Chapter 10
How happy we were. How swiftly the years winged away from us, one after another. We traveled so much, lived so much. Sometimes in my memory I can hardly separate one city from another; I confuse Lisbon with Budapest, or Florence with Milan.
Other times I recall moments, fragments of moments, with such vivid clarity, it’s as if I’m living them again, my heart beating, my voice speaking, my blood pumping, just as it happened back then.
Standing beside him at the edge of Lake Como, squinting out at the dark waters, trying to finish our gelato before it melted, orange and sticky, down our fingers.
Saint Petersburg in the winter, when, in the lobby of our chic hotel, he presented me with a fur hat with flaps around the ears, and the flaps were so long I looked like a cocker spaniel. Neither of us could stop laughing. The staff thought us quite drunk.
Athens, at the Parthenon, when he whispered to me beneath the stars that I was surely more beautiful than Athena, and I smacked him on the arm and told him to hush, because it was never a good idea to make the gods jealous.
Taking my bow at the Met after my debut performance.
Stealing a glance at him, standing in the wings, as I rose.
He held an enormous bouquet of pink roses in his arms, the biggest bouquet I’d ever seen.
Autumn Damasks, they’re called, so richly perfumed their fragrance ended up saturating the entire apartment. I made a sachet from their petals.
If you look, it’s still beneath my pillow.
JUNE, 1914
NAPLES, ITALY
A bank of sapphire clouds was unfurling along the southern edge of the Bay of Naples, great boiling plumes that devoured the line between sky and sea, blending all to blue.
A breeze skated the bay waters, fitful, pushed by the clouds.
To the east loomed the heavy cone of Mount Vesuvius, green and slate and amethyst, ringed by a haze along its base, one that stretched long arms all the way down into the city, making silvery shapes of the medieval cathedrals and castles and cream-and-ocher buildings that lined the piazzas and winding stone roads.
“An enchanted view,” said Charles Frohman, standing at the edge of Rita’s rooftop terrace, holding a glass of dry white wine. “An ancient city. I can understand how you’d not want to leave.”
“It’s ancient, all right,” she said, pouring her own glass from the carafe on the table in the middle of the terrace.
“Catherine de’ Medici is said to have danced with her Henry in the grand hall below us, and I can well believe it.
The roof leaks and the plumbing barely functions and there are cracks in the floors deep enough to lose a silver dollar. Don’t drop any loose change.”
He laughed, looking back at her with one foot braced against the rim of the low wall lining the edge. “Even so …”
“Yes, I know. Even so.”
Even so, Rita’s Italian flat stood within kissing distance of the bay, right above Via Partenope, crowded with donkeys and autos and yachtsmen, dandified fellows with too much money and likely not enough wives, on their way to and from the slips cradling their sleek, waterbound homes.
On clear days, the horizon stretched nearly to infinity.
If she stared at it long enough, the corners of her vision would prickle and dissolve until she lost sight of everything but that blue.
Rita took up her glass, joined Charles at the edge.
It was a pleasant afternoon despite the mist, an idyllic warm Italian summer, and the air carried the scent of rosemary and citrus and a coming rain.
She’d lived here for nearly a year. She knew from experience that the rain might tease and tease along the horizon, but would likely only roll in across the waves much later, carried along by the dusk.
Her skirts plastered against her legs, flicked forward again. By the doorway to the apartment’s interior, a pair of terracotta planters held clusters of white-and-yellow daisies, their sweet faces nodding.
“It suits me,” she said. “For now.”
“You’re well cocooned.”
“Cocooned from what?”
“Everything beyond. Beyond this mist, beyond this country. Politics and posturing.”
“Believe me, Charles, there’s no escaping politics, even here.
The papers go on and on about it. The French seethe over the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine.
The Serbians despise the Austrians over Bosnia.
Wilhelm versus Edward, and the ungodly amounts of money they’re both burning through in their race to control the seas and straits. ”
“E la bella Italia, caught in the middle of it all, everyone holding their breath. You’re a butterfly in a bottle.”
“Hardly that! As I said, I do read the papers—I’m not a complete na?f—and I’m out and about nearly every day. The photoplays are shot one after another with barely any pause, you know. Even so, I follow the news. I care about what’s happening. Here and abroad.”
