“I didn’t want to spoil dinner by telling you sooner. I have to go to France to fulfill a commitment I made before Mirrors came out. I signed a two-picture deal then with a group of foreign businessmen, extremely well financed, serious Lebanese with money to burn, who want to get a toehold in the international film business. I have to make those pictures for them before I can go on to anything else. I’m meeting them in Paris the day after tomorrow. Chances are we’ll do a lot of the filming in France and England.”
“Damn.”
“I know. I’m not anxious to go, but that’s the name of the game. As Willie Sutton said, he robbed banks because that was where the money was.… and right now it’s in Paris. Maybe you can come over during the summer for a few weeks … I could give you a job as a gofer, start you out in the business. I’ll call Billy from Paris and discuss it with her.”
“Oh, don’t forget, I want to come, I really do!”
“I won’t forget,” Vito promised. He opened the door for her and kissed her good night quickly, waving as he drove away.
Disconsolate, Gigi entered the house and made her way upstairs to Billy’s room.
“Darling!” Billy turned around and hugged her. “You look perfect! But so sad! What’s wrong? Did your father say something awful? William told me you were out for dinner with him.”
“He just told me he’s leaving for God knows how long, making pictures in France.”
“Well that’s understandable, isn’t it?” Billy asked gently.
“I think it’s a good idea, I just hate to see him go.”
“Did he say anything about that … the picture?”
“Not a single word.”
“So you didn’t have to say anything either,” Billy asked, looking at Gigi closely.
“No, thank goodness. I was really worried at the beginning of dinner, but then I understood that he was going to act just as if nothing had happened, so I relaxed. I’ve never had such a fabulous talk with him! Oh, Billy, he was so interested in everything about me … it was as if he was discovering me for the first time! Maybe I’m finally old enough for him, do you think that’s what happened? I had so much to tell him, and he was such a good listener that I completely forgot all about the picture. I can’t believe that it just went right out of my mind.”
“Hmm.” Billy was thoughtful. When she and Mazie and Gigi hadn’t been able to get seats for Kramer vs. Kramer, they had popped into the first Friday-night screenings of The WASP in Westwood. Neither of the two girls had dared to suggest leaving as the film began to unfold itself in all its misbegotten embarrassment, until Billy, suffering keenly for Gigi, had insisted on going, pleading a terrible headache. Gigi had read every single one of the reviews over and over, grieving so much that Billy had finally had to take them away from her and tear them up.
“Where did you eat?” Billy asked curiously.
“A place called Dominick’s. That’s why I smell as if I’ve been barbecued. But I met a bunch of Dad’s friends on the way out … he knew everyone there. They all were awfully nice, very friendly, just as if nothing had happened. Nobody said a word about it.”
“That’s the way it goes … in public. No one in the business knows when he’s going to be in the same position as Vito, so there’s a code of behavior,” Billy explained, putting her arms around Gigi.
You are a truly accomplished swine, Vito, she thought bitterly, using the daughter you’ve never bothered about as your shield, taking her to the most public possible forum, bombarding her with your charm, playing the adoring father, parading her in front of Hollywood, knowing that she would deflect the difficult moment, confuse the crowd, throw some temporary Stardust in their eyes. I can just see you operating tonight, giving Gigi the same treatment that worked on me, making your daughter fall in love with you at your convenience. What plans will you have for her, now that she’s an asset?
6
Valentine O’Neill sat at the drafting desk of her design studio at Scruples, sipping the strong French coffee she brewed for herself each morning, and considered a variety of subjects. It was spring of 1980 and she was entirely happy. How many women were entirely happy, she wondered. And at the inconsequential age of twenty-nine, at that? It was her impression that most women at twenty-nine were worried about their boyfriends or their husbands or their children or their jobs, or their lack of them, or their problems in managing all of them at once. Most women didn’t achieve entire happiness—which meant a kind of serenity that allowed you to actively observe yourself being happy, did it not?—until they became grandmothers and could retire from the fray of life and just enjoy themselves, or so her mother had assured her. Her poor mother, Valentine thought, who, for all her wisdom, had died much too soon, working almost until the last minute at her highly skilled job as a fitter of haute couture clothes at the House of Balmain.
