The Brave

by Nicholas Evans

  Whether there had been something about Ray Montane, when she'd first laid eyes on him, that suggested the moment might be at hand, Diane would never be sure.

  They had met in June, on her first trip to Hollywood, after Fortune's Fool closed its six-month run in London. Herb Kanter had organized a screen test in London. It was just a formality, he said. The suits at Paramount and, just as important, Gary Cooper needed to get an idea of what she was like.

  The test, as far as Diane was concerned, was a disaster. She wasn't a complete novice in front of the camera. She'd been in a couple of small, very British, films and some TV plays and knew a little about the difference between stage and screen acting, how intimate the camera was, how much your eyes mattered, how less was invariably more. But on the day of the screen test, all of this seemed to fly from her head.

  In a shabby corner of Elstree Studios, where Herb (who in his shiny black jacket that day looked even more like a sea lion) sat watching from behind his glasses, Diane acted out a scene from the screenplay of Remorseless with a young actor—clearly hired more for his price than his talent—playing Gary Cooper's part. They did it seven or eight times, each one worse than the last, as Diane got angrier and angrier with herself. When it was over, she managed to laugh about it and stayed for a while to chat and smoke a cigarette. But as soon as she was in the taxi, heading home, she burst into tears and cried all the way back to Paddington. It had been her big break and she'd blown it.

  Only later did she find out that Herb had cunningly told the cameraman to keep rolling and that what had clinched it for the suits was her natural, riotous, self-deprecating performance after she thought the test had ended. When Gary Cooper saw it, he apparently declared her a knockout. Everyone was eager to meet her and as soon as she was free from the play, she was flown out, first class, to Hollywood.

  It was a two-week whirlwind of meetings and parties, lunches and dinners. She met managers and agents, publicity people and studio executives. Just about the only person she didn't meet was Coop, as everybody seemed to call him. Their planned lunch at the Paramount commissary was canceled because of what Herb said were unexpected and unavoidable family matters. Coop sent his apologies in a sweet handwritten note saying how much he was looking forward to working with her.

  Diane was offered a three-picture deal, starting at eight hundred dollars a week which her newly acquired LA agent, Harry Zucker—an elegant little man who wore bow ties and a trademark white gardenia in his buttonhole—managed to hoist to a thousand. Diane would happily have worked for nothing. In celebration, at the end of her first week in Hollywood, Harry held a party for her at the agency offices on Sunset. And in walked Ray Montane.

  He hadn't been invited. He just happened that same evening to be visiting his own agent who had brought him along. Diane noticed him as soon as he entered the room. Had he been wearing a cowboy hat, she might have recognized him, for she tried to keep up with Tommy's TV westerns and knew most of his heroes, including Red McGraw, from the pictures on his walls. Tonight, however, Red was out of uniform. All Diane saw was a tall man, lean and tanned, dressed in an open black leather jacket, a white snap-buttoned shirt and black jeans (she couldn't yet see the hand-tooled cowboy boots). His dark hair was cropped short, with long sideburns, and he had the kind of craggy good looks that made his age hard to pinpoint. Somewhere in his mid-thirties, she guessed. What was clear, even across the room, was that he had presence, the kind of easy confidence that Diane had always found attractive.

  Harry made a little speech, funny and sweet, saying how thrilled and proud he and everybody at the agency were to be representing England's new and bright young star, Miss Knockout (the nickname had already been in the trades), Diane Reed. He toasted her and everyone clapped and Diane said a few suitably modest but charming words—just the way Audrey Hepburn would have done it—and, as she wound up, found herself smiling at the man standing by the door, giving him that knowing look that had launched a thousand ships of frustration back home. Ray Montane returned the smile and raised his glass in an intimate toast of his own and Diane shocked herself by blushing, something she hadn't done since she was twelve years old.

  By the end of the following week, after a series of long, late dinners at Ciro's and Romanoff's, walks along the beach, dancing at the Mocambo, her room at the Beverly Wilshire so full of Ray Montane's flowers that it looked like a greenhouse, England's newest and brightest young star found herself, for the first time in her life, in love.

