Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  John Fairchild’s Women’s Wear Daily ridiculed Bingo for trying to play God. Another rival editor assailed him for “making a fashion king out of an obscure male seamstress named Christian Lacroix.” USA Today did a lip-smacking, gossipy account:

  “Why is Bingo Marsh so cross?” meowed the headline.

  Monsieur Gérant, Pipi’s manager, announced Fashion magazine was now banned from the house. “One does not invite criminals into one’s home.” Faye Dunaway, a faithful client of Profonde, was photographed wearing a Lacroix. “I adore Lacroix,” she said diplomatically, “but Pipi is king.” The First Lady confided in Zizi Orlando, “I’d love to wear a pouff. It would be marvelous with my legs. But give Bingo Marsh the satisfaction?” Jackie Onassis went right ahead and bought a Lacroix. Bingo wrote the front-page headline himself: “Her Elegance Goes Pouff!”

  In Paris Paul Profonde went underground, shunning his usual table at Lipp, his other haunts.

  “He’s dying of something,” Bingo said darkly. Other papers picked up rumors about Pipi’s health. I smelled Marsh’s influence and challenged him.

  “I don’t just make these things up,” he told me in an injured tone.

  “But you do, Bingo. You’re forever making things up. Most times it’s all good fun. But planting rumors a man’s dying isn’t fun anymore. Think of his friends, of his business.”

  “Well, I didn’t make this up. Maybe I do, sometimes, but not about Pipi. And my instincts are often very good, even when there’s no proof.”

  Now, almost miraculously, firsthand proof there was something seriously wrong with the designer. A French eyewitness was found, not someone cooked up by Bingo but real, a petit bourgeois, middle-aged functionary who lived in the rue des Acacias near Paul Profonde’s apartment, who claimed to have had a frightening encounter with the designer the preceding weekend, babbling about “a great, hairy rascal that leaped out at one!”

  Marsh spent hours on the transatlantic phone to get the neighbor to recount his adventures to a lawyer in front of a notary, a transcript received by telex at the office:

  “My wife and I had just emerged toward midnight from the cinema, a rather entertaining trifle by Besson, no plot to speak of but an amusing film, when suddenly, coming out of the shadows, and you know how the trees are along there, I saw this hunched, distended figure, longhaired, grotesquely bloated, snuffling and grunting, lurching toward us. I recoiled, not knowing if we were to be attacked. My wife cowered behind me, as a woman does, tu sais, whimpering and telling her beads, but the thing shambled past without doing harm, perhaps seeking more vulnerable victims, hurrying into the night, and it was only then as it passed that in the light of a street lamp I saw it in full profile. It was, messieurs/dames, our most celebrated neighbor, a man well known (‘bien connu’) in the quartier. The monster was monsieur Paul Profonde!”

  Bingo was desperate to run the neighbor’s account on a full page in large type facing another full-page sketch of the scene by our art department.

  “Just read this, Tyson,” he told Rambush, the art director. When Tyson had read the report, he handed it back, eyes rolling toward the back of his head. Marsh, at his most winning, inquired, “Tyson, what do you think Pipi would look like at midnight if he came at you and your wife in this way outside the movies and was all swollen up and hairy and galloping at you, frothing and such?”

  Rambush, who had no wife, said he would work up a few sketches.

  “Tyson’s wonderful,” Marsh enthused, “he always knows precisely what to do.”

  Neither story nor sketch ever ran. The lawyers protested. Always before, Bingo had his way. But these were Sir Hugo’s lawyers.

  “No bloody way, mate,” Barrier Reef informed Marsh. “That’s bloody actionable on the face of it. And malice besides.”

  Disconsolate, Bingo continued to hammer Profonde and to puff Lacroix in the magazine until, out of patience, Pipi canceled his advertising contract. Substantial money but Marsh shrugged it off. “Church and state, church and state,” he told people.

  Grottnex’s money man, Old Blue Rinse, wasn’t as cavalier, but, unable to confront an evasive Marsh, he took it out on the rest of us.

  “That’s nearly a million dollars American, mate, a million out the bloody door with the trash.”

