Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris & Mrs. Harris Goes to New York (26 page)

Well, I have saved my piece of news for the last. Mr George Brown of Kenosha, Wisconsin is not the George Brown who is the father of little Henry. He is someone else. But he was very kind about it and seemed to be very sorry he could not help me. He did not know the other George Brown, but said there were a great many in the Air Force, and he personally was acquainted with two but they were not married.

However, never you mind whether it was the right Mr Brown or not, that is my worry and I will find him very soon or my name is not Ada Harris. In the meantime thank you for telling me I may collect him on Sunday next. I will tell Mrs Schreiber I have a relative at Washington too. Ha ha. Having been with little Henry so long you almost are.

Now I must close as Mr and Mrs Brown are very kindly taking me to the airport in their car and I will go back to
New York, but next Sunday I will come and collect little Henry and thank you for your kindness.

Hoping this finds you in good spirits.

Yours faithfully,      
A
DA
H
ARRIS

French Embassy, 18 G. Street, Washington,
N
10,
D.C
.
4 May

D
EAR
M
RS
H
ARRIS
,

Thank you so very much for your letter from Kenosha, Wisconsin, and I sympathise with you in your disappointment that the George Brown you were so certain was little Henry’s father turned out to be someone else.

Nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to have received you next Sunday and to have heard personally from you your impressions of the Middle West, but alas, I fear that Fate has taken an unexpected hand and your visit must be once more postponed. It appears that little Henry has suddenly contracted a disease called the chicken-pox, to which I understand children of his age are frequently addicted, and he is compelled to remain in bed, where I assure you he is receiving the very best of care, and the doctor informs me that his recovery is not far distant.

You need not be alarmed over the fact that I myself have acquired a mild attack of the disease from little Henry, who, I suspect, received it as a gift from the son of the ambassador of Persia, and thus am sharing the quarantine. It seems the illness skipped me when I was a child. I have no complaint to make about this state of affairs, since it has given me some necessary solitude and time to reflect upon the grandeur of this vast nation and the responsibilities of my position. It will also provide you with the necessary leeway
to pursue your inquiries and discover the father of this child, a task to which I have no doubt you are entirely equal.

As soon as little Henry’s period of confinement is at an end I will advise you. At that time, too, I shall spread the word that the Easter holidays of my little grandson have come to an end and I have had to return him to his family in England. He will be greatly missed by the many friends he has made during his brief stay here, but by none more than the estimable Bayswater and myself. To avoid putting you to further expense in this unselfish and charitable enterprise of yours, I have commissioned Bayswater to drive you and the boy back to New York from Washington. It will also give you an opportunity to see a little more of this magnificent country.

If there is anything further I can do to aid you in your quest, do not hesitate to let me know. However, knowing you, your energy and intelligence, I have no doubt but that you will discover the right Mr Brown.

With kind regards and wishes for good luck,

I am yours, as ever,         
C
HASSAGNE

B
UT
if the Marquis had no doubts about Mrs Harris’s ability to locate the missing father, Mrs Harris, now that she was there, was beginning to entertain some herself, since the one man upon whom she had banked so heavily proved to be the wrong one.

Using her Cockney shrewdness and wit, she had had no difficulty locating a particular Mr George Brown of Kenosha, Wisconsin, referred to in the newspaper cutting, and who had turned out to be the wrong one; to find the right one amidst the teeming millions who inhabited this vast land mass, so great that not even the fastest jet planes could reduce it appreciably in size, was a very different matter. She discovered for instance, to her horror, that there were no less than thirty-seven George Brown’s in the Manhattan telephone book alone, with an equal number in Brooklyn, and further specimens crowding the other three boroughs. Just to name a few of the large cities with whose names she was now becoming familiar, there would be as many in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, besides which she had no assurance
whatsoever that George Brown lived in any of these cities; he might be a wealthy tobacco planter in the South, a textile merchant in New England, or a mine owner in the Far West. A letter written to the Air Force brought the reply that there had been some 453 George Browns on its roster at one time or another, and which one did she mean, where had he been stationed when, and what had been his serial number?

For the first time Mrs Harris became fully aware of the enormity of her task, as well as the realisation that she had let her romantic nature betray her into doing something not at all characteristic of a sensible London char, and that was to go off half-cocked, saddling herself in a strange land - or at least she would be saddled when she collected him from the Marquis - with a small boy whom she would be forced to conceal from her kindly employers.

The almost fortuitous visitation of the chicken-pox it was true would give her more time and breathing space before she had to face the problem of how to conceal little Henry in a penthouse apartment day and night, but for the first time Mrs Harris felt the cold wind of discouragement.

Yet she did not give way to despondency, but remained her cheerful self and did her work as well. Under her aegis the running-in of the Schreiber penthouse was prospering, Mrs Butterfield, relieved of her fears and tremors by the continued absence of little Henry, was cooking like an angel, other servants were being added to the staff, with Mrs Harris inculcating into them her own ideas of how a house ought to be kept clean, and Mrs Schreiber, given confidence by the presence of Mrs Harris, was beginning to lose her trepidation and commence those rounds of dinner parties and entertainments expected of a man in her husband’s position.

In the course of the social duties connected with business and the eminence of their position at the head of one of the largest film and television studios in America, the Schreibers were called upon to cater for and entertain some genuinely appalling people, including newspaper columnists who wielded a make or break power over entertainment properties with multi-million dollar investments, rock ’n’ roll and hillbilly singers, crooked labour leaders who could shut down the studio unless properly buttered and kow-towed to, mad television directors whose frenetic profession kept them just one barely discernible step away from the booby-hatch, morbid and neurotic authors who had to be pampered in order to produce a daily output of grist for the mills to grind, and an assortment of male and female actors, stars, glamour girls and boys.

