by James Brady
Vava liked it that I knew Europe.
“So few Americans really do. They don’t understand what it was to survive the war. When the money began to run out, I knew Europe was finished. I purchased a one-way ticket on the Ile de France, confident I could make my way in America. With the thousand or so (in dollars, I assure you!) I had left, I took over a private room at Maxim’s and invited my friends, people I knew, people I knew of. A marvelous evening. I ended, drunkenly, I am willing to admit, in bed in a hotel particulier on the Avenue Foch, with two women, a mother and daughter, each quite appealing in her own debauched way. I arrived in Manhattan with perhaps twenty dollars.”
I cleared my throat.
“But surely, dear boy, you have had even more exotic experiences, a man of your background and breeding.”
“Which of us doesn’t, Count. But there are things, even now, too painful to…”
“Of course,” he said solicitously, one man of the world recognizing another and saluting discretion.
He was less discreet about his own affairs.
In the weeks and years to come, I would learn more of the Count’s activities, on behalf of everything but the American Indian Movement and Boris Yeltsin.
“Never,” he told me. “The man’s a charlatan. Several Obolenskys have warned me against his counterrevolutionary posturings…”
On efforts to restore the Greek monarchy he was more sanguine.
“Things are definitely afoot in Athens and Piraeus. I have my sources.”
Regina Stealth, suspecting I might be Bingo’s lover and could be undercutting her with him, sent the Seeing Eye dog, Blanche.
Over drinks in a booth at the King Cole Bar in the St. Regis, she said, “Mind, I don’t believe any of it. Mr. Marsh, if so inclined, would surely choose juicy little boys…”
I remonstrated.
“You know, this is all foolishness. I barely know Vava. I have no influence on Mr. Marsh. Please assure Madame Regina…”
“ ‘Vagina,’ ” she said, giggling, pronouncing the noun with a long i.
I tried to look stern.
“Your boss, your editor, a woman of breeding!”
“Yes,” the Seeing Eye dog said, cowed. I smiled, knowing I’d made my point.
The girl looked at me, with something resembling affection.
“But Madame told me to go to bed with you. She’ll be furious with me if I don’t…”
I empathized with the child. First Vava had wooed me; now Blanche had been sent to offer herself up. It would have been brutal and unthinking of me to have sent her away.
Later, as we lay together following a somewhat less than frenzied passage at arms, the Seeing Eye dog murmured, “Is that how you did it with Chanel?”
31 Vulgar people pretending to have taste.
ACTUALLY going to work at Fashion magazine, as opposed to writing for it from Europe, was a decided cultural shock.
I’d been in the magazine’s offices before, of course, shepherded about by Marsh, provided the grand tour, cozened and cosseted, shown the Sphinx and the Pyramids and a few of the lesser tombs. Now I was there, not for a matter of a few hours of handshaking and smiles, but day after day, sometimes the day long.
“There’s this little oddity they have in the art department,” Bingo advised, proceeding in a cautionary and uncharacteristically tentative manner, “to which narrow people might take offense.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, but what it really is…” Bingo paused, seemingly embarrassed, “… is that some of the boy artists…”
“Yes?”
“… prefer to wear dresses.”
I wanted to hold Bingo close and comfort him.
“It’s called cross-dressing, Bingo. One season the star mannequin in the cabine of Balenciaga was a paratrooper.”
He looked relieved. “Good, then you know about it. I was afraid it might, well, intimidate you.”
“No, it’s okay. Chanel’s secretary, a guy named Jackie Iskandere, used to…”
Marsh was off now, on a hobbyhorse, enthused the way he often became, rather excited.
“Ames informed me there was historical precedent,” he said, “a royal governor of New York under the British, a Viscount Cornbury. He posed for his formal portrait wearing a very nice dress, the bodice just so, the usual lace trim and softly belled sleeves, rather flattering actually.”
