Satin Dreams

by Davis, Maggie;

  “Get off my back, will you?” Jack Storm fixed his international development director with a stern look. “Gilles is going to design beautiful numbers for the ‘fantaisie.’ Trust me. I’m also going to take care of the princess at the same time.”

  “She’s not pulling publicity like she was supposed to.” Peter Frank had never been high on their royal apprentice designer; Candy Dobbs had already filled him in on the details of Princess Stephanie’s stint at Dior. “Nobody’s going to be interested until the princess actually designs some clothes, and that’s months away. If ever,” he added.

  “You haven’t been listening, Peter.” Jackson Storm tapped the surface of his desk with a pencil lightly. “Our Greek moneyman has his beautiful dolly, Alix, to play with, which keeps him happy and out of our hair. Gilles is going to design a fantaisie of the white birds, which is going to make Gilles more famous than Christian Lacroix. And the princess we can definitely deal with,” he said firmly. “Princess Jackie’s going to make us a bundle of money, too.”

  Peter Frank looked skeptical. “Jack, look, uh—a lot of people say Prince Medivani had her in a drug treatment facility here in Paris the early part of this year.” He plunged on. “I’m not saying she’s into drugs now, but she’s only, what—seventeen? So her record’s not exactly clean, is it?”

  “Peter, let me remind you we’re dealing with Prince Medivani’s own PR person, a smart chick, Brooksie Goodman. She’d know better than to throw us a curve like that,” Jack assured him. “Lighten up! Think positively, Pete. We’ve got it made here, everything’s working out just like I said. No problems at all!”

  Ten

  WOMEN’S WEAR DAILY, December 17th:

  New York—In answer to the question, What will fashion mogul Jackson Storm’s recently acquired couture house, the Maison Louvel, do for a spring showing this year? the Paris office of Jackson Storm International has just announced the focus has been shifted to a fall-winter haute couture collection, traditionally shown in Paris in July.

  Dropping a spring line from the couture house’s schedule leaves the way open for Storm’s just-announced mid-winter extravaganza, Le Bal des Oiseaux Blancs, featuring one-of-a-kind costumes designed by the Maison Louvel’s new couturier, Gilles Vasse. Vasse, formerly assistant designer at Rudi Mortessier, was winner of last year’s Prix de d’Or of the French Haute Couture Award as Most Promising Young Designer.

  According to Jackson Storm in a telephone interview from the yet-to-be-opened Maison Louvel in Paris, the masked ball will benefit the Heart Fund of France and the Musicians’ Retirement Home at Brest. Entertainment will feature music by the Paris Chamber Orchestra, the British rock group Motley Crue, and Lester Lanin’s Orchestra of Washington, D.C. The event will be held in mid-February in the grand foyer of the Paris Opera. The international invitations list will be handled by Prince and Princess de Polignac-Brun, co-chairpersons of the French Heart Fund.

  Particularly exciting are the creations to be displayed in a special son et lumière fashion show. Jackson Storm emphasizes the costumes are “fantasy interpretations” of exotic bird themes, including the white owl, Japanese crane, egret, etc., etc.

  Jackson Storm International’s purchase last year of the old fashion house in the rue des Benedictines created considerable controversy, with established Paris couturiers divided as to its impact on French haute couture. The recent announcement that Princess Jacqueline Medivani, teenage daughter of Balkan Prince Alessio Medivani, had been added to the staff as “assistant designer” (a position held at Dior by Princess Stephanie of Monaco a few years ago), caused a minor sensation.

  Since then, the Jackson Storm corporation has hailed its Maison Louvel as the flagship operation of the company’s worldwide mass-market fashion empire. President Jack Storm has announced plans to develop franchise-signature couture ($10,000 and up) and mini-couture (under $10,000), as well as a lower-priced “Storm King Boutique” line.

  “Christ!” Mindy Ferragamo, just in from New York, looked around the salon floor landing. “This place is a mad-house.”

  She stood with her Vuitton carry-on luggage at her feet, a rigid figure in a gray tweed business suit, surveying the traffic surging up and down the Maison Louvel’s marble grand stairs. The porter, Abdul, descended with his son, the tall boy still in his university soccer clothes. Both men were carrying armfuls of ancient pipe from the remodeled toilet on the second floor. Nannette, the fitter, raced past them going up, answering the call of Sylvie in the cutting room.

