Stories (69 page)

But to return to the light, the easily understood, with a man whom I once knew who claimed that his tragedy was that, while loving women, he was unable. He was always in our company, and taking us out, and being seen in public with us, but, when it came to the point—there it was, he said. Very well
then. He was shooting a big film. During the course of this, it was necessary, he said, to make a screen test of the leading actor for another film, also to be shot by him, in which he, the actor, might again play the leading role. Reasonable enough—it was a very different film in which a handsome acholic eighteenth-century rake would endeavour, but fail, to rape a beautiful village girl in circumstances which would force her to become his mistress. In the film which was currently being shot, he was playing a lusty workingclass youth before whom women fell like cut grass. The scene was set for the test. In came the actor, transmogrified out of overalls and a cloth cap into aristocratic elegancies. It was about ten in the morning. The scene to be shot was the moment of the gentleman’s failure with the lady—her lack of refinement and probably unwashed condition were responsible, the script suggested. Usually half a morning would have done for such a test. But for the whole of that day, hour after hour, the studio with its armies of hands, lighting experts, camera crews, makeup women, watched the mad director with the marvellous politeness of their most necessary discipline, while he watched the handsome hero attempt and fail, attempt and fail, and attempt and fail and fail, again and again, to have the beautiful and scornful girl. The great expanse of the harshly lit studio, the small area of especially focussed lights, the fourposter bed, and at least three hundred people standing about, if they were not actually assisting, forced to watch while the lusty young man who for weeks and weeks had been light-heartedly romping his way through at least a dozen women in one film, was reduced to public impotence for the benefit of another. Again and again. And again.

When it was all over, but not until five minutes before the trade union rules made it inevitable that the camera crews must go home to tea and their wives, the mad director said, addressing the by-now-exhausted young man: “Well, that’ll do I think. But actually, love, I do think that X [another actor] could probably be better in this particular role. You are too earthy, darling, let’s face it. He’s more subtle.”

Or the famous screen actress, American, well known for her fastidiousness about what she plays. Much dreaded is that moment when, surrounded by lawyers, agents, a husband and protectors of all kinds, she hands back a script with: “As it
stands, it really is not for me—if we may suggest some changes …”

What, then, is for her? She has played, for some decades now, women in every kind of desperate situation, ex-jailbirds, betrayed lovers, doomed invalids, sorrowing mothers. But what can be the common denominator which causes her to say: “Yes, this is for me”? I once knew a man who worked, on a very humble level, in films she was starring in. What was she like? I wanted to know. It was offered that she was businesslike, adamant in her choices of co-stars, would not be photographed without the exact density of a piece of gauze being specified by lawyers, in triplicate, for certain revealing shots; that she could never be shot in such a way that her nose, not her best point, could emphasise itself … yes, but what is she like? “Good God!” said he, “you must have seen her in a hundred films.”

She lives, has lived, a life of improbable probity, married to the same man, with never a breath of scandal; remains a lady who insists on maintaining what she describes as the high standards of Hollywood.

Not long ago, I heard, she turned down a part which would have involved her battering to death her husband (in such a way that it would look as if someone else had done it) so that she could benefit from his will. That was, she claimed, nothing but unmotivated nastymindedness. Soon afterwards she was pleased to play a part where she battered to death—but openly, as it were, nobly—a lawyer lover who had tricked her out of a fortune.

Fairly straightforward really, daylight stuff still, as is this …

A certain English gentleman, a sort of semi-lord, being a middle son (he refers to himself with a rather tetchy refusal to conform to current prejudices as well-connected), lives in a large country house but alone, as his wife died shortly after their marriage. Alone, that is, except for his manservant. Failing to remarry, the usual rumours gathered about him and his way of life, dark tastes of all kinds were hinted at, and the women who had not succeeded in marrying him allowed it to be understood that it was their discovery of his secret which had cooled their pursuit.

He had been a widower for more than a decade when he was taken to what he called “a show.” He did not care for the
theatre at all. There he saw Mary Griffiths, a woman who had been married twice but who had announced to everyone and even to the Press that she did not intend to remarry, she chose freedom.

