Falling Star Read online

  This particular restaurant—the Orangery it’s called—employs one of the most famous barmen in London. His name is Mario, and everybody I know respects him and his judgment. In fact, quite a few of my younger friends are frankly scared of him. Keith had introduced Sam and myself and asked us what we wanted to drink, and Sam had ordered a Bacardi. Keith and I were both having straightforward whisky, which was at our elbows in a second; but Mario made quite a performance over the Bacardi, tossing in the ingredients with a fine flourish and making great play with the shaker. Sam, who had resumed a technical conversation about sound tracks with Keith, appeared not to notice what was going on behind the bar. It was only when he had taken a sip from the ice-misted glass that he looked up and said amiably to Mario, “Hey, chum. This isn’t a Bacardi.”

  Mario’s face was a study. I don’t think anyone had ever accused him of mixing a drink wrongly before, and he went white with anger. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, in a voice that might have come frosted out of his own martini jug. “That is a Bacardi.”

  “It’s not, you know,” said Sam, with a lazy smile. “You used bottled lime juice.”

  “But, sir,” Mario made a big, Italianate gesture, “fresh limes are unobtainable in London in December…”

  “Then you should’ve told me you couldn’t make a Bacardi, shouldn’t you?” said Sam reasonably, “and I’d have ’ad something else.”

  That was the first time that I heard him deliberately playing on his North Country accent, and it wasn’t lost on Mario. What made the whole thing so beautiful was that Sam was completely and utterly in the right. I saw Mario taking a split-second decision, and then he swallowed his pride and decided to accept defeat gracefully.

  “Ah, sir, it is not often we have the privilege of serving a real expert,” he purred, beaming furiously at Sam. “Of course I will remove the drink at once. What may I offer you in its place, sir?”

  “I’ll ’ave a whisky,” said Sam, shortly, and turned back to Keith to discuss dubbing.

  That may sound like a very small incident, but it summed up Sam’s character as I later got to know it, and I must say I took off my hat to him. Soon after that Biddy arrived, and put an end to any doubts I might still have had about enjoying the lunch party. I had never before met anybody with such a blazing personality. Not that she was flamboyant; far from it. She was small and neat, and her suit was plain and black and beautifully tailored. With it, she wore thick black woolen stockings and shiny Wellington boots—an eminently sensible choice for the coldest day of the winter. The effect was to make all the other women in the place look silly.

  Once again, the Wellington boots were a sure indication of character. No rules of etiquette or conventional way of life could ever have contained Biddy, for she was one of those rare people who make the rules instead of following them. Because she took nothing for granted, everything became fresh and fascinating when seen through her eyes. When I felt shocked at her bad language, I realized that the fault was mine and not hers, although it was against all my principles to admit such a thing. When she drew attention to the qualities of her Wellington boots—“Aren’t they elegant? So beautifully made. Look at that seam in the middle. And only nine and eleven in the Edgware Road”—I felt that they were indeed remarkable objects. I wondered how I could have been so crass as to have lived for twenty-eight years without ever appreciating the merits of Wellington boots. That was the kind of effect that Biddy had on people. I don’t think I have mentioned that she had dark red hair.

  I enjoyed that first lunch. I may not be very bright, but it was obvious even to me that the others wanted me to join the company for no other reason except my capacity to put up the necessary cash; and, curiously enough, this did not worry me. I barely bothered to listen to Keith’s stumbling protestations about how valuable my business experience would be—I had fooled around for a year or so in an insurance office at one time. I noticed that neither of the other two deigned to support this bare-faced flattery. They both said, fair and square, that what was needed was money, and left it at that. Still less was I impressed by Keith’s even more feeble efforts to sway my decision by promising me champagne parties with glamorous starlets. Over coffee and brandy I told the others that I would think the matter over and let them know. This was a mere matter of form, because I had already made up my mind.

