A Woman of Integrity

by J David Simons

  ‘Well, we could check out the terms of Georgie’s will, get an extract, see if Quentin is acting appropriately, bring the lawyers on board if he’s not, force him to back down with his conditions, then we’d be back to square one, probably still paying five dollars a word for the price of your integrity. Which is money I don’t have. The show wouldn’t go on.’ Sal moved closer to the screen so it was just his face she was seeing. ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘I feel defeated already. And we haven’t even started yet.’

  Sal pulled back so that he became a less threatening headshot. ‘Look, I get it that Quentin is exploiting Georgie’s estate for his own benefit. But he’d be saving us a helluva lot of money.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And this integrity stuff. It’s not like he’s asking to have sex with you.’

  ‘That’s what my friend Victoria said too. As if that makes his proposal any less of a blackmail.’

  ‘You’ve just got to set the bar a bit lower. Otherwise nothing’ll get done.’

  She’d thought the voice-over for a crab had set the bar low enough. ‘It just doesn’t sit right with me.’

  ‘It’s not a question of right or wrong, Laura. It’s a question of the end justifying the means. We both want the same ending, don’t we?’ Sal’s image slowed down, then froze on the screen. That was her moment, her chance to say ‘no’. But she wanted this too much. He stuttered back into life. ‘Can we move ahead on this now?’ he drawled.

  ‘OK.’ She let out a half laugh. ‘After all, it’s just a shitty play between friends.’

  ‘Good. I’ll put together a crew for the filming. Camera, sound, lighting. How many actors do you need?’

  She did a quick count with her fingers. ‘Eight. Six at a pinch, if I double up a couple of the small roles. Not sure if Quentin would be happy with that. Especially since it’s being filmed for posterity.’

  ‘Do the eight then. Can I leave you to get the venue and the cast?’

  ‘Sure. But who’s going to pay for all this? Crew. Venue. Equity rates.’

  ‘I’ll sort out the filming. Can you front the acting and theatre costs? Once we have access to all the papers, we shouldn’t have any problem with funding. I’ll pay you back then. Is that OK?’

  ‘I can just about manage that. But that’s all, Sal. Cash flow is a serious issue for me right now.’

  ‘I thought you were one big success story.’

  ‘Tax problems,’ she said, allowing her brain to release that one anxious phrase for a millisecond before shutting it back down.

  ‘Oh yeah, that’ll do it for you.’ Sal ran his palm over a bristled chin. She could hear the friction all the way from California. ‘One other thing,’ he said. ‘This play. Is there a role in it for someone around your age?’

  ‘There’s the wife of one of the main characters. But I don’t want a part in this. Doing all the organization and direction is enough for me.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of you. What about our friend Lady Caroline?’

  ‘Caroline? Seriously?’

  ‘She used to be an actress, didn’t she?’

  ‘Thirty years ago.’

  ‘Well, maybe she’d like to revive her career.’

  ‘I’m sure she would. But why her?’

  ‘I’m just thinking ahead, that’s all.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Hepburn Archives

  Extract from an unpublished memoir

  There was a Hollywood film out around this time with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers called Flying Down to Rio. Rollo and I absolutely loved it mainly because it contained all these ridiculously impossible flying scenes. Ginger sitting astride the fuselage of a monoplane in a silk aviator’s suit flying over Rio as if she were riding into town in her pyjamas on some fine horse. Up in the skies, twenty dancing girls high-kicking across an airplane wing, a routine so top heavy that the plane would never have gotten off the ground. Another shot showed five wing-riding young women having their dresses ripped off to their underwear by the wind. Astaire would sing something about spinning the plane’s propeller and getting to Rio on time and Rollo would substitute the place name of our destination so we had to get to Bristol or Swindon or Woking, or wherever we were going, on time. By then, Rollo had ditched the Gipsy Moth for a spanking new Percival Gull Four with a three-seater glazed cabin. No need for goggles or helmet. Rollo sitting just ahead of me singing his head off over the sound of the engine and I knew he was spinning that old propeller, heading off for somewhere else in his mind. Perhaps even Rio with one of those stripped-off wing-riding girls.

