The Slipper (43 page)

The audience loved it. They hooted with laughter throughout. They gave noisy cheers when the reprieve came and Lavinia and the girls were allowed to stay. Applause thundered when the curtain came down. There were seven curtain calls. The audience gave them a standing ovation. They had a great big rollicking hit on their hands, or at least it seemed so until the critics had their say. The reviews were scorching. Walter Kerr confessed that the play was amusing, the cast quite good, but the story was hackneyed, the characters mere caricatures and the laughs cheap and obvious. Clive Barnes found it deplorably old-fashioned and totally devoid of wit or the least relevance. In his inimitable style and with his customary compassion, John Simon savaged it mercilessly and added that, in her garish makeup and blonde wig, “Soap Opera Diva Julie Hammond looks and acts like a shrill drag queen having a bad night at the Baths.” While allegedly literate, sophisticated New York theatergoers might possibly be able to go to the bathroom on their own, they certainly couldn't purchase a ticket without being told what to see by a small group of critics with their own personal axes to grind. The play was doomed.

Eight nights later a despondent Julie sat in her dressing room, removing her makeup after the evening's performance. They were already playing to a half-empty house, and they'd be lucky if they stayed open till the end of the month. All that work, all that energy, all that effort, gone down the drain because a few men found the play unworthy of their superior approval. It was like the Christians and the lions. Thumbs up, you live. Thumbs down, you're eaten alive. Julie wiped the cold cream off and then washed her face with a cloth dipped in water. She was wearing a shabby cotton robe. Her hair was pinned up and covered with the net she wore under her wig. Now she would be forced to sign the new contract with ABC. She had no choice. Two more years of suffering nobly on
This Life of Ours
. Meg would come out of her coma, and God only knew what would happen to her next.

The dressing room door flew open and Julie was startled to see a radiant Nora, marvelously chic in a red satin de Givenchy with trapeze skirt. Satin rustled noisily as Nora rushed to throw her arms around Julie.

“You were brilliant, love! Positively brilliant! I've always known you were a magnificent actress, but until tonight I didn't know just how magnificent you were!”

“Nora! You—I thought you—”

“I got in this afternoon. I've got a tremendous surprise for you, love. Terry's with me. I've
forced
him to watch the soap for the past two months, and—”

“He's here? At the theater?” Julie was appalled.

“He's gone to get our things from the cloakroom. He'll join us in a few minutes. Julie, he's been watching the soap every day and tonight he was absolutely mesmerized by your performance. He couldn't believe he was watching the same woman. I insisted he come to New York with me. I knew if he could see you in this play, see your range, he'd be—”

“Terry Wood's coming backstage? With me looking like this! I love you, Nora, but sometimes—”

Julie tore the net off her head and unpinned her hair and started brushing it vigorously. The door opened again, and a rotund, moon-faced man came in carrying a gray vicuna overcoat and a gorgeous full-length black sable Julie had never seen before. He tossed the sable to Nora and dumped the vicuna across a chair and, eyes twinkling behind his horn-rims, gave Julie a tremendous smile.

“So we meet at last!” he exclaimed jovially. “I've been hearing a lot about you, little girl, and I've been seeing a lot of you, too. This one has insisted I watch your soap. Thirty minutes a day, it costs me a fortune, but I watch, I let everything go, I sit in front of the television set, and I say to myself, this girl, she has something. Tonight, I am astounded! She's the one, I tell myself.”

Julie was standing now, gazing at him with puzzled eyes. Nora was grinning like the Cheshire Cat. Julie longed to slap her.

“Everything's set on
The Slipper
,” Wood informed her. “Nunnally's written a great script. Negulesco is directing. Hope Lange is playing the model and Susan Strasberg is gonna play Billie—remember how great she was in
Picnic
? Lana Turner is doing a cameo as head of the modeling agency, and we've signed Greg Peck to play the older man. The only part we haven't cast yet is Anne.”

Nora dumped the sable on top of the vicuna and gave Julie another vigorous hug. Terry Wood was beaming now.

“We were looking for someone with that special quality, a young Margaret Sullavan, luminous, sensitive, vulnerable—My God!” he interrupted himself. “Those eyes! They're gonna photograph like a million bucks. The complexion isn't so hot, makeup'll take care of that, but the bone structure is perfection!”

