Blue Movie (18 page)

His “idea,” as it turned out—at least in its most elementary and mechanical aspect—was that the two women, Angela and Louise, dressed as they were in the scene, would reenact it in the Vegas hotel room, exactly the way it was going to appear on the screen, but this time it would be interrupted. The interruption would be a marauding, roughshod Yankee cavalry soldier—dirty and unshaven, straight out of battle, brutish, lusting with pent-up desire, and brandishing a pistol—who would burst into the room, pummel Mom aside, fling the immaculate white-pantalooned daughter onto the bed, and, still wearing his boots, would ravish her voraciously . . . pistol on the pillow, muzzle near her temple to discourage outcry from either Mom or the ravished daughter.

The swashbuckling intruder, of course, was C.D. himself, who, instead of leaping through the window, Errol Flynn style, simply rushed out of the bathroom, where he had been awaiting his cue (“. . . stroll out onto the
verandah
. . .”)

“She ain’t going
anywhere
tonight,” he snarled, as he entered, pointing the pistol at Angela, and shouldering Louise aside, “not before she’s been
fucked half to death!”

Both ladies gasped (as per script) in astonishment.

“Oh, Momma . . .”

“Suh, you wouldn’t . . .” pleaded Louise, then to Angela, “Scarlett, honey, don’t be afraid, ah’m shuah the gentleman will listen to reason . . .”

“Shut up! One more word out of you and I’ll blow your head off!” Then to Angela: “Scarlett? Is that your name?”

Angela lowered her eyes demurely, and replied in a soft voice: “Yessuh, Scarlett . . . Scarlett O’Hara.”

“I’m going to fuck you, Scarlett O’Hara,”
said C.D. tersely, pushing her onto the bed,
“I’m going to fuck you hard and long!”

“Oh please, suh,” Louise beseeched, “that little girl is a
vuhgin!”

“Use the
name,
damn it,” snapped C.D. in a sharp aside, “keep using the
name!”

“Sorry,” said Louise quickly in her normal voice, then resumed: “Ah beg of you, suh, please don’t do it to my little Scarlett! Scarlett is a
vuhgin!”

Meanwhile, C.D. had pulled down the lacy top of the bodice, exposing her breasts.

“Oh please, suh . . .”

“All right, tell your mother what I’m—what this Yankee soldier is doing.”

“Oh Momma . . . the Yankee soljuh is . . . kissing my breast.”

“Not
kissing,
” C.D., fairly hissed.

“Oh Momma, he’s . . . this Yankee soljuh is . . .
sucking
my breast!”

“Suh, ah beg of you . . .” cried Louise very convincingly.

C.D. tore at the pantaloons, not pulling them down, but ripping them open at the crotch, its seam having previously been weakened by snipping a few threads inside.

“Oh Momma, he’s . . . he’s got it
in
me . . . he’s doing it, Momma . . . the Yankee soljuh . . . he’s
fucking
me!”

“Oh suh, ah beg of you . . .”

“Okay,” said C.D. urgently,
“now, now!”

“Oh Momma,” Angela wailed, “he’s making me
come
. . . the Yankee soljuh is making me
come . . .
ah’m goin’ to
faint
. . . oh Momma, he’s
fucking me half to death!”

Louise came in precisely on cue, grand old trooper that she was:

“Oh suh, how
could
you do that to my Scarlett! Ah shall report it to youh captain—”

“Say
it, Louise,” urged C.D., “quick,
say
it!”

“—and tell him,” she hurried, “how
you fucked Scarlett O’Hara! And made her come!”

And as C.D. strove into a frenetic spasm, shouting,
“I’m fucking you, Scarlett! I’m fucking you, Scarlett!”
Louise picked up a Polaroid flash camera from the dresser and popped a pic.

“Hey, wait a minute!” said Angela, bolting upright in the bed, “nobody said anything about
dirty pictures!”

C.D. raised himself on elbow, sighed, reached for a cigar, laughed softly, and reassured her: “Don’t worry, kid, it’s just for my private collection,” then shrugged, tapping the cigar, “. . . besides, who’s ever gonna know it’s you?”

