I'll Take Manhattan (64 page)

In the momentary wait before the presentation of the Oscar for Best Picture, that pause during which Oscar fever reaches its height, while the presenters walk out of the wings and downstage to read the list of nominations, Vito Orsini began to sweat. What if Maggie MacGregor’s information had been wrong? What if
Mirrors
hadn’t won Best Picture? Jesus—he’d have to buy the rights to
The WASP
come what may, according to the terms of his bet with Curt Arvey. But what the hell. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. Right or wrong he had to have that book. It had been written for him to produce. He knew it
.

Billy Orsini, squeezing his hand tightly, had no such last-minute panic. Dolly Moon had called her first thing that morning, unable to hold back the good news. But Billy hadn’t wanted to tell Vito because she suspected he might feel that in some way it diminished the Oscar he was about to get if he knew the secret of the envelope had been revealed before the actual presentation. Nor would she tell him that she was pregnant until tomorrow, when the glory of this night was less fresh. The news, for bambino-loving but childless Vito, would upstage whatever industry recognition he could ever be given. And as she felt Vito’s hand tense more firmly than ever over her own, she told herself to be honest. She, Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop Ikehorn Orsini, did not have the faintest intention of sharing the particular spotlight of glorious maternity with any little gold-plated statuette that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in its infinite wisdom, might ever bestow
.

B
illy woke reluctantly from a dream of such happiness that she tried to cling to it as long as possible. She was running in the dream, running effortlessly up a circular flight of steps that led to a platform at the top of a tower from which, she knew even as she ran, she would see a radiant springtime woodland leading to the adventure of a beckoning turquoise sea. She opened her eyes with a sigh and waited for the emotion of the dream to fade, but all the joy stayed with her.

Blissfully disoriented, confused even as to the date and place, she dreamily consulted the high ceiling until memory floated back. She was in her own bed in her own house in California. It was 1978. Last night Vito had won the Oscar for Best Picture and Dolly Moon, her dearest friend, had won for Best Supporting Actress. Four hours later Dolly had, with dispatch and composure, given birth to a magnificent baby girl. She and Vito, with Lester Weinstock, Dolly’s publicist, had skipped the post-Oscar party and waited at the hospital together. Then they had all returned here, to celebrate with scrambled eggs, English muffins, and champagne. Billy remembered cooking the eggs and she had a clear vision of Vito opening champagne, but after that everything blurred into a haze of toasts and laughter. Perhaps both men were in bed with her? A quick peek revealed that she was alone and on Vito’s side of the bed the covers were thrown back.

Yawning, stretching, groaning with pleasure, Billy eased herself cautiously upright. Her bedside clock told her that it was past noon, but she didn’t feel at all guilty. If a woman couldn’t sleep late after enduring the many nervous tensions of yesterday, when could she? Especially in her condition, her incredible condition, her excessively interesting, newly discovered condition that was still a secret. But now the time had come to make her announcement. She heard Vito’s voice on the phone in the sitting room next to their bedroom. Good, that meant she could throw some
water on her face and brush her teeth before he realized that she was awake. As Billy brushed her hair, dismissing as always the bugle call of her insistent beauty, even she couldn’t fail to notice the fresh color of her skin, the brightness of her smoky eyes, the electricity of her deep-brown hair. She looked ten years younger than her thirty-five years. It must be hormones, she thought, up to their notorious tricks.

When she emerged from the bathroom Vito was still on the phone, so Billy was inspired to take a quick shower. From the instant she told Vito about this baby, he’d be so excited, so thrilled, so blind to distraction that everything else would be put on hold for hours of talking and planning, so she might as well grab this opportunity. A few minutes later, still damp from her hurried shower, barefoot and dancing in eagerness, Billy threw on a peignoir made of almost-transparent crepe de chine and flung open the door to the sitting room.

In quick, reflex confusion, she stepped back into the bedroom. What the devil was Vito’s secretary, Janet Miller, doing sitting on Billy’s favorite chair in her very own, very private and off-limits sitting room, murmuring discreetly into Billy’s private phone whose cord Janet had dragged over from Billy’s desk? Neither Vito nor Janet had noticed her, so absorbed were they in their separate conversations. Billy shrugged out of her indiscreet peignoir and put on slippers and a robe made of heavy toweling, feeling her waking mood dim just slightly around the edges.

“Good morning,” she said to Janet and Vito. Janet made an apologetic grimace and continued talking. Vito looked up quickly, waved, smiled, blew her an abstracted kiss, and continued listening intently.

“Yes, Mr. Arvey, Mr. Orsini will take your call as soon as he gets off the other phone,” Billy heard Janet say. “Yes, I know how long you’ve been waiting; would you rather he called you back? No, I can’t say exactly when, that’s the problem.
We
don’t have a switchboard here, and the phone hasn’t stopped ringing all morning. Mr. Orsini hasn’t even had time to dress to go to his office. It shouldn’t be long now, Mr. Arvey, but this phone doesn’t have a hold button. Yes, I know that’s ridiculous but I’m on Mrs. Orsini’s private phone.”

Billy scribbled a question mark on a piece of memo paper and thrust it at Vito. He shook his head at her and pointed toward Janet.

“Who’s he talking to?” Billy asked.

“Lew Wasserman, about
The WASP
,” Janet answered, putting her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. The two women looked at each other in mutual congratulation. The combination of the most important and powerful man in Hollywood and Vito’s cherished new project in which he hoped to star Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson explained everything about Vito’s intensity.

