Belinda (38 page)

Anyway Mother was on the couch with Marty, and Marty was making her eat some cold cuts and some cold fish from a china plate. Mom looked wonderful, she really did. She looked fragile and just about ageless. And Marty was absolutely feeding her, putting the bites right into her mouth. And he was telling her in a hushed voice that television was easier than film. They had to shoot so many pages in so many days and you never got involved in extensive rehearsals or retakes. Her kind of professionalism would be perfect.

Mother was trying to eat. She kept saying that she didn't know if she could do this television thing, and, of course, I had seen this routine a thousand times before. I had seen her do it with Gallo on every picture and in Germany and in Denmark, and each time the director would take over, inspired by her vulnerability and humility and all that.

So this sexy guy, Marty, is some kind of director, I thought, and it is television of all things. Well, for a major role in an American film Mom would have done anything. But for TV? I almost laughed. Poor Marty whatever-your-name-is. You better wipe your hands on a napkin and give up.

I went in to shower and change for dinner, and I tried not to think about the screening, that nobody, not Mom or Uncle Daryl or Trish or Jill had come. Don't think about it, Belinda, I kept thinking. You had all those strangers cheering for you. So what if these guys didn't even care? But I was getting more and more upset and finally crying, and I just let the shower run and run.

Then Trish was banging on the door. "Hurry, Belinda'." she said. "There's a press conference in the lobby right now."

Well, the crowd down there was easily five times what it had been for our conference. There was no comparison at all. Mother had really brought them out. And the whole thing was to announce that she'd be going back to the States to work for United Theatricals on a nighttime soap called "Champagne Flight."

Now if you know anything about movie people, Jeremy, you know that they really look down on television. You ask Alex Clementine. They disdain it utterly. So why the hell was this happening at Cannes?

Within seconds the answer was clear. Mom was the American Brigitte Bardot, Marty was saying, and the American Brigitte Bardot was coming home. On "Champagne Flight" she would play herself as Bonnie Sinclair, the émigré actress returning to take over the Florida airline empire of her father, and Mom's old films would be used in episodes of "Champagne Flight." Clips from Gallo, Flambeaux, all Moro's Nouvelle Vague successes would be used in this brand-new concept series, that would have the thrust of "Dynasty" and the style of Mom's old films.

In sum, Marty had made television news into film news and he had used the moment, on the moment, maybe better than anyone else could have done.

Now we were off to the special tribute and the dinner. I had to find Susan and Sandy. Surely they had been invited. Then somebody took my arm. It was this handsome young man from United Theatricals, I don't even remember his name if I ever knew it, and he said he was my escort, I was to go with him. We made a triumphal march out of the lobby, and, of course, somewhere under the noise and the glare of the lights and all the madness there was this little voice saying, "Not one word was said in Moro's press conference about Final Score."

But frankly, as we left the lobby, I was pretty damned horrified not by their not mentioning us but by the idea of TV. I mean, what the hell was Mom doing in a nighttime soap?

But I didn't understand then what big business these nighttime soaps were. My mind really was on films. I didn't know that people all over the world watched "Dallas" and "Dynasty," that the stars of these shows even have their voices recognized by the overseas operators when they make long-distance calls. I didn't understand the immediate fame and money that this sort of thing conveyed.

I iust thought, OK, ifMom wants to do this, this means we're going to the States and that's terrific, and what kid my age doesn't want to be in the States right now? And then Mom can make United Theatricals distribute Final Score. We are really doing just fine. Like hell we were doing just fine.

Susan was not at dinner. No Sandy, no Susan at all. It was eleven o'clock before I finally found Susan in the bar. I never saw anything like the change in her. It was worse than the change in you when you hit me, because that was really the other side of the same coin.

Susan said, "Do you know what your mother b. as done? She's killed our picture. United Theatricals dropped us. We've got nothing. It's all over Cannes that the film's unmarketable. Everybody has backed off."

I said that couldn't be true. Mother was all wrapped up in herself, of course, but she would never have gone that far to hurt somebody else. But in my heart I knew Mom could let something like this happen. I had to find out what was going on.

