Who is Alyssia Del Mar?
To Desmond . . . she is “the last movie star”—and the last chance to save his studio from ruin.
To Maxim . . . she is temptation in the flesh—and salvation for a price.
To Barry . . . she is the perfect wife—until her success outshines his own.
To Hap . . . she is the inspiration he needs to become the world’s greatest director—unless their torrid affair explodes in scandal . . .
DREAMS ARE NOT ENOUGH
“All the necessary ingredients are in place: glamor, fame, wealth, travel, romantic complications and danger.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Mar-velous!”
—Cosmopolitan
“Jacqueline Briskin keeps the plot simmering.”
—New York Daily News
“There’s more intrigue and suspense in this tale than in most Hollywood novels, and you’ll love the surprising conclusion.”
—Wichita Eagle-Beacon
Also by Jacqueline Briskin
Everything and More
Too Much Too Soon
Dreams Are Not Enough
Jacqueline Briskin
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
New York
CONTENTS
BEVERLY HILLS, 1986
It had rained before dawn on that particular Wednesday in December of 1986, but by nine o’clock sunshine spread like warm butter through the green, landscaped folds of the overpriced Beverly Hills canyon.
A woman stood at a bedroom window, gazing at the sunlit morning. Even unadorned with her black mane of hair pulled austerely back, a peignoir hiding her apparently felicitous curves, she was lovely. For a moment she closed her eyes and her thoughtful expression altered to one of haunted dread. Then she shrugged as if reminding herself of a task, and moved briskly to a long, narrow dressing room. Behind a professional strew of cosmetics, the front section of the Los Angeles Times was folded and propped to show a photograph of her. With her artfully tousled head thrown back and her lipsticked mouth open in a breathless smile, her image on black and white newsprint appeared far tougher, that of an aggressively sensual woman. The caption read: ALYSSIA DEL MAR, THE RETURN OF THE RECLUSIVE STAR.
Alyssia del Mar hadn’t made a film in six years. For long months at a time she vanished completely. Her reappearances were noted by television newscasts and the press—the Star and the Inquirer routinely sold out when they printed a rumor that she had been secluded in an exotic Katmandu palace, a Moorish castle, or a viceregal estância in the Brazilian jungle with some billionaire, say Adnan Kashoggi, or a notable like Prince Rainier. Legends have never thriven on the rocky soil of truth and Alyssia del Mar had transcended her own myth. What is more intriguing than a star—an international star of the first magnitude—who quits at the height of her beauty and fame? The public, who had suffered with her through illness, tragedy and lurid scandal, snatched at clues to the enigma.
Alyssia switched on a surgical array of lights, leaning forward to study her reflection. Her nose and chin were rather too delicate, but in the manner that exacts homage from the camera. Her upper lip was fractionally narrow for the lower, a flaw that made her appear provocatively vulnerable. It was the large, dark blue eyes, though, that one noticed—the eyes dominated her face and had mysterious depths.
During her lengthy, patient application of makeup, she kept tilting her head, listening for a sound that by her expression she anticipated with fear.
• • •
At precisely ten thirty, three cars turned in at the steep driveway on Laurel Way, following one another up the snaking curves of the long driveway to park near the sprawling bungalow whose pink stucco was in need of a painting crew.
Barry Cordiner didn’t move, but sat fiddling with the keys of his dusty BMW. Beth Gold’s lined but still pretty face was anxious as she peered into the mirror on the sun visor of her Cadillac Seville to straighten the impeccably tied bow of her slate-gray silk blouse. PD Zaffarano’s expression proved a wary reluctance to get out of the Rolls with the personalized license plates AGENT 1.
Simultaneously, as if summoned by an inaudible bell, they left their cars. Calling out greetings in loud, overcordial voices, they merged in an awkward troika. Before they could reach the front door, a plump, middle-aged black woman in a maid’s uniform emerged from the pink fencing that hid the service entrance. “Miss del Mar says will you please come this way to the backyard,” she said. They followed her along the side path, Beth cautiously avoiding the huge, serrated leaves of overgrown birds-of-paradise.
