Stella, page 15
She shook his tough little hand and smiled. She felt good. Mike had arranged for her to borrow an imitation mink through the wardrobe girl at the theatre. Only an expert eye could have told it was a fake. Looking around the gathering there today she couldn’t envisage she’d be threatened by too many expert eyes.
There was one man who shone out among the rest. He was tall and good-looking in a suave, sophisticated way. She didn’t think these sort of people existed north of London, and when she spoke briefly to him she discovered she could still be right. He was American. His name was Bernard Goldman, and she wasn’t to know then that this man was to play the singularly most important role in her whole life. What she did know then was that he could well have had expert eyes.
The fashion show began, and the girls – and the occasional man – paraded through in their various costumes that would suit the oncoming season. Stella was attracted to a very smart grey outfit that clung daringly tight to the hips, accentuating the young model’s form. She saw Bernard Goldman eye her up and down as she walked past and decided that if it had that effect on good-looking men like him she was going to have to save up for one.
As judges, they had to give points between nought and ten for each outfit. The points were then collated at the end, and the outfit with the most points would obviously be the winner. But this aspect of the occasion wasn’t taken very seriously. The main purpose of the exercise was to show off the new designs and give the guests a chance to meet the designers. The model who was in the winning outfit was, however, allowed to keep it. A splendid little perk, too.
The grey suit came out the winner, so Stella hadn’t been alone in her choice. She wondered if she would be able to strike up a cash bargain with the model. ‘I see you’re admiring the winning outfit,’ remarked Bernard Goldman to her.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Stella, surprised by the sudden voice at her side. ‘She’s a very lucky girl to be keeping it.’
Other than the initial hello and inevitable goodbye that was to be the only conversation between the two of them for the time being.
The mayor made his excuses and left, and after a cup of tea and a sandwich or two, the other guests did likewise.
Stella returned to the Midland, trying to decide which she liked the most – the grey suit or Mr Bernard Goldman. As it happened, she wasn’t going to have to decide; she was going to get them both.
Woody’s end-of-run party hadn’t exactly gone off with the ‘bang’ they’d all expected. Perhaps it was because Nola’s death still hung over them like a dark cloud, or that every-one’s thoughts were on the forthcoming provinces before hitting London’s West End – or both.
When the curtain fell on the last night they all heaved a sigh of relief and hugged each other lovingly. It wasn’t so much because the show had been a great success that they showed such affection and delight – though the show had been a great success so far – it was more because they knew it was one down and two to go.
Henry Charles had mentioned to them at the party that he might consider – as the show was doing so well and receiving such wonderful notices – paying off Birmingham and Brighton and taking it straight into town to make the ‘big killing’, as he referred to it. But when Stella approached him next day about this he sounded less certain, and she could only assume that he’d contacted the two remaining provincials and discovered that their contract was more binding than he could remember. Most likely they were in for a share of the gross, and, having seen the success in Manchester, were in no mood to be ‘paid off’.
After the final show at the Opera House, Stella, as did all the artistes, went to change out of her working clothes for the last time there. ‘Some guests to see you, Stella,’ informed the doorman.
‘Oh. Who is it?’ she asked from within her dressing-room.
‘It’s us,’ replied two excited voices. ‘Sade and Tommy.’
Stella froze. She felt like a trapped animal with no possible way of escape. If she’d been holding a glass, now would have been the moment to drop it. ‘Can we come in?’ asked Sadie, not understanding what the delay was for. Stella dumbly nodded, then remembered they couldn’t see her with the door closed.
‘Yes, yes,’ she said, blankly. ‘Please come in.’
‘’Ello, ’ello, ’ello,’ Sadie said, and threw her arms warmly around her elder sister – a warmth that wasn’t returned.
‘Hello, Sadie,’ Stella greeted her coldly and, turning to Tommy, said in the same tone, ‘Hello, Tommy.’
‘Thought the show was knockout,’ he congratulated.
‘Thanks. I’m glad you enjoyed it. I didn’t realise you were coming to see it.’
