Chanel Bonfire Page 6

  “Hi,” she drawled, as we looked up at her over our plates of chicken curry and chips.

  Tracy Turner was the most glamorous and beautiful girl our age. She was thin and willowy, with long, caramel-colored hair, tanned skin, perfect teeth, and a nose that turned just ever so slightly up at the end. She was like the girl from Ipanema—whenever she walked by, everyone would go “Ah.”

  I glanced around to make sure she wasn’t talking to someone else. “Hi,” I blurted back, regaining my composure.

  “Are you those new girls, Wendy and Robin from New York?” Everyone stopped and stared because the It girl was speaking to us. Robbie practically spit-taked her Fanta.

  “Um, yes, we are,” I answered haltingly. I noticed that she kind of shone, as if she were on the red carpet under a follow spot or something.

  “Well, I was wondering if you wanted to come over to my house this afternoon. I have some new records we could listen to while we do our homework.” She put one hand on her hip and used the other to adjust her leather-fringed handbag.

  “Wow, we’d love to. Thanks.” Robbie and I smiled and nodded.

  “Great. See you after school.” She flounced off, executing a perfect hair toss on her way out of the lunchroom.

  And that was it. We were in.

  Tracy welcomed us into her large posse of girlfriends, which included the wildly popular Cassidy girls, Lynn and Diane, whose international banker dad hunted big game in Africa in his spare time; Lourdes Lopez, a red-haired Mexican spitfire; and Paige Dundee, whose parents were rumored to be spies for the CIA. Our moms all became friends, and many of our weekends were full of sleepovers, shopping at Selfridges or Way In, or just hanging out at Lynn and Diane’s listening to music and watching them feed live mice to their pet boa constrictor. There always seemed to be exciting people there, like the dishy actor John Phillip Law from the Sinbad films, or tall, toothy Jeremy Lloyd, a writer and actor who had been in A Hard Day’s Night with the Beatles. Robbie and I begged Mother for a whole new wardrobe just to keep up.

  The other thing besides size that made ASL different from our school in New York was bling: music and art classes, sports teams, a state-of-the-art gymnasium, a theater with a thrust stage, and tons of money for field trips.

  In my English class, we were reading Macbeth, so our teacher, Mr. Jesse, took us to see the play at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Nicol Williamson and Helen Mirren starring. It was my first exposure to Shakespeare since watching my dad onstage at the Guthrie. This made me instantly adore Mr. Jesse, who was unlike any other teacher I had ever had. He was in his forties, short and compact, always clad in jeans and turtlenecks. He changed the way he looked every few weeks by growing a beard, shaving his head, or sporting a Fu Manchu mustache or a goatee. Always in motion, he feverishly spouted poetry like a crazed beat poet, pacing inside the circle our desks made.

  “‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ ” Mr. Jesse boomed.

  He’d throw the dictionary at you if you didn’t know a word, shouting, “Look it up!” He told us he divorced his wife because she used too many three-letter words.

  One day after class he called me over. “This story you wrote, Wendy, is really very good.” He handed the pages back to me.

  “Thank you, Mr. Jesse,” I said shyly.

  “I showed it to a friend of mine, an actor, who thought it was wonderful. You should keep writing, my dear.”

  “Yes, sir.” It meant the world to me that he liked my story.

  “Life is short, and one musn’t squander one’s talents, don’t you agree?” He arched his eyebrows and scratched the muttonchop sideburns that he had recently grown.

  “No, sir, I won’t.” I was too afraid to tell him I didn’t know what squander meant.

  I continued to struggle in math and flunked algebra. Twice. Math made me cry, but I adored history, French, and Mr. Jesse.

  My sister’s attitude toward school was similar to the one she had toward her appearance—she didn’t care. Or at least she didn’t care about what other people—her teachers and Mother—thought she should care about. Where my years of being a goody-goody made me the perfect student capable of delivering exactly what was asked for, Robbie had evolved into a more out-of-the-box thinker, preferring her own ideas to those of others. I kind of admired her for it, but was also afraid. We were teenagers now, and Robbie was stepping out more. I couldn’t shield her from poor grades or from Mother’s reaction to them. Report cards were the one thing Mother noticed during this time, and they sparked a long-simmering battle between her and my sister.

