Princess Daisy (62 page)

Since the make-up expert had her own prized collection of dozens and dozens of hard-to-find,
recherché
types of make-up she had discovered over the years, she was not at all happy about having to use only Elstree products, but truth-in-advertising laws forced her to do so, since Daisy was going to say, “I wear it every day.”

“Luckily,” she said, looking at Daisy, “you don’t need much make-up—I’m not used to this muck.”

The Elstree product-line manager flinched. “They’re excellent products,” Patsy Jacobson said in irritation.

“Yeah—but its not theatrical.” The two women glared at each other.

Daisy, who was
sitting in
front of a mirror, as motionless as a mannequin, was seized by an urge to get into this conversation. Severely she stopped herself. Develop an
attitude
, she told herself.
Be a star!
Don’t get into their act. If they’re having problems, that’s not something I should be worried about at this stage of the game. It’ll put them in shock if I turn back into Daisy the Fixer. It’ll get resolved faster and better without me and if it winds up being something I don’t like, I’ll simply tell them to start all over again, until I do like it. If I dare. If I dare? Of course, I’ll dare, won’t I? After all, I am the star.

She sat quietly, thinking of the check for three hundred and thirty-three thousand dollars, and thirty-three cents, she had received from Supracorp last January when she had signed her contract.

She had written Anabel as soon as she had made the deal with Patrick Shannon at Le Cirque, telling her the news of her riches, telling her she knew of Anabel’s illness, telling her not to sell
La Marée
whatever she did, telling her that she, Daisy, could easily meet all of Anabel’s expenses, in addition to Danielle’s, and that Anabel was not to even think about money but just concentrate on getting better. She never mentioned Ram. Even as Daisy wrote the letter she knew that she wasn’t being rash in making these promises before the contract was signed. Whatever kind of man Patrick Shannon was, he wouldn’t change his word, once given. She knew that as surely as she knew that Columbus had not circumnavigated the globe.

There had been several other dinners with Shannon in the months between then and now, oddly formal dinners, Daisy thought, to which various members of the Supracorp hierarchy were invited, almost as if she were being presented to them, or them to her. Shannon had been away a great deal, off and on, during the last months, on Supracorp business, and he had not renewed his suggestion about a rendezvous between his lurcher, Lucy, and Theseus. Daisy wondered if perhaps her princess act had been a little too convincing.

At last, it was July, and the shoot had officially begun, although filming would not start for another day.

Daisy was alone in her suite at Claridge’s. Somehow, by means she preferred not to discuss, Mary-Lou had contrived to get them all first-class seats on the flight they wanted. Now she and North were conferring with the actors who had been chosen to be with Daisy in each commercial. Shannon’s desire to show her with genuine lords had given way to North’s absolute refusal to use more than one untried, nonprofessional in the shoot.

As Daisy wandered about her suite, so large that its closets could have been small bedrooms, she thought of all the things she might be doing in London, from riding in Hyde Park to hunting up a jumble sale. She had only a few hours before they all met the English location crew to leave in a procession of cars and equipment-filled trucks for their first location, in Sussex. Not enough time, she fretted, to visit Danielle and be sure to be back in time. But once the shoot was over a few days would belong to her. Then—ah, then she’d see Danielle, and go to visit Anabel.

As she waited, she felt absolutely alien in the city that had been her home for so many years. Who knew who now lived in the pale yellow house on Wilton Row in which she’d grown up? Who had bought Anabel’s house in Eaton Square? The only places in which she might perhaps feel a sense of belonging were the stables in the Grosvenor Crescent Mews or at Lady Alden’s School, and something kept her from revisiting these old haunts. Restlessly Daisy went down the great flight of stairs to buy some magazines to read in her sitting room, which was large enough for a cocktail party of sixty.

“Magazines, Madame?” the head hall porter said politely. “Oh, we don’t
keep
magazines, Madame. However, if you will just tell me what you require, I’ll send a lad to get them for you, immediately.”

“Oh, never mind, it’s perfectly all right.” Daisy retreated to her room, furious with herself and furious with a hotel so uncommercial that it didn’t even have a magazine stand. She realized why she hadn’t gone out anywhere, why she had not chosen to leave the absolutely protective luxury of this monolithic hotel during these last free hours before work started. She was afraid of meeting Ram.

