Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  Not that Mr. Rosenthal or Mr. Gelb ever said anything. There was just an… atmosphere.

  “Trouble with you, Sharkey,” a city-room friend informed me, “is that you’re cavalier. They don’t like that here, you know. They like people to worry. And sweat. You don’t seem to give a shit.”

  We were drinking at Bleeck’s, and I thought he was drunk and laying it on a bit thick, but I was just twenty-three and quite pleased I’d been able to mask vulnerability, to conceal my demons. Why should it be anyone’s business at the Times what happened to my dad?

  At my age and with what I’d accomplished, I could afford a little swagger.

  14 The mandolin lady was very old and had whiskers.

  GILLIAN was gone when I got back from New York. She left a long letter, affectionate, ill-spelled, and erotic, reminding me of acrobatic interludes. But she realized she would one day be twenty. Hollywood beckoned, she said, and if that didn’t work out, there was always university. Over the next few months I received girlishly scrawled postcards, a few from London, from Rome, several from the Beverly Hills Hotel, with a view of the Polo Lounge. In each she spoke briefly of influential men she’d met, and hoped I was well. There were no longer dirty passages, and the cards were signed “Fondly.”

  I knew love had fled.

  I kept the apartment, despite its being too big and where, for purposes of tax evasion, the gas and electric and the phone were all listed in the names of other people, presumed long dead. The rent was paid in cash to the elderly countess who lived upstairs. We would meet once a month across the street in the zinc bar where she drank and flirted and sent out the boy to buy cigarettes she stained crimson with her uneven lipstick and tossed away after a few puffs to light another.

  My Vietnam novel finished, I sent it off to New York, and on the momentum of the Chanel best-seller it was published but went nowhere. I was now seeing a Goucher girl who worked for Vogue in the Place de Palais Bourbon who read everything. I mean that, she read Dreiser! But she couldn’t finish my novel.

  “I tried, darling. I really did. It must be me.”

  She was sweet, but she lied. Even in Paris where anyone should be able to write, I was punk. In a thousand words I could pin a character to the corkboard; at three hundred pages I was unreadable.

  It was the era of the discotheque, and I hung out at the best of them, one run by Regine, a red-haired Polish woman, the other by Jean Castel, an old rugby player going to fat. There was the new music and always plenty of pretty girls, models and actresses and whores who worked for Madame Claude, and one got to know the barmen and you could always get a table, even at three in the morning when the crush was on and the music was the best. Downstairs at Regine’s at six in the morning people lay on the dance floor and staged pasta fights, throwing cold pasta at each other; at Castel’s you saw Jean-Paul Belmondo with Ursula Andress and Mick Flick and Sasha Distel and Kim d’Estainville and the other “locomotives” of Paris, the best-looking girls and the men who held their drinks best, and you watched the most beautiful young women dance or you danced with them and tried to seduce them. At the entrance to Castel’s, the mandolin lady, who was very old and had whiskers, played the mandolin while men shoved hundred-franc notes at her to keep from being kissed. Girls who worked on the fashion pages of Elle took their lovers to Les Nuages to drink brandy and argue politics, and when we ate we sat late over steaks and pommes frites at La Coupole, downstairs from where the Gestapo used to interrogate the unfortunate.

  That was how it was being a journalist then, especially if you were unmarried.

  The most interesting of us were French and worked for Paris Match. Jean Prouvost, who ran woolen mills and owned Match, a sporting weekly he’d turned into a Gallic Life, bought himself off from collaboration charges after the war, much as people said Coco did, and rebuilt his staff. Not a journalist himself, Prouvost recruited tough boys from the Maquis, the French Resistance, ex-paras, racing car drivers, ski instructors, bouncers, tennis players.

  “He went into the nightclubs,” said one of them, “and picked out the guys who had the best-looking girls. He hired us, and his editors gave us a crash course in the questions to ask and how to get the stories back. Fast.”

