Scruples

by Judith Krantz

Hill’s greatest strength was in his flexibility, his willingness to use the script as a jumping-off place rather than as a bible. Like Vito, he never forgot that what they were all doing there was essentially playing; he never forgot that playing meant having fun. He wasn’t a self-indulgent director of the sacred agony variety, the oh-sweet-Jesus-what-happened-to-my-dream school. He made the dream come true, and it was that quality Vito had seen in him when he gave him his first directing job. Fifi was able to create an atmosphere in which the actors and actresses all felt that they were a little in love with him and he was a little in love with them. Meanwhile, it suited him perfectly if everybody who needed it had somebody to hate. With Vito protecting his flanks, ready to kick ass if anybody was fucking up Fifi’s picture, as he now thought of it, he was in the best of all possible worlds.

  After her misadventure in the lily pond, Billy felt all but nailed to her canvas chair. Electric cables, of an unknown but unquestionably sinister nature, were lying in wait almost everywhere. If she walked around she knew she risked getting in the way of one set of technicians or another, and she had sworn to herself not to cause one more second’s worth of trouble. But even from her fixed viewpoint, Billy was able, after several days of shooting, to come to the accurate perception that making a movie was 98 percent waiting and 2 percent action. No events in her life, certainly nothing she had ever read about films, had led her to expect the unrelenting tedium of the experience. At first she thought that things were going slowly because the shooting was just starting, but soon she perceived that the tedium was the natural rhythm of the process. It would have been more interesting to watch a doddering old man build a boat out of balsa inside a bottle, she decided balefully.

  Could she be the only person in the world who found that spending half a day waiting for a setup, only to find it had to be relit, was not inspired living theater? There was no one she dared ask. She’d rather rot on her chair than say anything to Vito, and, in any case, the only time they had alone together was late at night, after the dailies. Sitting there in her director’s chair, Billy smiled to herself and sucked down hard on her lower lip. No matter how thin Vito spread himself all day long, busy with other people, she could hardly fault him at night. He kept her so blazingly and so thoroughly fucked that she generally made her observations of the tiresomeness of movie making through a haze of sensual anticipation. She caught sight of him a hundred feet away, naked to the waist, gesticulating with his dazzling energy like the leader of a great troupe of followers, and thought that she wanted him again, now, damn it, not ten hours from now. She felt an almost irresistible, quite unbearable tug throughout her whole body as she imagined walking off the field with him and into the Winnebago, which was parked there for his use, locking the door and peeling off her clothes. She would just stand there, her legs wide apart, absolutely still, while she watched his prick rise and stiffen, his face assume that blunted, half-blind expression that came over it when he saw her naked body, like a sacred bull, like a forest god in a Jean Cocteau drawing. Thinking about it, imagining how he would smell, already sweating in the sun, Billy closed her smoky eyes and rubbed her thighs together imperceptibly.

  “Lunch, Mrs. Ikehorn!” someone boomed in her ear. She started up, almost overturning the chair, but whoever had spoken to her was gone.

  Lunch, she thought, blushing and furious. How did they dare to call that revolting meal lunch? It was supplied on the set every day by a company that specialized in catering to movie locations. By tradition the food was abundant: huge trays of fried pork chops, platters of fried chicken, casseroles of spaghetti and meatballs, vats of potato salad, mounds of barbecued beef ribs gleaming with fat, and crocks of hot dogs and baked beans encrusted with brown sugar, each dish as heavy and indigestible as the next.

  Confronted with this spread, fit for teamsters, Billy had finally unearthed some Jell-O and, miraculously, a plate of cottage cheese decorated with grated carrots, a dish she had hated since her school days. But at least it wasn’t fried. Since Vito spent his lunch hours in conference, she ate alone, self-consciously, for two days, before she decided to take her tray into the Winnebago.

  Billy sat in the trailer, her world reduced to a mound of cottage cheese, and knew she was too angry to eat. She felt her anger like a hard rubber ball that filled all of her belly and realized that only a minor part of it came from her rage at her own hard-core shyness and her own sharp vision of how alien she must appear to the company of Mirrors. Alien or not, she knew that most people don’t really pay that much attention to others, not nearly as much as every individual tends to think, and that she could probably appear in a trailing, flowered garden-party dress and a parasol and no one would give a damn.

