Scruples (61 page)

“That’s the worst part of it, I admit. But look, Valentine, they grew up in a very secure home, they’re good kids, they’re formed already, they’ve passed the most vulnerable stages of their lives; I can’t live the rest of my life without you just because of teenagers. In six years they’ll all be going their with college and going their own ways—why, in only two years they’ll all be in college and only home for vacations anyway. And Joanne is still young enough and attractive enough to remarry.” Valentine considered his reasoning for a moment, her anger fading but her unwillingness as strong as ever.

“No, it’s impossible. I would be in such a false position, they would hate me; people—people would say—oh, I can’t bear to think about it,”

“That wouldn’t last more than eight days, my darling, and you know it. We live in Beverly Hills, not in some English village in the Victorian Era. You’re being upset about things that don’t have any real meaning when you compare them to our being able to live together for the rest of our lives.”

“But what about me? What if I wanted to have children? You already have a family, all grown up. Don’t you see?” she cried querulously.

“I’d like to knock you up tomorrow. You can have all the children you want as far as I’m concerned. I happen to love babies—I just never told you that about me.” He grinned. “It’s my secret vice.”

“And my career, it’s just getting started, Josh. I have to work all day, even Saturdays. I couldn’t run a house the way your wife—”

“Dopey, darling Valentine. You’re talking nonsense. Look, you can have as many kids as you can manage
and
your career
and
all the servants you need to run a house
and
I don’t want a big establishment anyway. Valentine, don’t you love me enough? Is that what this is all about?” She shook her head in negation and turned her eyes away from his probing gaze.

“You’re too much the lawyer, Josh; I can’t explain it logically. It’s too big an idea. We were having such a wonderful love—now everything has to go Boom! and all the lives get rearranged and everybody changes places, all because you want to get married. It’s just not—
comme il faut.”

Josh smiled with relief and indulgence. He’d been carrying this idea in his subconscious for so long that he hadn’t realized how surprised, how actually shocked, Valentine would be. She was, after all, the product of a culture that didn’t take marriage or divorce lightly. Nor did he for that matter.

“Listen, darling, if you won’t say yes and you won’t say no, can you give me a definite maybe?”

Unwillingly, but unable to maintain her position entirely, Valentine said, “Only an
indefinite maybe
, and that is absolutely
all
. Please, Josh, I warn you, don’t think it’s more because it isn’t. And don’t make any plans that involve me and don’t speak to anyone,
anyone
—or I will say no, I promise you. I won’t be rushed into anything, I won’t be pressured, I won’t make any decisions until I’m ready.”

“It’s harder to negotiate a deal with you than with Louis B. Mayer. And he’s dead. OK, we’ll start with an indefinite maybe and I’ll see if I can improve my position.”

His legal mind was already busy with plans to get a divorce from Joanne with the minimum of recrimination, the maximum of dignity, and the least loss of community property. Josh Hillman was reasonably sure that any kind of “maybe” from Valentine would eventually become a “yes.”

Vito and Fifi Hill set about casting
Mirrors
with the special gusto and sense of playing God that comes from a budget that doesn’t allow for star salaries. Denied the crutch of a star, they could browse majestically through the hundreds of working actors—not to speak of the many thousands of nonworking actors—picking, considering, rejecting, reconsidering, putting together combinations of players, taking the combinations apart, all with a kind of innocently arrogant delight that would totally disappear once they had made their choices and had to live with them.

Well before the Fourth of July the three most important parts in
Mirrors
were cast, those of the two lovers and a third part, that of a girl who is a friend to both the lovers. This last part, essentially a strong supporting role, was filled by a girl name Dolly Moon. Two years before she had been a regular member of the cast of one of those summer replacement television shows that lean heavily on the brand of humor known as “zany,” consisting largely of sight gags and the sight of appealing people making cheerful fools of themselves. Dolly Moon had caught the nation’s fancy for a few weeks with her distinctive laugh, a cross between a gurgle, a yodel, and a whinny; which invariably greeted her good-natured acceptance of the witless humiliations the show’s scriptwriters visited on her each week. She possessed the rare and particular beauty of a born comic actress and no one who saw her ever forgot what she looked like: gawky, stubbornly silly, brave, and unsinkable; her too big eyes always amazed by events; her too big mouth always ready to smile; her too big bottom and her too big breasts seeming to make her more vulnerable to the thinly veiled sneers of the writers.

