“But this is magnificent!” Edwina said. “Who would have thought of building a ballroom across a river? What style!”
“It is magical, isn’t it? And it wasn’t Diane de Poitiers who dreamed it up. She just had the bridge built so that her lover Henry II could ride across the river and hunt on the other side. It was the mousey little Catherine de Medici that had the ballroom built upon it,” I said.
“Oh, Hugo. Thank you very much for bringing me here!” Edwina Grey leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. She was wearing the dark blue linen dress again today and her Bulgari jewels. A magnificent gold chain with a large antique coin embedded in it and gold coin earrings. She had a large ruby on one finger. As I came to know Edwina better I was never to find her without jewels. She was not very French. More like a Russian princess.
We were standing at the balustrade of the formal gardens beside the Cher River. Before us was the great cream-colored stone barrier of the Château of Chenonceaux, standing on enormous arches, under which the river ran.
“It is a bridge. It is a palace. It is a dream,” Edwina said, leaning on both elbows on the stone balustrade, staring hard.
On the river below us small boats were skimming about and around the pillars of the arches. On the high promenade that surrounded the formal gardens in front of the château many people were walking. Most of them Japanese. But with a strong dash of Italians, also. The Italians come here because Leonardo da Vinci had lived in Amboise, which was very near. The Japanese were here because they had to be. As we approached the château down its famous alleé of trees, I had seen a group of Japanese posing to be photographed on the green lawns immediately in front of the entrance to the château. The angle of the camera was such that only the lawns would show around them. No château. How would they know where they had been? What would they tell their friends? “This is us. In France.” And then they will tee-hee and cover their mouths. Am I being racist?
Edwina didn’t seem to notice the Japanese. Or the Italians. Perhaps she was just imagining that she was Mary, Queen of Scots, wending her way from Amboise down through the trees to her wedding festivities at Chenonceaux. We were by ourselves. Nina had asked me if I would mind taking Edwina in the black Peugeot as she wanted to rest her pregnant body. She’d been standing up a lot for the rehearsals of The Red Mill, and she also wanted to spell Graham so that he could be free of Theo to learn his Tea with Sympathy lines. I didn’t mind. It even made me a little nervous, and I like that feeling. You felt you had to toe the mark with Edwina. She was something like Marie Antoinette, of whom they used to say, “She was of perfect graciousness and never made you feel that you were in the presence of the Queen. Although it was quite clear that you were.”
Out of the blue Edwina said, “The trouble with treating people as though they are your equal is that they treat you the same way.”
“Are you referring to me?” I asked. We were walking toward the entrance to the château now. Below us in the gardens there were any number of small flowering trees planted among the strictly geometric patterns of low shrubs and flowers. Everything was very much in the formal garden style of the sixteenth century. Yet the colors were all lavender and pink.
“Oh, heavens, no, darling. I was just thinking of the great democratization of tourism. Now everyone is on the move, and everyone has a Gucci bag. Or Vuitton. They’ve killed Vuitton, haven’t they? Do you think lavender and pink were popular colors in the time of Diane de Poitiers?” She gestured toward the gardens. It was uncanny how she sensed what you were thinking. Or perhaps we had similar minds. I would be flattered to think so. And she obviously had noticed the bands of roving tourists, but had risen above it.
In the château the bands of roving tourists were now compressed into mobs. There aren’t a great many rooms in the château, only four to a floor, with a large hall down the center. Each room is vast with a gigantic fireplace and little furniture. Furniture was sparse in those days, and I believe when they moved from château to château they carried it with them.
I told this to Edwina, who said, “But I know nothing of this!” So I told her that in the time of Diane de Poitiers’s residence in the château it couldn’t have been spick-and-span as it now looked. There was certainly straw on the floors. Servants, and there were many of them, had no real sleeping places and just snuggled down on the straw and pulled their cloaks about them. There was probably quite a battle to sleep as close to the fireplace as possible. The reason that nobility moved from château to château was that this was the only way to clean them. Everyone peed and shat in the straw, as did the many dogs that undoubtedly accompanied them for hunting. And finally when it got too foul, they packed their furniture onto wagons and moved to the next château, which was probably only one or two very slow days’ haul away. The nobles would be on horseback most likely. It was the fastest way to move about. The carriages of the time didn’t have springs and must have been hell over what were undoubtedly poor excuses for roads. Servants stayed behind and swept and scrubbed the château until it was clean again.
