The Woman Who Had Everything

by Stephen Greco

Genres: Women's Fiction; Family Life

Synopsis

A luscious, wildly entertaining biographical novel about love, ambition, resilience, reinvention, and Elizabeth Taylor in Italy during the summer of 1967 when, on the big-budget set of Boom!, alongside her husband Richard Burton, she truly was the woman who had everything…and needed so much more.

On the glittering Italian set of Boom!, a big‑budget adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, Elizabeth Taylor is at the height of her fame. It’s an exhilarating experience for everyone in her orbit. That includes Jean, her personal assistant, and Buddy, her semi-closeted best friend and costume designer. A flamboyant force of nature, Taylor enjoys “improving” the lives of those around her through matchmaking—and the young, gamine Jean is one of her favorite projects.

Yet Jean can see that for all Elizabeth’s verve, she’s worried that her box-office potential is dimming. At 35, she needs to stretch. She sets her sights on an unlikely role: the lead in the film version of Hello, Dolly!.

Jean and Buddy must also help Elizabeth navigate her tempestuous personal life. The Burtons live on their lavish yacht during filming, and Elizabeth is fiercely protective of her four children. Richard Burton’s heavy drinking makes him apt to stray, and soon the off-screen dramatics eclipse anything happening in front of the cameras.

But beyond the public spectacle, there are other, undeniable transformations underway. By the time Boom! wraps, Jean and Buddy’s lives will have changed irrevocably. And the star herself will have taken steps toward a new legacy built not on her fabled beauty but as an entrepreneur and humanitarian, driven to help others live their best lives . . .

Release date: August 25, 2026

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 480

Sample

July 1967

The morning’s shoot was going well. Elizabeth had arrived on set neither too late nor too hungover. She hadn’t dawdled in hair and makeup or called for more of her customary breakfast hair-of-the-dog Bloody Marys. Trooper that she was, she’d slipped easily into character and already spent an hour emoting for the cameras—enough, they all knew, to yield a minute or two of usable footage, which for this slightly chaotic production was a perfectly decent return.

The director and crew were ready to begin the next shot, and Jean, the star’s assistant, was standing by.

“Ready, Elizabeth?” said the director. Those who knew her well knew she preferred her full given name to “Liz.”

“Ready,” said the star.

They were working on a scene from the end of the movie, part of a sequence leading up to the death of Elizabeth’s character, Sissy. The setting was the bedroom of Sissy’s clifftop villa, meticulously built inside one of the vast, almost brand-new soundstages at the Dino De Laurentiis studio outside Rome. With the star in place, the director called, “Action!”

In the scene, Sissy is dolled up in a white peignoir trimmed in ostrich feathers. She stands unsteadily inside the bedroom’s closed door, applying copious amounts of lipstick and weighing whether to invite in Chris, played by Elizabeth’s husband of three years, Richard Burton, who would later be filmed on the other side of the door in a black samurai robe.

“Wait out there a moment,” says Sissy, the lipstick still in hand as she crosses the bedroom in a melodramatic stagger, past a sleigh bed, to a vanity mirror standing on an antique dresser. This footage would be intercut with shots of Chris, outside the bedroom door, to be made on location, in a duplicate of this portion of the villa that was then nearing completion in Sardinia. Elizabeth’s shots that morning would be edited together with those shot on site, for a sequence in which Sissy parleys coyly from the bedroom, negotiating Chris’s entry; then emerges to order dinner for him when he complains of being “famished”; then, before the meal arrives, takes him to bed, for the movie’s climactic sequence, leading to her death.

The shooting schedule depended very much on Elizabeth and Richard’s ability to keep the entire story and their characters’ arcs in mind, and to produce the appropriately calibrated emotional pitch for each of their scenes, because, as with many movies, the scenes were being shot out of narrative order, in the interest of production efficiency. This mental acuity was only one reason why the stars were worth the one-point-two-five-million dollars they were each being paid for this movie. Another reason, of course, was their knack for turning realities like famishment and death into high-wire spectacles that drew millions to the box office.

