The broadbelters, p.18
The Broadbelters, page 18
Then, as if for the first time, they tumbled into bed and made love. And it was good. Very good. Better than she had ever remembered. This was the way it felt, she thought, when you were Number One.
Chapter 9The Celebrity
“YOU’LL HAVE to rent a dog,” Flugelhorn said.
Bonnie stared at him. “What the hell for? I hate dogs.” She shuddered involuntarily. “I’m scared to death of them.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but you’ll need one when the Life team comes out tomorrow to do their close-up on you. A dog’ll give the place a more homey effect.”
“Why?” she countered. “Am I supposed to live in a kennel?” She glanced around the apartment and shrugged. “I don’t know, it looks homey enough to me.”
Flugelhorn shook his head. “No, you need a pet,” he insisted. He extracted a pamphlet from his briefcase. “Now I’ve already spoken to the Rent-a-Dog place, and they say a Yorkshire terrier is very popular with the big feminine stars today. Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Sandra Dee, and Sonny of Sonny and Cher all have Yorkshires.” He consulted the list and his mouth dropped open in awe. “Even Frank Sinatra has one. Well, what do you say?”
Bonnie waved her hand in a vague gesture of indifference. “Why don’t you rent me a couple of kids while you’re at it,” she grumbled. “Oh, all right. Get a Yorkshire.”
“Good.” Flugelhorn put the pamphlet away and took out some mimeographed sheets which he handed Bonnie. “Now here’s something else I want you to do for tomorrow. You’ll have to be prepared in case their reporter gets tricky and starts throwing you questions about the current book scene or the theatre. So to help you out, I got you a copy of Waldo Psudosmith’s Standard List of Knowledgeable Opinions”
“Who’s Waldo Psudosmith?” she asked, scowling at the list.
“He’s a culture expert,” Flugelhorn said. “He tells people what to think about books they haven’t read or plays they haven’t seen so they can discuss them intelligently at cocktail parties. He’s what you might call a one-man crash course in instant hipness.”
Bonnie groaned as she glanced over the list. “My God, look at the names on this thing, will you? ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’—they sound like a Jewish comedy team in the Catskills.”
“Well, don’t let it throw you,” he told her. “Just try to remember the key words I’ve underlined for each author or playwright, and you’ll be all right. For instance, if James Baldwin’s name comes up, say something about the ‘polemicism in his novels’; or if they mention John Updike, talk about the ‘Dutch Calvinist influence’ on his work; or if they get on the subject of black comedy in the theatre, toss them a line about the ‘crackling menace’ in Pinter’s plays vs. the ‘bursts of passionate poetry’ in Ionesco’s.”
“Lots of luck,” Bonnie said. “I’ll be lucky if I can remember my own name after all this.”
“Oh, you’ll do all right. I’m not even worried.” Flugelhorn riffled through the batch of press releases he always carried with him like a second skin and added, “And one other thing. If they ask you what you intend to do after this book, tell them you’re working on a sequel: Return of the Broadbelters or something.”
“Will there really be one?”
“Are you kidding? It’s in your contract,” Flugelhorn laughed. “And the way this book is going over, Shmeer’ll milk it for an eight-volume series, six movies, and a five-year TV serial. In case you don’t know it, owning The Broadbelters is like owning the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Bonnie smiled. “With a little Shmeer in every toll booth.”
Flugelhorn snapped his briefcase shut and looked around the room as if checking it over. His eye roamed proudly over the neat rows of brand new leatherbound classics and bright-jacketed unopened Book-of-the-Month Club selections he had crammed into Bonnie’s once half-empty bookcases, and the superb collection of oils and lithographs, mostly on loan, with which he had covered her living-room walls. There were paintings by Klee, Rouault, Picasso, Miro, Matisse, Braque, Chagall, and even one by Van Gogh, the bold, whirling “Road with Cypresses,” a fake requisitioned by Manny from the United Misalliance property department. “I must admit,” he said finally, with a touch of pride, “the place does have class. That reporter ought to be pretty impressed tomorrow.”
“I hope so. I feel like I’m living in a goddam museum.”
