Finding Sylvia

By Alan Shayne

Sylvia was from England. She was titled and beautiful, and one day she disappeared. Having never quite fallen out of love with her, Judd, a young movie producer in search of the next big idea, decides her story just might be it. After all, hasn’t he always known that she’s still alive? His search for clues to Sylvia’s whereabouts take him from Connecticut to Hollywood, New York to London, Israel to Spain and Marrakech. Each city reveals new pieces of the woman Judd thought he knew, and leaves him more bewildered as to who she really is. Who is Sylvia?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543908770

Alan Shayne

Alan Shayne retired as president of Warner Bros. Television in 1986. There, he was responsible for launching the hit shows Wonder Woman, The Dukes of Hazzard, Alice, and Night Court, among others. He began his career in television with David Susskind’s production company after heading the Broadway casting office for David Merrick. Prior to that, he was an actor on Broadway and in television. Norman Sunshine is a painter and sculptor whose work is in permanent collections around the country. Earlier in his career, he was a fashion illustrator and creative director at the Jane Trahey Agency, where he coined the phrases “What becomes a legend most?” for Blackglama Minks, and “Danskins are not just for dancing.” He won an Emmy for graphic and title design in the 1970s. Shayne and Sunshine live in Connecticut. 

Book preview

Acknowledgments

Who Is Sylvia?

Who is Sylvia? what is she,

That all our swains commend her?

Holy, fair and wise is she;

The heaven such grace did lend her,

That she might admirèd be.

Is she kind as she is fair?

For beauty lives with kindness.

Love doth to her eyes repair,

To help him of his blindness,

And, being helped, inhabits there.

Then to Sylvia let us sing,

That Sylvia is excelling;

She excels each mortal thing

Upon the dull earth dwelling:

To her let us garlands bring.

William Shakespeare

I

I’ve always prided myself on not looking back. Whenever something unpleasant has happened in my life, I have tried to deal with it and then forget it. Move on. Friends are always harboring grudges—I never do. I always figure that the present moment is the important one. Who cares if someone has slighted you, or worse belittled you? Life is full of promises, so let’s get at it and see what the next one will be. When I was a young actor in a television series in Hollywood, I had the privilege of acting in a special with the great actress Katharine Hepburn. One day in rehearsal, she came over to me.

I heard you say you live above the Strip, she said.

Yes, I do, I replied, overwhelmed that she was talking to me.

Well I do too, she said, you can ride home with me if you like. I was thrilled, and each night after rehearsal I climbed into her battered car that was driven by a nondescript man who looked like anything but a chauffeur. She had no airs and wanted anonymity away from her performing. She was such a legend. I just sat beside her afraid to say a word, hoping she would talk about her films and her director, George Cukor, and her lover, Spencer Tracy; but instead, as we drove from the Valley into Beverly Hills, she kept pointing at houses, really mansions. I could have bought that one for fifteen thousand dollars, she’d say. Then she’d point to another one, I could have had that for twenty-five thousand. And so she’d recount deal after deal that she hadn’t done and how much it would have made her. One of the most important figures of her time and she was still thinking about the wrong choices she’d made years before. I took it as a lesson, and remembered it years later as my friends would bemoan not buying a Basquiat painting for a few thousand dollars that was then worth millions. Out with the past. I decided that’s the way I’d live my life. And I’ve succeeded pretty well. That is, maybe, except for Sylvia. But I had just about stopped asking myself why she disappeared, and whether or not I was to blame, when today, all my resolutions about the past faded away. It all came rushing back like a sudden wind that makes every leaf on a tree tremble.

I had driven into New York for my weekly attempt to see agents who handled writers, trying to get an early look at a book I would be able to make into a movie. I wanted to jumpstart my career as a movie producer but I was getting nowhere. The money I’d made when I was an actor was gradually being eaten away. I was afraid that I would have to sell my house in the country that I had promised my wife, before she died, I would always keep. I was facing the dilemma of the aspiring producer: you can’t get a film made unless you have a property a studio wants. But you can’t find a good property unless the agents will give you one. And most of the agents didn’t take me seriously. They only knew me as an actor and must have figured I’d get over my determination to be a producer and go back to acting where I belonged. All of them must have thought that I was the last person who could get a deal at a movie studio. Well, they were right about that one.

