The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  Then there was Wally, the shoe-shine boy who made daily rounds of the executive offices. Most people paid no attention at all to Wally as he squatted on his bootblack’s box tending to their uptipped toes, and went right on with their business conversations as though Wally weren’t there. But Lenny had discovered that Wally not only liked to listen, but that he also liked to talk, and enjoyed an audience, and it was quite amazing what significant scraps of corporate news Wally was able to pick up, and which Lenny was able to fit together into a larger picture.

  There were also the people Lenny called “the Production moles”—the solemn-faced kids who came out of Yale and Princeton, Smith and Wellesley, who had made it out of the mail room to the next step up, the Production Department, but who were still willing to work for next to nothing because, after all, this was considered a glamour industry, and the Production moles were able to tell their friends that they had glamorous jobs “in publishing.” Lenny had managed to skip that particular stage in the scramble up the masthead—where the names of the Production moles were listed, in tiniest print, at the very bottom—and so Lenny had no idea what the Production moles actually did. Some of them seemed to spend their days crouched over computer consoles, staring at moving lines of green print. Others seemed to occupy themselves with pots of glue. The moles spoke a strange and incomprehensible lingo all their own. At times they spoke of headers and footers, flats and column-inches, which sounded as though they were in the construction business. They also talked of plants and inserts and tip-ins and slugs and mice, as if they were landscape gardeners. At times, the instructions from the Production chief sounded like instructions for a space launching: “Bring your ruler bar up to the foreground, and click the mouse button when your cursor is on it, and set your tab stop.” When they spoke of serifs and fonts, it sounded as though they were part of a religious cult. Lenny comprehended none of their mysterious language, beyond knowing that a “typesetter’s widow” was not the surviving spouse of a deceased typesetter, and only when the moles talked about paste-ups, proofs, galleys, and tear-sheets did Lenny realize that the moles were involved in the grubbiest, mechanical part of putting a magazine together. In fact, the final printed-up, pasted-together page was called a mechanical. The moles were mechanics. Their fingernails were even dirty.

  But Lenny felt deep pity for the moles. They all worked together in one large, windowless room over messy desks, where the floor was always strewn with discarded scraps of paper and computer printouts, where the rows of bright fluorescent lights overhead bathed the bespectacled faces of the moles in a kind of prison pallor, and where they breathed the fumes of rubber cement. The moles were universally unpopular with their higher-ups. “Production has a problem with this piece” meant that an editor had to go back and cut a story or—even worse—had to add to it to fill the necessary column inches, which meant that everything had to be cleared with Alex Rothman all over again. Nobody ever thanked the moles for what they did—except Lenny, even though he didn’t understand what it was. No one offered a sympathetic ear to the moles as they recited, unbidden, their litanies of the woes inflicted upon them by those higher on the masthead whose jobs they naturally one day hoped to have—except Lenny, even though he could be mentally planning an entire month’s itinerary in Europe while they talked. Still, the moles occasionally picked up an interesting tidbit or two, and when that happened Lenny quickly pricked up his ears. It was from one of the moles, for instance, that Lenny had first learned that Herbert Rothman had called Alex Rothman’s offbeat June cover “a piece of shit.”

  How did Lenny repay his spies for what they passed along to him? With promises, mostly. “You seem like a bright lad,” he might say to one of them. “I’ll put in a word for you with Ho Rothman when I speak to him next.” And everyone knew that Lenny Liebling had special access to the Rothmans—all the Rothmans, including Herbert, who hated him.

  He could never have repaid his spies with cash, even if he’d wanted to. Because it was a sad fact of Lenny’s existence that, despite his long years of loyal service to the Rothmans, and despite his apparent power in the family company, Lenny had never earned much in the way of salary. Rothman Communications, Inc. was a notoriously tightfisted organization. Even Alex Rothman, Mode’s editor-in-chief, called the High Priestess of American Fashion, earned only slightly more than $200,000 a year—low by industry standards—and it had taken her seventeen years to reach that level. The Oracle at Delphi, Lenny assumed, earned more than that. At Rothman, bonuses were rare, and always grudgingly given. Ho Rothman’s idea of a promotion had always been to give a favored employee a slightly more exalted title, perhaps a slightly larger office with, perhaps, a nameplate on the door, or an extra chair. Higher-ups also got chrome-plated Thermos jugs for their desks. But salary increases rarely accompanied these lagniappes. And the fact was that Lenny Liebling, in any of his positions in the company, had never earned more than $55,000 a year. And, as Lenny often complained to his longtime companion, Charlie Boxer, “In New York, in nineteen ninety, fifty-five thousand is hardly enough to keep Bridget in birdseed.” Bridget was their canary.

