Rosemary Hoyt
The young film star whose dazzled eyes open the book — eighteen, freshly famous from a picture called Daddy's Girl, and in love with Dick Diver by the end of her first week.
Dick Diver, which she says out loud within a week of meeting him — and behind that, admission to the grown, ordered world the Divers appear to have built.
The book
At a glance
- American film actress on the Riviera with her mother
- Almost eighteen at the beach; she turns eighteen in Paris, and is twenty-two when the book last sees her
- Daddy's Girl, seen by everyone she meets
- The late Captain Doctor Hoyt, U.S.A.
- Her mother, Elsie Speers — negotiations with First National or Famous
- The beach at Gausse's and the first movement, the Paris chapters, and again in Rome four years later
- Lois Moran, in part — the young actress Fitzgerald met in Hollywood in 1927 and was briefly infatuated with · 1909–1990 · Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeRosemary arrives at Gausse's hotel on the French Riviera with her mother, intending to stay three days. She is almost eighteen, ash-blonde, and recognised everywhere because of Daddy's Girl, a picture whose closing shot reunites her with her screen father in a way that makes Dick wince for the whole psychology profession. She has been a celebrity for six months. Before that she was a doctor's widow's daughter in a Paris hôtel-pension, which is where the fluent, slightly flat French comes from, and she was sent alone into the stage entrance of the Odéon at twelve.
The book's first movement is hers, and it is a deliberately partial instrument. She sees the Divers as the most attractive people she has ever encountered and reads their expensive simplicity as innocence, not knowing it is a selection made against considerable odds. She tells Dick she fell in love with him the first time she saw him, and then spends the Paris chapters discovering that adult arrangements are more crowded than they look. Her mother, who manages her career, treats the whole episode as part of her education.
How the book draws them
- The first pageHer body hovers on the last edge of childhood, nearly complete, with the dew still on her. Her colour is real, breaking close to the surface, and her forehead borders her hair like an armorial shield.
- Daddy's GirlThe picture that made her, and the reason nobody lets her forget it. She frowns when Earl Brady praises it, because nobody wants to be thought of forever for one picture.
- Her mother's voiceShe obeys it without needing to be told twice. Elsie Speers sends her out to meet a producer alone, and Rosemary goes, on the strength of the same clear voice that sent her into the Odéon at twelve.
- In the movies, not at themThe book's exact distinction. She has money and celebrity and the company of the celebrated, and none of the loose living that could go with it, because her mother would not tolerate the substitutes.
- The first champagneShe drinks a glass in Paris and admits, having finished it, that she turned eighteen the day before and said nothing because she knew they would make a fuss.
- The screen testHer worst misjudgement, and the most revealing. She arranges a test for Dick as a gift, announces it to the whole table, and watches the Norths laugh while Dick refuses. She had no idea the card was the wrong one to play.
Nothing between her and Dick resolves on the Riviera. What ends the Paris idyll is a body: . The dazzled first movement closes with Rosemary overhearing enough through a door to understand what a fellow guest, Violet McKisco, saw in the bathroom at the Villa Diana, the Divers' house above the sea.
They meet again in Rome four years later, when she is twenty-two and shooting a picture and he is thirty-eight. The book is unsentimental about the arithmetic: eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence, but twenty-two sees thirty-eight with discerning clarity. They finally become lovers, and it settles nothing. By then she has had other lovers, he has lost the emotional peak he met her at, and Dick's Roman week ends in a police cell rather than with her.