500,000 first printing $500,000 ad/promo Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selection. Perhaps in ``Scruples Three'' Billy will donate excess clothing to the homeless. It centers on Billy Orsini (born Wilhelmina Hunnenwell. Ultimately, Billy realizes that having scads of money doesn't buy happiness (though it does make it possible to dine in five-star restaurants, live in groovy houses, wear fabulous clothes, stay forever young-looking, and finance your own business venture to design less expensive clothes for average-income folks-``Scruples Two''). Her first novel, Scruples, published in 1978, is a fashion-retail version of a Cinderella story, set in nineteen-sixties L.A. Gigi moves to New York, lives with lingerie model Sasha (the ``Great Slut'') Nevsky, and falls for Sasha's brother Zach. Then a tragedy involving her key staff sends the distraught Billy fleeing to Paris, where she has an affair with a sculptor. Meanwhile, Billy's Beverly Hills-based designer clothes store, Scruples, is so successful she opens new branches. She mothers Gigi, starting her off, naturally, with an expensive new haircut and wardrobe. Wealthy and gorgeous Billy Ikehorn has a secret, but when her movie producer husband Vito Orsini's never-before-mentioned teenage daughter shows up, Billy's secret, and her marriage, become irrelevant. Picking up on Oscar night, where Krantz's 1977 blockbuster first novel left off, this sequel is long on background filler, short on suspense, rarely exciting or even steamy.
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