It was true that neither of their faces showed clearly—just enough of Angela’s top-quarter profile to give someone momentary pause when sworn to that it
was,
in fact, the famous star—after which it would be immediately dismissed as another cheap lie . . . like the one told by the drunken Grover Morse.

In other respects, it was quite an arresting shot—portraying, as it did, the torn, lace-edged bodice, pulled down to just beneath the lower half of two superb breasts, and, due to its binding effect, causing them to jut out dramatically, followed by white-ruffled pantalooned-legs wrapped around a bare buttocks raised in thrust, the leverage for which was being achieved by the toehold of a pair of muddy cavalry boots, spurs still intact.

Although the photograph was almost invariably discredited as
not
being of Angela Sterling, it did, for a while, enjoy a certain vogue among the smart fetishist set, the so-called “Boots and Period” crowd.

“You can be honest with me,” said Angela, reaching across the table for Boris’s hand now and giving him her most serious look, “you do know that, don’t you?”

He smiled. In order not to smile quite too much, he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Yes, I know,” he murmured.

“Then tell me . . . do you think I have talent?”

Boris frowned and looked away for a moment. Talking to actors about their narcissism was a drain; it put one in the superior position of the psychiatrist—pointless, except on the set.

“Everyone
has talent,” he said, “it’s just a question of using them”—he caught himself in time—“of
their
using it in the right way, at the right time, and to the right degree. Do you know what I mean?” It seemed she might not have heard.

Angela nodded silently, lowering her eyes, then raised them. “Please tell me something,” she said, making it sound brave. “Which one of my movies did you like best . . . no, I don’t mean that, I mean which one did you think . . . well,
showed
that I could . . . or that I
might
. . .” She broke off, beseeching him with her eyes, “You know what I mean?”

“Uh, yes, well you see, it really isn’t important what I think was best—it’s what
you
think was best, the thing
you
felt most involved in . . .”

“Oh please, Boris,” she begged, squeezing his hand,
“please
tell me one . . . one part, one scene . . .”

“Uh, well, let’s see . . .” He raised his eyes as though trying to recall, and it slowly came to her that he couldn’t think of
anything
of hers he liked.

“Oh God,” she said hopelessly, “wasn’t there
anything?
Surely there must have been
one scene . . . one line
. . .”

“Well, uh, the thing is, you see—”

Then she knew, and she put her face in her hands.

“Oh
no
,” she said, “you’ve never even seen
. . . oh no
. . .”

“Don’t be silly, of course I’ve seen you!”

“In what?” she demanded.

“I’ve seen you in trailers on TV.”

“Trailers for
what?”

“Well, let’s see . . .”

She was shattered. “You haven’t! You haven’t seen
anything
I’ve ever done!” And then it turned to wrath. “Would you please tell me why I’m here? Because I’m supposed to be such a good piece of ass? Is
that
the reason?” She began to weep bitterly.

Boris grasped her shoulder; it was time to be firm. “Now stop it, Angela, you’re acting like a
child! I
don’t
have
to see you on screen, I know you’re
exactly right
for this film! I don’t want to discuss what I’ve seen you do, because I know that your potential has never been realized, or even approached. Now you’ll just have to have confidence in me. Okay?” He handed her his handkerchief.

She dabbed her eyes and smiled at him through the tears. “I’m sorry, that was silly.” She squeezed his hand again. “Forgive me?”

“Here,” he said, filling her glass, “have some brandy.”

She joined him as he raised his glass. “To . . .
The Faces of Love,
” he said.

She nodded. “To
The Faces of Love
. . .”

They drank, and said nothing for a moment, Boris looking at her, but his mind somewhere else.

“Do you know why the studio wasn’t able to change my image?” she asked then. “I mean, even though I stopped doing the bikini-beach pictures and started doing nice sort of Doris Day things? And I still stayed a sex-symbol? And not only that, but it even got worse? Do you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because,”
she went on, not without a certain bitterness, staring down at her drink, “every man in America likes to think that he’s the Big Bad Wolf fucking Goldilocks,
that’s
why.”

