The suit was wrong. Duke knew this because Barbara told him it was wrong, and Barbara was never wrong about clothes.
She was wrong about other things, like she believed that Italian cinema was superior to American cinema in every category including westerns.
But about clothes, let's say Barbara Bouchet knew her field.
"No," she said, standing in the middle of the suite in a silk robe with her blonde hair pinned up and a cigarette burning between her fingers, surveying the charcoal suit Duke had laid out on the bed. "Absolutely not. No."
"It's a good suit, I got it from a jewish guy that Steve Ross recomended, Barbara."
"It's a dead suit. It has no personality. It has no-" she made a gesture with her cigarette hand, trailing smoke through the air. "aura. You are going to a premiere tonight, not a funeral."
"It's a musical premiere. I didn't think the bar is particularly high."
"The bar is always high. You run a studio. You are twenty-five years old and you look like-" she tilted her head, studying him from across the room. "You look like a man who could be atractive if you would stop dressing like an accountant."
The suite was a disaster. Garment bags were draped across every surface. Shoe boxes formed a small cityscape on the floor near the bathroom door.
Open jewelry cases sat on the vanity, their contents glinting under the warm light of the table lamps. Barbara had been shopping.
"This one," she said, pulling a garment bag from the close. She unzipped the bag and held up the suit.
It was green. A deep, rich emerald that seemed to absorb the lamplight and give it back warmer.
Three pieces, jacket, vest, trousers cut in Italian style, which meant close to the body, structured through the shoulders, tapered at the waist.
With it, Barbara had selected a high-collared white shirt and a silk tie in a shade of deep blue that she held up next to Duke's face, squinting at the color match.
"The green goes with your eyes," she said, nodding to herself. "And the blue tie to bring them out."
Duke looked at the suit. He looked at Barbara. He looked back at the suit.
In this town, in this industry, in this specific moment of cultural history, appearance was not vanity. It was strategy.
Duke had been neglecting his narrative. He'd been so consumed by the work, the films, the deals, the technology acquisitions, the comic book wars, the satellite leases, the thousand daily decisions that constituted the management of a sprawling entertainment empire that he'd allowed his public image to solidify into something flat and colorless.
The young mogul. The boy wonder. The serious man in the serious suit who ran Paramount and apparently had no personal life whatsoever.
"The bachelor boy rumors," Duke said, pulling off his undershirt and reaching for the white dress shirt Barbara was holding out. "Jaffe mentioned them."
Barbara let out a laugh.
"In Italy," she said, stubbing out her cigarette in the crystal ashtray on the vanity, "no man has no scandals. If people are saying you have no women, it is because we never go out to public places. This is what happens when you insist on eating room service every night and working until midnight. People fill the silence with stories. If you don't give them the real story, they will invent one."
"I prefer quiet nights where nobody takes photographs."
"Tonight, we will have to take a lot of photographs."
Duke buttoned the shirt, knotted the blue silk tie, and shrugged into the emerald vest. The fabric settled against his body like it had been waiting for him. He looked in the mirror and saw someone he almost didn't recognize.
The Italian cut emphasized his shoulders and narrow waist, the physique of a man who still trained every once in a while. The high collar of the shirt framed his jaw, his face, the sharp planes and angles that photographers loved and that Duke had never thought much about.
'Tonight, i'm mogging people.'
Barbara appeared behind him in the mirror, her chin resting on his shoulder, her eyes meeting his in the glass. "There," she said softly. "Now you look like you."
There was a bittersweet quality to the moment that neither of them acknowledged directly but both of them felt. Barbara was leaving.
Not tonight but tomorrow afternoon, a flight to Rome, a four-picture deal waiting for her in Italy, a year of work in the giallo and poliziotteschi films that were her bread and butter in the European market.
But that was tomorrow. Tonight was tonight.
___
The Eden Theatre on Second Avenue was not, by Broadway standards, the grandest venue in New York.
But tonight, for the premiere of Grease, a new musical that was generating the kind of pre-opening buzz that made producers' hands shake and ticket scalpers' eyes light up-the Eden had been transformed.
He had heard about the play and bought the movie rights directly.
A red carpet stretched from the curb to the front doors, flanked by velvet ropes and the compressed, mass of photographers and reporters.
The black Lincoln Continental pulled to the curb, the driver opened the rear door. Duke stepped out.
He could feel the photographers' attention shift toward him. He was known, the young Paramount chief, the director, the mogul but he was not, in the parlance of the tabloid ecosystem, "good copy."
He didn't date publicly. He didn't cause scenes. He didn't give the cameras anything to sell. He was, in the visual economy of the red carpet, a respectable but unexciting commodity.
That calculus changed in the space of a single heartbeat. The heartbeat during which Duke turned back toward the car and extended his hand into the dark interior of the Lincoln.
Barbara Bouchet took his hand and stepped into the light.
The gown was silver. The neckline was low enough to generate letters to the editor. The back was lower. The fabric moved when she moved, which was constantly.
Duke placed his hand on the small of Barbara's back. The gesture was small, natural, and possessive without being aggressive.
They walked the carpet together, and Duke did something he had never done at a public event before, he slowed down. He let the photographers work. He paused at the marks, turned when asked, smiled.
Barbara was magnificent. She knew the carpet and she angled her body toward the strongest light source. She laughed at something Duke murmured in her ear, and the laugh was real, and the photographers captured it.
By the time they reached the theater doors, Duke could already feel the narrative shifting. He had stopped by the press corps that Paramount's publicity department had strategically placed along the carpet.
