Belinda (46 page)

"Of course," Ollie said, "and the babying would have been enough for her until you became a threat."

I was agreeing, but it was too ugly and too complicated still.

Then Dad said it really didn't matter what made Bonnie tick, I was here now, and I could live in New York, near to him and Ollie and that he would handle whatever Bonnie tried to do.

Ollie didn't answer, and then he said in a real small voice:

"That's all very nice except for one factor, G.G. United Theatricals is my producer. They financed Dolly Rose."

I saw the two of them exchange looks.

Then Ollie made another speech like this:

"Look, darling. I understand your position. When I was fifteen, I was waiting tables in Greenwich Village and playing bit parts on the stage every time I had the chance. You're a big girl, and I'm not going to try to sell you any bill of goods about going home and letting yourself be packed off to school. But I won't lie to you either. United Theatricals is the biggest break I've had in the last twenty years of putting it together with Scotch tape on Broadway. Not only have they financed this musical, which doesn't make them a whole hell of a lot of money by the way, they're talking about financing the picture. And I would direct that picture, an opportunity I badly want.

"Of course, they wouldn't shut down Dolly Rose. They couldn't, but the picture? And the picture after that? One word from your mother and her studio executive husband and their interest in Ollie Boon would dry up overnight. No cross words, no explanations, just, 'Thanks for calling, Ollie, we'll get back to you.' And I'd never get a direct line to Ash Levine or Sidney Templeton again."

And then something came up which seemed very small at that moment, but it was to mean a great deal later on. Ollie went on with his speech. Dolly Rose was a lavish antebellum New Orleans piece, real Broadway opera, but the property he dearly wanted to make into a movie musical was Crimson Mardi Gras, a book written by Cynthia Walker, the southern writer, and guess who owned the rights? United Theatricals, which had made the straight movie in the fifties with Alex Clemcntine, and the miniseries a few years back. Dolly Rose was good Broadway, but it would never travel. The movie was iffy. But Crimson Mardi Gras? It would run forever. And the movie would be a smash.

OK, I understood Ollie's position, I said. And I really did.

I had grown up on location in Europe. I knew what it meant to lose the backing. I could remember a thousand arguments, phone calls, struggles to get the food trucks and the wardrobe trucks and the cameras just to stay put. I started to get up from the table.

But Ollie said: "Sit down, darling, I'm not finished. I've been frank with you about my position. Now what about yours?"

"I'm leaving, Ollie, I'm going out on my own. I'll wait tables in Greenwich Village. I can do that, too, you know. And besides, I've got some money of my own."

"Do you really want to be running from the police or from your family's private detectives? Do you want that kind of thing right now?"

"Of course, she doesn't, Ollie!" Dad said suddenly, and for the first time I realized how angry he was with Ollie. He was glaring at Ollie.

But Ollie didn't seem to take this very seriously. He just took Dad's hand, like to calm him down. Then he said to me:

"Then what you've got to do, dearest, is bluff these people. Bluff them hard. Tell them you want your freedom here and now and you will use the story and, believe you me, it is a terrific story, and you can use it not only with the authorities but with the press. But you cannot be connected with me when you do it, dearest, because I might very well lose my backers, no matter who wins your little war."

This time when I stood up, he didn't tell me to sit down. And this is what I told him and Dad both:

"You keep calling it my story. You keep saying what a hell of a story it is. And you tell me to use my story. But it's not mine, you see, that's the awful part. It's Mom's story and Susan's story and Marty's story, and I can't hurt all those people. I mean, you can be sure that the press would bring Final Score into it, and then this studio, this great big power we're all cringing in front of, would cut Susan loose as well. I can't do anything, don't you see that? Not anything. It's like I don't own the rights to my own story! The rights belong to the grownups involved."

Ollie was very quiet, and then he said that I was a strange case. What did he mean, I asked him.

"You don't really like having power over others, do you?"

"No, I guess not," I said. "I guess all my life I watched people play with power-Mom, Gallo, then Marty and other people I hardly remember now. I think power makes people act badly. I guess I like it when nobody much has power over anyone else."

