Blue Movie (16 page)

The gist of the agreement was that the citizens of Liechtenstein would not be permitted to see (or
“be exposed to”
as the document read) the film, except by special dispensation from the Church, to be granted under only the most extraordinary circumstances. In this way were they to be protected against any influence the film might have on them, corruptive or otherwise—though at no loss, certainly, to the massive influx of tourist dollars, pounds, marks, and francs they hoped to attract. On the contrary, it was deemed, by the hot-shot West German publicity team which had been engaged, that this curious (perhaps unique) national “restriction” would garner “a million dollars’ worth of wire-service releases,” and would “psychologically enhance the taboo-potential of the film tenfold—a definite
plus,
motivation-wise.”

The relationship between the film company and the heads of the Church—or specifically, the aging Cardinal von Kopf—had been tenuous and delicate from the beginning. A thin and hawklike man, one of those scions of Austrian aristocracy, he had showed extreme annoyance when he learned about the hookers-in-the-hearse episode. Not that he was a particularly superstitious man, but rather that his notion of impropriety was fairly rigid. Also, by unfortunate mischance, three days later, he himself had occasion to engage the vehicle-like the ambulance, the only one in Vaduz—for use in the burial of his mother.

“Still warm from the heat of their vile writhing bodies!” he had bitterly complained, and swore moreover that the “fetid stench of musk and tallow yet hangs heavy in the air, like the
shroud
itself!” A proud and eccentric man, he had secretly sworn vengeance against the film company, and above all “against the gross Leviathan,” by which he presumably meant a certain grand guy, Sid K. Krassman.

To date, however, his only effective interference had been in denying them the use of two sixteenth-century chateaux which Morty and Lips had located, and which happened to belong to the Church.

“He’s anti-Semitic,” said Morty, “the lousy wop cocksucker!”

“He
ain’t no wop,” said Lips.

“He’s a
Catholic,
ain’t he? And he sure ain’t no
mick!”

“Yeah, but he ain’t no
wop
either—he’s some kind of
kraut.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Mort wisely, “well, if he’s
Catholic
and he ain’t no
mick,
then in
my
book he’s a fucking
wop!”

“Wait a minute—maybe he’s a
Nazi,
for Chrissake!”

This notion excited Mort “That’s
it!
He’s a lousy Catholic kraut
Nazi!
You may of put your finger right on it, Lips!” He grabbed the phone. “We’ll get Sid to check it out!”

Another thing which had enticed the ire of the Cardinal was a piece of information, or misinformation as it proved to be, that he had received on the very first day of filming. As it happened, two of his parishioners, a middle-aged couple who owned a restaurant in town, had the catering concession for the film company, preparing breakfast and lunch for them from a makeshift lunchwagon, and maintaining the urns of hot tea and coffee which were available throughout the day. While they were not allowed on the set itself, they did, of course, have occasion to see the principals—namely, Arabella and Pamela Dickensen—when they passed near the lunchwagon. They did not see them for the first time, however, until
after
their magical make-up job—and so the good couple, understandably, failed to recognize the famous movie stars, and saw them instead (as they later reported to the Cardinal) as “two girls of the region . . . girls who could not possibly be more than fifteen or sixteen years old.”

Naturally, this had not gone down too well with the Card—who went straight to the Prince and lodged the strongest sort of complaint, which ultimately put him in the embarrassing position of having treated hearsay as fact. And for this, too, he blamed Sid, and the others—but mostly Sid.

A
S THE MYSTERY
of night is followed, generally speaking, by glorious morning, so the dark-eyed Arabella departed Vaduz only an hour before the arrival of the golden Angela Sterling, and seventeen pieces of luggage.

Boris met her with the big chauffeured Merk, while Lips Malone, driving a Citroen station wagon, took care of the luggage.

“Gosh, I just can’t
wait
to see the script!” Angela said excitedly. “From what you and Mr. Krassman told me in Hollywood, it seems so . . .
daring!

“Well, uh, yes, we like to think so. At least, it’s. . .
different.”

“Oh, of course! My goodness, what Boris Adrian picture isn’t?!?”

“Tony Sanders is working on it, too—you know him, don’t you?”