Herstmonceux Castle, in Sussex, had been chosen as the location of the first of three thirty-second commercials.
The soft-rose brick building was surrounded by an exceptionally wide moat which could be crossed only by a long drawbridge, built on a series of graceful arches sunk into the deep waters of the moat. Its builder, Roger de Fiennes, Treasurer of the Household of Henry VI in the mid-fifteenth century, must have had good reason to suspect that someday he might need to defend himself, for he had built a strong and most beautiful fortress, with a gatehouse protected by two powerful octagonal, crenelated towers, above which stood double fighting platforms. This castle had been chosen for the commercial in which Daisy would ride up to the entrance, since Kirbo, when he had finally found pictures of it, had suddenly seen that a gallop across a bridge was more visually interesting than a gallop up just any driveway. North planned on shooting at Herstmonceux first, since it involved horses and would demand less of Daisy’s acting ability than the other commercials.

When North had first seen the pictures of the castle, he was disgusted. “That bridge is thirty feet above the surface of the moat, Luke. Even with a barge and a crane, I can’t get high enough—it’s a helicopter or nothing, for the approach and the gallop, and then as she rides closer and gets off the horse I’ll only have the width of the bridge to work on.”

“Old Roger didn’t want to make it easy for strangers to walk in uninvited,” said Luke, unmoved. If there was one thing he never let worry him, it was the technical problems of commercial makers. He had never met a good one who couldn’t have humped a camera to the top of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh—all by himself if necessary. They wallowed in stories of technical impossibilities they’d conquered; their magazine,
Millimeter
, was full of harrowing tales of difficulties overcome, and while it was true that nine commercial makers
had
been killed in helicopter accidents, they’d still swim a river crawling with man-eating alligators for the right shot … or get out of the business. Even as Luke refused to react to North’s niggling objections, North himself was thinking that the old bricks of Herstmonceux would look even lovelier through an amber filter and a few smoke bombs set off in the background would make it seem to literally float on the surface of the moat, a trick he thought he might have invented even before David Dee.

As North stood just outside the great portcullis of Herstmonceux that first week in October, with Wingo just inside, riding the camera, watching Daisy, her hair flying like the standard of a great queen, galloping toward him on a huge black horse, followed by a white horse carrying an actor who looked more like a lord than any lord could have, he had to admit that she didn’t look like an amateur. She didn’t even
sound
like an amateur as she dismounted and spoke her one line, dressed in fawn breeches, black boots, and a soft, open-necked, full-sleeved, billowing white silk blouse such as one of the Three Musketeers might have worn. The changes of expression on North’s face, flickering with quick emotions, sometimes crossed by a smile he didn’t know was there, the descriptive pantomime gestures of his hands, as if he were engaged in hypnosis or legerdemain, led Daisy through her paces over and over, and still once more, and then again, and yet again, until he was satisfied. She had never, not even in Venice, felt so much closeness between them as during each take. She finally understood his particular genius in its very special manifestation and she knew, finally, why he had married his two best models—she knew already why they had divorced him.

Even before he looked at the rushes in London, less than three hours away by car, North was aware that he had something extraordinarily special on the film; he could tell by the way a chill had run down the back of his neck and upper arms each time Daisy galloped closer to the camera and he anticipated the lyrical moment when she pulled up her huge beast and leapt off, laughing. It had been years since he’d felt that chill, that promise of something inexpressibly
right
.

The mystery that had always engaged him, the deep unsolvable mystery of the human face and its ability to convey emotion—even if it was only an emotion that led the viewer to a certain counter in a supermarket—this mystery was charged with power by Daisy’s features on film, North realized, as he watched the rushes. Why had he never even thought to film her before? He resented her excellence only a little less than he was relieved by it.

From Sussex, using cars, planes and trains, with admirable precision, Mary-Lou led the entire company far north, to Peeblesshire, in Scotland, where the castle called Traquair House was located. Totally different from stern
Herstmonceux, it had evolved from a simple stone tower built in the middle of the thirteenth century. By the time of Charles I, the castle itself had grown into a tall, pale gray edifice guarded by a long expanse of delicate iron gates which had been shut by the owners until such a time as a Stuart was again crowned King of England, and, even for Frederick Gordon North, they could not be opened. However, right outside the gates was a flower-dappled meadow in which Daisy, and an actor, were to picnic on strawberries and cream.