She was an attractive blond woman, her stage personality formed in the Fifties to the formula of that time—casual, loudmouthed, frank—and, as she insisted, as common as dirt. She took pains to conceal her middleclass origin—a handicap when she first started to act. She took care to play parts suited to this formula—mostly sad dishevelled girls doomed to disharmony. “A lost ugly duckling with moments of swan,” as one critic put it. A jolie laide, said another, thus enabling Mary to describe herself as more laid than jolly, and to reap double benefit, when people protested the joke was not new, by claiming: “Well, I’ve never had an education—I’ve never pretended I did—have I, then?”

What the gentleman saw in her struck his friends into incredulity, and her into laughter, and then thought. She was the reincarnation, he said, of his grandmother, the best horsewoman in the county, the bravest woman he had ever known—and, but of course, a great lady.

Mary wondered for a while whether to take riding lessons, in case some play or film producer saw in her what her still unknown admirer saw, but decided against it. They were introduced, and he began to court her—the only word for it. She was living at the time with a fashionable dress designer, and it was hard to say which of the two, Mary or her lover (“boyfriend”), got more excitement from the ritual. John sent her flowers, formally charming notes, left visiting cards, took her to tea, drove her into the country in his Bentley—or rather, sat with her in the back seat while the manservant drove—took her to dinner. From each excursion Mary returned to mourn with her dress designer the sad lack of romance in modern life, and more than once they lay wrapped tearfully in each other’s arms, because of the poetry their relationship lacked and must now always lack (there being a time and a place for everything) because for them flowers, formal notes, drives and long intimate dinners were simply impossible, out of key. Their fate had been to meet before a fitting-room mirror, to quarrel half an hour later, and to start living together a week after. Surely, they both wondered, it was not possible that gentleman John could
be working up to a proposal of marriage? As Mary put it: “I know he’s nuts, but he’s not completely gone—me, his wife, he must be joking.”

About six months went by, of a patient courtship conducted to rules invisible to Mary, but which she respected. Why not? As she said, she’d have time to fit in a dozen of such relationships concurrently, apart from acting in one play and rehearsing for another and keeping her boyfriend happy. What did those people do with themselves in those days, she asked, putting that time at about a hundred years back, while waiting for the moment of truth? Then, at last, John told her that he had decided she was the woman for him.

“You are the woman for him?” enquired her dress designer.

“That’s what he said—I swear it.”

Mary was then invited, and for the first time, to weekend at his house. Her lover made her some dinner dresses, romantic rather than frank, and the two of them considered her day clothes, since both felt strongly that she should be properly dressed for the occasion. But as at the time she was wearing very short skirts, if she wore skirts at all, and she was not prepared completely to lose her character, a trouser suit was concocted that was chiefly mink, which, worn with mink boots, made her look like a moon Eskimo.

Mary discovered that for the weekend there would be three people in the house: herself, gentleman John, and the manservant. She found the house charming. It fitted her like a glove, she insisted to disbelieving friends. In the afternoon she was taken for a drive, the manservant driving, drank sherry in the library before dinner, the manservant acting as butler, and ate a long and formal dinner, the manservant handing the dishes he had previously chosen. Then, intrigued to the point of hysteria, as she afterwards said, Mary waited for what surely must be a dishonourable proposal.

At eleven-fifty-five John leaned his handsome person towards her and said: “My dear, you must understand what my feelings towards you are, but before I could ask any woman to share my life, there is something I must do. If you like, you can call it a test.”

Mary was willing for the test.

John then nodded at the servant, who went out of the room and came back a moment later wheeling a tall black coffin, upright.
It had wheels at the feet-end, for manoeuvreability. This coffin was steered, upright, in front of a tall mirror. The servant, in his impeccable black clothes, stood as it were to attention, at one side of it. John, with a smiling nod of encouragement at Mary, went to the coffin, and stood inside it, his hands crossed on his breast, gazing into the mirror. Inside the black coffin, black-clothed John; beside it, the black-clothed servant.

