Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  “Okay, so I used too many adjectives. I’m having dinner with my first West Pointer, and she turns out to be a literary stylist.”

  “I did my senior thesis on Emily Brontë.”

  This wasn’t my vision of West Point.

  She also, it turned out, swam, captained the field hockey team, tried but failed to get a women’s rugby side sanctioned, and was a battalion commander at the Academy.

  I was becoming besotted. “You did it all.”

  She shrugged. “I missed the ‘Nam.” She was also stubborn.

  I told her stories over wine about Elaine’s, about how someone once said, “All the men are suntanned and all the girls are five nine,” and about the time the London gossip columnist Nigel Dempster hit George Plimpton’s ankle and accused Adolph Green, who has large teeth, of having “stolen someone’s teeth” and how Elaine threw out Norman Mailer bodily one night when his girl kept unscrewing light bulbs because they shone in her eyes, and Woody Allen was there so often, Elaine gave directions to the men’s room by saying “Go to Woody Allen and turn right.”

  A bit drunkenly, late that evening, I looked into those blue eyes and said, “Is there anything about you that isn’t perfect, Babe Flanagan?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m not five nine.”

  Yes, she said, she’d like to see me again.

  “But not for ten days. I’ve got final exams and a date with a cram course and black coffee.”

  “Ten days?”

  “Yes.”

  I suspected it might be a long ten days.

  53 Surreptitiously urinating into the white wine.

  I’VE made the point about Bingo’s distaste for personal confrontation. But until now I’d never seen him panic.

  We strolled jauntily, the two of us, into the Grill Room of the Four Seasons restaurant where Marsh had his favorite banquette, Bingo waving to and being waved at by various people of significance. Now, as we made our way across the great dining space toward his banquette, Marsh literally froze in midstride.

  “Oh, my God!” he said, genuinely stricken.

  There, on a neighboring banquette, sat Henry Kissinger, publicly flogged in that week’s issue of the magazine on the express instructions of Bingo Marsh. The story dealt with Dr. Kissinger’s many advisory and consultancy deals since leaving government service and suggested Henry was something of a crass money-grubber. Marsh kept calling for the story to be brought back, strengthened.

  “Nastier, juicier, more stats, more details!” Bingo cried, and when a final, decidedly hostile version was presented for his approval, he giggled in delight.

  The headline, dictated by Bingo, read:

  “Tin-Plated Iron Chancellor.”

  The story’s opening lines conveyed invidious comparisons to Bismarck.

  Now Marsh and Kissinger were in the same room, and the prospect of a scene had Bingo shuddering in alarm.

  “For God’s sake, Bingo,” I hissed, “he’s not going to slap you with pearl gray gloves.”

  “He might,” Marsh said mournfully. Then, “Don’t look at him, I beg you.”

  “I won’t,” I said, trying not to snicker.

  It may be Kissinger never saw us. Or hadn’t read the story. Or didn’t think it was worth making a scene. In any event, nothing untoward happened. But for the first time I’d seen a Bingo Marsh taken by sheer terror.

  Nor was Bingo’s cowardice restricted to the celebrated and powerful, to men like Henry Kissinger. If an employee had to be chastised, it was someone else who provided the chastisement. There was even a man who did the sacking, one of the magazine’s least appetizing characters, the office manager, one Cap’n Andy, his title a relic of undistinguished, if lengthy, membership in the National Guard. Le Boot, who despised him, once blackened both Cap’n Andy’s eyes in a fistfight, despite being half the Cap’n’s size.

  Now it was about le Boot that I went to Bingo.

  You could see P.J. deteriorating, fast. His pranks had become more destructive, his binges longer and more violent, the hangovers physical and psychic, more painful. Before going to Marsh, I tried to talk to le Boot.

  “P.J., you’re killing yourself, kid. Killing this job, too.”

  “Oh, hell.”

  He was a tiny, skinny, rather ugly man of enormous energy and magnetism, a splendid editor, a dynamic personality, crazed and rather wonderful. And now he might be going to lose it all.

