Get the women, he told himself, and they’ll take care of the men.
Vito sent invitations to afternoon screenings to the women who lived in the residential communities all over Los Angeles in which sound men and cameramen and editors and short-subject men make their homes. Every single day, from Christmas until the day during the first week in February when the ballots for the nominations are filled out, there were at least three, and sometimes as many as seven, screenings of Mirrors, playing from Culver City to Burbank, from Santa Monica to the far stretches of the San Fernando Valley. Vito didn’t care if the female relatives of the Academy members brought every woman friend they had; he simply wanted them to see Mirrors. “Operation Matinee,” as Billy dubbed it, was a complicated affair logistically. Vito had to find local movie houses that were empty in the afternoon, make deals with managers, borrow prints, arrange for their delivery and return, and see to rounding up projectionists.
“How’s it going, darling?” Billy asked, looking at Vito with worry. During the tension of the shoot he had never seemed so preoccupied. Stubbornly, in her opinion, stupidly, he wouldn’t use her money for this project.
“I’m perfectly swell, except for a nasty heart murmur, those mysterious shooting pains in my head, a spastic colon, and fallen arches. But I can’t complain, I think my hearing is coming back in one ear, and I barely fainted at all yesterday.”
“Are you even sure it’s worth it?” she wondered, refusing to be put off by his diversionary tactics.
“No. Of course not. Sometimes there are only a dozen women at the matinees, and for all I know, they are just somebody’s curious neighbors. Sometimes there are almost a hundred. But if I don’t do it, nobody will. And if I don’t make the attempt, I’ll never forgive myself.”
“I think Mirrors will be nominated simply on merit!” she flashed.
“I wish you were a member of the Academy.”
Vito never knew how or why Mirrors was one of the five pictures nominated in the second week of February 1978. The element that finally swung the vote might have been actors voting for a picture in which three almost unknown performers were given a chance to do their stuff; it might just have been Fifi’s year for a nomination; it might have been the more than three hundred Academy writers voting to salute a film that depended so much on a sensitive script; it might have been because people had wanted to see a love story or a film of exceptional visual beauty, or liked to cry at a happy ending—or even because of his matinees. Afterward, it was as impossible to single out one single reason, although it was as irresistible a subject of conversation as trying to decide which ethnic or socioeconomic group was responsible for the election of a President of the United States.
But it was not a fluke. Mirrors also received nominations in three other categories: Dolly Moon for Best Supporting Actress, Fiorio Hill for Best Director, and Per Svenberg for Best Cinematography.
“Thank God!” exalted Billy. “Now you can relax.”
“Are you mad, girl? Now we have a crack at the Oscar! I could only relax if we hadn’t gotten a nomination.”
Dolly Moon, thought Curt Arvey, he’d have to do something about her. Now that Mirrors had the nominations, his feelings toward Dolly, Fifi, and Svenberg had become paternal to a degree. Just as Mirrors was his picture, Dolly and the others were his people. He successfully blocked out any memory of Vito’s role in any of the glory. Fifi and Svenberg were established, respected, famous professionals, and he could do litle to add to their reputations at this point. But Curt Arvey fancied himself as a star maker. And he was a devout tits and ass man. Cute, sexy, little Dolly Moon deserved her own full-time publicist, he told the vice-president in charge of Promotion and Public Relations.
All of the top people in the Promotion Department, presently deployed in the salvage of Pickwick! which was now rescheduled for an Easter release, were beset on all sides by the piranha fish of the press who flock joyously to munch and suck on the bleeding carcass of a big picture known to be in deep shit, an event far more productive of copy than anything else Hollywood provides except the suicide of a top star. Surveying his depleted troops, the head of Promotion picked out his youngest employee, one Lester Weinstock.
He had to do something special for young Weinstock, who was the son of the president of the company that supplies all the honey wagons used on locations. Like an army, a film unit travels on its stomach, but unlike an army, its members demand decent toilet facilities. Although young Weinstock was a brilliant graduate of the Film Department of the University of Southern California, he could, at best, have aspired to a job in the mailroom if his father had not been “Honey Fitz” Weinstock, an influential man indeed.
