Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  “I think… you… are… disgusting.”

  Cowed, le Boot and the salesman made their way down, the salesman falling the last ten feet to the sidewalk, knocking me down.

  Rambush had more than a house in the Village and a convenient elm—his équipe of artists, mostly young, all talented, underpaid, most gay. Mostly, the artists socialized together. Occasionally, they made exceptions.

  “Chester’s having people in for cocktails. It’s rather special,” I was told.

  Chester was small, ugly, and bald, with a mustache, and he was mad for the work of Luis Estevez, a California designer who did not currently enjoy Bingo’s favor, whose name never appeared in the magazine.

  Bingo would debate “never.”

  “If they die or go into Chapter 11, we always write about them.”

  Bingo had his biases, and they were respected. Not, however, by tiny, ugly Chester, who had purchased for his own personal wardrobe an eight-hundred-dollar Estevez dress. Now, in excitement bordering on ecstasy, Chester threw a small cocktail party to show off his purchase. We stood around his loft drinking wine in plastic glasses while Chester went in to change, emerging triumphantly in the new Estevez, an off-the-shoulder number which I privately felt was in no way improved by the kinky black hair that covered Chester’s shoulders and back.

  Still, ave atque vale! We all saluted a man in Bingo’s employ with the courage to wear a dress created by a designer of whom Marsh did not approve.

  Many of the young artists dreamt of becoming designers themselves. It was how Calvin Klein got started, working as a copyboy at Women’s Wear Daily, running errands and sharpening pencils, hiding in the men’s room when the publisher walked through because Calvin was afraid of him. Women’s Wear Daily discerned no talent in young Klein, and eventually he left to find greatness elsewhere.

  We had a young star of our own at Fashion, and he too had slipped through the magazine’s seine: Elegant Hopkins.

  “Don’t mention that fellow’s name!” Marsh ordered. Rival publisher John Fairchild had just anointed the “African Queen” one of the year’s ten most promising young designers. “I’m sure there are grounds for a suit.”

  The office offered other divertissements. I may have mentioned how I enjoyed hanging around the art department. There was a sort of screened-off area where cover girls changed their clothes and where, if you were deft, you could watch them.

  The models didn’t seem to mind being ogled, and I thought, not for the first time, that exhibitionism came with their calling. I remembered Paris, and Gillian.

  With a certain wistful emptiness.

  42 Please tie me to the bedposts.

  OCCASIONALLY the art department produced. Her name was Sabra and she was an Israeli. I’d known one Israeli mannequin in Paris, very beautiful and quite conservative, dieting and doing yoga and drinking only hot water, even at the small bar of the Ritz. Sabra was also very beautiful but not at all conservative. She posed for the underwear and swimsuit shots in the magazine. She also worked for other magazines and showed clothes in some of the collections. Her father was a famous tank general who was now in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

  “Israelis,” she told me, “are all crazy. That’s why I like the fashion biz.”

  On our first date I took her to a dinner party at Calvin Klein’s apartment. Sabra diplomatically wore one of his evening dresses, and Calvin was charming.

  “You made quite a hit,” I said in the cab.

  “Oh, designers are so stupid. You wear one of their dresses, they wet their pants.”

  I suggested, with my usual subtlety, a nightcap at my place.

  “No, I want to go home.”

  So much for subtlety.

  But when we pulled up in front of her apartment, Sabra said, “Why don’t you pay him and come up?”

  “Sure,” I said, feeling a bit better about things.

  We had a drink in her living room and listened to some music, heavy metal I didn’t like but to which Sabra moved her hips, even while seated, crooning along.

  “I’m mad for dancing,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, noncommittal, afraid she was about to suggest we go downtown to Heartbreak or one of the other new clubs.

  Instead she said, “I heard about you and Chanel. Let’s go to bed.”

  It was a very large bed, a four-poster. Sabra kissed me and started to take off her clothes without a wasted motion. The tank general’s genes were evident in her crisp efficiency. When we were both undressed, she went to a wardrobe and came up with four neckties, men’s silk neckties.

