Till We Meet Again (40 page)

He was glad to observe, as the three of them waited to be granted entry to the studio, that Delphine seemed remote, thoughtful, far less flirtatious than she had been on the night of the dinner at Valmont. He liked her incontestable elegance in a red shantung suit, trimmed in navy blue, which she had bought at Bullock’s for visits to the track at Santa Anita, and he thought that she looked older than he’d ever seen her, with a small navy straw hat tilted down over one eye.

“Ah, there’s my pal,” Guy said, introducing them to a short, blond young man with a friendly grin who had arrived hastily at the main gate. “Jacques Sette, Mademoiselle de Lancel, Vicomte de Lancel—Jacques is the assistant to Bluford—he’ll take us around.”

“Sorry you had to wait, Guy, but you know how it is. Mademoiselle, Monsieur, follow me—Guy knows the way. We’re not at all busy here today. Unfortunately, several films are being shot on location, and many are in pre-production, but Gabin and Michèle Morgan are working on Stage Five. René Clair’s directing—I thought that would be the most interesting way to begin.” He produced the great names casually, as if they belonged to him, and Delphine looked at him with envy.

There was a red light on above the small door on the blank, unexciting wall of Stage Five, and they had to wait until it went off to enter. Once inside, they found themselves in a confusingly vast structure. Some parts of the stage were in darkness and others were so brilliantly lit that the white illumination seemed to give off a noise like a low hum.

“Watch your step,” Jacques Sette cautioned, and took Delphine’s arm without ceremony, to guide her around the cables that led to banks of lights, and around obstacles created
by props that rose up out of the floor. She looked everywhere at once, and understood nothing, until suddenly Sette brought them all to a stop just at the edge of an area in which the aura of concentration was as palpable as the lights were bright.

She could smell it, Delphine thought, her heart beating quickly, smell the excitement. They had stopped twenty feet from the set, the interior of a dining room, where Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan sat at a table, their meal interrupted, with four other actors, none of whom Delphine recognized. A makeup woman circled the table, powdering down foreheads, touching up lips, rearranging a lock of hair. The actors sat patiently, in a kind of limbo; Gabin murmured one joking sentence and they laughed quietly, but for minutes they did not move, while two men, one standing, and the other in a director’s chair, conferred. Finally the conversations ended, the makeup woman left the set, the standing man went to his camera and spoke to another man, and in the deep silence that followed, someone unseen announced with aggressive authority,
“Silence! On tourne.”

Delphine shuddered with excitement. She had taken half a dozen silent, dreamlike steps forward before Sette noticed. He made a quick leap, grabbed her shoulder, and drew her back into the visitors’ zone. She mimed an embarrassed apology. She hadn’t known she had moved.

A minute later the scene was interrupted again. “Let’s go,” Bruno whispered into her ear. “This is no longer interesting.” Delphine shook her head in refusal. The scene started again, and this time it continued for less than two minutes before René Clair, dissatisfied, stopped it with an abrupt “Cut.” He walked onto the set and talked to the actors at length in a voice too low to be heard. Gabin nodded several times and Michèle Morgan shrugged and smiled, and to Delphine it was as if the gods on Olympus had deigned to manifest themselves to her in human form.

Lights were rearranged, the cameraman put a small object up to his eye, gave directions, spoke to his assistant, and now, with Bruno and Guy restlessly waiting, and Delphine as unmoving as if she were a garden ornament, the scene started one more time. Finally it came to an end. “Cut … and … print,” René Clair said with some faint satisfaction. The lights went off, the actors rose and disappeared in all directions.

“About time,” Bruno said, expelling a breath of boredom.

“They’ll be at it again all afternoon. They broke for lunch. That was only the first good take,” Sette explained. “However, I have the feeling that you’ve had enough.”

“For the rest of my life,” Bruno replied.

“I warned you,” Guy said.

“Not vividly enough. Come on, Delphine, let’s go.”

“No,” she said.

“What do you mean? There’s nothing left to watch.”

“I want to see them do it again.”

“As you wish, Mademoiselle,” Jacques Sette said, shooting a look of amazement at Guy. “But nothing will happen here for at least two hours. Lunch is sacred, particularly on a film. May I invite you all to join me in the commissary?”

