Authors: Dazzle
Jazz, creature of flesh and blood that she was, had surfaces that could only be compared to a topaz, that rare gem flashing a rich gold with an undertone of warm brown, those precious crystals which the ancient Scots thought were a cure for lunacy. But had those ancients ever seen a woman with golden eyes, Toby wondered? Had they ever looked at a woman whose tawny plumage of golden brown hair looked amber in some lights and chestnut in another, hair that
hung all the way below her shoulders in the kind of artless, childlike ripples that other women sometimes possess, but only at their temples or foreheads? Had they ever had to deal with a woman whose skin seemed always faintly tanned, with a tint that gave her cheeks the blush of an apricot-hued Brandy rose, a golden pink blush very different from that of any other rose in any garden? If so, he felt sorry for them, as sorry as he felt for himself.
Above her golden eyes Jazz’s brown brows formed unusually strong and level lines, as precise as those drawn by a ballerina. They shot straight up when she was surprised, provoked or amused, and often only the expression in her eyes would signal the difference in her emotions. Below the firm, independent and potentially impudent line of her nose, her mouth was a study in contrast, her upper lip delicate, almost childish, her lower lip too full, too frank, too swollen for classic beauty.
For with it all, Toby reminded himself, Jazz Kilkullen was a hussy, an electric hussy, a fabulous flirt, a player of games, a mistress of disguise, a creature of many moods, a teller of truths, a lady of accomplishments, and as hardworking a photographer as any he’d ever heard of.
Thank God I’m never going to fall in love with Jazz, Toby repeated to himself as he checked the cameras for the tenth time that morning. Jazz owned a score of cameras she rarely used but today she’d told them to load all six of her Canon T 90’s with the multiple metering system that gave her three computerized options for focusing. She was playing it as safe as he’d ever known her to, for normally she scorned automatic focus.
While Melissa counted the host of easily movable lights and tiny flashes, all self-powered by battery packs, she observed Jazz’s outfit, from the Cecil Bea-ton hat to the short, skittish skirt and thin red wool blouse cut like an oversized smock, apparently held together with one giant jet button. She’d expected that her boss would think today’s challenge called for the
combat boots, the Army-Navy store sailor pants and the five-hundred-dollar Harry Truman Hawaiian shirt, worn with dangling antique garnet earrings and delicate, precious old rings on each finger; one of the getups that she sometimes wore to confuse and control a new victim.
But apparently Jazz had decided on the ladies-lunch-at-the-Bistro-Garden approach, another manipulation tactic, relentlessly overdressed in a way in which no other photographer would feel comfortable.
Jazz never just put on her clothes in the morning, Melissa thought with exasperated admiration. She overdressed, underdressed, fancy-dressed, screw-you-dressed or didn’t bother to dress at all in her brightly colored rugby shirts that she mixed with jeans when she wanted to look as if she could be safely ignored. Melissa was wise to her boss. She knew that if Jazz really intended to be ignored she’d wear all black as Melissa did herself. One day, when she too was a famous photographer, she’d throw out every black thing she’d ever owned, Melissa vowed silently as she went to answer the intercom from the desk downstairs.
“They’re on their way up!” Sandy shrilled as the intercom rang again. “Now they’re almost on time—honestly, don’t you think they could have called?”
Melissa hung up without answering. “Battle stations,” she said warningly to Jazz, who was still lying on the sofa. She raced into the office to summon Sis Levy, an efficient young redhead who was Jazz’s office manager.
“I was almost asleep,” Jazz protested, yawning, but she got up and into her hat and shoes two seconds before a group of people spilled out of the elevator.
“Come on in,” she said, as Melissa and Toby faded into the background. She had never seen such a large entourage, not even when she’d photographed Stallone and Streisand together for
Rolling Stone
. And they were all female, like members of a cult that dooms young widows to wear deepest mourning, skirts falling either to mid-calf and worn with flat,
ankle-high boots, or cut just below the crotch and worn with black tights and spike heels.
“I’m Tilly Finish, from the magazine,” the oldest of them said, coming forward to introduce herself. “Sam will be right up. He saw some sort of car downstairs and he wanted to take a better look at it.”
“That’s my punishment for having a car photographer on the first floor,” Jazz said pleasantly, as she mentally damned Pete di Constanza for not hustling the new Ferrari Testarossa inside his shop under wraps the way he did when prototypes arrived. Sometimes the cars leaving and entering his studio became such an attractive nuisance that she and Mel Botvinick had to complain formally to Phoebe Milbank.
