Spring Collection

by Judith Krantz

  Actually, once I told April, Jordan and Tinker why I’d awakened them I couldn’t have kept them from going. They were dying to see the clothes, but more important, although they didn’t say so, they each wanted to impress Lombardi. He, the designer, might well be the one who was going to pick the girl to represent his clothes, rather than Necker.

  Not for the first time I wished that Justine had been able to find out how this game was being played, but Gabrielle had resisted giving us any details. All we knew was that one of the girls would be chosen to win the jackpot, but by whom we had no idea. It occurred to me, while I was tucking myself tenderly into a sublime dark green wool suit that made me look almost sinuous and decidedly omnipotent, that even if I knew the answer there was no way the knowledge could benefit me, since I was rooting for all of them equally.

  Two limos were waiting for our party of six, neither driven by that fink, Albert, who had undoubtedly been promoted a day off after his exertions of last night. The trip to Lombardi’s atelier was less than a block, but it said limos in our contracts and limos we had, although it would have been quicker to walk.

  Gabrielle met us in the small lobby and I followed her upstairs, followed by Mike and Maude and finally the girls, with Jordan lagging behind. Another superb performance like last night’s, I wondered? Who taught her that a star will always choose to come on last? Forget “taught”—she’d probably been born knowing. As we filed upstairs I wondered how Lombardi would present himself. I’d seen a snapshot of him in a group in a fashion magazine but it had been taken years earlier. The faces of the assistants to great designers are unknown by and large, since no designer wants to promote anyone but himself, or even, in most cases, is unwilling to admit that assistants exist.

  Would Marco Lombardi have adopted the severe, immaculate white smock so favored by many designers, giving them a look that made for a strange combination of Dr. Frankenstein disguised as a Rockwell Kent druggist? Would he do your Calvin Klein-Giorgio Armani plain white T-shirt with a dark jacket number—I think they look like trustees at Devil’s Island—or would he be the exquisitely tailored, suave, gracious grand seigneur like Oscar de la Renta? I hadn’t expected anyone like the man who came rushing down the stairs to meet us.

  First of all, the guy was gorgeous. We all—even those of us who haven’t the luck to be Italian—know about Italian men, right? When they’re Renaissance Florentine darkly gorgeous, like Marco Lombardi, there’s nothing more so, unless you insist on Robert Redford in his Navy officer’s uniform, drunk at the Stork Club, sitting on that bar stool in The Way We Were—and that, film fans, is a whole other breed of cat to say nothing of ethnic background. Lombardi looked younger than I’d expected, he moved with a dancer’s ease and precision and his beauty was unfair, the kind that any decent, thoughtful woman like me feels is wasted on a man. He was wearing clean, faded unremarkable jeans, an old pink Brooks Brothers shirt, with the top three buttons open, bright red socks and the most beautifully polished, elegant pair of brown loafers I’d ever seen. The total effect combined the Ivy League with early Gene Kelly and vintage Fred Astaire. He was a dandy, a man who played games with his own clothes. What disarming disguise, I wondered, did he put on when he wasn’t expecting a bunch of Americans? Gay, I thought, but why should I have expected anything different?

  In the confusion created by Gabrielle attempting to introduce us in the proper French way and Marco Lombardi introducing himself in a highly excited and enthusiastic Italian way, enough confusion and giggles were generated so that what might have been an intimidating moment happened so quickly and easily that I could feel my girls relaxing in his warmth. Gay, I knew with sudden conviction, was the opposite of whatever this man was.

  The girls were dazzled by his charm and warmth. He thought that they were all ravishing, exquisite, that much was absolutely conveyed by his eyes and his hands and his smile. He adored them. They were the most welcome sight he’d seen in years. “Such beautiful girls, three perfections,” he crooned in the sort of full-bodied, old-country Italian accent I hadn’t heard from anyone but an ancient storekeeper who used to sell fruit to my mother. Even though Marco had just met the girls there was a teasing, affectionately naughty, harmless little boy way in which he related to them.

