Judith Krantz (6 page)

“Just like Mother used to make.”

J
azz shifted back to cruising speed, after she passed a truck on the Pacific Coast Highway, driving south to the Kilkullen Ranch, and reflected on the job well done for
Vanity Fair
.

On the second day of the shoot with Sam Butler she had, in various small and subtle ways, allowed him to feel dominant. She’d worn her Ralph Lauren genteel, gentile, gentry gear, the ankle-length white flannel pleated skirt and high-necked, white Victorian blouse with her grandmother’s cameos, her hair in one long braid down her back, and she’d spoken softly and looked at him blushingly and bashfully, and all but pawed the floor with her foot. Jazz thought she owed it to him since, on reflection, just possibly, she might have led him on. Some degree of mental seduction of the subject, regardless of gender, was always involved in any good celebrity shot, no photographer, male, female or gay, could ever deny that, but it was presumed to stop there. God knows, no male photographer from Man Ray to Herb Ritts, on his best day,
could ever have come close to the shots that she had taken on the day of the earthquake.

Why did people say that the camera doesn’t lie? It was ridiculously easy to make the camera lie, to project yourself into the image and create it as you thought it should be. Almost every celebrity portrait was a cleverly composed lie, hiding behind an appearance of super-reality. It was far more difficult to free the camera to tell the unvarnished truth, as she had with Butler. Yet there might be small, petty, picky, prudish, evil-minded folk who would claim that she should never have agreed to take off her pantyhose.

Sam Butler had shown up at Dazzle on time for the second day of photos the following Wednesday, as unruffled as if nothing had happened between them and apparently willing to take his chances on another quake. Jazz knew that she could never reach his vulnerability on this shoot, for he would never trust her again, but she hadn’t needed to probe twice into his inner self. The essential elemental image that she always sought and always caught in a celebrity shot, that absolute
flare
of an individual personality behind the fame, had been captured in that first day’s pictures of the homesick, horny actor. Drilling into the depths of a subject’s psyche with a camera was something Jazz did as well as, and usually better than, any other great photographer in the world.

Mel Botvinick had been shooting a fast-food ad when Sam and his attendants had arrived on Wednesday, and in spite of the powerful vents in Mel’s third floor studio, the smell of frying grease crept downstairs and distracted everybody.

Jazz had taken the actor outside, on the Ocean Avenue boardwalk, and let him wander, buying from the street vendors and talking to a flock of teenaged girls on roller skates. His face was still not so well known to the average movie fan that she couldn’t trust crowd control to her assistants and the efficient, willing widows. The big Australian’s beauty had become more animated as he talked to people and at the same
time more awesome in contrast to the mortals who surrounded him.

They had finished just before twilight. Thursday had been spent by Jazz and Sis Levy, with a group of creative people from Chiat/Day/Mojo, the innovative advertising agency, scouting locations for a new campaign for Vacheron Constantin, the oldest Swiss watch manufacturers. Location scouting was something Jazz usually left to Sis, but the campaign was so offbeat for the conservative Swiss that the agency people had asked her to go along. On Friday Jazz had decided to book out of the studio and leave for the ranch a day early.

She should be there in less than an hour, she thought, in good time to help her father with the preparations for the great annual Fiesta that was being held Sunday as it had been every September since early in the 1800s.

Jazz’s father, Mike Kilkullen, was the fourth in a direct line of Kilkullen men to own and run the ranch, a hundred square miles of property, roughly five times the size of Manhattan Island. This private empire lay south of the small town of San Juan Capistrano. It was an almost fan-shaped piece of land that stretched down toward the Pacific from the mile-high summit of Portola Peak, a summit that could be envisioned as the handle of the fan. From the heights of Portola, the boundaries of the ranch widened steadily on both sides, descending all the way down to the ocean, where the shoreline formed the uneven edge of the fan. Every wave for twenty miles crashed on the Kilkullens’ broad sandy beaches; on their wide, horseshoe-shaped harbor; on Valencia Point, the natural breakwater that stretched far out to sea. Beyond Valencia Point waves exploded around large white rocks that stuck up from the ocean floor and defied the Pacific to grind their fantastic shapes down into pebbles. When Jazz was five and her father taught her how to sail her own small boat that was tied up on an inlet at the Kilkullen boathouse, he warned her not
to venture out too far since the next landfall after Valencia Point was Hawaii.