A certain kind of silence settles over a movie set when “action” is called. It’s not just quiet so the actors’ voices carry cleanly to the microphone, but something deeper, almost reverent, reflecting a prayer among the entire crew—the lighting and sound people, the cameramen and grips, the script and continuity people—that the scene, especially if it comes after a previous attempt or two, or ten or twenty, will be good enough to print.

At the mirror, crowded by a fancy mantel clock in front, Sissy steadies herself, leans in, and brushes on some rouge, then emits a faltering cough. In the finished movie, she will have been dying of an unspecified disease, and complaining about it, for the preceding hour and a half. And to give the scene some existential resonance, the shot was written to cut artfully to a detail of a wall-size Renaissance painting hanging just outside the bedroom, where Chris and two of the story’s other characters are lurking: Blackie, Sissy’s secretary Miss Black; and Rudi, her head of security.

After Sissy’s cough, the director yelled “cut,” and Elizabeth, dropping the role, tottered over to the bed and collapsed with a sharp groaning sound, clearly in real pain, her hand thrusting out dramatically for help.

“It’s the sciatica,” Jean told the director quickly, stepping over to Elizabeth’s side.

“Bean, honey, I need a shot,” moaned the star.

Jean helped Elizabeth rise into a sitting position. They would have to go to the dressing room for the injection.

“Sorry, Joe—ugh. It’s my back again,” said Elizabeth, in a voice somewhere between an anguished scream and an amused cackle.

The director came over and rested a hand on the star’s shoulder. “Perfectly alright.”

“No, but we can keep going. Just give me twenty minutes.”

“You sure?”

Elizabeth nodded with a wince, as she rose to her feet, helped by Jean.

“You know me,” said the star. “Old warhorse.”

“That’s one hour, everyone,” called the director, to all on set.

Jean was glad to be back in Rome. Just months before, she and Elizabeth had spent long, arduous days here while the star filmed The Taming of the Shrew and Reflections in a Golden Eye, and despite the usual headaches of both productions, there’d been something spirited about it all—Elizabeth in her element, the center of everything; delighted to be making another movie in the city where not long before she’d been vaulted from stardom to superstardom. Now Jean and her illustrious employer were here again, this time on a more rarefied project, with a director Elizabeth had long admired and a script that veered into allegory or … something even more delirious.

The movie they were filming was Boom!, and the director was Joseph Losey, the American-born, London-based maverick responsible for such cult favorites as The Servant, The Go-Between, and Modesty Blaise. Based on playwright Tennessee Williams’s expressionistic fantasia The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore and adapted for the screen by Williams himself, Boom! featured Elizabeth as the aging, ailing Flora “Sissy” Goforth, a multiply widowed zillionairess attended not only by a personal physician, a security squad, and Blackie—to whom she is dictating her memoirs—but by a sizable household staff headed by a butler dressed in a djellaba and turban. Into this ménage, installed in a modernist villa atop a cliff on Sissy’s private Mediterranean island, comes Christopher Flanders, a handsome young drifter-poet with a reputation for turning up—perhaps not by chance—at the demise of wealthy society women, a habit that has earned him the nickname “the Angel of Death.”

People in the movie industry buzzed a bit when they heard about Losey’s casting choices. When Milk Train ran on Broadway three years before, Sissy was played by Tallulah Bankhead, who was then sixty-two, and Chris was played by Tab Hunter, then thirty-three. Though Elizabeth, at thirty-five, was notably younger than the character of Sissy as written, and Richard, at forty-two, was notably older than Chris, these were, after all, The Burtons—who, since Cleopatra, were the most famous movie stars, and possibly the most publicized human beings, on Planet Earth. Losey was clear, when signing his stars, that he wanted not only their skills and box-office draw, but their “mutual effulgence,” which was part of what had made them so great in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the year before—and which, despite their chronological ages, would provide an aura that Losey thought would nicely harmonize with what he called “the poetry of the author’s words, the music of the sea, and the dazzling light of Sardinia.”

