Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, Hollywood, where you live.”

  “Hollywood is shit,” he said.

  “But you live there…”

  “Nah. It just sounds good, you know, ‘of Hollywood.’ Gives dames a thrill.”

  “It does have a ring,” I agreed.

  “Sure,” said Olivier, “but L.A. is bullshit. I don’t never go there. I got Mexican wetbacks sews up the goods. In this business you need a name. You think dames buy sexy dresses from ‘Olivier of Thirty-eighth Street’?”

  It was Bingo’s lunch, but Olivier had already called for the wine card.

  “The Pétrus ’61,” he said.

  I had a vague idea what that cost.

  Marsh, simpering with satisfaction and ignoring the price, said, “John was Chanel’s last and closest friend.”

  “You fucked her?” Olivier inquired, looking at me with a new respect.

  “They were friends, Olivier,” Bingo said sternly. “John wrote a book about her.”

  “Oh.” He sounded disappointed.

  “It’s possible for people to have a relationship without its involving sex.” Bingo was starting to sound almost schoolmarmish.

  The wine arrived and Olivier tasted it. “Fucking great,” he enthused.

  “Tell Mr. Sharkey about the Blue Train, Olivier,” Marsh urged.

  “You know,” the Frenchman told me, ignoring Bingo, “I like your name. It’s sexy.”

  “The Blue Train,” Marsh insisted sternly.

  It turned out that while traveling on the famous Blue Train between Nice and Paris, Olivier of Hollywood had actually seduced a young American bridegroom while the man was on his honeymoon, luring him from the nuptial compartment to Olivier’s narrow berth as the train sped north. He told the story with considerable spirit and in great detail. Bingo smiled smugly, satisfied that Olivier had performed as advertised.

  “Gee,” I said, unsure if that covered the situation.

  Olivier apparently thought it sufficient. “Maybe you write in the Times about me?”

  “Sure,” I said, carelessly and insincerely. I could imagine Mr. Gelb and Mr. Rosenthal seeing a feature on Olivier of Hollywood and the Blue Train cross their desks.

  “I got a new boyfriend now,” Olivier went on, “a New York cop. I wear his uniform around the apartment, and he lets me blow his whistle.”

  Bingo giggled.

  I lifted a wineglass, smothering confusion with the Pétrus. It was an extraordinary wine. I liked Olivier better already.

  Madame Henriette, the ugly woman who’d greeted Bingo with such zeal, hovered as we ordered.

  “She’s Henri Soulé’s old mistress,” he confided. “She was the hat-check girl at Le Pavillon, and in a moment of weakness he took her to bed. Great chefs are so vulnerable, slaving over hot stoves all day, tasting things, stirring the bonne soupe. I’m sure she took advantage of him while he was enervated by spices. Can you imagine waking up next to a face like hers?”

  I wondered if she could hear him, if people at other tables were, as Bingo often did, taking notes of overheard conversations. I wondered about the laws on slander in New York State. When we’d lunched and were on the way out, Bingo introduced us, again embracing Madame Henriette with enormous affection, turning to me while still in her arms:

  “Madame Henriette is so nice, John. And Ames…”

  17 Stepping down to enter Dracula’s castle.

  AS Olivier of Hollywood left us on the sidewalk, Marsh peered at his wristwatch.

  “Come on,” he said, skipping east on Fifty-fifth Street, “it’s after two and I hate to miss the start.”

  “Of what?”

  “There’s this new movie I’m dying to see. Don’t you love going to movies in the afternoon?”

  “Well, I guess so…”

  “This one’s about lesbians. Come on, I want to see how they do it.”

  Evenings were for Bingo’s wife and his children and their home; afternoons, when he could sneak away like this, delighting in the joy of truancy, were for movies. He liked having company, and I was drafted. I’d always felt furtive about afternoon movies, coming out while it was still daylight.

  Less than two hours later we were back on the street. The film turned out to be exceedingly dull and not about lesbians at all; he’d gotten that wrong, and I was a bit huffy about it.

  “Well, I certainly thought it was going to be about lesbians,” Bingo said lamely, “the ad in the paper looked that way.”

