Scruples (51 page)

Maggie’s first intimation that common wisdom about movie producers might sometimes be faulty came when she laid eyes on Vito Orsini. In some ways he looked the part. The custom-tailored Brioni suit, the obviously Italian haircut, the Bulgari watch, the highly polished thin leather shoes. But where was the little fat man with the cigar? Where was the little balding man with the funny accent? She’d expected Vito Orsini to look Italian but not like a noble Caesar. She brightened considerably.

“Welcome to Rome, Miss MacGregor.” What’s more, he spoke English without an accent and did a neat hand kiss.

“My goodness,” said Maggie, who made a specialty out of deliberately gauche remarks, “I thought you’d be a lot older.”

“Thirty-eight,” said Vito, favoring her with a smile that indicated clearly that even if she was deliciously young, he was not yet old. His smile came
through
his eyes, not just from them, his nose had a proconsular boldness, and his coloring was bronze all over. His presence radiated a kind of flash. He had the physical authority of a great orchestra conductor.

“Tell me,” said Maggie, still in her most naïve manner, “what is it exactly that a movie producer does?” She had decided that ignorance was not just sensible in this case but downright appropriate—it might provoke him into making some comment for which he would be everlastingly sorry. Those were always the best interviews.

“Thank God you asked,” Vito said. “You’ve no idea how many people have interviewed me without knowing precisely—or even vaguely—what I do. They’re too lazy to bother to find out. I’m going to tell you all. But not now—I have to be at the studio in fifteen minutes. Could you possibly have dinner with me tonight? We could talk then.”

Like taking candy from a baby, thought Maggie, nodding agreement.

“I’ll pick you up at eight and take you to one of my favorite places. Meanwhile, remember that the Gucci shop here is just as expensive as the one in New York, so don’t go crazy.”

Movie producers who survive inevitably develop a high degree of ESP.

That evening, at the Hostaria dell’ Orso, Maggie didn’t need her bag of interviewer’s tricks: the ability to go for the jugular, to ask just the wrong question to get the right answer, to give just enough of her own self to disarm suspicion, to be neither too deferential nor too cozy. All she needed to do was listen. Vito hadn’t stopped talking for three hours and he had, so he insisted, only scratched the surface.

“Please, Vito, I can’t take any more. I’m out of tape, I have writer’s cramp, I know more than any reasonable human being would want to read.”

“I keep doing that to people. Well, you should never have asked. Nobody warned you about me, eh?”

“Nobody told me anything. Just said, get on a plane and talk to you.”

“Why don’t we go back to my hotel and talk about you.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

From Vito, Maggie learned what had been bothering her about star fucking. It wasn’t making love. Vito Orsini was a great romantic. When she went to bed with him, Maggie suddenly understood that she was the star of this particular production. She learned, for the first time, that her large breasts and voluptuous bottom were a stupendous plus when they weren’t being regarded in comparison to the American ideal. She learned that there existed a famous man who did not think that he was doing her a favor by letting her get acquainted with his cock. There was in the first night, and all the following nights she spent with Vito, none of that feeling she used to unconsciously ignore in her star-fucking episodes, an intimation of being an inferior who was allowed a short peek into the way the better people live. Vito cured her, once and for all, of what he called her “upstairs maid” complex in which she shone only in borrowed fame.

Maggie stayed two weeks in Rome in that warm early fall of 1974, sending cables to the office every three days that she was having trouble with the Orsini interview because he was too busy to see her. Everyone back at Cosmo understood perfectly. They all knew about Italian movie producers. Impossible people. Maggie and Vito became loving friends, fellow conspirators in an unnamed sense against an unnamed force, sincere appreciates of each other’s body and mind. Maggie wondered, from time to time, whether this encounter, like the others she had had, would come to nothing once the article was researched, but gradually she learned to trust Vito. They would not always be lovers, but they would always be friends.