Yet even with a few quiet months between films—dividing their time between their chalet in Gstaad and their suite at the Dorchester—the Burtons arrived at Boom! subtly frayed. Jean saw this more clearly than anyone. Shrew had been a long, heated slog of a shoot, full of theatrics on and off camera, and Reflections had pressed Elizabeth into a darker, more consuming state than she liked to admit; both films had been demanding, and they had been shot far too close together. So when the couple stepped onto Losey’s soundstage, they were still incandescent, still “Liz and Dick,” but Jean heard the strain in their voices—Elizabeth’s just a shade hoarser, Richard’s edged with impatience—as if both were running on nerves and sheer force of will, their bodies carrying the residue of too much work and not enough rest.

The production had been shooting in Rome for two weeks and would soon decamp for a rocky cape in northwest Sardinia called Capo Caccia. Moving an entire movie—crew, staff, cameras, lighting, trailers, catering, and housing—was no more complicated than moving the Burtons themselves. They had four children in tow, along with household staff, personal hair and makeup people, and the usual gang of agents, lawyers, and security personnel. By then, this was how the Burtons traveled from film to film, with the help of their private jet and helicopter, and a pair of Rolls-Royces. And right now, the task of getting this entourage smoothly to Alghero, the nearest city to Capo Caccia, fell largely to Jean, since the Burtons’ longtime majordomo and logistics coordinator, Dick Hanley, was ill.

Tenderly, offering her arm for support, Jean led Elizabeth off the soundstage, the star making slow, pained steps. Behind them, silently, followed the wardrobe mistress and the dresser.

“See how I did the bit with the rouge, in the edge of the mirror?” said Elizabeth, as they walked.

“Very resourceful,” said Jean.

“Who the hell has a clock in front of a mirror?”

“They don’t want you writing on it with your lipstick.”

Elizabeth gave her assistant’s side an affectionate push. The quip was a callback from Elizabeth’s Butterfield 8: “No Sale.”

Jean was dressed for the studio that day in white mod shorts with a chunky belt, a sleeveless vest, and custom Ferragamo raffia loafers—a gift from Elizabeth. As the star’s representative, Jean was expected to maintain a certain chic, which she relished; and at the studio, everyone seemed to ooze dolce vita, stylish even in the heat. During the previous two weeks, it had been unusually warm for Rome in July—a sweltering thirty-two degrees Celsius for days at a time. People in the city were complaining, yet inside most of the buildings of the De Laurentiis complex, located half an hour’s drive south of Rome, the temperature was a comfortable twenty-two. No need for old-fashioned floor-mounted oscillating fans, no heat exhaustion under bright lights here, no melting makeup or wilting costumes. …

Jean had worked at the De Laurentiis studio before, of course, when Shrew shot some of its interiors there. She already knew the studio’s layout—which entrances the drivers preferred, where the costume girls slipped off to smoke, what café served the Chinotto-and-asti spritz she liked. Waggishly known as “Dinocittà,” it felt to her like a city built for dreams—hundreds of acres of soundstages, offices, workshops, and backlots stitched together with canteens and garden courtyards where crews took their breaks, lingered over coffee, and flirted in the shade. The place had sprung up only a few years before, the brainchild of the unstoppable producer Dino De Laurentiis, meant to replace the drab, rickety, thirty-year-old Cinecittà. To Jean, the studio seemed like a symbol of the new Italy—brash, modern, and stylish. Since the war, the Germans had been limping, the English and French still rebuilding, the Soviets still licking their wounds, the Americans still congratulating themselves with backyard barbecues. The Italians, meanwhile, were riding the economic miracle of il boom, and to Jean it felt as if they’d already slipped into the future—breathlessly up to the minute in spirit, turning postwar life itself into an art form: optimistic, even opulent—part sci-fi, part Eternal City, fun with a dark edge but never nihilistic.

