Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  Rarely did he attend the Seventh Avenue openings, snubbing the most slavering invitations, humiliating the senders. On occasion a major designer would get Bingo to a privately staged preview late at night a day or two before Vogue and the Times would see the clothes. These little shows for an audience of one cost thousands to arrange, overtime for the building to be kept open and the elevators run and for the runway models to perform. Marsh shrugged it all off, and often, despite the private showing, Fashion ignored the collection.

  And he remained exasperating, erratic.

  One moment Bill Blass was “my best friend”; the next Blass was threatened for having lunched with somebody of whom Marsh disapproved. Princess Tiny Meat was alternately lionized and ridiculed. Giorgio Armani’s name vanished from the magazine for eighteen months when he cooperated with Newsweek for a cover story Bingo felt belonged to Fashion. Jimmy Galanos was banned. The House of Dior threatened a lawsuit in both France and the U.S. A feud with Pauline Trigere had gone on so long not even she could recall how it began, much as no one remembered what inspired Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Bleak House.

  As these guerrilla wars raged, I was accused by strangers of being Marsh’s lackey. Time magazine said I “rode shotgun.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you?” Babe asked.

  “I fight with him all the time about stories. I tell him when I think he’s wrong.”

  “Do you?” she said.

  “Of course,” I said, not quite truthfully. Babe and I were still becoming comfortable with each other, and I was not above giving myself the benefit of the doubt, impressing her. The fact was, my arguments with him were pretty rare, the occasions on which I won even more rare. Not that I agonized over it. Bingo was Bingo, this was his magazine.

  Nor was I, in a spasm of newly discovered virtue, about to question him on the fashion. On fashion and its trends, he was uncanny.

  When we got back from Europe he was invigorated, enthused, like an addict in the marvelous surge that follows a mainlined injection, summoning the entire editorial staff—artists, writers, editors—to hear his comments on the new clothes. Cables had been sent back, sketches and photos radioed home, but now the staff of Fashion was to have the benefit of Bingo’s firsthand, eyewitness account of splendors. So many of us packed into his office, spilling over onto windowsills and standing room, there wasn’t space for Bingo to skip.

  I’d been there with him, had seen for myself the wonders of these latest Paris prêt-à-porter collections, yet no one could bring to the account quite Marsh’s enthusiasm. As people looked up bright-eyed, expectant, and poised to take notes, he was almost raving with excitement.

  “Consider the scene. A fashion revolution like nothing you’ve ever witnessed…’”

  “Call up the tumbrils,” Count Vava murmured near me.

  “… incredible stuff,” Marsh went on, the words tumbling out. “Dark hints of bondage… Tyrolean hats with little feathers, quite authentic, I would think… rosary bead necklaces… a revival of the Frye boot… big, washerwoman skirts over what looks like attic-insulating material, all pink as in the commercials… spandex bicycle shorts worn with leafy codpieces… women fainting… fistfights among the paparazzi…”

  “The shapes, Bingo,” Madame Stealth cried, serious about her craft, “what are the important shapes?”

  Marsh fixed her with a glare which, since she was nearly blind, was lost on her.

  “Shapes? Shapes? How often must I preach that fashion is the spirit of the clothes!”

  There was a cowed silence, and he went on, more under control.

  “Imagine the scene. The Margiela collection. Not in a salon but in a large khaki tent pitched in a rubble-strewn dirt lot, with half-naked urchins cavorting at the very feet of the models. The clothes? Seams and stitches showing, as if they’d been turned inside out… fabrics like plastic garbage bags. At another show a naked couple parades down the runway wearing appliqués of snakes and four-letter words and Communist slogans. At another house, fabrics made not of cloth but of eucalyptus leaves, medicinal as well as chic, and ecologically respectable. As were the recycled cardboard dresses from Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and Marina Spadafora. Then there was Gaultier, hardly my taste, you know, a fashion brat. But this time, even I had to applaud. He opens the collection with a nun swinging a pot of incense…”

  He looked out across the office.

  “What’s that called, the incense pot?”

  “A censer,” someone called out.

