“You’re serious.” It wasn’t a question.
“I’m behind schedule already, for Christ’s sake. It’s almost the end of May. I have to start shooting no later than July. So I have only June to get a script, find a director, cast the picture, get the right cameraman—”
“What if you didn’t start shooting until September or October. What difference would it make?”
“What difference?” Vito was stunned until he remembered that some people didn’t understand everything about making pictures.
“Darling, beautiful Billy, this is a love story I’m making. It has to be out, finished, in time for a Christmas release, not a single day later.” She still looked bewildered. “Christmas, Billy, that’s when the kids are out of high school, home from college, vacation time, everybody goes to the movies. Who goes to see love stories? Kids my sweetheart—young people, the biggest movie audience.”
Billy looked wise. “Of course, it makes perfect sense. I should have realized. Well, naturally, Christmas. Vito—what about our wedding? I’ve planned it for Friday, but if you’re going to be so busy—”
“Just tell me where and when. Don’t worry—I’ll arrange my appointments so that I’ll be there in plenty of time, but try to make it after six-thirty, all right, darling?”
In the weeks and months to come, Billy, who now had her first piece of knowledge about the film industry, was to learn a great deal more about it, more, she often thought, than she cared to know.
The French novel, Les Miroirs de Printemps, that Vito had optioned he now called Mirrors. With the budget of two million two hundred thousand dollars, Mirrors would be what is known in the industry as a “small” picture. Such pictures fall in the gray area between the “big” pictures, which cost upwards of eight million dollars and use stars as insurance against failure, insurance that doesn’t necessarily work but is deemed necessary nonetheless, and the “exploitation” or “low budget” pictures, which cost well under a million dollars to make and are destined to appeal to some section of the audience that can be counted on to go to a drive-in or a neighborhood house and pay to see movies about car chases, cheerleaders, or vampires.
Characteristically, Vito had become enchanted with a project that went against the grain of the tried, if not true, folkways of the industry. With a budget of just over two million dollars, he couldn’t afford stars. Yet the superb quality of the novel and his own dedication to making a fine film out of it demanded that he work with a fine script, a fine director, and a fine cameraman. When Vito Orsini used the word fine, he did so in the same sense that Harry Winston would in describing a diamond. He meant flawless.
During the flight back from Paris he had made a short list of the men he wanted: Fifi Hill as director, Sid Amos to write the script, Per Svenberg as cinematographer. Currently Hill was getting four hundred thousand a picture. Amos wouldn’t expect to take less than two hundred fifty thousand dollars; Svenberg made five thousand dollars a week and Vito would need him for seven weeks. All together, six hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars of talent. Vito intended to get them for no more than three hundred thousand plus percentages out of his own piece of the eventual profits of the picture. It was time to collect on certain favors, time for fancy footwork, time for Vito Orsini’s luck to change if it ever intended to.
Sid Amos, the scriptwriter, phenomenally fast and the ideal writer to adapt a love story, was the first of the three Vito tackled.
“Well, Vito, sure I’d like to help you out. You’ve done me favors when I needed them most. But, I mean I’m busy, man. My shit-eating agent thinks I’m a two-headed electric typewriter. He’s got me working steady for the next three years.”
“Sid, I’ve got the book of the year. I’ve got Fifi and I’ve got Svenberg. I’m asking you to tell your agent that you’re taking this job because you owe it to yourself. You’ll never forgive yourself if somebody else’s name is on Mirrors. The book is a beautiful piece of material, you said so yourself. Naturally, it goes without saying that you’ll be paid in cash, right into that Panamanian Company of yours. Seventy-five thousand dollars and you can tell your agent and the IRS that you did it for scale, for an old friend.”
“Seventy-five thousand dollars! You’re joking. Not nice, Vito.”
“And five percent of my share.”
“Seven and a half—and I’m only doing it to screw the IRS—and to see the look on my agent’s face.”
One down—two to go.
Eight years before, unknown and untried, Fifi Hill had been given his first job as a director by Vito. It had been Fifi’s first success, and from there he had gone on to many others. But Vito didn’t presume merely on gratitude, a condition even more unfashionable in Hollywood than virginity. He knew that Hill had always dreamed of making a picture with Per Svenberg. Vito hadn’t even talked to the great cameraman, but he promised Fifi to obtain his services.
“If I can’t deliver him, Fifi, we don’t have a deal.”
“You said a hundred and twenty-five thousand, and what percent was that again, Vito?”
“Ten.”
“Twelve and a half—and Svenberg.”
Cameramen have a long-standing and well-founded grudge against the movie industry. Svenberg in particular. He was famous only inside the business; although critics vied with each other in comparing his work to Vermeer, to Leonardo, to Rembrandt, no moviegoer, except for the sophisticated film buff, would recognize his name. Vito knew that Svenberg would do almost anything to see his name become famous. He promised the enormously tall Swede that “Director of Photography—Per Svenberg” would appear prominently in every piece of paid newspaper and magazine advertising, every piece of studio promotion and publicity devoted to Mirrors—if he worked for two thousand dollars a week. The studio would fight Vito to the last inch on this assurance, which he had no right to give. But nothing comes easy.