  “And you,” he said, turning to me and taking both of my hands in his, and sounding much more serious. “You are a gift, a surprise package. I was expecting someone less young, someone less”—he sketched a voluptuous bosom and a tiny waist with his hands—“But they cannot make a woman who looks like you into a duenna! What a folly, what a delusion! You are in far more danger from me than skinny little girls.”

  I felt myself smiling in gratification. It was nice to be appreciated by someone who knew a real woman when he saw one. I hoped I wasn’t blushing and I hoped that Mike Aaron was getting a shot of this moment. Zaftig, indeed!

  “Marco,” Gabrielle interrupted, “can we finish these compliments somewhere besides the staircase?”

  “Of course,” he answered, with a flash of irritation. He didn’t like her bossy manner any more than I did.

  Eventually we all moved into the relatively big room in which he worked on his fitting models. There were a few uncovered dress forms pushed into a corner but not a sign of any clothes. The girls shrugged off their parkas and I was fascinated to see that they’d each had the same idea about what to wear: those second-skin ski pants that had caused a sensation in the Plaza-Athénée lobby and equally clinging knit sweaters of the thinnest materials, through which anybody with poor eyesight could count their ribs and accurately estimate their bra sizes, although they weren’t wearing bras. Just in case that wasn’t enough to make you sit up and take notice, they’d all put on their highest-heeled boots, the ones that sent the message “Do me or I’ll stomp you.” I doubted that there was even one pair of panties among them. All in all they did me credit.

  The only variations on this covered-up version of show and tell was in the color of their sweaters. April’s was a soft French blue that deepened her eyes, not, I assumed, an accidental effect. Nor had Jordan picked her white sweater by chance. Whenever she wore white, the contrast with her skin ensured that she was at her most compelling. Tinker wore a rather ratty black sweater that looked as if it had been chosen at random, but it enhanced the breathless underwater flash of her eyes and the artless—not on my best day had I been so artless!—high-piled tumble of her hair seemed to beg to be let loose.

  “When can we see the clothes?” Maude asked eagerly.

  Marco looked half startled, half indignant. “The clothes? Not yet, Signora, not yet. The collection is still two weeks away, the clothes are not completed, and even if they were, this is not the moment.”

  The guy doesn’t audition, Maude, I thought wryly. Of all the gauche things she could have asked! My girls made teeny oohs and aahs of disappointed sounds although I glared at them. Honest to God, it’s at moments like this that I feel like a gamekeeper entrusted with a daffy herd of wild, annoying, but essentially defenseless giant animals, a cross, let’s say, between an antelope and a giraffe. When they lope or drift or sway through a group of normal people, taller, in their heels, than all but the tallest men, they belong firmly to a species other than humankind. Aliens among us, they sit differently, as if they have no firm idea of what to do with their excessively long legs; extreme ectomorphs, they nourish themselves by nibbling on green leaves, and, as they were doing now, they communicate among themselves in a soft animal language.

  “What do you want them to do then?” Maude persisted. “I heard that you wanted to see how they looked wearing your clothes.”

  “No, Signora,” Marco said, “I need to see how they look wearing anything at all. What they have on their bodies isn’t the question, it is how they relate to it.”

  “Oh?” she said challengingly.

  “For example, I will give them my clothes—nothing is more interesting on a woman as a man’s clothes—and, if they would be so good,
ask them each to put them on and show me what happens.” He picked up a tweed jacket and a long grey wool scarf he’d thrown over a chair and handed them to April. As an afterthought, he also gave her the red cardigan he must have worn under his jacket. “Over there’s a room you can use to dress in,” he said.

  “Do you want me to put on everything?” April asked calmly.

  “As you wish, bella,” he answered, smiling at her like an old pal. “There’s no way you can go wrong, this is not an examination.”

  April disappeared behind the door and Marco engaged Mike in a technical discussion about his cameras while I waited, thinking quickly. What Marco was up to was nothing less than a probe into my girls’ runway walking ability.

