‘Welcome home, special girl,’ said Ursula, blue eyes twinkling. ‘Welcome back to New York. The city where you should be living.’
‘Thank you, Ursa,’ I said. ‘It’s great to be here – in the city I love to visit.’
I’d called her Ursa since I was tiny and when I’d discovered it meant ‘bear’ in Latin, it had seemed all the more appropriate to carry on using it. A short round woman, with cropped wiry grey hair, Ursula looked just like a cuddly teddy bear to me. I towered over her, even without my heels on – she always made me take them off to protect her parquet – but her personality and intellect more than made up for what she lacked in feet and inches.
‘Size doesn’t matter,’ she always used to say when the subject of height came up. ‘Trust me – I’m a lesbian.’
My stubbornness about living in a small and dull provincial town called London, rather than the throbbing metropolis Ursula considered to be the epicentre of civilization, if not the entire universe, was an ongoing debate between us. Apart from anything else, her flying phobia made it impossible for her to visit me at home, so she had to rely on me going over to New York to see her. Ursula didn’t like the passive role.
‘I can get you a Green Card in a minute,’ she would always say to me. ‘Wouldn’t that ambitious husband of yours love the chance to live in the real big city? The opportunities to social climb here are limitless. He’d love it. And I could babysit.’
I knew this constant nagging was just because she wanted to see more of me – her un-daughter – and she desperately wanted me to have kids, so she could be an un-grandmother as well, but having scoured out a cool and cosy niche for myself in London, I had no intention of changing anything about it. It was too hard won.
Our other constant source of friction continued to be my weight.
‘Did you read those books I sent over to you?’ she was asking me, as I leaned back in a beaten-up leather armchair breathing in the unique scent of that room – books, brandy, leather, dust – which was so nostalgic for me.
For a moment my mind was blank – what books?
‘The books I sent over with Paul?’ Ursula continued.
I remembered, groaned inwardly, considered lying, then considered telling her off for involving Paul in our ongoing wrangle, but decided to leave it be for the time being. I was too happy to see her, to have a row straight away and although her nagging irritated me, I could never stay cross with Ursula for long.
‘No,’ I said, bluntly.
‘Did you even open them?’
‘No.’
Ursula laughed and shook her head.
‘Did you even look at the covers?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, sighing deeply, like the sulky fourteen-year-old I had once been in that very room. ‘One was some dumb poetry thing and the other was hideous self-help tripe about fashion making you fat, or was it thin? Something like that.’
‘I should have known you wouldn’t even open it,’ she said. ‘I’ve met fishing lines that were better padded than you. And better read. But when are you going to face up to it? You are putting your health – and your fertility – at risk pursuing some completely false notion of feminine beauty dictated by a cabal of homosexual men with complex mother issues. Do you eat at all, Emily?’
‘From time to time,’ I said, sucking my cheeks in and pulling a face. ‘Of course, I eat. Just not as much as you do.’
I stuck my tongue out at her. She responded by opening a drawer in her desk and taking out a large tin of Fauchon marrons glacés. She reverently took one from its rustly gold wrapper and brought it to her nose like a connoisseur with a Cuban cigar. Not breaking eye contact with me she inhaled deeply and took a bite, chewing slowly and making appreciative noises.
‘Mmmmm, delicious… sugar… sweetness… heavenly melting texture,’ she murmured ecstatically and offered me the box. ‘Would you like one, Emily?’
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve just had a banana.’
‘You’re too thin, Emily,’ said Ursula.
‘You’re too fat, Ursula,’ I replied.
It was a fairly routine exchange between us.
‘Well, at least you drink,’ she said, topping up my glass. ‘So, where shall we have dinner – sorry, I mean where shall I have dinner, while you toy with an undressed salad and a tragic piece of denuded chicken?’
‘Elaine’s,’ I said immediately. We always went to Elaine’s. It was one of our many special places in New York and one of the things I loved about that city was that those special places never seemed to change. And I loved going to them with Ursula, because we always got a good table.
