An American Love Story Read online

  THE WOMEN WHO LOVED CLAY BOWEN—

  LAURA MARRIED HIM ON HIS WAY UP …

  A prima ballerina, she was already a celebrity when Clay was a mere talent agent, just starting to make a name for himself. Average height, average build, average looks—but charisma off the scale. Laura fell in love at first sight, married him, and became pregnant. She knew she’d have to sacrifice her stardom, but that didn’t matter—as long as she had Clay.

  SUSAN LIVED WITH HIM AT THE TOP …

  She was a starry-eyed student with her first article published in the college newspaper. Witty, energetic, ambitious, she knew she was going to be a writer, maybe even a great one. What she didn’t know was that ten years later she’d come into Clay’s seductive orbit … would become his lover, his partner, his everything—except his wife.

  BAMBI USED HIM ON HIS WAY DOWN …

  She lacked the talent of a Laura or a Susan, but she did have an obsessive desire to succeed, and an unerring sense of which men would help her to the next level. By the time she latched on to Clay, he was no longer the hottest producer in Hollywood. But he was still useful—for as long as he lasted.

  NINA WAS ALWAYS THERE …

  The love-starved daughter so adored him, she would risk anything to win the attention he withheld.

  ALL BUT ONE OF THEM WOULD PAY A HEARTBREAKING PRICE

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  666 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York 10103

  IF I COULD FLY AWAY by Frank Duval

  MAGAZINE MUSIC, Musikverlag GmbH & Co. KG, Hamburg

  Copyright © 1990 by Rona Jaffe

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  ISBN: 0-440-20884-X

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5401-7

  Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press, New York, New York

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  1. 1959—New York

  2. 1960—New York

  3. 1965—New York

  4. 1967—Seattle

  5. 1967—New York

  6. 1944—Glenville

  7. 1969—New York

  8. 1969—New York

  9. 1969—Seattle

  10. 1970—New York

  11. 1971—Seattle

  12. 1971—New York, Hollywood, London, Paris

  13. 1974—Beverly Hills

  14. 1974—New York

  15. 1975—Seattle

  16. 1979—New York and Hollywood

  17. 1979—Seattle and Los Angeles

  18. 1981—Hollywood

  19. 1982—Hollywood

  20. 1983—New York

  21. 1983—New York and Hollywood

  22. 1984—Hollywood

  23. 1985—Hollywood

  24. 1985—Hollywood

  25. 1985—New York, California, Paris

  26. 1985—Hollywood

  27. 1986—New York and California

  28. 1986—Hollywood and New York

  29. 1987—New York

  30. 1987—Connecticut

  31. 1987—Hollywood

  32. 1987—New York and East Hampton

  33. 1987—New York and Los Angeles

  34. 1987—New York

  35. 1987—New York

  36. 1988—New York

  37. 1988—Paris, London, Los Angeles

  38. 1988—New York

  39. 1989—Hollywood

  40. 1989—New York

  41. 1989—Beverly Hills

  42. 1989—Hollywood

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  The room was very quiet. The walls were a shell-pink and white Laura Ashley print, and there were matching curtains at the open window, moving slightly in the summer breeze. There was a single bed, a small bureau, and three chairs. Something about it seemed like a child’s room, or a place where you would be protected. The woman was sitting in one of the chairs, next to the window. Below her was an expanse of lush green lawn, trees, and four tennis courts, where people were playing. She was a pretty woman, but pale and inordinately still, her face drawn inward looking at secrets. Her hands were folded in her lap and she never turned her head to look out at the view. Then you saw that the window had bars.

  There were two other women in the room; one her friend, the other her doctor. “Don’t you want to talk about it?” the doctor asked gently. No answer. “Do you remember anything at all?”

  “What can we do?” the friend asked the doctor, looking frightened.

  “I wish we could reach her,” the doctor said.

  “She hasn’t said a word since she got here?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe she’d like to talk about something else. Would you? Anything?” Silence. “Do you think she hears us?”

  The doctor sighed. There was a pad of lined paper in a clipboard on the dresser, and next to it was a pen. The doctor brought the paper and pen to the motionless woman and smiling encouragement put them on her lap. “Why don’t you try to write something?” she said. “You like to write.”

  The woman looked down at the pad, but did nothing.

  “Perhaps you’d like to be alone,” the doctor said. “I know it’s easier to write when other people aren’t around. We’ll come back later. Okay?”

  “I love you,” her friend said in a sad little voice, and then they left the room.

  The woman sat there for a long time looking at the pad of paper. Then she touched it, as if relating to something that grounded her. Her fingers closed around the pen. Finally, slowly, in a script so small and timid it was almost illegible, she began to write.

  A long time ago men outlived their wives. The women had a dozen children, many of whom died young, and then the wives died in childbirth and were buried in the midst of tiny tombstones. The husbands married again.

  The woman reread what she had written several times. Then in larger letters, at the top, she wrote the title: TINY TOMBSTONES.

