“Davy, you keep calling the target customer for this client ‘large.’ I know and you know that you really want to say ‘fat.’ We probably agree that ‘fat’ is not a word that will sell this product. Even ‘plump’ won’t do. So could we think of our customers as ‘abundant’? Abundance is a lovable concept, lots of good things to eat and drink, plenty for everybody, joy and comfort all around.”
“Sure. I’m just the art director here. Never large, always abundant, as far as I’m concerned.”
“At Scruples Two we sell tons and tons of dresses for abundant women. We call them ‘Dolly Moons.’ ”
“How the hell did you manage to use Dolly Moon’s name? Her last movie with Dustin Hoffman was the best!” David sat up straight.
“As usual, Dolly was trying to lose weight, so she decided she’d be motivated to diet by wanting to stay out of wearing Dolly Moons, and gave us permission to use her name. And she’s Billy’s best friend, that helped. A lot.”
“We obviously can’t get her for Indigo Seas.”
“No. But my point is that in the catalog we didn’t shoot the Dolly Moons on thin models, we used real abundant women. Abundant women know damn well they’re abundant. They’re deservedly suspicious, and get infuriated when they’re being shown size-six models wearing clothes meant for them. There’s nothing wrong with being abundant, some women naturally are, some not. In any other century—even early in this century—it was a non-issue. Many men, a surprisingly large group, have no objections at all to abundance. You can never underestimate the charms of abundant women. But when they buy swimsuits they’re gritting their teeth and hating the idea, so they put it off as long as possible. In order to merely get them into the stores we have to make swimsuits at least a somewhat desirable purchase—but yearning is out of the question.”
“I’m listening.”
“The Nina Blanchard Agency has a whole list of former models who grew too abundant to work. That’s where we found them for Scruples Two. Why don’t we show the product on the most proudly abundant and prettiest model we can find? Make her our Indigo Seas poster girl?”
“Well … yeah … maybe,” David said slowly. “It’s never been done, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be.”
“Maybe a guy with her?” Gigi wondered.
“No, I see her alone in a pool, a lush Venus in lush turquoise water … she’s … she’s not floating … she’s bursting up out of the water, straight up from the bottom of the pool, lush sparkles of water flying through in the air all around her, lush shoulders, lush hair slicked back off her face, and a lush smile, terrific teeth—all you see of the product is where it’s doing a sensational job of holding up a lush pair of abundant boobs—big boobs weren’t on the list of complaints.”
“And the copy line is ‘Are You Woman Enough for Indigo Seas?’ ”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all we need.”
“ ‘Woman enough’ … don’t you want to amplify on that? Do a riff? About the designers who understand what to minimize?”
“No,” Gigi said firmly. “Once we get women curious enough about being ‘woman enough’ to venture into the swimsuit department, they’ll find that out for themselves. The hard part is getting them there at all.”
“Okay. Here’s the look.” David used a marking pen on a sheet of special tissue paper and passed the sketch over to her. Gigi looked at it quickly. “You’re really good,” she told him.
“Yeah. That’s why they let me work with you. It’s a reward—instead of a raise.”
“How many other ideas do we need?”
“How many do you have?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m just starting. ‘Woman Enough’—that could be ‘For the Woman Who’s All Woman—Indigo Seas.’ Or how about using ‘abundant’ in Italian—abbondanza!—a line that asks, ‘Have You Got Abbondanza?’ and then a checklist of things like—oh, you’re learning to tango, you cook in four languages, all the neighborhood kids hang around, you whistle at construction workers, you’ve won prizes for your barbecue, you have five terrific red dresses, you sing like Dolly Parton, you give great head—and then we say, ‘Indigo Seas, the Swimwear for Women With Abbondanza!’—and get Sophia Loren to pose in Indigo Seas. She does eyeglass ads, she’s got great cleavage, she’s the incarnation of abbondanza, why shouldn’t we take a shot at getting her?”
“ ‘Great head’! You can’t put that in the copy!”
