Scruples

by Judith Krantz

  In Arvey’s office the atmosphere was chill. Arvey, having been outwitted in the matter of taking over the picture in postproduction, now clutched it even more possessively than he would have normally. Mirrors was “his” picture now, just as it had been Fifi Hill’s while it was being shot. Hadn’t he given Orsini the opportunity to make it? Hadn’t he released it in time for Christmas? Vision, that was what a studio president had to have, vision and daring.

  “Vito, I’m putting Mirrors into over fifteen hundred houses all over the country next week,” Curt Arvey announced imperiously.

  “What!”

  “Face it, Vito, it’s a fluke. It’s the kids who’re making the box office. When they go back to school in ten days, the picture’ll die.” Arvey smirked with pleasure at Vito’s face. “I want to milk it bone dry before then. Take the money and run—don’t tell me you’ve never heard of that.”

  “Curt, you just can’t do it.” Vito jumped up, keeping his voice logical. “This picture is just starting. When Christmas is over the parents of these kids will be coming to see it, young married couples will be coming to see it, everybody in the whole damn country will be coming to see it! If you ruin the distribution pattern now, if you book it into second-rate houses, you’ll dissipate the whole word-of-mouth buildup.” Arvey’s expression hardened. “In one week you’ll end up with half the cash—maybe less—than you would have if you keep it where it is, letting it grow, build, naturally. I’ve been talking to the kids on those lines; some of them are waiting to see it for the third or fourth time. Curt, those lines are just as important a lure as the picture itself. Book it in fifteen hundred houses and in a week you won’t have any lines left. Don’t you see that, for Christ’s sake?” Vito was leaning forward, both hands on Arvey’s large desk. He couldn’t believe the other man could fail to agree with such basic business logic.

  Arvey looked at Vito vindictively. Mirrors was his, damn it, and he could do anything he liked with it. No gigolo of a Vito Orsini was going to tell him how to run his business. It was a nice switch to have Orsini by the balls for a change.

  “You are entitled to your point of view,” he drawled, “but I happen to have another. And I’m in charge now. Cash, quick cash is what interests me, not pie in the sky. You’re a romantic, Vito, and a thief as well.”

  Vito moved swiftly. Tall and lethal, he leaned over Arvey’s desk and switched the desk intercom to “Sales.”

  “Oliver? Vito Orsini here. I’m with Curt. He plans to string Mirrors out in the dates we presently have instead of going into a wide break. What do you think?”

  Arvey, gaping in his swivel chair, was about to bellow into the intercom when Oliver answered.

  “He’s a hundred percent right, Vito. Anything else would be totally ridiculous, cost us millions in the long run.”

  Vito released the switch and aimed a look like a rifle barrel at Arvey’s congested face.

  “What would your board of directors think about that, Curt? Are you in a position to blow millions in box-office grosses just to prove you’re boss? How’s Pickwick! coming along? I hear you took full credit for that idea before it started to go sour.”

  “Get the fuck out of here, you shit-ass, you—you—” Arvey, too angry for more invective, pushed the button for his secretary and screamed, “Get Security! Right away!”

  “Careful, Curt. Remember your ulcer.”

  Vito strolled out of the office like a big tawny panther. As he passed Arvey’s secretary, he blew a kiss at her frightened fece.

  “Don’t celebrate yet, darling, unfortunately he’ll survive.”

  In spite of the sprinkling of smugly overorganized women who delight in declaring by the first of November that they have finished their Christmas shopping, most retailers find that December 10th, not a day earlier, is the magic moment for the Christmas rush to begin. Scruples was no exception to that rule. Although few customers were buying clothes, they jammed the Country Store, and the entire first floor, being systematically stripped of its treasures, swarmed like an anthill under attack. Spider had spent the day exerting his benign influence, trying on dozens of sweaters for women unsure of their husbands’ exact size—“He’s about a head shorter than you, Spider, and weighs twenty pounds more, would you be a darling and just slip it over your head?”—and giving advice to the perplexed: “What would you send to your mother-in-law if you positively detested her but had to spend at least three hundred dollars? A Waterford jar of sour balls and a gold-plated nutcracker?—Spider, you’re a genius.”

