Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  “Chad.”

  “… their wealth, the scandals, their incredible lifestyles, the jealousies. That ripe stuff you pried out of Coco for your book. All about the designers and the rich bitches who support them and the richer men who support the rich bitches and the whole phony society that leeches off all of them.” He paused for an instant. “Is it true Khadafy’s a transvestite, or was that just propaganda the CIA put out about him?”

  “Well, there was a story that…”

  Bingo waved a hand. Then, as if realizing he was confusing me, he concluded, “Well, you know what I mean.”

  I didn’t, not really, but I didn’t say that. He offered to start me at fifty thousand a year.

  A week later I returned to Paris, sending Bingo a note thanking him for his graciousness and the handsome offer, suggesting that if at any point I left the Times but remained in Paris, perhaps I could write the odd free-lance piece for him. Journalists talk endlessly of money, but most of us are snobs and I wasn’t yet sure I really wanted to trade in The New York Times for something called Fashion that employed people named “Elegant Hopkins.”

  19 The creator of the New Look ate himself to death.

  IN the 1920s the American poet Hart Crane scrawled on a postcard this description of Paris:

  “Dinners, soirees, poets, erratic millionaires, painters, translations, lobsters, absinthe, music, promenades, oysters, sherry, aspirin, pictures, Sapphic heiresses, editors, books, sailors. And How!”

  I hadn’t tried sailors. But fifty years after Crane I recognized the town.

  The New York Times doesn’t sack young men with Pulitzers but they give you hints, and after another year I resigned, writing Marsh to tell him I was staying in Paris but would be open to writing assignments. In January, he replied, he would be over for the fashion shows, staying at the Lancaster, and suggesting lunch.

  I was airy about the Times. You don’t confess failure to people you’re hoping will hand out plummy jobs.

  “I knew you weren’t their sort,” Bingo said with considerable satisfaction, “Abe Rosenthal and Artie Gelb.”

  Actually they’d both been more than generous with me, so instead of responding, I talked about Paris.

  “Don’t tell me about Paris,” Marsh said impatiently. “Don’t forget, it was here I bought Fashion and gulled Nunc into financing it, where I met Ames, where I learned French and lost innocence.”

  I sat back, swirling my wine, dark and wonderful, recognizing I was about to be treated to Bingo in full flight.

  “Dior was king then. I was at the Sorbonne in ’59 when he died on a voyage his astrologer warned him against taking. People who liked Dior said it was a cardiac. Or stress. It was none of those things. It was gluttony. We had mutual friends through family and I’d been taken up by him and I can testify what killed him. This patron saint of couture, the creator of the New Look, ate himself to death. Oh, you could see it coming. The pâté, the pot-au-feu, the sausage, the rack of lamb, the faisan à l’orange, the lunches of choucroute at Lipp, the crevettes at Méditerranée, the dinners Chez Allard. And desserts! The fraises de bois, the framboises, the peaches swimming in kirsch, everything smothered in crème fraîche, the tortes, the profiteroles, the cheese platter and petits pains thick with slabs of butter!”

  Bingo enjoyed himself a good meal and ate all through this account, his slight tummy pressing against his vest and the beltline of his gently pleated trousers, but there was no mistaking his righteous indignation.

  “Dior,” said Marsh, “was a pig.”

  After Dior as king came Balenciaga.

  “He and his little monks,” Bingo said with some asperity, “all in their surgically pristine neat little white smocks. Those juicy boys and this ascetic old Spaniard, a man of such taste and artistry, of discrimination and genius. And what was he doing? Getting down on his hands and knees for the little monks to mount and bugger him. Really, you had to be there.”

  “Were you?” I asked, unable to resist.

  “Of course not. But by then I had my sources. Gérard used to tell me everything. Discreetly, of course.”

  Who Gérard was, was not explained. There had been a falling out between Balenciaga and Fashion magazine and Bingo was now banned from the house.

