Cover Girl Confidential

by Beverly Bartlett

  “I daresay,” Hughes ad-libbed during a long lull when the bride’s train got caught on the door of the carriage, “the groom hasn’t drawn this big a crowd since he had that funky dance hit back in—when was that, Addison?”

  “That would have been ‘Smog Machine of Love,’?” I said, looking perhaps a little too pleased. “The groom’s biggest hit spent three weeks at number one in 1978, Hughes, and the video of the song was considered groundbreaking.

  “Of course,” I continued, “just having a video was considered groundbreaking back then. But I suppose you remember all about that, Hughes.”

  I playfully patted his arm then and he reacted with mock horror to my reference to his (slight) age advantage over me. (People always assumed he was older, because of his graying temples. But that gray came out of a bottle and was touched up weekly. Gray is considered distinguished on men, don’t you know?)

  Hughes then turned to Baxter. “Speaking of smog, how’s that haze situation?”

  “It appears to be clearing,” Baxter said, matter-of-factly. Cal glared from offstage, and Baxter’s voice turned more grave. “But you never can be sure.”

  By the time the possible future king and queen of Denmark were tossing bouquets and handling the ceremonial releasing of the oystercatchers (the national bird), I was loose and cool.

  “He’s beastly, for sure,” I said, “but it’s beastly in a sexy rock-star sort of way. Don’t you think, Hughes?”

  Just saying the word sexy on air filled me with a secret thrill. My parents were horrified, I was sure.

  Even Hughes looked a bit flustered and said he didn’t know a thing about “sexy beasts.”

  “But really,” he said, “it’s not like you’d expect the possible future queen of Denmark to have her pick of men. Danish fashion has been in a slump for years. They keep making all those unflattering dresses with the billowy cuts.”

  I looked at him uncomfortably. Was that right? It didn’t sound right. I felt a surge of panic. I didn’t like Hughes knowing more than I do about fashion, even Danish fashion. I made a mental note to read up on that after the show. I said, “Oh please.”

  It wasn’t all playful banter. Cal wanted substance, he said. So I did a rather impressive piece on the role of royalty in modern society, and Hughes did a lengthy—some would say way too lengthy—story on the tourism draw of the various royal families. Baxter did an in-depth look at the history of weather patterns at royal nuptials, coming to the surprising conclusion that British royals are the most likely to be blessed by good weather. “They know how to pick wedding days,” he said. “Now, if they could just do a better job picking spouses.”

  My second report, much mocked later, was supposed to be the definitive look at the courtship of American presidents. The current president was the first in more than a century to be elected without a wife, and thus needless to say Samson Briarwood was the first president in at least that long to find a wife while in office.

  The fact that Margaret Clemons was a seated senator from the opposing party made it all the more interesting, though President Briarwood laughed off my questions about their political differences in the short interview I was granted. “Do you think you’d be a better match for me?” he said, nudging me a little in what I feared was an inappropriate, flirtatious way. (I left that exchange out of my story.)

  The presidential wedding, held on that final Friday of Wedding Week, had none of the pomp of the European ceremonies, of course. (It was the second for him and the third for her, so they were trying to make it tastefully understated.) And what little pomp it would have had was ruined by the morning storms. Cal had been thrilled that Baxter finally had some legitimate weather to discuss. But honestly, the storms were terrible for the show. Senator Clemons, fiery dynamo that she is, dashed from the limo to the church so quickly that you could barely see her white Chanel suit or her interesting bouquet of buckeye blooms.

  “I wish that were a joke,” Hughes said, rather unpopularly. (At least in Ohio.)

  The president looked as goofy as ever in one of those double-breasted off-the-rack suits he’s famous for. “If you’re wondering whether the president met with a tailor for the occasion,” Hughes quipped, “the answer is a resounding no. It’s appalling, don’t you think, Baxter?”

