The LeBaron Secret (23 page)

TRYOUTS TONIGHT

The Bay Area Amateur Theatre Troupe will hold tryouts tonight for
She Who Is Seized
, a new romantic drama by the internationally renowned playwright Wilmarth L. Fears. The drama offers speaking parts for six female and five male characters, plus four walk-ons, according to Millicent Simmons, the troupe's president, who will also direct the production. Interested local thespians are invited to appear for readings and casting tryouts tonight at Miss Simmons's house, 815 Sutter Street, at 8:30
P
.
M
.

That night, Sari went to Miss Simmons's address and was given two pages of dialogue to read. About thirty other people had shown up, and so Sari had not held out much hope that she would be chosen for any sort of part. But the next morning, to her everlasting wonder and surprise, she received a note from Millicent Simmons saying that she would like to cast Sari in the leading, and title, female role. “My dear, you will be perfect as Sabrina!” Miss Simmons wrote.

As Sari would later find out, the chief attraction of
She Who Is Seized
to Miss Simmons and her Amateur Theatre Troupe was the fact that its production rights could be acquired for a very low fee—fifteen dollars is the figure that comes to Sari's mind today. And, looking back, the play was a terribly silly piece of costumed and melodramatic claptrap. It told, in three crowded acts, the story of a wealthy and beautiful American woman named Sabrina Van Arsdale who was pursued across the face of Europe by a handsome Russian prince named Ivan Troubetskoy, or something like that. For three acts, and through many costume changes, Sabrina resisted the prince's blandishments and costly gifts and amorous advances as she fled from Moscow to St. Petersburg, from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Paris to Capri, and finally to a doge's palace on the Grand Canal in Venice. There where she had been hiding, protected by the doge, the prince, disguised as a peasant, at last succeeded in finding her, and burst in on her, brandishing a sword in one hand, and speaking lines Assaria would never forget: “Madam, I am mad with love for you! I am intoxicated with your beauty! I am made insane by love! If you continue to repel me, I shall destroy your loveliness with this blade, and then fall upon it myself!”

This was the cue for Sabrina, played by Assaria, to cry, “I am seized by love! I am your princess for all time!” And to fall into the prince's arms as the curtain descended.

“My dear, I want you to play this last scene with
passion
,” Millicent Simmons, the play's directress, said to her. Miss Simmons was an ample, marcelled spinster of a certain age, much given to breast-beating gestures. But despite her age, Sari learned, Miss Simmons was considered to be frightfully daring and “Bohemian.”

“You are not just seized by love here, you are seized by
passion!
Passion, sexual passion, of the deepest, most visceral sort! It is
lust
that you must express here. I want you to project all that feeling into those two lines! Let your voice
growl
—growl out those lines—with passion!”

Despite the creakiness of the material, and the director's almost impossible demands, the largely inexperienced cast had worked hard rehearsing the production, and when
She Who Is Seized
finally opened before an audience in the auditorium of the Odd Fellows Hall, one February evening, the play was an astonishing success. And Assaria, holding the hand of her young prince, was required to bow and curtsy her way through a total of thirteen curtain calls, to a standing ovation. The originally scheduled run of three performances was extended to eight, then to ten, then to twelve. No previous production of the Bay Area Amateur Theatre Troupe had ever achieved so long a run, and the play seemed to delight audiences of young and old alike. Gabe Pollack himself was assigned by his paper to do a story on the city's surprising new hit drama. (“You were very good,” he said to her almost shyly after coming to see the play, and she did not tell him that the only way she had been able to perform the last scene had been to try to hold, in her head, the memory of the time he had held her in his arms and kissed her nearly three years before.) The story in the
Chronicle
created a new demand for tickets, and the play's run was extended four more nights. Then
She Who Is Seized
and its cast were invited to perform the play for the patients and staff of the Shriners' Hospital for Crippled Children. That story made the papers, too.

