Harriet Evans - Not Without You

I pull the rug over me, snuggling down so I’m as comfy as I can be and as hidden away as I can make myself. The black-and-white figures on the screen seem to glow in the darkening room. A world I can lose myself in where everything is, like the line says, fine and noble. I stare hard at the screen, sharp tears pricking my eyes.

‘ I know, Captain. But I won’t leave them here to die. I simply won’t. ’ I’m mouthing along with her, watching her perfect rosebud mouth, the dark, intelligent eyes that hint at something but never quite tell you what their owner is thinking. ‘ I’m standing up for something I believe in. I’m trying to do something fine and noble in this awful mess. I’m trying to do something wonderful. ’

Where is she? I look around our house, wondering how she came to lose her life here. How maybe I have mislaid mine.

I’ll be around

Hollywood, 1958

EVERYONE WENT TO Romanoff’s. It had started life as a small bistro on the Sunset Strip, run by His Imperial Highness Prince Michael Alexandrovich Dimitri Obolensky ‘Mike’ Romanoff (otherwise known as Harry Gerguson, a small-time crook from Brooklyn). I never did find out where he acquired his knowledge of Russian aristocracy or English country houses – he was able to describe the guest bedrooms at Blenheim Palace in detail to me. Perhaps the library at Sing Sing was particularly well stocked. But despite the fact that he was a crook, and the food was middling to fair at best, everyone went there. When I say everyone, of course I mean stars. By the time I was first taken there, it was well established in Rodeo Drive. Almost two years had elapsed since I came to Hollywood but it was still the place to go and be seen.

One fresh evening in March, Gilbert and I drove there for supper. We were both feeling extremely happy, on top of the world, in fact. We had just that day completed the purchase of a house just off Mulholland Drive called Casa Benita: a sprawling white clapboard bungalow high in the Hollywood Hills, complete with tennis court, swimming pool and suitably impressive views. We had looked at places in Beverly Hills, but I wanted to be able to see the city, not be right in the thick of it.

You were part of the club if Mike waved you into Romanoff’s without a reservation. I had seen him turn away millionaire oil barons, nouveau riche Valley residents, and New York society matrons by the dozen. Aspiring producers, new punk actors, hotshot directors – all were shown the door. Yet Gilbert and Mike were old pals, and at some point Gilbert had obviously helped His Imperial Highness out. Whenever we turned up, there was no problem.

‘Get a table for Mr Travers and Miss Noel. Snap to it, boys. Miss Noel, may I take your coat— Who, those sons of bitches? Fat fucks from Wyoming – get rid of them.’

Gilbert was always in a good mood at Mike’s. His old cronies were there, the rest of the original Rat Pack that had hung around Bogie when he was alive. A lot of people had deserted Gilbert when he came back to Hollywood after the war. It was the way of these things: they called him a hero, but the truth was he’d been out of pictures for five years, was heavier and older and things had changed. The audience had moved on, and Gilbert Travers’s brand of charming English gent wasn’t what American teenagers were looking for. I winced whenever we passed a billboard for Jailhouse Rock. Gilbert hated Elvis, with a passion that was almost violent.

As we sat down at a discreet banquette, an executive from the studio with whom I’d dealt on my last film, The Boy Next Door , passed behind us. ‘Great work on the Life magazine spread, Eve,’ he said. ‘Mr Baxter’s delighted they chose to run the feature about you.’

‘Two White Ladies.’ Gilbert flicked his hand to the waiter. ‘They’re lucky to have her,’ he told the executive. Then he gestured to one of the shots on the wall behind us, me arriving at Romanoff’s after the premiere for Helen of Troy the previous year in my white Grecian goddess gown, gold sandals, gold jewellery, real gold thread in my hair from the Welsh Valleys and spun into a beautiful diadem especially for me, reflecting my mother’s Welsh heritage. (Mummy was a vicar’s daughter from Berkhamsted, but the publicity department never allowed the facts to obscure a good story.) On one side of me stood Cliff Montrose, my co-star, and on the other, his arm around me, Joe Baxter. ‘Look at you, my dear,’ Gilbert said. ‘Many more such nights to come, I’m sure.’

His hand lightly pressed my arm, and I gazed up at him.

When the studio ‘suggested’ we go on a date together, I’d leapt for joy with excitement, but then demurred. It was well known in Hollywood that Gilbert Travers had a drinking problem. Margaret Heyer, his second wife, had left him and gone back to England three years ago; Confidential and Photoplay had still been full of it when I’d arrived here. He was a drunk; he beat her; she’d run out of the house naked, screaming, to be rescued by a zoologist who happened to be down on Wilshire Boulevard – which was a neat coincidence as Margaret Heyer’s latest film was about a young wife who goes to the Congo and falls in love with a zoologist. (The publicity machine at work again; Hollywood wasn’t ever that original in its ideas. Even I’d learned that, by then.)

But I thought about it some more and I felt sorry for him. I couldn’t help it. Gilbert had enlisted the day Great Britain went to war with Germany, had seen his friends killed, had caught dysentery and nearly died, and had come back to Hollywood to find film stars who’d never fought a day in their lives playing war heroes and lapping up the adulation of an admiring public. He never talked about the war to me, and after a few cock-eyed attempts to find out more, which he rebuffed angrily, I never asked him again. I understood, at least I thought I did. We both had secrets, things we weren’t to tell each other, and it was for the best.

The cocktails arrived and Gilbert lit our cigarettes. ‘Well, my dear,’ he said. ‘This is quite a red-letter day. Our house, us together. Are you excited?’

I looked around nervously. If the wrong people found out we were going to be living in sin, even if only for four weeks, it would be the end of my career. I’d laugh, afterwards, at how hypocritical it all was: what actually went on in this city while the proprieties were so slavishly observed. The studio, and Mr Featherstone, had spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on my image, the perfect English rose. If Louella or Hedda, or some other unfriendly source, should be close by and should overhear, all hell would break lose. ‘Yes, of course, dear,’ I replied. ‘But – do keep your voice down.’

Gilbert clinked his glass against mine, his thin moustache twitching above his lip as he smiled. ‘You’re too concerned with appearances, Eve dear. We’ll be married as soon as the shoot’s over. And anyway, goddammit – you’re a star. They can’t touch you.’ He gulped most of his drink down and put his huge hand on my thigh. ‘Hm?’

‘Miss Noel …’ A photographer appeared, flanked by Mike and one of the doormen. ‘Coupla shots, please?’

‘Of course,’ I said, smiling slightly. One had to be polite to the press, no matter how much the inconvenience. And the story of the quintessential English gentleman actor, once at the top of his game but mentally scarred by war, brought back into love and life again by a young English beauty, star of the highest-grossing picture of 1957 and heroine of every fan magazine, was proving to be addictive to the American public. They lapped us up, Gilbert and me. The studio, and Gilbert’s new agent, fed the magazines and the radio shows a soapy romance about how I’d lured him out of his shell, taught him how to laugh again, and he had protected me, a young shy ingenue, from the bear pit that was Hollywood. It was a little ridiculous, sure, but I rather wanted it to be true, too. My old life – oh, it seemed as if someone else had lived it and then told me about it: a memory acquired elsewhere, not my own. My parents, the house by the river … Rose, her great fits of anger, her death, and my life without her – all solitary, sad, strange – and then my time in London, so much fun and so different again from this life here. Back in England, I had grown up feeling lost without Rose. I was working towards something unattainable. The reward was satisfaction of a job well done. Here, you just had to smile, and people told you how wonderful you were.