The Resistance Girl. Jina Bacarr
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quite a character with her swinging, chin-length hair the color of a ripe pomegranate, her pencil-thin brows and smooch-y, red lipstick. When she’s not around, I mimic her cat-eyes with finely drawn, black cake eyeliner on my lids and then sashay through my apartment, pretending the pencil dangling from my lips is a long cigarette holder. I swirl my lace veil through the air, twirling and dancing free. I’m very protective of my convent keepsake and store it at the bottom of my garderobe. A reminder of where I came from, but I find Miss Brimwell’s approach to life fascinating and want to be like her.
Except I’m not.
Emil insists I keep my hair down to my waist because it’s how the fans want to see their Ninette. Angel-white hair that’s bleached every day when I’m shooting a picture. I want to be more like Miss Brimwell, prancing around in slinky, fringe dresses, but ‘sweet and innocent’ is my brand – Emil quotes like it’s a mantra.
I’m fed up with sweet and innocent. I have no social life. Rien. Nothing. I want to live. Act wild. How can I? I’m up every day at 6 a.m., cold porridge for breakfast with lots of coffee. Something I never drank at the convent.
Oh, how I miss Sister Vincent with her silver spectacles sliding down her nose when she’s praying, her fingers moving over her black wooden rosary beads but also watching me, clearing her throat when she catches me daydreaming.
I secretly write to her as often as I can, telling her everything about my new life. I don’t tell her about the long hours and no sleep. I pretend I am Ninette and give her the happy ending she deserves after risking her position in the convent to help me. My Ninette serial is so popular in the village, she wrote to me, Monsieur Durand holds special showings for the nuns and members of the local clergy (Sister Ursula attended a showing and never said a word afterward). My days are filled with wardrobe fittings, dialogue coaching, makeup, hair, learning my lines. And the actual work, of which I’m so proud. I love acting… even when we work long into the night. One scene today took twenty-nine takes before Emil yelled, ‘Print!’
No wonder I’m so tired and fall asleep in my dressing room with the sister’s letters spread out on my lap. I pay for my lapse in judgment when Emil drops by to give me rewritten script pages for the next day. Till now I’ve kept her letters hidden, but I’m groggy and he grabs them before I can stop him. His face scrunches up. I know that look. He hates anything that challenges his authority over me.
‘I told you, Sylvie, to cut off all contact with everyone.’ He tears them up and tosses them back at me.
I jump to my feet, the sight of the nun’s lovely, blue handwriting in shreds sending me into a panic with a rush of fear that smothers me. ‘I can’t let you take away Sister Vincent’s letters… I can’t,’ I tell him, a long, guttural sob erupting from my throat.
‘You need only me. Without me, you’re nothing. Don’t ever forget that.’
Hot tears sting my eyes as I try to piece the letters back together, but he sweeps the torn papers out of my hands and then stomps on them with his brown alligator-laced shoe.
‘Remember this day, Sylvie, remember the pain you felt when I tore up your letters, the anger, fear, dread…’ he says with a firm control in his voice. ‘You can use it to better your skills as an actress, to bring up those emotions when a scene calls for such intense pain that it tears at your heart. The audience will know those raw emotions are real.’ A smirk. ‘And that, ma chérie, is what sells movie tickets.’
And the horrible, heartbreaking truth is… he’s right.
An actress has to pull up the best and the worst of her experiences. Bon. So I shall. That doesn’t change anything. I hate him and his fiendish need to control me, but somehow he’s always right. The French director uses his power over me to keep me in line. Telling me I owe everything I am to him. And I believe him because I want to.
Because I love what I’m doing. I’m an actress…
And a star.
7
Sylvie
Ninette grows up
Paris
1929
I cry when Emil insists it’s time to cut off my long hair.
I didn’t think I’d shed any tears let alone a steady flow when long strands of my platinum glory fall to the floor. A mantle of lost childhood surrounding me, silken threads like the strands the nuns use to weave their lace. A story lies behind each lace design and so it is with me. Winding my hair up in a long braid or curls and ringlets every day became my pattern of lace, something I can cling to as I find my way in this world of takes and retakes, bright lights and X marks on the floor showing me where to stand. Costumes too big for me pulled in with giant safety pins that come undone during my pratfalls and stick me in the butt. For all my talk about wanting to bob my hair like Miss Brimwell’s, inside I want to remain Ninette. I thought I could go on forever playing the angel come to earth to defeat evil.
That I’d never have to grow up and face life. Face the fact that in spite of the piling up franc notes in my bank account, a garderobe filled with fancy clothes and satin shoes, I have no freedom. Emil controls everything.
Even cutting my hair.
I’m also aware Emil is tuned into my strengths as well as my weaknesses, my ability to ‘feel’ a part and take direction from him without a word, merely a gesture like putting his finger to his cheek or raising his brows. As if I can read his mind. I shudder, knowing how strong his hold is on me, how he keeps me on a short leash. At first, I thought it was wonderful to have someone who cares for me – the truth is, I’m nothing to him but a film property bought and sold to the highest bidder at the studio.
Unlike Ninette, I didn’t defeat the devil.
I sold my soul to him.
I hunch down in the barber chair in the stuffy, studio makeup room, the mirror framed with hot, bare bulbs witnessing the shedding of my hair. My shoulders slump as I try to conceal my anguish from the cheeky stylist chewing gum and chatting nonstop about how much she loves me as Ninette, but ain’t it true ingénues have to grow up if you want to keep working in this business.
With the incessant snipping loud in my ears, she rambles on about a famous star she used to cut hair for, how the forty-something woman insisted on covering up her grey roots with henna and red dye though the only parts coming her way were dowager roles. Then one day she stopped coming in. Last she heard, the actress was working as a madam in the Saint-Denis district where her hair was redder than the girls who worked for her.
I chuckle as she expects me to do, but I find her story so sad. That’s never going to happen to me, I vow. Still, it’s a lesson learnt. Crying over cutting my girlish curls isn’t going to get me anywhere. It’s time Ninette grew up. I should be smart like the good girl I play and not complain about having no freedom, count myself lucky to have Emil watching out for me. Like Miss Brimwell says, a girl can’t always get what she wants, but if she’s smart she knows when to shut up and play a new angle.
So that’s what I do.
I dry my tears and start reading the script Emil sent over for me to read. A film about a wicked woman. My first grown-up role. The studio is eager for me to make a talkie and when the actress hired to play the lead jumped ship to go to Hollywood, Emil convinced them to give the role to me. It’s called Bébé de jazz (Jazz Baby) and is about a flapper who falls in love with a poor trumpet player but marries a rich, older banker. When she goes back to the trumpet player, the banker shoots her… and she dies in her lover’s arms.
The film is a box office flop.
Emil