Scruples
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MEET THE UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTERS OF SCRUPLES
BILLY WINTHROP ORSINI
She owns SCRUPLES. At twenty-one she was the fat, poor relation of a great Boston family. At thirty-five she is thin, sumptuously beautiful, and worth a quarter of a billion dollars. But Billy is bored and frustrated until she meets the challenge of SCRUPLES.
SPIDER ELLIOTT
Dangerously charming, thoroughly sensual, a man who loves women—many women—this All-American golden boy runs SCRUPLES with the assurance of a pasha in his harem.
VALENTINE O’NEILL
Half French, half Irish, head buyer for SCRUPLES, this brilliant young fashion designer also creates the couture dresses that all of Hollywood wears to the Oscars. A maker of magic with mermaid eyes, her passions are hidden with difficulty.
MAGGIE MacGREGOR
Shrewd, sassy, and ambitious, with a network half hour of her own devoted to the inside news of show business, she observes the complicated relationships of the world of SCRUPLES and can’t stop herself from meddling.
VITO ORSINI
A movie producer, vastly talented and dictatorial, he imprints each of his films with his personal taste. When he becomes Billy’s second husband, he remains one of the few men who can’t be swayed by her power or money.
SCRUPLES
A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with
Crown Publishers, Inc.
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Crown edition published 1978
Bantam edition / November 1989
Bantam reissue / February 1992
Lyrics from “Valentine” by Henri Christiné, Albert Willemets; English lyrics by Herbert Reynolds. © 1925 Francis Salabert 1926 Warner Bros. Inc. Copyright Renewed. All rights for the United States, Canada and Mexico controlled by Warner Bros. Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1978 By Steve Krantz Productions.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Crown Publishers, Inc.,
201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80352-8
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Dedication
Preview: The Jewels of Tessa Kent
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
In Beverly Hills only the infirm and the senile do not drive their own cars. The local police are accustomed to odd combinations of vehicle and driver: the stately, nearsighted retired banker making an illegal left-hand turn in his Dino Ferrari, the teen-ager speeding to a tennis lesson in a fifty-five-thousand-dollar Rolls-Royce Corniche, the matronly civic leader blithely parking her bright red Jaguar at a bus stop.
Billy Ikehorn Orsini—whose faults did not normally include a tendency to erratic driving—brought her vintage Bentley to a stop with an impatient screech in front of Scruples, the world’s most lavish specialty store, a virtual club for the floating principality of the very, very rich and the truly famous. She was thirty-five, sole mistress of a fortune estimated at between two hundred and two hundred fifty million dollars by the list makers of the Wall Street Journal. Almost half of her wealth was tidily invested in tax-free municipal bonds, a simplification little appreciated by the IRS.
Hurried though she was, Billy lingered in front of Scruples, casting a piercingly proprietary eye over her property on the northeast corner of Rodeo Drive and Dayton Way, where, four years ago, Van Cleef & Arpels had stood, a white plaster, gilt, and wrought-iron landmark, which looked as if it had been clipped off the Carlton Hotel in Cannes and shipped intact to California.
Billy’s tawny wool cape was lined in golden sable against the chill of the late afternoon of February 1978. She pulled it around her as she looked quickly up and down the sumptuous heart of Rodeo Drive, where the two facing rows of immodestly opulent boutiques outglittered each other to create the most staggering display of luxury in the Western world. The broad boulevard was made gay by pointed fiscus trees, vivid green all year round, with low, wooded mountains visible in the near distance, like the background of a Leonardo da Vinci.
A few passersby acknowledged their recognition of her by that tiny sideways flick of an eye with which the true New Yorker, or the Beverly Hills regular, reluctantly validates the same celebrity who would draw a crowd in some other city.
Since her twenty-first birthday Billy had been photographed many hundreds of times, but newspaper pictures had never quite caught her challenging reality. Her long, dark hair, the deep brown of the best mink, so brown that it looked like black licked by moonlight, was thrust behind her ears, in which she always wore her signature jewels, the great eleven-karat diamonds known as the Kimberley Twins, which had been her wedding present from her first husband, Ellis Ikehorn.
Billy was five feet ten inches tall before she put on her shoes and her beauty was almost virile. As she crossed to the entrance, she took a deep breath of anticipation. The Balinese doorman, graceful in his black Scruples tunic and tightly wrapped pants, bowed low as he opened the heroically scaled double doors. Inside those doors lay another country, created to beguile and dazzle and tempt. But today she was in too much of a rush to scrutinize any of the details of what her Boston background, for she had been born Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop of the undiluted Massachusetts Bay Colony strain, caused her to refer to as a “business” rather than as a fantasy she had brought to life by pouring out close to eleven million dollars. She strode rapidly, with her characteristic pace, that of a huntress, in the direction of the elevator, determined not to catch the eye of any of the customers with whom she might have to stop and chat. As she walked, she threw open her cape and exposed her long, powerful throat. She was that most disturbing and rare of combinations, a female of rampant sexual vitality combined with an ultimate and totally authoritative sense of personal style. To any observant male, her smoky eyes, which had irises striped with faint horizontal lines of tortoise and dark brown, and her full mouth, ripe rose under a thin coat of colorless lip gloss, sent one message, while her long, slender body, severely clad in dark green kidskin trousers and a heavy cream silk tunic, cut wide and casually roped in at the waist, sent another message, a contradiction of the first. Billy knew that any emphasis on ass and tits played bloody hell with elegance. The absolute chic of her clothes was at war with her innate sensuality. She put people off-balance, almost certainly on purpose, because she wore her offhand yet splendid garments as if she was equally prepared to tear them off and tumble into bed, or to stand in front of a photographer and pose for Women’s Wear Daily.
