Scruples

by Judith Krantz

  “Vito, what if we just lived together? I wouldn’t ‘have’ you that way—couldn’t we—?”

  “No, Billy. Anyway, the man is supposed to ask the woman.”

  “That was fifteen years ago. Now women can ask for what they want and get it.”

  “Not from me, my darling, not unless I want to give it.”

  “You’re holding back progress.” Billy felt suddenly shrill, false. She’d never given a thought to the liberation of women, and now she sounded as if she’d been a dues-paying feminist for years. But better to sound absurd than rejected, better to make a bad joke than to admit how she yearned for him to love her, to marry her, like one of those silly besotted nineteenth-century literary heroines she had always sworn she would never be like, long, long ago.

  Curt Arvey, a first-rate son of a bitch, was a man who would go a long way to score a point. He was seriously annoyed with his wife, Susan, with whom he lived in a state of constantly fluctuating weights and balances even when they were getting along without an overt struggle. She had taken the tone that this business of Billy and Orsini was all his fault since he was the one who had thought of inviting Vito to dinner. She was acting as if Orsini were a fortune-hunting gigolo, a not too subtle way of reminding Curt that it had been Susan’s money that first got him started. True enough, but it hadn’t been her money that got him to the top, not her money that permitted her now to lead the life she led in Beverly Hills, and he’d be damned if he was going to let her tell him whom he should invite to his own dinner parties and whom he shouldn’t. Arvey telephoned Vito and asked him to come out to the hotel for a late breakfast.

  “The grapevine says you have a new project, Vito. Tell me about it.”

  “A first novel by a young French girl, another. Françoise Sagan, only much better. I optioned it for peanuts. It’s a love story about—”

  “Another love story? Didn’t Mexico cure you of that?”

  “Would catching the flu cure you of breathing, Curt? The day people won’t go to see a love story—a good one, Curt—is the day the world ends. I have a strong feeling about this book. It’s selling fantastically well in France and it’s being published in the United States and England—be out this spring.”

  “Does it need names?”

  “It could survive without them—the lovers are very young—it could be brought in for two million two, maybe two million even, depending on where I shoot it. It doesn’t have to be set in France; it’s a universal story.”

  “Romeo and Juliet?”

  “Yeah. But with a twist—a happy ending.”

  “Sounds good. Go ahead and talk to our business-affairs people and get the deal worked out.”

  “Absolutely not, Curt!” Vito went white.

  “Why the fuck not!” Curt dropped his napkin in astonishment.

  “Billy put you up to this. I’m not about to let a woman finance my pictures—”

  “Christ, Vito, you’re paranoid! The day I let some rich dame give me a couple of million dollars to have my studio make a movie that we distribute, that I personally have given the go-ahead on, that I have to account to my stockholders and board of directors for—that’ll be the day! I don’t deal that way and you know it—no studio does.”

  Vito took a deep breath. “According to you, you didn’t make money with me on those last two pictures we did together.”

  “So? We broke even; it helped pay the studio overhead. And we did make money on a lot of dreck I didn’t even enjoy making. At least your pictures were the kind I could run in my screening room and feel good about, class product. And where is it written that every picture has to make money? Breaking even isn’t as bad as we did with some others. Do you realize how fucking stiff-necked you are, Vito? You should have come to me with this project instead of waiting till I called you.”

  Arvey was right and Vito knew it. His one major failing as a producer was his deeply ingrained pride. Ideally, a producer of any kind should be eager to do business with Lucifer himself if the Prince of Darkness has money to finance his production, and if he finds Lucifer reluctant, he should return the next week and try again. And again, if necessary. Whether he should also sell his soul is strictly a matter of individual choice. True, he didn’t like or trust Arvey, but that should have had nothing to do with his holding back from seeking Arvey’s financing. His soul was still his own.

  “I’ll be in touch with your people as soon as I fly to the coast.” Vito’s matter-of-fact manner was apology enough.

  “Staying till the end of the Festival?”

  “Yes—unfinished business.”

  “I’m glad. But bring it in at one penny over two million two, and I’ll have your balls—oh, and Vito, come out here for dinner tonight if you’re free. Sue will want to congratulate you. She’s going to be tickled pink when she hears the news. She loves a good love story.”