  The biggest part of her rage came from another source. She was angry at Vito who was neglecting her, as he had to in order to do his work. She was angry at his work, which, necessarily, made her an outsider. She was angry at her own wanting to be with him that had stuck her up here in Mendocino, useless and self-pitying. She was angry because if she went back to Los Angeles now, she would have failed the challenge she had imposed on herself. If she left she would be proving that she couldn’t take it when life wasn’t going the way she wanted it to go. She was angry because she couldn’t have what she wanted when she wanted it and how she wanted it. She was about to detonate with rage because she’d made her bed and now she fucking well had to lie in it.

  She grabbed her plate of salad and Jell-O and left the trailer. Who to approach? That clump of gaffers roaring with laughter? Perhaps not, for her first try. Svenberg? He was sitting alone, his Norse eyes visionary, seeing his name in lights. He wouldn’t welcome any interruption. The cast? Only Sandra Simon and Hugh Kennedy were on call today and they had disappeared into another Winnebago. She found herself stalking over to the makeup trailer. The two gay hairdressers were gossiping there in the shade.

  “Mrs. Ikehorn!” They jumped to their feet, flattered and flustered.

  “It’s Mrs. Orsini really, but don’t bother with all that—call me Billy.”

  They glanced at each other in hidden astonishment. So she wasn’t the stuck-up richissimo bitch everybody figured she must be.

  “Why don’t you sit here, Billy? My, I love that watch.”

  “Your hair’s heaven—who does it?”

  “Love your pants—”

  “Love your belt—”

  Well, it was better than nothing.

  The film that was shot each day was flown to a local laboratory in San Francisco to be developed and flown back to Mendocino. The production manager had discovered an unused movie house in Fort Bragg where they could view the dailies under fairly good conditions. So much, Billy thought, for dinners in little country inns. Vito had just time enough to return to their house, take a quick shower, and put on another pair of jeans before they joined Fifi, Svenberg, Sandra Simon, and Hugh Kennedy for a quick bite at the International House of Pancakes before the screening.

  Billy had been looking forward to seeing the dailies. Her imagination, fed by Hollywood, saw a large private screening room, deep leather chairs, a wisp of smoke from expensive cigars, an aura of privilege and position, possibly the ghost of Irving Thalberg. Reality was an ancient movie house smelling of piss, with lumpy seats, which must be giving everybody some unmentionable disease if any of the germs in them were still alive, and a screen full of an incomprehensible multitude of images. After Billy had seen the same scene repeated four or five times, each version only slightly different from another, and listened to Vito and Fifi and Svenberg heatedly discussing them as if there were major and important differences among them, she began to rage inside at their endless nit-picking. Why couldn’t they ever reach any decision without such agony; didn’t any one of them have a clear vision of how it should be? She suspected that they were prolonging the problems because each one of them wanted to exercise his power to the full and exaggerating the difficulties of choice so that their individual creative viewpoints could be i
ndulged. Creative? Balls! They were making tiny little mud pies. Piddle. Piddle. Piddle!

  On a Saturday, when Vito had finished discussing some script changes with Fifi Hill, he finally had time to turn his attention to his wife. The picture was on schedule, the dailies promised great things, Sandra Simon and Hugh Kennedy had started a real-life love affair, which gave their scenes together a rocketing sensuality that soared off the screen and which, Fifi admitted, even he couldn’t have extracted from them. Svenberg’s camera work was the most inspired he’d ever done and, reassuringly, the generator had already broken down. Since this was to be expected at least once during the course of any shoot, Vito was glad it had happened sooner rather than later. Things were as they should be: The texture of a shoot, compounded of accidents and misunderstandings, mistakes and corrections, tension and belly laughs, clashes and reconciliations, and fuck-ups and ingenious solutions, was all happening, just as it should.

  “Vito,” Billy ventured, as he reached out his arms to pull her into his lap, “don’t you ever get—impatient?” She had almost said “bored,” but then “impatient” seemed a better choice. Less judgmental.

