Till We Meet Again (22 page)

American informality, even in this distinctly European setting, prevented strangers being introduced to strangers, in a way that immediately indicated the particular place that each one held in the local hierarchy. It was all rather catch-as-catch-can, Eve told herself, as they descended the staircase that led to the swimming pool. There, on the roof of an enormous pool house, a full orchestra played for dancing on the wooden floor laid around the pool just for this evening’s reception. It was entirely possible, she realized, that she and Paul would leave this important party knowing no one except the people they sat beside at dinner, whose names had meant nothing to them and who had seemed far more interested in greeting their friends at other tables than in getting to know a pair of foreigners.

When Eve had married Paul de Lancel during the war, she had had no time to wonder what the alliance would mean to him in the future. There had been no weighing life “after the war” in 1917. She had known almost nothing of his background, nor had she cared, and when she had impulsively given up the music hall for him, she had had no second thoughts about the limited domestic future she was choosing in place of the stardom for which she had trained herself, that great stardom Jacques Charles had destined for her.

Later, as the years followed, she had had ample time to realize that she and Paul had each given up something precious to be together. She had been received by Paul’s family with bitter reserve and suspicion. His mother had spared no words in letting her know, in the special terminology of diplomacy, that Paul, because of their marriage, could never hope to “enter into his career,” a term that indicated the path that must be traced by a future ambassador.

Eve had discovered that it was not just her deeply provincial and devoutly bourgeois family who felt themselves disgraced by her performing on stage, but the rest of the world as well—at least the world to which the Lancels belonged, and the world of the men who ruled at the Quai d’Orsay. In both worlds there was no meaningful difference between her
tour de chant
and the prancing of naked showgirls. A woman who worked in a music hall was little better than a streetwalker.

But Paul, she realized, had not been an innocent when he decided to marry her. He was a seasoned diplomat of thirty-one,
wise in the demands and attitudes of the foreign service. He must have realized that she was just about as unsuitable a wife as he could have found, and he had chosen her anyway. Not “chosen,” she would think, and tilt her chin proudly—but insisted, demanded, and implored her, overwhelming her with his passion and need. He had married her with his eyes wide open.

Eve felt—not precisely guilty, she told herself, but somehow—
responsible
. Never again did she sing in public, never again did she even mention the music hall years. She could not wipe out the past, but there was no need to insist on it, she decided, and in Canberra and Cape Town, as far as she knew, no one suspected that Madame Paul de Lancel, that young, devoted, proper and popular wife and mother, had ever performed before an audience.

But, oh, how she had missed it! Jacques Charles had been right. She yearned—from time to time—for the matchless thrill of walking out on a stage, for the applause, for the lights. And, more than anything, she missed the music itself. She sang and played to the children, but it wasn’t the same, Eve thought, as she and Paul joined the Dohenys’ hundreds of guests on the shining dance floor in front of the pool house.

Slowly they moved to the simple pace of the fox-trot that was the melody of the hour, surrounded by couples who were busy waving at each other, and talking over their shoulders even as they danced. The fun of the jazz age was over and the era of serious glamour had begun—the night air was thick with it, as heavy as the rubies that all but covered Mary Pickford and the diamonds flung over Gloria Swanson. Seven other women were wearing dresses exactly like Eve’s black satin, but with far more jewels. Never had Eve felt so much like a green girl from Dijon in a borrowed hat.

“May I have the honor of a dance with your wife,
Monsieur le Consul?”
asked a familiar voice.

Paul glanced over his shoulder and then, with a smile of surprise, surrendered Eve. “Good evening Monsieur,” he said. “For a compatriot, I will permit it.”

“So,
Madame la Consule Generale
, how do you like Hollywood?” Maurice Chevalier asked.

“Everyone asks me that question,” Eve answered automatically. She had never met him before, nor had he met her, yet he seemed so at ease that it was as if they were returning to an old conversation.

“And how do you answer?”

“I say that I love it.”

“And do you love it?” Chevalier asked, with genuine curiosity.

“Yes and no. It is … special. It takes time to accustom oneself …”

“Particularly when one remembers the lights of the Grands Boulevards.”