  I admitted then I was uneasy about movies in the afternoon.

  “Yes,” he said, “it all has to do with being a Catholic. Guilt and all that. You are a Catholic, of course. The eight deadly sins…”

  “Seven.”

  He was again regarding his watch, tempted to try to catch a four o’clock show somewhere. Then, resignedly, he shrugged. “I guess we’d better go back. I promised to show you around the office.”

  In the cab downtown he talked about film, saying that while he despised most American culture, he thought Hollywood made the best movies.

  “Including my own personal all-time favorite.”

  “Which is…?”

  “Laura.”

  Not, he told me confidentially, because it was a whodunit or because of the romance between Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews.

  “At Yale they were always pushing British films at us, art movies like Les Amants. Or Hiroshima, Mon Amour.”

  “Thought they were French,” I said.

  “Or the Laurence Olivier movies about Shakespeare,” he went on, unperturbed. “Hamlet. Or Henry the Fourth.”

  “Fifth.”

  “Whatever.”

  He also liked Citizen Kane and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and Singin’ in the Rain. And… Laura.

  “It’s the Clifford Webb character…”

  “Isn’t it ‘Clifton’?”

  “… yes, the evil columnist besotten with love for Laura. Who certainly wasn’t really worthy of him, not up to his standards at all, but isn’t that how men are, always pining away for…” He searched for the word.

  “The ‘unattainable,’ ” I offered.

  “Just so,” Bingo said. Then, more thoughtfully, “You know, had they made Laura a few years later, after I got the magazine started and began to be talked about, it would have been actionable.”

  “What would?” I asked, thoroughly lost now.

  Bingo regarded me with something less than tolerance.

  “The Waldo Lydecker character. Clearly inspired by me.” He paused. “I mean, if at the time they knew who I was.”

  He’d lost me again, in the details, but I was beginning to grasp his thought.

  “I really liked how Waldo typed his column, on a sort of little platform erected over the bathtub. I thought of doing that myself, you know, but Ames talked me out of it.”

  “Why?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  “Well, Lydecker used an old-fashioned typewriter. I use an electric. And Ames said if it slipped off and fell into the tub, I’d be electrocuted.” He paused again, “Just as surely as they electrocuted Hoffman, who kidnapped the Lindbergh baby.”

  “Hauptmann.”

  “Yes, that fellow.”

  I really didn’t know what to say at times like this, when Bingo thoroughly befuddled me with vagaries of grammar and the mythic nature of his thought processes.

  “Don’t you think I would have had a case? I mean, you’ve seen the film, how Lydecker is modeled on me.”

  Well, I said, there certainly was a similarity…

  “… as if they knew there’d be someone like me, before the movie was ever made…”

  Only Marsh, I thought, a man who could consider a libel action over a work made years before he could possibly have been its putative subject.… I was still mulling this when he was saying it was his nightmare to be caught coming out of the movies some afternoon by one of his many enemies.

  “If Nunc came along, for example, and saw me
. I mean, I’d never hear the end of it. Or the Social Larva…”

  It was, he concluded, part of the fun of afternoon movies, the thrill of risking exposure. “You know, how sex maniacs really want to be captured and write their names on mirrors with the victim’s lipstick.”

  He was rhapsodizing now about Japanese monster films, the ones starring B actors like Raymond Burr and always starting off with some idyllic picnic or boating scene when suddenly, set free by postwar nuclear underseas testing, an enormous prehistoric monster emerges to…

  “We’re here!” Bingo cried, rapping at the plastic window between ourselves and the driver and pushing bills into the cash tray. I looked out to see what looked to be a turn-of-the-century mansion, mullioned windows, turrets and all, looming above us, everything but cast-iron Negro jockeys flanking the enormous front doors.

  “This is it!” said Bingo enthusiastically. “The Marsh building!”

  For some obscure reason I thought of the young solicitor, new to Transylvania, stepping down from the carriage to enter Dracula’s castle.

  18 Pinsky does not do donkeys.

  “THIS is Mr. Sharkey,” Bingo said over and over as we entered and began to climb through the old building, floor by floor. “He won the Pulitzer Prize,” as childishly proud of me as of a new puppy.

