it meant to lose everything: not just your wealth and privilege, but your home, your freedom, your right to live free from intimidation, imprisonment and torture. They came to America to escape the horrors of their pasts and to build a new life, and that’s exactly what they did.
Radu trained as a pharmacist, eventually opening a successful chain of small stores across Westchester County. His wife gave birth to their longed-for son, and devoted herself to the traditional role of homemaking, diving in to suburban American life with unexpected enthusiasm. It was largely thanks to Anamarie’s assimilation into New York culture and her love of all things American that Dorian grew up the way he did: preppy, hardworking, and blessed with a natural, quiet confidence that was the perfect complement to his impressive academic abilities. To any casual observer, Dorian Rasmirez came across as the epitome of American boyhood, from the tips of his loafers to the button-down collars of his Brooks Brothers shirts. He excelled at school, winning a place at Boston University where he majored in Dramatic Arts. By the time he graduated, he already knew he wanted to direct, and with his usual focus and determination, won a place at UCLA’s prestigious School of Theater, Film and Television. But beneath the glowing, all-American CV, Dorian was his father’s son as much as his mother’s. Radu Rasmirez had made a point of educating his son in their family history, painting a wildly romantic picture of their Transylvanian roots, and the fairytale castle that should by rights have been Dorian’s, if only the wicked communists hadn’t stolen it.
‘One day,’ Radu promised him, ‘the righteous will triumph in our homeland, and what is ours will be restored to us. When that day comes, Dorian, you will know what it is to live like a king. The honour and responsibility, the joy and the pain. We Rasmirezes will always owe a debt of gratitude to this country. But Romania remains forever in our hearts.’
Of course, to Dorian, ‘Romania’ was just a word, a mythical kingdom that his father had conjured up for him, from a past that the boy had never known and couldn’t understand. But he did understand how much their family heritage meant to Radu. In later years that sense of displacement, of homesickness and longing that he saw in his father, would heavily influence Dorian’s film-making.
There were other influences too. Most notably Chrissie Sanderson, the enigmatic, elfin actress whom Dorian met and fell in love with in his last year at UCLA, and whose mesmeric beauty (in Dorian’s eyes at least) had entranced him ever since. By Hollywood standards, the Rasmirez marriage was considered an epic achievement. Dorian and Chrissie had been together since before Dorian became famous – five whole years before the release of Love and Regrets, the searing emotional drama that was to catapult Dorian to global prominence as a director. In those early days, it had been Chrissie who was the star in the partnership, with a leading role as Ali, a kooky chef, in the popular network television sit-com Rumors. A natural actress with a wonderful sense of comic timing, by the age of twenty-three Chrissie Sanderson was recognized across America, with a loyal, at times even fanatical, teenage fan base. Before long she was earning serious money, fifty-grand-plus an episode: a fortune in those days. It was enough to buy her and Dorian a comfortable house in Beverly Hills as well as to fund some of his early movie projects. Chrissie revelled in the limelight but, spurred on by Dorian, she also yearned for more serious critical success. In the same year that the release of Love and Regrets changed Dorian’s life forever, Chrissie made her own debut on Broadway, as Sally Bowles in Jerry Zaks’s much-hyped revival of Chicago. It was a huge mistake. Nervous and under-rehearsed, she flubbed her opening night performance badly. If she’d expected her status as the nation’s TV sweetheart to protect her, she was rudely awakened by the next morning’s reviews. The critics did not so much pan her performance as eviscerate it.
‘Laughable,’ said the New York Times.
‘You didn’t know where to look,’ wrote The Post.
‘Embarrassingly wooden.’
‘About as much sex appeal as a cold bowl of soup.’
Dorian told her to forget it. ‘What do they know? So you made a couple of mistakes, flubbed a few lines. Big deal. They’re just jealous because you’re a huge TV star. You know how these critics get off on bringing people down.’
But Chrissie could not forget it. Mortified at such public humiliation, she lost her nerve completely, quitting the Broadway show as soon as her contract allowed, then promptly walking off the set of her NBC show as well. For months she holed up at home in LA, refusing to attend any auditions or give a single interview about her shock departure from Rumors. Meanwhile, of course, Dorian’s career was taking off in spectacular style, a success for which Chrissie could never quite forgive him.
After fifteen years, Dorian still spoke loyally in interviews about his ‘stunning, talented wife’, and was famously immune to the manifold temptations of Hollywood. His fidelity was considered all the more admirable in industry circles since for years it appeared that his wife refused to have his children. Most people viewed this as the height of selfishness on Chrissie’s part. In fact, her unwillingness to become a mother mirrored her refusal to go to auditions, or to take any of the leading roles that Dorian offered her gift-wrapped in all of his movies. She was afraid. Trapped by her own insecurities in the wildly luxurious life Dorian had built for her, she complained ceaselessly about LA, how shallow it was and how being a famous director’s wife made her feel empty and invisible.
Then, four years ago, three things happened. The first was that Dorian found out his wife was having an affair, with the leading man in one of his movies. The liaison was actually the latest in a string of extramarital adventures that Chrissie had used over the years to prop up her fragile self-esteem. But it was the first one that Dorian knew about, and he was utterly devastated by it. The second thing was that, at long last, Chrissie agreed to get pregnant and conceived Saskia, the Band-Aid baby that both she and Dorian hoped would repair their marriage. And the third thing was that the Romanian government contacted Dorian out of the blue, to tell him that they had begun the process of restoring pre-revolutionary property to its rightful owners. Would Dorian like to return ‘home’ to claim his inheritance, the Rasmirezes’ historic Transylvanian Schloss, complete with all its priceless treasures?
At the time, Romania had seemed like a lifeline, the fresh start that he and Chrissie so badly needed. Chrissie had cheated on him because she was unhappy in LA and felt like a failure there. Dorian believed in marriage. His parents had managed it for the better part of fifty years under far more difficult circumstances. He owed it to Chrissie and to himself to try to repair the damage. Here was a chance to take Chrissie and their newborn daughter as far from the Hollywood madness as it was possible to go. Dorian would sweep Chrissie up on his white charger and install her as queen in his fairytale castle. Little Saskia would grow up as a princess. And they would all live happily ever after.
Or not.
If he were completely honest with himself (not always Dorian’s strongest suit), becoming a father had not been the seismic, emotionally transformative event that he’d expected. The baby was sweet enough. But, after waiting so long for parenthood, Dorian began to realize that the idea of having a child was considerably more intoxicating than the exhausting, often deathly dull reality. He also realized, not without a sense of shame, that a part of him was disappointed that Saskia had not been born a boy.
For her part, Chrissie also revelled in the idea of motherhood or, more specifically, the idea of herself as the perfect mother: devoted, selfless, instinctively maternal. It was a self-image Chrissie clung to doggedly as Saskia grew older, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and one that she demanded her husband validate by praising her mothering skills at every possible opportunity. But the truth was that, like Dorian, Chrissie Rasmirez found young children boring and her own daughter was no exception. By now a semi-professional martyr in her marriage (Chrissie had long ago convinced herself she had sacrificed her career for Dorian, and not on an altar of her own fear), her new role as tireless carer to a demanding toddler added another arrow of resentment to her ever-growing armoury.
New parenthood wasn’t the Rasmirezes’ only problem. Despite yearning for a fresh start, Dorian had misgivings about the move back to his homeland. Romania had been his father’s dream, never his. And while he felt a sense of duty (and curiosity) about his ancestral home,