I ran upstairs. I said I had to talk to Mother, and I practically shoved Uncle Daryl out of the way. But it turned out Mother's door was locked. She was in there with Sally Tracy, the American agent, and Trish, and they wouldn't answer when I knocked. They were talking over all the details, it seemed, little things that had to be worked out. Uncle Daryl told me there was really no problem, of course, with "Champagne Flight." The money part was done.

Then I started screaming. What about Susan? What about our film? Susan and Sandy and I had gotten a standing ovation out there.

"Now you calm down, Belinda," he said. "You know perfectly well if I had been there you would never have been in any such film."

"What are you talking about?" I asked him. "Mom made all her money off 'such films' and you know it."

"She wasn't fourteen when she did it," he told me.

"Well, I was playing bit parts in them when I was four," I said.

He yelled back, "That's got nothing to do with it. We are making the deal of the century in there, Belinda, and this is as much for you as for your mother, and I cannot believe that you would come here at this moment and "You get the drift.

I don't know what I would have said next. I could see already I was against a wall. Uncle Daryl is forever loyal to Mom, and no matter what anyone has ever told him, Mom is his only concern. When she nearly drove me off the cliff on Saint Esprit, Uncle Daryl said to me long distance, "And why did you let her drive, Belinda? Good Lord, on the ranch you'd have been driving at twelve years old. Don't you know how to drive a car?" That is Uncle Daryl. There is but one cause for Uncle Daryl and that cause is Bonnie, and, of course, Bonnie and Uncle Daryl have made Bonnie and Uncle Daryl very rich.

But to get back to the story, I didn't have a chance to say anything to him, because Marty Moreschi appeared right behind him. And when I saw this big mogul from United Theatricals, I just shut up.I went into my room and slammed the door.

I am telling you that at this moment I felt alone. I couldn't reach Mom, I didn't really want to, and I had lost Susan. Susan had looked at me with coldness in her eye.

Then comes a knock on the door. Marty Moreschi. Can he come in? I said, "Later," but he begged me, "Please, sweetheart, let me come in."

OK, suit yourself, buster, I was thinking. But if you start that bullshit again, I'm going to scream.

But this was where Marty's intelligence came into play.

The look on his face was very serious when he walked into the room. "I did it, kid," he said. "I killed your film."

I looked at him for a minute, I guess. Then I burst into tears.

"I understand how you feel, kid. I really do. But you gotta believe me. That film would have done nothing in the U.S. And this, what I am doing now with your mother, is for you, too."

Now, as I am telling you this, I know I am not able to get across the way this was done. The sincerity of it and the way that he looked. Like he was going to cry suddenly, too. Like he really felt rotten about what was happening, too.

And I know what you think, Jeremy, that I probably fell for this, that it was just crap. But I think I will believe to my dying day that Marty was the only one there who really understood. I mean, he knew I was disappointed, at least he knew.

So this is how it happened that Marry and I were sitting on the bed and he was telling me in this emotional way that I had re trust in him, that there would be big deals for me in America, too.

Of course, I hated the way he said it. But that is movie talk, deals. You may mean art and beauty, but when you're talking the bottom line, you say deals.

There would be deals for Susan, he was telling me now, yes, Susan, he hadn't forgotten Susan. Susan was sensational. But Final Score had to be sacrificed. It wasn't the way to introduce me to the American public, and it wasn't the way to introduce Susan either. United Theatricals could do better making a deal with Susan to do a picture, just on the basis of how Final Score did at Cannes, without it ever being seen at home.

"But will you do that deal with Susan?" I asked him.

He said he had it very, much on his mind.

He said that once we got "Champagne Flight" underway, I'd be in a position to do whatever I wanted. Just wait and see.

He said, "That Susan, she is the real thing. And you are the real thing."

"You've got to trust me, Belinda," he said. And there was a kind of frankness to all this. He had his arms around me and he was very close to me, and I guess about halfway through I realized that his physical presence was sort of confusing me. I mean, he was very attractive and I wasn't so sure he knew it or was even attempting to be.

