20
He has a twinkle in his eye,” Sasha remarked quietly to Billy, as Joe Jones, the newly hired marketing chief of Scruples Two, walked into Billy’s office, in which everyone working on the catalog was gathered, including Sasha’s four new assistants, sitting expectantly in a cluster of well-turned-out, ambitious young femininity.
You would too, Billy thought, if you had the deal Joe has. In order to lure one of the top marketing wizards of L.L. Bean to work for her, she’d had to quadruple his salary, to match each of the four seasons. For a man who worked as hard as he did, Joe Jones was deeply attached to leisure-time activities. She’d listened as patiently as she could as he described the joys of watching the leaves change in autumn, the pleasures of walking in fresh snow in winter, the fascination of the slow awakening of the woods in the spring, and the delights of summer sailing from Camden Harbor, all of which he’d have to abandon to come to California. When she’d agreed to his salary she’d also had to agree to move him and his wife to Los Angeles, pay the rent on a house for them for a year and sign an ironclad five-year employment contract that would continue to be paid no matter what happened to the business. John Prince had been a pushover compared to the gnome-like gent from Down East, but the harder Joe had made it for her, the more Billy had respected him, for he was leaving arguably the best job at the best-run company in the catalog business, and she admired him for driving the toughest deal possible. He was the kind of man she needed.
With Joe she’d managed to hire his almost equally expensive brother, Hank, one of several men who ran something called “operations” for the giant Spiegel people. Just thinking about operations made Billy squirm. She didn’t want to know about them; they were the vital plumbing of the catalog business, where words like “returns” were tossed about with a freedom that would make any sensitive person shudder. Just let Scruples Two get off the ground, she prayed, and she’d make herself find out exactly what operations involved … but not till then. That’s what Hank got paid for.
“You’ve all met Joe before,” Billy said when everyone had settled down. “I’m going to let him speak for himself.”
“Thanks, Billy,” he said, his pink cheeks, round face, spectacles and white hair making him look as innocently reassuring as if he ran an old-fashioned general store. “Folks, you all probably know that about ninety-nine percent of new catalog businesses go under in eight months,” Joe began. “That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you’re a success, you can expect to break even in two, three years, maybe a little less. So we’re talking about a capital-intensive business, and I’m satisfied that there’s enough capital here to keep going till the break-even point. My job is basically to get you the customers to reach that point and push beyond it. Far beyond it.” He twinkled steadily as he looked around the crowded room.
“Circulation,” Joe announced. “That’s the name of the game. Unless your catalog reaches the right people, it doesn’t matter how good your merchandise is. I know what kind of people you’ve got to reach, I know where the lists of those people are. I know how to buy those lists, I know how to use those lists and what to look for in them, and I know how often you need to hit people with new catalogs so that you finally connect with them and stay connected. Repetition, repetition, repetition! We hit them with five or six mailings for the fall-winter catalog, and the same for spring-summer. Plus the Christmas book, of course. Every catalog has a different cover, every one contains a percentage of new merchandise, we constantly drop what doesn’t work, but primarily we repeat the big sellers in different combinations photographed differently. Repetition, folks, you can’t live without it.”
Sasha nodded in agreement. Joe Jones was on her wavelength.
“Now your cost of doing business is in two places. First, inventory. That’s what mail order is all about. You can’t send out a catalog without physically owning the inventory and having it in the warehouse. Inventory’s all guesswork. You can be wrong in two ways,” he said benevolently, looking at their worried faces. “You guess wrong and you’re stuck with overstock. Overstock is what ruins most everybody. You guess wrong the other way, you understock and you can’t fill your orders. If you do that twice, you’ve lost a customer,” he said with the cheer of a magician who pulls out a string of rabbits from a toadstool. “Either way, you can’t expect to guess right most of the time without a couple of years of experience under your belt, and even then it’s still a crapshoot.”
Should I thank him for not telling me this sooner? Billy asked herself, not daring to look at anyone’s face.
“Excuse me, Joe,” Gigi said, “but why do you look so happy?”