  “Good, a nun with a censer, incense rising, and then, suddenly, more nuns, in everything from taffeta hotpants to Day-Glo bodysuits. Bastille was also on something of a religious kick, evidently inspired by the Miracle at Lourdes, with velvet jeans and the cutest little leather backpacks bearing icons of the Virgin.”

  He paused.

  “Was it at Lourdes that Saint Francis spoke to animals or where they changed water into wine?”

  There was murmured disagreement over that, and Bingo went on, all about another designer “gone cannibal,” embellishing clothes with morsels of flesh and bits of bone, necklaces of vertebrae; about a “Save the Rhinoceros” T-shirt collection; about a London collection billed as “Britain Must Go Pagan,” featuring gold appliqué penises on the fronts of all the dresses.

  “And then there was Galliano, not a wop at all, surprisingly, but English, with the most telling stroke of all, men’s pinstriped jackets with a third sleeve, worn ever so cleverly as a scarf, or, in the case of some unfortunate accident, an arm sling.”

  I gave Babe a reasonable summary that night, thinking it would amuse her.

  “He’s grotesque,” she said.

  “He doesn’t design the stuff; he just tells people about it.”

  “He loves it. If the designers didn’t create it, he’d make up stories. He’s as weird as they are.”

  “Don’t be stuffy,” I said. “Who says fashion has to make sense?”

  But she’d planted doubt, and I asked Bingo about the collections, how he could take it all seriously.

  “Look,” he said, somewhat sensibly for a change. “Fashion is a language, too. It tells you what people are thinking. Even this new craziness.” He thought for a moment. “I read somewhere that in 1939, just before the war broke out, when the French knew the Germans were about to attack Finland…”

  “Poland, I believe.”

  “… whatever. Just before the Germans attacked, a Paris couturier showed a dress in the August collection with the inscription, ‘Let’s get it over with… let’s get it over with…’ Over and over, a little fashion designer, some pansy, calling for war against Hitler.”

  “Yes,” I said, unsure just what the anecdote meant. Bingo looked at me, hurt, as you might be disappointed in a favorite child who fails to execute a somersault while the neighbors watch.

  “Well, I just think it’s significant that no one knew war was coming and we had to fight Hitler, but this little fairy did.”

  Then he paused, thinking back.

  “And maybe my mother, who, as you know, was shot down by Nazis, some claiming it was Goering himself. Wasn’t he a famous flying ace in World War One? Or was that the other fellow, Goebbels? Anyway, one of them may have been personally implicated in her death. Because she and a few fairies knew the war was coming…”

  It was only a silly conversation, typical Marsh, but that last bit stayed with me. As ignorant and mistaken as he could be, Bingo used to be candid, as when he long ago admitted that his mother was careless and probably just ran out of gas.

  Now he was like most people, merchandising legends.

  59 A sperm whale, perhaps sixty feet long, hung from the ceiling.

  AS Delavan and Mainbocher and Norell died and Donald Brooks drifted into other things and people like Jimmy Galanos aged, a younger generation of designers came along, men and women closer to my age, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren and Elegant Hopkins and Donna Karan and Halston. For a time it seemed as if Halston might be the big
star.

  Some designers are reclusive, suspecting their own inadequacies. Not Halston, a tall, handsome, troubled boy who’d been a milliner and lived grandly, with one of several places high above Fifth Avenue overlooking the Cathedral. I was up there one night to a black-tie party when Halston put down a wooden dance floor, hired a band, and had everyone there, from John Belushi to Scorsese and Isabella Rossellini to de Niro and Pacino and Liza Minnelli. Halston made sport of his own guest list:

  “A Cosa Nostra reunion. Everything but Chianti bottles sheathed in straw.”

  What we drank was champagne. I found myself with Belushi and his wife. Nice people, he slimmer than he looked on television or in films, wearing well-cut evening clothes, pleasant, soft-spoken, intelligent people. A few months later in Hollywood, he was dead. Halston had problems of his own, a drug habit, rumors of insolvency. Then, in a startling coup that would make everything right, a big bucks contract to design clothes for J. C. Penney, the snob Halston label in fourteen hundred Penney stores across the country.