Vito let Maggie sit in on all his conferences, listen to all his phone calls, follow him around on the set, watch dailies with him. By the end of two weeks she knew more about the mechanics and business aspects of movie production than almost anyone writing on film in the United States, knowledge that stood her in good stead when she got her television show. But that was almost six months in the future, six months during which Maggie wrote five more movie-star profiles and found out that she didn’t need to fuck a star to write about him. In fact, the ability to keep her distance became one of her most powerful weapons. Only when she stopped needing to be loved, even if only for a night, was she able to see movie personalities clearly, put them in absolute focus. Her interviews lost the faint flavor, so common in such writing, of revealing more about how the reporter feels about the star than about the star himself. Rereading her first profiles, she felt sick at the opportunities lost for devastatingly truthful reporting because of the memory of just another pretty face bending over her.

In the spring of 1975, six months after Maggie had said good-bye to Vito in Rome, she learned that he was producing a new picture,
Slow Boat
, on location in Mexico. The star, Ben Lowell, was one of the five leading male box-office attractions in the United States, a specialist in strong, stalwart roles, admired as much by men as by women. The female lead was being played by a brilliant, notorious English actress, Mary Hanes, who had a reputation as a devil in bed and the possessor of the foulest, funniest mouth in what was left of the British Empire.

Maggie persuaded her bosses at
Cosmo
that the time was right to interview Ben Lowell, that most all-American of performers in an age in which all-American boys were getting scarce on the scene. Her real reason for going to the Mexican location, infamous for its heat, discomfort, and bad food, was, of course, to see Vito again.

Maggie was the only member of the press to brave the location. Joe Hyams, Jane Howard, Laura Cunningham, and a dozen less important writers had all politely declined the invitation to suffer through a long trip in a chartered plane to a decayed fishing village on the coast, attractive only for its dependably calm sea and its authentic tropical sordidness. There were other, more agreeable invitations. Always.

Vito embraced Maggie as she stumbled out of the small plane on the badly kept landing strip.

“How’s the picture?” murmured Maggie even before she said hello.

“A dog.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I smell blood in the water.”

“What does that mean?”

“I can’t tell you exactly—many reasons, but so far I only know some of them,” answered Vito. “But I smell it, Maggie, I’m positive.”

After a day on the set, just watching and taking mental notes, as she usually did when beginning an interview, Maggie was more baffled than she had ever been since she started writing. She was accustomed to the deliberate pace of movie making, but on the set of
Slow Boat
there was an air of tension that she had never felt before. She found herself getting an anxiety attack just from hanging around, and Maggie had learned to dissociate herself from the normal temper flare-ups of a set since, in a way, they were all grist to her mill, just as a reporter doesn’t feel personally involved in a traffic accident he is covering.

She was staying in the room next to Vito’s in the motel, the best of the three mangy motels in the town, all of which had been rented to house the actors and crew. They were built to accommodate the California deep-sea-fishing buffs and private plane pilots who were the only non-Mexicans who usually came to this remote spot.

Vito and Maggie had had dinner together at the commissary set up for the entire company. The local food was a one-way ticket to gastroenteritis and all the film company’s needs were taken care of by California cooks cooking California style. The supplies were flown in from San Diego, the nearest large city, even though it was six hundred air miles away. The company doctor had also been imported, from Mexico City, since there were none in this flyspeck of a village.

Back at the motel, Maggie changed into a robe, went to Vito’s room, and snuggled into bed with him.

“Vito, if I didn’t love you, I’d go home tomorrow, Ben Lowell or no Ben Lowell. But I do love you—very dearly—so tell me, what the fuck is going on here and why is the light and life of the Via Veneto in this place. Can you even call it a place?”