  My decision to join the company was prompted by two reasons, which, I suppose, boiled down to the same thing in the end. Quite frankly, I was bored and dissatisfied with life. Not only was I bored with doing nothing, but also by the way in which my equally boring friends seemed to take it for granted that I was incapable of doing anything useful or constructive. So there were my two reasons. I wanted to work, and I wanted to work with people like Biddy Brennan and Sam Potman. I telephoned Pardoe the next day and told him that I would finance the venture on one condition: that I should be an active member of the board, responsible for all budgeting and finance. In fact, although I did not know enough about the film business to realize it, I was demanding the job of Executive Producer.

  I was irritated but not surprised by Keith Pardoe’s obvious dismay at my proposal. He said he must put it to the others, and we had another lunch together, which was rather less agreeable than the first one. Keith blustered and Biddy tried some Irish blarney and Sam said nothing at all until we were on the point of leaving. Then he said, with his usual slow grin, “Well, Mr. Peters, it is usual for an Executive Producer to have some knowledge of the business, but since you’re paying the piper, you’re entitled to call the tune. We’ll get you a good, experienced Production Manager and hope that all goes well.”

  Sam’s idea of a good, experienced Production Manager was a female dragon by the name of Louise Cohen. I suppose he hoped that she would be able to bully me into leaving everything to her. We had a couple of monumental fights, after which Louise retired into her own office and wrote furious memos to Keith and Sam accusing me of making it impossible for her to do her job. I can’t say I cared. There was nothing they could do about it, because they dared not lose me. The board of Northburn Films—the name was a graceful compliment to my father, of course—may have hoped to acquire a nonentity with a checkbook, but I was determined to show them that I could produce a film as efficiently as the next man, and what is more I enjoyed myself thoroughly, for the first time in years.

  I have to admit, however, that enjoyment soon gave way to anxiety. At the time when this story opens, we were in the middle of our first production, and things were not going well. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, we were on the brink of disaster, and through no fault of our own.

  The film was called Street Scene, and Biddy had written the script from an idea of Sam’s. The story concerned a provincial university professor visiting London, who met a girl from the East End and fell in love with her, not realizing that she was a prostitute and a thief. At least, that was my interpretation of the thing, and it seemed a pretty good yarn to me, even if a bit sordid. When it appeared, if you remember, the critics wrote columns about its symbolism and hidden meanings and so forth and for all I know they may have been right. Biddy, Sam, and Keith never discussed that aspect of the film with me, and I hardly liked to bring the subject up. They all had this quiet assurance of knowing. In any case, the artistic side was none of my business.

  Robert Meakin, the actor whom I’ve mentioned already, was playing Masterman, the professor. He was a big name, and we were lucky to get him, but during the casting sessions Sam had developed a most unexpected streak of sheer commercialism and declared that we must have a second star, a big female name. What we had to do, he said, was to beat the commercial boys at their own game. So Biddy took the script back, changed the girl’s name from Rosie to Rosa, making her an East End Italian, and we signed up Fiametta Fettini.

  From the beginning I was against using Fiametta. She cost us a fortune, and I considered that she was wrong for the part, and a bad actress. However, I was overridden by
Keith and Sam, who kept pointing out that they were professional film men and I was not. Of course, I could not dispute that La Fettini was the current sex symbol on both sides of the Atlantic, but I maintained from the start that she would be more trouble than she was worth. I didn’t know then how right I was.

  Fiametta Fettini arrived in London in the middle of May, in a blue mink coat and a blaze of publicity, accompanied by her husband, a crushed little man called Giulio Palladio who figured on our salary sheet as her manager, two maids, a chauffeur, her personal hairdresser, and a pet monkey called Peppi. We were reckoning on getting her part of the film “in the can” by the end of June.

  One of Sam’s ideas for Street Scene, which he did take the trouble to expound to me, was that London herself was to be, in some mysterious way, the central character in the film. This involved trundling our camera round the docks, up King’s Road Chelsea, into the British Museum, through City streets, and into Undergrounds, buses, and taxis. Consequently, the amount of studio work was cut to a minimum, which was also designed to be an economy.

