Indiscretions - Elizabeth Adler [38]
Their amazed eyes met hers. “Fitz McBain did all that?” asked Venetia.
“He did. He thought of absolutely everything.” Paris sighed as she contemplated Fitz McBain’s power.
“But why? We don’t know him. I only met Morgan once, a few nights ago. …”
“Then either it was love at first sight, or Fitz McBain was a Jenny Haven fan.” Paris stretched out on the sofa luxuriously. “Either way, it feels very nice to be looked after …” She didn’t add “for a change” but the words seemed to hang in the air unspoken. In the easy luxury of the McBain compound, Amadeo Vitrazzi and her struggle for success and recognition of her talent seemed very far away.
India began to prowl the floor restlessly.
“Being a princess must feel a lot like this,” she said, thinking longingly of Rome’s teeming thoroughfares and crowded cafes. “I’ll be glad when it’s over. I can’t bear being trapped in this house.”
It, thought Venetia, is the funeral. And it would take place the day after tomorrow. How was she to bear it, when maybe if she had come home when Jenny wanted, she would have still been alive….
“Vennie,” said India warningly, “there’s no use getting upset all over again. Surely we’ve cried enough!”
Venetia stood up suddenly and headed for the door.
“Vennie! Where are you going?” India hurried after her.
“To the kitchen,” she said with a sigh. “I think we need a cup of tea.”
Fitz McBain ignored the flashing red light on his office telephone, indicating that there was another call for him, and instead pressed the buzzer that meant he wasn’t to be disturbed. He was watching Channel 2’s six o’clock news report.
Paris in stark black silk and broad-brimmed hat took Bill Kaufmann’s arm as she stepped from the car, lifting her chin defiantly at the television cameras. Her escort walked her rapidly toward the church door, where she turned to check that her sisters were all right. India, wearing a simple black linen suit and holding tightly to Stanley Reubin’s hand, almost ran the length of the path. Venetia hesitated as she emerged from the limousine. She wore a short-sleeved black silk dress with a jaunty bow at the neck, and as she took the arm of Jake Matthews, superstar of the screen for two decades, four times Jenny’s costar and possibly onetime lover, her stricken eyes fastened on the camera lens in despair. Then, dropping her gaze, she pulled her hat lower over her brow and, helped by Jake, followed her sisters into the church.
The television news summary switched quickly to the scene of Jenny Haven’s flower-garlanded coffin being borne up the steps of the church, and to the watching crowds. The pretty red-haired gossip reporter, who considered herself a bigger star than the faded Jenny Haven—after all, she was on TV every night and that was now, not twenty years ago—continued her glib narration.
“Among this crowd are many of the people who found Jenny Haven to be a true friend—the commissary waitresses at the studio who she always remembered at Christmas, the grips and carpenters, the wardrobe people, and the hairdressers, all of whom worked hard to make things go smoothly on the set of her films and whose families she remembered to ask about by name. There are the drivers who picked her up to take her to the studio at five-thirty in the morning, a time when few of us look our best, but who swear that even then she was lovely. Yes, around the studios of our town Jenny was known among these ‘little’ people as a generous woman. Generous with her time, listening to their problems, and often generous with a loan that was really a gift because she didn’t believe in loans.
“There were many facets to Jenny Haven, the glamorous movie star who we all knew on the screen, the accomplished actress who could make us laugh, as she did in Matchless, or cry, as she did in her Oscar-winning performance as Maggie in A Time Gone Forever. Or the difficult star who demanded the best from everyone, whether it was the performance of her costar or the service