  One night Sinatra showed up at Castel’s with his gorillas and someone said something drunkenly and the gorillas started after a boy who looked easy, but he worked for Match and before it was over two gorillas were in the American Hospital in Neuilly and Mr. Sinatra was in his hotel making plane reservations out. I drank and partied with the Match boys, too much, and went home to the Goucher girl who read Dreiser or to a wealthy divorcée with a profile who stuck her finger down her throat after every meal. Sometimes it was to a model, any number of fashion models.

  And of course I worked for a living. People died and retired and were transferred home from the bureau, and by now I was on general assignment, no longer the new boy and permitted by the grown-ups to stay up late and everything, covering summit conferences and writing profiles and doing features. The Times even let me go to another war.

  “Sharkey, wake up. Are you sober?”

  It was the bureau chief. It was four in the morning.

  “Yes.”

  “Colonel Khadafy is wigging out again. His army’s invaded Chad.”

  “Chad?”

  “Yes, it’s in Africa somewhere. The Quai d’Orsay’s sending a regiment of paras down there. They okayed a gentleman from the Times to go along. Your plane leaves at eight.”

  Chad was in Africa all right, south of Libya, west of Mali, east of the Sudan, and north of someplace else. Chad was also empty, a hundred miles between towns, between oases. The Libyan army wasn’t much, the Chadian army was even less. Libya, at least, had a few old tanks. Chad had recoilless rifles mounted on trucks. The paras were pretty good, and after a few days the Foreign Legion came in and things got sporting. There were other reporters in the country by now, from the wires and one of the networks and a couple of papers. Chad didn’t sell the way more picturesque Third World countries might, but I’d been there first, I spoke French, the Légionnaires and the paras and I had spent a few nights over the vin rouge.

  Mr. Gelb sent me a gracious note from New York congratulating me on my coverage.

  But you know the best part? For the first time since Da Xiang I’d been in a firefight and I was able to function. Scared, as sensible men always were under fire, I could still work, take notes, registering the scene, getting it down and writing it up. I can’t tell you how good that makes you feel. Even better than notes from the Times, even from Mr. Gelb himself.

  I did other grown-up stories as well, in Paris and around France and elsewhere, hard news and features and personality sketches and literal question-and-answer interviews. They got their money’s worth out of me and always did. Where I failed the Times was on attitude. As my friend remarked that time at Bleeck’s, I didn’t seem to give a shit. But it only seemed that way. I wasn’t very good at bureau politics or writing memos or getting my expense account right and I had gone to a rival publisher with the Chanel book, and the bosses were uncomfortable with that, recognizing I would never become one of the bright young men on the newspaper’s promotion track, knowing I was no Max Frankel or Joe Lelyveld or Warren Hoge.

  But they knew something else, that I worked the correspondent’s trade, and as Thurber said once long before he applied for a job in Paris, I could get it, I could write it, I could put a head on it.

  So went the seventies.

  Toward the end of the decade, I had to be in New York on business and first met Bingo Marsh.

  I was always honest with myself and as I entered my thirties, I knew how lucky I’d been young, winning the Pulitzer and then having a bestseller. Such things sort of made up for my dad. Now, in a journalistic limbo, a competent journeyman or maybe a little better, luck was leveling out. Well, the hell with it.

  It was in that restive, queasy mood that I met Marsh. And then, back in Paris the attaché d
u presse of the Chambre Syndicale, the fashion trade association, took me to lunch at the Ritz, pumping me about New York. I mentioned having met Bingo.

  “Mind you,” she said brightly, “I don’t believe a word of it. But when Bingo was living here and buying Fashion and first getting it launched, there was a lot of talk.”

  “Talk?”

  She leaned closer. “They said he had affairs with animals.”

  15 You know what they call him on Fire Island?

  DESPITE the animals, it was comforting to know that if things really deteriorated at the Times, I had Bingo’s offer of a job.

  In July he was in Paris for the collections and laid siege to me over drinks downstairs at the Georges V. For all his curious obsessions, he was certainly brisk and businesslike when it came to getting what he wanted.