  He had a sort of old-fashioned and irresistible cowboy charm and at the same time was hip enough to know about the latest rock-and-roll bands. In fact he knew and hung out with some of them. He even knew Jack Kerouac. And he was kind and attentive and interesting and, most important of all, he made her laugh. He was also the most confident and accomplished lover she had known. In their lovemaking there was sometimes a frisson of danger that Diane, to her surprise, found herself excited by.

  On her last evening in Hollywood, on the terrace of his sumptuous house in the hills, under a tree of fairy lights, Ray Montane asked her to marry him. And she said no.

  "Is that no as in never?"

  "No. Just no as in now."

  They were sitting side by side and she took his hand and held it in both of hers and said she had something important to say. And she told him about Tommy. He listened without once taking his eyes off her. And as she finished—by now, naturally, in tears—saying it was her dream that one day, one day soon, she could be a proper mother to the boy, be openly his mother, for all the world to see, and do for him what she should have been doing all these years, Ray held her face in his big brown hands and kissed her tears and looked her in the eyes and said simply: "What's stopping you? Let's do it. Do it right now."

  He told her that he had been married once before but was now divorced. His wife, an actress called Cheryl, had suffered from acute depression. He had longed for kids, he said, but she hadn't wanted them. She'd remarried, found a good psychiatrist and now lived, more or less happily, in Oregon.

  In the two and a half months that followed Diane's revelation to Tommy that she was his mother, Ray had been calm and strong. He flew back from LA and they rented a cottage in the countryside near Pinewood Studios. The three of them lived there in a kind of limbo between bliss and pain while all the arrangements were made for their move to California. Diane's mother made everything as difficult and acrimonious as possible. But with the help of some expensive London lawyers and Ray's dogged diplomacy, they managed. Signed statements were made so that Tommy's birth certificate could be officially altered. They got him a passport and organized an American visa. Ray insisted on paying all the bills.

  What clinched it for Diane was seeing how good he was with Tommy, how patient and caring and full of fun. And once the boy was over his shyness and the shock of living with one of his TV heroes, he began to blossom. Watching the two of them from the cottage window, laughing and joking and chasing each other around the garden, was sometimes almost too much for Diane to bear and she would well up with tears. This was what she had longed for. They were a real family. Always one to examine the cloud around any silver lining, she asked herself whether she'd been too hasty, whether her guilt and desire to make things right for Tommy had made her commit to this man too deeply and too soon. But all the evidence spoke only of how fortunate she was to have found him.

  Julian, her London agent, was deluged with offers. Every producer in England seemed to be after her. But Diane turned every one of them down. The only role she wanted, until Remorseless started shooting in December, was to be a proper, full-time mother to her son. She would be there for him whenever he needed her, play with him, cook for him, take him to his new school and pick him up again in the afternoons, do all the things forbidden by those long years of deceit.

  Ray had to fly back to Los Angeles for some meetings two weeks before Diane and Tommy were due to leave. She ached inside, almost made herself sick, from missing him. On their
first evening together, back on his terrace in the hills, LA twinkling below them like a million promises, Tommy asleep in his new bedroom, Ray pulled a little suede box from his pocket and handed it to her. The ring was in rose gold with an entwined D&R in sapphires set in a square bed of diamonds. The fit was perfect. They planned to be married at Christmas.

  Chapter Twelve

  HERB AND ELLIE Kanter's house was of the sort that struck envy in the hearts of all but their most generous or myopic guests. It sat upon a rocky elbow of one of the most exclusive glens in Beverly Hills, looking out over groves of olive and lemon trees. In its four acres of garden, designed by a renowned Tuscan architect and manicured by a small army of men in green uniforms, were a helicopter pad, tennis court and croquet lawn and two cottages for guests, each with its own steam room, pool and hot tub.

  The reception rooms of the main house were spacious and exquisitely lit, the floors of polished limestone, the walls hung with Herb Kanter's famous collection of paintings. There were Monets and Gauguins in the living room, Cezannes and Picassos in the hallway. Only his lawyer and his accountant knew that these were all, in fact, perfect copies and that the originals were stored in a steel-walled, air-conditioned, fireproof vault sunk into bedrock below the basement garage.