  “It’s how he’s always run the magazine,” I said. “You lose a few ads from time to time but controversy causes talk and builds readership and the increased circulation brings in more ads. Lots of them.”

  Old Blue Rinse looked bleak. “I’m all for bringing in more ads but not losing what you’ve bloody got.”

  Profonde chose this moment to shut down production of a marginal perfume.

  “Pipi’s perfume stinks up bottom line,” Fashion gleefully headlined the event.

  When I grumbled, I got little consolation from Babe.

  “Find a grown-up job. It isn’t healthy. Marsh isn’t healthy.”

  I was growing tired of defending Bingo. A few years earlier the battle with Paul Profonde would have been fought with imagination and irony; not with this heavy-handed adulation of a nearly unknown rival and virtual censorship of Pipi. I remembered another Bingo, giddy and giggling, skipping about the room and reminding me we got paid for having fun while so many others were employed at joyless work.

  “I miss that Bingo,” I told her, but she hadn’t known him then.

  Now I was to suffer another loss.

  76 Lunatics like Marsh and girls like me…

  I came home one evening to find Babe sitting on the kitchen floor with the “faction cleenar” taken apart in what seemed hundreds of oily pieces.

  “It’s very simple, as easy as field-stripping a weapon. Your average small electric appliance is as basic a device as the fulcrum and lever. Pure mechanical advantage. Even you ought to be able to handle something like this, Shark.”

  It was a warm night, and she was sweaty and smudged with oil.

  “Shark?”

  Her voice had changed.

  “Yeah?”

  “I got my posting. My overseas assignment.”

  Something fell heavily inside me.

  “Oh?”

  She continued to look down, studying the vacuum cleaner with extraordinary concentration.

  “Yeah, Manila. The twentieth of next month. Legal officer handling civilian claims against American military forces.”

  “Babe,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, “great, isn’t it?”

  Tears were coming down her cheeks, and I started to cry, too.

  “Look,” I said, “you can always…”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve been after this two years, Shark. I gotta take it. I gotta go…”

  Had it been two years? Had we been together that long? And never seriously considered the future…?

  First, Bingo. Now Babe.

  Her face glistened with tears, but she was smiling. Or trying to.

  We both knew the day would come; it was something she was forever rattling on about; but when it happened I never thought it would be like this. Babe was caught up in the frenzy, the rush, the excitement. She had that. I had only a yawning emptiness.

  If ever I were going to commit myself…

  Instead, I fell back on shopworn, superficial concerns.

  “It’s the worst time for it to happen. Bingo going nuts and Australians crawling all over the place and now you’re leaving…”

  I despised myself for not saying more, for not being honest, the old fear of hurt, abandonment, too powerful.

  She’d stopped crying, I guess reckoning this was all she was going to get from me, maybe that I wasn’t worth tears.

  “Shark,” she said, all cheer now, “get yourself a life. Lunatics like Marsh and girls like me…”

  She was right. She and Marsh, some pair. And I loved them both.

  Babe didn’t believe in wasting time. She had four weeks to wrap up her affairs in New York and travel ten thousand miles to a
new job, a new life, and there she was at Berlitz on Fifty-seventh Street taking a crash course in Tagalog.

  “I can skim by in Spanish. But I’ve got very little Tagalog.”

  Bingo, as he usually did, had somehow learned she was leaving.

  “I know you’ll miss her, John, but she wasn’t really ever your sort.”

  Babe gave me instructions about the maid.

  “Now don’t yell at her. Try to be nice, huh? She’s a good ol’ gal trying to make her way with the ‘faction cleenar,’ and she doesn’t need grief.”

  I didn’t know what to do to celebrate our last days together. “Celebrate” was hardly the word to use anyway; “memorialize” was more like it, but that sounded morbid.

  As the time approached, she got more cheerful, and I didn’t.

  “This legal stuff can’t possibly occupy all my time,” she said.

  “No, there’s probably a pretty active social life,” I said gloomily, reeking with self-pity.

  “Oh, hell, Shark, that isn’t what I mean. I’m talking about getting upcountry, bandit territory, seeing the rebels on their own ground, that sort of thing.”

  “You be damned careful of those rebels.”