“Oh yes! Please,” said Delphine.

“You exaggerate, Delphine,” Bruno remonstrated, but he was hungry after all that endless, dreary standing about, and he had not made another engagement for lunch. One had to eat somewhere.

The commissary, like all studio commissaries, contained a large private room that was reserved for studio executives and the more important actors. Delphine looked around avidly, imagining that she was about to see Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan having their lunch, but they had both elected to eat in private in their dressing rooms after a morning spent before a dining room table.

Sette led them to a table, putting Delphine in the seat that had the best view of the room.

“First, a glass of wine,” he proposed and ordered from the waiter.

“Please, tell me who everybody is,” Delphine implored. He looked around, hoping to see a famous star who would make her evident wish come true, but except for the directors, Jean Renoir, Pierre Prévert, Marcel Carné, Nico Ambert and Autant-Lara, he saw no one except character actors who were unknown in the United States. Delphine cast a glance at each of the directors as he pointed them out, but they were only ordinary men, not movie actors, and her yearning was unappeased. Disappointed, she sipped her wine and gazed around the room, her huge eyes wistful yet alert.

At a table not far from Sette’s, three men ate together.

“Take a look at that girl,” Nico Ambert directed his two lunch companions. “The one with Sette.” The three men
turned slightly and examined Delphine from head to foot as if she were a sofa up at auction.

“Any idea who she is?” Jules LeMaitre, Ambert’s casting director, asked.

“Not an actress,” decided Yves Block, the cameraman on Ambert’s production of
Mayerling
, which was scheduled to start production in a month. The three men had been meeting all day to discuss details of the film, which had advanced into the semifinal stages of planning.

“Why do you say that, Yves?” asked LeMaitre.

“She’s too unselfconscious,” the cameraman replied. “She’s looking around like a tourist … no actress would allow herself to do that, even in a strange studio. What’s more, I’ve never seen her face before. If she were an actress, don’t you think one of us—
all
of us—would recognize her?”

“If she were an actress, she would have recognized me,” Nico Ambert said matter-of-factly. The director, a sturdy man in his early thirties, was olive-skinned, with black hair and the typically warm-blooded look of a man from the south of France, more Italian than French. He had great vigor even in repose, an aura of authority, a prominent hawk nose, ferocious eyes and a relentless set to his mouth. He was a man who was accustomed to power and used it well; a man feared by many men and coveted by many women.

Delphine was aware that the three men were staring at her, but like everyone else in this letdown of a commissary, they were nobodies. She was so accustomed to being in the focus of men’s eyes that she swam freely in their attention with as little curiosity about them as that felt by a gorgeous tropical fish, displayed to one and all in an aquarium.

“She’s not French,” Ambert said. “There’s something altogether too neat and trim about the way she’s put herself together, and look at her shoes … not possibly French.”

“But she’s speaking French, Nico,” said Jules LeMaitre. “The shapes her lips make, the way she uses her hands … what do you think, Block?”

The cameraman was silently studying Delphine’s fece. He was an encyclopedist of the syntax of features. Why, he often asked, did people find it so wonderful that no two snowflakes were alike when no human face, even that of an identical twin, was the same as another?

Block didn’t believe in beauty. He knew that the most flawless face could change into the flatness of a boring landscape
under the lights. He had seen too many extraordinary eyes lose their power to project starlight when the camera was turned on them.

The banks of huge arc lights and the lens of his camera worked together in a diabolical conspiracy to reduce the looks of men and women who were, in real life, creatures of natural splendor. Yet sometimes the lights and the camera seemed to regret their harsh verdict and made a compact to find the fascination in a face that had seemed only ordinarily beautiful. The most enchanting woman he’d ever tried to capture on film had possessed a nose that cast an ugly shadow, no matter how he lit her. He had filmed another woman whose prettiness was overwhelmingly banal, but in front of the camera, the arrangement of her features assumed the awesome mystery of a priestess vowed to ritual silence.

Block, without thinking, could read the essentials in a second: judge if the eyes were far enough apart, if the nose had any of the obvious and myriad inconveniences of most noses; gauge the volume of a chin, the length of a neck, the essential and absolutely crucial geometry of the placement of the mouth in relation to the eyes; but until the lights spoke, until the camera answered, he preferred not to be asked his opinion. “It’s impossible to say,” Yves Block finally answered, shrugging at the casting director.