  Ours was definitely the flying life. We were not as illustrious a couple as The Flying Sweethearts – Amy Johnson and her husband Jim Mollison (until they got divorced, of course). We weren’t interested in long-distance flying or trying to break aviation records. But our flight over to the Sinai and back had provided us with a solid reputation among those in the flying circuit.

  Rollo decided to focus on his aerial photography, a skill gaining in importance now that the threat of war against Germany was becoming more serious by the day. The RAF were determined to properly map as much of the potential theatres of conflict as possible with the result that Rollo ended up spending a lot of time photographing along the coast of North Africa. As for me, I would use his Percival Gull to take the general public up on joyrides or carry out post delivery and private passenger transport for a small commercial company. When our free-time coincided, Rollo and I would fly up to Scotland or over to Ireland. We enjoyed going to the cinema too. Not just the Astaire-Rogers musicals but fabulous thrillers like Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps when I could regale Rollo about my encounter with the now famous director and to remind my beau that he was now stepping out with a once briefly successful film star.

  We never did much talking about our plans for each other, I suppose our relationship was a bit like a silent movie in itself. But when Rollo did speak about us, he came out with words of such measured gravity that all I wanted to do was pin my future to him.

  ‘Love is an active verb,’ he told me once. ‘Judge me on what I do for you rather than what I say.’ Or when he had returned from a solo flight, he said: ‘I feel the Gull is heavier without you in it.’ Or when we hadn’t seen each other for a while: ‘You are like a print negative coming alive in my hands.’ He would have that faraway look in his eyes as he spoke. Most aviators had it. I probably did too. As did sailors. A gaze cultivated from forever scouring the wide horizons. And then he would smile that broad smile of his, as he did when we first met, in private amusement (and perhaps a little disbelief) at what he had just said out loud.

  And what words of endearment would I say to him? For the life of me, I cannot remember. When I try to recall the past and its conversations, it is usually that which is spoken to me that I remember (probably inaccurately) rather than the words I myself say. I was no longer the gushing young woman from when I was with Max but if I did not actually tell Rollo I loved him, I certainly felt it in my heart.

  I was down in the hangars at London Air Park, working with the mechanics getting my plane ready for a post delivery down to Ipswich. The sky was clear but I had a funny feeling in my bones that some kind of change was looming. All aviators have a nose and a wariness for the weather, always with a glance upwards or a sniff of the air to detect the slightest movement or dampness in the atmosphere. I remember Davy the mechanic saying to me: ‘Looks like yer man o’er there. Getting ready for the off.’

  I strode out of the hangar, held up my arm against the weak sunlight, and there was Rollo taxiing off in the Gull. I waved at him, strained to get a good look at his face in the cockpit, not sure if he waved back but I’d like to think he did. Like me, he was headed off east, although for him it was to Norfolk and the Broads for some aerial shots. It was a routine job, especially with a cloudless sky and a full tank of fuel. It turned out that I should have listened to my bones that day for a couple of hours later conditions had chan
ged dramatically with a heavy mist coming in off the coast and I had to postpone my own scheduled flight across to Ipswich.

  For a couple of hours or so I pretended I wasn’t worried, then I got our radio operator to call around the other airfields out east. There hadn’t been any sightings of Rollo’s Gull or any radio contact at all and I began to get more anxious. The police and coastguard were alerted. I took a chair outside the women’s changing hut and just sat there, scouring the skies for any sign of him coming out of the clouds. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the scene. I could see the glint of the sunlight off the glass of the cockpit, that little dip of the wings from side to side in greeting, that particular sound you get from the 6-cylinder Napier Javelin engine that Rollo preferred. And there was me running out to wave him down, the tension all draining out of me, wiping my greasy hands on my overalls, all ready to grab him as soon as he stepped out of the Gull.

