Chapter 6
I wonder what Queen Victoria’s palm reader said to you that night, those years ago.
I wonder what she would have said to me, if I’d been courageous enough to ask.
LONDON, ENGLAND
There are angels around you. There are demons, too, but the angels are stronger.
See this line here? It’s your heart, strong but broken twice.
This one? Your fate. Also strong and deep.
You’ll enjoy good fortune, great success.
There is … there is something here in your lifeline I can’t quite read.
A—a violence. An interruption. An act not of your own will, but still one that slices straight through you.
You will survive it. The angels will ensure it.
Rita didn’t believe in angels. She’d seen enough of the antics of men to know that if there were such things as angels, guardian angels, they didn’t feel like helping out all that often.
Still, for months, years even, after Mademoiselle Thenaud’s murmured predictions about angels and demons and acts of violence—her head bent over Rita’s naked palm at that party, her index finger cool against Rita’s warm skin—sometimes she caught herself wondering.
She’d never seen an angel. She’d encountered some demons, though.
Even as a child, even before her menses had come and her breasts had grown and her little-girl softness had melted into firm adolescence, Rita came across men who took pleasure in hunting her.
A subtle stalking, yes: she was still a child of privilege, born of parents who had power, who knew people of even greater power still.
But after a certain age, certain men always followed her.
Certain men could be counted upon to show up wherever she went in Medmenham, to the greengrocer’s or the ribbon shop or the butcher.
Certain men felt free to leer at her, to come close enough to brush against her arm or her skirts, to press their palms against the small of her back, as if to herd her, to push her where they wanted her to go, as if they were sheepdogs and she was the sheep.
These men told her in false, flattering voices that she was so fair, as if she didn’t already know.
That her smile was so fetching. Her figure so sweet.
Her teeth were white as sugar, her hands were tender as swans.
They hovered over her and whined about her dark eyes demolishing them, her sultry gaze that demanded more, more, her cherry lips that wanted more, and well, she should just stop pretending, shouldn’t she?
Stop teasing them, because she knew she wanted more, just as they did …
Was she sixteen already? Already? Soon she’d be a wife, a solid country wife. What about a little fun before that? What else was there going to be for her, ever—even a conceited, half-foreign bitch like her, the eldest Jolivet girl who kept pushing their hands away?
There was a great deal more, as it turned out. A universe more, far away from those men, and if there was a secret angel in her life, someone beyond the circle of her own blessed family, it didn’t take long for Rita to figure out who it was.
CHARLES FROHMAN DID not take her to Broadway.
At least, not right away. Charles would, of course, be the man credited for eventually leading her there, but before any of that—before her American debut in one of his plays that would lead to international accolades, and her picture on posters, and the interviews, and all the silent motion-picture offers to come—before that was the layout in The Sketch.
Which had also been arranged by Charles.
He refused to allow her to call him Mr. Frohman. “We’re going to be good friends,” he told her not long after they’d been introduced at the supper party, but before Mademoiselle Thenaud and her unsettling predictions. “Friends call me Charles. The people who work for me call me Mr. Frohman.”
“I’d like to be the friend who works for you,” Rita said candidly, which made him laugh.
“My dear, let us watch and see how the planets align.”
He’d read the review of Good Girls, that infamous review with that infamous illustration of Rita, a small goddess practically floating off the page.
What’s more, he’d made it a point to quietly go and see the show before its unceremonious closing, to judge for himself if Miss Rita Jolivet was truly the crackerjack prodigy she seemed.
He’d never told her what he thought of her performance, and she never asked. But as he’d sought her out at the former Lady Churchill’s party, and as he’d invited her to his suite at the Savoy Hotel three times since, apparently she was skilled enough to hold his interest.
His professional interest, Rita emphasized to her mother, so Pauline wouldn’t harbor any unlikely ideas.
“I understand he has a special friend back in the States,” she’d added.
“Male or female?” Pauline asked.
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“Not even a little.”
