The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  “That waiter needs a shave. Can you tell him so politely? Maybe let him borrow your razor, and use your bathroom.”

  Coleman made another note. “The NBC television crew is on its way. They need a little time to set up their equipment.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Cindy Adams called. She has the flu, but she’s going to do the story anyway. She wants to know what you’ll be wearing. I told her I’d call her back.”

  “This is Bill Blass—cotton challis pants and top with a cowl neck. Three-quarter sleeves, and an Old Pawn belt. She may not know what that is. Old Pawn is silver and turquoise jewelry that the Navajo Indians used to make and pawn at trading posts out west. They pawned it for booze.” She touched the heavy belt. “Can you imagine pawning this beautiful stuff for booze? This one has a squash flower design. It dates from about eighteen sixty.”

  He jotted down all this information. “Shoes?”

  She extended one small foot. “Turquoise slingbacks. Perry Ellis. Oh, and I have a turquoise cashmere shawl that I may throw over my shoulders if it gets chilly.”

  “Turquoise—to match your turquoise eyes?”

  She laughed. “Please don’t tell her that, darlin’,” she said. “What about the fireworks?”

  “Everything’s set. You give the signal to the band, the band moves to the north corner of the terrace and starts to play ‘Happy Days.’ That’s my cue to push the button that will signal the fireworks barge on the river.”

  “Have we thought of everything, darlin’?” Planning a party like this one was like laying out a military campaign—at least when Alex Rothman planned a party.

  “I think so.” He consulted his watch. “Six fifty-eight,” he said. “You have over an hour until launch time. Why don’t you go into the library and relax? There’s champagne on ice in the cooler.”

  “You know I can’t relax before I give a party.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything. Tonight your only job is to be the most famous woman in New York.”

  “Like Andy Warhol said—famous for fifteen minutes.”

  “Just one thing,” he said. With one hand, he reached up and lifted one small strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead. Then, holding the hair in place with one hand, he reached in his jacket pocket with the other and produced a can of Spray-Net, and quickly sprayed the errant strand into place. “Now you’re perfect,” he said. Among other things, Coleman was her part-time hair and makeup stylist.

  He had been with her for fifteen years. Sometimes she noticed him gazing at her with a look of such soulfulness and longing that she wondered whether he was in love with her.

  As she moved across the terrace toward the glass doors, she saw one of the waiters struggling to tie his black bow tie. “Need help?” she asked him.

  “I can never learn to tie these damn things,” he said. “And the boss said absolutely no clip-ons.”

  “Here.” She took the two ends of the tie. “You—tie—this—exactly as you would—a shoelace,” she said, straightening the knot and flattening the bow into place against his white shirtfront.

  “My old lady won’t believe this,” he said. “The great Alexandra Rothman having to tie her waiter’s bow tie.”

  “You tell your old lady that this old lady did it,” she said.

  In the library, she drew the curtains closed, and the room was dark, except for the museum light above her portrait, and the house was silent except, from the distant terrace, for the faint sound of the musicians as they began to bring their instruments into tune in a series of F-sharps. She stepped to the cooler, lifted the bottle from the ice, and poured herself a glass of champagne—liquid courage. “A person always needs a little liquid courage before a party,” her husband Steven used to say. Steven’s problem was remembering names. “I can’t even remember my best friends’ names when I see them in the middle of a mob of people,” he used to say. Alex’s problem was different. She would have no difficulty remembering the names of her two hundred and fifty guests tonight because she would be seeing them all in their proper context. It was when she encountered familiar faces out of context that she was thrown off guard. A year ago, for instance, she spent nearly six months seeing her dentist twice a week while he performed some extensive crown and inlay work. Week after week, this young man had spent hours with his boyish face bent over her open mouth while she familiarized herself with every contour of that face. Yet, when she encountered him one day at the small leather goods counter at Saks, and he greeted her warmly and by her first name, she had absolutely no idea who he was. She had mumbled something about how well he was looking, only to realize later that she had spent two hours with him just the day before! How do you account for that?

