Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  As the Count shook his head admiringly, I imagined I caught the glint of a tear. At Fashion magazine they took seriously such matters as the return of the peplum.

  I asked Bingo about it, how he knew, how he was so sure.

  “There’s nothing new in fashion. Everything’s been done before. Well, perhaps the duffel coat. Or blue jeans. And they were invented in 1849 so the miners had something to wear while they dug for gold in Alaska…”

  “… California? Sutter’s Mill?”

  “… and the pullover. And that was invented by the navy for sailors to wear. Chanel once told me that was where she got the idea for women’s sweaters, from gondoliers…”

  When he talked about fashion, he was almost articulate, talking of the different ways in which the great designers worked, right down to the use of toiles, light canvas, or even brown paper, in the early stages of cutting and fitting and basting so that the garment could begin to take shape and mistakes be corrected in the studio, without cutting into remnants fabric that sold at ninety dollars the yard.

  He knew the métier so intimately and his enthusiasm was so genuine, I thirsted to interview him.

  “You saw Coco work,” he said, “how she built a dress on the girl.”

  “Yes, many times. She liked an audience.” I didn’t mention what sport it was to look at the girls on whom she built the dresses.

  Bingo went on, still serious.

  “And did she work from sketches? She did not. Chanel never sketched in her life. Even before the arthritis got into her fingers. She worked from the original fabric, no cheap toiles for her, shaping and fitting right on the naked girl with her little tailors in their white butcher coats kneeling there, terrified of displeasing her, basting and pinning, snipping and tugging.”

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s how it went.”

  Bingo nodded happily, always pleased to be proved correct.

  “Whereas Saint Laurent can’t cut or sew at all. Never could. Yves works with a pencil, sketching the coat on long, narrow white cardboards. And then the tailors take over, cutting and sewing. Cardin can do it all. I know he’s impossible, I know his collections go on too long, but the man knows. And Ungaro as well. I recall a season when…”

  Then he was off on his hobbyhorse.

  When he explained all this to me, I said, meaning it, “But that makes a good deal of sense.”

  “Yes,” Bingo said, getting up from his chair to perform a brief skip of glee. “You see, I’m not entirely mad, am I?”

  33 Call Roy Cohn… . Roy’s organizing everything.

  MARSH wanted me to slip gradually into the weekly grind of a column by writing a few longer pieces to acclimate myself to America. Being Bingo, his notion of a simple little first assignment was the 1981 Reagan inaugural in Washington. He gave no instructions as to how to cover the festivities or the news angle on the story. Bingo was not precisely a political scientist.

  “I know Reagan’s a Republican, and that’s about the extent of it,” he admitted. “The key people to see down there are Blass, Jimmy Galanos, and Adolfo. Adolfo’s a spic who has a little dog, and I believe he’s from Cuba or somewhere. Does very good Chanel copies. Between the three of them they do all Nancy’s clothes. They’ll have the inside story on what’s happening, and Bush went to Yale, so if you meet him, tell him you work for me.”

  “Are you and Bush friends?”

  “No, but being a Yale man…”

  I went down by train, stayed four days, attended a number of inaugural balls and some other parties, sat way back on the Capitol Hill parking lot watching the official ceremonies, and then wrote precisely what I’d seen and heard. Which was what got me into trouble with the First Lady and her confidant, Zizi Orlando, and would eventually lead to difficulty with Marsh.

  Zizi didn’t work. He had inherited money, and according to legend spoke every day on the phone to Nancy out in California, filling her in on the New York gossip and reading snippets to her from that morning’s tabloids. Later, when she was ensconced in the White House, he continued to fulfill the same function. His fame derived both from friendship with the First Lady and his hotel ashtrays.

  “It is the most famous collection of hotel ashtrays in the world,” People magazine said in a profile, “some 11,000 different examples of which occupy an entire floor and the cellar of his double townhouse in Manhattan’s posh East 60s.”

  Others were less impressed.

  “The silly little eunuch, who gives a fuck about his ashtrays?”