  By closing time on December 23rd, both he and Valentine felt that the worst was over. Christmas Eve was on Saturday this year and all of Valentine’s special holiday party dresses had already been picked up or delivered; tomorrow’s gift buying would be light, an in-and-out last-minute sort of business except for the few wise people who knew that the best day to shop after December 10th is December 24th. These were usually businessmen with imposing lists who made up their minds in seconds, the saleswomen’s delight.

  Spider and Valentine sat facing each other on either side of the old partners’ desk. There should have been a comfortable, relaxed silence between them, as there so often had been at the beginning or the end of a Scruples day, but the air in the room was filled with watchfulness. Spider thought that Valentine looked troubled. Her impertinently tilted nose was held as delicately high as ever, but some of the aggressive, coruscating shimmer seemed to have been chipped away from her great green eyes. He knew his Valentine. She wasn’t happy.

  From her side of the desk, Valentine was considering Spider Elliott. He looked tired, she thought. Older in a way that couldn’t be explained by the mere passage of time. It seemed difficult to connect this polished, sophisticated, elegantly dressed man of the world with the carefree blond boy in a UCLA sweat shirt who’d carried her wine bottles home from the market, made her countless melted-cheese sandwiches when she was miserable, and listened to her old Piaf records by the hour in her little loft room.

  “Are you just exhausted, Val, my darling, or is there something wrong?” he asked gently.

  Valentine felt an ignominious, totally unexpected prickle of tears begin at the sound of his voice. She was longing for someone to confide in about her situation with Josh Hillman, but, of all the people in the world, Elliott was the last one she would discuss it with. Some mysterious but imperative reason lay behind her obstinate determination not to let Spider guess how far matters had progressed or how confused she still was.

  “Oh, it’s just these women, Elliott—so demanding, so difficult to please. They gain ten pounds between one fitting and another and they think it’s my fault.”

  “Come on, darling, you know they dote on you. And you never hesitate to lower the boom on any of your ladies when she’s changed her measurements—why, you’re the reason behind half the diets in this town. What is it, really? Is the mystery man giving you any trouble?”

  She sat bolt upright, alarmed and defensive. Her desire to weep disappeared.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The mystery man, the one who keeps you so busy that I never get to see you alone anymore. If he’s not treating you right, I’ll kill the son of a bitch!” To his amazement, he found that his fists were clenched, every muscle in his arms and shoulders was tense with rage. Killing the son of a bitch seemed like a very good idea. Never mind a reason.

  “You assume too much, Elliott. Your imagination is running away with you.” Valentine pressed her attack, suddenly as infuriated as he. “Do I ask you why you make all those women crazy over you? No wonder you look so tired—how do you tell them all apart anyway, all your little friends? Is there a magic in numbers, Elliott?” She was overcome by the injustice of the situation. “Am I not to have even one lover?” she blurted. “I’m not accountable to you, Elliott.”

  “You damn well are!” he shouted. The air between quivered, with amazement. Neither of them could quite believe that they had become embattled so suddenl
y. They glared at each other in a momentary, baffled hush. Finally Spider spoke.

  “There must be something wrong with me, Valentine. Of course you’re not accountable to me. I don’t know why I said that—just because we’ve known each other so long I guess.”

  “It still doesn’t give you the right—”

  “No. Forget it, OK?” He looked at his watch. “I’m late, see you tomorrow.”

  As he retreated hastily, closing the door behind him, Valentine sat motionless in her chair, stunned, puzzled, shaken by the intensity of the gust of emotion that had been released into the air. Elliott had spoken without any right, without any reason. She should be furious. She’d been furious for less cause. Yet she felt—pleased. Pleased? Yes, unquestionably pleased. What a terrible bitch she must be. So he thought she was accountable to him, did he? An involuntary smile crossed her face without her knowledge.

