Princess Daisy (34 page)

“Can we take money on Christmas and birthdays?” Kiki asked wistfully.

“Definitely. And we never go out with anyone who doesn’t pay for dinner. Dutch treat is out. Together, we’ll bring back the fifties.”

As Daisy climbed up the steps to their third-floor apartment in a shabby building on the corner of Prince and Greene Streets she sniffed the pervasive smell of fresh baking in the air. Cinnamon rolls today, she decided. SoHo, only fifteen years before, had been declared the city’s number-one commercial slum. Now it was the boiling, self-conscious main outpost of Bohemia, a boom town for artists where the current dress code called for paint-encrusted overalls, whether, as Kiki remarked disdainfully, you had ever held a paintbrush or not.

But then Kiki had finally discovered how to cope with her preoccupation about the right way to dress in any given locale. Thanks to the timely death of her grandmother, she was rich enough in her own right to become the owner, producer, and permanent leading lady of her very own off-off-off Broadway theater, The Hash House. She was, in fact, the recognized Ethel Barrymore-Sarah Bernhardt of SoHo, and she dressed to suit whatever play she was currently mounting. Her latest production,
The Lament of the Pale Purple Faggot
, was keeping the theater comfortably full, especially on weekends when the up-towners came down to see what was going on in playland. Casting herself as the protagonist’s only female confidante, Kiki had been drifting around for the last few weeks in an
arrangement of a lavender leotard, pink tights, purple suede boots and a mauve feather boa, all of which suited her admirably.

Daisy unlocked the door and looked around. The apartment was empty. That meant that Kiki was probably still at the theater and Theseus was with her. He consented to spend the day lying on a bean-bag pillow at Kiki’s feet or following her around the theater. He was only totally happy when Daisy came home, but it was impossible to have a lurcher on a set The caterer’s table would have been denuded before the first sleepy grip asked for a cheese Danish in the morning.

Kiki and Daisy’s place in SoHo wasn’t one of those enormous lofts that many artists had carved out of former cast-iron, palazzo-styled, industrial buildings. It was an apartment on a human scale in a shabby building that boasted a small art gallery on the first floor. But it was large: big enough to contain a rambling living room, three bedrooms, a studio for Daisy, a fairly large kitchen and two bathrooms which unfortunately seemed to still have their original plumbing. The style could only be called free-floating. At various times their apartment contained bits and pieces from the sets of Kiki’s plays; odds and ends from the junk dealers of the neighborhood, and much fine furniture from Grosse Pointe. The only constants were a fireplace, Daisy’s working materials, decent-enough beds and the mural with which one of their friends had been inspired to decorate a living-room wall: a pastoral scene featuring Theseus engaging in various criminal acts in a series of farmyards. Neither Daisy nor Kiki had the instincts of a homemaker, and when they weren’t invited out to eat—a rare situation—they bought something from a local delicatessen for dinner. When they bothered about breakfast, they snatched it at a little street stand right around the corner which sold a doughnut and coffee for fifty-five cents, and, mysteriously, featured fresh coconut.

Daisy flopped down with a sigh of relief on the latest couch, brown satin and agreeably overstuffed, that had recently arrived from Kiki’s mother. Every time she sent them a new shipment they promptly sold their old furniture. Eleanor Kavanaugh found it strange that they’d been able to absorb such
quantities
of objects, but she said, sniffing in disapproval, she supposed Kiki needed them for
that
theater.… Thank heaven Grandmother Lewis hadn’t
lived to know what had happened to her money. Although, of course, if she
had
lived, there wouldn’t have been—oh, never mind, just don’t tell her all the ghastly details.

“She’s actually thrilled,” Kiki declared. “I know that she boasts about me at the country club—she calls me a patroness of the arts.”

Daisy roused herself from her comfortable place on the couch long enough to take off her baseball jacket She’d bought it right after going to work as a production assistant for North. She’d appeared on that first morning in her newest jeans, freshly pressed, her best beige cashmere turtleneck sweater and a checked hacking jacket that had been made for her in London years before.

“Oh no!” hissed Bootsie, when she saw Daisy arrive.

“What’s wrong?” Daisy asked, alarmed.

“Christ—do you have to look so much like old money?”