Flugelhorn tucked his briefcase under his arm. “Well, we’d better get moving—it looks like another busy day today. You’ve got an autograph party at Pomo’s Book Store at 11:00; you’re commentating a maternity fashion show at the Fanny Hill Home for Unwed Mothers at 1:00; you’re being interviewed by Kitty Crone on the Tooth and Nail Radio Show at 3:00; and you’re co-hosting the Pal Buddyboy Show tonight.” He waved to her as he went out. “And tomorrow be ready for Life.”
Bonnie screamed when she saw the dog gallop in with Flugelhorn. It was big—big as a bison—and it had a panting, cavernous mouth stuffed with yards of unlovely tongue and teeth. Powerfully built, with a thick coat of black-and-white fur, it stood stiffly at the end of the leash gripped in Flugelhorn’s two white-knuckled hands, looking for all the world as if it should have been out pulling a sled across the tundra.
Bonnie cowered against Manny on the sofa in raw terror and gasped, “Jesus … Oh, my God … what’s that?”
“It’s a malamute,” Flugelhorn said. He smiled sheepishly. “They didn’t have any Yorkshires left so I got you this. His name is Tootles.”
“Tootles!” Bonnie glared at Flugelhorn and her terror swiftly turned to rage. “Get that thing the hell out of here!” she bellowed. “Now! Do you hear me?”
Flugelhorn tried to placate her. “Now take it easy,” he said. “It’s a very fine dog. Jill St. John has one.”
“To hell with Jill St. John!” Bonnie screamed. “Get that mother out of here before I call the S.P.C.A.!”
They heard the doorbell ring.
Bonnie paled as she sat up quickly and smoothed out her dress. “Oh, God, that’s the reporter,” she wailed plaintively. “Now what am I supposed to do?”
“Just forget Tootles is here,” Flugelhorn said, dragging the dog over to an armchair and unleashing him. He stuffed the leash under the seat cushion and sat down on top of it.
“How can you forget a hyena like that?” Manny asked as the dog pranced gracelessly around Flugelhorn’s chair. “Get him to be still, for Crissake.”
“Heel, boy,” Flugelhorn said tentatively. “Heel, fella.” When the dog gave no sign of understanding, Flugelhorn reached out and belted him across the hocks, and the dog promptly flopped down on the rug as though he had truly found a home.
The butler brought in the reporter, a svelte, coolly superconfident English major ten years out of Sarah Lawrence, accompanied by a rumpled photographer. The reporter, who introduced herself as Nancy Skewer, displayed in her mien and speech that finely honed edge of malice of the dedicated female journalist. She took the seat that was offered her as soon as the introductions were finished, Flugelhorn having been presented as an intimate friend of the family, and whipped out a yellow stenographer’s pad. Across the top she scrawled, “A Candid Close-up of the Ehrlichs at Home with Their Press Agent.”
The butler glided in with a tray of drinks and tea sandwiches and disappeared again like an apparition.
“Help yourself,” Manny offered, at which the photographer sprang over to the tray and attacked it with gusto. Miss Skewer, on the other hand, declined with a prim “No thank you,” too preoccupied with her computerlike reading of the room’s decor to brook any distraction. Her penetrating eye alighted on each object in the room and recorded it with an instantaneous, indelible impression: the Scalamandré silk drapes and upholstered sofa, the cushions of antique Greek embroideries, the Bavarian mirror above the Louis XVth commode, the 18th-century Swedish benches, the 17th-century Chinese altar table, the Louis XVIth bergère chair, the antique bouillotte lamp, the Russian icons, the Chinese-lacquer screen, the throw rug made from the skins of Greek jackals.
Finally she pronounced judgment. “You have a lovely home here,” she said grudgingly.
“Oh, thank you,” Bonnie said. “I had some help in furnishing it, but I picked a lot of the things out myself.”
“Really? You have good taste,” Miss Skewer commented, scribbling on her notepad, “The living room faithfully reflects its mistress—patently evident throughout are the discreet imagination, elegant taste, and sophisticated self-expression of the highest-priced decorator in the business.”
“I don’t know how good her taste is,” Manny laughed, “but it sure is expensive.” He pointed to the open terrazzo fireplace with its white Louis XVIth marble mantel. “That thing alone cost me four bucks a square inch.”
