The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  WITH LADY FIONA HESKETH-FENTON

  Alex Rothman tossed the newspaper aside with disgust. She should never have invited Mona to the party. On the other hand, if Mona hadn’t been invited she would have written something even worse.

  Now she picked up the telephone beside her bed, and called her lawyer, Henry Coker; she made an appointment with him for the following morning. Then she placed a call to her friend Mark Rinsky.

  She and Mark were telephone friends, since they had never actually met. Mark ran a private investigative agency, and Alex had used his services over the years—mostly to do background checks on models she was considering using in the magazine, and whose resumes sounded questionable. It had all started with a memorable cover girl in 1982 who, it turned out, had a second career as an Eighth Avenue hooker, and had a criminal record. The supermarket tabloids had had a field day with that one:

  MODE COVER GIRL CHARGES $100 A THROW,

  $1,000 FOR ALL NIGHT!

  After that episode, Alex had been much more careful.

  “Mark,” she said now, “her name is Fiona Fenton. She’s English, and she also calls herself Lady Fiona Hesketh-Fenton. I’d like you to find out everything you can about her, as well as about this magazine she claims to have worked for, called Lady Fair.”

  “Yes, I was just reading about her,” he said.

  “Oh. Then you saw the item in the Times.”

  “No, I saw it in Mona’s column,” he said.

  “Mark,” she said, “do you mean to say that private detectives read Mona’s column? Big, macho private eyes read her?”

  He chuckled. “It’s kinda like junk food,” he said. “You get addicted. And I’m not a big, macho private eye. I’m a nebbishy little Jewish guy from the Bronx.”

  “Another illusion shattered,” she said. “Well, see what you can find out about Her Ladyship.”

  Smiling contentedly, feeling that she was once more on top of the situation, she set her breakfast tray aside and rose to bathe and dress for the office.

  On her way out of the apartment, she peeked briefly into Joel’s room. He lay sprawled across the bed, sleeping soundly, covered only by the top sheet, and for a moment she was tempted to step inside and kiss the top of his tousled blond head, but she decided not to disturb him and continued toward the elevator.

  In the elevator foyer, Otto sat, stiffly, in one of the straight-backed Chippendale chairs that flanked the elevator door, waiting for Joel.

  “Oh, Otto,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to speak to you. After this weekend, we won’t be needing you anymore.”

  Otto sprang to his feet. “It’s because of last night, isn’t it? It’s because of what happened last night!”

  “No, it has nothing to do with last night. It’s just—”

  “They tricked me!” he said. “Him and she, they both tricked me!”

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Otto, but—”

  “It was her—that woman. She said there was a man on the roof, but there wasn’t no man on the roof!”

  “I’m sorry, Otto, it has nothing to do with you. You’ve done a wonderful job, and I’m prepared to—”

  “I went up to the roof! There was no man! It was a lie!”

  “—prepared to give you excellent references. It’s just that I feel Joel doesn’t need you any longer. And he really doesn’t. And I think you know that too, Otto.” With her finger, she pressed the button to call the elevator.

  He looked at her narrowly. “Does Mr. Herbert J. Rothman know about this?” he asked.

  “This is my decision, Otto.”

  “I was hired by Mr. Herbert J. Rothman,” he said. “Only Mr. Herbert J. Rothman can fire me. Not you! I ain’t takin’ no orders from no woman!”

  She stared at him coolly. “Your arrangements with Herbert Rothman are between you and him,” she said. “If he wishes to employ you in some other capacity, that will be up to him. But meanwhile Joel is my son, and this is my house. In fact, I would like you to be out of here before I get home tonight.”

  “It’s because of what happened last night. Well, you won’t get away with this!”

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  The elevator door slid open.

  “Frank,” she said to the elevator operator, “please be of any assistance you can to Mr.—” and for a moment she could not for the life of her think of Otto’s last name—“to Mr. Otto, and help him gather whatever belongings he has here and see that he is out of here by five o’clock tonight.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She stepped into the car, the door closed, and the car began its descent.

  There was a loud thud from above, as Otto apparently kicked at the door.

