“Maybe not be able to get you like that again, later,” Francisco said, looking irritated.
Lenny reached for the telephone.
“Hello, sweetie, what’s up?” he heard Mona Potter’s voice say. “Has she quit yet?”
“I—uh—I haven’t—uh!—heard anything yet, Mona,” he said, gasping as Francisco’s strong and agile fingers and knuckles kneaded and poked at his stomach and pectoral muscles.
“What’s the matter? You sound like you’re choking on a piece of steak. You need the Heimlich Maneuver or something, sweetie?”
“I’m—uh!—just having my morning massage,” he said.
“So—you saw this morning’s ad, of course.”
“I—uh!—I did. But—”
“So when’s she gonna quit? I need to know today, sweetie, ’cause I’m doing my whole tomorrow’s column on it.”
“I—uh—I just don’t know, Mona. Uh! Not quite so hard, Francisco!” But Francisco, who seemed angry now that his best professional techniques were not being employed to his client’s full advantage, was pummeling him harder than ever, his brown face grim.
“Think it’s safe to say she’ll be quitting some time today, sweetie? I gotta know for my column deadline.”
“I don’t know any—uh!—more than you do, Mona darling. Uh! Please, Francisco!” Francisco had just flipped him over on his stomach, and was furiously pounding his shoulders and upper arms. The telephone cord was now twisted around Lenny’s neck and, with his free hand, he struggled to extricate himself from it.
“What’s she cooking up with Rodney McCulloch?”
“Uh!—who?”
“Rodney McCulloch, sweetie. The two of them were having lunch yesterday at Le Bernardin. One of the waiters tipped me off. He said it looked like a heavy-duty meeting.”
“I don’t—uh!—don’t know anything about that,” he said, annoyed that she should have acquired a piece of news before he had.
“He said they were talking about money. Whaddaya think? Think he’s offered her some kind of deal?”
“I just—uh!—I just don’t know, Mona,” Lenny said.
“Think it’s safe to say they’re cooking up some sort of deal? Everybody knows McCulloch’s looking for a New York property. C’mon. Gimme a break, sweetie. I gotta have something for tomorrow’s column.”
“I—just—don’t—know,” he said again.
“Well, I think it’s safe to say he’s offered her a deal,” she said. “Anyhoo, let me know the minute you hear anything. You know I never identify you. You’re just ‘a high-placed source at Rothman Publications.’ Toodle-oo, sweetie.”
“Toodle-oo,” Lenny said.
Francisco flipped him over on his back again. “Okay, I make for you one more chance, Mr. Liebling,” he said. “If this no work, my hour is up.”
“Thank you, Francisco, dear,” he said.
Alex strode down her office corridor that morning trying to exude her customary self-confidence, her chin up, her hands in the deep pockets of her Calvin Klein suit, her skirts swinging, her Chanel bag—stripped of its signature double-C’s—slung jauntily over her shoulder, even though she was aware, as she passed each open office door, of the sudden and apprehensive little hush that seemed to fall, from within, as her Susan Bennis heels clicked by. This day, she promised herself, must not be permitted to seem any different from any other.
Gregory met her at her office door, and she immediately noticed another unusually tall stack of telephone message slips on her desk.
“Most of those are from the media,” he said, “wanting to know about your future plans. Do you think we ought to prepare some sort of statement to give to the press?”
She tossed her bag in a chair. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think we should leave all statements to Herbert Rothman for the time being. He seems to be very good at making statements.”
“I agree,” he said.
“If they call again, just say I’m unavailable, or in a meeting, or whatever.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying.”
“Don’t even say, ‘No comment.’ I always think ‘No comment’ sounds snippy and defensive.”
“There’s one call here from Miss Lucille Withers in Kansas City. She just says, ‘I’ve talked to the Canadian. Go for it.’ She said you’d know what she meant.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And Mr. Mark Rinsky called. He’d like you to call him when you get a chance.”
“Good. See if you can get him now.”
Gregory glanced at his watch. “And we’ve got the Scaasi show at the St. Regis at eleven thirty,” he said.
