The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer

Chapter Fifteen: The Big Time

CHAPTER FIFTEEN. The Big Time

Over the next few weeks I was kept busy enough to take my mind off my constant craving for nicotine. I was covered in patches and drinking enough caffeine to fix a race horse and somehow I was managing to keep most of the longings to fill my lungs with lovely, soothing smoke at bay.

     As the last of the cuts healed over on my face the producers began to plan the final scenes for the film. Q, who seemed to have taken over as my full-time manager as well as my publicist, had suggested that they stage a live singing showcase for me as a finale. I didn’t say anything, but I was touched that he had that much faith in my ability to carry it off, especially as I wasn’t sure if he had ever actually heard me singing himself. Unless, of course, he was thinking that a disaster would make for good ‘theatre of embarrassment’ anyway, like the auditionees who manage to make such prats of themselves on the reality talent shows. Q had a knack of creating ‘no lose’ situations for himself.

     ‘The live performance will give you a dramatic point to work towards,’ he explained over a working lunch at the Wolseley, ‘something to keep the viewers tuned in because they will either want to see you triumph and become a star, or they will want to enjoy you making a complete mess of the whole thing. When you triumph, after everything you’ve been through, it will be a double whammy, a double pull on the heartstrings.’

     ‘Cheers,’ I muttered, feeling an uncomfortable knot of fear in my stomach.

     What if I did mess it up in front of millions of people? What if my parents were tuned in in some old people’s home somewhere and witnessed me being laughed or booed off the stage? They would think my whole life was one giant mockery, that they had been right all along.

     ‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said, obviously seeing the fear in my eyes. ‘You’re going to be fabulous. They are going to love you. You’re a star, Mags, you always have been. You just needed the right moment to shine.’

     He had been keen to get the reunion scene with Steffi in the can as quickly as possible, in case she changed her mind or her schedule became too full. So, the moment my face was healed well enough for the make-up artist to do her work effectively, a date was set for us to get together at one of those boutique hotels in Kensington that have become so fashionable.

     The production team were all there; hairdresser, stylist, presenter, make-up artist, a whole room-full of them, all babbling away on their mobile phones as they worked, and I pretty quickly realised that the last person any of them wanted to hear from was me. It was lucky for them that they were dealing with a professional who had so many years of experience under her belt because I knew I just needed to let them do their jobs and work their magic. They didn’t want to hear anything I thought about anything they were doing.

     Keeping quiet was the right decision; even though there were a few tips I could have given them along the way on how to get the best from my figure and hair. The result they produced a couple of hours after I arrived was stunning. They hadn’t let me look in a mirror all the way through the process so that they could film me seeing it for the first time when the transformation was complete. I was all set to act surprised and amazed, but actually I didn’t have to act at all. I did look amazing. The stylist had put me into slim-line jeans and a long silk top, which was much more informal than I would have thought appropriate, but actually it did work and I looked like I still had the figure of a twenty year-old, (not that I had ever let myself go in that department). The hairdresser had worked a miracle on my hair, giving me a gamine look somewhere between Annie Lennox and Mia Farrow at the time when she was married to Sinatra. I could have been auditioning for the lead role in Peter Pan. It was a total image change from the sophisticated sex-bomb and pin-up thing that I’d had going ever since I arrived in London. It was the most intense mirror-moment I had enjoyed since seeing my adolescent self emerging from the child just before I left home.