Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  Time magazine, in a cover story on Marsh, called his career “one long-running essay in elegant bitchery.”

  Bingo, delighted, pounced on “elegant bitchery” and used it in ads.

  Men who’d been with him at Yale wondered how a well-bred young Protestant developed such an effectively vulgar instinct for attracting attention.

  “The biggest gossips in town,” he declared in an editorial manifesto, “are Irish priests, desk clerks, and fashion designers. Fashion will concentrate on the latter and will report every week what they say, what they whisper, what they may only suspect.”

  This cheeky declaration, typical of Bingo in full flight, scandalized the Archdiocese and annoyed hoteliers. But it got his little magazine talked about. Readership and circulation soared, the advertising poured in. In a way, the reaction frightened Marsh. For the first time he realized the passion a single editorial could arouse. And despite the bravado, he shrank from personal confrontation. As someone once wrote of Sartre, another timid man, “he could be violent on the page.” In person, it was something else again, and after that first, inflammatory editorial, Bingo rarely signed a piece of copy.

  “Terrible things are done in my name,” he protested, claiming innocence while, in private, urging his editors and writers on to further outrage.

  Lawsuits and irate letters were no problems. Attorneys and editors could handle those. But as his little magazine grew in influence and wealth, as he himself lashed the staff to new excess, “Vex them! Vex them anew!” Bingo’s insecurities deepened.

  He could cope with arm’s-length hostility; it was the face-to-face meeting, the ugly scene, the slim potential for actual physical attack, that terrified him. Suppose they sent a lynch mob? Or, as wronged parties did in Victorian novels, came after him with a horsewhip?

  Marsh had read somewhere about Joseph Pulitzer, years before, having shot at a man in the city room (he missed), and considered applying for a pistol license, only to be talked out of it by his wife, a sensible woman.

  “Bingo,” she predicted, “you’ll just shoot yourself. Or worse, an advertiser.”

  So when celebrated victims complained, he lied, claiming the item slipped past him or the reporter was to blame or that he was out of town or lay ill. While behind the barricades of the magazine, sheltered by guards and anonymous staffers, he continued to demand more and more from his editors and writers, a man torn by the conflicting emotions of crusading zeal and rank cowardice.

  Of course I knew scant little of this when I first met Bingo.

  12 Have you noticed her liver spots?

  THREE thousand miles and eight or ten years apart, I, too, was learning my trade. Though I still didn’t understand about clothes, not even Coco’s, I got to know the designers, and not only Chanel. As part of my Times beat, I learned the difference between Pierre Cardin and Pierre Balmain, and I met Emanuel Ungaro, who raised the five thousand dollars for his first couture house taking out a loan on his girlfriend’s Porsche and who rarely touched the brakes when I drove with him, the car radio blaring operas I didn’t recognize and chamber music Emanuel assured me was Beethoven; and Givenchy, who had a title and manners and who was said to be the handsomest man in Paris, though he lacked small talk and did needlework in his lap during dinner parties; and Gérard Pipart, who was always broke but could never pass the front door of Hermès without going in to buy a few silk squares on tick.

  And I met André Courreges, lean, balding, intense, a young man from Pau who’d worked as a tailor under the genius Balenciaga and who was taken with the messianic conviction he’d invented modern dress. André had a girlfriend named Coqueline who had a crewcut, and she and André wore identical white pants and tops and shoes. It was Courreges who got me playing rugby in the Bois Sundays with a club team and going out with him and Coqueline and sometimes Gillian to the Stade Colombes where they played the big rugger internationals and the French sang, “Allez la France!” and the English cried, “England and Sin George!” and after the match twenty or thirty thousand Frenchmen lined up outside to piss against the stadium walls, there being no urinals, while Gillian and Coqueline urged us to hurry to a café with a rest room so their turn might come.

  So I had a job and money and a girl and an apartment for which I bought a secondhand grand piano which neither of us could play and I smoked two or three packs of Gitanes a day until the cancer stories began and I became a famous consumer of foot-long, near-black cigars I liked even better. I also drank a lot and learned about bed from Gillian and was having a pretty good time being young and in love, not with her or with anyone, really, but with Paris.

  And maybe, in a crazy way, with Coco Chanel.

  I said I was uneasy with Marsh. But there was more to it than naïf concerns about my precious virtue and the remote possibility he lusted after me. While I hadn’t admitted a thing, had barely responded, it was unsettling, uncanny how Bingo was able to winkle out guilt. For, during those weeks I’d worked together with Coco on her book, I, too, had found myself, as Marsh so delicately put it, “experiencing erection.”

  Each day at noon she crossed over the rue Cambon from her suite in the Ritz to her apartment over the shop, and unless I had an assignment, I would be there by one, climbing the stairs to her drawing room with its chinoiserie and coromandel screens, where she greeted me reclining on the long, suede couch. I fetched a footstool close to her knee and she poured us both neat Scotch or Polish vodka and I asked questions and recorded answers of a sort. And got drunk.