  “Are you telling me that this is the best you can do?” Mother shook Robbie’s B’s and C’s report card at her angrily.

  “Yes, Mother!” she said tearily.

  “Do you know what would have happened to me if I had brought home a report card like this? I was a straight-A student!”

  “I’m sorry, I’ll try harder next time.” Robbie ran to her room, crying, and closed the door.

  “I’ll help her study, Mother,” I pleaded on my sister’s behalf. Mother stalked off in a huff, late for her ladies’ brunch, slamming the door behind her.

  These occasional outbursts over my sister’s grades at school and others about the tidiness of our bedrooms were short-lived and for the first time we were able to let our guard down a bit. Compared with the past, these were honeymoon years for Robbie and me. The usual tension and fear of Mother’s disapproval began to ease, as Mother became even less interested in her role as a mother and reworked herself as a jet-setter.

  Mother’s best friend and main guide through swinging London was Mary Broomfield, who was an upscale concierge at the London Hilton, helping the crème de la crème solve their high-class problems. Mary had found us our first strategically placed, trendy flat in London. She was a statuesque Brit with a helmet hairdo who looked a bit like Agnes Moorehead but with larger teeth. Mary came from an upper-class family, but had been forced to go to work when the family money ran out and her husband went down in an RAF plane. She was very well connected and introduced Mother to an international cast of characters who joined her entourage of other groovy American expat moms.

  Deziah was a psychic to the royals who wore her hennaed hair and Gypsy dresses long. Mother started telephoning her every morning to see if she should venture out to this or that event. “Deziah says there’ll be bad vibes there,” Mother would say, putting down the receiver. Fresh-faced brunette Hilary Mole looked like a kindergarten teacher but had been a high-priced call girl who was now safely married to a famous bandleader who had once been one of her clients. Dominique Lamond was a volatile French department-store heiress who looked like Anouk Aimée and swore and drank like a sailor, and whom I frequently found passed out in the downstairs loo.

  Mother also became fast friends with Marian Montgomery, the American singer, and started going to Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho to see her perform, with her girlfriends in tow. From there, they’d move on to exclusive discos like Annabel’s or Tramp and often end the evening at our house to drink the rest of the night away. On Sundays, they would all come to what Mother began calling the “drunken lunch” in our garden with cold white wine, cigarettes, and maybe a chicken salad for those who were hungry.

  Left to our own devices, my sister and I emulated the values and behavior of the only role model we had; Mother was out on her party circuit, so we created our own. It was easy to meet up at someone’s parent-free house and break into the liquor cabinet. I liked Mateus rosé because it was sweet and came in a curvy bottle, but sometimes we’d just pour a bit of everything in a tall glass and take turns sipping. The first time I was actually served alcohol—Dom Pérignon at a brunch at Mary Broomfield’s house—I felt so sick from drinking the night before, I poured it into a plant when no one was looking.

  Robbie and I also attempted to copy Mother’s clotheshorse side. She was sporting Ossie Clark, Yves Saint Laurent, and Courrège
s, so we started shopping at a kids’ clothing boutique named, appropriately enough, Little Horrors, the Kitson of its time. We bought trendy French New Man corduroy pants with matching jackets, and flowered Cacharel blouses to wear to school. For my first big formal party, thrown by the son of a diplomat at Quaglino’s, an exclusive Soho supper club, I went to Biba to buy a long dress and a beaded evening bag. Biba was simply one of the most fashionable shops in London. Twiggy had appeared in their ad campaign and their logo was of a glamorous couple dancing who were dressed like Fred and Ginger.

  And, of course, we smoked. We especially liked these herbal cigarettes that came in a flowered box and smelled like overcooked vegetables. Who cared if they tasted like burnt broccoli; we thought we looked so cool smoking. At the pub, conveniently located inside the tube station across the road from school, we were always trying to find someone to buy us a shandy, beer mixed with ginger beer, or a Babycham, which was sparkling pear juice with a cute fawn on the bottle. We had even purchased platform shoes, hoping to look older (taller) and sometimes it worked. I realize now we probably looked a lot like Jodi Foster in Taxi Driver.