Jean’s ensemble may have been a bit youngish for her, but that was the point. This was 1967, and a whole new way of living was in the air. Seven years before, at twenty-two, she had landed in London just as the Swinging Sixties were taking hold, after leaving her upstate New York hometown and spending a few years at an acting school in Greenwich Village. A friend at RADA introduced her to a Mr. Hanley—secretary to Elizabeth Taylor!—who was seeking help as Cleopatra was commencing production. Jean leapt at the chance, and soon Elizabeth herself had commandeered her as a personal assistant. Sometimes Jean chuckled to think of her high school classmates, long married with children, looking middle-aged already, while she was moving easily in international circles, still gamine and slim enough for the cheekiest contemporary fashions. With short sandy hair in a pixie cut, she was attractive, if not especially beautiful—a distinction that suited her. Elizabeth assumed that any self-consciously beautiful woman in her orbit could be a potential threat, and Jean had no desire to compete for the spotlight.

When they reached the dressing room, Jean helped Elizabeth slip off the peignoir and settle into one corner of an overstuffed armchair, then went to the dresser to prepare the injection.

The dressing room was actually a suite. Decorated in violet and gray, with several French provincial armchairs and a sofa that were upholstered in a glazed chintz floral, the suite incorporated not only a dressing room proper and lavish bath, but a retiring room for naps, and a storeroom for costumes and wigs. It had been decorated by the same interior designer that Elizabeth and Richard were using for their new yacht, Kalizma, which was currently being fitted out at the Benetti shipyard in Viareggio, on the coast north of Rome. Two stations were the focus of the suite: an abundantly lit vanity, as imposing as any holy shrine, and a bar that was lavishly stocked with champagne, liquor, and juices, including a large glass pitcher of tomato juice that was a staple for Elizabeth’s breakfast Bloodies.

In the corner, on the floor, sleeping in a plush cradle of a bed, was Rocco, Elizabeth’s aging Maltese, who often made it necessary for studio housekeeping to come by and clean up his messes. Elizabeth was well-known for her love of animals and disinclination to housetrain them. The other pets who were then traveling with the Burtons and family—a golden retriever, a poodle, two Siamese cats, a mynah bird, and a cage of turtles—were back at the hotel where the Burtons and their entourage were staying, Rome’s famous Grand Hotel, in a special petsonly suite on the same floor as the children. All the pets would be going with the entourage to Alghero, though it wasn’t decided yet whether the Burtons’ monkey, now in their suite at the Dorchester in London, after a visit to the vet, would be joining up with the family in Sardinia.

Jean kept a small case of syringes and vials of Demerol in the dresser drawer, beside a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a packet of cotton balls. One hundred milligrams was Elizabeth’s usual dose.

“Ugh, thank you, Beanie,” said Elizabeth, sinking back into the chair after the injection. Patiently, she let Jean blot away a spot of blood and apply a Band-Aid.

Jean smoothed the bandage. “I don’t think that’ll show.”

“No, no. I’ll tell Joe. We’ll work out an angle or something.”

“Do you want a drink?”

“Mmm, maybe a little one.”

Jean had been carefully trained by one of Elizabeth’s most trusted physicians, Dr. Rex Kennamer, in the proper administration of the Demerol. She’d also been well informed about the Seconal, Percodan, Benzedrine, and other drugs Elizabeth often took for various maladies and conditions, and their effects and side effects, and possible interactions with each other as well as with alcohol and marijuana. It was Jean’s responsibility as Elizabeth’s closest assistant to be as familiar with the star’s physical needs as with her preferences of vodka, champagne, caviar, and cigarettes—and that included the most basic bodily functions.

