Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  To use his word, I had been “shirty,” oversensitive, surely, after all these years. But it was none of his damned business and I didn’t regret blowing up.

  48 I suppose we’ll have to stare at her armpits all day.

  HE held grudges, Marsh did, with the designers and rival editors, but for some reason, not with me. Now, forgiving me my anger and without actually saying so, a week later he was making peace by taking me uptown to a splendid lunch during which he so studiously avoided any mention whatsoever of my family, you would have thought I’d been discovered newborn in a wicker basket on a doorstep on a snowy Christmas Eve.

  After being salaamed to our table by captains and waiters, he launched right in as if I’d never told him to shut his damned mouth about my dad.

  “You know, you really ought to do a piece on John Weitz. He hates Women’s Wear Daily and married a movie star and claims to have invented American sportswear, though how can you overlook Bonnie Cashin or Claire McCardell, and the Japs spend millions on his license deals and he went to Oxford or someplace and studied this British accent he has, all very grand, but he’s German and used to live in China to get away from Hitler and he’s very handsome and owns a yacht and some race cars.”

  All this in one breath. And since his voice carried in a restaurant like La Grenouille, where they’ll always squeeze in one table too many in the front room, people nearby were involuntarily included in the conversation.

  “Yes, I’m told he’s fascinating…”

  “And he was a spy during the war. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, in the USO. He used to jump out of planes in parachutes and land in Germany and blow up things.”

  “Probably the OSS, what the CIA later would…”

  “Well, one of those patriotic organizations. You’re probably right.” Bingo paused. “Do you see that woman over there, with the bare arms?

  “Yes.”

  “No woman over eighteen should ever attempt a sleeveless dress. Coco first taught me that. I suppose we’ll have to stare at her armpits all day. It really shouldn’t be allowed.”

  The woman saw him looking and waved, thinking she might know him.

  “Hello, there. How are you?” Bingo shouted. Then, to me, but hardly in an aside, “I haven’t the foggiest who she is, do you?”

  Pierre Cardin was in town to open a restaurant, and that swiftly became Bingo’s surpassing concern.

  “He knows literally nothing about food. The only couturier in Paris who doesn’t. So what does he do, naturally, he opens a chain of restaurants, all of them named Maxim’s, where Toulouse-Lautrec used to go and dance the cancan.”

  “No, Toulouse liked to watch the cancan dancers. And it wasn’t at Maxim’s. It was up the hill in…”

  “John, you know what I mean. You don’t have to pull out the Michelin Guide.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Anyway, he and André think they can just put a Maxim’s anywhere and so now they’ve found a place on Madison Avenue and I just can’t quite imagine Toulouse-Lautrec and that crowd flocking to Madison Avenue of a Friday night, can you?”

  “Who’s André?” Because of my intimacy with Chanel, Cardin had maintained a chill distance.

  “André Oliver, Cardin’s assistant. Everybody knows him. During the Algerian War André was drafted and Cardin made him his uniforms. The only couture uniforms of any private in the French army, I’m told. And when the collection is shown it’s never quite finished and poor André is there on his hands and knees still basting a hem on at least one of the dresses when the model walks out. It’s a popular feature of any Cardin collection, André basting and sewing in front of everyone. People would feel let down if it didn’t happen.”

  Once the menu was examined and Marcel or one of the other captains consulted, Marsh could relax. The room had been surveyed, waves and blown kisses, snippets of gossip exchanged, and he could range more expansively in conversation.

  “Speaking of Paris and Toulouse-Lautrec and that crowd, did you know James Gordon Bennett, the publisher?”

  “Not personally. I believe he died some…”

  “Oh, I know he’s dead. But he lived there for a long time and got the Paris Herald Tribune started and later Art Buchwald worked for it and Mr. Bennett was strange but that was before Kay Graham and the Times bought the paper.”

  “How so?”

  “He liked to ride around Paris at midnight in a carriage stark naked.”

  I glanced about, wondering how much of this was being overheard.

