Playing Dead (4 page)

Lionel’s voice was the first obstacle of many he had to overcome. Born within the sound of Bow bells, he had a pronounced Cockney accent, and it was a bugger to lose. But lose it he did, practising his vowel sounds hour upon hour in the stone-cold and stinking privy in the backyard behind their tenement building.

‘Fuckin’
toff
,’ his schoolmates snarled at him.

They’d shoved him against a wall, kicked him, then stolen his meagre pocket money.

Lionel didn’t care.

He had
plans.

He worked in a series of dead-end jobs until his twenties, then, without regret, he left his mum and the slums of the East End to go to Stratford-upon-Avon and start trying his luck in auditions. He worked hard, even if it was mostly unrewarded, painting backgrounds, helping with props. But then he got a small break, and started treading the boards in walk-on parts, and was approached by an agent.

On the advice of his new agent, he then abandoned the stage and went to try to make his name in Hollywood. Once or twice he even hung out hopefully around the constellation of bright stars that haunted every party. Lana Turner, Spencer Tracey, Clark Gable – they were all there, and all far too high-powered to acknowledge the existence of a handsome starstruck stranger from quaint little England.

‘What we need here is an angle,’ said his agent.

Or for you to get me some fucking work
, thought Lionel. But he asked, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you’ve been a Shakespearean actor. A real
thespian.
’

‘Only in walk-on parts though.’

‘Who cares?’

So Lionel’s résumé now stated that he’d played the lead in
King Lear
to rave reviews. But even
that
didn’t get him off the breadline. Nobody wanted an English hero right then, and he was too good-looking to play the part of the hero’s chubby best friend.

One day he was waiting with around twenty other hopefuls at yet another audition, this time for a small part – a destitute man – in a Warner Brothers movie. It was only a walk-on, but he was desperate and bloody near destitution himself.

As usual, his bowels turned to liquid at precisely the wrong moment – he was next but one up – and he had to go off to find the toilet. He passed two men fiddling with one of the new smoke machines. A crowd of people hurried past. Was that brilliantly stylish blonde at the centre of them Barbara Stanwyck . . .? He walked on, looking back, entranced by the allure of stardom, the way that cluster of people stuck to her like iron filings around a powerful magnet. He
wanted
that. But was he going to get it?

He was starting to seriously doubt himself. Maybe these endless rejections were a sign that he was
never
going to make it. And Warners were a bunch of slave-drivers anyway. Everyone in the building called the place San Quentin after the notorious prison. Did he want to work for people who drove their staff – even their stars – so hard?

Well . . . yes. He did. Anything they wanted, he’d do. He
had
to get there. But this was getting to be the last-chance saloon now. This was his last audition, he’d promised himself. If he didn’t succeed today, then he was going home. Not to his old mum in the East End, sod
that
; but back to England, to try his luck again there.

He missed England. There’d been trouble there, he knew, rumblings from Europe over a jumped-up little German leader – Führer, he called himself – Adolf Hitler. But now Chamberlain had the new Anglo-German accord in his hand, everyone was relieved and peace was guaranteed.

But maybe – just this once – he’d break the mould, get the part . . .?

‘No fucking chance,’ he muttered, and found the john, did what he had to do, and then emerged. He might have missed his place, but if he hurried . . .

‘I don’t care what you say, a deal’s a deal,’ said a tearful female voice from further down the corridor.

Lionel hesitated and peered into the dimness. A vivid blonde was standing there with a man, and for a moment he thought it was Stanwyck herself, but he quickly realized it wasn’t; this was a red-nosed, teary-eyed kid, no shining star.

‘And
I
don’t care what
you
say.’ The man leaning over her was a big bruiser, dark-haired and red with fury, shouting into her upturned face. ‘There’s no job. There never was.’

‘You
said
there was,’ she insisted.

‘You got proof of that?’ He let out a bark of laughter. ‘No? Thought not. So why don’t you just fuck off, sweetheart. Don’t come around my place of work making accusations again or you’ll be sorry.’

‘You
bastard
,’ she sobbed. ‘You promised . . .’