Billy arrived at the elevator without having to do more than nod toward a half dozen women with a brisk friendliness, which simultaneously indicated that she was pleased to see them there getting rid of a
tiny part of their unmitigated wealth but couldn’t possibly stop. She went straight to the top floor, where her destination was the private office shared by her two chief employees, Spider Elliott, who managed Scruples, and Valentine O’Neill, head buyer and custom designer. She gave a brief knock, which was not a question but an announcement, and entered an empty room, all the more deserted for the incongruity of the scarred English mahogany partners’ desk, which Spider had fallen in love with in an antique shop on Melrose Avenue and insisted on transporting to Scruples. It stood like an island of rugged reality in the center of the room, which had been decorated by Edward Taylor in future-wordly tones of melting taupe, fawn, biscuit, and greige.
“Damn, where have they got to?” Billy muttered under her breath, flinging open the door into their secretary’s room. Mrs. Evans jumped nervously at her unexpected appearance and stopped typing immediately.
“Where are they?” Billy asked.
“Oh dear, Mrs. Ikehorn—I mean, Mrs. Orsini—” The secretary stopped in confusion.
“It’s all right, everybody does it,” Billy reassured her quickly and automatically.
She had been married to Vito Orsini—that most independent of independent film producers—for only a year and a half, and people who had read of her over the years as Billy Ikehorn made the same mistake with her name without even realizing that they were doing it.
“Mr. Elliott is with Maggie MacGregor,” Mrs. Evans informed her. “In fact, he just got started with her and he said he’d be at least an hour, and Valentine is working in her studio with Mrs. Woodstock—they’ve been there since right after lunch.”
Billy tightened her lips in annoyance. They couldn’t be disturbed, not even by her. Just when she wanted them, Spider was closeted with perhaps the most important woman in television and Val was busy designing a complete wardrobe for the wife of the new ambassador to France. Balls! Billy had painted herself into a corner in establishing the fact that she was above acting like a Queen Bee in such matters as appointments and fittings at Scruples. Let Dina Merrill act, Gloria Vanderbilt paint, Lee Radziwill decorate her friends’ homes, and Charlotte Ford, followed by a whole pack of socialites, “design” collections of clothes, she, Billy Ikehorn Orsini, ran a flourishing retail business, the most successful luxury shop in the world, a brilliant combination of boutique, gift shop, the world’s best ready-to-wear and haute couture. The fact that Scruples represented the smallest part of her fortune didn’t make it any less important to her, because, of all the sources of her income, Scruples was the only one she had been personally responsible for establishing. It was at once her passion and her plaything, a cherished secret come to life, tailored on a human scale that she could see, smell, touch, possess, change and make perfect and ever more perfect.
“Look, I need them soon. Please let them know I’m here the minute they’re through. I’ll be somewhere in the store.” She stalked out and went into her own office before the flustered Mrs. Evans could offer the little speech of good luck that she had been nervously preparing for weeks. Tomorrow was the day on which the nominations for the Academy Awards were to be announced, and Vito Orsini’s film Mirrors had a possibility of being nominated as one of the five Best Films of 1977. Mrs. Evans didn’t know much about the film business, but she knew that Mrs. Ikehorn—Mrs. Orsini—was very tense about the nominations from the gossip she had picked up around the store. Perhaps, she thought, considering how abrupt her employer had been—perhaps, it was just as well that she hadn’t said anything. The protocol of such occasions escaped her.
Maggie MacGregor felt both depleted and electrified by the adrenaline of acquisition. She had just spent at least seven thousand dollars for clothes to wear on camera during the next two months and ordered an entire wardrobe for the Cannes Film Festival, which she would be covering in May. The festival wardrobe had cost an additional twelve thousand dollars for clothes that would be made by Halston and Adolfo in New York in special colors and fabrics just for her and delivered in time for her trip, or she’d have someone’s head on a platter. Naturally, it was stipulated in her contract that the ganefs at the network paid. No way she’d spend her own money like that.
