Scruples (58 page)

“Why d’ya bother?”

“Oh God, I understand why you sound so unfriendly and you’re right. I’ve never forgiven myself for writing to you that way—”

“Grand.”

“No please, let me explain—it was some sort of fear. I didn’t really mean what I said—it wasn’t true, not at all—but I was so afraid of being tied to you—oh, Spider, I just couldn’t handle things, I had to be terrible because I was so scared—”

“Melanie, I really don’t care. No harm done. Good-bye.”

“Wait!
Please wait! I need to see you, Spider. You’re the only person out here who loved me once and I need to talk to you—I really need to see you.”

“What about that Svengali of yours—Wells Cope—doesn’t he love you?” Spider damned himself to eternal hellfire for continuing this conversation, but he had never heard that openly begging tone in her voice before; she had always been so unbreakably, eternally distant, beckoning with one hand and pushing him away with the other.

“Wells? Not the way you mean when you use the word love. I’m so lonely, Spider—please, let me see you.”

“No, Melanie. It’s a lousy idea, an exercise in futility; we have nothing to say to each other.”

“Spider, Spider—” She was sobbing openly now. Spider had weaknesses for almost any female characteristic, but none was so strong as his response to an unhappy girl. He had loved Melanie too much once to turn away from her now when she was in some sort of trouble, he told himself, knowing perfectly well that the real reason was not humanitarian but simply that he couldn’t resist her.

“I’ll be here for the next hour, Melanie. If you want to come over for a few minutes, OK, but that’s it. I have to be out at the beach by dinnertime.”

“Just tell me how to get there. I’ll be right over. Oh, thank you, Spider—” Tears still ran down her face as she finished scribbling down the directions to his house, but as she put down the receiver there was the beginning of a tiny curve of satisfaction on her invaluable mouth.

“Tomorrow,” said Vito, with deep satisfaction, “back to work.” Billy laughed at his joke. They had arrived at her twelve-acre estate in Holmby Hills the day before and spent most of the time since then sleeping off jet lag. They weren’t unpacked yet, at least she wasn’t, and, now that she came to think of it, they weren’t married either.

“I should have started this morning,” he continued, pacing restlessly around the great four-poster, hung with billowing loops of geranium silk, which stood in the center of her thirty-five-foot-square bedroom. “Fucking writers, you can never reach them on Sunday. I know that they all go out in their damn boats just so they can’t answer the phone—actually they hate the water, those pricks.”

Billy got out of bed and walked, naked, to where he was brooding out of one of the many windows of her magical room, not even seeing the English walled garden below or the shady wilderness beyond with its acres of woodland paths, thick with wild flowers, which led to the greenhouses patterned after the Victorian glasshouses at Kew. She put her hands on his shoulders and stood nipple to nipple, looking into his deepset eyes to where yellow lights were swimming behind his irises. Barefoot, he was only two inches taller than she was and she pretended that they were twins. She rubbed her nose with his nose. How did men with small noses breathe? She inspected him gravely, trying unsuccessfully to disarrange his tight, thick curls.

“You’re serious.” It wasn’t a question.

“I’m behind schedule already, for Christ’s sake. It’s almost the end of May. I have to start shooting no later than July. So I have only June to get a script, find a director, cast the picture, get the right cameraman—”

“What if you didn’t start shooting until September or October. What difference would it make?”

“What difference?” Vito was stunned until he remembered that some people didn’t understand everything about making pictures.

“Darling, beautiful Billy, this is a love story I’m making. It has to be out, finished, in time for a Christmas release, not a single day later.” She still looked bewildered. “Christmas, Billy, that’s when the
kids
are out of high school, home from college, vacation time, everybody goes to the movies. Who goes to see love stories? Kids my sweetheart—young people, the biggest movie audience.”

Billy looked wise. “Of course, it makes perfect sense. I should have realized. Well, naturally, Christmas. Vito—what about our wedding? I’ve planned it for Friday, but if you’re going to be so busy—”

“Just tell me where and when. Don’t worry—I’ll arrange my appointments so that I’ll be there in plenty of time, but try to make it after six-thirty, all right, darling?”