“The Grands Boulevards …” Eve managed to make the words sound like neither a question nor an affirmation nor even a possible topic of conversation. She let them float in the air between her lips and the good-humored, absurdly famous face of her dancing companion as if they carried no associations for her.

“Yes, the Grands Boulevards,” Chevalier repeated, “and the lights … Maddy … the lights.”

“Maddy …?” she said incredulously.

“But I have heard you sing. Once you have heard Maddy sing, you never forget her. Everyone said that, and everyone was right.”

“Oh.”

“It was in 1914, at the Olympia, that first time, before the war, and then again, still in 1914, but during the war, when you came to sing for the soldiers at the front. What a night that was! You in your brave, beautiful red dress and your little red shoes and your hair just the same color as it is tonight, as if someone took precisely three ripe strawberries and put them in a glass of champagne, and then held it up to the light … ah, Maddy, you made us poor soldiers happy that night. Sixteen years ago and I still remember perfectly.”

“So do I—oh, so do I!” Eve cried.

“The night at the front? But you sang everywhere at the front. How could you remember one special night?”

“I remember them all,” Eve said simply, tears welling in her eyes.

Maurice Chevalier, who had first sung for his supper in the slums of Paris at the age of eleven, understood her tears. He had been a star for twenty-two years and he had never ceased to evolve, until he had stamped his personal style on the century. He well remembered Maddy. He realized that she must have disappeared into
Madame la Consule Generale
, and he knew, as clearly as if it had happened to him, what that must cost her.

“Do you know the words to
Mimi?”
he asked her, ignoring her tears.

“Mimi?
‘My funny little honey of a Mimi’? Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t know
Mimi?”
Eve asked.

“Would you rather we sang that, or would you prefer
Aimez-moi Ce Soir?
We could sing it in English. ‘Love Me Tonight.’ ”

“Sing?
Here?
With you? No, I can’t do that!”

“Ah! Ça alors!
It’s not every night that I get turned down. And so quickly.”

“I … I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that I don’t sing … anymore.”

“Maddy would never say that.”

“Maddy would never miss a chance to sing with Maurice Chevalier—never in a million years,” Eve admitted, as much to herself as to him.

“Then
be
Maddy tonight,
Madame la Consule Generale!
Why not?”

Eve looked around at all the dancers who were openly watching her conversation with the greatest international star who had ever come to Hollywood. Strangers who had ignored her all evening were looking at her with fascinated eyes. Strangers, she realized, who had perhaps never entertained the notion that someone who would sing in a music hall was beyond the pale, an outcast forever; strangers who belonged to a new, odd, unconventional, unpredictable country in which entertainers were royalty.

“Mrs. Doheny asked me to sing, but I told her no,” Chevalier continued. “However, if you consent to sing with me … I will reconsider.”

“All right,” Eve said quickly, before she could change her mind. She couldn’t
not
dare. Not now. Not here. “But call me Eve,” she said urgently, “not Maddy.”

Arm in arm with Maurice Chevalier, Eve walked through the throng of dancers up to the pool house. The orchestra leader hurried down to meet them, for the dancers parted as they approached. Chevalier spoke to him quickly and then led her up the staircase so that they stood together on the roof of the pool house. He addressed the suddenly silent, expectant crowd.

“Ladies and gentlemen. I worked hard all day … singing. I worked hard all week … singing. In fact, I worked hard all month … singing. Tonight I came here only to
honor Mrs. Doheny and watch you all dance. Not to sing. But then I did not dare to hope that tonight I would meet again a bright star, a compatriot, a colleague, who, when I first heard her sing, had all Paris at her feet, a brave and patriotic star who sang for us at the front during the war; a star so beautiful that I have forgiven her even though she abandoned her career for what? For marriage! I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, is that not a shame? And she has the audacity to tell me she is happy! I present to you Eve, the wonderful Eve, who has become Madame Paul de Lancel, wife of our new Consul of France. To sing with Eve I would even burn my hat and throw away my cane. Fortunately, she has not demanded that.” He turned to Eve and whispered,
“Chantons, Maddy, chantons!”
Then he leaned toward the eager, excited crowd and cried, “So, Eve,
ma belle
, let us begin!”