  But it wasn’t to be like that at all. No more sightings either on land or out to sea. No radio contact. The hour had long passed when he would have run out of fuel. The sun was gone from the day and Davy the mechanic came out with a jacket for me.

  ‘Come on in, lass,’ he said with a fatherly hand on my shoulder. ‘No point you catching cold.’

  But I stayed out in the twilight. The clouds had lifted and I watched the firmament come alive, praying that the birth of each star might be the light of his plane arriving back from the coast.

  Lost in fog over sea was the official report. Once the petrol had gone he would have crashed into the icy waters alone. Although I never saw it that way myself. I’d like to think he found a crack in the sky and just disappeared into it – into a better world.

  I still think of him. That perhaps he might be at home waiting for me. Or just around the corner ready to surprise. Or look, over there, strolling along the pavement, whistling Flying Down to Rio, with a little shimmy of a side-step like Fred Astaire. Spinning that old propeller. Trying to make up time.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Director’s Cut

  Laura had always fancied herself as a producer. A Cameron Mackintosh, a Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Kathryn Bigelow, a George Lucas, a Kathleen Kennedy. Assembling all the essential ingredients like a dedicated alchemist before handing them over to a director and cast to wield their magic. Although in this case, she lacked one essential part of the recipe. A decent script. But with her inner eye fixed firmly on access to all of Georgie Hepburn’s papers, she did the very best she could.

  She arranged the venue, managing to book a plush little theatre at the back of a north Islington pub on a rare day-off between other productions. She called up all the jobbing actors she knew who might be in need of work, explained the set-up of the run-through, apologised for the quality of the play. She received immediate acceptances to all her requests. ‘Oh we poor, poor actors’, she thought. ‘We’d do anything to be up there in the limelight.’ She produced multiple copies of the script, had them properly bound, then sent out to the members of the cast. She paid for both a sound and lighting engineer from the theatre to be there on the day, co-ordinated the arrival of the film crew with Sal, organized a buffet lunch, ensured the pub would supply a constant supply of coffee, tea and sandwiches. She then instructed her lawyer to draw up a contract between herself and Quentin, granting her full access to the Hepburn papers on completion of a run-through of his play together with the delivery of a digital video recording of the performance. She had only one item left on her to-do list before she printed off the final playbill. To ask Caroline to play the part of Hannah, a Holocaust survivor and wife of the main character.

  Caroline had servants. Maids, gardeners, a chef, a house-keeper and the butler who answered the door, whom Laura believed was called “Robert”. ‘It’s nice to see you again, Robert,’ she said, consciously using his name to show she was a decent human being who made the effort to remember such personal details.

  ‘You too, ma’am,’ he said as he directed her towards a gorgeous sun-lit sitting room, all pale blues and yellows, the air thick with the scent of iris (also pale blues and yellows), a bit too sickly sweet for her liking. ‘Lady Caroline will be with you shortly.’ Which turned out to be a matter of seconds for Caroline immediately appeared from behind her butler in a gorgeous multi-coloured maxi dress, her once-blonde hair dyed the reddish brown of the Australian desert.

  ‘Thank you, Ronald,’ Caroline said, immediately causing Laura to flush at her error.

  Ronald remained impassive. ‘Should I tell the kitchen to serve tea?’

  ‘We’ll have ten minutes to settle first.’ Then to Laura. ‘Sit, sit, sit. Marvellous to see you.’

  Laura did as she was told. ‘Love the dress,’ she remarked.

  ‘Nothing really.’

  It may have been nothing to Caroline but Laura had recently seen the very same outfit at Harvey Nichols. She simply hadn’t been able to justify the price-tag to an actress recently dumped by her agent. Which was probably just as well, as they both could have ended up meeting today like a set of twins.

  ‘So hot,’ Caroline said, fanning her face with her fingers even though the room was air-conditioned cool. ‘Sunning in the garden. You’ll just catch Lew. He’s on his way to somewhere. South Africa I think.’