“I-I don't understand,” Julie said.

“I've found our Anne!” Wood announced.

Nora took hold of both Julie's hands and squeezed them, her lovely brown eyes sparkling with excitement.

“You and Danny're coming back to Hollywood with me, Julie. You're going to play Anne. You're going to take the town by storm. Terry's gonna arrange a fabulous contract for you at the studio. Carol and I both got the slipper, love, and now it's your turn! You're gonna be a star!”

13

A French starlet who fancied herself the new Bardot cavorted on the beach with a lethargic lion cub as a crowd of photographers snapped hundreds of pictures. When her bikini strap “accidentally” popped and her breasts were exposed, more photographers appeared, shouting lustily, snapping away as the starlet pretended to blush. She made an effort to cover her major assets with her arms, but somehow they kept bobbing into view. The lion cub yawned and curled up on the sand and was soon asleep. The sky was a clear blue-white, the Mediterranean a deep azure. Sumptuous yachts were anchored in the harbor like so many floating white palaces, while up and down the Croisette flags of every nation added festive color as they flapped in the breeze. Horns blared noisily as hundreds of Rolls-Royces and limousines and battered taxis inched along in the perpetual traffic jam that plagued Cannes at this time of year. The annual film festival was in full swing. Some 10,000 outsiders had converged on the elegant, ordinarily serene seaside town, many of them in the business of making movies, most of them making deals, a vast number of them simply on the make.

Hundreds of new films were shown here every year, the official entries at the huge, ornate
palais
, Festival Hall, while countless others were on view at small, dingy theaters on various side streets behind the Carlton Hotel. While everyone breathlessly awaited announcement of the awards, art had precious little to do with it. A Cannes Film Festival award meant big money at the box office, and money was the name of the game. Hollywood moguls and European independents and oil-rich Arabs and Greek tycoons came to talk deals, percentages, grosses, rentals, to brag, barter and bribe, to form new partnerships and dissolve old ones. The press came like a swarm of locusts. Prostitutes of both sexes arrived in droves, international film stars and jet set darlings lending a bright glitter to the motley, perspiring throng. There were round-the-clock parties, in private villas, aboard yachts, in hotel suites and on the beaches, fireworks exploding every night as the madness progressed. The atmosphere was a combination of Mardi Gras, the Fourth of July and a major civil disturbance. The only thing lacking was tear gas. Carol wouldn't be surprised if that was forthcoming. After four days of this insanity, she would gladly have hurled a few cannisters herself.

If Guy and Jean-Claude and I survive this with all of our limbs intact it will be a bloody miracle, she told herself as she made her way along the beach toward the Carlton Hotel. It was a huge, grotesquely ornate white monstrosity gleaming brightly in the late afternoon sunlight, the official headquarters of the festival, and they were damned lucky to have suites. It was packed to the rafters. Several members of the press corps were actually camping out in the lobby, and getting past them every day was like running a gauntlet. Carol had a shapeless blue-and-purple cotton beach robe over her bathing suit and a purple scarf over her head. She wore dark glasses. Thus far, no one had recognized her this afternoon. They were too busy pursuing Romy Schneider and Curt Jurgens and Anouk Aimée. There had been no press conferences this afternoon, thank God, and she had actually been able to get away from the hotel and get a little sun. Four hours of wandering along the beach by herself seemed like a great luxury amidst all this insane brouhaha.

They had been besieged ever since they arrived.
Le Bois
was the official French entry this year, and word was out that it was an unquestionable masterpiece, Masson the greatest, most innovative director since D. W. Griffith, Jean-Claude the most exciting film personality since the young Gable, Carol a cinch to win Best Actress. Revolutionary camera angles and zoom shots notwithstanding,
Le Bois
was actually a simple love story filmed in grainy black-and-white about a naive American girl, Carol, who inadvertently causes the downfall of a breezy, engaging small-time French hood, ex-wrestler Jean-Claude Bresson. The film was poorly lighted, jumpy, technically an inept, amateurish disaster that really did resemble a home movie, yet the French film critics had shouted themselves hoarse lauding its virtues—for reasons that took Carol completely by surprise.

