Scruples Two (12 page)

The first public screening of
The WASP
took place on a night in late April of 1979. Susan Arvey had made a print of the picture available for a gala preview for the Women’s Guild of St. John’s Hospital, at five hundred dollars a ticket. This annual fund-raising event traditionally consisted of a black-tie dinner followed by a preview of a yet-unreleased and unreviewed, but major picture. The dinner had been a quick sell-out since everyone who had read the book, which included everyone who still read current fiction, had been itching to see the movie, the filming of which had taken place with a tight lid on publicity that only made them more curious.

After the evening had ended, as Susan Arvey settled down to remove her makeup, she found that she was still humming the music from the picture. She unpinned her long, naturally blond hair, which had been arranged in the smooth, elegantly prim chignon that was her trademark in a town of full, tinted, teased, sprayed hair, and inspected herself carefully in the mirror, as meticulously as she did after she’d finished dressing, for she held herself to a standard that decreed that her makeup be as impeccable when she returned as when she left home. She was not disappointed, nor had she expected to be, although she would never fail to double-check her immaculate prettiness, a prettiness so complete that it made many genuine beauties seem unfinished and raw. Her features were small and dainty and perfectly sculptured, set in a delicately rounded baby face, a legacy from her mother, an actress from Minnesota whose Swedish ancestors had made her one of the few genuine blondes ever to reach Hollywood.

At forty, Susan Arvey looked like a woman whose thirty-fifth birthday lay somewhere in the future, but her mental processes and her thirst for power were inherited directly from her father, Joe Farber, once a redoubtable leader of the film industry. Susan was Joe Farber’s only child, born to his second wife when he was in his late fifties. Her parents had brought her up to the ermine and the purple, her father imparting lore of the golden days of Hollywood to her while she was still a small child, her mother, hastily retired from an undistinguished career, watching exactingly over her chick to ensure that she made full use of her advantages. Susan had been taught to run a house with the fastidiousness of the Duchess of Windsor, she had been groomed to marry well, marry young, and, above all, not to marry “a piece of talent.”

At nineteen she had accepted Curt Arvey, son of a studio owner and an established, rising executive of thirty-three in his father’s business. Joe Farber had approved. Now, twenty-one years later, Susan had long been in possession of all the necessary traits and equipment for dominance in Hollywood society. She was one of the industry’s most accomplished and feared social leaders. The coveted invitation to her black-tie dinner parties, at which she casually used her mother’s huge collection of priceless Chinese export porcelain, placed a couple within a circle that made up, in Hollywood, the equivalent of a regal court. Thereafter the favored couple lived on the point of a sword, for Susan was capable of making intimates of them and then, after years of friendship, dropping them without their ever knowing why. In point of fact, she didn’t need any good reason for her actions, except to prove once again that she could exercise an authority that she was prevented from using openly at her husband’s studio.

Did any of the women at tonight’s benefit realize that although she could produce a print of
The WASP
at will, her ability to influence her husband’s business decisions was severely limited? Susan wondered as she continued to check herself in the mirror. After Billy Ikehorn she was the best-dressed woman in Los Angeles; she possessed the most respected backhand on any tennis court in Bel Air, and she owned one of the finest collections of first-rate French Impressionists on either coast, yet she knew herself as an unfulfilled woman as she turned from side to side to study her delicate profile.

Her days were full. Every morning she had a seven o’clock tennis lesson. At eight-fifteen she took her shower, and by nine-thirty, after she’d skimmed the
L.A. Times
and the
New York Times
, she and her social secretary began two hours of phone work, steadily calling the women with whom she lunched, planned charity galas, and dined. Afternoons were devoted to shopping for new clothes for these lunches, balls and dinners, for fitting the clothes she’d already bought, and for a strenuous daily two-hour workout in her private gym, followed by a massage.