Tilly Finish started to introduce the other women who gradually filled the entrance to the studio. Jazz and Sis Levy shook hands all around. Three of them came from the public relations agency that handled Sam Butler; two more were stylists, each with an assistant, all holding garment bags with items from the vast wardrobe Sam Butler might deign to wear; Tilly herself had two assistants, both of them carrying cellular phones; there was a hair lady and a lady makeup artist. Jazz counted an even dozen, all young, all pretty, all smiling tentatively, like a newspaper photograph of the wives of a renegade Mormon of the old school.
Sis Levy took over the crowd, directing the stylists’ assistants and the hair and makeup women to the dressing rooms, so that they could dispose of their burdens, but the others refused to move, standing about, watching the elevator, like nervous Secret Service men who’ve lost the President.
Jazz looked at her watch. It was almost lunchtime and they were far from starting. “Carry on,” she told Sis as she zipped out and clattered down the staircase. On the street floor of Dazzle, Jazz rushed out of the building and around to the side where Pete’s studio had its delivery entrance. The double garage doors, big enough to accommodate the largest truck, gaped
open and inside she saw two men walking intently around the Ferrari as if it were the first car to have been invented. Henry Ford had a lot to answer for, she thought grimly, or was it the Wright Brothers?
Jazz walked up to Sam Butler, as bumptiously as a winning colt. “I’m Jazz Kilkullen,” she announced, extending her hand. He took it without looking at her. “Right, I’ll be with you later,” he said, and turned his back, opened the door of the hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar car and slid behind the wheel. “Would you mind if I took this baby out for a spin? I’ve been wanting one but I don’t know, it might be a bit too flash.”
“It’s perfect for you,” Jazz said, firmly grappling him by his upper arm with her strong fingers, pinioning him by the tweed of his jacket. “If you don’t drive the best, who should? Let’s come back later, shall we? You have a fan-club meeting upstairs.” Angrily he turned to look at her. She gave him a deadpan stare. He was so beautiful that it was simply silly, Jazz thought, a minor genetic joke. She refused to try to deal with this large blond creature visually until she was behind a camera.
“They can bloody well wait,” Sam Butler said.
“But I can’t.”
“You have all day.”
“Half of it’s gone. This is a cover shot, remember?”
“I don’t want to do the thing anyway.”
“But I do.” Jazz tilted her chin so that the brim of her hat no longer shadowed her face, looked him straight in the eye and smiled at him, half siren, half London bobby, wholly excessive. “Later you can have all the Ferraris you can eat,” she said with a clear-cut twist of promise. “Let’s let Pete do his job and we’ll do ours, so you can come back to this car just as soon as possible. All right, Mr. Butler?”
“Call me Sam,” the Australian said, leaving Pete without a glance. Jazz turned back to the car photographer. “If you do this once more, honey-child, I
won’t let you help audition the girls for the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue,” she warned him before she followed Sam Butler up to her studio.
Five minutes later, as the widows’ club fluttered purposefully but distractingly around the actor, Jazz conferred with Sis Levy and appeared at Tilly Finish’s elbow.
“This isn’t going to work, is it, Tilly?”
“What do you mean?”
“Now, now, don’t play innocent,” Jazz said with a conspiratorial smile. “Obviously you’ve run into this before yourself, a woman of your sophistication. All these little girls are in heat. One can’t blame them but they’re useless. Total brain drain into the lower parts, wouldn’t you agree? Look, if you could just take them all downstairs to lunch at 72 Market Street—I’ve reserved a table, and they’ll put it on my bill—I’ll send Sis and my assistants with you and by the time lunch is over I’ll have the cover shot.”
“Don’t you need your assistants?”
“Everything’s prepared. Six cameras loaded and ready. Anyway, I was an assistant for years.… I can still load film in the dark underwater upside down, and I always do all the lighting myself.”
“But Sam isn’t dressed yet,” Tilly squeaked. “I haven’t decided what he should wear. New York left it up to me.”
“He’ll look great, I promise. Anyway he doesn’t need makeup or hair … you know they want a natural look. The important thing is to get the cover—I simply have to have the studio to myself for a few hours. Don’t forget, we still have another outdoor color shot and three black-and-whites for the body of the story and he’s only given us today and next Wednesday. We’ll be lucky if he even shows up next week—he’s not the most obedient boy, your Mr. Butler.”
