Scruples Two

by Judith Krantz

  “Oh. So I do.” Gigi looked crestfallen. Classics! “What about accessories?” she demanded.

  “That’s where I think you let the catalog customers do their own thing,” Spider said.

  “Oh no, that’s where I think you should give them an idea of what to do,” Gigi replied, incensed. “Take Sasha’s black cardigan—I could make it look fifteen or twenty-five different ways with the right accessories. If we sold the ultimate, perfect, best black cardigan in the world and didn’t have a double spread of pictures of different ways in which you could wear it, we wouldn’t be giving our customers the service they deserve!”

  “And when we get someone to design our ultimate cardigan, the Scruples Two cardigan,” Billy said, “we should offer it in a range of colors. Not everybody wants to wear black, lots of women can’t. We need at least six basic colors … gray, navy, camel—”

  “Deep, deep purple, heartbroken lavender, sort of an autumnal mossy-misty green, a blissful blue, between delphinium and the sky at twilight, a kind of ultimate pink, not shocking pink, not baby pink or raspberry, but definitely an important pink, a smoky beige that isn’t too yellow or too brown …” Gigi stopped, waiting for more inspiration.

  “Guys! Hold it for a second,” Spider said. “Before we get bogged down in details, are we agreed on the main thrust of Scruples Two: classic, versatile, newly imagined separates? Real clothes for real women? It has never been done before in the long history of catalogs.”

  “One minute! What about my antique lingerie?” Gigi protested.

  “And I promised Jessica to do a section for the discontinued woman, all those things she can’t find anymore,” Billy said.

  “I told three of my aunts that I guaranteed them a section where they could find wonderful things for themselves. They’re all still beautiful and they love clothes and are willing to pay good money for them, but they weigh over two hundred pounds,” Sasha informed them. “Each.”

  “All those things will be included,” Spider said. “Isn’t that right, Billy? But the meat and potatoes of Scruples Two, the part where we make most of our money, is, as I see it, the separates you need year in and year out.”

  “Will it be published four times a year?” Sasha asked, not willing to give up her hobby horse.

  “I hadn’t started to think about frequency,” Spider admitted.

  “I think it’s essential or it isn’t fashion,” Sasha insisted.

  “Sasha’s right,” Billy said. “We’ve got to be thinking in terms of the next selling season long, long before we send the first one out.”

  “For those technical details we need a catalog person,” Spider said firmly. “We have to hire the best person in the catalog world, somebody who’s lived a catalog life. None of us knows what kind of pricing we’re talking about, what kind of mailing lists, what inventory problems we might have. Guys, we don’t know fuck-all about catalogs, we just know that Scruples Two is going to be a howling success.”

  “We can hire ten people who know that stuff, Spider,” Billy assured him, “but we can’t hire somebody who invented the Five-Minute Fire Drill Wardrobe. You were getting us to lead you to the theme that way, weren’t you?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I love that ‘ah, shucks, it weren’t nothin’, ma’am,’ look you get, Spider,” Gigi said.

  “Just a hunch, Gigi,” Spider said modestly.

  Spider’s desk phone buzzed. Startled out of his concentration on the catalog, he picked it up with annoyance. “Who? Oh, okay, sure, send him in.

  “It’s Josh Hillman,” he said, turning to Billy. “He’s got those papers we’re supposed to sign today; they have to be witnessed.”

  “Why would one of the top lawyers in L.A. leave his office to bring them here himself?” Billy asked.

  “It’s got to be pure curiosity. He’s dying to know exactly what we’re up to.”

  “Oh, I haven’t seen Josh in years!” Gigi cried. “Is he still the most eligible man in Beverly Hills?”

  “So I understand,” Billy answered, shrugging, as Sasha quickly slipped out of the room by another door that led to a ladies’ room.

  Gigi rushed to give Josh a big hug and kiss, realizing as she saw him that she’d never really looked at him as a man before. She must have been too much of a kid, or too hung up on her imaginary visions of the young Marlon Brando, to realize that a man in his forties wasn’t too old to fall into the handsome category. His eyes were many shades grayer than the sprinkling of gray in his short hair; he was as lithe as ever, even taller than Spider, and his high cheekbones, quizzical glance, clever mouth and sardonic smile all combined to make him a man of clear distinction.