  “Please tie me to the bedposts,” Sabra said politely.

  I’d never tied a woman to bedposts before, not even in Paris, but I’d read The Story of O, so I knew that people did such things, and since it was our first date and not being rude, I complied.

  “A little tighter, please,” Sabra said. “I like to be stretched.”

  Sabra and I spent considerable time together that year, and then Sports Illustrated asked her to go to Madagascar to pose for the swimsuit issue, and while she was there she met someone else who presumably tied her up tighter and I got a postcard from Jo’burg telling me I was sweet and she would always think of me fondly and why didn’t I take up jogging and get in shape and, oh yes, quit smoking cigars.

  Bingo somehow heard about our affair and for months after informed anyone who’d listen, in admiring terms, “Sharkey ties up girls. And everything.”

  I’d have protested except that this sort of PR, erroneous as it was, did generate interest on the part of any number of attractive women. And got me invited to a party in Guccione’s backyard, not the sort of thing Bingo approved, but I was curious and I went.

  Bob Guccione and Kathy Keeton had a townhouse in the sixties near Fifth Avenue, a house filled with important pictures and patrolled by huge dogs, African ridgebacks, I think, bred to fight lions. The occasion was publicity, of course, to promote a new issue of Guccione’s magazine in which Pia Zadora, a young woman married to a very rich older man named Riklis, was the subject of a photo essay, somewhat more adequately clothed than the run of Penthouse beauties.

  The press was there. And the usual Manhattan cocktail party trash. A summer’s evening and we filled the garden. I stood on a sort of patio, watching and taking mental notes.

  “Mr. Riklis,” a paparazzo shouted, “put your hand on your wife’s leg.” “Higher!” shouted another. Always in good taste.

  The couple had been christened “The Young and the Riklis” by the tabloids. The husband, thirty years older, was asked if he worried about the disparity in age.

  “No,” he said, “if she dies, she dies.”

  Pia wore a summer dress slit high, and we all had drinks thrust upon us and were encouraged to ask questions, but I couldn’t think of any. Andy Warhol was there next to me, pale and apparently incompetent, fumbling with a camera and getting in his own way.

  “Lift your dress again, Pia,” the paparazzi shouted.

  Guccione, slung generously about with gold chains, gave me a tour of the house, the dogs padding along behind, drooling and panting. There were some marvelous pictures, and Guccione pointed them out and told me when he’d bought them and where.

  Downstairs there was a small indoor pool, occupied now by young women in swimsuits, splashing about. Guccione gave them a languorous wave.

  “A few of the Pets,” he said.

  I marveled at Kathy Keeton’s tolerance.

  Back in the garden the paparazzi were now urging Miss Zadora to remove her dress. I finished my drink and left. On the sidewalk I paused to consider a cab, but it was a pleasant evening, soft in the half light, and as I hesitated, Warhol came up. I introduced myself and he said, quite earnestly, “I know,” and we walked together toward the avenue.

  “She’s just so greeaaaatttt,” he said.

  “Pia Zadora?”

  “Yes, have you seen her new movie?”

  “No.”

 
; “She’s such a greeaaattt actress.”

  I assumed Warhol was having sport with me, and when a cab rolled up I let him get it and said good night. In the morning I described the scene to Bingo.

  “Don’t write about people like that,” he said, lips pursed. “They’re tacky, not our sort, and it just demeans you.”

  “I hadn’t intended to,” I lied. Actually, it would have made an amusing piece, but it was Marsh’s magazine and he set its standards.

  Standards of a sort.

  43 He makes these things up. I KNOW he does.

  THAT same week Bingo returned from lunch in a state of considerable excitement, summoning me to his office.

  “Close the door,” he said. “We can’t afford to be overheard.”

  He could be the most careless of men, imprudent and tactless, yet at times he was seized by the paranoid certainty he was being spied upon. I flopped into one of his easy chairs while Bingo buzzed his secretary, Mrs. K.

  “Get Ambrose down here, right away.” He turned to me. “I love to shock Ambrose. He gets all red.”

