Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  Especially infuriating was WWD’s latest hurled defiance. Fairchild had taken to featuring the designs of Elegant Hopkins in his newspaper’s pages, once, particularly galling, on the front page.

  “They do it to exasperate me,” Bingo complained. “They know I discovered and nurtured that boy, gave him his chance to escape the ghetto and build a decent life, and then he turned on me, ratlike and cunning, abandoning this magazine. And Ames.”

  Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar hated each other for more mundane reasons: advertising dollars.

  “They bicker and haggle endlessly about position,” Bingo explained. “The two biggest advertisers in the fashion business are Revlon and Estée Lauder. Mrs. Lauder couldn’t stand Charles Revson; he despised her. Ever since, even after Charles’s death, they continue to argue over who gets the first right-hand page up front in the magazine. If Revlon gets it in Vogue, Lauder threatens to take its advertising to Bazaar.”

  “And do they?”

  “No, they bluster and whine, but Vogue’s so much stronger, Bazaar has to walk a knife’s edge and try to keep everyone happy. Years ago Bill Fine was the publisher, and when he put a Lauder ad ahead of a Revlon ad, Charles Revson threatened to pull every ad not only from Bazaar but from the other Hearst books, Cosmo and Good Housekeeping and House Beautiful and so on. Poor Fine had to crawl on hands and knees to apologize.”

  Seventeen drew his ire. “It’s run by a nun. And the readers are all twelve years old.”

  Why this should aggravate him eluded me. But Bingo’s talk of rival publications convinced you the fashion magazines, like the Balkans, were constantly at war.

  Madame Vreeland, retired by Vogue a decade before, remained to many of her old competitors a hissing and a byword. Carmel Snow, dead twenty years, was still the target of lip-smacking bitchery.

  “When she ran Bazaar there was a young fashion editor assigned to Miss Snow in Paris who had but a single task,” Madame Regina informed me, “to iron Miss Snow’s underwear and dresses and to lay out her stockings. She set up an ironing board borrowed from the housekeeper of the Crillon. More senior editors attended the collections, while this poor girl was transported from New York twice a year to iron petticoats.”

  Vava also had a story about Carmel Snow.

  “She was past seventy and on the train from Rome to Florence for the July collections, and, the train having no air conditioning, Carmel went to stand between the cars to catch a breeze. A young Italian pushed by, bumping her slightly, before vanishing into the next car. When Carmel got to Florence she discovered her necklace was missing. She’d been wearing it when she left Rome, and now it was gone.”

  It must have been the boy who bumped her, they told her.

  “ ‘Oh,’ said Miss Snow, ‘and I thought he was just being amoreuse…’ ”

  I thought that story reflected rather well on a seventy-year-old woman, but when I said so, Vava scowled. In fashion’s feuds, you gave no quarter. Certainly Bingo gave none.

  “Fashion editors,” he warned bleakly, “all have dubious motives. And wear bladder control devices.”

  He didn’t say which was worse, and then, having warned me off but being Marsh, he suggested I go uptown to see Diana Vreeland.

  “She lives all alone and grinds her teeth. Very bitter. She’ll tell you everything. Just like Chanel.”

  I knew who Vreeland was, of course. Everyone knew about her. She’d been editor of Harper’s Bazaar and then of Vogue until 1971 when they retired her and put in her assistant, Grace Mirabella, whom Vreeland had regularly reduced to tears and sobbing. Grace, pale blonde, pretty, ladylike, nervous, and gracious, was now running the magazine as a superior sort of clerk supervised by the true editorial power at Condé Nast, Alexander Liberman. Mrs. Vreeland had been sufficiently colorful as an editor to inspire a Fred Astaire movie called Funny Face in which Kay Thompson portrayed her, mouthing lines like “Think pink!”

  There was an even better Vreeland line, too subtle for Hollywood: “Pink is the navy blue of India.”

  So, at Marsh’s urging, I went uptown to see her. Regina Stealth, who’d learned my destination, sent the Seeing Eye dog with a sprig of wolfsbane for me to wear as protection.

  “She considered providing a crucifix as well,” Blanche said blushingly.