  Baxter had not expected to be drawn into this conversation, and his face froze for a moment. Baxter wasn’t even wearing a suit, but a blue blazer, red bow tie, and khaki pants. Of course, he wasn’t the leader of the free world and wasn’t getting married, so the standard was a bit lower for him. But Hughes still seemed mean directing the question at someone with such a clearly stunted sense of style. It’s not as if Baxter could help it. He’d gotten his start in radio! No one cares about fashion in radio. I glanced around and saw that everyone on the set had tensed up. This sounded like the beginning of an uncomfortable conversation.

  What is it with fashionable men and tailors anyway? I thought. Women pride themselves on being a perfect size 6, or 4, or 8, or whatever. Men—those like Hughes, anyway—see no shame in having the waist let out or the legs shortened. Suddenly I saw a way out.

  “Oh, Hughes,” I interjected. “Classically proportioned men can buy clothes off the rack, you know. You only need a tailor if you’ve got—I don’t know—stubby legs.”

  Baxter, for the first time that week, chuckled. Hughes cringed.

  I flashed a dimple at Baxter, but turned to give Hughes my most seductive smile—the one I had perfected on ER—and playfully ran my hand across his chest. “Or, you know, really broad shoulders.”

  Hughes laughed, too. And the moment was saved.

  Wedding Week got solid ratings, better than you would expect on the first few days when it was about the distant heirs to defunct thrones and better than you would expect again later in the week, when there was so much competition as the nation built up to the president’s wedding.

  When we finally had the president married and the first couple off to their Camp David honeymoon, the Wedding Week staff went out to celebrate our short but successful run. We ate lunch at a restaurant near the Midtown studio, drinking a bit much for lunch, but then some of us had been up for ten hours by then. Besides, you had to toast the new first lady—a true career gal after all. Some people said she was, by virtue of her seat on the appropriations committee, more powerful than her hubby. And there was no doubt she was smarter and better dressed. “Marginally,” Hughes clarified, in a gossipy postproduction whisper.

  I saw Baxter scowl at that. “Always with the insults,” he said.

  But you know, that’s just Hughes’s thing—being all snarky and negative like that. It’s a kind of humor. You shouldn’t run for president, and you certainly shouldn’t marry one, if you’re not tough enough for a little public ridicule. I myself enjoyed laughing at Hughes’s little remarks, even though I thought it was neat that the new first lady was such a fireball. When he first took office, the president had been rumored to routinely exchange suggestive e-mails with a series of silly, young, undereducated, and generally inappropriate models. That all ended, reportedly, when Senator Clemons approached him after his second State of the Union address and asked if he was man enough to date a real woman. He had stuttered and stammered—of course, that’s not unusual for him—and finally said that he supposed that he was man enough. And she then, according to her already published memoir Courting a President, leaned close to him and whispered: “Prove it.”

  That story was positively inspiring. This was a woman who went after what she wanted, even if what she wanted might seem to many of us to be, well, somewhat less than desirable.

  “You gotta love Margaret Clemons,” I had said that morning on the air, in a clip that was replayed many times later. And I said something very similar that afternoon in our little private lunch. Everyone agreed. Cheers all around!

  But I felt a little sad as I left the restaurant. Our show was over. My new moment of glory was gone. The producers were all returning to t
heir teen soaps. Baxter was rushing off to the airport, returning to his regular job at a small radio station in Southern California. “Predicting the weather in San Diego?” Hughes had said as Baxter left. “Sounds challenging!”

  Afterward, Hughes offered to walk me the few blocks back to my hotel. He had an umbrella and I didn’t.

  His umbrella was quite fashionable, ample without being obnoxiously large. It sported an intriguing ridged handle, just nicked up enough to suggest that it was a much-used classic. “Wow,” I said, fingering the handle. “This is nice.” I had a habit of losing my own umbrellas, so I usually picked up new ones at drugstore counters. There was, I could see now, a difference in quality.

  “James Smith and Sons,” Hughes said.

  I nodded as if that meant something to me. (I later learned it was an English company that practically invented the modern umbrella.)

  He tapped the handle himself and said: “Whangee.”

  I nodded, again as if that meant something to me. But then giggled at my own charade. Plus the word. It’s just funny, isn’t it? Whangee?

