Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  And, like great editors from Mencken to Luce to Felker, he could be unforgiving. In Marsh’s case, he was contemptuous of most journalists who didn’t work for him.

  “They’re shirkers, lazy or drunks or both. They pad expense accounts and hang around bars interviewing each other and acting the pundit. They’d rather talk about being reporters than be one.”

  As an editor he knew the worth of a great headline, of a repeatable phrase. He was forever seeking the perfect word, the totally apt sentence. He didn’t know those words until he saw them; couldn’t write that sentence, but he knew it when someone else wrote it. That was what he saw in me, that I could write.

  “That interview you did in the Times about Nureyev.”

  “Yes?” It had been at least two years ago, in Paris, yet Bingo remembered.

  “It was the first time I ever read that, about his knees, how after all those thousands of hours onstage, jumping up and down, lifting ballerinas and leaping about, his knees were as damaged as those of an aging football player…”

  “Yes,” I said, “and that after every rehearsal, after every performance, he had to ice them down in order to be able to walk the next day.”

  Marsh nodded. “I remembered that, about the ice. If you remember one new thing you didn’t know before, then a story works.”

  But perhaps the true reason for Fashion’s success was that it reflected, as Forbes magazine did Malcolm or The New Yorker first Ross and later Shawn, or the early Time Mr. Luce, the personality of the man who ran it. Fashion was Bingo’s creature; its idiosyncratic personality his personality, its lapses and failings his.

  As Pinsky the adman put it, “We are not dealing here with the Ladies’ Home Journal. Mister Marsh does not do recipes.”

  For all Bingo’s cavalier attitudes, his disdain for so much and for so many, Bingo was one of the least secure men I’d ever met. He himself put it down to bed-wetting. Or his mother’s disappearance.

  Count Vava and Madame Stealth, who differed on everything, differed on this.

  “He should have been breast-fed,” Regina Stealth announced, inaccurately.

  “He was suckled too long, until the age of eight or nine,” Vava declared, also without great accuracy.

  None of us really knew. But it says something for Bingo’s fascination, his tap dance at center stage of our lives, that we wondered and bickered endlessly about him. The Count and Madame Stealth, convinced I held keys, that I wielded some influence over Marsh, laid campaigns, inviting me to lavish dinners, suspecting after a tepid report from the Seeing Eye dog as to my libido that a good meal might be a more effective way of wrestling for my soul.

  In ways it was like being back in Paris, subject to bribes from the designers, and I thought back wistfully to those jolly days and nights, those splendid meals and those amiable round-limbed young women with their lovely, knowing eyes.

  39 So cheap he sends his socks to France to be washed.

  ALMOST from the first, Marsh took me into his confidence, summoning me to his office, closing the door with a great show of circumspection, and then telling me the most outrageous things. Perhaps he’d run out of gullible people.

  “Olivier,” he informed me in considerable perturbation one morning, “is going to kill himself.”

  I asked Bingo if he’d notified the authorities. “Maybe it’s not too late to prevent tragedy.”

  Marsh gave me a sour look.

  “We don’t want scandal. Let’s take him to lunch. Olivier’s so cheap he’ll postpone his own death for a free meal. You’ve got to come along. He respects you. And Ames. I can’t handle emotion alone.”

  Olivier and I had met twice in our lives.

  During a television interview, Olivier of Hollywood admitted that in the true peasant mentality, he sent his wool socks back to France for his mother to darn. This admission was made with a certain pride, but Women’s Wear Daily got it wrong, suggesting the designer was so cheap he sent his socks to France to be washed, dispatching them “by private courier.”

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “Anyone he can persuade to take his dirty socks to Paris,” Marsh said.

  So Olivier of Hollywood was being pilloried in print not only for being cheap but for transporting soiled laundry across the Atlantic. We took him to lunch at Orsini’s to save his life.

  “I don’t mind they write shit about my collection,” Olivier complained. “But smelly socks? Maybe I get a good Jew lawyer and sue.”

