Paperback Tales

London Lester

London Victoria Lester, the only daughter of famed forties film star Victor Lester, was no longer a virgin. Fair enough, this was a day that either came or it didn't, but she had grown accustomed to the idea of dying untouched and pure. There was almost something biblically romantic about dying pure of sexual touch; never to feel foreign fingers brush against her nipples, never to feel joined with a man like she had expected as did every other teenaged girl she knew. She never worried about the unnecessary matters of virginity nearly as much as other girls because more often than not, London's head was filled with appealing thoughts of death.

To pinpoint an exact moment when the depression began to seep would be of some difficulty, but London could examine a spot in time when she was stricken to a low point. Without any way of softening the blow, her father had cut her off – in a financial sense.

Before one would start to presume London as another one of the litter of spoilt spawns conceived by film stars who exceeded the term of 'legendary', it should be made clear London had been on living on her own for a long time without her father's money. For a little while in the early months of '65, London struggled to pay for her necessities. The important things like the rent on her studio apartment, the taxi fares to get from her home to the shimmering siren call of Broadway where she worked and – when it got really bad for her – to pay for food. The facade of work in Broadway at the time of early '65 was the dreamy, self-esteem blowing equivalent of trying to scrape ten year old gum off the sidewalk.

London had endured through unemployment in the past, but this was a whole other level for her. She was truly fortunate to receive a glance from the directors or casting agents unless she did one of two things: mention she was the only daughter of Victor Lester the giant film star of Hollywood or if she threatened to call her father Victor Lester, the giant film star of Hollywood, if they did not, at the least, consider her for an audition. Neither one of those two things she ever did with pride but times were hard for dancers who could sing a little on the side. Broadway and Hollywood aspired for types like Ann-Margret and Tuesday Weld: sexy, pretty, kittenish girls with a little spunk in their stride, a little sassiness in their talk and a twinkle in their eye. Girls who made teenagers feel alive, old men feel young, and the young men pitch tents in the theatres waiting long after the film was over to feel it was safe to move again.

To answer London's frequenting gaze of bemusement, they would simply say the reason wasn't because she wasn't pretty. It was more that it was painfully discernible to them, from her ballet roots to the thick layers of clothing she wore day in and day out, that London was a conservative little virgin. At aged twenty in 1965, this was a scandalous idea.

London would be the first to admit she wasn't much of an actor – unlike her father and three brothers who had all won more than two Academy Awards – but she could dance her ass off, she liked to tell herself. She studied ballet since she was three and she could sing opera with a little bit of vocal practice beforehand. She wasn't completely useless, she desperately believed. But Broadway thought otherwise and she didn't dare enter Hollywood – the man's territory in the family.

Soon enough – as expected – the stress of living independently began to beat her down the way one would crack a lobster with a mallet. Her knees buckled under the weight of her financial dues and as harmful as it was to her pride, having built something for herself alone in the past three years, she called her wealthy father at his home in Bel-Air.

She could picture the manor in vivid detail in her head while the phone rang: sleek white marble flooring, an enormous spiral staircase situated in the foyer, a pool sparkling underneath the L.A. sunlight outside, magnificent golden wallpaper depicting shapes of woodland creatures shimmering in the light cast by the magnificent chandelier hanging above. With her childhood home in mind, London turned her head with a studying gaze at the features of the home she had made for herself in New York. The walls were painted hot pink (by the landlady; London had absolutely no say in painting them another colour), the hardwood floors were stained and ruined by the cigarette ashes of the previous tenant, the kitchenette was covered in a grunge that London fought hard to get rid of with one hard sweep of bleach after the other and her bed was pushed to the side of the studio space that was the cleanest. Four walls was all she could afford on her own to call home but she managed it. Now, she was struggling to keep it.