  “Garage sale?” Josh asked Billy, holding Gigi by the waist and looking at the mountain of clothes.

  “It’s a kind of contest,” she said protectively. She still hadn’t told Josh exactly what business she was going into with Spider, but had just asked him to draw up the partnership papers.

  “Josh, you’re the first to see the seed of Scruples Two,” Spider announced.

  “I thought it was going to be another store, there’s an awful lot of money being spent on designer clothes these days.”

  “Not a store, and not a lot of money,” Spider said like a proud father, not noticing that Billy was trying to signal him with her eyes to keep quiet about their plans. “We’re going to create the first great fashion catalog based on the essential clothes no woman can live without. The twenty percent of the stuff she buys that she wears ninety percent of the time.”

  “Where’d you get that statistic?” Josh asked, raising his eyebrows dubiously.

  “Pravda. But ask any woman, Josh, and she’ll confirm it. And we’re going to publicize it in a way no one has ever dreamed of publicizing a catalog before. Billy’s going to be on every national television show that has a female audience, from ‘Good Morning America’ and ‘Today’ to Phil to Oprah, and on all the major local shows, the way writers tour for new books, showing people how our pieces work together—”

  “I am going to do what!” Billy almost shouted, astonished. What the hell made him think she’d go on television?

  “Of course—with three models to show the clothes while you explain the theme—with the fire drill this morning, I forgot to mention it. The idea came to me last night after we looked over your new jet. The travel wouldn’t be tough, and shows will be fighting over a chance to get you. Of course we’ve got to give a huge press party, the way we did for Scruples, long before the first catalog is mailed, maybe one here, one in New York and one in Chicago—maybe Dallas?—I’ll work that out with our PR people—”

  “What PR people?” Billy gasped.

  “The ones we’re going to hire, of course,” Spider said briskly, getting up and striding around the room in excitement. “Another thing, we should send out specially designed Scruples Two clothes hangers with every piece of merchandise that needs one, nothing more annoying than not enough hangers, isn’t that right, Josh? And I’ve just realized that Gigi should do a lot of TV too with her accessory ideas, television producers are always looking for show-and-tell stuff.”

  “Spider!” Gigi squeaked, but he paid no attention to her, carried away by his ideas. “We’re going to advertise in selected markets in national magazines—no catalog has ever advertised—and Scruples Two is free, so we’ll get a terrific response.”

  “How about skywriters, Spider?” Billy asked, “and the Goodyear blimp saying, ‘Welcome home, January’?”

  “On target, Billy, on target,” he said, looking as if he were about to burst into a chorus of “Seventy-six Trombones.”

  “Maybe a little too cute, but I like your thinking. I always liked your thinking.” He stopped to blow her a kiss, before he continued. “We’ll send a special Scruples Two tape measure and a life-size wall chart to every new customer so we can establish their exact size, and then we’ll have fewer returns—of course we’ll take returns without question—”

>   “Nobody, nobody does that!” Billy said, outraged.

  “That’s why we have to. The only way to capture a mail-order customer with a new kind of catalog she’s never seen before is to give her the chance to return what she doesn’t like without any valid reason. If she doesn’t have that option, she’ll look but not order. Billy, I know it might cost us a lot at first, but we’ll build our customers’ trust, we’ll learn what merchandise works and what doesn’t, and we’ll more than make it back in the long run. Right, Billy, do we agree?”

  “We agree,” she smiled, finally won over by his enthusiasm. Why shouldn’t they use the Goodyear blimp? Before the football games? No, that would probably be too expensive, but the blimp didn’t only work on Super Bowl Sunday. And why not TV commercials? Lester Weinstock had bartered his old television shows for tons of commercial time, and she could buy it from him at a substantial discount. Absolutely TV!