  The magazine’s offices rabbit-warrened through gallery, floor, and wing of the handsome period mansion on lower Fifth, where the city’s publishing business once clustered and flourished, the anachronism conscious and charming. There were pretty, leggy girls at every turning; bent old men in vests; dashing postgraduates who affected suspenders; chattering typewriters, ringing phones, cigarette smoke hanging blue, brimming, reeking ashtrays, mugs of black coffee gone cold and sour. In all, a marvelous facsimile of real journalism.

  No one seemed aware of the imposture.

  Several floors up was the advertising department. The ad director, sullen and a drinker, was nodded to and ignored. We moved on swiftly.

  “And this is Mr. Pinsky,” Bingo said, voice cracking with emotion. “He sells absolutely all the advertising.”

  Pinsky, tall and craggy with thick, graying hair and a cordovan suntan no salaried worker ever comes by honestly, smiled his tolerance.

  “I bring in a few dollars,” he admitted.

  Marsh beamed on him. I had a Pulitzer; Pinsky brought in the dollars. We were both important, one actually, the other potentially. Perhaps it wasn’t all that different from the dusty, accustomed precincts of the Times. Pinsky, I would learn, was an office legend, living splendidly with a baroque style all his own. Arriving at a grand hotel, a resort in the islands, or the shingle at Portofino, Pinsky instantly summoned whoever was in charge—concierge, mayor, chief barman—to issue a terse announcement:

  “I am Mr. Pinsky,” he would say, pulling out an impressive wallet and holding it above his head, pointing to it with the free hand, “and this is Mr. Pinsky’s wallet. You take care of Mr. Pinsky and Mr. Pinsky’s wallet takes care of you.”

  Pinsky, it was said, invariably received excellent service.

  It was not simply his largesse that impressed the natives on his travels. During a trip through the Greek isles Pinsky was offered the ritual tour of a down-at-the-heels Orthodox monastery of enormous sanctity set atop a towering peak accessible only on the back of a small, sure-footed Aegean donkey. Pinsky would have none of it. To the local Pope he declared:

  “Pinsky does not do donkeys. Four natives carrying a basket, maybe. But Pinsky does not do donkeys.”

  The monastery remained unvisited.

  As we departed Pinsky’s realm into the stairwell, Marsh hissed, apologetic and pleased both, “Great salesmen ought to be vulgar. He’s terribly good, but not our sort, not our sort at all.”

  I was again unsure just what sort that was. Bingo went on:

  “We employ Jews, of course,” he said murkily.

  As we ascended through the building, cheerful (or intimidated) smiles greeting us, we encountered an extraordinary sight, a slender young black man, dizzyingly tall, smoking, or rather posturing with, an ivory cigarette holder and wearing a soft gray flannel vested suit that murmured Savile Row. I suddenly felt rumpled.

  “This is Elegant Hopkins,” Marsh said brightly, “one of our most truly talented young people.”

  Hopkins extended a languid hand as I was introduced, preferring not to expend energy on the unimportant and not yet having measured my role.

  “Charmed,” he said, in a studied Oxbridge drawl.

  As he passed on, Bingo giggled.

  “Isn’t he marvelous? Shoes by Lobb, shirts handmade at Charvet. And not even Gielgud sounds as grand.”

  “Is that really his name, ‘Elegant’?”

  “I asked the same question myself. Looked it up on his withholding forms. I questioned him about it, and he said his mother was a prodigious reader of romantic novels. He has sisters called Utopia and Bountiful and a brother named Zealous. Or maybe that’s a sister as well.”

  Then Marsh thought of something. “But he hadn’t been here a week when the girls christened him. He’s always carrying on about becoming a fashion designer, that this is temporary, a kind of summer internship. Very superior he is. So the girls gave him a pet name.”

  “Yes?”

  Marsh swiveled his head to see if we could be overheard.

  “The African Queen,” he said. “Delicious, isn’t it?”

  “But they don’t call him that, not to his face?”

  Bingo looked pained. “Of course not. Colored people are very sensitive. I’m most particular about such things. And Ames.”

