Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [153]
The menu had been chosen, perhaps mistakenly in retrospect, with flamboyance in mind, and included a lot of flambé dishes, which Jackie, who wasn’t interested in food, liked because of their drama. Great bursts of flame lit up the room, with the occasional smell of singed hair, illuminating, as in hell, Jackie, as she made her way from table to table. Booksellers were making paper airplanes of the promotional material and sending them flying through the room. Amoretti di Sarono, the small, round Italian biscuits wrapped in tissue-thin paper that had attained, at the time, a certain chic, had been placed on each table, and people were setting fire to the wrappers to watch them float slowly in flames to the ceiling. Jackie could be seen smiling fiercely, while attempting to shield her wig from flames in only partially disguised terror. At any moment, I expected the fire marshals to arrive. Green, wisely, I thought, was keeping well out of her line of sight. Setting fire to Jackie’s wig would be a lot worse than inviting a cripple.
At last, the meal dragged to an end. There was a rousing fanfare. The lighting dropped from dim to dark. A hired singer sang The Love Machine theme, while four waiters descended a flight of stairs bearing a spotlit cake in the shape of a giant copy of the book. The whole room stood—unsteadily—to applaud as the cake moved slowly toward Jackie, but before it arrived, disaster occurred. One of the publicists slipped and fell into the cake.
One look at Jackie’s face was enough to tell me what the right thing to do was. I went back to my hotel and told the operator not to put any calls through. The next morning, I got up at dawn and took the train back to New York City.
I never regretted it.
STILL, I remained friendly with Jackie, who fell out with everyone else at S&S until she had nobody else but me to talk to. Some time after she had finished touring for the book, she invited me to dinner at Danny’s Hideaway again, just to say good-bye, for the Mansfields were leaving for Los Angeles the next morning to work on the screenplay for The Love Machine.
Jackie was in a benevolent mood; even she could not deny that the book had worked, though it was already apparent to me that nobody else at S&S was up to doing another book with Jackie, however many copies it was going to sell. About halfway through the dinner, she glanced at my wristwatch and shook her head. “You know,” she said, “for a kid who’s going places in this business, that’s a pretty crappy-looking watch.”
I shrugged. It was an old Rolex, which I had worn through the Royal Air Force and the Hungarian Revolution. It had belonged to one of my father’s assistants in the art department at London Films, Philip Sandeman (of the sherry family), who had been instrumental in getting me into the Royal Air Force in the first place and had left it to me after being killed in a flying accident. I was mildly attached to it and said so.
Jackie dismissed all that. I should have a look at Irving’s new watch.
Somewhat nervously—I think he was afraid that Jackie was going to give away his watch as she had his blazer—he took it off and passed it to me. It was a Cartier tank watch, with his name spelled out instead of numbers—“I-R-V-M-A-N-S-F-I-E-L-D”—and a small gold ankh beneath the Cartier signature. The deployant buckle had an ankh engraved on it. I admired it and, to Irving’s great relief, handed it back.
“You know,” Jackie said thoughtfully, “your name would fit. It has twelve letters.”
I hadn’t thought of that, but she was right, as usual.
“You ought to have a decent watch,” she said. “Like Irving’s.”
I demurred. I liked Jackie, but I had