by Nina Siegal
I was pretty sure this Phipps just wanted to eyeball me so he’d know how to spot me in a room. But I realized at my interview that he’d be my future boss, if I’d have him. He flipped through my stack of clips and clucked, “Quite a nose for news.”
Buzz Phipps had a face like a new BMW sports car: sleek aerodynamic curves and a buffed, hot-waxed patina, tested for maximum performance on scenic mountain roads, seen idling in French hamlets before quaint patisseries. Around town, I knew, Buzz kept a harem of hair-care specialists, massage therapists, manicure-pedicurists, personal trainers, wardrobe consultants, eyebrow experts, ear-and-nose-hair pluckers. And there were fashion designers and boutique managers throughout Manhattan who’d rescheduled a Rothschild to offer Buzz a fitting.
I told him I wasn’t seeking a job at The Paper.
“Nonsense” was his answer. “You’re no slouch, but working for that glossy doesn’t say so,” he added confidentially. “Even a year here would make you legit. But you should already be thinking about your career, big picture. Not just your next little scoop.”
Nothing on him moved. A Kansas-style twister couldn’t put a single hair on Buzz Phipps’s pate out of place. His blond hair cambered off his brow with a gravity-defying curl. His slacks were pressed along the fold, his fine leather belt polished black and his buckle shined. A form-fitting shirt revealed a neat thicket of brown hair just beneath his bronzed throat. His lips were ample and pink, his teeth porcelain. And his eyes were, with the aid of contacts, pale blue verging on gray.
“I’ll think it over,” I said.
On the way home, I considered my mother back in Oregon, who paid five dollars weekly for the Sunday edition. She’d moved off the farm some years back, but she still had her ideals. Even if I didn’t work for the investigative team, writing for The Paper would prove I’d made something of my life.
The next day, I told Zip I wouldn’t be able to cash his blank check after all. He leaned back in his massage recliner and turned the volume to throb. “They were smart to steal you; you’re just what they need to shake up that sleepy section. But if you ever get tired of the scholarly life, come join us again in the gutter.”
I learned quickly that my life at The Paper wasn’t going to be cush. First off, the hours were a working stiff’s. At Gotham’s Gate writers arrived at noon and milled at the water cooler till six. At The Paper, reporters started at ten, worked till ten, and called home nightly to say they were running late. Second, there were new rules I had to obey: I couldn’t accept freebies over twenty-five bills—none of the gentle exfoliating cleansers, acid-free jojobas, or aloe vera extracts that arrived on my desk by the ribboned bagful. I had to bundle those off to Goodwill. No junkets, and free tickets were allowed only if I was really writing about the event. The bigger glitch for me, though, was the almost-outright ban on unnamed sources. I couldn’t quote half my friends. It was like running a pub during prohibition: traffic only in teetotalers.
The Paper was rigorous with the facts. Everything that appeared in print had to be both true and verified. This was new territory for me. So, in my first few months on Style, I inadvertently became a star feature in the “Corrections” column, on page two. The copy desk checked stories before they ran, but if they missed the smallest fault, there were always a million amateur fact-checkers among our readership ready to point out a mistake. When the Letters desk got a call, Buzz got a call, and then I got a call, and I had to oblige with a correction.
After some months had passed like this, Buzz called me into his office and sat me down in his Aeron chair (a gift from his partner, not the manufacturer or its flack). He leaned close and produced a silver tube of L’Occitane shea butter and offered me a dab. I shook my head. I didn’t need any lubrication. If he was going to chide me, I’d take it dry.
“I want to go over something with you,” he said, taking out a marked-up copy of my most recent story on Nora Sumner, the editor in chief of the glossiest fashion glossy in town. “First off, I want to talk about a few words you’ve used here: editrix.”
“Editor, you know, but with a touch of dominatrix.”
“Oh, I get it,” Buzz said flatly. “I’m familiar with the term. That’s just not what we call one of our media colleagues. How about we go with plain old editor?”
“Sure,” I said, and swallowed.
“Okay, now. We’re talking here about a rumored affair with an unnamed millionaire fund-raiser for the Democratic Party. And this just pops up in the sidebar, unattributed.”