“I love a crap game, kid, poker too. What’s the fun otherwise?”
“Poker Saturday night, my house?” Gigi offered.
“You’re on, kid. I’ll only warn you once—my wife’s considered a pretty good player. It’s those long Down East winters brings out hidden talent. Now the other cost of doing business is in putting out the catalog. Paper costs, mailing costs, printing costs, photography costs—they can all kill you. Spider here is going to worry with me about that. Right, Spider?”
“Right, Joe,” Spider said. Billy decided to peek at him and see how he was surviving Joe Jones with gloves off. She looked at Spider sitting next to Gigi and saw them exchanging a complicated, amused, somehow intimate glance. Maybe they both liked crap games, she thought, because they seemed to be enjoying themselves far more than she was. Come to think of it, in the weeks since she’d been back from her trip to New York, Maine, and then back to New York again to keep an eye on Prince and make sure he was producing sketches and finding fabrics as quickly as possible, she’d noticed that a new friendliness had sprung up between Spider and Gigi.
Working together in the same office, it was only natural, Billy speculated, particularly since, in the absence of actual finished samples, Spider and Tommy Tether, the superb young art director he’d hired away from Ralph Lauren, were experimenting with different ways of laying out Scruples Two, working from the best ads and editorial pages in actual fashion magazines, since Spider had decreed that the catalog was to give all the visual pleasure of a magazine, and depart completely from current catalog design. Gigi was working with them, trying to fit her kind of personal, chatty copy into the space they made available. Proximity always made for palship, Billy thought sagely as she listened to Joe talk about something called “sell ratio” that he’d already explained to her a number of times without totally getting through.
Proximity. No, it was impossible, absolutely impossible, Billy told herself. Spider was a hundred years too old for Gigi. Gigi was just a child … well, almost a child.… no older than … she had been herself when … she’d met Ellis Ikehorn. Who had been sixty. Spider was only thirty-eight. And she, Billy Ikehorn, must be insane.
“You’ll know in two months after your first mailing,” Joe Jones was telling them as he finished speaking. “Average industry response is two percent. If you don’t do that, forget it. If you do better, the sky’s the limit. When my brother Hank gets back from Virginia, he’ll brief you all on the new warehouse, the phone operations, and the packing and shipping setup. And returns. He can do that better than I can. Anybody got any questions?”
“I don’t get Virginia,” Sasha complained. “I can’t understand why we’re going to create the catalog here, design the capsule collections in New York, manufacture the stuff in factories all over the place, and then keep it all in Virginia.”
“When you’re building a half-million-square-foot warehouse you don’t want to buy land in California, Sasha. When you’re counting on your phone operators to be patient, helpful and thoroughly informed, in other words, act as the best salespeople possible, you want to hire nice folks with kind voices, and so you look for a place in the South, where there’s a solid, more or less unbreakable tradition of patience and good manners. And lower salaries. Now you wouldn’t want to do that in New York City, would you?”
/> “Not really,” Sasha said, laughing. She’d been working as Billy’s assistant, staying blessedly put in L.A. while Billy whisked around in her jet, lighting fires under Prince and luring key men away from other companies, a Lorelei with an open checkbook. Sasha’s job was working on the antique lingerie collection with Gigi and Gigi’s old friend Mazie Goldsmith, as well as on the Discontinued Woman petite collection and on the designs for dumpling-shaped women for which no one yet had found exactly the right name. Her four busy assistants were all experienced, sharp young women, and a good thing too that they worked as hard as they did, since her wedding plans were taking several hours a day of her time, and she couldn’t attend to them at night because at night there was Josh. And she’d better start paying attention, because after all, if it weren’t for her, this whole thing would never have happened. Or had it started with Gigi? No matter … her mind always meandered and gallivanted into the future when she thought about Josh, and he’d had to get Strassberger and Lipkin to handle a lot of his own work for the same reason.
“I guess that’s it,” Billy said as Joe stopped speaking. “Thank you, Joe, it’s been an education.”