  She found herself studying the Bouché portrait, asking herself that question. It had been a long time since she had really looked at the portrait, and she wished again that she had stood firm against Bonbon, M. Bouché’s tiny white toy poodle. For one thing, Bonbon lent an aura of artifice, or sentimentality, to the painting. For another, it dated the portrait, time-freezing it in the early 1970s. Dogs, like everything else, go in and out of fashion. Since those days, entire breeds appear to have vanished from the animal kingdom. Who ever sees a cocker spaniel anymore? Whatever became of chow-chows, Saint Bernards, Boston bulls, even collies? Scotties are similarly extinct, while the noble Bedlingtons and Afghan hounds are decidedly endangered species, destroyed by popular acclaim as surely as if by acid rain. Toy French poodles, particularly the itsy-bitsy white ones, are a rather special case. One still sees them, Lord knows, but in all the wrong places—in the Indiana couple’s farmhouse, on your cleaning lady’s Christmas card, or being walked on West 49th Street after dark by ladies of easy virtue. In their place, where women of fashion walk their dogs, have come Shi-tzus, Yorkies, and maybe corgies. Was there an idea for a Mode story in this phenomenon? Alexandra quickly dismissed it as frivolous. That was the way Bonbon made her look in the portrait—frivolous.

  But Bouché had insisted. He often included Bonbon in his portraits of beautiful women, and Bonbon was more than a cute prop. The dog, he explained, provided a crucial compositional element in the painting. Look how the animal’s triangular shape, with its rear legs tucked under its chin, and curled under Alexandra’s right arm, echoed the corresponding triangle of Alexandra’s left elbow as it rested on the arm of her chair, her slender fingers curved upward to touch her cheek, the fingers forming another triangle. The composition was based on a subtle series of interrelated triangles, he explained. The triangle of her right shoulder, crooked to hold the dog, was balanced by the triangle of her right knee as it crossed her left, and then there was the triangle of the delicate cleavage of her breasts, answered by the triangular shape of the subject’s face. And the significance of the triangle? Ah, but didn’t Mrs. Rothman know? The triangle is the simplest, strongest geometric form in nature, as the Egyptians knew when they built the Pyramids, as the Indians knew when they carved their arrowheads, as Bucky Fuller knew when he designed his domes! What is the shape of a feather, or a bird’s wing? Examine a fly’s wing under a microscope, and what will you see? Triangles within triangles.

  “My darling Mrs. Rothman, I assure you that Bonbon is essential,” he said. “Look how his pearl-colored eyes echo your earrings! Now erase that little frown for me, and look beautiful for me again, my darling lady.” And he picked up his brush again.

  She hadn’t argued with him. After all, he was charging her nothing for her portrait. He was painting it out of gratitude for the commission she had given him to illustrate some fashion pages for the magazine. In those days, he was not well known in America, and was eager for the exposure. And, she thought now a little guiltily, she had used him only once again. Such are the penalties of becoming fashionable. She remembered when she had been the first to introduce her readers to the hairstyles of Vidal Sassoon, and where is Vidal Sassoon today? Rich, but his hair products sell at K mart, and are give
aways in hotels. Ralph Lauren will be the next to go that way, just wait and see. Look beautiful for me again!

  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what is in the eye that the beholder beholds? That was the trouble. Alexandra Rothman could never really see herself from those wide, unblinking albuminous tempera eyes. What had Bouché said when she asked him if she really looked like that? “Mirrors lie. My portraits don’t.” Alex had never thought of herself as beautiful, had never permitted herself to think of herself as beautiful. The woman who thinks she is beautiful is in deep trouble. The woman who believes she is beautiful is a real danger to herself because she begins to think of herself as God, whereas the man who thinks he’s handsome is just a pain in the neck. Oh, yes.

