He amazed me with his ability to spout all that crapola at two in the morning after so much champagne, but that was my Ollie. He really believed his own bullshit. It was sweet, really. I chucked his cheeks affectionately and massaged Eve Lom cleanser all over his face and neck. Then I showed him how to rub it off with the damp muslin cloth.
‘Not that I don’t still value your world, of course, Emily,’ he continued, scrubbing frantically at his neck. ‘Iggy’s a great guy and I have to say I was quite wrong about Nelly. She’s really a super girl at heart. Terrific spirit.What they did with the make-up – it was amazing. Bloody hell, it’s hard to get off, though, isn’t it?’
He paused and looked down at the cloth which was quite orange with foundation, blusher and concealer. ‘God, I didn’t know it was such a hassle to get rid of it. Don’t think I’ll be taking it up as a daily look.’
That was a relief.
13
The next day at work there was a memo on my desk that made it clear it was time to get down to some serious scheming and planning. It was Bee’s official plan for the fashion to go into the next six months of magazines, listing which stories she had slated for each issue.
So while I had got over the first hurdle of having her agree in principle to my creative ideas, now I had to do the budgets and travel itineraries for each of them and get her to approve those.
This was a lot less glamorous than the fashion-shows and launch-parties side of my job, but it wasn’t enough just to have the poncy ideas – to be a great stylist you had to be able to make them happen too. It was surprisingly complicated and Bee was quite obsessed that we did it all ourselves, so we would fully understand the ‘macroprocesses’ of the magazine.
She was always lecturing us about it and she’d started indoctrinating me on my very first day at Chic, when she’d called me in to her office for a welcoming coffee and a pep talk.
‘This may look like a glossy magazine,’ she’d said, waving a copy of Chic at me. ‘But actually it’s just a business like any other.’
It was so like the kind of bollocky thing Ollie said, I felt my mouth twitch and hoped I wasn’t going to get the giggles. Luckily for me Bee was in full flow and didn’t notice.
‘Here on Chic we are all lucky enough to earn our livings doing something creative that we love,’ she was saying with great sincerity. ‘But while we are very fortunate in that regard, we are not artists – never forget that. We’re business women and that’s how I want you to think of yourself, as a mini managing director.’
My face must have fallen. That is the last way I had ever wanted to think of myself. I suppose I was more deeply imbued with my parents’ code of noble creativity than I’d realized.
‘Don’t look so horrified,’ Bee had continued. ‘You’ll still be able to swan about swooning over the perfect shade of beige, just inform every decision you make while you work here with this fundamental piece of business wisdom: the less money we spend producing this magazine the more profit it will make and the more secure all our futures will be. Geddit?’
I nodded earnestly. I didn’t particularly like it, but I did get it.
‘Good,’ said Bee. ‘Now go and make me beautiful fashion pictures.’
Frannie – whose political views were as red as her hair – used to fume about creative people like us being forced into being mini accountants, as she called it.
‘I don’t want to be mini anything,’ she’d said. ‘I want to be big.’
‘You will be,’ I had replied, flippantly. ‘If you carry on eating all those sweeties.’
I knew what she meant, though. The difference was that after four years living with Ollie and his genuine excitement about things like percentage yields, bottom lines, cost appraisals and profit projections, I was more able to mould myself into a ‘corporate drone’ – as Frannie called me.
I still found the budgeting part of the job pretty onerous, though. The managing editor had done it all at Gorgeous, and on the style magazines where I’d worked before that, there was no budgeting because there was no budget. On those mags, you got everyone involved to work for nothing in exchange for the prestigious ‘tear sheets’ – which is what we called the actual printed pages of photographs that came out in the magazine. We all worked gratis because those groovy pages got us the boring catalogue work where we made our money.
But although I recoiled from it, I was smart enough to realize it was better to accept budgeting as a necessary evil at Chic– and to get good at it. Ollie was a big help, sitting me down at his laptop and showing me what a spreadsheet was and how to use one. It was torture, but I had the enticing carrot of knowing it would help me convince Bee to let me go careering off to Buenos Aires, or wherever, to do a shoot. After that, as long as I kept my mind on the goal, I could be quite the little Uriah Heep with my budget.
Bee had been very impressed the first time I had handed her one of my professional-looking printouts shortly after I joined the magazine. Because while she was very generous with the hotels, limos and dinners while we were at the shows – all part of the magazine’s image – she watched every penny when it came to putting the editorial together.
She’d spend when she needed to, when it would make a real difference to the magazine – to get an amazing model for a cover shoot, or to fly a name writer across the world to do an exclusive interview – but the rest of the time she was like a miser with the company money. We all suspected it was because she was secretly on a profit-share deal with the management, but we weren’t game to ask her.
Whatever her motives, she was so impressed by my computer-generated budget, she had called Alice in to see it.
‘Now, Alee-chay,’ she’d said. ‘Look at this. A proper spreadsheet. This is how you need to do your budgets. I don’t want to see any more of those terrible little sums you do on the back of envelopes, and if you learn to do it properly, like Emily here, you won’t keep going over budget with your shoots and I won’t have to keep bollocking you about it. And believe it or not, I don’t actually enjoy doing that.’
