Genuine Lies

to check out the fact that Dorothy Travers was Kincade’s second wife, whom he divorced only months before marrying you. I couldn’t quite place her at first, but I’ve remembered she made a dozen or so Bs in the fifties. Gothics and horror films mostly, until she dropped out of sight. I can only assume now, to work for you.”
    “Nothing’s quite as straight-lined as that.” Though it continued to irritate that she hadn’t stated the connection first, Eve shrugged and expanded. “She came to work for me a fewmonths after Tony and I finalized our divorce. That would be, Christ, over thirty years ago. You find that strange?”
    “That two women could have a lasting and close relationship for three decades after being in love with the same man?” Tension was crowded aside by interest. “I suppose I do.”
    “Love?” Eve smiled as she stretched luxuriously. She always felt luxurious after a session with Fritz. Purged, pumped, and primed. “Oh, Travers may have loved him briefly. But Tony and I married for mutual lust and ambition. An entirely different thing. He was rather gorgeous in those days. A big, strapping man, and more than a little wicked. When he directed me in
Separate Lives
, his marriage was falling apart.”
    “He and Travers had a child who died.”
    Eve hesitated, then sipped her drink. Perhaps Julia had pushed her into a corner, but there was only one way to tell the story. Her way. “The loss of the child destroyed the foundation of their marriage. Travers couldn’t, wouldn’t forget. Tony was determined to. He’d always been completely self-absorbed. It was part of his charm. I didn’t know all the details when we began to see each other. It—our affair and resulting marriage— was a minor scandal at the time.”
    Julia had already made a note to look up back issues of
Photoplay
and the
Hollywood Reporter.
    “Travers wasn’t a big enough star to warrant a lot of sympathy or outrage. You find that arrogant,” Eve observed. “It’s simply truthful. That small triangle took up some space in a few columns, then was forgotten. People took it much more personally when Taylor scooped Eddie Fisher up from under Debbie Reynolds.” Finding that amusing, she tapped out her cigarette. “Actually I may or may not have been the straw that broke the back of their marriage.”
    “I’ll ask Travers.”
    “I’m sure you will.” She made a fluid gesture with her hands, then settled again. “It’s unlikely she’ll speak to you, but go right ahead. For the moment, it might be helpful if I started at the beginning, my beginning with Tony. As I said, he wasa very attractive man, dangerously so. I had a great deal of respect for him as a director.”
    “You met when you made
Separate Lives?”
    “Oh, we’d run into each other before—as people do in this small ship of fools. But a movie set, Julia, is a tiny, intimate world, divorced from reality. No, immune to it.” She smiled to herself. “Fantasy, however difficult the work, is its own addiction. Which is why so many of us delude ourselves into believing we’ve fallen desperately in love with another character in that shiny bubble—for the length of time it takes to create a film.”
    “You didn’t fall for your costar,” Julia said. “But your director.”
    Her lashes lowered, hooding her eyes as she took herself back. “It was a difficult movie, very dark, very draining. The story of a doomed marriage, betrayal, adultery, and emotional breakdown. We’d spent all day on the scene where my character had finally acknowledged her husband’s infidelity and is contemplating suicide. I was to strip down to a black lace slip, carefully paint my lips, dab on perfume. Turn on the radio to dance, alone. Open a bottle of champagne and drink, in candlelight, while I swallow one sleeping pill after another.”
    “I remember the scene,” Julia murmured. In the brightly lit room smelling of sweat and perfumed oils, it played vividly through her mind. “It was terrifying, tragic.”
    “Tony wanted excitement, almost an exaltation along with despair. Take after take, he was never satisfied. It felt as though my emotions were being ripped out, raw and bleeding, then ground to dust. Hour after hour, that same scene. After I looked at the rushes, I saw that he’d gotten exactly what he’d wanted from me. The exhaustion, the rage, the misery, and that light that comes in the eyes from hatred.”
    She smiled then, in triumph. It had