DIANE HAD ALWAYS BEEN ambivalent about the effect she had on men. She had long ago discovered that if she looked at a man in a certain way, met his eyes at a particular moment with a kind of knowing intensity, she could walk inside his head and usually, in no time at all, reduce him to a state of quivering and malleable infancy. This wasn't among the tricks of the trade that she had learned at drama school in London or, after that, in repertory where she'd leapfrogged the customary starter parts, those nameless and lineless ladies-in-waiting and girls-in-the-crowd, to be cast, from the outset, in speaking roles. The talent to attract was most likely innate, from some remote ancestor, for she had trouble imagining that it had ever been anything other than latent in her parents.
It took her some years to understand the other side of the contract, namely that heterosexual men, however much they protested that all they desired was friendship, inevitably had sex in mind. And Diane's pleasure in the power this invested in her was tinged only by a weary disappointment that it appeared to be the way of things, that men should be so tragically and predictably primitive.
She was aware that those who thought they knew her, even some of her closest friends in London, believed that because she liked to flirt and to relish the effect she had on men, she must therefore be promiscuous. It wasn't so, however. In the five years that followed Tommy's birth, the very thought of repeating with someone else what she had done with David Willis in the musky Malvern bracken had repelled her. This wasn't because the act had proved less than rapturous or because it had become too entwined in her memory with all the consequent trauma. It was more because of a sense of obligation to Tommy, a feeling that, despite the charade that she and her parents had chosen to play for fear of scandal, to allow another man to know her so intimately again would be a betrayal of her responsibilities as a mother. The fact that, to all practical purposes, she had ceded these to her own mother in no way diminished this.
During these years, the men who pursued her—mostly actors, directors and producers but also a few who had no connection with her work—frequently ended up bemused and disgruntled. They found it impossible to fathom how, having seemed so eager for their attentions, when it came to the final act, Diane Reed wasn't prepared to perform. On many occasions these poor, injured creatures (men's pride in these matters, she soon discovered, was quite hilariously fragile), having invested time and emotion and probably several expensive dinners, would accuse her of being frigid or heartless or—what to them was clearly the most damning insult—a cock teaser.
When, finally, she did allow herself to go the whole way once more with a man, it was more from a casually rekindled curiosity about sex than from passion. She was pleased to discover that disillusion wasn't inevitably part of the package. But neither, it seemed, was love. Perhaps love, she thought, of whatever complexion, was finite, each of us allotted just a certain amount to spend on what or whom we chose.
If so, in Diane's case, all of it was spent on Tommy. She would travel home to see him whenever she could, talk to him on the phone even before he had uttered his first words. When she was on tour, in some far-flung provincial town, she would hurry to the station after the Saturday night performance and catch the last train so that she might spend even just a day with him.
Pretending that she was simply his loving older sister became harder with the passing of each year. And watching the weary way her mother treated the boy, as if everything she had to do for him was a burden, made Diane feel ever more guilty and wretched. If she dared voice so much as a minor criticism, her mother would point out that the charade had been of Diane's own making. And this would usually be garnished with some snide reference to the carefree, hedonistic, even decadent life that their arrangement had liberated her to lead.
The fact that Tommy was turning out to be what even a doting, albeit clandestine, mother had to admit was an unusual, if not slightly odd, child only served to deepen the guilt. His every foible—the bed-wetting, the tireless obsession with cowboys and Indians, the way he whimpered in his sleep and woke up screaming and often talked out loud to himself and to his pictures of Flint McCullough, the bullying at Ashlawn—all this and more she attributed to her absence and to the face-saving lie in which she had conspired. And, gradually, this had come to cast a shadow on her success.
She loved the adulation, of course, the standing ovations, the glowing reviews, the stage door scuttle and bustle and pop of the flashbulbs. But part of her stood to one side, watching it with what almost amounted to derision. And this tendency to disengage worried her because sometimes it happened on stage. When Fortune's Fool was the hottest show in London and the whole world seemed to be talking about it, she would find herself, even in the play's most dramatic moments, thinking how ridiculous it all was. All these grown-up human beings pretending.