It fell to Jean, in fact, to observe the condition of Elizabeth’s panties on a daily basis, and when the star was having her period, to inform the movie’s producer and director of this fact, because one provision of Elizabeth’s forty-page contract began:

The Producer agrees that the Artist shall not be required to perform any work, including but not limited to rehearsals, filming, promotional activities, or any other related obligations, during the period of her menstruation each month …

In the seven years Jean had worked for Elizabeth, she had never found her tasks onerous. “That’s what the job is,” she once told her dubious mother, who never failed to remind her that she was now only a star’s assistant, not the star she had left Prescottville, New York, to become. Jean’s acting background made her a better assistant, and she took pride in that. More than that, she framed her duties within the affection she had come to feel for Elizabeth—a big-hearted, generous woman who wanted both to do good work and to lift the spirits of those around her. Jean adored her boss as truly as one person can adore another; and Elizabeth recognized this rare allegiance, which deepened the sisterly bond between them.

That bond, involving Elizabeth’s body and soul no less than her schedule, often felt to Jean more like stewardship than service. She knew how long Elizabeth’s body had been in revolt—ever since the fall from a horse during National Velvet that left the star’s spine misaligned. The sciatica that followed was only the beginning. Jean could tell from the way Elizabeth walked or shifted in her chair when pain was coming on. There were the inflamed joints, the rectal bleeding, the dental abscesses, the many surgeries for hemorrhoids. Then the sinus flare-ups, the bronchial colds, the sleepless nights, the bruises from yet another tumble. Jean arranged for the physicians and masseurs; she fetched the medicines and comforted through injections, aware that the line between help and harm was perilously thin. Elizabeth knew it, too. Her dearest friend, Monty Clift, had recently slipped over the line and died; though cavalier to the end, he always recommended taking “masses of bennies to forget your worries.”

And as Elizabeth’s weight rose and fell with the seasons and from movie to movie, she patiently submitted all five feet, two inches of herself, whether slim or zaftig, to Jean’s ministrations, almost like a dutiful child. It was in this role that Jean proved herself more truly devoted than anyone else in the Burtons’ retinue, save for dear Buddy Richards, Elizabeth’s trusted fashion and costume designer.

Jean took deep satisfaction in enabling her boss to face the world as the headline-making Liz Taylor, a role that demanded of the star not vanity but conviction. Elizabeth was beautiful, yes, and spent millions on yachts and jewels, and posed for the cameras and preened for fans. But what others took as the performance of superstardom, Jean had come to see as something almost priestly: a devotion to career that Elizabeth carried with astonishing seriousness, even through pain. Beneath the sparkle, Jean saw this conviction—discipline tempered with grace—and perhaps this was why it was so easy for her to feel kinship with all that brilliance, as though by tending it, she too was made a little brilliant.

Jean mixed the Bloody Mary and was placing it in Elizabeth’s hands when the phone rang. The call was on Jean’s line—unusual for a time slot when she was scheduled to be on set with Elizabeth. The star mugged comically as Jean picked up.

“Jean McCubbin here. … Oh, yes, hello. … Mm-hmm. I see. Can you tell me why? … Well, that’s very disappointing. … Yes, I know. Mr. Hanley’s told me all about it. … I understand. But still … mm-hmm. You know, we’ve been very patient with you.”

The call continued, with Jean making reference to “Viareggio,” “Alghero,” and “the Tanganyika frisé.”

“You’re sure about the seventh, then?” said Jean. “On your life… ? I’m sorry? On your life … it’s a saying. It means, are you absolutely certain… ?”

After a few more exchanges, the call was over.

“What the hell was that all about?” squawked Elizabeth.

“Oh, the boat …”

“What about the boat? Isn’t Dick handling that? Were we able to get Captain Ainslie? Mama Bear wants to know what’s going on.”

Jean took a moment to explain. The night before, in her room at the Grand, where the Burtons’ senior staff were also staying, she had taken a call from Dick Hanley, who sounded unusually shaky.