My eyes may have begun to glaze, but Marsh soldiered on:
“Various historians have referred to Cornbury as a ‘notorious transvestite.’ But Ames assures me the Viscount had a fixation he facially resembled Queen Anne and was in fact a distant cousin. So his turning up to preside over city council sessions wearing a dress was a rather touching little tribute, and not at all a perversion, his attempt more closely to resemble his royal cousin.”
He recommended I boycott American fashion (“Seventh Avenue doesn’t have a clue!”), but when Count Vava asked me to come along to Geoffrey Beene one afternoon, out of curiosity I went. The editors and clients behaved just as badly as they did in Paris, squealing in delight and weeping with emotion.
“Splendid,” Vava enthused, “so many vulgar people pretending to have taste.”
He scribbled in his program, cupping his hand so no rival editor could crib. We had front-row seats on one side of the salon, Regina Stealth and the Seeing Eye dog on the other, Beene being a diplomatist aware of the realities. Madame chain-smoked throughout, staring at the clothes a yard or two off target. I’d seen her arrive, lurching through the room, a spotted hand extended, feeling her way by touching the backs of chairs, the wall, women’s elbows. She was laughable, she was gallant.
“She has her horoscope drawn every morning,” Vava assured me, cold and unforgiving, “before she chooses her underwear.”
Madame took me to lunch, attempting to maintain parity in the internecine struggle with the Count. I told her I, too, had attended Geoffrey Beene’s collection.
“Such a nice boy,” she said, “a Southerner, you know. His real name is Willie something. He and Women’s Wear had a tremendous falling out when he let Architectural Digest photograph his country home before W. Years ago he did the wedding dress for one of those Lyndon and Ladybird Johnson girls, the tall, gawky one who used to be seen about with George Hamilton…”
“Lynda Bird, I think.”
“That’s the one. She married someone else. So naturally Bingo plays up Geoffrey in the magazine because Women’s Wear won’t. It’s a sort of game.”
“Yes?”
“And they say Beene attends leather bars on weekends. That can’t be so. Plump people avoid leather and wear something slimming.”
Eventually, over the poached salmon, she moved on to Count Vava.
“One evening at Mortimer’s words were exchanged between Vava and the barman. Vava cuffed the man. The next day he was quoted as declaring, ‘I shall never again patronize a saloon where one is not permitted to strike a barman.’ ”
She dove into a Gucci handbag to pull out a yellowed clipping of the incident.
“I’m only trying to save Bingo,” Madame assured me. “Vava is a notorious voluptuary, out to destroy him, take advantage of his sweet innocence. There are evil men in this city, clever, ruthless men…”
Vava exploded when I mentioned we’d lunched.
“She’ll bring the magazine down one day, the old bitch! How does one employ a blind woman to critique fashion? She’ll announce burnt orange is the season’s color when it’s snot green. Pension her off! I say. If she had a sense of honor, she’d kill herself. It would be the noble, selfless thing to do…”
Elegant Hopkins was no longer there, having gone off to make his mark on Seventh Avenue as a designer, presenting a small first collection of a dozen dresses done in muslin to save money. The few who saw his work remarked it was not bad. Bingo, who thrived on litigation, wondered aloud if it was possible to sue Elegant Hopkins.
“On what grounds?”
“Well, I g
ave him a job. And he left. Isn’t that sufficient? And Ames…?”
My second or third day there an unfamiliar figure approached me.
“You must be Sharkey.”
“Yes.”
“I’m le Boot, the managing editor.”
He was tiny, wizened, perhaps forty, and at ten in the morning smelled of barrooms.
“What can I tell you about this place?” he asked pleasantly.
“Well, Bingo’s taken me around. All a bit different from the Times.”
“The Times? This place makes the Woonsocket Call look serious.”
“Oh?”
“Sure, I drink out of a primitive instinct for self-survival. Have you met the fashion editors?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know. Two years ago the FBI was in here questioning Count Vava about threats he’d allegedly made to a pretender to the throne of Montenegro.”
