Crowned Heads (13 page)

“The impostor. Her first part.”

“And Nefertiti?”

“Again, the impostor. She was remarkably good, good as Fedora ever was.”

“Which did you meet at the Louvre?”

“The real one.”

“Ahh—then I do see.” She settled smugly back against the pillows and smiled at Barry.

“You’re looking very Mona Lisa yourself,” he told her. “What do you see?”

“I know who the impostor was.”

“Do you indeed?”

“Of course.” She gestured to the painting. “That’s not Fedora.”

“Aren’t you clever. You’ve got it right off. It’s not Fedora.”

She accepted the compliment and with a confiding air asked, “Who is it, then?”

“Stanna Wilchek. Like Fedora, an actress. She was in
Mother Courage and Her Children
at the Theatre de Lys about ten years ago. Incredible resemblance, isn’t it? Did you ever see her in the movies?”

“No …”

“You wouldn’t have—she never made one. Although she was kept under contract for seven years. It’s a rather sad story. Back in the thirties, some AyanBee executives saw the resemblance. They signed her without a test and put her under wraps so no other studio could have a rival Fedora. Fedora felt guilty because Stanna’s career never got off the ground, and she helped her out financially for a time—until Stanna married, in fact.”

“Whom did she marry?”

“Cyril Leaf.”

“The designer? Ahh, then that’s why she’s wearing the Ophelie costume. But—” Marion was suddenly baffled again. “How could she look young enough to impersonate Fedora? She’d be about the same age, wouldn’t she?”

“
I
never said she impersonated Fedora. You did.”

“Oh.” Her look was one of miserable frustration. “Then I
don’t
see.”

“Of course you don’t. Nobody did; that’s the beauty of it. I offer you that portrait as an illustration of how easily people can be deceived by what they think are facts, or by appearances. Appearances are deceiving, as they say. She looks like Fedora; ergo, she is Fedora. I led you to believe it, let you believe it. As I was led to believe the real Fedora was the countess Sobryanski: she looked like what I’d seen of her, behaved like what I’d heard of her, therefore she was the countess. But then she wasn’t at all; not the countess—Fedora.”

“Well, I’m waiting.”

“The impostor? You’ve been a patient listener, so I’ll tell you. Ophelie.”

Still she didn’t comprehend it. “You mean the movie?”

“I mean the daughter.”

“But Fedora never had a daughter….”

“She didn’t?” He was looking at her, long, steadily, with smiling traces of that knowledge she’d earlier been certain he possessed. Still …

“How could she have? How could she have gotten away with it? You don’t keep secrets like that in our business.”

“It was … arranged.”

“Who was the father?”

He rose abruptly and she grabbed at him. “Hey, don’t leave me there—”

“I was just going to get us another drink.” He carried the glasses to the bar and filled them partway. He brought them back and set them on the coffee table, watching her with his half-smile.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Sobryanski,” he said finally.

“The count?”

“Count Jan Ivan Chernieff Sobryanski, none other.”

“
Ohhh,
Barry …” Her tone clearly implied that she refused to accept his statement.

“I said you wouldn’t believe it, and you don’t.”

“Yes, you did, and no, I don’t. When were they married?”

“Never.”

“Oh.” She stopped her glass halfway to her mouth. “You mean … ?”

“I mean. She had his child, but she never married him. Refused to, as a matter of fact.”

“I didn’t think unwed mothers were fashionable in her day. And the child looked that much like her?”

“There evidently were certain dissimilarities, but nothing noticeable. It happens. Wait a minute.” He brought a Manila envelope from the table behind the sofa and began laying photographs out before her. On each, all but the face had been masked by taped-on paper cutouts, and all looked like Fedora. “Which is which?” Barry asked. Marion studied them and then pointed. “That’s Fedora in
Tsarina.
”

“Wrong. It’s Ophelie in
Mother Russia.
” He lifted the cutout to reveal “Fedora” in her Catherine the Great costume.

“Then
that’s
Fedora,” Marion stated, pointing again.

“Wrong.” It was Ophelie in
Madeleine Pomona.
“Why don’t I save you the trouble?” he suggested. “They’re all Ophelie.”

Marion pressed her hands to her forehead and closed her eyes, trying to take it in. “You mean ever since
Santa Cristi,
none of those performances was Fedora?”

“Ever since, none.”

“I assume you’ve checked the facts.”