"But situations like that don't exist, darling," he said. "And you are dealing with people who have used their power over you shamefully. They aborted your career, darling. And they did it at a pivotal moment, and for what-a prime time soap? If you do go out on your own, you had better toughen up. You had bctter be ready to use their tools against them right from the start."

Well, by that time I was too exhausted to say anymore. This night for me had been a terrible ordeal. Confiding in them left me feeling awful. I was drained.

But I think G.G. could see it. He went to get a jacket for me and to get his own coat.

Then he and Ollie had a sort of conference, but I could hear them because there were no rooms in this place. Ollie reminded G.G. what the last legal battle with Mom had cost him. He'd left Europe flat broke. G.G. said, So what, he'd been mobbed by offers to endorse products as soon as he hit New York.

"This woman could get the studio lawyers on retainer to handle this! Your costs could run you ten thousand a month."

"This is my daughter, Ollie!" Dad was saying. "And she's the only kid I will ever have."

Then Ollie really got mad. He told Dad that for the last five years he had done everything he could to make Dad happy. And Dad started to laugh.

In other words a real fight was coming on. Dad started sticking up for himself in his own mild-mannered way.

"Ollie, I can't even work anymore without your getting mad about it. If I'm not at the theater before the show and after the show, you throw a fit."

But understand, with these two men even this was highly civilized and mellow, like they did not know how to scream at each other and never had.

"Look," Ollie said, "I want to help your daughter. She's a precious darling. But what do you expect me to do?"

Nice words, I thought to myself, and he means them. But he's smart, and he's right.

And they had forgotten all about Mom's brother, Uncle Daryl, who was himself a lawyer, for Crissakes.

Next thing I heard was Dad on the phone making a call. Then he came and put a coat over my shoulders, a real fancy mink-lined trench coat that Blair Sackwell had given him, and he told me the plan.

"Now listen, Belinda. I've got a house on Fire Island," he told me. "And it's winter now and everybody is gone. But the house is insulated, it's got a big fireplace and a big freezer, and we can lay in everything that you need. It's going to be lonely over there. It's going to be spooky. But you can hide there till we find out just what Bonnie's doing, whether she has called the police, or what."

Ollie was very upset. He gave me a big kiss goodbye. And Dad and I left in Ollie's limousine immediately and we spent the rest of night getting stuff together for me to take. We went to the all-night markets and bought the food we needed and then Dad wrote down all my measurements and promised to bring me clothes. Finally at about three A.M. we were cruising through the dismal dark Astoria section of Queens out of New York City towards the town where you take the ferry to Fire Island, and I remembered something and sat up with a start. "What day is this, Daddy? Is it November 7?"

"Gee, Belinda, it's your birthday," he said.

"Yeah, but what good does it do me, Daddy? I'm still only sixteen." We nearly froze on the early-morning ferry. And Fire Island was spooky with not a soul anywhere, except the workmen who had come over with us, and the wind howling off the Atlantic as we followed the boardwalks to Dad's house.

But once we were inside everything was all right. There was lots of stuff still in the freezer, all the wall heaters were working, there was a lot of wood for a fire. Even the television was OK. And there were books in the shelves and lots of records and tapes. There was also a copy of Crimson Mardi Gras right by the fireplace, and it was full of Ollie Boon's notes.

I enjoyed that first day there. I really slept OK. And at evening I went out on the end of the pier. And I watched the moon over the black ocean and I felt kind of safe and glad to be alone. I mean, maybe it was like being on Saint Esprit or something.

But I tell you, this joy did not last.

I was entering one of the strangest periods of my life. G.G. brought back lots of supplies the following day, he brought some nice warm winter clothes for me, pants, sweaters, coats, that kind of thing. But he also brought the news that there was absolutely nothing in the papers about my disappearance, and he had not been contacted. Nobody was saying anything about my running away.

I got that cold feeling again when I heard it. I mean, I was happy they weren't looking for me, right? But it should have bothered me, shouldn't it, that they were not worried enough to look?

Ah, I was so mixed up. And then with all my doubts and fears about it, with the pain of missing Marty and wondering what Mom had told him, with the pain of wanting so bad to see Susan, with all those pains I settled into the Fire Island house for three months.