For the first time I was working on a publication where the strict rules of wire service procedure, where the stiff rituals of The New York Times, did not apply. At the Times reporters were discouraged from writing unattributed quotes, and there was no such thing as a “blind item” in which the reader was supposed to guess just who was being libeled. At Fashion magazine, such practices were positively encouraged. As Marsh pragmatically put it, “How can we be expected to report the dirt if we quote people by name? They’ll simply keep it to themselves or tell John Fairchild.”
I balanced the technique against my own ethical concerns and found it wanting. For the moment, at least, I would continue to work under older, stricter rules of play.
Through P.J. le Boot, the managing editor, I began to meet my fellow workers in Bingo’s vineyard, even though he kept warning me to maintain a distance.
“They’re simply not your sort.”
On this, as on some other things, I disregarded Bingo’s advice and occasionally went out for a drink with other people in the office. On one such outing with le Boot, he informed me over a glass that he owned a parrot.
“A parrot? A live parrot?”
“It was my wife’s,” he said apologetically. “I didn’t like having the damned thing in the house squawking and crapping, but I wasn’t home much nights and she deserved to have company.”
His wife left two years before, fed up. But the parrot stayed.
“He’s a savage little son of a bitch,” P.J. said, and could have been speaking of himself. “He’ll go right at you, and not just a nip on the finger. He goes for the eyes. I can’t keep a cleaning woman.”
For this reason P.J. had to go home at least once every twenty-four hours to air and water and feed the beast, the one constant in his otherwise anarchic existence. “Keeps me sober,” he said. It didn’t, of course, but it kept him functioning. Now, over gin, he asked if I liked Kipling.
A drinker standing next to us groaned. “Jesus, not ‘Gunga Din’ again.”
After several stanzas, followed by a passable impersonation of Jimmy Cagney singing the title song from Yankee Doodle Dandy, P.J. left, urged on by a chorus of fellow patrons.
“I know some good piano bars if you’re in the mood some night,” he shouted to me as he went.
“Le Boot isn’t your sort, John,” Bingo chided, “not your sort at all.”
I thought that on this, at least, Bingo was probably right.
32 It’s historic: the long-anticipated return of the peplum!
THE magazine went to press Thursday evening for publication coast to coast Monday morning. Being accustomed to the daily deadline of the Times, I assumed this meant Friday would be an off-day or at least a time of muted frenzy. Not so. It was the day on which Bingo laid down parameters for the next issue of Fashion, the one to come out ten days from now. We met in his office, a room too small for the purpose.
“It’s good for them to have to stand or sit on the floor and squeeze in together,” he told me once. “It creates esprit de corps, a sort of…”
“Togetherness?” I offered as he groped for a word.
“That’s the motto of Redbook magazine and is never used here!” he snapped, decidedly curt.
We pressed in shortly after ten of a Friday morning in one of those first weeks I was at the magazine. Young women, who knew their place, perched on windowsills or sat on Bingo’s Aubusson carpets, tugging short skirts primly over handsome knees. The couch, the several chairs, were reserved for more senior staff, Madame Stealth and Count Vava (strategically situated at opposite ends of the room), Rambush the art director, P.J. le Boot, with people like me left to find available space. Marsh began sitting upon one buttock at a corner of his Louis Quinze desk but was swiftly up and about, skipping here and there as ideas flew about the room for the next issue. His remarks, awkwardly phrased, vague, unexpected, often unintelligible, seemed to spark more cogent suggestions and ideas from his captive audience.
But he commenced slowly, almost diffident.
“Does anyone see lapels? Over lunch Ungaro was talking lapels. Is anyone in New York into lapels at the moment?
There seemed little enthusiasm for lapels. One young woman stroked her breasts, as if wondering.