“Can you do the boat, for the moment? I’m off to Salvator,” said Hanley. Salvator Mundi was one of Rome’s best private hospitals—where Elizabeth herself had been treated several times during Cleopatra and since then.

“Oh, Dick, what’s the matter? The heart again?” said Jean.

“It’s probably nothing. Weakness, shortness of breath. But now it’s even when I’m lying down. I don’t want to bother Elizabeth. You know how she gets. …”

“Yeah.”

“She’ll want to take over and pay for everything, and I just want her to stay focused on the film.”

“Okay.”

“I have some tests in the morning. I should be fine. But Benetti is going to call with a revised delivery date.”

“Ah, okay. I can handle it,” said Jean, mustering patience. “Give them my number.”

She took her orders from Elizabeth but generally dealt with Hanley’s requests without complaint—at least for now.

Hanley had been working for Elizabeth since 1957, after serving as a secretary to Louis B. Mayer. Hired by Elizabeth in the same capacity, “Dickie, luv,” as Elizabeth often called him, was one of two senior members of the staff, the other being Raymond Vignale, “Ray, baby,” who was now actually more of a social secretary, though a high-level one, in charge of the Burtons’ connections with celebrity friends and often of carrying the most precious pieces of Elizabeth’s jewelry from place to place. Currently, Hanley’s big challenge was to coordinate all the moving parts of the relocation to Sardinia, which included deploying a custom-designed dressing trailer for Elizabeth, and procuring the best suite in Alghero’s palatial Villa Las Tronas hotel as a nominal base for the Burtons—though the family was planning to make its home primarily aboard the new yacht, once it was delivered to Alghero’s marina.

Jean had been keeping half an eye on the yacht situation, in case Hanley let something slip. The captain that the Burtons wanted for Kalizma had indeed been engaged—Lieutenant Commander Rupert Ainslie, retired from the Royal Navy, a gentleman who’d once charmed Elizabeth at a party by remarking that, despite modern navigational equipment, he still liked “to steer by the stars.” But the completion of the yacht’s re-fit, originally scheduled for the following week, had been delayed by the late delivery of some rare Tanganyika frisé wood that Richard wanted for paneling in the vessel’s library. Now that the shipyard had the wood, the re-fit could be completed and the boat brought to Alghero.

It also now looked happily as though the shipyard delays and various movie production delays were in sync, both two weeks late, and that both the boat and the production would arrive simultaneously in Sardinia.

“I just need you to be my eyes and ears tomorrow,” said Hanley.

“She’ll have to know,” said Jean. “I don’t feel right about keeping it from her. You know she’ll get wind of it anyway.”

“Then handle it any way you want. I’ll call you tomorrow, if I live through the night.”

It was a typically prickly remark from Hanley, whose personality in recent years had gone from sharp to downright strident. Jean noticed this change; everybody did—though it wasn’t clear whether Elizabeth noticed or minded it.

Hanley was a trim, elegant man who always seemed faintly exasperated with the world. His voice was high and whiny, which could make even a simple remark sound sarcastic, and Jean sometimes had to remind herself not to take it personally. At fifty-seven, with his neat gray hair and heavy black spectacles, Hanley carried himself with a kind of old-school polish—a blend of precision and theatrical poise that everyone understood as part of his being homosexual. He was open about it, but in the restrained, self-protective way of his generation, with mannerisms meant to contain a natural flamboyance. This was not a problem for the Burtons, as many in their ambit were gay, as these men were now calling themselves. Elizabeth had always had close friendships with gay men, and so had Richard, though Richard was not above teasing with language he thought harmlessly funny, sometimes referring to Hanley as a “faygela” and Vignale as a “pouf.” Jean didn’t bother reacting to such language; Richard’s teasing was its own period piece. To her, Hanley was simply more formal than anything else. His fastidiousness amused her; his moods didn’t.