“The thing to remember, folks, is that it’s not nearly as complicated as I’ve made it sound,” Joe said, eyes positively dancing with anticipation. “It’s one hell of a lot worse.”
“Billy, you’ve been out of town so much that I feel as if you never really came back from Paris,” Dolly Moon complained, as the two of them sat out by her swimming pool in the late-April sun, near a bed of blooming tulips.
“Oh, Dolly, I know. W.W.’s growing so fast—poor thing, I’m a lousy godmother. She’s almost five and I haven’t done anything about her religious education yet. Isn’t that the main thing a godmother’s supposed to be responsible for?”
“She’ll manage, she’s got a God-fearing grandmother, it’s me who’s stuck without you,” Dolly fretted. “Just look at me, for God’s sake! I’m the one who should be God-fearing—maybe then I’d be able to diet. Give me some of that good, old-time religion! Fire, Billy, hellfire and brimstone, please, Billy, I’m counting on you,” Dolly implored pitiably. “I’ve got to lose twenty-five pounds in the next six weeks. We start shooting in June. Dustin and I are doing the sequel to the movie we made together, and as of right now I think I outweigh him two to one. He won’t be able to reach my lips when he kisses me, and if I sat on his lap, he’d be squashed flat. I love him, but why does he have to be so puny?”
“Dolly, you know I can’t help you anymore,” Billy said sternly. “You’ve got to go to some sort of group, Weight Watchers or Overeaters Anonymous or something like that. I’ve told you a thousand times that you need to have other dieters to call and talk to when you get those urges. It’s no good calling me, I’m compulsive about staying thin, so it’s easy for me.”
“But you’ve got to have some little … tips? Tricks? Or don’t you even want to eat anymore?”
“Sure, I want to. I’m human. Take chocolate. You know I adore it.”
“Yeah, but you don’t touch it. You wouldn’t eat a bite of the chocolate cake at lunch.”
“Well …” Billy said hesitantly.
“Well?”
“Actually, chocolate’s easy. Fortunately, chocolate looks like turds … real turds. It’s the same color, after all. So whenever I see chocolate, I tell myself that it’s turd sculpture. A wedge of turds, a circle of turds, a square of turds, a sauce of melted turds—”
“I get it! I love it! I’ll never eat another ounce of chocolate anything—but, Billy, what about white food? Mashed potatoes, vanilla ice cream, white bread with butter on it—?”
“Butter on it? I simply don’t believe you said that! Dolly, forget turds, you’re in deep shit. A group’s the only answer. Twenty-five pounds in six weeks? That’s almost a pound a day.” Billy shook her head in dismay. “You’d better go to a good nutritionist immediately and find out what’s the fastest safe way. And stop eating off your children’s plates. You know that’s where half the trouble is. Tell yourself that every time you do it, you’re depriving them, taking the food out of their little mouths.”
“But I know it isn’t true, the cook always makes too much. And they never even finish, they have picky appetites,” Dolly said miserably.
“Oh, Dolly, it’s not as if you didn’t look absolutely wonderful,” Billy said truthfully. “The real trouble is that being plump is so becoming to you, and you have so little vanity that you’re not motivated to keep your weight down between pictures.”
“I know,” Dolly wailed. “I turn down a hundred scripts for every one I accept. But I want time to be with the kids and Lester.”
“What’s the point of being one of the biggest stars in the world if you have to miss out on them? If you weren’t a working actress you could forget about the whole thing. Sasha Nevsky—you met her, remember?—has three aunts who are twice as overweight as you, and they’ve been that way almost all their lives, happy, healthy and well-loved. We’re designing a whole bunch of really wonderful clothes for them in Scruples Two, the ‘Dumpling Collection’ we call it, until we find the right name.”
“What do they look like? The clothes, not the aunts,” Dolly asked morosely.
“They’re based on elastic waistbands. Unlike you, most plump women don’t have waists, so they end up buying things that just start at the top and keep getting wider and wider. With the elastic waistbands we can build fairly wide shoulders into the clothes, and an illusion of a waistline, and work with an interesting drape.”
