“Gigi, if you bring up Walter Cronkite again, we’re through.”
“I’ll bet he’s gorgeous. He’s on my Hall of Fame team.… you can retire, but you’re always a member for life.”
“Another new rule,” Mazie complained.
“I’m feeling rebellious today. If I could, I’d repeal the Constitution and start this country all over again. I pick Andy Warhol. Dream Team.”
“Gigi!”
“Warhol, I say! It’s my choice, my right, my team.”
“That’s literally disgusting! Oh, Gigi, you revolt me!”
“But you’d never have thought of him, would you?” Gigi crowed triumphantly. Her fun came as much from Mazie’s reactions as from her choices. “Don’t I get points for originality?” Gigi made her eyebrows jump under her bangs in fierce triumph, a trick Mazie’s nerves could never resist.
“Sometimes I worry about you.” Mazie ate the last brownie with a sigh of concern. In the last few weeks Gigi had streaked her hair without warning, using the contents of an entire bottle of peroxide on a comb and running it repeatedly through her nice brown hair; she’d taken the spotless new white Volvo that Mrs. Ikehorn had given her, because it was the safest car going, and had it spray-painted shocking pink; and now her fantasy life was getting out of hand. Sinatra … Warhol … was this a bad sign?
“Gigi,” Mazie ventured cautiously, “the Uni football team?”
Gigi made loud, convincingly real retching noises. “Yuck! No boys! You know we said no boys! Feh, phooey, double feh!”
“Right,” said Mazie, relieved. Gigi hadn’t abandoned their major principle. “And the coach?” she asked slyly.
“Ah, the coach, the eternal problem, my Maze, my old pal, whether to go for the coach or not. I’m still sitting on the fence on that one. There’s something so banal about picking the coach, but … still, he is gorgeous. I can’t seem to figure out if I really want to see a real person’s penis, a person I actually see walking around campus, a person I personally know, or whether that’d be too much of a … responsibility.”
“I don’t get why you’d feel responsible. It’s not as if you’d have to tell him you’d seen it.”
“But there’d be this terrible temptation. Let’s say I saw it and I liked it. I wanted it. Then my responsibility would be to try to seduce the coach, to make actual … contact.”
“Want it? Who ever said anything about wanting it?” Mazie cried in alarm.
“But clearly that’d be the next step. After seeing, wanting, after wanting, touching.”
“No, no!” Mazie shrieked in outraged denial. “Absolutely not … you’ve changed one rule too many. You’ve gone too far! Touching! You know we said no touching!”
“No touching, never ever, I promise,” Gigi agreed hastily, having succeeded in frightening herself. “The coach is out! Just don’t bring him up again, don’t remind me.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t.”
“Girls? Girls? Are you doing your math homework?” Billy’s voice called to them through the door.
“Yes, Mrs. Ikehorn,” Mazie said quickly, “we’re in the middle of it.”
“Good, because if you’ve made some real progress you can take a break. I thought maybe you’d like to try to get into the early show of Kramer vs. Kramer and then grab a hamburger at the Hamlet—that is, if you’re still interested in seeing Dustin Hoffman.”
“Oh, we are,” Gigi answered quickly, “we definitely are. We’ll be finished in time, Billy, count on it.”
In the course of his career, Vito Orsini had been up and he had been down and yet no one could say that they had seen him crestfallen. His bold, energetic countenance never collapsed into a look of weakness, he bore trouble with the same self-assertion with which he encountered prosperity. Thanks to his Italian heritage, his aristocratically aquiline nose, the fullness of his well-marked mouth and his air of easy prosperity in his endeavors, any signs of insufficiency or disappointment were foreign to his exterior. It was easy for Vito to look strong. When he telephoned Maggie, expecting to set the time at which they would meet for dinner that night, and discovered a message from her answering service to tell him that she had left town and could only be reached by leaving his name and number, he received the news with nothing more than an irritated twist of his lips and an angry frown.
No one watching him would have realized that he had just received an authoritative announcement that The WASP was doomed, as clear as if he’d read it in a headline on the front page of the New York Times. The meaning of Maggie’s sudden departure was unmistakable, or would have been to anyone but Vito.
Maggie, who thought herself so clever, was a fool after all, Vito told himself as he hung up the phone, she’ll feel like an idiot when the picture became a success. Worse, she’ll know she was a coward, and it was he who was the fool to have expected more cinematic intelligence from a twenty-seven-year-old television gossip who had been nobody but a women’s magazine writer only five years ago. To hell with her, he thought, and dismissed her absence from his mind. He had never loved her, but she had been, or so he had believed, that rare woman with whom he could be honest, that female friend he could fuck and trust. So he’d been wrong about her. Life was full of mistakes where women were concerned, and Maggie would be the loser.
In the next few days, as the reviews began to appear, Vito, as was his habit of long standing, refrained from looking at a single newspaper or discussing the reviews with anyone who had read them. In the early days of his career, when he had gone to Italy and produced a string of critically reviled spaghetti westerns, Vito had decided once and for all that the public knew what it wanted to see, and no reviewers could keep them away. The westerns, so despised, had brought in amazing profits. However, a number of his later films, which he had considered to be among his best, films that had been the darlings of the reviewers, had failed to attract a paying audience. The whole thing was, always had been, a crapshoot, he told himself, and this time he felt lucky, he smelled success, the success in which he had never failed to believe throughout the struggle to produce The WASP.
By the end of the first week after The WASP was released, Vito no longer felt lucky. He felt almost nothing but total panic. So great was the fall from his expectations that there was no gradual spread of creeping disillusionment, no slow, relentless realization that the picture was falling off too quickly from a good start. The drop was as swift as that of a head from a guillotined neck.
On the first day, a Friday, the box office had been strong as the diehard Redford and Nicholson crowd showed up with a morbid curiosity to see for themselves just how bad the picture was, unable to accept the critics’ unanimous and ferocious recommendations that no one waste a single minute watching the atrocity that had been wrought on a brilliant book. The reviewers, all of whom had admired the book, overlooked anything good about the movie in their eagerness to condemn the desecration that the corrupt devils of Hollywood had visited on it. It was a bloodletting without precedent, an eagerness to destroy that not even Susan Arvey could have anticipated. However, on the second day, at least until the first 6:00 P.M. show, box-office receipts had been acceptable, and until the evening there was always the hope that on Saturday night business would pick up.
But word of mouth, that extraordinary force that is stronger than any ad campaign, stronger than any star appeal, had done its work. It was as if everyone in the country who had seen The WASP on Friday and Saturday afternoon had decided to call ten people to tell them how bad it was, and as if each of those ten people had called ten others, a verbal chain letter that kept the audience out of the theaters except for a few movie-buff death-watchers who wanted to see the picture before it was yanked so that they could report exactly how much worse it was than they had been led to believe.
Everyone who actually paid to see the picture hated Redford as a scheming bad guy, and loathed Nicholson as a helpless good guy. They felt personally insulted by every scene in the picture because they felt so bitter
ly cheated by the use that had been made of two of their favorite stars, a use that made them falter for a while in their necessary belief in the Redfordness of Redford, the Nicholsonness of Nicholson. It was as if Vito had scalped and eviscerated Santa Claus in an orphan asylum on Christmas Eve.
By Sunday it was all over; the picture would play to empty houses only until the theater owners could scramble to replace it. Vito had cut off all communications to anyone involved in the movie from the moment it opened. He had spent the time driving alone in an orbit of Los Angeles, from San Diego to Santa Barbara to the far reaches of the San Fernando Valley, searching out the theaters that had booked The WASP to see if there were any signs of life from the outside of the marquees, knowing that this occupation was futile and ridiculous, but unable to stop. By Sunday noon he knew there was only one thing left for him to do.
“It’s your father,” the butler, William, said, calling Gigi to the phone.
“Hi, Dad,” Gigi said, trying not to sound too surprised. “How are you?”
“Couldn’t be better. Listen, if you haven’t got anything else to do tonight, how about having dinner with me?”
“Oh! Well.… sure … terrific! I’d love it. Where are we going—I mean, what should I wear?” Gigi knew she sounded confused, but she hadn’t had a phone call from her father in two months or more.
“Don’t bother to get all dressed up, just look nice. Ask Billy, tell her it’s Dominick’s, she’ll figure it out. I’ll pick you up at a quarter of seven sharp.”
Vito hung up before she could say another word. Gigi contemplated herself in the dim glass of the painted and carved Venetian wood mirror that hung over the phone table in the hallway where William had found her. She made astonished eyes at herself and shook her head solemnly as she made her calculations.
She and Mazie had remained in their respective homes this weekend to study for a major English exam that was being given tomorrow, and was too important to study for together. Gigi had spent all of Saturday at her books, and intended to do her last-minute cramming on Sunday evening. She had planned to spend the coming afternoon in the kitchen with Jean-Luc. Billy had been in New York most of the week and wouldn’t arrive back at the house until after dinner, so Gigi and the chef had laid elaborate plans to use his free time to make a whole poached chicken in the fashion of François Premier, with wild mushrooms, truffles and heavy cream.
Forget the chicken, Gigi instructed herself, cram until a quarter of six and then get dressed.
“Jean-Luc,” she asked the chef, after she’d apologized and called off the lesson, “have you ever heard of a restaurant called Dominick’s?”
“Here in Los Angeles?”
“Yup.”
“Never. So you abandon me for a Dominick?”
“You know I would abandon you only for my father.”
“Have a good time, Gigi,” the chef said, showering Vito with mental curses, this so-called father who inconsiderately snatched away the most promising pupil he’d ever had, just before he intended to expose to her the ten most important things to know about truffles and their passionately interesting possibilities in conjunction with the meat and juices of a chicken.
Gigi managed to stay immersed in her books until just past five o’clock. It had never taken her an hour to dress in her life, but she was too excited at the prospect of seeing Vito and too anxious about how she looked to spend another minute with Elizabethan poetry. She took a shower and shampooed the hair she had shampooed yesterday. When it was blown dry she judiciously added a few new streaks to her bangs, thin but bright ones, using a paintbrush dipped in the peroxide instead of a comb. She marshaled all her favorite clothes and separated them into groups, discarding everything that looked remotely “dressed up” or suitable only for a high school girl. She tried on several different combinations before she arrived at a compromise she thought would fit any restaurant that Jean-Luc, who knew all the best places to eat in the city, had never heard of. She pulled an off-white cashmere sweater with a high turtleneck over her head and stepped into a wide skirt of supple suede in a shade that matched the darkest of the ochre streaks in her hair. She tucked the sweater inside the skirt and added a wide belt and cowboy boots, both made of a fine rust-colored leather.
No earrings, Gigi thought as she put on her eye makeup. She had a dozen pairs to choose from, but she wasn’t comfortable yet with the rules of the great earring code. Earrings could make or break anything you put on. Earrings meant so many different things in so many different contexts that you had to be as experienced as Billy to penetrate the language of earrings, to know which pair was right to wear on what occasion, and why. Although the easy, non-statement way out was to have your ears pierced and wear simple studs made from silver or gold, she, who wasn’t chicken about many things, broke out in a sweat at the idea of anyone getting near her earlobes with a needle.
Gigi grabbed a leather jacket to sling over her shoulders and settled in the semicircular entrance hall, perched on a chair that would give her an immediate view of Vito’s car. He was prompt, and she dashed out of the house as soon as he arrived, opening the car door, sliding in and greeting him with a quick kiss on the cheek, as if this were something they often did, instead of the first time she had ever had dinner out alone with her father in her whole life.
