The sun was bright in a clear blue sky as I made my way to rehearsal. My call was before Kelvin and KT’s, so I was alone when I rounded the corner and saw the company sitting and standing on the stone steps outside. They all seemed to be reading newspapers. My heart thumped; sweat covered my top lip. Cedric had run my piece.
‘Eleanor, you are so bad.’ It was Glenda. ‘But what means this? “Dan was fired so often we called him Uzi”?’
‘I’ll explain later.’
‘It don’t matter… I just love what you say about me.’
To show her appreciation of being described as a living Venus, she embraced me in a cloud of scent as potent as her looks. God just smiled, held his hands together in a praying gesture and bowed his thanks. God rarely touched anyone except Glenda, as he was self-conscious about the psoriasis that crept across his skin as we neared performance – a touching vulnerability that undercut his peacock vanity.
The others in the group were equally enthusiastic, thrilled at my naughtiness – at least to my face. I immediately felt guilty for suspecting them of duplicity. They were just kids – Tizer, the Liza Minnelli look-alike – all trusting me to lead them to some sort of salvation.
‘Is it always like this?,’ asked my understudy, a girl barely old enough to remember my wig being made.
‘Only in musicals,’ I said. ‘It’s like childbirth: the final result is supposed to be worth the pain.’
We all laughed, more from companionship than amusement, and I went in to find our new director.
‘Ohmygod, Eleanor, Darling.’ Ricky Ricky greeted me with air kisses. ‘You have to meet Charlie and Brandon, my assistants.’
He was standing with two young men, both in shrink-wrapped black. Each was holding a notebook, in which they wrote their master’s inspirational thoughts.
‘What are we doing, Charlie?’
Charlie consulted his gospel and replied, with more sibilance than a leaking gas-pipe: ‘You’re restaging the opening scene with Eleanor first, Ricky.’
‘Uh huh.’ Ricky considered this as though it were a proposal to invade Syria. ‘Right. Okay, while we’re doing that you go tell the kids I want all the boys to wear black, tight, I want to see the contours, you got me? And the girls, colours, bright, no leg warmers and full make-up at all rehearsals – and tell them to diet, they gotta be beautiful. It’s too late to do anything about their teeth. My God, don’t they have dentists in England? Go tell them. And make a note, the ugly ones go at the back, okay?’
Trinny and Susannah dipped an obeisance to their master and wiggled off to tell our rag-tag chorus that they were to be transformed into Broadway gypsies before the afternoon call.
‘Ricky, why are we working on the opening scene? I’m not in it,’
I said innocently.
His fish eyes observed me with distaste while his mouth smiled and his limp hands took possession of my shoulders.
‘Eleanor…’ His face now assumed an expression of sincerity that would have been more suited to a bereavement. ‘Can we talk?’
He led me to a short staircase, the only one not festooned with dancers eating, changing clothes or queuing for auditions for other shows. We sat down. His bottom, threatening to split the leather that confined it, spread so its heat seeped through my trousers.
‘Eleanor, you know I love your work.’ I couldn’t return the lie so I said nothing. ‘And I know I’m going to love you.’ I couldn’t imagine a Spaniard or Italian saying such a thing. Americans really were foreign. ‘I’m going to transform you, and I need your ideas, Eleanor. You’re so creative, you’ve got such a perfect instinct, I want all your ideas.’
‘I’m sure you do,’ I said grimly. ‘But what’s to guarantee once I give them to you I won’t get fired?’ This obviously wasn’t in his script, so I cut across his half-formed objections: ‘And what’s this about the first scene, Ricky?’
He grabbed the lifeline with another rush of enthusiasm. ‘Oh, wow, Viola has done such a good rewrite.’
‘I look forward to seeing it.’
Having drawn a blank with me, even after he offered the confidence that he’d pulled out of the original production because he didn’t trust Izzy, Ricky didn’t see any difference between my earlier surliness and present anger.
‘You gotta understand, Eleanor, I had nothing, I mean nothing, to do with Dan being fired, but there’s only room for one director. That’s what my agent said.’ Rudolph had shown signs of independent thought? ‘He did the deal, believe me, it was none of my business.’ Thank you, Pontius Pilate.
The old deaf actor, Barry, was already in the stuffy rehearsal room reading my article when we walked in. He folded the paper fastidiously, put it in his bag and greeted us politely. I saw he already had the new scene. In the corner of the room, huddled on a stool, was Viola. She wouldn’t look at me. I was the only person who had no copy of the rewrite, but I wasn’t going to ask for one. The petty games had started and I was a grand master after a lifetime with David.
Ricky made a great play of finding me a new script, which Ruby delivered with a private shrug to me. I was just reading it through when Izzy burst in carrying a newspaper. I could see the rest of the cast, now joined by Lee and Susan, through the glass partition, spectators at my lynching.
‘Eleanor!,’ Izzy shouted, ‘this is great! It’s the greatest piece of journalism by an artist in a show I ever read. Great publicity. Just great, kid.’ I couldn’t work out whether he was unbelievably stupid or, having turned down the chance to read the copy, making the most of a hatchet job.
