Scruples Two (57 page)

“What do they look like? The clothes, not the aunts,” Dolly asked morosely.

“They’re based on elastic waistbands. Unlike you, most plump women don’t have waists, so they end up buying things that just start at the top and keep getting wider and wider. With the elastic waistbands we can build fairly wide shoulders into the clothes, and an illusion of a waistline, and work with an interesting drape.”

“Call them ‘Dolly Moons,’ ” Dolly sighed. “They sound like a good idea.”

“But why on earth would you want clothes designed specifically for plump women to have your name on them?” Billy asked incredulously.

“So I could stay out of them! Billy, that’s it! I don’t want to have to wear your Dolly Moons, I want to wear divine Nolan Millers. That’s my motivation! Oh, Billy, I knew you’d help me. You’ve got to call them ‘Dolly Moons’ or it won’t work for me. Oh, Billy, thank you! You’ve saved my life!”

“Your reason, maybe, but hardly your life,” Billy said, laughing at her friend. “If you really mean it, it’s a sensational boost for us. But better ask Lester first, see if it’s all right with him. And talk to your agent and your lawyer, they may not like the idea, and I don’t want to take advantage of you.”

“Billy, hon, no one, and I mean no one, takes advantage of me,” Dolly said in a tone of voice that made Billy sit up in astonishment. “You don’t think I let my agent make my business decisions for me, do you?”

“I guess I did,” Billy said slowly, suddenly aware that her old friend’s native shrewdness was almost always camouflaged by the shock of the sheer extravagance of her Renoir-esque presence. Even she had allowed herself to drift into making the mistake of underestimating Dolly.

“Once I got my career on track, I promised myself that no man was ever going to tell me how to run my life again, not even Lester,” Dolly said, her astonished blue eyes wider than ever in their seriousness. “A woman in this business has to think for herself or else she’ll become the captive of a business manager, an agent, the hidden agenda of the agency he works for—those guys could teach the CIA and the Mafia a lesson or two—and at least three different lawyers plus her husband, if she has one. A bunch of guys who think they have the answers. Ha! As they say in Brooklyn,
fuhgedaboudit!
I trust my own decision-making powers, Billy, the way you do. It was the Oscar that allowed me to take this position, and after I’d seized it, I never let it go. I owe a lot to Vito, when you stop to think about it.”

“I never have. But you’re right, until you were cast in that part in
Mirrors
, nobody appreciated you properly, they couldn’t see the actress beneath the tits and ass.”

“Don’t say those words! I’d forgotten about them for a minute. All right, all right, tomorrow I’ll put myself into the hands of a nutritionist. A female nutritionist. Okay? You satisfied now?”

“Do it today,” Billy said grimly. “Butter!”

“Today. I promise. Oof! I feel thinner already. Now tell me about Gigi. I haven’t seen her in ages. How’s she doing?”

“Brilliantly. She’s writing the most original catalog copy you’ve ever read, and she and Mazie are hunting down antique lingerie all over L.A. and San Francisco. Then she does her own illustrations for those pages. They’re enchanting, funny … well, you saw the one she sent you for Christmas, so you know. If I didn’t bump into her at the office now and then, I’d hardly ever see her myself.”

“Don’t you miss her?”

“Of course I do, but what can I do about it? She’s too grownup to live with me. I suppose it would be like … living at home with your mother.”

“That’s ridiculous! If I were her age I’d jump at the chance.”

“It’s easy for you to say, because we’re friends, peers. But Gigi and I are … sort of related, well, not really related, not really mother and daughter at all, but … something,” Billy said, struggling, as she had for a long time, to figure out what she and Gigi were to each other now that she wasn’t her legal guardian, now that Gigi wasn’t an unadopted, teenaged almost-daughter she’d taken under her wing. She’d referred to her as her stepdaughter, but that had never really been true.

“Well, I hope she’s making good use of her privacy,” Dolly said, wiggling her eyebrows like Harpo Marx.

“That’s the thing, her privacy means I don’t have a clue. I had this crazy idea …”

“Hmm?”

“No, it’s something that couldn’t be. Put it out of your mind, as they say in Boston.”

“Billy,” Dolly said warningly, “you shouldn’t have brought it up if you weren’t going to tell. You know I won’t let you get away with doing that to me.”