‘Strange thing, that, about that girl getting bumped off, eh?’
Tommy’s just as blunt as ever, thought Stella.
‘Very unfortunate incident,’ she said. ‘I told you you’d be better off on your own,’ said Sadie, refusing to believe that her sister could possibly still hold a grudge against her for terminating their partnership.
‘I didn’t have a great deal of choice, the way I remember it,’ she said.
Tommy shuffled uneasily and took a step back – just like he always used to whenever that familiar glint appeared in Stella’s eyes. But Stella was more controlled these days and had no intention of causing a scene.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘What have you got?’ asked Tommy. ‘Have you a beer or anything?’
‘Only champagne.’
‘Our Colin had a bottle of that last Christmas,’ he said. ‘It sends folk daft, but then he’s always been daft, our Colin, hasn’t he?’
‘That would be lovely, Stella,’ said Sadie, unconsciously clutching at her sister’s sleeve. Stella had to yank quite hard to disconnect them.
‘We’ve heard you on the wireless,’ remarked Tommy. ‘So has Mrs Bennet.’
‘Mam and Dad mentioned you have a house of your own, now,’ said Stella.
Tommy beamed with pride. ‘Aye, we have. A corporation house in Willow Lane. Very nice it is, too. You’ll have to visit us when you’re not too busy.’
‘Yes, you must visit us,’ invited Sadie, far more insistently than Tommy.
‘That depends on work,’ Stella said, evasively. ‘After the revue is over in London I don’t intend being idle too long. I may take a short break – out to the country, or abroad, even. But then I’ll be back hunting down another part in a big show.’
After a little more formal conversation Tommy and Sadie took the hint and made to leave. ‘We’re catching a late train back,’ explained Tommy, ‘so it’s best we’re on our way, now.’
‘Do keep in contact, love,’ said Sadie – pleaded Sadie.
‘I’ll try,’ said Stella, and a tiny lump came to her throat. As her younger sister went to the door Stella said, ‘Sadie?’ Her sister paused and looked back inside.
‘Yes, love?’ she said, hopefully.
‘You take care, too.’
Sadie’s face broke into a smile. They were the best words she’d heard since Tommy said ‘I will’. She didn’t need to reply.
Stella listened as their footsteps faded down the corridor. After going into Milton’s dressing-room for a large malt whisky or two, she erased Sadie and Tommy from her mind once again. It took Tommy two hours and two hankies to stop his wife from crying.
There was a package addressed to Stella at the Midland when she finally returned there that night. She took it upstairs to her room. She hadn’t a clue what it could be, and wondered if it was a mistake. After all, she wasn’t even staying in Manchester after tomorrow morning. She tossed it on the bed and roughly tore off the brown wrapping-paper. Inside was the grey suit she had so admired on the model. There was no message with it.
Chapter Twelve
It was the first week in November 1937. Stella was twenty-three, a star, indeed one of Britain’s number-one box-office attractions. This meteoric rise to the giddy heights of fame and acclaim was solely attributable to the enormous success of the revue. Having done so well in the provinces, the show had come to the West End and had turned into a six-month sell-out blockbuster.
Everyone involved with it had done well from the good run – except for poor Nola – and was guaranteed regular work for the forthcoming year. But it was Stella who had emerged as its star, and she was guaranteed that if she did anything she wanted to do, an audience would pay to come and see her.
Understandably, she was quite thrilled at how her career had so unexpectedly soared. She’d seen the revue well received by press and public alike, but she hadn’t anticipated that it would be individually picked out as ‘the rose amongst the thorns of London theatre-land’, as one poetic reporter had worded it.
She was attractive, she was boundlessly talented, and she was ideal to fill the gossip columns of the time as torch-bearer of the revue. In fact, the papers often made it sound as though she’d brought the revue to London single-handedly. Henry Charles didn’t object. He merely rubbed his podgy hands together all the way to the bank.
