I smile pretty when an outrageously handsome man with the rich darkness of a Moorish night sparking in his eyes slides up to me, buys me a cognac. We drink… stare… then drink again before he pulls me out onto the tiny, round dancefloor and we dance… twirling me… tossing me into the crowd… then dragging me back to him… working his jaw as his eyes haunt me… executing the sultry steps of the Apache with a graceful rhythm thumping in my blood as he picks me up and throws me over his shoulder.
He carries me down a narrow flight of stairs to a cool, dark cellar reeking of wine and sweat… and hot, sticky passion. With amazing strength in his arms, he slides me down his broad chest in a slow dance, rubbing my breasts against him, and then lays me down onto a soiled and dirty mattress. I arch my back, lift my hips, ignoring the lumpy, hard spots digging into my flesh. I reach out to him and he lowers his muscular body over me, and I wait, my breathing coming so fast, dizziness makes my head spin.
Strong hands wrap around my waist and when he enters me, this time I moan with pleasure…
8
Sylvie
Sylvie Martone talks!
Paris
1935
Hitler became German Chancellor two years ago, my country is in a political crisis, but the people of France love me.
My foray into talkies is an astounding success.
Emil builds a brilliant marketing campaign around my pictures that reflects the desperate decisions Parisians face every day. Not as Ninette. He showcases me as a woman struggling to make a living for herself in these hard times. I become every shop girl, every laundress, and every office matron working hard to bring home her own bacon. I make films about floozies fleecing men, good girls turning to sin, socialites on the run. That doesn’t change the fact I’m still a piece of property to be exploited by Emil and the studio.
And I’d better look good doing it.
If I gain a few pounds, they give me pills to kill my appetite.
They shave my eyebrows and draw on skinny ones.
If my roots show too much – my hair darkens as I enter my twenties – the crew takes a break while I get a quick bleach touchup.
I’m whisked off to every film opening on a major publicity campaign, always in a long, sexy gown with a fur stole slung over my shoulder or fluffy feather boa with a handsome actor or producer at my side (Emil hovers in the background, making sure the press shoots plenty of pictures with me in the forefront). Silents are passé, yes, I tell them, and I embrace the chance to continue my career in speaking roles. Thanks to Miss Brimwell and her strict voice lessons, I’ve developed a rich mezzo soprano voice which adapts well to talkies.
All this partying is in addition to my nights carousing at my secret haunts. I develop not only a taste for champagne, but the white powder offered to me by musicians and artists I meet, eager to share illicit drugs sneaked into Paris from Berlin.
Sniffing the drug off my long nails, I head out for a night with a handsome gigolo hired by the studio to escort me on a junket down to Cannes. Rich celebrities can’t wait to be seen with me, drink and do drugs with me. When I do press interviews, I sober up quickly. I can’t forget I started out in this business as Ninette.
I feel like I’m losing myself, what I am.
And it frightens the hell out of me.
Emil wants to control my sex life.
He’s not pleased with my nocturnal jaunts, saying it’s bad for my image.
I should fire the purveyor of the gossip on set – a script girl I barely know – but it’s my own fault for not being more careful. A jealous fille de joie saw me dancing and cavorting with several men in a seedy club and told her friend who told the script girl. She couldn’t wait to spread the story.
It didn’t take long for word to reach Emil.
He insists on soliciting my partners, but I reject the men Emil chooses for me, preferring instead to find my lovers among the artists I meet in Montmartre and the university students in the Latin Quarter. Tall, muscular men with deep, sexy voices and stubble beards who aren’t afraid to find a woman’s secret places with their kisses, who take me in their arms and capture my soul with their fire, who don’t care or don’t know I’m Sylvie Martone.
Emil finds another way to make me do his bidding.
I’m dropped from a film for allegedly violating an obscure morals clause in my studio contract nobody ever pays attention to or there’d be no one making films. I realize if I want to stay on top, I have no choice but to acquiesce to his wishes. A sour moment in our relationship that makes me feel young and raw again – that I have no say in my own life no matter how much money I make or how many box office hits I have. No doubt Emil was the ‘unknown source’ making the accusation that was never proven, but it was enough to ‘suspend’ me. I hate how he uses his dominance over me to make me date the producers and studio moneymen who pay my salary. I’ll bed them, if I must. But it’s a cold bed. Not hot and passionate like the straw pallet in an artist loft in Montmartre, or the book-filled garret of the dashing young philosophy student.
Do I fall in love?
No, Sylvie Martone cannot fall in love. It’s against Emil’s rules.
God knows, my heart is fragile. I have no one to share everything I’ve worked so hard for.
On a whim, I drive out to the convent in my new, Italian, red Bugatti roadster to show Sister Vincent and ask her advice on how to nourish my wandering spirit. She blesses herself numerous times when she sees the expensive vehicle and asks if we can go for a ride with the top down. She never stops oohing and aahing the fancy car and I never get around to telling her the real reason I sneaked out of Paris. I’m lonely. I don’t make friends easily – a byproduct of fame. The irony is I’ve built a golden cage for myself and even when I fly away, I must return to that cage alone. No man could ever understand my passion to make films, the sacrifices I’ve endured, that I’m not made to bear children and make a home.
The truth is, I can’t bear a child.
Or so it seems. More than once I’ve fallen madly in love with a man and find such passion in his arms he can’t stop and I don’t want him to, hoping a child will be born of that passion, knowing I can give that child everything, love her, and adore her.
And pray the man of my passion will marry me.
Then I wait… and again I’m disappointed. My monthlies flow and I nurse an empty heart instead of a baby.
So I’ve embraced my fans as my children, my films are my legacy to them. I make sure the bouncy schoolchildren in my neighborhood behind the carriage gate of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine have shoes, the mothers have milk, and their husbands and brothers the tools they need to ply their trades.
To do so, I must work.
I have no choice but to fall in line, do what Emil wishes.
I never want to go hungry. I’ve seen the destitute humiliation of the people who live in the northern parts of Paris, men with their backs broken from arduous labor, children begging for sous, women selling their hair to buy bread.
That thought is on my mind a lot. The world is in a Great Depression, though France is hit later than the rest of Europe. What else can I do but act? I never learnt to make lace in the convent, I have no trade. I’ve gotten used to an extravagant lifestyle with an expensive haute couture wardrobe, jewels. Then Emil insists I take an expensive apartment in the Trocadéro in