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with him; he owed them that much, surely? The gloss had already gone off the marriage thanks to Viv’s drinking, but he couldn’t just abandon them, now could he? LaLa insisted he could. Rick insisted he couldn’t.
    Finally, LaLa won the vote. And she laid down the ground rules. Rick rented a modest house in the hills and Vivienne had to stay there with her little boy. To the outside world, to Hollywood, Rick Ducane must be a single man. There must be no mention of any marriage, none at all – not unless he wanted to fuck up his career before it had even started. He needed to be free to escort older ladies, the fading stars who needed ‘walkers’ and could thereby get him into the most desirable parties.
    ‘Jesus,’ complained Vivienne. ‘That fucking woman dictates our whole life. What, are you ashamed of me? Ashamed of your son ?’
    Vivienne took a lot of placating, but she agreed in principle to just keep her head down and later, much later, when he’d made it, LaLa promised that the announcement would be made and wife and son could begin to appear in public.
    He’d be paid to schmooze the movers and shakers, an opportunity that many a struggling actor would kill for. What more could LaLa do for him? she demanded. Hold his fuckwit little hand ?
    So Rick Ducane started schmoozing. He schmoozed so hard he felt as if his head was coming off. He chatted with directors, producers, gofers and lighting men; he attended so many auditions that he became bewildered about which part he was reading for.
    He resented it. He was back here again, chasing bit parts and walking old female farts who usually got falling-down drunk or hopped to the eyeballs on drugs, and groped him. After a year of exhausting failure and domestic discord he was all but ready to call it a day.
    ‘You’re never going to make it,’ Viv told him in one of her drunken rages. She was hitting the bottle harder than ever. ‘You’re a loser .’
    But the war had taught him endurance in the face of adversity and so he went on, sparkling, entertaining, handsome, until one night he exerted his charm on the right person and then . . . well, next day on his dressing-room door they hung a star. They really did.

Chapter 7
     
    1971
    Saul Jury watched Rocco Mancini and Frances Ducane from his car, which was parked across the street. Idiots , he thought. They were sitting there in a window seat in the diner, thinking themselves unobserved. Touching hands all the time – Jesus, he hated faggots.
    A woman’s instinct , he thought grimly. Hadn’t his own mother told him it was lethally accurate, whenever he’d tried her out with some scam or other? Didn’t his own wife tell him it was infallible, when he tried to get away with his own little minor indiscretions?
    And look at this; they were both right. And so was Cara Barolli Mancini. Only she was right in a way that was unexpected; probably it was going to shock her. However, he took the pictures, particularly pleased with the one that clearly showed Rocco Mancini kissing his little fag friend Frances Ducane’s cheek as he left. If Mrs Mancini was going to snoop on her ever-loving husband, then she had to accept that the consequences might not be pleasant.
    The private detective knew the identity of Frances Ducane because he’d already trailed him twice, once to Rocco’s cruiser out in New York Sound, and had even given Mrs Mancini his name. She was paying him plenty for all this work; he was a happy man. Frances was a good-looking kid, an actor – and, like ninety-five per cent of all actors, he was spending a lot of time ‘resting’. His father Rick had been a big noise in Hollywood in the Fifties, before a spectacular fall from grace. Saul hoped little Frances wasn’t going to go the same way, but the way things were shaping up, it didn’t look so good for him.
    Rocco had married a whole heap of money – apparently the Barolli family were huge importers of wine, olive oil and fruit from all