Many of these were faces with which Mrs Harris had long been familiar and admired only in their enlargements in the film theatres or their diminutions on the television screens, and who now sat living and in the flesh, close enough to touch, around the Schreibers’ groaning board, devouring Mrs Butterfield’s roast beef and Yorkshire pud, and accepting service from Mrs Ada Harris, imported from five Willis Gardens, Battersea, London, S.W.11.

Not all of them were as dreadful as one might imagine, but the house-broken ones would appear to have been definitely in the minority.

Mrs Harris, elegant in the black dress and white apron which Mrs Schreiber had bought her, acted as third server upon these occasions, removing plates and passing the gravy, salad dressing, and cheese biscuits, while the temporary butler and first waitress took on the more serious work of getting the food to the ravenous maws of the illustrious free-loaders.

If Mrs Harris could be said to have a weakness besides her romanticism, it was her affection and admiration for the people in the world of theatre, film, and television. She bought and cherished the illusions they made for her lock, stock, and barrel.

Ada Harris was a moral woman, with her own rigid code of ethics and behaviour, and one who would stand for no nonsense or misbehaviour on the part of others. To show people, however, this strict code simply did not apply, and she acknowledged that they lived in a world of their own and were entitled to different standards. Thus, Mrs Schreiber’s Friday night dinner parties were as near heaven socially as Mrs Harris ever expected to come. To view Gerald Gaylord, North American’s great film star, on a Thursday afternoon off, his beautiful head the size of a two-storey building on the Radio City Music Hall screen, and then the following Friday to see that same glamorous bean close up, and gaze upon him engulfing six Martinis one after the other, was a bliss she had never expected to attain.

There was Bobby Toms, the teenage rock ’n’ roller with the curly hair and sweet face, and she closed her eyes to the fact that he got drunk early in the evening and used very bad language in the presence of ladies, language that was only surpassed by that issuing from the exquisite lips of Marcella Morell, the film
ingénue
, but who was so beautiful that even the most dreadful words when she used them somehow seemed beautiful too - if one had the same feeling towards show people as Mrs Harris. There was a hillbilly singer by the name of Kentucky Claiborne who came to dine in unwashed jeans, black leather jacket, and fingernails in deep mourning, a famous comic who actually was funny in real life as well, dancers, heavies, beautiful actresses who
dressed glamorously - in short, a veritable paradise for Mrs Harris and Mrs Butterfield as well, who tasted the thrills of high life in the theatrical world via the reports of her friend.

However, broadminded as she was and extraordinarily tolerant in her approach to the people of the wonderful world of entertainment, Mrs Harris soon found the fly in this ointment namely - the hillbilly singer - who made himself so disagreeable that it was not long before he was loathed by everyone with whom he came in contact, including Mrs Harris.

Before his first appearance at a Schreiber dinner party Mrs Schreiber had given her something of a warning of what to expect, since the good-hearted American woman was certain that Mrs Harris would not have encountered such a specimen in London, and did not wish her to be too greatly shocked by his appearance and comportment. ‘Mr Claiborne is a kind of a genius,’ she explained. ‘I mean, he’s the idol of the teenagers and inclined to be a little unusual, but he is very important to my husband, who is signing him for North American Pictures and Television, and it is a great feather in his cap - everyone is after Kentucky Claiborne.’

The name had already awakened memories of curiously unpleasant feelings within Mrs Harris, recollections of emotions which eluded her until she suddenly had a moment of recall to the time when her adventure in a sense had begun; this was the night back in her little flat in London when the Gussets next door had used the caterwauling of an American hillbilly singer by that name on the wireless to cover up the beating of little Henry.

By that osmosis through which servants pick up what is going on about them, not only through their ears and the
gossip of pantry, kitchen, and servants’ quarters, but also somehow through the pores of their skin, Mrs Harris acquired the information and imparted it to Mrs Butterfield that this same Kentucky Claiborne, emerging from nowhere in the southern portion of the United States, had had a meteoric rise as a hillbilly singer, due to the fact that his recordings of folk songs had suddenly caught on with the teenagers, instigating a competition of frantic bidding among the moving picture and television powers to sign him up.

Mr Schreiber, who in a short time had metamorphosed into a genuinely brilliant cine-mogul, had not been afraid to gamble and was far out in front in the race. His lawyers and the lawyers of Claiborne’s agent, a Mr Hyman, were in the process of hammering out a contract in which the singer would be paid the sum of ten million dollars over five years - a sum so vast that not only Mrs Harris, but all the entertainment world, were staggered.

In the meantime it was necessary to keep Mr Claiborne in an amiable frame of mind, which was difficult, for it was obvious even to Mrs Harris that, celebrity or not, Kentucky Claiborne was vain, shallow, selfish, self-centred, loud, rude, insulting, a bore, and a boor. As his agent, Mr Hyman, put it to Mr Schreiber: ‘So what d’you want? He’s a jerk - but he’s a jerk with talent. The kids are nuts about him.’

This was true, as it is of many of the repellent characters who work their way to the top in the entertainment world. Now a thirty-five-year-old man with already thinning hair, deep-set eyes, and blue jowls, Kentucky Claiborne had suddenly emerged from the Deep South, where he had been moaning his hinterland folk songs in honky-tonks and cheap night clubs to the accompaniment of his guitar, to become
a national sensation. His eyes, his voice, his demeanour, his delivery, apparently evoked the loneliness and melancholy of the pioneer woodsmen of America’s past.