“But it’s my oldest jacket”

“That’s the point, dummy. It reeks of that good green stuff. And besides doing your job, you have to spend as much time as possible getting friendly with the crew so that they’ll tell you everything you need to know, something I positively do not have the time to do. You’re going to be pestering them with questions from morning to night and you’re going to be dependent on their good will. They’re the sweetest guys in the world if they think you need help, but no way do you look like a working girl who needs a job. That jacket says that you ride, you’ve ridden for years, you have better riding clothes somewhere else, and you’re probably still using them. And they’re hip to that. So get rid of it!”

“But
you
look very put together and expensive,” Daisy objected.

“I’m the producer, kiddo. I can wear whatever I want”

Now that Daisy had Bootsie’s job, which paid four hundred dollars a week, she still wore the baseball jacket from time to time. It reminded her of those first frantic, panicked months when, just as Bootsie predicted, she floundered around from grip to gaffer, from the sound man to the assistant cameraman, from the hair stylist to the set designer, from the prop man to the script supervisor, asking what now she realized must have been incredibly stupid questions, and writing down all the answers in a little notebook. Her jacket had won her friends by its mere existence, developed dialogues, created innumerable opportunities
to join in mutual nostalgia for the lost team. It had made her one of the boys at a time when she desperately needed to be one of than.

She looked at her watch. In one hour she would be picked up for dinner at La Grenouille, followed by the opening of the new Hal Prince musical. Her hostess, Mrs. Hamilton Short, lived on a large estate in Middleburg, and she had three children, none of whom Daisy had been asked to paint … yet Cinderella time, she thought, and reluctantly got up and went to her room to start the transformation from working stiff to princess. Or rather, from working stiff to working stiff, if the truth were known.

Ram was thirty. He lived in a perfect house on Hill Street, only a step away from Berkeley Square, a house decorated by David Hicks in severe bachelor sumptuousness. He was a member of White’s Club, far and away the most exclusive and difficult to enter of British gentlemen’s clubs, and he was a member of Mark’s Club, that private restaurant which is the haunt of the most languid and most privileged of the young elite of London. His suits, which cost nine hundred dollars each, were made at H. Huntsman and Sons, the best tailor in England, as were all his riding clothes. He was counted as one of the best shots in the British Isles and owned a pair of shotguns, made to his measurements, from James Purdey and Sons, a firm that had existed in the time of George HI. It had taken three years before they were completed, at fifteen thousand dollars the pair, and they were, Ram thought, well worth waiting for. His shoes and boots came, of course, from Lobb’s and cost from two hundred and fifty-five dollars a pair upward, depending on the style and the leather. He collected rare books in a major way and avant-garde sculpture in a minor way. He wore white silk pajamas piped in a sober burgundy, heavy silk dressing gowns and shirts made from the finest Sea Island cotton, all made to order at Turnbull and Asser. He considered Sulka vulgar. He never left the house without his umbrella from Swaine, Adeney, Brigg and Sons. It was made of black silk and the handle and shaft were carved out of a single piece of exceptional hickory. He drew the line at a hat—perhaps in ten years, but not now, except for fishing, riding and yachting, and his dark hair was cut in the privacy of one
of the ancient wooden rooms at Trumper on Curzon Street. He dined out every night, except on Sunday.

Ram’s name appeared with frequency in those sugary columns about society written by “Jennifer” for
Harper’s
and
Queen
magazine. Jennifer invariably described him as “the notably handsome and totally charming Prince George Edward Woodhill Valensky.” He also often was mentioned in Nigel Dempster’s purposefully bitchy column in the
Daily Mail
, where he was sometimes called “the last, dare we hope, of the White Russians,” although Ram had made it a point not to join the Monarchist League run by the Marquess of Bristol. He had no interest in a group he considered fundamentally frivolous, nor did he care to rub elbows with archdukes in exile, who, even if they might be cousins, would almost surely prove to be needy. His business sense had led him to multiply his fortune many times. Ram was a full partner in an investment trust, Lion Management, Ltd., which had had impressive success in supervising the placement of large amounts of money from the pension funds of trade unions and corporations in highly imaginative and productive international investments.

If he had wanted to spend a weekend at one of the country estates which still, in spite of taxes, exist in Great Britain, Ram had but to pick up a phone and call any one of dozens of the young lordlings he had known at Eton. An equal number of the most spirited and desirable young beauties of 1975 would have invited him to their beds with enthusiasm, for Ram was one of that small group of rich and wellborn young men whose name appeared on every list of the Most Eligible Bachelors in England.