‘I promised nothing.’ Now he was grinning down at her. He slipped one hand inside her blouse and roughly squeezed her tit. The girl let out a yelp of pain. ‘But if you want to try and read through again, be my guest. The last reading was shit, but baby, you were
hot
.’

Lionel stepped out from the dimness of the corridor. ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ he asked loudly.

Stupid question. It was clear as day what was happening.

‘What’s it to you?’ asked the man, instantly pushing the girl away from him.

Lionel found himself going forward, even while his brain was saying:
The audition, you’ll miss the audition . . .

Are you all right?’ he asked the girl.

‘She’s fine,’ said the man bullishly. ‘Just sore ’cos she didn’t get the part.’

‘He
promised
me a part,’ said the girl. She was pretty, Lionel saw. Her tears had dried and now she just looked furious. ‘If I . . .
you
know.’ She went red and stopped speaking.

‘What we have here is a little misunderstanding,’ said the man. ‘We had some fun together and the lady thought that meant—’

He didn’t even finish the sentence before Lionel hit him, hard. He went crashing back against the wall, and slid to the floor.

‘Come on,’ said Lionel, grabbing the girl’s hand.

‘Is he going to be all right . . .?’ They were walking away, but she was glancing back, worried.

‘Do you care?’ asked Lionel, hurrying away.

‘No.’ A smile appeared briefly on her face.

‘I’m Lionel Driver, by the way,’ he said.

‘Vivienne Bell.’

‘And I think I’ve probably missed my audition . . .’

Having failed spectacularly at the Hollywood dream, Lionel took Vivienne home to England with him and married her there. She was a chatty bottle-blonde and tired of being pawed over by fat old producers on the casting couch, tired of being wild at heart while presenting a carefully virginal image to the outside world, tired of the coke-fuelled merry-go-round that Hollywood truly was.

Vivienne was charmed by his English gentility, thinking that here was a real gentleman. He’d played at Stratford, for Chrissakes. He quoted the Bard’s love poems to her, and she melted. Accustomed to encounters like the one Lionel had interrupted, lifting her skirts for quick, sweaty couplings in draughty backstage corridors on the promise of a part – after which the part
always
failed to materialize – Vivienne was entranced by his old-fashioned charm and amazed that he actually took the trouble to woo her. Before a year was out, she was pregnant with Frances.

It was such a touching story, such a happy tale, it should have ended with bliss everlasting. Lionel and the lovely Vivienne waltzing off into the sunset together. But Vivienne quickly got bored with daily life in England. She was a good-time girl; she loved the bright lights. And Chamberlain’s famed ‘piece of paper’ had been proved worthless. War was declared on Germany, so Lionel went off to fight.

Feeling lucky to be alive and not maimed when so many of his comrades had died or had their lives altered forever at the hands of the Nazis, Lionel returned home when it was all over and thought,
What the hell?
He would give the acting dream one last shot.

He ditched his old agent and acquired a new thrusting one called LaLa LaBon, who was bursting with energy and unscrupulously single-minded in the pursuit of a deal. LaLa was a rampaging, cheroot-puffing dyke with black bobbed hair and a vulpine, predatory face. She appreciated beauty in her male clients and was now pushing him westwards with manic enthusiasm.

‘Think of it! Hollywood! You heard of an actor called Archie Leach?’ she asked him one rainy day in her poky little London office.

‘No,’ he said, feeling dubious but finding her enthusiasm infectious. He’d already told her he’d tried Hollywood before, but LaLa was not to be deterred. ‘I’ve never heard of him.’

‘And you fucking well won’t,’ she said, busily puffing on her cheroot. She stabbed the air with it, making her point. Her eyes gleamed diabolically through the smoke-haze. ‘You know why? Because he changed his name to Cary Grant and look what happened to him. He’s English, he’s charming, he’s handsome. And so, Lionel my pet, are you – and your time is now.’

So he went back to Hollywood not as Lionel Driver (‘My God – so dull!’ said LaLa) but as Rick Ducane.

He was back on the party circuit again in no time. LaLa went with him and worked long and hard to get him into the best places. He was rubbing shoulders with people like Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner now, and the dirt was they were having a
hot
affair, with Sinatra singing and shooting out streetlights as he walked her home.