The level area of the garden was taken up by a large patio and heart-shaped swimming pool—this coy pool had achieved a notoriety of its own in Andy Warhol’s much reproduced portrait of Alyssia del Mar with her breasts rising bountifully from its blue water.
The early rain had washed away every trace of smog and the threesome could therefore decently ignore one another in the pretense of admiring the panorama that stretched from the faraway, snow-topped San Bernardino Mountains across the endless sprawl of city to the Pacific, where for once Catalina Island was visible, a lavender hump on the horizon.
Beth broke the silence. “Did either of you know she was back?” Even though her hands were tensely clasped, her voice retained its soft-pitched, melodious quality.
“It wasn’t in the trades,” PD said.
“I knew,” Barry said. As the others turned expectantly, he rested a Dunhill tobacco pouch on his plump stomach, taking his time to fill his meerschaum, a writer’s ploy to enhance suspense. “It was on the front page of this morning’s Times.”
PD and Beth sighed with disappointment. After more inhibited silence, they heard a car snaking up the driveway. In due time, Maxim Cordiner emerged onto the patio.
Seeing them, he shrugged his wide, bony shoulders and formed a caustic smile. “Well, if it isn’t the Widow Gold; Paolo Dominick Zaffarano, superagent; and that well-known American author, Barry Cordiner. The four of us.”
Beth, thinking of when the four had been five, murmured, “Do you have any idea what she wants?”
Maxim lowered his thin, elongated self into a chaise. “The place gives off a distinct aroma of hard times. Possibly we’re here to have the bite put on us.”
“The run-down condition isn’t significant,” Barry said. “She’s been renting it out. Besides, she never cared about maintaining a house.”
“Well, I can hardly argue with you about that, Barry-boy. After all, you were married to the lady.”
Their styles were completely at odds. Maxim wore an unpressed work shirt and Levi’s so old that they were white at the knees, Barry a double-breasted navy blazer with unfashionably narrow lapels and brass buttons left open to accommodate his paunch, PD a black suit superbly tailored to his well-exercised body, while Beth’s sedate gray outfit was adorned with pearls so large that most people believed them costume jewelry, but in actuality were from the waters off Ceylon and insured for a sheik’s ransom.
In spite of their dissimilarities, a certain line of jaw proclaimed them kin.
Beth and Barry were twins, the only two on anything remotely resembling speaking terms, and their infrequent conversations inevitably centered on the care of their bellicose octogenarian father. Neither had seen Maxim or PD, their first cousins, in nearly two years.
Yet once, when there were five of them, they had been so inseparable that the Cordiner clan had nicknamed them Our Own Gang.
Beth persisted, “Waiting’d be easier if we knew why we’re here.”
“I don’t know about you, Beth.” Maxim fished a crumpled letter from his jeans pocket. “For myself, I’m on hand because a couple of hours ago a messenger brought this to my place.” He read the ink-printed words, “‘Imperative you be at 10895 Laurel Way at ten thirty, Alyssia.’”
“I got one like that.” Beth’s delightful voice rose shrilly. “Except I was told to bring Jonathon. But he’d already left for school.” She said the last sentence tremulously, as if begging their exoneration for her son’s absence.
“I had to put off a meeting with Spielberg.” PD glared at the sliding glass windows, which were coated with a substance that repelled sunlight and turned the glass into greenish mirrors. “What’s keeping her?”
Maxim formed his mordant smile. “When did the lady ever put in an appearance on time—or keep a commitment?”
Beth and Barry jerked, twin brother and sister acknowledging in this single unguarded motion that whatever had caused their umbilical cords to be untangled, they still shared memories of one secret time, sweet for both, when Alyssia had followed through on her promise.
“Given a choice, we’d all be schmucks to show,” PD said. “Let’s face it—she wrecked our lives and—”
“PD!” Beth interrupted, her face contorted with horror.
“Yes, PD,” Maxim said, “let’s merely count the minor wounds the lady inflicted. Breaking it up between you and Beth. Dropping Barry into the bottom of the bottle—it sounds like a fabulous miniseries.”