  Another favorite pastime was chasing pop stars. When Elton John gave a concertin in the ASL gym, Robbie and I ran outside at the end of the show to the back entrance, determined to get his autograph. “I love you, Elton!” I yelled, jumping in front of him as he came flying out of the exit. Startled, he tripped over me in his silver platform boots and matching pants. I can still see his shiny bottom flying away from me. I didn’t get his autograph, but our eyes met as he looked at me over his shoulder while he was dragged off by bodyguards. For weeks, I held out hope that he would come find me like the prince in Cinderella searching for his one true love.

  I always went for the pansexual guys who wore makeup, big shoes, and glitter: Elton, Roxy Music, T. Rex, and David Bowie. Even at fourteen, I knew you couldn’t help whom you fell in love with. My friend Lynn Cassidy was hopelessly gaga over Donny Osmond, who I thought was too perfect with his straight teeth and bowl haircut. At night, before she went to bed, she listened to him croon “Sweet and Innocent” on her stereo and then kissed the thirty-five Donny posters on her walls good night. When we discovered the Osmonds were coming to London, we mobilized at the Cassidys’ house to make a plan.

  “How are we going to meet them?” screeched Lynn. We plowed through many bags of crisps and bottles of soda trying to strategize. It was important that we not have a repeat of our botched attempt to meet the Jackson Five at Heathrow a few months before. Having gotten up at 4:00 a.m., we were only able to get close enough to see five Afro’ed heads cross the tarmac. I was devastated.

  “Let’s just go over there. Maybe we’ll think of something on the way,” said Lynn’s little sister, Diane, sweetly. We all jumped on the tube, heading for the Churchill Hotel. When we got there, it was completely surrounded by hundreds of screaming, crying girls. Bobbies were trying to keep the “weenyboppers” (as Donny’s followers had been dubbed in the British press) back, and television crews were filming. It was a circus.

  “Look, they’re letting taxis through,” said Robbie, characteristically observant. It was often my sister’s diabolical genius that set the plans in motion. “What if we pretended to be hotel guests, getting out of a cab?”

  “Outstanding!” cried Lynn.

  We ran down the block, tearing past the hotel and the screaming mob, and hailed a taxi. We gave the driver five pounds to drive us up to the entrance of the hotel. Less than a minute later, the top-hatted doorman at the Churchill was opening the taxi door and welcoming us. We headed through the lobby, straight to the elevator, having no idea what floor they were on.

  “Let’s start at the top,” Lynn said, punching the highest floor. When we got out, it was too quiet, so we started running down the stairs, stopping to check every floor for Osmonds. Five flights down, security men were sitting on folding chairs in the hall. We thought we were busted, but they were so impressed that we had made it this far that they let us stay for a while and hang out. Jimmy, Donny’s little brother, was playing basketball in the hall. Robin stuck her head out the window, and the girls below went wild thinking she was an Osmond.

  “You girls want to meet Donny?” The rest of us didn’t care, but Lynn did, so she went to meet her dream man. Afterward, she was all flushed and gooey-eyed. We rode down in the elevator in silence, Lynn, on cloud nine, ecstatically dreaming of being Mrs. Donny Osmond, and Robin and I thinking of how much fun it had been breaking and entering.

  chapter six

  CHANEL BONFIRE

  When Mother became restless or bored, or if she was avoiding a lover or was too afraid to open her American Express bill, we’d skip town. Most often, we’d go to Paris. Like the spoiled American teenagers we were, Robbie and I soon began to whine about having to go: “The waiters are so rude! The toilet paper’s waxy! What about Italy? Or Spain?!” Finally, at one point we refused to go.

  “Leave us here; it’s only two days,” we said before one early-fall weekend. There was going to be a big party that weekend with hot boys we did not want to miss. We had even bought new hip-huggers to wear.