What did trouble her now was the shortening of Hanley’s mental fuse. Increasingly, he was making errors that Jean had to reverse or work around, often at her own expense. Still, she kept her irritation in check, figuring her cooperation might prove strategic. If and when Hanley could no longer present the polished face the Burtons expected, the role of majordomo might pass to her. Already, Hanley was pissing off people the Burtons needed on their side. The week before, at the studio, during setup for a photo shoot, a visiting Vogue editor made a snooty remark about dog poop in the dressing room, and Hanley flew into a rage and canceled the shoot. Elizabeth later claimed she didn’t mind and didn’t need the free sable coat they would’ve given her, but Jean suspected the star had registered the incident, and that maybe, just maybe, Dickie, luv, was starting to lose it.

“Good luck for your tests, Dick.”

“Thank you. And by the way, Jeannie, can you handle the earmuffs, too?”

Jean sighed.

“There’s a good girl,” continued Hanley. “They need to be ordered now, or she’ll never have them for Christmas.”

“Just have someone put the information in my box,” droned Jean.

Elizabeth finished her Bloody Mary as she listened with interest to this account of Jean’s phone call with Hanley. The star admitted that she did indeed suspect Hanley was getting worse.

“You can see it in his face,” she said, setting down her glass. “He’s pale, he’s lost weight. But I didn’t know he was dropping so many balls. Damn.”

“Anyway,” continued Jean, “now the boat will be in Alghero at the same time we arrive, so there’s that.”

“Bean, I want him to have the best. Richard and I will take care of everything. He’s not to worry.”

“I’m sure he’ll give you a full report.”

“Good.”

“And I’ll keep you posted, too.”

“Capable, as always.”

Jean hesitated. “And if there’s ever a time when, you know, you find that Dick can’t …”

Elizabeth was ready with a response.

“Leave it to me,” said the star brightly, with a hand gesture, meant to signify the final word on the subject. “Just leave everything to me.”

Jean smiled. The Demerol had eased her boss, but the lady still commanded. Even now, in this little time out from filming, Jean could be astonished by Elizabeth’s beauty—the insinuating tilt of the head, the potency of a look from those violet eyes—and the vocal charisma that could flash from refined to crude in a syllable.

“So, Betty—feeling better now?” asked Jean, with the affectionate name she used for Elizabeth when the star started calling her “Bean.”

“Fine,” said Elizabeth.

“Shot kicking in?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Do you want wardrobe?”

Elizabeth stretched out her hand and wiggled her fingers.

“Not yet,” she said. “Stay with me a minute.”

Elizabeth repositioned herself in the armchair, wincing a bit as she sat up straighter. Jean perched next to her on an ottoman.

“Art imitating life, eh, Beanie?” said Elizabeth, philosophically.

Jean laughed. “You’re so Method.”

As per Boom!’s script, Elizabeth had collapsed on the bed in practically the same way that her character Sissy did in a scene that was shot a few days earlier.

“Except the line says ‘injection,’ and I said ‘shot.’”

“I noticed.”

“I noticed you noticed.”

They both laughed. That line, too, was in the script, and would be shot later, in Sardinia. Jean often ran lines with Elizabeth, and always knew, forwards and backwards, the script of any movie Elizabeth was working on.

“Now, listen,” said Elizabeth, “when we go back, I want you to say something to that grip.”

“What grip?”

Elizabeth snorted. “Don’t play dumb with me, missy. The adorable one on Camera A, with those honey brown eyes and sparkling teeth—the one everyone on set, girls and boys, is lusting after.”

“Oh, him.”

“‘Oh, him,’” mocked Elizabeth.

“Guys like that are never interested in girls like me.”

“Bullshit! I see the way he smiles at you.”

“He smiles at everyone that way. That’s his thing.”

“You smile back, now. Don’t flirt, just be nice.”

“Elizabeth. …”

“His name is Enzo.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Just do it. Or Mama Bear will need to get involved.”

Jean had envisioned her expatriation as a pathway to great work and great love, but early on, in London, an affair with a young actor named Geoffrey had