Scruples

by Judith Krantz

  “You cunt, you bastard cunt! You know he’s determined to leave me if there’s any more mess—and my babies—he’ll get them—oh, Christ, how could anyone do this—It’s all over—over.” She was racked by loss.

  “Don’t be absurd. Harry Brown was raping you and Ben Lowell saved you, possibly saved your life. Look at the way Brown beat you up, hit you, choked you. Your husband is terribly upset. You know how much he loves you. Hell be here tomorrow.”

  “Vito—?”

  “The television-news camera crew will be here tomorrow, too. They will want to interview you, of course-perhaps we should go over the story you told me yesterday. Mary, look alive! I know you’ve been through a nightmare but you’re not usually a slow study.”

  She smiled as she washed the blood off her battered face. “You’re a smart little swine, Vito. Right! Read me my part.”

  The incredible ratings of the show “Who Was Harry Brown and Did Ben Lowell Murder Him?” which preempted two half-hour situation comedies, told the network news chief that he had stumbled on a gold mine. There was a huge audience out there, addicted to television and hooked on celebrities. They could wallow in the pop-cultural peepshow of Maggie’s program, feeling virtuously well informed about the doings of the world, without having to actually time in to Washington Week in Review. The news chief had as little trouble talking Maggie into signing a contract for a weekly show as Maggie had had in getting him to send the camera crew to Mexico. They both knew a ripe thing when they smelled it The only surprise was how good a thing it was. More than good. It was majestic. A new genre of television had been born: the movie magazine dressed in the superior style of the news documentary. A new media star had been born: Maggie MacGregor. There were only two losers along the way, Harry Brown, still bitterly, secretly mourned by Ben Lowell, and Vito’s picture, Slow Boat. Even with the enormous publicity it received it didn’t do well. By the time it was released, the Mexican episode had long since dimmed in the public consciousness. Nobody cared, really. And besides, Vito had been right about it. It was a dog.

  Billy Ikehorn was restless. It had been five months since Scruples had reopened and in this April of 1977 she had become accustomed to its raging, tearing success. Nice for Spider and Valentine, she thought, gratefully and fondly. However, in the small hours of the morning, for lately she had again been waking up before dawn, the thought of the triumph of Scruples was not enough. She had retained too much of her basic honesty to avoid the realization that now that Scruples was no longer a festering disgrace, now that no one would ever snicker about it, the daily details of running a store were not enough to fill her life. She even took for granted the bimonthly dancing parties, which had first captured her imagination as a form of victory over her hideous memories of dancing school, now that they had turned into California’s most anticipated social events. As for the shifting sands of the supposed “A” list and “B” list, it was too silly to take seriously, reminding her of the politics of the sandbox. Her life at the moment felt as confining as the house she had visited with Ellis in Antigua where all the windows were hermetically sealed so that the salt air of the marvelous night breeze didn’t spoil the millions of dollars’ worth of French Impressionist paintings on the walls.

  Billy was almost six months away from her thirty-fifth birthday. She had just barely attained the prime of a beauty that would last for many years; she was rich beyond even her ability to comprehend the extent of her wealth—and she was bored. Disgusting, she thought to herself, imagining what her late Aunt Cornelia would think if she knew. She, Billy, found it more than disgusting; she found it immoral and humiliating. Immoral because anyone with all that she had should, must, be happy, and humiliating because obviously she was not, so the fault must lie in her nature. Probably a lack of inner resources, she thought wryly, remembering the Boston code. Undoubtedly, a life devoted to good works, large dogs, and weekly attendance at the symphony would have left her enriched and fulfilled.

