Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

“Where are you staying?” Babe inquired.

  “The A.C.”

  “The New York A.C.?” she said. It didn’t sound Olivier’s kind of place.

  “Yeah, I cruise the steam room and check out the priests…”

  Toward the end I asked if he’d seen Bingo.

  “Nah, I call a couple times, but he don’t answer. For me he’s never in.”

  “But you and he used to…”

  “Sharkey, you don’t know Bingo Marsh as good as I thought. In fact, about Bingo, you don’t know shit…”

  We dropped him at the Athletic Club and went home. “I can’t believe Bingo would just shut him off like that. Olivier used to be…”

  “I love you, Shark,” Babe interrupted, “but you have your blind spots.”

  “I love you, too,” I said. And I did, even if she’d have been happier if I were Drew Middleton or Hanson Baldwin or, better still, Shelby Foote, and wrote about wars and generals and strategic planning instead of about Cindy Crawford and Princess Tiny Meat.

  “The Peninsula Campaign, now, there’s something you would have been able to get your teeth into. Or the Four Hundred at Thermopylae. Or how Gallieni realized the Germans had given him their flank and Joffre could fight on the Marne. When you’ve got material like that, who gives a damn about the pouff dress?”

  Deep down, I knew she was right.

  And then, for her birthday, I bought her a pouff dress.

  “It’s delicious, Shark. I’ll wear it everywhere. I do so love you.”

  She didn’t wear it everywhere, not quite, but she wore it. And was wearing it the night she first met Bingo.

  I mentioned that for all our professional intimacy, and the very real, if odd, friendship that had grown between us, Marsh and I never socialized. He had his family, his Fifth Avenue apartment, his country places; he had Yale and breeding and the Protestant church; he had money; and for all his tics, a very sure sense of just who he was and why.

  That last, in my mid-thirties and nudged on by Babe, I was just starting to figure out.

  Bingo also had Ames, a cousin to Sir Edmund Hillary, and herself an “honourable,” and until now I’d felt that gave Bingo an advantage, a good woman providing ballast, something we all needed. I knew about Ames; I’d just never met her, Bingo believing firmly in the compart-mentalization of life, some people destined to travel first-class, but most of us in steerage.

  Then, suddenly, stunningly, we met Ames.

  67 “Ah yes,” said Henry Kissinger, “we all serve in our own way.”

  ALICE MASON sold Manhattan apartments to rich people. She seldom advertised; she gave dinner parties that were black-tie and brilliantly choreographed. People came at eight for an hour of drinking and rubbing shoulders and were then parceled out to tables of eight, place cards and all, husbands and wives (or lovers) strictly separated. Alice was very firm about that, and her dinners became so celebrated New York magazine did a cover story about them.

  Only rarely was there a gaffe. Such as the evening when Bingo Marsh and John Sharkey, employer and employee, were both invited.

  Babe liked how everything was so organized. “Very crisply set up,” she said approvingly, as if inspecting a military honor guard. Over drinks, when she was introduced to someone and asked where she was from, she said, “Long Island.”

  “Oh, then you must know C. Z. Guest.”

  “No, my father was a cop.”

  “Oh!”

  Babe didn’t always play the kiss-kiss social game as well as some did. For one thing, it didn’t really matter to her that much; for another, there was no doubting her sturdy self-coherence. I might not always be sure of who I was; but, like Bingo, Babe was always quite certain.

  The pouff dress didn’t hurt, but Babe had a lot going for her that had nothing to do with fashion, and as we lolled in Alice Mason’s library, I knocked back the vodka and enjoyed seeing famous and wealthy men, and a few women, make their way at flank speed to where we stood.

  “Babe, this is Henry Kissinger. Dr. K., this is Babe Flanagan.” Fashion magazine’s treatment of him had been forgiven if not forgotten.

  Henry greeted her with enormous élan.

  “I know Mr. Sharkey,” he said, “and am not quite sure of him. Of you, Miss Flanagan, I am sure.”

  “It’s ‘Lieutenant Flanagan,’ Dr. Kissinger,” Babe said. “I’m in the army.”

  “Ah yes,” he said, “we all serve, don’t we, in our own way.”