  “He’d better not have left a mark on my mahogany door,” Frank said. “Them’s solid mahogany, solid Philippine mahogany, all these doors. Germans. I was in the war, ma’am, and they’re all alike, those Germans. Except maybe Mr. Kissinger. I brought Mr. Kissinger and his wife up to your party last night, and he struck me as a gentleman, not like the others. But don’t worry, ma’am. I’ll see that that one is out of here by five P.M., ma’am.”

  “If he gives you any trouble, call Security.”

  “And that thing in this morning’s paper, ma’am, does that mean you’ll be retiring from the magazine, like Miss Mona said?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a wonderful thing, retirement. Sure wish I could do it. Fort Myers, Florida, is where I’d go. That’s God’s country, Fort Myers, Florida. Needlefishing. Well, here we are, ma’am. Now you have a nice day, you hear?”

  “Thank you, Frank.” And Alex Rothman stepped out of the elevator into the glory and brilliance of a whole new day.

  Immediately, she noticed that the company limousine, which always waited for her at the curb, was not there.

  Charlie, the doorman, looked anxious. “Your car didn’t show up today, Mrs. Rothman,” he said.

  “That’s all right, Charlie. I’ll take a taxi,” she said, and he stepped into the street with his whistle.

  She had decided to treat this day like any other. There was no other way to treat it. She was certain that her staff would be full of nervous questions but, since she didn’t have the answers to any of them, she decided not to address them. She would go through this day—and yes, thank God, it was a Friday—as though precisely nothing at all had happened. It would take some doing, it would take some stagecraft, but she knew she could pull it off. “Walk tall, Lexy,” her friend Lucille Withers had told her when she was training her to model clothes on the runway. “Walk tall, think tall and straight. Remember the chin line. Chin up, toes pointed slightly outward when you walk. No, don’t wiggle your ass as though you had a fifty-cent piece pressed between your cheeks—it’s not sexy, Lexy. Just remember that the shoulders and the hips should be on the same plane, like a skier’s. Think of yourself as a skier. Take slightly longer steps. Pleasant expression on your face, not a big smile. This is acting, honey, and the clothes you’re wearing are your lines.… There, that’s better.… In that black dress, you’re not a woman now. You’re a panther stalking its prey.…”

  She was wearing a black silk suit by Ungaro today, this panther.

  She also knew that Herb Rothman would be expecting a call from her, demanding an explanation, or clarification, of what he was trying to do. Well, if that was what he was expecting, she was not going to give him the satisfaction of having his expectations fulfilled. If he wanted a confrontation scene, he would have to set the stage himself and write the script—for the time being, at least. He had said that Fiona would join the staff on the first of July, and that left some time for plans to be made and strategies laid. In the meantime, she would treat this day, and the next, and the next, and the next, exactly like any other. It was called playing it cool.

  From the moment she stepped off the elevator on the fourteenth floor—from the receptionist onward through the long corridor of offices—the tension in th
e air was palpable. Everyone here, of course, had read Mona Potter’s column. The responses to Alex’s customary, cheery “Good morning” were lowered eyelids and nervous smiles. Click, click, click went the sounds of the heels of Alex’s Susan Bennis pumps on the vinyl tile as she made her way down the corridor toward her office, chin up.

  The greeting smile of Gregory Kittredge, her assistant, was also nervous. “Good morning, Gregory!” she said brightly.

  There was a stack of pink telephone-message slips on her desk, taller than usual. She flipped through them. The New York Times had called. Women’s Wear had called. The Washington Post had called.

  “Most of those calls are from Mr. Rodney McCulloch,” Gregory said. “He’s been calling every ten minutes since before nine o’clock, leaving a different number where he could be reached every time.” He consulted his watch. “Right now, we should be able to reach him at five-five-five-oh-two-oh-two, until ten fifteen. Want me to get him for you? He says it’s extremely urgent.”

  “No, no,” she said with a wave of her hand. “I don’t have time to talk to Mr. McCulloch now.”

  Gregory’s dark eyes widened. “You don’t have time to talk to Rodney McCulloch? Do you know who he is, Alex?”

  “Of course I know who Rodney McCulloch is. I just don’t have time to talk to him right now. I wouldn’t have time to talk to the Queen of England if she were calling,” she added, remembering Lulu’s line.

  Gregory looked crestfallen, and Alex suspected she had hurt his feelings. “It’s just that we have a planning meeting at ten thirty, remember?” she said. “I want to prepare for that, Gregory.”