PD nodded glumly. “Maxim, I can get you a major deal if you want to produce it.”
In the sixties and seventies, Maxim Cordiner had been a startlingly innovative producer. Critics applauded him, the box office rejoiced in him, and his movies had brought him nearly as much fame as his glamorous marriages and affairs, yet, in 1981, after tragedy had engulfed his brother, he had abandoned filmmaking.
Barry got to his feet. “While we await Alyssia’s purpose, anybody for liquid refreshment?”
Beth lowered her dark glasses, querying him with a somber glance.
“Not to worry, Beth,” Barry said. “If there’s one lesson the doyenne of this manor taught, it’s that alcohol is a poisonous substance for me.” The bar in the den had a Dutch door onto the pool deck and he opened it. “Still the same for everybody?”
It was. And the bottles on the otherwise empty shelves showed a care for these preferences. A chablis spritzer for Beth, Polish vodka for Maxim, Campari and soda for PD. Barry opened himself a Perrier.
Drinking, the men began to relax, and soon were talking shop. Barry’s upcoming espionage novel, which would be published in hardcover the following April, was being auctioned off to the paperback houses. PD was closing a deal for Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek. Maxim had recently worked with his longtime friends, Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, on a human rights committee.
Beth remained silent. The others feared disclosures from their past. She, however, was the only one with anything current to surrender. Jonathon, she thought with a shiver. Why does she want him here?
Barry poured fresheners. At a metallic screech, they all froze. The window of the master bedroom was being slid open.
Alyssia emerged. She wore her favorite color, red. In her tightly belted crimson cotton dress that displayed dazzling white cleavage, her face made up, her gleaming lips parted in a tremulous smile, she was a different woman—no, not a mortal woman. As she came toward them, back arched, hips swaying, she was the ultimate screen love goddess. Even at close range in the clear sunlight, she appeared to be in her mid-twenties, yet they knew that she had begun working at Magnum in 1960, twenty-six years earlier.
“I appreciate you coming here on such short notice,” she said. Her voice was small and slightly husky.
“The question is, why?” Maxim retorted.
She gave him a little smile, then looked inquiringly at Beth. “Where’s Jonathon?” she asked.
Beth paled until the freckles that covered her cheeks were clearly visible. “In school,” she said pleadingly to her former sister-in-law. “When your note came, he’d already left for school.”
PD, glancing around at his cousins, realized for the first time that Alyssia had gathered together the perfect group for him to package with her. Barry with a hot property, Beth with the financing, and Maxim the producer. He asked with atypical bluntness, “Have you got comeback in mind, Alyssia?”
“Isn’t it possible I might like to be with family again?”
“Such a thought has occurred to me, yes,” Maxim said. “After all, you have, shall we say, an overview of a certain episode that we Cordiners feel is best left in the shadows.”
“Is that what you think?” Alyssia asked. “That I’ve invited you here to blackmail you?”
Maxim’s mordant expression was gone. “Tell us what you want,” he snapped. “Then we can get the hell away.”
Without a word, Alyssia turned. Though something about her posture and walk suggested dismay, even sadness, the little group heard the click of her stiletto heels as ominous. She slid the window shut after herself.
Maxim narrowed his eyes at the uncommunicative, green-hued glass. “She comes out, she says nothing, she leaves. What the hell is that all about? Barry-boy, you and the lady shared many years of matrimonial bliss. Let’s hear your theory on why she’s called this chummy pow-wow.”
Barry walked to the pool, frowning reflectively at a dead eucalyptus leaf afloat in the chlorinated water. Why are we here? He couldn’t pursue the thought. His reasoning power had fled. Coming face to face with his ex-wife, disturbing enough after so many years, had fluttered the pages of his authorized history of their disastrous marriage, the version that laid blame for all their woes at her slender feet. Now, after being in her presence less than two minutes, it didn’t seem so obvious, did it, that she had eternally done him the dirty?
BARRY
1959
1
On October 8, 1959—a blazing hot Saturday—three weeks into his senior year of pre-law at UCLA, Barry Cordiner took by far the most daring act of his twenty years. He eloped to Las Vegas with a girl called Alicia Lopez whom he had met exactly seventeen days earlier.