Guy Masson was a Communist. She had known that from the first, had given it not a thought. Half of France was, if not Communist, at least far left, it seemed, and Carol paid no attention to anyone's politics. During the filming of
Le Bois
neither Carol nor Jean-Claude had detected the least political content. It was a loosely structured love story with cops-and-robbers overtones, a
nouvelle vague
version of a Hollywood forties
film noir
. She was amazed to discover in
Cahiers du Cinéma
that the film was a vehement denouncement of American capitalism. The girl, wide-eyed, naive, was supposed to represent America and through ignorance and indifference she callously destroys the world-weary, street-wise petty thief, who was supposed to represent Europe. Carol couldn't see it that way, but the critics cheered and lauded its brave, potent political statement. Anti-Americanism was definitely in now at Cannes, the Far Left holding sway. Glossy, vulgar American films with their garish Technicolor and inane content were invariably dismissed with a sneer. Of late the awards usually went to some dreary Russian epic about a boy and his tractor or a depressing Brazilian tract about disfigured transvestites working as migrant farmers. All this taken into consideration,
Le Bois
stood a very good chance of winning Best Picture, but Carol knew she hadn't a prayer of winning Best Actress. She was American, for one thing, and she hadn't acted at all in the film. She had simply been herself.

Leaving the beach with its starlets, lion cubs, photographers and bronzed hustlers, Carol crossed the terrace of the Hotel Carkon. Every table was occupied. She noticed a grizzled, aged Darryl F. Zanuck sitting with a pompous, pontificating Orson Welles and a bored-looking Juliette Greco. Greco was the latest of Zanuck's bony European Galateas. After his dismal failure to transform mistress Bella Darvi into a film star—her acting was said to make the perennial starlet Terry Moore look like Sarah Bernhardt—the former head of Twentieth Century Fox had attempted to do the same with Greco. Her films had been as disastrous as Darvi's. He had recently teamed her with Orson in something called
Crack in the Mirror
, which he had written himself under a pseudonym. A few of their relatives might have seen it. Everyone else treated it as though it were a contagious disease. Eric Berne had introduced her to Zanuck when he was still head of the studio, but Carol doubted seriously he would remember her. Passing their table, she heard Welles praising his own genius, as he was wont to do. Juliette wearily downed another Pernod. Zanuck stared into space, looking suicidal.

The noise level inside the lobby was even higher than it had been outside on the terrace. Telephones rang. Bellboys scurried around in frantic haste. Voices rose in shrill determination to be heard above the hubbub. Carol spotted handsome actor Stephen Boyd chatting with—yes, it
was
Hedda Hopper under that preposterous flowered hat. Rumor had it he was sleeping with her. Hedda certainly mentioned him in her column often enough, which would explain Boyd's attentiveness. With the gradual breakdown of the old studio system in Hollywood, Hedda and Louella no longer wielded the power they had during the golden days, but, like dinosaurs from another era, both still tromped around attempting to terrorize their prey. Most merely laughed at them nowadays.

Carol moved through the luxurious, congested lobby, feeling secure behind her dark glasses. “There's Carol Martin!” someone shouted, and suddenly she was surrounded by reporters and photographers who seemed to spring at her from every direction, all of them pushing and shoving to get closer. Blazing flashbulbs blinded her. Someone grabbed her arm, whirling her around. Questions were fired at her in French, in English. She felt she was in the middle of a maelstrom, felt faint, felt a panic attack building as faces pink with excitement pushed nearer, as voices rose shrilly, as more questions were fired, more flashbulbs popped.

“Are you and Bresson sleeping with each other!”

“Are you a Communist!”

“Think you're gonna win Best Actress!”

“Eric Berne's here! You run into him yet!”

Carol tried to keep her composure but it was impossible as someone yanked her arm again, as a photographer grabbed her dark glasses and ripped the scarf from her head. Because of
Le Bois
, she was the most popular and sought-after actress at Cannes this year and she had given dozens of interviews and attended countless press conferences already, but this was insanity. These weren't newspeople, these were vultures, working for the scandal sheets and scurrilous tabloids. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a frenzied Hedda Hopper shoving her way through the melee, flowered hat shoved over one eye, face set in a fiercely determined scowl. Hedda slammed her purse into a reporter's face and viciously shoved a photographer out of her way.