  Still, as she looked at the portrait now she decided it was probably an honest one—at least as honest as could be expected from such a romantically inclined artist as Bouché. At least Steven had told her she was beautiful. At least he had admired the portrait, which was why she had hung it here, in the library, his favorite room in the house. At least that was the way I looked to Steven, she thought. At least that was how young I was. And Bouché had not tried to play down her face’s flaws. Her nose was long and straight and thin—“aristocratic,” Bouché called it—though Alex herself had always thought it was too long and thin, since it tended to cheat her out of a certain amount of upper lip. Her chin was small and a bit too pointed—“My horrible, pointy chin,” she often muttered to herself when she put on her makeup in front of her mirror.

  But the dispassionate observer might have insisted that these were minor imperfections. He had certainly captured her best features—the eyes which were large, widely spaced, and luminous, and of an odd shade that seemed blue-green in some lights and hazel in others—her “tricolor eyes,” the Frenchman had called them—and the thin, delicately arched eyebrows, slightly raised as though she was about to ask a question.

  The expression on her face? “Too serious,” some friends had told her, since Alexandra Rothman was famous for her throaty laugh. Others said that she looked haughty, and still others said that she looked sulky, remonstrative—even fierce, feral, almost angry. Her friend Lenny Liebling once told her that her expression was one of not-quite-amused skepticism, as though someone had just told her a story, or offered her a flimsy excuse, that she could not quite believe, or told her an off-color joke that she hadn’t found funny. “You look the way you look every time Herb Rothman tells us we should get out there and try to sell more ad pages,” he said.

  And not a few people had commented that in this portrait she looked sad. Alex herself said she thought she looked as though she had a lot on her mind, which she certainly did that first year after Joel’s birth—a lot on her mind, and very little in her pocketbook.

  Still, Bouché had chosen an antique silk chiffon dress by Poiret for her to wear—pale pumpkin-colored, with thin spaghetti straps—borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum’s costume collection. He had had to use safety pins at the back of the bodice to make it fit—Poiret must have, designed it for a woman with a more ample figure than Alex’s—but what would the museum have said if it had known that its precious dress was being pierced with pins! Alex could still feel the icy pressure of those pins against her skin. Then he had arranged a fichu, of a slightly darker pumpkin shade, over her bare shoulders. The colors, he explained, were subtly planned to draw the beholder’s eye upward to the subject’s crown of fluffy, feather-cut, reddish-blonde hair with its triangular widow’s peak at the hairline, and of course the folds of the fichu fell in other loose, lazy triangles, into the folds of the Poiret as they fell to the floor about her feet.

  “I want you to look like a duchess,” he said.

  “Ha—the Duchess of Paradise.”

  “Paradise?”

  “Paradise, Missouri, the town where I was born. We called it Paradise, Misery.”

  “Ah, ma petite zuzu.…”

  He had even suggested a tiara—another triangle—but she had drawn the line at that. “Me—Miss Hick—in a tiara?” she had laughed. (“Heek? What is heek?” he wanted to know.)

  Studying the portrait now, she wondered whether she should have let him paint in a tiara. Perhaps, seventeen years later, I have earned my little crown, she thought.

  But instead she had worn the triple strand of twelve-millimeter pearls that Steven gave her when they became engaged in 1967. She was wearing these tonight, for the pearls had become something of a personal signature for her. In her ears—there on the wall, and here in the room—were the pearl earclips he had given her on their first anniversary. And on the third finger of her left hand, the hand that grazed her cheek in the painting, was the Kashmiri sapphire with its narrow girdle of diamonds, his engagement ring which, of course, she still wore. But there were few other reminders that the wary woman in the portrait, and the triumphant woman of tonight, were the same person.

  “Did you love him?” Lulu had asked tonight.

  “Do you love him?” Lulu had asked her in 1967, when she first showed her the ring.

  “We’re quite crazy about each other,” she said.

  “But are you truly, deeply in love with him? Or is it just the money and the power that attracts you to him? There’s nothing wrong with wanting money and power. I love money, and I love power, honey, as much as the next one. But that’s not the same as falling deeply in love with someone, and remember you heard it here.”

