Scruples

by Judith Krantz

  Although millions of magazine and newspaper readers knew that “Billy” meant Billy Ikehorn, just as they knew the last names of “Liza” or “Jackie,” she, Billy, had never accepted the reality of her media celebrity status. She didn’t feel known. Ellis had taught her to distrust the pettiness of what is usually termed “Society” in New York, and she had been happy to stay just outside of it. When she moved to California she never made, in any substantial, meaningful way, the first move to swim freely in Los Angeles society. In addition, although Billy did not subscribe to the ultimate viewpoint of Boston society that no other “Society” exists worthy of the name, her Boston mannerisms and her residue of a Boston accent had never really disappeared, and they accentuated the impression she gave of being, in some final way, an outsider.

  “Even if you don’t know everybody, they all know you,” Spider insisted.

  “Well, what does that matter. I can’t invite perfect strangers—can I?”

  “You damn well better,” Spider answered. “We’ve just spent about a million dollars, lady, and it would be a shame to let only the neighbors in on it.”

  “Look, Spider, since you’re such an expert, you make out the list.” Billy fled, feeling for an embarrassing minute out of command. Spider tended recently to have that effect on her. He was such a wiseass, she reflected, annoyed at her own lack of social sophistication.

  Spider had a field day. He started his list with the important local residents, then the barons and baronesses of the entire West Coast from the Mexican to the Canadian borders. Customers first, after all. Then he added selected notables from New York, Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, and Palm Beach. Hollywood—The New and The Old. The Fashion Establishment, of course. Washington? Why not the best? Well, maybe not President Carter, but certainly Vice-President Mondale, and it wouldn’t be a party without Tip O’Neill. Then he added what he could still only call the International Jet Set, but carefully culled, that fucked-up bunch. Was anybody left out? Jesus! The press! Spider hit himself on the forehead for his stupidity. That was what it was all about. He’d been jerking off over celebrities and politicians and overlooking their creators. So—the press; not just the fashion and society press but the right people from People and New York Magazine and New West and Los Angeles and the newsmagazines and Condé Nast and Hearst and network big shots. Rolling Stone? Maybe not. Would Walter Cronkite come? And Norman Mailer? How about Woodward and Bernstein? Hell, Scruples could easily hold six or seven hundred people when all the sliding walls were opened and all the display cases whisked away, just as Ken Adam had planned. That gave him room to invite at least four hundred couples since, Spider assured himself, many of the people he was inviting probably wouldn’t travel all the way from wherever they lived to attend a ball. He invited several dozens more, not forgetting his family or Josh Hillman and his wife. Maybe he was getting carried away, he reasoned, looking at the pages in front of him. He crossed out some names from Florida and Texas—how often did they get to California anyway? Then he went over all his lists, crossing off any names that were faintly dubious, either as potential customers or in their celebrity value. He ended up with three hundred and fifty couples and the party of the decade. Perhaps The Last Great Party. Certainly the most expensive party, the most photographed party, the most electric and talked-about party of the 1970s.

  Without thinking it through, Billy had chosen well to give her ball on the first Saturday of November 1976, right after the presidential elections. Those whose candidate hadn’t won wanted to forget, while those who were glad about the outcome of the election wanted to celebrate. Above all, everyone wanted to think about something besides politics, the British pound, and pollution.

  The last flower arrangers and lighting men left just as the caterers arrived to set up the bars and the buffets. On the first floor, which had been cleared for dancing, there were several large bars. Spider’s tour de force was putting a buffet, a bar, and a dozen chairs in each one of the twenty-four large fitting rooms. No one who came that night could miss a tour of the second floor of Scruples, which Billy Baldwin, working as fast as he had in his illustrious life, had transformed into a fascinatingly amusing and erotic pastiche of delectable rooms, each one of which provided his less inventive colleagues inspiration for years to come. Downstairs the dancing never stopped; Peter Duchin’s three best bands alternated so that there was never a moment without music. The Edwardian winter garden’s doors were thrown open so that people could stroll in the formal garden behind Scruples. There was even a full moon. Some magic lay over that warm night; women looked more beautiful in Ken Adam’s lighting than they had ever looked at any age in their lives; men felt more romantic and yet more powerful, perhaps just because they had been invited to the most glamorous and star-filled of all gala balls, perhaps because all of Scruples blended to touch somewhere, everyone’s most luxurious fantasy. Even the constant popping of flashbulbs added a note of delight. You have to be one of a half-dozen genuinely misanthropic celebrities to truly dislike having your picture taken.