  No matter how beautiful a model is in person, only a small percentage of them can work a runway until it squeaks. Fashion shows have become pure spectacle, a combination of theatre and circus, and it takes a very special talent to dominate an audience just by strutting down a runway. The girls have to be as show-stopping as Ethel Merman without singing, as physically electric as Josephine Baker without dancing and as glamorous as Dietrich. And there was only one Dietrich. Great runway models have to be born exhibitionists, without a scrap of stage fright, able to do that crazily sexy shoulder-thrusting, ass-swinging, pelvis-pointed walk in shoes that would kill even me. They have to play to three hundred insane photographers blasting them with a wall of blinding flashbulbs as well as to the couple of thousand fashion professionals who judge the clothes in large part by the conviction with which they are presented.

  I sat helplessly, wishing I were in the other room so that I could tell the girls what was up and fix each of them to her best advantage. I felt like three stage mothers rolled into one, and yet, hadn’t the girls demonstrated at Necker’s that they were astute about showing themselves to their best advantage? My job is supposed to end with the booking, not to carry over into real life, and this was the first time I’d seen models in such an intimately competitive situation, so much more overt than last night’s dinner party.

  April entered the room. She’d taken the cardigan, slung it around her neck and tied it so that it fell over her left shoulder, like a short cape. She’d chosen to make the advantage of her hair a nonissue, pulling it back and tucking it under the cardigan so that it was all but hidden. Her thumbs were hooked into the top of her ski pants, her pelvis thrust forward and her arms akimbo. She advanced toward us quickly, unsmiling, her chin in the air, not looking at anybody and with no movement at all in her upper body. Her knees crossed each other at every step so that her hips swayed to the maximum. All the street urchin qualities that usually were totally outweighed by her regality, now were magnified and she looked tough and arrogant. April stopped suddenly a few feet away from our group, pivoted on one heel, and paused for one long, tough, don’t-mess-with-me minute.

  “Hey, now!” Mike said, in what I supposed was a gender-neutral statement approved by the fashion photographers’ union, although, in my opinion, his tone of voice constituted sexual harassment. Even his camera seemed to be aroused. April returned the way she’d come, her fine ass swinging like a hooker’s. In a second she was back, hair hanging straight down her back, as much a princess as ever.

  “I left the sweater in there,” she said demurely to Marco.

  “Brava, April! You have a very bad-girl walk.”

  “Not always, not unless I think it’s appropriate, but something about a man’s sweater … well, it turns me on. Isn’t that strange?” she wondered sweetly.

  “No, it’s normal,” he told her, patting her hand like an uncle. “Now, Jordan, if you would be so kind?” Marco indicated the improvised dressing room and Jordan went toward it with a hint of reluctance. You could tell by her shoulders that she was not used to being the middle child. What difference does birth order make in the success of models, I wondered, not for the first time.

  Jordan kept us waiting twice as long as April had. When she reappeared she wore the tweed jacket, belted in tight and wide with the long scarf that she had somehow turned into an obi. The jacket collar was up, her chin was tucked into its shelter and she wore a pair of dark glasses. She walked in a bubble of preoccupation with herself, deliberately and reflectively, looking at the floor, her feet placed perfectly parallel, her hands thrust deeply into the pockets of the jacket, with only the thumbs showing. There was no question in my mind that she was a movie star, thinking her own thoughts and hoping to pass incognito through a crowd that was unable not to stare at her. When Jordan was three feet away from Marco she stopped and took one hand out of a pocket so that she could lower her dark glasses just enough to peer at him from over their rims. She gave him a meltdown, show-stopping smile that said “Watch out, baby, I’ll be back for you later,” and retired, slouching as she had come.

  “Dio,” he murmured.

  “Yeah!” Mike agreed, odiously, switching cameras.

  “Now it’s your turn, Tinker,” Marco told her. Tinker looked at me and I could see the edge of cold apprehension flickering in her eyes. If only she’d been able to go first, I thought, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but after April and Jordan, what was the poor girl going to do for an encore?

