The Fame Game (46 page)

“Do we have any champagne?” he asked.

“Yes, Mr. Libra.”

“And get four glasses and your steno pad. We have to make out the guest list for this wedding. I’ll hire the Terrace Room.”

It seemed so long ago that Silky had made her little plot for Libra to give them a fancy wedding. How a half an hour of hatred could change everything! “We won’t have a circus,” she said. “Bobby and I will make the list.”

“I’m paying for it, and I’ll make the list,” Libra said. Gerry opened the champagne with a loud pop.

“Just our families,” Silky said. “And a few friends.”

“And columnists,” Libra said.

“Just the ones who were nice to me,” Silky said.

“Some stars …”

“No! Just people we know.”

“Let the bride be the star,” Bobby said. “It’s her wedding.”

“I think that’s a lovely idea,” Gerry said. She handed each of them a glass of champagne.

“No Terrace Room,” Silky said. “I’m getting married in a church.”

“The Terrace Room is for the reception, stupid,” Libra said.

“Then we can have an orchestra,” Silky said.

Libra nodded. He raised his glass. “To the lovebirds.”

Bobby glared at him. He wasn’t going to drink to the occasion, even though it had turned out to be theirs. Silky put her hand on his arm. “Please, honey?”

“I’m not going to drink with a lunatic,” Bobby said. “Whose wedding is this, anyway?”

“Yours,” Libra said innocently. “Yours. I’m just helping make it nice.”

“Oh, let him,” Gerry said. “He hasn’t got any children.”

“You’re all lunatics,” Bobby said. But he raised his glass and took a sip of the cold champagne.

Silky drank hers all down with relief and kissed him. Sometimes, like now, she was really glad that Bobby had the soul of a hustler. At least she would get the beautiful wedding she’d always dreamed about. And as for the rest of their lives together, they could do as they pleased.

They set the date for Valentine’s Day, about three weeks away. The day was Gerry’s idea, because Mad Daddy’s divorce still hadn’t come through and she felt if she couldn’t use Valentine’s Day for her wedding at least her friend could. Silky decided with surprise that she and Gerry really were good friends, maybe even best friends. After all, who else did she like?

The next days were frantically busy. There was a church to be found—not so easy because neither she nor Bobby were members of any congregation—and invitations to be printed and sent out, a wedding dress to be chosen, flowers, the food … Silky insisted on hovering over Mr. Libra throughout all the plans so he would not make her wedding too vulgar. She didn’t trust him. Since he wanted to pay for it he seemed to feel it was
his
wedding, more of a publicity party than a wedding at all. He insisted that Franco design her wedding dress, and then Silky had to fight with Franco because she wanted a sweet, old-fashioned kind of wedding gown and he wanted to make something crazy. She won. Nelson was to do her hair, and
he
wanted to stick a bird on her head, so there was another fight. No stranger to fights, Silky finally had her way with Nelson too. She wasn’t going to look like any freak just so he could get publicity out of the pictures. She even had to fight with Mr. Libra over the music the orchestra would play at the reception. She didn’t want them to play any of her songs, just classical favorites, but Mr. Libra won this fight and said she couldn’t tell the orchestra every single song to play or not to play because there were too many songs to choose and people had to be able to dance to some of them.

She didn’t want to have bridesmaids because they would have to be the Satins and that would be a farce. Luckily, they found a minister who said he would marry them in the little chapel outside the main room of the church, so all she needed was someone to give her away, and she decided that would be her older brother Arthur. Old ape-face Libra actually looked disappointed—he had thought she was going to ask
him!
What did he think she was, an orphan with no family at all? She bought Arthur a groovy tux, and he would wear a little flower in his lapel, maybe lily-of-the-valley if there were any that early.

She ordered a great big three-tier white wedding cake, with a bride and groom on top, and told the baker that the bride and groom
weren’t
going to be white. There would be champagne and canapes, and then a big dinner with roast beef, and cherries jubilee, flaming. And she would have a bouquet to toss after the reception when she and Bobby rushed away. She went to Bendel’s and bought a little suit to rush away in, because she wouldn’t be caught dead in one of Franco’s jobs with the shoulder pads and peplum.

