Last Dance with Valentino

‘Not a dream to me,’ I told him. ‘I hope. You’re not a dream to me – are you?’

He shook his head. ‘No, Jennifer,’ he replied, his hand on my cheek, finger tracing my lips. ‘I think you are the dream, cara mia . . . All this time I have been waiting, and wondering, and hoping . . . hoping against hope . . . and finally . . . ’ He sighed. ‘But I wish you would stay tonight. Or at least let me get you a room of your own. You’d be far more comfortable. And safer. And closer. And then maybe you could accompany me tonight – if you wanted to. Or maybe you would let me come to you later and then – Jenny, if you were here, in the hotel, we could be quite discreet. Quite unobserved . . . ’

Cara mia.

He has been waiting for me all this time.

But I can’t let him get me a room. I can’t go with him tonight. I think we both understand that.

‘Will you be here for me when I return?’ he asked.

I replied that I would be in my own hotel room on 41st when he returned, preparing for my meeting with Miss Marion. He nodded at that. So, I said to him, I would return to my hotel and sleep, and wait for him to telephone me there.

‘Tomorrow, then,’ he said. ‘ After you have seen Frances. I shan’t distract you, I promise. And then, when you’re finished, I shall send all sorts of messages. I shall inundate you with messages . . . I shall telephone you every half an hour. That is,’ he stopped suddenly, ‘if I may?’

If I may! I laughed aloud. And after a polite hesitation, he laughed too.

For I am his completely. We both know it.

Now, it is my turn to wait. Again. It is Lola Nightingale’s turn to wait. Or Jennifer Doyle’s turn, I should say. Jennifer No-one from Nowhere must join the long line . . .

– – –

Last month he was voted the Most Desirable Movie Star in America by the quarter-million astute readers of Photoplay. Hardly a surprise, after all . . . He has lit a fire in us all. Every woman in America! But I have loved him since long before the others, I have loved him from the moment I first laid eyes on him – that airless night ten years ago ... 11 August 1916 . . . Ten years, one day, nineteen hours and twenty minutes . . . It was my first night in America, and he was as lonely as I. Fighting, just as I was, only with better grace and a bigger, warmer, bolder heart, for a little space in this brash new American world...

And now I am alone in his bed, with our salt on my skin, the taste of him, the feel of him glowing, still, in every corner of my being – and he is returning to me because he loves me. He loves me. And I have always loved him.

– – –

I need to leave. I begin to think it’s a little mawkish to be lolling here in this crazy, beautiful bed – now that he is gone. I should get the hell out of this beautiful, warm place before the maids come in and gawk at me, and imagine I am simply another of his little fans.

Only I feel too feeble. I feel so dizzy – I don’t have any strength left, not to sit up, let alone to stand . . . So I shall lie here, mawkish or not, and I shall do what I always do in times of confusion, disorder, disarray, complete and utter madness . . . I shall scribble it down on paper. On his own embossed writing paper, nothing less, since I have found it lying here . . . And then the mental effort of ordering my thoughts will force me to some sort of stillness, just as it usually does.

– – –

I heard a couple of ladies paid Mr John Barrymore’s valet $2,000 in fresh new dollar bills a short while back so as to be let into his bungalow over at Warner while he was out; and they hid in his private bathroom until he wandered in from the set and then, in a great burst, the ladies jumped right out in front of him! Heaven knows how Rudy might have responded. In any case, the great John Barrymore was too well fizzed (quel surprise) to give it even the slightest notice. He simply looked at them, from one to the other, and smiled, and then as the poor girls almost died right there before him, he gave them a low bow, and said, ‘Care for a little moonshine, ladies?’ And, yes, as it happened, they did! Cared for a great deal more than a little moonshine, I understand. Cared for all sorts of things. So much so, indeed, that I believe the valet was even permitted to keep his job! But never mind that. Never mind them.

He loves me. Rudy loves me. And I am not just a fan. I am not just a lady in search of moonshine. I am a professional person, for God’s sake! A paid-for professional writer of Hollywood photoplays. At least, I am about to be. Frances Marion has telegraphed to say they will surely buy the first one and with her recommendation they surely will, since all Hollywood listens to Miss Marion . . . And really, quite suddenly, everything in my crazy life is too unimaginably wonderful, and I have not the faintest idea what I may have done to deserve it.

But I should leave! I must leave! There is the new Marion Davies picture showing at the Strand, and Frances Marion says I must see it before our lunch together. But of all the movie theatres in New York, could it not have been showing at any other? It’s where we saw the Mary Pickford picture, he and I, on that awful, terrible night.

And then afterwards we took a taxicab with all our winnings, and he came with me to surprise Papa for supper . . . And I suppose that was where it started. Not with the secret dance on the lawn that first warm night, and my mind spinning, and the sound of the Victrola seeping out through the moonlight . . .

You made me love you . . .

I didn’t want to do it

Ha! How I remember that song!

. . . You made me want you . . .

And all the time you knew it

. . . Not with the secret dance that first night. Not quite. A little later, I think. Of course, it was at Papa’s that it started.

Chapter 2

Summer 1916

I must begin with leaving England, I suppose, and with my father, even if normally I try my best to avoid thinking of him. Only today, and yesterday – in the midst of so much happiness – suddenly I discover I can hardly keep him from my mind.

