Chapter One Katie Barstow Hollywood royalty gathered Saturday night at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Katie Barstow wed Rodeo Drive gallerist David Hill. The two of them left afterward for Paris and then the wilds of Africa on a "safari." Rumor has it that the actress is bringing along an entourage into the jungle that will include her brother and sister-in-law, Billy and Margie Stepanov; her agent, Peter Merrick; her publicist, Reggie Stout; actress Carmen Tedesco and her husband, Felix Demeter; and Katie''s friend and co-star in the still controversial Tender Madness, Terrance Dutton. The little group has nicknamed themselves the Lions of Hollywood--though anyone who knows Katie Barstow or has seen her on the screen understands that she is the lioness in charge of this pride. --The Hollywood Reporter, November 9, 1964 She was watching the giraffes at the watering hole after breakfast, no longer as awed by their presence as she''d been even four days ago, when she''d first seen a great herd of them eating leaves from a copse of tall umbrella acacia, their heads occasionally bobbing up to stare back, unfazed and not especially alarmed by the humans. Their eyes were sweet. Their horns were the antennae on a child''s extraterrestrial Halloween mask. The inscrutable creatures were wary of these humans, but they felt no need to flee.

They''d just finished breakfast and were still at their camp. Her husband, David, was on her left, and her brother, Billy, was on her right. Both had their cameras out. Terrance was sitting nearby with his notebook on his knees, sketching the creatures. Katie had known that Terrance was as talented a visual artist as he was an actor--her husband loved his paintings--but she was still stunned by how quickly and how remarkably he was drawing the animals they saw. The eyes of his elephant had broken her heart. Earlier that autumn, when they were still in L.A.

, David had said it was only a matter of time before he could risk giving the man a show. ("He''s a movie star," she told David when she heard the hesitation in his voice. "He''s a Black movie star," David had reminded her, and while he was only acknowledging the backlash he might face from some quarters, she had still felt the need to remind him it was 1964, not 1864. His gallery''s fiscal foundation couldn''t possibly be so weak that it couldn''t withstand blowback from racist critics and so-called connoisseurs.) The group, all nine of them and their guides, were about to climb into the Land Rovers and start the drive to the next camp, a journey through the savanna that would take three hours if they didn''t stop, but would, in fact, take seven or eight because they expected to pause often for the Serengeti''s great menagerie of animals. You just never knew what you would see and where you might detour. Yesterday, they had been particularly lucky. They had witnessed the great wildebeest crossing at the Mara River: thousands of wildebeest and zebras storming down the sandy banks into the water and attempting to reach the grass on the other side.

There were five giraffes this morning, three with their legs splayed awkwardly as they stretched their long necks down to the water to drink. She felt a small pang of guilt that she was taking for granted her witness to their presence, animals over fifteen feet tall--their legs alone were taller than she was--with their cream-colored coats and those iconic tawny spots. She wondered at the way her mind was wandering instead to the differences between coincidence and synchronicity. Her brother, Billy, a psychologist, had been expounding on the two words over breakfast in the meal tent. A coincidence, he had said, was the fact that there were nine Americans on this photo safari, and last month two had been caught in the same end-of-the-world traffic jam that brought freeway traffic to a standstill before the Beatles'' appearance at the Hollywood Bowl: Katie''s husband and Katie''s agent. Though David Hill was nearly thirty years younger than Peter Merrick, the idea that they had turned off their engines and stood smoking Lucky Strikes on the highway beside their cars at almost exactly the same moment near almost exactly the same exit had still been fascinating enough that it had broken the ice their first night in the Serengeti, and led David and Peter to bond in ways that transcended the generation and a half that separated them. (It also gave them something less awkward to discuss than the reality that Katie Barstow, their more obvious commonality, made dramatically more money than either of them, or that they were two big, strapping men who depended upon the earning power of a one-hundred-pound woman with a childhood more freakish than fairy tale who was barely five feet tall.) Synchronicity was something more profound, a connection that suggested a higher power was at work.