  Zizi was short and dumpy, with a black-dyed Zorro mustache he waxed each morning that gave him something of the look of the gentleman caller in an old-fashioned stag movie. He also had a mouth on him. People used to call him “Orlando Furioso,” but then Bingo Marsh and Fashion magazine offered another nickname, “The Social Larva.” It was the name I’d heard at La Grenouille during that first lunch with Bingo so long ago. Now I was to record his pensées at the inauguration.

  The entire week was a circus and quite marvelous. Maybe they all were; this was my first. P.J. le Boot gave me a little paperback, Inaugurals throughout History, that I read on the train south. I decided my favorite was Andy Jackson’s.

  Jackson, the book said, invited his good ol’ boys from Tennessee to help him celebrate. Three days later they were still camping out in the White House in their coonskin caps, pinching the maids, drinking whisky, setting an occasional fire, and, when things got dull, firing their long rifles out the windows. In the end Old Hickory got them to leave by rolling the whisky barrels out onto the White House lawn.

  Mr. Reagan’s first inaugural wasn’t quite up to those standards.

  The usual press credentials didn’t count for much, these being Republicans and suspicious. Then someone from the New York Post gave me a tip. “Call Roy Cohn,” she said, “Roy’s organizing everything.”

  I knew who Cohn was, one of Joe McCarthy’s bully boys and now a very successful New York shyster and influence peddler. Where he got his purchase with the Reagan crowd, Californians cool to both gays and Jews, I didn’t know. I called and was immediately invited over to his hotel. Cohn loved reporters; he understood the publicity apparat and figured he could manipulate most of us. He was probably right. From the moment I entered the suite I was “Jack,” he was “Roy.”

  “Just use my name at the door,” he kept saying. “You’ll be on the lists.”

  Cohn was as good as his word. At one of the early events I went up to him to say thanks. “Say hello to Barbara Walters,” Roy said. “Barbara, Jack won the Pulitzer in Vietnam. A great reporter.”

  I hadn’t recognized Miss Walters, and I said hello. Roy beamed. “Barbara’s my dearest friend.”

  Bingo dealt in absolute imperatives; Roy Cohn in superlatives.

  “Thank God those shitkickers are finally gone,” a pretty woman told me, and I jotted it down. Washington was fed up with the Carters after four years of Jimmy and Rosalynn, with brother Billy getting stewed and little Amy up in the tree house and old Miss Lillian and her good works.

  The Reagans were to change all that, restore elegance to the White House, inspire a Republican Camelot.

  The leading fashion designers were there. I recognized Blass, who did some of Nancy Reagan’s clothes, but not Adolfo, the Cuban émigré who made very nice copies of Chanel suits. And then there was Olivier of Hollywood, who was not impressed.

  “These people, strictly from Zinzinnati,” he complained. The few exceptions were women wearing “Oliviers.”

  Olivier passed on a few items of salacious and obviously unprintable gossip about the celebrated and powerful. I mentioned that the new President’s son wanted to be a ballet dancer. Olivier brightened.

  “No shit?”

  “Ted Graber’s the Reagans’ decorator,” a woman offered as she saw me jotting notes. “He does all their private homes, and he’ll be doing the White House.”

  “I didn’t know the White House needed ‘doing,’ ” I said, drawing her.


  “After four years of the Carters? Ted’s been in there quietly already. He says even the dinnerware has to go. There’s a private fund being pledged, a couple of million so far, so no tax money will be needed to clean up the mess Rosalynn and Jimmy left behind…”

  I got the woman’s name, had her spell Graber for me.

  “The man to see in the new Administration will be Charlie Wick,” a cheerful drunk informed me. “His name used to be Charles Zwick but he changed it. Now it’s Charlie Wick and Z is his middle name. Get it?”

  “Sure.”

  I saw a tall woman I suspected might be Betsy Bloomingdale but it wasn’t. I asked her anyway about Nancy’s clothes.

  “She’s a size six. Maybe a four. Some people very close to the family don’t think she’ll live out the first term, the way she’s shrinking.”

  “Shrinking?”

  “She’s terminal. Some dreadful sort of cancer, I hear.”