  I was relieved Olivier was talking litigation and not suicide.

  But Bingo, anxious to discomfort his chief and most hated rival, John Fairchild of Women’s Wear, egged Olivier on.

  “They’ve held you up to ridicule, Olivier. To opprobrium.”

  “What’s that?” Olivier demanded, suspicious of words he didn’t know.

  To my surprise, Bingo provided something of a definition:

  “Suggesting you’re a cheap shit.”

  “Oh,” said Olivier mildly. He knew himself and had no argument for that.

  Bingo wasn’t ready to give it up. “That’s how Fairchild is, insensitive to the feelings of creative men.”

  Olivier shrugged off piety.

  “All fashion editors are shit.”

  “Well, now,” Bingo said, “I wouldn’t…”

  “Sure, your Regina…”

  “Yes?” Bingo said, leaning close, always eager to hear some dirt, even about one of his own oldest and most faithful employees.

  “Ask her,” Olivier insisted, “about her dildos. Electric ones, too. All sizes.”

  People at the next table seemed to be listening with a certain curiosity, and I said, more loudly than I should, “Might we have some wine?”

  By the second bottle of Chianti Classico (Marsh was paying), Olivier was feeling more cheerful.

  “I went horseback riding last weekend,” he said, “up in Connecticut (he pronounced the second c). But I can’t do that no more.”

  “Why not?”

  “I get too excited. Every ten minutes I got to go in the bushes and whack off. I used to think there’s nothing like a clean twelve-year-old boy. Now I think horses is better.”

  I regarded the restaurant’s ceiling. Olivier’s voice carried. But Bingo, entirely unperturbed, was up to the occasion.

  “That’s why so many young girls learn to ride,” he said. “It stimulates them. A rather innocent way of deriving sexual pleasure without losing their virginity or becoming emotionally involved.”

  “No shit?” Olivier said.

  Conversation then moved on to a discussion of true love, just how did you define it. I said something banal, and Bingo talked about his wife. Then Olivier waved us off.

  “Lemme tell you. I got this new boyfriend, you know, a kid from down South, some shit place like Georgia.”

  As their relationship deepened and ripened, Olivier said, he asked the young man about life at home.

  “I said, look, here in New York you find horny guys like me all over the place. Down there on the farm, what the hell you do? So the boy says, ‘Well, Olivier, on my farm I have a mule.’

  “That’s nice, I say.”

  One day, infatuation having become real love, Olivier told us, “This boy looks in my eyes and he says, ‘You know, Olivier, I think my mule would like you, too.’ ”

  Olivier of Hollywood paused, triumphant.

  “Now that,” he said, “is true love and not what Regina Stealth does with dildos or shit about my socks.”

  Headed back to the office by cab (his limo was transporting Bingo’s wife somewhere), Marsh said, “You know, that was interesting, Olivier and horseback riding.”

  “Very.”

  “My father wouldn’t let me own a bicycle. I didn’t have one until I went to Yale. I bought it out of my allowance to get around the campus, and I didn’t tell him about it until sophomore year.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, Father had a theory that bike riding got boys ran
dy. You know, the vibration and the bar between your legs and all those abnormal pressures on your groin region…”

  I glanced at the driver.

  “… and he didn’t want me to be like Olivier, jumping into the bushes every few miles to whack off.”

  “Your father knew Olivier?”

  Marsh gave me a sour look. “Well, you know what I mean. Generic whacking off, not Olivier in particular.”

  The driver nearly hit a crosstown bus at Thirty-fourth Street, running a red light, so I assume he’d followed our conversation.

  40 The macaw perched on his shoulder, where it subsequently enjoyed a small bowel movement.

  I found an apartment, on Second Avenue in the forties, and out of some vestigial ache for Paris, bought another piano, this a modest upright in deference to the size of the place.

  “You play?” asked the man who moved it in.

  “No.”

  He shrugged. New York was full of nuts and fashion designers.

