(8 of 9)
"I Squeak Cheerfulness." Sir Michael, Rachel and Corin are, of course, delighted with the girls' success, but no more than the girls themselves. Each one seems genuinely to hope that the other will win the Oscar, but neither is the sort to grump for long if someone else gets it.* For one thing, they keep too busy to think about prizes and such. In Manhattan, Lynn gets a thorough workout eight times a week in Black Comedy. Her role calls for some adroit tricks, since the action takes place in a house where the light fuse has blown. To let the audience see what is happening, the stage lights are actually turned on, and the performers have to act as though they are in the dark. Lynn's butter-legged climb up and down the stairs, the way she pours drinks to overflowing, and her well-timed near-misses as she staggers around the room are hilariously engineered.
Offstage she is a sunny torrent of activity. "I squeak cheerfulness," she says, "in the face of adversity." She carries on an endless correspondence with her family, loves to have a good blub over their letters. To relieve the Manhattany, she often cooks up an enormous meal—one of her favorites is a lamb casserole crammed with raisins, garlic, apples, onions and lemons. She downs yoghurt by the pint, and has been heard to hail a taxi by imitating the shriek of a pewit—which she learned from a Northumbrian shepherd when she was nine years old.
Underneath the hoyden there is a serious and remarkably mature young woman who knows exactly what she wants. For a while at least, she wants all the fun of being single, and she wants a career. In her rare brooding moments, she worries over how to perfect her craft. "I find myself occasionally elaborating on things a bit too much," she says. "I hate my voice most. It's always higher than I expect and more childish. It annoys me. The best things I do happen suddenly by accident. I have to be acting something out with other people."
Rosé in the Fridge. Vanessa's problems are of a different sort—though on the surface no problems are apparent. She rents a modest stucco house in a pleasant but not palatial suburb of Los Angeles, and except for her daily visits to the studio lives there like any other matron of reasonable means with her two children, their nanny and her secretary. She gets home by 7 or 8, gives a big hug to her two little girls—Natasha, 3½, and Joely Kim, 2. Then she hears all about what they did that day, reads them a leisurely bedtime story, puts a diaper on the baby, and tucks them both in bed. Weekends she sees the children all she can, but arranges to spend a few hours by the pool or work in a round of trapshooting. She is a charming though infrequent hostess, and the nanny and the secretary love her dearly.
On the Camelot set she is adored. Warm and natural with everyone, she never claims her star prerogatives except for the sake of somebody else. Last week, when a workman got drunk, she summoned her limousine to take him safely home. At the noon break, on occasion, she bunches her floor-length royal robe between her thighs, hops on a studio bicycle, goes pedaling off to the fridge for the bottle of rosé that she stashed there in the morning—and then shares it with her hairdresser or the company's dog trainer.