Crowned Heads (6 page)

The siege turned into something of a carnival, with assorted vehicles parked helter skelter at the entrance, radios playing, food being consumed, and litter strewn about.

Fedora remained invisible. Then suddenly all the hoopla proved fruitless, since its object had mysteriously reappeared in Hollywood. No one had seen her leave the convent, but a limousine arrived at the Bel Air Hotel, where the star was now registered; she was driven to the studio, where she lunched with various notables in the commissary, photographs were taken to mark the occasion, and a new movie was announced. Such furor did the actress Fedora occasion and thus were her comings and goings noted by an eager and curious world.

She completed
Ophelie,
one of her most beloved silent pictures, that year. She received her first Academy nomination for
The Red Divan,
but lost to Norma Shearer. Her films were released with almost unvarying regularity through the following decade. During this period it seemed she had given up her penchant for travel; she seldom left Hollywood or its environs. She preferred her new house in Pacific Palisades, with its view of the ocean. The property was enclosed by a high stucco wall, over which could be glimpsed only the tops of banana trees, and few visitors were admitted. Her housekeeper-companion was an Englishwoman, Mrs. Balfour, the widow of a Scot who had raised alfalfa in the San Fernando Valley. After his death she moved to Encino, and it was Viola Ueberroth who found her and brought her to Fedora.

Then, in the middle thirties, the Sobryanskis, mother and son, arrived unexpectedly in Hollywood, and their itinerary was diligently recounted by the papers. They visited Shirley Temple in her bungalow at Fox, lunched with L. B. Mayer at Metro, and at AyanBee they came on the set to watch Fedora and Willie Marsh shooting
The Player Queen.
Everyone knew the reason they were there: Sobryanski was hoping to persuade Fedora to marry him. Despite their wide acquaintance with notables, neither Barry nor Marion had ever met the count. What details there were were most accurately reported in the Tole biography (Tole had himself secured several interviews with the count, who was still living in Menton, while the countess spent most of her time on Crete). His mother was the countess Maria Yvonne Lislotte Chernieff Sobryanski. She seldom went to movies and initially had never seen Fedora on the screen. Of the old nobility, she hardly approved of her son’s involvement with an actress—and an “older woman”—no matter how beautiful or famous. The reasons for her change of heart were as obscure as other details of the story, but the fact was that the two women did afterward become exceptionally close friends. Though the three were the object of considerable speculation in the press, no one had ever accurately divined the true relationship. But at the time, lacking the success he sought with Fedora in Hollywood, the forlorn count returned with his mother to Europe.

It was further noteworthy that the link between Fedora and Countess Sobryanski was more closely forged during the war, when Fedora sought refuge at the château in Switzerland, and that she was later a frequent guest at their other residences—the Paris apartment, their horse ranch in the Camargue, and the villa on the island of Crete. Just before the war John had finally married and produced the heir required to ensure the title, and his wife seemed as much in evidence—and as good friends with Fedora—as was his mother. By then the family estates had been wrested from the Nazis by the Russians, but since Countess Sobryanski had been outspoken on the subject of Communism, she was not permitted to return to Poland, and spent her time exiled on Crete. Barry recalled for Marion the
Life
(September 23, 1946) photographs of Fedora and the countess exploring the labyrinth at Knossos and other excavated sites. Lislotte, always a regal figure, was now white-haired, if trim and spry, a somewhat younger version of Mary, dowager queen of England, whom she had known as plain May Teck, and with whom she shared an affinity for fine needlework, porcelain snuffboxes, and cameos, one of which Mary had bestowed on her friend.

But before all this, Fedora’s long Hollywood career continued. She revealed her finest artistry with the production of
The Voices of Joan of Arc,
and again she was nominated by the Academy, and again she lost, this time to Luise Rainer for
The Great Ziegfeld.
This was followed by the unfortunate
The Mirror,
from a story written by her friend Countess Sobryanski; two successes,
The Three Sisters
and
Madame de Staël;
then two dreadful flops. One,
Night Train from Trieste,
took advantage of the war-scare headlines, while another, her last Hollywood film,
The Duchess from Dubuque,
in which she again co-starred with William Marsh, was a badly conceived attempt to convert her into an “American princess,” a formula plot already a screen cliché, which kept the customers away in droves and hastened the decline of not only her own career but that of Marsh as well.