  As several weeks passed without Mirrors being shifted from the theaters in which it was currently playing, Vito became increasingly confident that Oliver Sloan’s understanding of the best way to make a buck, combined with the unwilling corroboration of Arvey’s sensitive digestive system, had triumphed over Arvey’s attack of bad judgment.

  However, Arvey’s personal animosity to Vito was more virulent than ever, and he showed his spite and thwarted wrath by placing only a bare minimum of trade ads in the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety. Under normal circumstances with a top-grossing picture, the studio would have thrown the success of Mirrors in their competitors’ teeth. No, thought Vito, he could expect nothing from the studio, but the beauty of it was that he didn’t need them now. Two things told the only story he cared about: Variety’s weekly box-office chart, on which Mirrors remained number one, and the yearly lists of the “Ten Best” pictures, as judged by critics all over the country. All of them, to date, included Mirrors. Vito decided to proceed with the plan he had been forming since he first saw the answer print.

  Several days before Christmas Billy drove out to Venice, that raunchy, Coney Island-like seaside colony of Los Angeles where a number of slapdash Bohemian houses still have not been replaced by the rapidly growing mass of new condominiums. She was going to visit Dolly for lunch and see for herself how she was feeling halfway into her sixth month of pregnancy. Loaded with Christmas presents, Billy climbed to Dolly’s two-room apartment on the third floor of an old stucco house, painted pale pink with magenta trim, on a street where everyone seemed to know everyone else, where neighbors chatted as they basked in the winter sun in their front yards or watered their potted plants or avoided skateboarding kids. So far none of these houses had been sold to developers, and Dolly’s landlord, a captain in the Los Angeles Fire Department, managed to pay the escalating taxes on his modest but increasingly valuable house by renting his top floor, now that his children had left home.

  One look at Dolly convinced Billy that the pregnancy was going well. She stood in affectionate contemplation of the blooming milkmaid of a girl, euphoric, rosy, blessed with positively Restoration amplitude, although totally lacking the Restoration waist, or any waist at all.

  “You’re a toothsome dish,” she told Dolly, surveying her from all sides.

  “What does that mean?” Dolly asked, laughing, demurely delighted with her majestic belly.

  “Tasty, I think. Anyway it sounds good.”

  “Wait till you try what I made for lunch, Milton Berle’s Gefilte Chicken à la Fish,” Dolly pronounced impressively.

  “What on earth—?”

  “I almost did the Senator Jacob Javits Cheese Blintzes or the Irving Wallace Matzo Brei, but then I remembered how careful you are about gaining weight so I compromised.”

  “Where did you get those—those recipes?” Billy asked, torn between laughter and skepticism. Dolly produced an oblong pink-and-red book.

  “It’s the Celebrity Kosher Cookbook—it’s marvelous. Yesterday I practiced the Barbara Walters Stuffed Cabbage.”

  “But why?”

  “I figured that as long as I wasn’t working, I should do something useful. Remember what you told me about finding some wonderful Jew? Wouldn’t it help if I were a terrific kosher cook?”

  “Unquestionably,” said Billy dryly. “But is this the time to catch one?”

  “Some men are attracted to pregnant women,” Dolly answered impishly. “Especially when they can make a fabulous Neil Diamond Pot Roast. Actually, I guess I’ll have to wait until after the baby is born, but you just never know, do you? The other day I went to see Mirrors again—it’s my eleventh time—and about fifty people asked me for an autograph, and three guys asked me out for dinner.”

  “Did you go?” breathed Billy.

  “Of course not—weirdos, all of them. But still, they asked.”

  “What’s it like,” asked Billy curiously, “seeing Mirrors with an audience, all the way through?”

  “Don’t you know? Billy, you’ve seen it over and over!”

  “Only in an editing room or in a mixing studio, never with strangers, not where they have to pay to see it.”

  “That’s simply terrible.” Dolly was shocked. “Why, the audience is the best part of all. You know the scene after I’ve told Sandra how Hugh really feels about her and she finds him on the cliff—”

  “Know it?” Billy groaned. “I know it so well I think I wrote it.”