“Right,” she said.
“Mark,” she said, when she had him on the phone.
“Alex,” he said, “do you think there’s any chance your office phone might be bugged?”
“I doubt it,” she said. “Do you think so?”
“Let’s not take any chances,” he said. “Things seem to be heating up over there. I’ve got a little scrambling device I can turn on. It’ll scramble both ends of this conversation, and if this conversation is being recorded, both of us’ll sound like chipmunks. It’ll make my voice sound a little funny, but hold on while I turn it on.” She waited. Then he said, “Hello? Okay, it’s on. We can talk.” His voice sounded as though he was talking in a wind tunnel.
“I’ve been talking with my operatives in London,” he said. “A lot of what our friend has been telling people checks out, but a lot of it doesn’t, and we keep hitting dead ends. To begin with, it seems she did work for a publication in England called Lady Fair. It wasn’t much of a thing—just a little advertising giveaway, really, with fashion tips in it, and it was published out of a woman’s basement in a house in Maida Vale. Woman named Jane Smiley. She and our friend Fiona put it out together, just the two of them. Anyway, Lady Fair went out of business two years ago, and Jane Smiley—who now works for a newspaper in North Wales—doesn’t know what happened to Fiona Fenton. Doesn’t have too much to say about her, either, except that she was a hard worker. Good at selling ad space, apparently. But the two women had some sort of falling out. My man wasn’t able to get to the bottom of what it was about—the Smiley woman wasn’t very forthcoming—except that it apparently had nothing to do with the little business they were in together. My man got the impression that the falling out was over some guy—some bloke, as my man in London puts it—that they were both involved with.”
“Hmm,” said Alex.
“Now, the next part of her story—about how she ran some ritzy little dress shop in Sloane Street, and sold clothes to the Princess of Wales—we’ve struck a complete dead end here. Nobody with a shop on Sloane Street seems to have heard of Fiona Fenton, or know anything about a shop she might have run. And Buckingham Palace just stonewalls questions like this. They refuse to say where the princess buys her clothes, except places that have so-called Royal Warrants, and all they’ll give out is a list. So as far as the so-called dress shop is concerned, we’ve come up with zip.”
“What about her family background? Anything there?”
“Another dead end, Alex. She claims that her father is the Earl of Hesketh, and there really is such a person. But it turns out he’s a real looney-tune. Lives all by himself, with a single manservant, in a falling-down castle in Surrey, and hasn’t set foot outside the place in years. Most of his neighbors haven’t ever laid eyes on His Grace, though they know he’s there because they see the manservant go in and out every week or so with groceries. The manservant won’t speak to anyone. No one even knows his name. There’s no telephone in the castle, and the entire place is guarded by big, fierce Doberman dogs. None of the people in the village know anything about the old earl’s family, even if there ever was a wife or children.”
“So, if Lady Fiona Fenton has picked a peer to be her fictitious father, she’s picked the right one,” Alex said.
“Exactly what I was thinking, Alex. My man did find one old
lady in the village who claimed to know all about the Earl of Hesketh. She told him all sorts of stories, and the stories got weirder and weirder. She told him that the earl could change himself into a starling, and often came to feed at her bird-feeder. So—you guessed it. This old lady is the village crazy, who makes the Madwoman of Chaillot look like Margaret Mead. So I’m afraid, Alex, that this is all we’ve got and, as I said, it’s not much.”
“No, it really isn’t, is it?” she said.
“But don’t worry. We’re going to keep digging. We’re going to get to the bottom of this dress-shop thing, if there ever was a dress shop.”
“Well, thank you, Mark.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then he said, “That was a shitty ad in this morning’s paper, Alex.”
She laughed softly. “Yes, it was a shitty ad,” she said.
“Well, if someone’s going to give you a shitty ad, maybe it’s a comfort to know that it came from somebody everybody thinks is a first-class shit.”
She whooped. “Yes! It is!”