“My Mr. Butler,” Tilly Finish said wistfully. “Wouldn’t that be the day?” She clapped her hands. “Everybody, lunch break. Sam, I’ll leave you here if you don’t mind, to get started.”
In minutes the studio was empty.
“Thanks,” the actor said. “They were beginning to make me nervous. Why are they all in black? Did somebody die?”
“It’s political,” Jazz assured him, dismissing the whole question of young Hollywood chic. “If you’re hungry I’ll make you a sandwich before we start.”
“I never eat lunch. It slows me down.”
“Good. There should be a Versace raincoat in the dressing room. Would you try it on for me?”
“Yeah, right. I fancy that myself.”
And well he might, Jazz thought. Sam Butler was the most astonishingly handsome actor she had seen since photographs of the young Gary Cooper. He must be the beginning of the swing of the pendulum away from the actors whose all-too-ordinary faces were described as “lived in”: Richard Dreyfuss, Al Pacino, Robert de Niro, Billy Crystal and Donald Sutherland. He didn’t suffer from the not-lived-in-enough syndrome that afflicted Tom Hanks, Tim Robbins, Charlie Sheen, Dean Stockwell and Michael Keaton, nor did he come under the heading of the neighborhood that was too marginally scruffy to be lived in at all, like Mickey Rourke, Patrick Swayze or Sean Penn.
Sam Butler was flawless, Jazz decided, and shrugged. A Grand Canyon of manhood, blond and blue-eyed in a way that defined those attributes for all time. Definitely not her type.
He returned with the raincoat tightly belted, the collar turned up.
“You’re too bulky, Sam,” Jazz said. “I don’t want a stuffed-raincoat shot, I want a Butler shot. But I like the coat on you. Let me think … I know there’s an idea in here somewhere … could you go back and take off that bulky jacket and put the coat back on? In fact, take off all your clothes while you’re at it.”
“Are you some kind of nutter?”
“Think of the raincoat as a bathrobe. You wouldn’t be dressed in a bathrobe, would you?”
“Of course not.”
“So what’s the difference?”
“I don’t know, but there’s got to be one,” the actor said, puzzled.
“Oh,” Jazz coaxed, “just try it.” She spoke capriciously, candidly inviting him to indulge her whim and join her in her wayward fancy. His resistance collapsed.
“What are you going to take off?” The actor was ready to bargain.
“My hat? My shoes? No? Not enough? What about my … pantyhose?”
“Done.”
Jazz shook with laughter while he undressed. Sam Butler returned, belted, buckled, buttoned, looking fifty pounds lighter. His expression was set into a James Bondian toughness. By that time Jazz had rolled the Victorian sofa close to one of the windows. She was barelegged, and classical guitar music was playing on the tape deck.
“Better,” she said, all business. “Lie down on this.”
“Lie down on a sofa in a raincoat? I’d rather stand.”
“I have to use this gorgeous light. See the way it’s flooding in the window and pooling on the sofa? You can’t get that quality any other place in the studio. The light’ll be gone in half an hour or so and we’ll be all finished.”
“I had a dentist like you once. Quite like you, and quite unlike you,” he remarked, sitting down on the sofa, bolt upright.
“Dentist? Where? Back home?”
“Yeah. Near Perth. He was my uncle so naturally I had to go to him, special family price. He was pretty good, actually. Painless. I’d never be in flicks without the job he did on my teeth.” Butler’s jaw had relaxed and he leaned back against the sofa, as if remembering, not too unhappily, the cut-rate work that had given him his twenty-million-dollars-for-three-pictures smile.
Jazz took a quick Polaroid and gave it to him. She believed in letting the subject know immediately that you were willing to let him see the work in progress, and veto it if he hated it. With image-exchanging you were halfway home.
“Not bad,” he said, looking at it carefully. “It’s … different, not one of those Christ-aren’t-I-gorgeous shots that everyone else wants. Maybe it’s the raincoat.”
“Something about the neck is still too uptight.” Jazz shook her head thoughtfully. “You look bunchy around the throat. Open about five buttons, spread the collar wide and put your head back on the sofa. Maybe put your feet up on the arm of the sofa there and stretch out all the way across to the other end—get comfortable and pretend it’s a day at the beach, and you’re lying in the sun at Surfer’s Paradise …”