  When the doctor returned with the patient’s medication the page she had written had disappeared. She had hidden it. It didn’t matter. A first step had been taken to unravel the past.

  1

  1959—NEW YORK

  On this autumn night that would change her life forever, Laura Hays sat in front of her dressing room mirror for the last time, carefully penciling her eyes to make them huge, and thought what a miracle it was that every single one of her dreams had come true. For little girls training to be ballerinas, their dream was to be accepted by the famed Rudofsky at his Metropolitan Ballet. And greater than that, if a girl would allow herself such a dream, would be to have Rudofsky create a ballet just for her. If that happened, then forever after people who loved dance would remember her. Rudofsky had created Sinners for Laura Hays. She had danced the lead for three years now, to critical acclaim. And tonight at twenty-eight she was leaving her envied career, telling everybody good-bye with no regret at all, because the last of her dreams had come true: the baby she now knew she carried inside her.

  Small and fiery, too thin, intense, nervous, she wore her dark hair pulled
straight back, the way all the girls in the company did; but on her it gave her the look of some kind of ethereal bird. She was pretty in such an offbeat way that it became beauty. She looked at herself in the mirror and smiled. Nobody but her doctor and her husband, Clay Bowen, knew that the baby would be dancing Sinners with her onstage tonight. That fragile little life, scarcely the size of a fingernail, the fragile little life she would protect forever, would be having the first of their shared experiences together.

  The other girls would not be sorry she was leaving. The best ones would wonder which of them would be chosen to dance the lead in Sinners now. Rudofsky would be upset. He would not want to replace her, and would tell her she had to come back after the baby was born. It was nice to know he wanted her, but she wasn’t coming back. This baby would have a real childhood, which Laura had never had, and from now on she herself would have a normal life as a devoted wife and mother. No more mandatory starving. No more constant physical pain. No more fear of injuries, nor dancing through them, filled with painkiller that never seemed to work. And, the best: all her evenings spent with Clay.

  Laura Hays Bowen … Mrs. Clay Bowen … It had taken her two years to get pregnant. They had been trying from the very beginning of their marriage, and finally this morning her doctor had confirmed the wonderful news. Something fluttered inside her. Fear? Certainly not the baby, it was too small to flutter, all it could do was cling. For a moment Laura wondered if it was dangerous to dance tonight, but then she put the fear aside. It would be so nice to tell her daughter—it just had to be a girl—that they had danced together on a vast stage in front of a huge audience, and that everyone had applauded and cheered and given them both roses.

  Whenever she thought about Clay, Laura felt herself melting. She loved him so much.… She remembered the first time she ever saw him, at a restaurant where the dancers often went for dinner after the performance. Someone had brought him along, and he was at their large round raucous table. He was a talent agent at AAI, someone said; very up-and-coming, a boy wonder. At first glance he didn’t look so amazing: about five feet eleven, average build, with sandy blond hair and hazel eyes—attractive but average, she thought. And then he leaned toward her and smiled, and suggested a drink she’d never had—a martini with vodka in it instead of gin—and it wasn’t what he said that was amazing, it was his charm. No, it was more than charm; it was genuine charisma, a way of making her feel that being with him would be an adventure, that tonight would be wonderful, and that he would take care of her.

  And he had. He called, he sent flowers, he pursued her, he found times for them to be together every day or night, even though both their days and nights were filled with the demands of their careers. He talked to her about real things, not small talk the way other men did, he gently massaged her feet, and when she talked to him he really listened. His tenderness enveloped her. “Your poor toes in those toe shoes,” he said, holding her naked foot, “like little bound lotus feet from the ancient Chinese. It’s so barbaric. But you create so much poetry from it. With your strength. Your talent.”

  “Some people find my poor feet erotic,” she said. “Like cleavage. I think it’s sick.” They looked at each other and laughed.

  They talked to each other about their childhoods. Hers had been comfortable, even privileged. It was an accident that her gym teacher had found her walking down the hall en pointe in her little sneakers, holding on to the wall. She was seven. Such natural talent! Such ambition! So her future began. Clay’s life was not so protected. Brought up in a very small town where his father worked in one of the liquor stores, he had been just a skinny, nondescript-looking boy, delivering wine and liquor after school to the rich people who lived on the nearby estates. He wanted to get out of that town, to go to New York, to go to college, to be somebody in show business. Yes, he wanted money, but he wanted his life to mean something. He knew how bored the rich people on those vast estates were, how unhappy, and that their lives held sad stories.

  He told Laura about the suicide. Clay had been fourteen. The woman had been twenty-six, beautiful, married to a very rich man. A crazy woman, he thought now, looking back, but then he’d had a crush on her; long-distance, romantic. And one afternoon, carrying in a case of champagne, he had found the body. She had shot herself through the heart. White-carpeted stairs, white wall-to-wall carpet, and the red blood. Death. “I’ll never forget the smell,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears.