She completed her contract at AyanBee, stunned the world by announcing that she would make no more films, then disappeared again. She sold her house, flew to Halifax, and boarded one of the last ships taking passengers to Europe before the outbreak of the war. She arrived eventually at the Sobryanskis’ Montreux château, where she remained sheltered and in seclusion until peace came six years later. She never returned to America.

After V-E Day, when she was again seen, it was sometimes in Paris or London, sometimes in Athens, en route to Crete, in the company of the Sobryanskis. Publishing more photographs,
Life
(July 23, 1951) noted that the countess was aided in her ascent up the gangplank by a cane; she had fallen from a horse at the Camargue ranch. Tourists who came to Crete with cameras to get snapshots of their goddess were disappointed, and found themselves confronted by only another high wall; though there was a fine view of the Aegean, there was none to be had of Fedora. She kept virtually out of the public eye for almost another ten years, during which time it remained a matter of conjecture whether she really would never make another film.

There was little doubt that one of the Stories of the Decade was Samuel L. Ueberroth’s production of
The Miracle of Santa Cristi.
And since Fedora’s was an unbilled appearance, the surprise was the more astonishing. Marion remembered it well. Beetrice Marsh had found a book,
The Miracle of Santa Cristi,
which she gave to Viola Ueberroth to read. Viola agreed it had movie possibilities and turned it over to her brother. Sam, now Samuel L. Ueberroth, arranged to produce it independently of Columbia, where he had been under contract. Ueberroth shocked the industry by casting his girlfriend, an ex-baton twirler from Santa Monica, who until his liaison with her had made only B pictures; this was Lorna Doone, whom he later married, and still later divorced, and whose career had had so many quirky and passionate ups and downs. Lorna played the American girl touring in Italy, where she meets a young boy who becomes a miracle worker through the intercession of the Holy Virgin, who appears to him in the local church.

The boy, Bobby Ransome, later famous as the star of the Bobbitt films, was discovered by Viola Ueberroth. The problem casting was that of the Virgin. She appeared with the child in five scenes in the church interior, and the major requirement was that she be classically beautiful. Sam Ueberroth had flown with Viola to Tel Aviv, where they located an Israeli girl and signed her for the part. Locations were shot at Rocaillo, a small hill town about eighty kilometers outside Rome; the interiors were to be done at Cinecittà. The Israeli girl had completed only two days’ shooting, however, when Ueberroth looked at the rushes, didn’t like her, and ordered her replaced. Viola had a private meeting with Sam and the director, then she went south to Morocco. When she returned from Tangier, she was accompanied by a second party, incognita, who was smuggled into the Grand Hotel through the kitchen entrance. The following week Fedora began her comeback on the screen.

The Miracle of Santa Cristi
was premiered in New York ten months later. Cannily, Ueberroth had made no announcement of Fedora’s unbilled appearance, nor was she listed in the credits. He waited for word of mouth and gossip to do their work. Pins could have been heard to drop in the theaters as the boy knelt in the darkened church and saw the radiant vision emerging from the shadows of the sacristy. She stood there, robed in white, with a blue mantle, a girdle of gold, the Crown of Heaven on her head, surrounded by a blinding nimbus of shimmering light, through which could be discerned a face. But whose? Whom did it look like? It looked like Fedora. But no, they said, it couldn’t be. Then, yes, they said, it was. Finally Ueberroth called a press conference and “confessed” that indeed it was Fedora. But oh, they said, they’d tricked her close-ups, shot her through gauze, burlap, even linoleum. It couldn’t possibly be her; this was seventeen years later. It was a cheat; they’d used dazzling light to disguise the wrinkles and sag. It scarcely mattered. Her slaves rejoiced in being tricked; their goddess could do no wrong. She spoke no lines, it was all pantomime, but her brief scenes electrified, if frustrated, the audiences, and the line at the Roxy reached almost from Seventh Avenue to Fifth.