“Would you like to see them? Photostats of the birth certificate, the works? I have all the authenticated documents. I have also sworn statements from Mrs. Evelyn Balfour, if you need that kind of proof.”

“Barry, I believe, I believe. But I don’t understand. The daughter wasn’t being kept prisoner, then?”

“As Balfour said, she was perfectly free to come and go as she chose. Kritos was actually a mild sort, and his main task, when Ophelie was there, was to see that she didn’t hurt herself. I simply misread his actions. She was always threatening suicide, and making trouble for her mother and Balfour. They didn’t want her being seen in the village when she was on drugs, and the day she went to the beach Kritos merely went down to bring her home safely. She became obstreperous as usual, and he had trouble getting her into the house, so he carried her. When she became hysterical, Fedora slapped her, not an unnatural thing to do, but one I misinterpreted. She had made up the whole plot thing; as Balfour said, it was her heightened sense of the dramatic. She was always causing scenes.

“At last the count was called, and he flew to Athens and came for her. He and his wife did look after her well; when she got out of the hospital she was moved back to Switzerland to a sanitarium. Finally they brought her back to Menton—she liked to be close to Monte Carlo for the gambling—but of course she couldn’t; too ill. She evidently died at the Menton house.”

“You were that close to Fedora, and you never recognized her? That face?”

“But it wasn’t
that
face, you see.
That
face was gone, destroyed. The whole structure had collapsed, there wasn’t a trace of resemblance to the original. That was the greatest tragedy, I think.”

“How did you finally know the other one wasn’t Fedora?”

“I’ve already told you.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I gave you every clue—you simply overlooked them. Like everybody else.”

“Explain.”

“Explain … yes, explain.” He sat abruptly and picked up his drink. The room was silent for some moments, then he drew her back once more to Crete, to the old woman sitting on the villa terrace, but the old woman was no longer the countess Sobryanski, she was the once-great star Fedora.

She had turned her face away, and he could not tell if she was angry at him or angry at herself. For she would not speak again. She rang her bell until Kritos hurried out and wheeled her away. Mrs. Balfour had been standing in the doorway, witness to the scene.

“What does it mean?” Barry asked her.

“She has told you. She is Fedora.”

The next day he did not read. Kritos appeared at the cottage with Balfour’s note asking him please to wait. Two days later word arrived that he was to come again. He returned to the villa. All seemed as before; the schedule was kept punctiliously, she sat as usual in her place at the balustrade, he took up the book and read. She had not looked at him. Later he decided that it was her woman’s curiosity that broke the silence between them. In the middle of a passage she raised her hand. He stopped. She said:

“M’sieu’?”

“Oui, madame? Qu’est-ce-qu’il y a?”

She shook her head. “No, speak English. Your French is quite bad, and there is no need to continue such deceits now. I was afraid you might recognize my accent in English. How did you know? We fooled the world; how was it we did not fool you?”

“But you did, madame, absolutely fooled me. Until almost the last, just before—may I say Ophelie?—went away.”

“And then?”

“William Marsh once told me that you never ate shellfish of any kind, yet at lunch I saw her eat a plate of shrimp salad. Then I saw her cutting her meat, and she switched her knife and fork the way right-handed people do. But, if I recalled correctly, I was told that you are left-handed. This was confirmed when I saw you, first eating your soup, then when you pitted the apricots I brought you.”

“Very astute. You are correct. My eating habits were not hers, she always preferred the American style of using cutlery. It was a small thing; we thought no one would notice that.” She fell silent for a moment, then: “Do you think it was clever, this impersonation?”

“Very.”

“I thought so, too, but now it seems it was not. You see how matters go, the moment one blinks the eye.”

“How do they go?”

“Badly, badly. They become something else, something you did not intend them to become. Still, it was never a shabby deception. She made a very good Fedora.”

“Whatever she was, there is only one Fedora, madame.”

She shook her cane. “Because I am her mother it is perhaps immodest of me to say so, but she is—was—remarkable. We fooled them all for a long time. It would be nice to die having fooled them forever.”

“Why can’t you?”

She made a scoffing sound, waved her hand at him. “You are here. You will write about it; I cannot stop you. But I should say the truth. It is why I sent for you—I
want
you to write it. It is time; there has been so much untruth. I will tell you how it was, if you will promise to write it the way it was. Can I trust you to do that?”

“You can, madame.”