She found being a star was not quite the joy she had once dreamt it would be. Mike Farrow was quick to point out that achieving stardom is rarely better than the hunting for it.
She went through a transitory period as she fought to build new routines into her new life. She could no longer behave quite as unrestrictedly as before. She couldn’t use public transport; tell the press where to shove their criticisms (not without it being used as a quote); walk down Shaftesbury Avenue looking at the billboards without wearing a hat and dark glasses; or accepting she’d be mobbed by irreverent autograph hunters if she didn’t.
The pleasures were that she no longer had financial difficulties; she didn’t have to rent flats in Brixton; and she could shout back at management if she disagreed with them.
In the early part of 1937 she’d taken some time off to rest and reflect on her position. It was on the advice of Henry Charles that she’d done so, and it was the best thing she could have done. When she returned some weeks later she was revitalised, and still capturing the imagination of a nation of theatregoers – and the inevitable gossip-columnists.
Journalists hounded her when and wherever: ‘Stella Raven – the Lancashire Hot Pot – [that was what they had dubbed her] has been reputed to have bought a six-bedroomed mansion in Knightsbridge. She has a swimming pool, a butler and many lavish furnishings. Neighbours say she holds wild parties there most nights, but they never complain as she is willing to sing for them from her bedroom window.’
She would chuckle at such write-ups. The six-bedroomed mansion was a three-bedroomed flat; the swimming pool was more a communal bath with predominantly green, stagnant water, and the butler a porter employed to service the needs of the whole block. She’d had only one party in the six months she’d been in possession of the flat, and to her knowledge it hadn’t been a particularly wild one. And she couldn’t recall ever having sung for the neighbours, though she had once played a long-playing demonstration record of herself on the gramophone just to hear that it was all right before it went on release. Such was the press in her life at this time.
Henry had given her a substantial cash advance to enable her to purchase the flat. He’d also gone about arranging her private use of the company accountant – at her own expense, of course.
Her contact with Milton Keens had become non-existent. His problems with Jane Butterworth, it seemed, had not yet resolved themselves. Stella had received one letter from him since the show’s conclusion, to which she had replied. He mentioned Jane only once, and spent the rest of the two sheets talking about his new role in a play that ‘makes a pleasant change from those blessed dance routines Woody put me through’. And that had been all.
That was back in June, and now she hardly thought about him, or anything else, for that matter. Her biggest concern was her forthcoming pantomime – Dick Whittington – in which she was to star at the Empire, Leeds, commencing December the twelfth, and hopefully not finishing until some time late in March of the following year.
When she did think of Milton she couldn’t help picturing him sitting in the small terraced house in Oldham, with Jane hovering in the background holding a pot of tea and a bald, red-faced baby bouncing up and down on his lap, while Adolf fired ink-pellets from somewhere across the room. She found it silly she should think like that. She couldn’t even be certain if he’d moved in with Jane.
A taxi delivered Stella to the front steps of Henry Charles’ office. She paid the driver, giving him a sizeable tip, and hurried inside, shielding her face to avoid being recognised by passers-by. If people did recognise her and approach, she would always joke with them and sign her name – sometimes on various parts of the anatomy, if so desired, but normally on paper.
‘You should advertise for an assistant,’ said Henry, when Stella had told him how tiring it was trying to keep her flat in order; deal with the press; do her work, and so on.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said, ‘but if I advertised, I’d end up with about two thousand applicants, one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine of which would not be getting the job.’
Henry chewed this over for a moment as he paced the room. He also chewed his fat cigar over. It played like a pork sausage on his lips, asking to be devoured. ‘If I could get a short-list drawn up,’ he finally said, ‘I could say something about one of our artistes – no specific names mentioned – requires a personal assistant; a domestic help. That sort of thing.’
‘That’d be great, Henry, and it would save me another chore.’
‘Well, I don’t want you overdoing it, Stella,’ he ordered, as if he was her doctor. ‘You’ve got Whittington coming up. I don’t want you tired out with nervous exhaustion.’