Now Bob Shaw, her art director, was waiting for her in her outer office. He, too, was doing his best not to seem edgy and nervous. “I’ve got some more information for you on the sex life of the bees,” he said. “I’ve been talking with a beekeeper out on Long Island, and it seems that it’s tannic acid that attracts a swarm, which is why bees will usually swarm on the branches or the trunks of trees. This guy thinks that if we can put some tannic acid in the model’s hair, and he can lead a few drones over to her from a crowded hive, he might be able to get the swarm to form in her hair.”
Gregory beamed. “My mother had been swimming in the river. River water is often full of tannic acid.”
“That is, if you still want to go ahead with this idea for the shoot,” Bob Shaw said.
“Oh, I think it would be definitely worth a try, don’t you?” Alex said.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “What’s this shot supposed to say? What’s it supposed to mean? I mean, bees swarming in a woman’s hair could end up looking kind of peculiar, couldn’t it? I just don’t have a mental picture of what this shot’s going to look like.”
“You’re right, of course,” she said. “I’ve never seen bees swarming in a woman’s hair, either. What did it look like, Gregory?”
“I thought it looked—beautiful,” he said. “With her head tilted back, her long hair hanging down, and this living festoon cascading from it, like a waterfall.”
“Yes, it could look beautiful,” she agreed. “It could also look exciting, exotic—dangerous, even. Swarms last at least twenty minutes, so we’d have time to get it from lots of different angles. Who were you thinking of for a photographer, Bob?”
“Helmut Newton?”
“Perfect!” She clapped her hands.
He hesitated. “Or should we wait and see what Fiona Fenton thinks about this?” he asked.
She gave him a quick look. “Miss Fenton hasn’t even joined the organization yet, Bob,” she said.
He nodded, and looked down at the square of carpet between his feet.
Now there was a telephone call from Miss Lincoln, Herbert Rothman’s secretary on the thirtieth floor. “I just wanted to extend my personal best wishes to you, Mrs. Rothman,” Miss Lincoln said.
“Best wishes for what, Miss Lincoln?”
“All of us up here on thirty were so terribly sorry to hear that you’ll be leaving the magazine.”
“Now wherever did you hear that?” Alex said.
“Oh.… But that’s what we were given to understand,” Miss Lincoln said.
“Not a word of truth in it, Miss Lincoln,” Alex said, and replaced the receiver in its cradle.
And now it was time to leave for the Scaasi show, and Gregory was waiting for her in the outer office with her briefcase.
In their taxi, on the way to the St. Regis, Alex said, “This is Arnold’s winter resort collection. So think picnics.”
Gregory nodded.
All these fashion shows were somewhat alike, Alex thought—the music, the lighting, the flowers, the parading, skinny models, the often banal commentaries that no one really listened to. Each collection opened with a few little afternoon dresses, proceeded through evening dresses and ball gowns, and closed, traditionally, with the kind of elaborate wedding dress that no one paid the slightest attention to, much less considered buying. How many of these collections had she attended over the years? Hundreds, easily. But she attended them dutifully, always on the lookout for something that might appeal to her readers, that might be new and different enough to include in the magazine. And whenever she saw that special dress or outfit that seemed to have Mode’s signature on it, she would touch Gregory’s shoulder lightly, and whisper, “That one.” And he would make a note.
