The It Girls

by Karen Harper

  From backstage, she peeked out through the curtain. Her four young male assistants, whom Cosmo jokingly referred to as her acolytes, had everyone seated. Her acolytes were all so eager to learn design, to have their names on fashions of their own someday, but today they were serving as ushers to escort the guests to their proper places. All attired alike, they enhanced this large room as much as did the newly done decor.

  Before Lucile stepped out onto the stage in front of the blue silk curtain to introduce the different ages of fashion in a woman’s life, she glanced down at her notes: the Schoolgirl, the Debutante, the Fiancée, the Bride, the Wife, the Hostess, and the Dowager. Her seven goddesses, each nearly six feet tall, were well prepared to show her new designs off so alluringly. Despite being upset by Elinor’s letter, she was ready too.

  Applause swept at her like a wave as she stepped out before the curtain. The scent of roses and lilies in huge bouquets on both sides of the stage nearly made her swoon as she smiled and began.

  “Welcome to Maison Lucile for our mannequin parade to share with you, entitled The Seven Ages of Woman.” Her voice quavered a bit, perhaps because she was trying to project it. My, she was nervous and hadn’t planned on that, but she went on, “The early sections of the Seven Ages we will present today have just a few frocks, the later sections, many, but is that not the way our lives blossom? Just like each one of you, each gown you will see today has its own name and personality, evoking emotions. See if you can tell which are ‘When Passion’s Thrall Is New,’ ‘Give Me Your Heart,’ ‘The Sighing Sound of Lips Unsatisfied,’ and ‘A Frenzied Song of Amorous Things,’ to name but a few. The gown I am wearing today is ‘Dreaming of the Rainbow.’” She slowly pirouetted to let them view the high-waisted, daring shimmer of pink, lilac, pale green, and orange chiffon with the intricately embroidered, beadwork, and Belgium lace at the hemline and the garland of silken and pearl roses round the neckline.

  Several oohs and aahs and another round of applause washed over her. Lillie Langtry in the second row was nodding and clapping louder than the rest. Lucile smiled and bowed, wishing Elinor were here to see and hear all this. They had once teased each other that Lillie was going far, that she had that difficult-to-define quality they called “It,” part charm, part charisma, which sometimes boiled down to just plan animal magnetism.

  Elinor had cheekily claimed she felt she had “It” when she was lying nearly naked on her most recent tiger skin. Today, Lucile felt she had “It,” too.

  CHAPTER Nineteen

  There you are, at last!” Lucile cried and popped up from the sofa when Elinor came in the door of her small suite in the Plaza Hotel. “So busy you could not meet your big sister at the pier? I simply had to come visit you in New York when I received your long, excited letters.”

  Elinor dropped her fox stole on a chair, and they kissed on both cheeks. “I’m glad you arrived safely and hope it was a good crossing. Sorry I’m late, but I was at a luncheon in my honor arranged by Emily Post. She’s quite the social arbiter here. She writes about etiquette, something I agreed with her is important. I didn’t say so, but especially in this country, the so-called gentlemen could use a bit of polish. All rush, rush and money, money.”

  “Yes, thank you for asking about the voyage,” Lucile said, frowning at the gush of words, but Elinor didn’t notice her sarcasm. “From what you’ve written, you are always busy.”

  “I just couldn’t change these plans today. Reporters were at the event from New York Journal and New York World. Those papers are known for some sensational stories, so I supposed Three Weeks is cannon fodder, but with this novel, I’m starting to learn that any promotion is still promotion.”

  “I’ve always told you that, and I’ve proved it too. Women are coming to me in droves for fashions,” Lucile said, annoyed that Elinor had not asked her how things were at home. “But your letters with such detail make it sound as if you have another novel in the making.” She sat back on the sofa, and Elinor perched beside her and pulled out her long hat pins.

  “Always. Lucile, it’s made me famous here! Mrs. Elinor Glyn, authoress!”