  Madame Vreeland, whom friends addressed as “Dee-Anne,” lived in a small apartment enameled red. I’d sent a note, introducing myself, and she received me graciously but, unlike Chanel, serving no drinks. Vreeland really did resemble one’s image of the last Empress of China, with black hair, surely touched up, no gray anywhere. Although she now worked for the Met, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as curator of its costume wing, she had no money to speak of beyond a generous pension from Vogue and was understandably cagy about her former employer. Bingo wanted very much to get her to trash Vogue and Grace Mirabella and just about everyone else.

  “It’ll make a great piece,” he said, rubbing his hands and skipping about the office.

  But Madame Vreeland fenced deftly, or perhaps I simply lacked cleverness, and I got very little that was quotable. Which didn’t mean it wasn’t a pleasant hour or two. Like Regina Stealth, she had trouble with her eyes. And with facts. Perhaps it was her memory that was bad, but I tended to think she just made things up, quite marvelous stories.

  Legs Diamond, the gangster, for example. Diana told a complicated anecdote about Legs and his “moll”—an expression Madame Vreeland enjoyed—an incredible slut of such sensuality and raw beauty that Ernest Hemingway, who didn’t realize to whom she belonged, picked her up one night at the “21” Club and took her back to his hotel, where they spent two days in bed until a pal called.

  “Ernie, don’t you know who that dame is?” and Hemingway departed that very afternoon on the plane to Cuba.

  Then there was Diana Vreeland’s account of that day in 1927 when she dandled her infant son in the garden of Tuxedo Park, “waiting for the bootlegger to arrive,” when Lindbergh flew over the garden on his way from Mitchell Field, Long Island, to Paris.

  “The bootlegger arrived at that very instant,” Vreeland told me, “but I ran across the lawn with my baby and cried, ‘Hush! That’s Colonel Lindbergh overhead in his gallant silver plane. We can discuss the gin order afterwards.’ ”

  How it was that Lindbergh, heading northeast to France, was flying almost due west over Tuxedo Park that day, I was unable to fathom.

  Diana Vreeland, leading me unsteadily to the door, issued no feasible explanation. “You must call me Dee-Anne,” she said, looking past me at a large vase, “and return often.”

  36 They’ll swim naked each morning and drink a lot of wine.

  AT times it seemed as if Bingo had appointed himself adviser and counselor to people in fashion, alternately stern and consoling as a chaplain might be, a latter-day Father Flanagan ministering to the spiritual and other needs of a chaotic home for aging boys.

  “Sol Blum’s wife, lovely woman, is dying of cancer,” he told me one morning, Blum being quite aged and a towering figure in brassiere manufacture.

  “That’s sad,” I said.

  “Yes, they went everywhere together, and he was just devoted.”

  I began to say something pious about there being so few good marriages when…

  “But he has this fantastic mistress.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, and Princess Tiny Meat told me recently her sexual demands are such that Mr. Blum’s been totally distracted from depression.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “So you see, John,” Bingo said, smiling beatifically, “that even a silver cloud can have a lining.”

  “Yes.”

  At moments like these I was tempted to hug him and pat his cheek.

  Bingo’s specialty, of course, was the libido. He may not have known the term, but much of the energy he expended counseling the designers dealt with their sex lives. One of his favorite subjects was Clive Neville, a good-looking man going to fat, and for m
any years one of Seventh Avenue’s most consistent designers.

  “He never does anything original, but then neither does he offer the merest vulgarity,” was how one of Fashion’s reviews of a Neville collection concluded. “The man simply has too much taste ever to be great.”

  “It’s really so courageous,” Bingo began as we slid into his accustomed banquette at Le Cirque for Tuesday lunch, opening his remarks as he frequently did, in media res.

  “What is?”

  “Well, you know Clive Neville.”

  I did, and for all his pretension (he’d seen too many Cary Grant movies growing up in small-town Missouri and was given to wearing Oxford bags and hacking jackets and gesturing with a cigarette holder), I found Neville a good fellow.

  “Yes.”

  “Anyway, he and Emma are going to spend a month together in the South of France, at Cap d’Antibes in a villa of the most extraordinary lavishness, to see if they can… ‘do it.’ ”

  He pursed his lips and wagged his head knowingly, as if I, too, were now in on the secret.