  “Suicide …” Laura said. “No one should ever have to be that miserable.”

  “Or that alone,” Clay said, and held her hand.

  “Whenever we’re dancing the section where my partner is holding me up above his head, I feel a real wave of fear,” Laura told him. “I know how big and strong those guys are, but still I’m afraid he’ll drop me. I can’t ever quite get over being afraid of that.”

  “I’ll never drop you,” Clay said.

  They went to bed together, and then they moved in together, and then her mother gave them a lovely wedding. And two years later, at only twenty-nine, Clay had bought himself and Laura a beautiful apartment in The Dakota, an elegant, historical old building on Central Park West, overlooking the park. “Our lives will always be wonderful,” he said.

  Our lives will always be wonderful.…

  Now in her dressing room Laura leaned forward and put black eye shadow on her lids, extending it far outward, then glued on the spidery false eyelashes, and last, very carefully, applied the black lipstick. She was proud of the makeup; it was so bizarre, and so right for the part, and she had created it herself.

  The dresser came in and zipped up her sexy red costume. Clay would be in the audience tonight. Usually he was so busy with clients it was simply understood that he and Laura each had to do their separate work and they met late at night at home, but tonight was a landmark event. And afterward they would go out to celebrate.

  It was time to go onstage. The hushed moment, the instant of terrified stage fright, then the familiar music, and her run out into the golden light. The applause; warm, familiar. And then the joy of motion, of expressing the passionate feelings of her character, and of herself too. While she danced, Laura remembered how much she loved doing this despite the restrictions it had placed on her. But it was also something she had chosen over twenty years ago, when she knew nothing. She had wanted it enough to be willing to give up her life for it, until now. She would never regret any of it. She would always be grateful it had been hers. She would not be giving up dance entirely, only the applause: she would continue to go to ballet classes, but on a normal schedule, like a normal person. She loved movement and she always would.

  Good-bye, she thought, leaping higher than she ever had before. Good-bye …

  And then the curtain went down, and for the last time there was the applause; like pelting rain, like pelting love. She took her curtain calls, and of course there was her armful of red roses. Thank you, she mouthed, smiling. Thank you … for all three of us. And thought: And my life begins.

  1959—NEW YORK

  This is the first day of my destiny, Susan Josephs thought, and I’ll never forget it. Although it was a thirty-block walk from Barnard College, where she was an eighteen-year-old sophomore, to her parents’ West 86th Street apartment, where she reluctantly still lived, on this dark and chilly autumn evening she didn’t want to take the bus. Her mind was so full of thoughts and her body so full of excited energy that she welcomed the time alone.

  She was a very pretty girl, tall, slim and curvy, with masses of shiny auburn curls that were always out of control, mischievous green eyes, and a look of intelligence and adventure. People could tell at once that she was one of those bright and determined people who could indeed choose their own destiny; but what they didn’t know was how shy she was. She had not been born shy, it had happened, more and more over the years. The only thing that gave her a sense of herself was her writing. Writing was her expression and her escape. She sat working at her typewri
ter for hours into the night, dreaming of becoming a good journalist, of traveling to distant places, of learning and experiencing what life could bring. Her idol was Margaret Mead, who also had been a student at Barnard once, long ago. Susan too wanted to write about how people behaved; not in Samoa but here, a sort of social anthropologist. And now at last … at last … she’d had an article accepted by the Barnard Bulletin, with a promise from the editor that they wanted more!

  Her article was sharp and funny, an hour in the life of a student taking a gut course. This was an Ivy League college for serious women, but not everybody was as serious as they pretended to be. Including sometimes herself. She’d been one of the students in that course, taken at Columbia, in search of attractive men.

  She had met Gordon Van Allen there, in the last semester of her freshman year, gone with him all summer and this fall, and now she was going to tell him good-bye. She had tried once before to break up with him and he had actually almost cried. Her friends thought she was crazy to want to get rid of such a handsome good catch. He was not only nice but modest. His family was social and rich. He took her to restaurants for dinner, not just out for drinks after she had eaten free at home. And he really loved her. Here she was, her friends reminded her: a girl whose parents had told her she could only apply to a college that would be close enough so she could continue to live at home; so great was their fear of letting her get away from them. Gordon would save her. She could marry him and escape.

  That was the last way in the world Susan intended to escape. It was only a different kind of trap. She knew she was too young to be tied down so early in her life, and besides, although she was truly fond of Gordon she didn’t love him back. It had started with sex, and lasted because of sex. A nice girl couldn’t do certain things with a boy unless he claimed he was in love with her, and they were going steady. Not that the two of them did so much: there was no place to go. But the kissing and touching were so wonderful she allowed herself to ignore (temporarily) her knowledge that conversation with him was limited. He was far from a genius. But whom did she expect to meet in a gut course, and what girl in her right mind wouldn’t want to neck for hours with Gordon Van Allen?