Tycoon (38 page)

They built a swimming pool, but downhill from the house, at the edge of the woods, lay a small natural lake. They did not touch it, except to arrange filtration of the water and to plant cattails and water lilies. Anne swam in the lake; she preferred it to the pool. When she was satisfied about her privacy, she swam nude at dawn in midsummer.

In late July, Joni came to Jack with a request. “Daddy, could Frank and I use the shower?”

Jack reached for her hands and took both of them in his. “The two of you are that close?”

She nodded.

He smiled and told her yes, any time. He wrote to John, who was now at Pensacola, that Joni seemed to be in love. He had no idea what kind of impact that news would have on John.

W
HEN
C
AP
D
URENBERGER ASKED
J
ACK IF HE COULD HAVE A
private conversation with him, Jack told him to come to the townhouse that September evening. Both of them had begun to wonder just how much notice was paid to who talked to whom in the office.

Joni had replaced some of the furnishings and decorative pieces that had been taken to Greenwich, and the place now looked very different. Joni's prints were bright and cheerful, but they were nothing like the original Boucher and the Dürer that had once hung in the living room.

Joni was out of town, modeling. The only household help
she had was a cleaning woman who came in once a week, so Jack and Cap had complete privacy tonight.

Jack poured drinks from the bar, which Joni kept stocked.

Cap sipped, then leaned back in his overstuffed chair and closed his eyes. “Shit's in the fan, boss,” he said. “One way, anyhow.”

“What is it?”

“Sally Allen.”

“What's with Sally?” Jack asked, concerned.

“She's pregnant.”

A week later Jack and Cap met with Sally in Kansas City.

“So I'm knocked up,” she said. “I'm a woman. I'm entitled. We'll do the Monica Dale special before it begins to show.”

“Can I ask who's the daddy?”

She smiled at Jack. “Len, of course. Who'd you suppose? Hey! He's not the shabby bum you remember. Now that he's got a respectable job, he—”

“I understand he writes good comedy,” said Jack. “But this is something else. So, okay, we get the special on the air. What about the rest of the season?”

“Len has written a sketch about my being pregnant.”

“Unmarried
and pregnant?”

“The script doesn't say.”

“But that's the whole point! If the scripts don't say it, the news people will. Look, we just went through the battle over
The Moon Is Blue—”

“Yeah! What a
horrible
film! It dared to use the word ‘pregnant.' It dared to—”

Cap interrupted. “The Legion of Decency—”

“Legion of
Crap!”
she yelled angrily. “Fuck the Legion of Decency!”

“We can't—”

“Wanta bet? Everywhere that film plays it makes big money!
Big
goddamned money! The
audiences
don't give a shit about—”

“Wait a minute,” Jack interrupted. “How will you do energetic dance routines?”

“Very simple, Jack. I
say
I'm pregnant. I tell 'em I can't dance like an idiot right now. So here's a kinescope of a dance routine I did last year. Or, better yet, here's the new young
dancer, so-and-so. I can still sing. I can deliver funny lines. The movie studios have notified me they're canceling my contracts, under the so-called morals clause. And you can do the same. In which case I'll take my pregnant body to Europe and appear before audiences who don't give a shit about the Legion of Decency.”

Sally clapped her hands over her face and began to cry.

Jack stared at her for a moment, then at Cap. “Okay,” he said decisively. “Okay. We'll do it your way. Tell Len to write a line into the special, announcing that you're pregnant.”

She drew her hands down her face, streaking her tears. “It's already written,” she said. “Goes like this: Monica says to me, ‘Hey, Sally, I hear you're gonna have a baby.' I rub my belly with both hands and say, ‘Feels that way.' Then she says, ‘Uh, can I ask the pregnant question?' And I say, ‘Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies.' That's also what I say to the reporters.”

“I
THINK YOU'LL AGREE—
I
THINK YOU
HAVE
TO AGREE—
that we were entitled to be told,” Dick Painter said at a meeting of the board of directors. “Lear Communications is not your private fief anymore. We should
consult
on major decisions.”

“I am chief executive officer of this corporation and am entitled to make decisions,” Jack said coldly. “I wouldn't refinance the company without consultation and action by the board. But decisions about the content of a program are within my executive purview. I made the decision, and the decision was carried out. Besides, if we'd consulted, we wouldn't have done it. Committees—and I don't care what kind of committees they are—are not noted for courage.”

“You did take one hell of a risk,” Douglas Humphrey observed.

“I don't think so. This is 1954, gentlemen, not 1934. Audienees
are sophisticated today. They're sick of the tired old pap that passes for television comedy and drama. I saw a film the other day. It's called
On the Waterfront,
with Marlon Brando. There's a scene where Brando tells a priest, played by Karl Maiden, to go to hell. In those words. ‘Go to hell.' So how does the priest react? He doesn't go cow-eyed and wring his hands like ‘Father' Bing Crosby. He clenches his fist and slugs Brando. Have any of you looked at the ratings for
The Sally Allen Show
since she announced she's pregnant?”

“It could have come out the other way,” said the Chicago banker Joseph Freeman. “And may yet. Some powerful people are shocked and offended.”

“And what are these powerful people going to do?” Jack asked.

“Catholics in Columbus, Ohio, have been ordered not to watch our station for the next six months, under pain of sin,” said Ray l'Enfant.

“So?
Are
they not watching us? Look at the numbers.”

“We've lost some sponsors—”

“And picked up others.”

