Capote's Women by Laurence Leamer

Author:Laurence Leamer [Leamer, Laurence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Her theatrical career may have been on hold, but C.Z.’s nightlife sizzled. Victor Mature was still her man, and when he was in town, they were together. C.Z. had never experienced the tedious, often demeaning process of trying out for parts and risking rejection. She knew the right people in the right places, and she did not have to demean herself by hustling to get ahead. It was at a Manhattan dinner party among talk of other things that the Hollywood producer Darryl Zanuck met C.Z. and signed her to a film contract at 20th Century Fox. Just like that, she was off to Hollywood with plans of becoming a star. It was her due, after all.

As C.Z. arrived in Los Angeles, Katharine Hepburn was back in town as well. In the romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story, she had played to type as a socialite. The popular Academy Award–winning film showed that there might be room for C.Z. to play roles that hardly stretched her. But she still had the minuscule attention span that she had in elementary school. Not realizing that “overnight success” often happens after years of work, she was totally unprepared to spend the time it might take to hone her craft and find her place in the Hollywood ecosystem. The auditioning process was often humiliating, nothing but rejection after rejection, and she began to lose interest in acting as a profession.

Though C.Z. quickly played out her hand in Hollywood, her evenings were far from boring. Much of the time she was with the Australian-born swashbuckling star Errol Flynn. The actor was almost twice her age and married, and her affair with him suggested how far C.Z. had traveled from the chaperoned world of a Boston debutante. She eventually got an uncredited role in Diamond Horseshoe starring Betty Grable and Dick Haymes, but that was it. After spending no more than six months in her abortive film career, C.Z. left for Mexico City, where she took up with a devastatingly handsome bullfighter.

There were few things rarer in Mexico City than a blond beauty, and C.Z. attracted stunned attention wherever she went. One of those who saw her and was mesmerized was the painter Diego Rivera, who asked to paint her in the nude. The finished painting was placed above the bar at Ciro’s, a leading club, where patrons could sit drinking palomas or margaritas, admiring the nude body of a Boston Brahmin. By then C.Z. had left the city for good, not the least bit distressed that she had left part of herself there.

C.Z. may not have been an actress, but she was incredibly photogenic. One of those mesmerized by seeing one of her photos was Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, an heir to the Phipps steel fortune. His mother had married Frederick Edward Guest, a first cousin to Winston Churchill, and Winston Guest had been brought up both in England and the United States. The dual fortunes had been so large and so long-standing in the two families that they existed in their own alternate, upper-crust reality.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.