I went from office to office, as if I were back to my early days as an actor making the rounds, looking for work. I’d scheduled appointments, but it turned out that the agents only offered me properties that I knew had already been turned down by Hollywood. Maybe I was in the wrong city. Friends on the West Coast said I should be there where the action was. I just couldn’t leave the small town where I still felt close to Hope—where we’d been so happy together. I told myself, anyway, the literary world is in New York, not in Hollywood. It was almost time for me to drive back to Connecticut and avoid the rush hour, but first I thought, I’d just drop in on Flora. Maybe she had something for me—a book by a young writer that hadn’t been seen yet by the studios. Flora Roberts was a leading literary agent, and she had been helpful to me in the past. She loved to talk and, usually when I went to see her, she would stop what she was doing and tell me stories about the stars she had handled and her liaisons with famous men. She was in her seventies with bright dyed red hair and a figure that was the result of endless noshing (as she called it) when she was watching rehearsals of her clients’ plays. She was hardly a sex object, but her charisma made everything she said about her former exploits seem absolutely true. Her office was high up in a building near Carnegie Hall. There was a small reception room with a secretary who sat in front of a wall of files. She said hello and immediately announced my name over the intercom and waved me in. It was always a shock. After the noise and bustle of the city, I walked into a quiet living room with two huge stuffed sofas and chairs covered in a patterned yellow linen. There was a sideboard with a tray of decanters and glasses. Colorful paintings of flowers made it all seem like a country room in my little town. There wasn’t a sign of any work being done except for a telephone on a coffee table in front of Flora, who was seated on one of the deep-buttoned plush sofas. I bent down and kissed her on the cheek.

What’s the matter with you? she said, peering at me through her huge glasses. You look tired. Are you sick?

I’m not sick, I replied, I’m just frustrated. I’ve had a terrible day. I must have seen every agent in the business.

That would be enough to make anyone sick, she said. It’s not a pretty group. Sit down and tell me about it.

I sank down into a soft armchair opposite her. Flora, I’ve tried and tried but I just can’t find any good material that a studio will buy.

She put up her hand before I could continue, First, you can stop kvetching. That’s not going to get you anywhere. You must be looking in the wrong places.

I’ve looked everywhere. No agent will give me anything, unless it’s already been turned down by a studio.

Listen, she said, "remember, I’m an agent. I know nobody’s going to help you, you’re not bankable. But I have an idea. I’m going to give you some advice out of one of your ‘golden oldie’ movies that you’re always quoting from: it’s the scene in Imitation of Life where Ned Sparks tells Claudette Colbert he’ll give her two words that will make her a fortune."

Oh I know that one, I said, Claudette’s making pancakes in a diner and Ned says, ‘I’ll give you two words that will make you a lot of money: Box it,’ and she becomes a great success in pancakes like Aunt Jemima. So what do you want me to box?

The two words I’m giving you, she replied, "are not ‘box it’, but write it."

Write what? I asked.

There must be something in your life that you know better than anyone else, or some experience that could make a movie.

But I’m not a writer, I said. That television idea for the series you sold for me was just a few lines. Besides, my life isn’t that interesting.

"You are a writer, she interrupted, at least enough of a writer to put some ideas together. Do an outline and you’ll get a screen writer to develop it. I’ll give you one of my writers, but first you have to find the idea and write a premise. So my two words to you are ‘write it.’ You’ll come up with something. Remember, when you’re rich and can afford to buy a fancy yacht, I was the one who told you what to do. Now get out of here. One of my authors has a play opening off Broadway tonight, and I have to go home and get glamorous."

As I drove back to Connecticut, I thought about what Flora had said. I knew she was right. I had to be the instigator of my career, no one else was going to do it. I wouldn’t get a telephone call that would change my life. Everything was going to go along as it had, unless I did something. But what? Write? Write what? Where was the idea? Was there anything interesting in my life? My childhood in Pittsburgh was nothing special. The years I spent at Julliard were filled with acting classes and stumbling affairs that never went anywhere. Writing about acting in a sit-com for five years would be as boring as it was to wait in a dressing room for hours to finally be called to do a scene. I can’t go through my wife’s battle with cancer. And living in Connecticut, in Still River, hardly lent itself to anything exciting. And then a tiny voice inside me, that I didn’t want to hear, said, Sylvia.

Sylvia. That’s certainly a story. Or at least it would be if I could ever find out what happened to her, and why, one day, she just vanished. I’m sure she’s alive. People have seen her – always at a distance. It’s a mystery. What was the hidden reason that made her disappear? I’ve always felt somehow responsible, but I’ve never been able to figure out what happened that day in London—three years ago—when I last saw her. I wonder if by discovering Sylvia’s story, I could find the movie I’m looking for.

I hardly noticed the time passing as I thought of Sylvia. It was dark when I reached Still River and the few shops were closed. As I turned onto the dirt road where I lived, still thinking about Sylvia, a huge deer came leaping out of the woods right in front of my car. I jammed on the brakes just in time to save both our lives. I sat back and forced myself to relax for a moment. What a close call, I thought. I’m not superstitious, but I do believe in signs. I immediately wondered if I was being warned that pursuing Sylvia was dangerous. Or, on the other hand was I being told that if I did find Sylvia, it would give me a new life? Well, one way or the other, I decided then I would try to find her.