“I won’t be confirmed,” Freddy announced, “until I get a plane ride.”

“That’s the limit!” Paul exploded. “Religious blackmail.”

Freddy nodded in solemn agreement. After all, nothing else seemed to work. Each time she had asked for a plane ride, somebody or other had quickly promised it and then, just as quickly, forgotten. Her long-delayed confirmation could surely wait until she had obtained her heart’s desire.

“I’ll take you out to the airport this weekend,” Paul decided reluctantly. He didn’t approve of giving in to blackmail, but Freddy, at eleven and a half, was older than she should have been for her confirmation, and he wanted to see it over and done with, if only because the ceremony might have a much-desired sobering effect on his younger daughter.

Three times in the last year, local policemen had brought Freddy home after she had been caught roller skating at full speed straight down the center of the steepest streets, with a sheet firmly gripped by its corners, billowing out behind her like a sail. “The kid’s a menace to traffic,” the officers had said, “and she’s going to get hurt someday.” The Lancels’ house was high in the hills of Los Feliz, and Freddy had been able to travel miles downhill before she’d been caught.

When her roller skates had been confiscated after her last brush with the law, Freddy had taken every last one of her dolls, shoved them unsentimentally into her doll carriage, and set up shop on the street corner, planning to sell them to
the neighbors, among them Walt Disney and Cecil B. DeMille, so that she could buy new skates.

“She’s just a tomboy,” Eve said. “It’s only a phase. She’ll grow out of it.” She couldn’t even admit to herself that she liked seeing Freddy running wild as she had never been allowed to do. Some old and still-untamed emotion of her own was satisfied when she looked at her child and saw an unrepentant, happy outlaw.

Freddy was tall for her age, inches taller than Delphine, and already long-limbed. She was as nimble as an acrobat and intrepid enough to go over Niagara Falls in a rubber tire. Her arms and legs, under a network of scratches and bruises, were tanned, firm, and muscular, yet delicately rounded, as was her long neck. From Paul she had inherited exceptionally deep-set eyes, spaced unusually far apart, under thick brows that flew upward, like Eve’s, toward her wide temples. Eyes of an unholy blue, they were so vivid that it seemed impossible that they belonged to a child.

Was it only her imagination, Eve wondered, or did Freddy truly see farther and better than everyone else? In Canberra and Cape Town she had always been able to spot birds in flight and animals approaching on the horizon before anyone else in the family, and even as a baby she would point and cry out to draw attention to her discoveries. She never had to brush her hair out of her eyes like other children, for it grew straight back from her forehead in an imperious mass of thick, tangled, turbulent waves of a shockingly aggressive red. Her nose was already straight and well formed, a distinctive feature that gave her face a look of unchildlike strength and purpose, until she laughed, and it wrinkled up in uncomplicated fun.

Her younger daughter was not, Eve suspected, going to be an indisputable beauty like Delphine, yet there would always be people who would judge her the more beautiful, who would be captured by her unruly allure, by a certain noble sternness that came over her face when she wanted something—as she so often did. She was an undomesticated creature, her Freddy, with a rakish, rollicking laugh and a swaggering walk, as if Robin Hood had come back to life as a young girl.

And, like Robin Hood, she held her father up to ransom. That night Paul telephoned John Maddux, who had first started an air service between Los Angeles and San Diego in
1927, with a single plane and a young pilot named Charles Lindbergh. The venture had prospered, and now Maddux had fourteen Ford Tri-Motor passenger planes, each boasting three engines, and able to make regularly scheduled trips on three routes: Los Angeles to San Francisco, to Agua Caliente, Mexico, and to Phoenix.

“What can I do for you, Paul?” John Maddux asked.

“I’d like to take a girl for a plane ride, Jack. Any suggestions?”

“Well, you’re in luck. We’ve inaugurated a limousine service between the ticket office on South Olive and the airport. The lady should enjoy that,” Maddux said, in a high good humor.