Scruples (50 page)

“Look, Pershing, I’ve got nothing here.” She waved her notebook at him in an accusing way. “I looked over my notes before lunch and you’re coming over like pasta without salt. Yech! I just don’t think Helen is going to be interested in this unless I can manage to interject a little insight into the piece. I know that good stuff is there—you could make a terrific article—but having that creep attached to you like a second head is drying me up, and you too. Did you ever hear of three people waltzing together?” She made a funny face at him, a what-the-hell-you’ve-tried-but-you-can’t-win-’em-all kind of face, which indicated clearly that if
Cosmo
couldn’t run a piece on Pershing Andrews they could immediately replace it with one on Warren Beatty or Ryan O’Neal.

“Shit! Is it really that bad?”

“Afraid so. But, after all, what can you do? He’s got his job to do like everyone else. That’s the system.” Maggie shrugged so expressively that Andrews literally saw his name being penciled out of the coveted December issue.

“The fuck it is. I can’t get rid of him till after dinner, but then he has to go home to Larchmont. We can get together afterward, can’t we?”

Maggie considered the idea exactly long enough to be convincing. “Why not? I’ll just break my date—it’s no big deal—so, where and when?”

“My hotel at eleven—he’ll be gone by then.”

She was at her most dry and professional when she said “Right.” But her mind was speeding ahead. Maggie had had a number of more or less unimportant love affairs, but she’d never been alone with a young movie star in his hotel room. She reminded herself sternly, comfortingly, that this was business. Yet the combination of Pershing Andrews, who was, after all, exceptionally good-looking and had been recognized everywhere they went for the last two days by hundreds of thrilled women, who was, after all, a MOVIE STAR, for Christ’s sake, and the idea of being alone with him in his hotel room at night seemed to give the interview the character of a rendezvous. She had a momentary feeling that she was doing something incredibly glamorous and slightly sleazy.

“We could have a late supper,” he added. “I got a great suite with a view of the Park.” A suite. Good. That word changed things. There was nothing suggestive about supper in a suite, nothing taken for granted in that invitation.

And she did get a great interview, that night and the following one, good enough to make her piece, “The Life and Hard Times of a Hot Property,” a minor classic of its kind. She also got thoroughly and inevitably fucked just as she had planned to be. Consciously? Unconsciously? What difference did it make? And she found out something about herself, after the same pattern of seduction had been repeated with every male heterosexual movie personality she interviewed. She was a belt notcher. What became important to her was not whether the sex had been good, bad, or indifferent, but the fact that she, Maggie MacGregor, had had sex with famous men, men whose names were household words. Fame turned her on. She was three quarters of the way to an orgasm with a famous man as soon as they were alone together. He didn’t have to do much to make her come. All that had to happen was for her to see that famous face over her, or under her, or alongside her,
that famous face fucking her
, Maggie MacGregor, who wasn’t famous, and sex took on another dimension altogether, the eroticism of the situation was totally contained in the fact of the man’s celebrity, which during the period of fucking she shared.

Maggie learned to take it for granted that once the days of the interview were over there would be no more sexual contact. At first she thought there might be a carry-over into real life, but she found out that unless she was actively working on an article about him, an actor was not about to have an affair with just another magazine writer. As far as they were concerned, once the interview was over she fell into the category of super-groupie, cute but not to be taken seriously.

Each month brought a new assignment, a new notch for her belt, a new name for her private collection. Although she was a small-town Jewish girl, who had once had small-town Jewish values, Maggie’s sexual adventures with stars never seemed to her to violate anything she had learned at home. They had nothing to do with love or commitment or caring. It was one of the perquisites of her growing talent. Still, something about it bothered her, although not enough to make her give it up. It was nothing moralistic or petty; it had nothing to do with feeling, inside, that she was acting in a cheap or easy way—oh, those fatal words from high school, which she had put behind her—but, undeniably, there was something.