  As Curt Arvey watched the door close behind Vito, he allowed himself a mighty, malicious, vindictive chuckle. It was easily worth two million two to show that Philadelphia snob he’d married just who was in charge.

  As he drove back to Cannes, Vito found himself plunged into an unprecedented bout of introspection. Normally, at a time like this, with the go-ahead finally given for his next picture, one that he had more hopes for than any he had yet produced, he should have been totally engrossed in making mental lists of potential writers and directors. He felt an expansive elation, but the elation seemed to be somehow mixed up with Billy. Yet what had she to do with it?

  He was stuck in the prenoon traffic jam outside of Cannes when it finally came to him that the same impulse in him that took a book or an idea and immediately envisioned what it could be as a film also made him want to mold, shape, and change Billy’s life. He saw the unhappy girl and wanted to make her into a happy woman. The fact that no one saw the unhappy girl under Billy’s facade except himself made the prospect all the more tempting. He was enchanted by her big feet, her long bones. The lusdousness of her body when she took off her ridiculously beautiful clothes astounded him. So much was hidden in her. He wanted to listen forever to the faint Boston accent he thought no one else noticed. He would like to make her pregnant.

  If only she were a poor young starlet and he the all-powerful producer who could say “There, that’s the girl, that’s the one I’ll make a star” and change her life—if only, Vito thought to himself, laughing at his potentate fancies, she had been the young Sophia Loren and he Carlo Ponti. Those fantasies had been all right for the young man he used to be, but today he had to deal with facts. With an effort, he turned his mind to the question of the ideal director for his next production.

  Billy wandered around the park of the Hôtel du Cap, losing herself in the overgrown paths, avoiding the clearings where she might come upon another guest sunning himself on a bench, prowling through the kitchen garden where flowers for the hotel and vegetables for the restaurant grew in well-tended rows. Everyone was either sleeping late or having breakfast in their rooms. Except for a stray gardener, she had the acres of park to herself. Finally she sat under a tree in the sun-splotched, buzzing green shade, which smelled far different from any American earth, the smell of centuries of civilization she supposed, and tried to think.

  She was acting like a love-sick child. Perhaps it was merely sexual. Vito had a knowledge of how to please a woman she had never known in another man. There was such a—she could only think of the word “generosity”—in his lovemaking. In recent years she had become a taker, a commander who told a man exactly what she wanted him to do to her, where and in precisely what manner she wanted him to stimulate her, and for how long, and if he wouldn’t or couldn’t, she left him flat and found another. She made her demands unconditionally and took her satisfaction as quickly as possible. That was what they were there for, those young male nurses who eventually went their way with such generous bonuses. Whatever happened to them afterward, whatever their private worlds were, Billy never knew or cared to know. To her, alth
ough she had never used the words, even to herself, they were male whores. She understood that now, and understood that she had had contempt for them. Did she have contempt for herself, with them? It was something she didn’t want to think about.

  Oh, but with Vito she didn’t even remember her predatory, peremptory ways. She felt as if he were browsing in her, a man enjoying a long, lazy stroll over his beloved, property, treasuring everything about her as if the very happiness he gave her made her more precious than she had been before. When she came, he was like a man who had received a priceless gift, yet it was he who had given it. He was so perfectly unhurried. Lying with him, it was always as if they had all the time in the world, no urgency, no pressure, no goal except the moment. He had washed the cynicism out of her and the hardness and left her as soft and helpless and open as—as she had never been since Paris.

  Billy stood up, left the shade of her tree, and walked back to the hotel, a golden-white château with tall shutters painted in the palest gray-blue. It wasn’t purely sexual and she knew it. Whatever happened, she felt in her bones that Vito was the love of her life. It terrified her.

  The last few days of the Cannes Film Festival are like the last few days of college after exams. Everyone whose picture has already been seen leaves town as quickly as possible. Those who remain are aware of a change of mood. The carnival atmosphere melts away as if it had never existed; the press, nursing hangovers and bloat, drifts off; the facades of the hotels regain their dignity as the elaborate advertising signs are removed from them; it becomes possible to find a waiter from whom to order a drink; and the food improves.