  “Impatient, darling? Like when?”

  “Well, remember when the generator broke down and you all just had to sit around for almost two hours until they fixed it? Like then.” like always, like every single stupid day, she thought.

  “Yeah. That always bugs the hell out of me. But basically it doesn’t matter—after all, the whole business is so boring that one hour more or less doesn’t make any difference in the long run.”

  “Boring!”

  “Of course, sweet. Darling, sweet Billy. Put your head here, in my lap. Ah. Nice. Shooting a film is the most boring thing about the movie business.”

  “But you don’t act bored! You don’t look bored! I mean—you’re totally engrossed in the whole thing—I don’t understand at all—” Billy raised her head from its warm nest between his legs and looked at him in amazement.

  “Look, it’s simple. It’s boring—but I’m not bored.”

  “You don’t make sense.”

  “I’ll give you an example. It’s like being pregnant. No woman is going to tell you that for a large part of the nine months she isn’t bored numb—who can think about the ‘miracle of birth’ day and night? But every once in a while the baby gives a kick and that’s fascinating, that’s exciting, that’s something real. And the whole time she’s growing bigger and bigger and that’s damn interesting, too, and at the end there’s a baby. So it’s boring, but she isn’t bored. Anyway, the most fun comes later, after production, in the editing and mixing.” He looked pleased with himself for his explanation.

  “I understand perfectly,” said Billy and she did. It meant that Vito was the mother and the father of the film, and she was not even a relative, except by marriage.

  Shit. Oh, shit. The man she loved was having the time of his life doing the thing he did best, and she was choking with resentment. All that crap about babies—what the hell did Vito know about being pregnant? Making movies was a job for children and madmen, all joined together in the common delusion that they were giving birth to a work of art. Maybe Vito wasn’t bored but she was—bored, bored, BORED right out of her fucking skull.

  Josh Hillman and his wife were eating cold poached salmon and cucumber salad in their dining room on Roxbury Drive, a splendid room in which they could accommodate forty-eight people for a seated dinner or hold a buffet for three hundred, as they often did. They were alone tonight, their children off improving their French in France for the summer.

  “How was your day?” Josh asked Joanne, having run out of legal gossip to tell her but not willing to let a silence fall.

  “Mine?” She looked mildly surprised. “Lunch with Susan Arvey. I think she’s a bit of a prune. Maybe she always was, but she seems to have gotten worse. And Prince was in town with his collection, so I went to Amelia Grey’s and ordered some fall things.”

  “How is Prince?”

  “How is—Josh, you’ve never even met the man.”

  “Well, it’s—you’ve been talking about him for so many years that I think of him as practically a member of the family.”

  “Hardly,” she said, laughing. “I doubt that he’d fit in. We’re not nearly grand enough for him. But he was fine, just the same, always adorable to me. And he had some great-looking clothes, better than last year.”

  So Prince hadn’t mentioned him, Josh thought. Why did he feel such a sense of disappointment? His clever brain, too long and too well trained in seeking the right answer quickly, supplied him with the answer he didn’t want. He had been counting on Prince to do his dirty work for him. He had been so sure, so convinced, that the man wouldn’t be able to resist telling Joanne about seeing him with Valentine at Lace’s party. That would have precipitated everything. Now he had to make the first move. Certainly Joanne, sitting placidly in her chair, ringing for the maid to clear the table, seemed well contented with her lot in life. Damn it all to hell, he thought, and damn himself for being a coward.

  “Iced tea, dear?”

  “Please.”

  Dolly Moon didn’t arrive in Mendocino until the first two weeks of shooting were over. Vito had carefully planned to shoot the scenes in which she wasn’t involved during those weeks, saving, by this means, at least a thousand dollars on her room and board, as well as paying her three thousand dollars less because of the shorter shooting schedule. Four thousand dollars might not seem like much of an economy in a budget of two million two, but he knew that in Mirrors every penny was going to count.

  Billy first noticed the new addition to the cast as Dolly and Sandra Simon were being filmed walking along a Mendocino street together. The contrast between the two girls was delicious, Billy thought. Sandra so poetically beautiful, so lyrical, and this girl so—so funnily bouncy and kind of awkwardly bountiful.