  “Where the hell is Jack?” his vice president and CEO wanted to know.

  Recognizing a familiar voice, Candace Dobbs leaned over the second-floor railing. “Oh, God, is that really you, Mindy? When did you get in? Did you read about the fantaisie in the International Herald-Trib? It’s a disaster. We can’t get any models!”

  Mindy shoved her gold-rimmed glasses back with one finger as she peered up the stairwell. “Call Bettina or Sophie Litvak,” she said tersely.

  “The top agencies won’t return our calls!” The public relations woman started down the stairs. Months in Paris dealing with the French press and electronic media, all of them resistant to what they saw as Jackson Storm’s less-than-couth invasion, had worn pounds from Candy’s lank frame, and she looked haggard. On the second-floor landing she had to press against the wall for two delivery men carrying new cutting tables for the atelier. “We’re getting blitzed by the French,” she complained breathlessly as she reached Mindy at the foot of the stairs. “We can’t get models for the fantaisie, the opera’s being bitchy about a date—would you believe a Wednesday night?” She groaned out loud. “Nobody goes anywhere in Paris on a Wednesday night!”

  Mindy tried the door to the salon. “Where’s Jack?” she repeated as she stepped inside.

  “We’re paying a whole bunch of people,” Candy went on, trailing behind her into the half-finished showroom, “beginning with the Prince and Princess Polignac-Brun, to handle invitations and deliver the whole bon chic-bon genre, the whole French social list, also the chairman of the Heart Association, the Comte de Bonripeau. But they’re just hanging back, Mindy! I can’t put my finger on it, but the rumor is circulating that the fantaisie and the Bal des Oiseaux Blancs is a bust!”

  The small woman in the severe gray suit turned slowly in the middle of the room, surveying the jumble of furniture and unopened boxes. “Who’s ‘everybody’?”

  Candy ran her hands through her pale hair. “Mindy, Paris is worse than some goddamn small town in Ohio, the way the top names have everything locked up! You either know a few people whose families date back to King Charlemagne and they like you, or you don’t. And they don’t. And that’s it! It’s not just fashion, either,” she added, a note of hysteria tingeing her voice, “it’s the whole enchilada—business, society, the government—”

  “Two months is not enough to put this thing together,” Mindy interrupted. “I told Jack so.”

  “We should have had at least six months.” Candy was relieved to know someone as powerful as Jack Storm’s second-in-charge agreed with her. “What did he say?”

  The other woman gave her a chilly smile. “Jack said do it anyway.”

  There was a storm of voices from outside the salon. The natural amplifier of the grand staircase brought a shrill, juvenile screaming in French, an infuriated tenor answering her in the same language. Followed by several alarming crashes. Then a door slamming. And another.

  Candace Dobbs had turned pale. Her eyes sought Mindy Ferragamo pleadingly. “Oh, God, please don’t let them do anything horrible. Not while Jack’s gone and Peter Frank is in New York and I’m here all alone.”

  The vice president was listening intently. “The princess?” she asked at the end of another piercingly vitriolic exchange. When Candy nodded, she said, “They sound like they’re going to kill each other.”

  Candy nodded again, hurriedly. “She’s the apprentice designer, you know, that’s what we told her she could be.” She start
ed toward the salon door and the stairs. “But no one ever asked Gilles.”

  “Trini came back with me, that should help.” Trini was Jackson Storm’s secretary. “Where is Jack?” Mindy asked for the third time.

  The public relations woman turned on the landing and waited for her. The shouted argument upstairs was growing, if possible, even more violent. “Oh—Jack,” Candace said. “That’s another story.”

  The journey by train took longer than expected, even though the Paris-Lyon express moved at up to one hundred miles per hour. Peering out the window of the first-class coach, Jack Storm saw the rolling countryside south of Paris flash by under a cold blue-gray winter sky, the vestiges of dirty snow like a retreating beachhead as they moved south.