  “You’ve got to go,” Bingo pleaded. “I can’t face those two alone.”

  He’d been invited and in a weak moment accepted a lunch date with Mister John, who was billed, modestly, as “Emperor of Fashion,” and his roommate and partner, Peter Brandon. Mister John made hats and was apparently quite successful at it.

  “I don’t want to have lunch with Mister John,” I said sulkily. “You keep telling me to be aloof, to stay away from Blass and Calvin and Trigere, and you keep making me go to lunch with suicides and hat designers. I won’t do it.”

  Bingo wheedled. “I’m desperate,” he said. In the end I went along. How bad could Mister John be?

  John and Brandon had a wonderfully large apartment in an old building with high ceilings. Peter met us at the door on a ten-speed bike that he rode up and down the apartment’s corridors and in and out of rooms.

  “John will join us momentarily,” he said. We were given a drink, and then Mister John entered, the Emperor of Fashion, a plump man with thick glasses and bee-sting lips. A macaw sat on his head and squawked at us.

  Mister John was very nice, hospitable and gracious, only once essaying a mild complaint that Bingo’s magazine should expand its coverage of the millinery market, which Mister John naturally felt was very important and was being overlooked. Bingo was evasive, blaming his editors and promising to look into the matter. The macaw remained on Mister John’s head for the first course and then flew across to perch on Peter Brandon’s shoulder, where it subsequently enjoyed a small bowel movement. I was hoping the damned bird wouldn’t come near me, and I wondered just what Bingo would do if it flew in his direction.

  I knew he was nervous about it because he talked constantly.

  “I was thinking about Helena Rubenstein just the other day,” he said, “and what a pig she was. She had this sublime apartment in Paris and I was asked up there once for lunch, much as we’re doing today, and she received me sitting up in bed, this little old lady wearing a hat…”

  Mister John looked pleased; milliners like stories with hats.

  “… and I sat down on a straight-backed chair near the bed. Patrick O’Higgins was there, her flunky. And when they served lunch it was cold chicken, the sort of thing you might find at a picnic, and we sat there eating chicken with our fingers, with Madame Rubenstein telling stories about how she became a designer and wiping her greasy fingers on the bedsheets and sucking them clean. Silk sheets and she wiped the chicken grease all over them.”

  In a way, I enjoyed lunch. This was how I thought fashion designers ought to be, awarding themselves grandiose titles and living splendidly, riding bikes about the apartment and being shit on by birds. I mentioned how I felt on our way back to the office.

  “Nonsense,” said Bingo, “you’ve got to be more aloof.”

  During another lunch our host passed around some grass, a single cigarette passed from mouth to mouth in the affectation of the moment. I took a puff and passed it on. When it got to Bingo, who had never in his life smoked as much as a Camel, he positioned the joint delicately between two fingers, opened his mouth slightly, placed it to his lips. And blew!

  For months after that he informed anyone who’d listen, “You either dominate drugs or they dominate you.”

  Smug, oh, but he was smug. I suppose it was bred in him, those Roman numerals after his name, third-generation Yale, old money and all it meant: manners, the right clothes, the social connections, the effrontery to wear cracked old wing-tip shoes so long as the cracks were waxed and polished, the sense of caste and of belonging, the haughty, know-it-all tone even when he didn’t, the complacent sense of superiority and class.

  I felt rumpled and homespun around him, suspecting my suit needed pressing or my tie was spotted, a rustic attempting to make my way in the great city, forever in peril of using the wrong fork.

  But you couldn’t really resent him, this aristocratic snob, in those endearing, and frequent, moments when he proved himself as gauche and awkward as any hayseed, referring, inevitably, to Mario Cuomo as “Como,” misplacing entire states and nations, unsure at all times whether the sun circled the earth or the earth the moon.

  “Galileo, I think it was, found out which. But I forget,” he would confess.

  Fascinated as he was by masturbation, he seemed interested in all biological functions, discharges, emissions, and the various bodily orifices, telling anyone who would listen how he took all his medicine (“especially aspirin!”) in suppository form.

