A Week in Winter (18 page)

‘I didn’t want to destroy your dream.’

‘Now I have two dreams: a family
and
a movie career,’ he said.

They were married three weeks later, and Monica moved in over the laundromat. They found even more work to keep up their funds. Acting lessons cost a lot of money, and people told them that having a baby didn’t come cheap either.

By the time that Maria Rosa was born, Corry Salinas had an agent and had been cast as one of three singing waiters in a big musical comedy. Not a great role, his agent had explained, but it would get him on the ladder. It was a vehicle for an ageing and difficult actress who was going to make life hell for everyone during the shoot. And if they liked him, who knew what could follow?

Corry made sure they liked him. He was attentive and endlessly patient for long, long days of work. He treated the First Assistant Director as if he were God. He made special fresh juices for the difficult movie star. She told everyone that he was cute.

The other two singing waiters might let their irritation show, but Corry never did. His ready smile and willingness to please paid off. By the time the shoot was over he had been offered a part in another movie.

Maria Rosa was the most beautiful baby in the world.

Monica’s family did a great deal to help as they waited hopefully for Monica’s husband to get a serious job that paid properly. Corry had no family to help them out but he often wheeled the baby up to the orphanage where he had been raised, and got a great welcome. He always asked if they could tell him anything at all about his own natural parents, and always they said no. He had been left at the gates of the orphanage aged about three weeks with a letter in Italian begging them to look after him and give him a good life.

‘And you
did
give me a good life,’ Corry always told them. The nuns loved him in the orphanage. So many of their charges had left bitter and saddened, resentful that they had spent their youth in an institution. Times had changed now, and nuns could go out to movies and theatres. They promised Corry they would go to everything he appeared in and even start a fan club for him.

Monica said it was going to be very hard getting the baby buggy up and down the stairs over the laundromat, but Corry said they couldn’t move yet. Acting was a perilous career. They would indeed have a lovely home for the baby, but not at the moment.

The second movie, where Corry played a troubled teenager and the ageing, difficult actress played his stepmother, was written off as a movie too far for the diva. Her time was over, the reviewer said, her day was done. The boy, however! Now here was a talent! And so the offers started coming in.

Corry bought the house that Monica had longed for. But by the time Maria Rosa was three, everything had begun to fall apart. He spent more and more time in the bachelor apartment the studio had provided for him. He had to be seen at receptions and night clubs and at benefit nights.

Monica read that his name was coupled with Heidi, his co-star in the latest film. The next weekend when he had come home for a whole two days, she asked him directly was there any truth in what the gossip columns were saying.

Corry tried to explain that the publicity people demanded this kind of circus.

‘But is there anything in it?’ Monica asked.

‘Well, I’m sleeping with her, yes, but it’s not important, not compared to you and Maria Rosa,’ he said.

The divorce was swift, and he could see Maria Rosa every Saturday and for a ten-day vacation each year.

Corry Salinas did not marry Heidi, as had been confidently predicted in the gossip columns. Heidi behaved badly about it. She got a lot of publicity as the victim of a love rat.

Monica remained silent and gave no interviews. She was never in the house when Corry arrived to pick up Maria Rosa for his Saturday visit; either her father or mother would hand over the child with few words, a look of resentment and disappointment.

Sometimes Corry was lonely and tried to ask Monica to review the situation. The answer was always the same.

‘I bear you no ill will, but please contact me only through the lawyers.’

The parts were getting better; the years rolled by.

He married Sylvia when he was twenty-eight. A very different wedding day to his first one. Sylvia was from a very wealthy family that had made several fortunes in the hotel business. She was a beautiful and much-indulged daughter who had been denied nothing, and when she had insisted on a giant society wedding as her twenty-first birthday present, she got that as well.

Corry was stunned that this dazzling girl wanted him so much. He went along with all the arrangements that Sylvia’s family suggested. One request, that his own ten-year-old daughter, Maria Rosa, be one of the flower girls was refused point-blank. So firmly that he did not mention it again.

Sylvia’s lawyers arranged a series of prenup agreements with Corry’s lawyers. The publicity for the wedding was intense and the photographic rights hotly fought over.

The day itself passed in a blur. If Corry remembered, a little wistfully, the small wedding party when he and Monica were eighteen and full of hope, then he put the thought far from his mind. That was then, this was now.

Now did not last long. Corry was needed for long hours at the studio, for costume fittings, for publicity tours, for foreign movie festivals. Sylvia was bored. She played a lot of tennis and raised money for charities.

For Corry’s thirtieth birthday Sylvia planned another lavish event. It came at a time when he was very much in the public eye with his latest film, where he played a troubled doctor with a difficult moral choice to make. Posters were everywhere showing Corry’s sensitive face pondering what he was to do. Women longed to meet him and take the tortured look from his eyes.

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.

His agent, who was called Trevor the Tireless, had been trying to direct him towards a television series, but Corry would have none of it. When he had been starting out they always thought that only old, failed actors went into television. The real arena was the movie theatre; nothing else counted.

Trevor sighed.

Corry was way behind the times, he said. They were in a golden age of television, he said. There were fabulous writers doing their best work for television. There was a part on offer which had all the gravitas he was looking for – he was going to play a President of the United States! Corry could write his own ticket. The real rule for success was to be adaptable, he kept saying. But Corry would not listen.

It wasn’t a matter of changing agents. Not at this stage. Trevor was indeed tireless in his efforts to find the perfect part for his most famous client. And Corry knew the old saying that changing agents was like changing deckchairs on the
Titanic
.

Corry had always been relaxed and easy-going. Suddenly he had become stubborn, utterly certain that he knew better than agents, the studios and the whole industry.

Corry hadn’t listened to the kind nuns who had wanted him to be a priest, or to the man who ran the first sandwich bar who had offered Corry a permanent position. He had turned a deaf ear to those who said his acting lessons were an expense he could not afford. He had always been his own man.

Soon he would be sixty. Trevor wanted to be able to announce something great to coincide with this anniversary, but all he came up with was yet another television offer.

‘It’s a peach of a part,’ Trevor begged. ‘You play an Italian who thinks he has a fatal illness and goes back to Italy to find his roots before he dies. Then he meets this woman. They’re lining up to play her if you are going to be the lead, you wouldn’t believe the names we have.’

‘Not television,’ Corry said.

‘It’s all changed, believe me. Look at the awards! They’re all going to television stars now.’

‘No, Trevor.’

And that’s how things stood for weeks.

Corry told Maria Rosa about it all.

‘Why don’t you do it, Father? None of my friends has time to go out to movie theatres. They all watch TV or download things on to their computers. It’s all changed. Everything has.’

She was more right than either of them knew.

Corry’s business manager, who had always advised him well, had been badly stung by the recession. Investments had not paid off, so even more hasty and unwise investments were made. It all blew up the day that the manager was killed in a car wreck.

He had driven straight into a wall, leaving behind him a financial confusion that would take years to unravel.

Now, for the first time in decades, Corry had to make a career decision based entirely on the need to make money. Most of his property had to be sold off piece by piece.