  Hughes looked at me, and for a moment, I thought I would get one of his withering remarks, but then he just smiled in an indulgent way. Leaned toward me and whispered: “Bamboo. More or less.”

  “Ah,” I said. It strikes me as I remember this that left to my own devices, I probably would have said Oh. But around Hughes I tended to say Ah. Ah seems so much more refined than Oh. Doesn’t it? If I were writing an updated Miss Liberty book, I would touch on that.

  Hughes and I walked quickly, huddled together and whispering. When we got to the hotel, we stopped outside and stood together for a moment, water sheeting down around us. Another few steps and we would be under the hotel canopy, but we stopped, still in the rain, alone under his James Smith & Sons whangee umbrella.

  “Well,” Hughes said. “It’s been a pleasure.”

  I smiled and agreed.

  “We make a good team,” Hughes said. “You saved me from looking like a complete jerk about the tailored suits.”

  I started to protest that he’d not been a complete jerk, but I didn’t even get a word out before he held up his hand to stop me.

  “No,” he said. “It’s true. I don’t know what gets into me sometimes. When I started out in television everyone loved my outrageous cattiness. So I just kept giving people what they wanted. But I went too far today.”

  He glanced at his feet. “I do that a lot, actually.”

  He looked back up at me. “So thank you,” he said.

  And then he startled me by reaching up and pushing a strand of hair behind my ear. I blushed, looked down at my feet.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Was that inappropriate?”

  I wanted desperately to be taken seriously at this job, but this job was over. And I was silly-sleepy and easily flirted with. Plus, I was still nursing a bit of a fragile ego after being dumped by Cowell. Besides, I was, I confess, taken with Hughes and his fancy ways. I had never met a man with a nice umbrella before. In LA, of course, no one needs an umbrella, and in Nebraska men just dash from door to car holding a newspaper over their heads or hunching their shoulders, as if that helps.

  Besides, the men I dated in Nebraska weren’t men at all. They were boys. Fairly immature ones at that. They would never have been able to let the word whangee go in and out of a conversation without making some sort of rude remark. All of that went through my mind, as I stood there, with Hughes’s finger on a strand of hair behind my ear. And it all flashed through my mind again when he said: “Was that inappropriate?”

  I grinned, shrugged. “I don’t see why,” I said. “Might have been inappropriate this morning, but now . . .”

  My voice trailed off, and I looked up and down the mostly empty streets. People had crowded into shops and doorways; only the occasional hurried- and harried-looking person in a raincoat happened by.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “We’re no longer co-workers, are we?”

  I shook my head no.

  He reached up, pushed another strand of hair behind my other ear, and then ran his hand down along my cheek to my chin. His fingers lingered there a moment and then he swallowed hard, looking around the street himself. It seemed late, an illusion generated by the dreary, dark day and by the week of early, early mornings.

  “So it’s back to California for you,” he said.

  “Colorado,” I said. “I have a ranch there.”

  I hesitated. Did I want to lie to Hughes? I cleared my throat. “Well, you know, a ranch-style place. A condo, actually. And I’m not heading back until Monday. Cal told me I deserved a weekend in the city.”

  “Ah.” Hughes seemed surprised, thrown off a little. Was he appalled that I didn’t live in California? Surely it wasn’t about the condo. Everyone in New York lives in condos. Right?

  He looked at the street sign, as if to get his bearings.

  “There’s a lovely bookstore around the corner, you know. You should give it a look. If you’ve got the weekend.”

  He pointed toward the east, muttered some directions. Looked at his feet, again.

  “Thanks,” I said. I was thrilled that Hughes mentioned a bookstore. It suggested that my effort to reinvent myself as a journalist had been at least somewhat successful. No one I knew in LA would have mentioned a bookstore to me. They might have pointed the way to a gym or, I don’t know, an oxygen bar.

  There was a gust of wind, and the umbrella pulled sharply to the right. We each got wet and laughed. I gestured toward the lobby and said I was ready for a nap. Then I blushed. Talking about going to bed in the middle of the afternoon sounds suggestive, doesn’t it? Especially when standing this close to a man who has just touched your chin. But as I said, the early-morning schedule had been a killer.