  It was certainly not enough to keep Lenny and Charlie in their apartment at the Gainsborough, not enough to pay for Lenny’s silk Turnbull & Asser shirts, his Patek Philippe watch, his Louis Vuitton luggage, his Baccarat wineglasses, his Porsche sunglasses, his silk pajamas and robes from Sulka, his Brioni suits, his Guerlain toilet water, his Plisson badger-hair shaving brushes, his Caswell-Massey soaps and talcum powders, his collection of alligator belts and Gucci loafers, not to mention the bills for face-lifts, hamburgers from “21,” hairstylists, and a masseur three times a week. It was nowhere near enough to support Lenny and Charlie in the style in which they chose to live, which demanded Porthault sheets and towels, as well as that sweeping northward view of Central Park. Oh, Charlie helped as best he could, of course, but it had for many years been necessary for Lenny to supplement his salary from other sources.

  In England, this was called “the fiddle.” In England, virtually everyone who worked for wages was on the fiddle. In England, the fiddle was so commonplace that employers figured it into their overhead. In England, where the fiddle was understood, it was easy to accomplish. In America, it was slightly more difficult, but not impossible.

  A special projects editor, for example, must do a certain amount of traveling to research his special projects and, for years, Lenny had charged the company for first class tickets while flying in economy. But then Aunt Lily, who had started in the company as its bookkeeper, and was still its treasurer, had begun asking for receipted ticket stubs. This had proven awkward, and the airline companies stubbornly refused to doctor their tickets, and so that was the end of that, alas.

  But, as the saying goes, there is more than one way to skin a cat. In fact, there are several ways. Hotels, for example. When Lenny went to Paris, as he did twice a year to view the collections (Alex covered the couture, and he covered the pret-à-porter), he was expected to stay at one of three hotels—the Georges Cinq, the Plaza Athenée, or the Bristol—where other members of the fashion press routinely stayed. But Lenny had been able to make a little arrangement with the Georges Cinq. For a modest tip, the concierge there would take his telephone messages and collect his mail, and otherwise treat him as though he were a registered guest. When Lenny was ready to leave the city, this same gentleman would prepare a delightfully large bill for him to attach to his expense account. Meanwhile, Lenny had found perfectly comfortable digs for himself in the rue de la Chapelle, near the Gare du Nord. Not the best neighborhood, of course, but the room could be had for thirty francs a night.

  He had a similar arrangement with Claridge’s in London. The British were particularly understanding, having invented the fiddle. But hotels in Rome, Milan, and Tokyo could also be persuaded.

  Restaurants, too, were cooperative—even some of the finest dining establishments in the world. In return for a small consideration the captain would infla
te the check, Lenny would charge it all on the company’s credit card, and Lenny would pocket the difference, though some captains made him split it with them. Then there was the matter of conference room lunches. From time to time, when meetings in the conference room ran over into the lunch hour, meals were ordered up from outside. There was a coffee shop around the corner where the company maintained a charge account for such occasions, and Lenny had been able to make an arrangement with the coffee shop’s proprietor. Every month, a few extra conference room lunches made their way onto the company’s bill. The proprietor of the coffee shop kept ten percent of these bogus charges, and Lenny got the balance for having set the system up. Every now and then the proprietor, one Mr. Bogardus, got greedy, and asked for a bigger cut. “You’re not the only coffee shop in town,” Lenny would politely remind Bogardus. There were certain advertisers and agency people who liked a drink before lunch, and the conference room contained a well-stocked bar. Lenny had made a similar arrangement with the neighborhood liquor store.