“The question is,” said Painter, “will this board of directors have any influence on programming decisions?”

“The answer is no.”

1955

J
ONI WAS NOT INTIMIDATED BY THE BIG PHOTO STUDIO SHE
was working in today. She had been photographed here before and had confidence in the photographer, Clinton Batchelder. Anyway, her agent, Muriel Hubbel, was with her. They had discussed the project at length and decided it was worth a try. The magazine was disinclined to use photographs of professional models—or so it said—but Joni was so conspicuously unspoiled and youthful that the publisher might make an exception.

The project had been initiated by Batchelder.
Playboy
, he had explained to Joni and Muriel, was a new magazine, but it had a rapidly growing circulation and received an immense amount of attention. Its Playmate of the Month photo spread could send a model's career soaring. Besides, the magazine paid generous fees to both model and photographer.

Robin Rodman, the president of the Rodman-Hubbel Modeling Agency, had issues of
Playboy
in his office. After looking over the centerfolds in those issues, he and Muriel and Joni had agreed they were professional and tastefully done. The final decision was Joni's, and she agreed to be photographed in a set of pictures that would be submitted to
Playboy.

The studio was cavernous. The room was so large, and the
ceiling so high, that Batchelder said he flew his radio-controlled model helicopter around inside it, though no one Joni had talked to had ever seen him do it. The expanse of empty space made it possible for the photographer to move cameras, lights, props, and models around without interference.

There was no dressing room, not even a screen behind which models could undress, and many did so because Batchelder shot a good deal of lingerie advertising. He photographed nudes occasionally but not often. When he did, they were only for photography shows, where in fact some of his nudes had won prizes. He had some kind of connection with a Manhattan ballet school, and almost all of his nudes were young ballerinas. Joni's admiration for his ballerina prints was another reason why she had agreed to this session.

Clinton Batchelder was about forty-five years old, not memorably handsome but not unattractive, either. Joni knew him to be a very businesslike photographer, brusque in manner and abrupt in his movements when he was working. He was wearing a white shirt with a yellow necktie and tan slacks. He smoked a pipe, which he would put aside when the shoot began.

“Well, Joni, all set?”

Joni smiled weakly. “I guess,” she murmured.

“How ‘bout a Scotch to settle your nerves.”

Joni glanced at Muriel, who nodded and said, “One for me, too.”

“We'll all have a Scotch,” said Batchelder. His liquor bottles sat among the bottles of chemicals in his darkroom, and he took ice and soda from the darkroom refrigerator. They sat in three wooden chairs behind the lights and toasted each other.

Joni drank about half of her Scotch, then said, “Well, I guess I better, huh?”

Batchelder nodded. “You can finish your drink afterward.”

Joni nodded. She drew a breath and reached behind her back to unzip her white knit dress. She stood up, pulled it over her head, and folded it on the chair. She was wearing a half-slip and a bra, and she took those off. She unhooked her stockings from her garter belt and pulled them off. She unfastened the garter belt and dropped it on the chair.

She was wearing sheer white bikini-style panties that exposed
her hips and bottom, though not her pubic area because they had an opaque panel in front. “Clint . . . Since
Playboy
doesn't show the lower part, I was wondering if I could keep the panties on.”

He smiled faintly. “I'd very much rather you didn't,” he said soberly. “It's true that we won't submit pictures that show your down-below hair, but we probably will want to submit some that show your bare bottom.”

Joni nodded and pulled off the panties.

“You know Laurie,” said Batchelder.

Laurie was the body-makeup girl who now approached Joni and would smear parts of her with greasepaint to give her an even skin tone all over, hiding the pale stripes left by her swimsuits. Laurie would also cover the red marks made by the elastic in Joni's clothes. Joni had been made up by Laurie before, when modeling bikini panties or appearing, as she occasionally did, with arms folded over bare breasts.

Laurie also gave her hair a final brushing. It hung around her shoulders, smooth and glossy.

While Laurie worked, Joni finished her drink. Batchelder took her glass and poured her some more Scotch.

“We'll work with the neutral background first,” Batchelder said. He pulled a sheet of light-gray paper down from a roller that hung on one wall of the studio. “Just step over there and let us see what
you
think might be effective poses.”

Joni handed her glass to Muriel and walked out in front of the gray background. Batchelder's two lighting men switched on powerful lights.

Suddenly the situation struck Joni. She was standing in front of the photographer and his assistant, her agent, the makeup girl, and two lighting technicians. She was naked. Six clothed people were staring at her. Her mouth dried up. For an instant she felt as if she might lose her balance.

She stared down at herself. It had seemed so cute to trim her dark pubic hair and not allow a thick bush to grow over her crotch. Now the piercing lights exhibited her pudenda and even outlined the dark stripe of her cleft.

Batchelder's assistant began to shoot pictures with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera.

“How do you want to pose, Joni?” Batchelder asked.

She recovered a little and raised her hands to clasp them behind her head.

“I love it,” said Batchelder, “but that's a little too bold for the magazine. Let's turn to your left. Turn . . . a little more. Now bring your hands down. Now look back over your shoulder. Hey!”

He went to the big camera, hooded himself with the black cloth, and studied the image she was making on the ground glass. He began to order changes in the lighting. They spent three-quarters of an hour shooting pictures that would show the profile of Joni's left breast and all of her backside while she looked over her shoulder with various expressions that Batchelder suggested.