  “I wrote that he and Givenchy strolled hand in hand. The most innocent of similes, meant stylistically of course, but Balenciaga took it to have a sexual connotation. So we’re banned from seeing the collections. I send pretty girls to work the sidewalks outside, swinging the bag like streetwalkers, and peeking in through the windows during rehearsals. Once I dressed up a young editor as a florist’s assistant, cheap plastic smock and carpet slippers, and sent her in with a vulgarly enormous bouquet for Monsieur Balenciaga, to be delivered personally into his hands and with a card I forged with the name of the man who owns Bergdorf’s. Balenciaga can’t resist flattery. So he took the flowers and signed for them, all the while letting the girl get a look ’round at the work going on and taking mental notes of the drawings. But as she left he suddenly called her back. Had she been discovered?”

  Bingo halted dramatically.

  “No, he wanted to give her a franc tip.” Another pause. “The skinflint.”

  Balenciaga was so obsessed by secrecy and so distrustful of the press, Marsh said, he entered and left his own maison de couture in one of its black-lacquered little delivery vans, getting in and out in the interior courtyard and riding in back with the racked dresses, “lying on the floor so no one could see him through the windows.”

  Balenciaga and his acolyte Givenchy were not favorites of Fashion.

  I decided to put in an anecdote of my own, about Castillo, the Spaniard Chanel despised.

  “Coco told me he once tried to set her on fire. There was a garden party one evening off the Etoile, lighted by tapers, and she was wearing something flowing…”

  “Chiffon, I would think,” Bingo put in expertly.

  “… and he surprised her by asking her to dance. Until she realized he kept steering her and the flowing stuff…”

  “… chiffon, surely.”

  “… toward the flaming candles.”

  “They’ve always had difficulty with chiffon and the flammability standards,” Marsh said pedantically, hating to have an anecdote topped. I decided against telling him about the Gypsy boys in the castle basement. It was just as well.

  Bingo related a preposterous tale about a famous American political figure’s second wife and a German shepherd.

  I must have goggled. “You know this?”

  Bingo looked at me tolerantly. “Everyone knows it, just everyone.”

  For all his journalistic lineage, a family in the business, Marsh was astonishingly vague about libel law, marvelous at winnowing out shameful secrets but erratic when it came to the reportorial conventions.

  “But just how do you prove such a story?”

  He fixed me with an incredulous eye. “Don’t be naive. It’s common knowledge.”

  You didn’t win arguments like that with Marsh, and before lunch was ended we’d agreed on a dozen pieces a year from Paris for Fashion magazine at two thousand apiece. It wasn’t a lot of money to him, but it would keep me going until I figured out just what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

  And it didn’t pin me down to full-time work for a man and a magazine I didn’t yet quite understand. And a man who didn’t know as much about me as he thought he did.

  20 I didn’t want to be laughed at.

  IT bothered me, going to work for a man as relentlessly curious as Marsh and keeping things from him.

  “We all have our secrets,” he’d said. “Everyone has something to hide.”

  He was only blathering, going on as he did about the fashion designers and their little scandals. He didn’t know a thing about my people, and I hoped he never would. No one wants sandpaper rubbed across scabs.

  I was nine years old and came home from school to learn about it. I’d left that morning
a reasonably well-adjusted third-grader who lived in a nice clapboard house on one of the better streets on the right side of the tracks in a prosperous Ohio town where my mother, who had social ambitions, and my father, the county attorney, cut a certain figure. Then came the afternoon paper with its headlines:

  “County Attorney Sharkey Accused!”

  And the subhead: “State Alleges He Faced Evidence to Insure Convictions.”

  “Mom?”

  She sat at the kitchen table, sobbing. It was unlike her, both the tears and the kitchen table. We had a maid, and my mother, who never wept, preferred the sitting room.

  “Here, read it for yourself. You’ll hear enough about it.”

  I picked up the paper, an old-fashioned broadsheet not yet owned by Gannett or Knight or anybody, an ornery, independent small-town daily. There was my dad on the front page, a three-year-old photo from the last election. The paper said he had been indicted, that he would shortly be arraigned, that he was suspended from his job as county attorney. I knew those terms; lawyers’ sons hear them around the house, over the dinner table.

