“In case the studio needs to reach me,” he said, replacing the receiver in its cradle while I nodded sagely, wondering what to say next. But he was talking as he headed the car toward Sunset, climbing Coldwater Canyon, crossing Mulholland, and coasting down into the Valley below.
“How’s school?” he asked. Did I have many boyfriends? Well, no, no special boyfriends, I lied; I wasn’t going steady. Or anything. I bet he had a lot of girlfriends, though. But he laughed and said no, no girlfriends. At the moment, he had alimony payments—and his second wife was suing him for divorce. No, he laughed, no girlfriends. Lucky for me, I thought. Who would be dumb enough to divorce him? How old was he, if he didn’t mind? He was staring straight ahead. Thirty-six, he said, turning off onto a dirt road that led into a citrus orchard, down through groves of orange and grapefruit trees. Thirty-six.
“My farm,” he said, reading the question in my expression. “I bought it as an investment last year. Land is gold, kiddo, didn’t your father tell you that?”
“My father has farms too,” I said proudly, “all over the place, and an office building in Hollywood and a parking lot. I think the parking lot’s in Westwood.”
He switched off the ignition and smiled at me. His teeth seemed to glow in the dark. It was very dark. And very still. I knew he was staring at me though my eyes were cast down; I wondered if he could hear my heart pounding. Booming, really. Like a gun.
Why was this moment so familiar? Why did I feel I had been here before? Face flushed with shyness and excitement, eyes locked on my loafers, the careful cuffs of my jeans, the soft rolls of my socks; heart racing with forbidden feeling, with love, with fear, with the romance of it all. Was it like the time with my father? Just the two of us in his car when I was six years old? That evening when he drove me high up over the city as the sun was setting and we watched the lovebirds nuzzling in a tree—“Do you know what it means to ’bill and coo’?” he’d asked as the blood rushed to my face. Helpless with love for him; putty in his hands. “Do you know what it means to ’bill and cool” I think I do, Dad. Now, I think I do.
For this man’s hands were touching me now, pulling me to him, and he was kissing me—this older man who was not my father, this other man in whose hands I was again pure putty, this prince who had come to carry me away.
A light rain was beginning to fall, pulling the California grapefruit off the trees to land with a soft thud on the convertible. This was well beyond “bill and coo” now, heading into deeper, darker waters, and I was trying to keep from going under. In one night, I had gone from fourteen-year-olds in white bucks and braces to thirty-six-year-old movie stars in cashmere and real estate. From guys in letter sweaters to men in divorce suits. I was in way over my head.
He got rougher and more persistent as I knocked the mobile phone from its cradle once more in a hasty retreat across the seat. My back flattened against the padded Naugahyde door; he came at me, talking softly, firmly, asking me what was the matter? What was I afraid of? Didn’t I realize how many women would love to be in my place? Yes, I did, I nodded, thinking how much I wished they were.
This was no clumsy necking with boys in faculty parking lots; this was the big time, the Real Thing. There was no place here in the citrus for coy teenage crushes; he was not taking no for an answer, no longer treating me like a lovesick thirteen-year-old but like another girl in a car at night. A car pounded by grapefruit.
I became frightened as he began to lose patience, my mind searching for simpler, safer things. I had no idea where he had taken me, but, suddenly, I knew where I wanted to be: home, Auntie Em. Back in my bedroom with the horse-show ribbons and petrified prom gardenias, my sailing trophy and my stack of 45s. The sky-blue harlequin wallpaper with the apple-green butterflies, the matching Princess phone. Back in my canopy bed by the soft glow of my beloved clock radio. Home safe in my new teenager’s room.
The interior of the car was hot and muggy and had turned into a subtropical zone. The windows trickled with tiny drops of water and my hair spray was coagulating, growing gummy, and my hair crackled as it stuck and matted on his face. I had persisted in playing it as a game when it had clearly never been one, and finally fed up with my “childish attitude,” he soon agreed that I belonged back with my record collection, not with him.
We drove home in stony silence. I felt ashamed, relieved, apologetic. As we approached my house, all he said was, “I wouldn’t mention this to your parents, okay? They might not approve.” Mention it to my parents? Might not approve? Was he insane? Was I? I’d never had a date with a boy old enough to drive—much less telephone at the same time. I would be sent to a convent, a work camp. There was no imagining what would happen if they ever knew.
We pulled up a discreet distance from the house. He reached across me to open the door. “So long, sailor.” “So long,” I said, and ran up the driveway, tunneled under the ferns and hoisted myself in through the window. Changing into my nightgown, I crept out from my room to check: the housekeeper dozed in the den in front of the television. All quiet on the home front. I burrowed under the covers, snug in my bed, turning my clock radio on softly, soothed by the music, safe in its glow. My room. My radio. My, my, my. Home, sweet home.
This was the first of such encounters, but there were more where he came from—not all handsome and not all illustrious, but hard-eyed and hungry and good at the game. Not yet fourteen, and life was going too fast for me. Beverly Hills was like growing up in the Garden of Eden: I was tantalized and terrified, vacillating between wanting my parents to protect me and seeing to it that my escapades went undetected. A confused and cagy criminal with a secret yearning to be caught. Restless and uneasy. I had a sudden longing to travel, to go away to school. Where did not matter—but far, far away, and not here.
My friend Vicki Milland was taking her sophomore year in Switzerland, as it happened; it was not too late for me to apply. I went to my parents to request a transfer overseas. They were taken aback by the idea and firmly opposed to it. My father, in particular, was adamant: I was too young to be so far from home and on my own—I would be just fourteen. Besides, I was his only child; he wanted me home.
I turned to my mother, who finally agreed to lobby on my behalf, appealing to him on the grounds of higher education, the experience of living in Europe and the opportunity to learn French. At last he conceded: one year abroad.
Switzerland was the perfect solution: cows, cuckoos, mountains, meadows—the whole country was a rest home. My parents, too, were certain I would be cloistered; perhaps they were even secretly relieved that I was going. Finally, there was only so much they could do to delay and protect me through these rites of passage, to shepherd my progress into the same world where I grew up; a world, after all, that was like no other.
5
FEW schools could rival Mon-tesano (“Healthy Mountain”), snuggled high in the Swiss Alps, for beauty or inaccessibility. Classrooms and dormitories were housed in huge old log chalets scattered across the mountaintops above the swank ski resort of Gstaad. Nestled in mountains thick with pine forests and stands of silver birch, laced by streams which fed into rivers that ran past meadows grazed by cows, it was a shrine of serenity, a picture postcard of peace and repose.
The sixty-five students ranged in age from fourteen to eighteen and came from all over Europe, the United States, Canada, South America, the Middle East and South Africa. The curriculum was standard, but emphasized French—a language we were meant to speak at all times and study two hours a day. In winter the emphasis included skiing, which we did each afternoon.
The teachers were European: faded postwar-film types. The women—pale-skinned and proper in flannel skirts and sensible shoes, hair tucked in neat chignons—resembled Deborah Kerr, at a distance; they were refined and cultivated and represented, in fact, the kind of ladies we were expected to become. The man who doubled as English and History professor reeked of Ronald Coleman: neat pencil moustache, shapeless tweed jacket with patches, suede shoes. A ta
ll, intense Italian taught languages—a dark-eyed man with a Savonarola-like zeal who was rumored to be a communist; a sober Swiss spinster taught “cuisine”; and the “maths” and science teacher radiated an abused and battered brilliance—the message that a fine mind was at work, meant for better things than dissecting field hares for sullen students.
To be a teacher in a Swiss finishing school was, I suppose, a kind of death with dignity—an Alpine end of the line. These were all decent people, kind and hard-working; and in retrospect the patience displayed by dedicated, underpaid professors with insolent young girls—some of whose allowances were equal to their salaries—seems only short of saintlike. If the language teacher hadn’t arrived a communist, he certainly would have left as one.
Though Montesano was one of the most highly accredited girls’ schools in Switzerland, the education offered by Swiss finishing schools was “higher education” only in the sense that it took place at 3,400 feet; it was a less a course of college preparation than a crash course in how to run a chateau.