However, his status in British society had nothing to do with his money or his title. It rested on the one indispensable thing he had never even bothered to covet during his youth—land. And the land came through his mother’s family, the family he had barely considered as he grew up. His mother was the only child of an untitled family, the Woodhills of Woodhill Manor, in Devon; quiet squires who had lived in one spot since before the Norman Conquest, looking down their noses, with pastoral certainty, at all parvenus, whether they were recently created earls whose titles didn’t go back further than the eighteenth century, or merely merchant princes whose businesses had made England great in the Victorian era. As far
as the Woodhills were concerned, they were all “fearfully recent” people.

The important thing about Valensky, everyone agreed, was that, when his grandfather died, he had inherited Woodhill Manor and the nine hundred acres of farmland that went with it. It was the ownership of this small piece of England that put Ram on the same lists as H.R.H. Prince Michael of Kent; Nicholas Soames, grandson of Sir Winston Churchill; the Marquess of Blandford, who would one day become the twelfth Duke of Marlborough; and Harry Somerset, heir to the Duke of Beaufort Without Woodhill Manor and its pleasant fields, Ram’s fortune and title would have always been just a bit
foreign
, but with Woodhill backing them up with the reassuring solidity of county status, they could be appreciated fully.

Ram went to his office in the City every day and worked hard. He returned home on foot, considering the walk as necessary exercise, changed for dinner, went to the entertainment of that particular evening, drank little, came home at a reasonable hour and went to bed. He rarely picked up his phone to arrange a country weekend, nor did he often ask for admittance to any young woman’s bed. When he did it, he never asked a second time, not wishing to encourage bothersome attachments or raise false hopes. If he had had a cat, he would have kicked it.

When he reached his thirtieth birthday, Ram decided he must consider the idea of marriage to someone suitable. Not immediately but eventually. Looking around White’s one night, when he’d taken a partner there for dinner, he’d noticed how different the club’s atmosphere was from the busy, cheerful lunchtime scene. Only a handful of tables were occupied, many of them by solitary, older men who were far more interested in their wine and food than struck him as entirely decent. Ram didn’t care for that fate. He began to consider the available crop of possible wives in the intense, humorless, practical manner that fit his outward demeanor.

Ram knew perfectly well that eligible as he was, he was not really liked. He didn’t know why and he considered it of little importance. Some men spent their time being liked, others had better things to do. He was, however, highly and widely
respected
, and that, he felt, was the important thing, the
major
thing.

When Daisy’s picture appeared in
Vogue
or any of the other publications, English, French and American, which kept an occasional eye on her horsy weekend parties, Ram looked at them with bitter disapproval. He felt absolute disgust at her job with North, working in a field he considered low, common and contemptible. Her social life seemed, to him, to be devoid of discrimination. Whenever any of the people he knew questioned him about her, he took pains to inform them that she was only a half-sister, with no English blood, and that he knew nothing and cared less about her private life. If it were not for the dreams about Daisy, dreams of love; hopeless, endless, devouring, destroying, never diminishing love, that tormented him ceaselessly, week after week, year after year, he might almost have managed to believe what he told his acquaintances. How he wished she were dead!

14

C
onference rooms are, almost by definition, designed to impress, but few of them were as explicit, Daisy thought, as that of the Frederick Gordon North Studio. It always amused her to look around and appreciate its purposefully spare and unornamented severity, its deliberately unemphatic and austere whitewashed brick wall and bare wooden floors lacquered in shining black. No one of any sensitivity could fail to be susceptible to the astringent luxury of the chrome Knoll chairs covered in pewter suede and the ascetic sweep of the huge, bare, oval conference table of white marble. From his place at the table, North could operate a concealed console of pushbuttons that signaled to the projectionist in the booth outside, telling him when to darken the room, when to lower the screen from the ceiling and when to roll film, a device which rarely failed to make even the most sophisticated clients sit up and pay attention. The conference room was on the top floor of a three-story building which had once been an abandoned music school in the East 80s, between First and Second avenues. Seven years ago North had bought it and converted it into one of the few privately owned commercial studios in the city. The first and second floors formed one huge sound stage which could be arranged in a thousand ways. Only the top floor was used for offices. North also owned his own cameras, lights and equipment. Since the vast majority of commercial directors had to include the cost of rental of studio space and equipment when they bid on a job—and most advertising agencies ask for at least three bids on each assignment they award—North was able to underbid
on almost every commercial he went after, and still make a larger profit than his competitors despite his high fee.