  Within seconds Kissinger and Babe were deeply into a discussion of Soviet hegemony and NATO throw weights. I took a refill on the vodka and then, to my astonishment, saw across the room Bingo and a very pretty, slender blonde woman. Ames, of course.

  For a long time I hadn’t really believed in her, suspecting she was just a name he bandied about to certify masculinity. Or that in some inexplicably Gothic way she existed, as batty as he, a pale nun gliding through corridors and wringing her hands in a wing of the house shut off to the servants. Bingo seemed just as shocked to see me.

  “Sharkey, what are you doing here?” It was usually “John”; I knew he was upset.

  It was as if I’d just delivered the pizza or come to repair the faucet, an enlisted man by accident in the officers’ mess.

  “Well, I guess because I was invited, Bingo.” Across the room Alice Mason was balancing David Rockefeller and Norman Mailer and looking uneasily our way. Also across the room, drawn from me by the magnetic fields of force of a cocktail hour, Babe chatted, alternating between solemn intensity and laughter, with Jimmy Carter and Misha Baryshnikov. But Bingo was talking to me. And Ames.

  “… and this is John Sharkey, Ames. He writes things for the magazine.” He could be patronizing.

  She gave him a tolerant look.

  “… and this is my wife, the Honourable Ames Hillary Marsh,” Bingo went on, very proud of her.

  My annoyance at his snub vanished on the instant, swept away by his obvious love.

  Mrs. Marsh bestowed a beneficent smile. An honest smile. “Most people call me Amy, Mr. Sharkey. Bingo is so stuffy about given names and such.”

  I like you very much, Mrs. Marsh, I thought, and I wanted to hug them both, pleased that I worked for such an odd but occasionally wonderful man, and secure in the knowledge from that moment on, his little verbal “and Ames,” would never again be a dangled phrase, but a declaration of love.

  Bingo, unaware of my thoughts, looked nervous. He liked to stage-manage social intercourse, and once Ames and I had said our howdy-dos, he was adrift, lacking a script.

  David and Helen Gurley Brown came by, offering distraction. Bingo attempted to introduce them, and so shaken was he still by my presence, he got names confused and introduced Brown as “David Gurley Brown.”

  “Alone, Jack?” Mrs. Brown inquired. “Tonight’s extra man?”

  “No, I’ve got a date. She’s over there, with President Carter and Baryshnikov.”

  Ames Marsh turned to look, squinting slightly, which made her even more appealing, less Bingo-ish. “She’s lovely. My congratulations, Mr. Sharkey.”

  Bingo never knew when to leave well enough alone, especially when he was flustered.

  “Oh, Sharkey’s got lots of girls. Ballerinas and tailored women and everything. Dozens.”

  His wife looked at him. “Well, let’s not share that information with his lady, shall we?”

  Peter Jennings and Mary Tyler Moore and the admiral who used to run the CIA were at my table, along with Mrs. Mason, and I don’t know who sat with Babe except that Bingo was one of the eight. Dinner was fine and the CIA man said something about how the hostage rescue went wrong in Iran and Jennings, who had actually been to Tehran, corrected him on the location of a key street.

  While we queued for our coats, a man named Maurice peered at me through glasses. “That girl of yours is extraordinary,” he said. “Did you know she’s in the army?”

  And Bingo grabbed my elbow long enough to hiss, “She’s not your sort at all.”<
br />
  So I knew Babe had done very well, and when we were in the cab heading home, I asked her if she’d enjoyed the evening.

  “Oh, it was okay, I guess. But that Marsh, I don’t think he’s the man you ought to be working for, Shark.” She shrugged her shoulders, lovely and bare against the satin of her pouff.

  “No?” I said lazily, feeling too good to argue.

  “No, he’s not your sort. Not your sort at all.”

  68 He killed a man, you know, Claus von Bülow remarked.

  ONE morning I mentioned having seen Olivier of Hollywood, had taken him to dinner. I still didn’t quite believe that Bingo would simply drop him.

  “Oh?” said Bingo. Then, swiftly, “Have you heard about this new Mickey Rooney film? It’s called Nine and a Half Weeks or something. All about S and M. And whips. Maybe we should go this afternoon, though I find Mickey Rooney rather old for that sort of role.”