  “People do weird things. When I lived in Paris and before I met Ames, the big sensation was a place in Montmartre, the rue Lepic as I recall, where people used to do it on motorcycles.”

  “On motorcycles…?”

  “Yes, in a nightclub, this girl and this boy would get on a motorcycle onstage and take off their clothes and the motorcycle was on a stand or bolted down or something, I’m not precisely sure how all that worked, but they had floodlights on them and the front tables were always filled up with cloak-and-suiters from Seventh Avenue every night for the late show because the word got around about the motorcycle so everyone went.”

  That little account led him to further musings on the neighborhood. “There’s a wonderful restaurant on the rue Lepic, halfway up on the left side, I forget the name, where they serve the most marvelous soufflé de turbot. I’d never had it anyplace else and it…”

  Just then Madame Masson, the owner, passed by.

  “Madame Masson, the soufflé de turbot at rue Lepic, isn’t it good?”

  “Pardon, Monsieur Marsh. Is it…?”

  “Oh, it’s incredible. I’ve got to tell Cardin about it, for the new Maxim’s. And André, if he isn’t doing any last-minute sewing and basting on his hands and knees, ha ha.”

  Madame Masson, a pretty, blonde woman, smiled nervously and went off in some confusion.

  “John,” Bingo said sternly, “you’re just toying with your food. Eat up.”

  “Yes, Bingo,” I said dutifully. There were things worth arguing about with Marsh, but food wasn’t among them.

  49 That’s when you called her a geisha girl?

  MARSH tried to discourage me from writing about other writers. I’d known Irwin Shaw in Paris and through him I’d met Mailer, and a girl I went out with a couple of times introduced me to Capote, whom I admired greatly for the lovely economy of his writing. I was still slightly in awe of all three, but not Bingo.

  “They drink too much and get married and then they shoot themselves. You look it up, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe and that lot, and didn’t Mailer stab somebody…?”

  “A wife, or an ex-wife, yes.”

  “See! And Irwin Shaw has an artificial hip. I’m quite sure of that. It was the talk of Gstaad last year. And Capote can’t drive anymore because he’s always drunk and they took his license or something. I’d stay away from them if I were you, John.”

  “Sure, Bingo.”

  I didn’t, though. Old English majors are allowed our heroes.

  Capote and I went to lunch at a place he liked, La Petite Marmite on Forty-ninth Street, directly across from where he lived. Jeane Kirkpatrick was there with people from the U.N., and Truman was very late. He arrived drunk and wearing a broad-brimmed plantation hat, which he declined to take off. At such times, one admired him… less greatly.

  When the captain came over, Truman said, “You grow strawberries on the roof, don’t you?”

  The Frenchman had been through the routine before. “Ah yes, Monsieur Capote, and peaches and arugula and pommes de terre.”

  “We’ll have some. But first, a double bourbon.”

  His fly was open and there were spots all over his jacket and shirt, and when he ate he drooled and dropped food. Every so often he waved to Ambassador Kirkpatrick, who was stern and disapproving and did not wave back.

  “And people say I’m difficult,” Truman remarked. “Look at the bags under her eyes, look at that f
ace. Tell me she isn’t into the sherry every afternoon in the Delegates’ Lounge.”

  We talked about his unfinished book and other things, and he drank a lot.

  “I get my hair cut right down the street,” he said in that whining voice. “Tino and George. George is the juicy one. They shave me every morning because my hand shakes, and they give me a shampoo. Sometimes they have to help me back to the apartment. I’m not well. I’ve been through sort of twenty bad periods. One was right after In Cold Blood and then I began another book and I’m just now getting towards finishing up and I ran into a lot of trouble with it and I stopped. I had various forms of illnesses that took on all kinds of disguises. One was drinking, one was taking too many sleeping pills, this, that, and the other, but then I pulled out of it. I’ve been writing pretty steadily for the past five years.”

  I was taking notes, and he noticed, but he didn’t stop or ask me not to, so I continued. And so did he.

  “My mother was a great beauty, what in the South they called a belle. And I was an embarrassment and an inconvenience to her, and once when’we were on a train, she threw me off. I was raised by aunts, maiden ladies.”