The grand climax to the dramatic history of
She Who Is Seized
came after that performance. Sweeping into the dressing room, Miss Simmons threw up her hands and announced, “My dears, I have some extraordinary, astonishing, absolutely breathtakingly wonderful news for all of you! We have been invited to perform for the students, parents, and faculty of Miss Katherine Burke's School! Need I tell you what this
means?
Miss Burke's is the educational emporium of San Francisco's most elite young ladies! It is to other schools in the city what Russian ermine is to muskrat! These are the daughters of Crockers, Floods, Fairs, Mackays, and Spreckelses, the flowering of the city's finest families, the backbone of the financial community and the heart of the
Social Register
! My dears, what we have enjoyed thus far is mere popularity. This, my dears, is
prestige
. Up to now, we have been casting our pearls before swine, the hoi polloi, the proletariat. Now we have been invited to perform our talents for the aristocracy! This is an equivalent to a command performance before the kings and queens of all the high courts of Europe. What can
possibly
follow this, my dears? Only—” and Miss Simmons placed one hand dramatically across her broad bosom, “Only—Hollywood!”

As it happened, however, the performance at Miss Burke's was the group's last. And it was after this that Sari was sitting backstage at her dressing table, removing her makeup, and looked up into her mirror and saw, standing behind her, one of the most beautiful girls she had ever seen. Tall and slender and blonde, the girl was about her own age, and even her Miss Burke's uniform—blue and white middy blouse, long, pleated, dark blue skirt—which had been starchily designed and crafted to reveal as little as possible of a girl's good looks, could not disguise this particular young woman's beauty. In a husky, throaty voice that seemed as honeyed as her hair, the girl said, “You were wonderful. You were absolutely wonderful. I had to come backstage and tell you.”

“Thank you,” Sari had said.

“Assaria Latham. What a beautiful name. What a beautiful name to go with such a marvelous talent. When you said those last lines, I felt I was going to faint.”

“Well, thank you. Thank you very much.”

“I want you to be my friend,” the girl said. “Will you be my friend?”

“Well, yes—”

“Good. I want you to be my friend, and I want to be your friend. When can we meet? Can you meet me tomorrow after school?”

“I'm afraid I have to work after school.”

“Saturday, then. Saturday afternoon.”

“I also work Saturday afternoons,” Sari said.

“Then Sunday. Nobody works on Sundays, do they?”

“Yes, I guess that would be all right.”

“Good,” the girl said. “I'll meet you at four o'clock on Sunday, at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. We'll have tea.” She touched Sari's shoulder lightly with her hand. “I'll see you then.” She turned on her heel to go.

“Wait,” Sari called after the retreating figure. “Wait—I don't even know your name!”

“I'm Joanna LeBaron,” the girl said.

Assaria LeBaron, for the past several days and with increasing interest, has been watching the recent burst of activity in the trading of shares of the Kern-McKittrick Oil Company on the Big Board, as reported in the
Wall Street Journal
. Forty-six hundred shares were traded on Monday, fifty-seven hundred shares changed hands on Tuesday, and then, on Wednesday, sales of Kern-McKittrick jumped to ten thousand six hundred shares. During the course of all this, the price of a Kern-McKittrick share has risen from fifty-three dollars to fifty-nine and seven-eighths, an increase of well over ten percent. On Thursday morning, she had called Ed Neuberger, her man at E.F. Hutton and one of the few stockbrokers in town whom she can trust, and asked him about it.

“What's going on at Kern-McKittrick?” she had demanded.

“Rumors,” he had said. “Nothing but rumors.”

“What sort of rumors?”

“That they're about to announce a big takeover bid.”

“And who—or should I say whom?—is said to be the target of this bid?”

“So far, there's nothing but rumors, Sari,” he had said with some hesitation. “The whole street these days is nothing but rumors.”

“Are you leveling with me, Ed? Because I'll find out if you're not. Because we're not talking here about rumors, we're talking about what smells to me very much like insider activity, which as you know is quite against the law.”

“I'm not going to accuse anyone of breaking the law, Sari.”

“Then why don't you find out what's going on?”

“Why don't you ask Harry Tillinghast?” he had said. “He's your relative.”

