B00C4I7LJE EBOK (7 page)

“London!” I repeated. “When? How many people are they going to pay for?”

 “Three,” she answered. “Phyllis, Warde, and you.”

I was immediately wary. “How do you know the third person will be me?”

“Well, they’re paying for two first class and one coach; that’s all I know.”

I’d thrown a wet blanket on her excitement and her feelings were hurt. She wanted me to be as excited as she, but I wanted it too much to believe it would happen.

“When?”

“The middle of December, right before Christmas.”

December wasn’t the time of year I would choose to go to London, but what fun it would be to see my friends again. It was exactly a year since I’d left. “I think I’ll wait until Phyllis says something before I set my heart on going,” I said, but that was a lie. My heart was already set.

Phyllis said nothing about the London trip until the following week. “I know you’d like to go,” she mused as we went through her correspondence, “but I think I might take one of the girls” (by which she meant Susie or Stephanie, her teenage daughters).

I tried to mask my disappointment.

“I know you have a lot of friends there,” she continued, “and that might be frustrating for you if you had to work and couldn’t get together with them.”

We couldn’t possibly work twenty-four hours a day,
I thought.

“Well,” she concluded, “we’ll have to wait until it gets closer to work something out.”

11

F
or the next five weeks we remained in L.A., Phyllis made occasional appearances on television shows, had fittings for costumes, went to lunch with friends and tried to catch up on correspondence, which generally came in faster than she could handle it.

It was a frustrating time for me. I didn’t like working at the house in part because there was no place to get away for lunch. The closest place to eat was a Jack-in-the-Box three miles away. When I brought my lunch from home, the only place to eat was in Phyllis’s kitchen. I had thought it would be fun to sit out on the lawn, but a picnic in the front yard didn’t appeal to me, and the master bedroom overlooked the side yard. Nobody else seemed to mind, but I found the situation confining and often went for walks at lunchtime, taking Phyllis’s little dog, Candy, with me. Once in a while I’d convince Karen to go out for lunch, but otherwise I just stayed in the office and worked through my lunch hour.

As the London trip got closer, I began to get anxious. “I think I’ll take Karen to London,” Phyllis told me one morning as we were going over the contract for the Tom Jones show. I couldn’t imagine any earthly reason why Phyllis would prefer taking Karen than me, especially when she knew how much Karen hated London.

“After all,” she continued as she set down the contract, “she’s been there with me before and she knows the way I like things done. I’m afraid you might want to play with your friends when I needed you to do things for me.”

Wow, that hurt!
Of course if I was going there on business my job took priority. Phyllis couldn’t seriously believe I would go off with my friends and neglect the job. It might have had something to do with previous secretaries, but by this time she should have realized she could trust me. I was also piqued that she would imply Karen could do the work better—especially when it came to secretarial things, about which Karen neither knew nor cared. However, it would have been counterproductive to argue.

“Well, of course, you know what you want,” I said as casually as I could. “You know I’d love to go, and Karen doesn’t like London, so I’m sure if it were up to her, she’d rather not.”

Phyllis didn’t reply immediately, but when she did, I was certain my approach had been right. I hadn’t pushed her into making a decision.

“Well, I’m just not sure what I’m going to do yet.”

In this fashion she kept us guessing until almost the day before departure. I never understood her reasoning. Both Susie and Stephanie said they did not want to go, and Karen simply kept her mouth shut on the subject. It seemed as though Phyllis derived a perverse satisfaction out of keeping us dangling. I also wondered how much of it was Warde’s doing.

During those weeks, I got to know Ingrid, the college student who worked on the gag file. One day while we were having a coffee break, she mentioned she was going to move to a new apartment. I had already decided it was time for me to get a place of my own since I’d been living with my parents for nearly a year. Ingrid and I fell into the idea of getting a place together and agreed to go apartment shopping right after the first of the year. Although I didn’t like the idea of sharing a place, when Karen told me that her apartment had been burgled three times while she was on the road with Phyllis, the thought of having a roommate became more appealing.