“Davy, for heaven’s sake … I think I shocked you. You’re blushing!” Gigi rolled her eyes in wicked delight. “I was just making sure that you were paying attention.”
“I was.” He must have gotten an unfocused look, David thought, while he was visualizing Gigi taking off a tiny little shrunken Indigo Seas suit.
“I’m trying for a sort of what-the-hell, let’s-not-get-too-serious-about-swimsuits kind of mood. Women love to take checklist tests, I always do when I see one anywhere. Damn! I just realized I don’t have abbondanza. I never whistle at construction workers.”
“Don’t change the subject just when you’re cooking,” David begged. “We need at least four ideas that we think really work, plus others we don’t have as much confidence in, for Arch and By to shoot down. Not only that, but when we get to the pitch meeting we have to show we’ve tried a lot of different approaches, explored various alternatives. But not too many, never confuse the client.”
“I see what you mean about banging our heads against the wall. If I weren’t a woman and didn’t know Dolly Moon and how she feels about her body, I might be wondering where to go next,” Gigi said thoughtfully. She stood up with sudden determination.
“We’ve got to take a look at some real, live swimsuits, Davy. Come on, let’s go to Nordstrom’s sports department for some on-site, in-depth research. And then let’s drop in at the Department of Motor Vehicles and talk to the ladies waiting in line for their eye tests. My old dad always told me they make the best focus groups. You don’t have to pay them, and they love to talk.”
“Listen, Gigi, I’m sorry that I said you weren’t serious, that you didn’t give a shit about swimsuits.”
“You know the Chiat/Day motto, ‘Don’t take your work seriously, but take it passionately’? That’s what I’m striving for, step by step. Hey, Davy, stop! Don’t you dare look for your keys. I’m driving you in my new little red wagon.”
“Did you know I had a cousin who’s a shopping-mall almost-billionaire?” Billy asked Spider, as they sat having drinks in front of the fire before dinner, alone now that the twins were finally stowed in their cribs.
“Nope. What’s his name?”
“Winthrop, Ben Winthrop. In fact, Benjamin Warren Saltonstall Winthrop, no less. Ring any bells?”
“Loud and clear. He’s one of most aggressive of the businessmen of the eighties, according to Forbes, although they’re more polite about their terminology. I didn’t know you were related. He operates out of New York, not Boston.”
“Maybe, but he’s also one of the awful tribe of evil cousins who persecuted me when I was growing up in Boston. There were dozens of them, all beastly. I don’t remember anyone named Ben, but he called this afternoon and identified himself convincingly. The Warrens are part of the family tree that came over on the Mayflower.”
“It sounds to me as if his blood hasn’t thinned out too much, in spite of all that genealogy.”
“He said he was out here on business and would love to come calling. I haven’t been back to Boston since Ellis was alive, and I haven’t seen any of my cousins since Aunt Cornelia’s funeral, when I was twenty-four. I certainly don’t remember a Ben Winthrop back then.”
“Did you invite him over?”
“Of course, sweetheart. Would I miss a chance to show you off to any of that snobbish, clubby, self-satisfied gang that made my life a misery when I was a poor little poor girl? Would I pass up an opportunity to show off the twins?”
“I think you’ve reversed the order of your areas of prid
e,” Spider said, temporarily willing to come second.
“Not by much. Anyway, he’s coming to dinner tomorrow. Let’s ask Gigi, she’s all alone and I’m dying to hear about her new job.”
“She’s only been there two days.”
“True, but what about the importance of first impressions? You decided I was a frosty bitch the minute we met.”
“Weren’t you?”
“Damn right I was. And I’m proud of it. At least I have that period of my life on my résumé, now that I’m brainwashed, barefoot, tied to the kitchen stove, and pregnant.”
“Again?” he asked mildly.
“Just an expression.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Don’t you want more children?” Billy asked piteously. “No little girl?”
“Of course I do, but not right yet, darling, not until Max and Hal stop controlling you with their eyes and start verbal interaction in which you might be able to get the better of them.”
