Her room at the hotel was deco, an homage to 1930s Hollywood, with a large terrace and its own dressing room. She took a bath, ordered room service, and flipped channels on the television. Then she stood on the terrace and looked out at Hyde Park.
The next day she went to Walter’s Georgian town house in West London. It was decorated in bold colors, with an Italian feel. It had been just over two years since she had seen him, at the London premiere of Husbandry, but he did not look any older. In fact, he seemed younger, his cheeks fresh and pink.
He ushered her to the kitchen in the back, where he had set out tea and cookies. “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” he said. “I have come across a very intriguing script. It’s set here in London, in the early ’60s. It is about a young schoolteacher who begins to suspect that her husband is leading a double life. As her mind expands, first in fear and later in shock, she begins to explore the counterculture of the time. She begins closed and becomes open. It’s called The Moon and the Stars.”
“When you say double life, what do you . . .”
“I’d like you to read the script. I know you have just completed an action picture, playing a siren with an alliterative name. Perhaps that is the direction in which you wish to take your career. But consider this. That’s all I ask.”
“I don’t want to do action movies. I only did that because—because—that was just a onetime thing.”
“Maybe you’ll hate the screenplay. But I don’t think so. I have realized I work better with material that I have not written. I want to do an homage to an older kind of film. They used to call them women’s pictures. The screenwriter is Nuala Fallon. She’s written for a popular television drama here. She wanted to meet you, but I said you’d have to read the screenplay first.”
“When is it shooting?”
“October.”
“That’s in two months. You haven’t cast yet?” He shook his head. “Walter, am I your second choice?”
“Another director was attached, and it didn’t work out. He was going to cast his wife. When he backed out, she did, too. The financing is all in place, but now they want me to do it. When I came on board, I said I wanted you. Are you free?”
“I’m supposed to do this biopic,” she said, “but I think I can find a way to delay it. If I like the script, that is.” There were always out clauses, she knew, because she had gone in on other roles that other actresses couldn’t do. It was all a big chessboard. She could push the Mary Cassatt a few months. She was big enough now that Tim would reschedule in order to keep her.
At the door, they embraced. “I know we had our ups and downs on Husbandry,” Walter said, “and for that I apologize. There is nothing I would like more than to work with you again.” She wondered whether he was referring to their exchange in her dressing room in Woodmere, the comment about Steven not loving her. She was about to ask him when she decided against it. What was the point? She had long ago concluded that he’d been manipulating her.
She read the script in bed that night. The Moon and the Stars was a slow, quiet drama with an upsetting revelation: The lead character, Betty, discovers that her husband is gay and sleeping with men behind her back. When Maddy got to the part where Betty first spies on him as he enters a gay bar, she threw her arm over her eyes.
She thought again of Walter’s words in the dressing room. But Walter had not written this script. It had come to him. From a woman writer, no less.
Even so, she did not look forward to hearing what her husband would have to say about the script. He would hate the subject matter. Beyond that, there was the Walter factor, the hostility Steven had felt for him after the reviews.
But she liked the role of Betty even better than she had liked Ellie. She began to imagine how she would do it, flipping through the pages to reread her favorite scenes. It was a dangerous thing when you began to imagine how you would play a role.
The next morning Maddy went out to explore London on her own. She did some window-shopping and visited the Tate, then decided to see the Victoria and Albert Museum.
She stopped in the fashion gallery to examine the dresses, particularly interested in the ones from the 1960s. Her museum program said there was a special exhibit of photographs by Lane Cromwell, a name she had never heard before, and she decided to see what it was about.
She wound up staying in the exhibit for two hours, staring at the photos and imagining the woman who had taken them. By the end she had virtually memorized Lane Cromwell’s life story.
Lane Cromwell was born Helen Cromwell in upstate New York, and her father, an amateur photographer, frequently took nude photos of her when she was a child. In her twenties, she had been plucked off a Manhattan street by a modeling agent and wound up posing for the women’s magazines of the day. One of her photographers suggested she try photography herself. He sent her off to Paris, where she changed her name from Helen to the androgynous Lane and became a fixture on the Parisian scene, taking male and female lovers.
In the early 1930s, she returned to New York to pursue a career as a photographer and fell in love with a surrealist painter named Max Sandoval. When World War II broke out, she saw opportunity. Her black-and-white photos of men on the battlefield, many of them corpses, were stark and arresting. She went to Normandy, Paris, and Germany with the U.S. Army, even though women weren’t allowed.
But after the war ended, she lost her sense of purpose. She had thrived on the danger and excitement and was adrift without it. She returned to London with Sandoval and had two children in two years. They moved into an old farmhouse in Buckinghamshire, and she became an alcoholic. She was bored as a housewife and mother, her life devoid of excitement. She died of liver disease in the mid-’60s. Her daughter and son had no knowledge of her past until they discovered a box of her photos and gradually learned the story.
Outside the museum, Maddy sat by the fountain, flipping through a biography she had bought in the gift shop. She fished her phone out of her purse and left a message on Zack’s voice mail at Bentley Howard, knowing it was the middle of the night in L.A.
He called her back that evening when she was in her hotel room. “Have you heard of Lane Cromwell?” she asked.
“No. Tell me.”
She rattled off the details of Lane’s life. “She has an incredible story,” she said. “It’s filled with deep courage and, at the same time, intense pain. She was ahead of her time. She was a woman who thrived on danger, but when the danger ended, she couldn’t find a way to be happy. I think I might—I might want to do something with it.”
“Option it, you mean?”
“I want to find out if the life rights are available. And the rights to this biography I’m reading. Do you think you can help me?”
“Of course I can help you,” he said.
Zack’s instinct had been to keep his distance from Maddy when he moved to L.A., and he suspected it would soon pay off. If you were pushy, you didn’t get what you wanted. Your goal was to listen. Just be.
“She was kind of unbalanced. Obsessed with men. She basically cheated on anyone she ever loved, and at the same time she wanted to be a man. When she realized she couldn’t be one, she didn’t know what to do with herself. If she had lived at a different time, her story might not have been so tragic. She was such a product of her era.”
“I’ll be happy to have our lit department look into this for you.”
“Would you? And please don’t say anything to your mother. I could ask Nancy and the OTA lit department, but I don’t know, I’m just not—”