  It seemed to me that Tinker was taking forever to get ready. I had to stifle an urge to ask if I could go in and see if there was anything wrong. Finally she opened the door of the other room and stepped out and I understood what had taken her so long. She’d been fussing with that damn hair of hers, until it hung down over her shoulders in the kind of careless mess that usually takes an expert to achieve. She’d stripped naked from the waist up, wearing only Marco’s scarf, which she’d wrapped twice around her neck, the ends drooping almost halfway down her high-riding breasts.

  All well and good, but Tinker was still standing there, her arms hanging limply at her side, her nipples partly covered. Walk, for the love of God, I thought, just walk! That’s the whole point of this, don’t you realize it, not a striptease? Hair can’t walk the walk, you idiot! Finally she raised her hands and grasped the ends of the scarf, making fists over each nipple. I took a breath of relief. At least there was something going on in her mind besides playing for shock value.

  Tinker approached us, posture unremarkable, projecting absolutely nothing at all except total panic. She had become a pretty enough girl who’d forgotten her sweater. I couldn’t believe it. Here was this girl who had more genuine glamour than ninety-nine percent of the models we represent, here was this girl whose potential had hooked Justine and me from the minute we’d looked at her, here was the girl we’d trained for months to move in front of a camera, and she couldn’t fucking walk!

  Now, at this minute, in Paris no less, in front of an informal group of only six friendly people, she’d frozen, able at best to put one foot in front of another, just barely not stumbling. Tinker was like a zombie when she stopped, looked vacantly over our heads, not making any kind of eye contact or body statement at what was the all-important end of the runway. The only sound was Mike’s camera mercifully going nonstop. Finally Tinker managed to turn and make her way, stumbling once, back to the changing room.

  The worst of it was that we were all suffering for her. She’d dragged us into her problem and if she did that to us, she’d do it to a larger audience. Whatever she wore would be a disaster, even if it were the best dress in the show.

  “I will work with her, Frankie,” Marco said quietly to me. “She needs training. Don’t worry, I think I can show her what to do.”

  “Do you have time?” I asked, stunned by his words. I’d expected him to say he simply couldn’t use her.

  “Nobody has time at this point, but I’ll manage, at odd hours. She’s a beautiful girl otherwise. She needs more self-confidence, that’s all.”

  “Thank you, Marco,” I breathed in disbelief. I couldn’t remember when I’d felt so grateful to any man. He was someone special.

  As quickly as possible I hustled all the girls into their parkas, said good-bye to M
arco and Gabrielle, and led the way back down the stairs. It was icy and dark on the street and I was glad to see the sheltering limos waiting.

  “April! Chérie, you haven’t forgotten?” a male voice called out.

  “Tinker, over here!” another shouted.

  “Frankie, we’re waiting. Come on, we’re freezing to death!”

  “Jordan, what took so long?” another guy complained at the top of his lungs.

  Who were these guys howling familiarly at us from a group of cars and one motorcycle? I stopped dead and glared at them. One of the car doors burst open and three young men rushed across the pavement and laid hands on me. Friendly hands, familiar hands, Bains Douche dancing partner hands. Reflexively I struggled, keeping them from tossing me in the air.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded with as much dignity as possible. Mike Aaron was watching, shaking his head and grinning in a superior way, like someone watching kittens squirm.

  “Frankie! Ma petite adorable Frankie, we said we’d do it again tonight.”

  “You promised! I’ve been thinking about you all day!”

  “Come on, baby, the concierge told us where you were but he didn’t say you’d keep us waiting in the cold. Let’s go, mon adorée.”

  “No!” I shouted at the three of them. “Absolutely not! It’s impossible.”

  I didn’t remember making a date with these big hulking cute oafs. Well, maybe I might have said something but I didn’t mean it, I was just dancing. Carried away. You know. Still … it might be fun. And it was a sure way to lose another two pounds. Even three.

  “Break it up fellas,” Mike said, coming over and putting his arm possessively around my shoulders. “This is my wife you’re talking to. We’re going home to find out just exactly what went on last night, and it better be a good explanation, or she’s in beaucoup trouble. Comprendez? Say, what are your names, guys? Let me see your identification.”