  “It may not be two days this time. I have to go on business,” Mother replied.

  Business? I thought. Like working? For money? Mother had once sold a few poems when we were small, but business was not a word anyone would associate with anything Mother did.

  “Pack for a week. We leave in an hour,” she said.

  The next morning we were checked into the Hôtel Sydney Opéra, a stuffy little box of a hotel, not at all Mother’s usual style, and she was leaving us for her “business” meeting, which, it turned out, was at the Hôtel Ritz bar. I wondered about her choice of a clingy, fuchsia, Pucci print dress and an excessive amount of Chanel No. 19, but said nothing.

  Paris was having a heat wave and the Hôtel Sydney Opéra wasn’t air-conditioned, so Robbie and I lay around our room in our underwear. Unlike me, and much to my dismay, Robbie had started wearing a bra, having recently developed boobs. I was a little jealous.

  We dug into some cold roast chicken and chunks of Doux de Montagne from the restaurant downstairs.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, “why don’t we pretend that we’re Henry VIII and eat with our hands like they did back then?” Robbie was learning about the Tudors in her history class.

  “Yeah!” It sounded like fun. We stretched out on the bed, semi-naked, and chewed on chicken bones and bread, pretending to be English royalty. But what to do with the bones? Robbie informed me that in the great dining hall of Hampton Court, Henry simply tossed the bones over his shoulder onto the floor.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, like this.” Robin expertly flung her chicken bone over her shoulder out the open window.

  “Well done!” We both laughed and rolled on the bed, nibbling at the bones and then throwing them out the window with Tudoresque flourish.

  My sister’s fast track to puberty, and her rebellious nature, seemed to diminish the difference in our ages. While we had left New York very much the older and younger sisters, we were now becoming more of a unit—the dynamic duo, laughing and tossing our bones at the world.

  We were just finishing the last of the cheese, giggling and licking our fingers, when loud stomping and angry French voices came down the hall, followed by pounding on our door.

  “Ouvrez cette porte tout de suite, mesdemoiselles!”

  Thinking that a mob with torches and pitchforks was about to break in and see us naked—a fate worse than death—we screamed and threw on our clothes.

  A look through the peephole revealed the mob to be the concierge, manager, and room-service waiter. Despite that our school French hadn’t included so much cursing, we were able to decipher that our window opened onto the air shaft where the hotel dried its clean linen. We ran to the window and looked down to see white sheets stained with grease and strewn with chicken bones. Mortified and a little terrified, we slumped to the floor wi
th our backs against the door, afraid to open it.

  The shouting continued until I heard a familiar voice arguing in French with the hotel staff. As the staff’s anger was checked and their grumbling voices moved away, the voice switched to English. “Jesus, Georgann, this place is a shithole! You’re damn lucky I’m here.”

  We opened the door to find Pop, our now ex-stepfather, standing there with Mother’s suitcase. “Hello, dearies, we’re getting you out of here,” he said happily, playing the knight in shining armor ready to whisk us all away from the dangers of a second-class hotel.

  We had heard that, after a brief shot at reconciling with his first wife, Pop had married that old girlfriend of Mother’s and they had had a child, so we were a little mystified by his arm around mother’s waist after a five-year hiatus. Being relatively young, and at times on the wrong side of her angry rages, I couldn’t fully appreciate Mother’s appeal to men or her ability to wield it. She may not have been much of a businessperson in the usual sense, but clearly she had struck quite a deal at the bar at the Ritz. So a half hour later, Robbie and I were in a spacious, sunlit room at the InterContinental, looking out at the Tuileries from our balcony window, and drinking Coca-Colas we’d ordered from room service.

  Pop took us to Cartier on the swanky rue de la Paix and bought both of us gold charm bracelets with little French flags on them. He also bought Mother a grape-size sapphire ring that was surrounded by diamonds.

  The next morning, we were eating croissants slathered in jam and trashy American cereal at the rolling table from room service when the door flew open and Mother entered dramatically. She was wearing a luxurious hotel terry-cloth robe, her makeup slightly smudged, her hair pillow-rumpled.