  Scruples reopened for business on Monday. By mid-morning they knew that they had triumphed. Valentine’s merchandise, ordered so late in August, had arrived in time and combined with the best of Billy’s earlier fall buys performed that immensely lucrative maneuver called, in fashion shorthand, “walking out of the store.” Spider had to call a secretarial service by 10:30 A.M. to order six temporary clerks just to handle the opening of new charge accounts. The chef, accustomed to the mountains of food served at Scandia, had prepared wisely, but even he was amazed to find his giant refrigerators almost empty by the end of the day. His four waiters, three kitchen assistants, and two wine stewards were trembling with exhaustion. The salespeople were trembling with exalted disbelief; none of them had ever before sold so much in one day. The weary Oriental masseuses almost, but did not, quit en masse.

  After the doors had closed for the day, Billy, Spider, and Valentine met in Billy’s office. Spider lay full length on the floor and Valentine, who had pitched in as a saleswoman all day long, stretched out on Billy’s priceless Louis XV sofa and kicked off her shoes.

  “Can it last?” asked Billy very softly.

  “Fucking right it can,” said Spider.

  “Christmas shopping is just around the corner,” mused Valentine.

  “WE MADE IT!” Billy yelled.

  “Fucking right we did,” answered Spider.

  “YOU ARE BOTH WONDERFUL!” exalted Billy.

  “Fucking right, we are,” said Spider.

  “Thirty-eight women asked me to design originals for them—I need an assistant, workrooms, workwomen, fabrics—everything—” uttered Valentine.

  “Whatever you need, you get, tomorrow,” Billy assured her.

  “Fucking right she does,” Spider said.

  “And I have to leave on another buying trip. Even so, I’m already a few weeks late for the French and Italian spring-summer ready-to-wear,” said Valentine wearily.

  “Spider, tell me finally, were you ever in retailing before?” Billy asked.

  “Why, of course, Billy—whoever made you think I wasn’t?” Spider laughed.

  “He is now,” Valentine murmured.

  “FUCKING RIGHT HE IS!” Billy yelled in jubilation.

  All of that week, all of that month, business at Scruples exceeded their most extravagant hopes. Even when the novelty value and the curiosity factor of the store had worn off to some extent, customers settled down into a pattern of buying that didn’t falter.

  The country store, designed primarily for its whimsy and sense of gaiety, became the ultimate place to buy gifts and things-you-didn’t-know-you-needed, so successful that for the following Christmas Scruples issued a coveted mail-order catalog.

  The trellised winter garden—with its cozy discreet corners, its plumply tufted love seats, antique wicker armchairs, and round tables covered in sublimely out-of-date mauve and pink hydrangea chintz; its baskets of begonias and cyclamens and orchids,
its huge potted ferns, and its dim, insinuating light—became the local community’s favorite place for the exchange of idle gossip and vital information, which, in many cases, were one and the same.

  The main salon, Spider’s Fun Fair—with the men’s department, the Ali Baba’s cave of women’s accessories, the pub, the backgammon tables and the pinball machines—became that substitute for Bloomingdale’s that people always complain is missing in Beverly Hills, a playground for grown-ups, a place to be seen, to bump into people, to be both stimulated and soothed by abundance piled on abundance.

  Valentine’s couture designs soon took up so much of her time and energy that Billy hired two highly experienced buyers to leave her free to do the work that added so much to the prestige of Scruples, but she still remained head buyer for the store. Two additional buyers, one for accessories and one for gifts, toured almost constantly, their shipments arriving from all corners of the world.