  I was jotting furiously now, but the woman was gone, blowing kisses.

  Someone pointed out an official with the Reagan party, an assistant to somebody. Notebook out, I started to ask about Nancy Reagan’s “shrinking” and if by any chance…

  “The First Lady is in the best of health. She’s just petite.”

  “Oh.”

  A hearty man with a suntan took me aside. “I hear that when they got in there today they found the White House basement just filled with peanuts. Hundreds of burlap bags full of peanuts. Do you think that’s possible? I mean, I thought Jimmy was an asshole, but…”

  Some of the Republicans I met were quite nice, especially the ones who were drunk. In a way, my ignorance was a help. I had to ask questions, having so little background, and after a few drinks, people tended to give you rather interesting answers. I even got to see the President once, at a distance. I wrote it all down and put it in the story, including what Zizi Orlando told me.

  “Some nominations clear through me. I know the eastern players more intimately than does the Beverly Hills bunch.”

  “The Beverly Hills bunch?” I asked. “Who are they?”

  Zizi looked at me pityingly. “My dear young man, the California Mafia, of course. Don’t you know anything?”

  A few months before I’d been living in Paris and, no, I didn’t know much.

  But I put Zizi’s quotes, tactless if anything, into the story. I wondered if Bingo would let it run untouched. Not that he was that enthusiastic about Reagan, but he and George Bush were Yale men and I knew about the old school tie.

  It was one thing to tease the fashion designers; quite another to annoy a new President and First Lady and their cronies.

  My account, spiced with drunken quotes and earthy asides from party guests, ran in Fashion the following Monday, diplomatically balanced by some swell fashion photos of Nancy and her chums, plus a few cheap shots at the Carters (written anonymously by Bingo). It was the first time Bingo’s magazine had taken on the political Establishment, and by some fluke the thing came off. Marsh and I were political illiterates, but The New York Times quoted the magazine on its assessment of so-called “California chic,” while the next week’s Time would take note of several of my bitchy snippets, including Olivier of Hollywood’s dismissal of “the new Camelot” as “strictly from Zinzinnati.”

  “Zizi’s more furioso than ever, I’m told,” Marsh enthused, rubbing his hands as we sat in his office. “Next time let’s misspell his name.”

  Most of my newspaper experience had been at the Times. I couldn’t quite imagine Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Rosenthal sitting around giggling over stories and plotting to misspell names. But Bingo looked so beatifically happy it would have been churlish to protest.

  A week or so later it was reported to me Zizi Orlando complained to Marsh on behalf of the First Lady and himself and that Bingo denied culpability.

  “We have this new man, Sharkey, just in from Paris. He doesn’t understand how things are done in this country. I’ll speak very sternly to him, Zizi. You can count on it.”

  I laughed off the report. Editors and publishers stood by their reporters; part of the journalism ethic. Surely I could trust Marsh.

  34 I wonder if Nunc wet the bed. I must ask him.

  PINSKY, the salesman, bought me a welcoming lunch, shrugging off thanks.

  “It goes on the swindle sheet. I select the name of a valued advertiser and put it down. These are the accepted conventions.”

  Over the meal he filled me in on some of the magazine’s cast. It sounded pretty much like that of any big publication, drunks, misers, a guy who spent his lunch hours surreptitiously photographing women’s backsides, an elderly reporter so cheap he suffered a cardiac moving from one Village apartment to another by using the subway.

  “I met Tramlett,” I said, naming another character.

  “Then you know.”

  The first day on the job I’d gone into the men’s room to encounter a silver-haired fellow standing atop a toilet seat, tossing scraps of torn newspaper, confetti-like, up toward the air vents. When I stared at him, curious, he cried out in anguish as the bits fluttered down:

  “Call this a venting system? And there are men in this building who’ve not yet sired children!” This was Tramlett, the environmental quack.

  “There are also a few sane people,” Pinsky said complacently, “not necessarily including anyone named Marsh.”

  Not feeling it appropriate to criticize the man who’d so recently hired me for a hundred thousand a year, I said blithely, “I had lunch with the chairman.”