Yet in spite of this life in which not a minute was solitary or unemployed, Susan Arvey lived with constant frustration, for her birthright had been a giant appetite for business ascendancy that had been thwarted, not just by her gender but by her father. By the time she had reached the age of twenty-six, both Joe Farber and his wife were dead. She had inherited a vast fortune, but it had been left in a trust so constructed that it was unbreakable. Her trustees had invested a good portion of her inheritance in the studio her husband had now taken over from his father, and when Curt Arvey took his company public, Susan found herself her husband’s largest stockholder. However, all meaningful, heavy-duty muscle in the film business had been denied her because her father hadn’t trusted her to manage her own money. Only through the unsatisfying proxy of marriage could she try to impose herself on the doings of the studio, an influence that at best could never give her a position of equality.

As Susan brushed her hair she couldn’t keep from brooding on this permanent grievance, the galling, infuriating, thwarting prohibition of a lifetime, an impotence for which there was no cure. As the mere wife of the boss, not the boss herself, she was forced to sugar-coat her demands, indeed to stifle all but the most important of them. If she hadn’t been married to Curt, her stock would have guaranteed her a recognized, major position in the studio’s policymaking. However, if she wished to stay successfully united to a man as stubborn and prickly as Curt, it was necessary to restrain herself, to stay within certain well-marked boundaries, for he could take umbrage even at her most tactful interventions. Yet divorce was not an option, even if she had wanted one, for a stable marriage is essential to a woman who intends to continue to rule within the film community.

Although Curt had now far surpassed her father’s financial success, Susan often reminded herself, with an inward sniff that it was only in today’s devalued dollars, her father’s money had been made when you could keep it. The Arveys’ twenty-one-year marriage existed in a state of turbulence. Curt Arvey couldn’t reject out of hand his wife’s deftly disguised reactions to his decisions. Yet, like two soldiers from opposing armies, cast up alone on a desert island, their sniping at each other made for a more distracting and interesting interchange than if they had been making a predictable common cause around a campfire.

During the period that Vito Orsini had been in production of
The WASP
for Curt’s studio, the film had received more than Susan’s usual critical scrutiny. Ever since Vito had practically abducted Billy Ikehorn from her party during the Cannes Film Festival two years ago, she had distrusted him. Even the Orsinis’ divorce, which proved that she had been right all along, hadn’t restored Vito to favor with her. Yes, she’d kept a particularly sharp and authoritative eye on
The WASP
every step of the way.

Now, her hair drawn back from her face, Susan moved around her bathroom, getting ready to go to bed. She was so delighted with the events of the last few hours that she couldn’t resist breaking into a dance step from time to time, still humming the music from the picture in a gleeful monotone. As she settled down and began to remove her makeup, Susan Arvey reviewed the evening against the background of other charity galas. The hotel ballroom dinner had gone as planned; the food had been up to its routinely boring but perfectly edible standard; the service had been deft; the usual women who didn’t know how to dress for a formal screening had outdone themselves in bouffant dresses that overflowed into their neighbors’ laps; the audience had received the picture with a great show of enthusiasm.

Susan herself had been enthralled by the novel from which
The WASP
had been made. When Curt told her of the unheard-of sum he’d been forced to pay for the film rights, she had contented herself with nothing more than a side-to-side motion of her head that indicated he’d been suckered. In truth, she was glad that he was to make the film rather than any rival studio. The storyline of the book wasn’t complex—that was one of the beauties of it, Susan thought as she methodically creamed her face.

The action took place over a period of twenty-five years, beginning in 1948 when the WASP of the title, Josiah Duff Sutherland, entered Princeton. He was a descendant of a wealthy Rhode Island family who numbered Presidents of the United States, senators, and presidents of universities among their ancestors.

Sutherland, a veteran of Korea, fine looking, upright, and virtuous, was possessed of a decent intellect and a charming, gregarious disposition. He became a roommate of Richard Romanos, the great-grandson of the country’s most important and long-established Mafia family, a magnetic figure who had been designated by his proud, powerful father to emerge totally from the Mafia and take a place among the American aristocracy.