Young Lester Weinstock was a throwback to another time, another civilization. Just to look at his round, cheerful, bespectacled face, his shaggy head of hair, his warm, delighted, delightful, delighting smile, was to feel that he had tumbled out of a more innocent past, one of the Three Musketeers perhaps, although too plump to be much good at duels, or a youthful Falstaff, before he gained all that weight. He was tall as well as bulky, with hair the color of a Teddy bear’s and nearsighted eyes the color of anybody’s favorite dog, sort of brownish, and indeterminate but pleasant features, which no one really could describe because his smile was what they focused on. Women invariably had one of two reactions to Lester: They wanted to adopt him or they wanted him to adopt them, as sisters. Since Lester possessed a deeply romantic soul, this familial state of affairs was not really what he had in mind, but, at twenty-five, he was not discouraged. life was too good.
When Lester got his assignment to become Dolly Moon’s personal public-relations representative until the Academy Awards, he was overjoyed. His ultimate ambition, as is almost universal with film students, was to become a director, but, meanwhile, realistically, he knew how lucky he was to have this happen after less than two years as lowest man on the Promotion Department’s totem pole.
He had already seen Mirrors and been utterly enchanted with the austere, fatefully beautiful Sandra Simon. Now he screened it again, concentrating on Dolly. Physically she wasn’t the type of girl he generally went for. Lester lusted after moody, fascinatingly neurotic, miserable, will-’o-the-wisp beauties with haunted eyes. There was nothing haunted about Dolly Moon, but she was one hell of a splendid actress, Lester realized, and saw the picture through again. Much, much too big fore and aft for his taste, but he was supposed to nursemaid her, not date her.
He telephoned Dolly right after lunch to announce his mission and to make an appointment to meet her.
“What did you say your name was, again?” asked Dolly, somewhat befuddled from the block party that had begun in the morning as soon as the nominations were announced.
“Lester Weinstock.”
“Could you say that again—slowly? Spell it?”
“Hey, are you OK? You sound a little, sort of, dizzy.”
“Oh, no! I’m perfect. Come on out here, Lester Weinstock. We’ve got eggnog and rum punch and sangria and Tequila Moonlight and hot toddies, and I’m baking strudel. If you get here in less than an hour it’ll still be hot. Goodbye till then, Lester Weinstock.”
Jesus, thought Lester, his first movie star and she turns out to be a bit bananas. His next phone call confused him even further.
“Mr. Weinstock, we haven’t met, but I’m Billy Orsini, Vito Orsini’s wife. Now this is very, very important, so listen carefully. Dolly Moon is my best friend and her only fault is she doesn’t know how to dress. Not a due. Understand? So you’re in charge of getting her to Scruples no later than this afternoon so that Valentine O’Neill—got that?—can design a dress for her to wear to the Awards. Don’t let her ask anything about who’s going to pay for it or what it costs—it’s on the house but I don’t want her to know. Tell her the studio is picking up the bill. Is that all perfectly clear? Good. We’ll be meeting soon. What? Yes, of course I’m thrilled for my husband. Yes, I’ll tell him. But, Mr. Weinstock, Lester, there
are only six weeks till the Awards and Dolly’s got to see Valentine today. You do understand? Never mind, you will!”
Lester climbed the stairs to Dolly’s apartment with his heart, reacting to the excitement, almost not beating at all. Billy’s breathless phone call coming on top of his conversation with Dolly had plunged him farther into a world in which anything could happen. His mother and his oldest sister sometimes shopped at Scruples for extra special occasions, but he’d never ventured inside. Now he was going to be taking a gorgeous, well, an adorable potential Oscar winner there for an evening gown under mysteriously urgent circumstances, and the strudel smelled wonderful. Just for today, he decided, he’d forget about his diet.