That night we got a really great table – by the bar, the third one along – and it was the usual crazy hubbub of people coming over to greet the powerful agent while she gave me a hilarious sotto voce commentary on everyone in the place. I loved being temporarily immersed in a world as complex, conniving and petty as the fashion scene and not knowing a thing about it. It gave me some perspective on getting too wound up by my own life.
‘See the guy over there, who looks like he just swallowed ground glass?’ said Ursula, in a low voice, as the waiter filled our glasses with dark red wine.
‘The one with a stupid haircut like a superannuated Tintin?’ I whispered back. Ursula barked with laughter.
‘That’s him. Lawrence Selwyn. He’s hoping for a Pulitzer for his second novel. He’s not going to get it. He doesn’t know yet, but I do. He also doesn’t know that I know he didn’t write the book. He took a first-draft manuscript written by his late boyfriend and with a little work, made it his own. A recently ex-new-boyfriend is spreading it around. Going to be a huge story when it breaks. The question is, though – does it matter? It’s a great novel. I wish I represented him.’
She shrugged and took a big slurp from her glass. I gawped appropriately.
‘See the woman by the bar?’ Ursula continued. ‘The blonde with the tight-ass body in the tight-ass suit?’
I looked. ‘The red Versace suit, with the corset lacing up the back?’
‘Yeah, the one with the great tits. She’s one of that strange tribe of author groupies – they get off on bedding bestselling bookish types – but the thing is, that particular Martha is really an Arthur. Hasn’t had the entire op, if you know what I’m saying. Not that she cares who knows, she’s a great girl and totally open about it – but you’d be amazed how many well-known literary gentlemen profess not to have known what was still lingering down there until it was too late. And by then, what could they do?’ She pulled a mock innocent face and raised her glass to me.
Even though I knew none of the characters, this was as good as sitting in the Princh bar with Paul. It got even better later on when he joined us, arriving shortly after Ursula’s latest lover. Like all of Ursa’s girlfriends she was very young, very pretty and very impressed by Ursula. This one was called Snapdragon.
‘Trust-fund hippy parents – well, briefly hippy,’ Ursula said to me, by way of explanation. ‘Knew her dad back in the day. These days, however, he’s a Wall Street tax lawyer and not talking to his old buddie Ursula, is he Snappie?’
Snapdragon shook her head, which was cropped in the same brutal style as Ursula’s, serving only to emphasize her classic bone structure, dark skin and improbably full lips. She had tattoos up both arms, studs and rings all along one eyebrow, a big fat steel ring through her septum and a big stud on the end of her tongue. For a girl who had grown up a couple of blocks from where we were sitting and who was now a graduate student at Columbia, she was quite exotic.
‘Gorgeous, isn’t she?’ said Ursula, seeing me staring at her. ‘Mother’s Brazilian. Would like to have me killed, but is going to come to a few of my parties first.’
Ursula’s parties were legendary. She had four a year – one for each season – as her apartment had great views over the park which set the scene beautifully. I had always liked the winter parties best, with Central Park transformed into a snowscape and t
he hall coat-closet stuffed with floor-length minks redolent of expensive scent.
Apart from the flowing booze and excellent catering, what people came to Ursula’s parties for were the other people. She had a Rolodex that spanned interesting identities from every microculture in Manhattan, from the Lower East Side crowd of unknown conceptual artists and radical opera directors, to Upper East Side Brahmins, with every shade of intellectual and pop-culture guru making up the middle ground. She even invited people from Brooklyn. I’d arrived one time and found myself in the elevator with David Auster and RuPaul. They were getting on famously.
The fall party had been a few weeks before and it had been Paul’s first experience of Ursula’s entertaining style.
‘That was what I call a party, Ursula,’ he said, giving her a big kiss. He gave me one too – on the mouth as usual – then he kissed Snapdragon on the top of her shoulder. ‘Hey, beauty,’ he said to her. ‘Safest place to kiss you. Don’t want to get caught up in the ironmongery.’
He sat down and held Snapdragon’s exquisite chin between his thumb and forefinger, turning her face from side to side. ‘Such bones,’ he sighed. ‘Decided when you are going to let me put you in a photographer’s studio and make an object out of you yet?’