At the end of a month of negotiation, Vito felt that the chief elements of his production were finally buttoned down. His own producer’s fee had been worked out with the studio. Although he normally would have received, by virtue of his reputation, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, he was taking only one hundred and fifty thousand because the budget was so small. On one of the memo pads, which were now scattered over Billy’s house like too many clues in an insane paper chase, Vito jotted down the approximate figures for the rest of the picture: cast and crew salaries; secretarial services, which would include every last phone call and Xerox copy; rentals; transportation to the location; living expenses there for everybody; sets; wardrobe; makeup; and the most gruesome item of all, studio overhead of 25 percent of the entire budget. In addition there was interest on all money outstanding and, of course, the standard 10 percent of the budget as a contingency in case anything went wrong. Although less than four hundred thousand dollars was devoted to such major items as script, director, producer, and cameraman, he now had a budget swollen to two million dollars, give or take two hundred thousand. In the film business it is almost always give, never take.
It was a budget, Vito decided, he could live with, provided that nothing—absolutely nothing—went wrong.
The question of deciding what to wear to see Spider made Melanie feel more alive than she had since she last stood in front of the camera. She was filled with a surge of erotic excitement at the problem of how to present herself for this confrontation, toward which she had been inching for weeks. She went through her closets in Wells Cope’s guest house in a delighted panic, considering and discarding a dozen possibilities, from the obvious nonchalance of jeans to a simple but powerfully seductive short Jean Muir in the most delicate shade of pink. In minutes she found the dress that expressed the way she wanted to look. It was the most innocent of pale blues, batiste, with a deep, round neck and tiny puffed sleeves, tied at the waist with a blue sash. It needed only a sunbonnet to make the illusion complete, but Melanie settled for a blue ribbon in her cinnamon-nutmeg hair. Almost no makeup, bare brown leg
s and feet in thin, low-heeled sandals and she had completed the effect she had set out to project: unspoiled, childish, almost countrified, and, above all, vulnerable.
As she drove to Spider’s house her hands shook on the wheel. At last, something was about to happen.
Melanie Adams’s discontent had started again soon after her first picture was completed. All during the making of the picture she had existed in a state of grace. Just to wake up in the morning and know that she would spend the day acting seemed like a benediction. She attributed this newfound ease with herself to the idea that she had been born to be an actress, that she had finally found her métier, that the strange, inexplicable anguish she had felt for so much of her life had simply been her search for her proper work. When the picture was finished, during the traditional wrap party, Melanie stayed in character, still talking with the innocent hesitation and unworldliness of the girl she had played, while all around her, cast and crew members were relaxing into their everyday selves, getting ready to put the picture behind them.
The next morning she woke up to desolation. There was no studio to go to, no makeup people and wardrobe people waiting for her to appear, no director to confer with, no camera to establish her existence. Wells Cope told her it was a perfectly natural reaction, the letdown that comes after any sustained creative effort has been completed. All actors and actresses go through this, he assured her, but it passes quickly; normal life can be resumed until the next picture comes along.
“When will it start—my next picture?”
“Melanie, Melanie, be reasonable. I’ve still got months of post-production work on this picture before it’s finished. And even when it’s all done, I don’t plan to release it until exactly the right time, until the right theaters are available. I’m not running a Melanie Adams film factory, you know. The whole point is to use you in such a way that you become a great star—and you’re not there yet by a long shot. It’ll take a careful, controlled buildup. I don’t intend to flood the market with you. No, your next picture can’t start until I’ve found the perfect property. I’m looking, I’m reading galleys and scripts every day, but there is nothing even faintly right available at the moment Why are you so impatient? You should use this time between pictures to enjoy yourself—eat lunch with friends, play tennis, maybe take a dance class, buy some clothes. You’re studying with David Walker—that should be enough to keep you busy, darling.” He turned back to the pile of scripts by the side of his chair.
Although Wells Cope entertained frequently and any of the women in his carefully culled circle of friends would have been delighted to lunch with Melanie, she never telephoned them. Woman-talk had never interested her, even in high school. She had no talent for intimacy, even superficial intimacy. Her life was reduced to studying with her drama coach, who no longer could spare her more than two hours a day, taking a modern-dance class, and waiting. Everything would change, everything would begin to happen for her, she promised herself, when her picture was released, not really sure what she meant by “everything,” except that she had come so far, so rapidly, that some wonderful change must be in store for her.
When Melanie’s picture came out in the early spring of 1977, not a single critic failed to fall in love with her. There had not been such a personal triumph for an unknown in many years. Five of the most important critics in the United States were not amused to find that four of their detested colleagues also thought that Melanie Adams was “The New Garbo.” She read the reviews in a burst of glory. Wells Cope gave a thrilling dinner party. Nothing changed. There were dozens of messages of congratulations from people she had known in the past. She reread the reviews from all over the country. But nothing changed.
