Scruples (49 page)

That first morning at Scruples she bought enough new clothes to carry her through the next six weeks of television. Rosel Korman, who was to become her permanent salesperson, bumped into Spider, who was busy giving instructions to the window dresser he had imported from Bloomingdale’s. Elated with the amount of her sale, she gave him the news.

“Has anything been fitted yet?” he asked.

“No, she’s taking them with her.”

“What dressing room is she in?”

“Number seven.”

“Rosel, bring back everything to the room, please, everything she picked. Don’t wrap anything, OK?” The saleswoman’s look of astonishment was wasted on Spider’s back.

Spider knocked on the door of Maggie’s room. “Are you decent?”

“For the moment, yes.”

“I’m Spider Elliot, Miss MacGregor, director of Scruples.”

“Hail and farewell, Spider,” Maggie said, surveying him with keen interest. Physical appeal in the male had long ago ceased to automatically impress her, but she was always enough of a woman to hear an inaudible fanfare as this tall, marvelously made man smiled at her from the doorway.

“I adore this place,” she added, “but I’ve got to get to work, and as fast as I can.”

“Then we’ll do this as quickly as possible,” answered Spider, as the heavily burdened saleswoman and a stock girl, both carrying Maggie’s eight thousand dollars’ worth of garments, came in through the open door.

“Do what? And why aren’t my things packed up already? All you have to do is put them on hangers in plastic bags, damn it!”

“I have a policy that none of our customers should be sold anything that doesn’t do justice to her—it’s part of the Scruples approach.” Spider was winging it. He had been visited by a flash of inspiration as soon as he heard the name Maggie MacGregor, whom he had long considered to be the worst-dressed woman in public life. He still wasn’t sure where this was going to take him, but he knew he was on the track of something. The chaise and the chairs in the room were rapidly being covered with a crazy quilt of brilliant fabrics and glitter as Rosel and her helper spread out Maggie’s clothes. It was the season immediately after Yves Saint Laurent had unleashed his rich Russian fantasies, and everything Maggie had bought reflected Seventh Avenue’s adaptations of the look. She had picked the most richly encrusted, elaborately detailed examples she could find. Catherine the Great would have felt at home in her new clothes. So would Mae West. The room now looked like an explosion in the costume department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Since when has the age of Big Brother come to retailing?” Maggie said furiously. “Nobody tells me what I can or can’t buy.” She was as taken aback as she was angry. Like many powerful people who have come to their power recently, she was fiercely protective of her rights and privileges. Anything that seemed to return her to any past dependency on the rest of the world was a threat Spider ignored her words and circled around her, eyeing her like an object he might photograph. There wasn’t more than a little over five feet of her, he thought, and probably one hundred and fifteen pounds, at least fifteen of which was bosom. Angles—none. Volume—in abundance. His eyes narrowed, his nostrils quivered like a hound dog’s on the scent, he seemed to be talking to himself, but Maggie heard every word.

“Yeah—yeah—it’s all there. Tall she’s not, doesn’t have to be, no bones showing, that’s all right too if—tits, yeah,
great
, shoulders terrific—cute neck, too short but cute—soft—sexy—eyes gorgeous, skin gorgeous, waistline—never mind—we can fake it—hips—hips—not as difficult as the boobs—it’s quality raw material, just needs—needs—”

“Needs
what
, for God’s sake?”

“Needs bringing out, needs a new way to be displayed,” he said, still to himself. He turned swiftly to the saleswoman, “Rosel, bring us everything you have in an elegant eight that’s slender, simple, and soft.” As she scurried off, Spider turned back to Maggie, who was hesitating between fury and fascination. Like most people, she was willing to stand still for any amount of verbal dissection as long as she was the focus of attention. Spider finally stopped his detailed inspection of her body and looked her directly in the eyes, a look that combined intimacy and intensity without a hint of flirtation or sell.

“It boils down to a question of self-image, Maggie. You dress wrong because in your mind’s eye you see yourself incorrectly.”