  Since he spoke of his youth, I asked about the character Dill, in To Kill a Mockingbird, the little boy supposedly based on Capote.

  “Oh, he definitely was. Miss Harper Lee and I grew up together in a very small rural town in Alabama and her father was a lawyer, the hero of the book, Atticus, and I was a character called Dill. I taught Miss Harper Lee to type, but I was the one who wanted to be a writer. She wanted to be a lawyer. She won the Pulitzer Prize, but she is now a lawyer and never has written another book.”

  I’d read in Thurber’s The Years with Ross that Capote worked at The New Yorker as a copy boy.

  “Well, actually,” he said, “I wasn’t a copyboy. I was working there in the art department and then after a few months on ‘Talk of the Town.’ It was a very hectic place. Mr. Ross was a very formidable man, a very rough fellow. He was extremely nice to me. He was amazed by me because I went to work there when I was seventeen years old, and when I was seventeen, I looked about eleven. Every time he’d see me in the hall he’d stop and shake his head and then walk around muttering about child labor.”

  “Thurber said one of your jobs was to get a drunken writer out of the Algonquin bar and back to the office.”

  “Namely, him,” Capote said, laughing, and when he was like that you forgot about the stains on his clothes and his open fly and the drooling. So I got him talking about some of his chums who were sore at him.

  “Lee Radziwill, your old pal, did a little screaming about what you said about her and her sister Jackie.”

  “No, no, no, that’s not what Lee and I had a falling out about. She was quite pleased with the book. We had a falling out because Gore Vidal brought a libel suit against me for a million dollars because of something I said about Gore in an interview. And the source of the thing that I said was Lee Radziwill and in the thing I had to give to the court, the deposition, I named the different sources. So that’s what we had the big falling out about.”

  “That’s when you called her a geisha girl?”

  “No, no, no, that was really a compliment.”

  “Did Jackie like that, too?” I asked. This story was beginning to write itself, and I was scribbling faster and faster.

  “Yes, that was meant as a compliment.”

  “That they were beautiful…”

  “… and they’re geisha girls, not prostitutes. Geisha girls are just highly accomplished girls who are sort of meant to be charming and cultivated and entertaining.”

  I knew he disliked Ted Kennedy and asked him if he thought we might ever have a “President Teddy.”

  “Some things just run their course,” Truman said, “and I think his has run its course in every conceivable direction. I don’t think he is very intelligent.”

  “Is Jackie intelligent, do you know her that well?”

  “Yes, I know her very well. And, yes, she is.”

  After lunch he waved his hat at Jeane Kirkpatrick and was again snubbed, and he staggered out. On the sidewalk he was so shaky I walked him across the street to his building where the doorman took him from there, giving me a look as if to say, “Yes, I know, we’re used to this.”

  I told Bingo about lunch, and he was so excited he forgot he’d told me to stay away from Capote.

  “And Ambassador Kirkpatrick wouldn’t wave back?”

  “No.”

  “I never liked her. Until now.”

  Bingo was especially interested in Capote’s decline, manifested by his appearance and the drinking, because he’d known Ann Woodward, who killed herself, it was said, over something Truman wrote.

  “I was in San Sebastian for the Tir aux Pigeons,” Bingo said. “All the chic people were there from Paris and Madrid and a few from London, and all anyone talks about down there is the shooting. I’m less keen on the shooting than on the ambience, and Ames, because I never hit anything. Anyway, we went down on the overnight train from Paris, this was years ago, shortly after Mrs. Woodward shot her husband and claimed she thought he was an intruder, and that first night I was in the library, waiting for Ames to change and looking for a book, and this attractive woman came in in a velvet dress. I’m always fascinated by women in velvet dresses, since they can’t sit down, the fabric marks so. But in any event I said hello and she said hello, obviously American, and I said, since it’s how you start every conversation at the Tir aux Pigeons, ‘Do you shoot?’

  “ ‘Not any more,’ she said, giving me the sweetest smile.