“It’s attributed—”
“It’s attributed to ‘the Sumner camp.’ Where, may I ask, is that? Rhinebeck?”
“It’s on good authority from two executive secretaries. They don’t even know each other. They work in different departments.”
“Hmmm. That doesn’t give us the right to call it a ‘none-too-secret dalliance.’ And meanwhile, her lawyer says she’s not seeking a divorce. We have him on the record. His statement is going to stand up against two unidentified secretaries. I suggest we scrap this sidebar altogether. There’s nothing on this loin once you remove the gristle.”
“Okay, Buzz, but I know we’ll look silly if we don’t even mention it. Everyone else in town is running it already.”
Buzz leaned back in his chair and sighed. He took the tube of L’Occitane off his desk and squeezed some yellow cream into his palm. “That’s just it. We’re not everyone else, Valerie. This paper writes the first draft of history. We can’t afford mistakes, and we can’t be putting out unverified items about any old editrix. If you get something wrong here and, by some fault of our system, it gets in print, it stays wrong. It gets reported in other papers wrong, it goes out on the Internet wrong, and then it turns up wrong in the history books. Then it’s always wrong, and it’s our fault. That’s a big burden we shoulder, but it’s one we all share.”
The way Buzz was rubbing the lotion into his hand made it seem like he was working up to something. He wielded the word wrong like a battering ram.
“So, you’re saying we need to cut that section about the affair? What if I got some more publishing world insiders?”
“I know what’s happening here,” Buzz continued. “You never worked anywhere but Gotham’s Gate, and that’s the kind of reporting you know—the kind where facts don’t ever get in the way of a good story. Maybe you had fact-checkers who were supposed to comb for flaws, but they were using their combs for their bangs. Gotham’s Gate is as full of mistakes as a colander is full of holes. I knew all this when I hired you, and I blame myself for not taking the time out to help you. I’ve been remiss.”
I started looking around for my purse. I wondered if they’d let me finish my lunch before they showed me the door.
“Don’t look so glum,” Buzz said. “We’ll fix it. We’ll make it right. From now on, you sit down and circle every fact in your story. Check it against your notes. Check it with your sources. Check against your gut. Is something not right here? Is this not exactly the truth?”
He stopped making circles on the back of his hand and handed me the tube of lotion. This time I took it and smoothed some into my palm, then rubbed it against my neck, massaging slowly. He wasn’t firing me. He was giving me a second chance.
“I understand,” I said. “I promise to do better.”
Buzz smiled. “Of course you do.”
After that talking-to, I followed Buzz’s advice and kept my stories lean as a triathelete. I avoided the promo specials, made sure my sources were sober and on the level, vetted my info with people The Paper had already quoted ten times, and made no mention of any camp, save the one to which Charles Rhode’s daughter went for tennis (which happened to be in Rhinebeck). As a result, my stories were dull as dust, but, at least, I was off the Corrections page. Not a single complaining call, not a single private conference. I even got buddy-buddy with the staff fact-checkers, who didn’t brush their hair.
As a reward for my vigilance I was appointed to a new Style beat:
Society. It was what I’d always wanted, and I’d never imagined I could do it at The Paper. The opportunities before me seemed vast; maybe I’d finally find some of my father’s childhood chums or my great-grandmother’s other great-granddaughters. But I was still a newbie.
On my first assignment, a patron’s dinner for the Met, Grand Dame Mitzy Carlisle grabbed my hand as I was scribbling her quips on my notepad under the table. She tapped me on the thigh and whispered that I should join her in the Ladies’, where she was going to powder her nose.
“It’s fine if you quote me,” she told me as she leaned in to, in fact, powder, “and I’m sure it’s fine if you quote most everyone here. But leave that notebook in your purse. You are among people who don’t appreciate a paper trail.”
“But I’ve got to take notes,” I said. “How else will I get their quotes right?”
“You’ll just have to develop a colorful memory, darling. And take lots of bathroom breaks.”
As I soon gathered, Mitzy had missed her calling to be a gal reporter for the International Herald Tribune in the 1920s when she gave up her slot in the London bureau to marry an Oxford purebred. She told me she’d followed Brenda Starr’s fortunes in the Sunday funnies through the years with the tragicomic sense of remorse.