“Oh yes, he’s simply wonderful—he wrote one of
my
pictures. It got all sorts of awards. . .” Then she sighed and gave Boris her brave little-match-girl smile, renowned throughout the world, “. . .none of them, of course, for ‘Best Actress.’”

In a blue miniskirt that matched her eyes and lay halfway up milk-white thighs almost the color of her teeth, she was quite adorable. Boris returned her smile, reached out and squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry, Angie,” he said seriously, “I think you may have better luck this time. It’s a very serious film.”

“Oh I know, I know,” she exclaimed happily, “and I simply can’t tell you how much I appreciate the opportunity.” She pressed his hand between both of hers, resting in her lap—which, in the twelve-inch-above-knee skirt, was comprised of her two bare thighs, backed up briefly by Pucci panties. Like alabaster, thought Boris, visualizing them against the pink satin sheets and entwining around thrusting black buttocks—at the same time was quite surprised to feel along the side of his hand she held in her lap how very warm and soft they were. . . not like alabaster at all.

In New York, on the morning Angela received the cable from Boris saying they were ready to shoot her sequence, the first thing she had done was rush to Actors Workshop to tell her guru, Hans Heming, the wonderful news.

A passionate, bearlike man of Hungarian extraction, he and his extraordinary teaching techniques were at once the scandal and the salvation of the industry, the center of a perennial storm of controversy among students and professionals of both stage and screen. For every person who considered him an opportunistic charlatan—and there were many—could be found another who thought he was a genius, in fact, a messiah. In any case, two things were incontestable: his Workshop was credited with having produced at least a dozen of the most celebrated actors in the profession; and secondly, his influence on them, and others, was profound. Angela Sterling was in this latter category; although the world’s highest-paid star and top box-office attraction, she remained completely unproven as an actress. In fact, there were those who not only insisted that she was without a trace of talent, but went so far as to use her in their denunciation of Hans Heming—citing his professed interest in her as the final proof of his cynical deceptions and his artistic spuriousness. For his own part, he maintained that in Angela Sterling he could see purity and essence—something untrammeled, untouched. “A
blank
page, perhaps,” as he was fond of saying, “but a page of
vellum.”

And she, in turn, idolized him to an almost fanatical degree.

“Isn’t it just too
wonderful!”
she exclaimed through joyous tears, when she showed him the cable.

“I am so glad for you, kitten,” he said, hugging her to him. “Boris Adrian is a great artist—it is the break we’ve been waiting for.”

“Oh I know, I know, I know,” she sobbed ecstatically.

Then he held her at arm’s length, and fixed her with a somber gaze. “A word of caution. What about the studio—you’re under contract, aren’t you? And your agent? What if they are against it?”

She seemed astonished. “But why on earth should they be against it? They know this is what I’ve been working for. . . what we’ve all been working for—the chance to do something. . .
creative—
the chance to work in a. . .
serious film—the
chance to work with a
great director . . .
isn’t it?”

His face darkened slightly. “Ah yes, but this picture . . . there are rumors . . . they say it is a . . .
strange
picture.”

“But
all
of his pictures are strange, aren’t they?”

He shrugged. “This one, perhaps more than the others. You understand, I only say this to caution you that the others—the studio, your agent—may try to dissuade you from it. You must be prepared for that, you must be prepared to resist their dissuasion.”

She looked at him in amazement. “Are you
kidding?
You think I’d let them? You think I’d stand still for that?” In her eyes now was a glint of hardness and resolve. “This is the break I’ve been waiting for, right?”

He smiled sadly. “Yes, my dear kitten, it is indeed—but you must remember that the most cruel and ironic tragedy of life is our inability to do
what
must be done
when
it must be done . . . instead, we are like the reed, tossed about on the waves of chance.”

Angela shook her head gravely. “Uh-uh, not
this
chickie—I’m not leaving
anything
to chance. Not anymore.”

He nodded benignly, releasing her and lowering his hands; then he placed one on her shoulder. With his large face and sad solemnity, he resembled a kindly Benedictine monk about to bless her. “Good,” he intoned, “I think my kitten is growing up.”

“You bet your sweet ass I am,” she agreed. “My bags have been packed for a month.”