“But what did you expect?” Wells asked in mild exasperation, the strongest emotion he permitted himself outside of the cutting room. “It wasn’t a coronation, just the first step in your career. It’s business as usual out here for someone like you who makes her first mark. If you want to feel that your life has changed, go back to New York and visit the girls at Eileen Ford’s or, better yet, go home and visit your parent—they’ll treat you like a celebrity in Louisville, but here? All you’ll get are requests for interviews—and maybe somebody will recognize you in the street or in a store, but otherwise—you’re just the new girl in town, Melanie. What did you imagine actresses do between pictures? The best of them? They wait and they take classes. If they’re married they can fix up the house or be with the kids, and wait. If they’re on television they can do game shows and wait.”
“I can always take up needlepoint,” Melanie muttered, tears of chagrin and deception in her eyes.
“Good thinking, you’re on the right track,” said Wells absent-mindedly, turning back to his open script.
Melanie ran her film dozens of times in Wells’s projection room. Now that she wasn’t before a camera, the woman she saw on screen could have been another actress. She couldn’t merge again into that figure on the screen. She found herself still sitting in the projection room, just Melanie being—what? She began searching her eyes in the mirror again. More and more often she fell into daydreams of being another. She wished she had been born looking like Glenda Jackson. Melanie was sure that she would have become totally there, a complete person, strong and arrogant and absolute, if only she had had to build herself up from scratch, had to overcome bad skin and an ugly body. If she looked like Glenda Jackson, she would know who she was.
The failure of her first film to fill the inchoate, questing need she had harbored all her life made Melanie more greedy than ever to see what she could get from other people. Trying to manipulate Wells was hopeless. No matter what she did or said, he was endlessly patient with her. It was his form of love, but their sex life, as elegant as a saraband, which had first been so soothing, and his lack of curiosity about her began to make her feel that she existed less and less.
It was then that she started to make tentative phone calls to Spider. His remembered passion, so insistent, so probing, so demanding, began to seem like an answer to her questions. Spider had never let up on her, never stopped trying to find out who she was. Perhaps, this time he could tell her.
Her timid knock sounded twice on Spider’s door before he brought himself to open it. Melanie stood there, innocently proffering her towering beauty, waiting, eyes downcast, for him to invite her in.
“Oh, cut out the nonsense, Melanie,” Spider said roughly. “Don’t act as if I intended to bar the door in your face. Come on in—we have time for a quick drink.”
“Spider, Spider, you sound so different,” she said. He had forgotten the sweetly painful impact of her voice. Possession of a voice like that, he thought savagely, should be limited by law to ugly women. He gave her a vodka and tonic, automatically remembering what she drank, and motioned to the far end of the long couch in his spare, white living room. Surrounded by a landslide of objects all day, Spider chose to live in as empty a space as possible. He pulled up a canvas folding chair just far enough away from Melanie to esablish an uncomfortable distance between them. She moved considerably closer on the couch. Short of moving his chair again, Spider was locked into position. He waited in silence.
“Thank you for letting me come over—” her voice trailed off. “I had to see you, Spider—maybe you can explain things to me.”
“Explain!”
“I’m so confused about things—and you used to ask me all kinds of questions about myself—maybe you could figure out what’s going on.”
“Lady, you’ve come to the wrong place. Go to couch canyon over on Bedford Drive and you’ll find dozens of good men who have trained for years for the chance to help you find out what the fuck is wrong with you, but I’m not an analyst, and I’m not about to start practice now. If you need advice on your wardrobe I’ll be glad to help, but otherwise, you’re on your own.”
“Spider, you were never cruel.”
“And you?”
“I know.” She was silent, looking gra
vely at him with no hint of plea in her eyes, an absence of coaxing, which in itself was consummate artistry. The silence lengthened. She refused, mutely, to play on his emotions with words. She knew she didn’t have to.
“Ah, shit! What’s the problem? Wells Cope? Your career?”
“No—no—not really. He’s as good to me as he could be to anyone and he’s looking for another property for me as hard as he can—I can’t complain about that. It’s just that nothing seems to have turned out the way I thought it would. Spider, I’m not happy.” She said the last three words in genuine astonishment, as if she were just discovering the fact for herself, putting words to her feelings for the first time.
“And you expect me to tell you why you’re not happy,” Spider said flatly, finishing her thought.
“Yes.”
“Why me?”
“We were happy once—I thought you’d remember why.” She was simple, sad, wondering, denuded of her mystery, a state that she conveyed as if it were a last surrender.
“I know why I was happy then, Melanie, but I was never sure about you.” Spider’s voice was harsh. He didn’t want a victory now.
“Oh, yes—I was. And then I was happy again when I came out here and happy while I was working and then—I wasn’t happy anymore.”
“And now you think you can come back to me and feel happy again, is that it, Melanie?” She nodded her head shyly. “It doesn’t work that way—don’t you even know that?”
Scruples Page 44
