7 In California, October is usually the hottest time of the year, while the coldest times, especially at night, often come in November and early December. Nonetheless, when Californians – whether referring to fashions or to divisions of the school year – speak of spring, summer, autumn and winter, they usually mean the conventional seasonal divisions, which, like the forebears of most Californians, come from Europe, for in most of Europe the seasonal changes come almost exactly on the calendar dates. It was during the calendar summer, between solstice and equinox, that the shooting of two films went on, one in Catalonia and the other in Hollywood. It was hot and dry in both places, with temperatures highly conducive to the copious disrobing that both scripts called for. England, however, remained its cool, rainy self all through that summer. When Margaret Blackwood would arrive at her mother’s bedside during her frequent visits to the hospice, her raincoat and hat were usually dripping.   The location shots of Campus Capers were done at a private college in Glendale, with the administration’s permission in exchange for a sizable donation to the Theatre Arts Department, during the lull between the spring term and the summer session. In addition to the usual walks across the campus, they included classroom scenes. Jenni Jarman played a science major named Clarissa Howard, who needed one more lit class – there was a recurrent joke of someone saying “clit lass” – in order to graduate, and her fellow students advised her to take the Shakespeare course given by Professor Bernard Francis (Frank Bond) – “he’s so cute” – who was so popular that he required the largest classroom on campus, filled mostly with girls who shamelessly flirted with him at every opportunity they got. The students who were hired as extras for the campus shoots had to be informed, of course, of the nature of the finished product, but except for a very few they happily agreed to the terms. They looked forward to seeing themselves in an X-rated movie and the girls made a point of wearing their most provocative outfits. Ah, the liberated eighties, Barry Bergman thought. Clarissa, however, dressed conservatively and did not flirt but subjected the professor to penetrating questions about Shakespeare’s logical lapses, question that the professor handled with aplomb. The dialogue had for the most part been concocted jointly by Jenni and Frank in the course of the tête-à-tête meetings at which they got acquainted socially and physically, and Barry Bergman thought that it would have been witty enough for a mainstream comedy. At the end of the class Professor Francis invites Miss Howard to come to his office for further discussion. When Barry outlined the sequence to Frank and Jenni, he noticed a mysterious, knowing smile on her face. She must have had an affair with a professor, he thought. He would ask her about it some time. The scenes involving Maggie Schneider, the secretary played by Lesli Lyman, had to wait until Lesli’s breast augmentation was complete – she used the recovery time to learn her lines – because they invariably involved a routine of unbuttoning an initially high-necked white blouse, button by button, until an ample portion of bosom was exposed. This occurred even in the scene at the beginning in which the professor interviews her for the job. “It’s so hot in here,” she says. “Do you mind if I get some air on my skin?” Later in that scene the professor, reading her application, says “You put down ‘excellent’ for writing skills, but you left ‘oral skills’ blank.” “That’s because I wasn’t sure what it meant,” she replies. “Yes,” he says, “that can be ambiguous. I’ll show you what I mean.” Down goes his zipper; the rest of her buttons open, revealing her brand-new endowment; and Miss Schneider demonstrates her oral skills. After the class, Clarissa is so eager to talk to the professor that she comes to the office ahead of schedule, and finds him engaged in a desktop nooner with his secretary. She, hesitantly at first, joins them in a threesome. Her unenhanced breasts look just as lovely on screen as in real life, in Barry Bergman’s eyes. As the semester goes on, Clarissa’s questions turn more to sexual matters. “When Ophelia says country matters,” she asks, “does she mean cunt” – pause – “ry”? The students gasp. “Indeed, Miss Howard,” the professor says. The joys of the X rating! That, thought Barry Bergman, could be used in A Bard in the Bush, with Frank Bond as Hamlet on stage saying “cunt-ry,” and the audience gasping. Clarissa and the professor, who is married – and manages to satisfy the kinky appetites of his wife, played by Lili Long – embark on a cinq-à-sept off-campus affair (she has a studio apartment), in which they act out Shakespearean sex fantasies: Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra... These scenes are interspersed with daytime office sex with Maggie, and a nighttime bondage scene with the wife. At the end of the semester, when Clarissa gets the only A+ in the class, a jealous student lodges a complaint, charging sexual favoritism. The professor, in his defense, alleges that he had relations with numerous other students who did not get particularly good grades, but he chivalrously declines to name them. The faculty committee (played by Alan Marcus, the lawyer, as the chairman, Paul Kruger, the plastic surgeon – both under pseudonyms – and Melissa Milton, playing a psychology professor) finds him guilty of academic misconduct, but lets Clarissa’s grade stand. The professor resigns. Barry Bergman liked giving his buddies, such as Kruger and Marcus, bit parts in his productions. Upstanding family men that they were, they would take advantage of their presence on the set to score a little extramarital nookie. This time it was Kruger with the newly augmented Lesli – he liked to test his work first-hand, his standard line being “You wanted them so you’d be sexier, so I have to