Well, whatever the case, I didn't let him off the hook. I just didn't say things that made it OK.

I went out looking for Susan. And this time she was back in the room and she was really knocked down. She was for leaving the festival that very night. Everything was finished, she said.

"Kiddie-porn, that's what they're calling it. They're saying everything is wrong politically now for our film."

"That's where you fucked up," Sandy said, "using her at her age and all."

But Susan shook her head. She said there was all kinds of stuff being shown in the teen exploitation flicks in the U.S. It' was a matter of labels and word getting around and people being deliberately frightened off. Even the smallest distributors had left her high and dry. Yet everybody said Final Score was a wonderful film.

I was crying. I was miserable. But she hadn't really turned against me, that was clear. She said she was going right on with the Brazilian film.

"Are you for that, Belinda! ....You better believe it," I said. I told her then what Marty had said.

"Marty Moreschi's television," she said. "But I think I can get the backing I need, even with Final Score in the can, when I get to LA."

When I left Susan, I knew I was too angry and disappointed and confused to go back to the suite. I couldn't have gone to sleep.

I went back to the lobby and out to the Croisette. I didn't know where I was going exactly, but just being in the twenty-four hour crowd and the excitement of Cannes was helping me. I could not calm down.

I had money in my purse, I figured I'd get a sandwich or something or just walk around. People were looking at me. Somebody recognized me and came over and took my picture. Yeah, Bonnie's daughter, and suddenly out of the blue there was my dad. My adorable dad.

Now one of the worst parts of the secrecy between us, Jeremy, was that I could never tell you about my dad. His name is George Gallagher, but, as I said, he is known all over the world as G.G., and he is very big in New York, having one of the most exclusive salons. Before that, he had one in Paris, which is where he met my morn.

Now there had been a big fight between my mom and my dad, as I already mentioned, and this was before I went to school in Gstaad. I'd spent a lot of time with G.G.-G.G. had always been wonderful to me. G.G. would fly to a city and wait for hours just to see me for lunch or dinner or take me for a walk in the park. We'd done quite a few advertisements together when I was little-his blond hair and my blond hair, shampoo ads, that kind of thing. We even did one with both of us naked which was in magazines all over the Continent, though in America they only showed us from the shoulders up. Eric Arlington photographed us for that one, the same guy who does the Midnight Mink pictures exclusively and who later did the famous Bonnie-with-dalmatians poster of Mom.

Anyway, when I was nine, G.G. and I went to New York on vacation, promising Mom we'd be back in ten days. We did a lot of work for a line of hair products Dad was marketing, and we also had an absolutely wonderful time. One week stretched into two, then three, and pretty soon we were gone a month. I knew I should have called Mom to ask her if it was OK to stay, I should have known how insecure she could be, but I didn't call because I was afraid she'd say, Come home. Instead I just sent messages back by cable and ran around with G.G., going to musicals, plays, hitting Boston and Washington, D.C., for tourist weekends, that kind of thing.

The upshot was, Mom got terrified she was losing me to G.G. She got hysterical. She finally reached me at the Plaza in New York and told me I was her daughter, G.G. wasn't my legal father, that she had never even intended for me to know G.G., that G.G. was breaking their original agreement for which by the way G.G. had been paid. She was incoherent finally, talking about her mother's death and how nothing in life was worth it and how she'd kill herself if I didn't come home.

GG. and I were terribly upset, but the worse was yet to come. When we got off the plane in Rome, G.G. was hit with all kinds of legal papers. Mom took him to court to force him to stay away from me. I felt horrible for G.G. I felt I should have known Mom would flip like this, and there was G.G., spending a fortune on Roman lawyers and not even understanding what was happening. I could have died. But I couldn't leave Mom for a minute. She was in a state of nervous collapse. Gallo was in the middle of a picture and furious on account of the delay-and so was Uncle I)aryl. Blair Sackwell was there, but nothing he said helped. I always Named myself.

After that, G.G. left Europe. And I had always feared that Mom had something to do with the closing of his Paris salon. But I was just turning ten when these things happened, and the subject couldn't be mentioned without Mom starting to cry.