by Cat Marnell
Well, except the beauty intern in charge of the whole thing. It was tons of work. I spent all morning lugging overflowing mail bins—full of T3 blow-dryers, Aveda salt scrubs, John Varvatos cologne, you name it—from the beauty closet to the conference room. I was wearing another dumb pencil skirt and high heels, so every step was a baby step. Ridiculous. I was already exhausted as I spread out products—OPI nail polishes, Too Faced mascaras, Ted Gibson flat irons, the Body Shop foot creams—on every surface of the conference room. Women circled, studying my progress.
“Hey, sweetie.” A fashion market editor stuck her head in. “When do you think it’s going to start?” Staffers who hadn’t given me a nod hello in four months were suddenly sweet as sizzurp.
Then I opened the floodgates. Like a zillion people came!
“Fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven . . .” I tallied their bags of one-dollar beauty products for six hours straight. By early evening, I wanted to stick a gun in my mouth, but I had a manila envelope stuffed with cash for Holly. Hopefully she wouldn’t notice my trembling hands. I’d been taking triple Adderall all day. Could you blame me?
Another morning, Holly asked me to go to West Chelsea to pick up four dozen cupcakes for a staffer’s birthday party. Yes, Billy’s Bakery could have easily messengered the order to 4 Times Square. Yes, Holly could have given me cab fare or sent me in a town car. But I’m glad she didn’t. The whole point of having interns is to haze them and make them fucking earn their future careers! High five, Holly. She didn’t even offer me a MetroCard.
It was November. I took the subway in four-inch heels, the only shoes I had at work that day. It was frigid and blustery over on Tenth Avenue, by the Hudson River. My legs were bare. The wind was blowing my hair all around and making it stick to my Dior Addict lip gloss. Clip-clop, clip-clop. Always with the clip-clopping! I was like a show pony.
The dude at Billy’s came out with the order. The cupcakes were in big, oblong boxes. I could barely carry them. And they were heavy. These stupid bakeries just load on the frosting! Clip-clop, clip-clop. I was staggering down Tenth Avenue with these plastic bags and huge boxes of cupcakes. I didn’t have gloves on, and my knuckles were chapped, and my hands hurt from carrying the bags. I was zigzagging on the sidewalk; I couldn’t walk a straight line in the wind. It was just miserable—like, Leonardo DiCaprio–filming–The Revenant miserable. I was very privileged, and very cold.
When I got back to the office I set the cupcakes in the art department, along with plates, napkins, and quarts of milk from the kitchen. Then I sat and shivered at my desk. Holly sent out a mass e-mail, and people from all over the office got up to go to the party.
I stayed at my desk for twenty minutes until Holly returned.
“Why are you sitting here?” she asked.
“Uh,” I said. “I . . . Were interns invited?” Holly laughed at me.
“Get a cupcake!” she said.
I went to the party. No one seemed to mind that I was there. A fashion editor even smiled at me. I selected a vanilla-vanilla and ate it standing up next to the art director’s office. It was the best cupcake I ever tasted.
* * *
Alex and I broke up for good in December. I tried to feel better the same old ways: by dancing on banquettes at promoters’ tables and fucking mad dudes. But it wasn’t fun. Every night I’d crammed into taxis after the clubs with Alex, SAME, Alden, and Fat Jew and hit the after parties. Now I cabbed home drunk and dolo. I was lonely and getting lonelier.
At least I had a new hobby: doctor shopping. There were so many psychiatrists in my new neighborhood that I just had to try them all.
“Can I try Dexedrine?” I’d ask my new shrink. Dr. A. was an old white dude, just like Dr. M. (I was still seeing him, too). “Can I try Lunesta?” The answer was always yes. My secret? Charm! Plus, I’d grown up lying to a psychiatrist. Oh, and doctors like cash.
Back in midtown, it was my first holiday season at Condé. Everyone at Teen Vogue was in a jovial mood, opening the loot that arrived from PR firms and fashion houses. I helped Holly pile Kara’s gifts in her office—CDG wallets, Dior bags, Fendi planners—and oohed and aahed over the less expensive stuff that arrived for Holly, like Tory Burch flats. I hadn’t handled so many bottles of Dom Pérignon and Moët & Chandon since my coked-out summer at Pangaea! The guys in the messenger center were up to their husky necks; they came by nine times a day. Over time, the S.W.A.G. (Sealed With A Gift) thing became normal to me—you get numb to it—but back then, the excess was very intoxicating. It made me want to be a magazine editor even more.