  If Marsh increasingly seemed less easily defended, I was firm about the journalist’s trade.

  Babe was increasingly critical of both.

  “You know in La Dolce Vita how Mastroianni is this gossip columnist for a cheap Rome scandal sheet, and he’s a basically nice guy who keeps getting involved with the people he’s writing about? How he’s sympathetic to them, or repelled by them, or falling in love with them? Or with their glamour and their palaces?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, that’s what I think is happening to you.”

  Sometimes I thought she might be right. Other times I thought I was a professional and knew what I was doing and she was an amateur who didn’t.

  I’d met John de Lorean, before his difficulty, at a Christmas party at Ed Downe’s house. De Lorean’s wife was beautiful, his new sports car would soon be coming off the assembly line in Ireland, he was an assured and successful figure. Only when I turned from the bar, I found myself right behind de Lorean and looked down at his hands, clenched behind his back like Prince Philip’s. Then I noticed how his hands were kneading each other, a man under tension. Reporters tuck such moments away, as I did, and then pull them out to be used on suitable occasions. When de Lorean was arrested, I wrote a column that began with a description of his hands at a Christmas party.

  It was easy to be secure about that; the column didn’t need a defense, even from Babe. I was more equivocal about other things.

  Claus von Bülow and his girlfriend had us to dinner. I’d met Claus early in his troubles. A mutual friend had set up a lunch at a West Side restaurant called Jean Lafitte, but it was my impression the choice of place was von Bülow’s.

  “Is it significant,” I asked, “that Lafitte was one of our more famous buccaneers?”

  Claus laughed. “You’re right, you know, but it never occurred to me.”

  He was all charm, but I don’t know how much you could believe.

  There were twenty for dinner, Dershowitz the Harvard lawyer among them. We sat in the drawing room of the lovely Fifth Avenue apartment. It had been Sunny von Bülow’s, of course, and now Claus and Andrea Reynolds lived there, along with his daughter, Cosima, who was headed for Brown and who floated through the room as we had cocktails, long, young, and blonde, and I wondered, “What does she think about all this?”

  Claus made a fuss over Babe.

  “He’s a shit,” she’d said when I told her we’d been asked for dinner. “How can you go to dinner with this guy?”

  I said I was curious to see him up close, to see the apartment, a lot of reasons, none of them especially doing me credit.

  “He tried to bump off his wife, didn’t he, and steal the money?”

  “Well, that’s what they said. Not proved.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Okay, Babe, I’ll go alone. I won’t impose Claus on you.”

  “Oh, I’ll go,” she said. “Is it formal?”

  Over drinks Claus told stories. He didn’t have much credibility, but he could tell a story. He was talking, in that clipped English aristo way of his, product of a public school and the occasional caning, about men he’d known at school who’d become celebrated, and someone said, “Did you know Jimmy Ewald?”

  This was Sir James Ewald, a very successful and apparently quite odious international financier.

  “Oh yes, we were never intimate, but I knew him quite well. We were at school together.”

  People leaned forward, sensing there was more to come. I was taking notes without ever touching pen to paper.

  “He killed a man, you know,” Claus von Bülow remarked. There were a few gasps and someone said “No!” and Claus went on.

  “Yes, one of our masters, a perfectly dreadful old man we all feared and despised, especially Jimmy. The man made Jimmy’s life sheer hell. So one day Jimmy tripped him on the steps. The man hit his head and died. It was murder pure and simple, even if there was no prosecution. Murder.”

  He paused, his timing perfect.

  “Though I’m hardly one to talk, am I?”

  During dinner I had Claus’s lady, Andrea, next to me, and Babe was between Claus and Dershowitz, whom she swiftly engaged in discussion of some arcane point of courtroom pleading. I looked over to her table every so often to see how she was bearing up under the hammer of Claus’s charm, but you couldn’t tell; she had a good trial lawyer’s poker face.

  “Your girlfriend is a beauty,” Andrea said, “but what a strange profession for a woman.”