  And again, as if the mention of his name had the effect of conjuring him up, Sir Lew Hoffman himself arrived, full of brusqueness and tight efficiency, his too-tanned face the colour of his wife’s hair. A stocky man with a thick neck, Lew always seemed to wear suits and shirts too tight for him which Laura thought was odd because his clothes must surely be custom-made. Yet here he was, all buttoned-up and ready to burst, dispensing with his briefcase, taking both her hands, kissing her on one cheek then the other, smelling of an expensive cologne that rivalled the roomful of flowers in its pungency.

  ‘Good to see you,’ he said, pulling back, still holding on to her, inspecting her as if she were a piece of real estate. Everything was a commodity for Lew. That was why she always thought of him as being unfaithful. Not with lovers but with high-end call girls. ‘Heard you met one of my number crunchers,’ he said. ‘Freddy Nilssen. Hope he didn’t bore you?’

  ‘He was quite charming actually. In his own way.’

  ‘His own way is usually very intense. Someone who can’t seem to switch off from his work.’

  ‘Takes one to know one,’ Caroline said.

  Lew ignored the comment. ‘And where is life taking you these days, Laura?’

  ‘Trying to get a new project off the ground.’

  ‘Film?’

  ‘Play and documentary.’

  ‘I wish you’d put Caroline in it.’

  ‘I might do just that.’

  ‘Excellent. She needs something to do.’ He glanced at his wife – who scowled back at him – then his watch. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to chat. Off to South America. Maybe catch one of your films on the plane. Anything recent?’

  She shook her head, decided against mentioning the Disney thing.

  Lew pecked at his wife’s cheek, retrieved his briefcase from the sofa, Ronald was at the door to let him out, and he was gone, leaving behind the residue of his cologne, lingering like a canine scent.

  Caroline snorted an acknowledgement of her husband’s departure, her head still tilted towards the front door. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

  About what Caroline didn’t know, Laura decided not to ask. Instead she remarked: ‘The flowers are beautiful.’ She wasn’t sure why she always spoke to Caroline like this. The flowers are beautiful. Your dress is lovely. Such gorgeous curtains, wallpaper, cushions, paintings, antimacassars, sculptures, sconces, coffee table. Was it for a lack of something to say, a bland recognition they no longer had anything in common? Even though they had been at drama college together, slummed and slutted around Europe along with Victoria, stuck out their thumbs in short skirts at the side of French autoroutes, the three of them a perky little triumvirate, soaking up the vo
dka, marijuana and one-night stands as if their world was about to end in a nuclear holocaust, Caroline generally ending up with the best looking of whichever young studs they had set their greedy sights on. Or did she really think the flowers were beautiful?

  ‘They match the room,’ Caroline noted off-handedly, as if the sole purpose of Mother Nature was to chime with the decor. Or Victoria’s taste, for it was she who had been the interior designer of this sumptuous property. ‘Is it true?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You might have something for me.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘How exciting. It’s been decades since I’ve done any real acting.’

  ‘It’s just a run-through,’ she said brightly. ‘A chance to catch up with some of our old drama school chums.’ Chums? When did she ever use a word like ‘chums’? It was Lew. Something about his bullish self-assuredness that always put her off-balance, stripped away her own self-confidence until she was gushing away like an awkward teenager, trying to impress, commenting on the flowers. ‘Some of the old crowd.’

  ‘Do tell.’

  She reeled off a list of names, then told her about the play.

  ‘A Holocaust survivor?’

  ‘It’s a decent-sized role.’

  ‘Don’t you think I’m a bit full-figured to have been in a concentration camp?’

  ‘It was thirty years ago in this woman’s past. She will have filled out since then.’

  ‘I don’t think these people ever fill out.’

  ‘Caroline. It’s only a bloody run-through.’

  ‘Still. I like to feel I fit the part.’

  ‘I’ve brought the script. Read it through and let me know.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’ll do it, I’ll do it.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘It was nice of you to think of me.’

  ‘To be honest, it wasn’t my idea. It was Sal’s.’

  ‘Oh really. Sal. How thoughtful of him. Tea?’

  Chapter Twenty-Six