  He’d grown tired of reading the International Edition of the Herald-Tribune and his copy of Time. Although the French train had been advertised as having a dining car and Jack had looked forward to an elegant meal like those he’d seen in films about the Orient Express, the railway system had taken its cue from the cost-cutting Americans and offered only a lunch cart pushed down the aisle by an ancient, uniformed attendant.

  With a sigh, he settled back in his seat with a sandwich of jambon et fromage to watch an attractive pair of young Frenchwomen opposite. The railway lunch cart had a few redeeming features. There was fresh fruit, an excellent Breton pate, and bottles of vintage Bordeaux, even a split of respectable champagne, nicely chilled. But it was still a damned far cry from the elegant dining he’d had in mind when he’d chosen the train. He could have chartered a jet at Orly, he reminded himself, and made the trip in a fraction of the time.

  The girls across the aisle were quite a sight, both sloe-eyed brunettes with the rather brittle self-awareness that one found in French women. His lack of French annoyed him slightly, as they seemed to be discussing him. He lifted his glass of Bordeaux in a gracious toast to youth and beauty, and smiled. They looked away, bending their heads over something in a magazine.

  Jack felt an unpleasant pang. Jesus, he told himself testily, don’t panic just because a pair of young broads have given you the chill. French ones, at that.

  He leaned forward to see his reflection in the train window. He was wearing a suit he particularly liked, a Cardin silk and wool mixture, a rich fabric, well worth the rather exhorbitant price he’d paid for it. He’d just had his weekly shape and cut at the barber shop in the Plaza Athenee, by one of the best men’s haircutters in Paris. He looked pretty damned good. Nothing had changed.

  Except the French chicks across the aisle, he thought with another burst of irritation. Who’d frozen him when he’d toasted them with a glass of wine.

  Of course, they didn’t know who he was, Jack reminded himself. And he’d admit he was spoiled; he was used to women throwing themselves at him, at the internationally known Storm King of mass-market fashion, the way they did at movie stars. It was silly, but he’d often been told he resembled Cary Grant. Even once, God forbid, remembering back a few years, Rock Hudson.

  When the lunch cart returned, Jack stuffed the remains of his sandwich and the bottle of Bordeaux into the garbage container the attendant held, and slumped back in his seat. Peter Frank should have been making this trip with him, because he wasn’t all that familiar with their French textile mill. Jackson Storm International had acquired De Brissac Frères over a year ago for its supply of rare quality silk fabrics. It was ironic that originally the mills had been their acquisition target. In the process of buying out his silk supplier, Jackson Storm had acquired an assortment of assets: some St. Tropez development property, an apartment building in Uzes, and an ancient, forgotten Paris couture house, the Maison Louvel.

  And that was how it had all started.

  When Jackson Storm left the train at Lyon, the air was cold, but there was no snow on the ground, for which he was thankful. Taking a taxi from the railroad station, he stared through the light drizzle, remembering his first sight of De Brissac Frères mills two years ago. Then, when he was still considering the purchase, he’d been reminded of French films his wife Marianna dragged him to at Manhattan art movie houses. The setting: some time before World War Two. The cast of characters: semi-aristocrats who’d had a monopoly on the silk industry by royal grant for two-hundred years. The plot, naturally, revolved around the mystery of how they continued to produce unique silk fabrics since 1939.

  The textile consultants called in from the United States to assess the plant had, after six months and $175,000 of Jackson Storm International money, advised leaving everything in place. Although no new machinery had been added for fifty years, the alternative—tearing down the spinning mills and weaving mills, and rebuilding from scratch—was too expensive. Besides, the French were doing very well with their antique operation. As long as the exquisite custom-made silks for the Paris fashion industry continued to bring a respectable profit, the American evaluation team recommended keeping the current management, taking a reasonably hard line with the French unions, and repairing the plant machinery with the hairpins, chewing gum, or whatever other ingredients it looked like the Frenchies were using.

  Jack met the de Brissacs, father and son, in the courtyard of the spinning mill. Louis de Brissac, president of the silk mill company, in pinstripe suit, his plant supervisors in long white lab coats, repeated the same tour Jack had taken during that initial visit two years ago. They inspected the loom rooms where the jacquards, brocades, and metallic-shot taffetas were woven in gray yardage, then the dyeing rooms where the fabric was converted to glowing colors. Last were the finishing rooms, where the final chemicals were applied.