II

A storm had swept up from the Caribbean past the Carolinas. The noise of the rain hammering at the wood shingle roof, like a flock of woodpeckers, woke me in the night. I was startled by the pitch darkness. I thought for a minute that the bulb had burned out on the nightlight, but after I turned on a lamp and nothing happened, I realized the electricity was off. The generator didn’t reach to my bedroom so I walked to the kitchen, where it did. I flipped a switch and the room was flooded with light. What a relief it was working. Still River was in the middle of nowhere and sometimes days could pass before the power company repaired whatever had happened. I looked at the clock; it was still the middle of the night but I was wide awake. All I could think of was Sylvia. I started for the stairs to go up to my computer to see if there was any mention of her, but I realized the electricity would be off there as well. I forced myself to put her out of my mind or I’d never get back to sleep.

In the morning, when it was still too wet for my daily walk in the woods, I went up to my study at the top of the silo, sat at my old partner’s desk and tried to think of how to begin my search. I had made an attempt to find Sylvia once but without any success. Why should it be easier now? Maybe then I’d been too angry and had given up too easily. This time it would be different. What could have happened to her? Maybe the thing to do was to go back to the beginning and look for clues. There must have been signposts along the way that I wasn’t aware of then, or maybe I was too taken in by her to see them. Something had to have gone wrong. Sylvia seemed to have a perfect life: the perfect eighteenth-century house in the perfect New England town with money and friends and even what had seemed, at one time, to be a perfect relationship. But either it was all a sham or something happened to make it turn to ashes and force her to run away from everything, even from me.

I heard about Sylvia long before I met her. I was on the West Coast sitting in a tiny office, in the Writers Building at Warner Brothers. The room was probably no different than when Faulkner and Fitzgerald were working there on movie scripts in the forties, except that now it was 2003 so I was sitting at my laptop, not at a typewriter. I had gotten a development deal for a movie at Warners, and now I was trying to rescue a script that I was afraid the studio would turn down. It was called Starlets, and was about young girls going to Hollywood hoping to break into the movies, but finding themselves forced into sex and drugs by men who pretended to be important agents. I thought a woman would be perfect to write it since she could really get into the character of the girls who dominated the story.

The script was terrible. The writer had stolen from every movie about young actresses, even copying Lana Turner’s drunk scene in one of my favorite golden oldies, Ziegfeld Girl. She thought no one would remember it since the film dated to the beginning of World War II. Little did she know that I had studied the history of the movies and had watched every old film on Turner Classic Movies since I was a kid. Since the studio wouldn’t put up any more money, I was trying to rewrite it myself. I had written a few things when I sat in my dressing room on the days I was acting in Family Values. I was desperate to get the studio to rubber stamp the Starlets picture, but the script was unfixable. I sat for hours staring at the blank screen hoping for some inspiration, and my only relief would come when a friend called to see how I was doing. But when my cell phone rang this time, I got a totally unexpected call.

Hey Judd, I tracked you down. It’s Stuart Chase, he said, you won’t believe where I am.

Good to hear from you, Stuart, I replied. Stuart Chase had been one of the most important suits in the movie business. I had read that he had left Twentieth Century Fox and retired, so what was he calling me about?

I’m in Still River, Connecticut, at the bottom of the hill looking up at your house, he said. Betty Burnham, the real estate agent told us where you were and that, since you’re doing a film, you’re thinking of renting and that it might be perfect for Lady Sylvia and me. Can we take a look at it?

I had thought about renting my house, to at least pay for the maintenance, when I had hoped to be away filming the movie, but the bad script had changed everything. Stuart, I said, I’d like nothing better than having you as a tenant, but this picture doesn’t look like it’s going to happen so I’ll be coming back home sooner than I planned.

Well, he replied, that’s the bad news and the good news. The good news is we’ll be able to spend some time with you and you’ll get to know Lady Sylvia. We love your little town, and we’re determined to find something here.

I hung up promising to find the two of them through Betty Burnham the minute I returned home. I had bought a house in the quiet New England town when I was doing well in Los Angeles, and Hope and I wanted a weekend hideaway, for her, from her busy life in advertising in New York, and for me, a place for the two of us to vacation when I wasn’t filming my series. The townspeople couldn’t care less that I was a television actor, and it was a great equalizer for Hollywood, the company town I had to work in where everything was about movies or television. But I wondered if Stuart moved to Still River if he would bring all of the show business life that I was so happy to leave behind me when I returned home. Would I now have to hear about how much money every movie was making when I bumped into Stuart at the hardware store? Would Stuart’s friends, who must include big movie stars, be changing the one horse town into paparazzi heaven when they visited? And what about Lady Sylvia? What would she bring with her? I had read about her: she was the ex-wife of the brilliant British film director Sir Richard Royce. The gossip was that Royce had only married Lady Sylvia, who’d been his mistress for years, in order to be knighted by a Queen who didn’t approve of a man and a woman living together without being married. Once he got the title he wanted so badly, he dumped her for someone else and now she was with Stuart. Well, if Stuart did find a house near me, it would bring a great deal of excitement and glamour to our little town. I was comforted by the knowledge that New England had its own way of absorbing all sorts of people, and never losing its Yankee values. The simplicity and the beauty was what had drawn Hope and me there in the first place.