see if I succeeded” – and Marcus with Jenni; the flirtation at the signing had not gone to waste. Barry Bergman didn’t mind; whatever romantic feelings (and jealousy certainly was one) he might have had toward her had been vanquished by watching her uninhibited work on the set, and without them he had enjoyed his times with her, if anything, even more than before. Forward to a few years later. Bernard Francis is on a book tour promoting his best-selling book Shakespearean Sex. At a reading, he concludes his talk with “I would like first of all to acknowledge my wife Brenda, who put up with me while I did my research; my faithful secretary, Maggie Schneider; and my collaborator and former student, Clarissa Howard, now Doctor Howard, who just got her PhD in sexology.” The audience applauds as the camera pans to the three women sitting side by side in the front row, Maggie now wearing a low-cut scoop-neck blouse with no need for unbuttoning. Dissolve to an acrobatic foursome in the hotel suite.   Barry Bergman often thought that his obsession with sex, and the career that this led him to, resulted from his birth date. Not that he believed in astrology or anything like that (he was an Aries), but the Torah portion that he had to read for his bar mitzvah happened to be the one in Leviticus that was replete with sexual taboos – endless instances of “thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of...” as the English Bible put it – and, over the months that he spent preparing, his twelve-year-old imagination was inflamed by images of depraved, incestuous orgies as detailed in the haftarah from Ezekiel that he had to chant (“And one hath committed abomination with his neighbor’s wife; and another hath lewdly defiled his daughter-in-law; and another in thee hath humbled his sister...”). The prohibition that most stood out in his mind was the one about a woman (any woman) and her daughter. He had asked the rabbi whether this applied only to having sex with them in the same time period – he could accept that as morally reprehensible – or also at widely separated times. The rabbi, uncomfortable with the questioning, said curtly “Never!” but young Henry persisted: what if the mother dies and then you meet the daughter many years later when she’s grown up and you don’t even know who her mother was? The rabbi said he would check the authorities and get back to him, but of course he never did. Twenty-odd years later the issue came up in Barry’s life. Every so often he would wonder if Doc Kruger knew that it was he who had deflowered his daughter Helena, now a pre-med student, after she had forced herself on him at her sweet-sixteen party (he had resisted, but found himself unable to counter her argument that she wanted her first time to be with someone experienced – his own first time had been at fifteen, with a friend of his mother’s) and that, on Helena’s insistence and independently of any relationship she might be in, they continued to have encounters three to five times a year. No, Doc probably didn’t know. Helena could have been a poster girl for her father’s work, had she not come by her attributes naturally, courtesy of Mrs. Kruger, or rather Doctor Nancy Fishman Kruger, the psychologist. A photograph of Nancy’s breasts hung on Doc’s office wall, and Doc would say to his prospective patients, without telling them whose they were: “These are God’s work; I try my best to imitate.” Of course Nancy knew about Barry and Helena. And did Doc know about him and Nancy, the knot that had initially impelled him to resist Helena? Not likely either. Doc was a nice guy, but he was a surgeon, and his mind revolved around himself. Anyway, it was Barry’s Leviticus-molded conscience that made him stop shtupping Nancy once he started with Helena.   The shooting of Campus Capers was done in a little more than three weeks. The student extras had been invited to the wrap party, held at Barry Bergman’s house, but only a few came: some girls who had scored with Frank Bond after hours and were hoping for a repeat – Barry, as was his habit, eyed them for potential – and a young man who seemed to be taken with Jenni; he had sat next to her in the classroom scenes, and was now flirting with her; she was not unresponsive. What Barry felt most was a keen awareness of Gina George’s absence. This was the first wrap party in many years that she had not attended; she even came to the ones for projects that she had not acted in. The one for Fleshpots of the West, an overly rushed quickie project (a mock-western in which Gina played a barroom hostess) that Barry had felt was doomed from the start, was the last time he had seen her. Campus Capers would get a much more careful post-production treatment, as befitted the launch vehicle for his new stars; an August opening, September at the latest, seemed realistic. His attention focused on one of the students, a tall, thin redhead named Cydni. In the movie she had scored a sexy shot with the way she, playing one of the students flirting with the professor, thrust her large breasts almost in Frank Bond’s face. At the party, Barry Bergman found himself intrigued by the size of those seemingly natural breasts in relation to her otherwise skinny body; by the graceful way she danced, by herself, to the music of Phil Collins that was playing on the stereo in his music room; and by her name, which he heard first as Cindy, then as Sidonie (as a boy he had been a devout reader of Colette’s tales of teenage lust), and then as Sidney. When she told him the spelling, he thought that it seemed Welsh and wondered if someone who spoke that language would pronounce it “kidney.” A little after midnight, as the first guests were beginning to leave, he decided to try to get her to stay, but did not make his move until around one, when Frank Bond left with Lesli. As they made their way to his bedroom at two in the morning, he again wondered what Gina was doing in Europe at that moment.