  “Over dinner we learned who she was. A handsome woman, tall, with good manners. And your friend Capote killed her.”

  “Well, she killed herself.”

  “Same thing,” said Bingo, immensely pleased, getting up to skip across the room.

  50 Are we in favor of the ozone layer or opposed?

  “IT’S corporate blackmail,” Bingo complained, “the curse of being a publisher in New York.”

  What had him incensed was a charity black-tie dinner at the Waldorf for some worthy cause or other, and Pinsky the adman convinced Marsh that if his magazine were to continue in business it must purchase a table for ten thousand dollars.

  “Pinsky rarely panics, nor does he exaggerate, Mr. Marsh. Our biggest single advertiser is being honored and a gun has been placed at my head. The magazine buys a table so trees can be planted in Israel, cedars of Lebanon I would not be surprised, or they cut our ad pages next year.”

  Bingo raged and then, as he usually did, capitulated. I was drafted to attend, and several of our major advertisers were invited. Bingo surprised me by going along himself. I think he suspected the magazine was being bilked and wanted to be sure there really was a dinner.

  It might be a tiresome bore to Marsh, but such evenings in Manhattan were new to me, exotic and flamboyant. Over cocktails I wandered about, drink in hand, slipping away from Marsh and his round of reluctant handshaking, to absorb the moment’s flavor, noisy, glittering, vulgar, fascinating, irresistible. The recognizable faces of famous men, the jeweled and powdered old women with their evident wealth, the ripe, younger, obviously second, wives, the bearded rabbis, the lush gowns, the gross and the elegant; the scene was intoxicating. In Bingo, of course, it was sufficient to alert every latent snobbish impulse.

  Over dinner in the garish ballroom, routine food and bad music, interminable tributes and fawning recognitions of great men, and then the speeches, on and on, our table attempted to divert itself. One of the women with us, married to an advertiser, tried to draw Marsh, bored and making no effort to conceal it. The woman had a small child and had turned the desultory chat to child-rearing techniques.

  “A fascinating topic,” Bingo intervened unexpectedly, brightening perceptibly and eager to talk. As he often did when among strangers or nervous, he would go on, compulsively, the words tumbling out almost without regard to meaning or sense.

 
“Why so, Mr. Marsh?” one of the men asked, surprised Bingo had interests beyond fashion and publishing.

  “We’ve made a considerable study of it,” Marsh said, warming swiftly to the theme, “and Ames.”

  “Ames?” someone asked, befuddled. Bingo didn’t explain, just launched into his lecture, telling the table how his children were encouraged to address him, somewhat stiffly, as “Father.”

  “I don’t feel this ‘Daddy’ business is healthy. Breeds a contempt for authority, bringing the father figure down to a cute diminutive.”

  “Oh?”

  Then, rather winningly I thought, he revealed that his wife had early on bestowed on him a pet nickname.

  “What is it?”

  “Soames,” Bingo said, “after the leading character in that television series, ‘The Forsyte Affair.’ ”

  “ ‘Saga,’ ” I said, suspecting Marsh knew nothing of Galsworthy and believed the Forsytes were characters a BBC scriptwriter had made up.

  “Whatever. Charming of her, don’t you think? I like the sound of it, ‘Soames.’ ” He smiled broadly, enjoying the notion he and his wife could share such a middle-class concept as a nickname. How could anyone have the heart to tell him what an insufferably righteous prig Soames was? But you also had to like the never-seen Ames Marsh for a sense of humor.

  Marsh, totally insensitive to others at the table who were regarding each other narrowly, was already embarked on another aspect of raising children in the eighties.

  “You have to be concerned about things. And ecology.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, disposable diapers, for example. We’re opposed to their use. Because of the ozone layer.”

  “Diapers? The ozone layer?”

  “The earlier you begin potty training, the better,” Bingo said firmly, leaving the ozone layer to its own resources. “We put them on these little potties the French make, porcelain and quite attractive, no one else does them half as well, before they’re a year old.”

  “Terribly young,” a woman clucked.