  “Sure, sure, come on, I’m the career military officer, you know, not some feather merchant like you. Besides, it could be Manila’s the place to hang around. They say Cory is out of it, there could be a coup anytime. That’d be something,” she said, a dreamy look coming over her face, “a real live coup d’état with jets screaming in over the palace and tanks whamming away at one another on the main drag and the paras coming in from the hills shooting up the town and the American Embassy under siege and Marines running around and roadblocks being set up and people on balconies tossing Molotov cocktails and…”

  “Babe,” I said.

  “Yes, Shark?”

  “Babe, this is Manila you’re going to. Not West Beirut.”

  She looked thoughtful.

  “I could get lucky,” she said.

  77 The decline of decency and civility in America…

  IF the Paul Profonde affair opened the eyes of Sir Hugo Grottnex, Marsh was also learning about Sir Hugo.

  “He thinks we should have television stars on the cover. People I never even heard of. Some black woman, even. ‘Opera’ something…”

  “Oh, dear, a black person on Fashion?

  “It’s not funny, John. I have nothing against blacks. Ames and I always watch Bill Cosby, and didn’t I give the African Queen his start? And we’re always doing stories on Patrick Kelly and other talented colored people…”

  Marsh said he told Grottnex the magazine quite frequently ran celebrity covers.

  “Oh, quite right,” Sir Hugo had responded, “but this Donna Karan person no one ever heard of…?”

  Bingo was apoplectic. “Can you imagine, not knowing who Donna is?”

  “Did you tell him?” I said.

  “Of course not. I’m not getting into unseemly debates over cover stories.”

  That was Bingo, carping and whining to people who worked for him, but refusing to stand up to Grottnex. It was his way, how he’d always been. When Old Blue Rinse came around, sniffing over the books, Bingo ordered all of us to deny we kept records. “He’s prying and snooping. And he’ll just tell Nunc everything.”

  Then came the officers’ meeting on Paradise Island, a three-day event in the Bahamas at which Grottnex and his senior aides talked business and planned the year ahead.

  “He wants me to go,” Bingo announced in a panic.

  “Of course he does. You run one of his finest properties, and he wants to show you off to the other top people in his company.”

  “No one goes to Paradise Island except gangsters and cheap hookers. A dreadful, vulgar place. Now if it were Lyford Cay…”

  But greater atrocities were planned. “Hugo wants me to come to dinner. And Ames.”

  Dinner was but the opening wedge. There were evenings at the theater and weekends at his country place and black-tie events at which Grottnex had purchased a table. I suspected such invitations might come as something of a divertissement for Mrs. Marsh. Bingo, the snob, agonized.

  “Well, just tell him you can’t go. Or won’t.”

  He was contemptuous of Sir Hugo but too timid to say so.

  Nigel Reef, more commonly “Barrier,” became the cross we all bore, taking it on himself to counsel me solicitously in affairs of the heart, appalling poor Bingo with his cheerful vulgarity.

  Somehow he’d learned of Babe’s flight, of my solitary nights.

  “Ought to get yourself someone, y’know. Man was not meant to abide alone. Nothing wrong with a good wank once in a while, but not every night.”

  A “wank” was masturbation, or as Barrier delicately put it, “a date with merry fist.”

  I asked Marsh if he knew about “wanking” and got an extremely pained “Oh, dear” in response.” Then, brightening, “At times like this don’t you miss Olivier? It’s a word he’d surely like.”

  Reef certainly did not “abide alone.” He was out drinking most nights and had found a woman. We were told there was a wife in Sydney. Or in London. Perhaps both. Now he had a girl, tall and pale and gaunt, with deep, smudged eyes. Her name around the office, a name Reef himself had bestowed, was Deadly Nightshade. We met one morning with Reef and Old Blue Rinse, the money man. Reef looked terrible most mornings, but on this occasion especially so. When he left the room briefly Marsh inquired, solicitously, “Is he well? He looks drained.”

  “Well,” said Old Blue Rinse, “if you closed the pubs every night and then for a couple of hours the Deadly Nightshade sat on your face, you’d bloody well look bad, too.”

  Bingo adjourned the meeting shortly after and left the building.