  Oddly, I did happen to know who “Emma” was, an attractive and very wealthy woman in her thirties, recently divorced from an eight-goal polo player of international renown, and perhaps Neville’s best friend. They went well together, if you know what I mean, good friends with common interests. Now, according to Marsh, they’d leased a villa in France in an attempt to “do it.”

  As soon as we’d given Benito our order, Marsh resumed, literally rubbing his hands in excitement.

  “Yes, it’s an extraordinary situation. Everyone knows Clive’s gay, just everyone. But he keeps pretending he’s straight. I don’t know how many times I’ve lectured him, ‘Clive, be yourself. There’s no shame in it.’ But no, not Clive Neville. He’s a sweet boy but so stubborn…”

  “Bingo, he’s fifty.”

  “Boyish for his age. Anyway, now that Emma divorced the golf pro…”

  “He’s a polo player.”

  “… she and Clive are perfectly free to marry. And it’s just a perfect match; she being made for his clothes, you know, and Clive always needing someone to go to dinner parties.”

  It didn’t seem to Marsh there might be other criteria for a successful marriage.

  “But he confessed to me in a conversation I pledged to keep entirely confidential, and I shall! that he isn’t quite sure he can, you know, do it with a woman. So they’ve taken this place at Cap and Clive says they’ll swim naked each morning and drink a lot of wine in the afternoon and then, at night, they’ll share a bed he tells me is authentic Louis Quinze and they’ll see what happens.”

  He paused and I said nothing. What possible comment could suit the occasion?

  “I do so hope it works and they can have an orgasm,” Bingo resumed. “They’ve spared no expense.”

  “Yes, well…”

  “But I’m hardly optimistic,” Bingo said, his voice stern, less lilting. “You know what they say about tigers never changing their spots…”

  37 Face of a monkey, mouth of a sewer.

  BEFORE being diverted by Lindbergh, Madame Vreeland had told me about China Machado, who’d been a leading cover girl.

  “Oh, don’t write about her,” Bingo said. “Models spend their time examining their underarms.”

  I wrote about China anyway.

  “China (which Vreeland pronounced ‘Cheena’) was just glorious,” Dee-Anne had assured me. “You never saw such a beauty. The men were all mad for her, duels in the Bois and diamond necklaces dangled, the keys to Bentleys proffered, that sort of thing. But she never made the money she should have. Some magazines wouldn’t have her on the cover. She was half-Portuguese and half-Chinese or Thai or something and had been born in Macao or someplace exotic, and so, in the crude terms one then used, she was a ‘half-breed.’ Some of the magazines wouldn’t use her at all as a model lest it upset more sensitive readers. Those were the days, of course, when no one ever dreamt of using a black model except for hair-straightening products in Ebony. And in the models’ cabine were girls who wouldn’t dress with China or use the same mirror or makeup tables.

  “ ‘Not with a nigger,’ one girl told me, a simpering little blonde bitch quite put out to have China sharing the bathroom.”

  Vreeland paused, an elegant hand touching her lacquered hair, as if seeking to recall. “A lovely girl, China. A scandal there was such prejudice, such pride.”

  She really spoke like that.

  Journalists are a lot like policemen. We pick up a clue here, a clue there, a lead from one person to the next. In the end, you may have a story, or an arrest. Since my assignment as the magazine’s new columnist was vague as to its restraints, and I knew so few people in New York, Madame Vreeland’s little vignette caught at my reporter’s instincts. And so, despite Bingo’s objections to models, I went to see Miss Machado, finding her in a vast, echoing apartment on Central Park West that had once belonged to Ring Lardner.

  She was, as Dee-Anne insisted, very beautiful still, and had gone on from modeling to become fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar and later become a designer herself, something I thought might enable me to slip the story past Marsh.

  “When I quit modeling,” China said, “and was the most junior and humble of magazine editors, I was assigned to sit next to our Paris editor, Marie-Louise Bousquet, in the front row of all the fashion shows.”

  “I know who she was. Chanel despised her. ‘Face of a monkey, mouth of a sewer.’ ” I could still hear Coco, her voice full of contempt.