  At the lunch break she lined up at the caterer’s long table, dreading in advance yet another chapter of the lives, times, and tribulations of her two hairdressers. As she passed the fried pork chops, she heard a voice just behind her.

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Billy turned, alarmed, and saw Dolly Moon looking appalled.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong! Do you realize that there isn’t anything on this table that isn’t swimming in fat?”

  “There’s a carrot and cottage cheese salad when you get to the end of the line.”

  “Oh, never! That would be an insult to my stomach. Say, listen, unless you like this junk, why don’t we split and eat together—I saw a spot that has do-it-yourself sandwiches, avocado, prosciutto, roasted peppers, cold sliced turkey, things a human being could put into herself and not turn into a whale. How about it?”

  “Point the way.”

  Since so many of the tourists were engaged in watching the movie people eat their lunches, Billy and Dolly were able to squeeze into a free table at a nearby lunch bar that served health food, delicatessen, and homemade lasagna. Wordlessly, Dolly demolished half a huge sandwich while Billy, picking at a tuna salad, observed her with intense curiosity. Some strands of Dolly’s haze of hair were exactly the color of orange marmalade, others a nondescript light brown, her blue-gray gaze was seraphic, and her waist and nose were tiny—everything else about her, however, was just a little bigger than too big.

  “They’re something, aren’t they?” Dolly said conversationally.

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, come on—the bosom and the bottom—you don’t think I don’t realize? Listen, I went to a Mormon junior high and I couldn’t even try out for cheerleader when I was twelve—they said I’d project the wrong image. That’s when I left the church. Still, maybe without them I wouldn’t be able to earn a living.”

  “But that’s just not true! I’ve seen your work—I saw the movie you made and you’re a truly talented actress, a tremendously talented actress!” Billy cried, in a tone that contain
ed no taint of flattery.

  Dolly smiled with uncomplicated, candid joy. “Gee, you know, you’re almost the only person who’s ever said that to me? Usually they get stuck looking at the boobs and ass and don’t pay attention to what I’m saying. I bet even if I were playing Lady Macbeth or Hamlet’s mother or Medea—”

  “Or Juliet or Camille or Ophelia or listen, I can almost see you as Peter Pan.” Billy and Dolly joined in laughter at the range of roles Dolly would never play.

  “Gosh, I’m glad I met you,” Dolly said finally, subduing her last extraordinarily individual giggle. “I just got here last night and I don’t know a soul in the company. I’ve got the room next to Sandra Simon and she and Hugh Kennedy were making the most embarrassing noises half the night and that means I won’t get friendly with her, and gee, a location shoot is tough without a friend.”

  “I’ve noticed,” said Billy tightly. “What do you mean, ‘embarrassing’ noises?”

  “Well, they were having such a ball that I was turned on, but, on the other hand, I didn’t think I should be listening to something private like that—so I was embarrased. Today I’ll buy earplugs.”

  “So that’s why they never show up for lunch.”

  “You can do a lot in an hour. They probably eat a big breakfast. Ain’t love grand?”

  “Oh, yes, yes it is,” Billy said wistfully.

  “A girl who looks like you—say, what’s your name?—Billy?—cute—a girl who looks like you must have a million guys.”

  “I used to,” said Billy, “but now I’m a one-man woman.”

  “I’ve just given up being one. It lasted a year, but my guy, that bastard, Sunrise, loved his broncos more than he did me. Gosh, I’d like to find someone steady, but it’s hard when you look like a bimbo. Once I tried putting on a plain brown wig and glasses and a dumb dress two sizes too big for me, and the first time I crossed the street a truck driver yelled, ‘Hey, four eyes, how about a slice of my sausage?’ and then the moving man said that with knockers like mine I didn’t need to see where I was going, so why did I bother with the glasses?—it’s sort of hopeless,” Dolly sighed, like a mournful Druid. “Yeah, I really need a steady guy, but not dull, sort of like a dentist maybe or an accountant or, what other kind of man is supposed to be steady?”