“The style,” Miss Skewer noted accordingly, “is Haute Nouveau Riche.” Her gaze returned to the painting above the mantel. “I notice you have quite an impressive art collection,” she said. “That’s a Van Gogh, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and it was a real bargain,” Bonnie answered, turning to Manny with an impish smile. “My husband picked it up in California for next to nothing.”
“How fortunate,” Miss Skewer remarked. “Owners of an impressive art collection (Van Gogh, Picasso, and others), the Ehrlichs are the kind of avid collectors who tend to remember paintings by how much they paid for them.” Her eye traveled to the bookcase and leapfrogged over the titles. “I see you manage to keep up with your reading, Mrs. Ehrlich,” she observed in a smirky voice. “How did you like James Baldwin’s new novel?”
Bonnie glanced at Flugelhorn who shook his head faintly from side to side. “I didn’t like it,” she answered quickly. “I thought it was … ummm … banal in construction and content and lacking in … uh … credible characters with real problems.” She saw Flugelhorn’s lips form a P, and she added offhandedly, “Of course I’ve always found his fiction marred by too much polemicism.”
Miss Skewer looked staggered. “I’m afraid I have to agree with you,” she said. “Mrs. Ehrlich is surprisingly familiar with the works of our serious contemporary artists,” she wrote, appending after a moment, “although her opinions seem to have a vaguely secondhand ring.”
At this point the dog, who had been lying peaceably until now gnawing on the cabriole leg of Flugelhorn’s chair, suddenly leaped up and began clambering over the photographer’s legs in an effort to wrest a tea sandwich from him. Miss Skewer looked down with wry amusement as Flugelhorn, enticing the dog with a deviled ham and watercress sandwich, managed to bribe him into submission again. “That’s a malamute, isn’t it?” she asked. “I seem to remember Jill St. John having one when we did a close-up on her. What’s his name?”
Bonnie and Flugelhorn answered together.
“Doodles,” Bonnie said.
“Tootles,” Flugelhorn said.
Miss Skewer looked from one to the other in mild confusion.
Bonnie laughed good-naturedly at her own mistake. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me—his name is Tootles,” she said. Then she added, “Doodles is our Yorkshire terrier. She’s at the vet’s.”
“As the title of her book suggests, Mrs. Ehrlich is none too good with names. Understandably, she has trouble remembering the names of her two pet dogs: Tootles (a malamute) and Doodles (a Yorkshire terrier).” Miss Skewer read over her notes hurriedly. “Goodness,” she exclaimed, glancing at her watch, “We’ve spent all this time on preliminaries and we haven’t said one word about The Broadbelters. My editor will kilime.”
Bonnie smiled, unabashedly pleased both at the prospect of Miss Skewer getting “killed” and at the mention of The Broadbelters. What a relief it was to be approaching safe territory after so much perilous treading in the minefield of strange topics. “Fire away,” she said agreeably.
Miss Skewer turned to a fresh page of her notepad. “Suppose you begin by telling me how you came to write The Broadbelters in the first place.”
Bonnie sighed, almost as if clicking on some internal tape recorder, and went into her routine, spinning out her spool of lines with an electronic ease and precision achieved in countless such interviews. She began by relating her experiences as a struggling young actress in Hollywood who had supported herself by waiting on tables in the studio commissary. Any reference to her stint at “Auto-Erotica” was, of course, studiously avoided; but she larded her story with as many cute—and promotable—anecdotes as possible. (“My screen test was one of the most expensive in the studio’s history. I did it without a brassiere, and one of the grips got so excited he fell off a scaffold and broke his collarbone and twenty-five hundred dollars worth of equipment.”) As Bonnie retold it, her acting career became not the dismal failure it had been but rather a pearly strand of minor but nonetheless brilliant performances. She embellished her achievements by claiming she had won the “most curvaceous bit player, male or female” award five years in a row. That this title had been conferred on her solely by Flugelhorn, no other performer ever having won it before or since, was a fact that invariably escaped the attention of all the reporters who dutifully parroted it to the public.
Even when Miss Skewer raised some of the touchier questions concerning The Broadbelters’ success, Bonnie was glibly prepared. “Isn’t it true,” Miss Skewer wanted to know, “that you were helped rather considerably with the writing of your novel?”