The picture itself proved far from satisfactory, but Fedora’s presence in only five short scenes was sufficient to ensure its success. Having thus aroused the world anew, she once more disappeared. The fox had gone to earth again and, like hounds, rumor, conjecture, and supposition went sniffing in her wake. She had given no interviews, and it was not known if she planned to further continue her career. Then more news came from a casual remark made in the Ritz Bar in Paris, where Sam Ueberroth had dropped the word that in a coproduction deal with some Italians, Fedora would undertake the role of Nefertiti in a superspectacle,
The Blue Nile.
The most remarkable thing about the film was the way the lie was given to those who said Fedora’s age had been disguised in
Santa Cristi.
Though she is talked of a good deal, Nefertiti does not appear until twenty minutes into the picture. Nor does she make an entrance; she is simply
there.
The pharaoh enters the great palace hall, demanding to see the princess. Off-camera footsteps are heard, he looks toward the doorway, but instead of cutting to the central figure, the camera remains on the actor’s face, then as he speaks the camera cuts to a full shot, holding the pharaoh in the middle ground, with Nefertiti’s back to the audience. Finally, in a dazzling display of cinematography, the camera slowly dollies during his speech, circling her, losing him, and slowly, slowly, gradually closing in as she listens. And there, at last, is the face.

Ageless. She was ageless. This time there could be no doubt; the camera saw it all. She hadn’t grown old, hadn’t suffered the mutilations of time. Who cared if the picture was terrible? One cared only to look, to see, to glory in the goddess, to hear again those inimitable drawled-out heavy accents. And though the inevitable comparisons between smiles was made—that of Nefertiti versus Mona Lisa’s—it was a question which was the more enigmatic.

The French press had for many years called her
La Déesse,
the goddess. The romantic Venetians had conferred upon her the very title of their city,
La Serenissima.
The Neapolitans countered with their own
La Sublima.
But it was the Romans who now dubbed her with another title:
La Scandalosa.
Everyone knew that goddesses were impervious, and in this particular instance, quite immortal; but what now seemed apparent was that the
La Déesse
was possibly immoral as well. Since she had ventured again into the public eye, Fedora’s private life had once more come under careful scrutiny. Now the talk centered on reports that she had revived her old affair with Count Sobryanski, and a second gossip-ridden triangle was formed. From Hollywood both Louella and Hedda worried in print about the peculiar geometry involved. Wags said it required only two superimposed triangles to make a star. In the earlier instance it had been Fedora, the mother, and the son. Now it was Fedora, the husband, and the wife. John Sobryanski’s wife was a French girl, daughter of a wealthy automobile manufacturer. Fedora was seen frequently in the couple’s company, and she was known to be spending much of her time between movies at Menton, a French town close to the Italian Riviera, in their small but handsome house high in the hills. Previous to this the count had bought an old castle on the outskirts of Tangier in Morocco. An architect and a team of decorators had been brought from Paris to make it elegantly habitable, and the four principals were often in residence there, in various combinations, for the dowager countess would occasionally arrive from Crete, where she had been living since her riding accident. While she continued to avoid press interviews, Fedora worked steadily over the next twelve years. For Warners she remade
Ophelie,
which was shot in Paris, and she received another Oscar nomination, again losing, this time to Patricia Neal for
Hud.
Fedora was not available for comment. Little was seen or heard of her between pictures, though stories had begun cropping up of difficulties on her sets, of arguments and disagreeable incidents; often players were dismissed and recast, the films went over budget because of delays, and it was said that Fedora, who before had been merely tempestuous, was now temperamental. It hardly mattered. Audiences craved her. Producers vied for her name on a contract and exhausted themselves trying to dig up suitable material as vehicles. Gossip concerning her was as rampant as ever, though more outrageous. Several times she became ill and vanished as of old, usually, they said, back into Switzerland and Vando’s personal care. She would hole up at the château, and though reporters established their usual watch, no eye fell upon her. There were comings and goings that even the press found impossible to keep up with, from the Montreux château, to the Riviera with Sobryanski, to the Tangier castle, where Sobryanski would be waiting, sometimes alone, sometimes with his wife. Then, when she left, Sobryanski and Fedora would be seen in Athens, boarding a boat for Crete to visit the countess, who after complications following her accident was now confined to a wheelchair. It was, the papers noted, rather like a royal progress, house to house to house, but what, they wondered, went on inside?