Where were they going to rush to? The theater to do their evening performance? The idea seemed sacrilegious. Silky pleaded with the producers of her show, who had been invited to the wedding, and they agreed to give her a week’s vacation as a wedding present, so they were going to go to a ski lodge in Vermont. Neither she nor Bobby could ski, but snow and quiet and a roaring fire in a big room seemed very romantic, and it wasn’t very expensive, so he could manage to pay for their honeymoon himself, which was what they both wanted. A friend of his was lending them a car to drive up in. Mr. Libra gave them a matched set of Vuitton luggage—six pieces—for a wedding present.

She went with Bobby to pick out a wedding ring, and they decided on a plain platinum band because it looked nice with the little diamond bracelet he’d given her for Christmas, which she never took off. She got him a matching ring.

There were so many things to do and so little time to do them in, with their shows every night and two matinees. Lizzie Libra even made her go to register her silver and china patterns at Tiffany’s so that people could give her wedding presents, which Silky thought was ridiculous because nobody in her family had any money except what she and the girls gave them, and everybody they knew gave cash for a wedding gift anyway. Besides, she was living in a sublet, and then they would be renting in California, so who wanted a lot of dishes and silverware to lug around all over the country? Still, Lizzie insisted, saying that was what a bride did.

“What do you want, paper plates?” Lizzie said. “Are you going to register your china pattern at Hallmark?”

The invitations went out, really a formality, because Silky had already telephoned her family and told them all the details. She knew they would be impressed with the engraved invitations. She arranged for their transportation and hotel rooms for them to get dressed in, and sent her Auntie Grace a check so she could buy anything she wanted to wear. She knew that would make the twins mad, because they bought Auntie Grace more fancy clothes than she wanted, but it was
her
wedding and Auntie Grace was the closest thing to a mother she had.

Bobby was patient with all the plans and the shopping and actually seemed to enjoy it. He always enjoyed nice things, and everything at their wedding was going to be very nice, in perfect taste. Silky decided one thing no one would ever be able to say at her wedding was that here was an ex-slum bunny getting married.

The night before the wedding the kids from the show chipped in to give Silky and Bobby a party at her understudy’s apartment. She noticed with surprise that it was really kind of a dump, and she realized that actresses didn’t make much money unless they were stars like she was. Silky had never been to the homes of any of the kids in the cast, and the party gave her a warm feeling. It was funny how when you had a man everybody got very nice to you and wanted you around. She decided that after she and Bobby were married she would give little dinner parties for people at their apartment. She’d never invited any of the kids up there before.

And then it was her wedding day. She and Bobby woke up and looked at each other and at the sun streaming in from the terrace into the living room and realized it was their wedding day, and it made them both feel strange and shy. It was like opening in another show. She was almost sorry they hadn’t eloped, after all. She put on her robe and went out onto the terrace alone. The air was cold and crisp and there was some snow along the edges of the tops of small buildings far below.

“This is my last day as a single woman,” she said to the world. She wondered if Bobby minded that it was his last day as a bachelor. It was much harder for men to get married. They had so much to give up. But she would make it up to him. She would make him happy. She would never let him regret what he had done for her.

The wedding was beautiful, like a dream. Silky cried a little, Auntie Grace cried a lot, and even the Satins looked touched. Then they all rushed over to the Plaza in rented limousines and they had the most perfect reception Silky could ever have imagined. Even though there were more strangers there than she would have liked, it didn’t matter. Everybody was all dressed up, and they ate and drank and danced, and nobody got drunk and made a scene … it was lovely. Really, it was like a wedding in the movies. She never would have imagined, when she was a kid going to see movies where rich people got married, that someday she would be having a wedding that was much like that but ten thousand times better. It was
her
party, the first real party she’d ever had in her life. It made up for all the birthday parties she’d never had. It almost made up for everything. Everybody liked each other, and everybody liked her, and she liked all of them, even old ape-face Libra there, unwillingly dancing with his wife. Bobby would never treat her the way Libra treated Lizzie, not even when they were old. But looking at Bobby’s beautiful face it was hard to imagine that either of them would ever grow old. It seemed now in this magic time that they would both stay young and beautiful forever.