  Susan Arvey was in a snit. She and Billy should have already left for Paris as they had originally planned before coming to the Festival, but Billy seemed glued to Cap d’Antibes. It was all Vito Orsini’s fault. He was still milking his Mexican dog. In an excess of wild energy he had sold it to a dozen foreign countries. With the certainty of seeing his next movie through production, he seemed unable not to make a sale, even if he didn’t know where the country was located on the map. How he found time to do business while he saw so much of Billy, Susan couldn’t imagine, but she was a woman of little imagination to begin with. She did have enough, however, to stop herself from telling Curt what she thought of him for financing Vito’s next picture. Anyway, this delay could last only one more day, two at the most.

  On the day before the end of the Festival, Vito invited Billy to have lunch with him at La Réserve, in Beaulieu. The restaurant of this small, gem of a hotel is a long, open, shaded marble gallery, decked in pink, facing the ocean, certainly the most elegant outdoor dining room in the world.

  As Billy listened to Vito ordering lunch in his fluent Italian, a lunch she didn’t want to eat, she realized that, through the screen of her sunglasses, she was observing the scene as if to memorize it for the future. She was trying to photograph Vito, just as he was now, glowing bronze, as Mediterranean as the sea at his back, explaining to the headwaiter with words and gestures that the crayfish should be served with three different kinds of sauces. She was behaving as if the die had been cast and the game had been lost long ago, as if there was nothing for her to do but save her pride by treating the whole episode as just another impulse of a frivolous woman flirting wildly but not seriously, a sensation seeker, a maker of empty, affectionate phrases and promises. She was reducing her emotions to the size they had been stuck at for years, shrinking, diminishing with every minute that passed.

  Slowly she took off her sunglasses and put them down on the pink linen tablecloth. She was not going to permit herself this failure of character. She had to risk another rejection, no matter what humiliations it would cost her in the middle of the night for as many years as it took for it to become a memory. She felt obstinate, urgent, awkward—even brutal—and she didn’t care.

  “Vito.” There was a resonance in her voice that made him look up abruptly. “Vito, I don’t have the essential argument.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I wanted to captivate you with my flexibility, be whatever you wanted in a woman, convince you that you could never let me go, but I was wrong.”

  “I don’t understand, Billy.”

  “I was wrong, because my money will not go away—I couldn’t get rid of it if I wanted to, and I don’t.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “No, you can’t turn it into a joke with a twist of your voice. I’m rich and I’m going to always be rich. It is very important to me. But it’s not fair, is it? If I were a man and you were a woman, and I were rich and you were not, there wouldn’t be any problem, would there? We could try, couldn’t we, without anyone thinking anything except that it was natural—normal—to be expected?”

  He looked at her brave, unbeaten, lyrical eyes and said nothing.

  “Vito, I’m sure that there are other men in the world besides you who can’t be bought—but they’re not in love with me. You are. You’re throwing it away to prove how far you are above temptation. But the whole thing becomes an exercise in useless pride because you won’t stop loving me after you’ve made your gesture. So we’re both going to lose, aren’t we, for the rest of our lives?”

  “Billy—”

  “But I told you I didn’t have the essential argument, didn’t I? It’s just such a waste—I hate waste.”

  “So do I.” It went beyond love, Vito thought. It simply was, like destiny, like nationality, like inevitability. He put his hands over hers. “I’ll give you the essential argument. You must promise never, under any circumstances, to buy me a Rolls-Royce.” Billy stood up abruptly. “And,” he added, “never to give me a surprise party.” Tiny crayfish and wineglasses crashed to the marble floor, skittering in every direction. His words hadn’t quite made sense to Billy yet, but her stomach or her heart or whichever part of her it was that knew things before her head was filled with an intimation of happiness. Everyone in the urbane restaurant looked at them, wondering what insult this man could have offered this woman to cause her to advance on him in such an uncivilized manner.

  “If you’re teasing me, I’ll kill you!”

  “I never joke about family matters.” The diners turned back to their plates. Just another pair of lovers it seemed. Surrounded by waiters whisking away the debris, Billy sank back in her chair. She flamed with joy and felt as bashful as a child.