  Ambrose was the in-house lawyer, a bright young man who went home nights to wife and children. He came in now, disgruntled.

  “I was chairing that meeting you wanted with…”

  “Never mind, Ambrose,” Marsh snapped. “This is important.” He started to pace a bit, as if unsure just how to start, and then, with a joyous little skip, he began.

  “I had lunch with Norman.”

  Norman Delavan was perhaps the greatest of all the American designers, a lean, aging, elegant man of near ponderous dignity. I’d met him and found myself intimidated even though I knew that under that courteous, magisterial shell, he was as wacky as any of them. On the afternoon of a collection Norman worked off tension by getting down on hands and knees with a bucket of soapy water and an old-fashioned brush to scrub the floor of the entire showroom before bathing and changing into a dinner jacket to greet the fashion editors with champagne and a new line of dresses.

  “Well,” Bingo said, again glancing toward the door to be sure it was closed, “Norman tells me the designers have a new thing. You’ll never guess.”

  Ambrose no longer tried. I said, “No, what?”

  “It’s so disgusting, you won’t believe it.” Bingo didn’t look disgusted. He looked elated.

  Ambrose perked up a bit. “Oh?”

  “Yes,” Marsh said, pacing faster now, tossing in the occasional skip, “they get a live goose. There’s a place out on Long Island you buy geese, and they get undressed…”

  “The geese or the designers?” Ambrose said, his lawyer’s face carefully blank.

  “The designers, of course. Don’t be gross.”

  “I just like to be sure.”

  Marsh stopped pacing now and faced us. “… and they take this goose and put its head in the bureau drawer, and then they close the drawer slowly on the goose’s neck so it can’t get away. And then they…”

  I confess I found myself tensing, leaning forward.

  “… slam the drawer suddenly on the goose so it strangles and they’re mounting the goose from the rear while the poor goose is in its death throes.”

  My mouth was hanging open, and the lawyer sat there silent, kneading his hands.

  “Isn’t that awful?” Marsh said. “And all the designers are doing it.”

  As he and I walked through the city room from his office, Ambrose said, “He makes these things up. I know he does.”

  I stared at him. “Ambrose, how could you make up something like that?”

  “Jesus,” Ambrose said, shaking his head, “you’re right. How could you?”

  44 He stroked a beautiful piece of cloth and wept.

  BY now my pieces had been institutionalized as a regular weekly column, entire page, facing what’s called the third cover, the inside back page, a position for which advertisers pay a hefty premium. The column even had a title. Originally Marsh suggested the headline:

  “Shark Attack!”

  “Oh, come on, Bingo,” I protested indignantly, vestiges of The New York Times stubbornly still with me.

  “Gives people fair warning,” Marsh said. In the end we settled for “Shark!” though I continued to grouse about the exclamation point as stagy and self-conscious. In vain.

  Fashion and the fashionable were still the magazine’s main thrust, but the coverage and material had broadened over the years to what people now called “lifestyle.” Fashion was doing as many pages on houses and their decor as were Architectural Digest and House & Garden, nearly as many on wine and cuisine as Gourmet, and running book and film reviews that would have done nicely in the Atlantic. I continued to see the designers and record their oddities, but in any week I might as easily be writing about Billy Joel or Henry Kissinger or Meryl Streep or Norman Mailer or about Martina Navratilova’s entourage, tennis and otherwise.

  “Write whatever you want,” Bingo told me. “A single caveat: that people be talking about it Monday morning.”

  Monday was when both Fashion and People magazine, its putative rival, appeared. Time Inc. was considerably larger and more powerful than Marsh Publishing, and Bingo viewed People as the enemy. Having himself the attention span of a gnat, and assuming our audience did as well, Marsh harped on the need for editorial impact.

  “If they’re not talking about the magazine by Tuesday at the latest, I know that week’s issue is a flop.”

  And while he didn’t want me writing about Warhol and Pia Zadora, he wondered aloud if I couldn’t somehow get in there the story of Delavan and the goose.

  “Bingo, besides being disgusting, it’s clearly libelous.”