The wife of Dolly’s landlord opened the door, revealing a room filled with celebrating bodies. Lester stood uncertainly in the center of the room, wondering where Dolly Moon was and how he was going to spirit her away from all of this. After a moment an unmistakable voice from behind him said, “I’ve saved you a piece of strudel, Lester Weinstock, and believe me it wasn’t easy.” He whirled around and met the full force of Dolly’s huge eyes, profligate in their blueness, smiling welcomingly at him. Automatically, he reached out for the plate she held just above waist level. WAIST LEVEL!
“I know,” giggled Dolly deliciously, “I can’t believe it myself. Every morning I wake up and see myself in the mirror and I just don’t think it’s possible to get any bigger, but I do. Eat your strudel while it’s still hot.”
Without knowing what he was doing, Lester put a piece of pastry in his mouth and chewed.
“Don’t you like it?” Dolly asked apprenhensively.
“It’s—great, just great. Would it be rude if I asked—”
“For the recipe?”
“How many—months?” She looked like an explosion in a pillow factory, he thought. No, a mattress factory.
“Seven months and one week, give or take a day or two,” Dolly answered, pleased with her accuracy. “It happened over the weekend of the Fourth. People should always get knocked-up on holidays, don’t you think? It makes keeping track so much easier.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Lester looked wildly for a place to sit down and finally lowered his bulk to the floor. Dolly maneuvered herself down to sit beside him. He definitely needed a haircut. Why was he counting on his fingers? He looked smarter than that. He looked very sweet, steady, reliable but fun. Just as she had known he would. And Lester went so well with Weinstock. But why did he seem so concerned?
“There’s nothing to worry about,” she said softly.
“Eight months and three weeks,” he sighed, “on the night of the Awards.”
“I don’t have to go, if you don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Oh, yes you do. My boss made that very clear. Everyone connected with Mirrors is going to be there. He says it’s the worst kind of public relations when the nominees don’t show up, unless, of course, they’re working on location somewhere on the other side of the world. And even guy—no?—your father? No? Shit. Look—a date, somebody who’s just some old buddy, a high-school sweetheart?”
Dolly smiled at this absurd man. She might not know much, but she knew whose job it was to escort her to the Academy Awards if she didn’t have another date. And she didn’t.
“Have some more strudel, Lester.”
Valentine had never imagined that a day that started out in such a normal way could end with such frenzy. As she had predicted to Spider, the comedy had begun, but it was only a comedy to nonparticipants. Because the Awards ceremony is telecast by satellite throughout the world, the estimated audience is something more than one hundred and fifty million people. Fortunately, it is quite impossible to visualize that many people. Nevertheless, each of Valentine’s customers knew that they would be seen by more people at one time than they ever had been before, and that thought did nothing good for their anxiety levels or their senses of inner security.
Maggie MacGregor, ordering the first custom-made dress of her life, was the most at atwitter of them all. Since she was going to be on camera, interviewing various stars as they arrived and then backstage with her minicam crew, she would be visible for much of the broadcast.
“Valentine, I should never have gotten into the business,” Maggie moaned.
“Nonsense,” retorted Valentine, who was fed up with a day of feeling more like an English nanny with a houseful of bad children than a designer. “You’d poison anyone who tried to take the job away from you, wouldn’t you? So shut up and let me think.” There was no question that Maggie had a difficult figure. In the half-slip and bra she was standing in, her miniature but lushly ripe body did not inspire thoughts of chic. Spider had done wonders in getting her into quiet, elegantly forgettable dresses, but what was suitable for her weekly show just would not do for the awards. Maggie had to be as glamorous as the occasion, in all fairness to herself and the network. Valentine peered closely from behind her stockade of black lashes.
“Maggie, push your breasts up with one hand your bra down with the other. Farther down. And farther up. Hmm. That’s it, that’s it all right, the tops of your breasts, seductive but not indecent. Thank God for the Empress Josephine.”
“Valentine,” Maggie protested “you know Spider won’t approve. He’d never let me get away with showing so much of my boobs on camera, you know how strict he is about that.”