I was mortified. Alice had just stood there, looking like a naughty schoolgirl – and, no doubt, all too aware that she was inappropriately dressed for the occasion, in a drippy cheesecloth sundress and flat Greek sandals. She’d just come back from shooting at Jade Jagger’s house in Ibiza. It was not a power look.
Adding to the misfortune of the timing, I was wearing a crisp black poplin shirt-dress, tightly belted, with high heels. I looked like Smart Businesswoman Barbie and I was a good head taller than Alice too. I sat down quickly.You don’t survive a girls’ boarding school without learning the catastrophic implications of such moments.
But Alice didn’t look at me with the loathing I was expecting. In fact, she didn’t look at me at all, until Bee brought me back into the conversation. She was clearly hoping that if she ignored me hard enough I would cease to exist.
‘I tell you what, Emily,’ said Bee. ‘As you are clearly so good with computers and figures, why don’t you show Alee-chay how to do this?’
Now, I realized, I had a chance to redeem myself. It meant sacrificing serious points with Bee, but I really didn’t want Alice to hate me when I had only just started my new job. She was my immediate boss, after all, and she could make my life hell if she wanted to. I also didn’t particularly relish the artificial goodie-two-shoes role I had been pushed into. So I plunged in.
‘Actually, Bee,’ I said. ‘I have to confess it was Ollie who showed me how to do all this – I didn’t have a clue where to start. I’ve never had to do a budget before.’
Bee roared with laughter.
‘I should have known,’ she said. ‘That husband of yours can manipulate figures like a bent chancellor, especially to show why he should pay less for advertising in this magazine. How very funny.’
‘I’m sure he’d be happy to show Alice – and all the editors – how to do this as well,’ I said, quickly. ‘He’d do anything to butter you up, Bee,’ I
added, unable to resist a small arse-lick.
So the following week, Alice, Frannie, the two junior fashion editors and all the fashion assistants, had gone over to Ollie’s offices for a morning’s training in how to do budgets on a computer spreadsheet, followed by a low carbs lunch and a bumper Slap gift pack as a going-home present – Ollie never missed a marketing opportunity.
I went along too, so as not to feel outside the team, and found it quite a fascinating insight into my new colleagues. Like most of them, Frannie just sat there resignedly and took it all in, but it was quite obvious that despite Ollie’s charismatic presentation skills – and he was a great teacher – Alice didn’t have a clue what he was talking about and couldn’t care less either.
I wondered whether she had ever actually turned a computer on, she looked so blank throughout the whole thing. She didn’t jot anything down, or even open the folder of colour-coded tips and hints that Ollie had specially prepared.
Luckily for her, she’d brought Natalie along, who sat right at the front, making copious notes and answering all Ollie’s questions with great enthusiasm, her plump brown bosoms heaving with excitement. At the end of the session, Ollie had awarded her a special prize as the star pupil – he was very keen on motivating people – and I would have sworn she was flirting with him as she accepted it. Little fucker.
But that all seemed a lifetime ago, as I sat down to do my fashion shoot planning, and apart from Alice, who left them entirely to Natalie to do, we had all become pretty slick at doing our spreadsheets since then. I’d even taught a new junior fashion editor how to do it all by myself.
Now, with six months of shoots to plan, the first stage of the process was for me and Gemma to sit down with Bee’s memo, our diaries and the magazine production schedule and make a plan of which photographs we needed to have ready by when, to get my stories into the issues they were planned for. I quickly saw that my first one was needed in just over a month. We had a lot to do.
Flights and hotels had to be booked – or scammed in exchange for editorial mentions – photographers had to be hired in and models secured, a process so complicated we had a dedicated ‘bookings editor’ to look after it all. We had to, because the people we worked with were in constant demand and their agents juggled them relentlessly to get the best gig for them. It was like some giant game trying to match the required dates with the optimum people.
Quite often you’d get the whole thing in place, only to have it fall apart when your model suddenly got offered a major advertising job. Then you’d lose the photographer as well, because he was only doing it to work with that model, and then the superstar make-up artist and household-name hairdresser would drop out because they only worked with that photographer.
It was quite normal to see a fashion editor banging her head on the desk after such disappointments. At least, that’s what I used to do. Frannie would send out for doughnuts when her shoots fell apart and, as far as we could tell, Alice just used to disappear and leave Natalie to sort it out for her.
Then, finally, only when all that structure was in place, could we start to call the bloody clothes in. And that was another whole number. You couldn’t necessarily just snap your fingers and get the dress, suit, or coat you fancied photographing, oh no.
First of all you had to check that the thing you had liked on the catwalk was ever actually going to be made – many of the more showstopping outfits were just run up to grab the attention of tabloid newspaper picture editors – and then if it would actually ever be on sale anywhere in the UK. And if it wasn’t, you couldn’t feature it in Chic. Bee was firm on that.
Even once you had established these points you had to duck and dive to get the press samples of the pieces you wanted and hope that they hadn’t already been nabbed by other stylists for their shoots. Designers only had one set of samples for each season’s collection to lend out to all the magazines and newspapers, and it was really competitive for the ‘key’ pieces.