  “Oh, I dunno,” he said. “You could say Norman told us the story, not that he actually did it.”

  He was now paying me more, something over a hundred thousand a year, something that did not go undetected by Elmer Marsh.

  “Nunc sent me a note about you,” Bingo said, “wanting to know why that lad Sharkey was making so much money.”

  Nunc called everyone “lad,” no matter your age.

  “What did you say?”

  “I told Nunc if he raised the matter again, I’d pay you one fifty and how would he like that!”

  He looked and sounded pleased, like the mischievous boy who’d just put one over on an unpopular master. I made no attempt to mask a grin.

  “One fifty would be splendid, Bingo,” I said, rubbing my hands in obvious avarice.

  He blinked then. “Well, I was threatening Nunc, you know, and not really doing anything about it.” To punctuate the fact it was only sport, he got up and skipped a little.

  But I could not escape wondering if over at Time Inc., where they published People, or at Mr. Newhouse’s Condé Nast, where they published Vogue, they had conversations like this, and concluded not. Time Inc. was run by grown-ups; Bingo and Nunc behaved like unruly little boys in a schoolyard.

  One of the first “Shark!” columns was a vignette of Barbra Streisand, a megastar with the reputation for being difficult. I’d wangled my way into a rehearsal studio where she was working on dance routines for a television special, and I was fully prepared to dislike her. But after she’d run through a routine she took a break, toweling off and sitting next to me on another wooden folding chair and talking. She was small and ripe, sexy in a pouty-mouthed sort of way and with the sweat-soaked leotard glued to her body. I assumed the charm was turned on and off at will, but it was effective and with me she was cute and flirtatious but very intense about her work.

  “Y’know,” she said, “I met Chanel once myself.”

  I was flattered she knew about my book, and I asked about Chanel. It turned out a mutual friend had arranged the meeting the first time Streisand was ever in Paris, and she’d memorized a gracious little speech. In French.

  “So we get up there, climbing those damned stairs with the mirrors, and Chanel opens the door to us. ‘So?’ and I shake hands or curtsy or something, I’m so nervous, and I launch i
nto my speech in French, memorized, of course. I’ve got a singer’s ear, so I guess it sounds okay, and when I’m finished, Chanel gives me this big smile and starts in, a mile a minute. I don’t understand a goddamned word she’s saying and she thinks I speak French and she’s going on and on and finally I grab this guy’s arm who made the introductions and I hiss in his ear, ‘Get me the hell out of here!’ ”

  I wrote it just that way in Fashion, and even if it wasn’t sufficiently bitchy for Marsh, who didn’t like Streisand, people were talking about it that next Monday, and he was mollified.

  I wrote about Walter Matthau, chewing gum like a cow working the cud, big, lumbering, slope-shouldered, flat feet pointing out, just as he looks in movie roles, exasperated, fatigued, reluctant to give much of himself; and about Richard Chamberlain, vain and fretting about whether his hair was combed as the interview proceeded; about the seventeen-year-old cover girl Paulina Porizkova, who greeted me wearing a T-shirt that said “Let’s Fuck” and told me “Modeling is such shit,” and claimed what she really wanted to do was write children’s books; and about race car drivers and television anchormen and politicians and once about a bordello keeper. And about the designers and the rich women who patronized them and about storekeepers like Marvin Traub, who still limped from having been shot by the Germans while serving with Patton, and about Gustav Zumsteg, the great Zurich silk designer, who told me as a child that when he touched and stroked a beautiful piece of cloth from one of his mother’s dresses, “I wept.”

  I wrote about grotesques and I wrote obituaries.

  When Jackie Iskandere died I wrote a column. Jackie ran a transvestite nightclub in Paris on the Rive Gauche, and when I went there he invariably offered to find me the prettiest boy with whom to dance. I settled for a scotch and yarns from Jackie about the old days when he worked as Chanel’s private secretary. And when the old girl was in the Ritz, Jackie sat at his little desk, and, instead of typing and filing, he sewed up little dresses by hand from filched materials, dresses he wore at night.