After dinner, she took me to a diner on Madison Avenue and tutored me on everything from the appropriate amount of frisée to leave on my plate at dinner to the proper pronunciation of sommelier. She wanted to ensure that I’d never get lost in a sea of bejeweled blue-hairs again. Working with me, she said, was her last chance to dance with the fourth estate. Mitzy didn’t care if what I printed was flattering to anyone; she was happy for a little scandal in her circle—“jazzed things up a bit,” she said. She just wanted it to be correct.
And after a year had elapsed covering my elders without a single mismatched pantsuit, Buzz pulled me into his office for another conference.
“Are you familiar with the term zeitgeist, Valerie?” he said.
At first, I thought I’d spelled it wrong in a story. “Sure, zeitgeist,” I said. “It’s the general gestalt.” Just replacing one German word with another. “The cultural climate, the, I don’t know, spirit of the times. The way things shake.”
“Zeitgeist,” he said again, without looking up. “You own it. Your new beat.”
The zeitgeist, as I saw it, was the dominant paradigm, at its most Hegelian extreme. New York, Big Picture. It was math geeks building technology empires on venture capital magic dust and art moguls turning the city’s oldest museums into international franchises offering Picassos like Big Macs.
For four months in a row, my splashy cover stories on Style came every other week. I introduced the term fashionista into the paper’s lexicon; I busted the dog-run wars open wide; I single-handedly popularized the pashmina. Love me or hate me, everyone read me. Valerie Vane was the name they flipped to after ordering their eggs Florentine.
Suddenly, I was always in Jeremiah Golden territory. I ran into him at Thomas Kren’s businessman collector’s preview at the Guggenheim’s motorcycle show, John McEnroe’s pre–U.S. Open Bloody Mary brunch, Tanya Steele’s “second sweet sixteen.” At Madam O’Hara’s pet-hospital fund-raiser, I noticed him notice me, and at the pre-opening imported sake tasting at Nobu Next Door, he insisted I try one milky and unfiltered. When Zita Marlowe held her Botox Buffet, he lay down on the gurney next to mine, too late for me to bolt out of my IV.
I paid attention to my schoolmarm’s ruler and when she saw him coming and tapped in a frenzy, I paid heed. She’d been good to me, after all. The more I kept focused on “Who’s on Top?” the better I could supply the answer.
My rebuff from that night at my loft still seemed to sting him, though, so he kept asking me if I’d let him take me to dinner. I kept saying no, without exactly saying it. And the more I said it, the more persistent he became, until I took pity and switched to “Not anytime soon,” and then “Not this week,” and eventually, “Not today.” When I finally offered up a “Maybe,” he grinned like a Cheshire cat.
“Maybe,” he said. “Now, that’s what a man likes to hear.”
Then one night, I happened into Ilin Fischy’s bathroom. Ilin was a Chinese-Slovakian artist who had just won a MacArthur “genius award” for her “ethnographic videography,” after spending a year filming herself “passing” as a man in various settings—men’s clubs and cigar bars, locker rooms and bathhouses. The party, as stated on the invitation, was her Official Coming Out. “As what?” was the question on everyone’s lips. Her hostess-wear didn’t provide answers. She appeared in a latex minidress, revealing both her ample breasts and the contours of an impressively masculine crotch.
In the bathroom, Jeremiah, one of her early collectors, was with Lance Glutton, Arty Guzzler, and Paul Bakanal, his Dalton cohorts, cutting an eighth on the mirrored sink. Arty marveled, “I guess she models her dildos here?” Seeing that access to the facilities was barred, I headed back to the party. But just as I was clearing the door, Jeremiah took my hand.
“Would you like a line?” he said. “There’s plenty to go around.”
In my travels for zeitgeist reporting, I’d happened into many a stage door and green room, even a corporate boardroom or two—after hours—to find bold-faced names in the midst of this kind of illicit business. I wasn’t judgmental and it didn’t get into print. I knew that for the ambitious among us, leisure often came in a pipe or a pill or a powder and only the meanest of gossip writers had the audacity to do that kind of damage.
