Judith Krantz (19 page)

Jazz Kilkullen learned abandonment before she could walk. Her mother left her before her first memories began, disappearing forever, as far as her infant brain could comprehend.

All the years of her early childhood were a series of contradictions. Sometimes her mother reappeared, brimming with love, her attention focused on her daughter, filling Jazz’s days with games, waking her in the morning with playful kisses, putting her to sleep at night with a Swedish lullaby. Sometimes her mother disappeared, taking with her the love and warm arms and lips and the songs, leaving behind an inexplicable world that had grown gray, empty and sad beyond tears. Jazz accepted this as normal, for she knew no other life.

When she grew older and she could begin to understand the explanations her parents repeated to her about the reasons her mother had to go away, she denied the depth of the emotions she felt. Since children fear abandonment more than anything else, since being left forever is the worst thing they can imagine happening to them, it becomes the most important thing to deny.

Yes, of course she didn’t like it when Mommy had to make a movie, but that was Mommy’s work. She had her father and Susie and Rosie, her nurse, to take care of her, she had her own pony to ride, and every single one of the vaqueros played with her when they had time. Mommy would come home as soon as the movie was finished. There was nothing, really, for a sensible little girl to feel bad about.

Mike Kilkullen helped her to deny her grief, for he was far too grown-up to be able to hide his emotions as well as the child could. Jazz tried to make up to him for her mother’s absence. With a stout heart and a talkative tongue she kept him company, eating an early dinner with him in the brightly lit kitchen,
with Susie and Rosie both busy bustling around, so that they wouldn’t be alone together in the dining room, just the two of them, at the table at which Sylvie had sat, laughingly and lovingly, only a week ago.

After dinner, her father would sometimes invite Jazz to look through the Kilkullen family pictures, his grandfather’s great collection of photographs that was kept in the long-unused archive room at the far end of one wing of the hacienda. She was the first of his own family to be interested in them. There, behind fireproof doors to which he had the only key, stood a long wooden table, well lit by green-shaded lights, in front of deep shelves of dusty portfolios. He would ask her to pick a year, any year, as long as it wasn’t before 1875, when her great-grandfather, young Hugh Kilkullen, had been given his first camera, and the little girl would cry out “1888” or “1931” as if it were a magic trick.

And indeed it seemed like magic to her to be transported suddenly back to the ranch she already knew so well, and see the familiar buildings as they had been then, mysteriously almost the same as today, yet so different in certain small details. It was a miraculous alternative world: certain saplings were now big trees; what had been tiny vines now covered walls; men she knew as ancient were mere boys; the fathers of these same men—sometimes, she was sure, wearing the same hats that their sons now wore—rode horses she had never seen; an old well, now covered with morning glories, had once served as a source of water; a newly planted rose garden was now enlarged by hundreds of bushes; long-dead women, plump and pretty in their white, floor-length summer dresses trimmed with lace, sat under their parasols and drank tea on the patio; children on ponies that looked so much like her own pony sat mounted in front of the same stable, yet they wore more clothes than any child she knew had ever worn, and had odd ways of parting their hair.

Jazz was fascinated by the photographs of weddings, baptisms, fiestas and funerals, photographs of
harvestings and fishing and hunting parties. Her greatgrandfather had worked only with natural light for most of his life, but he had been singularly gifted in his feeling for composition, and there was a density and clarity in these old photographs that had great power to stir her imagination. She wanted to know everyone’s name and how they were or were not related to her. What kind of food was in the cookpot around which the vaqueros were standing with plates in their hands? A White Steamer?—who had owned that car with such a strange name? Had her greatgrandfather learned Chinese from the Chinese cooks, or could they speak English? Why was the roundup the most important event of the year? Did the calves really have to be branded? Didn’t it hurt?

Best of all, Jazz loved the Kilkullen ranch sagas, the year-long battles against hoof-and-mouth disease and the Texas fever tick; the weekly baths and flea-removing that the children of the ranch endured; the annual black bass fishing contests in the reservoirs tucked into the hundred square miles of pasture.