  He launched the Penney collection with a gala at the Museum of Natural History, in the Great Hall of the Whales, where a sperm whale, perhaps sixty feet long, hung from the ceiling above us as the models pranced. An incongruous place to show a fashion collection. The deal with Penney turned out just as incongruous. Bergdorf dropped him, of course; so did the other high-fashion stores, and after a few years Penney cut the cord and poor Halston lapsed back into drugs and his financial woes.

  The “brilliant” deal with J. C. Penney, the dramatic stroke that was to spark a Halston renaissance, was a ghastly death rattle.

  “Omens and portents,” Count Vava reminded anyone who would listen of that curious evening in the Hall of Whales, “omens and portents.”

  When Halston died Marsh claimed to have expected it.

  “Fashion designers used to be laughable,” he said, “like hairdressers. And I suppose that’s changing as well. Now they’re movie stars, and people prance and caper about them, as people used to play up to Gable and Hepburn and Tracy.”

  I must have looked bored.

  “Did I ever tell you about Delavan and the geese?” Bingo asked, brightening.

  “Several times.”

  I got to know Larry Leeds, whose company owned Perry Ellis. Leeds said that even before Perry got sick he himself started seeing a shrink, “so I’d understand the craziness.”

  “They’re children,” Bingo insisted, “whatever their age, designers are children.”

  Even so and despite WASP snobbery and a titled wife and Yale and all that, Bingo, a relatively rich man himself, had to be impressed by the sheer volume of money. The Wall Street Journal reported Calvin Klein and his partner, Barry Schwartz, each made sixteen million dollars a year. Cardin made more; so, too, perhaps, Valentino and Saint Laurent; Lauren was now worth a hundred million. You could almost see Bingo licking his lips. But he was still Marsh:

  “Don’t waste space writing about money. It’s so common.”

  As I was increasingly doing, I ignored him on this, doing columns about their wealth. How Calvin bought a million-dollar house on the beach at Fire Island, next door to his, and then demolished it to provide room for a new pool shortly before decamping for yet another beachfront place in the Hamptons; how Ralph purchased a small forest and transported it tree by tree on flatbed trucks to his new estate in Westchester to create an avenue of Norway spruce leading to the front door.

  “They’re children, children with expensive toys,” Marsh sneered.

  He disliked Lauren. “An editor, not a creator. Good taste and no real imagination.”

  “Fashion magazine is important to me,” Ralph told me. “I wish they were friendly. But what can I do? I can’t beg. It would debase my work and diminish me.”

  A touching, quaintly dignified appeal, but when I told him, Marsh was unmoved.

  “How can a man his size possibly be diminished?”

  He was more favorably inclined to Calvin, perhaps because he saw in him some of his own ruthlessness.

  “Calvin’s cosmetic line back in ’78, ’79 was a bomb. So he and Barry just closed down the line and fired the entire staff and even canceled the return airline tickets of salesmen on the road.”

  Brooke Shields’s father, Frank, was head of sales, and when he left on a Christmas holiday, Calvin fired him, too.

  Klein started out with a pretty wife and a big talent and then his marriage broke up and he discovered discos and there were stories of facelifts and silicone injections to treat acne scars and he fell in with Liza and Bianca Jagger and Cher and seemed intent on doing a Halston. By ’81 he was earning eight million a year; by ’86 he was into the vodka, into pills; there were rumors he had AIDS, that he was dying in Mass. General. He and a young woman who worked for him flew to Rome to marry. The following spring he was in a drying-out clinic.

  “Children, they’re just children.”

  Ralph Lauren soldiered on, without Bingo’s benediction, stubbornly successful despite him, while Calvin, a more subtle man, flattered Marsh with luncheons and small, elegant dinners, earning for a brief season a sympathetic hearing from Fashion magazine.

  Some of the children, it turned out, were as clever as the grown-ups.

  60 Pillage and rape… spoils of war.

  BABE had her heroes. Her heroines. Serious people, none of them children or designers.

  “Boadicea, the warrior queen. Joan of Arc. The Amazons.”