  Over drinks, during lunch, through the long afternoons she talked, telling me of love affairs and betrayals, of ecstasies and crushing loss, of intrigues and riches and wartime flights, all the while calling me her little Indian, reaching out to touch my hair, my shoulder, occasionally to trail arthritic fingers lightly across my face and lips, fixing me with those dark eyes, dancing old eyes, and continuing to talk, talk, talk.

  Gillian, encountering me on the stair or crossing the salon as I came and went, snarled with the fury of a discarded lover, and I wondered just what I would do if one day Coco took my hand and led me drunkenly deeper into the mysterious apartment to a lover’s bed.

  Maybe it was the whisky, maybe the long hours together, perhaps it was just Paris or the stories of her lovers, or simply I was still an impressionable boy, and yet as we talked over a meal or a glass into the dusk, Paris darkening beyond the tall windows of her apartment, I thought what it might be like to be Coco’s lover, this extraordinary woman whose triumphs and romances, whose life had become legend.

  With the instinct women possess from birth, Gillian sensed it.

  “It’s ridiculous,” she cried, “infatuation! You’re my age, and she’s ninety if she’s a day. And bald as an egg under that silly wig. I doubt she’s a real tooth in her head. Those arthritic hands. Have you noticed her liver spots? Do you imagine what her breasts would be like…?”

  “Gillian,” I lied, “there’s absolutely nothing like that. She…”

  “It’s her money, her fame, her bloody celebrated charm. It’s despicable. You’re using her and she’s using you.” She paused.

  “Star fucker!”

  Pompously, I defended myself. “I’m writing her goddamned book, is all.”

  We both knew it was more than that.

  13 At this rate you’ll never bury the poor chap.

  IT wasn’t always tense, rarely Sturm und Drang. And there were distractions. Gillian, when in the mood. And Coco herself, who could be damned funny, unintentionally.

  She’d fired a new directrice, a chic, dignified woman who was to have brought order to the establishment. “That bit of filth,” Coco raged, “I had to show her the door. Now she drives ‘round and ‘round the block every afternoon, knowing I have the windows open to the breeze, shouting up obscenities at me. I’ll have the police on her.”

  Also dismissed, her longtime manager, a sleek and corpulent man, self-important, with a Légion d’Honneur in his buttonhole Chanel claime
d to have petitioned for him despite her contempt for de Gaulle and his regime. “The salot repaid me with larceny!” she said, the manager having punched a hole through her wall into a vacant building next door where seamstresses sewed up “false” Chanels, counterfeit suits and coats fabricated from cloth and braid and buttons stolen from her ateliers.

  “The man’s entire career: zéro à gauche!”

  “Zero to the left,” of course, meaning nothing.

  Sometimes she spoke of her youth, of the Auvergne, where she was born. “The Auvergnats are so close with their money that during the Revolution they sold drinking water. If travelers and refugees couldn’t pay, they died right there of thirst.”

  She sounded rather proud of that, pleased with her fellow Auvergnats.

  But she held in contempt the Swiss who owned her company, especially the latest Swiss, a man in his fifties, whom she dismissed as a child. “He belongs in l’école maternelle… the nursery school. They don’t permit him to order pencils for the company.”

  Yves Saint Laurent had just shown a collection critics said was inspired by Chanel. “I respect Monsieur Saint Laurent,” she said sweetly in response, “and the more he copies me, the greater my respect.”

  Cardin, that season’s especial rival, had, she insisted, floated the rumor Chanel died over a weekend and the Ritz had stored her body in the freezer of the Espadon Grill until the morticians reopened Monday.

  But she spoke also of herself with a candor I’d not expected. Looking back now, perhaps she knew death was near, and there was little profit in discretion.

  She talked of Westminster, her ducal lover, the wealthiest man in England, who took her cruising on a destroyer purchased after World War I and painted white, with a crew of a hundred and eighty. “Churchill dined with us on board one evening. He kept teasing, asking when I would visit him in England. Nonsense, of course. Westminster had a wife and I couldn’t set foot in her country. It would not have been comme il faut. He loved to tease, pauvre Winston; you couldn’t take him seriously.”

  I thrilled to hear one who’d actually known him refer to “poor Winston” and poke fun.

  I was too naive, I lacked the sophistication to do a proper job of biography, to punch holes in her narrative and demand dates, witnesses, corroboration. I simply took down what she said, which may be what made the book readable, and a seller.

  She was paranoid and a mass of contradictions, blaming the Jews for a rainy summer and last year’s poor vintage in Bordeaux and then rattling on about her great pal who was coming to lunch, Marie-Hélène de Rothschild. In one breath she talked of having to move her seat in a movie theater on the Champs Elysées because a black man came to sit nearby. “He smelled so, the way they do.” Then, without pause, rhapsodizing about another black, an American boxer she’d known in the twenties. “Ah, that man, how we danced.” Conversationally, she leapt about, rabbits on an April lawn, but that was what gave the book its pace, its bounce.

  Among her fulminations, a cheerful readiness to agree that, if not truly a fascist, she was sympathetic.

  “Despite Napoleon, who was a Corsican and therefore never understood, the French and the Russians should have been allies. We’re much alike, two nations possessing underclasses in need of the whip and the knout, both with their aristocracies preening and bullying.”