There were even legends that might or might not be true, such as that of the Franciscan shrine that dated so far back that nobody knew its age. The shrine was supposed to exist somewhere on the heights of Portola Peak, and her great-grandfather had been certain that he had found it when he was a young man. Her grandfather had never gotten around to climbing up to look for it, so her father couldn’t promise her the story was true.

Alone in the cozy archive room, after Susie and the two maids had all gone home and left the hacienda, after Rosie had been persuaded to go to bed, Jazz sat perched on a footstool by her father’s feet, and entered a brightly peopled universe of history which became far more real than the present. Mike Kilkullen allowed his daughter to stay up much later than Rosie approved of, and the man who would never speak of his loneliness and the child who couldn’t allow herself to acknowledge it, forged a bond that grew ever deeper. When he reluctantly realized that he had to
put her to bed, he sang one last song to her after he’d tucked her in: “Clementine” or “Oh, Susannah,” or her favorite, “On Top of Old Smokey,” the songs he’d grown up on. When Jazz remembered the tune of a Swedish lullaby as she lay there, she never hummed it to herself until after he had left the room.

At some point in the early years of his marriage, Mike Kilkullen began to hear about items in movie gossip columns that hinted that Sylvie Norberg was having an affair with the male star of her latest film. Although he didn’t read gossip columns himself, no husband of a famous woman is spared knowledge of what is being said or written about her. Before their marriage, Sylvie had prepared him for such innuendo. “If they don’t say I sleep with men,” she’d told him, “they’ll say I sleep with women. You must be able to ignore gossip if you want me.”

There had actually been surprisingly little gossip about his wife, considering her youth, her beauty and the fact that she lived alone so much, he thought, hoping that Susie and Rosie weren’t hearing or reading the same lies. Of course they would believe them no more than he, but it disturbed him to think of such ugliness touching anyone who shared his daily life.

The stories continued, like a slowly bleeding wound that could not be staunched, during the next several years, but he refused to so much as comment on them to Sylvie when she was at the ranch between pictures. Her quality of radiant existence in the present had not changed. Mike had never observed her in a moment of remoteness or dissatisfaction or absent-mindedness, as if she were thinking about someone else, or even something else. Her smiles were never self-contemplating. When she was at the ranch she was totally
there
. She mended him with her love, and even to speak of gossip, he told himself, was to dignify it.

In 1967, Mike Kilkullen realized that Jazz, who was in the middle of her first year of grammar school, soon would be reaching the age when some word of
gossip must eventually touch her, through the mothers of the children she went to school with in San Juan Capistrano, through one teacher overheard talking to another, through God knew what malignant source.

He did for his daughter what he was too secure to do for himself, and spoke to his wife. Wasn’t there something she could do to stop these columnists, he asked. Didn’t the public-relations people assigned to her pictures have any way of stemming the lies that were bound to reach Jazz someday?

“There is nothing you can do about the press except to rise above it,” Sylvie said with a weary, exasperated sigh. “I warned you, darling, remember? The only way ever to stop such stories would be for me to retire, to give up acting, to stay home forever. Those wretched newspaper columnists and movie magazine hacks would have nothing to print if they stuck to the truth. We love each other, we each need to do our work, and we can’t expect not to have to pay a price for living as we do.”

She hated to lie, Sylvie thought, no matter how easy it was. She would scorn to tell an unnecessary lie, but to protect her two universes she had to admit that deception was essential.

She could never expect any husband, and Mike in particular, to understand that she owned two universes, two separate and utterly different universes that had nothing to do with each other, two universes that must continue to have no impact on each other in order to remain perfect.

It had been almost two years after Jazz’s birth that she had first been—to use that absurd American word—“unfaithful” to Mike. She had been on location in Paris when she had an affair with her costar, an affair that stopped on the day the film was finished. It had been so very necessary.