Barry couldn’t remember his mother ever actually informing him in her rather nasal voice that, not being rich like his cousins, he had to earn top grades, be prompt and avoid the troublemakers at school. Neither could Beth. The twins therefore agreed that their obligations must have been genetically programmed: the ultimate requirements were that Beth graduate from college, then marry a Jewish professional man who had either already made it or would soon make it, while Barry must propel himself into a lucrative law practice before picking an equally suitable mate. Neither of them rebelled. How could they? Clara Cordiner bought her own clothes on sale at cheap stores like the Broadway while taking her children into Beverly Hills to outfit them at Saks or Magnin’s; she prepared them nutritiously balanced meals. She taught them manners, for she had been gently reared.
Clara Friedman Cordiner’s father had owned a large shoe store, and she, an only child, was cosseted. Right before her twenty-second birthday, she had been window-shopping along Hollywood Boulevard when Tim Cordiner, hurrying along, possibly a bit loaded on bathtub gin, bumped into her, knocking her down. He apologized by taking her for tea on the veranda of the nearby Hollywood Hotel. He was very tall, and his laughter rang loud and hearty. Being in the movie business, he knew Gloria Swanson, Tom Mix, Irving Thalberg, Louis B. Mayer, Art Garrison, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Clara had never met such a dashing man. Of course her orthodox parents would never let her date a goy, so she invented excuses to get out. Less than a week later she lost her virginity on Tim’s Murphy bed. The following month, she missed her period. Tim, who was equally nuts about her, said, “We’ll go tell your folks about us.” In her large, immaculate home, Clara wept and vowed to rear her future offspring as good Jews, with Tim concurring—his virulently antisemitic Hungarian peasant forebears must have been twisting in their graves. After disowning their daughter forever, the Friedmans also wept, then sat shiva, the traditional seven days of mourning, counting her among the dead. Clara’s missed period turned out to be a false alarm, and she took eleven years to conceive the twins. Early in her marriage she discovered that her husband, a studio grip, spent his days shifting heavy props: his knowledge of the Hollywood famous was garnered from his older brother, Desmond Cordiner, a bigshot at Magnum. Tim drank; he cheated on her. Yet when the chips were down—and in the Tim Cordiner household they often were—the couple clung together.
Barry understood that it was his obligation, as the only son, to make it up to his mother for his father’s shortcomings.
During the long, hot drive through the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas he had been unable to entirely block the vision of his frail mother’s impending horror; yet, standing at the gaudily painted altar with Alicia at his side, seeing the tears on her luminous, flushed cheeks, his heart seemed to swell, and he accepted there had been no stepping back from the madness that had overtaken him the first time he’d seen her sipping a Coke at Ship’s Coffee Shop in Westwood.
Love at first sight had been accompanied by the classic symptoms: sleeplessness, loss of appetite, inability to think of anything but Alicia, a constant semi-erection. They had made out vigorously in his 1950 De Soto coupé, but hadn’t gone all the way. Barry held Alicia in reverence, and also feared failure—his one experience with an aging pro on Main Street had been an unhappy one.
Barry was exceptionally thin: standing at the altar in his rumpled gray suit, he gave the impression of a malnourished adolescent who had grown too quickly. As he shifted on his storklike legs, he could feel the sweat running down from his armpits despite the extrastrength Mitchum’s he had applied the previous night before setting out for his date with Alicia—it wasn’t until they were embracing that he had seriously entertained the idea of elopement. The hairs on his neck prickled with awareness that his cousins and sister were staring at them, and he had a momentary surge of regret that he’d invited them. Alicia brought out a hitherto dormant protectiveness in him. During the six broiling hours in his un-airconditioned car, she had worried about looking a mess at her wedding—and from the guests’ vantage point, she did. The rear of her scarlet crepe dress was puckered into ugly creases, causing its miniskirt to ride yet higher in back of her slim, shapely thighs.