‘I wouldn’t do such a thing,’ she said, with mock-indignation. ‘I’m far too professional.’ They shared a laugh and Mike Farrow bounded in as if it had been to summon him.
‘This sounds a joyous place. Mind if I move in permanently?’
‘We’ve got to find Stella a live-in help,’ said Henry, deliberately curtailing Mike’s usual preamble.
Mike gave an easy shrug. ‘Shouldn’t be difficult,’ he said. ‘People are always after those kind of jobs. Jean – my wife –’ He always explained who she was whenever her name came up in conversation, just in case they might have forgotten. ‘She’s got this friend who’s just taken on someone who’s supposed to be brilliant.’
‘Fine,’ said Henry, ‘but that doesn’t really help Stella much, does it?’
‘It could do,’ argued Mike. ‘The thing is,’ he explained, ‘that they are all a bit like us in showbusiness; they stick together.’
‘Can you fix me an interview with one of them?’ asked Stella. ‘I mean, that’s all I want to know.’
‘Sure, I can.’
‘So that’s that taken care of,’ said Henry with finality.
‘Please sit down, Miss –’ Stella checked the sheet of file paper in her hands ‘– Baxter.’ The woman sat down and rested her hands together on her lap. Stella thought her to be anything between thirty-five and forty-five; the type who seemed to be born old and grow younger.
She was smartly dressed – about twenty years out of fashion, though – wore little make-up, and her skin was taut and very dry. She didn’t wear a wedding ring. ‘Well, Miss Baxter, as you know through Mr Farrow, I’m looking for a supportive hand.’
‘Aye, that’s right,’ she responded, in her flat northern voice. Stella briefly wondered if Mike had chosen her because of her northern background.
‘May I ask your first name?’
‘It’s Annie, love.’
‘Can I call you Annie?’
‘Yes love – it’s my name.’ She smiled a warm and simple smile. Her naturalness rather touched Stella. Annie reminded her of one of her aunts.
Stella was probably more nervous than Annie. She’d never had to interview anyone before. ‘It’s been cooler just lately,’ she remarked, as she tried to gain some time.
‘Aye, it has,’ replied Annie. ‘It’s probably the weather,’ she said, seriously. ‘They do say “it’s an ill wind that blows nobody”.’ Stella hadn’t heard that one before.
‘Er, yes. Now, have you ever worked for anyone in show-business before?’
Annie placed an index finger over her lips as she tried to recall. ‘Just the once,’ she got round to saying. ‘I was a daily for a woman whose husband was an announcer on the wireless. He had a smashing voice,’ she reflected. ‘A very proper man, indeed.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. I’m not having you on.’
‘No, I know you’re not, Annie.’ What an eccentric woman she had found herself.
She decided to direct the conversation back to the purpose of the interview. With Annie it was all too easy to diversify in several directions at once. ‘You understand what I would be expecting of you,’ she said, ‘were I to accept your services?’
Annie smiled inanely back, and Stella could see her as the sort who would’nt object to any work as long as she was treated well. ‘It’ll be no easy job; there’ll be no fixed hours. Each week will take care of itself, and I won’t be able to say what time you can have off until that week has started.’ Still no response from Annie; just the smile. ‘You’d get a good wage to compensate for the long hours.’ Annie didn’t flinch at the words ‘good wage’, which surprised her prospective employer.
Then Annie finally spoke. ‘What about men?’ Stella’s eyes widened.
‘Men?’ she said. ‘What about men, Annie?’
‘That’s what I just asked.’
‘Oh, I see. You’re married. Actually, I didn’t realise you were ma—’
‘I’m not married,’ she said, firmly. ‘And I never will be. I live by the old saying.’ Stella awaited the ‘old saying’. It didn’t come.
She just said, ‘Oh, right’, and let Annie continue.
‘And drink,’ she said. ‘I don’t drink. Nor smoke. I don’t smoke.’ She narrowed her eyes as she tried to remember anything else she didn’t do.