Once a year, Charles Frohman, renowned theatrical manager and producer, traveled from his permanent suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel in New York to his other at the Savoy in London, scouting for fresh shows, for fresh talent, for any overlooked spark of beauty and ambition that he might bring back to America and shape in his favor.
He had a keen eye and ruthless spirit when it came to getting what he wanted.
If he needed to bribe a playwright to secure the performance rights for Broadway before, say, Toronto or Paris, he would.
If he needed to poach an actor from another manager to get him in Charles’s own stable, he would.
He had a round, boyish face (like a custard pie, my mother used to say, he’d chuckle) and merry gray eyes that belied the relentless ambition that steeled his spine.
He enjoyed gourmet sweets and wine, silk ascots, and diamond rings on both hands.
“What you really need right now,” he’d told her over tea in his private parlor one muggy spring afternoon, “is exposure.”
Rita tilted her head, waiting, a gold-rimmed Limoges plate holding a single scone and dollop of clotted cream balanced on her knees.
The cream was slowly settling into a puddle; the temperature inside was nearly as warm as outside, even with all the windows open.
An occasional breeze scented of the Thames trifled with the lace curtains, and the slant of sunlight cutting through them cast long, filigreed shadows across the floor and up the Egyptian-green plastered wall.
Della, the housemaid from the Bloomsbury apartment, sat discreetly in a corner chair nursing her own cup of tea, pretending not to eavesdrop as they spoke.
“Public exposure,” Charles was saying. “Not just your face, but your name. You’re not going to have a problem being cast again, not for the next three months at least. William Poel has already asked for an introduction.”
Rita nearly dropped her plate. “William Poel? Of the Elizabethan Stage Society?”
“The very same. He’s putting together his next production. Much Ado About Nothing.”
“Heavens—”
“If I recommend you, you’ll go to the audition, and you’ll be commendable enough, no doubt. But as of right now, no one around you, no one, is going look at you and have the slightest idea who you are. Do you understand me?”
“I suppose so?”
“Because the key to lasting success in this business, Rita, to genuine fame, isn’t luck or even necessarily talent.
It’s having the public recognize you right away, having them crave you, more and more of you, before they ever come to see you perform, before they ever read your name on a marquee.
You want them to eat you, drink you. Dream you.
You are their ambitions for fame and glory fulfilled.
You are the elusive key to a life of glamour.
You are every single one of them in their fantasies, young and irresistible.
When they’re in the audience, we don’t want them saying, Now, who is this girl?
But rather, Oh, it’s her, how lucky we are, what a treat. ”
Rita frowned at her hands, cupped around the delicate porcelain plate. “It all sounds very grand. But I can’t imagine how to make anyone look at me and think such things.”
“Why, it’s the simplest trick in the world, if not the cheapest. Most people have no notion of how easily influenced they are by what they read.
” The river breeze slipped by again, tilting the shadows; a pair of women somewhere outside near the windows were conversing in soft, feminine tones.
Charles sat back and dabbed his napkin to his forehead.
“Tell me, do you subscribe to The Sketch?”
“Yes.”
“So does everyone else. That’s where we’ll begin.”
THE IDEA BEHIND the photography session was to showcase Rita’s beauty and versatility in the simplest, most dramatic way possible.
Charles had reserved a full page in the magazine on her behalf, a layout that would feature her in a series of posed photographs demonstrating the Characteristic Dances of Various Nations.
She hadn’t known the theme until she’d arrived at the studio that morning.
Charles wasn’t in attendance; it was just Rita and the photographer and his two assistants.
(And Rita’s pearl-handled pistol in her reticule, just in case.
It was her first official publicity shoot, at a studio all the way across town in Cheapside.
Inez had made her promise to take it along, even though it wasn’t loaded …
which was funny, since Inez never carried her own.)
When Rita had pointed out that she wasn’t entirely familiar with the characteristic dances of various nations, the photographer, a burly man with a razor-thin moustache, told her it didn’t matter.
“You’ve seen an Irish lass before, yeah? A Frenchie? All you have to do is pose like you’d think they’d pose. The girls and I will take care of the rest.”