“Maggie, did you ever hear the old saying that when a fish begins to stink, it starts at the head? This project started to go wrong from day one. I allowed myself to be persuaded to set a start date even though I knew the screenplay wasn’t right. One of the majors is putting up the money—a bunch of fucking banditti—and they insist on having the picture for a Christmas release. So we had to find sun and sea—otherwise no picture. It’s raining everywhere in the world but here and Saudi Arabia, excuse the expression. Also it’s the only time Ben Lowell and Mary Hanes are free—if I don’t use them now I don’t get another crack at them together for two years. So it was now or never—I let myself be stampeded. It’s not the first time I’ve ever had this happen, but the other times we squeaked through. But, this time it’s unreal, incredible—my screenwriter is so sick he can’t do anything but throw up and shit; I think he must have gone out for tacos. My favorite gaffer broke his leg and we had to fly him back to L.A., the generator has already gone out ten times during night shooting, the script girl is deaf, blind, or both—I had to hire her at the last minute when my regular girl got married on me—I could go on but why bother?” It was the first time that Maggie had ever seen Vito drained of the optimistic air he always maintained in the midst of crisis.

“But, Vito, you’re talking about details. How are the dailies?” He made a marvelously Latin gesture that indicated hope and despair in equal parts.

“So maybe it’s gonna all be worth it?” Maggie felt a great need to cheer him up. She didn’t want to mention the peculiar tension on the set, since he hadn’t brought it up; perhaps, she thought, it’s a result of all the accidents.

“It had better be.” Vito said this in such a pale voice that Maggie was startled.

“So if it’s not? It won’t be the end of the world. Canby, even John Simon, liked the one with Moreau and Belmondo. Your last two pictures got fantastic reviews—”

“They did
niènte
at the box office.
Bubkes
. Nothing. If I ever see profits, the Pope will get married. Like everyone else, you still think good reviews automatically mean money. Only in New York maybe—”

“Oh.” Maggie was conscious of a great feeling of shocked surprise. The openhanded, on-top-of-the-world way Vito lived, the way he shaped his life, had led her to believe that he had endless resources. She had never stopped to consider that a producer’s fee is the only thing he is sure of when he undertakes a film, and that he is dependent on
profits
for his real reward. “I simply can’t understand it,” she said finally.

“Maggie, how many pictures make a profit?”

“Well, my God, lots and lots—otherwise why would they keep making them?”

“One in four
. Don’t you remember what I tried to teach you in Rome? Only twenty-five percent of all the pictures made show a profit, but that twenty-five percent make so much money that they keep the studios going.”

“But your producer’s fees—you get them up front, even if the picture doesn’t make a profit.”

“It depends,” he said as wryly as if he were tasting foul medicine. “As it happens, on my last film and on this one too, it was so difficult to get financing that I deferred my fees until we show profits. The Belmondo film went down the toilet, I’m in hock, Maggie.”

In hock. She looked at him, magnificent in his silk pajamas and monogrammed silk robe.

“I never knew.”

“No one ever does. It’s a secret of the producers union. We’re all gamblers—worse than playing the horses. That’s why we don’t really have a union—we’re afraid someone might tell.”

“Oh, Vito! My darling. It’s going to be all right. With Ben Lowell and Mary Hanes—you can’t lose. All that animal sex up there on the screen—between them they’re the six sexiest people in the world. Everyone’s dying to see a really good love story. Vito, I know this is going to be a smash.” Maggie wrapped her arms around him as tightly as she could.

“From your mouth to God’s ear,” Vito answered, using the favorite expression of Maggie’s mother.

Within a half hour Maggie was too sick with tourista to do anything but flee to her room. She hadn’t touched anything but commissary food. Still, Mexico. There was another casualty within the twenty-four hours she spent in misery, one that couldn’t be cured by Lomotil. That night a handsome, young actor, Harry Brown, Ben Lowell’s stand-in, tripped over a garbage can in the dark alley behind the motel and fell. He hit his head on a piece of broken concrete in such a way that he was knocked unconscious and bled to death before he was discovered. While the company doctor was making out the death certificate, Ben Lowell talked to Vito.