I was rattling on. Edwina seemed to be interested. Perhaps she was just a past mistress of giving all her attention to whomever she was with. We had moved into a tiny room in a small tower adjacent to the two great rooms on the upriver side of the château.
“I would think Diane must have spent most of her time here,” Edwina said. “It’s tiny. It’s light with windows all around. The fireplace is large so she was warm. These châteaux must have been freezing in the winter. All this stone seeps up the coldness and hangs onto it fiercely.”
“She took a bath in cold water very morning,” I said. “To preserve her skin. She always dressed in black because she was a widow.”
“What a smart woman,” Edwina said. We had gone from a large bedroom with a portrait of Catherine de Medici over the fireplace to a room across the grand hall that had several portraits of Diane on the walls.
“She was blonde.” Edwina said. “That explains so much. Everyone thinks blondes fade early, but that depends on the climate. France is in the same latitude as Newfoundland, although we have the benefit of the Gulf Stream. Blondes hold up very well in this climate.” The fact that she was herself a French blonde must have had something to do with this statement, but I had to agree with her. The more mature blondes around Cornichons like the mayor’s wife, Madame LeBrun, certainly supported her claim.
Diane had been painted as Diana, goddess of the hunt, in a short tunic carrying a bow and arrow. A quiver of arrows was slung over one shoulder. A small crescent moon was in her hair. She had very much the same pert little regular features as Madame LeBrun. In another painting the Three Graces were painted in their famous pose, back . . . front . . . back, arms entwined. The guide pamphlet said all three were popularly supposed to be Diane. She had long legs, or at least was depicted so.
I pointed this out to Edwina. “It’s so interesting,” she said, “the ideal of beauty at this time in the French Renaissance was probably the closest to our own time than any other period. The women depicted in sculpture always had beautiful, long tapering legs, small bosoms that were up, up, up, and lovely oval faces. Even their hairdos were simple. Just long hair tucked up casually. All through the period of the two de Medici queens, neither of whom was particularly lovely, there was this idea of what a pretty woman should be. Then it all kind of went underground with the Louis’s, and when it reemerged it was much more buxom and short-legged. All tits and ass in the Victorian period.”
There was a gigantic portrait of Louis the Fourteenth in the last big room on the ground floor and Edwina opted not to go upstairs. “I think I’m all absorbed out,” she said. “If I saw any more, I’d go out and have my picture taken on the lawn without the château in the background, like everyone else.” Not much got past Edwina. I suggested that we go have tea in the café that had been converted from the stables.
“Delightful,” Edwina said. She seemed to be enjoying my company. Which again, may have been one of her skills. After a lifetime in advertising, she probably had every charm possible.
“That’s a nice dress,” I said once we were seated. It was self-serve, this little tea room, so I had self-served us.
“Courrèges,” she said. “Well, Ungaro really. Ungaro was Courrèges’s assistant, probably lover, and then struck out on his own. Good-looking but I don’t think he had any original ideas. He just imagined what Courrèges would do. Courrèges was the genius of the 1960s. He really changed how women looked completely. Those little dresses and boots and bonnets. Babies. I never did that. I would have looked like a complete fool. But later when he got less strict I wore him. Him and Jil Sander. They’re the only pure people. Wonderful fabrics. Wonderful sewing. People like Galliano are really circus people. And Ralph Lauren clothes are made so badly. With terrible Asian fabrics.
“So what are you rehearsing for right now?” she said, changing the subject abruptly. She pressed her tea bag under her eye. “It’s great for puffiness,” she said, ignoring the wondering stares of the two couples at the next table.
“We’re doing The Red Mill. I’m playing Kip Connor. Or is it Con Kipper? I can never keep them straight.”
I told Edwina about the very different acting approaches we were being subjected to by Kitty Carlisle Hart and Cranston Muller. Kitty wanting us to delve within and create our own persona, Cranston wanting us to obey direction in every minute detail. She seemed interested. I had no idea how much theater experience or interest she had, but again, who knew?
“I never know whether you are really interested in what I’m talking about or not,” I said.
“You never will,” Edwina replied. “Just watch what I do, not what I say. If we get up and leave very soon, you’ll know I’m not very interested. Actually, I find this quite interesting. I’ve never performed, but I suppose Ms. Hart’s technique is very much like creating your own personality. Find out who you are and then create a personality to communicate it to the world. She must be a lot of fun to work with. Beautiful women so rarely are, but I think she’s an exception. Of course, finding out who you are is a big stumbling block for most people. They really don’t want to cast their eyes in that direction for fear they’ll stumble upon something that won’t be to their taste.”