That particular show had never been renewed, but following it, she had made one unimportant movie, playing a pea-brained secretary, and stolen the picture. However, before she could capitalize on this early success she had fallen in love with a rodeo rider and disappeared, to her agent’s disgust, to follow the rodeo circuit. Vito had seen her in that one film, and with his memory for an interesting face, he had tracked her down and found her back in Los Angeles, finished with rodeos forever and out of work.

The two lovers were going to be played by Sandra Simon and Hugh Kennedy. Sandra Simon was a nineteen-year-old actress of fluid grace and a waiflike, poignant charm. She was currently starring in an enormously popular soap opera, and her agent had had the utmost difficulty in getting her written out of the script for seven weeks so she could work for Vito, but she was intent on moving from television to motion pictures and she finally had her way.

Hugh Kennedy had graduated from the Yale Drama School and done a lot of little-theater work before he landed his first movie role in a minor costume epic. Vito, who made it his business to see as many films as he could, sometimes as many as three a day, had noticed that, in spite of his turban and false moustache, Kennedy had romantic good looks of a contemporary masculine type, which seems to have all but vanished from the screen, to the dismay of female filmgoers.

Before June came to an end, these three principal players and almost all the smaller parts had been cast. Sid-Amos, working at his top speed, had delivered three quarters of a script, which was even better than Vito had hoped for, and the rest of it was promised for the following week. The frenetic pace of the past weeks had left Vito rejoicing and expectant. The last thing he wanted was a free Saturday, but after trying, unsuccessfully, to make a dozen phone calls, he bowed to the inevitable and spent a few hours relaxing with Billy.

“Know what I’m going to do?” he asked her.

“Call Tokyo?”

“Take you to dinner. You deserve it, a great, big, gorgeous, cunty girl like you. A romantic dinner—pasta!”

“Wow,” said Billy. Her sarcasm was wasted on Vito, who had eaten dinner at home with a phone by his side ever since they’d been married. When they came home from Cannes he had had three separate telephone lines installed in the bedroom, his bathroom, his dressing room, the library, the dining room, the living room, and the pool house. These twenty-one phones, each of which had its own extra-long cord, were for Vito’s use only, since he had a distrust of hold buttons and liked to keep his separate conversations going on separate lines entirely. Otherwise, he hadn’t made any changes in Billy’s weathered, timbered English manor house, which had been built and lived in continuously by one family since the early 1920s on twelve acres that were the last of the original Spanish land grant of the Rancho San José de Buenos Aires. She had paid two and a half million dollars for it in 1975 and put almost another million into remodeling and redecorating the thirty-six-room house, which now had only twenty rooms, twenty perfectly voluptuous rooms, full of treasure and comfort, rooms which, having made his decision to marry Billy in spite of her money, Vito thoroughly enjoyed between phone calls and business meetings.

“Let’s go to the Boutique,” he said. “We can probably get a reservation if we try now. Why don’t you call Adolph and get a table for eight-thirty?”

“If you want a romantic evening,” said Billy tartly, “why don’t you start by calling Adolph yourself?”