“No more so than any of Mr. Shmeer’s other authors,” Bonnie countered. “I was simply very fortunate in finding a publisher with such a marvelous editorial staff.”
“Aside from editorial assistance,” Miss Skewer demanded, “didn’t someone help you write the book?” A venomous smile puckered her upper lip. “To put it bluntly, Mrs. Ehrlich, there’s a nasty rumor going around that you hired a ghostwriter.”
“Absolute nonsense!” Bonnie snapped. “That’s just what I call ‘literary envy.’ Every time an unknown lady author comes along and writes a smash hit, everyone accuses her of ‘having help’ with it because they never heard of her before. Well, what they don’t know is that I’ve been writing for years: one-act plays, short stories, even poetry—haiku’s my favorite—all exciting, terribly original things I just never bothered getting published.”
“How interesting,” Miss Skewer said as she observed on her notepad, “Although previously unpublished, Mrs. Ehrlich bravely shoulders full responsibility for The Broadbelters by claiming to have written it herself.” Then she asked, “What about the unfavorable critical reaction to the book. Did it bother you?”
“Certainly not,” Bonnie said. “Why should I care what the critics say? As Disraeli put it, ‘You know who the critics are? They’re the men who have failed in literature and art.’ ” She grinned wickedly at Miss Skewer. “In my own phrase”—Flugelhorn’s really—“they’re like capons at a chicken orgy.”
Miss Skewer permitted herself an amused sniff and continued, “And how do you feel about the charge that your book is nothing more than ‘a vulgar triumph of promotion?’ ”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Bonnie said tersely, “I’d much rather have a vulgar success than a dignified failure.” (Another Flugelhorn original.)
And so it went, Bonnie neatly parrying each of Miss Skewer’s vicious lunges and coming back at her opponent with a telling riposte. Did the hostility of the people she’d scandalized in the book upset her, Miss Skewer wanted to know? No, Bonnie told her, because the people she’d written about were all characters she’d made up, and if the shoe fit anyone living it was because of their own clay feet. How, Miss Skewer asked, making a last-ditch effort, could Bonnie reconcile her notoriously permissive views on sex with a happy marriage? Here Bonnie grasped Manny’s hand in hers and smiled fondly at him. “To paraphrase Bertrand Russell,” she said—Flugelhorn leaned heavily on Russell for lively quotations—“ ‘marriage achieves dignity only by the freedom of the partners to cherish other relationships.’ It’s precisely because of my permissive views on sex that my husband and I have such a successful and enduring marriage.” She leaned toward Manny and kissed him tenderly on the lips. “Right, darling?”
This was too much for the photographer. He jumped up and recorded the kiss with a flash of his camera. “Beautiful!” he exclaimed as he reloaded the camera and took several more shots of Bonnie and Manny in fond connubial poses. The dog, meanwhile, had begun to growl ominously, following the photographer’s movements with wary, narrowed eyes. He seemed to bear the photographer a grudge for not sharing his tea sandwiches, and considered any of his actions suspect.
Distracted by the dog’s growling, Bonnie missed the next question. “I’m awfully sorry,” she said. “Would you repeat that?”
“I said,” Miss Skewer iterated, “after this book, what do you plan to do next?”
A glimpse of the dog’s teeth, now bared in menace as the photographer crouched before the bookcase for a shot, threw Bonnie off the track for a moment. “Why, I … uh … I’m looking forward to appearing in the movie.” As soon as she said the words she realized her mistake. Something buckled inside her and she felt uncomfortably exposed. Now why the hell did I say that, she asked herself.
Miss Skewer sniffed the scent of a scoop hanging in the air. “Has United Misalliance signed you?” she asked.
Bonnie shot an anxious glance at Flugelhorn. He shook his head ever so slightly up and down and with his thumb and forefinger made a gesture to indicate something very tiny. “Yes, they have,” she answered. “It’s only a small role”—she looked at Flugelhorn’s fingers again—“a bit part, actually, but it should be lots of fun.”
“Yes, I’m sure it will be,” Miss Skewer said. “Mrs. Ehrlich assured us that acting in the morie version of her book would be ‘lots of fun,’ ” she wrote, “but she failed to specify whether she meant for herself or the audience.” She looked up at Bonnie. “Could you tell me how much you’re getting paid for the part?”