“Do you want me to design a dress for you, or do you want to buy ready-to-wear from Spider?” said Valentine, joking very little.
“Oh, my God, you know I want you to make me the dress, but are you sure, I mean, won’t I look—vulgar, just a little?”
“You will look utterly, totally elegant, and the only ornament on the most ample, most slender, most refined, and most restrained dress I’ve ever designed will be your breasts, right down to the top of the nipples. And when the show is over, hundreds of millions of people will know two things: who won the Oscars and that Maggie MacGregor has fantastic tits. Now, off you go. My assistant will take your measurements and we’ll set up a first fitting for two weeks from today.”
“What’s this restrained dress going to be made of?” Maggie ventured, as Valentine turned impatiently to her sketching table.
“Black chiffon, of course—how else would we get the maximum contrast? And Maggie, no jewelry except earrings, not even a string of pearls. Tits and chiffon, it can’t fail. It never has, not in thousands of years.”
As Valentine quickly sketched a low-cut Empire dress, with bare arms too, of course, for Maggie had beautifully rounded arms and pretty hands, she realized with another part of her mind that she wasn’t feeling the elation she should be experiencing. From midmorning on she had had a flood of world-famous customers, women so beautiful and talented that it was a pleasure to dress them, a prideful thing to be called upon to create the gowns that would set off their particular points to their best advantage when they were called on to present awards or, possibly, to receive them.
Yet now, at a moment of triumph, with all her creative juices flowing, Valentine was aware of an uneasy place somewhere in her mind that somehow made her bones feel bad inside her skin. She had done as little self-searching as possible lately, living each day on the surface, postponing, putting off, filing away, and turning her back on any resolution of her future. She hoped that, like unanswered letters put out of sight, this method would eventually make the decision for her by itself. Somehow, thought Valentine wryly, it doesn’t seem to be working. Whenever she managed to pull herself together and resolved to think things out, her brain performed a neat backward flip, away in the opposite direction. Fantasy failed as limply as logic. She couldn’t project herself, even in fantasy, as Mrs. Josh Hillman. She kept seeing that big house on North Roxbury, but she could never imagine herself living in a similar one. It just didn’t fall in place. Some essential gear wouldn’t mesh.
Although Josh said nothing more to her, as he had promised, Valentine finally told him that she couldn’
t tell him if she was going to marry him until after the Academy Awards.
“What on earth does that have to do with us?” he had asked, baffled and disconcerted.
“I’m too busy to think about myself, Josh, and, anyway, until I know who wins, my mind is all wound up with Billy and Vito and hoping for them.” Behind the diversionary protection of her bangs and her eyelashes, Valentine wondered if that sounded as ridiculously lame—even false—to him as it did to her. In any case, it was the best answer she was prepared to give him and it would have to do. He knew better now than to push her. It was not, Valentine realized, that she was too busy to think about herself, but rather that she had no inclination to think about herself. Obviously her fatalistic Irish genes were dominating her French ones—so much the worse, or so much the better, as the case might be.
Valentine shrugged her unreconstructed Gallic shrug at her shamelessly ethnic excuse and waited, impatient now, for her next client, Dolly Moon. Billy had been so insistent this morning, so unusually nervous when she told Valentine to design for her friend the most marvelous dress she’d ever made.
Valentine had seen Mirrors twice, and she had a good idea of the problems involved in dressing Dolly, but she suspected that Miss Moon could wear almost anything and get away with it. She had the kind of personality that would inevitably triumph over whatever she put on. Billy had no need to worry. One did not look at her clothes, one looked at her funny-beautiful face, her wide, beguiling smile, her entire person, so adorably awkward and sexy.
Valentine stretched her arms to the ceiling, bent to the floor, and stretched up again. She felt tight from all the drawing she’d done. Time for Dolly Moon. Billy hadn’t made this much of a production about her own wedding dress.
A little more than an hour later, Billy had swept Dolly and Lester off to have dinner at home with her, as relieved as a mother who has watched her child perform in a school play for the first time.
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