Some people still think I’m a terrible person because I didn’t call the police right away. If I had, we might have avoided one of Hollywood’s most notorious sex scandals, and I wouldn’t have spent a lifetime living down the whole “killer nanny” thing.
But seriously, when I saw Alistair lying on the floor of Delia Kent’s motel room that night in 1973, I had no clue I was looking at a corpse. The room was dark, and I didn’t see any blood on that brown shag carpet. I thought Alistair was sleeping off the Mandrax he’d stolen from Delia’s medicine cabinet.
I admit the floor of your boss’s motel room is not the place most people would choose to take a nap, but Alistair Milbourne was nothing like most people—people outside of a Fitzgerald novel anyway.
Besides, I’d have been insane to wake him. He might have started throwing me around the room the way he’d done to Delia earlier that night.
For those of you too young to remember, this took place during the filming of Guido Malatesta’s Oscar-winning opus The Vast Inland Sea, in the California oil town of Taft, previously known as Moron.
Really. I’m not making up a word of this. You can read it all in Delia’s bio on Wikipedia. But of course it won’t tell you the whole story.
That’s because I’m the only one who knows the truth.
The night’s dramas started when Alistair and Delia got into a noisy brouhaha after the day’s shoot. I tried to ignore it: those two were always going at it. But when it escalated to thumps and crashes, I phoned her co-star, Sam Calhoun. (Yum. He really was that hot in those days, even without the rug.) Then I yelled at the connecting door to tell them Sam was on his way.
That quieted them down fast. I heard a couple of door-slams a few minutes apart—probably Alistair leaving and/or Sam arriving. Then nothing.
I figured maybe I’d overreacted, because few minutes later, Delia came into my room—wearing a little more make-up than usual for off-camera—but otherwise looking fine. She wanted to give little Pandora a kiss goodnight and tell me she and Sam were going to party at a local roadhouse with the roughneck extras.
I was pretty sure Alistair had gone back to his room to sulk. He was not into cowboy bars and loathed Sam. Alistair was supposed to be Delia’s business manager, but he acted like a Victorian chaperone. He claimed this was out of loyalty to her husband, Sir Thomas, but I never bought it. Loyalty was never Alistair’s strong point. He swore he’d never bedded Delia himself, but he probably lied about that.
In fact, the one thing you could count on with Alistair was that he was lying about something. That was a good deal of his charm. He was such an obvious phony, you kept thinking he was being ironic—that any minute he’d drop the act and get real. And every so often he would. That’s how he hooked you. He’d make you think you were special enough to be in on his joke.
After Delia and Sam left, I spent the next hour or so trying to get Pandora to sleep. Normally, she’d have drifted off after I’d read her a few pages of Winnie the Pooh—she was a nanny’s dream—but hearing all that violence had terrified her. Our suite connected with Delia’s, so poor Pandora had heard every scream, thump and crunch through that thin door.
Pandora was in no mood for bed, and insisted I get out her toy xylophone, so she could spend an hour or so inflicting unmusical plunkitude on the denizens of the Knight’s Rest Motel. I figured it was early enough in the evening to let her pound away some of her little five-year-old angst.
After I finally got her to sleep and put her precious noisemaker away, I readied for bed myself and turned on the TV. I was trying to mellow out with a Beefeaters and tonic—the violence had shaken me up too—when Alistair himself showed up at my door. He had a black eye and a bunch of cuts on his face. I was amazed that Delia had done that much damage with her tiny fists, especially since she’d survived unscarred, but I pretended not to notice. He couldn’t have been happy that I’d called Sam, so I figured it was best to avoid the subject.
Luckily, Alistair didn’t seem to want to talk. He gave me a sloppy kiss and asked if I had any downers. I had no desire to part with my last four Quaaludes, so I avoided the question and offered to go get ice to make him a gin and tonic.
He took a gulp of mine.
“It isn’t Schweppes, is it? You know I can’t drink any tonic but Schweppes.”
“It’s all they had at the 7-11.” I gave him an eye roll and sat back down to watch the rest of the Mod Squad.
But I should have known better. Alistair went into snark mode.
“Are you going for the hippie grandmother look?” He had a way of curling his lip that was pure melodrama-villain. “That outfit makes you look like Ruth Gordon on acid.”
I stuck out my tongue and pulled my Laura Ashley robe closer. Secretly I was relieved he wasn’t expecting sex. It was kind of understood I owed it to him because he got me the nanny gig, but oh geez, he was boring in bed. For a professional ladies’ man, he didn’t exactly have professional-grade equipment.
That’s not kind. I should add that his sexual inadequacies hadn’t kept me from falling madly in love with the man. But I was pretty much over it by then.
He stepped between me and the TV, and I could feel his anger from the Delia-fight beginning to erupt again. A little scary. I’d never known him to get violent before. So I told him I might have one ’lude I could give him, but he’d have to replace it because I got it off a college friend and had no idea how to score out here in the middle of a California oil field.
He gave one of his phony Cary Grant laughs.
“Quaaludes? Not that garbage. I need Mandrax, the English sleeping pills.”
The man was born in New Jersey, but he believed in the superiority of all things Brit. As he smoothed the sleeve of his linen jacket, he winced, as if maybe his forearm was hurting. He had a suitcase full Savile Row bespoke suits, which he often wore even in this heat, but he’d been wearing a blue Izod shirt earlier in the evening. I found it odd that he’d put on the Ritz for a drug run to the room of lowly moi.