  And Spider? Spider supervised the whole thing, from the parking garage to the smallest stock boy, from the windows to the kitchen. But his most important function was that of arbiter of elegance, one he had cut out for himself during the first week Scruples was in operation. No woman left Scruples until Spider had approved of what she had bought. He was always in at the kill. His taste was literally flawless and his specialty was twofold: to convince a wavering woman that she did indeed look beautiful in a particular garment, or to talk her out of something she adored but which didn’t suit her. He operated independently of concern about any individual sale. He would far rather see a customer leave without having made a single purchase than have her go home and decide, regretfully, that she’d made a mistake. If Spider detected that slight hanging back that a woman feels when she is compromising on something she isn’t truly enthusiastic about, he used all his wiles to dissuade her. He was only really happy with a sale in which a customer displayed her conviction by trying to sell him. And, with deliberation, he invariably managed to make each customer decide against at least one thing she loved so that when she got home, any pangs of guilt she might feel over having spent so much money would be annulled by her feeling of virtue in not having bought that one thing she had really wanted. To pass Spider’s inspection, you had to pick clothes that were utterly right for you and you had to be hot for them, dizzy with a desire that can’t be forced any more than a faked orgasm can be enjoyed. In the final analysis, it was Spider, with his firm control over what was sold and to whom, rather than any other feature of Scruples, that made it, within a year, the most successful luxury specialty store per square foot of selling space in Beverly Hills, in the United States—in the world.

  Mgaggie MacGregor was responsible for Spider’s first assuming his role of arbiter of taste at Scruples, although he never told her and she never suspected it. Maggie prepared her weekly television show with the help of a staff of trained journalists, who did a great deal of the preliminary investigatory work. She enlisted as well the aid of countless contacts planted in strategic places with access to the secrets of agents’ offices and studios’ inner circles. However, on camera, she carried her show alone, without a co-host. Outspoken, sassy, often tilting, but never falling, over the edge into vulgarity, Maggie was alone on the television screen whenever the camera was not trained on the face of the celebrity she was interviewing. Shrewd Maggie knew that only split-second cuts away from the performer were tolerable to a public fanatically curious to see if their eyes could tell them why this one or that one had become a star. That was part of the essential itching appeal of her show, the chance to get a long, close look at every pore, every eye blink, every facial line of a screen personality who was not, for the moment, saying words from a script, a temporary exile from the pedestal, who was at the mercy of Maggie’s questions. The fact that this glimpse told you nothing, absolutely nothing, to explain the whys and wherefores of the mysteries of who reaches stardom and who does not, did not matter as long as the audience thought they were getting a peek at something with a grain of reality in its core, something that would allow them to feel that they “knew” the star as a human being.

  Maggie MacGregor had arrived at Scruples early on the Monday morning after the reopening gala in her pale blue Mercedes 450 SLC, reluctantly leaving it for James, the head parking attendant, whom Billy had hired away from Saks, to deal with. Her most intense emotional relationship at the moment, she reflected, wryly, was with that Nazi car. And, at that, in a town where the Mercedes repair department closed down tight every day for an hour’s lunch break, just as unconcerned about their customers’ convenience as Gucci, which did the same thing. She pacified her conscience by reminding herself that the Mercedes was manufactured in West Germany, a country that paid substantial reparations to Israel, but still—enough of that, she told herself, she was thinking like Shirley Silverstein again!