Finally, in May, the studio said they were no longer interested in Starlets so I took off for Connecticut. Even though I still had a house I had bought in Beverly Hills when I was making money on my TV series, I never stayed there. It was for sale. The mortgage payments were eating up too much money. I didn’t need a house in Hollywood. No matter how much time I spent there, it wasn’t my home.

There had been an unusual amount of rain that spring, and when I got back, the countryside was as green as England and every flowering tree was bursting into blossom. I’d hardly had time to put the groceries in the refrigerator when the phone rang. It was Stuart Chase. Betty Burnham told us she saw you at the market so we knew you were back. We were going to call you on the coast, but we decided we’d wait and surprise you. We’ve bought a house and we’re already in it.

I don’t believe you, I said, it takes months to close on a house. How could you do it?

The woman died and we were able to get it from the estate before it went on the market if we paid cash and closed immediately.

But where is it?

It’s Mrs Carter’s house on Pin Oak Way, Stuart replied. Do you know it?

Wow, I said, that’s in the historic district. I’ve always admired it as I drove by. It’s a gem.

You won’t believe the inside: eighteenth-century and hardly touched. We’re ecstatic. Betty Burnham has been amazing. She arranged the whole thing.

That’s really terrific, I said, It’s looks like such a beautiful house.

Then Judd, when will you come to see us and meet Lady Sylvia?

Stuart, I said, I’ve just gotten here. Just give me a couple of days.

Then what about Saturday? Come for a drink while it’s still light so you can see everything and we’ll go to The Pilgrim Inn for dinner.

Stuart already knew the best restaurant in town, but then there weren’t that many choices in Still River. Perfect, I said.

You know how to get here? he asked.

Of course, I replied. What time?

Six?

Done. I hung up the phone. Mrs. Carter’s house was one of the few real landmarks left in town. It was a classic, built late enough in the eighteenth-century so, I thought, it must have big rooms, high ceilings, and many fireplaces. I was eager to see it and I wondered what Lady Sylvia would be like, probably a faded beauty.

III

Saturday was a glittering day, almost hot in the sun, but cool when you were in the shade. I spent most of the afternoon trying to clean up twigs and branches that the harsh winds of the winter had scattered everywhere. My back felt really ragged, so I was more than ready for a drink as I pulled up in front of the handsome white colonial. Stuart came bounding out of the house looking just the same as he did when I used to bump into him in Hollywood. He had made no concession so far to life in the country. I was in jeans, but he wore beautifully tailored slacks and a leather jacket that must have cost thousands. His hair and beard were perfectly groomed. He had an aura of confidence and success. Welcome, he said, as he opened the car door, you’re our first guest and we’re thrilled.

So am I, I said, and the place looks great. I handed him a loaf of French bread I’d gotten at the local eatery and a small shaker of salt. These are for good luck and a happy home.

Stuart embraced me as if we were old friends. Lady Sylvia is in the apple orchard, he said, so let’s go through the garden before we take you inside the house.

He led me along a path lined on both sides by perennials that were just sticking up their heads after the fierce winter. I was sure it would look like an illustration from an English garden book in a few weeks. As we rounded a corner of the house, the apple orchard came into view. There were rows of apple trees all laid out like ranks of soldiers lining up for a parade ground drill. Each tree was covered with white blossoms and at the end of the path, between the trees, sitting on a bench, was Lady Sylvia. With the spring blossoms above her head, she looked like she was posing for one of the old movies I had collected. My first thought was that she had chosen this setting to make an impression. But she certainly wouldn’t have wanted to impress me. My second thought was how young she was. She seemed to be in her early thirties, a couple of years younger than me, but half as old as Stuart. I had expected a much older woman since I’d heard she’d been with Sir Richard for a number of years. She was a beauty. From under a man’s straw hat, a mane of auburn hair fell loosely to her shoulders. It hung down like a waterfall around her face, framing her green eyes and British porcelain skin. She was wearing tweed pants, a man’s white shirt with long sleeves sparkling with silver cuff links, and a suede vest with turquoise buttons. She looked like she’d just come back from tramping the moors. I’m not sure I took all this in at that moment, but it is ingrained in my memory, so that now, after