  “Alex—” he began.

  “Yes?”

  “I hope you don’t think I said anything to Mona Potter last night. In spite of what she wrote in her column. She kept pumping me, but I told her absolutely nothing. You believe me, don’t you?”

  “Of course I believe you,” she said. “Everybody knows that if Mona can’t get a quote, she just makes one up.”

  The light on one of Alex’s telephone lines was blinking, and Gregory pressed the button and picked up the receiver. “Mrs. Rothman’s office,” he said. “One moment, sir. Let me check.” He pressed the Hold button. “It’s Rodney McCulloch!” he said. “Himself!”

  She shook her head. “No calls.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, she’s still in a meeting.… Yes, yes, let me take those numbers.…” Gregory stood there, scribbling, scribbling numbers on pink message slips. “My God,” he said, replacing the phone, “he’s given me his entire schedule for the whole day. That guy really moves around town, doesn’t he?”

  She smiled. “He has that reputation,” she said.

  “He says that he’s to be brought out of whatever meeting he’s in to take your call. It’s that important.” And he added, “Whatever it is.”

  “I have no idea what he wants.”

  He hesitated. “I think I know what he wants,” he said.

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “I think he wants to know what everybody else wants to know. What’s going on around here? What’s Mr. Rothman up to? What’s going to happen? Frankly, Alex, everybody here is very, very worried.”

  “Worried about what?”

  “Their jobs, for one thing. With this new—woman.”

  “Now, darlin’,” she said. “There’s nothing really to worry about. Everything’s under control. Nobody’s job is in any danger. Everything’s going to be just fine.” Of course she didn’t know whether she meant any of this, or whether anything she was saying meant anything at all. She touched her triple strand of pearls. Get through this day, she told herself. Put one foot in front of the other, toes out, chin up. “Now, shoo, darlin’,” she said. “I really do have to go over my notes for today’s meeting.”

  Alex sat alone at her desk, looking at the walls. She touched her pearls again, for luck, for courage. In the little town of Paradise, Missouri, where Alex grew up, no one had ever seen pearls like these. No one had ever dreamed of pearls like these, Steven’s pearls, or the Kashmiri sapphire ring with its girdle of diamonds. “Is this your office?” her mother had said, disappointed, on one of her increasingly rare visits to New York from that place where she lived now, that place that was known as a “facility.” “But it’s so small, Alex. I thought the Rothmans were supposed to be so rich.”

  She had laughed. “This is a very cost-conscious company,” she said. “Every square inch of space has a price tag on it. All the offices are small—except for Mr. Ho Rothman’s office, which is very, very large.”

  It was a small office. She was sure her mother had expected to find her in a kind of Donald Oenslager stage setting for Lady in the Dark, with Louis Quinze furniture and a gilded French phone on her desk and great swagged Fortuny hangings at the windows—and Alex in a huge picture hat, looking like Gertrude Lawrence—instead of a very ordinary-looking office, with one window and venetian blinds, and industrial-grade carpet on the floor and Alex herself, that day, in tweeds and flats and a pencil stuck behind her ear. Still, she had managed to imbue her small office with a certain theatricality.

  At first, the walls had been painted flat white, and for a long time she had studied those bare, white-painted walls, wondering how she could brighten them up a bit. Then, all at once, a solution had presented itself. Strolling down the corridor one day, she had encountered a maintenance man wheeling stacks of old magazines on his dolly. Files, it seemed, were being cleaned out, and back issues of Mode, from the date of its first issue in 1874 onward, were being thrown out. They had all been committed to microfiche, and the actual magazines were being discarded to create valuable space. Alex had salvaged the magazines, and had her walls papered with a collage of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Mode covers, some of which were extraordinary. They had featured fashion paintings by such artists as Edward Penfield, Paul Helleu, Grace Wiederseim, Harrison Fisher, Kate Greenway, Sir John Millais, and John Singer Sargent. She then had the walls covered with a lustrous clear lacquer. As a result, though she might not have the largest office in the building, hers was easily the most distinctive and colorful. Herb Rothman frowned when he first stepped into the redecorated office. It smacked of the kind of extravagance for which Rothman Communications, Inc. was not noted. But he couldn’t really complain. The job had cost the company nothing, and all the materials had been bound for the incinerator anyway.