  “But the famous French middle class, Coco…”

  “Ah, don’t speak to me of the bourgeoisie. One is either peasant or prince.”

  Mussolini she had found a cordial fellow, except for his unfortunate style of dress (“Can you imagine white spats with a black shirt?”). “A bit windy, fond of the elaborate gesture, the strutting posture, but at bottom just what the Italians need.” Hitler, she dismissed. “The usual Teutonic efficiency, of course, one expected that. But no family or background whatsoever. And have you ever looked closely at those water-colors, his architectural renderings? Childlike.”

  During the war, she said, Pétain threatened her with arrest because she wore trousers on holiday in the South. “In Occupied France, I was curtly informed, ‘women are to wear skirts, churn butter, and behave!’ Although she had her differences with Pétain and the other Nazi collaborators, she despised de Gaulle. Part of that stemmed from her postwar difficulties when she was accused of collaboration by the de Gaulle regime, when it was really de Gaulle, in her view, who had broken the law. “A gangster, a criminal,” she protested. “It was France that called for an armistice. To do that and then go out and shoot Germans and derail locomotives was simple banditry. Had the Germans caught de Gaulle it would have been only justice to hang him!”

  But there was more to her distaste for de Gaulle than narrow legalisms.

  “Some men age well,” she informed me, “as you surely will, mon petit Indien. But not General de Gaulle. Regard his chest, how it sinks below his belt. Dégoûtant! Disgusting! A woman’s breasts inevitably sag with age unless one keeps them small, discreet. Blame gravity. But for a man of de Gaulle’s great height and a man in the public eye to reshape himself into a ripe pear, plump end down, ah, one really must protest!”

  An invitation to dinner at the Elysée Palace had been turned down so she could dine one evening with Gillian and me.

  “But Coco, to be invited by the President?”

  “I will attend his funeral,” she cooed.

  She also shared her comments on Neiman Marcus, the Catholic Church, Jackie Kennedy (“a silly woman but at least she has a rather fluent French”), Robespierre, and Jean Cocteau.

  “It was during the First War, and Cocteau was staying with military friends in a château near the front, a place where generals and colonels went to rest, when a German zeppelin flew over dropping bombs. There was a great commotion, with officers routed from their beds tumbling downstairs to shelter in the wine cellar, and among them, in a very pretty little pink peignoir, came Cocteau!”

  Some evenings her banker dined with us, a prudent man who confided to me, “Mademoiselle knows the value of a safe nine percent”; sometimes Herve Mille, fat and clever, the man who directed Match for Jean Prouvost and addressed her always as “chère Coco,” deftly drawing her out.

  “Tell Monsieur Sharkey about Mees Rosalind Russell, chère Coco.”

  “Ah, that one. Her husband, Monsieur Brisson, quite nice. And naturally as the producer, he wished to have his wife play the leading role. I agreed to meet with her. The woman came up and I was hospitable. After all, I’d seen her films, and Brisson spoke highly of her as any husband would. But after one hour, surely after two, I knew the role of Coco on Broadway was not for her. Talk, talk, talk, endlessly, and with no more content than a gourd. What a treat when Mees Katharine Hepburn was presented to me a few months later. A delightful woman who knew how to listen.”

  She talked of lovers, of the young aristo who set her up in a milliner’s shop in 1914 before going off to die on the Marne. Of other men, vaguely identified. And always of Westminster.

  “We were cruising when Diaghilev died in Venice, and Westminster agreed to put in so I could attend the funeral. It was already in progress; White Russians, dancers, musicians, choreographers, all emotional, all of them crazy, mad with grief, swearing to follow the body on their knees all the way to the grave. ‘A tribute, Coco!’ they cried out. ‘We suffer as the master did!’

  “After a few hundred meters they were groaning and weeping, not for Diaghilev but for their torn knees. ‘Get up!’ I shouted, ‘at this rate you’ll never bury the poor chap.’ ”

  She gave me a flat, wonderful smile. “They got up, of course, thanking me profusely for absolving them with honor.”

  Only about her wartime lover, the German noble with whom she shared her bed at the Ritz, was she mute.

  When the book was sold to a good New York publisher for fifty thousand, for the hardcover and paperback both, I told Coco, very excited.

  She didn’t ask for a cut of the money or even to read the manuscript, but only fretted that I’d gone too
cheap, always the fiscally shrewd Auvergnat.

  “Mon petit Indien, I trust you,” she murmured, running old fingers through my hair.

  When the book came out she was dead, and for thirty weeks it was on the Times best-seller list and a television producer bought it for a miniseries that was never made, but I got money out of that, too. And a good thing. My bosses at the Times were not happy. There was some sort of unwritten rule I didn’t know about that you offered your book first to Times Books, and I hadn’t done that. While I was in New York on leave doing the talk shows and answering dumb questions about Coco, I dropped by Forty-third Street a few times, getting the very distinct impression my future at the paper wasn’t nearly as promising as it had been when I won the Pulitzer and was first hired.