When the bay froze in December, Dad couldn't get there. And at times even the phones sometimes went out.

And in this strange world of ice-cold glass and falling snow and burning fires and loud tape-recorded music, I was more alone than I had ever been in my life.

In fact, I realized I had never been alone really. Even at the Chateau Marmont there was the hotel around me, the world of Sunset Boulevard down there any time of night or day. And before that, the world had been a womb or something with Mom and Trish and Jill and all that.

Well, no more. I could walk round this house talking out loud to myself for hours. I could stand on my head. I could scream. Of course, I read a lot, went through novels, histories, biographies, everything Dad had brought. I read the libretto of every Broadway play ever written, since they were all in the bookshelves, and I listened to so much Romberg, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Stephen Sondheim that I could have answered the sixty-four-thousand-dollar quiz on Broadway musicals after that.

I read Crimson Mardi Gras twice. Then I read all your mother's other books that Ollie had, and-guess what?-some of your books were there, too. Lots of adults have your books, as I'm sure you realize, but I never realized it until I saw all of them at Ollie's place.

I drank a lot, too, on Fire Island. But I was careful. I didn't want Dad to call when I was drunk or, worse yet, to see me that way. So I kept it kind of level, but at the same time I put it away. I drank the bar Dad had on Fire Island. One week it was Scotch and the next few days gin and then rum after that. I had a real party on Fire Island, and, you know, the funny thing was, it made me think a lot of Mom. I understood Mom better when I was drinking and listening to music and dancing the way I had seen Mom so often do.

The earliest memory I ever had of Mom is that way-Mom in the flat in Rome dancing barefoot to a record of a Dixieland band playing "Midnight in Moscow" with a glass in her hand.

But to return to the story, I went through a kind of hell on Fire Island. I mean, when you are that alone, it is like solitary confinement and things happen in your head.

Meantime Dad reported that the columns said Mom and Marty were lovebirds, and no one, absolutely no one, had called him from the West Coast. "You think they'd at least ask if I had seen you," he told me. But then he shut up when he saw the look on my face. "Come on, we don't want them looking," I reminded him.

Then Dad got a furious call from Blair Sackwell. All Blair wanted to do, he said, was send me a Christmas present, for God's sakes, and he could not get through to Bonnie and that pig Moreschi would not give him the name of my school. "I mean, what is all this!" Blair raged. "Every year I send Belinda a little something, a fur hat, fur-lined gloves, that kind of thing. Are these people crazy? All they'll tell me is she isn't coming home for Christmas, and they won't give me an address."

"I think they are," Daddy told him, "because I can't get the name of the school myself."

By Christmas I was in a terrible way.

New York was under a terrible snowstorm, the bay had frozen, as I said, the phones were down. I hadn't heard from Dad in five days.

On Christmas Eve I made a big fire and lay there on the white bearskin rug beside it thinking of all the Christmases in Europe, midnight mass in Paris, the bells ringing in the village at the foot of the cliffs on Saint Esprit. I am telling you, this was my darkest hour. I didn't know what my life was supposed to mean.

But at eight o'clock who should come banging on the door but Dad, with his arms full of presents. He had hired a jeep to bring him onto the island at the far end, and he had walked all the way on the wooden boardwalk through the freezing wind to the house.

Till my dying day I will love Dad for getting to Fire Island that night. He looked so wonderful to me. He had on a white ski cap and his face was ruddy from the cold wind and he smelled so good when he took me in his arms.

We cooked a big Christmas feast together, with the ham he had brought and all the wonderful delicacies, and afterwards we listened to Christmas carols until midnight. And I guess it was one of the best Christmases I ever spent.

But I could tell something was going wrong for Dad with Ollie. Because when I asked if Ollie would miss him, Dad's face got dark and he said, To hell with Ollie. He was sick of spending every holiday backstage through a matinee and an evening performance just so he and Ollie could drink a glass of wine in his dressing room. He said his whole life had revolved around Ollie before my arrival and maybe I'd done him a big favor and I should know.