  The entire world was available to her she observed, as she flipped over the pages of Architectural Digest. For three hundred thousand dollars she could own an air-conditioned pavilion in Bali, built in a coconut grove next to the ocean, with a swimming pool of course. In Eleuthera there was a house for sale that had twelve hundred feet of pink sand beach and a private overseas telephone system—all for less than three million dollars, furnished. (Did the list of private phone numbers come with the furniture?) Or, if she preferred something less tropical, she could live in England at Number 7, Royal Crescent, Bath, for no more than seventy-five thousand pounds, owning a house that had been built in 1770 as part of the most splendid example of Georgian architecture in the world, and which now possessed a sauna and a five-car garage. If she chose, she could adopt the life-style of someone like Bunny Mellon with four fabulous homes, two full-time interior decorators, everything from her tennis hats to her ball gowns to her servants’ uniforms designed especially for her by Givenchy. They said she kept apples boiling at all times on the stoves of her one hundred thousand-acre Virginia estate to perfume the air with an authentic farm aroma. Such precious attention to detail made Billy’s teeth hurt. Too much!

  She could have anything in the world she wanted. Just name it. She couldn’t—that was the problem. She didn’t want another house. She still maintained a plane, a new Learjet now, but only Valentine and the other buyers used it for their trips. The St. Helena vineyard made a substantial profit and there was no reason to sell it. Perhaps a horse? Adopt a baby? A pet mouse? Obviously there was something wrong with her. Billy decided to accept Susan Arvey’s invitation to go to the Cannes Film Festival. She couldn’t think of a good reason not to.

  Susan Arvey was the wife of Curt Arvey, head of the Arvey Film Studio. She was not a particularly interesting woman, but Billy felt comfortable with her, primarily because she never showed any of the sycophantic delight in Billy’s every word that so many other women did. She had gone beyond the nervously enlightened largesse of the new rich to the taking-for-granted of good things, which made her company fairly relaxing. As the wife of a studio head, she was a divinity in a community where Billy Ikehorn, rich as she was, was merely a curiosity. She was an accomplished hostess, clever enough to hide her pretentiousness. Most important of all, Billy, like everyone else, had always been fascinated with the world of the movies. As a miserable teen-ager she lived for Saturday matinees. During the years of Ellis’s sickness, the projection room of the Bel Air mansion had become a refuge from reality. But Billy knew few movie people, although she lived in the midst of them. She would never admit it, but they did have a certain—intriguing quality.

  The Arveys always spent the two weeks of the Festival at the Hôtel du Cap, at Cap d’Antibes, which is a good three-quarters-of-an-hour drive along twisting roads from Cannes itself. No one who stayed there did so for the sake of convenience. The symbolism of staying at the Hôtel du Cap was profound. It meant that you expected people to come to you rather than your going to them, an enormously important point to score in the business. It meant that you could afford to set yourself apart, out of the hurly-burly, holding court in your own artfully remote and tranquil space, rather than fighting like a member of the common herd to secure a table at the bar of the Carlton or the Majestic. It also meant that you could afford to pay two to four hundred dollars a day for a suite, with taxes and tips and breakfast and all sorts of unexpected, cunning additions on top of the basic rate. The Arveys always took two suites, one for Curt to do business in, one to sleep in.

  “Billy, do come with us,” Susan had said a month ago. “Curt is busy shaking and baking all day long—I have nothing to do but wander around by myself. I always rent a car and driver and go all over the Côte—it’s heaven in May—and then, at night, we’ll all go for a big late dinner somewhere, with a mixed bag of amusing people. It’s great fun if you manage to stay out of Cannes—it would be so much more fun if you’d come and keep me company. Anyway, you’ve been in southern California
too long. It’s time you got away. Scruples can struggle along without you for a few weeks—we could stop in Paris on the way back—do come!”

  “Don’t you have to go to see films every night?” Billy asked curiously.

  “Heavens, no! Well—I suppose some people do, of course—but Curt can see anything he’s interested in at a private screening. He just asks for a print.” Susan was always amazed at the people who thought that one went to the Cannes Film Festival to see movies. If you had a film in competition you had to show up, but otherwise—goodness, what a bizarre idea.