In the weeks and months to come, Billy, who now had her first piece of knowledge about the film industry, was to learn a great deal more about it, more, she often thought, than she cared to know.

The French novel,
Les Miroirs de Printemps
, that Vito had optioned he now called
Mirrors
. With the budget of two million two hundred thousand dollars,
Mirrors
would be what is known in the industry as a “small” picture. Such pictures fall in the gray area between the “big” pictures, which cost upwards of eight million dollars and use stars as insurance against failure, insurance that doesn’t necessarily work but is deemed necessary nonetheless, and the “exploitation” or “low budget” pictures, which cost well under a million dollars to make and are destined to appeal to some section of the audience that can be counted on to go to a drive-in or a neighborhood house and pay to see movies about car chases, cheerleaders, or vampires.

Characteristically, Vito had become enchanted with a project that went against the grain of the tried, if not true, folkways of the industry. With a budget of just over two million dollars, he couldn’t afford stars. Yet the superb quality of the novel and his own dedication to making a fine film out of it demanded that he work with a fine script, a fine director, and a fine cameraman. When Vito Orsini used the word fine, he did so in the same sense that Harry Winston would in describing a diamond. He meant
flawless
.

During the flight back from Paris he had made a short list of the men he wanted: Fifi Hill as director, Sid Amos to write the script, Per Svenberg as cinematographer. Currently Hill was getting four hundred thousand a picture. Amos wouldn’t expect to take less than two hundred fifty thousand dollars; Svenberg made five thousand dollars a week and Vito would need him for seven weeks. All together, six hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars of talent. Vito intended to get them for no more than three hundred thousand plus percentages out of his own piece of the eventual profits of the picture. It was time to collect on certain favors, time for fancy footwork, time for Vito Orsini’s luck to change if it ever intended to.

Sid Amos, the scriptwriter, phenomenally fast and the ideal writer to adapt a love story, was the first of the three Vito tackled.

“Well, Vito, sure I’d like to help you out. You’ve done me favors when I needed them most. But, I mean I’m busy, man. My shit-eating agent thinks I’m a two-headed electric typewriter. He’s got me working steady for the next three years.”

“Sid, I’ve got the book of the year. I’ve got Fifi and I’ve got Svenberg. I’m asking you to tell your agent that you’re taking this job because you owe it to yourself. You’ll never forgive yourself if somebody else’s name is on
Mirrors
. The book is a beautiful piece of material, you said so yourself. Naturally, it goes without saying that you’ll be paid in cash, right into that Panamanian Company of yours. Seventy-five thousand dollars and you can tell your agent and the IRS that you did it for scale, for an old friend.”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars! You’re joking. Not nice, Vito.”

“And five percent of my share.”

“Seven and a half—and I’m only doing it to screw the IRS—and to see the look on my agent’s face.”

One down—two to go.

Eight years before, unknown and untried, Fifi Hill had been given his first job as a director by Vito. It had been Fifi’s first success, and from there he had gone on to many others. But Vito didn’t presume merely on gratitude, a condition even more unfashionable in Hollywood than virginity. He knew that Hill had always dreamed of making a picture with Per Svenberg. Vito hadn’t even talked to the great cameraman, but he promised Fifi to obtain his services.

“If I can’t deliver him, Fifi, we don’t have a deal.”

“You said a hundred and twenty-five thousand, and what percent was that again, Vito?”

“Ten.”

“Twelve and a half—and Svenberg.”

Cameramen have a long-standing and well-founded grudge against the movie industry. Svenberg in particular. He was famous only inside the business; although critics vied with each other in comparing his work to Vermeer, to Leonardo, to Rembrandt, no moviegoer, except for the sophisticated film buff, would recognize his name. Vito knew that Svenberg would do almost anything to see his name become famous. He promised the enormously tall Swede that “Director of Photography—Per Svenberg” would appear prominently in every piece of paid newspaper and magazine advertising, every piece of studio promotion and publicity devoted to
Mirrors
—if he worked for two thousand dollars a week. The studio would fight Vito to the last inch on this assurance, which he had no right to give. But nothing comes easy.