One hundred and thirty-eight years earlier, in 1852, another Michael Kilkullen, Jazz’s great-great-grandfather, had sailed to America from Ireland, an ambitious, industrious, unencumbered young man with a modest hoard of savings. Like so many others, he had heard that gold had been discovered in California, but unlike most, he was shrewd. Michael Kilkullen realized that he had more chance to make his fortune by selling hardware and lumber to the frenzied miners than by joining them in their hardships. In little more than a dozen years he had accumulated enough capital to venture south to follow his dream.

Land-hunger had always run in the young Irishman’s blood, growing stronger by the year once he left the confines of his native island and realized the possibilities of the United States. In the tragic years of 1863 and 1864 the Great Drought had ruined almost all of the California cattle ranchers. Land was desperately cheap and Mike Kilkullen, like a few others, took advantage of it, paying fifteen thousand dollars in gold for the
mas ó menos
sixty-four-thousand-acre Rancho Montana de la Luna, property of the family of Don Antonio Pablo Valencia. The flamboyant, hospitable, now-penniless Valencias had owned this land and lived on it in near-feudal conditions since 1788, when Teodosio Maria Valencia, an Andalusian veteran of the first Spanish expedition to set foot on the soil of what was to become California, had received it as a grant from the Crown of Spain.

There had been many other ranchos for sale at bargain prices in those days, but Mike Kilkullen fell in love with Don Antonio’s only child, Juanita Isabella, who would have been heiress to the rancho had her father not been forced to sell. Dona Juanita Isabella Valencia Kilkullen had been Jazz’s great-great-grandmother, and Jazz had been named after her, although only her father ever called her by that name.

Suddenly excited by her closeness to home, Jazz
turned off the highway below Three Arch Bay and headed toward the ranch, swearing with impatience at the fifty-five-mile-an-hour limit. Soon she was on narrow inland roads that earlier Kilkullens had built and maintained, but the Orange County police were not impressed by history, she reminded herself. Although she couldn’t bring herself to part with her T-Bird, something utterly rakish about the car invariably attracted unwelcome attention from the forces of law and order.

Jazz kept just under the limit along the miles of strictly fenced-in land until she turned in at the massive open gates that were the main entrance to the ranch. There, for five miles, she allowed herself one satisfying burst of speed down the private driveway. As she approached the hacienda she passed under an avenue of two widely spaced rows of ancient and noble Moreton Bay figs, natives of New Zealand. There were ten trees in each row, trees so immense that they seemed to come from prehistory, dark olive green trees more than thirty feet in diameter that arched overhead, branching so vigorously that they touched each other and formed an enormous canopy as they led to the courtyard outside of the front entrance.

Although it had been home to the Kilkullen family for more than twelve decades, the hacienda, one of the largest and best preserved of all the surviving landmark California adobes, was still called the Hacienda Valencia and still preserved its basically Spanish ranchero character. The one-story, thirty-five room, whitewashed adobe had a long façade of simple and deeply pleasing proportions. Stretching back from the central structure were two wings separated by a large patio and a central fountain. The dwelling was entirely roofed in old, weathered red tiles; all the main rooms opened onto broad, covered verandas beyond which the patio, with its flower-filled beds, lay under an ever-changing pattern of sun and shadow. The hacienda had always been and still was far more of a manor house, a
casa grande
, than a ranch house.

The hacienda was surrounded by ten acres of famous gardens, first planted by the Valencia wives, and later added to and embellished by the Kilkullen wives, the first two of whom had been of ranchero descent. This oasis was protected by thick plantations of trees that prevented any visible encroachment by the barns and stables that lay beyond their boundaries. The working ranch seemed to exist on a planet other than that green island on which winding, cypress-bordered walks led to a dozen different hidden gardens: a private world where many unexpected fountains played, surrounded by cascades of geraniums growing so rampantly that they almost hid their antique terra-cotta urns.

