The Lioness(15)

How was it possible, Carmen thought, and what did it say about her that right now—right now, facedown on the ground—she was thinking about how pathetic her husband was, and how glad she was that (thank God) she hadn’t taken his name, since she was likely to divorce him when they returned to California?

Assuming, of course, that he or she or both of them didn’t die here in East Africa on her best friend’s honeymoon. Was it irony or destiny that she and Katie had met on the set of a movie called Hanging Rock?



* * *



.?.?.

Hanging Rock would have been a pretty good name for a movie if it had had anything at all to do with the former volcano in Australia that carried that moniker. It didn’t. It was a Western, which left Carmen flummoxed: You could drop a rope from a branch and create a hanging tree, but who hung a noose from a rock? Or, for that matter, if you interpreted the two words a little differently, why would you dangle a rock from a rope at the end of a tree limb? Carmen had wanted to ask these questions from the moment she’d been cast, but she had the common sense to keep her disdain to herself. The film was about a corrupt sheriff in a corrupt cow town sometime in the late nineteenth century, and the decent, courageous cattleman who wants to avenge the unfair prairie justice—a hanging—that was meted out upon his older brother: Porter Rock. It came out in 1958, which was a good year for movies. Most of the film was terrible, and it never had a chance for any best-picture awards. But some people thought Katie should have gotten a Best Actress nomination over Anna Magnani for her work in Wild Is the Wind and Deborah Kerr for Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. She was never going to beat Joanne Woodward for her performance that year in The Three Faces of Eve, but a lot of critics had what seemed a genuine love for Katie’s portrayal of Porter Rock’s kid sister.

Carmen had two scenes with Katie in that film and they were her only moments in the movie. (They’d filmed a third scene of her confronting the sheriff that she was proud of, but she discovered at the premiere that it had been cut.) Both of the remaining scenes were on an outdoor set in the backlot and involved horses, and so she and Katie had a lot of time to bond while the lighting was set and the animals were wrangled onto their marks. She hadn’t realized until they’d started to chat that she’d seen Katie onstage when they’d both been teenagers, because back then Katie was using her family name: she was still Katie Stepanov. Carmen was never the type who went gaga over anyone or anything, but she’d nonetheless found herself, at first, uncharacteristically awed.

“It helped that my parents produced a lot of shows,” Katie said. “I had a leg up on everyone else my age.”

“But you also had—also have—a lot more talent than everyone else your age.”

Katie shrugged. “Again: I was getting lessons and coaching from the time I was, I don’t know, three years old.”

They discovered they were the same age and both came from the East Coast, though Carmen had grown up in the Westchester suburbs of New York City and her father was an adman and her mother a homemaker. There was no Stepanov or Broadway glamor to her childhood: she was the kid in a balcony seat at the Nederlander, and Katie was the kid on the stage. But that was, in its way, the template for their friendship. Carmen was a lady in waiting to the first daughter from a family of East Coast entertainment royalty that now, thanks to Katie, had a beachhead on the West Coast. But Katie looked after Carmen, too, making sure that Reggie’s PR firm took her on and advocating on Carmen’s behalf when there was the right sort of role for her friend: a role that had a great line or a great moment. A scene that demanded a little nuance.

And that was fine. Most of the time, Carmen took great pleasure in the reality that she was a Hollywood actress, even if she was never going to have her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She knew how fortunate she was. She knew the breaks she’d had to get where she was and how easily it could all disappear. Careers dissipated because of low grosses and bad choices, and they disappeared beneath the pounds of pancake and clown makeup they’d put on Bette Davis the year before last for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? She knew the euphemism: aging out.

When she thought of her mother or her sister back in Westchester or got letters from them, she would breathe a sigh of relief that she was here and not there. Neither worked. Neither had ever worked. Her mother still mailed her magazine recipes that she cut from Women’s Day in which the ingredients were canned pineapple, mayonnaise, and cream cheese. Her sister sent her housekeeping articles from Ladies’ Home Journal that supposed she cared so much about a polished floor that she’d spread the wax evenly on the brush with a butter knife. Her sister was married now and had a three-year-old son, and both her mother and her sister sent her the same Good Housekeeping essay by a woman who rued the loss of her husband to another woman because she had chosen not to have babies.

Her mother and father had visited her and Felix in August, and it was clear to Carmen that they were proud of her but uneasy with her career. They were suspicious of her neighbors, who all seemed to be involved in the movie business and all seemed to have—at least based on the stories they’d read in the Hollywood fan magazines—questionable morals. She could tell that her father had the same doubts about Felix he’d had since she had first introduced the writer, then her fiancé, to him. There was something about Felix that rubbed Richard Tedesco the wrong way, something the older man didn’t quite approve of. It may have been the way that Felix tried to ingratiate himself to her father. “Sucking up” was the expression Carmen herself had used after their first dinner together, when she was explaining to Felix that her father had spent enough years making up crap to sell cigarettes and soap that his bullshit meter was infallible. She understood Felix’s insecurities, but he should have had the spine or the common sense to stop dropping names as soon as he mentioned Clayton Moore—the Lone Ranger—and her father observed, “We did a Cheerios commercial together. He was a consummate professional. Quiet and good with the kids on the set. Never said a word about himself.”