T
HE CONTRACT BETWEEN
the government of Liechtenstein and Gray Eminence Films (the corporate name which Metropolitan was using for the picture) stipulated that “all principal photography” was to be done inside the country. This had been interpreted, much to the dismay of Boris and Sid, as including “second-unit” work as well. In short, instead of being able to send a small crew and camera to Tangiers to shoot exterior footage of the Casbah—mostly long or aerial shots—they were obliged, or so it had first appeared, to design and construct an entire village. It had soon become obvious however, that this sort of Cecil B. DeMille operation was not going to be feasible within their time and budget limitations—due mainly to the quality of the materials available and the inexperience of the local artisans. An exterior set used in anything more revealing than a medium shot almost invariably betrays itself as back-lot construction. It was a challenge even the ingenious Nicky could not rise to—beyond a few convincing facades, stone steps, and brief stretches of cobbled street—so that it seemed the all-important Casbah-sequence was in danger of being dropped from the script.

It was producer S. K. Krassman, however, who again saved the day—by dispatching Morty, Lips, and Nicky to London, Paris, and Rome, respectively—from whence they returned with six minutes of beautiful color footage, gleaned from a recent travel documentary.

“But will it
match?”
Lazlo demanded of Sid.

“Match
what,
for Chrissake—we haven’t started shooting yet! Just make sure
you
match
it,
schmuck!”

So now they had the establishing shot—a beautiful aerial view of the Casbah, and a slow zoom in on one particular street, then on one particular building, and finally, one particular window. It was a simple matter for Nicky to re-create the street, the facade, and the window; so it would not be discernible where the travelogue stopped and the hot stuff began—to the untrained eye, natch.

“H
ANS SENDS HIS LOVE,”
Angela was saying, across the candlelit dining table at La Marmite, Vaduz’s
in
Frenchie restaurant—it being, again like the hearse, the only one in town.

Boris smiled. “He’s a great man,” he said, matter-of-factly, “a great man.”

Angela sighed. “That’s what he says about
you.”
She put her head to one side and gazed at the candle flame with her wistful little-girl look. “I hope somebody will say that about
me
sometime.”

Boris laughed. “That you’re a great
man?
Not likely.”

She raised her eyes, and her brave smile. “That I’m a great actress,” she beseeched him, “. . . or not even great, but just
good
—instead of, you know,” she looked away from him, and her voice trailed off, “what they say instead . . .”

“What, that you’re a great piece of ass?”

Boris had a manner of speaking, whereby he could say something quite disarmingly personal to an almost total stranger without causing offense; it was the use of a tone which reflected a simultaneous detachment and concern, with no hint of lasciviousness, morbidity, or put-on. It had the ultimate effect of establishing an illusion of intimacy, in record-breaking time, to be followed, of course, by a profound trust—and it was this which enabled him not only to deploy actors like the proverbial pawns in a game, but to get from them even more than was in them to give.

“Is that what they say?” she asked after looking at him for a moment, but asking it softly and dropping her eyes again, knowing, of course, it was true.

“What do
you
think they say?”

She shrugged. “Something like that, I guess.”

Boris smiled at her, and spoke with gentle deliberation: “Angie . . .
they all want to fuck you.
You understand that, don’t you? All the men and boys in the world want to fuck Angela Sterling.”

She looked at him, a cold, slow hatred coming into her eyes before she spoke. “That’s the image I want to
change.”

“Yes, I realize that, and we
will
change it. But I need to know how it feels to be
you.
Don’t you see, it’s a fantastic thing, the pure phenomenon of it—boys in bathrooms, soldiers in all the armies of the world, prisoners of every country, all in their bunks at night, masturbating, thinking of
you,
having wet dreams about
you . . .
men making love to their wives, their girl friends, to whores, pretending it’s
you.
You know how they have those statistics—like there’s a murder in the world every eight seconds, that sort of thing—well, there’s probably not
one second
passes, day or night, that there isn’t a
gallon of sperm
discharged in your honor. Spurted out with your insides as the target! Isn’t that incredible? Don’t you
feel
all that collective desire? All the guys in the world wanting to fuck you? I mean, wow, the vibrations must be
fantastic.”