After holding a pouting expression for a second, she looked up at him. “But
you’re
not like that, are you . . .”

Boris shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I am sometimes.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be,” she admonished.

He laughed. “You’re too much.”

She gave him a searching look. “You mean
good
or
bad?”

He shrugged and smiled, pretending to hesitate.
“Good,”
he said then, “yeah, I’m going to have to say
good
on this one.”

“I’m glad,” she said softly, then lowered her eyes again, fingering the glass. “Boris . . . I don’t exactly know how to say this . . .”

“You mean I’m that hard to talk to?”

“Oh no, no, no, it isn’t
you
. . . I mean you’re
so straight
and everything . . . I mean, I don’t want you to think I’m, well, you know,
out of line,
or
freaky
or something, it’s just that, well, I know how some directors have to feel
close
to the actors before they can really work good together and . . . well, I mean, you’re so
cool
and everything that I might not even
know
it if you wanted to . . . you know, be
close
or something . . . I mean, well gosh, I don’t think you’d
come on,
you know, even if you
felt
like it . . .”

Boris saw it as a “Monologue in Close-Up”—clocking the face . . . twitches, textures, angles, shadings, highlights . . . matching the
word,
its substance, with the substance of the
image
—or
counterpointing
them.
How,
he wondered, could it have been done better? He was thinking only of this for the moment, then he was suddenly aware—not abruptly, but with the warm, swift smoothness that accompanies a severed artery—of her hand in his, and more, that he could not imagine her “Mono.C.U” as having been different. Good performance.

“What I wanted to say,” she went on, almost shyly, “was that you don’t
have
to, you know, come on with me . . . I mean, I wouldn’t put you through that—so if you, well,
do
have eyes . . . like the girl in the movie said, all you gotta do is, you know,
whistle.”

Boris smiled and pressed her hand. He was not surprised that his previous strategy had been effective in preparing her for work—she would now be like a clean slate, with no hangups from the past—but here was an unexpected bonus, her offering the fabled golden fleece. He had, of course, seen many of her films, some of them more than once. God certainly looks after the man, he mused, who takes care of business first.

T
HE
C
ASBAH SEQUENCE WAS
scheduled for six days’ shooting, with Angela in practically every scene—the exceptions being a montage segment of incidents and impressions from her childhood on the Virginia plantation. To play the father, they had prevailed upon the venerable and award-winning Andrew Stonington, a grand old patriarch from the Deep South of yesteryear; and, for the mother, none other, of course, than the great Louise Larkin herself. To play Angela as a young girl—in a series of scenes representing her life between eight and twelve—they had secured the services of the versatile and very pretty Jennifer Jeans, better known to close friends as “Jenny” Jeans, and to even closer friends as
“Creamy”
Jeans. Although she could do a passable eight, and a perfect twelve, she was actually eighteen years old. This had to be ascertained beyond any doubt before Sid would sign her.

“Morty, that fucking chick is
jail bait
if I ever seen it! I mean, she’s a fucking
child,
for Christ fucking sake! Are you
one-hunnert percent sure
that broad is
eighteen?!?
I mean, I don’t want to get hit with no fucking
Mann Act
and not even get
laid!
Jeez!”

“Swear to God, Sid,” said Mort, raising his hand. “Like I tole you, I seen the birth certificate awready—and as if that ain’t enough, I gotta affidavit from her folks saying she’s eighteen, and how they unnerstand we’re making an adult-type picture here.”

Sid put his head in his hands, keening, “‘Adult-type picture’ he calls it—I think we’re all going to
jail,
Morty, that’s what I think.”

It was Tony Sanders, however, who was to have the most dramatic encounter with Miss Jeans.

“Holy fucking Christ,” he said, stumbling over to where Boris was sitting, just off the set, making notes, “man, you really oughtta cop a taste of what’s jumping off in that second trailer—there’s an eight-year-old kid in there twisting up hash-bombers big as cigars.” He collapsed in a chair, shaking his head. “And it’s
dyna-fucking-mite,
too, daddy, I shit you not!”