in his excitement, full of how he longed to write a book about Sinatra and how determined he was to pull it off.

  ‘I’d have time to work on a book, too,’ he said later on, as we drove to Henrietta’s flat in Chelsea. ‘We don’t go into rehearsal for Cakes and Kindness till mid-Jan. It would be perfect timing. I loathe having to fill in with voice-overs and all the grot.’

  ‘Better not tell Sinatra you named your mynah bird after him – he might take umbrage!’

  We rang the bell at nine minutes past six to find Henrietta’s guests already arrived. When introduced, I stared shyly at Frank Sinatra, only dimly aware of Henrietta saying my name. He was immaculate in a tailored charcoal suit, double-cuff white shirt; an orange silk hankie was neatly evident in the jacket top pocket. His dark hair was receding slightly, he was tanned, had extremely white teeth, but it was his eyes that impelled me to stare so openly. They were as bright and deep blue as the Aegean Sea, a medium for his extraordinary dynamic talent – and they were staring right back at me.

  ‘Well, get you! They said you were some chick,’ Frank’s grin spread from ear to ear, ‘and they had it in one. The studios would be after you for a screen-test, no question.’

  That floored me. I blushed pillar-box red, at a loss to know how to answer. I wittered on, painfully shy, ‘I can’t tell you what a thrill this is, how I’m pinching myself.’

  Joe wittered too, while cleverly letting slip his encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Sinatra, his every record, every film – and he soon enough cut to the chase with practised self-deprecatory charm. ‘I act a bit,’ he said, ‘but I write too, and more than anything else I’d love to write your biography.’

  ‘Gee, hell, great idea, but I might want to write my autobiography one day. Say, how’s about you do a slim little book, just about my music, since you seem so well informed? I can see it now: black cover, yours truly on a spotlit stool . . . Why don’t you kids come on out? You can tag along to a coupla recording sessions; dig the scene. No skin off my back. You’re great, full of enthusiasm. Hey, Gloria, whaddya think? Can they stay with you?’

  Gloria, who was sitting with Henrietta on the sofa, beamed, and said, ‘They’d be most welcome,’ in a pleasingly soft Californian accent. She wore her dark brown hair back from her face, clear of a smooth high forehead. She was probably late thirties; she looked tidy and groomed in a plum print cocktail dress, gold necklace and earrings, an unmistakably American look. ‘When were you thinking of, Frank?’ she asked. ‘October maybe?’

  ‘You got El Dago’s inaugural flight late that month, Mr S,’ George, the valet, chipped in. He was tall and immensely elegant, terrific-looking. ‘That’s taking in Vegas, your two-week show at the Sands. You got recording sessions for Reprise goin’ on around there as well.’

  ‘Hey, they should come on that trip,’ Frank said. ‘See the sights and the show.’ He turned to Joe. ‘El Dago’s my new jet, a Martin 404 – they call me El Dago, hence the name. It’s a den in the sky – that flight’s gonna be a swell party! San Francisco, Vegas for the coupla weeks of the show. We’ll catch the end of Sammy D’s show, too – hijack it for a gas, maybe! We’ll chill out at my home in Palm Springs. Great place, I love the desert. You guys ever been out?’

  ‘Not even to America,’ Joe said. ‘I’ve never dreamed of seeing Palm Springs.’

  Joe was very full of his new best mate at Rory’s party. I dreaded the anti-climax when, as with so many other too-good-to-be-true ideas, it faded like a mirage the nearer it came. But no one else was quite as fascinated with Joe’s Sinatra news as he was; they were a sophisticated bunch, well up in celebrities, hobnobbing with film stars themselves, and they failed to swoon with fascination at his every word.

  I hung about; Joe did the talking. I was glad of the dimmed lights and party fug. The dust and cigarette smoke were as visible on the air as a rain shower. People were talking in groups, downing wine, vodka gimlets; a few couples shuffled round dancing where the rugs had been cleared. A small coterie was gathered where Cy Grant strummed his guitar, sitting at his feet. He was in a green and gold aloha shirt, looking wholesome and approachable, television’s man of the moment and it was easy to see why.

  The ballet dancer, Moira Shearer, was there, beautiful and delic
ate. Her red hair seemed almost backlit, the way it gleamed with gold lights. Her husband was beside her, the writer and broadcaster, Ludo Kennedy, whom I’d met before. He had an impressive head of hair of his own, thick and bushy, brushed up and back from his brow. Square-jawed with an intelligent gaze, he was an attractive man, I thought, accidentally catching his eye.

  He came to talk to me. ‘Let’s grab that space while it’s free,’ he said, as a couple vacated a squashy sofa, a threadbare subsided old thing against the wall.

  Ludo flattered me politely and I praised his new book, Ten Rillington Place. I hadn’t read it, but the reviews had been great, describing the forensic dissecting of the trial of Timothy Evans whom Ludo believed had suffered a terrible miscarriage of justice, hanged for murders he didn’t commit. We had a serious conversation then, about East Germany closing its borders and the first concrete blocks of a new wall being laid. Ludo talking of the grim spectre of fresh conflict it raised was hardly party chat, but it was refreshing not to be treated as a frivolous model.

  The artist Dominic Elwes was on Ludo’s other side; he began firing provocative questions at him, mainly about Jomo Kenyatta who was also in the news, released from prison that week. With Ludo distracted, arguing fiercely on Jomo’s behalf, I fastened on Alicia and Joe. They weren’t dancing, but just to see them talking together clawed and chewed at my gut. Alicia was in shocking-pink silk, a strapless dress, elasticated at the top, hanging like a sack, yet depressingly sexy and eye-catching all the same.

  My view of them was briefly blocked as Tony Lambton came to sit beside me, squeezing in and forcing Ludo to shifty along a bit, which didn’t go down well. ‘There’s not enough room,’ Ludo complained peevishly. ‘And I was talking to Susannah.’

  ‘You weren’t,’ Tony said, which was true enough. ‘Anyway, I am now.’

  It was a little morale boost, two influential older men sniping over me, though I felt slightly terrified of Tony, an aristocrat and an M P. He had a strong angular face and slicked-down curling black hair, but it was the hypnotic effect of his perennial dark glasses that gave him such Svengali-esque appeal. I felt caught in the glare dancing off those glasses and could well understand why a number of women were said to find him irresistible.