Glancing sideways at his bride, Barry found himself unable to look away. He considered Alicia gorgeous, but he wasn’t positive whether others did. From the heads swiveling in her wake he knew that most people found her riveting. True, her skirts were unfortunately short and her tops a shade tight so that the buttons pulled between her full, peach-shaped breasts, but this didn’t fully account for the zephyrs of attention that trailed her: women turned as often as men.
Ignoring the justice of the peace, who was rumbling on about the duties of matrimony, Barry gazed at Alicia’s profile, attempting to convince himself that he wasn’t moonstruck, that she was indeed gorgeous. As usual, he was incapable of analyzing her face. Her skin assuredly was unique. Other women possessed faultless complexions, but he’d seen no other skin with this velvety incandescence. Light was not an external quality for Alicia, but appeared to emanate from within, as if an electric current flowed with the blood that now was pulsing rapidly in the subtly blue vein at her throat.
He realized she was clutching the wilted bridal bouquet (he had just purchased it in the wedding chapel’s tiny vestibule) so tightly that the baby’s breath trembled. Edging closer, he let his arm rest in moist reassurance against hers.
At noon, the temperature in Las Vegas was well above a hundred, and the chapel lacked air conditioning. The justice of the peace’s bulging, magenta cheeks appeared to be melting into the creases of his double chin.
Hap, Maxim, Beth and PD were equally miserable.
The cousins had all been born in 1938 or 1939, the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood. Hap and Maxim were sons of Desmond Cordiner, the family emperor. Long before their births Desmond had been a major wheel in the Industry, second in command to Art Garrison, founder of Magnum Pictures, and after Garrison’s death he had taken over as head of the studio. PD’s father was Frank Zaffarano, the director whose sentimental, flag-waving films had made a bundle for Magnum. Barry and Beth’s father, Tim Cordiner, never rose higher than a grip. The cousins, therefore, belonged to the top, upper middle and bottom of an industry with a well-defined hierarchy. This had not prevented the friendship forged between them in early childhood from binding them yet closer during adolescence and adulthood.
PD’s button-down shirt collar had wilted into shapelessness and large globules of sweat showed on his face. The fresh handkerchief he took out to mop his classically handsome features was impeccably ironed: his mother, Lily Zaffarano, nee Lily Cordiner, had a live-in maid and cook as well as a laundress who came in on Tuesdays to iron the voluminously skirted little dresses and petticoats of her daughters, Annette and Deirdre, but she personally attended to her husband and son’s linens. Frank Zaffarano, who had left the hilltop town of Enna in Sicily at sixteen, kept the old Italian belief that a woman’s purpose in life is to serve the men of the household.
Hap and Maxim appeared less uncomfortable, though the blue of Hap’s sport shirt had a growing splotch between his broad shoulders.
The brothers were both six foot three, but here the similarities ended.
Hap, the older by thirteen months, was large-boned. He had thoughtful gray eyes, a wide forehead and a nose that once had been broken during football practice, leaving him with a rugged look.
Maxim spotted a sheet of old newspaper on the floor and he retrieved it. As he fanned himself, his narrow, well-shaped lips curled down in an acid smile. He had inherited a smaller, handsome version of his father’s thin scimitar of a nose; his attenuated height was elegant. Women fell all over him—among the Cordiners, he had the reputation of being a cocksman.
Beth alone seemed cool, until you noticed the moistness where her silky brown page boy curled toward her throat. Her delicate, unflushed face was lightly tanned as were the round arms bared by the sleeveless, powder-blue chemise that she wore with a strand of small cultured pearls. With her slightly too-thick legs tucked under the pew, she was the ultimate California coed.
She showed none of the inner anguish that she felt as her twin was severed from her and joined in wedlock to this cheap-looking girl, a girl whom Beth had not known existed until five thirty this morning when Barry had tapped on her window, whispering that she should dress and come to Las Vegas for his wedding. “Beth, no noise,” he had warned through the window screen. “I don’t want Mom and Dad in on this.”
Beth had a far more deeply ingrained sense of responsibility than her twin. As she sat on the hard wooden bench she was thinking up ways to ease the blow for their mother, who suffered from a coronary condition.