He turned his head, gave her an appraising look.
In the years that had passed between them, he as mentor, she as acolyte, the celebrated Charles Frohman appeared nearly the same as the first time they’d met, back at the Cornwallis-West party.
Back when he’d first sought her out in the crowd and said, so very casually, Ah, Miss Jolivet, how’d-you-do. I saw your play, you know.
Round face, keen eyes. Perhaps a little less hair that had gone a little more gray.
He’d changed her life back then. She hadn’t fully realized the extent of it, the power of the force behind his will to bend her path, but he had.
She might have been a star plucked from the heavens, destined to simply drop to the earth.
In fact, maybe she still was. But how bright he’d made her trail.
How brilliantly she shone because of him and all that he’d envisioned for her.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” she said, softening her tone, drawing him away from the roof’s edge. “I’ve missed you. Lucky for me you’re on holiday for a bit.”
“Not a holiday. A mission.”
“A mission! How mysterious.”
They returned to the tiled table, set their wine upon a surface painted with plump lemons and nightingales.
There was bread and cheese laid out by Rita’s very efficient maid, prosciutto and grapes and a shallow bowl of bright green olive oil dusted with herbs for dipping.
The woven runner beneath the bread basket shivered along its edges, the breeze tugging.
“Tell me.” Charles smoothed his hands along the table. Nails clipped, neat, tidy, exactly as she would expect. “How are your photoplays coming along?”
“Well, I hope.”
“You’re sorely missed back in London, I’m told. And certainly back on Broadway. I haven’t had another hit like Kismet since you left.”
“You’re very kind.”
“Don’t be coy, darling. I’m asking about your schedule.”
She sat up, taken aback. “I’m not being coy.
Fata Morgana is wrapped, and as far as I know, the director was pleased.
Zvani is nearly done, only a few reshoots planned.
I have Cuore ed arte coming up next week.
So, again, I’m not coy, Charles. I really do think it’s going well.
” She gave a small shrug. “The Ambrosio Company likes me.”
“We all like you.”
“Thank you, but they like me in their films. Honestly? It’s a relief to get away from the routine of putting on a show every night.
My Italian isn’t what it should be, I know, but I’m getting better by the day.
And it hardly matters for the sake of the moving picture, since the title cards will be in English for most of the audiences, anyway. ”
He studied her, unblinking, and Rita felt a flush of shame.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love the theatre, and I know you put me there.
I loved Poel and Shakespeare. I loved being in Kismet, and the rest. I loved the Knickerbocker, and I loved the applause, and the crowds whenever I tried to duck out the back of the building.
You put me on Broadway and shone the light on me, Charles.
You, and you alone. But these photoplays. My time here. This is something else.”
“The Italian silver screen,” he whispered dramatically, looking up, wiping a hand across the sky between them. The diamonds in his rings twinkled. “Better than Hollywood!”
“Maybe not better,” she said, nettled. “But something. Something new and—well, and mine.”
“What if I could make Hollywood yours, too?” He chose a slice of focaccia from its basket, dredged it in the shimmer of olive oil. “Come, now. Italy is a beautiful dream, another stepping stone along your path, but is there really anything besides the dream to keep you here?”
Rita hesitated, then plucked free a red grape from its cluster. “Possibly one thing.”
“One thing. One person, do you mean?”
She shrugged once more, deliberate, then bit into the grape, a burst of cool sweetness.
“I see. But is this person more important than Cecil B. DeMille?” Rita looked up sharply, and Charles smiled.
“Yes, him. Director General of the Lasky Feature Play Company. You might recall he was once one of my actors. Right now he’s in California preparing to make a motion picture I think uniquely suited to your talents, a four-reel feature to be called The Unafraid.
I’ve already mentioned your name for the lead.
A brave young heiress who unwittingly falls in love with two noble brothers, one good, one evil.
” He leaned forward, dropping his voice back into that dramatic whisper. “Who will prevail?”
Who, indeed.
JUST OVER A year ago, Rita had found herself one of the most popular leading ladies on Broadway, drowning in accolades and fawning fans, and she was cold and alone and exhausted.