“Oh, it’s too stupid. But there’s this kind of … thing … between her and Spider.”

“ ‘Thing’? What kind of thing?”

“An
attitude
, nothing more. At least nothing I know about. It’s as if they … shared … something nobody knows about. I must be certifiable, unbalanced, ready to be removed by little men in white to even dignify it by bringing it up. What’s more, it’s none of my fucking business.”

“You take the high road, I’ll take the low road,” Dolly said, almost bouncing as she leaned forward in eager interest. “Gigi and Spider? Well, it wouldn’t be impossible, would it? He’s a man, she’s a woman, that gives them something to work on right there.”

“Dolly, you’re disgusting.”

“I’m realistic, and realistic is often disgusting. He’s free, she’s free, she’s his type, he’s every woman’s type—”

“What do you mean, ‘she’s his type’?”

Dolly looked at Billy as if she were simple-minded.

“Red hair, green eyes, small bones, slightly pixified, full of adorable impertinence—like Valentine.”

“But Gigi
dyes
her hair!” Billy cried in outrage.

“Right, like I’m not a natural blonde, so how can I be thought of as one of the all-time ultimate blondes from here to Tibet?”

“ ‘Like Valentine,’ ” Billy said slowly. “It never occurred to me. Valentine was unique—so French …”

“Half-Irish, like Gigi, if you’re going to count country of origin. Gigi’s mother was Irish and so was Valentine’s father. Irish genes are potent stuff.”

“Dolly? Do you really see a resemblance?”

“Enough of one for his subconscious to latch onto it,” Dolly replied.

“That bloody,
bloody
subconscious stuff again, I’ve never been any good at it,” Billy said ferociously. “It’s done nothing but get me into trouble all my life. Nobody really knows what goes on in there, how it works, it could be just a lot of imagination! The whole thing should be abolished!”

“Even you, Billy hon, can’t do anything about it.”

“Well, as I said, it’s none of my business.”

“Of course not,” Dolly agreed. “Just because Gigi’s something sort of like, but not exactly like, your own kid, and Spider, well, he’s your business partner, for one thing, and he’s the best male friend you’ve ever had, and you’ve been working closely together for longer than I’ve known either of you—”

“Dolly, you’ve made your point. Get off it!”

“Okay.” She’d get off it, Dolly thought, but she hadn’t made her point. She hadn’t come close. Billy was even worse than she’d realized at the subconscious stuff.

Was her father listening to her at all, Gigi wondered, or was he just responding to her words automatically, according to his notion of how a man should behave with a daughter? Vito’s responses, all through dinner, had been intelligent and comprehending as she told him details of her own work and described the rapid progress that was being made on the catalog, but there hadn’t been one instant in which she’d been able to see an unmistakable flicker of real concentration or interest behind his eyes. He was listening, she decided, but with half a brain, certainly not well enough to conceal from her that he was deeply worried. And with him, what else was there to worry about but the film business?

The two of them had met for one other dinner like this in the last few months, now that they were both back in California, and Vito had not been entirely there for that one either. He talked a good game, Gigi thought, as she considered him closely over her coffee cup, and he looked a good game, he’d retained his physical authority, with that flashing commander-in-chief aura she remembered so well from every rare childhood encounter. Right now, if he had happened to be talking business, no one would be able to discern that he was uneasy and preoccupied, Gigi decided, but as she rattled on, keeping him up to date on Sasha’s wedding plans, his attention wandered and he let his guard down far enough for her to see that all was far from well with him.

She felt curiously protective of her father, Gigi realized, watching his preoccupation. He didn’t deserve it, that was for damn sure, and there was no reason for her to have much feeling for a man who had taken almost no interest in her life, but nevertheless
protective
was the only word she could find to describe her emotions. She wished she could do something to help him with whatever was bothering him, but when she questioned him, he assured her that getting
Fair Play
into a studio schedule was no more than the usual hassle it always had been on every film he’d ever produced.

As she observed Vito so essentially detached and remote, in spite of his approximation of a paternal figure, Gigi was seized by an irresistible impulse to talk about Zach Nevsky to the one person she was sure wouldn’t take an interest in him. Sasha and she avoided the subject by tacit agreement, and Billy knew nothing about him. But talking to Vito right now would be like talking to an echo chamber.

“In New York I met some theater people,” she said, as a pause developed in the wedding conversation.