  “Look, Shark,” he said finally, “this is the best job I ever had, the most money I ever made. I never thought I’d make it to New York. Or be hanging around with fashion geniuses. It’s a sort of miracle. I know that.”

  “That’s part of it, using the designers to get you laid. Bingo is going to go crazy when…”

  He leaned toward me, shaking his head and grinning.

  “And I never knew there were girls like this anywhere. Ten years ago I was picking up women in bars, horny women wearing glasses and with runs in their stockings. Last night I was screwing this kid one of the designers sent, the most beautiful damned face you ever saw and really, a nice kid, funny and open and genuine…”

  I understood the quid pro quo, a good play in the magazine for the designer’s next collection. As managing editor le Boot could arrange such things. Marsh didn’t catch everything. And P.J. was so damned candid about his graft.

  “I’m forty years old and funny looking and spindle-legged and my wife gets the alimony and here I am screwing the most lovely girls you ever saw this side of a wet dream. You think I’ll give that up, Shark?”

  How could I argue with him, what could I offer in return?

  Now he’d committed another outrage, something so unprecedented and imaginative it was bound to be taken public, embarrassing, if not le Boot, who seemed immune, then Marsh and the magazine.

  Drunkenly, or just maliciously, during a charity dinner at the Pierre, P.J. surreptitiously urinated into a half-empty bottle of white wine and then deftly replaced it on the table in front of the pompous garment manufacturer who was his host. The manufacturer, unknowing, did his ludicrous part, refilling the glasses.

  “I’ve talked to him, Bingo,” I said, “and he listens, but next time out it’s the same thing all over again. I guess it’s because I’m younger than he is, and I drink some myself. You’ve got to pull him short or we’re going to lose him. P.J. respects you, I know he does. If you really call him on the carpet…”

  “How can he do that, urinating in wineglasses? It’s so disgusting.”

  “Well, then, tell him so. Tell him you won’t put up with it.”

  Bingo got up and began pacing his office.

  “I can’t do it. It would just upset me.” He skipped a little. “You talk to him again. Threaten him.”

  “Bingo, I’m not the boss. You are.”

  “No, no,” he said, shaking his head, “and I don’t want to hear any more stories like that business of urine in the wine.” He paused, thoughtful. “What was it, a Sancerre?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  54 Olivier of Hollywood… had a nervous breakdown.

  BABE called.

  “Remember me?”

  We’d started off honestly, so I wasn’t coy. “The last ten days I’ve been remembering.”

  “Good,” she said, matter-of-fact as ever.

  Then I recalled why it had been ten days. “How’d the exams go? Straight A’s?”

  “The army expects every officer to do her duty.”

  We had dinner that night at Le Perigord, over near the river in the fifties. It was the first time I’d ever seen her in uniform.

  “I had to attend a meeting on Governor’s Island,” she said. “Hope uniforms don’t make you nervous.”

  “Me? The hero of Da Xiang?”

  “Ha! Some hero. You told me yourself you were scared shitless.”

  “Told the truth. I wouldn’t know which end of a gun to point.”

  “Weapon,” she corrected me primly. “A ‘gun’ is an ar
tillery piece. Or a smooth-bore weapon like a shotgun. The correct term is…”

  “Have a drink.”

  We went back to my apartment after dinner. I was hoping we would, but with Babe you couldn’t really predict. Under the uniform, for example, her underwear was decidedly not government issue, black and lacy, even a garter belt.

  “I don’t usually wear a bra,” she said when we were in bed, “but on duty you’re supposed to.”

  She didn’t need a bra.

  “You’re beautiful,” I said. “Your hair, your eyes, that mouth, your face, your…”

  “Tits,” she said, “which is what you’re staring at.”

  “Never end a sentence with a preposition.”

  Two could play English major. But I had been staring.

  She was, in ways, the most admirable, and most exasperating, woman I knew. And I got to know her very well that year.

  “Shark,” she said, “you never exercise. Never do a damned thing, do you?”

  “No. I walk a lot.” I suspected I was sounding defensive with that.