I said, “That’s why I think there’s something to the way Cranston Muller directs. If the performer has no idea who he is, it would probably be impossible to create a personality for the role he is playing. They can’t even play themselves. So the director has to mold them into a personality. And a lot of those people are very young.”
Edwina laughed. “I like that. They can’t even play themselves. I read that about Truman Capote when he ventured to play in a movie. The reviewer said he shared with Zsa Zsa Gabor the inability to even play themselves. But who is this Cranston Muller? Do I know about him?”
“He’s a major producer and director from New York. Considered very avant-garde. He became famous when he did a staged version of Gone With the Wind, reversing all the black and white roles. Did you ever see that? He founded the theater festival in Cornichons a few years ago,” I said.
“Was he ever known by a different first name? I used to work with a television commercial director way back named Len Muller who was always talking about Gone With the Wind with a black Scarlett. I wonder if it can be the same person? I wonder if Nina ever worked with him? He was especially good with beauty products, fragrances, that sort of thing. What’s he look like?” Edwina said.
“Medium height. Shaved head. Very tan. Blue eyes. Well, that could be anybody,” I said.
“Even a woman these days,” Edwina said. “It would be very strange for Len Muller to wash up in my life again at this point.”
“I’m sure you’ll meet him. We open The Red Mill next week and play for three weeks. We go into rehearsal for Tea and Sympathy as soon as we open. I wish you could be here for that. I play the lead,” I said.
“The Tony Perkins part? I can see that. Well, not really. You have a lot of self-confidence for the role of a sexually confused teenager,” Edwina said.
“That’s what’s interesting about it. The world has come such a long way since that play was done. All your sympathy is supposed to go to the schoolmaster’s wife who sleeps with him and saves him from the dreaded horror of being homosexual. Or at least wondering if he’s homosexual. I suppose there are still some people . . . many people . . . who see it as the dreaded horror, but it’s kind of an old-fashioned idea. I certainly wasn’t brought up to think of it as something awful.” I was rattling on.
“Has Nina told you that I am a lesbian?” Edwina said. “At least at the present time.”
“No,” I said. I hadn’t really thought about it.
“My lover is coming down from Paris at the end of the week. She’s the only woman I’ve been with, but I think this is it. I don’t plan to go back to having a male lover. We have a real relationship that in some way rises above our sexuality. We’re people first, women second, I guess you could say.” Edwina finished her iced tea. We didn’t need to signal for the bill. I had paid for our teas inside.
As she started to get up, I said, “Does this mean this part of the conversation is over?”
“By no means. We’ve been sitting down for quite a while. Let’s stroll back to the car.” Which we did through wave after wave of tourists pouring into the château grounds. Chenonceaux is supposed to be the second-most visited tourist spot in France after Mont Saint Michel, and the crowd we were pushing our way through did not contradict that information.
“Her name is Angela,” Edwina said. I assumed she was talking about her lover. “She’s in Paris right now doing some television commercials for L’Oréal. She’s the spokeswoman for their hair products in the United States. She has wonderful hair. She’s doing a new fragrance for them, also. I freelanced the copy for it. It’s called Tu M’Amuse. ‘You Amuse Me.’”
“I speak French,” I said.
“I’m sure you do. I would put nothing past you.” Edwina reached for the door of the car.
“Should I open the sun roof?” I asked.
“Of course. Let’s go all to hell with ourselves. Have the sun and wind stream all over us and destroy our skins. We just don’t care,” she said as I wheeled up the little back lane that leads to the narrow main street of Chenonceaux village.
“You want to know where I met Angela? It’s quite unusual. Through Graham and Nina. Graham shot a pornographic film with her. They’re quite a lot alike. Beautiful. Do with their bodies as they damn well please. Have almost no sense of societal pressures. It’s a great way to live,” Edwina said. “She knows Mr. Muller, also. If he is Len Muller. He did a very high-class porn film once. It was never released. One of the male principals paid the director a fortune not to because he got a very important major movie role at the time.”
“Tom Cruise?” I asked.
“No. My lips are sealed. Although I do know who it is. Angela told me.”
“It will be weird if Cranston Muller is the man you know. And that your friend knows him, too. It is a small world, if I may use that cliché.”
Edwina said, “Oh, please do. I’m sure it is one and the same man.”
And it was.