  We had a talk about that and agreed we knew very few career army officers who looked like Babe, and then coffee was served in the library and Claus led us in, all bonhomie and good cheer. Babe took one of the armchairs, and Claus made a great fuss over her, fetching the brandy himself. She seemed to have thawed a bit. But when we were home she said:

  “I’m glad I went. You were right, of course, it was something to see that apartment. And the daughter is lovely.”

  “But…?”

  “Well, you know. He’s a wonderful host, and a charmer. I was repelled and attracted at the same time. I kept wondering about that poor woman in a coma in a hospital somewhere hooked up to all those tubes, and I kept wondering why I had such a good time and laughed so much… at her table.”

  I knew why I’d had a good time at Claus’s table; it was my job, it would make a good column. A year ago I wouldn’t have understood Babe’s reservations. Perhaps common sense was becoming contagious.

  69 God belongs to everyone… even Episcopalians.

  YET there were giggles, small, quirky delights.

  Another magazine—regrettably not Fashion—discovered that the new editor of The New Yorker, Robert Gottlieb, was something of a collector and had in fact, with a collaborator, written the definitive work (profusely illustrated) on his particular collectible. Marsh, reading about Gottlieb’s hobby, became frenzied.

  “I’d have paid a free-lance writer fifty thousand for that story. A hundred fifty!”

  What Mr. Gottlieb collected were plastic handbags, women’s purses in plastic, the sort of thing women carried in the forties and fifties, many of them transparent. This was his hobby, and he posed happily lounging on a chaise surrounded by dozens and dozens of plastic handbags, looking inordinately pleased.

  “I’d have made it the cover story!” Bingo swore, “and given it eight pages inside, in color.”

  No sooner had editor Gottlieb’s odd hobby faded from consciousness than Elegant Hopkins surfaced. In an interview in the Sunday magazine of The New York Times, Elegant had unburdened himself of any number of provocative remarks, several of which rather pointedly criticized Bingo Marsh. But they, for once, weren’t what drew Bingo’s ire. In discussing his recent rejection of Christianity (born a Baptist, Elegant had now embraced Islam), he referred to his growing conviction that any number of significant Christian figures, including the Apostle Paul, had been “self-loathing, repressed gays.”

  “I mean, John,” Bingo exploded, “St. Paul gay?”

  “News to me,” I said.

  “Well, I suppose any
thing’s possible, and that’s as may be. Next Elegant will be telling us he didn’t drive the snakes out of England.”

  “Ireland. And it was Saint Patrick.”

  “Well, they were all very holy, I’m sure.”

  “Fine men, both,” I said respectfully.

  “Nothing self-loathing about Elegant. He loves himself and hates everyone else. Including me.”

  “I daresay.”

  Marsh became thoughtful. “That stuff about the snakes, wasn’t there a plague of frogs…?”

  “Yes.”

  “And which Catholic saint took care of that?”

  “It was God and Moses, working together,” I said.

  Marsh nodded, absorbing fresh information, ever eager to expand knowledge.

  “And do Catholics believe God is a Catholic? Or does He belong to all of us?”

  “God belongs to everyone, Bingo. Even Episcopalians.”

  Marsh seemed comforted.

  The fashion magazine business was becoming more competitive, even tougher. Hachette, the French publishers, and Rupert Murdoch cut a deal to launch a monthly American version of the very successful French weekly Elle; Vogue was rumored to be bringing in a smart new editor to stir things up; Norman Lear’s ex-wife Frances took the alimony and announced she was starting up a monthly named… well, Lear’s. Even Harper’s Bazaar bestirred itself, speaking of a redesign and an ad campaign.

  Such things concerned Marsh. But it was another sort of magazine entirely that fascinated him. He was still reading Spanky, the corporal punishment monthly about which he’d gone on enthusiastically on Capri that summer night so long ago.

  “It’s good to see a magazine with staying power. So many of them start up with enormous promise and then wither away. Spanky seems able to maintain its editorial freshness month after month, though it’s beyond me where they come up with all these variations on what is, after all, quite a simple act.”

  There was another new one now, only in its second or third issue, but showing possibilities. He unlocked a drawer in his desk and slid the magazine across the polished surface. It was the size and heft of that week’s Time magazine, but its title warned you were in for something different: