A Week in Winter(46)

He went through the invitation list. The great of Hollywood and the hotel industry were well represented. His daughter’s name was not there.

This time he did insist.

‘She’s twelve years of age. She’ll read about it. She has to be there.’

‘It’s my party and I don’t want her there. She’s part of your past, not your present, or indeed your future. Anyway, I was thinking it’s time for us to have our own child.’ Sylvia was very insistent. She had only agreed to meet her stepdaughter, Maria Rosa, half a dozen times since the wedding, saying she wasn’t good with young girls – they were all so silly and giggled over nothing.

There was something so dismissive about the way she spoke, something that sent out the message that Sylvia would always get what she wanted. The rosebud smile he had once thought so entrancing looked more like a pout now.

He tested the water to ask if he could include some of the people from the orphanage where he was raised.

‘But darling Corry, they would be so out of place. Surely you can see that?’

‘They will never be out of place in my life. They raised me, made me who I am.’

‘Well, send them money, sweetheart, help them in fundraising – that’s worth twice as much as some gesture of inviting them to a glitzy do where they will be fish out of water.’

Corry did already send money to his orphanage. He was on the board of a fundraising committee, but this was not the point. Three of those gentle plain-clothes nuns, as he called them, would so enjoy being guests at a huge catered event. How could these women, who had looked after him since he was found on their doorstep, be out of place anywhere?

He felt a vein in his forehead; a throbbing sensation. He even felt slightly dizzy. He could hear his own voice as if it were far away. It didn’t seem to come from inside.

‘I don’t want a party if I can’t have my daughter and the people who educated me, fed and clothed me.’

‘You’re overtired, Corry. You work too hard,’ Sylvia said.

‘That’s true, I do work too hard. But I am serious. I have never been more serious in my life.’

Sylvia said they should leave the matter for now.

‘If you send out those invitations, then we can leave the matter.’

‘I will not be bullied or blackmailed into doing something I don’t want to do.’

‘Fine,’ Corry said, and the marriage ended.

It was fairly painless, all things considered. Corry’s lawyers dealt with Sylvia’s lawyers. Settlements were agreed. But afterwards Sylvia found that a social life without Corry Salinas on her arm was not nearly as bright as it had been. She was tempted to give interviews about their tempestuous marriage.

Corry read them in disbelief. It hadn’t been at all like this.

He tried to tell his daughter, Maria Rosa, that life with Sylvia had been a series of staged events, all set in a goldfish bowl to encourage the admiration and envy of others. There had been none of these violent arguments. Corry had always given in to her. The truth was that he and Sylvia barely knew each other.

‘Why did you marry her then, Dad?’ Maria Rosa asked.

‘I guess I was flattered,’ he said simply.

Maria Rosa was wise beyond her years and, because she had heard the same explanation from her mother, she believed him.

During the next two decades, Corry Salinas became a household name, not only in the United States but all over the world. He could raise the money for any movie he was involved in. He was seen with elegant women in and out of high-profile occasions, film premieres, Broadway first nights, art openings and on the grandest, most expensive yachts in the Mediterranean. The gossip columnists were always marrying him off to film stars, heiresses and even minor royalty, but nothing transpired.

Maria Rosa was dark-eyed and romantic-looking like Corry, practical and even-tempered like Monica. She had inherited their work ethic, trained as a teacher and did voluntary service overseas. Her father’s A-list celebrity lifestyle didn’t attract her remotely. When she was growing up it had been the enemy of any kind of family life.

She had spent too much of her youth fleeing from paparazzi, refusing to talk to people in case she was misquoted in the press. Any door would have been open to her as the daughter of Corry Salinas, but she never wanted to walk through them.

She was never hostile or resentful about her father. She always called him whenever she came back to LA to suggest a pizza or a Mexican dinner in a neighbourhood restaurant, where they could sit quietly in a booth without all the attendant publicity that Corry Salinas trailed wherever he went.

He heard from his daughter that Monica had married again, a gentle guy called Harvey who ran a flower shop. Her mother had never been happier, Maria Rosa explained; the only cloud in the sky was that there was no sign of her upcoming wedding and maybe grandchildren. But, Maria Rosa sighed, she just hadn’t met anyone, and Lord wasn’t this town an awful warning about how marriage could go horribly wrong.

People often said that it was unfair how men looked better as they aged; Corry could still play passionate leading roles when women in their fifties were struggling to get character parts. But he knew this could not go on for ever.

When Corry was in his late fifties, he knew that what he needed was one utterly unforgettable part to play. Something with gravitas and sensitivity. A part that would for ever be associated with him. Yet it didn’t seem to come his way.