  “Damn,” Lenny Liebling said when he first saw what would become known as “Alex’s little jewel box”—“I wish I’d thought of that.”

  “You could still do it,” Alex said. “There are hundreds of more covers.”

  “I can’t do it now that you’ve done it,” he said, pouting. “It wouldn’t be original. It would be just copycat. After all, I have a certain reputation for originality to uphold.”

  Hundreds of more covers, she had thought at the time, and immediately had the idea of papering the ceiling with more Mode covers, and her little jewel box was complete.

  She gazed about her jewel box now. All those covers represented nearly twelve decades of work, of an editor’s work and thought and imagination. Over the years, there had been a baker’s dozen of Mode editors. Some had been brilliant, some had been dull. Some had been extravagant, some had been penny-pinching. Some had been innovators, some had been copycats. Some had lasted for just a few months, and others had stayed in their posts for years. There had been editors who had worn huge picture hats in the office, editors who wore turbans, an editor who affected a monocle on a pink satin ribbon, and an editor who always wore white opera-length gloves while she worked. There had been eccentric editors, autocratic editors, despotic editors, and there was even a tale—possibly apocryphal—of a Mode editor who had succeeded in making a Philadelphia-bound passenger train back up into Pennsylvania Station because she had forgotten a layout she needed for a meeting. There was the editor who had declared that the bikini was “mankind’s greatest invention since the atomic bomb,” and who
devoted an entire issue of the magazine to huaraches. And there was the editor who, one afternoon for no apparent reason, put on her Lilly Daché hat and coat, and stepped out on the window ledge of this very office and jumped to her death on the Fifth Avenue sidewalk a hundred and twenty feet below. This room, Alex thought now, was not only filled with the tastes and imaginations of editors. It was also filled with ghosts. And all those editors, with the exception of Steven Rothman, had been women like herself.

  But there had never been such a thing as a co-editor of Mode. And, she reminded herself, there was not going to be one now.

  She walked into the conference room, a slim Hermes briefcase under her arm, chin up, smiling at everyone, greeting everyone, and took her place at the head of the table. Looking around the room, she said, “Where’s Lenny?”

  “He had a dental emergency,” someone said. “I think he lost a crown.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to do without him.”

  Bob Shaw, the art director, looked up from his usual chair and said, “You haven’t lost your crown, have you, Alex?”

  There was brief, uneasy, and decidedly embarrassed laughter at this not very funny joke, and Alex gave Bob a quick look and wondered if he’d been drinking again. She sat forward in her chair, unsnapped her briefcase, and took out a pad of legal cap and a handful of ballpoints. “I’ve been thinking about picnics,” she began. “I’ve been thinking about everything a picnic can be.” She was setting her “What-If” meeting on its track, suggesting a theme.

  “Picnics—for a January issue?” someone asked.

  “January is a blah month,” she said. “I’m thinking about something upbeat for January, like picnics. And I’m not just thinking about outdoor picnics, though we might do a Caribbean picnic. I’m thinking about picnics as a whole lifestyle for the ’nineties. It seems to me that people aren’t cooking elaborate dinners these days. They’re picnicking, right in their apartments on the Upper West Side. Have you looked at your supermarket shelves lately? They’re full of stuff that’s essentially for picnicking. I’m not talking about old-fashioned TV dinners, where you get a slab of meat and gravy, mashed potatoes, and buttered peas in a compartmented tray. I’m talking about really wonderful-looking prepared dishes you can find in supermarkets now—lobster salad en brioche, skewered shrimp, soufflés of all sorts, galantines of beef, duck, even quail and pheasant. Picnic food. I think fashion’s in a picnic mood, too—elegant, pretty, but easy and fun—quick, impromptu. I see picnic as a mood, a spirit. The word is from the French pique-nique, which means pick-and-choose, suit yourself, and I think we could have a lot of fun with this. Does anyone remember that wonderful scene in Citizen Kane, when Kane’s second wife complains that she’s bored, and so Kane decides to treat everybody to a picnic? They all set off for their picnic in a long string of chauffeur-driven limousines. I imagine we could get a still shot of that, and use it in a fun way in the issue. Any more thoughts on a picnic issue?”