The Boutique of La Scala Restaurant is owned by Jean Leon, who also owns the more costly and elaborate La Scala, which shares the same kitchen, but the Boutique attraete the prettiest girls and the most interesting-looking men in Beverly Hills. La Scala is just another good, expensive Italian restaurant; the Boutique is a way of life. It is the only restaurant in Beverly Hills that would feel totally right in New York City. It opens at twenty minutes before noon for lunch, for which it does not accept reservations, and five minutes later every one of its seven booths and fifteen tables is filled, with a line of people waiting at the bar, cursing themselves for having once again imagined that the place couldn’t possibly be that crowded so early. At three in the afternoon on a Saturday there are still people waiting to eat lunch. The Boutique’s windows, which look out on busy Beverly Drive, are filled with boxes of rare brands of pasta and bottles of imported olive oil, packages of breadsticks, jars of olives, anchovies, pimientos, and artichoke hearts. There are flasks of Chianti hanging from the ceiling, wine racks rising to meet them, and, in one corner, an open delicatessen counter at which Adolph, who is the headwaiter at night, chops a special salad at lunchtime, so that the hubbub of conversation, surprisingly urbane and electric for southern California, is constantly punctuated by the sound of his knife. It is crowded, inconvenient and noisy, and nobody cares. At night the Boutique accepts reservations and becomes relatively peaceful and intimate in a hole-in-the-corner way that most California restaurants, with their vast open spaces, never achieve. But if people don’t arrive on time, Adolph may still give away their table.

Vito and Billy were being led to the very best booth when Vito spotted Maggie MacGregor and a young man seated at one of the small tables in the center of the room. He waved at Maggie, and as soon as Billy was seated, he went to greet her with an enormous hug. They talked quickly for a few minutes and Billy saw Maggie and the man with her both rise and approach the booth.

“What luck! They haven’t even ordered yet, so we’re all going to sit together,” said Vito, beaming. “Just push over a bit, Billy, there’s plenty of room. Darling, you know Maggie, of course? And this is Herb Henry, who produces her show. They’ve just finished taping and Maggie’s having a pasta fit. God, I’m starving too.” Satisfied that everybody was squeezed into the booth, Vito turned his attention to the menu.

“I didn’t want to intrude on your dinner,” Maggie said apologetically to Billy, “but Vito absolutely insisted, and you know how irresistible he can be when he wants something.”

“Oh, it’s no intrusion. I couldn’t be more delighted,” said Billy, feeling a gracious smile, worthy of Aunt Cornelia, mask her annoyance.

The two women did know each other, since Scruples considered Maggie among its very best customers, but they had never done more than exchange greetings. Maggie, in Billy’s opinion, was like an aggressive toy poodle, snappish and dangerous unless treated carefully, with a kind of open and unabashed need for power and influence of which she didn’t seem ashamed. Billy, who possessed in herself such a strong need for domination, could sense it in others more quickly than any other quality they might possess, just as one dedicated social climber can spot another social climber in a crowd of hundreds. To cap matters, Maggie made Billy feel like a gawk. Maggie had become so entranced by the way she dressed on her show that she had bought an entire wardrobe from Scruples for her private life, so understated, so artful that she had transformed herself, with Spider’s advice, into an ambiguously virginal courtesan, like a tiny, immaculate bawd, a rosy Fragonard or Boucher in modern dress.

Maggie, clever as she was, had a blind spot when it came to Billy. She saw her only in one dimension, The Woman Who Has Everything, not just the obvious advantages but also the unbeatable Winthrop-ness, which Maggie never forgot, as well as that marvelous, enviable height and leanness, and even, goddamn it, Vito Orsini. She was awed by Billy and disgusted with herself for feeling that way. She knew that Maggie MacGregor should not have been awed, but Shirley Silverstein turned to custard in the presence of Wilhelmina Winthrop. Frozen custard. Maggie turned her attention to Vito, who had finally finished ordering.

“Pussycat,” she cooed, “what’s all the talk I hear about your next picture? Fifi told me you’re going on location. I want to come visit with a crew—we might pick up another good story.”

Vito made a sign of warding off the Devil. “Jesus, Maggie, I’m not a superstitious man, but do you really think that’s such a good idea?” They both gave a laugh that bewildered Billy and Herb Henry by its undertone of complicity.

“Listen, baby, the way I figure it, I owe you, know what I mean?” Maggie asked. Vito nodded his head in agreement. He was entirely aware that Maggie’s quick thinking in Mexico had not been untainted by self-prómotion. Given the opportunity, he would have grabbed the same brass ring.