  “The only sensible way, really,” he would inform a luncheon or dinner table, “so that it gets into the bloodstream quicker and doesn’t upset your digestive tract. Many people can’t tolerate aspirin taken orally; in some instances suffering antiperistalsis, or what’s more commonly referred to as vomiting. And Ames.”

  Strangers, at such moments, cleared their throats and looked away, hoping desperately someone would change the subject. Those of us who knew Marsh dove into the claret or pushed vegetables around the plate.

  41 Calvin Klein, hiding in the men’s room.

  UNDER terms of my deal I didn’t have to spend a lot of time in the office. Bingo might be petty about some things but not that.

  “I don’t care where you write. So long as everyone’s talking about it Monday morning.”

  “And if I irritate your pals, the rich and elegant?”

  “Vex them! Vex them!” he cried, bold in the certain knowledge we were alone and I was the only one who could hear his cry of defiance.

  He had these histrionic moments; you learned to discount them, for surely a cautionary word followed:

  “But don’t upset everyone. If you trash Macy’s be sure to puff Bloomie’s.”

  For those hours I spent in the Marsh mansion I was assigned a small office, a mere cubicle, really, but with a door you could shut and a window on Fifth Avenue through which you could watch pretty women heading for the New School or to the Lone Star Cafe.

  “It used to be Schrafft’s,” Pinsky said, “where old ladies drank Manhattans in the afternoons and the drinkers who worked for Marsh could get their first of the morning, drinking it straight from the glass sitting on the bar so their hands wouldn’t tremble and spill any.”

  Pinsky was full of local lore.

  Although I wasn’t there nine to five, you know how it is in an office, you get caught up in the rhythm of the place, absorbing office politics and hanging out. The art department was the place to hang out; it was where the models spent their time between shoots, cover girls lounging in their jeans and tank tops smoking grass and gossiping and watching themselves in mirrors. Even without the models, the art department had a charm of its own.

  Tyson Rambush was the art director, tall, handsome, courtly, about fifty. It was Rambush who gave the magazine its distinctive look, selected its crisp, readable typeface, at ten points just slightly larger than that of most magazines, convinced Marsh early on to make Fashion the same size as Time and Newsweek rather than outsized, like Vogue and Bazaar, all the b
etter to emphasize its timeliness, more like the news weeklies than the leisurely paced monthlies. Rambush was a genius at photo selection, had an unerring eye for just the right model, possessed the subtlety to manage a large art department of unconventional talents. He was also somewhat intimidated by Marsh and often reduced by him to nervous stammering and wildly rolling eyes.

  Bingo recognized and admired his talent and bullyingly delighted in tormenting him. But then, the reticent, mannered Rambush was an easy target for any of us. He owned a gracious brownstone in the Village where he lived with his friend, another sedate middle-aged gentleman. One evening P.J. le Boot and a space salesman and I went drinking, starting at Bradley’s on University Place, a joint for obscure reasons known as “the evil place.” By two in the morning and quite stewed, we found ourselves on the street where Rambush lived. A noble elm fronted the house.

  “Let’s climb up and look in the window,” le Boot suggested boozily. I started to tell him about the night long ago when Bingo and I attempted to look through bedroom windows on Capri, but I was too drunk to get the story out and by then, le Boot’s having been a very witty notion, all three of us were climbing the tree. When you are very drunk, a thin idea gains dimension. P.J. le Boot led the way, the salesman following. I had difficulty focusing and because some tiny remnant of sanity remained, I decided after all to remain on the sidewalk below in case someone should fall. When the others were level with Rambush’s windows, le Boot called out:

  “Tyson’s friend, can Tyson come out to play?”

  We found this very amusing, and I fell about in laughter while P.J. kept up the chanting, echoed by the salesman.

  Then the lights blazed on and Rambush pulled open the blind to look out. He was in pajamas but he looked very stern. In an angry, but very controlled voice, he spoke.