Did his cousin Billy Winthrop also take a pair of bodyguards with her wherever she went, Ben Winthrop asked himself in mild surprise as he leaned out of his car to give his name to the guard at the gatehouse that stood squarely at the driveway entrance to Billy’s estate in Holmby Hills. This was almost like Houston, that great boomtown, he thought, where one of his richest friends had built a watch-tower on top of his house, manned round-the-clock by men with machine guns. Hugely rich people in Boston and New York, including people who had as much money—well, almost as much—as Billy Ikehorn, were known to walk the streets, take taxis, even subways. Surely this was excessive? Or perhaps not? He still knew little, after all, about the intricate local rituals of Los Angeles wealth, although he intended to become a quick expert on the subject.
Los Angeles had fascinated Benjamin Winthrop for years. It was the last American frontier before Hawaii in his plan to pinpoint certain privileged parts of the world with his malls. Now thirty-five, he had entered his teen years in the 1960s, a fact that might have sidetracked a boy with less focused ambition, but Ben had zoomed right through those tempting, throbbing years without feeling the slightest temptation to drop out, tune in, turn on, or acquire flower power. He’d homed in young on real estate, the way millions of his generation had homed in on rock ‘n’ roll, and singlemindedly he had started to acquire mall sites while he was a freshman at Harvard, by borrowing against the funds he could expect to come into at twenty-one.
Most un-Bostonian, his father had considered it, disapproving of something that deviated so far from what he considered a proper use of a sound business mind. “You should plan to go into the family trusts, many of them eventually your own, Benjamin, instead of trying to cover good land with ugly parking lots and hideous shopfronts,” he’d said dryly, as he sat in the library of his Bulfinch mansion on Mount Vernon Street. “Brains like yours should be used for the conservation and growth of family capital and the protection of the public institutions that depend on our support. Certainly not on something as essentially vulgar and aesthetically immoral as those repulsive malls. That’s why I’ve decided not to invest with you.”
Clearly his father was not the stuff of which clipper ship captains were made, Ben told himself, no matter how many such rip-snorting, rough-and-ready pistoleros had founded the family’s fortune. So much the worse for the old fellow. He’d been obligated to give his own father a chance to get in on the ground floor, but now that he’d missed his shot, there wouldn’t be another.
Ben Winthrop took his father’s refusal as final proof that his own plan to base his future operation in New York was sound. The Boston financial decision-making climate was frequently influenced by moral judgments. Ben considered himself warned by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland. “Tut, tut, child,” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral if only you can find it.”
Early in his life, at the age when people were still giving him children’s books, he’d decided that he didn’t have a minute to waste and morality didn’t intrigue him. No man ever made a fortune by seeking moral opportunities, and in the course of the last decade and a half, Ben Winthrop had become a millionaire eight hundred times over, both from his malls and other investments he made on the side, particularly in shipping. His eye was always on the alert for opportunity, and the gods of opportunity, so flatteringly courted, rewarded him richly.
Although Ben Winthrop’s quick success in business might have indicated that he was an impatient man, such a judgment would have been wrong. He had an innate capacity to judge when patience, a keen and relentless patience, would repay the investment of his interest, and he was disciplined in the art of waiting and watching and coddling a project along until precisely the moment when it reached perfect ripeness. Then he would leap, quickly and thoroughly, and take what he wanted and make it his own. Anything he possessed, he insisted on possessing in its entirety. The concept of sharing was foreign to him, and profoundly distasteful.
He treated women he coveted in the same way as he treated pieces of property, cultivating them with a deliberately lulling patience until exactly the propitious moment. He was more than enough of a self-observer to understand the advantage of his somewhat academic exterior that gave no clues to his inner and predatory self. He had graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, with a genuine interest in literature and history, and a genuine love of beauty in all its forms. His greatest pleasures were making money, loving women, and observing beautiful objects. When a woman or an object struck him as exceptionally worthy, he would stop at nothing to acquire her or it.