Papa must have drawn the sketch of me from memory, alone in that awful boarding-house. He must have drawn it at the very end, when I half believed he was capable of nothing. In any case, even if there had never been the sketch, and Rudy never had kept it all this time, and never had shown it to me as he did, only yesterday – and taken the wind from my lungs, so that I thought I might drown – I must still remember him. Because in spite of everything he was a wonderful man – and I loved him. I loved him dreadfully.

Papa and I were only ever meant to come to America for a short while. It was summer 1916, and since neither of us was much able to make a contribution of our own, we thought we would leave the war behind, which had already taken my brother, and my father could finally start to work again.

The trip was another of Papa’s Big Ideas; it was the Big Idea, like all the others before it, which was finally going to rescue us. We believed it, he and I.

We embarked on that long voyage – the one that was going to save us – with only each other in the world to care for. I had no memory of having met our American benefactor, John de Saulles, whom my father assured me would be waiting for us at the other end. But Papa swore we had been introduced in the spring, at the Chelsea Arts Club, where my father and I used to spend so many evenings together. He tended to forget that during those long nights I often used to peel off on my own, hide away and read or, more often, simply fall asleep.

They were like peas in a pod, the two of them: utterly feckless, and hopelessly, faithlessly – lethally – addicted to a certain type of woman. Mr de Saulles had been in London the previous few months, on some sort of business, I don’t recall what. It happened to coincide with a time when my father was especially desperate for money, having blown his last of everything, once again, on who knows what? Mr de Saulles had visited Papa’s rented studio, and after plenty of bartering (something Papa took a great and uncharacteristic pleasure in), my father had made a painting of Mr de Saulles, in exchange for which Mr de Saulles had not only provided the paints (or so I assumed, since Papa was often so broke he was unable to finish a work for lack of materials) but also paid for his and my passage, second class, to America.

Mr de Saulles wanted Papa to paint his wife, a celebrated beauty. Also his mistress, a celebrated professional tango dancer (named Joan Sawyer. I was quite a dance fanatic back then and I had read about her, even in England). Since, by then, Papa had infuriated virtually everybody who might have been inclined to employ him in London, either by delivering botch jobs horribly late or – more often – by taking the money but failing to deliver anything at all, and since, with the war, portraiture was not in very high demand in London at the time, and since Papa was almost certainly broken-hearted again, we took up the offer.

The tickets were hand delivered to Papa’s rented studio on 27 July 1916. On 6 August, we had packed up our few possessions and boarded the great Mauretania for New York.

I shall never forget how the two of us stood on deck, quite silent, as that vast ship pulled slowly out to sea. Side by side, we stood, surrounded by noise: the ground-shattering bellow of the ship’s horn, the whistling and weeping and the weeping and cheering of passengers on either side of us, and from the decks above and below us; and together we looked back at the Liverpool dock, where not a soul in the great waving crowd was weeping or whistling for us . . . It seemed unimaginable to me then that we would not return to England again.

In any case, we watched until we could no longer make out the faces on shore. I was tearful, feverish – half wild with every crazy emotion – grieving for my brother and my unremembered mother, and for England, and for myself a little.

I longed to speak, but couldn’t quite summon the confidence. So it was Papa in the end, with one of his heavy, melancholic sighs, who finally broke our long silence.

Ah, well, he said.

And he turned away. From me. From the shore. From everything he and I had ever known. My father presented himself as a man of the world, and he was, I suppose, in a way. But he had never left England before, so perhaps he was afraid. Or perhaps he already knew, as I didn’t yet, that the wonderful, whimsical era of Marcus Doyle and his Big Ideas was edging ever closer to its tired and unfulfilled finale.

Or perhaps he might have been searching for somebody in the crowd, hoping until the last minute that some beautiful, familiar woman might appear from the midst of it and beg him to turn back again. Poor Papa. Since ever I can remember there was always a woman, always absurdly beautiful, always breaking his selfish, silly, fragile heart.

I said, impertinently, because usually it lifted him a little when I was pert, and in any case I needed to talk – to say anything, just to make a noise, ‘You oughtn’t to worry, Papa. I understand there are ladies galore in the city of New York. Some of them quite intelligent. And not all of them hideous.’

He smiled rather weakly. ‘Thank you, Lola. You’re very kind.’

Papa used to call me Lola. I never knew why. He didn’t like the name Jennifer, I suppose. It’s why I chose it, of course. When the choice was mine.

‘But, Papa, you may find them alarming at first,’ I continued facetiously. ‘Mostly they are entirely fixated with the vote. So I read. Much more so than the average Englishwoman. You may have to become a “suffragist” if you’re to make any progress with the American girls.’

He laughed at that. Which thrilled me. He ruffled my careful, seventeen-year-old hair, which, I remember, thrilled me rather less. ‘Come with me, my silly friend,’ he said to me. ‘Come and entertain me, will you, Lola? While I get myself a little stinko.’

It was how we spent the voyage. It was how Papa and I spent the greater part of all our time together actually, once my brother had died – or since probably long before: since Mother died and Marcus was away at school and it was always just the two of us, on our own, with him a little stinko, and me trying my darnedest to keep his melancholy at bay.