  “We know what we’re doing, Lulu.”

  “Do you? Sometimes you seem so young, honey.”

  “I’m twenty-three.”

  “Marrying a rich dude isn’t always as easy as it sounds. And the Rothmans? They have a reputation for being tough customers, I guess you know that.”

  “He’s taking me to meet his parents next week.”

  Lucille Withers’s look was dubious. “I just wish I could make this sound like a love story, Lexy. Do you really know what it’s like to be in love?”

  “Of course I do! Do you?”

  The dark-haired hawk-shaped head inclined slightly, and her smile was wan. “Oh, yes,” she said.

  “Then why didn’t you ever marry? Why didn’t you have children? That’s one of the first things we want to do—have children.”

  “Children. To feed the dynasty. Bullets.”

  “No! Children to raise and love. Didn’t you ever want to have children to raise and love?”

  Her smile was still wan, and the look on her face was faraway. “I’m like Mr. Chips,” she said at last. “Running this agency, I’ve had hundreds of children. And all of them girls.”

  Later, Alex would wonder whether, perhaps, very discreetly, Lucille Withers was a Lesbian.

  Lulu always wanted to talk about love. But no one knew better than Alex, even then, that if you fell too deeply in love, or even very much in love, or even if you fell in love at all, you risked losing all your happiness and peace of mind forever, and was it worth that precious candle? When love ended, you were left with nothing but a tiny splinter of ice in your heart. That was the only way love penetrated the dominion of the heart: when it ended, as a splinter of ice. But it was that icy shard that gave you strength, the ice-cold strength to survive in a business as reef-strewn and treacherous as this one, and in a family such as the House of Rothman. And remember, you heard that here. Alex learned that long ago.

  She turned away from the portrait, which was beginning to have a hypnotic effect on her.

  Here, right in this room, right on these library shelves, was the truest measure of her accomplishment, her success. Here, in a special section in the center of the book-lined walls, bound in lipstick-red morocco and embossed in gold lettering, were issues of Mode since it had become hers and hers alone—seventeen volumes, one volume for each year. That translated into more than two hundred individual issues, and it was impossible not to notice how the volumes grew fatter as the years went by—fatter, more prosperous and healthy, like a growing child. Partly, this was an indication of
her advertisers’ growing faith in her. But, even more, it was an indication of her readers’ growing faith in her magazine, because a magazine’s advertising pages—and revenues—do not increase unless readership grows first. But at the same time, a careful balance must be struck between editorial content, which draws the readers, and advertising pages, which make the money. A magazine editor cannot let her book become overwhelmed with advertising, tempting though that notion often is. There is no exact science involved here, no set formula for how to strike that delicate, perfect balance, though each editor may adopt a loose formula of her own. No amount of market research will tell you what makes a magazine appeal to readers. Only an editor’s instinct can be counted on to provide that answer, issue by issue. Taste and judgment are words you often hear used to account for editorial success, but it is more like instinct, hunch, blind guesswork, and a gambler’s idiot willingness to take the big plunge and throw all the chips on double-zero. Each new issue of a magazine goes out to face a public firing squad, with its editor saying the hell with the blindfold. Each issue of a magazine is a fragile, perishable vessel, as fragile and perishable as a human life. In those red-bound volumes on Alexandra Rothman’s bookshelves were arrayed exactly two hundred and four separate lives. Rather like children, she often thought.

  Years ago, in another library—at the house in Tarrytown—there had been a family meeting, a council of war, after Steven died. The mood was electric, tense. His will had just been read, in which he requested—not bequeathed, but requested, since the magazine was not his to bequeath—that Alex be given full editorial control of Mode “because she loves it so.”

  “What the hell makes you think you can run a magazine?” Ho Rothman, Steven’s grandfather, the family patriarch and the head of everything, had asked her.

  “Because I’ve been helping Steven run it for the last six years, in case you haven’t noticed!”