“Call them ‘Dolly Moons,’ ” Dolly sighed. “They sound like a good idea.”
“But why on earth would you want clothes designed specifically for plump women to have your name on them?” Billy asked incredulously.
“So I could stay out of them! Billy, that’s it! I don’t want to have to wear your Dolly Moons, I want to wear divine Nolan Millers. That’s my motivation! Oh, Billy, I knew you’d help me. You’ve got to call them ‘Dolly Moons’ or it won’t work for me. Oh, Billy, thank you! You’ve saved my life!”
“Your reason, maybe, but hardly your life,” Billy said, laughing at her friend. “If you really mean it, it’s a sensational boost for us. But better ask Lester first, see if it’s all right with him. And talk to your agent and your lawyer, they may not like the idea, and I don’t want to take advantage of you.”
“Billy, hon, no one, and I mean no one, takes advantage of me,” Dolly said in a tone of voice that made Billy sit up in astonishment. “You don’t think I let my agent make my business decisions for me, do you?”
“I guess I did,” Billy said slowly, suddenly aware that her old friend’s native shrewdness was almost always camouflaged by the shock of the sheer extravagance of her Renoir-esque presence. Even she had allowed herself to drift into making the mistake of underestimating Dolly.
“Once I got my career on track, I promised myself that no man was ever going to tell me how to run my life again, not even Lester,” Dolly said, her astonished blue eyes wider than ever in their seriousness. “A woman in this business has to think for herself or else she’ll become the captive of a business manager, an agent, the hidden agenda of the agency he works for—those guys could teach the CIA and the Mafia a lesson or two—and at least three different lawyers plus her husband, if she has one. A bunch of guys who think they have the answers. Ha! As they say in Brooklyn, fuhgedaboudit! I trust my own decision-making powers, Billy, the way you do. It was the Oscar that allowed me to take this position, and after I’d seized it, I never let it go. I owe a lot to Vito, when you stop to think about it.”
“I never have. But you’re right, until you were cast in that part in Mirrors, nobody appreciated you properly, they couldn’t see the actress beneath the tits and ass.”
“Don’t say those words! I’d forgotten about them for a minute. All right, all right, tomorrow I’ll put myself into the hands of a nutritionist. A female nutritionist. Okay? You satisfied now?”
/>
“Do it today,” Billy said grimly. “Butter!”
“Today. I promise. Oof! I feel thinner already. Now tell me about Gigi. I haven’t seen her in ages. How’s she doing?”
“Brilliantly. She’s writing the most original catalog copy you’ve ever read, and she and Mazie are hunting down antique lingerie all over L.A. and San Francisco. Then she does her own illustrations for those pages. They’re enchanting, funny … well, you saw the one she sent you for Christmas, so you know. If I didn’t bump into her at the office now and then, I’d hardly ever see her myself.”
“Don’t you miss her?”
“Of course I do, but what can I do about it? She’s too grownup to live with me. I suppose it would be like … living at home with your mother.”
“That’s ridiculous! If I were her age I’d jump at the chance.”
“It’s easy for you to say, because we’re friends, peers. But Gigi and I are … sort of related, well, not really related, not really mother and daughter at all, but … something,” Billy said, struggling, as she had for a long time, to figure out what she and Gigi were to each other now that she wasn’t her legal guardian, now that Gigi wasn’t an unadopted, teenaged almost-daughter she’d taken under her wing. She’d referred to her as her stepdaughter, but that had never really been true.
“Well, I hope she’s making good use of her privacy,” Dolly said, wiggling her eyebrows like Harpo Marx.
“That’s the thing, her privacy means I don’t have a clue. I had this crazy idea …”
“Hmm?”
“No, it’s something that couldn’t be. Put it out of your mind, as they say in Boston.”
“Billy,” Dolly said warningly, “you shouldn’t have brought it up if you weren’t going to tell. You know I won’t let you get away with doing that to me.”
“Oh, it’s too stupid. But there’s this kind of … thing … between her and Spider.”
“ ‘Thing’? What kind of thing?”
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