She nodded with evident satisfaction. “I have discussed it with Balfour; she says you are to be trusted.” She thought again, then asked, “What was it, the Colette? The line about the mask?”

He quoted:
“‘Rien d’ailleurs ne rassure autant qu’un masque.’”

She nodded again. “Yes; very reassuring. Ophelie-Fedora was my mask; she kept me hidden. I did well to stay that way. I have looked older and uglier longer than I ever looked young and beautiful.”

“You had a great career.”

“Ahh, car-r-r-reer. What is a career? I never wanted to be that, a movie star. I wanted only to be an actress. As a movie star one gets the best table in the restaurant, that is all. A name on the marquee. The first time I saw my name in lights, they spelled my name wrong. ‘Fedroa. Fedroa in
Zizi.
’ What a silly picture. How silly they all were. There are better ways to amuse oneself than by being a movie star, I tell you that.”

“Such as?”

“Looking after someone. Having babies. Washing clothes.” She laughed, not the old laugh, but the palest recollection of it, and it really wasn’t the movie star, it was the washerwoman. Barry waited to hear the source of her amusement. “Marlene. I once talked to a steward on a plane and he told me he used to take Dietrich’s grandchild’s dirty diapers from Paris to New York and she would wash and iron them and send them back, all the way across the ocean. I think that was nice.” She composed herself, then began, going back to her first meeting with Jan Sobryanski, the accidental encounter that had initiated their long relationship. He had been ill and was in New York; he had been bedded at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital for three months, undergoing tests. She confessed she had never cared for Europeans as lovers, but he had struck a responsive chord in her and they saw much of each other during the Atlantic voyage. Before docking at Le Havre he had already proposed marriage. She put him off. He was charming, but too young, and she did not want to be married, to him or anyone. A summer was fine, but not a lifetime. She had only her work. They enjoyed their idyll in Europe, and she returned to Hollywood, to discover she was pregnant. She was scheduled to make
Madame Bovary,
which she would just have time to finish before she began to show, but the picture was continually postponed, and it became too late. The film was abandoned, and she went away to have the baby.

“I went to a place where no one would find me, but they did—they always did. They gathered and sat and waited until I would come out.”

“Where was this?”

“In California, at Monterey. The Convent of Santa Margarita.”

Santa Margarita. Barry recalled the stories of the furor outside its doors, while Fedora sat peacefully in the garden with her secret.

“They were kind, the nuns; they told no one. But I had to go back, to earn a living. They smuggled me out under the reporters’ eyes, in the back of a bakery wagon.”

Her next film was to be
Ophelie,
and she liked the name, so she gave it to her child.

She had left it in the nuns’ safekeeping, visiting whenever possible. When things became safe, she leased a house in Pacific Palisades, where Viola arranged for Mrs. Balfour to come and keep the house and look after the child. The three lived there from 1927 to 1938, when Ophelie was twelve. The birth certificate had been falsified, and with the exception of Viola, Balfour, and a Mexican woman who came in to do the cleaning, no one was aware of the child’s existence. Her early schooling came from Mrs. Balfour, who had been at one time a teacher in England. Count Sobryanski had not married, and in 1936 Fedora informed him about his daughter. He came to Hollywood with his mother; together they tried to persuade her to wed Jan, but she remained adamant. Jan had threatened that if he could not have her he would have no one, but to ensure the family title he was obliged to marry, and this he did sixteen months later. They eventually had four children, two boys, two girls. The war threats had already begun, and afraid that she would be cut off from Vando, Fedora, too, returned to Europe.

Since a passport had been denied the doctor, and she felt it necessary to be close to him, she flew to New York, then to Halifax, where Balfour met her with Ophelie, then twelve years old. There Fedora parted with her housekeeper, and was not to see her again for nine years. She took refuge with the Sobryanskis in Switzerland, and through the war they lived together, Jan, his wife and children, the dowager countess, and in a separate wing, Fedora and Ophelie. There were other children as well, those of the servants and various Polish refugees, and at times there were as many as two dozen of them on the large estate. It was not difficult to lose Ophelie among the rest, and she had plenty of companions. She enjoyed a perfectly normal life, and in the guise of being one of the Sobryanskis, she accompanied her younger “sisters” to boarding school in Geneva. Her hair was short and parted on the side, and though she held the promise of a beautiful young woman, no one at the time could guess what a striking replica of her mother she was to become.