Score!

Franco. When Fat Franco didn’t show up, Rannaldini dragged him out of another recording studio in Rome and sacked him.

‘That’s a million saved for a start,’ he told Tristan gleefully, as he put down the telephone.

When Franco’s agent came on the line in apoplexy, Rannaldini countered suavely that the final contract had not been signed, again due to lawyers wrangling; and, if it had, Franco was in default for not having attended a single rehearsal or having lost a kilo of weight. ‘He hasn’t got a fat leg to stand on.’

‘How can you fire the finest tenor in the world?’

‘Pour encourager les autres.’

As shock-horror at the sacking ricocheted round the world, Liberty Productions called a press conference to announce their new leading man: ‘The dazzling, drop-dead gorgeous, honey-toned Australian tenor Baby Spinosissimo. The most exciting thing to come out of Oz since Joan Sutherland.’

‘And the same sex,’ muttered the Daily Mail, scribbling furiously.

Aware that he was getting Liberty Productions out of a hole, Baby had played terribly hard to get. When Howie Denston, now his agent, had rung to offer him the job, he had said he’d think about it. He then went screaming ecstatically round the house, before calling Isa Lovell. He was going to earn more money in a few months than in his entire life, so he could now pay his tax bill and buy that horse, Peppy something, Isa kept banging on about.

Baby rolled up at the subsequent press conference on the arm of a ravishing pony-tailed youth in a pinstripe suit. Gwynneth, the flabby crone from the Arts Council on whom Rannaldini had landed when Viking hit him across the room, was covering the event for the Sentinel. Wildly excited, she whisked the pinstriped youth from group to group, introducing him reverently as ‘Mr Spinosissimo’s partner’.

‘How long have you and Baby been together?’ asked the Telegraph.

‘Oh, he picked me up in the car park half an hour ago,’ grinned the youth.

‘D’you prefer guys to women, Baby?’ asked the Mirror.

‘I prefer sheep,’ said Baby. ‘If sheep could cook, I’d marry one.’

Over the roars of laughter, a blonde from the Scorpion called out, ‘Who’s this guy Schiller who’s done the tie-in?’

‘Shriller, if it’s Dame Hermione,’ drawled Baby.

The only obstacles ahead seemed to be that Baby must lose a stone before filming, if he were to look suitably lovelorn, and that the Don Carlos press officer, Bruce Cassidy, predictably nicknamed ‘Hype-along’, would have to try to hide the fact that Baby swung every which way including koala bears.

In another corner of the room, as the loudspeakers played Posa and Carlos’s Friendship Duet, Rannaldini and Tristan told a battery of cameras and tape-machines how delighted they were Baby was taking over and how equally excited they were about their new Russian discovery Mikhail Pezcherov. Rannaldini did most of the talking, as Tristan lit one Gauloise from another and looked languidly beautiful.

‘Bankable and bonkable,’ wrote the Mail.

‘You’ve been called the Italian stallion and the Kraut lout, Sir Roberto,’ piped up the Scorpion, ‘how come the Frog Prince is making a film with you?’

‘Rannaldini,’ said Tristan, in that husky, smoky accent with a slight break in it that sent shivers down every woman’s spine, ‘as my godfather and friend, has inspired and encouraged me. It has been my lifelong ambition to work with him on Don Carlos. I have every confidence in our collaboration.’

12

Alas, the recording was continually embattled. For a start, Rannaldini was only interested in the music sounding as he wanted. He would scrap even Hermione’s most glorious take if he didn’t like the intonation of the clarinets. Nor would he adjust his tempo to suit a singer, and had no intention of adjusting it for Tristan, for whom the timing of every bar was crucial.

Normally in films, music is added later to enhance the action, but in filming an opera, the action has to fit already recorded music. Thus, Tristan kept having to halt Rannaldini if he played something too fast or too slowly because when it came to filming the relevant singer wouldn’t have the right amount of time to run to the centre of the maze or indulge in a passionate clinch.

Rannaldini detested this. He had arranged for a camera to be on him constantly while he was conducting, so that the video could be shown on a huge monitor to guide the singers on location. Such was his monstrous vanity that he required endless lighting rehearsals, and would hold up a hundred musicians, not to mention singers, chorus and technicians, all on overtime, for twenty minutes while his hair was brushed and the shine taken off his nose. Once started, though, he was reluctant to be halted except at his own whim.

Nor were his singers behaving any better. Hermione was staying at the Lanesborough, Chloe at the Capital. The hotels were only a stone’s throw apart, but both divas insisted on travelling in different limos. When she discovered that Chloe’s dressing room was bigger than hers, Hermione was enraged and duly took her revenge the next day.

Singers are reputed to sing less well when they have their periods. Their vocal cords thicken and the diaphragm supporting the voice becomes sore and easily tired.

Next day Chloe recorded her great aria, ‘O Don Fatale’, and denounced her ‘fatal gift of beauty’ so gloriously, but with such controlled venom, it was impossible not to think it was part of her character. As she came to the end, however, and before the strings could tap their bows on the backs of their chairs in congratulation, Hermione had produced a Tampax from her bag, and thrusting it towards her, asked solicitously, ‘Are you needing this, dear?’

Chloe was outraged.

‘I can’t believe you’re still young enough to use those things,’ she snarled back, and retaliated later in the day by dropping her handbag in the middle of an exquisite take of Hermione’s aria in Act II. This triggered a five-minute screaming match, with Hermione threatening to walk out. Only Tristan managed to calm her.

‘There are women, Hermione,’ deliberately he made his voice even huskier, ‘who Verdi claimed are “born for others, who are quite unaware of their own egos, and who rise above the petty squabbles of lesser mortals”.’

Hermione was so moved she behaved herself for the rest of the afternoon.

On the other hand, she was not the only member of the cast to be worried that Fat Franco had been ousted by an unknown Australian. At least Franco would have ensured that Don Carlos was a commercial success. Confidence was restored, however, the moment Baby opened his mouth. The entire orchestra turned round to gawp, and at the end of his first duet with Chloe, Mikhail put down the score he was studying, ran across the hall and flung his arms round Baby. ‘You have most beautiful voice I ever hear. It will be privilege to vork with you.’

Mikhail’s own voice was just as impressive: Posa’s death scene had everyone in tears. Mikhail, however, was easily demoralized, particularly by Alpheus the bass who, in the great duet between Philip II and Posa, kept sighing and wearily holding the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, as Mikhail, with his poor command of English, fluffed line after line.

Baby and Mikhail on the other hand took to each other instantly, almost as an extension of their comradely role in the opera. In the evening they went on pub crawls, rehearsing their songs for the next day to the noisy delight of the punters. They tried to take Tristan with them but, to their disappointment, he insisted on returning alone to a friend’s flat he had borrowed overlooking Regent’s Park. After all the rows and hysterics, he needed peace to study the next day’s score.

Mysteriously with Mikhail’s arrival things started to disappear. Serena mislaid some pearl earrings, Alpheus some gold cufflinks. Chloe had quite fancied Mikhail until a large topaz ring, the only decent present Alpheus had ever given her, went missing. The cutlery in the canteen had to be replaced twice in a week. Only Baby, Mikhail’s buddy, remained unfleeced, which convinced Hermione, who’d made an unbelievable fuss about a missing umbrella, that he must be the thief.