In this case--on this safari--it was the idea that on their second afternoon in the savanna, one of their guides overheard two of the guests discussing Katie''s latest film and the MGM lion that was the first thing a person saw in the theater, and on a hunch drove the Land Rover to the far side of a tremendous outcropping of boulders, one of the kopjes not far from their camp, and there they were: a female lion and four of her cubs. Regal and proud, the cubs content, all of them lounging in the grass beneath the trees that grew beside the rocks. Even when the second vehicle had roared up behind the first so that everyone could see the animals and snap their photos, the mother lion had done little more than yawn. The cubs looked on a bit more intently, slightly more curious, but since their mother wasn''t alarmed, they merely rolled over, stretched their small arms with deceptively large paws, and found more comfortable positions in the grass. The two Land Rovers were barely a dozen yards from the lioness. "Katie?" She turned now toward David. "I think we need to bring a few home," her husband said, motioning at the giraffes at the watering hole. "And a couple of zebras.

We''d never need a lawn service." "The zebras would certainly help. But giraffes don''t eat grass," she reminded him. They''d just bought a ranch. Or, to be precise, she had just bought a ranch. Thirty acres. It was near Santa Clarita, north of the valley. She''d considered buying something in Malibu, but she''d grown up on Manhattan''s Upper West Side, a theater kid born to theater parents, and now that she was--and the words simultaneously made her bask and cringe--a movie star, she wanted to steer clear of the mod world that these days marked the sands: the beach houses with their massive windows, circular fireplaces, and Peter Max paintings against the crisp, white walls.

She imagined someday she might have a horse. Or horses. One would be lonely. She''d ridden horses in two different movies and enjoyed the experience. She''d felt horrible when she''d watched her stunt double put the animal through some terrifying gallops and then send it to its knees after the creature was, supposedly, shot. "Point noted," David agreed. Beside them, her brother, Billy, was photographing the giraffes with a camera that had a lens so stout it looked to Katie like a club, and his wife, Margie, was staring at the giraffes through binoculars so delicate they reminded Katie of opera glasses. Billy was thirty-five, David''s age and five years her senior, and Margie was thirty-three.

Margie had found out she was pregnant in August, and her doctor had thought morning sickness alone was a reason why she shouldn''t go on the safari, but she was game. Said she wouldn''t miss it. This was both her brother''s and Margie''s second marriage. Billy had a four-year-old son at home from his first, but Margie had left no children in her wake when her previous marriage had imploded. Katie knew that she was supposed to want children, and speculated sometimes what it meant that she didn''t. Perhaps she was too ambitious. Or immature. Or selfish.

Perhaps it was her hatred of her own parents, who had made her career possible, and yet had also been mercenary and mean and fake. And, yes, cruel. They had not been cruel to each other, which in hindsight was rather surprising, but they had been cruel to Billy and her. (Billy, however, had borne the brunt of the abuse. Most of the real horrors had been inflicted upon him, and it was their mother who was behind the lion''s share of that carnage. How Billy had wound up who he was, rather than whoever was strangling all those women in Boston, was a mystery to her. But, thank God, he had wound up a pretty gentle therapist instead of a pretty violent monster.) Katie''s team at the studio, her publicist, and her agent all expected that someday soon she and David would have a baby.

And most of them had mixed emotions about that. On the one hand, at thirty she was already outgrowing "starlet": how many more times could she play the ingenue? Besides, now that she was married, it would be unnatural not to have a baby. What would her fans think? On the other hand, most of her entourage disliked the idea of her taking time off, given the box office bullion of everything she touched. Even Tender Madness, her movie with Terrance, had done well, despite the inference in one of the scenes at the mental hospital that the pair had kissed after the cut. (They had, though the moment had wound up on the cutting room floor.) Reggie Stout was the lone exception: he honestly seemed to want only what she wanted. He was far more to her than a publicist and she put considerably more stock in his counsel than she did in even her agent''s--and she trusted Peter Merrick a very great deal. Reggie seemed as invested in her future and her happiness as a real father might be, though this was supposition since some days she hoped desperately that Roman Step.