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pause. I seemed to have been in that room for hours. I began to wonder if Olivier and Milton Greene would still be at the studio when I got out. I hoped they wouldn’t think that I had forgotten about them and gone home. They would certainly be very impatient. Everything to do with Marilyn seemed to take an incredibly long time, even though she was always in a rush.
    â€˜Colin.’ Marilyn spoke so quietly that I had to step forward to hear her.
    â€˜Colin, whose side are you on?’
    â€˜Oh, yours, Miss Monroe. I promise you I’m on your side and I always will be.’
    Marilyn sighed. ‘Will you be coming to work tomorrow?’
    â€˜Well, yes. I come to work every day.’ I didn’t understand the question, but I was saved by a sharp tap on the door.
    â€˜Marilyn,’ said Paula in honeyed tones, ‘it’s really time we went home.’
    She opened the door wide, catching me standing on one leg in the middle of the room.
    â€˜Colin has to finish his work now,’ she said. ‘Don’t you, Colin? Thanks for stopping by.’
    She was like a mother hen fussing over her chick. She could hardly
regard me as a wolf, but then again I wasn’t exactly a baby chicken either. Marilyn gave another sigh. My interview was over.
    As soon as I was out in the cold stone corridor of the studio, I found myself gasping for air. My first instinct was to rush along to Olivier’s dressing room and report the whole thing. I felt incredibly pleased with myself. I’d asked Marilyn exactly what Olivier wanted to know, and I’d got an answer. Even better, I felt that I had established a rapport with Marilyn which might come in useful later on.
    But wait one minute! Things weren’t quite that simple now. Whose side was I on? Olivier was my boss. He was also, in some respects, an old friend. Uncle Larry. ‘Boy’, he called me most of the time. And Vivien was my heroine of all time. She was by far the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
    But Marilyn was different again. She was prettier than Vivien, younger, of course, and more vulnerable.
    And she had appealed to me directly.
    â€˜Colin, whose side are you on?’
    â€˜Yours,’ I had said. I could never go back on that. I marched down the corridor and knocked on Olivier’s door.
    â€˜Come in.’
    â€˜Miss Monroe says she will not be coming to the studio tomorrow. Mr Miller is going to Paris and she wishes to spend the morning with him.’
    â€˜Did she tell you this herself?’ Milton was incredulous.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Is that all she said?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    Both men looked at me with curiosity. For the first time ever, they were actually taking notice of what I said. I have Marilyn to thank for that, I thought, as I turned and went out. I know whose side I’m on now.

THURSDAY, 13 SEPTEMBER
    All film crews take a pride in being cynical. The more well-known the stars they work with, the more the crew effects an air of studied indifference whenever the famous person appears. The team working on The Prince and the Showgirl is even more professional than most. They have been hand-picked by Olivier and his production manager Teddy Joseph so that they will not ogle Miss Monroe, or try to catch her eye. At the same time, they have strong views about the actors and actresses they work with, and there is a rigid pecking order which all crews observe.
    Minor actors, and even major ones in supporting roles, are totally ignored.
    British stars in British films, like Anthony Steel or Maureen Swanson, who are both working on other films at Pinewood at the moment, are treated as complete equals – just as if they were also technicians, merely doing a different job.
    Great British stage actors, like Dame Sybil Thorndike, who is playing the Queen Dowager, the mother of Olivier’s character the Regent of Carpathia, are given exaggerated courtesy, as if they were honoured visitors to