  “And drink too much and chain-smoke cigars. Shark, you’ll never live to see fifty. Maybe not even forty.”

  From the very first I was “Shark.” Jack was a perfectly good name but she wouldn’t use it. I was “Shark.” As in Bingo’s magazine, though without the exclamation point.

  “I read somewhere,” she was saying, “that every flight of stairs you climb adds five seconds to your life. You ever think about that, Shark? You ever think about doing laps? A few reps?”

  After our third date she sent me a plant. Practically a tree, growing out of a green plastic pot that must have weighed forty pounds with the topsoil.

  “Your apartment is morbid,” she said. “No wonder you worry about pigeon lice and pick up soldiers in bars.”

  She thought the tree might help.

  “Famous man like you, big war hero, Pulitzer laureate, celebrity journalist, we lived better in dormitories at the Point.”

  “Stop carping. Besides, we established I’m not a war hero. I just happened to be there when the shooting started.”

  She was very intense about that. “Hey, being there when the shooting starts is what makes a career in the military.”

  I even told her about passing ammo at Da Xiang, about contravening “the Geneever Conventions.” She liked that but found it unfair a man, even a civilian, could somehow sleaze his way into a firefight.

  She really believed one day they’d change the law that kept women out of combat.

  “It’s sexist as hell. Like unequal pay for equal work.”

  She liked some of my friends but not others. She liked Olivier of Hollywood. He’d had another nervous breakdown and lost this New York job and Yves Saint Laurent hired him in Paris just to keep him going. And maybe to borrow a few ideas. Olivier was back in New York to sell his apartment and tidy up loose ends. Babe and I took him to lunch.

  “Let me order the wine,” Olivier said, “you don’t know shit about wine.”

  “And let you put me into Chapter 11 ordering Pétrus?”

  “Let him order, Shark,” Babe said. “Always go with the expert.”

  Olivier, who didn’t like women, bathed her in a grin.

  “Finally, Sharkey, you find a good girl, hein?”

  He ordered the Pétrus ‘61 and it cost me a hundred and twenty-five.

  “God, this is great wine,” Babe said.

  “A year ago you were drinking Thunderbird,” I groused.

  When Olivier learned she was in the army, he got excited.

  “I always loved soldiers. There was this guy I met in Paris. He…”

  “Olivier, she’s a professional. An officer. A graduate of West Point. Don’t start with your love life…”

  “West Point? West Point?” He pronounced it “West Pwant.”

  “My God, I am in love with West Pwant. Since I was a little boy. Those uniforms. Those buttons. Those little gray jackets. Those tight pants and the hats. I’m mad for those hats.”

  “Shakos,” she said.

  “He’s sweet,” Babe said, “a little screwed up. But sweet.”

  Most of my other friends, she thought, were phony.

  Not Woody Allen, of course. She thought he was great. Trouble was, Woody and I were not precisely intimate. We sat two tables away at Elaine’s, I knew a couple of his pals, Mia Farrow used to say hello, but when Woody came in, the bottles of wine under his arm (Elaine’s wine cellar was lousy), he would pass my table head down, terrified of making eye contact. It was okay, I could live with it. But Babe kept trying to meet him.

  “I could just go over and sit down and start to talk, very brightly, nothing trite, about his body of work, and, you know, maybe one button too many unbuttoned, and I’d postulate a new approach to the auteur theory, and…”

  “… and Elaine would throw us both the hell out, and rightly so.”

  “Sharrrkkk!”

  One night she got away from me. It was early, and for some reason Woody was there alone, staring at the table, counting the weave in the tablecloth fabric, analyzing the fiber content.

  “I’ll be back, Shark.”

  I thought she was going to the ladies’ room, but when she got to Woody, she didn’t turn right. She sat down.

  It was a hot evening and she was wearing one of those big, loose, lovely cotton skirts and a tank top, and even Woody, myopia and all, couldn’t miss any of it. But he tried to keep looking at the table and she kept talking and I sat there being embarrassed and hoping Elaine wouldn’t pick this moment to arrive. Finally, it was over, and Babe sauntered back to the table looking very pleased with herself.

