“I have a question,” said Tangerine. “What’s with all the magnolia flowers?”
“Magnolias have long been associated with the mansion. For a time, Mr. Frick was the owner of the famous Magnolia diamond, a flawless twelve-carat pink diamond. Today, the Frick Collection is well-known for the large magnolia trees on the main lawn.”
“What happened to the diamond?” Veronica didn’t want to draw more attention to herself, but her curiosity got the best of her.
“It disappeared in 1919. Rumor has it that the family thought it was stolen, but oddly enough, a police report was never filed. No one has seen it since.”
“Too bad, that,” said Barnaby, leading Joshua to the door, smacking him on the back a couple of times. “We could have used it in the shoot.”
“There’s more I can tell you about the family, if you like.”
“That’s all right, we’ll take it from here.”
After Joshua had gone—giving one last worried look over his shoulder—Barnaby pointed to Veronica. “Someone, give the girl a hand and clean up her face. Do I have to manage every little thing, or can you girls show some initiative?”
Embarrassed, Veronica turned and fled.
Chapter Three
1919
As a young girl, Lillian would often rise out of bed on hot summer nights, sweaty and irritable, to find her mother standing nude in front of a window, staring out into the empty city street, her body silhouetted by lamplight. To Lillian, the female form was neither beautiful nor obscene. It was just skin and breasts and the moles that dotted her mother’s arms, a constellation that Lillian would trace with her finger.
Her father had abandoned the family when she was a baby, and she and Kitty had moved to a boardinghouse in Providence, Rhode Island, where Kitty worked in a silverware factory. Kitty rarely spoke of her life before Lillian was born, but she knew that her mother had been raised in one of the smaller Newport mansions—“a glorified carriage house, really,” she’d said once—before falling in love and eloping with a man who was not of her class. Despite being cut off from both her family and her inheritance, she’d insisted on raising her daughter with a soup?on of what was required in good society, from the correct utensils for the game course to the proper way to cross a room.
Desperate for culture, Kitty would bring Lillian to see whatever shows were playing at one of the five theaters in town, sitting her on her lap until the managers insisted that Lillian was old enough to have to pay for a separate ticket. Her mother’s earnings went straight into Lillian’s education at the local Catholic school, which was chosen not for the religious education but for its extensive arts offerings. The school provided its students music and singing lessons, which Lillian quickly took a shine to, performing for the other roomers at the boardinghouse every Friday night. She eagerly lapped up the attention, and it was her idea to move to New York City and try for a career on the stage. Kitty gave her notice at the factory within days, explaining to anyone who asked that Lillian was on her way to stardom as an actress.
They moved when Lillian was fourteen. A year later, Lillian landed a job in the chorus for a Broadway show at the New Amsterdam Theatre called Pretty Girls. The newspaper advertisements appalled Kitty, who threatened to pull Lillian out. Pretty Girls, the ads read. Sixty of them. None of them Twenty. None of them Married.
“It’s disgraceful,” said Kitty, giving the newspaper a sharp snap.
“It’s Broadway,” answered Lillian. “Besides, think of the weekly pay.”
She was allowed to go on.
After each show, the stage door was mobbed by young men hoping to take one of the chorus girls home. Kitty made sure that never happened to her daughter, knitting in the dressing room during the performance before escorting Lillian through the gauntlet with a firm grip. Her presence also discouraged the other performers from becoming friends with Lillian, though, and she was never invited out after. Not that she would have been allowed to go.
One night, Lillian found a note stuck in her dressing room mirror. It was from an artist, or so the man purported, asking if she’d model for him, for money.
Lillian had begged her mother to consider the request, not ignore it. She’d asked around and been told that the artist, a Mr. Isidore Konti, was the real deal. “We both know the show’s not going to last long,” she’d said to Kitty. “And consider Mabel Normand.”
“The actress? What about her?”
“She was an artists’ model for illustrators like James Montgomery Flagg, and now she’s Charlie Chaplin’s leading lady. This could be a lucrative stepping-stone, and better money in the meantime.”