  Beset by Australians, afraid of Grottnex, his magazine slipping away, Marsh lapsed into depression. Ambrose and I, perhaps other friends, attempted to divert him, even at this late date to broaden horizons. Occasionally he came out of his funk, shaking off despair, to be again for a brief, shining moment the old, silly Bingo we loved.

  We’d lunched, and Bingo and I were standing at adjoining urinals in the Racquet Club, “doing number one.”

  “Ugh,” said Bingo, “there’s a cockroach.”

  “Yes,” I said. It was undeniably so, a small, brown cockroach scuttling across the tile.

  “You ought to do a column about it. The decline of decency and civility in America…’ Something along those lines.”

  “Bingo,” I said, zipping my fly, “it’s your club. Do you really want to trash it?”

  “But it’s so tacky having cockroaches in the little boys’ room. And what’s the purpose of having a magazine if you don’t use it constructively, to improve the quality of life?”

  I shrugged, not intending to do a column about cockroaches, just wanting to torment him.

  “Members will blame you, you know. They’ll see the column and make connections. Could be unpleasant for you…”

  “I don’t care,” he said, stubborn as a child being told not to get his feet wet.

  Then, as we exited the men’s room, Marsh stopped. He’d gone pale.

  “Wait a minute. Is Sir Hugo a member here? He’d be upset if you wrote anything…”

  A year ago Bingo wouldn’t have been prey to such doubt. He’d have been confident of his ability to slip out from under by lying, by saying someone planted the cockroach story, that he’d been out of town, or stricken with tumors.

  Now the hand of Grottnex, the Wallpaper King, lay heavy on his soul.

  78 Is Cristina Ford still around?

  MY soul, too, was leaden. Babe flown west, the apartment had never been as empty, nor had I. I signed up for piano lessons. Lonely, I purchased a dog. It bit me. I began accepting weekend invitations. At a barbecue in the Hamptons, hot dogs and burgers and jolly good fun, I asked the wife of a friend to dance.

  “Oh no,” she said. “Those baked beans. I’m afraid I’ll fart.�
�

  Out of desperation I did what Babe, I thought, cured me of: I dated a cover girl.

  She was six feet tall and her name was Niki and the fashion magazines described her as having Christie Brinkley’s hair, Christy Turling-ton’s cat-eyes and cheekbones, and Elle Macpherson’s body. I met her after a Todd Oldham fashion show and asked if she’d like to meet me that evening for a drink and go uptown to Elaine’s.

  “Well, I don’t drink much, Mr. Sharkey,” she said. “My mom doesn’t let me.”

  It turned out she was sixteen years old. We didn’t go uptown to Elaine’s. I wasn’t quite yet ready to turn into P.J. le Boot.

  To get away, as much as to salvage Marsh, I volunteered, along with Ambrose, to travel with him. Ambrose’s turn came first, dinners in the South with executives from Stevens and Milliken and West Point Pepperell, seeking their business.

  “At one place the waitress chilled a red Bordeaux and Bingo went mental. ‘No problem, mister,’ she said, and started warming it over a candle.”

  On one trip Marsh wanted to attend services on Sunday morning but couldn’t find an Episcopal church. I suggested he drop into the Catholic church across from our hotel, the ritual being quite similar.

  Bingo regarded me tolerantly. “Don’t try to lull me, John. I’ve seen The Exorcist, and I know all about those ushers standing just inside the door sprinkling holy water on people. They’ll sniff out a non-Catholic in an instant.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, when the steam starts rising from the holy water, turning instantly to vapor on Protestants or Jews.”

  Bingo didn’t like Japan, where Grottnex was considering a foreign edition of Fashion.

  “All that bowing and taking baths with perfect strangers and eating live fish. It’s disgusting. I resent having to take my shoes off so often. My shoes are perfectly acceptable in this country; why not there? Lobb makes them.”

  But it was the bowing that irritated him most. “Have you ever seen three or four Japanese businessmen sharing a limousine? They keep bowing one another toward the door while the driver stands there. Even if it’s pouring rain. They bow and they bow and nobody gets in. That’s my definition of the slowest thing on earth: four Japs trying to get into one limo.”