  This same combination of refinement and financial prudence had been the hallmark of Herb's career. As well as doing excellent business at the box office, his movies almost invariably won wagonloads of Oscars in all departments, including three for Best Picture, which were tucked away modestly (though unmissably lit) in his den. He was known to be ruthless and tightfisted but as honest as the business allowed.

  Above all, Herb was well connected. He and Ellie had become members of the young and glamorous new presidential candidate John F. Kennedy's Hollywood inner circle. During the Democratic Convention in LA that same summer, they had dined with Jack and Jackie in booth number one at La Scala, where a special presidential phone was later installed. When Jack and Bobby helicoptered in for lunch with the Lawfords at Louis B. Mayer's old beachside house in Santa Monica, Herb and Ellie would be there along with the great and the gorgeous. And if either brother needed somewhere for assignations of a more carnal kind, Herb would discreetly make one of his garden cottages available.

  To be invited to a party at the Kanters' was thus to be ushered into the Hollywood hallows, to mingle with the gods and goddesses who supped at the summit of the A-list. Diane Reed, of course, wasn't yet on any list. For the moment she had that most thrilling, if precarious, of passes that gave access to all areas: potential.

  For the past few months, Herb had been doing what he most enjoyed: spreading the word. Over dinner at the Bistro, cocktails at the Polo Lounge, lunch at the Brown Derby and the Paramount commissary, he had been telling those who would be sure to pass it on most effectively that he had discovered the Next Big Thing.

  Diane Reed, he would quietly confide, was the new Liz Taylor; she was like Marilyn, only smarter and saner; like Audrey Hepburn, but with tits, of the kind that would give the Hays Office censors a collective heart attack. Herb didn't want too much publicity too soon, just the right kind of snippets in the right kind of places. And it was already working. Only last week those archrival queens of Tinseltown tittle-tattle, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, had both mentioned her—and Remorseless, of course—in their columns.

  Sitting back in the plush hush of the sedan as it slid through the gates and began to wind its way up the Kanters' driveway, Ray Montane was feeling a lot less at ease than he appeared. He was holding Diane's hand but they were both lost in thought, gazing out at the torches that flamed among the thicket of palms and shrubs on either side. It was like the set of a Tarzan movie.

  Ray wasn't looking forward to the party at all. It was the kind of fancy do he never normally got invited to. He was only here because of Diane and everybody would know it. Though he pretended not to be bothered with such trivia, Ray knew he wasn't A-list. In fact, he was barely B.

  Anyhow, the whole list thing was just bullshit. He was more famous than nearly all the jumped-up little jerks who'd be there tonight. More people watched Sliprock than watched all of their goddamn movies put together. Walk down any street in any town in America and Ray Montane would get mobbed. At a supermarket opening in Fresno just three weeks ago, nearly a thousand people had shown up to see him cut the ribbon. Even with their names printed on their foreheads, some of these so-called movie stars never got recognized by anyone. In any case, everybody knew that movies were in trouble. TV had the studios on the skids; they just didn't know what to do anymore. Except throw away more and more money making bigger and bigger turkeys. Wider screens, Cinerama, movies in 3-D, hell, they were so goddamn desperate they were even making movies you could smell. Yet, in his less acrimonious moments, Ray knew that TV was and always would be the poor relation. In Hollywood all that truly mattered was movies.

  Not that he hadn't had his chance. He'd done a dozen pictures, probably more. But never one that had hit the mark. They were all B pictures, the kind that kids went to watch on Saturday afternoons at the Hitching Post. He'd told Enid, his agent, a hundred times that he wanted to break out of playing cowboys, that she should put him up for other kinds of movies, modern movies like Brando did or Jimmy Dean used to do. Ray had that same kind of moody charisma, for heaven's sake. The camera loved him. But nothing ever came through. He'd said the same as many times to the suits at Warners and they said Sure, Ray, that's a great idea, let's look for something. But it was all bullshit. All they ever really wanted was another season of Sliprock.