They drove the relatively short distance to Dominick’s, on Beverly Boulevard, chatting about the weather. Vito headed straight into the hidden parking lot behind Dominick’s, as did all habitués, and helped Gigi out of the car, entering the restaurant through its back door and passing through the tiny kitchen before they reached the dining room proper. Vito and Gigi were, as he had planned, the first to arrive for dinner that evening. He had requested a particular booth, one slightly removed from all the others, at the far end of the small room and off to one side, so that Gigi faced into the room and his back was toward it.
While he drank several honest 1940s-style gin martinis that Dom made for him at the bar, Vito explained to Gigi what the significance of the restaurant was, the clubbishness of it, the insidership that it conferred. Behind him he could hear the room filling up quickly, for Hollywood ate especially early on Sunday night, but he never glanced around to see who was there.
Vito directed his attention entirely toward Gigi, his dark head with its distinctively short cut, thick cap of tight curls bent toward her as if she were the most fascinating woman alive. He asked her about school in detail, nodding in absorbed concentration to her animated answers; he wanted to hear everything about Mazie and her other friends and he made her giggle repeatedly as he commented on everything she told him. As they ate their lamb chops and French fries, no detail of Gigi’s life was too insignificant to interest Vito, no description quite full enough for him not to pose a series of sensitive, often droll questions. He was utterly absorbed in her, preoccupied as only a man can be when confronted by a beautiful and alluring woman, made oblivious to his surroundings by his thirst to communicate with her.
Gigi grew more and more at ease in the glow and gallantry and solicitude of his attention. Her low, authentically joyous laugh rang out time and time again, cutting clearly through the discreet mumble of gossip that filled the smoky room, echoed by Vito’s deeper but equally sincere amusement. Gigi bent her sophisticatedly sleek, chic head toward her father, the simplicity of her sweater making a startling point of her vivid hair, her lovely neck rising from the turtleneck to her oval chin in such a beautiful shape that every woman envied it. Gigi was so obviously unaware of everything but the high pleasure of being with Vito that no one at a single one of the booths and tables in the room was able to escape noticing that a very special kind of excited fun was taking place at Vito Orsini’s table, a fun from which they were entirely excluded.
After dessert they were ready to leave the steak house before anyone else had finished dinner. Once Vito had signed for the check, he and Gigi walked back the entire length of the restaurant, arm in arm, Gigi flushed and, in he
r own delicately demure way, thrilled with herself. At each table Vito stopped to introduce her briefly, with the proudest of smiles, the happiest of looks, his expression, as ever, that of a conquistador. “Sid, Lorraine, my daughter, Gigi Orsini.… Sherry, Danny, my daughter, Gigi Orsini.… Lew, Edie, my daughter, Gigi Orsini.… Barry, Sandy, Dave … my daughter, Gigi Orsini …” By the time they found their way out through the kitchen and back to the car, Gigi had met a sizable percentage of the most important people in the film industry, people who would have laid heavy money against seeing Vito Orsini having a splendid, carefree time on this particular night, people who had never known he had a spectacularly adorable daughter with whom he had such a loving and close relationship.
These people gave each other meaningful looks that expressed two sentiments: Bewilderment at Vito’s carefree acceptance of the disaster of the year, and an equal, slightly grateful acknowledgment that there was, after all, something more important in life than the success or failure of a single motion picture. Didn’t they all have families, if not children? Wasn’t that what counted in the long run? What about a man who wouldn’t let anything spoil his evening with a daughter like Gigi? You had to admire the guy. For many minutes after Gigi’s exit from Dominick’s, a number of the leading citizens of Hollywood found themselves thinking of Vito Orsini as a lucky man.
Gigi didn’t notice Vito’s silence as they drove back to the house. She was basking in the afterglow of an evening such as she had never known before, the kind of evening she had never thought to spend with her father.
As they reached the gatehouse, Gigi noticed that the limo that had brought Billy back from the airport was just leaving.
“Billy’s home,” she said warningly.
“I won’t come in, then,” Vito replied. “We’ll say good night outside. I’m going out of town tomorrow.”
“For long?”
“Yeah. Probably for months.”
“Oh, Dad,” Gigi said, suddenly forlorn.
Scruples Two Page 13