My parents and I planned a Christmas party. It looked like it would be the last Christmas I would actually be living at home.

In the meantime, other friends were making Christmas plans, and I realized I couldn’t give anyone a definite answer about coming to parties because I didn’t know if I’d be in L.A. or in London. On Wednesday afternoon before the Friday departure, Phyllis finally announced her decision. “I know how you like London,” she began, “and you probably have a lot of friends at the Embassy.” She sat down on the edge of the bed and fixed me with what I’d come to think of as her “earnest look.”

This is it. I’m not going.

“I’ve thought a lot about this. Karen doesn’t like London, although she would be the logical one for me to take. After all, there isn’t going to be much for a secretary to do at a television taping, but Karen can be helpful with my costumes.”

I thought it would be more logical to take a secretary since there would no doubt be phone calls and appointments and perhaps even interviews, but I kept my mouth shut.

“However,” she continued, unable to drag it out any longer, “I’ve decided you’ll come with me. Call the travel agent and have them put the third ticket in your name.”

I’m going to London!
My heart started to pound. I couldn’t catch my breath.

Suddenly Phyllis broke into a huge grin. “Are you excited?” she asked.

“Oh, yes! Oh, my gosh! It’s like a dream come true!” I squeezed my pen so tight that it bent.

“Well, you know we’ll be working all day long, but you’ll have evenings free.”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“Once we get back from the studio you won’t have to hang around.”

“Okay. Sure.”

Phyllis gave me a big smile. For a moment it seemed almost as if we were a couple of co-eds discussing the upcoming prom.

So many things crowded my mind—I wanted to go back by my old flat in Ashburn Gardens and see what was in the flower boxes, and find out if my charge account at Harrods was still good, and see if my favorite basement bistro was still there, and visit the folk club where I used to hang out Saturday nights. I began to feel dizzy. I couldn’t sit still one more minute.

“I have to tell Karen,” I said and jumped up. Phyllis just smiled and waved. I was nearly beside myself with excitement. I ran up the stairs, thinking about what clothes to take. It would be cold, of course, perhaps snowy. Rainy for sure. Umbrella!
Where was my umbrella? Did I even have an umbrella?
I laughed out loud as I pushed through the office door. “Karen! Guess what? You’re not going to London. Phyllis is taking ME!”

“Thank heaven!” She mopped a hand across her brow as if she’d been sweating.

Maria smiled broadly. “I knew it all along.”

“You did? How?”

“I believed it.”

Phyllis had read a book called
The Magic of Believing
, which she always said changed her life. Maria had read it as well and adopted the philosophy. The basic premise, as I understood it, was that if you believed something strongly enough, it would come to pass.

“I told you just to believe it,” Maria went on with maddening calmness. “You should have just pictured yourself in London, walking along the streets, meeting with your friends. But I did it for you,” she concluded in triumph.

I doubted the system worked that way, but she was so pleased, I let it drop.

I had written to a couple of friends and cautiously mentioned I might be seeing them in December. What fun it would be to call and say, “Hey, guess where I am?”

“I have to go home!” I told Karen and Maria. “I have to get packed!”

I took the 405 freeway, pushing my little Volkswagen to the limit. Still, I was in the right-hand lane with traffic zipping by me. When I got home, I burst through the front door.

“I’m going to London!” I yelled.

My dad jumped up from the piano, and Mother came in from the kitchen. We hugged and laughed together.

“Do you want me to take anything to the cleaners?” Mother asked.

“Anything you need to have before you leave?” Dad asked.

“Not a thing. I have to pack.”
I’ll be in London this weekend!

12

W
e left L.A. for London on Friday afternoon at 4:30. The nonstop flight got us there just before noon on Saturday. Colin, the agent from the William Morris Agency, met us, waiting while we went through customs and passport control.

It amused me that even though Phyllis and Warde had gone through customs first (being VIPs, of course), they still had to hang around for me at the back of the pack. At last I emerged from the customs hall and we climbed into the large Rolls Royce the studio had provided. I settled into the front seat next to the chauffeur and ignored the conversation between Phyllis and Colin while we drove into town.

