Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  Yet, because I was perceived as Bingo’s protégé, resentful and jealous men created monstrous tales which were passed along with lip-smacking malice. Nor did Marsh’s own loose tongue and careless exaggerations help.

  It was said my war experiences were fabricated; that I killed Coco Chanel with my youthful passion; that fashion designers bribed me with girls; that I conspired with greedy men attempting to take over Bingo’s magazine; that I introduced Balmain to his lover, the Franciscan monk; that I actually helped Castillo whip the Gypsies; that I was Elmer Marsh’s illegitimate son.

  None of these allegations was entirely true and several, such as being Nunc’s bastard, palpably false.

  Yet even before taking the boat train out of the Gare St. Lazare for Le Havre and the QE2, where Bingo had typically and generously arranged for me the right stateroom on the right deck and a window table in the Princess Grill, my excitement about homecoming was dampened by a certain trepidation. A New York acquaintance learned I was coming back to take full-time employment at the magazine.

  “You know, of course,” he wrote, “that Bingo has a history of taking people up. And then, for whatever reason, he just cuts them dead.”

  My friend went on to alert me about someone called Peter Quinn.

  “Pete was with Marsh almost from the start. A terrific writer, very nice guy. He did some of the best early stories Fashion ran. He and Marsh were peas in a pod, lunches together, slipping out to go to the movies, laughing at the same corny things, coming up with great story ideas. Then Hearst hired Pete away, gave him big bucks and a magazine of his own to run. He’d always wanted to be an editor, this was his big chance, and it wasn’t anything like Fashion, no competitive situation. Quinn rushed in to tell Bingo, he was delighted and he thought Marsh would be happy for him as well, excited over his prospects. Marsh just went icy, turned away, told him to clear out his desk that day, never spoke to him again. Even assigned a reporter to dig up negative stuff about Pete’s new magazine. Never mentioned Quinn’s name in print except when he was in difficulty. The magazine eventually folded and Quinn was fired and Bingo ran a prominent story about how he’d flopped, much more prominent a story than the news was worth. Inside the mag, people said that was one story Bingo actually wrote himself.

  “Much of this may be bullshit,” my friend concluded, “but Marsh can be a petty, malicious son of a bitch is all I’m saying. So, take care of yourself, Jack, and guard your ass.”

  Then, in an ominous postscript:

  “Funny thing, this guy Pete Quinn that Marsh played up and then dropped sort of looked like you.”

  28 Fortunately, I had a revolver in my stateroom.

  BINGO was swift to put me at ease.

  I returned to my own, my native land, a couple of weeks after Reagan’s election and a month or so before his inaugural, a clear, chill Thanksgiving week. Bingo dispatched a limo to pick me up at the pier and a man to haggle about the luggage. I sailed through customs and immigration and plopped myself temporarily in a decent hotel just off Madison in the seventies for which the company was paying until I found digs. That very first day in New York Bingo called the hotel before I was fully unpacked.

  “I want to show you something this afternoon. Be downstairs about four, and I’ll pick you up.”

  He sounded so pleased to have me there, I shrugged off concern.

  The limo swung downtown on the FDR Drive and around the Battery and into the bowels of the World Trade Center. We took an elevator to the roof, to a private club. Functionaries genuflected and led Marsh and me to a private dining room overlooking the city. It was just sundown, Bingo’s timing impeccable, a lovely evening with the east in dusk and New Jersey and the Hudson and the taller buildings about us clinging to last light. A man brought wine, a blanc de blanc, and Bingo had him uncork and pour it. When we each had a glass he motioned me to the window, where we both stood, silent for a moment. Then, with a stagy gesture:

  “There it is. Vanity Fair. Paname. Gotham. Baghdad on the Hudson. The world’s greatest city.” He paused. “I unleash you on it!”

  I didn’t know quite what to say, so I remained silent, thinking that surely he would say more. And then he did, slightly more subdued:

  “Subject only to the laws of libel. And a good newsstand sale.”

  The grandiose, typical of Marsh, made the midwesterner in me squirm. But I was sufficient of a journalistic predator to relish the task. It really was a dream assignment, to write about anyone or anything I wished, so long as it interested, inspired, irritated, informed, or enraged the readers of Fashion magazine.