  When my father came home he went into the den alone for a while. Then he called for me.

  “Son, you saw the paper.”

  “Yessir.”

  “You understand I’m in difficulty. Legal problems. And that in school tomorrow your friends may talk about them, about what the newspaper said. They may tease you a bit.”

  I nodded, not really knowing.

  “If they do, don’t get into fights, don’t argue. Just say you know about it, or say nothing, or go your way.”

  “Yessir.”

  “And, Johnny, are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t say you’re sorry, don’t apologize, remember that? Nothing they say I did calls for any apology from you or your mom or anyone but me.”

  “Yessir.”

  “All right, you go now and play.”

  When I went out of the den I looked through the open door into the kitchen where my mother stood, red-eyed, over the afternoon paper.

  A week later my father killed himself, using the old shotgun he kept in the cellar for shooting crows. My mother went sort of funny after that, drinking a bit. She died when I was thirteen, able to take disaster but not embarrassment.

  Uncle Ab and Aunt Micki brought me up until I went away to school at Ohio State and applied right away for the staff of the newspaper as a freshman. I figured if a small-town afternoon paper could change people’s lives, being on a newspaper was the thing to do. Not even lawyers, or county attorneys, were as important as newspapers. And their headlines.

  So when Bingo Marsh talked about newspapering and coming from a newspaper background and about the journalist’s code and ethic, I knew as much as he did. In a way, I wanted to tell him about my dad and the trouble so he’d understand why being a good newspaperman was important to me.

  But Bingo had that way of snickering and making sport of things, and I didn’t want to be laughed at. Or gossiped about. Or felt sorry for. Anyway, it was none of his business. His life, his wife and home, whatever Marsh was beyond the office and the magazine, were kept guarded and private. Why not my life?

  So I held old secrets close.

  21 He’s a hundred years old and he has a girlfriend.

  THERE was a final dinner with Bingo. “You’ve got to meet Bergé before I leave. The smartest man in Paris.”

  By now I recognized the patterns in Marsh’s speech. One “must” do this and “never” do that. People were “the smartest… the most dreadful… my best friend.” He dealt in absolutes, chiaroscuro, no grays or pastels on Bingo’s palette.

  I’d seen Pierre Bergé around town, of course, once at a cocktail at Saint Laurent’s flat on the Left Bank, the one decorated with narwhal horns. I was standing there with a glass when a New York coat-and-suit buyer cornered Bergé, Saint Laurent’s partner, and was asking impertinently if he spoke English.

  “I… can… count,” Bergé responded with malicious glee. My admiration for him derived from that moment.

  “I don’t know if they, you know, sleep together…”

  “Who?”

  “Yves and Pierre. They’ve been, well, together for years. Pierre is from La Rochelle and came up to Paris to paint, but he lacked the talent. Even he’ll tell you that, so I’m not being bitchy. While still a teenager he was arrested at the Palais de Chaillot demonstrating on behalf of Garry Davis. You remember him? The ‘citizen of the world’ who burned his passport.”

  “I think so.”

  “A poseur, that’s my opinion, but it was American MPs who arrested young Pierre, so he hates us. Not you or me or Ames, for goodness’ sake, but us in general. He’s a bolshie, red flag and all, and a millionaire. Drives a Bentley and blathers on about the redistribution of wealth. Didn’t that fellow John Reed go to Princeton, the one who wrote about the Russian Revolution and was so chummy with Lenin?”

  “Harvard, I believe.” I wondered what any of this had to do with Saint Laurent’s partner.

  “You may be right. Harvard’s always been rife with bolshies. Free love, Timothy Leary, vegetarianism, all that sort of nonsense. Anyway, Bergé’s first fortune was made with Bernard Buffet, managing his career, marketing his pictures. I’ve been through Bergé’s apartment, end to end, it’s chockablock with Buffets, even the bathroom. There must be a hundred of them, and they’ve got to be worth forty thousand apiece, that is, if you like the linear style.”