“Wrong? Incorrectly?”

“Look, I’ll lay it out for you. It’s a question of perspective.” Spider took Maggie by the shoulders and turned her around so that the two of them were reflected together in the large triple mirror.

“Now look very carefully, as if you were looking at a big picture. With someone next to you in the mirror you can get an idea of how you
really
look compared with other people. When any of us look in the mirror alone, we all tend to concentrate on the parts, not the whole. Now, pay attention, Maggie. What’s the first thing you see?” She was silent, unable to answer. “Small, right?” Spider responded to his own question. “Super feminine right down to the bone. Rounded, rounded, petite, female. That’s what we’ve got to play with. Everybody should be so lucky. But you have never accepted the reality of what you actually look like. The clothes you buy would take a Margaux Hemingway to wear properly. Now watch, I’ll show you what I mean.”

Spider took a sumptuous gypsy dress in a gold lamé from a chair and held it up in front of her. “See, you’ve just drowned, disappeared.” Rosel had just come back with a heap of dresses piled over her arm. Spider grabbed a Holly Harp crepe from among them and draped it so that the unadorned, supple, flowing red fabric fell from Maggie’s shoulders. “All right! Now you’re back in the picture. Now we see the essence of you, pretty Maggie MacGregor, small, soft, pretty, female Maggie—a real live girl. We’re free to focus on your eyes and your skin, not the dress.”

“But that gypsy look is the new thing!” Maggie complained. “Crepe has been around for years—don’t you read
Vogue?”
she said plaintively.

“You must never try to follow fashion, Maggie,” Spider said severely. “You simply don’t have the height—you’re seven inches short of it—and you don’t have the right kind of body. It’s a swell body for a lot of things—but it can’t carry important clothes. You have one best look and I’ll help you to find it. Then it’s up to you to be consistent, to stick with it. Fashion exists
only
to be adapted to you. The Maggie-ness of Maggie is what you should be looking for every time you buy something. Ask yourself, ‘Am I still there or have I vanished?’ Think thin, think soft, think simple, think easy, with the emphasis on your eyes and your skin. That way you won’t ever get lost.”

Maggie felt like weeping. Not because she was disappointed about the gaudy heap of costume party clothes, which she now understood were all out of the question, but because Spider was taking such a serious interest in her
self
, in the Maggie who was a woman, not just a television star, the Maggie who had always been smart enough to have a suspicion, a disturbingly insecure inkling that maybe she didn’t know fuck-all about clothes, the Maggie whom everyone flattered and to whom no one told the straight truth about the way she looked.

“Do you have any idea how much I resent finding out that I’m wrong?” she asked Spider, in tacit surrender. He didn’t let his exultance show. This was the first time he had ever verbalized his hazy ideas about fashion.

As a photographer, Spider had always worked with fashion editors who picked their models carefully so that the dress and the girl were equally enhanced. Valentine had spoiled him for the taste of ordinary women by the wit and authority with which she wore clothes. Suddenly he realized that very few women he had ever seen in normal life really dressed to make the most of whatever aspect of their physical selves was especially attractive. Very probably, he thought, they didn’t even know what it was. Back in the days—only weeks ago—when models used to tell Spider their troubles, he had often been amused and puzzled that the very thing he found beautiful in a girl—her wide, big-toothed smile, for example—was often the thing she most deplored, the thing she envied other women for not having. Was there ever a woman who could say “I want to look exactly, precisely like me, no one else?” He doubted it. Maggie never knew that she was the very first Galatea to Spider Elliott’s Pygmalion, the first in a line of hundreds.

Maggie didn’t learn the term “star fucker” at the Columbia School of Journalism. During her first year at
Cosmopolitan
, while she was still Bobbie Ashley’s secretary, she heard it only on one or two occasions. Although
Cosmo
is dedicated, among other things, to the celebration of more and better sexuality, its editors, given their clue by Helen Gurley Brown, retain an almost dainty purity of phrase. As Mrs. Brown once put it, “You can say anything you want to so long as you say it like a lady.”