  “Working on another book?” he asked right away, sniffing out vulnerability like a ferret.

  “Oh, you know,” I said, wary of giving too much.

  “Book publishers are awful little people. Not our sort at all.”

  “Well,” I said, not knowing precisely what “sort” I was.

  Then, shifting gears, Bingo announced, “Abe Rosenthal resents you.”

  I had to laugh.

  “Abe is barely aware of me,” I said honestly. The editor of the Times was famous for distancing himself from mere reporters.

  “Nonsense. You have a Pulitzer, you wrote a best-seller. It’s common knowledge the man is writhing with jealousy. It’s all New York is talking about. You’ve got to get out of there.”

  Since Rosenthal had his own Pulitzer, had written his own books, I mumbled something, and then Marsh swiveled again, without warning, master of the non sequitur.

  “See that fellow there, the sleek Rudolph Valentino spic with the greased hair?”

  A rather good-looking young man waved to Marsh from one of the more desirable booths.

  “Yes,” I said, unsure if I were to say more.

  “He’s a fashion designer from New York. Here to buy fabric and sniff the air, which is how designers always describe stealing someone’s idea.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. He spent last summer on Fire Island, recruiting lovers and attempting to arrange financial backing for his Seventh Avenue house.”

  “Mmm,” I said, attempting to be blasé.

  Marsh leaned closer to me at the bar, dropping his voice. Obviously, this was to be some variety of confidential remark.

  “My informants tell me he’s exceedingly modest when it comes to sexual organs.”

  “Oh?” I gripped my old-fashioned glass more tightly.

  “Yes, a penis about so long…”

  Bingo held up two fingers, not very far apart. I glanced about nervously, wondering who else might be listening.

  “And you know what they call him on Fire Island?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Marsh smiled in triumph. Then, in a much louder voice: “Princess Tiny Meat!”

  He left me soon after to visit what he called, also aloud, “the little boys’ room.” I ordered another drink, quick.

  When Marsh returned, he again abruptly changed subjects.

  “I’m absolutely sure… now don’t deny it… that Coco seduced you.”

  I pushed back from the table a bit. “How can you be sure about something like that?”

  “There’s passion in every line of your book about her. I wouldn’t say so if we weren’t such good friends, but you wrote a very randy book, John, very randy.” I wasn’t sure whether he was chiding or becoming aroused.

  “She was extraordinary,” I said, choosing prudence.

  “I flew over for her funeral,” Bingo said. “It was all comme il faut, everything but a Nazi honor guard standing attention at the Ritz.”

  I’d been in the States for the book’s publication and had missed the old girl’s funeral and felt bad about it, and Bingo sensed that.

  “People living off her for years couldn’t bestir themselves,” he said. “The Seventh Avenue manufacturers, the fashion editors, most of the retail buyers, Rosalind Russell and Freddie Brisson, who made a fortune off the musical. I called Freddie in Cleveland or some vulgar place and screamed at him. He kept saying, ‘Dear boy, dear boy,’ so I hung up on him. He and Miss Russell sent a floral arrangement. The sort of thing you might send to the requiem of a distant aunt.” He brightened. “But an entire clan of Rothschilds came, even knowing how Coco felt about the Jews. Givenchy was there, but not Balenciaga. He never forgave her for saying he was too old, and she a decade older.”

  I was aware of who these people were, just, but knew little of their feuds and alliances. Bingo sensed that as well.

  “There are dozens of reporters who know such things, any number of them at Fashion. And scores of fashion experts, who realize, for example, that men should have short necks.”

  “They what?”

  “Short necks. Look at Cary Grant sometime. Or photos of Jack Kennedy. Fredric March. Nice, short necks, so the suit jacket sits more elegantly. A long neck on a woman is swanlike. Consider Babe Paley. But on a man…”

  “I see,” I said, though not really. Bingo was in full flight, quite excited.