Oddly, this never seemed to affect her performance. Or rather, nobody ever seemed to notice. And, of course, she never dared mention it to anyone because nowadays real acting was about being, not pretending. The Old School of Fakery was closing down, the grand thespians—Gielgud, Redgrave, even Olivier—with their knighthoods and mannerisms and tremulous intonations mocked as ailing dinosaurs. All the young directors and actors were talking about Stanislavsky and Lee Strasberg and the Method and about how the only route to real, honest, meaningful acting was through tapping into some deep and personal emotional memory and reconjuring it in the heart and head of whatever character you had been called upon to inhabit.
Diane had always been as good as any of her peers at doing this. And the emotional memories she tapped into, be they joyful or traumatic, had invariably been connected with Tommy. While many of her peers needed eyedrops or menthol puffed into their eyes, Diane could summon tears at a moment's notice, simply by thinking of her lost son. In the early days of Fortune's Fool she had even exploited his unhappiness at Ashlawn, kept his most wretched and despairing letter in her pocket to read in the wings before her final tragic scene. Now, however, just as she was finding fame, the idea of using him as a resource for her own ends made her feel ashamed. The irony was almost laughable. She had succeeded in what she had always wanted: to have a child as well as a career. And yet it now seemed impossible fully to enjoy either.
That the solution to this conundrum might be the love of a good man was not a sudden revelation, for the lack of logic would then have been too blatant. It was more of a slow coalescence of ideas, a sort of sprawling resolve, that if she were to meet a man she could love, who might be ready to share the responsibility, she would then be in a strong enough position to do the right thing: to reclaim her son and thereby, at a stroke, eradicate her guilt and his unhappiness.
Whether there had been something about Ray Montane, when she'd first laid eyes on him, that suggested the moment might be at hand, Diane would never be sure.
They had met in June, on her first trip to Hollywood, after Fortune's Fool closed its six-month run in London. Herb Kanter had organized a screen test in London. It was just a formality, he said. The suits at Paramount and, just as important, Gary Cooper needed to get an idea of what she was like.
The test, as far as Diane was concerned, was a disaster. She wasn't a complete novice in front of the camera. She'd been in a couple of small, very British, films and some TV plays and knew a little about the difference between stage and screen acting, how intimate the camera was, how much your eyes mattered, how less was invariably more. But on the day of the screen test, all of this seemed to fly from her head.
In a shabby corner of Elstree Studios, where Herb (who in his shiny black jacket that day looked even more like a sea lion) sat watching from behind his glasses, Diane acted out a scene from the screenplay of Remorseless with a young actor—clearly hired more for his price than his talent—playing Gary Cooper's part. They did it seven or eight times, each one worse than the last, as Diane got angrier and angrier with herself. When it was over, she managed to laugh about it and stayed for a while to chat and smoke a cigarette. But as soon as she was in the taxi, heading home, she burst into tears and cried all the way back to Paddington. It had been her big break and she'd blown it.
Only later did she find out that Herb had cunningly told the cameraman to keep rolling and that what had clinched it for the suits was her natural, riotous, self-deprecating performance after she thought the test had ended. When Gary Cooper saw it, he apparently declared her a knockout. Everyone was eager to meet her and as soon as she was free from the play, she was flown out, first class, to Hollywood.
It was a two-week whirlwind of meetings and parties, lunches and dinners. She met managers and agents, publicity people and studio executives. Just about the only person she didn't meet was Coop, as everybody seemed to call him. Their planned lunch at the Paramount commissary was canceled because of what Herb said were unexpected and unavoidable family matters. Coop sent his apologies in a sweet handwritten note saying how much he was looking forward to working with her.
Diane was offered a three-picture deal, starting at eight hundred dollars a week which her newly acquired LA agent, Harry Zucker—an elegant little man who wore bow ties and a trademark white gardenia in his buttonhole—managed to hoist to a thousand. Diane would happily have worked for nothing. In celebration, at the end of her first week in Hollywood, Harry held a party for her at the agency offices on Sunset. And in walked Ray Montane.
He hadn't been invited. He just happened that same evening to be visiting his own agent who had brought him along. Diane noticed him as soon as he entered the room. Had he been wearing a cowboy hat, she might have recognized him, for she tried to keep up with Tommy's TV westerns and knew most of his heroes, including Red McGraw, from the pictures on his walls. Tonight, however, Red was out of uniform. All Diane saw was a tall man, lean and tanned, dressed in an open black leather jacket, a white snap-buttoned shirt and black jeans (she couldn't yet see the hand-tooled cowboy boots). His dark hair was cropped short, with long sideburns, and he had the kind of craggy good looks that made his age hard to pinpoint. Somewhere in his mid-thirties, she guessed. What was clear, even across the room, was that he had presence, the kind of easy confidence that Diane had always found attractive.