No, she was, of course, not entirely happy, Valentine realized, for she would always miss her French mother, who had married an American she’d met the day of the Liberation of Paris and gone to live with him in New York, where Valentine had been born. Only after his early death had the young widow taken her half-Irish, half-French child back to her own native Paris, where the workrooms of the great dress house of Balmain had become Valentine’s second school. There Valentine had learned so much that she dared, after her mother’s death in 1972, to return alone to New York and seek a designer’s career for herself.
And now here she was, eight years later, she and Elliott, incredibly, married and almost as incredibly partners with Billy Ikehorn in two ever more wildly successful boutiques, the new Scruples in Chicago and New York. If only her mother had lived to see her happiness, Valentine thought, almost unable to comprehend it without someone to discuss it with besides Elliott himself, who spent so much time being charmed in his carefree way at her wonderment that she wasn’t sure he truly understood just how surprising it all was.
Valentine kept her feet on the ground by continuing to design clothes for individual women, custom-made clothes in the grand tradition. No amount of other work had made her relinquish her absolute control of the couture department that existed only in the California Scruples, a luxury to which many rich women could only aspire, no matter how much money they had, for Valentine had only so much time to give them, and her earliest customers received preference. She had a visceral need to continue to work with her hands, to invent, to sketch, to handle fabrics, to create clothes for special occasions, clothes that expressed her own imagination and talent. Her waiting list had been closed for a year now, although, like every other closed waiting list, it always had just one or two openings for women with special connections.
Like Gigi Orsini. Of course she was going to make Gigi’s senior prom dress, Valentine thought with a tilt of anticipation, even if Billy, as fussy as a typical worried mother, thought it risked spoiling her. How could you spoil a girl whose idea of heaven was to be initiated into the secrets of Valentine’s own kitchen? How could you spoil a girl who had spent an entire Saturday shopping for and cooking a five-course dinner in their own apartment and presented it to them as a second-anniversary present, a supremely classic dinner that Valentine had admitted gladly she herself could never possibly have equaled on her best day? Her own cuisine, learned from her mother, was that excellently comforting but essentially middle-class cooking that you could—should, if possible—eat every day. But Gigi had learned from an accomplished French chef, and her elegant, complicated cooking was to ordinary French food what one of Valentine’s own designs was to a garment off the rack.
Even if Gigi had been a horrid brat, how could she not design a dress in which the girl would be seen to her greatest advantage at such an important occasion as a senior prom? Any designer who had to work day after day with ordinary flesh and blood, with women whose raw material it was necessary to conceal, enhance or disguise, would jump at the chance to take a busman’s holiday and make something exquisite for Gigi, that delectable young person who combined such whimsical f
reshness with such an air of innocent swagger. Gigi, it seemed to Valentine, brought with her the sound of distant music whenever she appeared, joyous snatches of carefree tunes that had filled the air in another time in the history of the world. She looked as if she had danced out of another era, now a half-century in the past, danced to the beat of jazz; she looked as if she should be smooching in the backseat of a convertible with a Yale boy and drinking bathtub gin in honkytonks, whatever they were, and smoking forbidden cigarettes and driving entire squads of young men crazy with unfulfilled passion—this girl who had just barely started to date, who had, according to Billy, no bad habits, which in itself was enough to worry Billy.
Was it the half-Irish heritage they shared, Valentine wondered, that made her feel such an affinity for Gigi? Or was it that they were both, she believed, hardworking and logical respecters of a status quo that they would rebel against immediately and effectively if it struck them as the right thing to do? One thing was sure, they were both of the green-eyed, white-skinned, redheaded type of female, no matter by what artifice that red—or rather orange—was obtained in Gigi’s case, no matter that Valentine felt that she towered over Gigi, who seemed to have finally stopped growing. Designing for Gigi would be like designing for herself if she had ever had a senior prom, an institution that would surely have been forbidden in her own Paris lycée, if it had ever been heard of at all.