Star fucker
. It means so many things. It can mean the taxi driver who keeps a mental list of every hapless celebrity who ever hailed his cab or the hairdresser who gives a perfunctory comb-out to his regular customer while telling her of the marvels he performed yesterday for a television-game-show regular. It reaches from the office of the powerful multimillionaire whose walls are covered with photographs of himself standing next to a series of politicians, to the exercise teacher who lingers on the tense upper-back muscles of a minor movie actress while dozens of angry civilian women wait impatiently for his attention.

Star fucking is something millions of Americans do, in a minor key, every time they buy a movie magazine or an issue of
People
, every time they listen to Miss Rona or watch Dinah or Merv, every time they read a syndicated gossip column or society column. It is, generally speaking, a harmless way of sprinkling yourself with a glint of Stardust, of gratifying, for a second, the need to feel in the know.

But, to Maggie MacGregor, after eight months of writing her celebrity interviews for
Cosmo
, star fucker meant fucking stars, in the most direct possible way: sexual intercourse with famous actors.

It started mildly enough. Her third assignment, the first one in which a man was the subject, called for her to spend several days following Pershing Andrews around New York. He was a young movie name who had recently broken into major success through one of those twelve-hour prime-time television dramatizations of popular novels. Since Maggie had interviewed only women before, she had no way of knowing that talking to male celebrities would touch on a deep vein of shyness that she had had no suspicion she possessed. Suddenly, in spite of the armor provided by her notebook and her pile of sharpened pencils and her tape recorder, in spite of the protected position conferred by her magazine connection, she began to wonder if she was looking as well as she possibly could during the interview. She had to constantly fight the fear that her questions might be considered a sexual come-on. Although Pershing Andrews seemed to be at ease with her, the interview felt—and sounded—like a strangely awkward blind date. She was getting only routine answers to her questions without the well of female-to-female understanding to fall back on. Maggie suddenly understood that there is a very difficult line to draw between being a journalist out to get a good piece and being a woman; asking a man she has just met aggressive, decidedly overintimate questions, the kind of questions she had to ask to get the answers that made good copy. It didn’t help at all that she was only twenty-three, with a tiny, lush body, droll, round, dark eyes, and smooth, rosy skin. To get the kind of story she wanted, to feel free enough of her body to wade into her subject’s psyche with both feet, Maggie thought she should look like Lauren Bacall, not as she used to be, but as she is now. Or, better still, Lillian Hellman.

Even before the Pershing Andrews interview Maggie had smelled out the essential fact that stars basically hate, fear, and despise the press to the precise degree that they know they need the press. And the press is both star-struck and simultaneously half-disparaging, half-contemptuous. While members of the press are free to vent their ambiguous feelings in their writing, the stars must conceal their feelings behind a mask. With male journalists the mask is that of good-fellowship; with female journalists it often takes the form of seductiveness; verbal seductiveness always and actual seduction far more often than the public imagines.

Pershing Andrews was followed everywhere not by just Maggie but also by a public-relations man who had been assigned to him during his entire visit to New York. This is standard procedure for all but the most established, most stubborn stars: Talent agencies are determined to protect their investments by gluing a sheep-dog chaperon to every piece of talent they possess for fear of what the talent might say or do if left alone. The presence of a cautious press agent virtually guarantees a hopelessly dull interview, but better dull than controversial or foolish, the talent agency feels. They so distrust the actors and actresses they represent that they are literally terrified of what a smart reporter might find out if left alone with them. The talent agency people are usually right.

After Maggie had spent the first two days of her time with Andrews and his press agent, receiving only stiff, dull answers to her leading questions, she began to devise a plan to create enough collusion between them so that she might persuade Andrews to sneak away from his keeper. At Sardi’s, while the press agent took a quick leak, Maggie struck.