  Now he skipped ahead of me through another department where “the girls” worked, where even now they might be concocting nicknames for newcomers like me. One looked up from a typewriter and briefly held my eyes. This might not be a bad place to work after all.

  Bingo’s office was lushly carpeted, book lined, with pictures I assumed to be originals, more a comfortable study than a place of work. Marsh fell into a deep leather armchair and motioned me to another, before embarking on an impressive tour d’horizon of fashion journalism, from Vogue to Women’s Wear Daily.

  “Vogue is the biggest and richest,” he began. “Si Newhouse and his brother own it, and the publisher is a salesman who keeps getting married again. But the man who really runs it is named Alex Liberman. He’s an artist. He cuts up iron girders and things with a blowtorch and puts them out on lawns to rust, and Hilton Kramer at the Times and Tom Hoving at the Met go crazy.”

  “I think I’ve seen some of his…”

  “He’s an aristocrat as well, you know, just getting out of St. Petersburg before they shot the czar or something, and he’s very bright. He has the art directors all terrified of his sheer good taste. They retired the editor of Vogue a few years ago, Madame Vreeland, a woman with lacquered hair who resembles the last Empress of China.”

  “Coco used to speak of her,” I said, “called her ‘the most pretentious woman ever…’ ”

  Marsh loved to hear people he knew being trashed, and he got up and skipped about a bit.

  “Did she? That’s splendid. I remember Walter Hoving saying when he was running Lord and Taylor, he had Vreeland come in and look over the store and tell him honestly what she thought, this was when she was still at Harper’s Bazaar, and so Diana went through all the floors and then she got to Mr. Hoving’s office and she said, ‘You know, Mr. Hoving, your store would be ever so much nicer if there weren’t so many customers.’ ”

  Back in his chair, Bingo resumed his appraisal of the magazines.

  “Bazaar is a disaster area. Hearst keeps changing editors, firing publishers. Winston Churchill’s mother used to write for the Bazaar a hundred years ago. Did you know that?”

  “No, I…”

  “It’s true. She was broke and having affairs and Winston and his brother were still in school or in the army or something and Lady Churchill wrote free-lance pieces and now they publish fe
atures on corrective footwear. I wish she were still alive; I’d love to have Churchill’s mother on Fashion, wouldn’t you?”

  “Sure. She’d certainly sell some maga…”

  “Glamour and Mademoiselle are both owned by Condé Nast. Newhouse, again. Both make money. Glamour is very smart in its marketing, lots of pretty girls fresh out of Sarah Lawrence and Bryn Mawr running around showing their legs and charming the retailers. But they have zero influence with the designers…”

  “The Sarah Lawrence girls?”

  “No, Mademoiselle and Glamour. The designers are key to the entire business. They’re all crazy except for Sarmi and he has no talent. Town and Country has a very good editor named Frank Zachary, and they read it in San Diego, all the admirals’ widows. Fleur Cowles used to have a magazine, too, but she got divorced. Women’s Wear Daily has the most influence, even more than ours. The daily frequency gives it a tremendous edge, and Fairchild is a clever man, smarmy but shrewd. He went to Princeton…”

  I had visions of a feud that began at a half-forgotten Yale-Princeton game a generation ago.

  “… and frequency is why I made Fashion a weekly. Not as good as a daily, obviously, but so much more timely and fresh than a monthly. That’s why Elle magazine is the most interesting fashion magazine in France. A woman named Helen Gordon Lazareff runs it. Quite mad, totally gaga.”

  “I met her at Coco’s. She had both of us for lunch and…”

  “Well, then, you know. Certifiable but cunning. She’s the reason every little French shop girl has at least a suspicion of chic.”

  He went on like this, ending up with Fashion, never apologizing for it, always talking it up, real passion in his voice. He wanted it to be more than a fashion magazine, the Vanity Fair of its time perhaps, saying something and saying it memorably, good writing, great art direction, cutting criticism, acutely honed commentary. That was where I came in, the commentary.

  “Not about clothes. You don’t know enough to write fashion. We have people to do that. I want you to write about the designers, these mad, glamorous, tortured people, the way you wrote about Colonel Khadafy for the Times when he invaded Mali…”