  “They cut off one breast, you know. So they could shoot arrows more effectively.”

  “Shark, that’s why we had to invent gunpowder.”

  Short of sacrificing a tit, there seemed to be nothing Babe wouldn’t do to further her military career. She read Clausewitz and Admiral Mahan and watched old war movies on television, critiquing the tactics, sparing no one, not even John Wayne.

  “The Duke wouldn’t have lasted fifteen minutes in a real fight,” she said. We were watching Sands of Iwo Jima, which looked pretty good to me, but Babe had a lot to say about small unit tactics and fire support. “And John Agar; the Nips would have dropped that sucker before he got out of the landing craft.”

  She also thought Napoleon would’ve had a shot at winning Waterloo if he’d moved on the farmhouse an hour earlier.

  “Wellington lucked out,” she said. “Boney was suffering from piles and lacked concentration.”

  “They really teach you all this stuff at West Point?”

  “The basic material. If you’re ever going to make general officer you’ve got to go way beyond what you get at the Point.”

  That’s what she wanted to be, eventually, a general. I wondered aloud what it would be like to be married to a general.

  “You’ll never know. I can’t afford to get married. Being married cuts down on the range of duty options, those plum overseas commands you’ve got to have to get promoted.”

  “I wasn’t proposing,” I said testily.

  “I know, Shark, and you’re sweet. If I ever did get married you’d certainly be on the short list.”

  You couldn’t really get sore at her, though she could be awfully pushy.

  I came home one evening to find her straightening out my kitchen cabinets and stocking the refrigerator.

  “I can’t believe you. A grown-up who makes good bucks, and your refrigerator has a six-pack of Coors, two bottles of wine, a half bottle of Stolichnaya, mayonnaise, butter, a box of Total…”

  “Wait a minute. Total provides all my daily requirements of vitamins and minerals and I…”

  “… six ice trays and three jars of hot mustard.”

  She’d bought eggs and oranges and milk and apples and some tomatoes and a head of lettuce and some other stuff.

  “And I cleaned out some of that junk under the sink. What did you do, buy out the entire stock of Roach Motels?”

  “Well…”

  Other days she organized my sock drawer, matching up socks and rolling them into balls and folding my han
dkerchiefs. I had a half dozen sweaters, and I kept them on a director’s chair in the corner of the bedroom. Now they were neatly folded and stacked on a shelf in one of the closets.

  “I’ll never find anything!” I protested.

  No matter how late we went to sleep she was always up by six, doing exercises on an old beach towel spread out on the floor of the living room while she watched “Sunrise Semester” on television. And she ironed. She bought an ironing board and a GE iron and she pressed everything, mine and hers. Only woman I know who ironed blue jeans. And I began to find my shirts with tiny initials, mine, embroidered into the shirttails so that only I, and the Chinese laundryman, knew they were there. That first Christmas she bought me a very good leather wallet, which I badly needed.

  She was always broke, and only later did she confess to having sold a pint of blood to pay for it.

  “The normal, healthy body regenerates a pint in a week. And you really need a new wallet.”

  How could you not love her?

  She was reading American poets now, especially Emily Dickinson; and when I started calling Babe the “poet warrior,” she purred:

  “You’re sweet, Shark,” she said. “You know George Patton wrote poetry?”

  She had her favorites among the generals. Patton, except for his lack of discipline, Lee, Grant in certain campaigns, Longstreet, George C. Marshall. On Eisenhower she had reservations. “Very good on logistics and how he handled that prima donna Montgomery.” She also admired some of the Germans and one or two of the Japanese.

  “Yamashita, with that three-week campaign to take Malaya, jungle all the way, five hundred miles of it, and he had twenty thousand troops on bicycles and they took Singapore from the rear, from the land side, while the Brits had all their artillery pointed out to sea.”

  She was very critical of MacArthur.

  “I know up at the Point he’s our patron saint and all that, but God, how did they ever let him get away with splitting the Eighth Army into two columns separated by a mountain chain with winter coming on in Korea in 1950? He was damned lucky the Chinks didn’t put them all in a bag.”