But Arnold Scaasi always liked to add little expensive touches when he showed his collections, and that made them at least superficially different. Today, for instance, instead of lining up his audience in rows of little gilt chairs, the St. Regis Roof had been set up with round tables for ten, with pastel-colored cloths, and sandwiches were being served—turkey, Westphalian ham, thin-sliced filet of beef, and smoked Scotch salmon on the thinnest of white bread slices—while waiters passed champagne. Thus the first commercial showing of his winter resort collection—to his regular customers and to buyers from the stores—became more like an invitation-only luncheon. There were even engraved place cards, all examples of spending to put women in a spending mood. And, after all, Scaasi was one of the last surviving designers of American haute couture. Even he had been thought to be finished, until he was discovered by Barbara Bush. And the expensiveness of his presentation was justified because his were very expensive clothes, designed to be worn at expensive gatherings at expensive resorts where rich people went simply to enjoy being rich together. There were so few of these places left: Palm Beach, Acapulco, Lyford Cay, the Mill Reef Club …
There were other costly touches, Alex noted as she looked around the room. Tubs of plantain and bird-of-paradise trees and fishtail palms had been brought in to create the illusion of a tropical rain forest. Concealed pink spots illuminated the runway to suggest a moonlit tropic night. Instead of ordinary centerpieces, each round table was centered with a pot of white phalaenopsis orchids, from which also sprouted a cluster of transparent balloons, some of which had been magically filled with crumpled silver Mylar. (“Those balloons go for a hundred dollars a bunch,” she heard someone comment.) Alex noticed that a number of the clear balloons had been partially filled with water, and that in these swam brightly colored tropical fish. (“A hundred and fifty with the fish,” someone else said. “He’s spent at least a hundred big ones today.”) The collection opened with a simulated lightning flash, followed by the recorded roll of thunder, and a black model, wearing jaguar-printed chiffon beach pajamas, strode imperiously down the runway with a live jaguar on a leash. There were appreciative gasps, followed by applause, and the show was under way.
Still, for all the elaborateness of the presentation, the focus—thanks to the clever lighting of the runway—was always on the clothes. And, after each model did her turn on the runway, she had been instructed to step down from the stage and circulate among the tables so the women in the audience could reach out and touch the fabrics—a leisurely, and expensive, use of a model’s time, Alex knew. Scaasi was showing a lot of chiffon today. Chiffon flowed in floating panels from wrists, elbows, waists, and plunging backlines. It had even been used, reinforced with invisible wiring, to create amusing artichoke and pumpkin-shaped capes in vivid greens and oranges. Suzette Bergerac, Scaasi’s directrice, who was doing the commentary, was noting the preponderance of chiffon—“shee-foh,” she pronounced it. “Pumpkin is definitely going to be this winter’s in color,” she advised her audience from the microphone. How did she know these things? How did even Arnold Scaasi know? Soft, lazy, vaguely Latin taped music played from hidden speakers, and the models par
aded up and down the runway, did their turns and swirls, and then moved down into the audience to a sultry flamenco beat.
But was anyone really paying attention? Alex sometimes wondered. “Blaine Trump doesn’t pay a penny for her clothes,” someone near her was saying. “They’re all loaned to her. The designers drop them off for her the afternoon before the party, and a messenger picks them up the next morning. How do I know? I live in her building, and the concierge told me.”
“I make my cook use shallots. Shallots. That’s the secret of perfect vichyssoise.”
“This? It isn’t real. All my good stuff’s in the box.”
Pussy McCutcheon was describing, to no one in particular, the recent incursions on her Visa card account. “Vuitton, Hermes, Giorgio, Baccarat,” she was saying. “All on Fifty-seventh Street. What does that say to you? It says to me that Maggie’s burglar had to be a woman. Those are places where women shop. Men don’t shop on Fifty-seventh. They shop on Madison.”
More little sandwiches were passed, and more champagne was poured. The tall, willowy models, wearing expressions ranging from indifference to insolence, moved one by one down the runway, paused to be admired, then moved between the tables to be touched and exclaimed over, before gliding backstage again where, Alex knew, the scene would be frantic and sweaty and not the least bit ladylike as the half-naked girls flung themselves out of one outfit and into the next. Zippers would jam, buttons would pop, pins would be applied. Shoes would be kicked off in every direction, and rat-tailed combs would attack errant hairdos. And there would be much profanity. Alex had stage-managed enough fashion shows to know what went on. “Who stole my fucking eyeliner?” “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this belt?” “Hook me up next, you black bitch! I go on before she does.” “Ouch! You stuck that pin in my tit!” “Fucking zipper broke!” “That happens to be my hair spray, cunt!” Scaasi’s wardrobe mistress would be busily logging accessories in and out, watching for pilferage, because runway models were notorious thieves. After every fashion show, you could count on certain missing items—scarves, belts, earrings, gloves, even pairs of shoes.
The Rothman Scandal Page 40