  “Through the years all the really well-dressed men, the great old actors, men like, well, Herbert Marshall…”

  “Who?”

  “Excellent actor. Did some movies with Bette Davis. An Englishman who had, I believe, a wooden leg. From the war. In fact, I’m quite sure about that, the wooden leg, but a nice, short neck…”

  I was blunt.

  “No, Bingo, I don’t know about short necks.”

  “… and Bette Davis herself, you might not be aware, had a very low bosom.”

  “Well, she’s hardly in the first blush of…”

  “No, even when she was young. Quite low. The brassiere industry keeps very careful track of such matters, statistics and such, when they involve the bosoms of famous people. Women, I mean.”

  Despite all those hours with Coco, I was a fashion illiterate. I admitted as much now. Bingo accepted my confession as enthusiastically as they welcomed back the prodigal son.

  “But you’re a writer. You got Chanel down on paper. Memorably so.” He understood flattery.

  “Well…”

  “That’s why you’ve got to join the magazine, why you simply must work for Fashion.”

  He dealt in imperatives.

  16 Tell Sharkey about the Blue Train, Olivier.

  HE was also persistent. A month later he called me from New York. An airplane ticket was en route. Open dates, round trip, first class. All he asked was a good, serious talk about my leaving the Times to come to work for him.

  That fall I flew over, taking a week’s vacation.

  Lunch was in that season’s fashionable restaurant, La Côte Basque, where we were greeted with enormous enthusiasm by an ugly woman and shown to a banquette in the front, more desirable, room.

  “That’s Madame Henriette,” Bingo hissed. “She hates me.”

  That he and Madame Henriette had exchanged delighted kisses went unremarked.

  “We’re lunching with Olivier,” I was informed. “You’ll love him.”

  I thought we were having lunch to discuss my career, but I said that was fine and just who might Olivier be?

  “Olivier of Hollywood.”

  “A director?”

  “No, he makes dresses.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes,” Bingo went on, “he was a great hero during the war, in the French Resistance. Well, actually he wasn’t a hero; he was the boyfriend of the hero, a truly sainted man.”

  “Oh,” I said again, queasily aware of how Bingo’s voice rose on such disclosures.

  “The Nazis were closing in, so the hero confided to Olivier where the money was hidden, gold the British and Americans dropped by parachute to finance the Maquis and disconcert the Germans. Anyway, here was the Gestapo at the door and the Resistance hero gave Olivier a final, sure
ly passionate, kiss, and shoved him through the window into a convenient alleyway, patting his little bottom as he went.”

  “And what happened?” Bingo had a way of leaving a story in mid-crisis.

  “Oh,” he said offhandedly, “the Gestapo pulled out the hero’s fingernails and did beastly things and then shot him or something and within a few months the Allies were in Paris. Olivier surfaced, pried up the floorboards, and retrieved the gold. Anyone else who knew about the fortune was dead, and the Americans had plenty, so Olivier made an instant moral judgment and kept it. ‘As a small tribute to a man I loved’ was the way he later put it.

  “Olivier moved in with an American colonel from Des Moines with a penchant for young boys, got the colonel to arrange for a visa, and by ’46 or ’47 Olivier was in New York, a rather wealthy young man.”

  Marsh paused, calculating.

  “He must have been just eighteen.”

  I cleared my throat, wondering how much of this the waiter was getting.

  “So you see,” Marsh said, “that, after all, the fairies really did play a major role in the war effort.”

  Olivier of Hollywood came in a few moments later, a tough-looking, slim, dark-haired man.

  “This is Mr. Sharkey, Olivier, of The New York Times.”

  “You a fashion editor?”

  “No, Olivier, John knows nothing of fashion. He may just be joining us at the magazine to write about people.”

  “No shit?” said Olivier. I don’t know where he learned his English, but from its Brooklyn accents, it could have been Huntz Hall. Or Leo Gorcey.

  Wanting to be cordial, I said, “And you like Los Angeles?”