  “Just don’t say, ‘I told you so.’ ” He traced the outline of her lips with his finger and caught a tear on her cheek before it had time to fall into the herb mayonnaise, the only dish left on the table.

  The headwaiter, a hardy Communist from Milan, was thinking that the poulet à l’estragon and the lemon soufflé were going to be wasted on these two. On the other hand, he felt assured of a monstrous tip. If only all the lousy capitalists in the world were as much in love, it would be a better world for the working classes.

  The cablegram was addressed to Valentine. She tore it open and, after one incredulous look, rushed into the office she shared with Spider and thrust the piece of paper at him. GETTING MARRIED IN A WEEK TO VITO ORSINI. HE’S THE MOST MARVELOUS MAN IN THE WORLD. PLEASE MAKE ME SOMETHING BRIDAL TO WEAR. I’M SO HAPPY I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. LOVE AND KISSES, BILLY.

  “Holy shit! I can’t believe it either—this doesn’t sound like our employer—Valentine, why the hell are you crying?”

  “Elliott, you don’t know a fucking thing about women!”

  Maggie heard the news during a meeting with her head writer.

  “Hey, how about that! Maggie, isn’t Orsini your buddy, for God’s sake. Don’t you think you could get an exclusive to cover the wedding? It’s the biggest thing of its kind since Cary Grant married Barbara Hutton.”

  “Oh, shove it up your ass!”

  The period of almost eight weeks between the final days of the Cannes Film Festival and the Fourth of July weekend of 1977 was one of settling accounts, in various and different ways, for both Spider and Valentine. For Vito it was a period
of renewal, of calling in old markers, of revving up. For Billy it should have been a honeymoon, but, in retrospect, the only honeymoon she and Vito ever had took place during the eleven hours it took their plane to make the polar flight from Orly to Los Angeles International Airport, and at that point they still weren’t married.

  Valentine had searched for a place to live as soon as she was assured of the future of Scruples. Her one absolute requirement was privacy. She couldn’t consider a small house where there might be observant neighbors or an ordinary apartment building where people could come and go at will. She needed a place in which she and Josh Hillman could meet and love in security. It had to be reasonably near Scruples, reasonably near his home, reasonably near his offices in Century City, since the time they spent together was carved out of his busy, public life. Finally, a few blocks east of the border of Beverly Hills, in West Hollywood, she found a penthouse in a splendid, new apartment building in Alta Lorna Road. It had the advantages she had been looking for. There was a guard at the desk in the lobby who questioned every visitor. No one could go up in the elevator without being first announced over the house phone, and permission given.

  Of course, Valentine reflected, there were bound to be disadvantages. Inescapable walls of glass partly surrounded the living room and the bedroom. If she approached them without mental preparation, she found herself confronted with too vast, too wide, and too high a view of all of West Los Angeles, right out to the horizon of the Pacific Ocean. For a dedicated city rat like Valentine, so much air, so much light, so much space, made her feel like a visitor from another planet. But she was an illusionist, a conjurer of the first water, and when her furniture arrived from New York, the same furniture she had sent ahead of her from Paris more than five years before, Valentine devoted her wistful necromancy to re-creating another atmosphere, another time. This was particularly true at night when she closed her new white wooden shutters, drew her new rose-and-white curtains made from a romantic toile de Jouy, almost a duplicate of the old ones that were now too shabby, and lit her red-shaded lamps. She re-covered her old velvet sofa and deep armchairs in an old-fashioned Boussac print, sprigged in a rustic green-and-white print, which reminded her of Normandy, and covered the floor with her one great extravagance, a beautifully faded, very old, flowered needlepoint rug. The new kitchen was a great improvement on her improvised cooking arrangements in New York. She raided Williams Sonoma in Beverly Hills and made it perfectly French, filled with shining casseroles and earthenware crocks, wire whisks, copper-bottomed pans, and heavy, white pottery dishes banded in blue. Josh, who was frustrated by her independence, showered her with the only kinds of gifts she would accept, plants and lithographs, too many for her limited wall space, so that she had to hang them right up to the ceiling, even in the kitchen.