“Great,” Vito said, “that’s great, Lew. Yeah … yeah … uh-huh … I understand your point … Right. Listen, Lew, thanks again for the advice. Breakfast tomorrow morning? You’re on. Seven-thirty? No problem. Good-bye, Lew.” He hung up and gave Billy a quick, violent hug and a brief, hard kiss, triumph and victory making him move twice as quickly as usual. “Sleep okay, darling? No time to talk, I absolutely have to take the other phone and talk to Curt Arvey. That miserable sucker should never have bet me that
Mirrors
wouldn’t win. Now he’s going to shell out the million and a half for the rights to
The WASP
, so it’s the least I can do. I want to make sure he’s closed the deal with that New York literary agent—if ever there was a hot property …” He had picked up Billy’s private phone and was deep in conversation with Arvey while Janet jumped to answer the other phone, which had started ringing the minute Vito put it down.

Billy looked at the two of them and realized that they had forgotten her. Well, her news would wait, she told herself, and she was starving. She all but waltzed down the staircase and corridors of her Tudor mansion, through the great double living rooms and the music room, smiling brilliantly at her three maids as she crossed their busy paths. Two of them had their arms filled with flower arrangements that had just arrived and the third clutched sheaves of telegrams.

In the kitchen Billy’s chef concealed his surprise at the appearance of his employer who normally contacted him on the house intercom. Twice a week they would confer together about menus, but he had never seen Mrs. Orsini in a bathrobe before. He had never seen her in his kitchen before, as far as that went. Billy asked him to send Vito and Janet a platter of club sandwiches and make her a dish she saved for very special moments: three slices of white toast covered thickly with Tiptree’s Little Scarlet strawberry jam and topped by carefully layered slices of very crisp bacon. The combination tasted like sweet and sour Chinese food for infants and was a masterpiece of empty calories.

Sugar, salt, white flour, and animal fat. Billy gloated while she waited in the breakfast room for the bacon to be browned almost to the point of burning. This would be her last hurrah before she began her pregnancy diet, a bravura farewell gesture that could be appreciated only by a woman as compulsive as she was, a woman who knew the value of every calorie she had ingested since the age of eighteen, when she had lost a lifetime accumulation of fat and determined successfully to stay thin forever.

Nothing but melon, broiled tomatoes, and steamed fish tonight, Billy thought, without regret, as she sipped orange juice and considered the scene in her sitting room. This phone marathon couldn’t go on much longer. Presumably it had started hours ago since Vito, an early riser under all circumstances, still hadn’t had time to shave or dress. Soon the calls would taper off, most people would be out to lunch, Janet and Vito would go to his office to handle things more efficiently. Of course there’d be more calls to the house and more flowers and telegrams, but this post-Oscar frenzy couldn’t last more than a few hours. After all, the world had a million really important things to focus on no matter how important this big win was to both of them.

She’d finished her sinful meal without tasting it, Billy realized as she hurried back upstairs to the private part of the house, hoping to hear Vito busy in his own dressing room, expecting to find her sitting room empty. But both Vito and Janet were exactly where she’d left them. “What the hell?” Billy wrote and shoved the paper under Janet’s nose. Janet grimaced in semidesperation and wrote, “He’s talking to Redford—I’m keeping
Nicholson
waiting.”

“Good lord!” Billy said to the air, in a mixture of mystification and exasperation. My God, those actors had perfectly good agents. Why was Vito talking to them directly? Or had they called him? That must be it.
The WASP
had been on the top of the best-seller list for seven months, it was the hit book of the decade, everyone wanted to be involved in it; but such a breakdown in Hollywood protocol was something she’d never heard of before. She’d settled down to listen when Janet waved another note at her.

“Maggie’s on her way here now with a camera crew … a special day-after-Oscar roundup show for tonight’s news. Shouldn’t you dress?”

Billy’s jaw dropped. This was a goddamned invasion of privacy. She’d turned over her house to Vito and his band of workers without a second thought for six weeks of postproduction when it
had been a question of getting
Mirrors
edited and mixed without the studio’s interference. She’d worked eighteen hours a day as a script girl; she’d never complained at the damage her splendid house had sustained during the entire mad and feverish process, but Maggie MacGregor and her gonzo camera crew were something else again. She didn’t give a shit for the fact that Maggie’s weekly television show from Hollywood was, week in and week out, one of the five most widely viewed programs in America. Nor did she care that Maggie had tipped Vito off about winning the Oscar. Maggie was Vito’s friend, not hers, never hers. She and Maggie never met without reinforcing their cordial mistrust. They couldn’t afford to allow themselves to become enemies—the town and the business were too small for that—but they’d never truly trust each other. Her house wasn’t a soundstage, for Christ’s sake, she didn’t want strangers inside it, she’d never allowed a single magazine to photograph it, and Maggie damn well knew that.

For the past three years, from the time she had bought her Holmby Hills estate, on the coveted south side of Sunset Boulevard just beyond Beverly Hills, Billy’s property had been discreetly patroled twenty-four hours a day by armed men with Dobermans; barbed wire fences were concealed in every foot of the thick perimeter hedges of her eleven acres; the entrance to her gatehouse was guarded by two uniformed men who waved away anyone who stopped a car to rubberneck up the driveway. All that security went with being one of the richest women in the world, as sensible and necessary as it was to any boss in organized crime, and now Maggie MacGregor, without so much as a by-your-leave, was thrusting her way in with a camera crew. Why couldn’t Maggie interview Vito in his office?