As for Rick’s affairs – well, he had taken Vivienne and sulky little baby Frances with him; he owed them that much, surely? The gloss had already gone off the marriage thanks to Viv’s drinking, but he couldn’t just
abandon
them, now could he? LaLa insisted he could. Rick insisted he couldn’t.

Finally, LaLa won the vote. And she laid down the ground rules. Rick rented a modest house in the hills and Vivienne had to stay there with her little boy. To the outside world, to Hollywood, Rick Ducane must be a single man. There must be no mention of any marriage, none at all – not unless he wanted to fuck up his career before it had even started. He needed to be free to escort older ladies, the fading stars who needed ‘walkers’ and could thereby get him into the most desirable parties.

‘Jesus,’ complained Vivienne. ‘That fucking woman dictates our whole
life.
What, are you ashamed of me? Ashamed of your
son
?’

Vivienne took a lot of placating, but she agreed in principle to just keep her head down and later,
much
later, when he’d made it, LaLa promised that the announcement would be made and wife and son could begin to appear in public.

He’d be paid to schmooze the movers and shakers, an opportunity that many a struggling actor would kill for.
What more could LaLa do for him?
she demanded.
Hold his fuckwit little
hand
?

So Rick Ducane started schmoozing. He schmoozed so hard he felt as if his head was coming off. He chatted with directors, producers, gofers and lighting men; he attended so many auditions that he became bewildered about which part he was reading for.

He resented it. He was back here again, chasing bit parts and walking old female farts who usually got falling-down drunk or hopped to the eyeballs on drugs, and groped him. After a year of exhausting failure and domestic discord he was all but ready to call it a day.

‘You’re never going to make it,’ Viv told him in one of her drunken rages. She was hitting the bottle harder than ever. ‘You’re a
loser
.’

But the war had taught him endurance in the face of adversity and so he went on, sparkling, entertaining, handsome, until one night he exerted his charm on the right person and then . . . well, next day on his dressing-room door they hung a star. They really did.

Chapter 7

1971

Saul Jury watched Rocco Mancini and Frances Ducane from his car, which was parked across the street.
Idiots
, he thought. They were sitting there in a window seat in the diner, thinking themselves unobserved. Touching hands all the time – Jesus, he hated faggots.

A woman’s instinct
, he thought grimly. Hadn’t his own mother told him it was lethally accurate, whenever he’d tried her out with some scam or other? Didn’t his own
wife
tell him it was infallible, when he tried to get away with his own little minor indiscretions?

And look at this; they were both right. And so was Cara Barolli Mancini. Only she was right in a way that was unexpected; probably it was going to shock her. However, he took the pictures, particularly pleased with the one that clearly showed Rocco Mancini kissing his little fag friend Frances Ducane’s cheek as he left. If Mrs Mancini was going to snoop on her ever-loving husband, then she had to accept that the consequences might not be pleasant.

The private detective knew the identity of Frances Ducane because he’d already trailed him twice, once to Rocco’s cruiser out in New York Sound, and had even given Mrs Mancini his name. She was paying him plenty for all this work; he was a happy man. Frances was a good-looking kid, an actor – and, like ninety-five per cent of all actors, he was spending a lot of time ‘resting’. His father Rick had been a big noise in Hollywood in the Fifties, before a spectacular fall from grace. Saul hoped little Frances wasn’t going to go the same way, but the way things were shaping up, it didn’t look so good for him.

Rocco had married a whole heap of money – apparently the Barolli family were huge importers of wine, olive oil and fruit from all around the world – and Frances was reaping the benefits, happily accepting not only Rocco’s manhood in places where Saul didn’t even like to
think
about, but accepting expensive presents too.

Of course it was the presents that had given him away.
Woman’s instinct.

Yeah, his mother and his wife were right. If a woman got a feeling about something, probably there were some grounds to it. Cara had been going through Rocco’s pockets for weeks, looking for evidence to back up her theory that he was playing away from home; finally, Rocco got careless and she found receipts. Incriminating stuff. And then she had hired Saul. And Saul had done his work, and now . . . now he was going to spin this out just a little longer, bump up the tab. She could afford it.