In educational terms, “finishing schools” were an exotic exercise in obsolescence, and they sometimes simply served as elegant warehouses for wealthy unwanted children, well-heeled refugees from unhappy households. Parents more involved with their divorce proceedings than with their kids sent them to school in Switzerland—out of sight, out of mind; to exalted day-care centers where the girls arrived accompanied by trunks of designer dresses and slick Italian ski wear, overweight and starving for affection.
Not all the students were like that, of course; many came from families like mine: parents who wanted their children to have the best education they could afford and sought it in chalets of higher learning in Switzerland. My parents sent me against their will, acceding to mine. But those girls whose parents considered them an inconvenience knew it, and they learned fast how to live alone.
Like street kids from the world’s most fashionable neighborhoods, they became seasoned survivors, wealthy warlords to weaker students, bullying the younger kids as they had been abused at home; or trying to buy friendship with money, with favors, with promises—as they had never known it offered any other way.
CHAMPIONNAT MONTESANO 1961
AVANCEES
1. Embirikos Ccmélia
2. Sulzer Malu (prix de Hyle)
3. Ekberg Elisabeth
4. Osborn Jane
5. Boucke Lilo
6. Depoit Claire
MOYENNES
1. Sandyck Rita
2. Swimburne Susan
3. Noel Linda
4. Dubois Susan
5. Hoare Patricia
6. Djanoumoff Carherine
7. Thesiger Juliet
8. Fordyce Susan
9. Mnouchkine Joelle
10. De Sausmarez Jenny
11. van slingelandt Saskia
12. Massoudi Vicky
13. Schroeder Nadine
14. Whittemore Sharon
15. Prete Christina
16. Fisher Diane Conner Gigi
DEBUTANTES I
1. Palmblad Gerda
2. Kehl Janet
3. Damerell Caroline
4. Laurie Vivienne
5. Boyd Ann
6. Milland Vicky
7. Bergen Candy
8. Shorto Penny
9. Gibbons Rohan (prix de style)
10. Bisi Anton1la
11. Milstein Mia
12. Thompson Tina
13. Graebrser Madeleine
14. Siegert Susan
15. Loake Vivien
16. Eaton susy
17. Geil steffi
18. Lyman Gayle
19. Plum Mary
20. Gibbons Lista
21. schat Veronica
22. Guignard Joelle Owen Elisabeth
DEBUTANTLS II
1. Bartlett Alexandra
2. Wood Daphne
3. Akkerman Yvonne
4. Franco Paola
5. Hardy Pamela
6. Salmon Patricia
7. Stack Barbara
8. McLeod Christina
9. Burt Tamar
10. Pinsent Charlotte
11. Dolphin Susan
12. Pugh Bridget Lasarte
13. Lacarte ju1iet
14. Hole Leslie
CHAMPIONNAT DE SLALOM SPECIAL
1. Embiricos Cornélia
2. Sulzer Malu
3. Ekberg Elisaberh
4. Boucke Lilo
5. SwimburneSusan Susan
6. Noel linda
7. Osborn Jane
8. Dubois Susan
9. Fisher Diane
10. Djanoumoff catherine
11. Thesiger Juliet
12. Hoare Patricia
13. Mnouchkine Joelle
14. de Sausmarez Jenny
NON-PART1CIPANTES
Barrera Gabriella
Dent Carole
du Pon Patricia
Estaniol Guillemette
Hart Diane
Ibbotson Caroline
Jeffery Veronica
Malleson Sophie
Meade Jene
Moseley Sonny
Powers Althea
Rubino Maria-Luisa
Schulé Michèle
Speelman Carole
Westerberg Inger
These were the aristocrats of abandoned children—chic semi-orphans begging for discipline, desperate for love. Some simply never seemed to get it, though they received substitutes—parental payoffs—instead: Cartier watches, second pairs of skis, Hermès luggage, when all they wanted was a hug. Shortly it would be too late to know how to accept it when and if the time ever came. For some, it was that time already: by sixteen, certain girls were no more than the sum of their gifts. That was all they had ever been given: all they expected, all they could understand.
