Pavka had come to the United States in 1936, at the age of eighteen, a Berliner whose family had been wise enough to leave Germany. He had spent the war in the Army, landing on Utah Beach on D-Day, officially a translator and unofficially, as the Army fought its way up to Paris, a procurer of milk, hard cider, and fresh meat in return for blankets, soap, and sugar. Even an occasional entire jeep had been known to disappear along the route of Pavka’s barter service.
“Go to it, Pavka,” Zachary Amberville had told the diminutive, dapper man who was only five years older than he was. “Use any photographers you want, any models, any quality paper, any printer. We have too much competition. We can’t hold back, we simply have to give the reader more than anybody else.”
Pavka worked hand-in-hand with the fashion editor, another unknown named Zelda Powers. Zachary had spotted her toiling away in a back room at Norman Norell’s—for even the great Norell could not design without buttons—and he had been struck by an immediate appreciation of her eccentric, brilliant, purely personal style. She was from Chicago, a passionate student of fashion who would work at anything as long as it kept her near the world in which clothes were created.
“Listen, Zelda, you don’t know anything about being the editor of a fashion magazine,” Zachary said to her. “That’s why I want you. Give me the land of magazine no one else has ever put out. The kind you’d want yourself. No imitations … strictly original. Do anything, anything you want, so long as you keep the advertisers happy and show their clothes the minimum amount of times you have to. Remember who’s in your audience—and give them dreams they can afford, but give it to them your way.”
Pavka and Powers, according to people who watched the progress of fashion magazines, were single-handedly responsible for the unexpected emergence of Style as a force and a presence. But people who had met Zachary Amberville knew otherwise.
By 1951 Zachary had made his fifth million. The first one had been due to Trimming Trades and Style, the others to Style and particularly Seven Days. He founded the weekly in 1950 with the large size and photo format of Life and Look. But with a difference. He had made his own studies of the reading habits of the American woman and he had become convinced that there wasn’t a female so high-minded that she wouldn’t read a dozen movie magazines in private if she were sure no one would see her doing it. He understood the deep appeal of gossip columns and the power of men, like Walter Winchell, who seemed to take the public behind the scenes. He realized that there would always be a society column in every newspaper, no matter how much some people deplored it.
Average people, who were almost everybody, wanted to know about non-average people, wanted to know everything about them, Zachary told himself as he walked the streets of Manhattan. He visualized a big shining weekly magazine with lots of color pictures; not heavy with text and letters and editorials, not concerned with farmers or football or Middle America, not anxious about the rest of the world and its miseries, not slightly to the right like Life or slightly to the left like Look, but completely apolitical and resolutely unserious. A magazine that would tell you what had been going on in the last seven days in the lives of glamorous, exciting, famous people, and tell it for an American audience in a way they’d never been told before, in a way that was irreverent, that didn’t keep any secrets that its libel lawyers didn’t say it had to keep, that held no man or woman sacred, yet realized that movie stars and royalty were more interesting than anyone else even if the United States was a democracy. Especially because it was a democracy.
Zachary hired as many of the best writers in America as he could find to craft the short articles that accompanied the many photographs. “Don’t give me literature,” he told them, “give me a first-rate blazing read and give it to me with guts … we’re not a nation of intellectuals, as you may have noticed. It’s too bad, but facts are facts. I want it fascinating, I want it red-hot and I want it yesterday.”
Pavka Mayer took over the art direction of Seven Days and made it so piss-elegant that no one who read it noticed that it hardly appealed to their finer instincts. The world’s best photographers were delighted to buzz off to all the corners of the world for higher prices than were paid by Life or its European rival, Paris Match. Seven Days was a wild, runaway, classic hit that became a national addiction almost overnight.
Late in 1951 Zachary Amberville decided to visit London. He’d been working too hard and as each of his European bureaus opened he’d missed the excitement of hiring bureau chiefs and seeing them get under way. London was his most important foreign bureau, except for the Paris office of Style, so he planned to stop there first. His executive secretary suggested that it might even be a good idea, while he was in England, to get a haircut and have some suits made.
“That’s not even a hint, honeybunch.”
“It wasn’t meant to be, Mr. Amberville, it’s not suitable for a man of your position to look the way you do. You’re not even thirty and you could be a very handsome man if you cared to be,” Miss Briny said with determination.
“I’m clean, aren’t I? And so’s my shirt. Even my shoes are polished. What’s your problem?”
“A secretary is only as distinguished as the man she works for. You’re undermining my position in the Executive Secretaries’ Lunch Club, Mr. Amberville. Everyone else’s boss has his suits made to order on Savile Row, he goes to the St. Regis for a haircut at least every ten days, his shoes are made by Lobb but you … you don’t even go to Barney’s,” she complained tartly. “You don’t belong to any exclusive clubs, you eat a sandwich at your desk instead of going to the best restaurants, you’re never photographed in nightclubs with beautiful girls—I just don’t know how to explain you.”
“Did you ever tell them what you make?”
“Overpaying your secretary isn’t what makes a man chic,” Miss Briny sniffed.
“Honeybunch, your values are screwed up. But I’ll think about that haircut.”