Ben Winthrop had no idea of the extent of his pride. He would have been astonished if anyone had called him immoral. He was amoral, he occasionally told himself with an inward smile, a man to whom petty moral judgments could not apply since he was outside the narrow world of morality, elevated by his own efforts to the rational sphere of nonmorality where the sensible and rich existed, envied by those who were unable to leap as high.
Ben Winthrop had always been keenly interested in the big clan’s other outstanding rebel, Billy Ikehorn, whose doings had gradually become the stuff of family legend. He had been a kid when she left Boston and just seventeen when, at twenty-one, she’d married Ikehorn, but he still remembered how the women of the family had discussed the subject of Josiah Winthrop’s daughter quietly among themselves at Sunday lunch, in tones that were the Boston equivalent of scandalized gossip. He’d read about her building of Scruples with the approval he reserved for absolutely anything that showed a spirit of enterprise, short of unsuccessful bank robbery.
As he let Burgo take his car, Ben Winthrop looked over the vast house and its acres of surrounding gardens, softly illuminated by night, with quick appraisal. An expert on every kind of real estate, he still got a thrill out of recognizing the ultimate, no matter if you couldn’t build a mall on it. He was shown in by a maid, and advanced to meet Billy with his characteristic quick and long stride, that of a man who was always in a hurry.
“Welcome, Cousin Ben,” Billy said, scrutinizing his face. “I certainly can’t say that you look familiar.”
“That’s probably because we’ve never met. I was part of another wave of cousins. Your bunch never fraternized much with mine until we got older.”
“My bunch never fraternized with me,” she said in the matter-of-fact way people learn to deal with the deepest wounds of childhood.
Ben Winthrop was a man with presence, Billy decided as she introduced him to Spider. He had a lean, hard face, a lean, hard body, a lean, hard handshake and a slow, thoroughly convincing smile that had, even in the moment of greeting, something thoughtful about it, as if it weren’t prompted by an automatic response but by a genuine inner decision.
Nanny Elizabeth came downstairs and presented Max and Hal. Billy watched as her new cousin looked them over closely, knowing enough not to offer them a stranger’s finger, covered with a stranger’s germs, to touch and, God forbid, then put in their mouths. Instead he stroked the soles of their fe
et with more than the normal degree of appreciation she would have expected from a bachelor.
“I don’t have children, but that indescribably wonderful way they smell has a powerful impact on me,” he said as the nanny carried the sleepy pair away. “I get to inspect a lot of them, my friends are all reproducing like mad, but your two have more powerful stares than any I’ve encountered. I feel as if they’ve scanned my brain and judged it passable, just barely. Am I wrong, or are they particularly fine examples of their species?”
“Nah, they’re mutts,” Spider said.
“In that case, I stand corrected.”
He was a clever boy, Billy thought, this Ben Winthrop, or rather a clever man. She looked at him with renewed interest. He had a high and lightly furrowed forehead that gave him an almost intellectual air, lots of independent-minded brown hair that grew in several directions at once in spite of a good haircut, a biggish, long, bumpy, idiosyncratic nose, highly strokable like that of an intelligent dog, a firmly cut mouth, long and thin, and a good chin. His eyes were the indeterminate deep gray blue of a changeable winter sea, and the way they were set under his brows gave him a look of being trustworthy and open, although she doubted that a mall tycoon would possess those attributes. He must be at least three inches shorter than Spider, perhaps barely six feet tall, and he moved well, in possession of the space around him. There was something slightly professorial about him, Oxford donnish, Billy thought, which most probably was due to the lingering influence of growing up in Boston.
What would his cock look like when he was aroused, she wondered. Good God! How had that popped into her mind? She who was so totally ga-ga about Spider that other men didn’t exist. How on earth could she have had such an outrageously inappropriate thought?
Deeply shocked at herself, Billy quietly sipped a glass of champagne while Spider talked to Ben. Finally she decided that her question only proved that old habits died hard, sterling wife and noble mother though she was. Or did it mean that Ben Winthrop had the kind of sex appeal that made every woman he met entertain such speculations? She preferred the latter explanation, although the days when she’d had similar thoughts about every attractive man she saw lay not that far behind her.
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