Rick Romanos was as witty as he was forceful, and possessed of an intelligence far superior to Sutherland’s. He and Josh instantly became friends, attracted by their differences in personality. Forming a tight pair, they went on to Harvard Law School after graduation, always rooming together, double-dating, sharing everything but the secret of Romanos’s true background. Together they joined an important law firm and together they planned how Josh Sutherland would run for the New York City Council, for Congress, then for the Senate and eventually for the Presidency.

Sutherland married a lovely, suitable girl, Laura Standish, descended from one of the great Charleston families, but Romanos remained a bachelor, the ultimate man about town. In the course of the twenty-five years between graduation from college and Sutherland’s attaining the Presidency, Rick Romanos found himself, against his will, growing more and more envious of his friend’s success, a career that he believed was only possible because Sutherland was a WASP. He became equally envious of his friend’s possession of a perfect wife. With Laura he carried on the kind of casual, aboveboard flirtation that can flourish under a husband’s very nose, if the husband is blind enough to be unthinkingly sure of his wife’s devotion.

Eventually, Romanos set out to betray Sutherland, gradually finding ways to use Mafia money to ensure Sutherland’s elections and reelections, slowly placing him under obligations to Mafia interests, encircling his friend with the Mafia so tightly and secretly that there could be no escape for the politician. When he had accomplished all this, he took Laura away from Sutherland in the course of the election campaign itself.

When Josiah Sutherland woke up on the morning of his inauguration, he was not sure whether his wife would be by his side or not. At the last moment she appeared and stood next to him, but even as he took the oath of office, he did not know the nature of her future relationship with Rick Romanos, who was destined forever to remain his closest associate, nor did he know what would be the first favor his friend would require of him, the first of many favors he would have to repay.

Well, they couldn’t have started out with a better cast, Susan thought, as she gently began to wipe away her discreet eye makeup with an oiled pad. Diane Keaton for the girl had been a perfect choice, physically far better suited to Redford than Dunaway or Fonda, and totally believable as a politician’s well-born wife. Yes, the ordeal of making
The WASP
, the ordeal that had been visited on Vito Orsini, the ordeal she had watched unfold with mounting fascination and pleasure, had begun with a perfect cast.

The first glitch came when the location scouts had bad luck with the Newport “cottage,” the mansion that was to serve as the Sutherlands’ family summer home, and the scene of much of the action. Too many canny, rich Newporters refused to rent their homes to a movie company at any price, and Vito had been forced to settle on an estate that was simply too small. The ballroom and other large sets had had to be built on Hollywood soundstages, but not even an expert could tell when an actor moved from one room in the real house into the next room, built on a set three thousand miles away. He had lost that authentically perfect Newport view, but who among the audience would know the difference? she wondered.

Yet it was there, with the location failure in Newport, that the budget had started to get out of hand, way back there, Susan thought, before a finished script had been delivered. Or rather when the first of the five scripts that were eventually written was still in progress.

Susan paused, one eye made up, one naked, and considered the nature of the four top scriptwriters Vito had approached. Naturally each of them, faced with a completed book, saw a way to tell the story with a shade of difference from the author’s own viewpoint, each had had a series of minor insights of his own that he fought for, insisted on. But no, Vito Orsini would never allow one of them that relatively small amount of creative freedom, that
necessary
amount. His ego growing larger by the day, he had become as protective of the absolute integrity of the book as if he’d written every word of it himself.

True, Susan admitted to herself, after fighting to a point of rupture with four of the top screenwriters in the United States and England, Vito had indeed managed to find an unknown writer who’d made a totally faithful and workable translation from book to script, she couldn’t deny that. Of course, by that time the budget had grown yet larger than expected, but writers weren’t your chief expense on a picture, not when you emerged with a good script on which everyone could agree.

Susan completed the removal of her eye makeup and reached for the bottle of rosewater she had made up for her at a local pharmacy. There was nothing as gentle for removing the thin film of oil that remained on her skin. Now directors, she told herself, looking back in delectation at the suffering that directors had managed to inflict on Vito, directors were, of course, notoriously impossible, far worse than screenwriters. She’d been doubtful when Vito went after Huston, and when that deal had fallen apart, she hadn’t been surprised. The two men weren’t destined to get along, even Curt had agreed with her on that.