“Anybody I know?”

“Nick De Salvo?”

“He’s not a theater person, he’s a movie actor. From what I’ve seen of him on film, that guy’s going all the way,” Vito said.

“Nick happened to be in New York because he was playing Hamlet Off Broadway for Sasha’s brother, Zach Nevsky.” As she said Zach’s name, Gigi felt a trembling awareness of stepping into a forbidden zone, a perilous place where she could only come to grief, yet there was a terrible sweetness of surrender in just uttering his name that she couldn’t deny herself in spite of what Zach had done to her.

“I read the reviews. Amazing coverage for a practically nonprofit venture like Off Broadway. I guess having Nick De Salvo in it accounted for its being such a giant success,” Vito responded judiciously. “How did you get mixed up with those wide-eyed idealists? Through Sasha?”

“Exactly. Do you really think that they’re just naïve idealists? Isn’t there a future for a director like Zach? Every review gave him the credit, they all called him extraordinary, they all mentioned his vision and daring.” Gigi tried to speak dispassionately, despite the thumping of her heart. “The consensus was that Zach’s far and away the most exciting and innovative of the young new theater directors—at least that’s what they said—I’m no judge.”

“Look, Gigi, this Zach Nevsky can be all of those things and more, but what good will it do him? Off Broadway? Come on, use your head. It’s hopeless financially, and getting more hopeless every year. Unless he’s making movies, he’s never going to find a big enough audience to make an impact.”

“But couldn’t Zach be another Joseph Papp? I know that’s what Sasha is hoping for, that one day Zach Nevsky will mean as much to theater as Papp does.”

“There’s only room for one Papp,” Vito pronounced. “How well did you get to know De Salvo?”

“Not well, but he was awfully sweet. I met him that weekend I broke my leg. He’s Zach’s oldest friend.”

“If he’s a friend, he should tell Zach Nevsky to leave Off Broadway and come on out here and learn the difference between a grip and a gaffer,” Vito said indifferently, not hearing Gigi’s sudden, oddly irrelevant little sigh.

He’d been kept dangling by Arvey since before Christmas, Vito thought as he talked to Gigi, and now it was April, four months later. They were no closer to an agreement than they’d been at any time, and yet their negotiations had not yet broken down. If another studio in town had been interested, he’d have taken the project away from Arvey immediately, but everyone had passed on
Fair Play
.

Vito had met with the heads of all the studios and each one of them had assured him that they personally had taken the time to read the coverage of
Fair Play
that had come in from their readers. The notion that they might have actually read the original material themselves was something so out of the question that it never entered their minds or Vito’s expectations. Their readers’ opinions were based on a three- or four-sentence “log line” summary of the plot, several pages of detailed analysis of the story, a character breakdown, and a final recommendation.

The recommendations had all been variations on the same theme: the book was a gem, a rare treat, a joy to read, its bestseller status was entirely understandable. But as a film?
Commercially?
No. It had too many negatives. It was not recommended. There was nothing in it, absolutely nothing, that would appeal to the young audience that kept them in business. As far as the adult audience was concerned, from whom unexpected support could come when a movie was made that appealed to them, not again. A qualified but definite no. Too risky. Far from a sure thing. The two main characters were just a shade too British, too completely embedded in the British class structure, not people who belonged in a contemporary Noel Coward romp on one hand, nor as powerfully wrong for each other as those in
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
, on the other. No, regretfully, no.

Only Curt Arvey hadn’t turned him down. Only Curt Arvey could see the potential in the project, but he wanted Vito to make the film at the unrealizably low price of seven million dollars. “You brought in
Mirrors
at two million two, Vito, seven million is more than three times that,” Arvey said stubbornly, not willing to give in an inch on the fact that every single cost of making a film had gone up enormously in the last four years. He discounted entirely the indisputable record that Vito had worked a one-time-only miracle in obtaining the cut-rate services of a great scriptwriter, a superb director and a legendary cameraman for
Mirrors
by collecting on long-due favors and giving away chunks of his share of the profits. Most important of all, Vito had not used a single star in his Oscar-winning picture. To make
Fair Play
work, two stars were vital. There was no reasonable or even rational chance that Vito could pull it off with unknown actors; eleven million dollars was the minimum the picture had to cost. With no room for error. And at that it would still be a low-budget picture for 1982.