Kelly joined the money men in the front room. Unobtrusively he sat in a corner, listening to the talk of mergers, proxy fights, realignments. Unobtrusively his pocket tape recorder spun within his jacket, the microphone wire leading to what looked very like a hearing aid in his left ear.
Into the solarium sidled Frank, slyly smiling, and amused himself by doing the voices of everybody in the room. People began to answer people who hadn’t asked anything, and gradually a vast fog of confusion settled in, making everybody sore. As Frank sidled out again the room was well on its way to a mass fistfight.
Upstairs, sitting in a narrow cone of light from her bedside lamp, sat Sassi Manoon, the latest book from Bernard Geis open in her lap. On the table beside her were an ice bucket, a carafe of water, a bottle of Scotch and a glass, all half full, and so was Sassi. Though her room faced the front of the house and she had the air conditioner switched on full, she could still hear the pulsing beat of the band, pounding away down there as though they were trying to build a house before daylight.
Sassi was getting sloshed, and she didn’t care. She knew she should go down and put in an appearance at the party soon, and she didn’t care. She didn’t even care that there was somebody knocking at her door, though when they just kept knocking she finally called, “Come in.”
The door opened and the Spence character stuck his head in. Sassi was sitting up on the bed, but she was fully dressed, in orange stretch-pants and a white top. She squinted out of her cone of light at Spence in semi-darkness at the door and said, “What do you want?”
He came all the way in, smiling nervously. “Just wondering how you were, Miss Manoon. We haven’t seen much of you downstairs.”
“You haven’t seen any of me downstairs,” she said.
“Uh,” he said.
“Fitzroy sent you?”
“Oh, no, Miss Manoon. I just thought—”
“Sure,” said Sassi. “I’ll be down in a little while.”
“I just wanted to see if you were all right.”
“I’m fine. The neighbors play the radio too loud, but other than that I’m dandy.”
Spence frowned, bending forward at the waist. “I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. Forget it. I’ll be down in a little while.”
“Yes. Well — all right. Yes. Just wanted to be sure — just checking to be sure — just checking to—” Babbling, Spence backed his way out of the room and shut the door behind himself.
“I hate Sir Albert Fitzroy,” Sassi said aloud, and reached for her glass.
Out front, another cab had stopped, letting out a young lady named Jigger Jackson, a redhead wearing a shiny white plastic top and shiny yellow plastic mini-skirt and shiny white plastic flats. In her left hand she carried a tiny shiny white plastic purse, and she was not unaware that the cabdriver waited in order to watch her walk up the driveway toward the house. Not unaware, and not unpleased.
Jigger Jackson was twenty-one years old, and could vote for President if she wanted. But what she wanted was more important than that. What she wanted was to be a movie star.
Every film festival has them, they add a touch of transient beauty to the occasion, like bright-colored flowers at a lawn party. The film festival is the one place where the real world and the world of movies intersect, where producers and directors and actors and movie businessmen are all gathered together and accessible, and it isn’t surprising that so many would-be stars have chosen to follow the circuit of the film festivals, making contacts, hoping for contracts, praying for the break.
Jigger Jackson was one of these. She had followed the film festivals for almost two years now, from Cannes to Venice, from Acapulco to Karlovy Vary, from Berlin to Moscow to New York to Locarno to San Francisco. She had been to the festival of underwater films held annually above water in Toulon, and the science fiction film festival in Trieste, and the sports film festival at Cortina d’Ampezzo, and even the Negro film festival in Dakar, Senegal. She had seen a lot of hotel rooms, some of them containing movie producers or at least people who said they were movie producers, and the words “screen test” had been whispered in her ear more than once, but up until the present moment no one had ever expressed an interest in seeing Jigger Jackson sign her name on a dotted line.
So Jigger had decided the time had come for a change. The trouble was, there was too much competition from other broads on the one hand and too much duplicity from festival-going men on the other hand, and so far as Jigger could see, the odds against her breaking through just weren’t good enough to go on with it. What she needed was an entirely new approach, a new concept, and she thought she finally had one this time, she thought she’d really come up this time with the winning notion.
The thing was, all the girls trying their stunts at the film festivals — parachuting from rented planes onto the decks of private yachts, stripping in hotel lobbies, engineering minor automobile accidents with major stars — were aiming those stunts at men, hoping to attract the man’s attention long enough to work a little sex appeal into a quid pro quo. But nobody, so far as Jigger knew, had ever tried working a stunt through a woman.
Not sexually, there were some things Jigger thought she probably wouldn’t do for stardom, but sex wasn’t everything, after all. And it had occurred to Jigger one thoughtful afternoon a few weeks ago that everybody likes a protégé, that it makes a successful person feel magnanimous and excellent to help a younger person up the ladder, that history was full of painters helping younger painters, successful writers encouraging beginning authors, and so on and so on. Why wouldn’t a successful actress feel the same way? If Jigger were to go up to one of the really big-name movie stars and say, “Miss Soandso, you are my ideal, I’m trying to pattern my life on you, I see all your pictures, and I want to be in movies just like you,” why wouldn’t that big-name star feel touched and honored, why wouldn’t she feel like helping Jigger make her dreams come true? Why not?
Jigger saw no reason why not, no reason at all. At the very worst, it couldn’t hurt to try, and at the best she might have stumbled onto something brilliant.
Well, tonight was her first chance to test the theory, which was why she was crashing the party in honor of Sassi Manoon. If she could get Sassi Manoon to sponsor her in Hollywood, even a little bit, even just as far as a screen test and maybe an agent, that was all she’d need. After that, she was sure she could handle the rest for herself.
She strolled through the open front doorway of the house, ready with a series of lies if anybody challenged her, but no one paid her any attention at all. She saw how crowded the place was, and knew she was safe. Just so the joint wasn’t so crowded that she never got a shot at Sassi Manoon.
She stopped at the first doorway on the right, looked in, saw all those gray hairs, smelled all that cigar smoke, heard someone say something six percent, and nodded to herself. “If I don’t get anywhere with Sassi Manoon,” she told herself, “I’ll try my luck in there.” She moved away from the doorway and deeper into the house.
Frank was dancing with somebody’s secretary. That is, he was dancing in her general vicinity, and they’d agreed before starting that they would consider they were dancing this dance “together.” They were talking about Sassi Manoon as they danced, which was only natural since Sassi Manoon was the guest of honor, even though it was now nearly midnight and Sassi Manoon hadn’t as yet put in an appearance, and also because this girl here, somebody’s secretary, happened to have had a great deal to do with the planning of Miss Manoon’s Jamaican itinerary. She enjoyed talking about it, and Frank enjoyed listening.