  Hughes leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. It was a gentle move, just ever so slightly slower than a typical social kiss, not that I had ever really moved in the social-kissing crowds anyway. Slater County didn’t really have a crowd of social kissers, and in LA people were too worried about their makeup.

  Hughes pulled back. “Maybe I could show you that bookstore tomorrow,” he said. And I said: “Maybe you could.”

  I stepped under the hotel’s sidewalk canopy and my recently former co-worker disappeared into the rain, his James Smith & Sons umbrella bobbing into the distance. No time was set, no arrangement was made. I don’t think either of us was sure if we had a bookstore date or not. I certainly wasn’t.

  But something had happened, of that much I was sure. Hughes Sinclair was everything that I was not. He was buttoned-up Waspy America, with the best education money could buy and a pedigree of success in the performing and judicial arts. He was the sort of man who could, with great confidence and no shame, discuss the difference between periwinkle and lavender and proudly buy imported umbrellas. (Not from Taiwan.) He was blue-blooded America. And I?

  I was the immigrant wave, slightly accented, smelling of exotic spices. He was smooth and confident, while I was awkward and uncomfortable. (In a good way, my fans said.) He was an erudite student of the world, not to mention of Yale, Princeton, and Harvard Universities. I was a dropout of Slater County, Omaha, and Los Angeles community colleges. And Nebraska Cosmetology School, come to that. (What can I say? I flailed a bit in my pursuit of higher education.)

  Hughes was a refined and well-bred television professional. I was a two-bit actress who’d gotten her most recent job by babbling almost incoherently on Hollywood Squares.

  But as we had stood under that expensive umbrella together—making jokes about the Ivy League–educated producers we had left at lunch, bantering a bit about the nature of our relationship, exchanging a social kiss—something changed. He had pulled me under his umbrella, and in some way that I did not understand, he pulled me into his circle as well. He had treated me as an equal. He had thanked me for saving him. He had suggested, by his sly asides and subtle flirtations, that he and I shared something. (After all, I wa
s the only one he was not making fun of.) I just wasn’t sure what we shared. A seat on the national stage? An ironic and detached outlook? Something more?

  I’m embarrassed, looking back on this, how quickly and easily I became absolutely besotted with Hughes Sinclair. As I watched him leave, I realized he was everything that I had ever wanted in a man. He was, I thought, sophisticated, articulate, just a tad snarky, and utterly urbane.

  I remembered how all the obits about Peter Jennings included the word urbane. I had thought it was the perfect word to describe Jennings; it was also what I wanted in a boyfriend. I wanted someone who was urbane.

  So I grinned and blushed as I watched Hughes stride away, even though I wasn’t sure if we had a date or not. I was confident we had something. I just had a feeling in my gut.

  But my confusion about what we had did not matter. We were not former co-workers for long, and we were both busy the next day anyway.

  Chapter 7

  Not long after Hughes left me at the hotel, news broke of the kidnapping of the president’s niece, who had been vacationing with her boyfriend in France. (It had been something of a scandal—all the leading gossip columnists wondered why, exactly, the president’s sister’s daughter did not find it necessary to attend the wedding of the American century.)

  Cal impulsively decided that the GUP network should launch its permanent news operation while there was big news at hand, an awkward decision given that no staff had been hired. So he made a snap judgment. “Let Hughes and Addison handle it,” he said. “They’ve got that map of Europe.”

  The network logo artist worked up a new title for the opening sequence, “Parisian Peril,” and the production staff used Wite-Out to quickly cover up the cartoonish crowns that had previously marked where the weddings were taking place.

  Hughes and I each arrived in the studio at 4 AM, nodded professionally at each other, and started reading over scripts and planning coverage. I insisted on going with a plain white teacup, thinking the floral prints I had been using during Wedding Week were too frivolous for the occasion. One of the producers offered me a cup and saucer from Crate & Barrel, the Palazzo line.