Zachary refused to justify his private life to his secretary. It was none of her business. The occupations of a well-known bachelor around town were his idea of nothing to do. He didn’t have the time or the interest. He knew a number of women, damned attractive ones, but somehow he’d never fallen in love. Too selfish? Too preoccupied with his magazines? Too cynical? No, why try to kid himself, he was too fucking romantic. Somewhere in the back of his mind there was a dream girl, and if that wasn’t pure corn, what was? She was gentle, pure, idealistic; hardly a type who flourished in Manhattan. She was as unreal as she was beautiful and one day he’d get her out of his mind and settle for a gorgeous, sensible broad with a sense of humor. He needed a wife, if only to protect him from his secretary.
4
Nobody in her noble family could claim to understand the Honorable Lily Davina Adamsfield but they were as proud of her as if she’d been a rare portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, passed with reverence from one generation to another, the family treasure. She was the only child of the nineteenth Baronet and second Viscount Evelyn Gilbert Basil Adamsfield and Viscountess Maxime Emma Adamsfield, born the Honorable Maxime Emma Hazel. Her many cousins, male and female, were perfectly upstanding, healthy and appropriate, and they did the expected things. They cared for the family estates, they hunted, fished, collected, gardened, took an interest in good works and married the obviously appropriate young members of their own world with whom they would have quite satisfactory and appropriate children.
Ah, but Lily! Like so many of her friends, she had started to go to dancing school at the age of four. Miss Vacani’s was and is the proper institution to which little aristocratic girls, and junior members of the Royal Family, are routinely sent to learn to waltz and polka. Almost all of them pass through Miss Vacani’s as routinely as they learn to mount a horse. But Lily turned out to be one of the very few, the unpredictable yet constant few, who become utterly possessed by the ballet training from the very first moment. There is nothing any parent can do to quench this passion, as they l
earn in time, often to their regret.
At eight Lily had auditioned for the Royal Ballet School which she attended after school three times a week. She grasped ballet to her as if it were a vocation, as if she had had a visitation.
“If we were Catholics,” her mother had said to her father, “that girl would be counting the days until she could enter a convent.”
“She certainly isn’t one for chatter,” her father had grumbled. “You’d almost think she already belonged to one of those orders that take a vow of silence.”
“Now darling, that’s not entirely fair. Lily just has a problem expressing herself—she’s never been an easy talker. Perhaps that’s why dancing is so important to her,” Lady Maxime had replied soothingly.
When she was eleven Lily was able to audition for and be accepted by the Royal Ballet Upper School where she could combine her academic and ballet studies. Her life was totally absorbed by her work and, racing from one class to another with her schoolmates, she never minded that she had to renounce all the traditional activities of other girls of her background. The only human contacts in her life besides her parents were with her teachers and her fellow students and even those were limited to a necessary minimum. Lily wasn’t at the Royal to make friends with her rivals, for by the age of eight she had an almost adult understanding of the nature of the ferocious competition that rages in the world of ballet, a lifelong competition that is only interrupted when a dancer finally retires.
For years her greatest fear was that she might grow too tall to dance. If she had reached five feet seven and a half or, God help her, five feet eight, she would have outgrown her future. Her discussions with other dancers were limited to the obsessive issue of height and her second greatest fear, that she might “get an injury,” a terrible, ever-present possibility they all shared equally.
When she had completed the Upper School Lily’s teachers agreed that she had so much promise that she should study for yet another year at the school run by Sir Charles Forsythe, a great dancer and teacher who had been formed by Anthony Tudor and Frederick Aston. This additional year of training would give her the final polish that would enable her to audition most successfully for one of the great ballet companies of the world.
Lily Adamsfield had grown into a girl of exceptional beauty, with gray-blue-green eyes as changeable as opals; lunar eyes that she never stopped in front of a mirror to admire. They were there merely to be enlarged by the stylized black makeup that she wore on stage. Her lovely hands, her long fingers, existed only to extend those gestures of languor and fragility that require the strength of a stevedore to look effortless. She had tiny breasts, broad, well-defined shoulders, arms and legs that were almost too elongated in comparison to her torso but perfect for the demands of the ballet; no heaviness or extra flesh anywhere, a flat back and a neck of exceptional grace; a body that had no other function than to dance. Her naked feet, without toe shoes, looked a thousand years old.
It never occurred to Lily that she was missing the pleasures of being admired by young men, for the only males whom she thought about were her partners in class; the only criteria by which she judged them were their elevations, the number of their leaps, the security with which they gripped her waist when they lifted her. She came into occasional contact with boys of her own social world and she had difficulty in finding anything to say to them. Outside of the cloister of the world of dance she had a speaking voice that, for all its silver sweetness, was tremulous, even slightly timid.
When Lily wasn’t dressed in her rehearsal clothes, the beloved, well-worn tights, leg warmers, leotards, and sweaters that turned her into a bundle of moving rags, she had no idea what to wear. Viscountess Adamsfield, a woman of taste, chose all her clothes for her. Lily had no conversational ability, no practice at banter, nothing to say about the world of sports, of films, of new cars or horses. Any boy of her own age who was attracted by her new-moon loveliness soon gave up trying to get her to respond, or at least to pay some attention to him, and wandered off in search of a girl with more animation.