  No one at all in the film business has a good word to say about the Cannes Film Festival. Yet nobody stays away. It is an indispensable trade fair, the commercial aspects of which drown out almost entirely the artistic window dressing. More deals are made at the Festival than anyone can count. Perhaps one in ten, or one in twenty, comes to fruition. It is not a place for the purely creative people of the film world. Directors and writers and actors are scarce, seen there only if they are involved in films that are being shown in competition before the jury and, even then, only if they have been strong-armed by their producers. Any actor or actress who is at Cannes without a good reason is a frank publicity seeker.

  But all the agents and producers and distributors and public-relations people and advertising people and business-affairs people are there, from Egypt to Japan, from Canada to India, from France to Israel, muttering to each other the ritualistic words that attempt to indicate they are above this unutterably vulgar rat race, even as they compose the rat race itself. The hookers of the world are there, male and female. The world press is there. And so are the movie critics, who even go to the films, along with the townspeople of Cannes and people so unpreoccupied with buying and selling films that they have time to actually watch them.

  Vito Orsini was also there, squeezing out some sales of the foreign rights to his Mexican dog and trying to drum up some financing for a new book he had discovered. Vito now had behind him three pictures in a row that had not shown a profit. Yet, in a world in which public reputations live on endlessly, he was still a very important producer. Only a few men knew exactly how empty Vito’s bank account was, even fewer knew how much he owed. They were the very men from whom he hoped to find new financing. In the eyes of everyone else at the Festival, Vito’s reputation was that of a brilliant producer with an impressive record of success.

  Even those who knew the precise truth about Vito did not count him out. Many a producer before him had had a streak of bad luck and then come up with a winner, a box-office success that had enriched everyone who had a part of the profits, Movie making, more than most businesses, survives on taking enormous chances, on eternal optimism. Even the hard-eyed business-affairs men, armed with pages and pages of figures, couldn’t last long in the industry if they didn’t occasionally say yes to a new idea, instead of no. Studios and their distribution companies, as well as independent distributors, survive only if they have a product to sell. But that product, by its very nature, is unknown, an unproven element, until it has been made. And then, for good or for bad, the money has been spent. No one can guarantee, in advance, which picture will make money, which will not.

  Vito was still very much in the ball game—not to the extent that he could stay at the Hôtel du Cap but surely to the degree that a small suite at the Majestic was a necessity. A sitting room was imperative. He could hardly do business sitting on beds. And the Majestic had a certain dignity, a certain class that the Carlton, the center of the frenzy, lacked. It was fractionally more expensive, but, on the other hand, every inch of the impressive lobby had not been rented to film companies, as it was at the Carlton, where you couldn’t push from the door to the bar without winding your way through a crowded maze of decorated booths from which publicity pamphlets for dozens of pictures were thrust at you. Was the crowd in the lobby of the Carlton more like a convention of camel drivers or rug merchants, Vito wondered, or more like a gathering of international crooks or international cops? It was impossible to tell from the faces, impossible to tell from the polyglot babble. He understood perfectly why everyone in that lobby seemed to be looking past everyone else: They were looking either for people who owed money to them or for people to whom they owed money in order to avoid them.

  Vito’s suite looked out on a crescent of beach beyond the Croisette. At twilight, with the sun setting behind the spars and sails of the boats anchored at the far end, where the old port still thrived, it was one of the most indisputably romantic spots on earth. He stood on his balcony and thought about money.

  To be at Cannes, at Festival time, with a winner behind you is one of the most intoxicatingly delightful experiences known to man. He had known many such seasons, years when a dozen different distributors lined up patiently next to his table at the bar, like men waiting to cut in on a debutante, for their chance to propose their deals to him. His time would come again, he reflected, but not this particular year.

  He left the balcony and started to change for dinner. Curt Arvey had asked him to join his party at Pavilion Eden Roc, the restaurant of the Hôtel du Cap, reached from the hotel by a splendid, long, wide path through a vast fragrant gardenlike park in which many birds sang.

  Eden Roc is most noted for the hotel’s swimming pool, a nasty misshapen bit of 1920s concrete buried in a great rock formation on the edge of the water, which, for some reason, had once been a symbol of the gilded life. No self-respecting citizen of any country would entrust his body to the strangely dubious-looking water of that miserable pool, although many sunbathe there. However, the Pavillon, a highly rated, elaborate restaurant next to the pool, still attracted crowds.