  And it was over our private dinner that evening high above Manhattan and the harbor, that I became “The Shark.”

  I may not have mentioned that I have rather prominent canine teeth. In a profile of me written at the time I won the Pulitzer, a woman writer said I was a cross between “David Steinberg-good-looking and a young shark.” A David Levine caricature at the same time, otherwise flattering, exaggerated my canines. But it wasn’t my teeth that held Marsh in sway. He sought and believed he’d found a shark with words:

  El tiburon. Le requin. The man-eater. Dangerous in any language and on any coast. Funny how Pierre Bergé had, jokingly, suggested so years before.

  A day or two later I had dinner with an old friend from the Times and told him of the assignment.

  “They’re going to pay you, too?”

  Were they not. A hundred thousand a year. I thought of it as all the money in the world. An expense account, besides. And I was expected to spend: the right places, the right tables, the right tips. Bingo was good about things like that. He might refuse a twenty-dollar raise to a file clerk or cancel a subscription to the Wall Street Journal for the ad department. But he believed we were dealing with people who spent money, and we were expected to spend. Not that this always pleased Nunc.

  When one of my earliest expense accounts reached the office of the board chairman, Elmer Marsh sent a testy note. Rather than insinuate myself into a family argument, I showed it to Marsh.

  “Should I respond or what?”

  Bingo waved a careless hand. “That’s just Nunc making himself important. He’s up there in his private shower with Miss Fuchs, anyhow. Throw it away.”

  “Miss Fuchs?”

  “Nunc’s secretary. They take showers together.”

  There was no evidence this ever occurred but whenever Miss Fuchs’s name was mentioned, Marsh smirked and spoke airily of showers.

  It must have been my cavalier attitude, making no reply to his chiding note about expenses, that impressed Elmer Marsh. A second note arrived from the old gentleman inviting me to lunch with him at what Bingo assured me was a bad club. Nunc told everyone he was a Dartmouth man, or a Cornell man, sometimes it was one and sometimes the other, the truth being he hadn’t attended any college at all and consequently could belong only to a club that welcomed people like himself. Or so went Bingo’s description of the place.

  The club dining room was just off the bar, and when I got there and was seated, Nunc came in from the bar pulling at his nose and sat down opposite me. “Had to make a phone call,” he said.

  I said the right thing about how handsome the room was, and the waiter came and handed us the cards and then asked if we wanted a drink.

  “I never drink at lunch,” Nunc said, “but you go ahead.”

  I ordered something and then we ordered lunch, but before the salad had cleared Nunc got up.

  “There’s a phone call for me,” he said.

  Since no message had arrived at the table, I was rather mystified. Then, through the swinging doors that separated dining room from bar, I could see Nunc standing at the bar, downing a quick one.

  “Sorry,” he said when he returned, “long distance. Business matter.”

  Twice more during lunch Nunc was “called away.” Each time I glimpsed him enjoying a furtive drink. Over the meal he said some nasty things about Bingo and Bingo’s late father and talked elo
quently of his own colorful history.

  “You sailed back?”

  “Yes, on the QE2.”

  “I crossed once on the Queen Mary,” Nunc said, “when there was a mutiny. Fortunately, I had a revolver in my stateroom, and with the help of a few officers and loyal members of the crew, I was able to put it down.”

  I’d never heard of a mutiny aboard a Cunard liner, not in this century, but it wouldn’t have been polite to say so.

  “Nor do I travel often by subway anymore,” Nunc was saying. “And I’d advise against it. On the Lexington Avenue line a year or two ago a band of spics began abusing passengers. I stood up, grabbed two of them, and knocked their heads together. The others fled, and when we came into the Fifty-ninth Street station, passengers rose as one man to cheer me.”

  I shook my head in admiration.

  Nunc hadn’t been in the war, he said, his one great regret.

  “I wanted to go but they’d assigned me to head up civil defense for New York City.”

  I asked Bingo about that. He looked impatient.

  “Nunc was air raid warden for the Marsh building,” he said.