But she could not begin to think about Gigi’s dress now, Valentine realized as she glanced at her watch. She had an appointment with a new client in two minutes, another exception to the waiting list. She frowned, thinking of the request—impossible to refuse—that Billy had made, asking her to design a wardrobe for Melanie Adams, who was to star in Wells Cope’s new film, Legend.
Cope, the most envied, secure and tasteful producer in all of Hollywood, had spent a year waiting to find the absolutely right second vehicle for Melanie Adams, who had leapt into international superstardom in the first picture he had made with her.
Legend, a story that skillfully combined the Dietrich and Garbo success stories, could indeed only be made with the one actress of today who had nothing to fear—at least physically—from comparison with those immortals. Nevertheless, Valentine would have refused, in spite of all the wooing, all the publicity she stood to gain, for she needed no additional press and she was impervious to the most skillful importuning.
However, Melanie Adams was the former fashion model who had broken Elliott’s heart when she left him flat, with a viciously cruel note, four years ago, leaving Valentine to put the pieces back together.
Elliott, her own Elliott, was a man who truly enjoyed and appreciated women, who celebrated the female presence in the world, who gave himself to them as warmly and sweetly as they gave themselves to him, healing their hurts and understanding their problems. But before he had fallen in love with Valentine, he had fallen truly in love only once, with Melanie Adams.
And that girl had been brutal to him, she had used him ruthlessly, she had lied to him consistently, and she had treated his emotions with nothing but contempt. Elliott had never blamed Melanie when he talked about her with Valentine, he had always sought to try to understand her, to explain away her actions, but Valentine knew the truth and she burned with a desire to punish the creature who had caused Elliott such desperate pain. Melanie had done unpardonable things to the man she loved. Elliott was a gentleman. If Melanie Adams came to him today he would be kind to her, he would never seek any revenge, but she, Valentine, was too much of a woman not to.
And also, to be honest, Valentine asked herself with a half-amused shake of her head at her own answer, wasn’t she a little bit curious about this Melanie Adams? Wasn’t it normal to want to see with her own eyes, in the flesh, the only other woman Elliott had ever loved?
Melanie Adams arrived at the studio just as Valentine buttoned the last button of the strict white smock she always put on over her own clothes when she received clients. She was surrounded by an entourage: Wells Cope himself, a fair-haired, handsome man in his early forties, slim and superlatively groomed, accompanied by his executive producer, two publicists, Melanie Adams’s personal hairdresser, and a secretary. These six people huddled around the actress protectively, so that at first Valentine couldn’t pick out Melanie standing among them with an air of not being present at all, like a captive queen among the savages, while they introduced themselves to Valentine.
“I regret, Mr. Cope, that I cannot say welcome to my studio,” Valentine declared. “I had no idea that you personally intended to accompany Miss Adams, and I cannot imagine why you’ve brought so many people with you.”
Wells Cope laughed easily, not taken aback by Valentine’s frigid tone.
“I should have warned you, Miss O’Neill, but of course the costumes for Legend are entirely too important for Melanie to walk in here by herself, just like anybody. We came to make your job easier, to help you, to—”
“Mr. Cope, you can add nothing to my job. I have read the script, I understand exactly what is necessary in the way of costumes. I need only Miss Adams.”
“But … you don’t understand. Miss Adams—Melanie—expects us to be here to paye the way, to give her feedback, to—”
“To hold her hand, Mr. Cope? If she cannot entrust herself to me with confidence, there is no use in proceeding. Obviously I intend to work with you eventually, naturally you will expect to approve my designs, to edit them with my assistance, but today I need Miss Adams by herself. I have less than two hours for her this morning. Are you going to leave her quite alone with me, or are you departing—all of you—and taking Miss Adams with you?”