Jazz parked her car quickly in front of the hacienda and ran inside, delightedly aware of the familiar coolness of the air even in the heat of a California September. There was nothing unfriendly or damp about the slight chill caused by the two-foot thickness of the adobe brick walls for the air was impregnated with nostalgic aromas. In the air floated the immemorial scent of centuries of wood fires. Subtle, spicy fragrances, impossible to pinpoint, but which she had never smelled elsewhere, emanated from the huge Spanish chests, the massive carved sofas and high-backed chairs, the mahogany armoires, some still covered in the original leather, that had been sent to the Valencias on board ships sailing around Cape Horn. Persian rugs that had first covered floors of packed earth, in the earliest days of the hacienda, now lay over tiled and wooden floors. Each generation had added its own furnishings and art to the hacienda, but nothing had ever changed the essentially Spanish Colonial character of the interior, a rustic and solid character that was far more masculine than feminine.

Today, as happened each time she entered the hacienda after being away from it, Jazz was momentarily reminded of nights of her childhood when she lay tucked up snug and warm in a deep brown leather chair in the music room, watching the firelight reflected on the beamed ceiling, while both her parents
listened to Beatles records. How many people felt a prickle of tears at the smell of woodsmoke and the memory of the melody of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Jazz wondered, and quickly put the thought out of her mind as she went directly to the kitchen to find her friend, the cook, Susie Dominguez.

“Susie, my one and only, how are you?” Jazz demanded, almost lifting her up in the air as she hugged her.

“Overworked for a change,” the tiny woman replied with relish. Susie was of the breed of cook who was only happy when there was a dramatic bustle and flurry in the kitchen. If she had her way, Mike Kilkullen would give at least three dinner parties a week. The large kitchen, where once several Chinese cooks had prepared three hearty meals a day for a large family, would, if Susie had her way, still be filled with voices and people. Now her employer usually dined alone except on those weekends when Jazz came to visit, but today’s planning for the Sunday Fiesta was up to her standards of hospitality.

“Where’s my father?” Jazz asked.

“Up at the bowl, kicking ass. I don’t have the time to worry about him—I’ve got my big chicken dinner to organize.”

“But what about the caterer?” Jazz asked in surprise. “More than five hundred people are coming for a barbecue, Susie, not a chicken dinner.”

“Oh, the caterer will be on the job tomorrow. His men are starting to set up already. But tonight it’s my special saffron chicken with pine nuts and grapes, my Italian-style French bread, my multicolored coleslaw, my strawberry layer cake with a sauce of—”

“All that just for the two of us? Are you bucking to be voted the Martha Stewart of Orange County?”

“We’re expecting company for dinner,” Susie said mysteriously, and wrinkled her nose in a secretive way that succeeded in provoking Jazz as no man ever had.

“That’s nice,” Jazz said, as indifferently as possible. Susie would not be rushed when she was in the
mood to withhold information. “I guess you don’t happen to have anything for my lunch? Peanut butter and jelly, or a slice of packaged cheese?”

“Look in the icebox. There might be something for you to pick at on the bottom shelf, but don’t dare touch anything else.”

“Gee, thanks, Susie,” Jazz said, helping herself to a large, carefully covered plate of sandwiches and salad. “And I thought you didn’t care.”

Sometimes compliments worked with Susie, sometimes insults, sometimes a judicious combination of both.

“Nellie and Matilda are coming to set the table tonight and serve,” Susie offered as Jazz ate with every sign of incurious contentment.

“Good. That’ll make it easier on you, honey. At your age you shouldn’t be expected to do too much. Slowing up is natural, Susie, after sixty. You shouldn’t feel badly about needing help with a little chicken dinner,” Jazz said solicitously. “I’ll do the flowers for you as soon as I’ve finished,” Jazz added, “and then you can tell me if you want me to chop the cabbage. Or I could go into town and get you some special-strength supplementary calcium. Have you been taking enough calcium, Susie? You certainly don’t want to shrink any more. I’ll bet you’re low on potassium too.”

“Sixty!”

“Well aren’t you over sixty? Or am I confused?”

“Damn it, Jazz, all right, I’ll tell you. You’ve got it coming. It’s your sisters. And their husbands. And their kids.”