  29 She had Paris, of course, and all its carnal arts.

  IF Bingo saw through Nunc’s boozy, rather pathetic, posing, he was less astute judging me, from the first endowing me with qualities I didn’t have.

  For one, he assumed sophistication; that was Paris and having known Chanel. The fact was I was the product of the smokestack Midwest and as awed by New York as the most casual provincial lately arrived on the Greyhound bus. For another, there was the Pulitzer. People sneer at prizes and insist the best-seller list speaks only to the cleverness of the book publishers, but Marsh was impressed. More important, I’d attended a war and he hadn’t, and the several young women he’d seen with me were attractive and he considered me something of a rake, continuing to insist I’d been Coco Chanel’s last lover. What I didn’t see until later was the detail with which he embroidered the legend and how energetically he broadcast it.

  “It was Sharkey’s ardor, as much as age and decrepitude, that finished off the old girl,” Marsh would confide over the dinner table or in the intimacy of the Racquet Club. “He was a boy and she near ninety. But she had Paris, of course, and all its carnal arts, oils and unguents, pomades and fixatives. She lured young Sharkey to her couch above the shop, to her bed at the Ritz, to the chalet above Geneva. She was insatiable, he tireless, and the combination killed her.” Pause. “It’s said, though without corroboration, that the concierge on the rue Cambon side of the hotel smuggled Sharkey into an anonymous cab in the night so that she could be found discreetly alone in her deathbed.”

  This was rubbish and Bingo knew it, especially that part about sharing her deathbed, since I’d been in America at the time, plugging my book. Not that fact ever interfered with a good story, not for Marsh. Nor always for his magazine.

  For all the sophistication of his audience, he could be extraordinarily gullible.

  Of course Bingo knew about Pierre Balmain and his boyfriend, the Franciscan monk. He expected such things of Catholics. As a good Protestant he was full of misinformation, and knowing I was a Catholic, even if not especially pious, he questioned me closely and confidentially about it:

  Was it true that nuns and priests were routinely, though secretly, married to each other; could you buy your way into heaven with large donations; did Christ’s wounds on the cross hung in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral actually bleed if someone used Jesus’ name in vain or was it a clever trick to gull the faithful?

  I invented ludicrous replies which he swallowed whole and then passed on in conspiratorial tones as having been privately confided to him by “one of the holiest Catholics they have.”

  So Marsh saw in me virtues that didn’t exist and vices that weren’t there. He’d just taken me up to the roof of Manhattan, as Satan once did with Jesus on the mountain overlooking Jerusalem, showing me this world and the glory of it. And then assigned me the daunting task of dissecting New York, this latter-day “Vanity Fair,” probing its rich and powerful.

  “Vex them, vex them!” was his cry, as he urged me on, demanding that week after week I tell millions of readers things neither they nor anyone else knew of this most subtle of societies and the grandees who inhabited its more elegant precincts.

  I should have cringed at his presumption, and mine, and petitioned Bingo for a return ticket, economy class, to Paris. I knew, deep inside myself, he was as mistaken about me as he was about nuns having to sleep with their feet toward Rome.

  I knew I could write; I had a functioning ego. But did he expect too much?

  I thought back to whisky-soaked afternoons with Coco when nothing seemed difficult and how I expected one day to write novels, dreamt of becoming… Somerset Maugham. A modest enough ambition, surely, for a young man. Now, more tolerant in my thirties than I’d been at twenty, I knew as a novelist how far beyond me even Maugham was.

  What I could be, and owed it to Bingo, was the best magazine writer he had, maybe the best there was. I owed that to Bingo, to his magazine, to myself. Even owed it to Nunc, who when not in the shower with Miss Fuchs signed the company checks.

  Oh yes, there was one other thing bothered me those first weeks in New York. For all my rakishness, for the “carnal arts” in which Coco had supposedly tutored me, I had never really been in love and, in truth, knew very little about women.

  30 This is Count Vava… active in émigré circles.

  NOR did I know much about the internal workings of a great fashion magazine. Or its politics.

  Being a fashion magazine there was, of course, a fashion department. Not that this was my concern, nor did Marsh encourage me to make it so.

  “They’re certifiable, fashion editors,” he cautioned, “and they conspire.”