It wasn’t until Maggie interviewed Vito Orsini that she learned what it was.

Vito Orsini was Maggie’s first movie producer. Her ideas about producers were vague and reflected the common wisdom. There hadn’t been any great producers since Thalberg, or was it Louis B. Mayer or Selznick? In any case, everyone knew that the day of the producer was long dead, that the people who called themselves producers were probably agents putting together a package of star, writer, and director and selling it to a studio, or else a producer was somebody on a studio payroll who was used chiefly as liaison between the studio heads and the director, a glorified gofer. The director and screenwriter reigned supreme—to them belonged the credit. Those anonymous middle-aged men, usually at least two of them, who came up to the podium on Oscar night to receive the Best Picture Award—were they the producers or people from the studio or what? Not that it was important. Producers were businessmen—not stars. Well, of course Bob Evans was a star producer. But he was special—he used to be in movies.

The common wisdom, or rather common ignorance, which Maggie accepted so easily, was, as it frequently is, right to a degree.

In the case of Vito Orsini it was utterly wrong. He belonged to the small group of producers who are the magic glue that holds every facet of a finished picture together. There are a small number of such men, alive and flourishing, in Hollywood, England, France, and Italy, and probably there always will be. There is no substitute for the kind of man who makes a picture happen from the moment of germination to the time the lines start forming at the box office.

Vito Orsini was a passionate producer. His properties often sprang from one of his own ideas, sometimes from a book he had read or a script that had been sent to him. Once he had settled on a project, his first task was to raise the money needed to finance the picture. When this basic element of the production was nailed down, he was free to divert much of his attention to the screenplay, conferring with the writer or writers on every revision, playing a major hand in shaping it in its final form. Often he had personally taken the risk of advancing money to the writers for a treatment or an option even before finding financing for the picture. Vito Orsini himself hired the director, chose the actors with the director’s help, found the right key technical people, selected possible locations for filming. He was fully in control of every aspect of his film until it reached its start date. By this point he had given at least one year of his creative life to the project. Unlike some massively successful producers, such as Joe Levine, who have managed to put their names as producer on hundreds of films, Vito did not delegate responsibility. He never abandoned to highly paid employees his right to imprint each film with his personal taste. His interest was in the film, not in the deal. Stanley Kubrick has produced eleven films in the course of twenty-two years. Carlo Ponti has produced more than three hundred films in fewer than forty years. There are producers—and producers.

From his first success in 1960, when he was twenty-five, until the day in 1977 when he married Billy Ikehorn, Vito Orsini had produced some twenty-three pictures. He did this by sometimes working on as many as three pictures at a time, one in its preproduction stages, one actually in photography, and one in postproduction.

Although Vito Orsini worked in Europe so frequently that many people assumed he was Italian, he was actually born in the United States, the son of a Florentine jeweler, Benvenuto Bologna, who had immigrated to the United States long before his son’s birth. Quickly understanding the disadvantage of being named after a luncheon meat, Benvenuto took the noble name of Orsini, as many another Italian has done with as little justification. He made a handsome fortune in the wholesale silverware business and brought up his family in the prosperous corner of the Bronx called Riverdale, where his neighbor was Maestro Toscanini. In 1950, when Vito was at the impressionable age of fifteen, he saw his first Italian film,
Bitter Rice
, produced by Dino De Laurentiis. From then on he bathed himself in the thrilling, ground-breaking excitement of postwar Italian movies and took for his three heroes De Laurentiis, Fellini, and Carlo Ponti. He went to the University of California to major in film, and after graduation, while other film majors were busy getting jobs in the mailrooms at Universal or Columbia, Vito took off for Rome. There he worked as a propman, extra, stunt man, writer, assistant director, and unit production manager before producing the first of his own films at the age of twenty-five. Vito’s success was due to the fact that his passion for film making was equaled by his intelligence, gilded by his nimbleness, and propelled by his raw talent and energy. His first film was one of the genre that later became known as Spaghetti Westerns. It made money and so did his next three highly commercial, totally unpretentious works. Finally, in 1965, just as he reached thirty, he had enough of a track record to enable him to raise the financing to make the kind of pictures he really wanted to make. He hadn’t looked back since.