In swift succession Bingo mentioned a recent chat with Giorgio Armani (the latest feud having been adjudicated) in which Armani was “definitely thinking padded shoulders once again, very Joan Crawford,” a veritable splurge of Mondrian-type geometric prints he saw coming out of the silk mills of Lyon, a telephone conversation with Yves Saint Laurent during which pleats were mentioned most prominently, and the merest hint from Pierre Cardin of a flattened, boyish bosom.
Cries and little gasps and muted groans went up from his staff at each of these dangled suggestions. No one knew which were simply stalking horses, false clues dropped by Marsh to get the rash to betray themselves into premature ejaculation.
Then, satisfied, Bingo went on, moving into more substantive fashion directions.
“Jimmy Galanos tells me the new show at the Modern will have everyone agog.”
“Everyone!” came a swift, agreeing chorus. Galanos was America’s fashion intellectual. And if he said the new show at the Modern…
“It’s bound to have influence.” That was Vava, his resonant Mittel European accent unmistakable.
“We’ve been betrayed before by the Modern.” That was Madame Stealth, canny, anxious to distance herself from the Count.
“Tyson?” Bingo asked, seeking out the art director.
“Mr. Marsh, I’d first like to scrutinize the catalogue. Just what do they mean by ‘Sources of the Twentieth Century’?”
“We ought to know that, surely,” murmured Regina Stealth.
“Should the Modern really be delving back that far, into a previous century?”
“Don’t be so literal,” Bingo cautioned. “Send someone around to ask Bill and Geoffrey and Calvin and Ralph what they think.”
“It’s not Ralph’s period at all… ,” a young woman crouched near me whispered.
“And tell Paris to ask Yves and Hubert. Emanuel might possibly have a notion, having been so close to Balenciaga…”
Count Vava dared float a suggestion of his own.
“From what my sources tell me, Paris today is much more concerned with the ‘Le Boy’ look…”
“It’s darling,” squealed a young editor before she could get control of herself, drawing an exceedingly narrow look from Madame Stealth.
The meeting meandered on to other matters, to story ideas and interviews to be sought and collections to be covered and artwork considered and just which of a dozen possible pieces might mature into the cover story. When a fabric editor rhapsodized about a new dress fabric “inspired by grandma’s sofa slipcover material,” I shifted uneasily.
“Can a museum show really turn around an entire New York fashion season?” I asked him later.
“One movie can do it. Bonnie and Clyde… Jules et Jim… Love Story with Ali McGraw in those wool hats tugged down snug like an Ivy League cloche… Annie Hall with t
hat Diane Keaton layered look…”
“And the Seventh Avenue designers take the look as inspiration for…”
“No, no,” Bingo said firmly, “the Seventh Avenue designers steal the look. Then they congratulate themselves on their originality.”
“And Fashion magazine says so? You accuse them of stealing?”
“Absolutely. It’s why they have to read us every Monday morning. And Ames.”
But for all Marsh’s airy assertions of infallibility, even on matters about which he was clearly in error, his histrionics at staff meetings, his skipping and capering, the man really had a fundamental appreciation of just how fashion worked and which were the new and important directions.
“Old Stealth taught him,” Count Vava conceded to me one evening over drinks. “When he started up in Paris with his new magazine he was still an amateur, but he recruited her over there somehow to provide a crash course. She’d been managing a brothel, I believe, and in return for her guidance he bribed the authorities and got her out of the country and back here. He’s grateful, and so he keeps her about now, blind and gaga though she is.”
But it went beyond Regina Stealth’s teaching.
“He’s neither a woman nor a Jew nor a fairy,” Vava concluded, “yet when it comes to predicting the dominant fashions as each new season looms, Bingo is uncanny. An American Protestant has no business having such instincts. Unheard of. But he knows, Bingo knows!”
While convinced Marsh was at least slightly insane, there was no mistaking Vava’s respect for his employer as unfeigned.
“Season after season, I’ve seen him come skipping into the fashion department, crying ‘Sportive is out!’ or, ‘I see dirndls!’ Or, perhaps, ‘It’s historic: the long-anticipated return of the peplum!’ ”