“You might have warned me, I had no idea you’d be so …” Wells Cope was no longer smiling.
“ ‘So’ … what?” Valentine asked, pleased by his consternation, but showing no change in her severe expression.
“So … positive.”
“Take it or leave it, Mr. Cope, just don’t waste my time.”
“Melanie?” Wells Cope turned to her questioningly.
“For heaven’s sake, Wells, will you all just please get the hell out of here?” Melanie Adams’s voice still contained faint, maddeningly sweet cadences of her native Louisville, Kentucky, but her delivery was curt.
Wells Cope had discovered her, he had invented her, he had turned her into an actress, and he had signed her to a four-picture contract. The deluge of adulation her personal success had brought had soured her on his mentorship and ownership, which, as yet, she saw no way to escape.
“I’ll be back for you at noon,” he said, frowning. “Come on, everybody, let’s leave these two ladies to get on with it.”
“Well,” said Valentine, when they were alone, “that’s better, I think.”
“I admire your style, Miss O’Neill. I’ve never seen anyone throw Wells out before. I enjoyed it.”
“Please call me Valentine. I’m not normally so abrupt, but their presence was entirely unnecessary. I’m surprised they didn’t know that in advance.”
“I told Wells that you didn’t design by committee, but they’re all so nervous about having the clothes right, with Legend being a period piece …”
“For which, of course, I would never design strict period clothes, since what women actually wore in that era would be shockingly unattractive to us now.”
“Oh yes! That’s exactly what I thought when I looked at all those early photographs of Dietrich and Garbo when they first came to Hollywood … they both dressed like frights, everything was too long or too bulky or just plain tacky, and those dreadful hats! I didn’t want to do the picture because I couldn’t bear the clothes.”
“Have no such fears,” Valentine said, as she observed Melanie Adams closely, watching the way she used her hands, the way she turned her head, the way she held her shoulders. She was, naturally, smaller than she photographed, but even more beautiful in the flesh than on the screen, if such a thing was possible, Valentine admitted to herself.
&n
bsp; “I will approximate the period,” she told Melanie, “interpret it, design whatever it is that your own look demands, and still give the audience the impression that you are dressed in the height of fashion of those years. What I will avoid—the reason Mr. Cope will pay me so well—is the disillusionment of reproducing reality.”
“ ‘The disillusionment of reality’ … I like that, I understand that,” Melanie said slowly. Reality had always eluded her never-ending search. All of her life, no matter how many people told her she was beautiful, no matter how many men had loved her, she had never been able to experience an inner perception of herself as a real person. She was only certain that she was real when she had a streaming head cold, she sometimes thought with the fretfulness of a child.
When Melanie Adams had turned from modeling to acting, she’d found that during the time the camera was rolling, she felt real. Like somebody else, of course, yet actual, there. But the camera had to stop eventually, leaving her beached and sad, absorbed again by her core of emptiness, her ever-renewed quest to break out of an intense, inescapable connection with her own image and emerge into the world, like a chick trying to peck its way out of an unbreakable eggshell. Melanie’s need to take and take in order to create the smallest, always fleeting sense of selfhood had taught her how to inspire love, but no amount of adoration had ever been enough to release her from the chains of narcissism.
“I said, of reproducing reality,” Valentine said softly, correcting her.
“Oh, I suppose, but it’s the same thing, isn’t it?” Melanie said vaguely, running her fingers over the bolts of fabric that leaned against the wall near Valentine’s desk, lightly touching the panne velvets, the melting cashmeres, the icy satins. She turned to Valentine with curiosity, seeming to come out of a dream.
“You’re married to Spider Elliott, aren’t you?” she asked. She had seen photographs of Valentine in Women’s Wear, but she’d never come across her in person. She hadn’t anticipated that Valentine would be so sympathetic, so understanding. In fact, she hadn’t wanted to meet Spider’s wife, and only Wells’s insistence had brought her here today.
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