Mary said afterwards that she was bothered because no gesture or pose that occurred to her seemed to be appropriate. So she rubbed out her cigarette, folded her hands in her lap, and remained silent, smiling. At the end of a long five minutes, her John stepped down from the coffin and nodded at the servant, who wheeled it away. He leaned intimately towards her.

“Brandy?” he enquired.

“Just a little, please.”

Nothing more was said about the coffin. Soon after, he escorted her to her room. There, but outside it, he kissed her. “And not bad either,” she said, describing the moment. “Not—bad—at all!” He said that she had passed every test, and with her permission he would like to ask her to marry him. She said she would think it over, and he kissed her hand and hoped that she would sleep well.

Still thinking it over, she returned next day to London, driven by the manservant, who offered not one word about the midnight ceremony. She had decided that she would be damned if she would ask him questions, but she cracked, and so found that the ceremony of the coffin took place every night of her John’s life at midnight. “It’s not every woman,” said the servant, “who goes along with it. Some I’ve seen come and go who didn’t take it as you did, madam.”

Mary consulted with her lover, who designed her a bridal gown, inspired, he said, by a fifteenth-century French court dress—too way out for current fashions, but he had been dying to make use of the ideas it provoked.

The dress ready, Mary wrote to John saying that he could have his answer, but he must come around to the dressingroom after the performance one night. If she could forgive him, he replied, he would not actually watch the performance again; one show a year was really enough for him, though it went without saying, he hoped, that he respected her profession.

When he arrived at the dressingroom door, he was made to
wait. At last the dresser admitted him. He did not immediately know where to look—Mary was not there, it seemed, and since he had never been in an actress’s dressingroom before, or, for that matter, backstage at all, the little room with its efficient mirrors, the cold strong working light, the surgical-looking appliances on the dressing-table, the clinical jars and bottles, were hostile to him. There stood the dresser, a small devoted grey figure, hands folded, her face saying nothing, in front of something that looked like—yes, she stood aside and there it was, a long black coffin, and in it, stretched out, dressed in the white wedding gown, eyes closed, hands folded around flowers, flowers all around her, lay his love Mary, dressed for a wedding ceremony, but most adamantly dead.

“As dead as blasted Ophelia,” as she said, when describing the scene to her friends and her lover in their favourite restaurant later that night.

He stared, stiffened, and went white—all this from the dresser, because as Mary said, she was damned if she was going to open her eyes and spoil the performance. He then bowed, and went silently out, taking his dismissal like a gentleman.

The dress became a starry item in the designer’s next collection, but by then he and Mary were no longer together. Discussing it in the friendly matter-of-fact way imposed on them by their style, or mode, they agreed there was something quite unassimilable about that wedding dress. Either she would put the bloody thing on and go to a registry office and be done with it, or they should call the thing off, with no hard feelings.

The dress then, prêt à porter, ready-to-wear, boutiqued, internationalised, led a thousand brides to the altar and the registrar’s table.

Still quite straightforward, or at least, understandable. But now enters the dark—or, at least, the tale turns slightly to the moonlit side.

Mary had the dress hanging up in her cupboard for some months. She could not wear it, it was not her style, but she did not want, for some reason, to part with it. At last she wore it for a fancy-dress party, and became for one night a fifteenth-century court lady.

At the party were stage and film directors, as well as the cooks, dress designers, hair-dressers and pop stars who were the lions of the current fashionable scene. A director who had seen Mary
a dozen times in her usual kind of role on stage or on television saw her now in a new light. A man with a fine nose for what was next, he wanted to make a large full-blooded film of a nineteenth-century novel whose heroine was a headstrong aristocratic daughter in love with a revolutionary plebeian. He was dubious about Mary’s voice, but it turned out her own voice did very well—he was the first person to have heard it for years. She got the part. She had to learn to ride. The film was shot in Somerset, where gentleman John had his country house.