“Quaaludes are second rate. Mandrax is far better.” He softened his tone a little. “You know I need the best, Nicky.”
Oh, yeah, I knew he needed the best. That’s why he didn’t need me. As he often let me know during the four months we dated in college. I was one of the academic Harvard Conways, not the boat-building Kennebunkport Conways. I found out later he only asked me out because he wanted to get closer my cousin Wogs, who was in line to inherit all those damned canoes. Too bad she only liked girls.
I mean too bad for Alistair. Not too bad for Wogs, who was saved the annoyance of falling in love with him, so she could be loyal to me through the whole mess. Most of my other friends were sure I killed him. Probably because they wished they had. At one time or another he had let every one of them know they weren’t the best either.
But Delia Kent was the best. Ever since her debut, at age nineteen, in the London stage version of The Great Gatsby, with Richard Burton, Delia was everybody’s idea of perfection: a luminous English rose with a sassy-urchin smile and an ethereal, almost weightless presence that made every male on the planet want to bang her. Luckily, she was saved, after a particularly nasty run-in with Elizabeth Taylor, by marriage to Sir Thomas Hume, the director, who not only had a title and an unassailable reputation, but a huge, remote country house where Delia could be tucked well away from further scandal.
But at the moment, Sir Thomas was back in Bedfordshire; Delia was here in the sizzling central California valley; and Alistair seemed to think it was his job to prevent a repeat of the Burton mess—this time thwarting a liaison between Delia and Sam, who was as charismatic and reckless as Burton, and marginally more sober.
Delia was screwing Sam anyway, of course, which is why it all turned into such an epic scandal. But I don’t put her down for it. Sam oozed a primal sexual magic that spoke to some pre-evolutionary place in the female psyche.
Plus, hey, they were in Taft. What else were they going to do?
They were doing their best to keep their thing secret, and Delia only told me because I needed to know where to find her if Pandora had one of her homesick nightmares that only a visit from Mummy could soothe.
“Delia has tons of Mandrax, but she won’t open her door,” Alistair said.
That’s when I realized what this was about. He wanted another round with Delia. But I was pretty sure she was still with Sam—either at the roadhouse, or in his room.
Alistair kept blocking my view of the television.
“Is she in there, or has she gone slumming with the yokels again?”
A cut on his cheek was still bleeding. Delia must have thrown something pretty big to inflict that. Probably the crash I’d heard.
I made a sign he should shush and pointed to the door of Pandora’s room. I did not want to have this discussion. We’d had it nearly every night since I’d arrived in Taft three weeks before.
“Let me have the key to her room, Nicky.” Alistair pointed to the door that linked our suite with Delia’s. “I’ve got to get some sleep. I have a headache from hell.”
Judging from his split cheek and the purplish lump rising on his forehead, I surmised the headache came not from the netherworld, but Delia’s lamp-hurling. But I wasn’t going to bring up the subject, for fear of rekindling his anger.
I reminded myself I was just the help. It was not my place to pry.
He’d never been physically violent with me, but then, I’d never known him to be violent with Delia, either. Words had always been his weapon of choice.
I heard Pandora whimper in her bed, so I shushed Alistair again. Pandora detested him and I didn’t blame her. He competed with her for her mother’s time like some overgown toddler.
“Nicky. Please. I’m in agony.” Alistair’s tone switched from bully to victim. His whining was more pathetic than Pandora’s. It got me every time.
So I did it. I may have made worse decisions in my sixty-plus years of life, but none have had more dire consequences: I unlocked the connecting door.
Maybe I thought if Alistair took a Mandrax, he wouldn’t start another fight with Delia and we could all get some sleep. Maybe I didn’t think at all. He’d been getting me to do whatever he wanted for nearly four years.
I checked on Pandora, finished watching faux hippies save the world from the scourge of recreational drugs, took half a Quaalude, and went to sleep.
At about four that morning, Pandora launched herself onto my bed, crying for her mother. I pushed druggy sleep from my brain and tried to soothe her, but nothing worked. When she started screaming for her xylophone, I figured I’d better wake Delia. Better her than the entire clientele of the Knight’s Rest Motel.
So I opened the door—Alistair had left it unlocked—and tiptoed into Delia’s room, avoiding the broken lamp shards on the floor. I saw the bed hadn’t been slept in, and was about to phone Sam’s room when Pandora rushed in, banging her xylophone, demanding an audience for her latest mutilation of the Beatles catalogue. My focus was entirely on keeping the noise down, so it took me a moment to realize Pandora was addressing Alistair, not her absent mother.
He lay on the floor, half in and half out of the bathroom.
People call me a liar when I say I thought he was asleep, but this is what I figured happened: he’d parked himself in Delia’s room, hoping to confront her about Sam again, and he’d just finished taking a leak when the Mandrax kicked in and he’d keeled over. Downers had that effect on me, too. One minute I’d be going strong and the next I was asleep, face down in my popcorn, like somebody’d flipped a switch.
So I told Pandora we had to be quiet and let Alistair finish his nap and promised that I’d get Mummy to listen to her play “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” in the morning. I tucked her back in bed, put the xylophone in the toy drawer, and sank back into my be-’luded sleep, oblivious to the disaster that had descended upon us all.