  “And,” Spider went on, “at least in the first issue, we ought to run a major contest, maybe customers could send us pictures of how they combine our separates and the winner gets to come out here in Billy’s jet and go on a shopping spree with all you guys on Rodeo Drive and also gets one of everything in the catalog—we ought to have more than one winner, what about a baker’s dozen?—and Sasha could—”

  “Sasha could what?” Sasha asked as she came back into the room wearing her lucky red dress and high-heeled black pumps into which she’d just changed. A total silence fell as she moved toward them with the walk of dignified yet delicately wanton energy that had sold enough panties and bras to reach to the moon, a creature of sheen and luster, dark fire and dark, dark red rubies, her limp jersey dress transformed into the most perfectly cut garment in the world, its long sleeves only adding to the shock of the deeply cut neckline from which her breasts rose halfway in their white splendor.

  Wrong, Spider thought, how wrong can a man be? On Sasha, sexy isn’t attitude, sexy is what is low-cut and fits like a second skin. And attitude. Women could always surprise him.

  She’s up to something, Gigi thought in diverted apprehension … that Orloff-Nevsky magic they should all be arrested and put away for, she’s turned it up as far as I’ve ever seen it.

  “Sasha, this is Josh Hillman,” Billy said, the only one of them with enough presence of mind to remember that they hadn’t met. “Josh, this is Sasha Nevsky, Gigi’s roommate and our co-conspirator in this project.”

  “How do you do?” Sasha and Josh each said at the same time as they shook hands. They paused and then said again in chorus, “Fine, thank you.”

  “Have we run out of small talk so quickly?” Sasha asked, looking up into Josh’s face with a breathtakingly intimate smile Gigi had never seen before.

  “Uh … no … uh … I hope not … not so soon,” Josh stammered.

  He looked as if he’d been hit over the head by a two-by-four, Billy noted with a touch of enchanted mischief. Her conservative lawyer could use a good shaking up, in her opinion, as could every other man, except Spider, who was like quicksilver.

  “You’re Gigi’s roommate?” Josh asked Sasha, as if there were no one else in the room.

  “We shared an apartment in New York for over two years. I’m so very, very much older than Gigi that I was acting as her chaperone.”

  “How much older?” he asked, as if it were a matter of life or death.

  “It feels like a decade,” Sasha sighed, swaying slightly closer to him. “Several decades, as a matter of fact.”

  Why doesn’t she swoon? Gigi asked herself gleefully. Why doesn’t she just swoon dead away into his arms, when she tells lies like that?

  “Where do you live?” Josh asked urgently.

  “Gigi and I share a place in West Hollywood …” Sasha replied, her voice a private, unexpected note, like a cello string gently touched for the first time.

  “Josh,” Gigi said, feeling mercy for him, “why don’t you come by for a drink tonight? Everybody’s seen our apartment but you, and we’re feeling house-proud at the moment.”

  “That’s a great idea, Gigi,” Spider said crisply. This courtship ritual was wasting his time. “Maybe we’d better look at those papers now, Josh?”

  “Papers?”

  “The papers you brought to be signed?”

  “Oh, those papers.… I have them right here. Ah … look, Spider, there’s no rush, I’ll just leave them with you and Billy. Gigi and … Sasha … I’ll come by for that drink tonight, if I may,” he said, and fled the room.

  “He doesn’t know our address,” Gigi said.

  “I think he’ll manage to find it out,” Billy laughed. “Back to work, ladies? Oh, and gentleman … come on, back to work, you guys.”

  “Will you stop fiddling with the ice bucket and get out!” Sasha ordered Gigi impatiently.

  “He’s not even due for fifteen minutes,” Gigi pointed out.

  “What if he’s early? I don’t want that ghastly pink car of yours anywhere in the neighborhood!”

  “I’m going, I’m going, but first you have to explain why you’re not wearing your lucky dress. If ever there was a time—”

  “I don’t need it anymore.”

  Gigi eyed Sasha wearing a high-necked black dress that was the most conservative and expensive item in her wardrobe, an utterly simple, clinging column of silk crepe.

  “That dress makes you look.…”

  “How?”

  “Like a … oh, my God! Like a nice girl! Sasha, I accept that you’re the Great Slut of all time, but don’t do this, you can’t be so cruel,” Gigi implored. “I know men must suffer, but why victimize that sweet, kind, good man—he’s never in his life done anything half bad enough for you to make him think you’re a nice girl!”

