Heading for trouble
William Leith
SCRUPLES TWO by Judith Krantz Bantam, £14.99, pp. 517 Scruples Two is the second instalment in the story of Wilhelmina 'Billy' Ikehorn, the beautiful, spoilt, insecure, half-mad bimbo whose early life forms the plot of the original Scruples. Starting off as a poor fat orphan from New England, Billy has, by the end of Scruples, shrugged off every social and physical disadvantage, and she begins Scruples Two as a sexy, thin multi- millionaire with a chain of clothes stores, an Oscar-winning husband and a huge, Doberman-guarded mansion in Beverly Hills.
But is she happy? Not remotely, of
The Magic Realists
Tonight, all over this divided city, where people in small terraced houses are viewing the big gangster movie on BBC, one family, watching a mobster riding shot-gun in a stolen car, hears him come raging through their own front door.
Francis Harvey
course. She is a staggeringly rich fool, a social-climbing food faddist, 'a woman who knew the value of every calorie she had ingested since the age of eighteen'. Primp- ing around her vast house in her peignoirs and robes, she wonders whether she should buy her neighbours' houses so that she can bulldoze them to extend her garden. She hires cooks to cook for her cooks. In a stream-of-consciousness passage, she thinks: 'It's criminal not to wear a touch of mascara.'
In the first few pages, Billy has a miscar- riage and a divorce and adopts a teenage girl, Gigi, whose potential as a killer bimbo she has spotted. Billy takes Gigi, the daughter of a gypsy, to Sara, her posh hair- dresser, who 'set to work as cautiously as a sculptor cutting directly into a precious piece of marble'. And, sure enough, Gigi is beautiful, with 'a very white neck that, for all its extreme delicacy of shape, was exact- ly as strong as it needed to be to form the perfect base for her head.' As readers of Judith Krantz, we can imagine what might happen to that perfect head-base later on in the book.
Meanwhile, Billy's ex-lover, Spider Elliott ('his raw manliness, like his outra- geous masculinity, his rogue energy, was bred in the bone. He had a manly energy, a manly gentleness, a manly openness') has married Valentine, the insomniac designer in Billy's Los Angeles store. Working late one night, Valentine falls asleep, cigarette in hand, and burns the store and herself to the ground. Shattered, blaming herself, Billy racks her brains for a way to find solace. After only eight pages she has it: 'I'm going to own homes in the right places, meet the right people, fuck the right men, give the right parties and be photographed at the right places at the right time of year.'
If I was a woman I would object to this book. The women are all sad, twittering fools, at the mercy of their fads and obsessions, always dressing and undressing, worrying about food and money and plastic surgery, taking all their underwear out of the cupboard and laying it neatly in rows before choosing the perfect pair of panties. Then they throw themselves at the much calmer, much more dignified male charac- ters, who cruise slowly in and out of focus, more concerned with their jobs, their friends . . . anything but these terrible mad bimbos.
I haven't told you the half of it. It goes on and on, this hideous life, the life of Billy and Gigi and Susan, who hires male prosti- tutes, and Sasha, the lingerie model, and Cora, the 'manipulative Baroness'. One of the best bits is when Billy, in a fit of stupid- ity unusual even for her, finds herself spending huge amounts of money in an effort to pretend she is poor, so that she can get off with a sculptor. If you are inter- ested in desperate, low-R) women with sexual hang-ups, don't bother with this book. Only read it if you are fascinated.
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