Not that she needed to experience passion to act it, she reflected, remembering that summer. She wanted that actor, it was as simple as that, wanted him badly, from the very first day of shooting. And he
wanted her so much that he couldn’t even remember his lines when they had a scene together.

She could have denied herself and remained aloof, but that would have been to impose a needless limitation on her existence, it would have constricted and lessened the freedom in which she deliberately gave herself permission to conduct her life It had been a purely physical relationship, almost wordless, but he had been a superbly gifted lover, and she had found that she was more than ready for this kind of sex, sex without marriage or parenthood or responsibility, sex without emotion or permanence or the slightest guilt.

Yes, Sylvie thought, she had learned an important lesson that summer in Paris. She had discovered that she was capable of redefining her life, enriching it. She
needed
to have lovers, she decided, knowing that she always made the right choices for herself.

Other affairs had followed the first one. Sylvie felt as young and ripe and hot-blooded as she had before her marriage, when she had been free and footloose in Stockholm. Once she had known the pleasures of sex with a man she’d never have to see again after the wrap party, she had almost always taken a lover with each new film, or, if not an actor, a director.

She played by the unspoken but well-understood rules of filmmaking romances; no participant ever wanted these affairs to intrude on his or her home life. Their families, those families who didn’t breathe the air of the studio, the lot, the set, the location, those families who waited for them at home, were never to be involved. The only way gossip got out was through those sharp-eyed, sharp-eared informants on every film—a wardrobe assistant, a script girl, a makeup artist—who acted as paid pipelines to the columnists. No one knew who they were, and there was nothing anyone could do about them but ignore them.

But oh, how exciting it was to know, even as she reveled in being a wife and mother, that her second universe existed, that her life knew no boundaries, that within weeks of making a phone call to her agent
she could be off to make another film, to meet another stranger, to share a secret intensity with him that could never hurt anyone.

It was well worth a few lies.

Valerie and Fernanda, Jazz’s half sisters, had been a constant in her life throughout her earliest years. They came to stay for almost a month every summer and for at least a week at Christmas and Easter. Liddy Kilkullen, in her self-imposed European exile, had not neglected to keep herself alert to all the details of the boom that was taking place everywhere in Orange County.

Sitting well protected from the Spanish sun, a Los Angeles newspaper in her hands, she brooded over the bitter fact that in 1960, the year of her divorce, the master planning for the University of California at Irvine, not too many miles to the north of the Kilkullen Ranch, had just been set in motion. The plan included urbanization of 35,000 virgin acres that ran inland from the coast to the future university. Her former neighbors, the Irvines, Lydia knew, would soon be richer than ever, and God knew they’d been rich for a long time, almost as long as some new Philadelphians.

It was obvious to her that it was only a question of time before some enterprising developer would strike a deal with her ex-husband for part of his land, particularly the most desirable acreage on the twenty miles of beach which were not useful for ranching, but only for growing lima beans. If she knew Mike, he would never sell outright, but would retain an interest, almost certainly a controlling interest, in whatever portion of the ranch such a change would involve. Perhaps he would even develop the land himself.

Previous generations of Kilkullens had rented large parcels of their lowland to small farmers to ensure a good, steady annual income during the highs and lows of the cattle-ranching business. Many acres of the Kilkullen Ranch were covered with fields of flowers and groves of citrus and walnut trees. Mike
Kilkullen had built homes on land he owned for the farmers who rented those acres, and in time he certainly would build homes for strangers. There would be an immense fortune in that, now that the new free-way from Los Angeles was open.

Not only had she been fool enough not to marry for money and position, Liddy told herself, with an agony of self-blame that was more difficult to endure than any outside reproach, but she had decided to get a divorce at the very moment when the ranch was about to be worth a fortune. If she had hung on, she would have
made
Mike Kilkullen sell some of his land, she told herself, sick to the depth of her being at her lost opportunities.