  “Well, I often…”

  “Since 1960 or so Pierre’s been with Saint Laurent. He’d been clever about discerning talent, and he’s been a tremendous help to Yves, who tends to faint, and things.”

  “Literally?”

  “Oh yes. When they drafted him into the army to fight the Algerians, Yves had a nervous breakdown. All those lusty young French boys, and here was poor Yves among them in the barracks, weeping and sobbing, and having to go pipi in front of everyone. They used to make him iron their underwear for inspection.”

  “Man’s inhumanity to man…”

  “And Pierre saved him from all that after the army threw him out. A very clever man, Bergé. Not that Yves doesn’t still have his little problems, such as the time when…”

  The cab chose this promising moment to pull up at last, having missed the restaurant several times and going back.

  “This is the most obscure street in Paris,” Bingo said proudly.

  Bergé was there ahead of us, reorganizing the table according to his own seating plan.

  “Hallo, you rat fink,” he greeted Marsh.

  “No, you’re the rat fink,” Bingo responded.

  “No, you are.”

  “The smartest man in Paris” and Marsh embraced. I was introduced.

  “This is John Sharkey, Pierre.”

  “Ah yes,” Bergé said, hissing his esses, “le requin.”

  “What’s that? What’s that mean?” Bingo said hastily, suspicious he was missing something, his French rusty.

  “The… shark!” Bergé said, smacking his lips, then calling imperiously for a waiter.

  Marsh had called him a Communist; what he was, theoretically, was a socialist. In actuality, he was in style a monarchist, of the strict construction.

  They fetched salad reeking with garlic, and we dove in, Bingo and Pierre swapping stories about people in the fashion business, most of them scatological, all of them libelous.

  “Cela ne fait rien,” Beré would say, “that’s nothing,” and he would tell another story.

  They even told stories about themselves, Marsh recounting the tale of a celebrated man who once broke into his stateroom on the Queen Mary and offered to perform base acts.

  “You invent these things,” I said incredulously.

  Bingo looked at me. “Everyone knows about him,” he said.

  “But…”

  Bergé snapped his fingers for more wine.

  “Don’t ever be provincial, John,” Marsh said
seriously. “More is expected of you.”

  Bergé told a story about Pierre Cardin’s being gulled again in yet another confidence scheme, while Marsh countered with an anecdote about the Baron Nicky de Gunzberg of Vogue.

  “The salot!” Bergé exploded, “the way he turned his vest.”

  The baron, who did fashion things for Vogue, had apparently been overheard being complimentary about the current Dior collection. When Bergé went to the men’s room, Bingo leaned his head close to mine. “You never, never praise one designer where another might hear of it.”

  Women’s Wear Daily had recently launched a new biweekly spinoff, a handsome broadsheet called W, and it was making something of a success in America.

  “They’re so cheap,” Bingo said in irritation. “It’s all recycled material from Women’s Wear… words, pictures, everything. They haven’t hired a single reporter, just some ad salesmen.”

  Bergé, who understandably wanted to stay on the right side of Women’s Wear Daily, said he did not agree, that the new paper was quite good. Now it was Bingo’s turn to sulk. The old man who owned the bistro, Monsieur Mangin, came out briskly to greet us and to praise the gigot d’agneau.

  “He’s a hundred years old,” Bingo whispered when Mangin returned to the kitchen, “and he has a girlfriend.”

  “He can’t.”

  “But he has. Everyone knows it. And Ames.”

  The lamb was wonderful, and after we went to Regine’s to dance with two lesbians, both of them handsome women. I was getting rather drunk and Bergé kept pushing the Black Label on me, enjoying watching me play the fool. Then one of our lesbians spied a very pretty girl dancing with a good-looking boy.

  “I’ll wager I can get her away from him,” she said. Stakes were arranged and money put up. Bingo said he never gambled. But just this once…

  Bergé made a book.

  When I left, alone, about four A.M., the woman, Betty, was dancing with the pretty girl and the good-looking boy was sitting morosely at the bar.