  Bingo had two of them, two fashion editors instead of one. This, too, I suspected, reflected a certain insecurity. Not one that he admitted.

  “I play them off, one against the other,” he said smugly, “you know, like Julius Caesar.”

  “Caesar?”

  “Yes, all Gaul being divided into two parts.”

  I refrained from correcting the quotation.

  “It’s the classic balance of power,” he went on, smiling, assuming I understood. Then, seeing a certain blankness in my face, he elaborated:

  “Ames, who is quite a student of the matter, tells me that in its dominant period Great Britain always allied itself with the second most powerful nation on the Continent. And against the first. If France, for example, were on top, the British sucked up to the Germans. If the Belgians seemed about to overrun Europe, getting too powerful…”

  “Hardly the Belgians,” I murmured.

  “… London hatched treaties with the Dutch,” Bingo said, ignoring protest. Then, once he was sure I understood, he concluded, “… and that’s why I insist on having two fashion editors on the magazine, maintaining the famous ‘balance of power.’ ”

  Now I was to meet them.

  “This is Count Vava,” Bingo said enthusiastically. “He’s active in émigré circles.”

  “Quite active,” said the Count, extending a hand.

  “Delighted,” I assured him.

  Count Vava was six and a half feet tall, a Mittel European of enormous charm and dash, who on this occasion was wearing a long black leather trench coat. He rather resembled photos of Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer. His enemies on the staff suggested Vava and the unfortunate Speer shared fascist sympathies. This rather pleased Bingo, who held no great brief for democracy.

  “They sit about and plot,” Marsh said, going on as if Vava weren’t there. “His best friend is King Tupa, whose late father was Zog of Albania. King Tupa sells jewelry for Van Cleef’s, but Vava tells me he lives quite modestly, in a furnished room, conserving funds for the counterrevolution. He keeps a machine gun under his bed, I’m told.”

  “He does, Bingo,” said the Count, “for I have seen it there
.”

  The other fashion editor was Regina Stealth, invariably addressed as “Madame,” at one time an editor at Women’s Wear Daily.

  “This is John Sharkey, Madame,” Bingo said perkily as he introduced us, “our new columnist.”

  Madame Stealth extended a liver-spotted hand about a foot to the right of mine.

  “She’s nearly blind,” Bingo whispered, “you have to point her in the right direction.”

  It was Regina Stealth whom Marsh early on hired to teach him about fashion, and he was, in his way, grateful, so that despite fading eyesight she was kept on, not simply as an aging pensioner but in a major role, balancing Count Vava. As we made small talk I mentioned to Madame that I’d met the Count.

  “Ah yes,” she said, “he once was a personage of some substance, apparently. Now he wears an elastic stocking.”

  I was curious as to how Madame could edit a fashion magazine if she couldn’t see the clothes or discern color.

  “She has a Seeing Eye dog,” Bingo said.

  That year’s “dog” was named Blanche, a Radcliffe girl with sufficient ego to have later done a year at FIT. She sat with Madame Regina at the shows and told her what she was seeing, lighting her cigarettes and holding the ashtray. Count Vava, who saw in me a potential ally, claimed they spent the entire fashion show conspiring against him.

  “Regina hates me,” he said, “resents my proximity to Marsh; envies my education and breeding. She would give both her unfortunately sagging breasts for a European title of any legitimacy. She is, as you know, from… Pittsburgh.”

  I wondered over lunch at La Caravelle how Vava had gotten into fashion.

  “You’re right to ask, of course, since I’m not a pansy. It happened this way. When I got to America there was a recession. No decent jobs. A friend, a certain Archduke Vassily (the title may be flawed, I caution you), had been taken on as a perfume salesman by Prince Matchabelli. He got me an appointment as well. The title did it, of course. We lived on commission, selling perfume to debutantes and their mothers, sleeping with the debutantes, and when unavoidable the mothers, and escorted them to nightclubs and polo matches and played tennis with them weekends. The debs picked up the checks. It was a marvelous, irresponsible life, so much better than rotting in a gulag somewhere or being shot. From there I dressed windows at Saks and drifted onto Bazaar and ended up here. Bingo’s mad, of course, but we get along splendidly.”