#4—THICKENING OR LUMP IN THE BREAST OR ELSEWHERE. “Dearest,” I would tell the Ambassador, trying to return his latest script, passing it back with what I hoped seemed more like humility than revulsion. “I’m afraid I could never do this role justice. It should go to someone younger, a luscious strumpet.”
“There is no strumpet more luscious than you,” my gallant husband would insist. He might have added, of course, that no one else in her right mind would even consider those ruinous parts. So, like it or not, I was the star of every maddeningly inept Rothstein-DeWitt production. And, hit or not, the Ambassador cherished each one, watching them over and over in our private screening room. “This is no simple romance, Sable of mine,” he would say, a lather of excitement on his brow and cheeks. “It’s the exploration of a universal conflict between our desire to submit and our will to prevail.”
Until the day he died, my husband continued to defend the artistic integrity of the borderline pornography in which he starred me. He never took off those ridiculous boots, never flagged in his belief that the empty theatres, the cruel reviews, my moribund career were all preliminaries to the universal acclaim that was our ultimate reward. I trust he has come to some reward by now, poor dear. As for my career? It never recovered from the blows he dealt it.