At the end of a month of negotiation, Vito felt that the chief elements of his production were finally buttoned down. His own producer’s fee had been worked out with the studio. Although he normally would have received, by virtue of his reputation, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, he was taking only one hundred and fifty thousand because the budget was so small. On one of the memo pads, which were now scattered over Billy’s house like too many clues in an insane paper chase, Vito jotted down the approximate figures for the rest of the picture: cast and crew salaries; secretarial services, which would include every last phone call and Xerox copy; rentals; transportation to the location; living expenses there for everybody; sets; wardrobe; makeup; and the most gruesome item of all, studio overhead of 25 percent of the entire budget. In addition there was interest on all money outstanding and, of course, the standard 10 percent of the budget as a contingency in case anything went wrong. Although less than four hundred thousand dollars was devoted to such major items as script, director, producer, and cameraman, he now had a budget swollen to two million dollars, give or take two hundred thousand. In the film business it is almost always give, never take.

It was a budget, Vito decided, he could live with, provided that nothing—absolutely nothing—went wrong.

The question of deciding what to wear to see Spider made Melanie feel more alive than she had since she last stood in front of the camera. She was filled with a surge of erotic excitement at the problem of how to present herself for this confrontation, toward which she had been inching for weeks. She went through her closets in Wells Cope’s guest house in a delighted panic, considering and discarding a dozen possibilities, from the obvious nonchalance of jeans to a simple but powerfully seductive short Jean Muir in the most delicate shade of pink. In minutes she found the dress that expressed the way she wanted to look. It was the most innocent of pale blues, batiste, with a deep, round neck and tiny puffed sleeves, tied at the waist with a blue sash. It needed only a sunbonnet to make the illusion complete, but Melanie settled for a blue ribbon in her cinnamon-nutmeg hair. Almost no makeup, bare brown legs and feet in thin, low-heeled sandals and she had completed the effect she had set out to project: unspoiled, childish, almost countrified, and, above all, vulnerable.

As she drove to Spider’s house her hands shook on the wheel. At last, something was about to happen.

Melanie Adams’s discontent had started again soon after her first picture was completed. All during the making of the picture she had existed in a state of grace. Just to wake up in the morning and know that she would spend the day acting seemed like a benediction. She attributed this newfound ease with herself to the idea that she had been born to be an actress, that she had finally found her métier, that the strange, inexplicable anguish she had felt for so much of her life had simply been her search for her proper work. When the picture was finished, during the traditional wrap party, Melanie stayed in character, still talking with the innocent hesitation and unworldliness of the girl she had played, while all around her, cast and crew members were relaxing into their everyday selves, getting ready to put the picture behind them.

The next morning she woke up to desolation. There was no studio to go to, no makeup people and wardrobe people waiting for her to appear, no director to confer with, no camera to establish her existence. Wells Cope told her it was a perfectly natural reaction, the letdown that comes after any sustained creative effort has been completed. All actors and actresses go through this, he assured her, but it passes quickly; normal life can be resumed until the next picture comes along.

“When will it start—my next picture?”

“Melanie, Melanie, be reasonable. I’ve still got months of post-production work on this picture before it’s finished. And even when it’s all done, I don’t plan to release it until exactly the right time, until the right theaters are available. I’m not running a Melanie Adams film factory, you know. The whole point is to use you in such a way that you become a great star—and you’re not there yet by a long shot. It’ll take a careful, controlled buildup. I don’t intend to flood the market with you. No, your next picture can’t start until I’ve found the perfect property. I’m looking, I’m reading galleys and scripts every day, but there is nothing even faintly right available at the moment Why are you so impatient? You should use this time between pictures to enjoy yourself—eat lunch with friends, play tennis, maybe take a dance class, buy some clothes. You’re studying with David Walker—that should be enough to keep you busy, darling.” He turned back to the pile of scripts by the side of his chair.