“He is
not
my relative. Just because his daughter happens to be married to my son does not make him any sort of relative of mine!” And she had slammed down the receiver in his ear.

Then, not adding to her sense of fiscal composure, had come Thursday's letter from her sister-in-law, whom she
had
considered her relative and—until now—friend. In perfectly polite, but—to Sari, at least—rather cold and impersonal terms, Joanna had announced her intention to resign the Baronet Vineyards account, “due to a divergence in advertising and marketing philosophies,” and had rather patronizingly offered to help Sari find new agency representation “across the street,” as Joanna put it in her maddening advertising jargon. “So much for pacts made in blood!” Sari had said, crumpling Joanna's letter into a ball and tossing it into the wastebasket where it belonged. Obviously, Eric's sudden and unannounced trip to New York had had a great deal to do with this development, and Sari does not like any of it, any of it at all. To reporters from the
New York Times
and the advertising weeklies who have already begun calling asking for a fuller explanation, Sari has been issuing—through Thomas—a curt “No comment,” until she can think of the properly worded statement to deliver to the press.

To her gratification, however, there have also been calls from other big New York agencies—including Benton & Bowles and Young & Rubicam—soliciting the Baronet account.

Now it is Friday, and Sari is swimming in her big indoor-outdoor pool. The pool enclosure projects from the back of the house, invisible from the street, at the lowest level, a floor below the one that contains Melissa's apartment. Most people in San Francisco do not know that the pool exists, and are unaware of its most remarkable engineering feature—a glass roof, which operates on electric motors and which can be opened to the out-of-doors in warm weather, or kept snugly closed on chillier days, such as this one. Swimming in her pool is the only sort of regular exercise Sari LeBaron is able to get these days, and she tries to do a daily stint of forty laps. Swimming is a mindless—and mind-calming—occupation, involving no more mental exertion than counting the laps as they go by, and this is one of the reasons why she enjoys it. Also, because it saves struggling in and out of a swimsuit, Sari LeBaron always swims in the nude.

Now her laps are done, and Thomas is waiting by the pool to help her out. A special lift, a sort of hydraulic breeches buoy, has been devised for this purpose, but then Thomas must help her out of this contraption, and into her chair, and cover her wet and naked body with an oversize bath towel, and then, when she has dried herself, help her into a thick terrycloth robe.

“Thank you, Thomas.”

“A registered letter has just arrived, Madam. I thought I'd better bring it to you here.”

“Ah,” she says, and he hands her the letter. She sees immediately that it is written on the letterhead of Baronet Vineyards, Inc., and she tears the letter open.
Dear Mother
, she reads.

This letter is being addressed to all shareholders of Baronet Vineyards, Inc., and is to advise of a purchase offer we have received from the Board of Directors of Kern-McKittrick Petroleum, Inc., for our company. In its initial proposal, Kern-McKittrick offers 12.5 shares of its common stock for each share of Baronet stock we hold. Because of the generosity of this offer, and my firm support of it, I urge that a meeting of our Board and shareholders be scheduled at the earliest convenient date for all concerned in order to consider this matter
.

Sincerely
,

Eric

“
Aha!
” she cries, in a voice that is a mixture of triumph and dismay, and hands the letter to Thomas. “Just as I suspected! War has been declared, Thomas—call out the Marines! Get my lawyers on the phone, and get them over here just as quickly as possible! Call out the National Guard! Get Gabe Pollack—I may need him, too—tell him to get here as fast as he can! Call out the Reserves! Order a freeze on any sales of Baronet stock—can I do that? Ask the lawyers! But wait—first things first! Get Eric for me—no, never mind, I'll get him myself,” and she seizes the poolside telephone. “They'll find out who they're dealing with!” she cries.

“Eric?” she says when she has him on the line. “I am in receipt of your little billet-doux. Let me just say that you, as of this moment, are dismissed as an officer of this company! Do you hear me, Eric?
You're fired!
Peeper has taken over full responsibilities for your job—as of this moment! Do you hear me?”