However, her parents and Lily’s many cousins had no concern about this strange swan they had nurtured. She was wonderfully different, what did it matter that she wouldn’t have any quick, worldly success as an adolescent? She would, as a matter of course, be presented at Court. It would be simply too odd for her not to make that necessary curtsy, not to have her photograph taken by Lenare, not to enter the grown-up world, but Lily drew the line at a debut, a party, a season. She had no time for any of those rituals for she was destined for glory. Indeed all their world knew that the Adamsfields’ youngest girl was going to become another Margot Fonteyn. Her devoted family was as convinced of Lily’s future as Lily was herself.
She took no credit for the conformation of the body with which she had been born but she knew that without her unquestioning, willing slavery to the almost unendurably hard work of ballet, without her unswerving determination, the mere possession of a dancer’s body would mean nothing. Her muscles and sinews and the articulations of her joints, the length of her limbs, were a lucky accident of birth. But the career of a prima ballerina was not made by a body alone, it depended on something else, something even more than talent, something in the spirit, and whatever that something was, she knew absolutely that she had it.
No one who observed the shy girl who used no makeup, who wore her long, fair hair falling carelessly around her face, who hesitated on entering a room, who avoided conversation, who walked with an unstudied, felicitous grace but kept her eyes fixed in the middle distance, could have guessed at the thirsty ambition that never was far from her thoughts. She was violently proud, viciously proud, and she carried this strong plant of pride within her as well concealed as if it were a newly conceived child.
“She’s an exceptionally accomplished performer,” the familiar voice said. “There’s no doubt that they’ll accept her at the Royal.”
Lily, on her way out of the school building, and already late for dinner, hesitated in the corridor. Sir Charles was talking to someone behind his half-closed door. Who else, she asked herself in anguish, which other girl among her classmates, her competition, would have such an easy time getting into the Royal Ballet? She had been given the lion’s share of leading female roles this past year, but evidently she must have a rival. Jane Broadhurst? Anita Hamilton? Were they good enough for Covent Garden? Both strong dancers, but that good? She stood perfectly still, waiting to hear more.
“She could try for other companies, too … even the New York City Center.” Lily clenched her fists. The second voice was that of her ballet mistress, Alma Grey. “Or perhaps Copenhagen—they need new dancers there since Laura and the other two were lured away to New York.”
The Royal Danish? Lily repeated to herself, unbelievingly. It simply was not possible. There was no one to whom such prizes should fall but her.
“Yes, Alma my dear,” she heard Sir Charles say with finality, “there really isn’t a first-rate company in the world that wouldn’t jump at Lily. Fifteen years ago, even ten, I would have said she might be too tall, at five feet and seven inches, but now that’s not a serious problem if she’s stopped growing. My regret is that she should be as good as she is …”
“Ah,” sighed the ballet mistress, “it’s heartbreaking … to come so close, so very, very close. This year she almost … yes, Charles, yes … she almost crossed that barrier. I promise you that there were moments when I prayed for her, as I watched, and then … no, I said to myself, no, it just isn’t going to happen. She has such beauty, and technically nothing is missing. Yet … somehow … that other thing, that thing we can’t put a name to, that thing that the public recognizes immediately, that lifts them out of their seats, that something just is not there.”
“I have often thought that it is a question, in some way, of personality,” Sir Charles mused.
“As for me, I don’t try to dissect it. I prefer to call it magic,” Alma Grey replied.
&n
bsp; She can dance all the second roles, in any first-rate international company,” Charles Forsythe said judiciously, “and principal roles in lesser companies.”
“Prima ballerina? I disagree. Lily will never be a prima ballerina. My dear Charles, you have to admit that there are no almost prima ballerinas,” Alma Grey said sharply.
“There are indisputable prima ballerinas and there are greater prima ballerinas who sometimes are given the ‘Assoluta’ to console them as they age, but I suppose that was wishful thinking.… There are no ‘almost’ prima ballerinas … with that I must reluctantly agree.”
“A strange metier, Charles, when you get right down to it, an unnatural sort of thing, and desperately unfair, I often think. As hard as we teach, as hard as they work, no one can really be sure until they have already devoted their youth … oh, of course there are those exceptions, the ones you know about immediately, but Lily never was one of them.”
“And just how many have you seen in your lifetime, my dear?”
“Only four, Charles, as you know perfectly well. I’m waiting for the fifth. There will always be another, one of these days.”
“Perhaps next year? Or the year after?”
“One can hope.”
Envious, Lily thought, fleeing into the street so blindly that she was almost hit by a taxi. Old, disgustingly old, dried out, vile, pitiful, ignorant and above all envious, pure pig envy of her youth, her talent, a talent neither of them had ever had, those two old people raving on about something they admitted they couldn’t even find words to explain, faking crocodile tears, gloating to each other, presuming to judge her, only too thrilled to be able to say she wasn’t good enough at the same time they had to admit, were literally forced to admit that any ballet company in the world would want her.
I'll Take Manhattan Page 5