My remaining time at Teen Vogue whizzed by. It was festive and very busy. Late one afternoon, I sat on the floor outside the editor in chief’s office, helping her assistant gift-wrap bottles of champagne. It was tranquil there on my knees, with fluffy snow blanketing Times Square outside the windows on my left, and Amy Astley working quietly at her white desk in her white-carpeted office on my right. I could have stayed there Scotch-taping for years! Or at least until my Adderall ran out.
“Thanks so much for helping,” amazing Amy said when she left at half past five.
“My pleasure.” My pleasure?! I was so lame. But whatever. A Condé editor in chief had spoken to me!
That was the end of my time at Teen Vogue. I’d worked hard.
“Where do you want to work next?” Holly asked.
I’d been thinking about it.
“Glamour!”
Holly e-mailed the beauty assistant. She replied immediately: they were looking for someone to work in the beauty closet.
Two days later, I met with the beauty assistant. She e-mailed later that afternoon to invite me to start at Glamour. I’d landed another internship. Three in a row! I couldn’t believe it. I’d start in the New Year.
Until then, I had a few weeks off. I was getting into some real pillhead shit, like twisting time-release capsules open to make them work faster. I’d pour the tiny, bitter sprinkles into my mouth and they’d get stuck in between my teeth. It was my first Christmas without Alex and his friends in years. But that was okay. The more amphetamine I took, the more fun being by myself was, actually. Speed was like magic! Lonely magic.
Chapter Eight
GLAMOUR. G-L-A-M-O-U-R! WHAT MORE COULD I want? The iconic women’s magazine took up the entire sixteenth floor of 4 Times Square. It felt very different from Teen Vogue up there: instead of high-strung fashionistas in Lanvin, Glamour was staffed by very nice editors and assistants with shiny hair, headbands, and wedding bands. The editor in chief, Cindi Leive, wore turtlenecks under her jumpers, and everyone was very kind. No “Nuclear Wintour”—to borrow a phrase from the British press—frost anywhere.
Working there—even as a ten-dollars-an-hour “beauty freelancer,” my new title—was a good look. So while Vogue got the most attention, it was Glamour that Adweek called Condé’s “biggest cash cow.” According to condenast.com, one in eight American women “engage” with Glamour, and the print audience is 12.2 million readers. What does this mean? Money! The higher a mag’s circulation is, the more it can charge their advertisers. That’s why those subscription cards are always falling into your damn lap at the nail salon.
At least that’s how I think it all works (I’m a real know-it-all for a dope fiend with no job). What I do know for sure is that every issue was full of expensive ads for skin care, hair products, and perfumes. They ran alongside the editorial content in the beauty section, which was considered the best in the business. Felicia Milewicz ran that shit. She was born in Austria and raised in Poland, and had started her career as a lowly fashion assistant in the early seventies. Now she was considered the most powerful beauty director in publishing. When I arrived in 2005, she’d been killing it at Condé for over thirty-five years.
She was an industry legend! And I knew this because everyone kept telling me so.
“She’s the Co
co Chanel of beauty editors,” Mary, her second in command, liked to tell me.
What did this actually mean? No idea. But Felicia sure looked the part. She rocked black tuxedo jackets with white Chanel camellias in the lapels, immaculate blouses buttoned up to the collars, eyeglasses, and red lipstick, always (“Mrs. Lauder” had personally advised her to start wearing it years ago, and she had ever since). Her signature red hair was maintained by the colorist Gad Cohen, and she wore it bobbed above her shoulders. She wore Guerlain Vol de Nuit parfum, and she had a wonderful, heavy accent.
She was an icon. And I could not pronounce her last name.
ME-LAY-VICH, I wrote on fifty thousand Post-it notes. It didn’t help: I always panicked when I was put on the spot. This was unfortunate because I often had to sit in Felicia’s assistant’s chair—right outside the boss’s office—and answer the phone.
“Felicia”—pause—“Me-a-leeel-a-weave-itz’s office,” I’d mumble. It was a thousand times more painful than Nylon! And forget relaying messages from the fashion director Xanthipi Joannides. She’s probably still waiting for Felicia to call her back.