  But the easiest fiddle of all was with taxicabs and livery companies. Not all cruising New York taxicabs were equipped with meters that printed out receipts for their fares, and so Lenny was always able to fill out a few extra petty cash slips for taxis every week, while he walked or took the bus or subway. Aunt Lily never bothered to go over the petty cash account, but that part of it amounted to peanuts.

  The livery company fiddle was much more lucrative. Like many large New York corporations, Rothman Communications, Inc. maintained a commercial charge account with one of several private livery services that operated a fleet of radio-dispatched cabs, and every Rothman executive and department head was given a book of trip vouchers with this company. The passenger then kept one copy of the voucher, and the second went back to the livery company, which once a month submitted its bill to Rothman’s Accounting Department, itemizing the various trips it had supplied to Rothman personnel. The Accounting Department then paid this bill with one company check.

  It was all supposed to be foolproof, and would have been unless, as in Lenny’s case, one had a special little arrangement with the owner of the livery company. The owner, whom Lenny knew only as Jocko, was most obliging. All month long Lenny filled out vouchers for Jocko, using various employees’ names, and making sure that they all worked in different departments, sending Rothman employees on fictitious trips to different points in the city on fictitious bits of company business. Lenny’s vouchers were marked with his special code. His “Driver’s initials” were J.D., and his was “Cab #13.” Needless to say, there was no driver with the initials J.D., and no driver wanted to be given the number thirteen. But Lenny was not superstitious.

  Jocko ran a special tab on the receipts that came in on vouchers charged to Cab #13. After skimming ten percent off the top for himself, Jocko turned over the balance to Lenny. This could amount to between two and three thousand dollars a month, and it was all tax free!

  But even these measures were not sufficient to permit Lenny and Charlie Boxer to live in the style in which they chose to live. Charlie had always longed to own a summer weekend place in the Hamptons and, Lord knows, at today’s real estate prices out there, where nothing decent could be had for under a million dollars, that dream was still far beyond their financial reach. But lately Lenny had been working on another plan to supplement the couple’s income. The idea had been suggested by a small sidebar item in the New York Times following the paper’s report on the multimillion-dollar art theft from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

  The item had been headlined:

  The Social Hierarchy

  of Thieves

  In the netherworld of thievery, there is a social hierarchy as strict, and as strictly observed, as in the world of High Society.

  Lowest in the social pecking order of thieves are the muggers and purse-snatchers. House burglars enjoy a social status only slightly higher than the muggers.

  Higher up on the social scale of thievery are the jewel thieves. Since most jewelry is small and pocketable, most jewel thefts are relatively easy to pull off. On the other hand, since jewelry is often insured, it is difficult to fence unless pieces are broken up, or unless important gems are cut up into smaller stones, which can be sold for only a fraction of the value of the original stones.

  Close to the top of the social ladder of thieves are those who steal antique furniture and home furnishings. Many dealers, galleries, and auction houses will accept without question a stolen antique.

  And at the very pinnacle of thievery’s social status are the thieves of great art masterpieces, such as those removed from the Gardner Museum yesterday. Enormous skill and planning are required to execute a successful art theft, and thieves of this caliber are held almost in awe by lesser thieves. A famous painting is extraordinarily difficult to fence. On the other hand, great art can be held for ransom, and insurance companies, though reluctant to advertise this fact, have been known to pay ransom for the return of stolen art. But the art of collecting ransom is in itself a complex science, not to be undertaken by the amateur or by the unsophisticated.

  Meanwhile, the paintings stolen from the Gardner were not insured, adding to the deepening mystery as to the motive behind this particular theft.…

  Lenny had been particularly interested in the next-to-highest category of this hierarchy. “Close to the top of the social ladder” described Lenny and Charlie rather nicely. They might not be at the very top, but they were certainly close to it. And he was also struck by the notion that “Many dealers, galleries, and auction houses will accept without question a stolen antique.” “Without question” was a tantalizing phrase.