  Fiametta Fettini’s interior scenes went well and smoothly, and in early June we moved out onto location in the City of London. I had budgeted to cover every contingency except that one eternal imponderable—the English weather. While we had been shooting in the studio there had been a heat wave. The day we moved outside it began to rain. We were now in the middle of August, with half the location scenes still to shoot. Since the end of June we had been paying Fiametta Fettini a thousand pounds a week over and above her agreed salary as a penalty for overrunning our schedule. Admittedly, the weather was not her fault, but it hurt just the same.

  The other disaster, however, was her fault, and was, in my view, utterly inexcusable. To put it as briefly as I can, the miserable woman had to go and fall hopelessly in love with her co-star, Bob Meakin. Now Bob, off the screen, was very much like the character he played in the film: gruff, unromantic, inarticulate, and stubborn—the last person for La Fettini to vent her southern passion on. The thing soon assumed the proportions of a major scandal. Poor little Giulio Palladio was sent down to the country with the pet monkey, and Fiametta’s pursuit of Bob Meakin around the London scene became the favorite topic of every gossip columnist in the country.

  I found the whole thing degrading, and it irritated me beyond measure when Keith and Sam insisted on regarding it all as good publicity. Even they, however, had to admit that things had gone too far when La Fettini was found by one of her maids in a state of collapse, having swallowed a number of barbiturate pills; not a fatal dose, I need hardly say, but enough to give everybody a severe fright and to keep her off the set for a week. The day she was taken to the London Clinic was the first day of sunshine we had seen for a fortnight. Her illness held us up for a further ten days, and, of course, our insurance company very properly refused to compensate us for what was clearly a self-inflicted injury. There was no question of accident, for the drug she had taken was available on prescription only, and her doctor denied strenuously ever having prescribed it. We never found out where she got the pills, but Fiametta was still, basically, a cunning little guttersnipe from Naples and could have got hold of a bottle of cyanide if she’d set her mind to it. I got some small satisfaction from withholding a week’s salary from her, but that was a drop in the bucket.

  I don’t want to give the impression that I was the sole financial support of Northburn Films. I provided the major part of the money, but there was a limit beyond which I could not go, and that limit was getting dangerously close. Biddy had contributed everything which the income tax authorities had left her from the sales of her first book, and she was busy writing another. Sam and Keith had thrown what personal funds they had into the kitty. All four of us were deeply involved, but in slightly different ways. Biddy, Keith, and Sam faced, quite simply, bankruptcy—if we ran out of funds before the picture was completed. I had a secure income, but I was bedeviled by the thought that the money which I might lose was not really mine but my father’s. I did not relish the prospect of having to tell him that it had gone and nothing to show for it.

  The others, being the type of people they were, took the whole thing rather more lightheartedly than I did. They were also, as I have hinted, continually spending more than I had authorized and then trying to hush it up. It was on my insistence that we stopped lunching at the Orangery and now frequented the cheaper Soho restaurants. I think I may be forgiven for being somewhat on edge at that time. According to my calculations, there was just enough money to finish the film. There was not enough to weather another catastrophe; and there seemed to be one waiting around every corner.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SUCH, THEN, WAS the situation on the August afternoon when Biddy, Keith, Sam, and I left the restaurant in Soho to walk across Covent Garden to the unused Underground station which was our location for the afternoon. Since we were shooting below ground, I need hardly say that the weather, for once, was perfect. London was looking her best, basking in warm sunshine under a deep blue sky, but we were all too preoccupied to notice it.

  Sam and Keith were involved in a discussion about the set for a studio retake scheduled for the following week. Biddy, in the inconsequential way she has, was reciting “Albert and the Lion” aloud to herself, and swearing when she couldn’t remember the words. When I asked her why she did this, she replied that it helped her to think. I pass the information on for what it is worth. It certainly did not help me to think. I was trying to calculate in my head the exact cost of the day’s shooting, allowing for twelve extras and the hire of the station, train, and driver from London Transport. I had nearly reached the answer when Biddy waltzed up to me chanting, “He lay in a som-no-lent post-u-are, Pudge, with the side of his face in the…damn…in the…to the bars! With the side of his face to the bars!”