Felicia was the last of the old-school beauty directors. I never saw her put a pen to a proof—those are oversize pages that circulate between editors—though surely she did. She oversaw the concepts, darling. The vision.
“Peenks,” Felicia would declare grandly, waving her manicured hand in the air. “Eet’s all about beautiful peenks this month.” She’d be holding court at her desk in a department meeting, while everyone else—all five of us—squished on to her love seat. It was my responsibility to open the dozens of bags that arrived for Felicia every day and place the products—neatly—on that very midget sofa. She’d keep what interested her (not much—maybe a By Terry Baume de Rose here and there) and dump the rest into plastic bins outside of her office. I would haul that stuff into the beauty closet and file it away.
My other big Felicia-related job was getting her a piece of seven-grain toast with peanut butter and a small coffee with a “leetle beet of meelk” from the cafeteria every morning. With so much beauty director breakfast-fetching experience under my belt, you’d think I’d be awesome at this, but no.
“Cat,” Felicia would call out thirty seconds after I left the toast and coffee on her desk.
I’d double back.
“Yes, Felicia?” Pleasant as a picnic basket. I knew what was coming.
“Eet’s not hot enough,” she’d say, apologetically.
“I’ll get you another!” Sometimes I got her a third.
The coffee thing drove me fucking bananas for months. How could I make it hotter? I didn’t want to put the Felicia Milewicz’s cup in the Glamour kitchenette microwave; it was gross. I decided it would be okay to zap just the “leetle beet” of milk to a boil in there, then pour it in separately. It worked! Felicia was happy with her coffee. I was elated. I’ve said it before: interning is strange heaven.
* * *
Felicia did the hiring, and it was obvious she had a type: good girls. Glamour’s two full-time writers, Stephanie and Tram, were pretty, supersmart, and mature. Even though they were only in their late twenties, they were both married. They spoke in quiet voices. They drank tea and pulled pashminas from their desks when they got cold. Felicia’s assistant, Alix, was only twenty-six, and she was engaged. They’d all gone to really good colleges: Penn, Georgetown. (Incidentally, I was by this time a senior at Sleeping Pill College of Tanning Bed University—no, at Eugene Lang—and on track to receive a degree in nonfiction writing the following year.)
Slaggy prescription crackheads like moi were surely a Glamour “DON’T.” I never, ever revealed my “wild side” at the office. Instead, I did my best to fit in: I started wearing red lipstick like Felicia’s; I attempted tidy ballerina buns. I dressed in tangerine, polka-dot Marc by Marc knee-length skirts and Diane von Furstenberg cardigans. I even used to put Scotch tape in Xs over my nipples in the morning so they wouldn’t show if they got hard. (Try it! Especially for job interviews.) Still, I felt like a back-door teen mom in church around the women of Glamour. I mean, no one even swore!
Or maybe Mary did. The executive senior beauty editor was Felicia’s right-hand woman; they’d been a dynamic duo since Mademoiselle. It was she who executed Felicia’s fashionably vague ideas and made sure they turned into stories with gorgeous photographs and placement for all the latest advertiser-brand launches. Mary was different from anyone I’d worked with at Condé. She didn’t wear makeup and she didn’t color her hair. She wore sneakers for her rush-hour Metro-North commutes back and forth from upstate New York, where she lived with her husband and two young kids. Mary was go-go-go all of the time. She went to like thirty beauty events a day! Truly a force of nature. The only time I ever saw her relax was when I spotted her puffing a ciggie out on West Forty-Third Street by the town car lineup. I’d never seen a beauty editor smoke before. It was nice to know someone at Glamour had a vice.
Mary could be intense—it was all about the deadline, the deadline, the deadline—but her anxiety kept the trains running on time. Besides, by then I could handle anything. Mary would burst into the closet with a no-name foam roller she wanted to shoot for Hair Guide and I’d track down the manufacturer in Florida and get someone on the phone to confirm credit information in fifteen minutes flat. Or if an eyeliner I’d called in that morning for a how-to story hadn’t arrived and Mary was bugging, I’d go down to the messenger center and personally rummage through the bags instead of waiting for them to come up. And if it still wasn’t there, I’d run back up to Glamour, grab another product from the closet, bolt to Sephora in Times Square, and exchange it for the product we needed. Then I’d hurtle back up to sixteen and careen into Mary’s office.