  Jack was unusually silent during the tour. He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. Ms. Brooksie Goodman’s idea of something as innovative as ultra-suede had been hanging in his mind for weeks. A seminal idea wanting to come, if not to full flower, at least to some sort of viable sprouting.

  Unfortunately, Jack was having trouble with the language barrier. Only Louis de Brissac and his son spoke passable English, and the son translated for the considerable crowd of management and engineering people following them. Secondhand information was always less than satisfactory.

  They spent a few minutes in the plant canteen drinking small cups of espresso coffee with the head of the spinners’ union. Then, after a tour through old-fashioned laboratories with cracked sinks, Jack finally asked about experimental fabrics.

  “Unfortunately, there have been no experiments since the early sixties.” Louis de Brissac, Jr. had a degree in textile engineering from Duke University. “My grandfather was the last to do anything, when we faced the first flood of competition from the Japanese. But innovation couldn’t bring back our markets.” He looked at his father. “Besides, laminated fabrics were extremely expensive to produce.”

  “What laminated fabrics?” They had walked through the rain to the warehouses. Jack looked around the half-empty gloom of the shed that, it had been explained, stored discontinued fabrics. “What were they, knits?”

  “For a silk mill?” The younger de Brissac smiled. “Oh no, nothing like that.”

  His father tugged at his coat sleeve. “Idiot, qu’es ce que tu fais?” the older man said in a stage whisper. “Il ne veut rien savoir de lamination!”

  Young de Brissac shrugged him off and turned back to Jack Storm. “That was about the extent of our new ideas. The laminates.”

  But the president of De Brissac Frères seized his son’s sleeve again, urgently. “Je te demande que veux tu faire, nous ruiner?”

  Jackson Storm moved ahead, down through warehouse canyons made of towering stacks of boxed cloth. “Okay, so what was it,” he said pleasantly, “if it wasn’t a knit?”

  “Lace.” The young Frenchman glanced at his father again, frowning. “Really quite lovely handmade Dendermonde lace from Belgium, laminated to fine silk gauze. It could,” he said rather hesitantly, “do everything lace couldn’t do, drape—float, a dream fabric. A mix of opaque handmade lace and transparent silk.�
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  “What happened?”

  “My grandfather abandoned it just as the last problems were being solved. The Japanese were chasing us out of the brocade market. We had to retrench in that area, so we couldn’t spend any more money.”

  “That’s too bad.” Jack lifted the lid of a cardboard box marked peau de soie and looked at the somewhat musty bolts of silk cloth inside. “I’d like to take a look at it.”

  Behind them, the weaving room supervisor and one of the De Brissac engineers were talking loudly. “Mais, ce tissu n’est pas stable,” one engineer said.

  The supervisor shot Jackson Storm a cryptic look. “Non, seulement avec du sodium dans le detachant.”

  Jack heard them, but only as a distraction, since he couldn’t understand the language. “I don’t suppose,” he said, raising his voice, “you have any of it around?”

  “Have we got any of it here?” The younger de Brissac looked as though the day he’d waited for had finally arrived. “Ah, M’sieu Storm, we have a whole roomful!”

  The high-top sneakers were Keds, carefully dirtied, very ordinary American-brand shoes. But immeasurably ultra-now in Paris where one could have one’s choice, but with only half the chic, of expensive German, British, and French street styles. The Keds were part of the uniform look among the jeunesse dorée, Paris’s “gilded youth”: grimy high-tops, elasticized ski pants that clung as tightly as long johns, an outsized cashmere pullover from Hermes under a French Army fatigue shirt. Princess Jacqueline’s sullen young face looked out from under a mop of springy, dark hair cut like a depression-era boy’s, the forelock held from her face with a trendy pink plastic hair clip.

  The princess drummed the Keds against the atelier floor and yelled, “But he told me I couldn’t draw! Gilles is such a little shit, he hates me! He’s not going to let me do anything!” For the benefit of Karim, who was standing in the doorway of the atelier with a forgotten push broom in his hand, the princess repeated it in French. With exactly the same heated nuances.