As we neared the city, I began to see familiar landmarks. In no time at all we were through Hammersmith, then Earl’s Court and coming to Ashburn Gardens. I strained to catch a glimpse of my old flat, which should have been just visible down the side street from Cromwell Road, but a bus blocked my view as we drove past.

When we reached the Connaught Hotel, I told the limo driver, “Those two bags over there are mine. The rest go upstairs with Phyllis.” By the time I got to the suite, Phyllis was going over her schedule with Colin while Warde busied himself with the red leather “booze bag” he always carried.

“Let’s take these bags into the bedroom,” I told the porter. It was a large, elegant suite, and we passed through the living room as unobtrusively as possible and into the huge bedroom, which had several wardrobes.

“Those two wig boxes and those two large bags go in this closet here,” I told him, pointing to the one by the door. Those were the costumes we’d be taking with us to the studio. “You can set the rest right here.”

Thank heaven Phyllis did her own unpacking. I was suddenly tired and anxious to get on to my own hotel. The Tom Jones show only paid for Phyllis’s hotel. My room came out of her pocket, so I wouldn’t be staying at an expensive hotel like the Connaught. Her attorney/business manager was very careful about how Phyllis spent her money.

“Give me a call when you get up in the morning. Or afternoon,” Phyllis said.

With the time change and the long flight, who knew how well any of us would sleep. Phyllis had insisted on arriving a day early so we could get used to the time change.

The Rolls left me and my two suitcases at the Cumberland—a moderately priced Americanized hotel. I unpacked and started calling friends. I desperately wanted to take a nap but knew that if I did, I’d wake up at midnight and would feel even worse the next day. Instead, I called Richard, an old flame, and made a date for dinner. Since there were still a couple of hours until dark, I went outside. I bundled up in my warm Spanish cape and pushed through the massive revolving door. The cold, sharp air took my breath away. Just what I needed.

“Evening, miss,” the doorman said. “Can I get you a taxi?”

“No, thanks, I want to walk.”

The shops all closed at noon on Saturday, but that was okay. Instead I strolled through Hyde Park and thought about the two years I’d spent working at the Embassy. I’d loved my years as a secretary in the Administrative Section. The fact that my boss had the final okay on the guest list for a host of Embassy-related parties worked out well. My name had mysteriously made its way onto the invitation list for the Diplomatic Tea at Buckingham Palace, so I’d taken tea with Her Majesty. I and 999 other people. I’d also been invited to the opening day of the races at Royal Ascot in the Queen’s Pavilion. It was a private, invitation-only area for 3,000 of Her Majesty’s closest friends.

My social life had worked out pretty well, too, I reflected as I walked through Hyde Park. I’d started dating one of the Marine Guards soon after I arrived in London. After he returned to the States, I’d gone out with a variety of nice Englishmen—oh, yes, I’d had a blast in London.

As I walked through Hyde Park, I remembered one particularly lovely summer afternoon when I’d been so enthralled with the joy of being in this storied place that I’d taken off my shoes and walked barefoot through the soft, green grass. As I reveled in the sheer beauty of it all, a man called out to me: “Hey, lady, that grass is full of dog shit.”
Oh, thank you so much
. Remembering that incident, I laughed out loud.

On the other side of Hyde Park, I caught the Number 12 bus on Knightsbridge and rode it to Cromwell Road, past Harrods, which I planned to visit later. It was only two blocks to Ashburn Gardens, and there it was—my old home. Five Ashburn Gardens was a lovely four-story building with a black door and white pillars, just like all the other buildings that surrounded the little garden. The caretaker, Mrs. Harris, lived in the basement flat; I had lived on the first floor, which in the U.S. would be the second floor because what we called the first floor, they called the ground floor. It had taken me a while to get used to that. My window boxes sat empty and seeing them left me sad. Perhaps the people living there just couldn’t afford to buy plants. Or maybe they were waiting for spring.
Yeah, I’ll bet that’s it
.