  He was thinking, in particular, of a seventeenth-century rug, an Isfahan, very nice, measuring about thirty by forty feet, with unusual shadings of blues, purples, golds, cherry-red, and a background that was almost face-powder pink. He was also thinking of a little Armenian fellow he knew, in TriBeCa, who had told him he could make a more than passable copy of this. He was thinking, too, of a matched pair of Boulle commodes, elaborately scrolled and inlaid with marquetry of ebony, tortoiseshell, chased copper, and white gold. A matched pair of Boulle commodes was in itself unusually rare. Burned into the back of each was the signature of André Charles Boulle himself, and the date, 1672. Also, each bore the familiar royal floral circlet, topped by a crown, and the words Palais du Versailles. It seemed certain—“without question”—that Louis XIV himself had feasted his eyes on both these pieces.

  At the moment, Lenny knew of no one who could copy Boulle’s cabinetwork, but that did not mean that someone could not be found. In any case, these were all projects for the future, with many small details that would have to be worked out.

  Back to Onward, Mississippi, where it all began! The name of that little town could serve as a metaphor for Lenny’s life. Did a kindly deity look down on that lonely, restless youth in Onward, and select him to be a force, a power? (“If you’ve never heard of Onward,” he often said, “it’s roughly thirty-five miles from Yazoo City. And surely you’ve heard of Yazoo City. It’s the nearest big town.”) In Onward, Lenny’s mother ran the general store, which meant she was also the postmistress, while his father read the Talmud. It was said that, as a child on his mother’s knee while she sorted the mail, Lenny fell in love with postmarks from faraway places. Lenny’s parents were dead now, of course, and Lenny never spoke of them, nor of the brothers and sisters who stayed behind there, because from Onward the seventeen-year-old Lenny’s ambitions were to go—onward! When he suddenly appeared in New York, never mind the year, with his astonishingly golden hair (more astonishingly golden than it would be appropriate for his hairstylist to maintain today), and his golden Mississippi Delta tan, people said that he looked just like ajar of honey. He was that beautiful. Lenny’s aim, he said then, was simply to become America’s best-kept boy. It could be said that he achieved that goal. A best-kept Jewish boy from Mississippi!

  “My father did me a w
onderful favor when I was a boy,” he once said. “He threw me out of the house. I had to leave Onward. I’ve been eternally grateful to him ever since.”

  Of course that old Lenny was gone now—gone with the thick, muddy accent and the bumpkin manners and the chewed-down fingernails—gone with the wind. That boy had been replaced by the completed Lenny, world traveler, bon vivant, man about town, always in demand by hostesses of the best parties, perennially on the best-dressed lists. This was Lenny of the monogrammed Sulka undershorts. This was the Lenny who, though he had never bothered to register to vote, dined at the White House under three U.S. presidents. This was the Lenny who was master of ceremonies at Bob Hope’s last birthday party. This was the finished Lenny Liebling, Lenny at climax, whose musical accent now combined the soft elisions of Charleston and the flattened vowels of what Scott Fitzgerald called the St. Midas schools. This was Lenny at his self-destined rainbow’s end—gone onward, and outward, and upward, from Onward.

  This was Lenny who lived with Charlie Boxer at the Gainsborough Studios high above the park—one of Manhattan’s finest pre-World War I buildings, and Lenny would never live in a building that was not pre-World War I. Lenny and Charlie’s apartment was featured in Architectural Digest in 1986. The article spoke of their regular Sunday afternoon salons, which had become something of a New York institution. No invitations were ever issued for these soirees. Anyone who wished to could drop in, though Peter, their doorman, had certain discretionary powers, and those who were not welcome knew who they were. Those who were welcome were a glittering array. Last Sunday’s guests included Gloria Vanderbilt and Bobby Short, Walter and Betsey Cronkite, Ivana Trump, Melina Mercouri, Rex Reed, Bobby Zarem, Doris Duke, Barbara Walters, Roger Mudd, and Walter and Lee Annenberg. Over in one corner, Candace Bergen and Rudolf Nureyev played backgammon, while the others shared in their hosts’ wealth of amusing anecdotes, and pretended to enjoy their not-very-distinguished nouveau Beaujolais, which was all Lenny and Charlie ever served.