  “Well?”

  “He was very nice,” she said. “I told him who I was and how I liked his work. And I gave him a little advice.”

  “About movies, you’re giving Woody Allen a little advice about movies.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, you know, nothing about camera angles or lap dissolves or any of that technical stuff. I concentrated on his self-confidence, telling him to come out of his shell and stop staring at the tablecloth, think better of himself, that sort of thing…”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Sure, as if I were his commanding officer, more genial than authoritative. You know, an enlisted man with a problem called in for a private little…”

  The army sent her to Arkansas for a month to help train summer reservists. They didn’t want young officers just hanging around Manhattan being idle and getting into trouble.

  I was at Elaine’s alone one night, waiting for Peter Maas, and Woody came in. He started to pass the table, head down as he always did. But he stopped.

  “The soldier,” he said, looking at his shoes, “is she here tonight?”

  “No, she’s away.”

  He shook his head. “Crazy, that girl. Just crazy. And in the army.”

  “I know,” I said.

  55 Yale men trust each other.

  WOODY ALLEN happened along maybe once or twice a year. It was with Bingo I had to deal on a daily basis. Oh, but he was complicated, Bingo Marsh, as tortured and angst-ridden and contradictory as any Woody Allen character ever. Until I met Babe Flanagan my horizons had for years been pretty much defined by Bingo and his magazine and my work. I thought I knew him. Now I began to think about Bingo with a certain objectivity, as from a distance. Like the artichoke, you peeled away leaves to discover what Bingo really was, only to find… more leaves.

  Peter Quinn, the protégé before me, the one I was supposed to resemble, had sold a novel which one of his sycophants confidentially informed Marsh had a character based on him, a nasty piece of work in the publishing trade. The book was not very good and only slimly reviewed and didn’t sell, but Bingo went out of his way to chill whatever chance it had. Simon Simone, one of the fashion designers, agreed to host a book party for Quinn, generating a little ink. Marsh had le Boot phone the fashion designer to say how hurt
Bingo was, how great was this betrayal, that it was obvious Simone thought more of Peter Quinn than he valued Bingo, or Bingo’s magazine. The threat was implicit.

  Simon, reduced to weeping, sent a handwritten note of regret to Quinn.

  People who’d known Quinn took it up with Marsh, one of them saying, “You used to be fond of Peter. You don’t use a nuclear device to squash a bug.”

  “He betrayed me,” Bingo said grimly. “I can’t forgive betrayal.”

  I’d never met Quinn, but I, too, thought Marsh was playing the bully. And said so.

  “So you turn against me, too,” he said lugubriously.

  “No, I…”

  “There’s no loyalty anymore. After all I’ve done for Simon. And Elegant Hopkins. And you. It’s Benedict Arnold all over again for thirty pieces of silver. And Judas.”

  He had an absolute gift for feeling sorry for himself, even when things went well, a strange mix of generosity and spiteful malice. I owed much to Bingo professionally. But my affection derived from the little private pleasures shared: those furtive movie afternoons, the barefoot scamper along Valentino’s balcony, our lunches with Olivier of Hollywood, Bingo’s hilariously mixed metaphors and mangled syntax, his inability to tell you which was the man, Hero or Leander, his little skip and giggle.

  I knew he was wrong in this business of Peter Quinn’s little book, and yet I felt, if not precisely Judas Iscariot, vaguely uneasy about criticizing Bingo. He could be nasty, even vindictive, as with Quinn, and then he would do or say something so innocent and unthinking that you wanted to hug him and shelter him from a world all too real and cold for a man so vulnerable.

  “Get Ambrose down here,” he barked into the phone during one of those moments when you suspended judgment, wondering what he could be up to now, why he was so excited, just why the company lawyer and I had been summoned to the presence. When Ambrose came in and he and I were seated, Bingo started to skip around.

  “This is confidential,” he said, glancing toward the curtained windows to assure himself no enemy was peering in.