He hoped that by morning, the Confidential headlines about him would be replaced by something like The Mogul and the Italian Muse or something similar.
___
Two days later, Duke stood in the terminal at JFK that everyone still called the TWA building.
Barry Diller was already there, standing near the departure board with a leather briefcase in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other.
Duke liked Diller.
This was not a common sentiment among the people who worked with Barry Diller, many of whom would have used words like "terrifying," "demanding," "relentless," and "impossible" to describe the experience.
"You look tired," Diller said as Duke approached.
"I wrapped a picture and went to a premiere. That's as close to rested as I get."
"I saw the photos. You and the Italian. Very strategic."
"It wasn't strategic. I happen to enjoy her company."
"Everything you do is strategic, Duke. Even the things you enjoy. That's not a criticism."
They stood by the windows, watching a Pan Am 747 go toward the runway.
"Jaffe is leaving," Duke said.
Diller nodded. He already knew.
"His father. Columbia. The dynasty play," Diller said. "Smart move for him. The question is what it means for Paramount."
"The question," Duke said, turning from the window to look directly at Diller, "is who replaces him."
The moment hung between them.
"Who would you recommend?" Duke asked.
Diller set his coffee cup on the windowsill. "You don't need a recommendation, Duke. You need a decision. And I think you've already made it, or you wouldn't be asking me this question in an airport where we both know I'm about to spend the next month watching you travel the world while I hold down the fort."
"Hypothetically, then. If you were me. What would you want in a CEO?"
"I would want an aggreasive president." Diller's voice had dropped. "Jaffe was a good president. He kept the lights on. He managed the operations. He put out fires and balanced budgets and maintained relationships with talent and exhibitors and all the other constituencies that a studio has to service. And he did it well."
But that's not what Paramount needs now. Paramount isn't a small studio anymore, Duke. If our slate works this year then other studios will begin to attack us. In that case, Jaffe who like to hop from studio to studio would be a liability."
"Those are strong words."
"It's the right thing to say. You've built something that nobody else in this industry has, a company that spans films, television, technology, comics, animation, international distribution."
"The person who runs that company can't just be competent. They have to be visionary."
"They have to see where the industry is going before the industry knows it's going there. Satellites. Cable. Home entertainment. International markets. The old model of making a movie, put it in theaters, and collecting the receipts is dying."
"And you think you're that visionary."
Diller didn't blink. "Test me. Give me a part of the operations from now until Jaffe leaves. Let me run the spring and summer slate or the Godfather release, the Pong launch, the satellite buildout, the DC Studios pipeline. Something. Give me the keys and see what I do with them. If I haven't proven my worth by October, fire me. I won't argue."
"You're not lacking in confidence."
"Confidence is a waste of time, Duke. I have evidence. I have the satellite deal that I brought to you. I have ideas about home video, about international co-production, about vertical integration, that nobody else in this building is even thinking about yet. I intend to have results to back my claims."
Duke studied him for a long moment.
"Okay then," Duke said. "Show me what you can do."
Diller picked up his coffee, took a sip, and smiled.
"You won't be disappointed," he said.
"I know," Duke replied. "Because if I am, I'll replace you. And you know it."
___
The first-class cabin of the Pan Am 747 was, in 1972, the closest thing to a flying living room that human engineering had yet produced. The seats were wide, upholstered in a blue fabric that Pan Am's designers had chosen because it photographed well in advertisements.
The legroom was generous enough to accommodate Duke's frame without the contortionist adjustments that coach demanded. A spiral staircase in the forward section led to an upper-deck lounge that featured a bar, actual bartenders, and ambient lighting.
Duke sat window side, watching as the 747 climbed over the Atlantic. Barbara was gone. Her flight to Rome had departed an hour before his.
She would be in Italy by morning. Four pictures in one year, a punishing schedule by any standard.
Duke turned from the window and looked at the materials spread across the empty seat beside him. A stack of BBC program guides. A manila folder containing transcripts of comedy sketches, episode summaries, biographical notes on performers and writers.
And on top of the stack, a single sheet of paper on which Duke had written, in his precise angular handwriting, a name circled in thick red ink.
Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Marty Feldman had been insistent that he meet them. Feldman, the bug-eyed British comedian had become one of Duke's unexpected friends in the entertainment world.
The Pythons were doing something that no one in American comedy was doing, or was even capable of doing, because it required a specifically British combination.
Each of the members of their group was distinct, each of them brilliant, and together constituting a comedic ensemble that was, in Duke's professional estimation, the most talented group of comedy writers and performers working in the English language.
And they were unknown in America. Completely, totally unknown. Flying Circus aired on the BBC, and the BBC did not, in 1972, have meaningful distribution in the United States.
American audiences who wanted to see the show had to rely on the handful of PBS stations that had begun importing it, and PBS viewership was a fraction of a fraction of the national audience.
The Pythons were, in market terms, an asset that was massively undervalued because of a distribution bottleneck.
In his past life, Python had been a cult phenomenon that migrated to America slowly, unevenly, through college campuses and late-night television and word of mouth. It had taken years for them to break through to mainstream American audiences, and by the time they did, the window of maximum cultural impact had already narrowed.
The Pythons had never achieved the kind of instant, explosive mass-market penetration that their talent deserved.
Duke intended to change that with the weight of Paramount's distribution network behind him.
___
Was watching the Oscars, I was supporting Timothy but i don't mind that Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor (although kinda crazy that he did it on an enssemble horror-musical piece)
I did not like OBAA as Best Picture