  “I hope some of that admiration spills over to our own countrymen,” Lucile said as Elinor spun her big-brimmed merry widow–style hat onto the floor, no less. Lucile tried to ignore that despite the fact she’d seen her popular creation on the ship and in the streets of New York. “You realize I received, just in time, your last post about not having room for my staff to stay here in your suite. I’ve put my secretary, Miss Francatelli, and poor Simpson in a room just down the street, but how to do without my lady’s maid on-site? If she’s late some morning, I may have to borrow your Williams. Someone who’s been dubbed ‘the best dressed woman in the world’ can’t go about looking slapdash.”

  “Ha! As if you ever would. But speaking of that, I have found the most wonderful treatments to preserve youth and beauty. A facial elixir called ‘The Secrets of El-Zair’ is simply all the rage here among some of the social elite. It’s part of a belief in what is called ‘New Thought.’ We must always think of and send out ‘golden lights’ in our thoughts, and the thought force will help you to obtain anything you desire.”

  Lucile gave her a narrow-eyed stare. “I’m afraid that all sounds a bit hobgoblin to me, like those old fairy tales full of magic you used to be obsessed with.”

  “I’ll say no more. I didn’t really expect you to understand. And how is Cosmo doing, as they say here, holding down the fort?”

  “I miss him terribly already. He’s overseeing things in Scotland and London, but, of course, my staff is highly capable of forging ahead without me for a short while.”

  “You’ll be here a short while?”

  “Don’t sound too hopeful. I intend to find a place for a Lucile’s New York while I’m here, and my old friend Elsie de Wolfe is going to help me.”

  “I’ve seen her here and there. You’re right to choose and use her, as it seems she knows everyone from way back, but then she is a native New Yorker. I recall she bought oodles of clothes from you when she was on her dollar-princess husband quest, but she just didn’t find a suitable title—or man, did she? I swear, Lucile, no man would have her if he really knew her,” Elinor said, leaning closer and lowering her voice as if someone would hear. “You do know that about her—don’t you?”

  “Yes, I know she prefers women. She’s made no secret of it since she has so many sapphic friends.”

  “She wasn’t pretty enough to find a man either, though I heard someone say just last week she had such willpower that she could persuade you that she was beautiful. Well, her stint on the stage here made her known not for her so-so acting but for her fabulous clothing, some of it probably of your making. I’d ask her for advice in a minute. Actually, remember when Lillie said to me, ‘Go west’? Well, Elsie and my publisher here have said the same, and I’ll be heading out west, clear to Nevada and California this spring.”

  “What an adventure! I intend to conquer this continent too, only with my designs.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask if you smell faint smoke in here?” Elinor asked, squinting at the room and fanning her face.

  “I don’t even smell it anymore,” Lucile said, leaning away to the end table to produce an ivory taboret she opened. She plucked out and held up a long cigarette.

  “You—you smoke? But you always had a conniption if someone lit up near your materials or gowns.”

  “Straw tipped so the smoke isn’t as strong,” she said, holding it out. “Quite calms my nervous demeanor sometimes. Well, Cosmo smokes an occasional cigar or pipe, so he doesn’t mind, and it’s the rage among the uppers. In London, I also carry what’s called a Bo-Peep walking stick with a crook on the end. I tell my assistants and my sewers, fitters, and the rest of the staff that I carry it so I can pull them back from disaster like a little flock of sheep if they stray. And I’ve taken to wearing ropes of pearls over my gowns, not to mention I always take my little Pekes and pugs to wo
rk. I adore having them about my feet, though I suppose, the others have to watch where they step. You do know Queen Victoria always had pet dogs hiding under her skirts? All that is my persona, Elinor, and you have yours with your many spoken and written golden thoughts.”

  “And you think I’m long-winded? Well, at least you didn’t bring your little dogs.”

  “But just like Elsie and you, I brought bags of ambition. I say, do you have anything to drink round here or can we order something up? Here we are in New York with new worlds to conquer, and a toast has become our tradition.”