Chalets were known by name and reputation, assuming the colors and characteristics of their inhabitants: quaint class structures, gingerbread hothouses for budding elitists. Rivalries raged between chalets: gang warfare with bilingual leaders who, in a version of Swiss Darwinism, preyed on the young and weak. One, a six-foot French-Russian girl, would routinely pummel me, bringing her fist down square on my head, then stalk off, smiling grimly, as I lay crumpled in the hall. I took to carrying ski poles for protection.
She was a member of the “Montesano Mafia”: third- and fourth-year students whose French was faultless, their skiing superb, their family connections fortuitous. These girls were considered the school’s special forces, an elite task force who lived off campus in the village by the river. Theirs could have been called “Chalet Notorious,” as it had the highest recorded statistics of intrigue and drama, flashy but failed suicide attempts, rumored “lesbian affairs,” hushed-up pregnancies and shotgun marriages with savvy ski instructors. When we, the weak, were not being mugged by them, we worshipped them and followed their every move.
Where I was expecting Alpine Meadows, what I got was more like Blackboard Jungle. If I thought life was fast at home, here it made your head spin; Beverly Hills seemed like a Mormon settlement next to Gstaad. At Westlake you could get sent home for wearing loafers instead of regulation saddle shoes; here, a model student was one who made it back to her room before breakfast after having stayed out with a ski instructor all night. Though there were ironclad curfews and strict penalties for such late-night comings and goings, they were virtually impossible to enforce. Chalets were spread across acres, and adolescent girls became escape artists when men were around; nothing could keep them in.
My chalet, “Montesano,” also housed administration offices, faculty and student lounges, dining hall and kitchen. I was assigned to a large and sunny room on the third floor with French doors that opened onto a balcony with a magnificent view of the mountains. I had two older roommates: an English girl of sixteen whose father had made his fortune in textiles and a Rhodesian girl of seventeen whose father had made his in tobacco.
It was clear at once that age w
as a key to the caste system at Montesano, one of many ways to exclude and divide people. As one of the youngest first-year students, I was cannon fodder for the ranks. Terrified that I might be condemned as a weakling by older girls and sent into the snow to die, I faced the situation straightforwardly and lied about my age, moving it up a crucial year to fifteen and swearing Vicki Milland, who was fifteen in fact, to secrecy.
Even under my assumed age, my older, all-powerful roommates considered me more a pet than anything else: less than human, more than vermin—a cute American serf. Naturally, I did my best to prove myself and please them, rummaging in my bag of tricks like a nervous court jester, digging, digging for more.
When they got tired of my singing the whole of “Happy Birthday” in one protracted belch, I blew smoke rings. When those wore thin, I did my Flaming Mona Lisa: holding a lit cigarette between my teeth and flipping it into my mouth with my tongue, where it rested, in its crook, sometimes singeing my taste buds, while, with lips closed, I smiled serenely and smoke streamed from my nose.
A bell summoned us to meals, invariably starting a stampede of students furiously elbowing each other for first place in line. The dining-room doors opened and we inmates surged forward, shoving and shouldering our way to the tables. Permission to be seated was given by the headmistress in precise, high-pitched French that, one evening, was unusually long in coming.
Using an old sleight-of-voice trick picked up from my father, I called out in a reedy falsetto a crisp “Asseyez-vous” that sent everyone scrambling into her seat and falling upon her food. Everyone, that is, except the headmistress, who was left conspicuously standing, shaking with rage, demanding to know who gave the order.
The combined sexual energy of sixty-five girls confined in the Alps no doubt had something to do with the ferocity with which we attacked our food. Approached from any other angle, our impatience to devour these meals was mystifying as—with the exception of the occasional steak and pommes frites, served when there were visitors to the school—it was generally agreed the food was swill.
It seems oddly fitting, then, that the only political action taken that year of 1961 by the students of a Swiss finishing school was a food strike. Barricading ourselves into the salon of Montesano on Monday morning, wearing our school ski uniforms in a show of solidarity, with only a supply of oranges, Lindt chocolates and Marlboros to sustain us, we boycotted classes, meals and Downhill Slalom until an agreement was reached to upgrade the quality of the food. By the end of the afternoon, word came through that some concessions in the cuisine would be made: the faculty—and the chef—had caved in. It was a hollow victory for girls with nothing else to complain about.
Knock Wood Page 8