  Shirley Silverstein had joined, informally, the vast clan MacGregor right after high school, just as soon as she knew that she was smart enough and tough enough and hardworking enough to go all the way. All the way where? Obviously to Beverly Hills, Maggie thought, the promised land, where Moses could and certainly should have led his people if, dummy, he hadn’t turned right instead of left after crossing the Red Sea. When Maggie changed Shirley’s name she also altered Shirley’s nose and left behind Shirley’s extra thirty pounds and Shirley’s anonymous future, but she had never tried to put a veneer of Anglo-Saxon gentility over her salty Jewish tongue. Just as her mother had never wearied of saying in pride and mock dismay “The tongue on that one!” Maggie had always believed that her tongue was her only hope at fortune. If you could think smart enough, talk smart, loud, and bright enough, and sustain conviction, with a little bit of luck, you could own the American public. Maggie’s first-class brain, not her tongue, got her the scholarships to Barnard and to the Columbia School of Journalism. However, Maggie’s mother, whose truly inspired abilities to nag and harass had driven her unwilling daughter through three summer-school stenography courses, was able to say, with justification, that she had gotten Maggie the first job of her brilliant career.

  Newly hatched journalism-school graduates emerge, like an annual plague of monster mosquitoes, to torment the personnel departments of New York’s national magazines. Maggie managed to get past the personnel department at Cosmopolitan by applying for a job as a secretary, not as an editorial assistant, which is what she actually intended to be. The articles editor, Roberta Ashley, looked at the tiny, twenty-two-year-old girl, with a round, guileless baby face, surrounded by dark hair that threatened to hide her bright brown eyes, and asked, with her famous, forthright charm, “Do you take speed-writing or only fast longhand?”

  “Pitman. One hundred words a minute. As fast as you can talk, not to worry,” Maggie cockily assured the editor, who, since she was a very wise woman, immediately began to worry about just how long this windfall would last.

  It went on for one-and-a-half beautifully efficient years, while Maggie sucked in all she could learn about magazines from observing and remembering everything that was discussed in the constant stream of memos and meetings between her own boss and Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan.

  One winter morning in 1973 Maggie overheard the news that Candy Bergen had had dinner the night before with Helen Brown and her producer-husband, David Brown, during an unheralded, one-day stopover between London and Los Angeles.

  Five minutes later, from a place where she couldn’t be overheard, Maggie phoned the star at her hotel.

  “This is Maggie MacGregor of Cosmo, Miss Bergen. Helen just asked me to call you. We know it’s the last minute and Helen’s in an editorial meeting, or she would have called you herself, but the thing is—we were wondering if we could do a quick interview before you left? I know you don’t have much time—no time at all?—but listen, I could pick you up with a limo and take you to the airport and just tape some stuff on the way out. You know, life, love, lipstick, that sort of thing. Hmm? Wonderful! Helen’ll be delig
hted! I’ll call up from the lobby in half an hour.”

  The plane was four hours late in leaving, the divine Candice was in a mood to spill her guts, and Maggie had an interview so remarkable that it almost reconciled Bobbie Ashley to the loss of a great secretary. It was one of the very few celebrity interviews ever published that posed the obligatory question “What Is Candy Bergen Really Like?” and then proceeded to answer it until the reader felt she not only knew Candy, but that she really cared about her.

  Once a month, for nearly the next two years, Maggie’s spectacularly revealing interviews with film stars blazed on the pages of Cosmo. It became as much the stigma of arrival at stardom for an actor or actress to be shown by Maggie with his or her soul hanging out as for a political figure to be vivisected alive by Oriana Fallaci. “I don’t yentz them,” Maggie explained, Coca-Cola-colored eyes all innocence, “they just yentz themselves and I try not to run out of tape.”

  During her journalism years Maggie dressed in casual skirts and shirts, the perfect costume for a reporter who wants to make herself unthreatening and inconspicuous, while her subjects forget the purpose of her being there long enough to be lulled into saying the things their public-relations people have begged them never to mention.

  Her real taste in clothes didn’t surface until she broke into television and signed the network contract that included all her wardrobe expenses. The sponsor, eyeing Maggie’s inoffensive, nondescript separates, let it be clearly understood that she would be expected to dress the part of a serious intimate of the film world. Network executives had already learned that the television audience won’t begin to credit the intelligence and capacity of a mere local newswoman unless she is well turned out and perfectly groomed. Still less would they believe in a Maggie who didn’t reflect the lingering glamour of Hollywood, a pervasive, intrinsic glamour that has never really been dissipated in spite of the attrition of years.