Snapdragon shook her head.
‘Never,’ she said.
‘I’m trying to get this girl to make a few bucks out of her looks before she loses them,’ said Paul, to me, putting an avuncular arm round her. ‘Then she can go and shrivel up in a library for the rest of her life.’
‘You’ve always refused to make a buck out of your looks, Jacko,’ I reminded him. ‘And you’ve had plenty of offers.’
‘Good point,’ he said, nodding slowly. ‘Do you know that parallel had never occurred to me? All right, Snappie, I’ll stop bugging you. You can go off and write your PhD thesis. What is it about again? Labial imagery in…?’
‘Medieval annunciation paintings,’ filled in Snapdragon, earnestly.
‘That’s right,’ said Paul. ‘Lovely. Wonder if Prince William will be studying that aspect of art history as part of his course? What do you reckon, eh, Urse?’
‘As an extra-curricular activity, I hope he is,’ said Ursula.
*
After that dinner I didn’t see Ursula again until I’d finished the fashion shoot, when I had arranged to stay with her for a few days before going home. And there were times during that project when the idea of being cocooned back in Ursula’s apartment, the safe haven of my childhood, was all that kept me going. It was not one of my easier jobs.
Taking heed of what Ollie had said – and others, there was an increasing buzz about him – I was using Nivek for the pictures. It was the first time any of us on Chic had booked him, so I hadn’t had any warning how difficult he was.
Really, I think, if Paul hadn’t been there to gee me along, I might have walked out in the middle of the shoot, he was such a pain. He was one of those photographers who just would not take direction. Suggestions from the stylist were simply not tolerated, it all had to be his idea.
Considering that it was the first time he had shot anything for Chic I found his attitude almost unbearably arrogant. I felt like stamping my foot and yelling at him, but I knew it wouldn’t have had any effect except maybe to have him storm out. He was that much of an arse.
In some ways it would have been a relief if he had quit, but while I could have found another photographer at short notice more easily in New York than anywhere else on earth, I did not want to lose the model. She was serious cover material. Mind you, she wasn’t the easiest little bunny either and it was only Paul’s ability to make her feel like the most special girl in the world, that stopped her sulking the entire time, instead of just most of it.
Apart from his general creativity and technical skills, that was the secret of Paul’s success as a make-up artist. He didn’t just make models look good, that was a given, he made them feel good too and that’s almost more important – because a lot of them are truly convinced they are ugly, foul and fat. That’s modelling for you. Talk about a sick industry.
Paul had an amazing knack of being able to suss out people’s tender spots in an instant, and with tricky models he always knew which ones to tease, which to flirt with and which to talk to about books and politics. Because while most of them just wanted a laugh, some needed to feel sexy – and others needed to feel that someone understood they had a brain as well as a pretty face.
This girl – Amica, she was called – was a complex mixture of all three. She was astonishingly pretty, to the point where even I was impressed and beauty is something you get inured to after a while in the fashion world. But Amica had one of those faces like a delectable little kitten, combined with amazing legs, golden skin and long dark-blonde hair kissed with blonde highlights – natural – that did what it was told.
She also had a more indefinable quality that made her perfect for this shoot. As well as being young and sexy, she had some kind of innate class. You could have put her in leather hot pants and a lurex boob tube and she would still have looked ready for lunch at Hyannisport. She was the ultimate Chic covergirl.
It was a two-day shoot and the problems started with the very first picture. We hadn’t been able to get any of the big department stores to agree to us shooting in their luggage departments – they were too worried about security – so I’d got a discount warehouse down on Orchard Street to agree to it instead.
The guys there, full-on religious Hasidic Jews, were really nice and pleased to let us do it in return for a plug for the shop, which was fine with me because it was a great place to buy luggage. They knew me, because Ursula had taken me there to buy my school trunk and I’d bought my cases there ever since, which made Nivek’s attitude to them all the more terrible.