  “But, Billy, that’s when they start to cry—all over the theater you absolutely feel the emotion growing, swelling, people responding—I even get tears in my eyes.”

  “But, my God, Dolly, you were standing right there when Fifi made them do it over for the sixth time and Sandra kept complaining about the burrs in her shoes and Svenberg was screaming that the light was going—”

  “I forget,” Dolly said stubbornly. “I just don’t remember all of that—it’s all fresh to me, each time. Look, let’s go together, after lunch, OK?”

  “Your twelfth time and you still want to see it?”

  “Maybe I’ll get to be like one of those Sound of Music addicts, remember? Some of them saw it seventy-five times or more. And they weren’t even in it—don’t ever tell Vito, but mostly I go to watch my own performance. You know all those interviews when actors say they never see their own films? I don’t understand that—I just adore seeing myself up there!” She whispered the last words, hugging herself gleefully, half guiltily, half pridefully. “I guess I’m just a ham.”

  “You’re unreal,” said Billy. “You’re a most beautiful and touching actress—I’ve told you before but you’ll never trust me.”

  Dolly turned aside bashfully. She could never quite believe or accept praise for doing what came so naturally.

  “Here, I almost forgot,” she said, “your Christmas present.” She handed Billy a filled, covered earthenware crock. “It’s George Jessel’s Chicken Liver Pâté. You won’t believe it!”

  “I don’t already,” Billy answered.

  Vito wanted to get a Best Picture nomination for Mirrors. He hadn’t dared to do more than dream of it until he saw the answer print, but from that day on the thought was never out of his head. Mirrors was the finest production of his working career. In it he had achieved a film that became far more than the sum of its parts, expertly chosen though they were. It lived with a beating pulse of its own; it worked on every level from comedy through poetry. It would be a landmark picture, he felt in his bones, but first he had had to wait for the confirmation of the rest of the world to justify his belief. Until the reviews came in, until the box-office responded, and, finally, until the picture appeared on the “Ten Best” lists, it would have been an exercise in wistfulness to do more than dream. But now he had the necessary prerequisites to act.

  Mirrors had all the credentials it needed, but it lacked the one thing commonly considered necessary for a shot at one of the five Academy nominations: studio support. Lavish advertising campaigns, unabashed promotion, specially hired publicists, all these could have been provided by the Arvey Film Studio, b
ut Vito had no illusions. Curt Arvey wouldn’t spend one extra penny to push Mirrors. Perhaps, in fact certainly, if Arvey had been convinced that this small picture had an excellent chance to actually win the Oscar, he would have brought himself around to seeking a nomination, since an Oscar means an average addition of ten million dollars to the box-office gross. But Arvey could see, as could Vito, that the past year had produced a number of superstar, super-expensive films, which had powerful studios behind each one of them. Any one of them could legitimately merit the Oscar. A nomination for Mirrors would only mean some glory for Vito, and Arvey would travel far to prevent this, even if some of the glory could be expected to rub off on him.

  So, quite simply, Vito would do it alone.

  He pondered the membership of that group of some three thousand three hundred working people so elaborately called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Only this carefully limited number of people was entitled to even decide for which films and performers and craftsmen votes could be cast, something comparable to permitting only the population of Westport, Conneticut, to vote for President of the United States.

  The Best Picture nominations are the only ones voted on by the entire membership of the Academy. Nominations in all other categories are voted on by the branches involved, so that only actors nominate actors, only art directors nominate art directors, and so on. However, the final voting in all categories is by all members. This meant that Vito had to influence every one of the Academy members in order to get a Best Picture nomination.

  When a studio is actively promoting a film for a nomination, it gives any number of special, luxurious screenings at the studio’s expense. Vito couldn’t afford that. But he had never forgotten the response of the four secretaries at the first screening of Mirrors. He narrowed his entire campaign to capturing the attention of the wives and the mothers and the sisters and the daughters and the cousins and the aunts of the male members, who are a preponderance in every branch of the Academy.