“Here we go!” I’d say.
“Thank God!” Mary would exclaim. “Digital studio!” And I’d fly back out to the elevators. Only when I’d returned—with confirmation that the eyeliner would absolutely be photographed that evening, so the art department would positively have the image for the layout tomorrow morning—could Mary relax. She’d pop her head into the closet, where I’d be fanning myself with a press release, waiting for my heart rate to go down.
“Always remember,” she’d say. “This is just beauty. We’re not doing open-heart surgery!”
“Right,” I’d answer. Then we’d both laugh sort of nervously.
* * *
I had more Adderall than ever, so I took more than ever. My addiction was progressing, as addictions do. Stimulants made monotonous jobs bearable—and Mary always had a monotonous project for me. Have you heard of “the Glammies”—the magazine’s beauty awards? Over eighty thousand readers snail-mailed their handwritten paper ballots in 2005. Crates full of them piled up in the conference room. And guess who sat in there with a spiral notebook tallying the results—ballot by ballot—two years in a row?
Best Drugstore Mascara: Maybelline Great Lash. Check. Best Department Store Mascara: Lancôme Defincils. Check. Best Department Store Fragrance: Britney Spears Curious. Check. Adderall. Check!
Mary dug my “amphetamine work ethic,” if you will. She started asking me to come in additional days. Mary’s “special projects” were the worst—she knew they were the worst; everybody did—but I never said no. In fact, I cut college classes to come in and do them. I just wanted to be in the building as much as possible. To me, Condé was the happiest place on earth! Plus, Glamour paid ten dollars an hour. And I had doctors to see. When the beauty closet was renovated, I packed every cuticle cream and lip liner into dozens of crates, dragged them out, and then moved everything back in, and unpacked and reorganized it all a week later. Mary’s “new” closet looked exactly the same, just three feet wider. I also did beauty sales—huge ones. I donned a pink, long-sleeved Glamour logo T-shirt to take coats at a Fashion Week event at the Royalton Hotel. I never said no.
Sometimes I got a little
bonus. It was on a “special project” of this kind that I first scored opiates—the doctor-shopping Holy Grail. Glamour sent me undercover on “consultations” with plastic surgeons and had me essentially try to bait them into telling me what was “wrong” with my looks and what I needed to have done. Or something like that. It wasn’t the greatest conceit for a story; I wasn’t writing it or anything. I was just the guinea pig.
“So, why are you here?” Dr. X would ask.
“Well,” I said. “I want something . . . improved . . . but I don’t know what.”
It was harder to get a bite than you’d think. These were Park Avenue doctors—they didn’t need my money! I booked a nose job (which I later canceled, swear to God) with one doctor and took home a folder of papers. A script for generic Vicodin was paper-clipped to the inside.
“You’re going to want to fill that so you’ll have them ready at home after the operation,” the office manager said. I strolled out and went straight to Rite Aid.
A week later, at another appointment for the same Glamour story, I booked the same procedure.
“Oh,” I told the doctor. “I’ve had a bad reaction to Vicodin in the past, so if it’s all the same to you . . .” And his office manager sent me home with a prescription for Percocet. I filled that one at Duane Reade. For weeks, I was always a little bit extra-high on the job, though of course, no one knew. I kept the orange bottles in the zipper pocket of my mom’s Chloé Silverado bag—hidden away. A secret.
* * *
When I wasn’t doctor shopping, I was grocery shopping—at four thirty in the morning! I’d return from a night at the Coral Room or Home or wherever, change out of my party outfit into something terry cloth, and hit the twenty-four-hour Food Emporium on Second Avenue. I’d be the only customer in the store, and the night employees would give me the eye as I walked up and down the aisles. The supermarket would be eerily silent—well, except for the smooth jazz playing over the sound system. But smooth jazz really creeps me out! And the lighting was always sort of green. I’d load a whole cart: Scooby-Doo fruit snacks, Nestlé chocolate milk, Pepperidge Farm Sugar cookies, Jif Creamy Peanut Butter, Smuckers Sugar Free Apricot Preserves, whole wheat bread. Throw in a carton of skim milk—that would make the PB&J come up easier. And if I was buying milk, I thought, I might as well buy a box of Cap’n Crunch or Lucky Charms. Or Cookie Crisp. Or all three.