He had walked into that place with an expression on his face like he had just stepped in dog doo. He stalked round with his arms folded, not saying anything until he finally came back to where I was standing next to old Mr Himmelfarb, who had just been asking after my mother – actually Ursula, but I didn’t disabuse him – and hoping she had her health.
‘You are joking,’ was Nivek’s first remark, completely ignoring Mr Himmelfarb. I said nothing, because I was actually speechless. Nivek still had plenty to say. ‘I mean you really cannot be serious about this. What exactly am I supposed to do with this place? I mean – look at it. Lino tiles. Horrendo.’ Then he snorted.
‘Excuse me, Mr Himmelfarb,’ I said to him. ‘I think I need to have a word with Mr Thims here, would you excuse us?’ I steered Nivek out on to Orchard Street, which he looked up and down with the same curled lip he had treated the interior of Himmelfarb Brothers to – we were south of Delancey, not the newly trendy part of it. ‘What exactly is your problem, Nivek?’ I said in the most measured tones I could muster.
‘What is your problem, that you think this is a good place to shoot a fashion picture? It’s so gross!’
‘It’s a luggage store, Nivek,’ I said, dearly wanting to call him Kevin. ‘We’re doing a narrative story here, remember? About packing and going on holiday? We’re not doing landscapes, or interiors, the backgrounds are just settings for the story. The clothes and the model are what will make the pictures, and I think the functional appearance of this shop will add to the shot. The model will pop out against it.’
He sighed, like I was a complete idiot. ‘Emily, Emily, Emily,’ he said, shaking his head and actually patting me on the shoulder. ‘There is a basic minimum aesthetic below which you cannot expect me to work.’
‘Oh really?’ I said, removing his hand and dropping it. ‘Well, go tell that to Bruce Weber and Corinne Day. I’m going back in there to apologize to Mr Himmelfarb and then I’m going into the location van to see how Paul is getting on with the make-up. Meanwhile, why don’t you have a think about where you think we should do this shot – seeing as no department store will let us in and Bee insists on the opening picture being in a shop buying
the luggage. It was her idea.’
That was a total lie, but I was desperate. Mr Himmelfarb was charming about it.
‘We are in retail,’ he said, shrugging. ‘All day we see people, some nice, some not so nice. You do what you want. No problem.’
I did some yoga breathing on my way to the van, reminding myself not to be indiscreet in front of Amica. I could retain my professional discretion even if Nivek couldn’t. And there was the hairdresser to consider too. Mitch was a buddy of Nivek’s, that he had insisted we used – against my wishes – and I was well aware that anything I said would get straight back to Mr Attitude.
‘OK, hon?’ said Paul, instantly picking up that I wasn’t. ‘Amica and I were just talking about magical realism in Latin American literature.’ He winked at me over her head.
‘Oh, that’s great,’ I said. ‘I love Isabel Allende. Wow, you look gorgeous, Amica. Really fresh. The hair’s great too, thanks Mitch.’
I hated it actually, but we could sort that out later. At that moment I couldn’t take any more friction.
‘Everything OK, out there?’ said Paul, raising an eyebrow meaningfully at me. He’d already sussed that Nivek was not going to be a joy to work with. He’d asked to see Paul’s book before the shoot for one thing. No one asked to see Paul’s book any more. When you directed the make-up for Antonello Ferrucci’s shows and advertising you were way beyond that.
‘Oh marvellous,’ I said, crossing my eyes. Amica had hers closed while her mascara dried, so she couldn’t see me, and hairdresser Mitch was absorbed in a bodybuilding magazine. ‘Nivek is just sussing out the location.’ I pretended to strangle myself.
‘OK,’ said Paul, laughing with his eyes. ‘I see. Well, we’re doing famously here and we’ll be ready whenever you need us. Hey, Ami baby?’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Whatever.’
I decided the best way for me to deal with Nivek was to have as little to do with him as possible. So I sent my loyal right-hand girl Gemma out to talk to his assistant.
‘Go and ask him what the silly fucker wants to do,’ I said to her, just outside the van. ‘I’m going to get Amica ready in the first look anyway.’
Handbags and Gladrags Page 21