At the end of the reception, just before Silky and Bobby rushed away, Silky threw her bouquet to Gerry. “You’re next!” Gerry pulled out one of the white carnations and put it into Mad Daddy’s lapel. They both looked so sweet together. Honey was looking mad because she had hoped Silky would throw
her
the bouquet for luck. Fat chance. That one needed more than a bouquet for luck.

When Silky and Bobby returned from their honeymoon, Mr. Libra told them he’d gotten an offer for Bobby to be the lead dancer in a television special, with billing. Their marriage had gotten a lot of publicity and people were calling to offer him jobs.

“It always happens that way,” Libra said.

Didn’t it always! When something wonderful happened and you were really happy it seemed as if everything good started happening for you after that. Silky knew that there was no stopping them now.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Damn Telethons anyway, Gerry thought. Here it was March, still freezing cold, and everyone would have to sit in that hot, overcrowded room in their winter clothes, waiting for hours to go in front of the cameras for one minute, bored, miserable, and not even getting paid. The worst was that Mad Daddy hated telethons so much, and she had to go with him to hold his hand and keep him happy when she didn’t feel exactly happy about the whole thing herself. He was dawdling in the bathroom, combing his hair, changing his tie three times, doing anything to be as late as possible.

“Libra acts like the great man of charity,” Mad Daddy had told her, “but the real reason he makes all of us do so many benefits is it’s free publicity. He couldn’t care less about the cause.”

“Hurry up,” she called. “I want you there early, before the crowd.”

He came out of the bathroom, tieless again. “Do I have to go?”

“You know you do. You promised, and they announced that you’d be on. You can’t back out now.”

“They’ll never miss me,” he murmured miserably.

“You know they will.”

“There’ll be that mob outside …”

“We have the limousine. There’ll be cops. I’ll hold your hand. Come on, don’t be silly. Let’s get it over with.”

“I’m glad you’re with me,” he said. “Even though you
are
little.”

“I love you,” Gerry said.

“I love you, too.”

The person who was probably happiest about the telethon that night was Barrie Grover, president of the now-defunct Mad Daddy Fan Club of Kew Gardens, its only surviving member. When she’d seen on TV that Mad Daddy was going to be on the telethon she decided she would go, and meet him at last. She knew it was going to be on all night, so she told her mother she was going to sleep overnight at Donna’s house so they could study together, and then she put on two sweaters under her winter coat in case she had to stand outside the stage door all night. She took her schoolbooks so her mother wouldn’t suspect anything, and dropped them off at Donna’s.

“If she calls, say I’m in the bathroom or something,” she told Donna.

“You’re crazy,” Donna said. “There’ll be two million people there and you’ll never see him.”

“I’ll see him. He knows me.”

“Sure he does.”

“He
does!
”

“You really going to wait there all night?”

“Maybe he’ll be on early.”

“Well, if he is,” Donna said, “be careful coming home. You’d better take a cab.”

“I haven’t any money. Do you?”

“Are you kidding? I bought false eyelashes this week and I have to use my lunch money for bus fare. You should have asked your mother for money.”

“For what?”

Donna shrugged. “Well, just be careful. You shouldn’t run around by yourself in the middle of the night.”

“I’ll be all right,” Barrie said. But she was scared. Love was stronger than fright, and she knew she had to go, but she was scared. She just wouldn’t think about that dark, lonely walk from the bus stop. Maybe she wouldn’t have to come back till morning, and then she could go straight to school.

“Will you bring my books to class tomorrow?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Don’t forget.”

“I won’t. Good luck.” Donna grinned. “Maybe he’ll ask you out for a drink.”

“Ohhh, wouldn’t that be great?”

“Here, listen, let me fix your eye make-up.”

Donna was a great expert on make-up by now, and she skillfully put eye liner and shadow on Barrie’s eyes, making them look twice as big. Barrie could hardly recognize herself. She really was pretty. Maybe Mad Daddy
would
ask her out for a drink. Stranger things had happened!