If anyone had ever tried to convince her, ten years ago, when she was a short, jouncingly plump teenager named Shirley Silverstein, daughter of the owner of the biggest hardware store in tiny Fort John, Rhode Island, that spending nineteen thousand dollars on clothes was hard work, she would have—laughed? No, Maggie reflected, even back then she was ambitious enough to have been able to imagine such a situation and smart enough to understand that it involved a lot of psychic strain to say nothing of what it did to her feet. She just wouldn’t have thought of it in any relation to herself. Even now it hadn’t become routine, although, at twenty-six, she was a television superpower, as tough as—many thought tougher than—Mike Wallace, and a hell of a lot less obvious about it; even prettier than Dan Rather, and blessed with an inborn talent for interviewing as strong in its own way as the talent that makes Beverly Sills sing. She had her own network show in the choicest cut of prime time. For a half hour every weekend more than a good third of the television sets in the United States were tuned in to Maggie as she reported, with the help of a faithful crew who had virtually grown minicams out of their shoulders, the inside news of show business, particularly the film industry; tightly researched, completely authoritative stories, which had nothing in common with the tiny turds of coy gossip that were served up only three years ago to an incurably curious public.
Right now she was just an exhausted female whose Betty Boop-round black eyes had seen so many dresses in the last three hours that they were all jumbled around in her sassy head. But the network insisted that if she reported on show business she had to look as if she belonged in that glamorous world. As she waited for Spider Elliott to come in and tell her which of the outfits she had chosen were absolutely right for her, she looked disarmingly disheveled, her bangs and black hair separating into a dozen cowlicks. She didn’t bother to look in the mirror. Maggie knew that no matter how much money she spent, the only time she looked put together was during the half hour after the studio makeup man and hairdresser had finished with her just before she went on camera.
Spider knocked and Maggie merely answered, “Help!” He came in and shut the door behind him and leaned against the wall of the dressing room, looking at her both quizzically and tenderly.
“Hey, Spidy, did you study leaning from old Fred Astaire movies? Just like you practiced walking and sitting down? Where’s your top hat?” Maggie asked.
“Don’t try to change the subject. I know you. You probably bought stuff you can’t wear and you’re trying to put me on the defensive.”
“You,” she said, enunciating clearly, “are a putz, a schmekel, a schmuck, a schlong, and a shvantz. And a WASP putz, at that.”
“Her ladyship.” Spider kissed her hand. “You’re a class act, kid. I may be just an ex-UCLA beach bum, but I know when I’m being called a prick. So, you have a guilty conscience and I haven’t even seen the clothes? One thing I’ll never understand about women, Maggie—why, when you call a man a prick, is it considered an insult? ‘Eunuch,’ now that would really hurt.”
Maggie made a throaty sound of resignation. She knew already that she’d gone a bit overboard on those evening dresses for Cannes. Spider, that cock-sucker, could read minds, female minds, no question about it. Where did such a gorgeous stud get his gift for women? As Maggie well knew, it was rare in a red-blooded American heterosexual, that quick, instinctive intuition that no system of psychology could explain. And as horny as a whole herd of young goats too.
Spider pressed a button and Maggie’s saleswoman, placid, well-bred Rosel Korman, popped her head in the door.
“Rosel, would you please get Maggie’s new things for us?” Spider asked, with a smile. Spider and Maggie were the best of friends, but she felt a quiver of apprehension as Rosel disappeared. He was such a fucking dictator. On the other
hand, he was always right. She knew already that he wouldn’t let her keep that batwing Bill Blass she loved so much. But no matter what he did to frustrate her, there was a bond between them based on the sweetness of non-possession. They cherished not having had each other because it created a current of continual warmth, which, they both knew, was more important to them than sex. Sex they could, and did, get everywhere. Warmth was rare.
Spider Elliott, at thirty-two, was, in Maggie’s opinion, one of the most attractive men in the world, and she was in the business of observing the mechanics of what makes men and women attractive. Her shrewd, measuring eyes were trained to miss nothing of the workings of seduction; if a performer is not also a seducer of some sort or another, he or she will never become a star. Certain obvious things were in Spider’s favor, she thought. The All-American Golden Boy with a great body never goes out of style. And he had the hair, the naturally blond hair that had turned a darker, richer, more streaky gold as he grew up. And he had the eyes, Viking eyes, as blue as if they reflected nothing but the sea. They squinched almost closed when he smiled, as he had at Rosel, and the semisunburst of lines at the corner of each eye deepened, making him look merry and wise, as if he’d been somewhere very far away and had many a good tale to tell. He even had that nose, broken in some long-forgotten high-school football game, and a tiny chip in one front tooth, which lent an agreeable toughness to his face. But basically, Maggie decided, it was Spider’s very special knack for moving through a woman’s mind, trading easily in her idiom, speaking directly to her, cutting across the barriers of masculinity and femininity without any of the warping caused by fag bullshit that did the trick. He had a passionate absorption with the sensuous secrets of raw femaleness, which drew him naturally into the center stage of the erotic-narcissistic atmosphere that reigned at Scruples, as essential a masculine counterpoint as a pasha in his harem. And no matter how cunt-happy he was, he was never unprofessional. If the men of Bevely Hills, La Jolla, or Santa Barbara had guessed of Spider’s underground reputation as a dedicated, world-class cocksman, spread through impeccably firsthand reports, they might not have paid their women’s staggering Scruples’ bills with such good-humored resignation.