Harry made a little speech, funny and sweet, saying how thrilled and proud he and everybody at the agency were to be representing England's new and bright young star, Miss Knockout (the nickname had already been in the trades), Diane Reed. He toasted her and everyone clapped and Diane said a few suitably modest but charming words—just the way Audrey Hepburn would have done it—and, as she wound up, found herself smiling at the man standing by the door, giving him that knowing look that had launched a thousand ships of frustration back home. Ray Montane returned the smile and raised his glass in an intimate toast of his own and Diane shocked herself by blushing, something she hadn't done since she was twelve years old.
By the end of the following week, after a series of long, late dinners at Ciro's and Romanoff's, walks along the beach, dancing at the Mocambo, her room at the Beverly Wilshire so full of Ray Montane's flowers that it looked like a greenhouse, England's newest and brightest young star found herself, for the first time in her life, in love.
He had a sort of old-fashioned and irresistible cowboy charm and at the same time was hip enough to know about the latest rock-and-roll bands. In fact he knew and hung out with some of them. He even knew Jack Kerouac. And he was kind and attentive and interesting and, most important of all, he made her laugh. He was also the most confident and accomplished lover she had known. In their lovemaking there was sometimes a frisson of danger that Diane, to her surprise, found herself excited by.
On her last evening in Hollywood, on the terrace of his sumptuous house in the hills, under a tree of fairy lights, Ray Montane asked her to marry him. And she said no.
"Is that no as in never?"
"No. Just no as in now."
They were sitting side by side and she took his hand and held it in both of hers and said she had something important to say. And she told him about Tommy. He listened without once taking his eyes off her. And as she finished—by now, naturally, in tears—saying it was her dream that one day, one day soon, she could be a proper mother to the boy, be openly his mother, for all the world to see, and do for him what she should have been doing all these years, Ray held her face in his big brown hands and kissed her tears and looked her in the eyes and said simply: "What's stopping you? Let's do it. Do it right now."
He told her that he had been married once before but was now divorced. His wife, an actress called Cheryl, had suffered from acute depression. He had longed for kids, he said, but she hadn't wanted them. She'd remarried, found a good psychiatrist and now lived, more or less happily, in Oregon.
In the two and a half months that followed Diane's revelation to Tommy that she was his mother, Ray had been calm and strong. He flew back from LA and they rented a cottage in the countryside near Pinewood Studios. The three of them lived there in a kind of limbo between bliss and pain while all the arrangements were made for their move to California. Diane's mother made everything as difficult and acrimonious as possible. But with the help of some expensive London lawyers and Ray's dogged diplomacy, they managed. Signed statements were made so that Tommy's birth certificate could be officially altered. They got him a passport and organized an American visa. Ray insisted on paying all the bills.
What clinched it for Diane was seeing how good he was with Tommy, how patient and caring and full of fun. And once the boy was over his shyness and the shock of living with one of his TV heroes, he began to blossom. Watching the two of them from the cottage window, laughing and joking and chasing each other around the garden, was sometimes almost too much for Diane to bear and she would well up with tears. This was what she had longed for. They were a real family. Always one to examine the cloud around any silver lining, she asked herself whether she'd been too hasty, whether her guilt and desire to make things right for Tommy had made her commit to this man too deeply and too soon. But all the evidence spoke only of how fortunate she was to have found him.
Julian, her London agent, was deluged with offers. Every producer in England seemed to be after her. But Diane turned every one of them down. The only role she wanted, until Remorseless started shooting in December, was to be a proper, full-time mother to her son. She would be there for him whenever he needed her, play with him, cook for him, take him to his new school and pick him up again in the afternoons, do all the things forbidden by those long years of deceit.
Ray had to fly back to Los Angeles for some meetings two weeks before Diane and Tommy were due to leave. She ached inside, almost made herself sick, from missing him. On their first evening together, back on his terrace in the hills, LA twinkling below them like a million promises, Tommy asleep in his new bedroom, Ray pulled a little suede box from his pocket and handed it to her. The ring was in rose gold with an entwined D&R in sapphires set in a square bed of diamonds. The fit was perfect. They planned to be married at Christmas.