Judith Krantz by Dazzle Read Free Book Online Page A

worry, eat your meatloaf, I’ll take care of it.”
    “How?”
    “Jazz is a problem. A female problem. And I never saw a female problem I couldn’t fix. Just leave it to me. This steak isn’t bad. How’s the meatloaf?”
    “Just like Mother used to make.”

3
    J azz shifted back to cruising speed, after she passed a truck on the Pacific Coast Highway, driving south to the Kilkullen Ranch, and reflected on the job well done for
Vanity Fair
.
    On the second day of the shoot with Sam Butler she had, in various small and subtle ways, allowed him to feel dominant. She’d worn her Ralph Lauren genteel, gentile, gentry gear, the ankle-length white flannel pleated skirt and high-necked, white Victorian blouse with her grandmother’s cameos, her hair in one long braid down her back, and she’d spoken softly and looked at him blushingly and bashfully, and all but pawed the floor with her foot. Jazz thought she owed it to him since, on reflection, just possibly, she might have led him on. Some degree of mental seduction of the subject, regardless of gender, was always involved in any good celebrity shot, no photographer, male, female or gay, could ever deny that, but it was presumed to stop there. God knows, no male photographer from Man Ray to Herb Ritts, on his best day,could ever have come close to the shots that she had taken on the day of the earthquake.
    Why did people say that the camera doesn’t lie? It was ridiculously easy to make the camera lie, to project yourself into the image and create it as you thought it should be. Almost every celebrity portrait was a cleverly composed lie, hiding behind an appearance of super-reality. It was far more difficult to free the camera to tell the unvarnished truth, as she had with Butler. Yet there might be small, petty, picky, prudish, evil-minded folk who would claim that she should never have agreed to take off her pantyhose.
    Sam Butler had shown up at Dazzle on time for the second day of photos the following Wednesday, as unruffled as if nothing had happened between them and apparently willing to take his chances on another quake. Jazz knew that she could never reach his vulnerability on this shoot, for he would never trust her again, but she hadn’t needed to probe twice into his inner self. The essential elemental image that she always sought and always caught in a celebrity shot, that absolute
flare
of an individual personality behind the fame, had been captured in that first day’s pictures of the homesick, horny actor. Drilling into the depths of a subject’s psyche with a camera was something Jazz did as well as, and usually better than, any other great photographer in the world.
    Mel Botvinick had been shooting a fast-food ad when Sam and his attendants had arrived on Wednesday, and in spite of the powerful vents in Mel’s third floor studio, the smell of frying grease crept downstairs and distracted everybody.
    Jazz had taken the actor outside, on the Ocean Avenue boardwalk, and let him wander, buying from the street vendors and talking to a flock of teenaged girls on roller skates. His face was still not so well known to the average movie fan that she couldn’t trust crowd control to her assistants and the efficient, willing widows. The big Australian’s beauty had become more animated as he talked to people and at the sametime more awesome in contrast to the mortals who surrounded him.
    They had finished just before twilight. Thursday had been spent by Jazz and Sis Levy, with a group of creative people from Chiat/Day/Mojo, the innovative advertising agency, scouting locations for a new campaign for Vacheron Constantin, the oldest Swiss watch manufacturers. Location scouting was something Jazz usually left to Sis, but the campaign was so offbeat for the conservative Swiss that the agency people had asked her to go along. On Friday Jazz had decided to book out of the studio and leave for the ranch a day early.
    She should be there in less than an hour, she