  Vito was sure that Arvey must have asked him to dinner in order to function as an extra man. There was no love lost between the two of them. Arvey had made money with Vito in the past, but his studio had partly financed two of Vito’s last three pictures, and although they had perhaps recovered their investments, they had not made any profits according to their bookkeeping departments. Vito suspected that, although the studio claimed they had barely broken even, they were hiding profits somewhere, but he could prove nothing. Much as he disliked Arvey, he had accepted the invitation. At Festival time any casual meeting can lead to something.

  Or, as Doris Day would sing, que sera, sera. Vito felt very Italian tonight.

  Susan Arvey, had she been a man of mildly criminal disposition, would have made a fine pimp. But her marked predilections toward bringing a man and a woman together for sexual purposes with financial advantages did not include introducing Vito Orsini to Billy Ikehorn. She had indeed found a number of wives for men who didn’t clearly understand that they needed them as well as she did, but in her conventional mind the girl must be in search of the protection, the wealth, and the security of the male.

  She had given a lot of thought to Billy Ikehorn. It would be her crowning achievement to marry her off—but to whom? What could a man offer Billy? Her future husband must be a man who was so clearly above marrying for any consideration other than true love that it baffled even Susan’s inventiveness. On the political side, she would consider nothing less than a senator or a governor from a large state. She had hopes of Jerry Brown, but he and Billy had not hit it off. In the film business there was absolutely no one. All the major studio heads were taken or had sworn never to marry again. And, unless they happened to own a great deal of stock in their company, like her own husband, they weren’t financially secure enough to suit her. President Carter was married. And Billy was taller than he was anyway. Royalty? Not in Cannes. The invitation to come to Cannes had been extended because Billy was nice. Susan was very proud of the fact that she thought Billy was nice. So many women didn’t, quite obviously, in her opinion, because they found Billy overwhelming. They were envious of her. It was delicious not to have to be envious of Billy Ikehorn—it proved to Susan exactly how high she stood in the world. She felt very pleased with her warm heart. Susan’s heart was warm only for a
tiny group of people she thought good enough to deserve it. Lesser folk she treated like friends she had dropped years ago but still felt faint pity for, mingled with vague suspicion.

  Like most practiced hostesses, Susan Arvey liked her guests to feel honored by each other’s presence. This demanded that they be familiar with each other’s outstanding achievements. If one of her guests owned a giant savings and loan company and was as unknown to the general public as a shoe-repair man, Susan simply worked his savings and loan company into the introduction. She was so adept at this that hardly anyone was aware of what she was doing, but the subliminal impression was made. Not just a superior pimp but a great P.R. person existed in Susan Arvey. Many guests, of course, didn’t need explanation. They were the most satisfactory. She certainly didn’t have to tag a phrase of identification onto either Billy Ikehorn or Vito Orsini.

  Tonight Susan had invited fourteen guests, all meeting first to have a drink in one of the Arvey’s suites before going on to the Pavilion. It was not at all one of her more illustrious gatherings, in fact, frankly, rather a mediocre crew, but at Festival time you took what was available. In other circumstances, Susan wouldn’t have invited Vito until he had a new hit picture, but she needed an extra man, and Curt had suggested him.

  For the first half of the cocktail hour, Susan was so busy putting a little high gloss on everyone’s reputation that it was a while before she realized that Vito Orsini seemed determined to monopolize Billy Ikehorn. They weren’t circulating. It wouldn’t do, not at all. As she herded her guests down the walk from the hotel to the restaurant, Susan found time to whisper to Billy that it was too bad that Vito Orsini’s last three pictures hadn’t made money.

  “So he told me,” said Billy. “Amazing, isn’t it? The taste level of the world is lower than low. I loved every one of them. I think he’s a genius—almost a Bergman. You have put me next to him at dinner, haven’t you?”