  “Yes, as long as it isn’t imported brandy. Clayton nearly bathes in it, and it might as well be rotgut. It’s ruining him, that is, ruining him more.”

  “I’m sorry. Really, I am,” Lucile said, reaching out to touch Elinor’s arm.

  “I too, but I’m happy to be away from him, even if he’s off again on one of his first-class travel adventures. Mother will keep an eye on him, and I pray he won’t make a fool of himself in front of our daughters. So, shall I order up some good Scotch whisky in honor of your Scottish husband, and we’ll drink to your better marriage than mine?”

  Despite the fact they’d been subtly at each other since Elinor walked in, Lucile tugged her closer and hugged her. “Sorry, Nellie,” she said, “but you carry on with style and aplomb through it all.”

  “Well, we aren’t our own ‘It Girls’ for nothing!”

  Elsie de Wolfe exuded confidence and cleverness. The one time Cosmo had met her in London, he’d said she reminded him of a “house on fire.” Today she was taking Lucile in a hired hackney to see a building on fashionable West Thirty-Sixth Street that Elsie was sure would do for a New York Lucile’s.

  “But the key to self-advertisement here will be not the name Maison Lucile or New York Lucile’s, but Lady Duff-Gordon,” Elsie insisted. “Please trust me on this. Americans are simply mad for English titles. It will pull them right in. It would be worth the money to hire a local publicist, too, instead of thinking everything up yourself. You are in a different world here, you know.”

  “So Elinor says. But if you send your friends, the shop will prosper under any name,” Lucile told her with a smile.

  My, the traffic is busy here, she thought. They might as well have been near Hyde Park, but things got calmer when they turned off Park Avenue onto a more residential street. Now was as good a time as any to ask her friend the big question. “Would you like to invest in my New York shop, Elsie?”

  “Believe it or not, I’m living a bit on the edge. Despite family money, I’m hardly being frugal to have my daily open-door tea times and to help keep up the Washington Square home. I was paid a pretty penny to decorate the Colony Club here—it’s the first women’s club in the city. I’ll take you there another day. But I just cannot tie up too much capital right now. However, Lady Duff-Gordon,” she said with a little laugh that showed her large, uneven teeth, “I can find you several investors, I promise.”

  “Of course, Cosmo and I will put money in, but I would be ever so grateful if you could. I’ll make it up to you with some new frocks.”

  “Speaking of that, will you be able to design enough frocks to open a shop here soon? If you take a lease out on this place—there,” she said, pointing at what she’d described earlier as a gothic brownstone town house. “You’ll need to get it decorated, staffed, and inventoried soon to make it more than pay for itself in this fashionable district, of course.”

  “Oh, it’s lovely. Reminds me of my second shop in London. Today, New York, and soon—Paris! I can’t wait to see the inside.”

  But suddenly, she recalled that long-ago day that dear Cosmo had taken her into her first shop she could let. She supposed that neither Elinor, with her disappointment in Clayton, nor Elise, with her disdain for men, cared to hear one word about her love for Cosmo, but, indeed absence was making her heart grow fonder. How she wished he were here to assess the possibilities—and the finances. As they disembarked with the driver’s help, the horse stamped and nodded as if he knew this was the right place too.

  “Once I look inside, I’ll have to consult my husband,” she told Elsie. “But it looks perfect. And if it is, give me two months back in London to design at least one hundred American styles and fetch my mannequins and we’ll take the town!”

  “I think we Americans call it painting the town red.”

  “There won’t be many shades of red in a new spring American collection, I think,” Lucile said with a little laugh. “As for the interior of this handsome house, I’m planning on dove-gray walls and a rose room for lingerie and lots of gardenias for the first parade here. I swear, I’m phasing out that pouter pigeon-breasted silhouette that people liked so much and tapering the lines and—well, let’s go inside, and then I’ll take you to that restaurant you mentioned to celebrate. What was its name again?”

  “Delmonico’s. And I bet my bottom dollar we’ll find at least two or three of the investors I have in mind eating luncheon there.”