I’d been offered my fair share, and I hadn’t dabbled. Growing up among hippies had been plenty mind-bending and the space-cakes by us didn’t fly anyone anywhere great, so I’d never been a fan of the scene. These days, I had to keep alert. At any moment there could be a subtle power play, a slip of status, and my schoolmarm taught me that the best way to catch it was to befriend sobriety and to be the only one in a room steady on both feet.
I was about to demur again, but now Jeremiah had my hand. “Maybe, maybe, maybe. You’re too full of maybes,” he said.
Maybe I was too full of maybes. Maybe I was too uptight. I’d been pressing my nose against the glass for a long, long while. Maybe it was time I joined the party. Maybe I could stand to fraternize a little with the boys. Just once, anyway, couldn’t hurt.
I heard my schoolmarm’s ruler tapping, but I took the straw from him anyway. I leaned over the sink. I’d seen Jeremiah do it so many times; I figured it was simple. But the first snort was way too fast and ached in my face, so I put a hand up to my temple to try to stem the pain. “Somebody better help her out,” declared Paul, while the others laughed. “Can’t have a Valerie Vane OD on our hands.”
Jeremiah eased over, silencing the laughter. He took up a razor and cut another line. This one was shorter and narrower. “That was made special for you,” he said. He rolled up a bill and held it to my nose. “Nice and easy. Nice and slow.”
I did it his way and won some praise. “Fast learner,” said someone, as my schoolmarm’s tapping got louder. Jeremiah seemed to be proud of his new student. After I tried a second line, my schoolmarm had resorted to SOS in Morse code. There wasn’t too much left on the mirror now, but Jeremiah said, “Shoot the works, baby. The rest of it’s yours.” I decided I could ignore the code, just this once.
And so, after Ilin Fischy’s genius party, I let Jeremiah put me in the back of his Lincoln Town Car. It went north this time, toward the cherry-wood doors of his Sixty-third Street town house. The first three floors were musty, decorated in various shades of brown and maroon: velvet club chairs draped with chenille throws, a lot of empty crystal vases. Scattered about the walls, in the appropriate nooks, were landscape paintings and still lifes of plums and pears. “My grandmother’s,” he said, as if it needed saying.
“I don’t spend any time down here,” he said, leading me upstairs. “There’s only one floor that’s really mine; it’s really where I live.”
The fourth
floor was practically a Hammacher Schlemmer showroom. A life-sized replica of R2-D2, complete with remote. An antique pinball game and a foosball table—original, circa 1976. A tower of high-end electronics and two subwoofers shaped like trucks. And then there was lots of Pop Art. Behind the taxi-yellow leather couch was a series of photographs of teenage boys captured in 1980s bar mitzvah glory, each in a multicolored rococo frame. “I got those at the Armory show early this year,” said Jeremiah. “A really cool artist named something-Marti. He’s going to be a superstar.”
He walked me over to a giant abstraction that looked like a blue Rorschach blot. “Elephant art,” he said. “These two New York artists give elephants paint brushes and let them go at the canvas. Amazing, huh?” Above the fireplace mantle was an enormous orange silkscreen that was unmistakably Warhol: a mangled car wrapped around a tree. The driver still in the wreckage, the body curled over the steering wheel.
“My newest acquisition,” Jeremiah said, striding to the fireplace. “It’s from his death and disaster series. I picked it up at Sotheby’s in May. It depicts the American dream turned nightmare. The car is our emblem of progress, the industrial revolution, America’s most generic status symbol, and it’s all wreckage.” Jeremiah poured the contents of his plastic bag onto the coffee table and started shaping it into smaller mountains of dust. “At least that’s what the auction catalog said.”
I walked toward the Warhol, drawn by the repeating image of the driver crushed behind the steering wheel. The car was completely mangled, ruptured, and yet there was something peaceful about the way the body was just slumped there.
“It’s hard to look away, right?” said Jeremiah. “Sort of like pornography.”
“Pricey pornography,” I said.
“But at least with this one I can be sure I’m not going to lose money. Not that I’d ever sell this baby. But the others”—he shrugged—“you don’t know. Elephant art could be dead in a year. Or it could be worth millions. Here, let me show you something.”