‘Thanks, Izzy.’ What else could I say?
Through the window I saw disappointment in Lee’s eyes. Susan was looking at me down her sharp little nose. Bitterly frustrated that she’d have to wait to see my fall.
Izzy fizzed with excitement as we started the rehearsal. Two things were quickly evident: the first, that the new lines were literally unspeakable; and the second, that Ricky had not a clue how to stage the scene.
Barry tried to help, coming up with suggestions for basic moves, and modifications to Viola’s illiterate lines. I simply sat with my face setting into a stone mask of what used to be called dumb insolence. I felt silly and childish, but it didn’t change my expression or break my silence. Trinny and Susannah took down Ricky’s inspirations, which included: ‘Eleanor could fly in on a catafalque,’ and, ‘Viola, what if Eleanor plays the whole scene behind a screen?’
This latter brought some joy to our writer’s sour face, until the deaf actor pointed out the only place for a screen was upstage and he’d be left in darkness with his back to the audience, which didn’t altogether suit an artist who’d spent a lifetime playing straight out front.
‘You don’t have to look at her,’ squeaked Viola. Even Ricky could see that was ridiculous, and the idea was abandoned. We were left with Dan’s original idea of my being brought on, down the staircase, on Tizer’s shoulders.
Viola hated it and screwed up her face to object. I got in first.
‘Sorry, Ricky, I don’t think you can use that. It was one of Dan’s ideas. You’d be infringing his intellectual copyright.’
I thought Viola was going to explode. I hoped she would, despite the mess it would make.
‘You shit,’ she hissed, as she ran from the room in yet another river of tears. Ricky and his amanuenses followed at the trot. Izzy clapped his hands in frustration, clamped the cigar into his cheek and followed his wife. The deaf actor and I were alone. He said nothing, but turned his back on me in silent disapproval.
‘Something wrong?,’ I asked, with more challenge in my voice than I’d intended.
‘No, no, darling, of course not. Is that the time? Do you think that’s a tea break?’ He scuttled out, rather than be caught with me.
I waited a while, but after half an hour I wandered out onto the street and sat on the steps chatting with the kids, who had been hanging round since ten o’clock. Ruby came out a couple of times for a smoke, his thin handsome face grey and hollow from a diet of cigarettes and Izzy Duck.
‘He couldn’t organise a piss-up in my local. And as for the Leather Queen in the Bandana, he has to have smelling salts every time I mention the word schedule. Sorry – skedule.’ He went into a cruelly accurate imitation of Ricky’s limp wrists and California lisp: ‘”Ohmygod, I’m an artist, I’ve worked with Cher, Elton, Madonna… I don’t deal with this kind of crap.” I tried to get sense out of Trinny and Susannah, but they’re so coked up they’re bouncing off the ceiling. So the LQIB goes, “Well, just call everyone in at ten a.m., that’s what they’re paid for.”’ Ruby took a long drag on his Marlboro Light. ‘Stupid cunt.’
The cast mooched about, in and out of the building, half-heartedly practising dance steps and getting more and more irritable, until Jonty arrived in a taxi and, with the briefest greeting, rushed into the rehearsal room.
Shortly after, Viola, Izzy, Ricky and Rudolph shot out and tumbled into the cab. We watched, neither interested nor surprised. Had they been on fire, it wouldn’t have raised more than an eyebrow any more. Jonty came out a few minutes later and stood pensively polishing his sunglasses and watching the traffic, as if expecting the cab to return.
‘Well, I was only called for the morning so I assume I’m done for the day,’ I said. ‘Are you going to the theatre?’
Jonty paused, then said, ‘Yes,’ drawing it out through a couple of Ms and a few inches of Ns.
‘Mind if I come along?’
We may not be previewing for another week but that was no reason to neglect the dressing-room. A free en suite pied-à-terre in central London was never to be neglected: so handy for dumping the shopping.
The cab was filled with companionable silence, apart from a couple of monosyllables when Jonty answered his mobile. Afterwards I could see by his cheese-eating grin he was bursting to say something.
‘What?’ I obliged.
‘I don’t think there’ll be any more rehearsals today,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Someone from the Home Office has left their card at the stage door – for Ricky Ricky’s urgent attention.’
•
That evening, I sat in the stage door pub with Ruby and Basher. Jonty joined us, sank a pint of Guinness, lit a panatella, sat back with a sigh and said:
‘Izzy Duck and party boarded the Eurostar for Paris at four o’clock this afternoon.’
We were so astonished no one said anything. Finally, Ruby broke the silence. ‘Fuck me, so he really didn’t have a work permit.’
‘Nope, and no doubt that’ll be my fault,’ said Jonty, not obviously worried by the prospect of another unjustified bollocking, nor about his twenty-five grand, which was now sitting on the other side of the Channel.
‘You were right, Eleanor.’ Ruby looked at me with something approaching admiration. I shrugged modestly. Being right was a novelty.
‘So when are they coming back?,’ I asked.
‘The day after tomorrow…?’