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 mothers 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 administrations 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) hes 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 Shakespeares 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 Leslis 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. Its 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. Thats because I wasnt sure what it meant,
she replies. Yes, he says, that can be ambiguous. Ill 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 Bergmans eyes.
As the semester
goes on, Clarissas 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 Clarissas 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 youd 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 didnt 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 neighbors 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 shes
grown up and you dont 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 Barrys 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 mothers) and that, on
Helenas insistence and independently of any relationship she might be in, they
continued to have encounters three to five times a year. No, Doc probably
didnt know. Helena could have been a poster girl for her fathers work, had she
not come by her attributes naturally, courtesy of Mrs. Kruger, or rather Doctor
Nancy Fishman Kruger, the psychologist. A photograph of Nancys breasts hung on
Docs office wall, and Doc would say to his prospective patients, without
telling them whose they were: These are Gods 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 Barrys 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 Bergmans 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
Georges 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 Bonds
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 Colettes
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.
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