Daisy was wearing a dress from Gene London’s Gramercy Park Shop made of antique Victorian panels. It had cost four thousand dollars to rework the rare material into a dress that didn’t look like a costume, a dress that floated almost transparently from her half-bare shoulders, with wide, long sleeves, like wings. The color of the frail, old ivory lace against her skin was entrancing, and the hairdresser had pulled her hair up and away from her face with a twist of silk ribbons, as green as the color of the meadow, and then let it fall down simply at the back.

“No helicopter here,” North decreed, when he saw the Traquair location. “The rotors would blow the grass and flowers flat. There’s only one way to get this shot right Mary-Lou, get me a Hovercraft”

“Who is she, when she’s at home?” asked Wingo.

“Mary-Lou,” North rapped out. “Hovercraft”

“As large as the ones that cross the English Channel or a smaller version?” she intoned, expressionlessly.

“As small as you can get Since it rides on a cushion of air, a few feet above the ground, or above the water, as the case may be—are you listening, Wingo, you ignorant lout—it’ll look as if we’re lighter than air. What I want in this entire scene is the viewpoint of a
butterfly
, not a bird, not a bee, but a dipping, gliding, lazy, fucking butterfly.”

“What keeps it up?” Wingo asked suspiciously.

“Keep your eyes open. Maybe you’ll find out,” North answered.

As Mary-Lou went off, looking quietly pleased with herself, to conjure up a Hovercraft, North said, loudly enough so that Wingo and Daisy could hear him, “Damn that broad.”

“North, she’s only being efficient,” Daisy protested.

“Yeah. But why does she have to be so fucking surreptitious about it?”

“That’s not fair. She’s just doing her job.”

“Daisy, do me a favor, will you? Try not to explain my prejudices to me?”

When Patrick Shannon made a deal, he liked to understand both sides of it. He always knew what he intended to gain, but the other man’s motives, the reasons behind his agreement, were more fascinating. Shannon realized that he had no idea why Daisy Valensky, a rich society girl, who worked to keep from being bored, who insisted that she cherished her anonymity, would have consented to the ordeal of becoming the linchpin of an entire company’s efforts to put themselves back on the map through exploitation of her personality and persona. “Private reasons,” she had said when he’d asked. What private reasons? Why did she want a million dollars during the next three years? It didn’t make sense if she was what she was, and he couldn’t believe she was not.

For months, these questions occurred to him from time to time as he spent weeks in California, dealing in Supracorp’s entertainment division, as he flew back and forth twice to Tokyo and once to France. This gap in his understanding bothered him like a grape skin stuck between his teeth. He suspected that he’d fallen into some sort of trap, that something was going on over which he was not quite in control, but the never ending pressures of running a conglomerate had prevented him from digging into the matter.

He had no trusted second-in-command with whom to discuss this unusual state of affairs, nor was he the kind of man who could speculate with a chosen cohort. At Supracorp, either the employees accepted the fact that, at any time, Shannon might step personally into their domains, or they quit. But they never had to worry about a court favorite screwing things up between themselves and the man at the top. Problems, pressures, tensions, the cat’s cradle of thrust and counterthrust of corporate politics were pure joy to Shannon and he had no urge to share them. But he hated operating in an unclear area and, as Patrick Shannon inspected the folder of publicity material Candice Bloom had built up on Daisy, now a respectable pile of photographs and interviews, he decided to fly to England to see what the hell was going on.

As the chauffeur-driven Daimler carried him from Heathrow to Bath, where North and company were staying
during the shoot of the final commercial at Berkeley Castle, Shannon realized that he was attaching a unique importance to the Elstree problem. He’d never visited the locations of any of the dozens of commercials which were made yearly for various Supracorp products. He paid people well to do just that. When had this begun, he asked himself. When had Elstree stopped becoming a worrying trouble spot on the conglomerate balance sheet and turned into something almost personal? Damned if he knew. But he’d soon find out. He instructed his chauffeur not to stop at the hotel in Bath, but to continue on to the location.