  Cosmo, my dear love,

  I will be coming home soon now that I have financing for the new Lady Duff-Gordon Shop. I will be in a whirl to design enough for a new American collection and then hurry back with the goddesses to show my work. But I must tell you that Elinor and I have had an opportunity to meet the American President, Theodore Roosevelt, at the White House in Washington, no less!

  However, I believe you would have done better with him than I, for he is a sportsman too. And, would you believe that he went on and on about my book ‘Memories’ his wife had read? I tried to tell him that book was written by your late, departed aunt Lucie, but he seemed not to either hear that or accept it. Elinor thought it was great fun, of course, that he believed I was an author too. At any rate, I would rather be with you than with any man on earth, however well known and powerful.

  Clayton has decided to bring Mother and their girls home via the Trans-Siberian railway and not via the Pacific and America. First class, as ever, of course, but I worry that it is another sign their marriage is on shaky ground. When he arrives, do see if you can warn him about mitigating his drinking.

  And you may be right that there are sad signs he may have overspent, especially since he’s moved his family into Mother’s house in London when they are there. At least he’s given her that little house Lamberts in Essex. Worse, I have heard Elinor tell more than one person that Clayton is independently wealthy and she writes merely to amuse herself, when I know she quickly sends her royalty checks home to help support Margot and Juliet.

  I will see you soon and hope you will return with me next time to America if you are able with all you oversee at home. Meanwhile, kiss Esme for me. What a blessing that she, like us, has a happy marriage.

  Shall I claim some sort of prize from you when I return?

  Your loving wife,

  Lucile

  CHAPTER Twenty

  A man with a megaphone on board the ship kept announcing, “All ashore that’s going ashore! All ashore that’s going ashore!”

  “I wish you could go back with me, darling,” Lucile told Cosmo as they stood on the deck of her ship. “I so want you to see the new shop, and we could ‘do’ New York, as they say.” She was heading back nine weeks after her first trip there, armed with one hundred fifty new frocks for the American market and planning to make more. She had already shooed her female entourage down the deck so she and Cosmo could have some semblance of a private farewell. As others who would not be sailing vacated the vessel, she clung to his arm. “You would love the so-called newfangled cocktails they serve at parties.”

  “I would love being with you after the parties, so we could have our own private one. You’ve been so busy designing since you’ve been back, but the time we’ve had . . . Well, I will miss my ‘best-dressed woman in Europe,’ though I must say I prefer you in undress.”

  She hugged him hard. Here she was in her midforties, feeling like a young girl leaving her first beau. Yet her time home had be
en worth it. Just last week, a parade she had staged had drawn over five hundred people. She felt sad, in a way, that her sister would not be in New York, but Elinor had gone out west and that perhaps was for the best. As strange as it seemed, the more success each of them achieved, the more they argued and didn’t get on at all.

  “Next time, I promise I’ll go with you,” Cosmo vowed as they clung to each other. “I have a friend who knows J. P. Morgan, the owner of the White Star Line ships, and they’re going to build a massive ocean liner, an unsinkable one. It’s supposed to take over three thousand men to complete it in Liverpool, but it will sail out of Southampton to New York City and back. Its maiden voyage will be a great, memorable event, and he’s suggested we be there for the parties and the memories.”

  “Mm. Sounds like our kind of ship—unsinkable, like us.”

  They kissed each other again.

  “Best of luck, darling, and hurry back,” he said.

  “After Lady Duff-Gordon’s designs have conquered another country,” she told him with a smile but tears in her eyes.

  “If it wasn’t for the promises I made you before you said you’d marry me, I’d cart you off this ship right now, slung over my shoulder, like a pirate seizing a maiden, but I’m not and you’re not.”

  She watched him turn quickly away and hurry toward the canvas-covered disembarkation ramp. For once, she wished she was a character in one of Elinor’s romantic novels to be carried away.

  But she went to join her staff and wave from the railing when the ship set out.