As each one of his twenty-three pictures reached its start date, Vito was forced, reluctantly, to loosen the tight reins he held over the production in order to allow the director freedom. Once the camera starts to roll, the film essentially belongs to the director. He tried, but rarely succeeded, to force himself to restrict his visits to the set to two each day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, feeling like a mother who isn’t permitted to be present during the upbringing of her own baby. On the set he could be found hovering a tactful twenty feet behind the director, slightly to one side, observing everything the director was seeing by narrowing his focus, yet far enough away to watch the functioning of the crew, to observe the attitude of the cast members who were not in the particular shot, to keep his eye on the supporting actors. Why was that girl reading a magazine when she was in the next setup? Who was the grip who chewed gum so noisily? Why couldn’t that assistant lighting man wait to take a leak later? People who couldn’t stand a kvetch didn’t work for him twice, but many workers in the film community so admired his perfectionism that they willingly put up with Vito, nicknamed “That Italian Mother.” When he wasn’t actually on the set of any one of his films, he was always expected momentarily, was temporarily in conference, couldn’t be disturbed for five minutes, would be with you as soon as he finished, or had had to leave the set but would return shortly. And invariably, like royalty, he was where he was reported to be and always met people on time. Many people suspected there were two Vito Orsinis.

A passionate producer spends his evening sitting through dailies of the picture currently shooting and screening rough sequences that have been put together from prior dailies. When he isn’t on the set during the day, he’s out raising money for future projects, seeing his last film through postproduction trauma, attending editing sessions, finding the right music, omnipresent at the looping, dubbing, and sound mixing, and then, staying right on top of the film until the advertising campaign is running smoothly, watching carefully as the film rentals come in, auditing, if necessary, the distributor’s books to make sure he is getting his proper percentage. And, of course, making deals to sell films in Kuwait and Argentina and Sweden. Before he goes to bed he may make a half-dozen phone calls to theaters that are playing his most recent film to ask the theater manager about the daily box office. A crowded life with many manic moments, many depressive ones—a life only a passionately obsessed man would choose.

In the fall of 1974 when Maggie was first assigned to interview Vito Orsini, he was on location in Rome, with two more weeks of shooting left on a film starring Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau. The excitement of going to Europe for the first time more than made up for Maggie’s disappointment that it was Orsini she was going to be talking to, not Belmondo, for whom she had always had a major yen. The magazine had made reservations for her in the modest Hotel Savoia, a mere half block away from that famous moviemakers’ headquarters the Excelsior, on the Via Veneto, but only one quarter of the price. The Hearst Magazine Corporation is nothing if not conservative in its attitude toward expense accounts.

Before going off to interview movie stars, Maggie had always consulted the recent periodical file at the New York Public Library to get the background from which she could devise her fiendishly unexpected, acute questions. But to interview a producer, that inconvenient, time-consuming trip to the library, the searching through the files, the most important one of which was invariably missing, just seemed like too much trouble. She’d been to Orsini’s last two pictures—both of them critics’ delights—and that should give her enough to start on.

Orsini’s suite at the Excelsior was exactly what she had expected: ornate, impressive, phones ringing, two secretaries typing, a number of people waiting around in varying attitudes of despair and anxiety while they ordered from room service, Telex messages being delivered. Maggie knew it was a bummer. How do you do an interview with somebody who, to begin with, doesn’t particularly interest you and, second of all, is the center of a whirlwind? Maggie’s touch depended on intimate conversation in intimate circumstances. Yet, at the promised minute, one of the secretaries ushered her into Orsini’s inner sanctum, the smallest of the three sitting rooms of the suite.