  A couple of years ago, he'd gotten within an inch of landing the big one, of joining the guys who always worked for Jack Ford, the so-called Stock Company—Duke Wayne and Ward Bond, Ben Johnson, Dobe Carey, that gang. Ray knew them all, got drunk with them sometimes, was as good an actor as any of them—well, maybe not Duke, but as good as the others for sure, better even.

  At the time, Ford had been casting The Horse Soldiers and sent word for Ray to drop by his office. It was a done deal, Enid said. Ray thought the meeting went pretty well but the guy never called back. Then he heard on the grapevine that Ford hadn't liked his attitude, thought he was too full of himself or something. Next time they met, Ray cut the grouchy old buzzard dead. The picture turned out to be a crock of shit anyhow, so he was probably well out of it.

  A glimpse of these grouchy reflections must have shown on his face because Diane squeezed his hand. She was staring at him. He told himself to snap out of it, not to spoil her big night. The car was on its final approach now, cruising in under the marble porch that jutted out like some movie-set Greek temple over the driveway, valets in red-and-yellow-striped vests scampering like squirrels down the steps to open the car doors. He smiled at Diane and she smiled back. She looked so goddamn sexy it was all he could do to keep his hands off her. The most wondrous piece of ass he'd ever had. He should count his blessings.

  "Are you okay?" she said.

  "Are you kidding?"

  "What were you thinking about?"

  The valets had both the rear doors open now.

  "That I must be the luckiest guy alive."

  He leaned close and kissed her lightly on the lips.

  "Knock 'em out, kid."

  It probably had something to do with the endless flow of champagne, but Diane felt as if gravity had somehow taken the evening off and that she was floating a foot above the ground, gliding from room to room, lips locked in a smile of barely suppressed ecstasy.

  There were more famous faces than she'd ever seen gathered in one place and Herb had introduced her to almost all of them. At dinner on the torchlit terrace, the scent of jasmine wafting in over the treetops, she'd been placed between Billy Wilder and David Selznick. Across the table, Ray hadn't done so badly either, Jennifer Jones on one side and Merle Oberon on the other. William Holden was there, Natalie Wood, John Huston. Even Frank Sinatra had dropped by but he had some other commitment so hadn't been able t
o stay for dinner. When Herb led her up to meet him, Sinatra had held on to her hand and fixed those blue eyes on her and said he'd heard all about her. It was clearly a lie but Diane didn't care. The only one missing was Gary Cooper, who she still hadn't met. He was in England shooting a movie with Deborah Kerr called The Naked Edge.

  There were other faces, less famous but a lot more important, big-shot agents like Lew Wasserman from MCA, who Herb said was probably the most powerful man in Hollywood. While she was speaking with him, Diane noticed dear Harry Zucker, with his white gardenia buttonhole, hovering nervously nearby, pretending he wasn't trying to eavesdrop.

  After dinner Connie Francis sang some songs beside a white grand piano that had been wheeled out by the swimming pool upon which floated hundreds of white and gold balloons. Then there was dancing. Diane did the twist with Bill Holden and by the end of the song she was laughing so much she almost fell backward into the pool and he put his arm around her and steered her over to the bar. Ray was there on his own, with a glass of straight bourbon in his hand and he didn't seem too happy. She introduced him to Bill Holden and the two of them shook hands. Ray didn't manage so much as a smile and Holden soon got the message and moved away.

  "Are you having a good time?" Diane said.

  Ray shrugged.

  "Sure. You obviously are."

  "I'm having the time of my life."

  "Great."

  At that moment Herb appeared with a young writer called Steve Shelby who'd apparently been wanting to meet Ray all evening. He had a tangled mop of curly hair and looked about fourteen years old.

  "Sir, this is such a privilege," Steve said, shaking his hand. "I'm a big fan."

  It was the first time Diane had seen Ray smile since they'd arrived and while the two of them got talking, Herb led her to one side.

  "I didn't know you had a son," he said quietly.

  "Yes. Tommy. He's the light of my life."