  “I wish you’d be quiet,” I said. “Now I’ve forgotten where I was.”

  “O Pudgekin,” said Biddy. “What does it matter? It’s only money.”

  And before I could remonstrate against this absurd statement, she had danced away again, singing something about Albert having heard about lions, how they were ferocious and wild. I was glad when we reached our destination.

  This was, as I have indicated, a derelict tube station on a small branch line which had not been in use for several years. We had arranged to hire it for the scene in which Professor Masterman is pursuing Rosa through London in a vain attempt to find out where she goes in the afternoons—the answer, of course, is a brothel. Since readers of this book are going to have to learn quite a lot about film-making before they are through, perhaps the best thing I can do is to reproduce the relevant passages from Biddy’s shooting script, in order to describe the little sequence we were hoping to shoot that day.

  DISSOLVE TO:

  LONG SHOT, Underground Station

  Platform (Location.) Several

  travelers are waiting for a

  train, among them ROSA.

  She looks at her watch.

  CUT TO:

  Stock shot. Underground train approaching from tunnel. Noise of train

  CUT TO:

  MEDIUM SHOT, Platform.

  The train pulls in.

  ROSA boards it, along

  with a few other passengers. Background station noise (Stock)

  CUT TO:

  LONG SHOT, Escalator. MASTERMAN

  is running frenziedly down it,

  jostling other passengers.

  CUT TO:

  Platform. CLOSE SHOT, GUARD.

  GUARD: Mind the gap!

  GUARD blows his whistle. Sound of whistle.

  CUT TO:

  LONG SHOT, Platform. The train doors close and the train begins to move out. Train noise.

  CUT TO:

  MEDIUM SHOT, MASTERMAN

  running pell-mell down the stairway

  leading to the platform.

  CUT TO:

  MEDIUM SHOT, Platform. MASTERMAN

  arr
ives at a run, simultaneously with another

  train. Passengers alight and board it.

  MASTERMAN scans them desperately.

  ROSA is not among them. Train noise.

  Now, if you read that carefully you will see that there are only four shots in which the Underground train actually appears, and one of them we could get from a library of stock shots. Since the train was extremely expensive to hire, we had decided to do the other three shots as soon as possible, without any reference to the continuity of the action. That’s the way it is with films—the sequence of shots gets completely mixed up. For instance, we’d needed Meakin—that is, Masterman—for other shots the previous day, before we moved down to the tube station; so the very first shot we had taken was the last one of the sequence—where he arrived on the platform. During the morning, we had shot the train moving out, and later on, Rosa boarding it. That should have disposed of the train, but we had kept it standing by until we heard from the laboratories that all was well with the previous day’s takes. Just before lunch Sam had rehearsed Meakin in the shot where he was to run down the staircase, and this was what we were about to shoot.

  I was not overpleased by the amount of work the unit had done during the morning. Two simple shots and a third rehearsed did not seem good enough to me. It was only after questioning Keith and Biddy pretty rigorously that I discovered there had been a hold-up due to Fiametta Fettini making some sort of fuss about her costume, to which she had taken a dislike. This was typical of La Fettini. She must have known perfectly well that there was no hope of changing her costume, because some weeks ago, in the studio, we had shot the scenes which would immediately precede today’s on the screen—a sequence of Rosa and Masterman lunching at a large popular café. The details of exactly what Rosa had worn then were meticulously recorded on the Continuity Girl’s record sheets, and what Rosa wore today had to tally exactly. This sort of logical argument, however, counted for nothing with Fiametta Fettini, who had contrived to delay shooting for nearly an hour. Clearly it had simply been a display of childish bad temper—she was always impossible to work with when Bob Meakin was not on the set, and he had not been called until the afternoon. I mention these small frustrations and annoyances merely to explain why I was inclined to be short-tempered myself, and why I was determined to be on the spot in person, in order to nip any further hold-ups in the bud.