  “Ah yes,” Pinsky said, “Nunc. You never knew Bingo’s father, of course. Nice, decent man, very good with his people. Maybe not as creative as Bingo but you couldn’t snow him, couldn’t scare him.”

  “Bingo told me about his mother’s death, first time we had lunch.”

  “Yes, blame it on that,” said Pinsky, choosing not to elaborate.

  P.J. le Boot was less circumspect. Tiny, capricious, clever, obscene, he had a hard-edged wit and too much courage, whisky and otherwise. In a dim, local bar a large black man, surly and panhandling, braced us. I tensed, anticipating a scene if no worse. Not le Boot.

  “Pal,” he said amiably, “if you’ve got an attitude, don’t blame me. I’m not Achmed the slave trader…”

  The black, befuddled, walked away.

  P.J. and I got along, began having a drink together after work. Marsh pulled me aside.

  “He’s not your sort, John, not your sort at all.”

  “I hope not,” I said, having seen le Boot drunk. The stab at humor seemed to elude Bingo.

  When le Boot propositioned female employees or fell down drunk or erupted in tantrums or got into fistfights, most of which he lost, Marsh shrugged.

  “He gets the magazine to press every Thursday night. I need him.”

  And when P.J. got into a punch-up with a movie producer during a black-tie premiere party at the Pierre and people from the studio came next day in delegation demanding le Boot be sacked, Marsh refused to see them and called for his car, to be taken home faint.

  “I can’t stand scenes. They make me physically ill.”

  Le Boot was the one who looked sick but he smirked, ignoring his black eye and swollen lip.

  “Hollywood guys can’t hit for shit,” he assured people.

  For days after, Bingo ducked down corridors or sheltered in his office when he saw P.J. coming, just so he wouldn’t have to face chastising him.

  Why was Bingo this way, why couldn’t he tell off a Zizi Orlando or chew out le Boot?

  Over the next few years in unwonted, unwelcome spasms of self-revelation, while we traveled in airplanes or sat late over dinner in a distant city, he would lift corners of personality, drop tantalizing hints.

  “I was a bed-wetter,” he said brightly. “Were you?”

  He was as frank about that as he was about his preference for suppositories, a subject on which he would expand in near clinical detail.

  “I’m s
ure a qualified psychologist would know,” he told me once, “some link to aviation…”

  “Aviation?”

  “My mother. Something Freudian.” Pause. “Or is Freud only about sex?”

  He was contemptuous of Nunc but in an odd way envious.

  “I worry too much,” Bingo said. “In ways I wish I could be like Nunc. There’s consolation in being so dumb you don’t know it.”

  “Invincible ignorance,” I murmured, a phrase from a long-lost lecture.

  Marsh looked as if he were about to pursue the line, and then, abruptly, he returned to an earlier, more familiar, theme.

  “I wonder if Nunc wet the bed. I must ask him one of these days.”

  There was a naiveté about Bingo his enemies never saw. But then he would slink off behind half-truths and mendacity, as when I asked him casually about Peter Quinn, the editor who abdicated Marsh’s favor by going to work for Hearst, the fellow who was said to look like me.

  “Quinn? I barely knew the boy. He worked here, I believe.”

  No reference to afternoon movies or giggles together. It was like Chanel’s chill dismissal of poor Castillo, who “held the pins.”

  35 Hush! That’s Lindbergh in his gallant silver plane!

  THERE were enormous feuds among the fashion magazines and their editors. Most of them bloodless.

  “They threaten each another,” Vava cried. “Beaded purses at three paces.”

  Especially hostile, Bingo and John Fairchild of Women’s Wear Daily, who swapped insults, slyly recruited star reporters and artists from each other’s staff, and engaged in deadly earnest competition to break the new fashion sketches first. In the middle, the poor designers, both bullied and bribed. If Donna Karan gave Fairchild an advance look at the new collection before providing equal justice to Bingo, Fashion magazine was sure to savage her in its next review. If Gianni Versace slipped Marsh the new sketches before anyone else, Women’s Wear Daily could be counted on to suggest his impending bankruptcy.