  “Never mind,” Sasha said loftily.

  “And putting your hair up on top of your head in that prim way, you look ancient,” Gigi said wrathfully, giving a severe poke to the fire she’d lit in their fireplace.

  “How ancient?”

  “Almost … thirty-five.”

  A gratified smile briefly illuminated Sasha’s ardent face.

  “Good. Now out, Isadora, before I strangle you with your least favorite scarf.”

  “Okay, okay, but first tell me … or I won’t leave,” Gigi said, backing away, “tell me, was it the words ‘top lawyer’ or the word ‘eligible’ that made you change into your lucky dress?”

  “I honestly don’t remember. I think it was instinct, a reflex action, something about that name, Josh Hillman—it resonated. Oh, will you just please leave?”

  “Sasha, you’re not, no, you can’t be … nervous …?” Gigi came close and peered at her friend.

  “Sasha Nevsky doesn’t even know how nervous feels,” Sasha said threateningly, “but you will if you’re still here in the next five seconds.”

  “We’re out of wood,” Josh said as he and Sasha sat in front of the low-burning fire. “How can that be? There was plenty when I arrived.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s … almost ten. What happened to the time?”

  “Did we spend it on the Hillmans?”

  “And the Orloffs and the Nevskys?”

  “I can’t sort it out,” Sasha answered dreamily. “The Hillmans sound exactly like a bunch of Nevskys who don’t happen to dance. It’s all a blur.”

  “But we missed dinner,” Josh said in concern. “I made an eight-thirty reservation at Le Chardonnay.”

  “For three?”

  “For two. I was planning to separate you from Gigi one way or another. We’ve got to eat. I’ll call Robert and tell him we’re on our way.”

  “Would you think I was crazy if I said I was in the mood for deli?”

  Josh looked at this peerless woman in astonishment. He’d been craving a corned beef on rye for the last few minutes. He’d never before talked so much and so personally, never found such a sympathetic, understanding audience, and only Jewish soul food would hit the spot in his state of exaltatio
n.

  “I’m taking you to Art’s in the Valley, it’s the best deli in L.A.,” he promised her. “Say good-bye to Marcel.”

  No one at Art’s was surprised to see the elegantly dressed couple enter. From spiffed-up teenagers after their proms to babies six weeks old; from groups of hale and well-nourished senior citizens to film-star refugees from celebrity restaurants—all forms of humanity eventually beat a path to Art’s. There, Art himself presided over his famous establishment decorated in a calming combination of beiges, walls hung with enormous photographs of each of its sandwiches, roomy booths spaced so that diners could eat in a privacy and relative quiet unknown in the other delicatessens of Hollywood.

  Sasha and Josh were given a semicircular booth in a corner and presented with open menus that offered, besides eighteen appetizers, forty-four sandwiches and eight soups, six different kinds of hamburgers, thirty-eight varieties of hot or cold plates, thirteen salads, eighteen side orders, eight kinds of potatoes and eighteen desserts.

  “Oh.” Sasha looked bewildered. “Gee whiz.”

  “Shall I order for you?”

  “Please. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “How hungry are you?”

  “I’m not sure, but logically I must be perishing. I’ve barely eaten a thing since breakfast … the plans for the catalog were too exciting.”

  Josh scanned the menu. “Do you like smoked fish?” he asked Sasha, and when she nodded assent, he looked up at the waitress. “First bring us some appetizers; sturgeon, lox, whitefish and, let’s see, oh, the herring in sour cream … hmmm.… and then a corned beef sandwich for me and a—Sasha, is corned beef okay for you? Right, make that two corned beefs, and maybe a brisket dip on a French roll with gravy, and one of your combo sandwiches—the Art’s Special, the triple-decker with rare roast beef, pastrami and Swiss. That should do to start. And potato pancakes with sour cream and plenty of applesauce. Maybe you’d better bring us a few extra plates so we can share. To drink? Club soda, Sasha? White wine? Beer? Champagne? It’s something called Rocar, must be Californian? Fine, a bottle of Rocar, please, and some plain water.”