The justice of the peace was inquiring in an orotund tone, “Do you, Barry, take Alee-sha to be your lawfully wedded wife to cherish and protect?”
“I d-do,” Barry stammered.
“And do you, Alee-sha, take Barry here to be your lawfully married husband and promise to honor and obey him?”
Alicia murmured assent.
The justice said that by the power vested in him by the state of Nevada they were man and wife.
Alicia turned. Her lashes fluttered as Barry bent for the traditional kiss.
The justice of the peace clomped over to lean on the front pew, assailing PD, who was closest to the aisle, with odors of rancid sweat and raw onion. “Can I bother you and the little lady here to be witnesses for the happy couple?”
“Come on, Bethie,” PD said.
Now a faint flush did show on Beth’s smooth throat. Nobody, not even Barry, who was closest to her in this world, was aware that she was mad for PD. Her greatest childhood treat had been to stay overnight at Aunt Lily and Uncle Frank’s house, occupying the small room adjacent to PD’s. Her adoration had turned distinctly physical during her eleventh year, when she had simultaneously attained her menarche and learned about the Italian renaissance. In her secret thoughts she called PD by his baptismal name, Paolo Dominick, visualizing him as a Medici duke clad in velvet and satin. Beth knew her love was hopeless—she was irrevocably Jewish, PD a devout Catholic, and besides they were blood relations, first cousins. Being sensible as well as pretty, she dated many boys, thus becoming the most popular senior in USC’s Alpha Epsilon Phi house.
She and PD waited while the justice of the peace with painful slowness readied the license for them to sign. Afterward PD linked his moist-jacketed arm companionably in hers and they went outside.
The others were waiting in a clump to take advantage of the sliver of noontime shade cast by the parody of a church steeple that topped the wedding chapel.
“Where’ll we go for the wedding breakfast?” Hap asked. He was Our Own Gang’s unofficial leader, originally because he was the largest, later because they respected his unerring instinct for fairness.
“This is a no-frills elopement,” Barry replied stiffly.
“My treat,” Hap said.
“Ours,” Maxim added.
Hap and Maxim took it as a given that, as the ones with trust-fund incomes, they would foot the bill for group extravagances. PD was able to accept the largesse because his father was well known as a director, Beth because as a female she was accustomed to checks being picked up. Only Barry felt a poor relation with his manhood threatened each time he was treated.
“Not that I don’t appreciate it—” he started.
“Come on, Barry,” Hap said. “Alicia deserves some little celebration.”
“It’s not necessary,” Barry said awkwardly. “We’ll—”
“Jesus Christ, will you guys quit arguing in this oven?” PD interrupted, “I’ll sign Dad’s name at the Fabulador. He has privileges there.”
• • •
The Fabulador, with its top-rank entertainers, opulently appointed rooms and five gourmet restaurants, was considered the best hotel on the strip. Dapper Uncle Frank must have dropped considerably more in the Fabulador’s colossal casino than the family suspected. PD led the way to the Champs-Elysées, the most expensive of the eateries, and when he explained whose son he was, the beaming captain escorted them to a large booth. Flipping open stiff white napkins for Alicia and Beth, he suggested that they start with the blue points.
While the others tipped on horseradish, tabasco, red sauce, Alicia gripped the damask of her napkin. Noticing, Hap picked up the tiny pitchfork to pry the fleshy mollusk free, eating it without any doctoring. She watched, and followed suit. Swallowing the first oyster with a gulp, she hastily covered her mouth with her napkin. She played with the rest, twisting her fork.
At first the cousins were a little stiff, as if Barry’s marriage had somehow elevated them all to another generation and they weren’t yet certain of the ground rules. Even Maxim’s sarcastic humor was blunted. But the champagne—a vintage Mumm’s—did its work, and by the time the eggs benedict arrived, the five cousins were back to their usual bickering jests and digs.
“So tell me, Barry-boy,” Maxim asked, “how do you intend breaking the news to your parents?”
“Quite simply. I’ll point out that they e
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