It could wreck your whole story if Vogue had already flown down to Rio with the particular outfit you wanted to take to Rajasthan. FedEx made a fortune flying hot pants from one part of the world to another on such occasions.
And then, of course, there were fashion editors who had been known to hold on to samples deliberately because they knew other stylists wanted them; just to fuck them up. It was brutal.
Sometimes it worked the other way, though, and there had been a hilarious day when I had been shooting on one part of Flamands Beach on St Barths, and Nelly had been working a few hundred yards along with her crew. We had spent the whole day running up and down the beach in bikinis trading outfits along the lines of: I’ll give you this Lanvin, if I can have that Balenciaga. It was hilarious. If Bee and Beaver had only known…
After a couple of hours of pencil chewing, Gemma and I had our action plan for the season in place, and she went off to talk to the travel editor about deals for New York and Prague, while I got on the phone to Ollie to discuss dates. I didn’t want to organize all my work travel and then find it clashed with some Slap event he desperately needed me to go to, or the flights he would be booking for our planned trips to Milan and New York.
I left three messages with his secretary and two texts on his ‘phone off’ mobile, before he finally got back to me. Sometimes it was a royal pain having a high flier for a husband.
‘Hello, darling,’ I said cheerily. ‘Busy?’
‘Frantic,’ he said. ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened – Peter Potter has told the paper’s features editor what happened on Sunday and they’re doing a whole feature about Slap for Chaps. A double-page spread. It’s fantastic. I’ve had one of their reporters in here all morning doing an interview and just now a researcher from “Wakey Wakey” called up. They’re going to do a big segment on it too. I’ve sent Nelly flowers and the entire Slap range to thank her.’
‘Aha,’ I said. ‘I wondered why your assistant asked me where “Miss Stelios” was staying when I spoke to her earlier – one of the many times I spoke to your assistant today…’
‘I’m sorry, my angel, Steffie did tell me you’d been calling. I’ve been frantic. Now you have my complete attention. So what can I do for you?’
‘I just want to talk about travel dates – I’m trying to fix my shoots up and I wondered when you were thinking about for our trips to Milan and New York.’
There was a distinct pause – very unusual for Ollie, he very rarely needed to stop to gather his thoughts.
‘Ollie?’ I said. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes, yes, of course I am. I’m just thinking about those trips, you see, the thing is, I think this Slap for Chaps idea might take off – I mean really take off – and I don’t want to miss any opportunities by being away between now and Christmas. Then it’s the New Year and we have our audit coming up in January, as you know, which is always huge and then it’s sales conference and then you’re off to the shows again, so I don’t really see when we can do it.’
I was amazed. Ollie loved our trips together, he’d never cancelled one before. Even if it had meant going to New York for just two nights, we’d do it.
‘So you don’t want to do Milan or New York?’ I said slowly, honestly not sure if I had properly understood what he was saying.
‘I’m sorry, Em, I hate to disappoint you, but I really don’t think I can do the whole New York jet lag thing – not to mention all the partying we’d do there. Not with all I’ve got on at the moment.’
‘OK,’ I said, flatly. I was really disappointed. I loved going to New York with Ollie, we always had an amazing time, but I made a quick decision not to whinge about it, because at least I was going there for my fashion trip.
‘But what about Milan?’ I asked him.
I wasn’t prepared to let that trip go so easily. I’d really been looking forward to hitting the luxury brands Bermuda Triangle with Ollie and his credit cards by my side.
‘After yesterday I don’t feel I need
to go rushing over there to bond with Nelly and Iggy,’ said Ollie, back to his usual quick and slick replies. ‘We’re fully bonded. I think they’re both great.’
I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that they might not be living there anyway.
‘But what about looking at Slap’s Italian retail opportunities?’ I said, still thinking I might be able to persuade him. ‘I thought that was important too.’
‘Well, that is important, Emily, you’re right,’ said Ollie, in his most corporate mouthpiece voice. ‘So I thought I might pop over there next April for the Milan Furniture Fair and then I can see what that’s all about. That fair is the absolute epicentre of the whole design world apparently, so I think Slap might have a stand at it, and then I can reconnoitre the retail at the same time. Much more efficient way to do it.’
‘Well, I hope you have a lovely time with yourself,’ I said, quite tartly, but Ollie seemed oblivious.
‘Yes, sorry about that, darling, but we will get other trips in later next year. I’d better go now, Steffie is making take-this-call faces at me through the glass partition. It’s probably something else about Slap for Chaps. Bye, my angel.’
And he hung up, to take whatever phone call it was that was more important than talking to me.
14
Three weeks later I was sitting in Ursula’s apartment on 83rd and Fifth. We were in her wonderfully chaotic study, which had books floor to ceiling on every wall, going right over the doorframe and lying in precarious piles on every flat surface.
We were facing each other across her huge marble-topped French desk which was covered, as always, in a mess of manuscripts, toasting each other with champagne from a bottle of vintage Krug, which had just been brought in by her maid, Manuela.
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