“Do you want to test her?” Jules LeMaitre persisted.

“That’s for Nico to decide.”

“Yves, get that girl on film,” Nico Ambert decided.

“For the part of Marie, Nico?”

“Who else?”

“We can have Simone,” Jules reminded him.

“Only if we want her … nothing’s signed yet. Jules, you know Sette, don’t you?”

“Sure, Bluford’s assistant.”

“Go over and introduce yourself. If she doesn’t speak with an impossible accent, tell her what we want. And arrange it for this afternoon. I’m seeing Simone’s agent in two days.”

“Wait a minute, Nico. Why would you even consider going with an unknown for Marie?”

“Actually I’d prefer it.
Mayerling’s
been done before, in films and on the stage; everybody knows the story of Marie Vetsera, Archduke Rudolph and their suicide pact at Mayerling. An unknown would add a touch of the unexpected.”

“It won’t hurt to see her, I suppose,” Jules agreed without
enthusiasm. The picture was definitively cast in his mind, and he didn’t like any interruption once that constellation had been formed, but humoring the director was part of everybody’s job. With Ambert it wasn’t even humoring, it was obeying. He put down his fork and approached Sette’s table.

“Well, Jacques, are you giving the guided tour today?”

“I have that honor. Let me introduce you—Mademoiselle de Lancel, permit me to present Jules LeMaitre, casting director with neither illusions nor scruples, in other words, one of the greats. Jules, our other guests, Vicomte de Lancel, and Guy Marchant—of Marchant Actualités.”

As he greeted Delphine, LeMaitre heard, in the few words she said, that her accent was as French as his own, yet by nuances of attitude too subtle to be put into words, he knew that she was not French and not of the world of the cinema.

“Are you visiting Paris, Mademoiselle?” he asked politely, turning away from the three men after he had shaken hands with them.

“For a few days. Then I return to Champagne.”

“You live in Champagne, then, and tend your most excellent vines?” he probed.

“I live in Los Angeles,” Delphine answered, smiling. He was a smoothie.

“Ah. Then you must be in films.”

“No,” Delphine laughed, flattered in spite of the familiarity of his line. She’d never heard it from a casting director. “As a matter of fact, I’m a student at the university.”

“So, an intellectual. Charming. I have another question, not too indiscreet, to put to you, Mademoiselle. My boss, Nico Ambert, the director, wondered if it would amuse you to do a little screen test for us. This afternoon, in fact, if you have a few minutes to spare.”

“Damn! I knew you were up to something, LeMaitre,” Sette said, annoyed by the poaching on his guests. What if Bluford, his boss, wanted to test her? He should have thought of that earlier.

“Delphine, it’s impossible,” Guy Marchant protested, instantly alarmed. “Bruno, tell Delphine that she absolutely can’t do it. I’m sure your grandmother would be furious.”

“Don’t be an utter ass, Guy,” Bruno shot back. “Why shouldn’t she, for heaven’s sake? There’s nothing immoral about a screen test, as far as I know.” Who, he wondered, did
Marchant think he was, making decisions about what was right or not right for Delphine, telling
him
what his own grandmother would think. An inferior would always presume. It was something to remember.

“But, Bruno, just because some guy sees her and she appeals to him? There’s something indecent about it—it’s as if he just put out a hand and tapped her on the shoulder and said, ‘Follow me.’ It’s not
comme il faut
.” Guy had risen from his chair in his agitation.

“ ‘Not
comme il faut’
? I think I can judge that for myself, Guy. Not
comme il faut
, indeed.” Bruno mocked him.

“Guy, and you too, Bruno, may I ask what this has to do with either of you?” Delphine said calmly. “Monsieur asked me a question, and my answer is that it would amuse me very much indeed.”

“Delphine, I beg you, think twice. It’ll take all afternoon,” Guy sputtered helplessly.

“My afternoon, Guy, not yours. Monsieur Sette, I enjoyed my lunch. Thank you for your hospitality.” Delphine got up and looked directly at the casting director. “I’m ready for your test, or I will be after somebody does something about my makeup. Shall I follow you?”