  “That’s Marie-Louise. Anyway, I was to help her in and out of her chair, to tell her what she was watching, to get her to the ladies’ room. And she chain-smoked, as all the fashion editors did, but she was so old and trembled so, everyone was terrified she’d set herself on fire. At Lanvin they kept a fire extinguisher always at the ready. Balenciaga considered banning her on grounds the insurance premiums would rise. We were at Dior, right up front along with the Duchess of Windsor and Babe Paley and the Rothschilds, with Marie-Louise puffing away, the ashes falling on her lap, coughing and hacking like a tubercular, talking endlessly throughout, slandering everyone and barely watching the dresses pass, lighting one cigarette from the other and dropping the burning butts on the pearl gray carpet. I haven’t to this day seen a single dress of that collection, I was so busy watching her cigarettes and snuffing out fires.

  “Blah blah blah, Marie-Louise goes on, and then suddenly right in the middle of a puff, she loses a cigarette! It’s dropped down inside the bodice of her dress and I can’t see it and she’s mystified as to just where it might have disappeared, looking around for it on her lap and then giving up and starting to light another. Then I see smoke starting to rise up out of her dress. I jump up crying, ‘Au secours! Au secours! Help! Help!’ and begin slapping at her chest with both hands to extinguish the fire. The Dior directrice, in silky tones, ignores the distraction and continues to announce the numbers, the models still coming out for their passage, pirouetting ever so gracefully, with everyone watching and taking notes, to polite applause, superior to it all, the way the pious might ignore a vulgar outburst in church during High Mass.

  “All the while I’m beating at Marie-Louise’s bony chest and she’s trying to fend me off, crying ‘Assassin! Madwoman!’ and demanding aloud have I gone berserk or am I molesting her sexually?”

  When the interview ended, I took China Machado for a drink. “Do you know Regina Stealth?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “There was one season when Bingo kept trying to marry off Regina. He’d picked out the groom, middle-aged, as she was, a coat-and-suit buyer, very nice man. But homosexual, completely uninterested in marrying Madame Stealth or anyone. Bingo kept pushing, though, forever throwing the two of them together.”

  “He’s like that,” I agreed, thinking of Clive Neville and Emma.

  “Oh yes,” China said. “He doesn’t think people know what’s good for them and have to be so informed, the way one does with small chi
ldren.”

  38 Was Moby Dick the man or the fish?

  BUT why, with all his blind spots, his fears and evasions, the vast ignorance that made one question Yale, was Bingo so good at what he did?

  Even he shrugged helplessly when I asked. He had no rational explanation why he and John Fairchild and Diana Vreeland and a few more were great fashion editors while others flopped.

  “You just… know,” he said weakly.

  I realized being eccentric helped, setting him apart from the crowd. He was bitchy, and that provided among the designers a certain entrée; ruthless, and that frightened some into telling him and showing him what he wanted. But Bingo had a big talent, an absolute editorial instinct, an untaught gift for knowing what the fashion story was and what it meant, a talent few possessed.

  Marsh could sit through a Pierre Cardin collection of three hundred dresses and come outside to tell you, right there on the sidewalk and with certitude, just which single coat or dress would be that season’s “Ford,” the copyable number after which women would lust and that Seventh Avenue would make up in the tens of thousands, the one dress or coat that, as the retailers put it, “walks out of the store.”

  Not that he would have flourished on another kind of magazine.

  He knew nothing of sport or finance or politics, could not name half the states, and didn’t know, I believe, if the Mississippi flowed north or south. Like Harold Ross of The New Yorker, another great editor, Bingo was capable of asking, “Was Moby Dick the man or the fish?”

  Yet he winnowed out, hired and promoted, the brightest young women and homosexual men and more conventional types and seemed to understand the raw clay at his hands and how to mold it. When it came to needing precisely the right free-lance writer to tackle a subject, Marsh’s mind became a swiftly spinning and fully annotated Rolodex. He knew the names, he knew their strengths, he had their unlisted phone numbers and could reach them. And he had the money to pay them and the charm, when turned on, to lure them into his employ. And it wasn’t just freelances. He had his contacts among the sketchers and photographers and layout artists and assistant art directors. He always knew.